Longing for Auld Lang Syne: America’s Cultural Nostalgia

Posted By Christa Thornsbury on Jan 2, 2017 | 3 comments

“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9, ESV). American pop culture is certainly proving the preacher of Ecclesiastes right, though I realize it may be a bit of a stretch to apply the verse in this way. It seems that we can go nowhere without seeing advertisements for another reboot, remake, or reunion of beloved shows and movies. Whether through another trip to Stars Hollow, a new evening with the Tanners, yet one more Spiderman franchise, or a roguish battle in a galaxy far, far away, our culture seems to be fascinated with the past. Nostalgia is running high, evidenced by our desire to “throw back” to previous times. One need only briefly scan many popular websites to find “Every 90’s Kid Will Remember . . .” lists and several others like them.

In many ways, this trend is quite ironic. Consider how our culture so often encourages us to throw off time-tested restraints, to flee the traditions of centuries, to embrace solely the new and the now instead of the handed-down. Why, then, is there a simultaneous yearning to re-experience our cultural past? Does this tendency betray deep, often unexpressed, desires? Are we longing for something secure that we think we once had but have lost somehow?

While it is impossible to answer these questions definitively, Christians should ponder this phenomenon. Understanding our cultural moment helps us better interact with our lost neighbors, to meet them at their point of need, and to share with them the hope and security that can only be found through Christ.

Longings for Simplicity

Twenty-first century American culture is certainly not the first to use its creative expressions to convey longings for days gone by. Romantic poet William Wordsworth often strikes a nostalgic tone in his poetry as he reflects on the innocence and blessed naivety of childhood. Consider this stanza from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”:

O joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction: not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blest;

Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast.[1]

Perhaps twenty-first-century Westerners are venerating youth in a similar way. One often hears young people bemoan the fact that “adulting is hard” and older people wistfully long for “the good ol’ days.” Childhood is, for most people, a time of innocence that is free from many of the complications and struggles that accompany adulthood. Furthermore, memory tends to diminish any unpleasantness that existed during the time and presents us instead with a vision of total stability and security.

While there is certainly nothing wrong with fondly remembering the past, we must not idolize it to the point that we do not mature and embrace each stage of life with grace. The apostle Paul exhorts believers to “not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (I Cor. 14:20). Furthermore, in I Corinthians 13:11, Paul reminds the Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” Christians ought to set the example of joyfully reaching adulthood and finding hope not in the past but in the presence of Christ.

Longings for Stability

It is certain that we are living in a culture that, by and large, is throwing off all restraints. This is seen clearly in the sweeping effects that the sexual revolution has had on the basic foundations of our society. Family structure is being totally redefined and fractured. Also, overemphasis on independence and individualism sometimes strongly diminishes need for family. On another front, realizing and embracing one’s perceived identity has become the all-important marker of personhood. To question such behavior, according to secular society, is to fundamentally damage people’s psyches.

This thinking affects both our cultural and individual stability. When self-worth and self-definition are rooted in identity, ever-changing feelings and understandings about ourselves can result in our feeling unstable. Furthermore, a de-emphasis on the importance of the traditional family brings with it the loss of a strong, God-ordained support system. People who embrace this new vision of life become like unmoored ships tossed on the turbulent sea of an ever-changing culture.

However, it is unlikely that many people who are experiencing these feelings would ever recognize them, much less admit that their worldview is deficient. Often, unrestrained freedom or “enlightened” understanding seems better than the “stodgy,” yet more stable, ideas of the past. Maybe this lack of real security offers an explanation of why people are so eager to recall or even glorify the temporal, pop culture relics from their childhoods. Maybe they find a small sense of stability in them.

Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” masterfully illustrates the angst that comes with societal rejection of long-held truths. Arnold wrote in the Victorian era and witnessed the beginnings of modernity, which arose, in no small part, due to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Though Arnold himself embraced this new way of thinking, his work clearly shows that he recognized the deep effects that early modernity was having and would have on society. In “Dover Beach,” Arnold likens Christian faith and practice, which had long been, consciously or not, the foundation for Western culture, to the tide going out with a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” According to Arnold, this frightening, seemingly inevitable new world

. . . lie[s] before us like a land of dreams,

so various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.[2]

Perhaps, indeed most likely, our own culture is filled with a similar, yet unacknowledged, dread and is desperately seeking comfort in the warm glow of nostalgia.

Good, Clean Christian Nostalgia?

Christians, too, often incorrectly glorify the past. We want to “return” to the mythic Mayberry which seems, in our memories, to be free of care and full of morality. We recognize and acutely feel the instability that comes with the new societal norms. When we recall times in history when society benefited from a basic Christian understanding of the world, it’s easy for us to idolize the past when life was simpler and Christianity was honored. In his excellent book Onward, Russell Moore writes that this can cause us to have “a siege mentality that seeks to catalog the offenses of what’s going wrong in the culture, in order to shock the faithful into action. We then castigate the culture because we start seeing the culture as something we ‘had’ and are now ‘losing,’ rather than seeing ourselves as those who have been sent into this culture in order to reach it.”[3]

To avoid this harmful mentality, we must not forget that there were evils in the past as well. We should also remember that, as Moore reminds us, God has placed us where He wants us both in time and in place. Therefore, because of the firm foundation we have in Christ, we must not venerate the past to the point that we seek only to return to good moral living while avoiding very lost people who make us uncomfortable. Instead, we must show them the hope that the Gospel of Jesus Christ offers as we live for God’s glory in the present, not neglecting to tell them of Christ’s sacrifice.

Conclusion

Is all of this to say that we ought to avoid the nostalgic bandwagon? No. We can enjoy it along with our friends and neighbors. Maybe these new expressions of old favorites can open doors to conversations about the hope we have. Because of this possibility, then, we must be on the lookout for the Wordsworths and Arnolds of our day who honestly recognize the problems that come with our “brave new world,” even if they have not embraced the right solution. The gospel, shared by Christians who are living well in the time in which God has placed us, can offer them the stability they need and the joy they are missing.

____________________

[1] William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” lines 129-138, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 2006), 311.

[2] Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” lines 31-37, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 2006), 1368-1369.

[3] Russell Moore, Onward (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2015), 32.

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