Avsnitt
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A woman was interviewing for a philosophy professorship at a Catholic university. Though she respected the intellectual tradition of the university, she was not herself Catholic. She hoped to find there similar respect for her own thinking, whatever its metaphysical conclusions.
The interview began well. Potential future colleagues discussed her research and gave her an opportunity to display her considerable knowledge of epistemology and continental thought.
Then a new voice chimed in. A crotchety but not-yet-old Catholic man began to dig into her moral and political views. He settled on the topic of abortion. How could she condone the murder of innocent unborn children? What other wickedness would she countenance?
She tried to respond that, while she was not a Catholic herself, she admired the moral tradition of Catholic theologians and philosophers. Nevertheless, respectfully, she disagreed with it. That was not good enough for the crotchety Catholic philosopher.
While the interview was otherwise successful, its final phase sapped the woman of energy. It left her desiring to be employed as far from this university as possible.
In her place, the university hired a different pro-choice secular philosopher: My dissertation advisor, who fortunately was not subjected to the same treatment.
As a Christian philosopher, I struggle to comprehend why a secular analytic philosopher’s failure to be pro-life would be surprising. And anyway, why would we focus on our points of disagreement, rather than our points of agreement - the rigor of philosophical thought, the merits of the candidate’s research, and the mission of the philosophy department?
Yet often, we approach people who hold different views than us in exactly the way this professor approached the interviewee. In those moments, we are tempted to think that our ideological differences are so fundamental that there is no common ground between us.
But there is common ground, and we’re standing on some of it.
There Is No Common Ground
“There is no common ground between believer and unbeliever.”
That was a dictum of the seminary I attended. Its presuppositionalist philosophy held that Christians and non-Christians do not differ merely in our conclusions. We differ at every level of thinking down to the most fundamental presuppositions of thought - even on the principles of logic and mathematics themselves.
“No common ground” was intended as a pious affirmation of our commitment to have a distinctively Christian worldview. Yet in our zeal to be as Christian as possible, we ignored the deeply divisive and partisan effects of the statement.
Imagine if a progressive activist said, “There is no common ground between progressives and conservatives!” Would that person strike you as open-minded and willing to hear opposing perspectives? Would you be likely to feel comfortable having a conversation with them about matters moral or political?
Personally, I would fear being written off for my beliefs, or being thought evil or irredeemable.
But that’s what we Christians do if and when we say: “There is no common ground between believers and unbelievers.” And even if we don’t say those words, we often act like it.
I wrote about this a few months ago in “Berating the Godfearers.” My friend “Brent,” who is interested in Christianity, was dismissed and shouted at for not being a six-day creationist by a number of evangelical Christians on a Zoom meeting. What had happened? The evangelical guys found one point of disagreement and went hard at it. But that’s not the path to a productive conversation.
As I put it then, the evangelical guys pursued conversion rather than conversation. And ultimately, it was a poor means of persuasion, forget conversion.
Common Ground at F3: Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith
A couple weeks ago, I hosted a philosophy night with my friends from F3, “Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith.” I was especially excited to talk about common ground with them because F3 itself has been for me a major object lesson.
At the end of every workout, someone says, “F3 is not a religious organization. All we ask is that you believe in something higher than yourself. It could be Jesus, Buddha, Allah, or the man next to you.”
But then, if the person is a Christian, he continues, “But I am a Christ-follower, so I’m going to close us out in a Christian prayer. Join me or respect the time. Dear God…”
There’s something very remarkable about this. Americans think that any public display or mention of religion is an attempt to impose faith on others. And many religious Americans publicly express their faith in a very impositional way.
But at F3, I learned a different way of interacting with non-Christians. Our faith or religious commitments are known, but they are not imposed on others, and they are not the source of our commonality. Our commonality is that we just sweated and lifted a concrete block (“the coupon”) together for forty-five minutes. Our commonality is that we want to escape “sad-clown syndrome,” a problem which afflicts many American men. Our commonality is that we believe that there is something higher than ourselves – that living for self-gratification is the wrong goal.
This commonality clears enough ground actually to discuss both normal life and deeper things. We have weekly “QSource” discussions in which we touch on themes of faith, virtue, manliness, community, and more. These discussions go deeper and engage more men than any church men’s group you’ve seen. I even instituted approximately monthly “philosophy nights” when we discussed a book over beer.
The key is that F3 discussions place Christians and non-Christians on a level playing field; we enter conversation as equal partners in the search for truth and goodness. I have indeed seen people become Christian through this. I’ve seen other people at least soften their stance on religion. And at a bare minimum, we are able to be open and understanding of one another’s perspectives.
This is the religion-friendly pluralist ethic on which America was founded. These days, most have more of a more secularist understanding - that religion shouldn’t be brought into the public square. Much better to do it in the manner of that polis within the polis, “F3 Nation.”
Finding Common Ground in Philosophy
My studies in philosophy are another of my attempts to disprove, “There is no common ground between believers and unbelievers.” In the first place, I’m studying philosophy, so none of my arguments can start from Christian premises. We proceed by reason alone, as it were.
But in the second place, I sought out a non-Christian dissertation advisor as a test of the thesis that there can be common ground between believers and unbelievers.
Now, I first took a course on Plato’s ethics with Dr. B____. I detected that he took a very secular view of Socrates; Socrates was a purely secular guy, whom Plato had corrupted and spiritualized. Whatever seemed to point in a Christian direction could therefore be attributed to Plato, or to later Neo-Platonist interpretations, rather than to Socrates. Socrates was a utilitarian; he didn’t believe in an afterlife; and Platonism was and is consistent with a scientific worldview.
Almost the whole semester, my mind kept thinking of paper topics where I disagreed with Dr. B____. But finally, I realized that I would learn the most by writing about the one topic I’d discovered on which he and I agreed.
After that was a success, I asked him about advising my dissertation, and we followed the topic to the next point of agreement. Eventually, I realized that Dr. B____ and I agree primarily on one thing: Reality exists. We just disagree about what reality is like (i.e., everything else).
But I relish that point of agreement for this reason: I believe that the common ground between all of us, no matter what our different views, beliefs, convictions, faiths, is reality itself. Even the postmodernists who think that reality is nothing but a mental construct - we drive on the same streets, breathe the same air, encounter the same objects in our visual field and so on. No worldview, philosophy, belief, metaphysics, or any of it can obscure the fact that reality itself is the common ground between us.
The common ground between different worldviews is reality itself.
A Philosopher and an MS-13 Member Walk Into a Bar…
The process I went through with my professor can work with anyone. You may disagree with them about ten things, all of great importance, but you agree on one thing. Start there! Revel in that point of agreement.
Short of morality and politics, revel in all the other things you can share. Maybe you like the same food, root for the same sports team, or send your kids to the same school. You can always find points of commonality.
But aren’t there still limits? Some people are just so evil, we couldn’t have any common ground. Like an MS-13 gang member, right?
Well, I recently heard a story about a former member of the gang MS-13. He had become a rat, telling on other members, after reaching a moral line in the sand. Though he had previously murdered twenty people in cold blood, he happened upon several other gang members poised to murder a baby. “What are you doing, guys? It’s a baby!” Inside, he knew that there, he drew the line. It’s not right to murder an innocent baby!
Hey, I agree with that! It’s not right to murder an innocent baby. I just extend that courtesy also to grown-ups.
There it is. A point of common ground! It could be the starting point for a conversation. Even a philosophical dialogue.
If I can find common ground with an MS-13 murderer, then I’m pretty sure you can find common ground with your laptop-class interlocutor whose views differ slightly from yours.
My song “Common Ground” was inspired by seeing failures of people to do exactly that: “I heard that you don’t think like me/I bet that means I won’t like you.”
I even accidentally described the story at the beginning of this post about the pro-choice professor being taken to task: “I think you all should shut your lids/’cuz you think it’s cool to murder kids.”
Now here’s to extending a bit of courtesy to our ideological opponents. And if you ever forget, just give “Common Ground” another listen.
Dedication
I dedicate this post to my friends in F3 St. Charles and in New Town at St. Charles.
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As a young Christian, I jumped wholeheartedly into a burgeoning theological movement, one which got young people excited about the Bible and Protestant theology, inspired us to devour books and attend church religiously, and provided us with guides and gurus to direct us in a confusing world: The young, restless, and Reformed.
After years of reading their blogs and books and watching videos, after a three-year seminary degree and a decade attending Reformed churches, it’s time to take stock. What should we think now of the young, restless, and Reformed movement?
Briefly, that while it taught us some good things, it is time to move further in, and further up. Youthful zeal, even with knowledge - and biblical knowledge, at that - must be transcended in order to attain wisdom, which only comes with experience and maturity.
What follows are four areas of critique of the young, restless, and Reformed movement - under the headings of theology, church, practice, and wisdom - and some pointers to a way forward.
1. Theology Revisited
While I studied Reformed theology at seminary and retain a commitment to it, the critiques of it are true.
Take for example the critique that we focused on Paul’s letters rather than the Gospels. I always resisted this critique; but following seminary, I really did have to shut the epistles and spend time in the gospels. I had to stop reading the Bible as a theology textbook, partly because I had already maxed out its potential in that direction. What I needed was spiritual and practical direction, not to mention a critique of the very theology-nerd mindset.
There were other theological critiques with which I began to resonate. People critiqued Reformed theology for being antinomian, concerned only with whether we are justified or elect, and not with the whole life lived. As I studied the Reformed tradition, I found that this was fundamentally incorrect about the sources - Calvin, Turretin, Baxter, Edwards.
But today’s Reformed pastors and churches? They were antinomian. They propagated a message of “Here’s what God’s law requires; but don’t worry, Jesus already did it.” They objected to the relevant passages of Calvin, of Turretin, and especially of Baxter and Edwards.
Most importantly, in practice, the theology-nerd obsession with the dictums of explicit theology led to a practical soteriology of “justification by profession of faith alone.” N. T. Wright had offered this critique, and while I hold that the traditional exegesis of Paul on justification is correct, the actual Reformed culture matched Wright’s critique. Our focus on explicit theological commitments implied that it was crying, “Lord, Lord,” - in just the right way - that saved.
The best of the Reformed tradition, I continue to believe, is neither narrow nor antinomian. But the popular American Reformed tradition is both.
2. The Church
Returning to the Gospels, I found in Christ’s teaching - mediated through regular conversations with King Laugh - a deep critique of the theology-nerd mindset. Who were the theology nerds, the theo-bros of Christ’s day? The Pharisees.
We can believe all the details of Paul’s theology, and of Christ’s. But if we do it in the way of a Pharisee, we’re just, as King Laugh puts it, better Jews. (No offense to my Jewish readers!) What we need is a critique of religious hypocrisy and Pharisaism that applies to Christians.
In the Reformed culture, the temptation is to think that Jesus’ teaching about the Pharisees can be subsumed under the heading, “Those Darn Papists.” (Ahem, Catholics.) Once again, as if being on the right side of one theological divide were the key to salvation. Or again, as if properly saying that Jesus did it all and everything we do is worthless were the key - antinomian theology is not the key to salvation.
This critique of theology-nerds, however, applies equally to our churches. After all, for over a decade, I have been approaching church attendance as a matter of exemplifying one’s explicit theological commitments by where one attends one hour a week. I have tried to choose my church to exemplify where I’m at theologically.
But now I think it’s deeply incorrect to derive spiritual pride from one’s church attendance. I think it’s deeply misguided to think that where one attends one hour a week is the key to whether one is the “best kind of Christian.” I’m done sharing stories about my second conversion - to five-point Calvinism - and my supposed third conversion - to infant baptism. (Sorry, Presbyterians! We baptize babies ’cuz Constantine, not theology.)
We can’t think that churches and pastors, or doing church right, or getting the sermon message right will save the day. Action in the world both before and after the gospel is absolutely necessary.
3. Practice: The Fourth Evangelical Wave
Trevin Wax recently wrote that we are entering a fourth evangelical wave after the third wave of gospel-centered (see my recent critique), i.e., young, restless, and Reformed. (The first wave was the charismatic movement, the second the seeker-sensitive movement.)
The fourth wave is about Christian practice, habits, and virtues. John Mark Comer’s re-popularization of Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, and “the way of Jesus” is the spearhead. Comer is recommending a raft of spiritual disciplines and meditation as shaping our Christian lives more than theological details (to which he is not opposed).
You could read my emphases and those of King Laugh as contributing to this fourth wave. However, I want to massage the details. After all, I fear that a focus on spiritual disciplines as “the ticket” can be just a privatized version of the same ritualism into which Reformed practice has fallen. (Instead of attendance at gospel-centered expositional sermons being key, it’s morning devotions.)
I’m less interested in disciplines, rituals, liturgy, and habits than Comer and, for that matter, Jamie Smith. What I’m interested in post-YRR are wisdom, growth, and maturity. I think habits and liturgy sometimes are a kind of place-holder for that, both for good and ill. Comer’s new “way of Jesus” seems to have its own rituals, but rightly understood the focus on practice is correct. Russell Moore talked recently about being a “practicing Christian.” I think that would be the thing to emphasize.
Implicit Theology
While I retain Reformed theology, I am much less concerned about our explicit theology, and much more about our implicit theology exemplified in practice. You can be explicitly reformed, for example, but functionally Pelagian. You can be explicitly justification-only, but functionally prosperity gospel.
Implicit theology is revealed in actions and concrete judgments, not explicit theologizing. The gospel-centered movement’s response to celibate, gay Christians revealed their functional theology as a myopic focus on being a white-washed Christian, while suppressing the finer details of our unnatural nature. In a more pointy-headed way, the Federal Vision controversy revealed the implicit theology of NAPARC (Old-school Reformed and Presbyterian) churches as functional antinomianism. And every week, our church practice and sermon structure reveals our belief that listening to theology lectures will save us osmotically and sacerdotally.
Theological Triage
Once you reorient around Christian practice, most theological distinctions pale in comparison. Now, I learned the idea of theological triage - ranking doctrines by their significance - from this movement, from Al Mohler, specifically. But we actually have to practice it. For example, if you think that being Baptist is what matters you’re not practicing it. If you think that being Presbyterian is a third conversion (and Federal Vision a fourth!), you are not practicing it. With these things in perspective, the differences between Protestants and Catholics pale, so no intra-Protestant distinctions stand out as much.
In that light, the book The Imitation of Christ stands out as a post-theology-nerd manifesto.
4. Wisdom
In reorienting around Christian practice, we need a new type of knowledge. The knowledge of the theology-nerd does not suffice for healthy Christian practice. Nothing that can be embraced by a 17-year-old and mastered by a 25-year-old can be sufficient teaching for Christ’s church.
Instead, we need wisdom.
There is no shortcut or brand that will do the job. We don’t need new “practicing Christian” t-shirts or bumper stickers. We need actual virtue, wisdom, and maturity. These are hard won and require inter-generational teaching, decades of experience, and trial and error.
Churches who sought to contribute to this, rather than to disseminating seminary knowledge, would also look different. They would teach meat, and not just milk. But given a paucity of such churches, (churches, in order to address a wide audience, usually focus on milk) we must not be afraid to look outside the church for meat.
We must resist the guru. If I have a guru, he is, or was, Jordan Peterson. But the rise of Jordan Peterson only revealed the poverty of our evangelical gurus. They had left gaps - the entire realms of wisdom and psychology - which Jordan Peterson swooped in to fill. But ultimately, we don’t just need to “find us a new guru” to fill those gaps - we need to seek wisdom in those areas. (Take Chris Williamson as the non-Christian example of trying to find “modern wisdom” with Peterson as a launching point but not an endpoint.)
I have captured this epistemological change as “Christian empiricism”: Knowledge from experience. We must recognize the necessity of knowledge from experience. This is part of moving on from young and restless to older and wiser. For it is also possible to become older, but none the wiser.
Am I Still Young, Restless, and Reformed?
Am I still young, restless, and Reformed? In many ways, yes. But I’m no longer quite so young, my restlessness now has a different cause, and I care less about being explicitly Reformed and more about being implicitly Reformed.
I don’t offer a new way, or a new ideology. If I could point somewhere, it would be to the words of Christ, who never wrote a systematic theology, who if he ever spoke the gospel, tried to keep it hidden, but who truly lived the gospel. His teaching was about a way of life that would distinguish his followers from the world, as well as from doctrinaire religious authorities and practitioners.
A Reformed children’s book my wife and I own reads thus: “Jesus Wins! He is our eXample.” (It’s an alphabet book.) “But more importantly, he is the Yes and Amen to all of God’s promises.”
It is the “But more importantly” that gets me. I no longer read that phrase aloud. For it creates a false dichotomy. Nothing is more important - for us - than that we imitate Christ.
And in that point, we Reformed are not at all distinct from any other variety of Christian. We do not have a corner on the gospel. In fact, being Reformed and gospel-centered theology are often nothing but a hindrance. They make us think that the secret things of Lord - whether we are justified or elect - are within our province. But they aren’t. We should treat predestination as the secret knowledge it is. It hardly concerns us.
The one thing we can do is to live in accord with Christ’s new commandment to love others, as only he loved us. By that, they will know that we are his disciples. And it is in choosing and living, by our free will, to imitate him that we have been, are being, and will be saved.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Scripture is the only source of theology that evangelical Christians all accept. As a result, the methodology of evangelical theology is to argue deductively from premises of a single source: the Bible. Excluded from theology are philosophy, empirical science, and literary imagination. Accordingly, evangelical theology is functionally biblicist.
If a theologian introduces a premise that is not biblically-derived but is based in experience, that theologian invites suspicion that his premise is unbiblical. “The earth is 4.5 billion years old” - unbiblical. “Sexual orientation is a real feature of human psychology” - unbiblical. “Christianity is at least socially useful, even if this does not prove its truth” - unbiblical.
People who reject these “unbiblical premises” are led to specific theological conclusions: “The earth was created in six 24-hour days.” “A Christian may not describe himself as ‘gay.’” “We should believe in Christianity only because it’s true, independently of its fruits.” With a narrow range of theological sources, our theology itself narrows.
But theologians who utilize experience in addition to the Bible have a greater wealth of resources on which to draw in their thinking. What is more, their thinking takes into account human nature itself, resulting in a humane theology, rather than one that feels foreign and unsympathetic to who we are.
The eminent Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar is an example of a theologian whose theology draws on human experience in addition to the Bible.
In a perfect case study of theology from experience, Biggar questions the Christian pacifist conclusions of Richard Hays by transcending his Bible-only method, and introducing a premise from experience: Human violence is not always motivated by hatred, vengeance, and anger. A theology that takes into account the full breadth of human experience cannot condemn all violence.
Biggar’s argument is a perfect case-study in Christianity’s need of the theological source of experience.
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The Bible-Only Case for Pacifism
A long-time New Testament scholar at Duke Divinity School, Richard Hays made the case for Christian pacifism in his The Moral Vision of the New Testament. Hays argues that, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus lays out the ethic of a new kind of community, radically different from ordinary human communities. This radically new ethic is “one in which ‘anger is overcome through reconciliation … retaliation is renounced … and enemy-love replaces hate’. … In sum, ‘the transcendence of violence through loving the enemy is the most salient feature of this new model polis’” (36).
To this Hays adds Jesus' frequent refusal of political violence, desired by the zealots of his time, and his injunction to “turn the other cheek.” Hays also appeals to Jesus’ rebuke of Peter, when he draws a sword in Christ’s defense; Hays “takes [this] to be ‘an explicit refutation’ of the justifiability of the use of violence in defence of a third party” (36-37).
The Bible also condemns the motives that inspire violence. The rest of the New Testament “forbids anger, hatred, and retaliation–and the violence that issues from them” (47). Hays concludes, from appeal exclusively to the biblical text, that Christianity supports non-violence.
In the following section, Nigel Biggar introduces a premise from outside the Bible that calls Hays’ argument into question.
But even Bible-only interpreters have reason to question Hays’ Christian pacifism. Both Christ and the apostle Paul speak about soldiers without condemning their calling; Jesus’ words for soldiers are, “Do not take things from anyone by force, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be content with your wages.” Likewise, Paul in Romans 13 recognizes civil government as appointed by God and having the right to bear the sword against evil. Biggar raises these biblical counter-arguments.
Even if Hays’ biblical argument is not airtight, there is something appropriate about the Bible-only perspective being a pacifist one. Bible-only theology is a facet of what what Richard Niebuhr calls the “Christ Against Culture” perspective.
This school of Christian thought, which includes everyone from Tertullian (“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”) to Tolstoy, argues that the Bible brings a distinctive perspective from those of the world. The world frequently operates on the basis of power, hating one’s enemies, and retaliatory violence. But the New Testament introduces an antithetical principle into history - Christ’s New Commandment of love even for the enemy.
If you wanted a distinctively New Testament perspective on violence, one that stood at odds with the powers and principalities of this world, you might very well adopt Christian pacifism. Tertullian and Tolstoy both did. And so did the entire Anabaptist tradition - including Mennonites and the Amish.
Hays’ Christian pacifism claims to be the position that is most exclusively and distinctively biblical.
Is Violence Always Motivated by Hatred?
In In Defence of War, Nigel Biggar introduces a premise from experience that contravenes Hays’ conclusion. While Biggar also makes biblical arguments, it is his empirical argument that raises questions about theological methodology.
For instance, one of Hays’ arguments began from the New Testament’s prohibition of hatred, vengeance, and anger. Since these are the motives from which violence flows, violence itself is thereby also forbidden.
But, Biggar points out, Hays has just introduced an assumption about the motives for violence: That violence only flows from vindictive motives. If any violence does not flow from hatred, vengeance, or, as Biggar distinguishes, unloving anger, then such violence would not be prohibited. Indeed, if any violence flows from motives that are commanded, like love and justice, such violence may even be obligatory.
Biggar devotes the entire following chapter, “Love in War,” to demonstrating that many military actions are divorced from vindictive motivation. He summarizes, “Soldiers in battle are usually motivated by loyalty to their comrades and by fear of shame, rather than by hatred for the enemy” (56).
In fact, many soldiers would cross lines to shake hands with their opponents if given the chance, though during battle, they will need to fire at them, often lethally. Ernst Jünger wrote about the First World War:
Throughout the war…it was always my endeavour to view my opponent without animus, and to form an opinion of him as a man on the basis of the courage he showed. I would always try and seek him out in combat and kill him, and I expected nothing else from him. But never did I entertain mean thoughts of him. When prisoners fell into my hands, later on, I felt responsible for their safety, and would always do everything in my power for them. (78)
Biggar writes about the military preference for cold, dispassionate violence rather than “hot violence.” He quotes Vietnam vet Karl Marlantes:
Contrary to the popular conception, when one is in the fury of battle I don’t think one is very often in an irrational frenzy … I was usually in a white heat of total rationality, completely devoid of passion, to get the job done with minimal casualties to my side and stay alive doing it. (79)
Biggar surveys other examples and motives, “love for one’s comrades,” something than which Jesus said there was no greater love; love for one’s family; the desire to prove oneself, the desire to be worthy of the heritage of one’s regiment, and so on.
