In 1974, I lived in Boston, and I shared an apartment with a college classmate who was an architect. The firm he worked for was responsible to design most of the signage that was appearing everywhere, alluding to Boston’s great history at the time of the American Revolution. The city was gearing up for the American bicentennial two years later; it anticipated an influx of millions in 1976. It was excited to show those visitors the events which so recently—a mere two hundred years before—had occurred along the Freedom Trail.
A mere two hundred years: from that to this!
One of the pleasures of knowing my architect friend was that I was able to participate in the early stages of the creation of amusements which, later, would be available to all. One such amusement—later to have its own kiosk in front of Faneuil Hall—was an electronic quiz game. In those days, electronic games were themselves rather new, so its mere existence was interesting.
Here’s how it worked. A machine asked you about a dozen thought-provoking, multiple-choice questions. Your answers caused the machine to develop your belief profile and to compare your profile with those of various historical characters from 1776. Then, after a few moments of electronic cogitation, the machine told you who you were.
I wanted to be Sam Adams; that would be cool. After all, in retrospect, who would not want to be the most eloquent and effective pamphleteer of the Sons of Liberty?
But my downfall from perfect revolutionary rectitude was the Boston Tea Party. When sternly questioned by the machine about this event, try as I might, I could not in honesty say I should have supported that attack on private property, as Sam Adams had so vigorously done. Theatrical as I am by nature, I did subscribe to the notion that, when and if people were to rise up, they should do so with striking effect. But now—1773—was not the time…or so I surmised two hundred years later.
The machine found, though, that the Battles of Concord and Lexington were finally to persuade me, and that those events would get me off my duff. It discovered that, from 1776 forward, I would bend my rhetoric to persuasion that we colonists must now secure our freedom from British tyranny. Therefore, the machine informed me, because of my dislike of the Boston Tea Party’s rationale, but because of my support of the militiamen “by the rude bridge that arched the flood,” I had botched my attempt to be Sam Adams, but it had decided that I was, instead, his distant and more cerebral cousin, John Adams.
(Of course, as I like to remind my cousin Sam, I went on to be a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, Vice President to the monumental General Washington, and later President of the United States in my own right…so there!)
For thirty-five years, this game has stuck in my mind. It is a fun to recall. Since then, I’ve read volumes, and volumes, and volumes of history for the purpose of determining as closely as possible what it was like to be them, and then…whoever they were and whenever they were.
But there is another perspective —what is it like to be us, and now?
Suppose it were two hundred years from now—2213—and you were looking back, being questioned by a machine about how you should have felt, back in that quaint year of 2013. Further, suppose that the cultural forces in 2013 that are arrayed against religion, and that favor progressive, atheistic secularism, have triumphed by your time.
Whose voice, in 2013, should you like to have been yours?
Me? I’d pick the voices of either of two men, each now close to the end of his earthly work, both of whom passionately defend the fundamental truth that man is created in the image of, and eternally saved from damnation by the sacrifice of, God.
And only thus.
One voice upholds Catholicism, the other voice upholds Protestantism, but in the end that is a doctrinal matter and is not the very core of the nature of life, truth, faith, and being.
May the voices of Pope Benedict XVI and of Billy Graham remain loud during at least the next two hundred years of the Manichean struggle for the universe!
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