JOHN STARKE|10:00 PM CT

Exchanging Fisticuffs for Gentleness: Doug Wilson on Bloomington

Earlier this year Doug Wilson traveled from Moscow, Idaho, to the Bloomington campus of Indiana University to deliver a series of lectures on sexuality. In the weeks leading up to the event, articles in the student paper accused Wilson of being sexist and a homophobic racist. At the event, Wilson stood before a crammed lecture hall facing nearly 400 people, many of whom were angry protestors.

Wilson gave two lectures and a two-hour Q&A afterwards. The event was continually interrupted by planned protests, angry outbursts, and hateful slurs. One student was arrested and more than 20 were asked to leave. Nevertheless, Wilson displayed an unusual gentleness throughout.

I asked Wilson a few questions about the event and how to engage in apologetics in such a difficult climate. We talked about the use of satire and gentleness, why the issue of homosexuality is such a challenge to the legitimacy of Christianity today, and what he would’ve done differently.

You were warned about this event. But were you still surprised by the level of animosity?

I was not completely surprised, but I have to say I was somewhat surprised. I know that there are folks out there like that, and I have seen this kind of thing before. But what was surprising was the level of energy in opposing just a couple of talks scheduled for a classroom—their response was way out of proportion to what was going to happen, and so I suppose we should thank them for helping to make it such a roaring success. Seriously . . . couldn’t have done it without them.

You began your first talk saying that you hoped that the listeners would be surprised at what they heard. What about your talk did you hope they would be surprised by, and do you think they were?

The agitprop circulating about me beforehand was that I was a racist hate-slinger, so I wanted those present who had believed their own propaganda about me to run headlong into a major existential contradiction. I wanted to present the gospel in a way that seemed like a good news gospel, and I wanted it to hit them that way.

In these tense situations, satire, gentleness, and respect can all be used in response. You are sometimes known for satire, but surrounded by rudeness and antagonism, your manner stayed fairly gentle. What made you use one tactic over the other?

One of the principles of war is surprise. Satire should always be used as a tool or a weapon, and not as a relief valve for a personality disorder. When nonbelievers are expecting an effeminate and (to them) suitably soft articulation of biblical truth, the use of public satire can often come as a complete surprise, and can be very effective. When they are expecting a hate-filled thug, conjured up in their own imagination, surprising them the other way is also effective.

In addition, I should add that in face-to-face, person-to-person situations like this one, the apostle Paul requires us to speak this way.

And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth; and that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will (2 Tim. 2:24-26).

In situations like this where repentance is much needed, gentleness is much called-for. I don’t believe this passage is a “one-size-fits-all” verse, but it is a size that fits the kind of situation Paul was talking about. And I think Paul was talking about just this kind of event.

I heard a popular apologist say recently that if he had to write his apologetics book over again today, he’d begin with his first chapter on homosexuality. Why do you think homosexuality is such a challenge to the legitimacy of Christianity in society today?

I believe it is the perfect cultural expression of postmodern relativism, so much so that I call it pomosexuality. If culture is religion externalized, as Henry Van Til observed, homosexuality (and other forms of deviance) are the perfect manifestation of an evolutionary, re-invent yourself kind of paganism, which is the religious worldview our nation is in the process of adopting. It is no accident, no coincidence, in other words. Gay pride is not the basic problem; the basic problem is plain old pride—refusing to honor the Creator, and refusing to give him thanks. Paul lays the whole thing out in Romans 1. This disease progresses just the way the physician told us it would.

If you had to do the whole experience over again, what would you do differently? And what bit of advice would you give to pastors who minister in similar social climates?

I would try to answer some of the questions better, try to think more nimbly. If you imagine me with a metaphorical tennis racket, not as many of the answers were in the sweet spot as I would have liked. And of course, where I was happy with my answers, I would want to guard against being happy about that in a wrong way. C. S. Lewis has a great poem about that problem called “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer.” I keep a copy of that poem in my Bible.