He acknowledges, however, that sometimes rage comes over soldiers. This motivation and the violence that flows from it, Biggar condemns. However, even there, “sometimes what inspires [rage] is the death of comrades.” But “what appears to anger combat soldiers most…is not the death of a comrade, but enemy conduct that breaks the rules…treachery, gratuitous sacrilege, wanton cruelty.”
Other times, soldiers’ rage has no justification and leads to great wrong; yet soldiers are often conscious of this moral danger. Marlantes wrote, “There is a deep savage joy in destruction … I loved this power. I love it still. And it scares the hell out of me.” Soldiers have a duty to control “the beast that lies within us all” (89).
The assumption, therefore, that all violence is motivated by hatred, vengeance, or anger turns out to be false. Biggar summarizes his conclusion:
It contradicts the charge that military violence is mainly and necessarily motivated by hatred. … It confirms the thesis that soldiers are usually motivated primarily by love for their comrades. And it supports the claim that they can regard their enemies with respect, solidarity, and even compassion–all which are forms of love.
Given this information from human experience, a crucial premise of Hays’ argument is overturned. The Bible does not condemn all violence. The Christian call to love our enemy is not incompatible with, and may sometimes require, killing him.
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Other Premises from Experience
Consider what occurred in the last section: A theologian’s exclusively biblical argument was undermined by a premise from human experience. And even for those of us who have never been pacifists, the Bible’s warnings about anger and Christ’s command to “turn the other cheek” often induce worries about the legitimacy of violence and war, even in self-defense.
Biggar’s examination of first-hand accounts from the frontlines reveals, however, that these worries cannot be absolutized. Not all violence is motivated by motives that the Bible proscribes.
Biggar introduces yet another premise from outside of the Bible: The doctrine of double effect. According to that ethical doctrine, we can distinguish the intended consequences of an action from side-effects that are foreseen, but unintended. For example, in a situation of self-defense, you might have the following thought: “I do not intend to kill you, only to protect myself, but I foresee that shooting you at close proximity is likely to leave you dead.”
Hays and others object that the doctrine of double effect is a speculative premise, foreign to the text. The doctrine of double effect is unbiblical.
Biggar concurs with his critics that he is not “aware of having first learned [the doctrine of double effect] from the Bible.” Still, it is “in [his] view, correct,” presumably on philosophical and empirical grounds. He counters that the doctrine may not be unbiblical, but only non-biblical.
Both with the doctrine of double effect and the evidence of soldiers’ motives for violence, Biggar is bringing the “fruits of experience” into his biblical interpretation and theological argumentation.
Biggar is aware, however, that, “Some might find it suspect that I presume to take these fruits of experience into my reading of the New Testament.” In fact, Hays does not completely deny the role of experience as a theological source; he acknowledges “experience,” but defines it narrowly as subjective religious experience and limits its role to that of “confirming the truth of the teaching of Scripture.”
Biggar counters on both points. Experience is not just subjective religious encounter or emotion: “A far wider range of human experience of the world that God has created should come into play.” And experience can play a role, not only in confirming Scripture’s truth, but in informing our interpretations: “One of [experience’s] main roles should be to help determine the meaning of Scripture, and not merely to confirm its truth.”
On this latter point, Christians often try to argue that empirical sources should not affect our biblical interpretation; it should only call the empirical information into question. Others revise their biblical interpretation on the basis of uncritical acceptance of scientific consensus. Biggar points out that we may question the deliverances of experience in light of biblical witness, or we may be moved to change our interpretation of the Bible in light of experiential or empirical knowledge.
The Danger of Presuppositions
Biggar argues on the basis of experience, and not the Bible only. But, he alleges, so does everyone else, including Hays. As I have argued myself, those who deny the role of experience in theology are just as influenced by experience in their theological formulations, but in an undisciplined and accidental way.
Biggar writes, “Hays himself brings more empirical data–and brings it more deeply–into his exegetical and synthetic work than he himself recognizes.” After all, where did Hays get the assumption that all violence is motivated by hatred, vengeance, and anger if not from experience? The problem is not using experience in theology; the problem is not having enough of it. (In this case, insufficient reading of military histories and memoirs.)
Biggar’s conclusion is apt:
It seems to me that the reason why [Hays] reads Jesus’ death on the cross as meaning the absolute repudiation of all violence everywhere is that he has imported empirical assumptions about anger and violence as necessarily vengeful and malevolent. I do not complain at all about the importation. I merely dissent from the assumptions.
Likewise with the use of philosophy in theology. Biggar’s grounds for adhering to the doctrine of double effect are philosophical. But someone who rejects the doctrine of double effect is not free of philosophical beliefs. Rather, Biggar points out that if you reject the doctrine of double effect, you are committed to an alternate philosophical doctrine: that “the moral quality of an act depends…primarily on its good or evil effects,” without regard to intention. Famously, that is a doctrine of consequentialism. Does Hays realize that he has imported a consequentialist philosophical doctrine into his reading?
When we encounter the Bible, all of us already have a panoply of empirical beliefs. We can’t help but think things from experience before our engagement with the text. Rather than thinking ourselves blank slates or trying to be free of empirical assumptions, we should discipline ourselves in the acquisition of knowledge from experience. We should cultivate our natural reason. We should read widely in (at least) history, science, and philosophy. That is what I call Christian empiricism. And Nigel Biggar is a great example.
Biblical Silences
One more point before we leave behind Biggar’s dispute with Hays. One of the biblical arguments Biggar makes has to do with an absence of condemnation from Jesus and Paul for the calling of soldiers. Biggar writes that that silence is “loaded.”
But there is something else we could say, not only about this biblical silence, but about all biblical silences. Whatever we find the Bible has not clearly spoken on, we can read as an invitation to fill with premises from natural, non-scriptural revelation. In particular, from human experience and philosophy.
I think, for example, of the Christian discussion of contraception, which I entered last week. The Bible offers no unmistakably clear word. At the same time, its silence does not predetermine a permissive view. Instead, by leaving the question unanswered, it opens up a space for the empirical and philosophical discussion of contraception, appealing to biblical principle, but also human experience.
The Bible’s silences are an invitation to listen to other sources of information and even - as Christian tradition would have it - sources of divine revelation. Experience is a chapter in the book of nature.
Formation, Not Information
Biblicism arise from a faulty presupposition about the nature of redemption: That it is integrally concerned with apprising us of information about the nature of the world. Instead, redemption is focused on the formation of our character and the resurrection and transfiguration of our bodies themselves. Redemption assumes a world that is already in place and that is, in principle, already knowable by human beings.
The offer of redemption in the Bible assumes knowledge of the existence of God, our creation in his nature, our moral duties to him and one another, our failure with respect to those duties, and the suffering with which our world is replete from which we would seek deliverance. However much people may resist these truths, Christ comes into the world in which these are already true, and the gospel message presupposes these truths. Chiefly, the Law is prior to the Gospel.
Accordingly, the purpose of divine revelation is not to describe the structures of the world. The purpose of supernatural revelation is to enter into the already-existing world of human thought and experience and to tell us about certain actions of God within history. It is not to define human nature for us. It is to tell us that God has taken a human nature to himself, and that what he has assumed he is redeeming. It is not to make human knowledge as such possible; it is to provide us with some particular bits of knowledge and to direct us to higher wisdom.
In fact, Christ did not primarily come to deliver us from ignorance and provide us with knowledge at all. He came to save us from sin and to work in us love for God. Salvation is not primarily about information, but formation.
While Christ is the only source of our formation into God’s likeness, the Bible is not our only source of information about the world. To live faithfully, we must gather information from other sources. Not to do so is to squander our God-given capacities, reason, experience, and judgment.
Nigel Biggar is a prime example of a theologian honing just such natural capacities, without neglecting supernatural revelation. I commend his work to you.
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Yesterday morning, I listened to Preston Sprinkle’s response to criticisms of his Exiles in Babylon conference. Sprinkle presents, in his books and on YouTube, an evangelical perspective that is arguably theologically orthodox, but sympathetic to Side B, celibate, gay Christians. He is also mildly left-leaning on politics, from an Anabaptist-inflected Christian perspective. Hence, “Exiles in Babylon.”
Alisa Childers and Christopher Yuan criticized Sprinkle and his conference in a recent podcast. Alisa Childers is a former contemporary Christian music star, turned Christian discernment YouTuber. Christopher Yuan is the author of Out of a Far Country: A Gay Son's Journey to God. (Though I’m sure he would revise the word “gay” today.)
Childers alleges that the conference is platforming a gay-affirming, progressive Christian as well as Christians who “identify as trans” and have pronouns in their bios. She is concerned that the conference presents views that may be incorrect without loudly proclaiming that these are just someone’s opinion, or presenting a debate.
Yuan brings a “Side Y” Christian perspective on homosexuality, as someone who “struggles with same-sex attraction” himself. He argues against Side B, those Christians who say that being gay is not a sin, while holding to an otherwise traditional Christian sexual ethic. In fact, he says that Side B is “a different gospel.” (See this explainer on the “four sides” on questions of sexuality.)
The Big Question
I have one question about these discussions: Who here is woke?
From a partisan political view, an evangelical might say that clearly Sprinkle is more “woke.” After all, his politics are a bit to the left of the average evangelical - he is willing to use LGBTQ+ language, and even preferred pronouns. He has spoken with people on his channel who are to his left, including a (non-Christian) transgender woman. (Great episode, by the way.)
But in the context of conservative evangelicalism, Sprinkle is actually the free speech warrior. He is the closest thing I have seen on evangelical YouTube to what, for example, Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster do on Triggernometry - interview people on all sides of the aisle in good faith discussions and debates without demonizing one’s opponents. The Exiles in Babylon conference featured several panels of this kind, including on the Israel-Palestine conflict and Christian deconstruction.
On the other hand, it is Childers and Yuan who here advocate a kind of “no-platforming.” It is they who want a conference to have speakers with all and only approved views, in order to teach people what they ought to think. It is they who wield rhetoric to demonize their opponents - and especially the opponents who are closest to them ideologically.
They also speak far too freely of other Christians preaching “a different gospel.” J. Gresham Machen used the related rhetoric of a different religion in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. But Machen was speaking of people - theological liberals - who did not believe in the virgin birth, the divinity of Christ, or his or our resurrection, i.e., people who did not believe in Christianity(!), but continued to call themselves “Christians.”
Is celibate gay evangelical writer Wesley Hill preaching another gospel? Far from it. Wesley Hill’s story was the first of a gay Christian that I heard. He graduated from Wheaton College a decade before I did and spoke in chapel the year I started. His story in Washed and Waiting is a beautiful presentation of his journey with Christian faith and homosexuality. And, by the way, it preaches the one gospel, of salvation from sin through Jesus Christ, received by repentance and faith.
Theologian John Frame coined a phrase for those who continue in the mood of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy even when that is not what is happening: “Machen’s Warrior Children.” It’s when you fight evangelical Christians who are one step toward the lef… —nope, it’s just the middle—from you as if they were Harry Emerson Fosdick, the liberal preacher and author of the sermon, “Will the Fundamentalists Win?” Others have described this as “St. George in Retirement Syndrome”; with the dragon dead or out of the region, what is St. George to do with his fighting spirit?
Now, I’m willing to argue about which side in a theological controversy is being more faithful to the gospel. Sometimes it is faithfulness to the gospel that is at stake. For example, I would argue that the Ex-Gay movement of the ’70s to ’00s (Side X) offered what was effectively a prosperity gospel, and that Childers and Yuan’s position, that same-sex attracted Christians should not “identify as ‘gay,’” (Side Y) still has some of the same prosperity elements.
But I’m not going to say that people who think those things believe a different gospel. In fact, because we believe the same gospel, I’m going to appeal to the gospel we all believe in to argue that their approach to same-sex attraction is mistaken. (As I did, for instance, here.)
Both Sides
As in politics, so in the church, wokeness isn’t about right or left per se. It is about, within a large ideological group, who takes things to the extreme where they demonize their own. To quote Relient K, “We’re cannibals; we watch our brother fall. We eat our own the bones and all.”
On the left, wokeness sets in when you demonize fellow liberals for not signalling virtue loudly enough, strongly desire ideological purity, and refuse to listen to those with whom you disagree.
Among evangelicals, it occurs when… well, when you demonize fellow evangelicals for not signalling virtue loudly enough, strongly desire ideological purity, and refuse to listen to those with whom you disagree.
I concede that there certainly are some evangelicals who adopt uncritically liberal “wokeness,” both socially-liberal views and the mash-up of concerns about race and sexuality viewed in terms of oppressors and oppressed. (Some adopt it critically; to y’all, I say, let’s have the conversation!)
But among thinking, conservative evangelicals, there is an opposite danger - whether equal or greater, I cannot judge. That danger is to fall into tribalism, the purity spiral, and not talking to one’s opponents.
The fact is, whenever you talk to someone, you can find some common ground. And that humanizes other people. They’re not evil. They may be wrong.
But they may also be saying something you need to hear.
My New Band
It’s as good a time as any to let you know that I’m starting a band. I’ll be releasing a single soon called, “Common Ground.” It’s a burning pop-punk track mocking the reasons we demonize others.
I’ll let you know when the single is released. If you want to hear the song before the release, send me a direct message or email ([email protected]) and I’ll send you the private link.
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This article is the text of my presentation at a working group on theology and DEI hosted by the Princeton Initiative in Catholic Thought.
Today, there is a confusion of moral equality with mathematical equality. Ethicists and theologians are out; number-crunching nerds - empathic as they may be - are in.
Today it is held - especially by proponents of the doctrine of equity - that those most qualified to speak on the subject of human equality are social scientists: Whether human beings are equal turns on the mathematical outcome of social-scientific studies and a yet-incomplete human experiment.
I would like to reclaim equality as the terrain of ethicists and theologians. Why? Because equality is moral, not mathematical.
In particular, human equality is the claim that human beings, as people, are essentially and individually bearers of dignity, unaffected by accidental and empirical differences between them, at individual or group levels.
The doctrine of human equality is latent in ordinary moral discourse, in Christian and post-Christian societies. But its Christian foundation deserves reiteration. After justifying and exploring the claim that moral equality has been placed on the empirical and falsifiable foundation of mathematical equality, I will present a theological foundation for human equality, across five anthropological dimensions. By the end, I hope the presentation will prompt questions about whether and how the doctrine of human equality can be maintained in a secular society.
The Mathematical Doctrine of Equality
How can I say that the proponents of equity think that the doctrine of human equality depends on the empirical outcome of social-scientific studies and a yet-incomplete human experiment? Here’s how:
I once was trying to retrieve some artificial flowers at IKEA. As I searched, I asked a woman for help locating the flower section and made a quip about men not knowing where the flower section is. She responded, quite evangelically, that men can be interested in flowers too, so she wouldn’t assume my ignorance of the location of the flower section (though she did direct me there). In the hard edge of her comment, I heard her rationale, “Because humans are equal…you sexist.”
Human equality entails mathematical equality across group means on accidental features - like interest in flowers.
But if human equality is logically equivalent to mathematical equality, then social-scientific studies could determine whether human beings are equal. By putting the doctrine of human equality on an empirical basis, this IKEA-goer has made it falsifiable.
Now, if I gathered the relevant data and demonstrated to her that women are, on average, more interested in flowers than men, she would likely respond that this is due to cultural factors.
Once again, however, this puts the doctrine of human equality on an empirical and potentially falsifiable basis. But this time, it is on a basis that requires data to be gathered from a yet-incomplete human experiment: Raising a generation of boys and girls with an utter absence of stereotypes and cultural depictions of women having greater interest in flowers than men.
While technically falsifiable, this puts the mathematical doctrine of equality beyond the range of what will likely ever be tested. It is unlikely that society will purposefully carry out this experiment and gather the relevant data.
Now my claim is not that the difference of interest in flowers between men and women is biological; I lack the kind of expertise to adjudicate that claim.
My claim is that this entire discourse is irrelevant to the question of human equality.
Human equality does not, and should not be made to, depend on the outcome of social-scientific studies or yet-incomplete human experiments. That is too flimsy a basis for a claim as central to Western polities as the doctrine of human equality.
Likewise, the premise that moral equality is logically equivalent to mathematical equality is a premise that the cultural left shares with the racial right: Differences in group averages on accidental features are relevant to moral status.
I would have thought that the proper response to rejecting the racial right would be to reject that premise. Instead, the cultural left has assumed the truth of that premise and banked their moral worldview on a falsifiable empirical claim: That human beings, in a utopian, newly-reconstituted Rousseauian state of nature, would have equal group averages on accidental features.
I want to offer a distinct basis for the doctrine of human equality, one independent of the vagaries of empirical, mathematical observation.
The Doctrine of Moral Equality
First, we need a different gloss on human equality itself, the moral rather than the mathematical.
While the mathematical is about the outcome of social scientific studies, the moral is a normative claim about how human beings ought to be treated.
One way to cash out the moral doctrine of equality is by appeal to an old principle of law: “Treat like cases alike.”
Here’s a violation of that: “I would serve a white person in this situation, but I won’t serve this black person. After all, they are different.”
But are they in a morally relevant sense?
This provokes the question what forms of likeness are morally salient. And I would claim that race is not morally salient, but personhood.
Whether you treat them as a moral person possessing dignity and an equal claim on your esteem is determined by whether they are a person, which depends on nothing but membership in the human race.
From this example, I generalize a principle:
Accidental differences between human beings are irrelevant to moral status.
Just as race and sex are irrelevant to the moral status of personhood, more fine-grained differences between individuals and groups on accidental features are all the more irrelevant to moral status. This is not to claim that any particular group differences are natural or biological. It is to claim that no such differences are relevant to the doctrine of human equality.
It is a further and separate question what should be done to help those who suffer and are disadvantaged.
Recognizing that equality is a moral and not a mathematical claim, we see that it has to do with a status man has by nature and not accidental features. We reach contested questions of human nature, essentialism, and meta-ethics.
Contemporary discourse is divided primarily between postmodernists who do not believe in essences or natures at all, and naturalists who believe that nature is without moral significance and, by the way, that things do not have natures or essences.
Western moral intuitions still point to an implicit belief in human equality, but philosophy often conflicts with these intuitions. What can possibly ground the Western faith in human moral equality? A Christian theological anthropology.
Human Equality in Five Theological Dimensions
A Christian theological anthropology maintains the equality of human beings across five dimensions: Human Nature, Responsibility, Sin, Suffering, and Human Destiny.
Human Nature
First, all human beings are equal in possessing the same nature.
Biologically, Christianity teaches, or assumes, that all human beings are the same species. Population-differences, including purported race differences, are not just gradations from species-differences, like the distinction between humans and non-human apes. I’ll leave the details of making this claim concordant with science aside.
So far “equality” would apply to any species. The same, after all, would apply to dogs: All dogs are equally dogs.
To arrive at moral equality, we must introduce a category that is not merely biological but moral: “Person.” We determine membership in the kind person by virtue of membership in the kind human being. Persons are not some kind of advanced being with certain cognitive abilities; they are members of a species which is unique in its cognitive abilities and linguistic capacity, and upright stature, and distinction between feet and hands, and they reproduce facing each other. All of which are reflective of personhood.
The crowning feature of the Christian doctrine of human nature is that the human difference, call it rationality, personhood, or something else, is reflective of our being made in the image of God. All human beings are ultimately moral equals in that they are made in the image of God.
Responsibility
A particularly salient feature of the human difference, of our being in God’s image, is human responsibility. If a dog kills a person, we may put it down; but this is not punishment. If a person kills another person, we hold him responsible for his actions.
Human beings are also equal in responsibility. Equality in responsibility is contradicted by any ideology that frees some groups from responsibility while laying responsibility exclusively on another group’s shoulders.
This occurs in contemporary racial ideology, for example. As Shelby Steele argues, in “The Culture of Deference,” the effect of left-wing ideology and action since the 1960’s has been to put American whites in a relation of deference to American blacks. All moral responsibility is on the shoulders of whites; blacks have no responsibility. Whatever the wrongs of the past, it is the wrong response to treat a group that has suffered as now free from the responsibility that all humans are subject to, equally.
Sin
Human beings are also equal in being subject to the power of sin. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose theology inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism, made the doctrine of sin the core of his “Christian realism.” He measured ideologies by whether they recognized human fallibility, error, and mixed motives as universal to human beings or limited to one’s outgroup.
For instance, he praised Marxism for recognizing that people’s beliefs could be motivated by economic factors. But he criticized Marxists for thinking themselves above such criticism:
“This is the truth in the Marxist theory of rationalization…that all culture is corrupted by an ideological taint. The unfortunate fact about the Marxist theory is that…the enemy is charged with this dishonesty, but the Marxist himself claims to be free of it. … This is, of course, merely to commit the final sin of self-righteousness and to imagine ourselves free of the sin which we discern in the enemy.”
Likewise, he praised activists who opposed racism for uncovering elements of human sin. But he criticized activists and African-Americans themselves for absolving themselves of this participation in human sinfulness and, chiefly, pride. The response to race-hatred cannot be race-pride:
“The sins that the white man has committed against the colored man cry to heaven. But might it not be well for the ultimate peace of society if intelligent white men and colored men studied and analyzed these sins not so much as the peculiarities of a race, but as the universal characteristics of Homo sapiens, so called?” (“The Confession of a Tired Radical,” in Love and Justice, Reinhold Niebuhr, 121).
We see strange versions in our own time. Robin DiAngelo teaches in White Fragility that whites are subject to a version of original sin to which blacks are not. Whites must constantly examine themselves for racism, but blacks do not have to. Reverse racism is “A-OK.” The same with the other contemporary race ideologues. Black people can’t be racist. Race pride is in.
Suffering
The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, “Into what estate did the fall bring mankind? Into an estate of sin and misery.”
As with sin, people often do not believe in the universality of suffering and so, human equality as including conditions of suffering and misery.
There are many examples. Today, people think that suffering only happens to minorities, the “disadvantaged,” the oppressed. Another group can be classified as oppressors and is known to have no suffering (and all sin).
Instead, we need to see people as our equals, their suffering as our suffering, and it goes in both directions on these various scales of oppression or disadvantage. A lot of black people take a very negative view of white people, their lives are free of difficulty. A lot of poor people take a negative view of people who are well-off; they’ve got no problems. These are as much violations of recognizing human equality as are prejudicial views held by the wealthy and white.
Destiny
Nothing secures a belief in human equality like the belief that we will all share in a true, not merely hypothetical kingdom of heaven. The political struggle to realize it on earth is valuable - though whatever we achieve will remain imperfect - but we need a hope that this will be a reality one day. That should not undermine activity today to make it true. It should allow us to be realistic in our idealistic pursuits:
“There are…no solutions for the race problem on any level if it is not realized that there is no absolute solution for this problem. … It is not possible to purge man completely of the sinful concomitant of group pride in his collective life” (“The Race Problem,” Niebuhr, 130-131).
