Randal Rauser's Blog, page 109

Transgender Washrooms or Climate Change?

Which ethical issue is more important? Transgender washrooms (“washroom” is a Canadian term for “bathroom”) or climate change? If you care to chime in, I’ve got the survey right here:

Which ethical issue is more important?

— Randal Rauser (@RandalRauser) December 15, 2017

If we can discern the relative import of ethical issues by what gets conservative Christians fired up, surely the right answer is “transgender washrooms”. So then we face the question: can we discern the relative import of ethical issues by what gets conservative Christians fired up?

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My New Video Discussing Divine Transcendence

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Alarmist evangelical apologetics and the so-called post-truth world

If you listen to evangelical Christian apologists for any length of time, you will soon hear reference to an ominous “post-truth culture” or a “post-truth world”. As Lee Strobel observed in a 2017 interview: “we see a trend toward a postmodern mindset and ‘post-truth’ culture.” (source) And as John C. Richards, Jr. opines in Christianity Today: “culture asks us to capitulate and live as ‘law-abiding’ citizens in a new post-truth world.” Richards continues,

“Last year the assault on truth was stunning. ‘Post-truth’ was named Oxford Dictionaries’ . Americans witnessed a tension-filled presidential campaign where truth-telling took a back seat to statistical errors and talking points. People shared fake news articles that hardly met the lowest levels of journalistic integrity. The world is changing rapidly, embodying this post-truth ethos.” (source)

This sounds dramatic and, as I said, ominous. If these apologetic reports are to be believed, the sun is setting on truth as we move into this brave dark new world where truth no longer matters. Enter the apologist who is concerned to defend the objectivity of truth and beat back the forces of darkness with astute arguments and evidence and savvy cultural analysis.

Richards is right about one thing: there was an assault on truth last year during the American election. And that assault on truth was indeed stunning. But that is largely due to an American presidential campaign and presidency that avails itself of what Kellyanne Conway infamously referred to as “alternative facts”. And it is exacerbated by what is indeed a troubling trend, namely the tendency to become increasingly locked in social media echo chambers that merely reinforce our personal opinions.

But does it follow that the world is increasingly “embodying this post-truth ethos”? The short answer is, no.

Consider first that the effect of which we speak manifests itself primarily on a relatively narrow band of belief. Trump and his administration may be notorious habitual liars. And the average person may be increasingly susceptible to having their political or religious opinions reinforced on social media. Nonetheless, on most topics we are as concerned with truth as we ever were. We get up in the morning, make coffee and some breakfast, listen to the morning news, traffic and weather, and plan our commute based on the information we hear. When we get to work, we talk at the water cooler about the news of the day. We answer emails and fill out paperwork, and drive home when our work is done. And on it goes: in most of our mundane beliefs precisely nothing has changed. To characterize this as a “post-truth world” is nothing short of absurd.

So what’s really going on? To begin with, we can note that the effect we are concerned with is primarily localized to religious and political opinions. These are the beliefs about which we are most likely to become siloed in an echo chamber. Having said that, let’s note three things.

First, this tendency is nothing new. After all, the warning against veering into religion and politics in polite conversation is old hat. Our tendency to silo may be exacerbated by social media, but the tendency itself is familiar to us all.

Second, the apologist’s diagnosis of the situation as being “post-truth” is a complete misdiagnosis. The problem is not that we are becoming post-truth about religious or political beliefs but rather that we are more apt to exhibit cognitive bias about these beliefs. We still ostensibly care about truth as much as ever, but we are more likely to exhibit cognitive bias in retaining and defending the religious (or irreligious!) and political beliefs we currently hold to be true.

Third, it is especially important to note that evangelical Christians — the very people who are most apt to consume this kind of  alarmist apologetics — are as susceptible to cognitive biases as anybody. And that includes many of the very apologists who bemoan the retreat to a so-called post-truth world.

So where does this alarmist rhetoric come from? That’s a great question. I suspect there are many reasons evangelical apologists are prone to avail themselves of the dramatic language of a “post-truth world” or a “post-truth culture”.

For starters, this drama reinforces the notion of a culture war and the importance of the apologist in that war. Practically speaking, this is even more important if the apologist in question needs to raise money for his/her apologetics ministry. There’s no better way to raise money than to talk of (culture) war.