As far as advice goes, a little bit of calm goes a long way. A crowd like that is wanting me to change my mind about homosexuality (obviously), but they are also wanting me to change my heart, my equilibrium. But why should I change anything in response to their demands? Too many Christians agree to change their hearts while stubbornly refusing to change their minds. But that is just as compromising. It is just another way to give in to them, another way of surrendering. If I don’t want to put them in charge of my doctrine, why would I put them in charge of my joy?

I have felt for years that the besetting sin of conservatives in our cultural engagements is that of being shrill, and I have devoted a great deal of attention in learning how to avoid that problem. I believe this kind of event shows the great need for that kind of approach.

John Starke is an editor for The Gospel Coalition and lead pastor of All Souls Church in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. You can follow him on Twitter.

CATEGORIES: INTERVIEW, Q&A

TAGS: APOLOGETICS, HOMOSEXUALITY

12 May, 2012

Bad Religion

The following is an interview at the National Post and may be read here.

I am anxious to read this book, as I think that the author has hit on something. I wonder though, if he will give due credit to theological liberalism that has done more to destroy the European and North American church than any other force. If one considers the role liberalism has played in the dismissal of Biblical authority on matters of life (abortion and euthanasia), sexuality, marriage, economics, politics, etc., it becomes clear that religious liberalism is the problem of the 20th century in the Western Church.

Q&A: Author Ross Douthat says the U.S. is turning to ‘bad religion’

Charles Lewis May 11, 2012 – 9:21 PM ET | Last Updated: May 12, 2012 8:03 AM ET

Lucas Jackson/Reuters files

Ross Douthat writes that after the decline of mainstream churches, the U.S. turned to extreme spiritual philosophies, such as those espoused by Oprah Winfrey.

Handout

Ross Douthat

There was a time when institutional Christianity was at the centre of American life because it stayed above partisan politics. A Christian leader could be a Republican or a Democrat, conservative or a liberal. A Martin Luther King and a Billy Graham could both promote civil rights and appeal to those of all political stripes. Religion provided a check on personal behaviour by promoting prudence and a moral compass that helped keep the nation healthy. But in the past several decades something went wrong, writes New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in his latest book, Bad Religion: How We Became A Nation Of Heretics. The centre began to crumble as the sexual revolution, globalization and increased wealth led to the decline of the mainstream churches. In its place emerged a nation that turned to the extremes: from Glenn Beck to Oprah Winfrey. Yes, that Oprah. The queen of self-actualization, says Mr. Douthat, preaches a brand of spirituality that is self-centred, destructive and parasitic. National Post religion reporter Charles Lewis spoke this week to Mr. Douthat, who was in his office in Washington.

Q: What is your definition of “bad religion?”
A: Bad religion may actually seem more logical than traditional Christianity because it does away with some of the paradoxes and mysteries inherent in the faith. It takes one element of the traditional Christian synthesis and promotes it at the expense of all others. But it ends up failing to do justice to the complexity of human existence and as a result having unfortunate consequences for the way people live their lives and for society as whole.

Q: You say Americans are “God haunted.” Are you saying that even in an era of bad religion, people feel God looming over their shoulders?
A: I think that’s true. One of the underlying themes of the book is because man is by nature a religious animal the decline of one form of religious faith is not necessarily doing away with the religious impulse. It ends up finding expressions in other ways, some of it exclusively religious and some spiritual and some political.

Q: What about when that impulse moves to politics?
A: When religious institutions are weak, as they are now, people with strong religious impulses are more likely to pour that fervour into politics. I argue that this take two forms — messianic and apocalyptic. Both are mirror-image heresies. It can take a messianic form where you assume that politics is the mechanism for bringing about the kingdom of heaven on Earth. This has always been the liberal temptation: to basically assume you can overcome human nature through political reform and bring the New Jerusalem down to Earth yourself. Look at the Barack Obama campaign in 2008 and its quasi-religious air: Magazine covers showed Obama with halos on his head and you had celebrities singing for him on YouTube. He had a messianic style.

