I’m blogging through Nancy Pearcey’s excellent book Total Truth as part of a book discussion I’ve been doing. Last time, I covered the third chapter, which deals with how our culture limits religion to the realm of values and morals. This time, I’m hitting some highlights from Chapter 4, “Surviving the Spiritual Wasteland”. This chapter deals with some competing worldviews that are prominent in our culture, or at least that’s the part I found most valuable. Here, I address that portion near the end of the post, so if you don’t find the beginning that helpful, scroll down.

Competing worldviews and real questions

Pearcey begins the chapter by relating a bit of her own story and how attracted she was by other worldviews before digging deeper into the Christian worldview, but I won’t focus on that part. However, she does note that the attraction of the unknown is one main reason to make sure we educate our children on worldviews. For a certain personality type, the unfamiliar and “forbidden” can have a particular appeal, meaning that kids who grow up knowing nothing about competing worldviews may find them extremely appealing when they first encounter them. This was Pearcey’s experience. She writes:

… in many cases students are never exposed to competing ideas within their families, churches, or Christian schools, and as a result they go out into the world unprepared for the intellectual battles they are about to encounter, especially on secular college campuses.

I definitely agree with this. As a worldview, Christianity is able to hold its own against (and more) against the best alternative philosophies – but people who grow up not understanding the full Christian worldview and how it answers these alternative philosophies can easily find it lacking.

Pearcey also goes on to explain how, when she began seriously considering Christianity, she had a number of deep intellectual questions she really wanted answered – but when she asked them, the Christian groups she approached tended to brush them off as just smokescreens, distractions from the real issue. Now, some people do raise objections as smokescreens, but honest questions deserve honest answers, she argues. She goes so far as to say that every time a minister introduces a Biblical teaching, the minister should also explain how to defend it against major objections. I’m not sure I entirely agree with the “every time” aspect of her view – one doesn’t have to know all the ways to defend a truth to know that it is true or to recognize truth (by analogy, one doesn’t have to have studied rotten food to know not to eat a rotten peach) but I agree with the general principle.

In any case, she goes on to argue that we need to apply the ideas of Creation, Fall, and Redemption – a worldview framework – to education, helping people understand who they were made to be, what has gone wrong, and then equipping people to do their future work to the glory of God, while being vigilant against false visions of redemption.

Unity versus diversity

Pearcey then goes on to look at how societies can err in focusing too much on the community, or too much on the individual. She argues that the Christian idea of the Trinity can help us avoid error in this respect, teaching us that we are individuals – yet created for relationship. We need to simultaneously be individuals but participate deeply and be integrated into our relationships and communities. But she notes:

Ever since the Fall, however, societies have tended to tilt toward either the individual or the group.

She notes the transient nature of family bonds given our current focus on personal autonomy, but notes how surprised she was interacting with some folks of Japanese culture when they found it very difficult to adopt a religion different from that of their family, whereas as an American, being different from one’s family is almost a religion to adopt a different religion.

Anyway, in this area I think the larger point, and the important one, is that the culture we’re immersed in will affect how we tend to err in this respect. As an American, I know I tend to be too individualistic, and not place enough emphasis on family and community relative to self. Other cultures may differ the opposite way.

Competing worldviews

As we saw previously, Pearcey presents the framework of “Creation”, “Fall” and “Redemption” as a way of thinking about key questions a worldview has to answer and here, she applies this to several worldviews which are common in popular thought.

Marxism and our culture

First, Pearcey addresses Marxism in terms of these three aspects. I remember when I first read this book I thought this was a bit strange, because I didn’t think I knew anyone who had a worldview resembling this – but in the time since then I’ve begun seeing how much this has affected present day thought about the big issues in our society, though it’s not usually referred to as Marxism.

In the area of creation, Pearcey notes that Marxism essentially views the original state as that of primitive communism, with creation being self-creating, self-generating matter. What of the Fall? The Fall came from the rise of private property, from which came exploitation, class struggle, and all sorts of other evils. The problem is not human nature, but the social structures behind our society. And what of redemption? It comes through revolution, overthrowing the oppressors and re-creating “the original paradise of primitive communism”.

This is widespread in the current political climate, the Black Lives Matter organization, the discourse relating to COVID-19, and even things like Bernie Sanders’ now defunct presidential campaign. The idea is that our system is totally broken – not in need of reform, but we need to throw out capitalism and start over, getting rid of the evil corporations, the mega-rich, etc. The talk seems to grow increasingly away from reform and towards revolution.

Rousseau and Revolution

Next, she spends a bit of time covering Rousseau, whose ideas have also affected the way we see things today. Rousseau’s view was that, stripped of all social relationships, morals, laws, customs, etc., we would be in a state of nature, truly individual and autonomous. Social relationships are secondary and in some sense contrary to our nature – so those are what cause us problems. So in Rousseau’s view, the primitive state of nature is the ideal, the “creation” – but the fall came with society or civilization, with relationships and organizations binding us in various ways. Redemption comes through a return to freely chosen relationships, only those relationships that are a type of social constract that are based solely on choice.

Pearcey argues that much of American political thought, on both sides of the aisle, rests on the view that the individual is the fundamental unit of society, and that then (willing) social contracts are the key basis for society. To some extent, this takes us towards radical individualism – where we believe we each ought to be able to do what we choose to, in every area of life, without anyone else imposing anything on us that we don’t consent to. “All human attachments are to be disolved, and then reconstituted on the basis of choice – that is, contracts,” she writes, summarizing this view.

That, certainly, is our society’s attitude today concerning marriage, sexuality, and so many other areas, including church membership. The view, it seems, is that each of us should only stick with those relationships that we continue to choose and prefer.

Sanger and Sexuality

Next, she focuses on what she calls “Sanger’s religion of sex”, or sex without strings. She argues that this, too, provides its own kind of world view. “Creation” in this world view, is evolution – Darwinism. Humans are fundamentally just animals, with natural drives and instincts. The fall, in this view, comes from the rise of Christian morality, where we’re (in this view) told to “repress” our instincts. Christian morality, she argues, is seen as preventing people from finding their true sexual identity, the core of their being, and then this leads into many downstream problems. The solution, or redemption, is sexual liberation – to cast of Christian morality and do whatever we feel like.

Again, this idea – that Christian sexual morality results in repression of desires and therefore suffering – seems common in the prevailing culture and, as she argues, taking a stand against it is hailed as being courageous.

Wrapping up

Finally, Pearcey spends a bit of time talking about new age views of religion, some of which have been influenced by Buddhism. I won’t walk through this one in detail, but I just wanted to point out it’s there, and you could read it.

Overall, though, this chapter was a great reminder to me because I hadn’t realized the extent to which some of these worldviews – particularly, Marxism, Rousseau’s ideas, and the ideas of sexual liberation, have become broadly entrenched in everday life. Certainly I’m seeing much more of these views now than I was when I first read this book – probably partly because the ideas have become even more common, but also because I’m more engaged in and aware of the world outside the church than I was when I first read this book.