Not Equity, But Equality
The doctrine of human equality rests on the recognition that human beings are, morally, as persons, and theologically, as made in the image of God, equal in nature and status. Human equality is not an empirical claim about the sameness of human beings across groups on accidental features - and therefore, a falsifiable and unproven claim.
Admittedly, recognition of moral equality does not answer the further questions about assisting the poor, including members of previously excluded groups, and finding reconciliation after historical wrongs. Advocates of equity rightly draw attention to these questions.
But our contemporary political problems must be dealt with on the basis of a prior belief in and commitment to moral equality. That commitment to moral equality must not be confused with mathematical equality. Its ground is more certain than the shaky ground of falsifiable social science.
We need a moral doctrine that is a substantive alternative to that of proponents of DEI. And that doctrine should retain an “E.” The E should not be understood as implying a mathematical equality between groups, but a moral equality across races as members of the human species, as people.
Here’s to “E”: Not equity but equality.
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What I found most difficult about evangelism as a child was the disinterest of my audience. Those whom I was supposed to evangelize - secular liberals in an affluent society - saw no need of the message I peddled.
But today, secular ex-liberals approach me from every direction, desiring to talk about the failures and inadequacies of liberalism and secularism. Their minds are open to a word of wisdom from the Christian faith.
And some even have open hearts.
In Christian apologetics, the traditional arguments for God’s existence appeal to universal features of the world: Causality, design, beauty.
But in our moment, a new, historically-contingent theistic argument is made available: The argument from the failure of liberalism.
The political philosophy of John Lennon’s Imagine has been tried. Its outcome has been censorship, political tribalism, new forms of genital mutilation, sky-rocketing rates of anxiety and depression, and increasing racial division.
The victims of the liberal experiment are looking for a new paradigm. And the Christian paradigm, if we are willing to translate it anew, has a ready audience.
Which Liberalism Failed?
In 2018, Notre Dame professor of political science Patrick Deneen argued that liberalism had failed. Deneen identified liberalism with both the contemporary target of conservative sneers (“Liberals.”) and the classical liberalism of the American founding and contemporary American conservatives.
On this perspective, both “the rights of man” and “drag-queen story-hour” have their origins in the classical liberal political philosophy of John Locke and company.
But my target is not the classical liberalism of the 17th and 18th century, which, whatever its claims of philosophical paternity, was nothing like contemporary liberalism in its social application. My target is the mainstream cultural liberalism of American life in the late twentieth to early twenty-first century.
This cultural liberalism promised freedom and prosperity for all people regardless of skin color, political affiliation, religious beliefs, or sexual identity. It emphasized toleration, with an implicit intolerance for political conservatism or traditional religion. However, that intolerance was the - by today’s standards, innocuous - political correctness of the ’90s and ’00s.
This liberalism culminated in the presidency of Barack Obama, especially in the racial universalism of his first presidential campaign and term and the victories for the gay rights movement of his second term.
If we knew nothing about what had happened thereafter, we might think that the story of liberalism had had a happy ending.
How Liberalism Failed
Yet that is not what happened.
On February 26, 2012, a young black man, Trayvon Martin, was shot by a neighborhood watchman. That shooting, along with those of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, galvanized the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Martin’s shooting, occurring in the year of Obama’s second campaign, inspired his comments, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”
From what I understand, this shooting was correlated with a change in Obama’s rhetoric on racial matters. Whatever the causal story, Americans’ stated opinions of the health of race relations in the US have plummeted since that year, in spite of little evidence that trends toward racial equality have changed.
Since then, galvanized also by the perception of a white backlash in the Trump election and presidency, a large portion of liberal America has come to believe that America is a systemically racist country, that whites are congenitally racist, that so-called “anti-racist” ideology and training must be widely enforced, and that DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) departments must be instituted at universities and corporations.
This was further expedited with the 2020 death of George Floyd and widespread “Black Lives Matter” protests in response, this time with the participation and support of almost all the major institutions and corporations of American life.
It is now widely believed by liberal Americans that color-blindness is racism, that reverse discrimination is not only allowable but necessary, and that America is a country that is systemically racist against blacks and other dark-skinned, non-Asian minorities.
On June 26, 2015, the US Supreme Court, including two Obama appointees, decided that traditional marriage was unconstitutional and that gay marriage was the law of the land. The gay rights movement had won. An American majority supported gay marriage, and prejudice against gays and lesbians was only declining further.
But only two months before, in April 2015, Bruce Jenner had announced that he would henceforward be known as “Caitlyn.” Without much public opposition, one would have thought that the “T” might have been quietly smuggled in with the “L,” “G,” and “B.” But instead, a new civil rights struggle began, with fights over bathrooms, the normalization and popularization of manifold gender identities, and the pushing of gender ideology onto young children.
Men began to enter women’s sports, women’s colleges, and women’s prisons. In the UK, secular feminists began to raise alarm bells: The sex-based rights of women would not be defended if the definition of woman expanded to include a great number of men.
Across the Western world, stories of detransitioners who regretted their “sex-reassignment” surgeries - and having the irreparable wounds to prove it - began to speak up, often facing violent opposition from trans-activist groups, manned (literally) by “trans women” exhibiting characteristically masculine strength and force in favor of their ideology.
Again in the UK, the British gay rights group Stonewall was split over the issue of transgenderism, with defectors founding the LGB Alliance. They raised alarm bells over the conversion of young effeminate gay men and butch lesbians into heterosexual trans women and trans men - what gender transition effectively does.
While gender transition for minors became only more available in the US, the Nordic countries were already beginning to wind down gender clinics. Eventually, the UK Tavistock clinic was shut down given concerns about the scientifically untested character of hormone “therapies” and surgeries being offered to minors. Opposition to such medical abuses has begun to mount in the US, though it has only recently begun to be permitted on the mainstream left.
Liberalism had hoped to create a world in which a black man can be president and gays can marry one another. But it was unable to produce a successful, liberal end-state. What is less evident is why.
Why Liberalism Failed
There are two explanations: Some people say that we left liberalism behind and just need to return to it. Others argue that liberalism was the problem in the first place.
There was a phase from 2016 to 2019 in which public intellectuals mostly argued for a return to liberalism. Individuals from Dave Rubin to Jordan Peterson to Bari Weiss called themselves “classical liberals,” taking up the term of political philosophy or the British sense of “liberal.” The Intellectual Dark Web was the home of these liberal defectors from the left.
Classical liberal criticisms of wokeness focused on its departure from liberal norms. Woke censorship was undermining freedom of speech. Equity, i.e., equality of outcome, was undermining equality of opportunity. Racial tribalism, and even segregation, were replacing a focus on our common humanity.
Individuals often made appeal to what being a liberal or a Democrat had meant to them a decade or two before. This dovetailed with the critique of wokeness as a religion. Bill Maher had mocked religion in his documentary Religulous; he now found himself critiquing the religion of wokeness for these same qualities of tribalism and irrationality.
Even the religious elements of the Intellectual Dark Web argued that religion provided justification for classical liberalism. Peterson mainstreamed this argument, that the recognition of the image of God in each individual, mythologically represented in Christian teaching, was the foundation of Western liberalism. Ben Shapiro, himself a classical liberal in the sense of the American right, argued this same perspective in The Right Side of History. (I made it the central claim of an unpublished book I penned at the time, The New Idealism.)
For a variety of reasons, the defense of classical liberalism has not been able to hold a new political center. While there remain defenders of this liberal approach, public discussion has shifted in a new direction.
It was liberals and their moral intuitions, after all, that wokeness hijacked. Trans rights, for instance, appealed to liberals’ concern for oppressed minorities, just as gay rights had. Black Lives Matter tugged at the heartstrings of liberals, whose moral imagination is shaped by the black-white conflict of the civil rights movement. A return to liberalism would arguably be susceptible to the same problems all over again.
Also, liberalism has no tools to adjudicate the claims of competing minorities. Trans rights, for instance, have come into conflict with women’s rights and even gay rights. Being a good liberal does not tell you how to square that circle.
Some classical liberals want to use science to adjudicate those claims. For instance, instead of religious fundamentalists, today it is evolutionary biologists who defend the sex binary, not to mention the empirical differences in personality and behavior, on average, between the sexes.
But again, it was secular liberals who “believe in science” who fell for this ideology in the first place. This suggested that religious thinking was endemic to human beings. While a small number of professional scientists appear capable of being liberals but not woke, the masses are not.
This, in turn, suggests a new moral to be taken from the failure of liberalism and secularism alone: That only a religious alternative could withstand wokeness.
The problem with liberalism, on this view, is that it tries to do without religion, at least in public life. Yet it appears that without religion, human beings merely create their own, but without the time-tested character of traditional religion. Like communism and fascism before it, wokeness was a secular religion with an ideological fury.
The death of God left a vacuum. Political ideology backfills it with a vengeance.
Ex-Liberals’ Religious Hunger
The failure of liberalism has left politically-engaged and intellectually competent Westerners searching for a religious answer. What more substantive set of ideas and ways of being can fill the void at the heart of liberalism?
Strikingly, this group of thinking people, many of them ex-liberals themselves, are more interested in civilizational Christianity than the dogmatic claims of the faith. This is because recent events have revealed the civilizational consequences of abandoning Christianity for secular liberalism. But as ex-secular liberals, they still find it difficult to believe in the supernatural or to adopt an exclusivist religion.
This fact colored, for example, the evangelical reception of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion. Her Unherd article about her conversion focused on the civilizational challenges to the West and the way in which a society needs a religious core. Evangelicals accused her of being a merely civilizational Christian, of advocating Christianity not because it is true, but merely because it is useful. (In fact, her conversion was also spiritual and personal.)
However, this ignores both the legitimate concerns of ex-liberals like Ali and the valid evidence the failure of liberalism provides of humanity’s need of God.
While the failure of liberalism does not show deductively that God exists, it suggests that the West’s hypothesis that society could survive without God is returning negative results. The West left God behind, and some of what has happened is exactly what Christianity would have predicted - a loss of moral direction and a susceptibility to political ideology.
What is more, if religion is useful, it raises the further question whether it is useful in spite of its falsity or because of its truth. This is why, once again, the obsession with whether Jordan Peterson really believes is beside the point. Jordan Peterson has argued for the goodness of Christianity and its pragmatic or psychological truth.
This conclusion raises the further question of why Christianity is so darn useful. Unsurprisingly, many of Peterson’s listeners, not to mention his wife and daughter, have gone further than Peterson, concluding that Christianity is not only useful, but also true.
Short of conversion, the failure of liberalism provides much common ground for conversation. It is this kind of unthreatening conversation that is preparatory to receptiveness to Christianity’s truth. The fact that this argument does not compel belief is one of its most powerful features.
Locating the Good Soil
When I first discovered the argument from the failure of liberalism, I set out looking for some of these ex-liberals, none of whom I knew personally.
Since then, I have found these individuals in ways I could not have planned. I found at least one through F3, the national men’s workout group named for fitness, fellowship, and (non-sectarian) faith.
The online community Other Life, where Justin Murphy’s course Indie Thinkers facilitated my starting this newsletter, sent me several more. Murphy himself is one such convert; I highly recommend reading his moving Easter reflection, “On the Unleavened.”
From there, my online interaction on Substack, writing on topics at the boundary of theology, philosophy, and the Jordan Peterson discourse has brought me into contact with even more.
While I once thought of evangelism as the duty to throw seed overhand at every passerby, I have come recently to see that evangelism is as much a matter of locating good soil that will be receptive to the seed. I credit fellow writer and subscriber Ross Byrd for contributing to my understanding of this dimension of evangelism.
The intersection of the theistic argument from the failure of liberalism and these disaffected ex-liberals is a nexus of good soil and Christian seed.
Now, the ex-liberals at that nexus have some associations: A penchant for culture war, resentment against liberal elites, and even a temptation toward harder right positions. This can tempt Christians to keep our distance. (Though Christians have many of the same associations and temptations.)
But this would be to miss an opportunity: A whole group of people whose minds are open to the possibility that Christianity might be good for the world.
Whether Christianity is true - acknowledging that will depend on the openness of their hearts.
And that, in turn, will depend, not on the rigor of our arguments, but on the openness of our hearts toward them.
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I’m currently deep in the weeds of writing chapter two of my dissertation, “Content Empiricism: The Case Against Content Rationalism.”
If I had to drop the jargon and say what I’m arguing for in English, I would say I’m against concepts.
Concepts. They’re like the curtains of the mind. Whenever I want to argue that our minds are related to the things of the world, my discussion partner mentions “concepts.” The opaque curtains of the mind are drawn, and the room darkens.
We only ever see the world through our concepts, they say. But I’m looking toward my curtains right now. I don’t see anything through them.
I object to concepts most strongly when they are appealed to as blocking our view of the world itself. This happens chiefly in postmodernist and social constructionist accounts, broadly, anti-realist accounts. The world as we see it is a construction out of our concepts, which are themselves constructs.
But I’ve come to object to concepts more broadly. In analytic philosophy, there is a strong tradition that combines adherence to concepts with realism. It views our access to the real world as mediated by concepts. Concepts do not occlude our view of the world but rather enable it.
It’s a nice thought. But I fear that no view of our access to the world as mediated by concepts will do the job. No set of curtains helps us see better out the window.
What are concepts supposed to be anyway?
I take it that a concept is supposed to serve several roles:
* Concepts are more fundamental than words.
* Concepts can be expressed in definitions.
* Concepts can exist even if what they refer to does not.
First, concepts are fundamental than words.
I and a Frenchman, say, have a completely different set of words, but we share many of the same concepts. I say, “snow,” and he says, “la neige,” but we’re utilizing the same concept. That’s why, if I learn French, I’m learning a new word, but not a new concept when I learn the French word for “snow.”
Of course, there’s a popular theory that concepts do differ across languages, such that Eskimo languages, with their multiple words for different kinds of snow, possess more concepts as well. Still, the idea is that the Eskimos don’t just have more words; they have more concepts - so concepts are a kind of thing deeper and more fundamental than words.
Still, so far, we seem to be identifying concepts as corresponding one-to-one with a language with words. But concepts are supposed to be expressible in different words within a language as well. For instance, “donkey” and “ass” would express the same concept, even though they are different words. Once again, concepts are distinct from and more fundamental than words.
Second, concepts are expressed in definitions. In popular discourse, experts are often asked to “define terms.” The expectation is that they will offer a brief verbal description that covers all and only the instances that fall under that term or concept.
If different individuals are working with different definitions of terms, we take it that they have different concepts. This impedes communication and leads to people talking past each other.
This search for definitions has a philosophical basis. Socrates sought for the essence of certain key terms of human life, like justice, truth, knowledge, and the like. He and his interlocutors would try out various verbal descriptions that look much like our idea of definitions. They would test these against counter-examples, usually finding some counter-examples to any purported essence or definition.
Third, concepts exists even if what they refer to does not. For example, this is how many atheists and agnostics view the term “God.” Even if God does not exist, there is a human concept of God, more fundamental than the mere word “God,” and expressible in various traditional definitions, “the greatest possible being,” “a transcendent person,” “the prime mover,” “the creator,” and so on.
If I had to utilize the term, I would say that, here, I have expressed the very concept of a concept.
The Conceptual Theory of Thought
Now the concept of a concept gives rise to a theory of thought:
Human beings think about the world by utilizing concepts. The concepts are human constructions, but they can refer to the world insofar as things in the world match the descriptions offered in the definitions of concepts.
Think of this as a set of criteria: A concept has a set of criteria for falling under it. Nothing is a cup, for instance, unless it is concave and designed for holding liquid. We think about the world by way of concepts that provide criteria for their own membership.
Now, an important feature of definitions or descriptions is that each of the terms in the definition itself expresses a concept, and so, when we determine whether something matches the description, we are ultimately making appeal to the application of other concepts.
For example, my definition of “cup” made appeal to “concave,” “designed,” “holding,” and “liquid.” (We’ll leave aside the semantics of the other words in the phrase.) Each of these words expresses a concept, which could be spelled out in a definition, which in turn, would utilize words that indicate concepts.
It is a key question of philosophy whether there are a fundamental set of concepts or whether there is a kind of perception of reality that is non-conceptual. This would provide a touchpoint, without which, it appears that we are trapped within a circle of concepts, of coherence rather than correspondence.
Many twentieth-century empiricists tried to provide this in terms of sense-data, the Given, or logically-proper names. (Bertrand Russell thought, or hoped, that we had “logically-proper names” that directly referred to something, though he thought we could only refer to sense-data.)
But even the chief twentieth-century empiricist, W. V. O. Quine concluded that we ultimately could not determine, nor did we need to, the reference of our words. Coherence was sufficient, so long as our conceptual scheme worked, pragmatically.
I think this demonstrates the degree to which even realist and empiricist philosophers have been beholden to concepts and the theory of thought they supply.
Frege and His Concepts as Case Study
In the dissertation chapter I’m currently working on, the object of my study is a quite different figure, the founding father of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege.
Frege was a realist who gave concepts a quite prominent place in his theory of thought. He held that concepts were objective, immaterial entities called “senses.” We successfully refer to objects in the world based on whether they match, or meet the criteria, of the senses we grasp.
While the immaterial aspect of Frege’s thought has been abandoned by many contemporary analytic philosophers, they are beholden to his picture of thought in other ways.
But examining Frege provides an important opportunity to put my theory to the test, that is not just postmodernist and social constructionist theories of concepts that are problematic. Concepts themselves are the problem.
If even Frege’s objectivist and realist account of concepts leads to subjectivist results, then concepts themselves turn out to be nothing but curtains, occluding the mind’s view of the world.
So far, that is what I’m finding.
Our theory of thought is due for a clean-out, and it’s concepts that have got to go.
“Against Concepts” is a distinct section of The Natural Theologian, in the pages of which I’ll be detailing and summarizing the content of my Ph.D. dissertation. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to it separately if you choose at the Substack “Settings” page.
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To evangelical ears, this title will seem to read as an attempt to revivify the spirit of Jerry Falwell. And it will be said that his spirit seems alive and very well - too well.
But I have a different audience in mind. In the intellectual circles of the political right, there are many open questions about the direction of the movement, chief among them whether and how religious the right ought to be.
You see, while the popular voting bloc of the Republican party is relatively religious, the intellectual elites of conservatism are less so, and the online avant-garde of the Right is even less so.
I am not arguing that Christians ought to take up the cause of the political right.
In this essay, I am arguing that the intellectual right ought to heed its religious impulse.
Why should the right be religious?
Without a religious impulse, the intellectual Right tends almost inevitably to become a racial movement. And if it is between a religious right and a racial right, then we should choose a religious right.
The Intellectual Right Is Not the Same as the American Political Right
Now this will all sound odd to American ears. The American right is a movement based on race-neutral, libertarian capitalism, plus a dose of American civil religion. It can avoid the charge of racism by appealing to the principles of classical liberalism: freedom of speech, freedom of association, and equality before the law.
In contemporary politics, of course, standing for classical liberalism has begun to code right, and many liberals who would formerly have identified themselves with the left have found themselves more aligned with the American right.
In fact, the alignment of classical liberalism with the Western right has been going on for a long time. Friedrich Hayek was a liberal. And the Neo-conservatives were liberals who had been mugged by reality. The Intellectual Dark Web’s defense of classical liberalism was but the latest iteration.
In contemporary politics, such people are considered to be on the political right.
But in philosophical discussion, someone whose fundamental moral appeals are to principles of classical liberalism is a liberal and not a conservative.
When I address the right, I am addressing those on the intellectual right, from conservatives right-ward, to the radical right. Their fundamental moral appeals are not to neutral, liberal principles but to something more substantive.
What Unifies the Intellectual Right?
Now what unifies the group I am identifying as the intellectual right?
The Right is unified by a commitment to the preservation of a culture, which it perceives as threatened by intentional actors committed to egalitarian and liberal ideologies and by cultural forces beyond human intention including technology and capitalism.
The deep debates on the intellectual right are about the identity and content of that cultural heritage. If we say, “Western civilization,” almost everyone on the intellectual right will be on board. But opinions divide about the relative priority of Christian, philosophical, and classical dimensions of Western civilization.
The deepest divide on the intellectual right is about whether Christianity is the cultural heritage we seek to preserve, or whether Christianity is a precursor to contemporary leftism and wokeism. Christians and their sympathizers, “god-fearers,” accept Christianity as the cultural heritage they seek to preserve. But a secular or neo-pagan, Nietzschean, vitalist right rejects Christianity as but a precursor to contemporary leftist decadence.
For more on the contrast, see Johann Kurtz’s essay, “Choose boldly between Christianity and Vitalism.”
The Christian and Classical Currents of Civilization
Now Christianity is not the whole of the cultural heritage that the Christian Right seeks to preserve. The classical heritage is there as well. Christians are the source of contemporary classical schools, for example.
But how to relate the Christian and the classical is another way to frame the Right’s debate. The vitalist Right favors the classical over the Christian. The Christian right seeks to integrate them.
(There are also facets of the Christian right that repudiate the classical, about which I’ve written elsewhere.)
The Nietzschean right wants to regain the virtues of classical, pre-Christian civilization. While Christianity valorized weakness and suffering, classical civilization celebrated strength and manliness.
In identifying a conflict between Christian and classical thought, Nietzscheans are not wrong. Christ says, for example, “Do you love those who love you? Even the Gentiles do that. But I say to you, love your enemies and do good to those who hate you.”
The Nietzschean right responds, “What is this leftist drivel? Our nations will break down if we do good to those who hate us! We need to insist on particularity and love those who love us and hate those who hate us.”
(It’s called, “the friend-enemy distinction.”)
The Nietzschean Right sees a direct through-line from Christ to contemporary leftism (and wokeism). It wants to depose these and return to the classical affirmation of strength, natural hierarchy, and inequality.
Christian Criteria
Now, while contemporary Christianity is indeed subject to some of the failings of leftism and of slave morality, the Christian Right believes that Christianity can avoid these criticisms. They believe that there are both resources within the Christian tradition for doing so and that Christianity can accept resources from the outside for doing so.
In these webpages, I have made both arguments: On the one hand, I have argued that some of the very features that make evangelicals evangelicals lead us to be ineffective in public action. Our preference for piety over competence is one example. I have pointed to Christ’s parable of the dishonest manager as an example of shrewdness as a Christian virtue.
At the same time, I have encouraged Christians to look outside of their own Scriptures for knowledge about the world, to science, philosophy, and common human experience. This will include recognition of the classical tradition, of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and even aspects of classical and contemporary vitalism as sources of wisdom.
One of the reasons I am able to adjudicate between different facets of the Christian tradition is that I am a Christian. When someone tells me that Christianity leads to x, I don my theologian cap and examine x as a Christian theologian. If I find it wanting, by the criteria of Christian theology, then no number of historical examples or arguments can persuade me that Christianity leads to x. X is a theological error.
