There’s an old phrase: whistling past the graveyard. To whistle past the graveyard is to pretend that death will not happen. It is to pretend that you are immortal, or that your youth and life will never run out.

At some point church, and religion for that matter, became the cultural preserver and not the culture maker. The Christian tradition, the tradition I am most familiar with, was a dynamic force for equality that tore down boundary after boundary and eventually deconstructed the ideology of the Roman Empire.