Since I became active on Twitter earlier this year, mainly to promote my new book and work, I’ve noticed that Christians can be narrow minded and dogmatic. And lest you think I’m bagging on my fellow Christians, these less than appealing traits come naturally to sinners regardless of what they believe. Such myopia, the inability to see beyond their own certitude, is why I often see people saying that Peterson is not an orthodox Bible-believing Christian, therefore he’s either dangerous or not worth listening to. I could not disagree more. I believe God is using him as an important piece of the puzzle to re-Christianize America and the West. I believe this, strongly, because of a concept most Christians have never heard of; plausibility structures. This post will be a short primer on the importance of this concept for our specific time in history, living in what Aaron Renn calls “negative world,” and the importance of Jordan Peterson.
In my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I explore plausibility structures in some detail, which is the idea of the reality generating mechanism of a culture. The term was coined by sociologist Peter Berger in his books, The Social Construction of Realty (with Thomas Luckman) and The Sacred Canopy. As a sociological construct (i.e., what it means to live with and among human beings and the culture and meanings they create), it simply means what seems true to us, and the social structures that contribute to that seeming.
A simple example is that for secular people God seems no more real than Santa Clause. Whether God is real, is not the point; what seems real is. Society creates the plausibility structures that contribute to God being plausible to us, or not. These structures are built into our educational systems, media, entertainment, etc. They are the secular air we breathe, and they affect us in ways big and small without our being aware of it. Christians are not immune to it either. In the West, God is persona non‑grata; if he exists at all he is merely a personal preference. I am convinced most people reject Christianity or never entertain it, because it just doesn’t seem real to them. For most, whether it is true or not is beside the point.
The sociology of knowledge is the study of how a life lived among persons in society affects their perception of reality, the “seemingness” of it. Reality isn’t just there; in some sense it is socially constructed, and the plausibility of our faith to us is directly related to the idea of a socially constructed reality. Christians affirm objective reality, that meaning inheres in things apart from our perceptions or experiences of them. Reality, however, is mediated to us in a variety of ways, through our senses, our psychology, our upbringing, interactions with other people, and society itself. This mediation means that although we affirm that objective reality exists, it must be interpreted by us, to us, and for us. Pure human objectivity does not, and cannot exist. Yet most human beings take reality for granted, as if their view of it was perfectly objective, no interpretation needed. All the while they are ignorant that interpretation is not an option; it is going on all the time whether they acknowledge it or not.
Secularism: There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
Western post-Christian secular culture no longer shares our Christian presuppositions. God, it is asserted and assumed, is not part of reality in any objective sense. He is wholly subjective, likely a projection of our wishful thinking, a purely personal phenomenon, and as such His existence has no bearing on society. This perspective, however, starts with the secular world’s understanding of faith.
Secular cultural messaging denies that irreligious people need faith because faith is defined as something required only by religious people. Secular, non‑religious people, however, don’t embrace something called unbelief, but rather some other faith. All people live by faith, but we live in a culture that defines objectivity in a way that prejudices it against religious belief. Scientists and those who live by its light, we are told, can be purely objective, while religious folks by definition can’t be. This “objectivity double standard” allows the culture to define objective reality against us because in this view religious people can’t be objective. Secular people technically may not be “religious” in that they don’t go to church, but they still have a worldview based on faith commitments, which is why there is no such thing as an unbeliever. Finite creatures of limited knowledge can only exist by faith, by trusting the knowledge or expertise or insights or authority of others.
Secular irreligious people don’t know this, and many Christians unfortunately don’t know it either. To the secular, the Christian faith is less believable, less credible, than the secular faith they embrace which seems more credible, more plausible. This faith takes many forms, be it agnosticism, atheism, or an indifference to the claims of Christ, but it is faith, a trust in something, nonetheless. It seems more plausible to such people that God is either not worth pursuing, or even if He’s there it doesn’t much matter, or that any meaning to be had is in this life alone. None of this is merely rational or logical, and I would argue it rarely is. What they believe has more to do with what seems real to them than what is actually real. Society and culture in many ways determine this.