For example, many - now from the left - will argue that Christianity leads to homophobia. Having considered a Christian theology of same-sex desire, I can argue strongly that Christianity does not teach homophobia, even if many Christians have taught it and exhibited it.
In fact, this is one of the main reasons why I think the right needs religion. It needs to utilize the resources of religious morality to distinguish between right and wrong. It needs to be able to follow in the path of a Bonhoeffer or a Niebuhr and say, “While many Christians defend x, x is incorrect by Christian criteria.”
If we conclude that the whole of Jewish and Christian religion has been a failure because its secularized step-children have, we strip ourselves of many of the resources of moral thought.
The Corruption of the Best Is the Worst
I want to appeal to philosopher Ivan Illich to make this point. (Not to be confused with Tolstoy’s character Ivan Ilyich.) Illich argued forcefully that contemporary society is a secularization of Christianity. The entire schooling system Illich identified as a secularization of the process of catechesis and discipleship, universalized to the whole society and backed up by force.
But Illich did not consider this to be evidence against Christianity. Rather, he thought it provided evidence of a principle: “The corruption of the best is the worst.” Christianity is the best thing. Modern secular progressivism is a step-child of Christianity, yes, but it is the worst thing for that very reason.
Likewise, the moral idealism and egalitarianism of Christianity is a beautiful thing. When stripped of love for the natural and fallen world, it becomes a deadly thing in the hands of idealists and communists. Their idealism justifies any wrong in the name of bringing heaven here upon earth. More deaths were committed in the name of this corruption of the best then had been by the evils of barbarism that Christianity itself replaced. The solution is not to throw away Christianity altogether but to return to it.
Dead Conservatism
Without Christianity, the Right is adrift. It appeals to classical civilization and to paganism, but it cannot claim truly to embody these either. These traditions are dead, and the secular Rightist cannot claim to believe in the classical gods of paganism any more than he can claim to believe in the Christian God.
As a result, the Right ends up arguing for the perpetuation of our tradition, our people, merely because they are ours. And who is this “we” who speaks? Ultimately, it must be identified with either a nation or an ethnicity, an existing political community or an underlying community of actual historical and biological relatives. And given the arbitrariness of nationhood, ethnicity is the natural conclusion.
By the experience of the twentieth-century and the promptings of Christian conscience, I do not believe that to be the correct path.
In short, for the Right to have a conscience, it must be, whether by remaining or becoming so, a religious right.
A Way Forward
Of course, there already is a religious right on a popular level. To that group, my counsel is to become philosophical and intellectual, to lose the moralism and to up its morality. But I have made and will make such arguments elsewhere.
What about for the intellectual right?
Return to and preserve the synthesis of classical and Christian civilization that we have inherited. America was founded on such a synthesis, the Republicanism and democracy of Rome and Athens, and the egalitarian promise of Christianity: “All men are created equal.”
Celebrate the valor of manly economic and military achievement but also the virtues of family, sexual restraint, and the domestic sphere.
Honor the poor and working class; believe also in the nobility and spirituality of intellectual, cultural, and religious activity.
But if I could emphasize one thing, it would be that the right become known for a quality that is, in Christianity, the chief virtue: Love.
Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton argued that love was core to a conservative vision, the love of family, the love of home, the love of one’s countrymen, the love of the foreigner, the love of beauty, the love of God.
Yet the right is often known for a kind of callousness. The poor deserve their fate. It’s every man for himself. Society should be organized by a strict system of merit, with winners at the top and losers at the bottom. (Meritocracy, it appears, reduces to Nietzscheanism.)
On the contrary, Scruton argued, we have duties to the least among us out of love. In Christian societies, this has been shown through personal and private charity. Scruton argued that a limited welfare state could actually express the love of a state for its people. While I leave the policy implications for another day - though I considered them here - a conservatism of love and mutual belonging would be an improvement on the conservatism of meritocracy, finger-wagging, and exclusion.
The resources of such a conservatism are in the Christian tradition. It is to there that I would encourage the right to return.
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Further Reading on the Intellectual Right
For further reading on the secular radical right, please read Matthew Rose’s A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right. For a brief introduction, read his recent First Things piece, “Suicide of the Radical Right.”
For a history of the American Right, see Matthew Continetti’s The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.
For the greatest modern statement of intellectual conservatism, read Roger Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism.
For a history of one literary figure of the radical right, Ernst Jünger, see “Through Every Human Heart: A case study in morality via the life of Ernst Junger,” by Eusephus, also known as “Brent” from my “Berating the God-Fearers.”
For a catalog of the factions of the contemporary intellectual right, read John Arcto’s recent and ongoing series.
And for perspective from a former White Nationalist (no longer), now constructing an Alt Right 2.0 (make of that what you will), read Walt Bismarck’s “Why I’m No Longer a White Nationalist.”
For a contemporary full-throated embrace of pre-Christian classicism, read Imperium Press: “What On Earth Is Going On In This Blog? An Introduction to the Imperium Press Substack.”
For Richard Hanania’s own embrace of Nietzscheanism, see “Building a Mythos for the Non-Christian Right.”
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I recently spent some time with Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man and Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. This comes on the heels of my writing about Christian realism, a theology and philosophy indebted to Niebuhr.
Niebuhr reminds me of Jordan Peterson. Like Peterson, he brought the claims of Christianity to public and political debate. Also like Peterson, Niebuhr arouses suspicion for whether he was really a Christian, this in spite of him being the most influential American theologian of the 20th century.
Here are five ways that Reinhold Niebuhr is still relevant to contemporary Christianity.
1. Niebuhr Is Not an Evangelical
Thank God.
Niebuhr is, for me, the answer to the questions I began to raise in “The Evangelical Critics of the Evangelical Majority” and “Three Mindsets that Make Evangelicals Ineffective.” In the former essay, I registered the critique of the evangelical majority coming from believers disaffected with the subculture of evangelicalism and its alignment with partisan Republican politics. In writing it, I began to think that a sufficient Christian public theology must bridge this divide, rather than firmly take up the cause of majority evangelicalism.
In “Three Mindsets,” I began to detect that the cause of the problems with the evangelical majority was a mindset of pious and internally consistent virtue-signalling within the evangelical tribe. I contrast that with a hard-bitten realist approach concerned with prudence and effectiveness in public action.
People critique Niebuhr for being outside of that evangelical movement, and even for being a theological liberal. In fact, Niebuhr was among the foremost critics of theological liberalism, the others being the Neo-Orthodox theologians Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, Niebuhr and Barth were outside of the American movement of evangelicalism. I would argue that they were the most able critics of liberalism because they had been theological liberals, something few evangelicals could claim. As a result, their critique of theological liberalism was most persuasive and cutting to the liberal theological movement.
2. Niebuhr’s Historical Analysis Beats the Trad-Cath One
The Reformation did not lead to the downfall of Western Civilization.
When in the belly of presuppositionalism, I ran toward Catholic intellectuals to teach me about the natural law. I took several summer seminars at The Witherspoon Institute, with Robert George and the other authors of What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense. At that event and others like it, I was told that my conversion to Catholicism was imminent.
It was there that I also first heard the Catholic critique of the American founding, that its lack of religious establishment was, implicitly, secularism. From there, I learned that the Catholic critique went deeper: The Reformation was the ultimate cause of “drag queen story-hour.” Purveyors of this incredibly partisan and anti-American narrative are - strangely enough - some of the most well-respected religious public intellectuals in America today.
In Niebuhr, I read a better defense of the relationship of Protestantism to liberalism and modernity than I have seen even in contemporary attempts. (I applaud those of The Davenant Institute and associated intellectuals.) If we want to blame today’s optimistic humanism on an early modern movement, Niebuhr argues, the Renaissance would be the culprit, not the Reformation. What is more, the idea that a return to 13th-century conditions would heal our woes is another version of the kind of perfectionism and utopianism that Niebuhr critiques evangelicals, Marxists, and liberals for alike.
It’s time for a renewed Protestant public theology. And Niebuhr should be a guide and model.
3. Niebuhr Was a Public Theologian
And we should be public theologians too.
Reinhold Niebuhr is a striking example of the kind of theology I aim to offer and the kind of theologian I aspire to be. His theology avoids unprofitable intra-Christian debates and is focused on the engagement with fields of knowledge and human action beyond Christian circles.
The publicity of his theology was effective. Niebuhr had the role of American thought-leader as a theologian in the 1950s in a way we can no longer imagine. He was on the cover of Time Magazine. His theology moved and motivated key players in American history and politics at the time, chiefly, Martin Luther King, Jr.
No one perceived Niebuhr as a partisan Christian, only speaking in Christian-ese to other Christians. Rather, he spoke to all people, all Americans, by arguing on grounds that were commonly accessible. Even when he argued for the relevance of Christian doctrine to secular debates he presented Christian doctrines as empirically defensible and relevant. I had previously attributed the following quotation to G. K. Chesterton, but apparently it belongs to Niebuhr: “The doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”
4. Niebuhr Was an Orthodox Peterson
And evangelicals still don’t think he was a Christian.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the way Jordan Peterson is perceived by evangelicals. This perception is due to the unique role Peterson plays in communicating Christianity to secular and Christian alike by arguing on publicly accessible grounds and not publicly professing faith but purely the pragmatic utility and psychological significance of Christianity.
Guess who played a similar role and was perceived in a similar way by evangelicals as a result? You guessed it: Niebuhr. To this day Niebuhr’s own faith has been called into question by Christians up to and including even Stanley Hauerwas. (Is Hauerwas even an evangelical?) Niebuhr made sufficient statements to make clear his departure from liberalism and adherence to orthodox Christian belief in the resurrection. Nevertheless, he often focused on and spoke about the Christian faith in terms of its philosophical significance and its status as true myth.Personally, I am struck by Niebuhr’s capacity to play the role of Peterson as a believing Christian. It inspires me that I and others might attempt to do the same.
5. Niebuhr Used Theological Doctrines Practically
Grrr… Liberal.
Much in the way I recommended in “The Post-Theology Nerd,” Niebuhr abides by the test of theological significance I proposed there: “A theological distinction is significant if it has implications for living out the Christian life.” For example, he avoids quibbles about predestination that are divorced from practical significance. Instead, he fronts a kind of Augustinianism that had deep implications for liberal philosophy, international politics, and a sober approach to racial justice.
For instance, Niebuhr takes the doctrine of sin to mean that no faction can take itself to be without conflicted motivations. In particular, he applies this to political radicals, whether of the economic or racial variety. These groups are inclined to apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to the actions of their political adversaries, but not themselves. Recognition of the universality of human sin undermines a kind of activist spirit and belligerence that is equally apparent on both sides of the political and religious aisle:
“This is the truth in the Marxist theory of rationalization…that all culture is corrupted by an ideological taint. The unfortunate fact about the Marxist theory is that…the enemy is charged with this dishonesty, but the Marxist himself claims to be free of it. … This is, of course, merely to commit the final sin of self-righteousness and to imagine ourselves free of the sin which we discern in the enemy.”
The Niebuhr Option
While Niebuhr’s ideas have been claimed by both right and left, Niebuhr’s own heritage is ecclesially homeless. He would certainly have been canceled from his own Union Theological Seminary had he been employed there today. But his views and his methods are outside the mainstream of American evangelicalism.
This might suggest a failure on Niebuhr’s part. His theology has not borne fruit. It hasn’t lead to a persisting Neo-Orthodox, Christian realist movement.
Rather, I would say that his theology clearly bore fruit, but in American public life rather than in the building of a religious tribe.
Likewise, a lack of followers today does not indicate the failure of Niebuhr’s theology. It indicates that his theology remains an option, but one - so far - not taken.
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The evangelical takes on Jordan Peterson’s “We Who Wrestle With God” tour are coming out. Jake Meador attended Peterson’s lecture in Omaha and says that Peterson’s ideology is focused on excellence to the exclusion of mercy. Aaron Renn attended in Indianapolis and says that Peterson’s message is, at the end of the day, a New Age alternative to Christianity.
Anna and I attended on Valentine’s Day in St. Louis. It was a moving experience. Here are some of our reflections.
Anna’s Reflections
Going to hear Jordan Peterson was quite a life event for me. Like many others, I started listening to him in 2016 when he splashed onto the stage after protesting Bill C-16 in Canada. I spent much of 2017 struggling with depression, and the best help I found was in the hours I spent listening to him talk about meaning, mental health, and motivation for living. I still remember the streets I walked as I listened to his lectures and the puzzles I did as I listened to his debates with Sam Harris.
Since then, I was greatly moved by his health issues and identified with much of his suffering and depression. I am also deeply grateful for the world of people to which he has introduced me: Jonathan Haidt, Camille Paglia, Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris, Jonathan Pageau, Andrew Huberman, Abigail Shrier, Slavoj Zizek, and countless others.
Going to see him was like going to meet my hero in real life, and even though I’d heard much of the material before, I was no less amazed by his talk. These days, I don’t get to listen to much undistracted. I struggle to get things from sermons because three kids clamor for my attention. Some of my euphoria probably came from sitting uninterrupted, just listening and thinking, for two hours straight.
However, there was much more to my enamor with Peterson. I have never heard someone be able to “riff” on Genesis 2–3 for that long with that much insight. I’ve been in the evangelical world all my life, so I have heard countless sermons, read many books and articles, and taught on that passage many times. Yet I hear more new truths from Peterson than from anyone else.
Peterson’s greatness comes from being one of our day’s greatest conversationalists. I don’t care for his writing (I won’t read his books) or Twitter habits, but he is incredible at leading you through a conversation, which is a skill that is sorely lacking today. Most pastors and professors talk at you, whereas Peterson helps lead you through truths, even when monologuing for 90 minutes. He is even better when having a conversation with someone like Camille Paglia, Sam Harris, or Douglas Murray.
“Wrestling with the truth” is how Peterson talks and thinks, and I am dismayed to hear criticisms of him from Christians that neglect this. They come from both the more conservative who don’t find him pure enough and from the more liberal who say he’s too capitalist or right-wing. But both miss the actual content and truth of what he is offering to millions of people.
Peterson’s project to help others with the problem of pain is also my goal in counseling. Suffering in this life is our greatest issue and what keeps people from believing in God. And even as a Christian, I am not finding answers to suffering in the Christian world but in Peterson’s material and interviews. Jungianism, symbolism, and archetypes are all vehicles to get at the truth, not hindrances.
His interview with Pageau on suffering after his health scare was one of the greatest “how-to-talk-about-suffering” conversations I’ve ever heard. His interview with detransitioner Chloe Cole was an incredible window into how a great therapist can pull out someone’s story. His conversation with Camille Paglia opened my eyes to insights on postmodernism, gender, and other forms of feminism. In a Joe Rogan podcast, he offered an incredibly powerful take on Scripture.
Lastly, Peterson’s words on, and example of, marriage and family seems better than anything I have heard taught on in the church. Because we attended on Valentine’s Day, (so romantic, I know,) there was a lot about love and marriage. I loved seeing him and his wife Tammy do the event together. Much of Christian teaching on Genesis 1–3 tends to get caught up in the submission-in-marriage debate, but Peterson transcended this.
The church is in crisis, especially because of how many marriages fail and a lack of integrity in leaders. In his own marriage and life, Peterson has displayed integrity, love, and honor to his wife, so I want to listen to him on the subject of marriage.
Given our appreciation of Peterson, Joel and I may end up like these guys:
Peterson’s Rebuke to Evangelicals
At the beginning of his lecture in St. Louis, Jordan Peterson addressed directly those who would have him confess Christian faith.
This is my own rendition of what he said, constructed out of things he has also said elsewhere:
“People ask me, ‘Do you believe in God?’
And it’s like, why do you want me to say that I do? And to say it publicly?
It’s like you’re asking me to stand on a street-corner and loudly proclaim my own righteousness, my alignment with the highest good. It’s like, I’m not going to do that.
And anyway, who are you to declare that you are on the side of the highest good? Who are you to claim the name of Christ or God and to say that you really and truly believe it?
Because if you really believed that God existed, you would act as though he did in every moment and every way. I’m not ready to claim that. Are you?
So my answer remains, ‘I act as though God exists, and I’m terrified that he might.’
Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord
Some criticize Peterson for his focus on Jungian and literary archetypes over literal truth. They say that he offers an alternative religion of self-help and New Age instead of Christianity.
But this is a failure to hear Peterson. Peterson is not offering a religion. He is exploring the universal dimensions of morality and myth, the psychological significance of religion, both what religious stories mean for everyone even if they aren’t literally true, and what they would mean for our behavior if they were true, if we truly acted as if God exists.
Let’s deal with the theological objection first: Evangelicals read Peterson as offering a Pelagian gospel of self-salvation.
But what Peterson is actually articulating is the content of the natural law and the moral teachings of Christ.
Of course, evangelical theology, especially of the more intellectual variety, has recently been neglecting these for a gospel of free grace. Jesus’s “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees” has been disemboweled:
“Unless your righteousness exceeds theirs - which it can’t and won’t by your power, so you need the righteousness of Christ! Then you can be justified even if your life is not exceptional.”
Peterson is raising the bar as high as Christ raised it. There is no salvation disconnected from bearing the fruit of righteousness.
One of the reasons we accuse Peterson is because we think that the content of revelation in Scripture is totally disconnected from God’s revelation in nature: The gospel story has no continuity with the rest of human religion, philosophy, and literature - all of which promote self-salvation. But Peterson’s message is that the biblical story is one that has resonance with all the rest of human religion, philosophy, and literature, and that is even built into biology.
This brings us back to the question of the allegorical, moral, and psychological reading of Scripture. If we think that this is just an attempt to avoid the literal meaning of Scripture, we place ourselves outside of the mainstream of Christian theology through the centuries.
The consensus of Medieval Christian theology was that Scripture had a four-fold sense, in addition to the literal, there were the allegorical, the tropological (moral), and the anagogical (eschatological). Contemporary Protestants, the Reformed Evangelical in particular, are inclined to speak as though we have left behind the allegorical and moral altogether. Our Christ-centered preaching is the literal sense combined with seeing how it points to Christ.
But…that’s what the Medievals called the allegorical. The way in which the Old Testament could be read as embodying “types” of Christ (typological), is in turn deeply connected to seeing Christ as an archetype through all of history and literature. The depth of meaning of Scripture should indicate to us the depth of meaning of all literature and prime us to see Christ as distantly as the places where Peterson sees him.
At Wheaton College, Leland Ryken taught his evangelical students about the literary and archetypal reading of Scripture. This was necessary because the evangelical populace does not read the Bible as literature, but only as either a book of isolated one-liners or a textbook of true doctrine.
In showing believers and non-believers alike biblical archetypes throughout culture, history, and biology, Peterson is preparing the way for openness to wrestling with Scripture and with God.
Jordan Peterson presents believers and unbelievers with the archetypal and moral dimensions of biblical teaching. He argues for the psychological import of what the Bible presents.
Now, does Christianity teach more than what Peterson teaches? Yes, but it does not teach less than what Peterson teaches.
Unfortunately, for decades, if not centuries, Christianity has been teaching less than Peterson teaches. The realm of imagination and archetype has been abandoned.
In the first half of the 20th century, Christians were at the forefront of the realm of imagination and archetype. J.R.R. Tolkien exercised a Christian imagination in his works. But importantly, Tolkien resisted attempts to read his writing as allegory. A work is not a true work of imagination, but propaganda, if a heavy-handed writer moralizes to his audience. While Lewis’s allegory was relatively transparent (not that this has prevented non-Christians from enjoying the Chronicles of Narnia), Tolkien wanted to write a work that stood on its own by resonating with our human nature and taste for the fantastic.
Tolkien resisted being a “Christian writer.” As a result, we can imagine the evangelicals coming after him today for not naming Aragorn “Christagorn.”
Andrew Klavan, Daily Wire pundit and novelist, said that, when he became a Christian, he prayed the following prayer:
“Lord, you made me a writer, and you have now made me a Christian.
“But please do not make me a Christian writer.”
Why? Because a Christian writer performs a parochial task, for the other faithful. He writes Christian things to a Christian audience.
But only a writer who remains in the realm of the purely human, the archetypal, the natural, in this case, the realm of imagination, can speak effectively to all people and prepare the way of the Lord. The realm of imagination is a preparatio evangelium, a preparation for the gospel.
Celebrity Conversions
When we expect or ask Jordan Peterson to become a card-carrying, and card-displaying evangelical, it’s as though we’re comparing him negatively with Justin Bieber’s or Kanye West’s professions of faith. Genuine as they may be (we don’t know), they lack sturdiness. We know that celebrity conversions are unreliable historically. They are also compromised by their publicity.
It’s more exciting to see seeds take root quickly and flower immediately so that we can reap the harvest rapidly. It’s less compelling to wait for a farmer to spend years preparing the soil or to watch a seed take deep root when the sprout has not yet broken ground.
Peterson’s work has, in fact, significantly affected the quality and condition of the soil. Justin Brierley, in The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, details how the atheist-Christian debates of yesteryear have been almost entirely eclipsed. That is the soil in which my interest in theology and philosophy was cultivated. It helped to grow certain kinds of atheists and certain kinds of Christians. They were predominantly male, rather abrasive in their tone and habits of speech, and they had a habit of talking past each other.
If we have yet to see Peterson’s faith flower, we have already seen the fruit borne of his work as a farmer. Does he acknowledge the owner of the farm as his Lord? It’s difficult to say. But he’s doing the Lord’s work. In fact, he’s using methods of cultivation of which professing evangelicals have been ignorant. But are we more concerned to see our own methods of cultivation be perpetuated or to see the work be done?
The Parable of the Two Sons
“What do you think?
A man had two sons.
And he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’
And he answered, ‘I will not,’ but afterward he changed his mind and went.
And he went to the other son and said the same.
And he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but did not go.
Which of the two did the will of his father?”
They said, “The first.”
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This is our first joint post. Enjoy!
I (Anna) have been counseling many people who experience obsessive thoughts and actions due to OCD. Some of them experience a cognitive distortion where a person conflates the thought of doing something with actually having done it.
Psychologists call this “thought-action fusion.” The mind conflates the thought with the action.
Meanwhile, I (Joel) have been writing about sexual desire and sin, mainly same-sex attraction. I have argued that same-sex attraction is not sin.
But in that discussion, many people argue that same-sex attraction is sin, on the basis of Matthew 5:27-28:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
In this passage, Jesus says that lust is equivalent to adultery. Doesn’t that mean that thought is equivalent to action? If so, then Jesus exacerbates the OCD symptom of thought-action fusion.
But no: Equating thought and action is incorrect. Thought-action fusion is a cognitive distortion, and Jesus does not want us to commit it. This essay explains how Christianity can inadvertently promote thought-action fusion.
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What Is Thought-Action Fusion?