Q: What is an example of the apocalyptic style?
A: Glenn Beck. Obama’s messianic campaign prompted an apocalyptic backlash and Beck’s popularity was the most obvious expression of that form. The apocalyptic temptation is that the kingdom of heaven has already been brought down to earth and it’s your political enemies who are taking it away. And that’s what you saw from Beck. He went beyond a healthy Christian patriotism to an almost idolatry of the American founding and this became part of his broader narrative in which his political opponents were not only wrong but evil.

Q: Why did you choose Billy Graham and Martin Luther King to write about?

Files; Getty Images

Previous U.S. religious leaders like Martin Luther King and Billy Graham could both appeal to those of all political stripes.

A: One of the criticisms made of the book is that people say I over-romanticize the era of King and Graham. And clearly there was polarization in that era as well … not every religious group was holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.” Graham did some courageous things on integration but he also said some evasive and cowardly things. Certainly he wasn’t always on the same page as King in that era. But that being said, I do think in the civil rights movement, religion related to the culture as a whole and there was a sense that it was easier in that era for religious figures to be influential in a way that transcended partisan divisions. Look at today when the [Roman] Catholic bishops come out against abortion. The assumption is they are siding with the Republican party. At mid-century it was easier for religious figures to present a message that was Christian first and then liberal or conservative second.

Q: How important was it that neither man had political ambition?
A: Even though Graham was more associated with a more right-wing politics and King with a more left-wing politics, they were different figures than say, a Pat Robertson or Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. It’s important to imagine how different mid-century would have been if Graham had tried to win America for Christ by running for president as a Republican, as Robertson did, or if King had repeatedly challenged for the Democratic nomination, as Jackson did.

Q: You say the sexual revolution was one of the triggers that helped erode the mainstream churches as more people became uncomfortable with Christian teachings about sex. Most people will get that. But you also cite the increase in personal wealth as a factor, too. But isn’t upward mobility part of the American dream? How did it become a factor in eroding mainstream religious institutions?
A: I’m a political conservative and a defender of capitalism. Of all the arrangements that we can make in a fallen world, capitalism is the one that has generated the most freedom and wealth. But it’s important for Christians to recognize that capitalist culture and the words of the New Testament rub against each other in sometimes uncomfortable ways. In an era of great wealth I don’t think it’s surprising that the message of an orthodox Christianity resonates a little less strongly than in eras of greater material privation. The idea that it’s harder for a “rich man to enter heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle” and “blessed are the poor in spirit” can seem less relevant in a time of great personal wealth.

Q: Is that what divides a Billy Graham from a prosperity gospel proponent like Joel Osteen?

AP files

Joel Osteen

A: Graham was able to combine a spirit of inclusion with a spirit of judgment, which obviously is a very tricky thing to do. The genius of Graham was he could stand up and preach a very stark simple Christian message, emphasizing his audience’s sinfulness and the need for repentance and the need to turn to Christ. Osteen’s genius is purely inclusive. Osteen’s message can be very inspiring and sometimes you need to hear that God loves you. But for Osteen that’s the entirety of his message. And there’s no room in that message for the possibility of real human sinfulness and real repentance. There’s no room in that message for the existence of suffering. Osteen’s message is that all people have to do is pray a little harder or have more faith in God and he will take their suffering away — and then also bless them with a big car and big house. That’s the point of having a cross hanging over a church: to offer a reminder that Jesus himself suffered and there are ways to live with suffering that don’t involve waiting for God to take it away.