The Social Construction of Reality
In order to work under the rubric of “science,” sociologists have to bracket questions of truth or ultimate meaning. So when they say that reality is a social construction, they are not saying that it is only a social construction. What they are saying is that human beings interpret reality, give meaning to it, in social settings, and that social settings in turn affect that meaning. In the words of Berger and Luckmann:
Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world. As sociologists we take this reality as the object of our analysis.
The key phrase here is “reality interpreted.” Reality isn’t self‑interpreting. Looking at the world through our eyes is not unlike how we experience a movie or TV show. The director constructs a reality, i.e., meaning, for us through various mechanisms at his or her disposal, and they are all deliberately, painstakingly used. After laying out an extensive list of what goes into making these virtual fictional worlds meaningful for us, Ted Turnau in his book Poplogetics says:
Each of these techniques adds meaning and texture for the imaginative landscape projected by the film, a world that the filmmaker constructs for our imagination.
Our world, however, is inundated with far more meaning than any film; it’s a veritable Niagara Falls of significance. And it doesn’t take a director to manipulate sound, light, or camera angles; we just have to wake up in the morning. The meaning exists out there, and we hunger for it as we hunger for stories told to entertain us.
Reality, however, isn’t merely something socially determined for us. The idea of the realness of reality, if you will, its objective nature, is both biblical and classical. In the Bible this is assumed from beginning to end, and Plato and Aristotle believed and argued that things have meaning in and of themselves apart from our subjective experience of them. The only other view of meaning, the default of most in the West, is that we are sovereign meaning creators because reality is what we make of it. Ernst Becker, a cultural anthropologist writing in the 60s and 70s, in his book the Structure of Evil writes that there was a “problem of creating meaning,” and that man is “the meaning creating animal.” His fundamental assumption about the nature of reality was that “man maximizes his Being by creating rich, deep, and original human meanings.” Even though in some sense we do create meaning, the difference for the Christian is that meaning is primarily there to be discovered. Our attempt to interpret it is to get as close as we can to the thing that is actually there, but as finite limited creatures we will always be one step away.
Whose Interpretation?
Even though as Christians we affirm objective reality, our everyday existence in the world is a constant encounter with a plethora of circumstances and experiences that must be, in one way or another, interpreted and attached with meaning. Berger and Luckman use the term, “Subjectively meaningful.” This reality is meaningful to us, and as such it must form some kind of “coherent world”; it must be comprehensible, it must make sense to us.
Everything, however, turns on the interpretation, which is “the action of explaining the meaning of something.” Interpretation, then, is where the true battle for the soul of Western civilization lies. Who gets to interpret reality? It is either God in Christ in Scripture, or secularism by default. The biggest challenge for the rise of a new Christendom is secular culture. As Berger points out in The Sacred Canopy:
One of the most obvious ways in which secularization has affected the man in the street is as a “crisis of credibility” in religion. Put differently, secularization has resulted in a widespread collapse of the plausibility of traditional religious definitions of reality.
And he wrote that in 1967! It wasn’t too many years prior that a universe without God would have been inconceivable for average Americans. Among Western society’s cultural elites after the Enlightenment it was totally conceivable, and it only broke out into the wider culture with a bang in the 1960s. Sociology helps us to understand how wider social currents, like secularization, get internalized into individuals.
The interpretation process and how human beings derive meaning from the world is interactive. Berger and Luckman:
It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity.
They call it a paradox that human beings construct a world that they “then experience as something other than a human product.” At first blush, concepts like “humanly produced, constructed objectivity” may appear arcane, but it is important for this discussion and Christianity’s influence in our secular world. This “seeming” process happens because all of us interact socially. In producing a world in our perceptions we externalize it, then interacting with it we objectify it, and finally we internalize it as “reality.” In effect our perceptions become reality for us, whether they reflect objective reality or not. You might want to read that sentence again, and think about it a bit. As Christians it is a good idea in our knowing and what we think we know to exercise some epistemological humility (I Cor. 8:2). I have written about that in detail previously.
