A New Dark Age

I fear we are watching the emergence of a New Dark Age, a time when belief systems blind the eyes and closes the mind to truth, reality, and facts. 

The Dark Ages is a pejorative term once used to describe the time between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance (5^th-15^th Century CE). The Dark Ages were allegedly an age of ignorance, violence, backwardness, barbarism, and superstition overseen and controlled by the Christian Church that placed religious authority over personal experience and scientific research. The Protestant mythology of my youth told me the Dark Ages was a time when Catholics locked away the Bible from the common people to keep them in bondage to the pope. I vividly recall hearing a preacher claim during the Dark Ages Catholics would chain Bibles to the pulpit to keep everyone except the priests from reading the Scriptures. Only later did I learn that books were extremely valuable, costing a small fortune to own. Bibles, which were typically works of art as well as Sacred Scripture, were exceptionally expensive. Consequently, these Bibles were chained to the pulpit to keep them from being stolen and sold on the black market.  

The idea of the Dark Ages originated with the Tuscan scholar Petrarch in the 1330s. Thankfully, as scholars and researchers discovered more about this period, academicians in the twentieth century began to drop the term, preferring the more neutral Middle Ages instead. 

Unfortunately, even though the name has changed, numerous myths continue to circulate about the Middle Ages. Most, if not all, of these myths are devoid of any evidence. Myths like everyone in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat. David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers have shown there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not know the earth was round and even knew its approximate circumference. Myths such as: “the Church prohibited autopsies and dissections during the Middle Ages,” “the rise of Christianity killed off ancient science,” and “the medieval Christian church suppressed the growth of natural philosophy,” are examples of myths that still pass as historical truth, although unsupported by current research. Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of horrible things that happened during the Middle Ages, just like in every age. The point I am making is the Middle Ages, the so-called Dark Ages, did not have a corner on darkness. 

But, let’s take this phrase The Dark Age as a condition where belief rules over truth, evidence, reality, and facts, and apply it to what is happening in our world today, and ask, Are we entering a New Dark Age? 

 James Bridle makes the case that as the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. While we are lost in a sea of information, we are increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. 

Somehow, we must make epistemology appealing again. Belief unhinged from reality ruthlessly overrules reason, truth, and these persistent little things called facts. 

Try having a fact-based conversation with someone who believes the earth is flat, Obama is a Muslim, the holocaust never happened, the Illuminati secretly run the world, or the global headquarters of the New World Order is underneath the Denver Airport,  and you will see what I mean. On second thought, you probably should not waste your time. Their belief overrules everything else. Facts be damned. Reality be accursed. Truth be silent. 

As those who are called to follow The Truth, we can do better than this. As Ed Stetzer said, “God has not called us to be easily fooled. Gullibility is not a Christian virtue, and we ought not to act like that.” Let us be persistent and insistent on following the truth, regardless of where it leads us. Christians ought to set the highest standards for when it comes to speaking the truth in love, for “in a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” (George Orwell).