Q: A chapter in Bad Religion is called “The God Within.” You describe it as a movement whose practitioners, like Oprah, stress that feeling good and self-actualization is the most important goal in life. It is also the furthest thing from orthodox Christianity. What is the problem with this kind of spirituality?
A: It’s the idea that you need to encounter God primarily within yourself and the highest form of your self may be actually identical to God. Elizabeth Gilbert popularized this in her book Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. So the only God that matters is the one you encounter within and you don’t have to consider other authorities, you don’t have to listen to a church and you don’t have to test your own experiences against scripture, religious authority, dogma and tradition. But it’s very tempting to listen to the voice within and assume that it’s God when really it’s your ego or libido.

Q: Are spiritual philosophies like Oprah’s dangerous to the nation? Is there a link to the risks Americans took on mortgages they could not afford?
A: The religious figures most people are likely to listen to today are not providing a check on people’s worst impulses that a better form of religion would provide. [It became OK] to elevate one’s short-term happiness at the expense of long-term interest of their families and communities. The problem for Americans was that we were trying to get rich and made foolhardy decisions along the way. And that’s where I think the Christian emphasis is most important for the wellbeing of society: it’s good to have a certain suspicion of material ambition and a knowledge that material ambitions often come to grief.

National Post

• Email: [email protected]

11 May, 2012

Same-Sex Marriage Makes a Lot of Sense | Michael Horton of the White Horse Inn

Same-Sex Marriage Makes a Lot of Sense

May.11, 2012 by Michael Horton in General

The media is still buzzing with President Obama’s recent announcement that he personally favors same-sex marriage. In 1996, he favored it. In 2004, though, he rejected it (affirming civil unions) on grounds of his Christian convictions that marriage is a “sanctified” union of a man and woman. Now he has reversed that position, again offering his Christian convictions (loving neighbors and being in a church community that accepts same-sex couples) as a rationale.

Speculations about political motivations aside, the President is hardly alone in his waffling over this controversial issue of significance for American society. Nor is he alone among those who say that they affirm same-sex marriage—or their own homosexual lifestyle—as something that is affirmed by God and their Christian commitment.

Makes a Lot of Sense?

Both sides trade Bible verses, while often sharing an unbiblical—secularized—theological framework at a deeper level. If God exists for our happiness and self-fulfillment, validating our sovereign right to choose our identity, then opposition to same-sex marriage (or abortion) is just irrational prejudice.

Given the broader worldview that many Americans (including Christians) embrace—or at least assume, same-sex marriage is a right to which anyone is legally entitled. After all, traditional marriages in our society are largely treated as contractual rather than covenantal, means of mutual self-fulfillment more than serving a larger purpose ordained by God. The state of the traditional family is so precarious that one wonders how same-sex marriage can appreciably deprave it.

Same-sex marriage makes sense if you assume that the individual is the center of the universe, that God—if he exists—is there to make us happy, and that our choices are not grounded in a nature created by God but in arbitrary self-construction. To the extent that this sort of “moralistic-therapeutic-deism” prevails in our churches, can we expect the world to think any differently? If we treat God as a product we sell to consumers for their self-improvement programs and make personal choice the trigger of salvation itself, then it may come as a big surprise (even contradiction) to the world when we tell them that truth (the way things are) trumps feelings and personal choice (what we want to make things to be).

Plausibility Structures

The secularist mantra, “You can’t legislate morality,” is a shibboleth. Defenders of same-sex marriage moralize as much as anyone. They appeal to dogmas like freedom of choice, individualism, love, respect, acceptance (not, tolerance, mind you, but acceptance), and excoriate religiously traditional opponents as hypocritical in failing to follow the loving example of Jesus. The agenda is plainly as ethical as any other. Whatever is decided at state and federal levels, a certain version of morality will most certainly be legislated.

What this civic debate—like others, such as abortion and end-of-life ethics—reveals is the significance of worldviews. Shaped within particular communities, our worldviews constitute what Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann coined as “plausibility structures.” Some things make sense, and others don’t, because of the tradition that has shaped us. We don’t just have a belief here and a belief there; our convictions are part of a web. Furthermore, many of these beliefs are assumptions that we haven’t tested, in part because we’re not even focally aware that we have them. We use them every day, though, and in spite of some inconsistencies they all hold together pretty firmly—unless a crisis (intellectual, moral, experiential) makes us lose confidence in the whole web.

