It seems to me that it is becoming more and more difficult to have an intelligent debate. And I’m afraid we haven’t hit the bottom yet. I believe that there are several reasons for this, and I will try to mention some of them. It will definitely not be a complete list, and I may be completely wrong about something. In that case, I welcome a warning. So take this article as a shot for discussion.
One reason is that people have far fewer opportunities for meaningful conversations that are about seeking the truth and not trying to push through the truth that I’ve arrived. This is due to the fact that today’s young people have grown up on smartphones and do not meet much physically. American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt speaks of “phone-based childhood” that has replaced “play-based childhood” (childhood based on playing together). It shows that three-year-olds spend a lot of time with a smartphone at the expense of children’s movement games, during which children met physically and learned to solve problems while playing together. Jonathan Haidt is sounding the alarm. The brains of children who grow up with a smartphone develop differently than the brains of children who were used to leaving their bags at home after returning from school and going out to play with others. (If it would be too difficult for you to wade through a book written in English, I can recommend the Czech neurologist Martin Jan Stránský. He sees it the same way as Jonathan Haidt – perhaps even more sharply.)
Clips on tik-tok do not encourage a child to read a text carefully and think carefully about what the text means. Lately, I’ve been helping a little two Roma girls – one is fine, and the other has gone from five to three thanks to books from home and the library. But I noticed that when she reads something, even fluently, she doesn’t always perceive what she was actually reading. And recently I heard one teacher complain that the understanding of the text is generally declining. Discussions on the radio and television often look like this: the individual inputs are a bit like clips. People don’t respond to the argument presented, so overall it resembles a conversation, but in fact it’s a series of independent inputs.
I recently experienced quite a miracle. I had cataract surgery. During the preparation, they told me that if I only wanted a basic program, I would need glasses for near and not for distance, or vice versa, I would need glasses for distance and not for close. I can choose. The miracle is that I don’t need glasses for either near or far. When I talked with my ophthalmologist about it, she told me that when she offers people melee glasses, the vast majority of them say that they don’t need them, that they don’t read anyway.
Until now, I have written about something that is outside the conflict of ideologies and worldviews. But now I will mention something that concerns almost exclusively Christians.
We Christians know that we are to make disciples of all nations. This is true for every Christian. Spreading the gospel seems harder than ever. Sometimes it seems to me that the following words of Jesus addressed to the Pharisees are now more true for Christians: “…you go around sea and land to get one proselyte…” (Matthew 23:15) We are worried that our mission is not going well, and we are looking for reasons why. We exchange experiences, visit churches where at least a little bit is going well, and look for ways to bring people to Christ. We ask ourselves why things are not going well, and we try to rid our evangelism of everything that could somehow displease potential converts, in short, that would offend them. We try to make the Gospel as digestible as possible.
I have the advantage that I’m already old. I have experienced different periods and different intensities of interest in the Gospel. From the revival in Maniny in the eighties, through 3 years of open doors in 1990-1992, when it was not difficult to fill the stadiums, then there was a time of total lack of interest in faith, to today, when it is a bit successful, but overall no glory.
I believe that these periods came and went without any correlation with how zealous or unzealous we were, how much we prayed or didn’t pray, or what evangelistic methods we tried to apply. I cannot fail to mention Paul’s words: :It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy” (Rom 9:16). I don’t want this quote to have a demobilizing effect. When we stop being zealous, we do not catch the change in the spiritual atmosphere for which we have prayed so much.
Before the Maniny awakening occurred, things were not going well in this Holešovice congregation. No one counted on this congregation to survive. Neither the secret police nor the Synodal Council. A colleague of mine, a protestant pastor, comforted me by saying, “Dan, the church is here to adore” (i.e., to worship Christ). Let this be your attitude – don’t give in to external circumstances. It helped me a lot.
I see another task for the Church. That is to think about what the Bible says about issues people deal with today. What questions do they ask? What is bothering them?
And here we encounter a serious problem. Christians sometimes do not study the Bible much, and then adopt the prevalent secular views. When you come up with an unpopular opinion, you are rejected by some because you preach things that could offend and fence off non-believers. And sometimes it is enough for you to just express a certain idea, and your critics will immediately accuse you of “imposing” your opinions on people. But if you are accused of such “imposition”, it is difficult to defend yourself that if was not your intention at all. I will give a specific case from the discussion on Christian today. First, I quote two sentences from my article, and then one reaction:
“My task is to pray for their husbands [i.e., the husbands of Ukrainian women] and their brothers who are defending their homeland. Pray and support them as much as possible.”
Am I to understand that a Christian should pray that these men and brothers of theirs can murder more effectively in order to preserve some lines on the map? Isn’t that completely absurd?
The brother who responded to my article knows very well that I do not pray for someone to murder more effectively. He attributed this absurdity to me completely unjustly, and I am afraid that he did that consciously. Of course, it won’t discourage me. I had specific people from our church if mind. I pray that these wifes will still meet their husbands. I pray that ome daughter, who lives here, will meet her father and her brother. I pray for them daily as part of the prayer chain and I experience at least partly the suffering that is their daily destiny.
Yes, this is a rather extreme example of misunderstanding. It is not always this escalated. It usually starts with a slight shift in the understanding of a certain idea, or some kind of “association of rejected ideas” (I can’t define it somehow). Again, practically: Several people wrote to me that if I am against the Istanbul Treaty, I must be a Putinite. And they were surprised when I objected that this was not the case. Simply to say that I understand a question from the Bible sometimes means to earn the label of imposing these views on people.
I have come across several times the claim that something in the Bible is only for Christians – we should not impose it on non-believers. I do not deny that something is really just for us. But when you claim, for example, that neglecting the upbringing of children is not right and that divorcing parents hurt children, then it is not only for Christians. This is true in general. And we should not compromise on this, even if it is unpopular.
I have titled this article “The Loss of Universalism”, and I only get to this topic in the last paragraph. Well, it won’t be the first time that there were two out of the planned one. Or even three. Stay tuned.
July 20, 2026