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AR 26:26 - Why political privilege harms Christian growth
In this issue:
CULTURE - "Why something you said that was fine 72 hours ago is now an unredeemably racist, sexist, excommunicable offense"
SPIRITUAL HEALTH - paradoxes in the vibrancy of Christianity
Apologia Report 26:26 (1,531)
June 29, 2021
CULTURE
Focused on "rebuilding the Catholic ethos," Steve Skojec's OnePeterFive released "Wokeness and the Current Religious Revolution" on May 3. It helped us think through the current morass of media-fueled confusion, even though it also tends to confuse some of the terminology - at least as many evangelicals understand it.
"A priest friend on social media sent me a fascinating article" - ("The Upheaval", <www.bit.ly/2STMFyF> by N.S. Lyons). It begins: "We are living through an era of epochal change. At few times in history have so many currents of civilizational transformation coalesced and crashed into us at once, and at such speed.
"[W]e are experiencing a tectonic upheaval, a rending, uprooting, cataclysmic shift from one era of history to another. ...
"The world is being forcibly reconfigured by at least three concurrent revolutions: a geopolitical revolution driven by the rise of China; an ideological revolution consuming the Western world; and a technological revolution exacerbating both of the former."
In particular, "this ideology seemed to emerge so suddenly, and is in its stark irrationality so alien to the modern liberal mind, that surprised observers and hapless opponents so far struggle even to settle on a name for it: 'Cancel Culture,' 'Identity Politics,' 'Social Justice,' 'Wokeness,' 'Postmodernism,' 'Reified Postmodernism,' 'Neo-Marxism,' 'Cultural Marxism,' just plain old Marxism in a new guise, the 'Successor Ideology,' ...."
This new belief system "rejects nearly every fundamental principle of liberal modernity - the existence of an objective and immutable reality that can be discovered by reason; the scientific method; an enduring human nature; the primacy of the sovereign individual over the collective; impartial equality before the law; secular pluralism and the value of freedom of speech; the separation of the private and political spheres...."
Skojec finds that Lyons relies heavily on the book The Great Emergence [1] by the late Phyllis Tickle <phyllistickle.com> as a lens for interpreting this phenomenon." Lyons also does an interesting job of compressing "the story of our societal decay" which begins: "The Enlightenment took hold in the West and its emphasis on reason began to undermine religious certainties. Then science ... began to systematically destroy traditional collective story and imagination about how the universe functioned. ... Next came the psychoanalysts and psychologists, the Freuds, Jungs, and Campbells, whose popular exploration of human consciousness and the unconscious mind, and of common mythical/archetypical religious experiences, served to both open a new frontier for 'rational' exploration ('what really makes us tick?') and break down, in the public imagination, the separation of the Christian from the generically 'spiritual.'" On the heels of that, a "growing philosophical obsession [was] further inflamed by the impact of Buddhist ideas that captured the counter-cultural imagination during the 1960s - along with the influence of psychoactive drugs.
"Meanwhile a revolution in communications technology ... served to democratize religious messaging and break down hierarchies of informational authority [and] beginning the process of splitting apart extended nuclear families." ...
"Then came the culture wars," which substituted and renamed terminology via "the emergence of a global, instantaneous media infrastructure [in which] mass communications plays a bigger role than most people realize." The result, writes Tickle, was "a new faith structure [that] dedicated itself to taking ... a 'priesthood of all believers' to its maximum extent. Like Pentecostalism, [it] believes everyone has a direct connection with God, or whatever they like to think of as God-like, and no one gets to tell them to believe differently."
As it turns out, these followers "are postmodern," and "Despite all that rationalist science [logic is] 'not to be trusted as an absolute, nor are its conclusions to be taken as truth just because they depend on logical thinking.
"Narrative, on the other hand," is for these new believers "the song of the vibrating network," because it "circumvents logic, speaking truth of the people." What we wind up with is "Story over substance. Pathos over logos. ...
"Secular Social Justice activism dovetailed perfectly with both the strong historical emphasis on social justice work within many Christian denominations (including the Social Gospel movement) and the post-modern seeds already present.... But more importantly it offered [its followers] nearly everything they had been missing and longing for. Suddenly they had a new source of authority (the doctrines of Critical Theory and the hierarchy of intersectional identity), a clear metaphysics of good and evil (the oppressed and their oppressors), an ultimate objective (to perfect the world by the elimination of evil), and a grand narrative of how to live in the world.
"[N]eo-Marxist Social Justice offered them revolutionary struggle, and so they prostrated themselves immediately. It's not entirely surprising, given that "white guilt has never found a satisfactory answer in Liberalism" and needed "a comprehensive plan of action for how to address this sin."
Indeed, "The concept of sin … implies that progress can be made through a sort of personal moral transformation (say by acknowledging one's privilege and 'unconscious bias' and moving from 'racist' to 'anti-racist') which anyone can achieve if they 'educate' themselves and 'do the work.'
