Postmodern Misery and the New Evangelization

The immensely sad news of the suicide of the comedically brilliant Robin Williams has given rise to a number of insightful commentaries.  It is not our intention to conjecture about the nature of the struggle which he ultimately lost.  Rather, we would like to highlight a particular paragraph from Russell Brand's article in the wake of William's death.  

Russell Brand is a troubled writer and comedian who understands the nature of an overriding societal problem with which the New Evangelization must contend.  It is perhaps the following paragraph that he most clearly makes the point of which we should be aware:

Is it melancholy to think that a world that Robin Williams can’t live in must be broken? To tie this sad event to the overarching misery of our times? No academic would co-sign a theory in which the tumult of our fractured and unhappy planet is causing the inherently hilarious to end their lives, though I did read that suicide among the middle-aged increased inexplicably in 1999 and has been rising ever since. Is it a condition of our era?

Postmodern society is marked by nihilism; that is, the theory (if not theoretical, at least practical) that there is nothing more to the world than that which we see.  The only meaning it has it that which we choose to give it.  It seems that the poets are most attuned to the misery of such a meaningless, empty worldview; yet they know not an answer to their despair.  However, if Brand's statistics are accurate, perhaps those becoming aware of the vacuousness of life without God, without striving for holiness, is growing.

With the general moral permissiveness, the widespread sexual license, pornography, contraception, and abortion all of which reduce persons to objects for use rather than gifts for authentic love, the requirements for authentic joy are undermined.  Such morally bankrupt habits turn us inward making us incapable of authentic love for God and others.  As a result, we are seeing social harmony crumble at an alarming rate.  Everyone who lives in this society is affected in one way or another.

This widespread malaise, when acknowledged, is reduced to a problem of mental health ignoring its spiritual dimension.  As a result, there can be no ultimate healing. The best we can hope for is developing coping skills to manage the damaging effects of the nihilsm.  Christians must become aware of this phenomenon not only in order to avoid its affects but also to be better prepared to understand how to offer Jesus Christ as the answer to the despair. 

Such a society presents its own challenges for evangelization.  Jesus Christ is the only solution to the misery, yet postmodern society is marked by at least an implicit, if not an explicit, rejection of Jesus Christ.  This demands pre-evangelization.  Persons affected by such post-modernism must first be helped to see the misery of such a life, if they have not yet come to that realization.  The next step is to help them to see what is really important in life, beginning with relationships with others and then to see that flourishing relations can come only through selflessness.  Finally, we can begin to deconstruct false notions of Jesus Christ and His Church in order to propose Him as the Source and End for everything we hold, or should hold, dear.