In addition, this language fits nicely with the premillennial pessimism that remains common among conservative evangelicals. They already believe the world is going to hell in a hand basket, so these dire reports merely reinforce their preexisting pessimism bias.

But the irony is that by repeatedly invoking such overblown rhetoric, the evangelical apologist is less likely to become aware of — and redress — the very cognitive biases that make them less able to attain the very truth they profess to defend.

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The so-called War on Christmas should be relabelled the War on Christendom

This is the latest header on Donald Trump’s Twitter-feed. While Trump is arguably the most cynical and amoral individual ever to hold the office of president, he knows a good wedge issue when he sees it, and the so-called “War on Christmas” is among the best.

We all know the story: secularists and pluralists are seeking to impose their ideological perspective by removing the celebration of Christmas from the public square. That’s why Starbucks’ decision to have plain red Christmas Starbucks cups in 2015 was immediately interpreted as yet another volley in that interminable war.

And so when Trump panders to his ever-diminishing conservative base with a promise that we will say “Merry Christmas” again, he’s seen as a culture warrior defending Christianity in the public square.

The fact is, however, that the so-called war on Christmas is nothing more than a war on Christendom. Ever since Constantine converted to Christianity at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312, Christians have sought privileged place from governments in the West and around the world. Christendom is thus a partnership between church and state, one in which the church receives favored status by the government.

While there have certainly been benefits from this partnership (the cessation of Christian persecution, for example), those benefits have been purchased at a very high cost. One of the highest costs is the completely erroneous notion that Christianity exists to provide a comfortable backdrop to civil society rather than a radical call to take up one’s cross.

And nowhere is the corrosive impact of Christendom more evident than in the milquetoast vestiges of public religion that provide the inoffensive backdrop to the consumerist festival which fills every December. So folks hear “Silent Night” sung by a public school choir on the courthouse steps and they look over at the creche on government property and they think they’ve won some sort of victory. And if anyone challenges their ever-diminishing territory of hegemonic rule in the public square (or, as in the case of Starbucks, private enterprise), they go to war for “Christmas”.

However, the truth is that all they’re really fighting for is the last vestige of a hived out and emasculated public religion that bears little relationship with genuine Christianity.

For further reflection, you can read my article “Why you shouldn’t sing “Silent Night” at city hall.”

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Conservative Christians Who Pine for Christendom

This morning Michael Brown posted an article endorsing Roy Moore for the Senate seat in Alabama. In turn I asked Michael about Moore’s views on Muslims in government:

Thanks, I appreciate your thoughtful tone in that article. Do you agree with Moore that Muslims shouldn't be allowed to serve in government?

— Randal Rauser (@RandalRauser) December 11, 2017

Michael replied:

“No, I hadn’t seen that specific statement, but I don’t agree, as long as the Muslim could swear that he/she supports the Constitution, not Sharia Law.”

In reply, I provided Michael with this link from The Hill which summarizes Moore’s views. The article includes this excerpt with quotes from Moore:

“Muslims can’t swear to uphold the United States Constitution and still be a Muslim, because the law of Allah as expressed in the Quran is supreme.”

He went on to add that Islamic law is “simply incompatible with our law.”

He went on to compare taking the oath of office on a Quran with allowing an oath of office to be taken with Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in 1943 or Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” during the Cold War.

Michael then replied: “Note Moore’s explanation, which is in harmony with my view.”

Wow!

So to summarize, Michael initially stated his view that Muslims should be allowed to serve in government so long as they swear that they will support the Constitution rather than Sharia Law. However, Michael subsequently appears to retreat from that view since he then instead endorses Moore’s perspective. And Moore explicitly says that a Muslim cannot uphold the Constitution. Further, Moore compares the Qur’an to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

The great irony of all this is that Moore himself is the one who has repeatedly put his own fundamentalist religious beliefs ahead of the Constitution. As Michelle Cottle observes in The Atlantic, “Moore is an expert on the subject of putting one’s religious beliefs ahead of the rule of law.” (“The Lawlessness of Roy Moore.”) For example, Cottle writes,

“in 2016, the chief justice directed Alabama probate judges to ignore the Supreme Court’s recent decision legalizing same-sex marriages and to continue enforcing the state’s ban on such unions by denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Once more, he was brought up on judicial-ethics charges and, in September of last year, was suspended from office. He resigned shortly thereafter to run for Senate.”

