Over the last few years I have been giving a talk entitled “Swimming Upstream: Living a Catholic Life in a Non-Christian World.” It is a scary talk and shocks people into awareness of what is happening around us.
The first Christians lived in a pagan Greco-Roman world. They were a despised and persecuted subculture. They were beheaded, burned alive, fed to lions and every other cruel form of torture and killing.
Within 300 years these suffering Christians turned the world upside down for Jesus Christ. But now we see right before our eyes our once “Christian society” turning against us and rapidly sliding right back into hedonistic, godless paganism.
“For decades, a growing number of the American elite—the people who manage the media and mold the culture, run our great colleges and corporations, and train our lawyers and judges—has been gripped by a growing anger, now becoming a raging envy, against any person, group, church, or institution committed to Christian moral teachings. Like the (ancient] Romans, these people hear Christ’s truth as an accusation. They even see Christ’s love on the cross as their condemnation. And strangely enough, they see Christian families not as witnesses for Christ but as witnesses against them. . . . The coalition of liberal secularists and homosexual activists—let’s call them “homosecularists” for short—have some very real goals that they know they can achieve only by driving Christians out of public life.” (Speechless: Silencing the Christians, Rev. Donald Wildmon (a Methodist minister who founded the American Family Association).
You can learn more about my talk Swimming Upstream here (also entitled Proclaiming the Gospel – same talk). Or I can bring the talk to your parish or organization. You can read these two excellent articles here: Part 1, Part II, Part III.