The first he calls "indifferentism" which is the idea that all religions and worldviews are equally arbitrary or groundless. Modern folks just don't have the time or inclination to sort through and examine all the competing worldview claims so they just assume that they're all implausible, unhelpful, or irrelevant to their lives.
White says:
At base this is a form of skepticism that leads to spiritual resignation; it is the mark of intellectual discouragement and malaise or despair. It frequently arises from affluence and cultural distractions such as wealth, pleasure, and ambition. The culture of secular liberalism may hope to aspire to something more than this, but it is not clear that it succeeds.The second challenge is scientific naturalism, which White describes as:
the hypothesis that human beings are merely highly complex material entities, evolved from random and accidental cosmic processes of physics and biology. The laws of physics, chemistry, and biology are the best and virtually the only resource we have to explain reality, and there is no other answer to why human beings exist. Enjoy the view; you will be dead soon.White points out that most secular people live in a kind of academic or social cocoon and are never confronted with an intellectual defense of Christianity.
It also should be said that most people have almost no access to Christianity in a university context or in their work environment, however intellectual the latter may be. Our specialized university and work formation play little to no part in our quest for meaning.Once young people are out of college or the military they become less and less exposed to those whose views would challenge their own. They gradually find themselves surrounded by friends and colleagues who think pretty much as they do, and if one or two members of the social or work circle do happen to be Christians, they often feel constrained by the unwritten rule that it's impolite to raise religious (or political topics) unless the views adduced conform to those of the rest of the group.
Another problem that often arises is that even when a Christian does have an opportunity to offer a contrary opinion, they're simply unprepared, intellectually, to do so. Too few of us know much about scientific naturalism, Critical Theory, or Islam to speak intelligently about them and so, rather than put our igorance on display, we choose to just be quiet. Yet all of these are posing powerful challenges to Christianity today and if we don't understand the nature of the challenge we'll have a very difficult time resisting it.
Relatively few Christians today, including, unfortunately, many pastors, even know their Bibles, much less their Dawkins, Kendi, or Koran. They don't read outside what's necessary to perform their day job, and consequently, they don't know much science, history, literature, or philosophy.
Given the extraordinary cultural pressures we face today, this ignorance is unsustainable. To quote Thomas Jefferson, "Any nation that expects to remain ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be."
Substitute "Christian" for "nation" and his warning applies equally as well.