Christians Should Not Take “Reality” for Granted: Says Who?
What does all of this have to do with Jordan Peterson? Everything! Reality and how people perceive it is in some way always socially defined. The dialectic process of a world becoming “real” to us is never ending. Christians can never take “reality” for granted because the question is always, “Says who?” That is, who serves as the definers of reality, secular culture or God. In The Sacred Canopy, Berger puts it this way: “The fundamental coerciveness of society lies not in its machineries of social control, but in its power to constitute and impose itself as reality.” The power of this imposition occurs when reality becomes taken for granted. We should never let reality be “taken for granted,” never assume reality is there to be seen for just the way people instinctively think it is. This is where Peterson comes in as a powerful question mark on this secular-taken-for-granted reality people inhabit in the 21st century.
Our Job as Christians battling secularism is to be consistently defining reality biblically. If we don’t, the hostile secular culture will always do the defining, and Christianity will lack a compelling plausibility to most people. The cultural air breathed throughout the West is plausibly secular. It is much easier for most people to believe in an irrelevant God (few are philosophical atheists) than the providential God of Scripture who ordains and defines all things. The challenge for Christians and Christianity at this moment in history, in “negative world,” is that we don’t have any cultural credibility. In fact, as Renn’s phrase implies, the dominant secular culture sees Christianity as positively harmful and dangerous. In this environment it is, practically speaking, extremely difficult to gain cultural traction. Most of us have little culture defining power, except in the very narrow pocket of our personal lives. Then, in God’s providence steps Jordan Peterson, himself a secular, Canadian liberal academic psychologist, and a most unlikely driver of a new Christian cultural consensus.
Too many myopic Christians focus on Peterson’s lack of historical Christian orthodoxy, as if that really matters for the cultural job God has called him to. It doesn’t. It’s almost a sport now, parsing Peterson’s words to see when he’ll finally take the plunge and declare with his mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in his “heart that God raised him from the dead,” so that he will finally be saved (Rom. 10:9). And being a man of many words, it’s a robust sport! It seems The Hound of Heaven is after him, though, given his wife is a convert to Catholicism, and his daughter an outspoken born-again Christian. Not to mention how many people challenge him on his conception of Christianity. But at this point, whatever the form and nature of this conception, his job is much bigger than his own salvation. I know that’s not a very Evangelical thing to say, but it’s true.
The reason Peterson is so important is because the “conceptual machinery” that elites in a society impose on the masses must be unmasked so that the underlying assumptions are always questioned. The secular culture like a machine grinds its notions, or concepts, into our plausibility field, so to speak, to make reality seem a certain way. This seeming must be questioned. As the popular bumper sticker in the olden days demanded, we must “Question Authority.” We as Christians in a culture hostile to our Faith must always question the authority of the definers: “Says who?” That is Jordan Peterson, and God has given him a huge platform to do that. This short video is a good example of how effectively he does that.
He also has credibility among cultural elites who are not leftists. Not being a run of the mill conservative Evangelical has helped him gain an impressive traction among people who would otherwise not find Christianity plausible at all. I’ve heard quite a few stories of people who have come to Christ because of him, so his lack of orthodoxy hasn’t kept people from being influenced by him to embraced Christ as Lord and Savior. The battlefield in our secular age is immense, and much of it happens, as Burger and Luckman say, on a “pretheoretical level,” that is prior to people even thinking. What Peterson is doing so well is again making the Christian worldview a player on the secular world’s stage, making it plausible for an increasing number of people. That means they will take it more seriously as a possible answer for the crying needs of our time. Secularism is not working, an experiment birthed in the Enlightenment that has proved wanting at every level. Let’s pray for Jordan that he makes it all the way to the only one who can save him from sin and death.
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