It's quite simple, religiously conservative American Christians are failing the world in an area in which they shouldn't: critical thinking. One would expect those who both live in a nation known for its educational institutions and who are taught to work hard to achieve would make excellent critical thinkers, but such is not the case. Instead, time and again we have repeated the same mistake that the Church made during the time when Heliocentrism became a hot topic.
Here we should remember that Heliocentrism, which is the belief that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the solar system. The belief in this view started in the mid 1400s but gained real traction in the mid 1500s due to Copernicus and 1630s with Galileo. Neither the Protestant nor Roman branches of the Church immediately accepted this belief. In fact, leaders from those branches of the Church either mocked or even sought to persecute Copernicus first and then Galileo.
The conflict over Heliocentrism is similar to the conflicts of today. Back then, there was a battle between using Mathematics and observation to determine what was real regarding the the earth's relationship with the sun vs a literal interpretation of the Bible. Those who relied on the later refused to accept Heliocentrism. Today we see some similar battles between what the world is telling us and what many religiously conservative American Christians are are willing to believe. Is there systemic racism? Because many religiously conservative American Christians are white, the answer is no. And that is the answer in part because some Christians don't believe in corporate sin--in sin committed by large groups like society or the state. That was Josh McDowell's insistence just a little while ago.
Are there some Christians who acknowledge corporate sins and, in this case, systemic racism? Yes, Tim Keller and those at the Gospel Coalition acknowledge that. But for those who agreed with McDowell, despite what can be clearly observed, there cannot be no systemic racism.
Are we threatened by man-caused climate change. Perhaps until recently, many religiously conservative Christians have been battling it out with science as to whether such climate change exists and is a threat. For many of these Christians, their understanding of the Bible leads them to conclude that man-caused climate change that can significantly harm earth's ability to sustain human life is not just false, but impossible.
Or let us travel over to the Covid pandemic and see what is happening there. A significant percentage of religiously conservative American Christians refuse to take the vaccination. For some, they don't believe that a the pandemic is real. For others, they believe that God will protect them. Still others believe that the vaccine mandates are being used to increase government control over our lives.. Here there are a few factors that determine whether a given Christian will seek a vaccination.
As with the Heliocentrism controversy, the struggle by many religiously conservative American Christians in recognizing reality is due to the inability to use critical thinking. It is due to the inability, or perhaps fear of not being able, to see the facts on the ground or listen to secular experts and correctly determine what is true and what isn't. And it isn't that critical thinking is infallible, it isn't. But using such thinking increases the odds that we will have a better grasp on reality.
This inability or refusal by my fellow religiously conservative American Christians to see the real world for what it is is due to one of two reasons. The first reason is that many of my fellow religiously conservative American Christians perhaps put unrealistically high value on being sincere. And the value they put on sincerity means that if one is sincere enough, it is unlikely that they are wrong. For it to be unlikely that they are wrong, the real world must be simple. A simple world betters the odds that sincerity will guide one into making the rights choices and holding to the correct beliefs.
So when the world exhibits its complexity as it does in CRT and how it reveals the existence of systemic racism or with how our way of life is significantly affecting the earth's ability to support human life or with how human history shows the existence of deadly pandemics and that the existence of different kinds of vaccines are not part of a government conspiracy to gain more control over us, many of us religiously conservative American Christians close our eyes and ears and picture a simple world that does not exist. Those who are good at critical thinking can use reason to sift through the complexity and will have a better grasp at what is real.
But to acknowledge the need to sufficiently exercise critical thinking, one must first admit that much of the world is complex. And because the world is complex, sincerity is often not enough to help us to understand the real world around us. The more complex the world is, the easier it is for us to be sincerely wrong.
There is another factor involved that hurts our ability to exercise critical thinking. That factor is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism has many sides to it. One side is that that with authoritarianism, the credentials, often ideological or religious credentials, of a source plays an increasingly larger role in determining whether what that source says is true. And so for many religiously conservative American Christians who are also political conservatives, they often will not consider listening to what an unbeliever or someone who doesn't share their political ideology because of the ideological credentials of a given person. If a news source is a Democrat or Socialist (there is a significant difference between the two) or does not believe in American Exceptionalism or is not a economic conservative and so on then such Christians will assume what those news sources are saying is false. Why? It is because the ideologies of those news sources are not the same as or accepted by such Christians and thus those speaking or writing are not voices of authority.
And so such Christians look to their favorite leaders to tell them what is real and what isn't despite the fact that these leaders may not have any expertise in the areas they are speaking or writing on. But they believe these leaders because they hold to the same religious views or conservative political ideologies. These leaders, to varying degrees ,become nanny thinkers to those fellow Christians of mine. They are nanny thinkers in the sense that they are like adults who are telling many of my fellow Christians what and how to think. And many times these nanny thinkers filter what they hear from the world through a limited or distorted understanding of the Scriptures.
The less adept that we religiously conservative American Christians are at exercising critical thinking, the more we become prey to false understandings of the world and to charlatans who are nanny thinkers. And it is that fact of becoming such easy prey that we hurt the reputation of the Gospel. We betray the fact that the Scriptures can help people better understand the world around them.
We need to become better at using critical thinking. That is one of the key traits that the world is looking to see in the Church. That is because when we don't practice good critical thinking in interpreting the world around us, at best we show the world that we don't understand it, while at the worst we show ourselves to be fools. And neither result helps the credibility of the Gospel.
No comments:
Post a Comment