Worldviews

In a piece for the New York Times Molly Worthen tries to get her arms around the idea of a "Christian worldview" and makes a few distressing missteps along the way.

She quotes, for instance, the Christian writer Rachel Held Evans who, criticizing the religious training of her youth, asserts that the Christian worldview includes the beliefs that “... climate change isn’t real, that evolution is a myth made up by scientists who hate God, and capitalism is God’s ideal for society.”

Evans' dismissive summation would be news to a lot of Christians who would certainly profess a Christian worldview but who hold to none of these beliefs.

Worthen adds that:

The innocuous phrase — “biblical worldview” or “Christian worldview” — is everywhere in the evangelical world.... [but it's] not as straightforward as it seems. Ever since the scientific revolution, two compulsions have guided conservative Protestant intellectual life: the impulse to defend the Bible as a reliable scientific authority and the impulse to place the Bible beyond the claims of science entirely.

This is a bit misleading, however. One can have a Christian worldview and have no particular opinion at all on the Bible's standing vis a vis modern science. In fact, I suspect that most evangelicals simply acknowledge that they don't know enough about the Bible or science to navigate this alleged dispute. They're too busy, in any case, ministering to the sick and the poor to worry much about it.

Part of the difficulty with Worthen's essay is that she conflates the term "Christian worldview" with "conservative Christian worldview" and by "conservative" she means "politically conservative." Thus she writes:

The conservative Christian worldview is not just a posture of mistrust toward the secular world’s “fake news.” It is a network of institutions and experts versed in shadow versions of climate change science, biology and other fields.

But there are many people who are skeptical toward the media, toward the pronouncements of some scientists about climate change and evolution, etc. who are not Christian. Conversely, there are many Christians who have a Christian view of life who embrace climate change, evolution, and largely trust the media. These are primarily political or ideological positions, independent of one's overall faith commitment.

So what is a Christian worldview? Its essence might be distilled to three fundamental propositions or beliefs:

1. That God exists and has created the world (How and when the world was created are ancillary matters)
2. That God reveals Himself specially in the person of Jesus Christ whose teaching on how we should live is divinely sanctioned and authoritative.
3. That God restored Jesus from death to life and will raise us as well to eternal life.

Of course, this is just the core of a Christian worldview. Many Christians believe more than this. Many hold that the Bible, properly interpreted, is completely trustworthy in what it affirms, that Jesus was Himself divine, that God grants eternal life only to those who accept Jesus' lordship, etc., but the point is there's nothing in any of this about "Fake News," capitalism, climate change, or even about evolution. These things are what Reformation era theologians called adiaphora. They're matters upon which Christians who share a core worldview can disagree.

Worthen adds this:

[T]he worldview that has propelled mainstream Western intellectual life and made modern civilization possible is a kind of pragmatism. It is an empirical outlook that continually — if imperfectly — revises its conclusions based on evidence available to everyone, regardless of their beliefs about the supernatural. This worldview clashes with the conservative evangelical war on facts, but it is not necessarily incompatible with Christian faith.

This is also a bit misleading. There is, as far as I am aware, no "conservative evangelical war on facts." There is, however, among evangelical thinkers a great deal of concern about what constitutes a fact as well as the interpretative framework in which facts are situated.

In other words, an evangelical can look at the same evidence as did Charles Darwin without coming to Darwin's conclusion that those evidential facts obviate the need for an intelligent agency to explain them. How facts are interpreted is often a function of a person's metaphysical or philosophical predilections rather than his or her commitment to objective science.

She concludes with this:

Mr. Nelson [a professor of journalism at an evangelical college] encourages his students to be skeptics rather than cynics. “The skeptic looks at something and says, ‘I wonder,’ ” he said. “The cynic says, ‘I know,’ and then stops thinking.”

He pointed out that “cynicism and tribalism are very closely related. You protect your tribe, your way of life and thinking, and you try to annihilate anything that might call that into question.” Cynicism and tribalism are among the gravest human temptations. They are all the more dangerous when they pose as wisdom and righteousness.

This is an ironic conclusion given that it is the skepticism expressed by some Christians - skepticism about the pronouncements of journalists as to what is true in the news, skepticism about the pronouncements of some climatologists concerning anthropogenic global warming, and skepticism about the metaphysical claims of some scientists about the nature of ultimate reality and causation - that Worthen considers to be so problematic.

The people who need to read Mr. Nelson's admonitions are not the Christians who are already plenty skeptical of secular authorities, but those who eagerly and uncritically gulp down their pronouncements. They're the ones who need to spend more time chewing on those claims before they swallow them.