The Evangelical Roots of Our Post-Truth Society
The Evangelical “Christian worldview” is not simply an
ally of the post-reality conservative movement.
It is the alt-right's bedrock .
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Original article by Molly Worthen - SundayReview (NYT)
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Alex Webb/Magnum Photos
THE arrival of the “post-truth” political climate came as a shock to many Americans. But to the Christian writer Rachel Held Evans, charges of “fake news” are nothing new. “The deep distrust of the media, of scientific consensus — those were prevalent narratives growing up,” she told me.
Although Ms. Evans, 35, no longer calls herself an evangelical, she attended Bryan College, an evangelical school in Dayton, Tenn. She was taught to distrust information coming from the scientific or media elite because these sources did not hold a “biblical worldview.”
“It was presented as a cohesive worldview that you could maintain if you studied the Bible,” she told me. “Part of that was that climate change isn’t real, that evolution is a myth made up by scientists who hate God, and capitalism is God’s ideal for society.”
Conservative evangelicals are not the only ones who think that an authority trusted by the other side is probably lying. But they believe that their own authority — the inerrant Bible — is both supernatural and scientifically sound, and this conviction gives that natural human aversion to unwelcome facts a special power on the right. This religious tradition of fact denial long predates the rise of the culture wars, social media or President Trump, but it has provoked deep conflict among evangelicals themselves.
That innocuous phrase — “biblical worldview” or “Christian worldview” — is everywhere in the evangelical world. The radio show founded by Chuck Colson, “BreakPoint,” helps listeners “get informed and equipped to live out the Christian worldview.” Focus on the Family devotes a webpage to the implications of a worldview “based on the infallible Word of God.” Betsy DeVos’s supporters praised her as a “committed Christian living out a biblical worldview.”
The phrase is not as straightforward as it seems. Ever since the scientific revolution, two compulsions have guided conservative Protestant intellectual life: the impulse to defend the Bible as a reliable scientific authority and the impulse to place the Bible beyond the claims of science entirely.
The first impulse blossomed into the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. Scripture became the irrefutable guide to everything from the meaning of fossils to the interpretation of archaeological findings in the Middle East, a “storehouse of facts,” as the 19th-century theologian Charles Hodge put it.
The second impulse, the one that rejects scientists’ standing to challenge the Bible, evolved by the early 20th century into a school of thought called presuppositionalism. The term is a mouthful, but the idea is simple: We all have presuppositions that frame our understanding of the world. Cornelius Van Til, a theologian who promoted this idea, rejected the premise that all humans have access to objective reality. “We really do not grant that you see any fact in any dimension of life truly,” he wrote in a pamphlet aimed at non-Christians.
If this sounds like a forerunner of modern cultural relativism, in a way it is — with the caveat that one worldview, the one based on faith in an inerrant Bible, does have a claim on universal truth, and everyone else is a myopic relativist.
Nowadays, ministries, schools and media outlets use the term “Christian worldview” to signal their orthodoxy. But its pervasiveness masks significant disagreement over what it means. Many evangelical colleges allow faculty and students to question inerrancy, creationism and the presumption that Jesus would have voted Republican.
Karl Giberson taught biology for many years at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Mass., where freshmen take a course that covers “the Christian worldview” alongside topics like “racial and gender equity” and “cultural diversity.” In the Church of the Nazarene, many leaders have been uneasy about the rationalist claims of biblical inerrancy, and Dr. Giberson openly taught the theory of evolution. “I was completely uncontroversial, for the most part,” he told me. “The problems emerged when I began to publish, when I became a public spokesman for this point of view.”
Nazarene pastors and church members — who absorbed the more fundamentalist worldview of mainstream evangelicalism — put pressure on the school. “The administrators were not upset that I was promoting evolution,” he said. “But now they had a pastor telling the admissions department, ‘we do not want you recruiting in our youth group.’ ” The controversy drove him to resign in 2011.
Dean Nelson, who runs the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, told me that he doesn’t see “how you can teach ‘Christian journalism’ any more than you can teach ‘Christian mathematics.’ ” But he acknowledged that “many of the students’ parents were raised on Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and distrust the mainstream news media. So it’s a little bit of a dance with parents who are expecting us to perpetuate that distrust and raise up this tribe of ‘Christian journalists.’ ”
The conservative Christian worldview is not just a posture of mistrust toward the secular world’s “fake news.” It is a network of institutions and experts versed in shadow versions of climate change science, biology and other fields, like Nathaniel Jeanson, a research biologist at the creationist ministry Answers in Genesis, in Petersburg, Ky.
Dr. Jeanson is as important an asset for the ministry as its life-size replica of Noah’s Ark in Williamstown, Ky. He believes the earth was created in six days — and he has a Ph.D. in cell and developmental biology from Harvard.
Home-schooled until high school, Dr. Jeanson grew up going to “Worldview Weekend” Christian conferences . As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, he dutifully studied evolutionary biology during the day and read creationist literature at night.
