What is your second favorite worldview?
If you are a believer in Christ, then what would you believe if you weren’t?
This is a question I like to put to people because I think the answers are so interesting and often revealing. It is a question I asked myself in a deeply skeptical phase I endured (cliché that I am) after college. It first occurred to me when I was reading an interview with David Bazan, a brilliant songwriter whose apostasy broke the hearts of many of his fans. His music had always had a haunting beauty and vulnerability and honesty about it, and while his “breakup” album, the unsubtly titled Curse Your Branches, isn’t difficult to argue with theologically, the insight into the psychology of one who rejects Christian faith could hardly be more raw.
I read the interview with Bazan just a couple of years before he jumped ship. It was in a student journal called The Pub with which a bunch of my friends were involved at my alma mater, Wheaton College. “In the modern era,” Bazan said, eating his gyro while sitting with my freshman year roommate, “people, especially those who are religious, would have a system in their brains for how things work. That everything is ordered as far as God and man, and politics and people. Any new information would come in and if it fit within that system it would be accepted as true. If it didn’t fit within that system it would be rejected as false, and they would go about their merry way.” Obviously he didn’t think much of this way of thinking, and celebrated its breakdown in more recent years, a breakdown much advanced since 2006. As he ruminated on the church, to which even then he was no longer attached, he commented on the commercialization of Christ. “To me, it shows that Christian people don’t take Jesus or the Bible seriously. I think the commercialization of Christianity and Jesus is just a symptom way down the line of fundamental problems of belief and fear that God doesn’t exist. How do we keep these thoughts out of our head? Whatever mantra we can come up with. And that mantra in today’s evangelical world is Christian radio, WWJD bracelets, and The Passion of the Christ.”
Perhaps this was a tad cynical. But when I read it, his words echoed off my own memories like a clanging bell. It resounded in the visceral emotions that have always—despite much pretense to dispassionate reason—accompanied the intellectual struggles that clung to my faith even as a kid and a teenager. It made me feel less alone. I had always noticed how many of the people I had grown up with seemed constantly to argue with a secret inner atheist.
Having been raised in the American evangelical tradition, I had been inundated with the sort of apologetics that represent a heaping mountain of evidence to back up Bazan’s words. Names like Josh McDowell and J. P. Moreland and Phillip Johnson floated around my education, along with dramatic displays of disdain at the laughability of atheism, Darwinism, and of course liberalism. The lost lambs, the prodigals, the fools who say in their heart that there is no God were to be pitied. Of course, we would celebrate with the angels if they changed their mind (to the obvious truth), but for now, it’s often appropriate to hold them in derision. This was growing up evangelical in the 90s.
It became clear when I got older that most people read these books to convince themselves, not to arm themselves for defense of the faith or to be ready with reasons, as the prooftext of 1 Peter 3:15 goes. Or, to be more precise, one is defending one’s own faith, not the general fides quae creditur, and one is defending it against one’s own doubting mind. Doubt hides all sorts of motivations, of course, and the struggle with one’s intellect is often also a struggle with one’s libido, one’s pride, one’s reputation. But the intellectual questions are real, even though they are chipping at the dam that holds back these other strong incentives not to believe in God and His proscriptions.
Here is where one might want some qualification: “we need only question people who are doing apologetics wrong, it’s not all bad,” or something like that. But instead of that, which would be disingenuous coming from me, let me point out that the mass exodus from the Christian faith in my own generation has everything to do with this problem: the problem of rationalization. The above account, if it doesn’t come from me—I who remain a Christian and always will—can be easily accessed in the public stories of people like David Bazan, musician Michael Gungor, comedian Pete Holmes, the late and much-debated Rachel Held Evans, and on and on the list goes. Let’s not come up with better arguments to convince ourselves. Let’s ask why we even do that, and what this practice is accomplishing.
So what is your second-favorite worldview? I would like to suggest that it is not actually the one you argue with, the one that tempts you when you’re otherwise tempted. It’s the one by which you defend your faith when it appears to come up short on its own steam. Here lies a much deeper, much more insidious syncretism. And unfortunately, we are reaping the consequences.
Idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley defined metaphysics as “the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.” I think this is a bit unfair, but the phrase is apt enough to be quotable. Walter Kaufmann, in a harsh critique of the philosophy of religion, uses Bradley’s quip to argue that rationalization occurs not just in metaphysics but “ordinary language” philosophy as well. Aldous Huxley puts it in the mouth of a World Controller in his dystopian novel Brave New World to scoff at the very notion of philosophical reasoning (and, from Huxley’s perspective, to lament its demise). If I had to come up with a grand-sounding moniker for the last few years, I would say, based on this definition, that we live in the Age of Rationalization.
