Unquestioned Assumptions of Modern Culture
But I think that one of the most persuasive arguments made against the Christian faith in our times is actually not really a rational argument at all. The people who are persuaded by it seem often to think of it as if it is an argument, but, when you look at it more closely, there is no actual argument being made. What has happened is that certain assumptions that have become immensely popular and mainstream in our modern culture have been absorbed without argument, and these assumptions have then been compared to Christian teachings and used to judge those teachings to be false.
The assumptions I am referring to are primarily moral. Our modern society is, in some ways, a profoundly moral society. I'm thinking particularly of that portion of our society which might be called our elite, or our intelligentsia, people who hold the kind of worldview (often called "liberal") which dominates academia and which also has gained immense power over public policy in recent times. Our modern liberals are very strongly moved by moral considerations, and particularly by considerations of justice, especially social justice. This is somewhat ironic, considering that many of these same people have moved away from the more Christian background that used to dominate American culture and have embraced a sort of secular Agnosticism that really has no basis for any idea of objective ethics at all. But, nonetheless, modern liberals are profoundly moved by moral concerns--even to a degree which (if it were expressed in more religious or conservative directions) might be called extreme or puritanical. We take our social justice concerns very seriously.
Over the past few centuries, and even more over the past few decades, the liberal movement has more and more embraced certain ideas that have become, in their minds, associated with social justice and which have thus become for them ideas and causes of great significance. Much energy is devoted to asserting these ideas, promoting them, proclaiming them over and over, and trying to get public policy to mandate and enforce them and everyone in society to embrace them (or else be ostracised, marginalized, etc.). Notice I didn't say that a lot of energy has been devoted to arguing for these ideas, for there has been little real argumentation given. (There has been, certainly, a lot of verbiage that might seem like argumentation, but much of it is simply elaborate exercises in question-begging and simply trying to reframe everything in light of the valued assumptions.)
Racial justice and equality has been one hot-button issue embraced by liberals in recent decades. Even if there is room to argue about some of the details in terms of how liberals have approached this subject, orthodox Christians can agree that the core idea of racial justice and equality is a good thing. Although the Christian world has not been free from racism in the past (or in the present), yet orthodox Christianity (and particularly Catholicism, which I view as the highest version of orthodox Christianity) rejects racism. So there is no inherent, necessary disconnect on this issue between modern liberal culture and Christianity.
However, this is not the case with some of the other moral ideas advocated by modern liberalism. For a couple of examples, we can think of homosexuality and transgenderism. Let's focus in on homosexuality. (I'll refer you here and here for discussions on transgenderism.) Here is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say about homosexuality (CCC #2357-2359, footnotes removed):
2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered." They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.
2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.
Despite the effort of the Catechism to be balanced and nuanced in its brief discussion of this topic, modern liberal culture has a serious problem with this statement. There is an unavoidable clash here, for modern liberal culture has decided that there is nothing morally wrong with homosexual acts. Indeed, homosexuality is a good thing, something that adds to the diversity of the human race and is to be celebrated, and, it is thought, one cannot celebrate homosexuality or affirm homosexuals as persons unless one regards homosexual acts as perfectly ethical and acceptable.