This “reading double,” as he calls it, equipped him to personify the contradictions that pervade this variety of Christian worldview. At Harvard Medical School, he chose a research topic that steered clear of evolution. “My research question is a present-tense question — how do blood cells function,” he told me. “So perhaps it was easier to compartmentalize.”
Dr. Jeanson rhapsodized about the integrity of the scientific method. Before graduate school, “I held this quack idea of cancer,” he said. “But that idea got corrected. This is the way science works.” Yet when his colleagues refuse to read his creationist papers and data sets, he takes their snub as proof that they can find no flaws in his research. “If people who devote their lives to it can’t point anything out, then I think I may be on to something,” he said.
Dr. Jeanson calls himself a “presuppositionalist evidentialist” — which we might define as someone who accepts evidence when it happens to affirm his nonnegotiable presuppositions. “When it comes to questions of absolute truth, those are things I’ve settled in my own mind and heart,” he told me. “I couldn’t call myself a Christian if I hadn’t.”
We all cling to our own unquestioned assumptions. But in the quest to advance knowledge and broker peaceful coexistence in a pluralistic world, the worldview based on biblical inerrancy gets tangled up in the contradiction between its claims on universalist science and insistence on an exclusive faith.
By contrast, the worldview that has propelled mainstream Western intellectual life and made modern civilization possible is a kind of pragmatism. It is an empirical outlook that continually — if imperfectly — revises its conclusions based on evidence available to everyone, regardless of their beliefs about the supernatural. This worldview clashes with the conservative evangelical war on facts, but it is not necessarily incompatible with Christian faith.
In fact, evangelical colleges themselves may be the best hope for change. Members of traditions historically suspicious of a pseudoscientific view of the Bible, like the Nazarenes, should revive that skepticism. Mr. Nelson encourages his students to be skeptics rather than cynics. “The skeptic looks at something and says, ‘I wonder,’ ” he said. “The cynic says, ‘I know,’ and then stops thinking.”
He pointed out that “cynicism and tribalism are very closely related. You protect your tribe, your way of life and thinking, and you try to annihilate anything that might call that into question.” Cynicism and tribalism are among the gravest human temptations. They are all the more dangerous when they pose as wisdom and righteousness.
Molly Worthen is the author, most recently, of “Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism,” an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a contributing opinion writer.
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The topic is the relation between "Christian worldview" and post-reality conservatism.
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RED RULES apply:
- Be polite. No insults whatsoever. No insults to particular people, to groups of people, to ideas, ... None!
- Be smart and stay on topic. Contribute substantive thought. Facts and/or reasoning. One-line zingers and bumper-sticker mantras are by definition off-topic, and will be deleted.
Dr. Jeanson calls himself a “presuppositionalist evidentialist” — which we might define as someone who accepts evidence when it happens to affirm his nonnegotiable presuppositions . “When it comes to questions of absolute truth, those are things I’ve settled in my own mind and heart,” he told me. “I couldn’t call myself a Christian if I hadn’t.”
This guy reminds me of several members...
Smart people cannot simply deny reality. The cognitive dissonance is too great. But they can do very well with an "alternate reality": the "Christian worldview".
Great article, Bob!
I spend (waste??) a great amount of time trying to understand how intelligent people can "ignore reality".
In fact, they do NOT ignore reality. They have a different reality from mine. My reality is based on the best data I can find, and the best reasoning that I can find... with the result that my reality is what it is, regardless of whether it pleases me or not.
My incomprehension of the alt-right has always been that they seem to reconstruct their reality (by cherry-picking data and using flaky reasoning) to fit their personal presuppositions... which is crazy because these are smart people! The cognitive dissonance of constantly lying to oneself should be unbearable.
So I was fascinated by this article, which goes a very long way to explaining how our alt-right friends can ignore reality with impunity. For them, there's a God-given reality that largely supersedes our poor evidential reality...
I find it ironic that we should be talking about a "Christian Worldview", when our founding fathers made it a point that this country should not have an official religion. That is what made us unique among nations.
Discussions on what party Jesus would have belonged to, is nutty. If anyone remembered the Jesus story, he was anti establishment, and probably would have been described as a hippy.
This is a derail. Intentional or not. "Jesus" is not at all the topic of the seed, and "was he a hippy?" even less.
Discussions on what party Jesus would have belonged to, is nutty. If anyone remembered the Jesus story, he was anti establishment, and probably would have been described as a hippy.
Oh Jesus is defiantly a Demarcate.
'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'.
Respecting those of other faiths, judging them by their deeds, (the good Samaritan), feeding the multitudes as needed, free health care for all he came across. Free education for all that sought it.
Oh yea, the J-Man has always been a D.
Of course his dislike for the money changers would seem to indicate he would have preferred to have caste his vote for a Sanders/Warren, (or Warren/Sanders), ticket but he was just fine with his Clinton/Kain vote.
Jesus was not a hippie.
Please, Six... if you want to post a seed, do so. Don't hijack this one.
Your article has nothing whatsoever to do with "Christian worldview".
Of course he was. He was anti establishment, preached peace and love and turn the other cheek. Wanted his fellow man to take care of each other... Funny how some words hit some people. Hippy isn't a dirty word. It's just a description.
