Since I keep seeing articles and blog posts about the apostasy of Joshua Harris, I keep thinking of lessons we can learn from his postmodern rejection of the Christian faith. I outlined three in my last post, and add another in this one. It’s a concept that is all but invisible in Christian conversations, and even in apologetics: plausibility structures. Before you go off somewhere else in Internetland because it sounds like an esoteric concept for brainiacs, or something, stick with me. It could not be more important for Christians trying to navigate their faith commitments in a hostile, secular 21st century Western culture.
The concept is simple even if ignored. It was first described by sociologist Peter Berger in a couple books he wrote in the 1960s, and without getting technical, culture determines what seems real to us. The problem is that most people never think about the seeming nature of this realness, of most importantly why it seems real to us. Whether it’s real or not isn’t the point: we just think, it’s real!
I’m convinced when someone like Joshua Harris leaves Christianity it isn’t because he’s diligently studied the evidence (historical, archaeological, textual, biblical, psychological, philosophical, etc.) and come to the conclusion that Christianity fails the test and therefore isn’t true. Rather, it’s because of disappointment (clearly in his case), and being ignorant of how secular plausibility structures affect our perception of what is real or what is not. I’m especially convinced this is true of him because he has completely embraced the secular culture’s sexual ethics (apologizing to the “LGBTQ+ community” and for not embracing “marriage equality”). Because he never learned how to interrogate (aggressively question) the secular culture’s messaging, he was slowly sucked into its view of reality.
So what is a plausibility structure? It is a meaning-generating mechanism that influences how we see reality, and it works at a subconscious level; we’re not aware it’s happening. The most obvious and powerful are education, entertainment, and media. A perfect example of this, and how pernicious it is, came in a movie my wife and son watched last night, a Russel Crowe movie from 2010 called The Next Three Days. The plot is not important. What is, is that God is invisible, never mentioned except when Jesus or Christ is used in vain a few times. Multiply this millions of times daily throughout the culture on every platform, and the sense we get is that, well, God just isn’t that important, not in life or death. Mind you most people (like 97 percent) still believe in God (it’s just too obvious), but he’s just not relevant to their lives. This message is reinforced for children in classrooms every day, and for those who attend college it becomes overt indoctrination.
For those who do not know how to challenge the secular messaging, they will in due course be determined by it, regardless of what they “believe.” Soon the secular world, and its values, will seem more real than the Christian one. I believe this happened to Joshua Harris. They will never likely get to the point of the rabid atheists who think God is about as real as Santa Clause, but they will get to the point where God in their lives can safely be ignored. The good news is that we can inoculate ourselves, and our children, against the noxious influence of secularism. How, you ask? By building an alternative plausibility structure, that’s how! One so powerful that the allure of secularism will almost seem comical in comparison.
The key to this building project is the real and metaphorical “clicker,” otherwise known as a remote control. We never get through a movie or TV show in our house without my (and yes, I am the Master of the Clicker in our house) pausing it and questioning. The most important thing to question is often the assumptions behind the story or a scene, what is not overtly stated or argued. Every work of art is a perspective on reality, and we must ask if that view is plausible or credible, what it means, what it conveys, why should we accept that view versus the Christian one. And almost all entertainment today is anti-Christian, but rarely overtly anti-Christian; it is much more effective that way. The metaphorical clicker comes in use as we stop and question everything else in the culture.
We’ll find, though, over time as we get good at our cultural interrogating skills, that the secular plausibility structure is found wanting, a weak and vulnerable house of cards, over which Christianity towers with impregnable dignity.
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