Let’s summarize the double standard here. Michael Brown and Roy Moore believe Muslims should be excluded from government because they allegedly place adherence to their religious principles over commitment to the Constitution. And yet Moore himself regularly places adherence to his fundamentalist (and dominionist?) interpretation of the Bible over commitment to the Constitution.

As the title of my article states, what we have here are conservative Christians who pine for Christendom, that yesteryear when Christians had special privilege in society, when Christians could enforce their opinions on others, when Christians were favored by the state and received special privileges. But a commitment to retrieving Christendom is as much a threat to the secular state as any commitment to Sharia law.

Whatever Roy Moore and Michael Brown may think, the truth is that Christendom is long dead and it ain’t coming back any time soon. And so to the conservative Christians who long to make this Faustian pact with the state in a misbegotten attempt to retrieve lost privilege, I ask this: What good is it to gain the favor of the state if it means losing your effective witness to a non-Christian world?

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Is it always wrong for a Christian to buy a brand new $300,000 Ferrari?

This is a 2018 Ferrari 488. It costs $300,000. That’s a lot of money. Believe it or not, it’s even more than I make as a seminary professor in an entire year!

So now the question: is it always wrong for a Christian to buy this car just because she wants one?

I asked this question on a Twitter survey. Twenty-eight respondents resulted in a perfectly even 50/50 split:

Is it always wrong for a Christian to buy a brand new $300,000 Ferrari just because she wants one?

— Randal Rauser (@RandalRauser) December 8, 2017

Perhaps it is worth unpacking the question a bit more. To that end, we should remove the particularities of the question and reduce it to its bare parts: cost and motivation:

Is it permissible to spend X [cost] on Y just because one wants Y [motivation]?

In our original formulation X=$300,000 and Y=new Ferrari. But we can readily substitute other amounts and products:

Is it permissible to spend $30,000 on a new Honda just because one wants a new Honda?

Is it permissible to spend $1 on a new Ferrari Hot Wheels just because one wants a new Ferrari Hot Wheels?

Is it permissible to spend $300,000 on a new home just because one wants a new home?

Is it permissible to spend $800,000 on a new home just because one wants a new home?

Is it permissible to spend $300 on a bottle of French wine just because one wants a bottle of French wine?

Is it permissible to spend $8 on a lattefrappumocachino just because one wants a lattefrappumocachino?

Is it permissible to spend $100 on a concert ticket just because one wants a concert ticket?

I don’t even know how to begin adjudicating on these and countless other economic decisions that we make every day. So while I have my own intuitions about what is permissible (or preferable), it seems to me that opining categorically on such matters is a practice that will soon land one in a morass of legalistic casuistry.

During Christmas 1999 my wife and I were walking through Harrods in London when we came upon a designer canopied pet bed. It was a meticulous reproduction of a canopied pet bed once owned by Louis the XIV. As memory serves, it cost £12,000. That bed has always remained in my mind as the ultimate example of crass commercialism. Can I say it should absolutely never be purchased by a wealthy Christian — perhaps one that is already a famous philanthropist — just because she wants it?

To complicate matters, there are innumerable reasons a person might desire something. Could our rich philanthropist  want the pet bed as a memorial of a beloved companion animal, for example? Or could she want it for what she perceives to be its timeless artistic merit and craftsmanship? If somebody can spend $450,000,000 on a Da Vinci painting, a mere £12,000 for a canopied Louis XIV pet bed might seem like a steal!

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Is it time for a female Jesus?

Jesus was a Jewish man. Despite this fact, for centuries Jesus has been depicted in western art with features more indicative of northern European ancestry. And what’s really interesting is that nobody seems to have a problem with this.

Nor is northern European ancestry the one exception. Jesus is regularly illustrated in the terms of a bewildering range of ethnicities and cultures, and again nobody worries about the fact. On the contrary, we all recognize that this practice illustrates the logic of divine accommodation.