Do you have anything to say in response to the seeded article?
Well, Bob.. that is what I was getting to, before you called a derail.
If you believe in Jesus, then a conservative world view is contradictory to his preachings. Hence my hippy comment. And proof of what I was getting to, was the response that Six had to my comment. The cognitive dissonance that you talk about, is at the root of their faith. If you believe in Jesus, it is hard to be a conservative, since he was anything but that.
Bob.. just a footnote.. everyone makes their point in a different way. Give people some leeway before calling off topic.
everyone makes their point in a different way. Give people some leeway before calling off topic.
Of course.
But if you post on "Jesus hippy", then others Reply about "Jesus hippy", and the derail is accomplished, regardless of your intent.
You got two Replies, each having nothing whatsoever to do with the seed. Derail.
Many evangelical colleges allow faculty and students to question inerrancy, creationism and the presumption that Jesus would have voted Republican.
The topic here -- the only use of the word "Jesus" in the seed -- is NOT whether Jesus would have voted Republican. It is "evangelical colleges".
But if you post on "Jesus hippy", then others Reply about "Jesus hippy", and the derail is accomplished, regardless of your intent.
You seem to miss my point. What you regard as a derail, is actually proof of what you are talking about in your article. It is how Jesus is talked about at some "evangelical colleges", and that isn't the Jesus that is written about. What people are taking away from these colleges about Jesus and his preachings is warped from the actual text.
Jesus is NOT the topic. That's why this derail pisses me off.
The "Christian worldview" as defined here has nothing to do with Jesus -- it is a usurpation... but that's not the topic, either.
The thesis of this article is that the "Christian worldview", based on Biblical inerrancy rather than on scientific method, explains the thinking of today's post-reality conservatives.
It's a fecund idea, leading to quite a few interesting conclusions. It is an idea that I have not seen before, and that I considered worthy of sharing with other members of NT.
It has nothing to do with "Jesus was a hippy".
How can anything Christian have nothing to do with Jesus? What is Christianity without Him? This whole diversion is why it's better to discuss this on the other seed without red box rules.
Welcome to Perrie's demolition derby, XX!
Here's a scoop: just because I give something a name including the word "Christian", does not mean that that thing has anything to do with Christ.
Here's another scoop: you'll understand better if you read the seed.
How can anything Christian have nothing to do with Christ?
Good question. Seems unhinged.
The thesis of this article is that the "Christian worldview", based on Biblical inerrancy rather than on scientific method, explains the thinking of today's post-reality conservatives.
Bob, how can faith be based on the scientific method? I am surprised that Hal isn't all over this one. The argument should be or could be about whether we are supposed to take the new testament verbatim or by interpretation. Then go forth from there on the thinking of today's conservatives.
Lol. I don't participate in articles slathered in RBR.
Just one off-topic post.
Thanks, Hal. I'll do the same for you, someday.
See what I mean?
No.
I don't understand the pleasure some members take in purposefully crapping on other members' seeds.
If you don't approve of Red Rules... then why not just stay away?
My name was brought up, and I can't even respond without getting a tongue lashing. That's not crapping on your seed. You should chill out on the red box militancy.
It's remarkable, Hal... People always say, "You should chill out!" when they get called for having behaved like a...
... a normal human being?
If that's how you see it.
It's no big deal, in any case.
Hal and I agree on something! Opposition to ridiculous red box rules.
Please re-read the sentence you quoted. The "Christian worldview" is NOT based on the scientific method. It is based on Biblical inerrancy.
In other words, data and reasoning are irrelevant in the "Christian worldview". All that is important is what the Bible says. Or, in fact, what the leaders of the fundie evangelical movement say, since the Bible in fact says very little about the 21st Century.
When people are accustomed to abandoning critical thinking for "religious" topics (which include things that are absolutely never mentioned in the Bible
) it must be very easy to abandon critical thinking and just follow the Word of the Leader for everything else...
Good article. Could we possibly compare the idea of a "Christian world view", as a counter-point to a "Scientific world view"? I don't think that this article is saying that, it is just sorta interesting.
:~)
Hi, Larry,
I think that the difference between the "Christian worldview" described here, and the "scientific method worldview" that has generally obtained in our Westrrn civilization for the last century and a half is fundamental.
The quote from the PhD, proudly declaring that physical evidence is of no importance to him if it contradicts Scripture... is a perfect representation of post-reality conservatism.
In order to "protect" Biblical inerrancy, despite all the contradictions in that Book, Belivers must cherrypick which verses are "really, really inerrant". There's a whole domain of fundie theology dedicated to defining rules for that!
So "educated" fundies have been taught that "reality" should be defined by a set of rules, themselves defined by church elders. Data is irrelevant.
Such "educated" people cannot distinguish between a "religious domain" and a "not-religious domain". The cognitive dissonance would be unbearable. So... they apply their "Christian worldview" to everything. Reality is not what the data indicates. Reality is what the preacher says.
This explains why debate about abortion is impossible. Data is irrelevant. Reality is what the preacher says.