Although only 3% of Americans claim to be atheists according to a recent survey, belief in God can be problematic in a culture awash in secularism. In our media, education, and entertainment God is persona non grata. Here are three examples:
It’s amazing how many movies or TV shows you’ll watch, seeing people deal with the deep and profound issues of all kinds, and God is totally absent. If he, or Jesus, is mentioned at all it’s in the passing form of a curse.
In media and journalism of all kinds, unless it’s specifically Christian, it’s the same. God is an idol curiosity, or something deeply personal that has no place in the public square.
In public education, both in the K-12 and higher variety, God is separated from the classroom for the most part by that wall made famous by Thomas Jefferson, and completely distorted by the United States Supreme Court.
Culture is almost an all-powerful plausibility maker. In other words, it has the power to make things seem real or not to us. Whether the thing is real or not isn’t the point; the seemingness is. So for many Americans because of our dominant secular culture, God sometimes bears a passing resemblance to Santa Clause; he seems no more real than jolly ol’ Saint Nick. Culture obviously communicates, but culture also cultivates, and if we’re not careful we’ll allow the culture to determine our reality, or what seems real to us.
I myself went through a period of what I call “plausibility insanity” not too many years ago. I could never not believe in God or Christianity because I am convinced on too many levels that it is The Truth, but I had a little problem with it’s plausibility. I even remember thinking how I could understand why atheists see this religion thing as so strange. A few years before I decided to write Keeping Your Kids Christian, I wrote these words in an exercise I had to do for our church:
When I first became a Christian my faith was so dynamic and fresh and exciting. After 10 years or so it seemed like any relationship goes after a period of time, not as intimate and real. I continued to go to church as our family grew, read the Bible and prayed here and there, but it was nothing like those early days. I suppose every relationship can’t be always be novel and exciting, where it moves into a type of maturity that requires love that takes a decision and commitment. God doesn’t always seem “real,” but I can’t help but believe in a living God who is actually there.
Not even realizing it I was using the concept of plausibility. I didn’t understand how powerful a plausibility generator is the secular culture we live in. Even someone as convinced as I was about the veracity of Christianity’s truth claims, couldn’t help but be effected by the culture. It wasn’t any new arguments that I’d come across that made God seem less real to me; it was the culture! Unfortunately we live, eat, and breath this culture, and it will have its effect on us. So whenever we go through our own bouts of plausibility insanity I suggest we make use of the secular culture’s greatest enemy for the Christian: explanatory power. I’ll explain this “secret” to having your own personal powerful plausibility structure for your faith in my next post, so stay tuned . . . .
I signed the Nashville Statement because I stand with Biblical orthodoxy, which is inseparable from God’s creation mandate and definition of gendered personhood found in Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female, he created them”. The soul is God’s fingerprint on humanity, but the gendered body—essentially and ontologically male or female—will also, for the believer in Jesus Christ, be glorified and resurrected in the New Jerusalem.
I signed the Nashville Statement because my conscience compels me so, because the promises of liberty on the world’s terms are false and deceptive, and because many who currently claim to have Christ’s forgiveness and salvation must be called to account for leading good people astray with false promises and filthy lies.
I signed the Nashville Statement because the wolves are prowling, and the lions are roaring, and because they are bold and proud of their heresy, and because you must be warned.
By God through the merit and power of Jesus Christ, here I stand.
My teenage music obsessed son shared this song from Queens of the Stone Age with me, and I was haunted by the lyrics. Human beings are really good at rejecting any ultimate meaning in the universe, but spending their life searching for it. Never finding. The lyrics of this song capture that futility, perfectly. The melancholy of the melody also captures that futility, perfectly. See if you agree: (more…)
We live in convoluted times, where we’re supposed to believe what is up is down, what is black is white, and where the only thing we can say is wrong are people who say things are wrong. This is especially true when it comes to the issues of sexuality in Western culture. Here we’re supposed to believe that something called “sexual orientation” is hard wired into our DNA and can never change, but that our sex (or gender in a less than helpful modern term) is malleable. Whatever you do, you are encouraged to be “true to yourself,” unless of course that means claiming such assertions are lies. If you do that, the dominant secular liberal culture will declare you a hater and a bigot.
The title of this post is almost an axiom among modern Americans. We may hear it put in other ways as well, like “as long it makes you happy,” or “you must do what’s in your heart.” I’ve heard it said that we live in the age of “the sovereign self.” In our age, the subjective rules; the only perspective that counts is my perspective, and my perspective is declared valid simply because it is mine. Whether what I think corresponds to reality in any objective sense is beside the point.
We tend to think of it as a relatively recent phenomena, but this idea of being “true to ourselves” is a form of relativism, and it’s been around a lot longer than most of us would think. The phrase actually goes back to a Johann Gottfried Herder, who wrote to his fiancee, Caroline Flachsland in 1772:
All our actions should be self-determined, in accordance with our innermost character—we must be true to ourselves.
Although I’ve never been a big fan of Bob Dylan, I’ve always appreciated his genius, and especially his ability to capture the cultural Zeitgeist. A piece by Rod Dreher titled “Bob Dylan On The Road To Damascus” explains why he was so good at this. We learn from Dylan’s Nobel Prize speech that several books he read in grammar school, Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Odyssey, among others, influenced the way he saw the world, and thus wrote lyrics. Dreher comments that
He goes on to discuss those three novels, and how they affected his understanding of the world, and in turn, his music. One of the greatest popular musicians of the 20th century, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, got his start in what we now call classical education — one that gives the student “a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by.”
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