Lighten our Darkness - Is Optimism downplaying the Negative?
by Pastor Bill Uetricht
Back in the early eighties, I read Douglas John Hall's book "Lighten our Darkness," a book that changed my life and my view of our culture. Hall argues that North America (the United States, most clearly) lives out of "official optimism."
This is something driven by our full embrace of the Enlightenment (the progress motif) and is supported by a theology that really isn't Christian, but American (Peale, Schuller, Osteen). The problem with this official optimism is that it has caused us to downplay the negative. Our lack of telling the truth about the negative means that the negative is never fully dealt with. This happened with the Vietnam war and has clearly occurred with the Coronavirus. Truthfully, if we had been willing to tell the truth about the virus right away, it wouldn't have had the devastating effects that it has had. This is the problem with official optimism. It covers up the negative, which, honestly, is a sure-fire way for the negative to bite us in the butt. The Christian faith with the cross as its primary symbol offers us a way through the negative, not around it.