It’s the age of replacement of respect for expertise, august institutions, editorial boards, church authority, and historic confessions with the ready-made utility of an unceasing, frenetic flood of preposterous technobaloney. If we thought it was bad in 2006, in 2020 the process of rationalization has become instantaneous. We are now outstanding seekers (and finders) of bad reasons for what we already believe, and what we already believe no longer changes with rational argument, but simply slides like a pile of wood on wet sand, often held together by nothing but fellow-feeling with those who have similar resentments. Aided by social media, unimaginably powerful search engines, popular podcasts, and plenty of sources that rely on these things without making a single phone call (read: every disreputable “news outlet” you repost on Facebook and Twitter), we can now “refute” atheism, postmodernism, partisan trolls, or whatever you would like to “refute” with such speed that we need hardly think anymore. And isn’t that a relief? Wrestling genuinely with doubt and coming to sound reasons for believing what we believe is an increasingly thankless chore. We have put hardworking apologists out of a job—how else? Through automation!
Let me lay my own cards on the table. If I were not a Christian, I would almost certainly be a straightforward nihilist. I think this makes me different from the generation that birthed the kind of science-y apologetics of yesterday. Nihilism is the view that nothing matters at all, and that all attempts to make things seem like they matter are laughably transparent upon closer inspection — as Nietzsche put it, “Human, all too human.” Everything is constructed, my alter-ego would declare, and the sooner we get used to it, the happier we will be. (For the morbidly interested, Nolen Gertz has written a succinct description of nihilism.) I would sign on with Nietzsche, with Horkheimer and Adorno, with Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, because truth, as Rorty once pointed out, is plainly just what your colleagues let you get away with. We can quantify how truthful something is through likes and retweets.
The deterioration of language on the Internet is well-documented (and obvious). A brief whiff of the Twitter cesspool yields countless users locked in a competition of pure Freudian id or superego, out-condescending, out-moralizing, and out-trolling one another. Indeed, at times the endless strings of emojis and abbreviations shift from nihilism to its aesthetic cousin, Dadaism. The speed with which our information is instrumentalized towards ideological goals is hugely facilitated by this impoverishment of language, and the price being paid is that a wall of undecidability is erected in front of every view of things. None of them seems able to make a firm case for itself.
The communications revolution, the Information Age, seems to be a triumph of relativism, and the nihilism that lurks beneath it. Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre have made a compelling case that the crumbling of the medieval edifice has made room for a tidal wave of spiritual and ethical artifice. The world is now filled with worldviews—more minted every day than we can possibly “refute” if we did nothing but google till our fingers were sore.
The trouble with these “democratizing” technologies (and I’m pretty sure that is an antonym for the word I’m looking for) is that they underwrite this sort of nihilism. They are a means that reveal what your real second-favorite worldview is. If you are satisfied with a quick google search, then you do not really believe it matters, because you are surely intelligent enough to realize what a faulty method of discovering truth that is. Truth, I have come to believe (against my alter-ego) is not artificial, nor is it simply built upon a foundation of tradition. It is something you must value before you have it, and something you must seek until you find it, and something before which you must be humble in order to lay hold of it at all. It does not yield as you ply it with your subversive presuppositions. It breaks every attempt at circumscription.
So: Is Christian faith just one of those prefabricated opinions? If it isn’t, then perhaps we should re-examine our second-favorite worldview and ask exactly what it is in Christ that has come up so short that we have reached for new tools. There is an obvious further step to take. I would argue—and some recent Reformed scholarship is with me—that the introduction of worldview thinking into theology has done more harm than good. It rams every common question down to an imagined epistemic floor that none of us, allegedly, can avoid. Every question, no matter what it is, is really the question, “Whose side are you on?”
The whispers that David Bazan detected over a decade ago have become loud shouts: rationalized reasons are cheap and cheapen the things they are meant to enhance. They do precisely the opposite of what they are called on to do. Exactly how one can do away with worldview thinking—a task with many pitfalls—is a topic for another time. Whatever we might make of this suggestion, the Christian faith is not a truth that lives in our hearts unless it is first a truth in which our hearts live. It accommodates the hearts of the simple and the wise, those who write catechisms and those who learn them. In fact, it is not the wise who are called upon in 1 Peter 3 to have reasons for their faith, but the suffering. The reasons they are meant to give are characterized by blamelessness. “Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing.” Even if we suffer at the hands of our interlocutors, “Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil.”
It is hard to overstate the difficulty of this charge in the present environment, yet the text is clear: the giving of reasons serves the very holiness of Christ. These reasons ought to be handled with the utmost care, for the goal is not necessarily persuasion, but blamelessness, and it is worth noting that the ground rules for discourse are expected not to be fair. Suppose there is something to the present argument and theology does move beyond worldview, perhaps in the old idea of common notions or through seeking a ground all its own. I am not sure that what we finally need is a smarter idea or a better strategy. Our ultimate example, even in our fundamental theology, is Jesus, who, as 1 Peter reminds us later, was justified before his accusers not just with good reasons, but with the cross. It is when we are in the dock that the Spirit bestows his eloquence.
Jacob Thielman is a PhD candidate in philosophical theology at Calvin Theological Seminary. He is a minister to grad students and faculty with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in North Carolina.
Blog Banner Image: David Bazan, photo by Ace Armstrong, taken October 1, 2009. Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic {{CC BY-ND 2.0}}, resized by MR.