Every worldview arises from a narrative—a story about who we are, how we got here, the meaning of history and our own lives, expectations for the future. From this narrative arise certain convictions (doctrines and ethical beliefs) that make that story significant for us. No longer merely assenting to external facts, we begin to indwell that story; it becomes ours as we respond to it and then live out its implications.

I’ve argued that in Christianity this can be described familiar terms of the drama, doctrine, doxology, and discipleship. But you see it in every worldview. Take Friedrich Nietzsche, for example. The late 19th-century philosopher believed that we came from nowhere meaningful and are going nowhere meaningful, but in the middle of it all we can create meaning for ourselves. Freed from an external creator, law-giver, redeemer, and consummator, we are finally on our own. The parents are on holiday (if there is a parent), and it’s party-time. In Romans, Paul identifies our fallen condition as a pathological inability to be thankful. After all, if reality is an accidental given of a random and impersonal universe rather than a gift of a purposeful God, then the only meaning we have is that which we design and execute for ourselves.

It’s something like Nietzsche’s narrative—the “Nowhere Man” poised to make something of his own individualism and will to power—that creates the plausibility structure of contemporary living in the West. Its central dogma is the will to power and its doxology is actually self-congratulatory, like Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” It yields masters and consumers rather than pilgrims and disciples.

The fact that “moralistic-therapeutic-deism” is the working theology of Americans—whether evangelicals, Catholics, mainline Protestants, or agnostics—demonstrates the pervasiveness of secularization even in our churches. The old actors may still be invoked: God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit. Bits of the old narrative may still be mentioned: creation, providence, redemption, salvation, heaven. However, the shift is evident enough. These old words are mapped onto an essentially human-centered rather than God-centered map. The map is the autonomous self’s striving to create a sense of meaning, purpose, and significance. Each individual writes his or her own script or life movie. “God” may still have a meaningful role as a supporting actor in our self-realization and peace of mind, but we’re the playwright, director, and star.

So when we come to debates about same-sex marriage in civic debates, even professions of deeply held Christian commitments can be invoked without the biblical narrative, doctrines and commands, doxology, and discipleship actually providing the authoritative source and structural integrity to our arguments.

Conservatives often appeal to self-fulfillment: gays are unhappy. They don’t realize their own potential to mate with the right gender and produce pleasant families like the rest of us. To be sure, there are other arguments, like referring to the decline of civilizations that accommodated homosexuality. However, this is just to extend the pragmatic-and-therapeutic-usefulness presupposition of individual autonomy to a social scale.

On this common ground, same-sex marriage is a no-brainer. Some people are happier and more fulfilled in committed same-sex relationships. There’s no use trying to refute other people’s emotional expressions of their own subjective states of consciousness. Do same-sex couples wrestle with tension, anxiety over a partner losing interest and being attracted to someone else, infidelity, and so forth? Looking at the state of traditional marriage, how exactly are these couples uniquely dysfunctional? A 2006 Amicus Brief presented to the California Supreme Court by the nation’s leading psychological and psychiatric bodies argued, “Gay men and lesbians form stable, committed relationships that are equivalent to heterosexual relationships in essential respects. The institution of marriage offers social, psychological, and health benefits that are denied to same-sex couples…There is no scientific basis for distinguishing between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples with respect to the legal rights, obligations, benefits, and burdens conferred by civil marriage.” Well, there you have it. The new high priests of the national soul have spoken.

How would someone who believes that sin is unhappiness and salvation is having “your best life now” make a good argument against same-sex marriage? There is simply no way of defending traditional marriage within the narrative logic that apparently most Christians—much less non-Christians—presuppose regardless of their position on this issue.

Tag: postmodernism

Bad Religion

Q&A: Author Ross Douthat says the U.S. is turning to ‘bad religion’

Related