Why does modern liberal culture feel this way? Well, there is a recognition that homosexual attraction is a condition some people experience and may even be born with a tendency towards. There is a recognition that it is very difficult for homosexuals to live counter to their homosexual tendencies and inclinations. There is a recognition that homosexuals are human beings whom we ought to love and respect. There is a recognition that homosexuals have been wrongly treated in the past. And all of this is true. Catholic teaching has no objection to it. But these facts fail to justify the conclusion that homosexual acts are ethical and acceptable. It is perfectly consistent to say that homosexuals are persons, that they experience same-sex attraction, that they have been unjustly treated in history (and are sometimes unjustly treated today), and yet that, at the same time, homosexual acts are immoral. There is no contradiction here. The former affirmations do not logically or necessarily imply the latter affirmation. To make this even more apparent, consider a parallel: violence. There are people who harm others unjustly through acts of violence. All of these people are human persons we ought to love and respect. Some of them have deep-seated proclivities to violence. They are drawn to violence. It is very difficult for them not to be violent. Many such people have been (and are) unjustly treated. But it does not follow from this that such violence is an ethical and acceptable thing. Or take any number of other examples. Some people are drawn to theft. Some people find in themselves strong desires to engage in sexual acts with minors. Some people find themselves drawn very strongly to commit adultery. Some people find it very difficult to curb a natural tendency to want to dominate and control others, or to be too shy or cowardly, or to talk too much or too little, or to be selfish and unempathetic. The human race is full of all kinds of proclivities, inclinations, even disorders and pathologies, that make our lives very difficult. And yet we don't argue in general that whenever anyone finds within themself a strong proclivity or inclination towards anything, making it very difficult not to indulge that inclination, this by itself makes acting on such an inclination ethical and acceptable. We generally recognize that doing the right thing sometimes involves struggling hard to stop ourselves from doing what we really want to do.
Those who promote the idea of the ethical nature of homosexual acts never provide any actual reasons to justify this position. Any reasons given amount to question-begging or special pleading, like the ones discussed in the previous paragraph. They are arguments that are selectively applied to homosexual acts because the arguer has already decided on other grounds that homosexual acts are ethical, but those same arguments are turned off and considered absurd when applied to acts the arguer has already decided on other grounds are not ethical (like violence or sex with minors). Our arguments are nothing more than rationalizations we use to try to justify what we have already decided.
Now, I think a case can be made that homosexual acts could be considered ethical if we were to assume certain non-Christian worldviews like Atheism or Agnosticism. In an Atheist worldview, so far as I can see, it is difficult to find any strong reason to oppose homosexual acts per se. (Of course, I'm putting aside for now the difficulties Atheism has with the very idea of ethics in general.) But this just highlights the question-begging nature of the argument against Christianity from homosexuality. If the ethicalness of homosexual acts makes sense from an Atheist or an Agnostic point of view but not from a Christian point of view, then one cannot use the alleged ethicalness of homosexual acts as an argument against Christianity, for one would be basing the entire argument on the assumption that Atheism or Agnosticism is true, which would obviously be question-begging. "If we assume Atheism is true, we can show you that Christianity is false!" Not a very impressive way of arguing, objectively.
What has happened is that our culture has, for whatever reason, simply come to the conclusion over the past few decades that homosexual acts are ethical. At first, a sizable minority were arguing for this. But, eventually, this minority was able to turn the general tide of public opinion so that, today, if you want to say that homosexual acts are unethical, you are to a great extent an outcast from what is considered humane and intelligent society. The ethicalness of homosexuality has become so ingrained in our cultural sensitivities that we can hardly conceive of anyone seriously thinking differently. The idea that homosexual acts are unethical seems to us to be shockingly immoral and completely unjustifiable, like believing that black people are an inferior race or that rape is a good thing. Anyone who advocates such a horrible view is seen as obviously wrong. So if Christianity insists on such a bigoted, immoral, outdated view, obviously it cannot be right or good.
Again, it is important to remember that we have not come to this conclusion based on any actual, non-question-begging evidence. Those who think homosexual acts are ethical and those who think they are not can all equally accept all the empirical data that has any bearing on this subject. What has happened is simply that our culture has had a philosophical/ideological shift, and this shift has been so profound that many people today, especially younger people, can't even conceive of questioning that homosexual acts are ethical. It just seems obvious and axiomatic to them, and even questioning this seems not only foolish but actually unethical itself, an insult to homosexuals.
And herein lies the danger: It is natural for us to imbibe the assumptions of our surrounding culture. Christians are not immune to this. It is therefore natural even for those inside the Church, and especially young people, to be subconsciously shaped in their thinking by the viewpoint of the surrounding, mainstream culture. Once this has happened, such a person is going to have a terrible time reconciling this viewpoint with his/her Christianity, for the two are really incompatible. And since it seems plain and obvious and unquestionable that homosexual acts are ethical, there seems to be a plain and simple knock-down reason to conclude that Christianity is false and evil.