People who experience thought-action fusion (TAF), especially devout Christians, feel guilt and anxiety about their moral status, by equating thought and action.
Two types of thought-action fusion can occur:
Likelihood TAF: This is the belief that thinking about a negative event makes it more likely to occur.
Moral TAF: This is the belief that thinking about a negative event is morally equivalent to actually carrying out that event.
With “likelihood TAF,” an individual believes that thinking about their house catching fire makes it more likely for the fire to occur. With “moral TAF,” the individual believes that thinking about harming a loved one is as morally wrong as actually harming them.
TAF is especially associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder but can also be present in other anxiety-related disorders.
Logic cannot convince someone with OCD that they did not commit an act and quiet their anxiety. One woman I (Anna) have been counseling has been through medical school but is still convinced that if she walks past an abandoned band-aid (without touching it), she has been contaminated and needs to go through her cleaning rituals.
A major category of TAF is intrusive thoughts of “unacceptable/taboo thoughts with mental/covert compulsions and reassurance-seeking.” Their most taboo thoughts tend to be centered around pedophilia, homosexual desires, blasphemy, and violent acts.
Everyone experiences unwanted, intrusive, taboo thoughts of some kind. Individuals with thought-action fusion tend to attach excessive weight to these thoughts.
Another woman I’ve been counseling is convinced that she is a pedophile because she has intrusive images, thoughts, and fears of molesting children.
“What if I ran this person over with my car?”
Many people have thought of this. It’s actually not weird; it’s human to have some intrusive thoughts. Usually, we dismiss the thought and move on.
But someone struggling with thought-action fusion might say, “I wanted to kill that person; so, I must be a murderer.” They are overwhelmed by this.
The same goes for unwanted sexual thoughts: “I had a thought of committing adultery with that person; so, I must be an adulterer because I wanted it.” Then the person will spiral into “cleansing rituals” of making sure that she did not want that thought.
Christians place a lot of value on the character of our inner lives and thoughts. This makes us particularly susceptible to TAF.
Christian scripture frequently refers to how we ought to think:
Philippians 4:8: “Whatever is true, … honorable … just … pure … lovely … commendable, … think about these things.”
2 Corinthians 10:5: “Take every thought captive to obey Christ.”
We read these Scriptures and conclude that thought is as important as action. Christians who have obsessive thoughts find their thought-action fusion reinforced by Christ’s teaching.
Christianity provides rituals for those seeking reassurance: Confession and repentance. But treating TAF requires breaking the cycle of obsession (confession) and compulsion (repentance). When an OCD sufferer confesses thoughts as sins and repents, seeking reassurance, the thoughts can become more powerful and frequent. It is a vicious cycle.
But in treating OCD, counselees must stop the compulsions and rituals, which means not repenting of these thoughts.
In my experience working with clients, not repenting for thoughts has helped my OCD clients reduce the compulsive, unwanted thoughts. Saying “Stop doing this thing!” will terrify someone with OCD. But my job is to help the client see that these intrusive thoughts are not sins, and that they are experiencing the distortion of thought-action fusion.
Anyone Who Looks, Intentionally
In Matthew 5:28, Christ appears to teach that lusting after a woman is equivalent to committing adultery with her in your heart.
In this essay, I (Joel) argued that sexual attraction is NOT equivalent to committing adultery in the heart.
For example, if the young man in the above image merely felt attraction to the woman in the foreground, he wouldn’t have sinned.
Obviously, if he hops into bed with her, he has sinned.
Jesus says that the young man could also commit adultery with her in his heart. He would do that by an inward act of imagination and lust.
In the linked essay, I argued that Jesus is condemning inward action in addition to outward action, but not mere attraction.
But take a second look at the verse:
“Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
What does Jesus say is sin? In addition to committing adultery, intentionally looking at a woman to lust.
Hold on. Looking is an outward action. When a man looks, observers know it. Especially women. And that’s what the man in the “distracted boyfriend” meme is doing.
Jesus also says “with lustful intent.” Committing adultery in the heart is intentional.
Those who say same-sex attraction is a sin argue that unintentional and unchosen desires are sins. But Jesus doesn’t say that.
In Matthew 5:28, Jesus condemns intentional looking. He doesn’t condemn peoples’ unwanted desires, unbidden attractions, and unintended feelings or thoughts. He doesn’t encourage us to commit thought-action fusion.
I suggest a new translation:
“Anyone who intentionally looks at a woman to lust, but not everyone who experiences unwanted sexual attraction, has already committed adultery in his heart.”
Helping Those in Misery
Pastor John Andrew Bryant writes powerfully about his OCD in A Quiet Mind to Suffer With. As he describes it, the thoughts he experiences are not his own:
“If they are mine, they are only mine in this way: that I am the one they are happening to. I am the one who has to see them.”
Key to Bryant’s being able to function well with OCD was recognizing that he is not his thoughts. They happen to him.
Christians do more damage to these sufferers when we say, “your thoughts are sins.” “Your intrusive thoughts about violence or sex are sin.” “Your sexual orientation is sin.”
Jesus does speak about hating someone in your heart as “liable to judgment” (though not equivalent to murder). But hatred and lust in the heart still require intention.
It is not sin to have intrusive, unwanted thoughts in our minds. That’s a result of being in a fallen world and having broken bodies and minds. “The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery.”
Those who focus on the sinfulness of sexual thoughts and temptations confuse thought and action. This causes Christians more shame and hiding:
“The anxiety and shame these irrational thoughts and sudden warnings create is tremendous. The content is unspeakable, the peril feels unmentionable, so you make sure you tell no one.”
The Book of Job is dedicated to warning us not to chalk it all up to sin in this miserable life. Job’s friends represent the voice of Satan when they keep telling Job to repent: “You’re suffering? You must have sinned!”
Had Job sinned? No.
When Christians tell people that their unwanted thoughts are sins, we are parroting Job’s friends.
Instead, let’s come to fellow sinners and sufferers with comfort and reassurance. Unwanted thoughts are part of the human condition; and some people experience it even worse, as OCD.
Those who are suffering from OCD and other mental disorders have a unique experience of life that we struggle to understand. However, God does understand our suffering completely: “He knows our frame; he knows that we are but dust.”
To those suffering from thought-action fusion, our message is not, repent of your thoughts. It’s, your thoughts are not sins.
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Study: Non-Affirming Attendance at Gay Weddings Saves Souls
Over the last twenty years, out of the public eye, evangelical researchers conducted a longitudinal study of the relationship between evangelical parents and grandparents and their LGBTQ+ youth. They conducted interviews and gathered qualitative data about the “coming out” experience and the evangelical adult response, church participation, and the theological and ethical views of youth and adults.
One finding stood out. When non-affirming parents did not attend a same-sex wedding, the LGBTQ+ individuals remained convinced of affirming moral views. But when non-affirming evangelical parents did attend their child’s same-sex wedding, 30% of LGBTQ+ individuals changed their views within the next five years. In one example, the gay son of evangelical parents ended his same-sex marriage after two years and returned to professing Christian faith, holding non-affirming moral views, and regular church attendance within four years of the wedding.
And yet, when one well-known, seasoned evangelical pastor mentions that he counseled a grandmother to attend her grandchild’s wedding to a transgender person, evangelicals dug up the months-old quotation and got his radio program canceled!
The pastor is Alistair Begg, and the response has been fierce. To many, it is absolutely clear that attending such a wedding while expressing moral disapproval is tantamount to expressing moral approval. While some have kindly defended the validity of Begg’s prior ministry, even they have held to the party line that attendance can’t be considered.
Now, obviously, I fabricated the study above. But if this empirical data came out, wouldn’t it provide reason to question what seemed so clearly biblical?
If we found that the way the world works is that non-affirming attendance is the most effective tool to bring back the prodigal son or daughter, wouldn’t all our handwringing be proven mistaken?
For these reasons, I think that Alistair Begg’s counsel is not the first step toward theological liberalism but an exercise in what is called Christian realism.
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Realtheologik
Last week, I published one of my pillar essays, “Christian Realism: A Philosophy of Effective Action.” Together with “Sophisticated Realism” and “Civilized Empiricism,” you now have my statements of metaphysics, epistemology, and now ethics.
In ethics, realism is the view that ethical action does not consist in rule-following but in appropriate response to the needs of the situation.
American evangelicalism, by contrast, has had a penchant for moral absolutes and maintaining a kind of purity. As a result, laypeople expect from their Christian leaders absolute “do’s” and “don’ts,” rather than counsel in situational sensitivity.
In response to Begg, many have echoed the absolute “don’t” of never attending a same-sex wedding, a position staked out by John Piper.
By making an absolute claim, the need for situational sensitivity is short-circuited. Evangelical congregants are protected from having to wrestle with the question and are given a clear word from above.
In comparison, Begg’s words seem like the first step onto the slippery slope of liberalism, moral and theological. He has departed from the moral orthodoxy, however slightly.
My alternative proposal is that Begg is not a liberal in comparison to a conservative, but a realist in contrast to an absolutist.
American evangelicals should be able to recognize realism. In spite of their moral scruples, many American evangelicals made a political calculation, held their nose, and voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. We call this realpolitik.
In the same way, Begg is engaged in realtheologik. In spite of their moral scruples, Begg advises this grandmother to make a spiritual and personal calculation, hold her nose, and attend the trans wedding. It’s an act of realism, but in the theological realm.
Incurring Guilt
The great danger of Christian realism is that it involves appearing to do evil in the eyes of one’s coreligionists.
Ignorant of the details of one’s situation and eager for the comfort of moral and tribal absolutes, those judging from the sidelines will perceive you breaking the rules and call “foul.”
While many moral acts provide the safety of also appearing moral, in this situation, you lose that protection. The thing is, the only true proof of a good will is the willingness to do what is right even when it appears wrong.
Plato argued in The Republic that people only do what is right because other people are watching; that is the moral of the tale of the Ring of Gyges, the inspiration for Tolkien’s ring of power.
But Plato argued that the real test of character would not be to do what is right in spite of risk to life and limb only, but in spite of positively being considered immoral or impious. Significantly, Plato’s teacher Socrates risked both, as did Christ.
In Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, the Christian realist version of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the Nazi prisoner argues that it is only in the doctrine of justification by faith that the Christian can find the confidence to act ethically, in spite of being thought unrighteous.
In Bonhoeffer’s context, German Christians held that the duty to obey the governing authorities was absolute, on account of Luther’s Two Kingdoms doctrine. This was summarized in the statement the Nazis used to defend themselves during the Nuremberg trials: Befehl ist Befehl: “An order is an order.”
When, at the height of Nazi power, Bonhoeffer decided to join a plot to kill Hitler and overthrow the government, he risked being thought un-Christian by his coreligionists, not to mention an enemy of the state by the government.
Bonhoeffer himself did not believe in a moral law justifying killing God’s appointed magistrate when things reached a certain threshold. No moral law could justify unquestionably his own choices. In the end, the Christian acts without legal or moral justification; the only justification of his action is by faith.
It’s Not a War, It’s a Purity Spiral
In our own context, things don’t look as dire as Germany in 1942. But there’s an irony: Evangelical Christians believe in a culture war (Kulturkampf). But their preferred strategy is the internal purity spiral and friendly fire, instead of realpolitik.
I admit that there are dangers of adopting a wartime mindset in peacetime, of Christians becoming controlled by the culture war. But if it is a war, why are we shooting our own? Why are we aiming to keep our hands clean? Why aren’t we elevating our strategy and engaging in some sober-minded realpolitik?
In fact, what we observe in evangelical discourse and behavior bears little resemblance to wartime strategy and more to what Gurwinder Bhogal calls a “purity spiral.” In a purity spiral, “members of political (and religious) tribes…begin competing with their fellows to be the most ideologically pure.”
When engaged in a purity spiral, a group does not pursue its strategic goals, but culling its own membership of independent-minded individuals. After all, strategy often involves expanding one’s alliances, co-belligerency, rather than further narrowing who one will work with.
When it comes to Christian approaches to LGBTQ+ issues, the purity spiral and the realtheologik recommend diverging paths. The purity spiral would mean shunning evangelicals who even appear to compromise in any way with the prevailing zeitgeist. Those who use the language of “LGBTQ+” or “sexual minorities” and especially those who use such language to describe themselves are to be culled from the tribe.
Realtheologik would recommend a different path. One of the primary reasons evangelical youth leave Christianity, and the primary reason young people are not attracted to Christianity is its approach to sexual ethics and to LGBTQ+ people in particular. Assuming that the Christian sexual ethic is not itself hateful, evangelicals and other Christians need to make central to their public perception their love for LGBTQ+ people in spite of their traditional ethical beliefs.
Strategically, this would involve promoting celibate and/or chaste gay Christians as models of Christian faithfulness, people like Wesley Hill and Greg Johnson. It would involve recommending that Christians pursue constructive relationships with LGBTQ+ people. And it would involve allowing for complexity in how this love is expressed, including whether to attend gay or trans weddings.
None of this is to discount the faithful witness of those cake-bakers and photographers who have refused, on Christian principle, to bake cakes or photograph same-sex weddings. Theirs was also a situational act of Christian realism. Realism allows for complexity rather than dictating conformity, in either direction.
But They That Are Sick
Let’s go back to the study with which I began. Even though it’s imaginary, it throws a wrench in the gears of Christian responses like this one, from Steven Lawson:
Should Christians attend a “transgender wedding?” Lawson proclaims, “Absolutely No.”
But what if it were shown in practical life and social scientific studies that there was no more effective way to persuade LGBTQ+ people of the truth of Christianity, sexual ethic, and all? The absolutism of Lawson’s position suggests that not even such studies should make any difference to his claim.
But if so, then what business is Lawson in? Not the business of saving souls? Not the business of fishing for men? (Including “trans men?”)
When theology meets reality, absolute claims are shipwrecked. Never attend a same-sex wedding? Even if doing so might “save some?”
If the gospel story had occurred in our own day, I can imagine a passage reading something like this:
And the third day there was a same-sex marriage in Cana of Galilee; And both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage.
And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at table, behold, many gays, lesbians, and transgender people came and sat down with him and his disciples.
And when the pastors and conference-speakers saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with gays, lesbians, and transgender people and attendeth their weddings?
But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.
Can I confirm that this is what Jesus would have done and said? No. Like Begg, I write without the firm foundation of infallible specific revelation.
But as Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, all Christian action must be without justification and must risk appearing immoral and even incurring guilt for the sake of the world:
“Jesus took upon Himself the guilt of all men, and for that reason every man who acts responsibly becomes guilty. If any man tries to escape guilt in responsibility, … He sets his own personal innocence above his responsibility for men, and he is blind for the more irredeemable guilt which he incurs precisely in this.” (Ethics, 241)
Was Begg right to recommend attendance at the trans wedding? I cannot judge.
But let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
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I’ve critiqued the evangelical subculture for some of its mindsets that lead to ineffectiveness in public action.
But during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, when the Neo-Evangelical movement was just getting up and running, theologians like Emil Brunner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr were articulating a compelling, non-partisan Christian political ethic known as Christian realism.
Christian realism provides key solutions to the problems of evangelical ineffectiveness and deserves to be revived and adopted by contemporary Christians, evangelical and otherwise.
What Is “Realism?”
“Realism” is related to but different than the philosophical view I argue for, (for example, in “Toward a Sophisticated Realism”) which basically defends the reality of a world external to our minds, and the possibility of direct knowledge of it, unmediated by presuppositions, worldviews, concepts, frameworks, and theories.
Here, “realism” refers to something that is best demonstrated: Not to pick on the Catholics, but consider Catholic teaching on contraception and marriage. While rigorous in its moral demands, to hold that contraception is inherently immoral in the modern day is just unrealistic. This is demonstrable from the small percentage of Catholics who abide by the teaching; it is clear from the fact that contraception can be used carefully, in order not to accidentally commit abortion, and from the fact that the needs and demands of particular couples may at times require its use. It is unrealistic to maintain a moral demand that is belied by the contemporary historical and material situation.
Realism is not relativism, however. It does not give license to reduce moral demands down to what people can, without difficulty, obey. For example, demanding that same-sex attracted Christians abide by the Christian sexual ethic is not necessarily unrealistic. But it is unrealistic to expect them to abide by it without cultivating a culture that welcomes them, encourages them, and supports them in celibacy or mixed-orientation marriage (and without quibbling about the adjective “gay”).
However, realism often does involve taking the risk of either not abiding by certain moral standards or appearing not to. For instance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer held strongly that one should obey the governing authorities, on the basis of Christian, and especially Lutheran teaching. However, when Nazism reached certain heights, he felt that to retain his purported moral purity at great cost to others’ lives would be, in the end, deeply wrong. That spurred his involvement in the plot to overthrow Hitler, which eventually led to his imprisonment and death.
Today, “realism” is most commonly spoken of in the realm of foreign policy, war, and international relations broadly. This kind of realism holds that moral evaluation breaks down at the level of international action. Even while we have created systems of international law, there is no neutral arbiter of such law. This means that nations that do not abide by international law can often only be corrected by other international action. If purportedly “good actors” restrain themselves by the code of international law, they may be hamstrung in bringing about the necessary ends for their own national interest as well as that of the international community.
Realism is really summed up in the idea that effective action in the world must risk the violation of conventional moral standards in order to accomplish real good and make a dent in the world.
Can Realism Be Christian?
Now, there are major forces in Christianity that push against realism, chiefly its high moral standards and sense of a divine law, and that no one is above that law.
While that element of anti-realism is universal in Christianity, the more strongly anti-realist elements are those found differently in Anabaptist and monastic traditions. In Anabaptist theology, there is a strong element of relinquishing the tools of earthly power, of monetary wealth, and of social status. Anabaptists, after an initial radical violent spell, were and are pacifists. They question Christian involvement in the military. To that extent, they question Christian involvement in politics, which is inherently tied to the use of violence and exercise of political authority. In a way that was later secularized by Marx, they found wealth-creation and money to be morally suspect.
The Anabaptist impulse was but the reincarnation of an impulse that had arisen within and been subsumed by Catholicism. In Protestantism, the Anabaptists and the Magisterial Reformers were separate movements, with the Magisterial Reformers taking a more affirming - realist - view of political and financial life. But within Catholicism, these two kinds of Christian approaches were brought under a single institution, in the distinction between the religious and the laity. The Catholic view of religious life, like Anabaptism, was that the life of poverty, non-violence, celibacy, and political disengagement is highest. However, because of its civilizational scale and universal claims, Catholicism also recognized the necessity of secular life, power, marriage, and violence. But in the recognition of necessity, one can see the seed of Christian realism.
Christian realism really comes into its own, however, when this necessity is recognized as endemic to human life. The necessity of dealing with human and natural reality as they are requires giving up the idea that righteousness is found in keeping one’s hands clean. This really comes in Christian history with the Magisterial Protestant (Reformed and Lutheran) reformation and its embrace of secular life. Luther famously married, had children, and drank - all recognitions that extra-biblical, ascetic constraints were not the standard of holiness. Both Lutheran and Calvinist reformations occurred in unison with political leaders, i.e., civil magistrates, hence, the “magisterial” reformation. This involved the embrace of political power, in its limit, capital punishment and waging war, as legitimate and useful to Christian ends. And finally, Calvinism famously became an economically productive engine, leading, for example, to the wealth of the Netherlands.
Note: The Reformation was the seed of a productive Christian view of secular life, not the beginning of the end, the inevitable seedbed of secularism, as the common, traditionalist anti-Protestant narrative would have it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Realism’s Theological Foundation
Bonhoeffer articulates the Christian foundation of realism, grounding it in the doctrine of justification by faith. Effectively, he argues that the attempt to act always in a way that can be justified to oneself, others, and God by verbatim obedience to divine law is a kind of justification by works of the law, as well as a shrinking from radical individual responsibility. Given the complexity of reality and the demands it can put on you of competing duties, it is ultimately impossible ever to act in a way that can be wholly justified by religious and moral teaching, or secular or divine law. The one who acts must risk doing evil in order to do good. His actions cannot be justified beforehand. They must be done in faith and recognition that they may require repentance and forgiveness after the fact:
“Jesus took upon Himself the guilt of all men, and for that reason every man who acts responsibly becomes guilty. If any man tries to escape guilt in responsibility, … He sets his own personal innocence above his responsibility for men, and he is blind for the more irredeemable guilt which he incurs precisely in this.” (241)
For example, Immanuel Kant had famously argued that the right thing to do was never to lie, even to a murderer at the door. This was no abstract question for Bonhoeffer. He knew that to fail to lie bald-facedly to the Nazi at the door was to be complicit in all the atrocities of Nazism. Worse, it was to participate in Jew-murder while thinking oneself innocent and pure and better than the Nazis. To murder, one added the sin of Pharisaism and self-righteousness.
Responsible human action, Bonhoeffer argued, followed Christ in taking on guilt for the sake of others, entering the sin-soaked world and risking impurity.
Consider: Last week, I argued that the Reformed-cum-Lutheran view of justification by faith common in Reformed evangelical circles is nihilist, undermining the motive to good works. Bonhoeffer finds in the doctrine an opposite implication, a freedom to act effectively and responsibly, without fear.
Emil Brunner: Realism in Peacetime
Emil Brunner offered a different description of the problem and pointed to a solution more helpful in peacetime. In his theological ethics, The Divine Imperative, Brunner described what he called “Christian inwardness”: “The obvious tendency of many earnest Christians to shrink from all external action.” This desire is based in the intent to do directly spiritual and personal work, but the technical spheres of life require involvement in bureaucracy, filling out forms, jumping through hoops, or just doing one’s job well, all in order to have a very indirect effect on other people.
However, “Since God requires from us not merely volition but action, He requires us to enter into this ‘alien sphere,’ into this realm of the impersonal, and it is His will that we, as believers, shall prove ourselves within this sphere.” For, “It is here, in this borderland between technical action and ethics–in economics, in politics, in public life–that the great decisions are made.” Now, that is a philosophy for public Christian action in the world.
Part of the difficulty of acting as a Christian in these various spheres is that the Christian approach to economics or politics is underdetermined by Christian teaching. This means it involves accruing empirical knowledge of these fields and exercising human judgment in areas of controversy and disagreement, not only between Christians and non-Christians, but also among Christians.
For instance, while I see much to admire in urging Christians not to align with either party, as a general teaching, this exhibits a lack of realism. The non-partisan approach may work for a theologian or some pastors, but for politics, it won’t cut it. To run in America as a Christian politician, one has to make a judgment which of the parties is the best vehicle for the ends that one thinks represent the good. To join with any of the parties, per Bonhoeffer’s teaching, will not be above reproach. In taking political action, one shoulders responsibility for the sins of Republicans or Democrats, Libertarians or Independent anti-vaxxers. Failing to align with a party does not make one holier than those aligned with political parties. At the same time, taking on a public role arguing for civility and non-tribal thinking in a non-partisan way is also a completely legitimate course of action to take.
