Shrugging Off Selfishness

Spirituality Column #237
May 24, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Shrugging Off Selfishness
By Bob Walters

Hang with me for a minute … this is a book / movie review, sort of.

I’m old enough to remember the economic malaise of the late 1970s and no, the Disco era was not an adequate off-setting cultural pick-me-up.

I was just out of college making $10,000 a year as a sportswriter. Gas was a dollar a gallon, unemployment was high, American automobile quality was low, inflation hovered near 9 percent, home mortgage rates chased 20 percent, gold prices were astonishingly north of $800 an ounce, President Jimmy Carter was cheerless, and the nightly news – still with Walter Cronkite – offered “the Misery Index” (unemployment rate plus inflation rate) instead of hope.

With institutions failing us, we maturing baby boomers constructed a self-absorbed culture that appropriately became known as “The Me Decade.” Certainly in my mind, the world revolved around Me; I was unmarried, unchurched, unbelieving and unconcerned with salvation, damnation, justification, sanctification or glorification. I didn’t own a Bible, and even my old Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (a gift from my dad when I was confirmed in 1965) was out of sight somewhere in a dusty box.

Please understand, I was “a perfectly good person,” I just didn’t need all that Jesus jazz. I had friends and an interesting job … what else was there? I knew the church “story,” but it wasn’t worth getting out of bed for on Sunday; there wasn’t anything at church about “Me.”

In the late 1970s I read a book that unveiled for Me many comforting mysteries of the Me life: “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand, first published the year I was born, 1954.

Rand (1905-1982) was an atheist, ardent anti-communist, “objectivist” (her word) and, if her TV interviews are an indication of the woman, a very, very bitter human being. Our highest moral duty, Rand taught, is to care for ourselves. Service to others is a self-immolating charade. God is an empty promise wrapped in ultimate disappointment. Jesus Christ, Rand wrote, presents an unsolvable contradiction; subordinating one’s ego and soul to the needs of others is impossible.

I bring this up because Atlas Shrugged, recently released as a widely-panned movie, often carries near-scriptural authority for unchurched political conservatives.

Play some defense. Understand. The May 2011 issue of “First Things” magazine offers a brilliant Christian review of both the book and the movie (free access at www.firstthings.com).

Don’t ever shrug off Jesus.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) wrote about Rand and atheism April 8, 2008, column #74 at this blogspot archive site.