Back in the 1980s Michelob Lite ran ads asking “Who says you can’t have it all?” Columnist George Will replied, “Reality, that’s who.” But thirty years later, reality is tougher and more bitter to swallow every day.

Artificial Lives

Think about it. Most of us live most of our lives amid the artificial. That is, we encounter the things we’ve made far more than the reality of the natural world. Hot, sticky, humid weather is a summer reality for much of the country. So we live in artificially air conditioned homes, drive artificially air conditioned cars to artificially air conditioned offices and end our day in artificially air conditioned gyms where we mimic physical work using artifacts called exercise machines. We shut the reality of heat and humidity outside where they can’t inconvenience us.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of air conditioning. Taking the natural and creating artifacts is central to the Cultural Mandate of Genesis 1:26-27. Subsistence living in caves was never God’s plan for humans. The Bible ends in a great city not back in the Garden. As God is the Maker, so humans who are in His image are makers.

There can only be one reality, but in a world of artifacts and nearly unlimited choices, that’s increasingly difficult to believe.

On the other hand, through the genius of modern artifacts, we drift out of touch. The natural and real fades so far into the background that we begin to get the impression that everything is artificial, a matter of human invention. That includes our own humanity. We “invent” and “reinvent” ourselves. Worse yet, we begin to call the artifact we’ve invented “real.”

Skewed Social Constructs

In an online video, a woman (with a rather telltale Adam’s apple) chastises lesbians for their unwillingness to date “women with penises.” The refusal implies that such women “aren’t real women.”

Apparently chosen gender has been promoted to reality and to deny that “women with penises” are “real women” is the newest cultural sin.

Remember five minutes ago when gender could be chosen because it was a social construct, that is, a human artifact? Well apparently chosen gender has been promoted to reality and to deny that “women with penises” are “real women” is the newest cultural sin.

You may be tempted to say that the woman with the Adam’s apple lives in a “different reality” than you do. But don’t say that too quickly. As Dickenson College professor of philosophy Crispin Sartwell recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, reality, “is hard and intrusive [and] it does not readily bend to human will or agreement or narrative.”

There can only be one reality, but in a world of artifacts and nearly unlimited choices, that’s increasingly difficult to believe.

Yet as Dr. Stanley Grove of Wyoming Catholic College said this week in “The After Dinner Scholar” podcast, “Art, for all its necessity, runs the risk of departing, whether maliciously or not, from the integrity of Nature. Art can become a distortion, or at least a distraction…. We would be foolish to distain that revelatory painting of a majestic tree; but we’re no less in trouble if we disregard that tree itself because ‘after all, we now have the painting.’”

The good, the true, and the beautiful are not social constructs. They are not subject to interpretations based on multiple realities.

Christian Reality

The Christian attachment to reality, to the world as it is needs to be affirmed and affirmed and affirmed again.

The good, the true, and the beautiful are not social constructs. They are not subject to interpretations based on multiple realities. Reality is one even as the God who created all things is one.

So we must affirm reality, but as we do so, consider the dangers. As Rod Dreher wrote in The Benedict Option, “American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears.”

The problem is hardly new. C.S. Lewis addressed it in The Abolition of Man in 1943. His analysis stands the test of time and deserves to be read and reread.

Living amid a sea of artifacts, the common belief is that the artificial and chosen are real. Why? Because we say that they are real. If that’s so, we can have it all just as we wish. But, as George Will pointed out, reality has a way of intruding. Think hurricanes, volcanoes, war, “real” women with prostate cancer, “real” men with ovarian cancer.

When reality crashes our neighbor’s post-modern party — which it will — Christians need to be prepared. Prepared with sincere love, gentle compassion, and a firm grasp on the world as it really is.