Until utopia arrives, this religious infusion helps allow members of this new belief system "to taste that sweetest of nectars: being both intellectually and morally superior to other people. ... Suffice to say, our once-guilty feeling and confused secular suburban white lady has likely never felt this level of moral righteousness and fanatical zealousness before, and the result is intoxicating."
So here we are. "If you ever wonder why something you said that was fine 72 hours ago is now an unredeemably racist, sexist, excommunicable offense, it's because [they] crowd-sourced it from the swirling Id of the mob on Twitter while you weren't looking." <www.bit.ly/3vECETh>
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SPIRITUAL HEALTH
Writing for Christianity Today (May 6 '21 - online only), Nilay Saiya (assistant professor, public policy and global affairs <www.bit.ly/3qeMVo9> Nanyang Technological University, author of Weapon of Peace: How Religious Liberty Combats Terrorism [2]) gives us real encouragement with his "Proof That Political Privilege Is Harmful for Christianity." He outlines the fruits of his research, wherein we read that "As governmental support for Christianity increases, the number of Christians declines significantly. ... [O]ur numerous statistical tests of the available data reveal that the relationship between state privilege of Christianity and Christian decline is a causal one, as opposed to only correlation.
"Our study notes three different paradoxes of the vibrancy of Christianity: the paradox of pluralism, the paradox of privilege, and the paradox of persecution. ...
"Just as iron sharpens iron, competition hones religion. ...
"Our study finds that as a country’s commitment to pluralism rises, so too does its number of Christian adherents. ...
"The strongest increase of Christianity over the past century has been in Asia, where the faith has grown at twice the rate of the population. ...
"Africa is the other world region where Christianity has seen breathtaking growth, particularly in recent decades. ...
"Christianity has made inroads into Africa not because it enjoys a privileged position with the state, but because it has to compete with other faith traditions on an even playing field. ...
"When Christians perceive a threat stemming from religious minorities, they may look to the state to give them a leg up on the competition. ... Paradoxically, though, the state’s privileging of Christianity in this manner does not end up helping the church, according to our data.
"Christians attempting to curry the favor of the state become distracted from their missions as they become engrossed in the things of Caesar rather than in the things of God to maintain their privileged stations. ...
"Interestingly, some research even suggests that missionaries from state-supported churches are less effective than missionaries whose commissioning churches are independent of the state. ...
"The relationship between political privilege and Christian decline is strongest in countries dominated by Eastern Orthodox forms of Christianity. ...
"Church attendance in these countries remains the lowest in the Christian world, despite the fact that the vast majority of citizens in these states retain their official church memberships. ...
"[D]espite the government threatening, pressuring, and coercing Christians, the church in Iran has become one of the fastest growing in the world in terms of conversion." At one time Open Doors ranked the country as "the second-worst place to be a Christian," behind only North Korea. (Today it has apparently <www.bit.ly/3wcT2el> fallen to eighth-worst.)
The Chinese church's experience "mirrors that of the early church under the sword of Caesar when it too experienced exponential growth." Indeed, Chinese Protestants "even witnessed sizable growth by the end of the Cultural Revolution. Sociologist of religion Fenggang Yang <www.bit.ly/3dq2JPL> notes that since 1950, Protestant Christianity has grown by a factor of 23. At least 5 percent of China’s population of nearly 1.5 billion people now subscribe to Christianity." And Yang predicts that "the percentage will grow exponentially over the next several years so that by 2030 China will have more Christians than any other country. By 2050, half of China could be Christian."
On the other side of the world, "Christianity in the United States, and in particular the evangelical movement, stands today at a very precarious crossroads. ...
"As Christianity has become increasingly intertwined with partisan politics, the US has been undergoing a simultaneous decades-long decline in religiosity - a trend confirmed in a number of scholarly studies. ...
"The intertwining of religion and politics in this way, ... has repelled people from Christianity who see the Christian faith as supporting a certain kind of politics they personally disagree with. As a result, politicized Christianity is able to appeal to an increasingly narrow group of individuals, even as it drives liberals and moderates away from the church. ...
"The good news for concerned Christians is that, if our research and analysis are correct, it may be possible to reverse trends toward secularization." In fact, "Our research suggests the best way for Christian communities to recover their gospel witness is to reject the quest for political privilege as inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus." <www.bit.ly/2TISGOS>
Saiya also presented his findings in the May issue of the scholarly journal Sociology of Religion: <www.bit.ly/3gIhY7K>
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why, by Phyllis Tickle (Baker, 2012, paperback, 220 pages) <www.bit.ly/3y7BdyA>
2 - Weapon of Peace: How Religious Liberty Combats Terrorism, by Nilay Saiya (Cambridge Univ Prs, 2019, paperback, 241 pages) <www.bit.ly/3gGiFiT>
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