For what he says out loud is what many of our cultural and social elites believe but lack the nerve or spunk or guts to say publicly. Indeed, if Christ did not rise from the dead, Mr. Turner has more than a small point. The real tragedy of Rancho Santa Fe is that here were men and women truly lost, searching for God and either the Gospel was not given to them or they were not given the faith to embrace it. But it is modernism and the godless branch of libertarianism, not Christianity, that must stand stupidly mute in the face of Rancho Santa Fe. If there is no God or God is dead, how one lives one's life or schedules one's death is without moral meaning and no one's business but one's own.
Modernism is challenged in another way by what happened.
Thus, in a world where anything goes, everything is going. From abortion to mercy killing of the elderly, to the assisted suicides of Dr. Kevorkian and Death with Dignity, to the rising suicides among the young, the culture of death advances. When Western elites threw Christianity out with the trash, to declare themselves their own gods, they prepared their own banquet of materialism at the end of which is a pudding dessert like that of Heaven's Gate. Soon comes the Stolichnaya.