The Crucial Importance of Learning to Question Assumptions
So how can we deal with this? It is absolutely crucial that we cultivate, in ourselves and in our teaching, the practice of questioning assumptions. Insofar as this problem is an intellectual one--and it is an intellectual problem, even if it is also more than merely an intellectual problem--the only way we can deal with it is by helping people to learn to question their assumptions. This is the one weapon that can cut through the subliminal propaganda that constantly inundates us from our surrounding culture. We must learn the art of asking, "How do I know this is really true?" We must learn to set up a gatekeeper in our minds and not allow any idea in unless it can provide for us a good reason to accept it. If we don't do this, we are at the mercy of the winds of prevailing opinions. And we must do it thoroughly. On my email signature, I have a quotation from Francis Bacon (often considered one of the fathers of the modern scientific method): "It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." All too frequently, what happens is that a person raised in the Christian faith begins to question their Christian assumptions. But they end up evaluating those assumptions on the basis of the unquestioned assumptions of the broader culture, and so, while they think they are being critical and objective, what is really happening is that they are abandoning one set of unquestioned assumptions for another. I am reminded of another quote from my email signature, this one from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: "With most people unbelief in one thing is founded upon blind belief in another." The questioning must not go down only part way but all the way.
An old TV show that was on during my childhood, G. I. Joe (which I never actually watched), used to have a catchphrase (I think they'd say it towards the end of each episode): "Knowing is half the battle." Once the seeds of questioning have penetrated so deep as to actually cause a person to be capable of questioning (or even recognizing) his own prevailing assumptions and the assumptions of his surrounding culture, his intellectual immune system is on its way to being able to defend his mind against unsubstantiated ideas, no matter how prevalent and accepted they are. I am reminded of yet another quote from the great Catholic author G. K. Chesterton:
In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.
Another good one from Mark Twain: "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect)." And yet it is not at all natural for us to do so. It is something we must work hard to cultivate. The majority is not always wrong, but we are herd creatures. It is very difficult for us to question, or even to recognize, unquestioned assumptions when they are enmeshed in the very cultural air we breathe.
Asking the Right Questions in the Right Order
If we ask the right questions, we will realize that we cannot start with the question of whether or not homosexual acts are ethical. Before we can get to that question, we have to establish the underlying worldview beliefs from which we can define what "ethical" even means, what makes something "ethical", and how we can know what is ethical. If Atheism is true, then "ethical", if it means anything, means "whatever happens to make me happy." And the way we know what is ethical is to come to understand our own feelings and how things in the world affect them. But if Christianity is true, there is an objective standard of morality rooted in God's values, and so we must look outside of ourselves to God to determine what is right and wrong. As I mentioned earlier, homosexual acts may well be fine from an Atheist point of view, as long as they make me happy enough, but, from a Christian point of view, God has declared homosexual acts unethical, because he has a positive purpose for sexuality that homosexual acts subvert. There is an objective wrongness to homosexual acts, and thus it is also the case that such acts will, in the end, lead to harm and misery, even if we don't see this during our earthly lifetime. Now we can't tell which of these views of homosexual acts is correct just by looking at the empirical data. We must first make a deeper examination to determine what overall worldview we think to be true, and then we have to evaluate homosexual activity from within that perspective.