Or take a financial example. The investment criteria of a Christian investment firm recently came to my attention. Its criteria involve having Christian board members and a kingdom-mission. While it offered a few more specifics, this struck me as an incredibly empty Christian philosophy of financial investment. There is no concrete and controversial vision of the common good of the nation, informed by Christian principles, and only a requirement of an outward guise of Christian profession and morality. In fact, the very idea of a Christian investment firm suggests that Christians won’t have any substantive differences or specific judgments about the economic good of the country. I have heard of investment funds that invest in accord with Catholic social teaching. That at least has some level of specificity. What about an investment firm built on the principles of Protestant social teaching? Better yet, forming a substantive philosophy of financial investment for the common good and then discovering who is aligned with that vision, whether they are Christian themselves or not.
Biblical Realism
I am struck by the moral impurity of many of the greatest figures of the Old Testament. While I do not think this is to be imitated purposefully, whether through polygamy or murder, it is notable that personal morality is not the only standard of righteousness recognized in the Bible. Effectiveness in great tasks is quite prominent in the Old Testament. This has a lot more in common with the great men of classical antiquity.
Following this line of thought could certainly lead to downplaying and compromising personal morality for the sake of “winning.” That is a real error to be avoided. However, it is equally possible to be prudish about personal morality, and especially the appearance of morality, relative to taking effective action in the world. For example, many have criticized Elon Musk for not giving to charitable and environmental causes with his great wealth. Musk’s response is that he puts all his capital into things like Tesla, which is doing far more to make human economic life environmentally friendly than any charity. In that secular example, we see the same conflict that is present in Christian morality, whether to embrace the use of power and finance for good or to divest oneself of power and finances for the sake of moral purity.
Bonhoeffer’s warning is haunting: The attempt to keep our hands clean is in effect an attempt to evade responsibility. All human action, including in monasteries, in Amish communities, and in activist circles, is implicated in the complexity and messiness of human life. The worst thing to do is to think that one is righteous. The best protection against evil is recognizing that all our activity is impure. To take effective action in the world, we must not seek to hide behind the appearance of pure motives. We must exercise human judgment, take action with which some will disagree, and attempt to make a dent in the world.
Those good works prepared beforehand for us to do? Don’t think that those are acts of safe, uncontroversial, publicly-recognized moral virtue or charity. They are acts of love for human beings in the brokenness and complexity of our world, with a real risk of getting it wrong. God demands of us nothing less.
Seminar: Vintage Christian Realism
On an upcoming evening in February, I’ll be offering a one-off seminar on the philosophical and theological foundations of Christian Realism. Click the button below if you’re interested in getting updates about the seminar.
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Christianity too often leads to this view: Nothing we do here matters.
For some Christians, this is because of their “end-times” views: “It’s all going to end soon, and Jesus will return. There’s no time to do anything lasting, just to tell people urgently to get saved. Nothing else matters.”
For others, it’s their desire to answer in a moment the question of salvation. This can be through conversionism: The real action in Christianity is the initial moment of conversion. Or it can be through the doctrine of justification by faith: Jesus did it all, so we don’t have to do anything but look back to our justification. Either way, the idea is that the initial moment at the outset of Christianity is all that makes a difference. Nothing between here and the end really matters: Nihilism.
Nietzsche famously hurled the accusation of “nihilism” at Christianity:
[Paul] needed the belief in immortality in order to rob “the world” of its value, that the concept of “hell” would master Rome—that the notion of a “beyond” is the death of life...
Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme...
Does This Life Matter?
A question for Christians: Does this life matter?
While people don’t always come right out and say “no,” here are some signs of Christian nihilism:
Eschatologically, some say, “It’s all gonna burn anyway,” or “Jesus is coming back really soon.”
Theologically, Christians can dismiss the effect of human action on account of divine providence. Does anything we do really make a difference?
Politically, Christians can decide that it is indifferent whether good things in society are preserved and improved or eroded and destroyed.
Some Christians view the exhortation “not to love the world or the things in the world” as undermining love for the very order that God called good. They equate “the world” with worldliness.
And the doctrine of conversionism, mentioned above, amounts to a very limited view of the Christian life as primarily about “getting in,” and then leading others to join the fold. It lacks a vision of sanctification and the life of Christian obedience and progressive sanctification.
But in my own Reformed theological context, the source of a highly intellectual form of Christian nihilism is a narrow focus on the doctrine of justification by faith.
At the outset of their reflections, Reformed theologians correctly detect a problem with conversionism, that it can lead to uncertainty and obsession about whether one has truly converted. The Reformed theologians’ solution is the doctrine of justification by faith: Recognizing that justification is once-for-all and not dependent on anything one does produces, in principle, perfect assurance of salvation.
But that is just a more intellectually robust form of Christian nihilism.
Just like conversionism, only the initial moment of the Christian life matters. But now, the earnestness of determining whether one is truly converted - the redeeming feature of conversionism - is gone. The justified Christian is left with nothing to do except to float through life, trying not to forget that he is already justified.
Officially, being knowledgeable about theology, the Reformed types will insist that sanctification is supposed to follow justification. But the impression given is that the pursuit of holiness is more or less optional. This is chiefly revealed in what they consider to be heretical; any idea that we cannot have perfect assurance of salvation, that Christians might commit apostasy, or that there is a final justification in accordance with works is commonly treated as a departure from the Reformation and from the gospel.
In one radical example, a professor argued that any exhortation making use of “the third use of the law” needs to be followed up with a gospel promise that “Jesus already did that for us,” so that no Christian would feel bad about failing to live a holy life.
But the logical conclusion of this teaching is that nothing we do here matters.
Protestant Anti-Nihilism
True Reformed theology opposes this nihilism.
From the first, John Calvin argued that knowledge of whether one was justified by faith, or elect, could only be obtained on the basis of the evidence of a life of good works, Christian perseverance, and fruit-bearing: “You shall know them by their fruits” (Matt 7:16). While the Reformed did promise assurance of salvation as a real possibility, this promise was always tempered by the equally real possibility of apostasy by professing Christians and the impossibility of knowledge of the hidden divine decree.
This meant that, in practice, the difference between Catholic and Protestant doctrines of justification was not infinite, as contemporary Protestants sometimes allege. (Eucharistic theology was the point on which there was deepest division.) Yet many contemporary Protestants draw the distinction between Christianity and all other religions by way of the contrast between justification by works and justification by faith. On this telling, in all other religions, people work their way toward God - justification by works - but in the Christian religion, God gifts salvation apart from works. But this common Protestant account draws too sharp a distinction between works and faith, suggesting that Christianity leaves the life of good works as an optional addition to a salvation that costs us nothing.
The Apostle Paul, on the contrary, speaks of us “filling up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ” (Col 1:24). He writes in Romans 8:17 that we are “fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.” Even if you – as I do – distinguish the necessity of suffering as a condition of salvation from its merit, suffering and good works are not optional for the Christian, but necessary. Francis Turretin captured this by arguing that good works were, not the grounds, but the way and means of salvation, and a necessary way and means. What Jesus did for us, we must imitate as a condition of salvation. Obedience and the life of good works are not optional, but obligatory.
The Penultimate Things
The most trenchant critique of Protestant Christian nihilism is the one Bonhoeffer mounted in his critique of cheap grace. The Lutheran church had strongly taught that justification by faith is all that matters: To insist on a life of obedience was legalism. What is more, this teaching had the political implication of a “two kingdoms” doctrine that left the secular realm alone, staying out of politics completely. Yet as Hitler came to power, the mainstream German Lutheran church refrained from commenting or intervening, out of adherence to this principle. From a Nazi prison, Bonhoeffer articulated what was so wrong about this approach.
The Christian thinks that the only things that matter are ultimate things, like whether you’re saved or not, justified or not, and the spiritual things of the future kingdom of God. Everything in between is a potential source of idolatry or legalism. If we think that some form of secular human action is necessary, that merely shows that we are trying to work our way to God, instead of confessing our total human inability and sinfulness.
These in-between things Bonhoeffer calls the penultimate things. He agrees, yes, that these are not the ultimate things. But they are not for that reason nothing; they are penultimate, all but ultimate. They are not the last things, but they are what is right before the last. Nothing could be more important, except, of course, the ultimate things.
This is a different theological perspective. This side of eternity, ultimate things are not even attainable without attention to and cultivation of the penultimate. At the limit, if you refuse to speak up as Hitler takes over Germany and eventually the German church, the ultimate things will be lost as well. A church that won’t protect people physically from harm is not one that will ever have a chance to protect them from spiritual harm.
Some try to argue that what kind of government or policies the state enacts, or what kind of culture we are surrounded by, should make no difference to Christian witness to the ultimate things. But this is just false. It makes a world of difference. If you don’t attend to the penultimate things, you may not even have the right or the opportunity to speak about the ultimate things. But even if you do, the Christian message will receive a very different response depending on the audience: Does your audience accept the basic outlines of the Ten Commandments? Or does your audience think that Christianity itself is deeply immoral? You won’t be able to communicate the ultimate things without understanding your penultimate context.
What is more, the entire Christian life is one that is lived in the penultimate arena. The good works we are called to do may not immediately result in the salvation of souls, but they can improve the world for the better, and thereby prepare people for the gospel. This is why it is true to say that the unbelieving, secular humanism that often replaces Christianity in the West is Christian in origin. Sometimes it is more Christian than Christianity in its devotion to making a dent in this world, while the remaining religious communities become gnostic, insisting that minor differences in profession of faith make more of an ultimate difference than obedience and activity in the penultimate realm.
The Law Before the Gospel
“The sons of this world are more shrewd than the sons of light.”
When people question Jordan Peterson for not being a “true Christian” or they take it that he is teaching a false religion of works-righteousness, or when they critique Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion for being motivated by political and civilizational concerns, they really miss the point. What Peterson has done is take the practical content of Christianity and spoken it in terms a broad range of people can accept (if not always understand), effectively urging our civilization to act as though God exists. Unfortunately, many a professing Christian does not act as though God exists. The idea that this minor, cheap, theoretical profession of faith makes more of a difference than acting as though God exists really has things backwards.
Even if the Protestants are right that all of us will fail to live up to the law of God, an absolutely necessary first step toward that recognition is to remind Westerners - Christian and non-Christian alike - that the law of God applies to them. No one who is not conscious of guilt for failing to live up to the practical demands of Christianity comes to Christ seeking forgiveness. No one who has not experienced the difficulty of trying to live righteously by human power alone seeks the Holy Spirit’s power. In the logic of Christianity, the law is prior to the gospel. Teaching the law is not legalism; it is Judaism - the first half of Christianity. It is the preparatio evangelium, the preparation for the gospel.
What is more, in the logic of Christianity, posterior to the gospel is again the law of God, which is to guide our living in obedience to the divine commands, which is nothing but living in accord with our divinely-designed human nature.
Christian Humanism
Now, one way to misunderstand the teaching of the penultimate things is to misread it as instrumental: The only reason what we do here matters is because of the afterlife. On the contrary, obeying the law of God has real material consequences here and now. If your mind is only set on the possibility of punishment or reward hereafter, it means you’ve already ignored the temporal consequences of your actions. Doing good for others physically and politically in this world really improves people’s lives. The world becomes a better place. There is nothing to discount about this. This world isn’t only good for what it can get us in the next.
The doctrine of creation is crucial here. The things God created are good. The Christian who can’t see that is less of a human for that fact. The heathen who enjoys the physical creation is more honoring to God than the puritan who doesn’t.
This also means that Christians are absolutely incorrect to say that, without God, nihilism is inevitable. On the contrary, non-Christians of all stripes can and should find meaning and goodness in this world. That meaning and goodness is a pointer to the divine, even if not all follow the trail. Christians who use the above apologetic line betray their own alienation from the created order and Christian nihilism. Our apology for Christian faith should move from the goodness and meaningfulness of created life to the reality of our creator and the human desire that created life continue beyond death - the desire for resurrection.
Idolatry of created things and indulgence in cheap pleasure is a real human temptation; it is true. But that path itself involves a devaluing of the created order, an attempt to instrumentalize everything around us egoistically for the sake of base pleasure, or narcissistic honor, or material gain. Following such a path reveals that we have already departed from the Epicurean path of enjoyment of the created order, with each thing in its proper place. We have ceased to live truly human lives; but the solution is not to live ghostly, inhuman lives, insisting that only the spiritual matters. No, this-worldly human life matters.
Christian nihilism is, I fear, a common offering from Christians to others. We tell them that nothing matters without God, hoping that they’ll come to God, after which they’ll have nothing to do, except to bring other people to God. This is so much less than what God himself offers and requires. God has made a world that matters, a world in which what we do matters. Christianity is supposed to draw us to more human lives, enmeshed in things that matter and hoping to see them continue on after death. Catch yourself when you are tempted to use those arguments. Eliminate them. Look at secular people who successfully live deeply human lives. Begin to live a more human life yourself.
Christianity is a humanism.
Why would I wait ’till I die to come alive?I’m ready now, I’m not waiting for the afterlife.I still believe we can live forever.You and I, we begin forever now.
Switchfoot, “Afterlife”
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I recently bought a bass guitar. After imagining, dreaming about, and lusting after a vintage instrument, I pulled the trigger. I could feel the dents and scratches in my mind, smell the aging wood, and sense the mojo of the object of my desire.
Within days, the instrument arrived. I plugged it in to an amplifier, and it sounded, well, alright. For a deep, dark, vintage bass, it sounded way too bright. I compared it to my previous bass; not that different. Don’t get me wrong; after a few tweaks and a good “set-up”, I’m a big fan of this vintage electric bass. But no object is quite as magnificent as we imagine when we desire it.
The Buddhists say that desire is based in ignorance. We idealize and fabricate the object of desire, imagining it to be without flaws. We imagine the experience of having the thing as a utopian eschaton of unending bliss. In fact, as short-form social media should have taught us, the euphoria ends with the unboxing.
I once thought that, when we feel the pull of desire, we should delay gratification. Resist the instant gratification of contemporary digital technology and the global economy. No longer.
My new method? Give in. Go to the end-state as quickly as possible. Burst that bubble. It sounds like giving in to temptation. But it’s actually the quickest strategy to undoing illusions.
Do you know what else is rooted in ignorance, and the idealization of a future end-state?
Ideology.
The Illusions of Ideology
Ideology, likewise, is based in ignorance: Ignorance of every problem apart from the one we were trying to solve, ignorance every solution except for the one we have latched onto.
Each ideology has a sense of The Problem with the world, and a sense of The Solution. But the problem with ideology itself is that each of these problems is not possibly the whole problem with the world. And each solution is not possibly the whole solution for the problems of the world.
One way to not be ideological is to be a “normie,” to try to return to that pre-ideological state where we just lived life and didn’t think about anything we didn’t have to. But for those of us who have had at least one ideology, that’s not very possible for us. We have seen something to be wrong with the world, and we’re looking for solutions. We can’t go back.
That’s why, last week, one of my strategies for escaping tribalism was, not to relinquish all tribal membership, but to become a member of multiple tribes. We have to work with our tribal, “political” nature as it is.
So here, my recommendation is not to relinquish all ideas, but to put them to the test of a rigorous experiment. Succumb to ideology. Exhaust it completely. Discover, as quickly as possible its limits, the illusions we suffer in giving in to it, the sins we commit when we are blinded by it.
Succumbing to ideology, it’s something I’ve been doing, and not always on purpose. Like when I was a techno-pessimist.
Example 1: My Techno-Pessimist Phase
Techno-pessimism diagnoses the root of our ills as the inherent nature of technological change. Our former state was one of integration with ourselves and nature; technology inherently moves us toward alienation with nature and disintegration with ourselves, such as the disembodiment of digital technology. The solution of techno-pessimism is a species of reaction and return (RETVRN) to manual labor, to remaining offline, and to the real rather than the virtual.
There is a lot of truth in techno-pessimism. Much of the change that technology brings is unexpected and almost impossible to opt out of. It encourages us to view the world as mere material resources to be mined and ourselves as functionaries of The Machine. I did my best to articulate this in an academic essay on Heidegger’s and Eric Brende’s distinction between the tool and technology.
However, an ideological techno-pessimism ignores the place of technological benefits and of technology serving and facilitating real life. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, mocked our replacements for the natural “power process” - the process of achieving an end through necessary physical labor - as “surrogate activities.” In fact, it is a relief to be secured against desperate necessity and be able to exercise manual power in more specific ways.
In the last several years, I’ve run several experiments in trying to do things the “old-fashioned way.” Roasting my own coffee for several years, having chickens, biking instead of driving, and having a dumb-phone. After all that, I find that the most satisfying activity for me that is physical and enjoyable is playing music. I know it’s not quite “a workout.” But it enmeshes me in the bodily and sensory, the unconscious, it is an exercise for me of the “power process.” Technology and the economy enable me to devote my energies to the labor that I choose (to some degree) instead of to subsistence activities.
I should also mention the very real (and physical) demands of being a father. This led to the realization that I don’t need to make caring for my children more difficult or to add to the number of living beings I need to care for. Life is real enough.
Today, I buy my coffee beans already roasted, we sold our chickens, and I have a smartphone.
The Pattern of Ideological Ignorance
Let’s observe the pattern. In adopting techno-pessimism, I saw a problem in the world, the alienation from the physical that results from the progress of modern technology. While it wasn’t the only ideology I held, I did see it as far-reaching. Significantly, I thought that it possibly indicated that in any arena of life, the more technological way was the worse way. In this way, I saw it as a sort of panacea. Technology is always a problem; less technology is always the solution.
This led me to ignore exceptions to my rule, and to fall into the other problems of ideology. I probably sounded at moments like a cult member or an eccentric. I appreciated the advice I received from one “normie” Catholic friend after I had him read The Benedict Option: “Don’t be weird.”
However, I want to highlight the positives. I tested how far-reaching the techno-pessimist thesis was in a way I couldn’t have if I wasn’t “taken in.” I learned what technology could explain and what I couldn’t. I learned where having less technology was a boon, and where it was a hindrance. It was ultimately an experiment, and even negative results are valid experimental findings.
Could I have run the experiment without being taken in? Yes, I think so. I might have tried individual activities in a less technological way to see if they were better. Instead of holding myself to the standard of adopting a demanding anti-technological life, I might have lightened up a bit. But either way, I needed to try out some anti-technological behaviors, and run the experiment. That is what you need to do to really put ideology to the test.
The alternative would be to have the ideas for a long time, and gradually aspire to live up to them, only to find out much later that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Some people work for years to be able to quit and job and try home-steading. Our limited experiment in suburban home-steading showed us that it wasn’t for us.
Example 2: Plugging in to Politics
Now what about political ideology? For several years, I paid close attention to politics through the lens of political commentary podcasts. While I would say that I succumbed to a political ideology to a degree during that time, it is important that I ran that experiment. I saw what life was like while paying close attention to contemporary political events, plugging in to “the discourse,” and seeing the world through the lens of a political ideology.
One of the reasons I no longer do that is that I found that events mostly just repeat themselves. Political commentators are not really in the business of having and refining their ideas. Their goal is to have ideas at a relatively young age and to stay true to them while applying them to every contemporary happening for decades.
This doesn’t seem like the best use of time. If you already know what you think in broad outlines, you will just say the same things for decades. But the events of the day are less interesting than the political ideas themselves: Which political philosophy should the left or the right adopt? Is there a way to bridge the two? What is the truth that libertarians are getting at, the truth liberals are getting at, the truth progressives are getting at, the truth conservatives are getting at? Is there a full-orbed, non-ideological political philosophy?
What’s more, I found that listening to the world through one ideological perspective was also very tribal. You begin to see the problems of the world to be only those that your party or team has identified and the solutions to be only those that have already been proposed. What if we assume that different political groups are attentive to different problems? Incorporating the other side’s concerns will be important even if you ultimately disagree with their solutions. I began to see people with the other leanings as evil, opponents of all that is good. This is partly because you assume that everyone who votes the other way is ideological about it, as opposed to mostly uninterested in politics but just voting out of a gut instinct or tribal membership. And those who are especially ideological, we can’t ignore the motives and psychological reasons why they are so impassioned.
Having followed that path, I no longer listen to commentators who hold my priors, who represent the point-of-view that I broadly agree with. I’m interested in incorporating insights from the other side of the political aisle into my own thinking. Learning that political affiliation was correlated with personality also led me to question tribalism. I don’t want to hold ideas that can only be appealing to people of a certain naturally-occurring temperament. I want an expansive political and moral philosophy that appeals even to people of the opposite temperament to me.
Experimenting without Being Ideological
Going forward, I plan to be much more self-conscious about the risk of ideology and tribalism. I want to keep running experiments on ideas, but without the narrowness of the ideological mindset.
As I shared aloud the thoughts that led to this essay, my wife asked if I had given up on ideas. I responded, “I love philosophy!” So the answer is that, of course, I still love ideas, thinking, figuring things out.
Philosophy does have a reputation of being a priori and ideological, conceptualizing the world from an armchair without any experimental findings. I think instead it should be empirical in a way, a seeking after wisdom that incorporates the complexity of life and cannot come to a judgment too soon; it requires age and maturity.
Philosophy must seek general truths, but we must be careful not to generalize. Philosophy does seek for the broadest possible observations and explanations; but, at the risk of falling into ideology, it needs to be based on careful testing, in thought and life, of the limits of our proposed solutions to the world’s ills.
To be non-ideologues, we need to cultivate a sense of what we don’t know and a continuing curiosity. This makes black-and-white thinking undesirable. As one reader commented last week, we must recognize that the world is not “black and white” but “greyish … with very small black and white pixels.”
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I’m deeply interested in the idea that most thinking follows narrow, ideological ruts and that it takes real effort to escape these ruts and allow one’s thought to be shaped by the complexity and multiplicity of empirical inputs, by the reality of how things are.
From several quarters, I receive pressure to hold that ideology, worldviews, presuppositions, socially-constructed conceptual systems, and so on, always color our vision such that the aspiration to empirical reception of the real is a modernist fantasy, even a hubristic one, a naïve realism and brute empiricism.
At the same time, many of the same people recognize that allowing one’s thought to be held captive by ideology, or failing to recognize the socially-constructed nature of one’s concepts, is itself naïve and the cause of much error in our thinking. Partisanship and tribalism seem like predominant errors of our day that sharply contrast with the idea that we have modernized, secularized, and reached the height of scientific, empirical thought. Resigning ourselves to ideological thinking and partisanship does not seem viable, yet the thought that we could or even should rise above it is often swatted down, like a poppy that has grown taller than those around it.
I want to argue that the aspiration to empirical, non-ideological thinking is one to which we must succumb. The risk of thinking that we have arrived is real, but that is the same as the risk of succumbing to ideology. Empiricism is not hubristic; it is rather the thesis that we do not know and cannot be certain but must endeavor perpetually to discover how wrong we are. Likewise, realism is not the thesis that we have a good grasp on reality but that reality remains, always, distinct from our thought and the standard by which it must be judged and tested. Seeking empirical apprehension of the real is a human obligation.
