The Unholy City

a meditation on Romans 1:18-24

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. —Romans 1:18-24 (NIV)

[from 2001]

I. The City

    The marketing people have many names for it: the Global Village, the Shrinking Universe, the Small World, the Electronic Marketplace, etc. They all amount to the same thing: technology and the appetites of society have linked the world together in ways unimagined a few decades ago. It is the gift, not of visionaries or master architects, but of engineers and businessmen, working for a living, each trying to exploit his opportunities to best advantage, “as God gives him to see that advantage.” I go to work each day to build a little piece of a future of which I see nothing, know nothing, and can say nothing save, “Let it be,” whatever “it” is.
    What “it” is, is a city, the one City. It stretches across the planet, engulfs the physical cities, and daily extends its borders. The City is no respecter of cultures, languages, politics, economics, morals, or religion, because it consumes them all. One is easily fooled into thinking these attributes retain their identity and simply enjoy greater scope due to the freedom of information exchange: there is room for all. There may be room for all, but the City reduces them all to components of itself.
    The City’s life-blood circulates in vessels of metal and glass and through the air. The Internet, that vast network of computers communicating with one another, is itself a manifestation of the City, a result of the City’s need to interconnect its citizens. But the City is far larger than the Internet, and its prince has been around far longer. Because the Internet is such a porous and friction-free medium, it is the new favorite vehicle for the City’s self-expression, and hence also its expansion.
    Need a culture? Look up “culture” on Yahoo, and you will find a thousand entries, which lead to a thousand thousand more, which lead to, well, all the choices in the world. Need a language? Sorry, English is it, the international language of technology, but the rest will be supported—eventually. Need some politics? Got lots of that, every flavor in the book, and some that don’t belong in any book. We have economics in theory, policy, action, and practice; every kind of moral system; religions old and just recently thought up. And we have room for every variety of these things yet to be discovered or developed.
    What we do not have is a guiding principle.

© Copyright, 2001, 2003, 2026, by Robert McAnally Adams.
The Unholy City is licensed in its entirety under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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