How Does Modernity Impact Society
Bernard Zylstra lists five ways that modernity has impacted society in “Modernity and the American Empire.” I would like to see how these negative effects can be utilized as five starting points for a counter-revolution.
The first impact is secularity. Rather than upholding traditional ethics, seeing freedom as acting in accordance to God’s will, people claimed that “to be free is to act in accordance with rules established by the human will” (3). Re-converting everyone to Christianity is not realistic. Instead, the counter-revolution should focus on what the founding fathers saw as extremely important in a pluralist society: coexistence and cooperation. Elisha Williams stressed this in his pamphlet in Conneticut in 1744: “Every man has an equal right to follow the dictates of his own conscience in the affairs of religion” (Dreisbach, 178), and every man ought to be able “to speak his sentiments openly concerning such matters as
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