I recently read a couple of articles that, together, illustrate well both the right way and the wrong way to respond to the moral values of our broader society when they conflict with Christian beliefs and values. The first article is entitled "On Wokeness and Reasons People Leave the Church". The article, from the blog Unam Sanctam Catholicam, has some very perceptive things to say about this, although I disagree with a lot of other things in the article. The author discusses a prominent couple who apparently left the Catholic Church. I don't know who this couple is or anything about them, nor does that really interest me right now. I'm more interested in this author's perception (right or wrong) about what caused these people to leave the Church. One of their strongest objections, according to this author, was that Catholics tend to be too unloving. Of course, this can be a real problem, but the author finds interesting (as do I) the specifics of what made this couple think that Catholics are unloving:
The interesting thing, however, was when these folks went into the details of why they though so many of their fellow Catholics were uncharitable. We've all experienced unkind Catholics, especially if you blog or publish anything online (believe me, I know); occasionally, I have probably been one of them myself. That's sort of par for the course. But these people mentioned something interesting—basically, that Catholics had by and large failed to adopt the appropriate responses to racism and LGBT issues, which demonstrated that they ultimately lacked love. For (they said) if Catholics were more "loving", they would have been more eager to embrace these causes. It follows that the reticence of Catholics to do so—indeed, their outright hostility to such causes—is a damning condemnation of Catholics' lack of love. Indeed, it is a mark against the Church's very concept of love, where "loving the sinner" is bound up with the idea of "correcting the sinner." As many others who have left the Church have said, this couple ultimately stated that "Love the sinner, hate the sin" was an unworkable proposition. Love needed to be reevaluated in a manner that was not so corrective—meaning, more woke. Basically, they were arguing that Christians aren't woke enough.
The term "woke" has become popular in recent days as a way of describing people who have come--through an alleged enlightenment--to agree with the viewpoint and the values of the current liberal culture. It generally involves, among other things, thinking that homosexual acts are ethical. The author of the article goes on to make some perceptive comments on how "wokeness" can affect people in the Church:
I predict that such "Woke" Christians will eventually lose their faith altogether. We could certainly already say that a liberal Catholic has already suffered an overthrow of faith to the degree that they are affirming principles contrary to Catholic truth. But what I mean is that, ultimately, we will see a lot more of what I described at the top of this post: Christians formally repudiating their Faith because Christianity is not Woke enough, because they have allowed their judgment of what is "good" and what is "moral" to be defined by the culture at large. And when Christianity is judged against these standards and inevitably found wanting (because Christianity historically does not share these novel value judgments), these people will choose Wokeness over Christ in order to feel accepted, to feel that they are "making a difference" or are on the "right side of history."
This is a very well-stated articulation of the danger I am warning against in this article. There is a strong tendency for Christians to imbibe, without even realizing it, the viewpoint and values of modern secular liberal culture, and then, holding these views and values as unquestioned assumptions, to evaluate Christianity on the basis of them and thus find Christianity wanting. But this is the wrong way to proceed. It is backwards and irrational. If we want to be good critical thinkers, we can't assume a worldview without question and then use it as a standard to evaluate another worldview. We have to first determine, by means of the available evidence, which worldview beliefs are actually true, and then, once we've determined this, we are rationally justified in using those beliefs as a standard to evaluate contrary ideas. Instead of just assuming without question that homosexual acts are ethical and, on the basis of this, judging Christianity to be wrong because it doesn't agree with this assumption, we ought first to ask which worldview is true--Christianity, Atheism, or whatever--and then we will have the foundation to be able to ask whether or not homosexual acts are ethical. If we first decide that Atheism better fits the evidence, we might then decide that there is nothing wrong with homosexual activity. If, on the other hand, we decide that Christianity is true, we will then conclude, on the basis of a Christian outlook on things, that homosexual acts are unethical, and that it is not Christianity but the assumptions of modern culture that are wrong on this point.