But then we come to the Rubicon: if it is permissible — and perhaps even advisable — to portray Jesus in various non-Jewish male ethnicities and cultures, then is it likewise permissible to portray Jesus as a non-male gendered person? In other words, is “Jessica Christa” a blasphemy? Or is it merely one more instance of reasonable accommodation?

I’m surveying the issue right now on Twitter. Feel free to vote there and share your own views below.

If it is permissible to portray Jesus as a non-Jewish male, it is likewise permissible to portray Jesus as a female.

— Randal Rauser (@RandalRauser) December 8, 2017

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Conservative Christian Bakers, Gay Cakes, and Beyond…

Yesterday I posted a survey on the whole Christian baker/gay cake debate. Here are the results:

Should bakeries have the right to refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings?

— Randal Rauser (@RandalRauser) December 5, 2017

This prompted me to pose a follow-up question: should Mormon bakers have the right to refuse to serve black people based on the (religious) belief of traditional Mormonism that dark skin reflects the mark of Cain? (One could, of course, suggest innumerable other scenarios like Hindus refusing to serve Dalits or various religious groups refusing to serve women. But let’s focus on the Mormon question.)

A couple people on Twitter responded to that query by stating that folks should indeed have the right to refuse to serve anyone. And we should let the free market sort it out. (E.g. patrons refused service have the right to promote boycotts of the discriminatory bakers.) While I don’t agree with that conclusion, I do respect the consistency of the position.

What say you?

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Making Sense of Gospel and Grace (10 Minute Interview)

I posted this ten minute interview with the Wednesday Bookmark on my book What’s So Confusing About Grace? a couple weeks ago. But I have since turned the interview into a video.

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Credibility, Apologetics, and the Ravi Zacharias Case

Ravi Zacharias (Photo Credit: TMDrew; Wikimedia Commons)

I’ve been following the unfortunate case of Ravi Zacharias for a couple years now (thanks to Steve Baughman). Now that case has finally been reported in the mainstream Christian media. You can read about the case at Christianity Today here.

The scandal includes two parts. Part 1 involves an unseemly online relationship between Zacharias and a married woman. You can read legal documents relating to that case here and here. I’ll let those documents speak for themselves. In the remainder of this article I want to address the second part which moves us from Zacharias’ own poor judgment into the conduct of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) on the whole.

Part 2 of the scandal involves Zacharias and his ministry falsely representing his academic credentials. Zacharias is not an academic and he has no earned PhD. His highest earned degree is an MDiv (a ministerial degree).

Zacharias does have several honorary doctorates. But of course an honorary doctorate is not an earned doctorate, and it is fundamentally dishonest — and thereby immoral — to blur the distinction for personal gain.

Despite this fact, RZIM has repeatedly used promotional language which falsely suggests that Mr. Zacharias is an academic. And one can reasonably infer that they have done so at least in part because of the authority that comes with the completion of terminal academic degrees.

Here is an excerpt from the Christianity Today article:

Up until earlier this year, the RZIM bio had not used the phrase “honorary doctorates;” instead, it had stated that Zacharias had been “honored with the conferring of six doctoral degrees.” The site also previously referred to him as “Dr. Zacharias” through 2014, as did multiple press releases, news features, and event postings.

“In earlier years, ‘Dr.’ did appear before Ravi’s name in some of our materials, including on our website, which is an appropriate and acceptable practice with honorary doctorates,” stated RZIM in its own statement, also issued Sunday. “However, because this practice can be contentious in certain circles, we no longer use it.”

It’s worse than that. In this 2015 article Steve Baughman provides additional evidence of dishonesty including Zacharias’ own false claim that he was a “visiting scholar” at Cambridge University. Add it all together and one begins to see a systemic pattern of significant misrepresentation.

Now is the point where I sermonize. When it comes to effective apologetics, it is important to have clear, concise, and logically valid arguments with plausible premises. It’s also important to have good rhetoric, a touch of humor, savvy cultural awareness, and a dollop of self-deprecation.

While that is all important, the most important aspect of any effective apologetic is credibility. Credibility depends on demonstrable integrity. And integrity depends on conduct that is absolutely above reproach. By misrepresenting Mr. Zacharias’ credentials, RZIM has called its own integrity into question. This regrettble action thereby undermines its credibility. And that, in turn, undermines the value of the apologetic that RZIM seeks to present to a skeptical world.

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