The Limits of Ideology
Ideological thinking has several features. In the main, it involves shortcuts for thinking by adopting a raft of views of one’s tribe and seeking confirmation of those views, rather than disconfirmation.
It is quite understandable in the young, who have not had time to examine issues and topics on a case-by-case basis but must, on a practical level, make far-reaching decisions about how they will live and operate in the world. Our choices of religious and political affiliation, especially in high-school and college, almost inevitably operate in this way. Without time or capacity to exhaustively study each religious or political issue, we must rely on limited evidence and our gut to take the leap into one way of thinking or the other and to use it as a broad heuristic for a variety of issues.
However, these either-or and black-and-white framings must be seen, or come to be seen, as only rough approximations of the world. Otherwise, a kind of unjustified certainty sets in that precludes the gathering of further evidence, the testing of individual conclusions, and seeing the merits in the arguments and conclusions of “the other side.”
At some point, we also come to see the way in which these partisan, ideological framings are the result of considerations other than truth. In politics, the ability to mobilize masses to vote, especially in a two-party system, requires casting political questions as partisan in nature. There are two views, and to reject one is to adopt the other: It’s capitalism or socialism. There is nothing else. In religion, the need to offer the laity a clear set of beliefs that signify membership in the religious community - and the kingdom of heaven - requires simplifying and closing off certain questions that religious intellectuals might want to keep open. “The first chapters of the book of Genesis are literally true.” “Moses certainly wrote the Pentateuch.” “The four gospel accounts definitely harmonize.”
Once we recognize the ideological nature of the majority of human thought, it is tempting to conclude that, since we are all human and subject to the same kinds of cognitive distortion, that there is no escaping ideology, only a circumspect acceptance of this condition and adoption of a kind of agnosticism and skepticism that casts all truth-claims or pretensions to objective empirical thought as suspect.
But there is another way. Once we lose our epistemological naïveté, we can conclude, with writer Gurwinder Bhogal, that our starting point should be, “I am wrong.” Given my humanity and subjection to the cognitive distortions of human psychology, the forces of tribalism, partisanship, and ideology, I know that my current thinking has no chance of being adequate to how things are. The remaining questions are, “How wrong am I, and in what particular ways?” The attempt to answer those questions is what I call empirical thinking.
Five Strategies to Escape Ideology
Human psychology is not ordered to truth but to certain biological ends. If we are to overcome the forces of nature and direct our minds to truth, it will require effort and strategy. We cannot continue to seek truth in the way that we originally did, by the rough heuristics of ideological thinking. We cannot simply download truth from our senses either; the world is too complex, and we are aware of the biases and cognitive distortions by which we are tempted.
In fact, we will have, to a large degree, to utilize alternative heuristics and strategies, which are by no means infallible but which, rather, generally counteract the tendencies to black-and-white thinking, to tribalism, and to certainty.
1. Have Multiple Tribal Memberships
One of my strategies is to locate myself in multiple social and intellectual circles, in effect, to have multiple tribal memberships. (Not to be confused with multiple trial memberships, which one should curtail.) Recognizing that we tend to think in ways that justify our tribe, it is important to complicate one’s own tribal membership by locating oneself at the periphery of one tribe, and at its intersection with another tribe. For example, by being in academic philosophy, I feel the pull to belong to that tribe and to adopt its habits of thought and standards of intellectual respectability. Yet, as a member of the evangelical tribe, I have competing and conflicting allegiances which, I find, help me to filter out the tribal commitments of each group from the intellectually valid commitments and merits of each.
2. Seek Out Disagreement
Another strategy is to seek out disagreement. I have found this most effectively through writing, both academic and online. Views that you formulate in private and keep private never undergo testing. At the same time, in order to find disagreement, you have to avoid writing and speaking to an echo-chamber. Once again, having multiple tribal memberships or distancing oneself from one’s tribe in certain ways can cultivate a readership that is willing and able to offer pushback and critique.
3. Non-Ideological Content Consumption
Yet another strategy is to take in content primarily from thinkers who do not share your prior ideological and religious commitments. While, as a Christian theologian, I have indeed read deeply in the tradition and community of which I am a part, having come to embody the tradition, I rarely consult it anymore. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t need to consult works of Christian theology frequently because I have read widely in that area and am capable of writing such works myself. When I read and listen to learn more about the world, I seek out sources that do not share my ideological predilections, even if I find them, as I often do, confirming some of my priors.
4. Cultivate Your Capacity for Empirical Thought
Another strategy is to cultivate one’s own capacity for empirical and, specifically, scientific thought. In response to my initial description of the contrast between empirical and ideological thought, my friend Mason Bruza raised the objection that the attempt to think scientifically often reduces down to deciding which tribe of scientists or people citing scientific studies to believe. While I would maintain that scientific and empirical disagreement does not undermine the validity of the scientific process, nevertheless I do think that the state of affairs obligates individuals to become capable in empirical and scientific thinking themselves.
As an example, I treated scientific matters most thoroughly in my series on the science of evolution. When I received pushback that cited a scientific response to Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves, I felt momentarily daunted by the task of reading and responding to a scientific paper as a philosopher-theologian. However, as I read the paper, I found the empirical and scientific portion of my brain testing and responding to the empirical claims of the scientists. Instead of their claims going beyond my expertise and intellectual capacity, I found that, as in other forms of discourse, when the scientists made a claim, I was able to bring my reasoning powers to bear on that claim. I did not feel the need to defer to their intellectual authority but rather to join them in the process of empirical reasoning.
5. Look at Yourself Like One of Your Ideological Opponents
In addition to these strategies, there are heuristics to test one’s own thinking for biases and cognitive distortions. Gurwinder Bhogal describes the heuristic of writing a claim and then considering it as if it had been written by one’s ideological opponents. All of a sudden, our minds are able to recognize flaws and errors as we are prone to do when considering other people’s positions, but much less prone when considering our own.
At the core of each of these strategies and heuristics is Bhogal’s and my original recommendation of starting from, “I am wrong.” “I am tribal in my thinking.” “I tend to judge matters ideologically.” If you start from those premises, then you are less likely to impose your ideology on new evidence. You are more likely to cultivate intellectual habits and attitudes that lead to learning new things, seeking moments of surprise, rather than confirmation of one’s prior commitments.
Toward a Civilized Empiricism
In this posture, I do not see naïveté or dogmatism, two of the chief errors of realists and objectivists. There is no insistence that I know the objective truth of the real world. Rather, there is a keen sense that the real world and objectivity are the standard by which thought must be evaluated. This leads to an earnest attempt to discern where our thinking is controlled by subjective factors, and the aspiration to have it be shaped instead by the object of thought, how things are.
In this way, reality serves as the object and endpoint of empirical inquiry, not something we claim to have already within our grasp. The postmodern mood which denies this endpoint loses the standard by which our subjective and ideological ways of thinking are judged wanting. Thereby, they leave us open to the forces of tribalism, ideology, and atavism.
Likewise, empiricism is a process, not an accomplishment. Empiricism is not evidenced in rigid, doctrinaire holding to the claims of “Science,” but by engaging in the methods and means of empirical and scientific inquiry.
Elsewhere, contrary to the characterization of realism as “naïve,” I have argued for a sophisticated realism. Here, contrary to the characterization of empiricism as “brute,” I urge a civilized empiricism, one which recognizes the dependence of empirical inquiry on habits and virtues of social and moral life. It depends on the social achievement of academic and scientific cultures of inquiry and experiment. It depends on the cultivation of a kind of republican virtue that seeks to advocate for and to understand the many tribes within the polis, rather than to give voice to the rumblings of a single tribe. It also depends on the few who desire, have the capacity, and have the resources to devote themselves to this task to take it seriously as a noble calling.
Here’s to the cultivation of a civilized empiricism.
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Last week, a group of young men with shared interests in self-improvement, virtue, and masculinity gathered in a Zoom meeting for an evening discussion. While they found common ground on their shared interests, the discussion took a turn when a difference emerged between one of the members, Brent, and the rest of the group. While the leader of the group, and the majority with him, held to a six-day-creationist, literal reading of Genesis, Brent was a devotee of Jordan Peterson’s evolutionary path to the divine.
Quickly, discussion soured. Brent was cast as the resident believer in “Science,” a local Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Richard Dawkins. Voices were raised. Enraged, the six-day-creationist Christian leader muted Brent on Zoom. The night ended at a standstill.
The next morning, at a group writing session at Other Life, Brent (not his real name) told me about this unnerving experience. I shook my head, not in disbelief, but in quiet disappointment at a kind of behavior that did not surprise me in the least.
I am sure these young men meant well. In fact, I warrant that they meant to be “defending the faith.” But what they actually ended up doing was berating a Godfearer.
Rushing the Unprepared
According to the predominant evangelical theory, there are just a handful of worldviews out there, and the question is which worldview to adopt. In the simplest form, the only options are secular humanism and Christianity. The Christian argues that secular humanism actually reduces to atheistic nihilism, and this leads the humanist, in the face of the loss of meaning, to adopt conservative American evangelical Christianity wholesale.
In this worldview-thinking, there is a demand for consistency. But consistency is, first, rather inhuman; we’re all a little inconsistent. And second, the world is a complex place, and there is no guarantee that it is as consistent as our purest mental models of it.
This results in a kind of all-or-nothing mentality and an impatience with the human beings we encounter. Brent himself told me that it felt like his interlocutors were “immanentizing the eschaton”: “Become a six-day-creationist literalist Christian…right now!”
This mode of engagement is also sub-intellectual. I can illustrate this in relation to my studies in philosophy. In academic philosophy, there is, on the hand, a rigorous demand for consistency. But at the same time, there is a rigid, almost atomistic separation of one intellectual point from another. Five thoughts that most people hold together are revealed to be distinct doctrines that can come apart. In analytic philosophy, you’ll probably find people who hold any combination of these views. To the amateur, this is inconsistent. To the philosopher, this is interesting. Things we thought stood or fell together turn out to vary independently. Two things might be true together that we thought were mutually exclusive. Or an inference that we thought was obligatory turns out to be optional or even flatly fallacious.
Theologically, we are also neglecting the necessity of preparation in order to receive the gospel: in Latin, the preparatio evangelium. The fact is, the Christian message is not a worldview. The gospel is a message of salvation. It assumes or presupposes a certain picture of the world, and especially of God, creation, nature, the moral law, man, sin, and misery. Strikingly, that world-picture is shared to a great degree across Abrahamic religions, different Christian denominations, and even some of the Christian offshoots that evangelicals call “cults.” It was also shared, to a certain degree, with Platonic and Stoic philosophy. According to some of the church fathers, what the Old Testament was for the Jews, in preparing them for Christ, philosophy was for the Greeks and Romans, preparation for the gospel.
This means that we are not only permitted but even required to be patient with people as we discuss with them the deep questions that lead to Christianity. Furthermore, we are required to operate in a piecemeal manner. We cannot require people to adopt a whole worldview. We must be content to discuss a single truth at a time.
Help Egyptians Plunder the Christians
One unique aspect of the misunderstanding above is that the mental model of “atheists vs. Christians” just doesn’t work when you include people who, like Brent, are following the “Jordan Peterson path” to God. While conservative evangelical discourse had failed to appeal to Brent, Jordan Peterson used the language of evolutionary biology and empirical science to argue a great many otherwise secular folks to an appreciation of the moral necessity of religion.
According to the worldview-model, evolution is a tenet of a materialist worldview, an obstacle to Christian belief. But in this actual circumstance, the theory of evolution has been a tool for opening Brent’s mind to the way in which religion is baked into human nature. For him, evolution has been a stepping stone toward God.
While I have registered my own objections to the embrace of evolution by Christians, I have no objection to the embrace of God by evolutionists. After all, most of Jordan Peterson’s observations about human nature derive from biology and psychology, not the theory of evolution, per se. (The evolutionary story that is used to defuse the worry that biological complexity might indicate design is, as my friend Mason Bruza wrote, a “retcon.”)
Jordan Peterson’s approach to the presentation of Christianity is, unlike much Christian theology, “from below.” It meets contemporary secular Westerners where they are and builds from things they already believe to new (and old) things they may not yet have considered.
In this, Peterson’s words are able to get a grip on the minds of his audience in a way that most Christian discourse fails to do. Similar to instances of “Christianese,” much Christian discourse and even evangelism and apologetics serves less as a foundation for further thought and discussion and more a marker of tribal identity, one that leads outsiders to perceive a threat rather than be provoked to thought. (“Uh oh, I’m being proselytized,” or, “I see, you’re one of them. I guess I can tune you out.”)
Most of all, we should use this approach when the person in front of us has already shown an interest in learning more about Christianity. I understand that when a person is not interested in Christianity, there are fewer non-confrontational means to invite a discussion of “higher things.” But when someone approaches a discussion with Christians out of curiosity, to continue to use the combative approach of apologetics can only be read as indicting a larger mentality.
In the New Testament, these types of individuals might have been called “Godfearers.” In the Roman empire, these would have been Gentiles who were sympathetic to Judaism or had fully come to believe in Yahweh. In our time, the Godfearers, at least in one corner of the Internet, are fleeing from errors they have seen on the secular moral left and finding wisdom in both evolutionary science and psychological readings of Scripture, as exemplified best by Peterson, but also a few others.
If we berate the Godfearers, you have to ask what objective we have in mind. It sure looks like we are dogs marking our territory, rather than thoughtful Christians inviting further discussion.
Among those Christians who, like me, emphasize the truth that can be found outside of Christianity, we often speak about Augustine’s phrase “plundering the Egyptians.” This is certainly one of the tasks of “natural theology.”
However, it turns out that another task is that of helping the Gentile, or Egyptian Godfearers to plunder the Christians. What if we offered them nuggets of Christian truth, without asking them to “change religions” first?
Instead of waiting for Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, or Leon Kass to offer a psychological reading of the Bible to secular people eagerly waiting to hear whether religion has anything of practical significance to say, we could simply embrace the earliest forms of biblical interpretation, the allegorical and moral interpretations of Scripture, and with Augustine, show that Scripture actually teaches things that even unbelievers can recognize as true.
Reclaiming Conversation
Let’s reclaim conversation.
Sherry Turkle wrote a bestselling book recently by that title, indicating the obstacles to conversation broadly in the present day. But for evangelicals, we introduce our own obstacles to conversation by conceptualizing discussion across religious boundaries in terms of either evangelism or apologetics. In doing so, we neglect the possibility and the promise of conversation.
Over the course of my education, I’ve been on a search for a better theory of how to interact with non-Christians. One of the things I’ve realized along this quest is that there are very few opportunities in general for conversation on a theological and philosophical level. There are also many preconditions for having such conversations. In academic philosophy, a system of complex social expectations and intellectual requirements makes interaction across religious division possible. In rare non-academic intellectual contexts, people choose to have conversations that potentially challenge their prior beliefs. And this is not to mention the obstacles to ordinary conversation on a broader societal level, the infrequency of having people at one’s dinner table, the elimination of time when we bump into strangers and aren’t looking at our phones, et cetera.
This obligates Christians to seek out and find and to foster the creation of spaces in which such conversation occurs. Currently, I have found this, to some degree, in the university in the discipline of philosophy. I have found it through the online community Other Life, where I recently, with Brent, hosted a philosophical salon discussing political philosophy. And I have found it through Substack, as writers and readers of different beliefs seek to broaden their minds and sharpen our thinking on the hard edge of other people’s thinking.
If I think of evangelical examples of this, the most prominent one is L’Abri, Francis Schaeffer’s center for intellectual conversation and communal living. In its early years, L’Abri was, if anything, at the forefront of the 1960’s counter-culture, in spite of Schaeffer’s adherence to evangelical or even “fundamentalist” Christianity. In a different way, Wheaton College, in spite of its predominantly evangelical make-up, facilitated conversation and allowed me to build friendships in a way that I, like most other college graduates, seek to replicate, with some difficulty.
Part of the difficulty with reclaiming conversation and finding space for it is that conversation is slow. The word “school,” as Josef Pieper once wrote, derives from the Greek word for “leisure.” In order to have patient and fruitful conversation, we need to make space outside of the daily grind. We need to decrease the urgency with which we urge people to convert. I linked it above, but watch this clip from the musical The Book of Mormon that illustrates the futility of this kind of urgency: [Buzzzzz] “Hello, would you like to change religions!? I have a free book written by Jesus!!!”
In fact, no one would like to change religions. It’s too destabilizing. How then do people - particularly, adults - change religions? Well, as a first approximation, they see something in the world that requires them to consider that their previous way of life is inadequate. A lot of time and experience leads them to begin to rethink what they once thought. After a decade or two, they find that they are Christians. See Molly Worthen’s conversion, Paul Kingsnorth’s, Tammy Peterson’s, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s, Winston Marshall’s, Candace Vogler’s, Justin Murphy’s, Mary Harrington’s, Luke Smith’s, Abigail Favale’s, and archetypically for the modern intellectual conversion, C. S. Lewis’s.
Christians should seek the opportunity to be one of the patient conversation partners along that decade-long journey for the adult Godfearer. Instead of berating the Godfearer, invite him to have a conversation.
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Since it’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s, here are three things I’m thinking about, topics that may inspire future full-length essays.
The first one is the meaning of “gay,” the next frontier in my ongoing engagement with the question of homosexuality and the Christian life. The second is the inspiration and encouragement I’ve been receiving from Ali Abdaal’s new book, Feel Good Productivity. The third is the difference between ideology and empirical thinking that I’ve been trying to formulate. Enjoy!
What Does “Gay” Mean?
The other week, I had an interesting Twitter interaction with Grant Hartley. I argued that “same-sex attracted” (SSA) and “gay” were synonyms. As a result, Christians shouldn’t have a preference between the two, allowing people to admit that they are gay, if they are.
Grant pushed back, arguing that “gay” is a term with more of a cultural and historical significance, rather than a mere report of one’s sexual orientation (like “homosexual” or “same-sex attracted”). He mentioned, and I also highlighted, the unique convergence between his view and what I often hear from “Side Y” folks: that “gay” is a loaded term that means a lot more than that one is same-sex attracted.
Here was our conversation, and I’ll comment more below:
Recently, Colton Beach, another first-time Revoice attendee this year, was interviewed by Preston Sprinkle, and it was one of the best interviews I’ve heard on the celibate (chaste), gay Christian issue. Colton is also a continual source of one-liners about this debate on Twitter. He also recently published a brief Twitter essay in which he asks whether “Gay Christian is an Oxymoron?” There, while he mentions the history of the word “gay,” he echoes my argument that the colloquial usage of “gay” in our culture is as a synonym for “same-sex attracted,” or “homosexual,” a reference to one’s sexual orientation, rather than to anything additional.
(He also had a recent essay about “Positive Experiences as a Gay Man in the Conservative Church,” and another, “Barriers to Discipling Gay People in the Conservative Church.”)
In my arguments so far, I have argued that “gay” is simply a reference to sexual orientation and that sexual orientation is not a concept or a social construct, but a real psychological phenomenon in the world. This dovetails with my realist and externalist views that the meanings of our words are exhausted by the things they refer to, rather than bearing additional layers of meaning, sense, or baggage. Grant (and Colton) may be correct that the word “gay” has this additional cultural history, however, with Frege, I would distinguish the baggage, the feelings, and the impressions people have when they hear the word from its actual meaning, which is a reference to the property of being homosexual in one’s sexual orientation.
I believe this is the next subject for a lengthier analysis in my ongoing essays on same-sex attraction. After the experience of self-publishing, I am thinking that the essays on same-sex attraction alone could be compiled into a resource for Christians.
Feel-Good Productivity
One of my latest favorites on YouTube is Ali Abdaal. Abdaal is a twenty-nine-year-old YouTuber in the UK who relatively recently left his stable career as a doctor to go full-time on YouTube. His content is focused on productivity, and his business is doing $4 million in revenue a year.
His new book, Feel Good Productivity, came out yesterday, and he’s started a bit of a podcast tour.
I’ve been loving his interviews. His message is simple: Productivity should feel good. His interview with Chris Williamson is a good place to start because of Williamson’s relentless positivity.
But his interview with Ryan Holiday of the Daily Stoic was enlightening because of the contrast it showed. In many ways, Holiday and Abdaal agreed. Holiday was honest about the limitations and balance having children brings to life, for instance. Abdaal mentions that he, though not yet married or expecting any children, has been reading parenting books, and thinking about the chosen constraints children bring to life.
At a certain point in the interview though, Holiday stands up for the Stoic ideal of buckling down and grinding through difficulty. Abdaal’s emphasis is more Epicurean, the simple, happy life. We work better when we do work we enjoy or make our existing work into something like an adventure. In the title of another interview, “hard work is overrated.”
Abdaal contrasts the hard work and grit that it takes to be a “hero” with the joy and lack of anxiety required to be a pleasant normal person. It feels to me like one of the elements of transition from a man’s 20s to his 30s is switching from the “hero” mindset to the normal man (dad) mindset.
Abdaal has also been helpful to me in explaining the role of a social media personality, something I think about even in writing this on the internet at all. Abdaal encourages us not to strive to be “gurus,” especially those of us who are young and would only feel impostor syndrome doing so. Rather, think of yourself as a “guide.” You are two steps ahead of someone out there, someone who would appreciate hearing your perspective to be led the next step or two of their own path.
Another line from Abdaal that pops up in the interviews is to be, rather than serious, sincere. Often we procrastinate or get anxiety about productivity when we are taking our task - and ourselves - too seriously. The solution is not to be cavalier, but to substitute sincerity for seriousness. I found this helpful a couple weeks ago when I approached five highly competent academics to defend my dissertation prospectus. I realized that there would be no help in putting on a pretense of being smarter than I am; the best result, and the lowest anxiety, would come from committing to be sincere, which means revealing one’s imperfections, but putting other people at ease.
To my mind, this mindset around productivity and seriousness is part of a change from the Puritan work ethic in general, and the academic, status-driven mindset in particular. I also think it’s part of a more forgiving and gentle Christianity.
In my own life this year, I’ve done some work in counseling to overcome anxiety about “productivity” that I have often felt. (It’s discussed in the interviews at some points as a distinct kind of anxiety.) Strikingly, some people have expressed being impressed with my productivity this year. I can assure you that I was much busier, and perhaps more productive during my master’s and Ph.D. coursework. However, a significant Substack output, a conference presentation and a prospectus have come this year from a writing habit largely focused upon doing two hours of deep work (writing) five days a week (and on average, probably only four). This has felt like accepting a limitation and settling for a rather small amount of work in total. However, I have found that there is about an hour of preparation, and probably another hour of wind-down just to complete those two hours of writing well.
In a way that contradicts the Puritan work ethic, this work schedule has more or less been what “feels good.” I’ve tried working less - and sickness or fatigue sometimes ensures that I work less. But working less doesn’t feel as good. I’ve tried working more, but I can’t sustain it. The following day, my brain is fried, and I end up working less to make up for it.