The second article I read recently, from Our Sunday Visitor, is entitled "How Partisanship is ‘Weakening the Gospel Witness’ in America". The article is by Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble, who left the Catholic Church as a teenager and became an Atheist, and then years later returned to the Church and is now a religious sister with the Daughters of St. Paul. She talks in the article about how she was exposed to some justice issues growing up Catholic, particularly abortion, but that it was only when she left the Church and immersed herself in punk rock culture that she discovered a wider range of justice issues--racism, immigration, protection of the environment, etc.--and encountered a strong thirst for justice in general. But eventually she became convinced that Catholicism is actually true and returned to the Church. She found, upon her return, that Catholicism has a rich tradition of concern for social justice that she hadn't known about before she left, but I am interested here in how she describes her attitude towards these issues upon returning to the Church:
Upon my return to the Catholic Church more than a decade later, I compared what I had believed to be true as an atheist to Church teaching. I believed the Holy Spirit guided the Church, so I was ready to give up any of my beliefs that were in contradiction. However, much to my surprise, I discovered that while there were some differences, there were many more similarities. All that was good and true in what I had learned as an atheist punk rocker was right there in the Catechism. Consistency in affirming the dignity of every human person made in the image of God was the foundation of the Church’s response to every modern concern.
In contrast to the description in the previous article of the couple who left the Church, Sr. Theresa Aletheia adopted a logical approach. She didn't assume without question the broader culture's moral views and then use these to judge Christianity. Instead, she first determined whether or not Christianity was true and accepted it when she found that it was, and then she examined the various moral beliefs of modern culture on the grounds of whether or not they were consistent with Christianity. She found, to her delight, that many of the things she valued as an Atheist were valued by Christianity as well, but she was prepared to allow her assumptions to be judged by the truth rather than the other way around.
If we can encourage and teach that attitude, we will be doing one of the most important things we can be doing towards countering modern culture's attack on Christianity and its persuasive drawing of people away from it.
Of course, although I've been looking at this from an intellectual point of view, I recognize that this whole situation involves more than merely the intellectual. We are dealing with emotional and spiritual concerns as well. Human beings are not moved solely by intellectual and rational considerations. We are swayed by the desires of our hearts, and these are affected by our human nature, our fallenness, and the effects of God's grace on our lives. Conversion, and tenacity of faith, cannot be attained or preserved merely by getting things right intellectually. We must pray for God's grace to move in people's hearts (including our own). But the intellectual is, nonetheless, a crucial component in all of this. Even if we human beings aren't solely motivated by intellectual concerns, we ought to be motivated by such concerns, because we ought to be honest and love truth, and honesty requires that we be willing to examine the evidence and follow it wherever it leads, whether we like where it leads or not. Addressing the intellectual concerns can provide the objective foundation necessary to show why we ought to be Christians, and it can counter the irrational pull of modern cultural assumptions away from the faith and so be an aid in helping honest truth-seekers to be more successful in finding and sticking to the truth.
For my own reasons why I think Christianity is actually true, see my book (or see here for a shorter version, and here for a more intuitive version). For a fictional dialogue on sexuality and gender issues, see here.
Published on the feast of Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions, martyrs.
ADDENDUM 4/1/22: A very perceptive and well-articulated comment from Reformed Protestant author Carl Trueman back in 2012:
[T]he beautiful young things of the reformed renaissance have a hard choice to make in the next decade. You really do kid only yourselves if you think you can be an orthodox Christian and be at the same time cool enough and hip enough to cut it in the wider world. Frankly, in a couple of years it will not matter how much urban ink you sport, how much fair trade coffee you drink, how many craft brews you can name, how much urban gibberish you spout, how many art house movies you can find that redeemer figure in, and how much money you divert from gospel preaching to social justice: maintaining biblical sexual ethics will be the equivalent in our culture of being a white supremacist. (Carl Trueman, "Pleased to Meet You. Hope You Guessed My Name.",from reformation21.org)
It is good to connect with modern liberal culture, to work with modern secular liberals on matters of common concern and social justice, and to attempt to build bridges in order to share the gospel. But, while non-believers often admire truth and morality when they see it in believers, they also often persecute believers and reject them when they diverge from the prevailing opinions and values. As Trueman points out, Christians who are desperate to be well-thought-of by modern "woke" liberals at all cost are going to find themselves increasingly torn by the competing values of being well-thought-of and keeping in step on the one hand and being faithful to the truth on the other. Difficult choices will have to be made. Do we have the intellectual aptitude and moral conviction to stick with the truth even when it becomes very difficult and counter-cultural?
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