From the Armenian Genocide to the Kardashians: The Spiritually Corrosive Nature of American Culture

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I grew up with a number of wonderful, dedicated Armenian Christians in my boyhood church. It was easy to tell who they were. Their family names all ended in “ian;” names like Sunukjian, Kitabjian, Bogoisan, Matosian, and Maljanian. I still keep in touch with a few of them.

What I didn’t know at the time was that my Armenian friends were descendants of persecuted Christians from Muslim Turkey. Their parents and grandparents had fled to America to escape the Armenian Genocide, a systematic murdering of Armenians by the Ottoman government in 1915 when 1.5 million Armenians were marched into the Syrian desert and left to die of dehydration and starvation. The Armenian Genocide, sometimes called “The Armenian Holocost,” is considered to be the first modern genocide and the inspiration for Hitler’s “final solution.”

During our vacation last week, I was reminded of my Armenian friends and the atrocity their relatives had suffered. My sister, Dottie Dudley, recommended a book to me and Patti called “Pearl,” by Donita Dyer. Since Dottie said it was her favorite book of all time, Patti thought, “That must be some book!” So, even though it has been long out of print, she found a used copy of it online, ordered it, and read it on the long flight to Alaska, where we celebrated our 40th anniversary.

On the flight back to Denver, I decided to read Pearl for myself. The book mesmerized me. Pearl is the story of Pearl Kashishian, a dynamic Christian Armenian woman whose family lived as Christians under the harshest of persecutions that preceded the Armenian Genocide. Fearing the worst for her, Pearl’s parents decided to send her to America for an arranged marriage to a wonderful Armenian Christian man. The book recounts Pearl’s harrowing escapes from death while living in Turkey and then fleeing to America, where she married and made a home in Long Beach, California.

After reading Pearl, my mind turned to some other, more modern and famous, Armenians: the Kardashians. The thought occurred to me that what the Turks couldn’t do over hundreds of years of trying to force Armenian Christians to abandon their faith and culture through the use of discrimination, subjugation, torture and murder, America has largely accomplished in just a handful of decades.

I’m no expert on the Kardashians. I haven’t watched a single episode of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.” But one would have to book a flight to Mars with Elon Musk to escape from hearing about them. And what I hear about the Kardashians through cultural osmosis is that in them we have an Armenian-descended family that has abandoned any pretense to being Christian. Instead, it proudly flaunts its immoral and godless lifestyle.

There’s a lesson and a warning here for all of us who are serious about our walk with the Lord: we live in spiritually corrosive cultural circumstances that are far more dangerous to our spiritual health than any persecution ever could be. I don’t want to glamorize persecution. Praise the Lord that we live in a free country where we can worship and practice our faith without fear. But we also live in a godless culture that can hypnotize us by accommodation and acculturation into first ignoring, and then forgetting, God; a culture that wants to eradicate, perhaps not Christians themselves, but certainly their Christianity.

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

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