It’s pretty classic for graduate students and academics to struggle in these ways. But I’ve been grateful to find a level of peace with my level of “productivity.” The work is creative, and it can’t be forced. At the same time, some of the most productive results come from when one is lying in bed or staring out a window. I can’t say that I know how to apply these insights to all professions, however, I think all of us could use a dose of feel-good productivity.
Order the book here. (I have! Mine’s arriving today by 10 pm.)
Ideology Versus Empiricism
I recently wrote on Substack Notes about the difference I see between ideological and empirical thinking:
To illustrate, for several years, I’ve been trying to process all the events and ideas related to sexual and gender ideology, race, and “wokeness.” One critique I hear, largely from secular critics of wokeness, is that it is a kind of religion or ideology, in a negative sense. Unfortunately, I see a lot of the same features of ideology, and “religion” in the bad sense, in certain Christian circles and intellectual approaches. These groups - like Christian coherentists, presuppositionalists, or worldview-ists - tend to offer the following criticism of “woke” ideology: “This ideology is incorrect according to our ideology. Adopt our ideology instead of that ideology!”
But the very problem seemed to be ideology itself! Adopting “Christian ideology,” rather than basing belief on empirical evidence, is not the right path. Accordingly, as a religious person, the question is whether Christianity can be something other than a religion or ideology.
What is ideology? I think that ideology is a kind of shortcut for thought, adopting a general model of the world, and trying to fit everything into that model. Ideology often has a deeply moral component in that it inspires action and sorts the world into good and evil with clarity and obvious distinctions. The obvious danger of ideology on the epistemic level is that the world is a complex place and cannot be known to conform to our model of thought in every case.
The criticism often comes that everyone has an ideology; we can’t do anything but that. That could even be one way to read the divide between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. Several years ago, the two had a series of discussions in which Harris argued for an objective/scientific basis of morality in empirically-verifiable standards of well-being. Peterson argued that not even Harris could claim to be free of moral beliefs distinct from science, however. Harris’s conception of the two poles of human subjective experience, the height of joy and the depth of suffering, which provide us with a topology of the “moral landscape,” is not itself a deliverance of scientific method, but a narrative, even an eschatology. Peterson was defending the ineliminability of narratival and religious thought.
Nevertheless, I want to be able to argue that we should both escape Harris’s critique of religious, i.e., ideological moral thought (like that of the Taliban) and embrace a religion in Peterson’s sense. Unsurprisingly, I’m enjoying Harris and Peterson’s recent conversation: “Jordan Peterson & Sam Harris Try to Find Something They Agree On.”
On a related note, Peterson will be speaking in St. Louis on Valentine’s Day, so you can guess who I’m bringing to hear him speak! That experience should inspire an essay or two.
Happy New Year!
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In the last couple of weeks, I compiled all the essays I’ve written at this Substack over the last year into a book: The Natural Theologian: Essays on Nature and the Christian Life. It’s currently on sale as a hardcover and as an eBook at Amazon.
For today’s post, I republish the book’s introduction, which I wrote specifically for the book. Enjoy the introduction, as well as a free PDF of the front matter, table of contents, and introduction.
Introduction to The Natural Theologian
Evangelical theology is shaped by its engagement with the Bible. Arguments begin from biblical passages as their premises. Biblical passages are exegeted down to the accent markings of the original languages, in the original manuscripts.
Some identify this focus on the Bible as a fault. Catholics criticize evangelicals for ignoring the place of church history and church tradition in theology. From academia, evangelical postmodernists criticize evangelicals for ignoring the place that cultural assumptions play in our theological formulations. Historical scholars urge attention to the ancient historical contexts of biblical passages. And many of these groups criticize evangelicals for their failure to reach unanimity in biblical interpretation by operating from the Bible alone.
After a decade in evangelical, Catholic, and secular academic institutions, I have come to a different conclusion about the limitation of Bible-only theology: Evangelicals have neglected the role of natural human knowledge, both empirical and philosophical, in their theology. The fact that reason and experience play a role in theology is the reason for the divergence between different interpretations of Scripture; correctly, but in an unexamined way, thought and experience are influencing different theological formulations.
At the same time, the promise of theological convergence would depend on the hard work of philosophy, empirical observation, and modern science. Convergence is not impossible on account of different cultural assumptions; but neither is there a short-cut to convergence by outsourcing judgment to a magisterium, or to the biblical text itself. True knowledge of God and the world is only available by taking the risk of thinking.
The Risk of Thinking
And thinking is risky. If a young evangelical begins to think, there is no telling where he will end up - a Calvinist, a neo-Anabaptist, Catholic, Orthodox, postmodernist, nihilist, or gender theorist. If you allow your thinking to be determined by the outcome of empirical inquiry, you do not know in advance what you will come to think or whether it will be consistent with your religious or ideological presumptions.
This is why Christians invent strategies to eliminate the risk of thinking. We limit our reading to Christian books. We train ourselves and our children in the “Christian worldview,” identifying the corrupt, secular assumptions of all other worldviews. In the most theoretically advanced form, Christian presuppositionalists argue that all our thinking should begin with premises distinctive to Reformed, Trinitarian Christian theology. If we do so, we eliminate the risk that some premise will enter in from the outside from secular science, philosophy, or ideology.
In doing so, we make several errors. First, by only starting from the Bible, we diverge from the biblical teaching concerning general revelation, the “book of nature,” and the natural law of God, written on the hearts of men. Second, in doing so, we cease to have anything we can say in favor of Christianity to those who are not already believers in it. Third, we thereby leave unbelievers with an excuse before God; they didn’t know, which robs them of responsibility for sin and thereby of their humanity.
Other errors affect Christians particularly. We ourselves become confident that we have all the knowledge sufficient for life and godliness, potentially by the age of 25 (the age one might finish seminary). We do not seek for wisdom, to which experience, gained through age, is essential. We fail to understand other human beings and the world we live in because we refuse to use our God-given natural faculties, including the senses, to observe and understand them.
In making Christianity a set of lenses and concepts that we impose upon the world, we implicitly deny that Christian theology is about the world. If the claims of Christianity are not falsifiable - which they are not if all thought is to begin from Christian premises - then they are not accountable to how things are. If I speak about an object available to both our senses, you are able to judge whether what I say matches the reality before you. If what I say is not accountable to our experience of reality, then we have to call into question whether it is about the world of common experience.
The Theology of Nature
What is the alternative? A Christianity that might be false?
Indeed, for in opening up the possibility that Christianity might be false of the world around us, we allow the possibility that we might discover it to be true. Christianity might be thinkable not as a presupposition, but as a conclusion of thought.
To make this change in theology, we need two things, acknowledgement of philosophy and experience as sources of theological knowledge, and a doctrine of nature, including human nature.
Periodically, Christian theology has had need of a renewed theology of nature. Famously, it occurred in Emil Brunner’s defense of natural theology against Karl Barth's denial. While Barth’s reply to Brunner, “Nein!” is certainly more famous, Brunner’s cogent argument in “Nature and Grace” was more accurate. At the same time, Dietrich Bonhoeffer made his apology for the category of nature in Protestant theology in his Ethics; Brunner and Bonhoeffer's promotion of natural theology and natural law was overshadowed by Barth’s prominence in the neo-Orthodox theological movement.
The same happened in Catholic theology in the first decade of the 21st century, as Lawrence Feingold and Steven Long rebutted half a century of Henri De Lubac’s nouvelle théologie, the Catholic equivalent of neo-Orthodoxy. While De Lubac attempted to argue that human nature was incomplete without a supernatural relation to God, Feingold and Long reaffirmed the integrity of created nature.
In evangelical theology, Cornelius Van Til played the role of Barth, denying natural theology a place in Christian thought. His extreme version of Kuyperianism trickled down into evangelicalism through Francis Schaeffer and other advocates of a Christian worldview. Christian analytic philosophy, especially in the persons of Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, can be seen as the late 20th-century rebuttal of presuppositionalism.
However, I encountered a strong Van Tillian presuppositionalism at Westminster Theological Seminary in the 2010s that was unfazed by these various rebuttals. In spite of its distinctiveness and idiosyncrasies, I felt that it was a concentrated dose of the same kind of insular Christian thought that pervaded conservative evangelicalism.
My experience at a more broad-minded Christian institution, Wheaton College, in spite of its wealth of the liberal arts and sciences, did not have the philosophy to ground a humane Christian intellectual life, because of the attraction of its faculty to postmodernism. Both Christian postmodernism and presuppositionalism, in spite of a great difference in spirit, agree in letter that Christianity cannot be known to be objectively true through experience, but is rather a lens through which we view the world.
Therefore, I conclude that another defense of the role of nature and experience in Christian theology is in order. That is what I seek to provide in The Natural Theologian: Essays on Nature and the Christian Life.
Theology from Experience
In this volume, I have compiled a year’s worth of my online writing at my Substack by the same title. In some of the essays, I discuss the theory, the theology and philosophy, of a Christian account of nature and an empiricist theological epistemology. In most of the essays, this theory is demonstrated by being put into practice and into conversation with contemporary political, theological, and ecclesial controversy.
My premonition had been that theology that gave place to nature and empirical knowledge would cut a middle way between opposed views or select a slate of theological positions that bridge contemporary theological divides. This can be seen in the range of views I take in political theology, creation and evolution, and the theology of same-sex attraction.
But the question of same-sex attraction is the one that, this year, has exhibited my method most clearly. The lines have been drawn in the theological debate, with one side claiming to be the most biblical, the other to respect people’s subjective experience. Over the course of about a dozen essays, I asked the question what conclusion we would come to if we sought objective knowledge from experience. My thinking was also shaped by actual experiences, over the course of the year, as I met several Side B, celibate, gay Christian individuals and attended the fabled Revoice conference. I came to conclusions firmly on one side of this debate, yet in terms unique to my natural-theological method.
When theology is open to experience, a theologian can be changed. My attendance at Revoice changed me, and the change is evident in the two halves of this volume. I organized the chapters by topic, except for dividing it in half with the section on Revoice as the mid-point. Readers will notice a change in tone. In the first half, I adopted a more combative political posture. I used the word “based” a lot. I advocated some things that I no longer wish to advocate, for example, in the concluding list of recommendations of “Whatever Happened to Reformed Theology?”
My concluding section on evangelicalism shows my transition from a relative defender of the evangelical majority to one more critical of the conservative evangelical subculture.
Such change is relatively uncommon among theologians. They stake out a position and spend a career defending it. But that is what is exciting about doing theology from experience; you don’t know how it will turn out, and you don’t know how you will turn out.
In this volume, I lay out a unique approach to Christian theology and the Christian life. I dare say that almost no one agrees with all of my conclusions. But I warrant that, if you open yourself to experience and the empirical knowledge of nature, you will be challenged, and you will be changed.
Tolle lege!
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Since 2014, changes in political ideology, toward cancel culture on the left, and political tribalism on the right, have been relatively obvious to observers. Conservative Christian concern is often focused on the cancel culture and the central place of sexual and gender ideology in it.
However, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, co-author with him of The Coddling of the American Mind, originally observed changes on college campuses at the psychological level, before things ever reached the political level. Lukianoff observed college student attitudes on free speech and censorship shifting strongly against free speech around 2014. Haidt and others later gathered psychological evidence of significant increases in anxiety and depression from college students at that time, changes which he argues are closely related to teenage social media use. This increased susceptibility to negative emotion by college-age students has led to an attempt by campus administrators to protect them from ideas they deem harmful.
At the same time, political and cultural changes were afoot to give elite approval to the ideas of cultural leftism. The Obergefell decision in 2015 was quickly followed by a strong push for transgender rights, a sharp change from when Obama, in 2008, opposed gay marriage, citing his own Christian religious tradition. Corporations began to host sensitivity training on sexual and racial matters. Stories of individuals being cancelled for running afoul of these ideas began to abound. A new movement of liberals disaffected from the cultural left arose; and then Jordan Peterson arose as the figure-head of a, for several years, politically non-partisan opposition to the cultural leftism that he called “Postmodern Neo-Marxism.”
On the political front, Trump arose as a kind of “middle-finger” to the cultural left, which further enraged the left, and probably strengthened its conviction, not to mention corporations’ intent to prove that they were not racist or otherwise bigoted. The country has continued to divide along the lines of people’s feelings about Trump on the one hand and cultural leftism (“wokeism”) on the other.
Is This the Negative World?
Several weeks ago, Aaron Renn noted that Jonathan Haidt’s analysis of a significant cultural change coincided with his identification of 2014 as the point of transition from the “neutral world” to the “negative world.” The neutral world was the phase of American culture from 1994-2014 in which being a Christian was seen as socially neutral, one lifestyle choice among others. The negative world is the period since 2014 in which being a Christian is decidedly a social negative, at least according to the prevailing zeitgeist.
However, rather than Haidt’s analysis supporting Renn’s, this observation made me wonder whether the “negative world” isn’t just the kind of psychological and political changes Haidt identified as commencing in 2014: the campus cancel culture, increased levels of anxiety and depression, and newly-ascendant cultural-leftist ideology. If so, this real change does not have Christianity per se as its target but rather particular heresies relative to its ideology, committed as often by Christians as by classical liberals, secular conservatives, and even old-school Marxists.
What is more, since 2014 - particularly since 2016 - I have also observed a new openness to Christianity that is just as distinctive of this cultural period, such that calling this phase the “negative world” misses out on the distinctive new openness to Christianity.
By viewing this cultural change in secular terms as a psychological and political phenomenon, Christians could avoid cultivating unnecessary fear and develop positive strategies effectively to engage this world, with its unique dangers and opportunities.
Christianity and Politics in the New World
In Aaron Renn’s analysis, this phase of American culture can be designated the “negative world,” because in it, being known as a Christian is a social negative, compared to previous eras in which it was socially positive or neutral. It should be said that Renn identifies these as three phases of the decline of American Christianity, at least in its cultural dominance.
But, is the post-2014 era best characterized as one in which being known as a Christian is a social negative, or rather one in which dissenting from cultural leftism is a social negative, because of the ascendancy of that ideology?
It is important to raise this question because evangelical churches and movements have themselves been divided along the lines of support of or opposition to Trump and opposition to or partial embrace of cultural leftism. This new divide is exactly the thing that Renn has sought to illuminate. I made my own contribution in my article, “The Evangelical Critics of the Evangelical Majority.” However, it reveals that the new era is not characterized by opposition to Christianity per se, but rather by devotion to a set of culturally leftist ideas and opposition to any dissent.
Among Christians who have merely moderate or moderately progressive sympathies, while retaining a Christian ethic, they often feel much more at home in that setting, even seeing it as an improvement. They don’t feel the “negative world.” In my own recent experience, I am thinking about folks in the Side B community and other “critical evangelicals,” who are at least temporarily aligned against the religious right.
Now, some of us, Renn and myself included, believe that those cultural dogmas are objectively contrary to Christian teaching (or at least many aspects of them are). But it is still not the Christianity per se that is the object of cultural scorn. It is, if anything, the political conservatism, sex-realism, or classical liberalism that opposes cultural leftist dogmas which is the object of scorn.
If you view things this way, the new left is actually less anti-religious. It is not primarily atheistic - famously, atheists have come into its cross-hairs - it is primarily culturally leftist and egalitarian.
Now Renn’s specific thesis is that elite (including corporate) culture has shifted from a kind of liberal neutrality toward Christianity to a position of moral criticism; I still believe that this is quite plausible, but the moral criticism is focused on areas, like sexual ethics, where Christians run afoul of the new dogmas. The atheism is less vocal, the progressive morality more vocal.
I also don’t want to ignore that there has been persecution of Christians in this context, but it always has to do with leftist dogma, like the refusal by some Christian bakers to bake cakes for gay weddings. The culture is actually welcoming of Christians to modify their views and teaching; they don’t care about most of our theological doctrines, only those points of divergence from cultural or moral leftism.
A New Positive World?
While the ascendant cultural left does not have an explicit stance toward Christianity, (of course, some of its academic counterparts do,) the new online, intellectual center-right does. In fact, it is more open to Christianity, recognizing Christianity’s key cultural and social role in Western, liberal civilization, even being the moral ancestor of progressivism. This was a change from the era of New Atheism, resulting in a set of “New New Atheists” (as Stephen Meyer calls them) who do not themselves believe but who do have a positive view of Christianity.
While many view the right’s response to the post-2014 changes as primarily socially negative, with Trump himself being representative, the online center-right has had much more nuance. Jordan Peterson and the “Intellectual Dark Web” were a politically and religiously diverse, sophisticated response to cultural leftism. Admittedly, Peterson’s work has taken a notable rightward turn in recent years, which subjects him to the temptations of political partisanship (to which he has sometimes succumbed). Nevertheless, the primary thrust of Peterson’s project has been an apolitical one, primarily psychological and even theological.
In this era, there has been a new openness to Christianity. This openness is often politically and intellectually motivated. An individual comes to believe that Western culture depends on Judeo-Christian foundations and then begins to explore whether he or she can embrace those religious foundations. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion is emblematic. Peterson’s wife has recently been baptized Catholic, and his daughter Mikhaila has begun to attend an evangelical church, that of Mark Driscoll.
Evangelicals have sometimes been unnecessarily critical of Peterson and his ilk as not sufficiently Christian. In doing so, I think they have missed out on this spiritual moment, with some notable exceptions, like Paul VanderKlay. Justin Brierley has traced the “surprising rebirth of belief in God” in his new book and podcast by the same title. Reading and listening to that work provides a real challenge to the idea that our time is defined by a negative stance toward Christianity.
Rekindling the Religious Right?
Given that Renn’s intellectual work has actually been inspired by Jordan Peterson, I think Renn would acknowledge these features of the “negative world” which are actually quite positive for Christianity. Indeed, instead of embracing negativity and fear, Renn has cautioned against adopting the strategy of a Trumpian populist or of the religious right, Christian nationalism, and the culture war. In fact, he has argued that the culture war strategy is just as ineffective in the “negative world” as the cultural engager strategy. I think some of his readers misunderstand him, for example, those who do not think there is anything to avoid in fundamentalism.
Nevertheless, Renn’s rhetoric of the “negative world” ends up playing into the kinds of fears that motivate the religious right and culture war strategy. While Renn is simply more sophisticated and high-brow than pre-millennial dispensationalists, the story that ours is a world newly and uniquely hostile to Christianity plays into the evangelical fears that stop careful thought.
Nicholas McDonald recently argued the same about Carl Trueman’s book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which attempted to give intellectual underpinning to conservative Christian concerns about the direction of culture, especially sexual and gender ideology. Opposite Trueman’s approach, McDonald sets Tom Holland’s monumental Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, a work that undoubtedly fits within the realm of the Intellectual Dark Web, the “New New Atheists,” and the recent openness to Christianity. In Holland’s narrative, even contemporary secular progressivism, with its cancel culture and Puritanism, is the fruit of the Christian revolution. Progressivism’s concern for the oppressed is the reversal of pagan attitudes that denigrated the weak and favored the strong.
While Holland himself has experienced cancellation from the cultural left, his narrative provides grounds to affirm elements of contemporary progressivism, at least in their intent. From this, McDonald develops a conversation strategy that takes shared features of Christian and progressive morality and uses them as a launchpad for gospel conversations. There is something remarkably constructive and win-win in such interactions, in contrast to the kind of conversations I criticized evangelicals for engaging in several weeks ago.
Another danger of Christians viewing the ascendant cultural left as an object of fear, and as something totally opposed to Christianity, is that they will fail to register legitimate critiques of evangelical attitudes and positions. I have found this particularly in the Side B discussion of the Christian sexual ethic. I know that many of the Christians who read Carl Trueman or Aaron Renn (like myself) are inclined to view Side B and Revoice as just an evangelical iteration of “woke ideology,” hence Rosaria Butterfield’s lumping of Side B together with Side A (gay-marriage affirming) as “Gay Christianity.”
Indeed, to the chagrin of many conservative Christians, Side B celibate, gay Christians view the LGBT rights movement in a relatively favorable way, at least for leading to a decrease in homophobia - the feeling of disgust toward people who are homosexual - and with it, an ability to be open about their sexual orientation, even if that is only to recognize it as fallen and disordered. On this view, the progressivism that motivated the LGBT rights movement included a proper Christian element of concern for the outcast, the societal leper.
On the other hand, it remains a question whether Christians who uphold a biblical sexual morality are just doing that, or are also expressing homophobic disgust and discrimination. This is a critique of the religious right and cultural conservatism that cannot be ignored. For example, we have to decide whether to take the path of Jerry Falwell or that of Francis Schaeffer in our approach to the same-sex attracted:
When Jerry Falwell in private brought up the issue of gay people with Francis Schaeffer, Schaeffer commented that it was a complicated issue. Falwell shot back a rejoinder: “If I had a dog that did what they do, I’d shoot it.” There was no humor in Falwell’s voice. Afterward Schaeffer said to his son, “That man is really disgusting.” (Greg Johnson, Still Time to Care, 13)
If Christians view all accusations of homophobia, sexism, and racism as baseless, they ignore the history of and temptation to prejudice in place of biblical faithfulness. Schaeffer was biblically faithful; Falwell was prejudiced. And which figure has been more influential in the popular, political evangelical movement since 1980?
Christian Strategies for Today
Where does this leave us? American culture has changed, post-2014, in unique and new ways, and Christian ministry and life has a new cultural context to which it must adjust. That cultural context cannot be singularly captured by the idea of the “negative world.”
Renn has written often about the need to develop new ministry strategies for the “negative world,” as opposed to the “culture warrior” strategy of the positive world, and the “cultural engager” strategy of the neutral world. What strategy is appropriate to our own new world?
To begin with, I think we need to understand the “material conditions” and psychological conditions of our context much better, with attention to Haidt’s descriptions, as well as those of other social and psychological researchers. In light of the progressivism of our moment, I think adopting Side B would be one method for being better received, recognizing the Christian source of concern for sexual minorities, not to mention the validity of Side B’s claims.
Likewise, embracing the new openness to Christianity, even if only on cultural and political grounds, would be advantageous for our intellectual and evangelistic approach. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion, as well as that of Paul Kingsnorth, are two examples from different political and moral places of the way that secular appreciation of Christianity is leading people to embrace Christianity personally.
In his last public statement, Tim Keller quite directly defended his approach against Aaron Renn’s claim that it was designed for the “neutral world.” Keller argued that New York was already in the “negative world” a long time before. While I do think there is a legitimate critique of those aping Keller’s approach, Keller himself is a model of how to engage with a culture that is negative toward Christianity, especially on moral grounds. Avoiding fear, being intellectually open and curious, and pursuing effectiveness, I believe it is time to give winsome Christian witness, combined with prudence, another try.
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This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joelcarini.substack.com/subscribe - Visa fler
