April 6 is National Tartan Day. Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, an act banning highland dress was repealed in England. After thirty-six years of repression, however, Highland Dress never again returned to dominance in Scotland. Scottish culture and heritage took a blow from which it still hasn’t entirely recovered.
As an American of Scottish descent, I’m thankful for the resurgence in Scottish culture in US over the past decade or so. Highland Games, Festivals, Robbie Burns dinners, etc. have been growing at a phenomenal rate. To top it all off, kilt wearing has become more popular.
Yet, I find my heart burdened for America and the American Church on this tartan day, as we seem to be forgetting our heritage, and this time, no idiotic law can be blamed for it. In America, we have little idea who our Founding Fathers really were and what this whole nation was all about.
Poll after poll shows little knowledge in the general populace of history, politics, and the Constitution. We seem to blithely accept a Leviathan state and corrupt politicians who don’t adhere to the Constitution. We expect the people charged with running our government to be dishonest and unprincipled. We forget the principled voices of the past and consider our current corrupt state of affairs to be the norm, rather than an aberration. While there’s always been corrupt men, our willingness to accept that corruption shows that we’ve forgotten many of our country’s greatest principles.
At the same time, many Christians know little or nothing of church history or doctrines. Luther, Calvin, and Wesley would be shocked by the theological illiteracy that dominates in the movements they founded. It is no less appalling in Evangelical circles, where few Christians understand fundamental doctrines of the Faith. Barna Research has catalogued an alarming trend of Christians merely digesting what culture tells them.
What most know of Church History is the crusades, the inquisition, the witch trials. Few Christians know of the building of hospitals, the care for the poor, orphans, and the needy, the establishment of universities, and the advancement of the arts and sciences that the Church has brought to civilization.
We’ve been left such rich history, such a marvelous heritage of wisdom and truth that boggles the mind. Yet, so many discard in favor of the trendy and trashy. We have in our past the answers to our present and future dilemmas. Our hope is in rediscovering who we are, and the values of truth in our modern times before it’s too late.