One of the striking aspects of both reading the informal writing of professional philosophers and of working in the university is the level of detachment, punctuated by episodes of visceral disdain, that different strains of people all doing what normal people would call “philosophy” display toward one another. This seems comical when you admit that most of us had our tastes in philosophy set before we ever came on campus, or even read a work of philosophy. For example, I didn’t understand much of a distinction between philosophy and literature. To me something like Plato’s Republic, however carefully argued, was a work of literature; if you’d shown me Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as an undergrad, I would have probably said, “What kind of math is that?” No surprise there: my verbal scores on standardized tests have always vastly, embarrassingly outstripped my quantitative ones. It’s likely I was born to sympathize with philosophers trying to do things with stylistics and dismiss work riddled with formal logic as something foreign.

But I’m learning to continually force myself to see them on equal planes. Mostly by accident, I ended up in an interdisciplinary but residually postmodernist context where a mixture of Frankfurt School critical theory and Americanized French post-structuralism are quite important. I found Derrida fascinating, and was awed in that amateurish way by his difficult style. But I couldn’t deny that I much preferred reading commentators on his work—especially English-language ones by philosophers rather than literary critics—than the work itself. It was possible to talk about Derrida without saying things like the “eventality of the event.” I discovered a few things about the fragmentation of philosophy in that early engagement with Derrida: I preferred a certain philosophical current he descended from (Husserl and Heidegger) to his larger French context (Barthes, Foucault) or his American descendants (literary theory, cultural studies). I liked the content of Derrida’s work, and continue to feel it was worth the effort; however, a certain attitude surrounded him that felt dated and insular and was not one I wanted to characterize my work.

Heidegger was a slightly different experience that taught a different crop of lessons. People who read him tend to be more firmly in the “philosophy” camp (as opposed to critical or literary theory), but even so he remains suspicious to some American philosophers. It’s still not uncommon to hear Heidegger casually described as “obscurantist” or, regarding his later work, “mystical,” both of which turn out to be shallow epithets. But I understand; even I, sympathizing enormously with Heidegger’s project and respecting the idea of letting a writing style aid the work of thinking, found myself occasionally disillusioned with the difficulty of Being and Time and the even more obscure later work. It’s difficult to shake the impression, especially when you pick up a book like Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind that’s making similar points in a much simpler way, that it just doesn’t have to be this hard. (Which is not always true, but sometimes is.) Again, every bit of the effort was worth it, but it was ever more obvious how much I—just by temperament and taste—tend to value clarity and concision.

And so I moved closer to finding a style that fit. It turned out, it was bits from all the “camps.” It was clear to me that I was interested in philosophy on a world-historical scale, and liked the occasional overlap with disciplines like literature, sociology and theology. But I disliked reading sprawling, oracular prose, even if its intentions were defensible and its effect on its comprehenders indisputable. I appreciated the practical application and the passionate political engagement of “cultural theory,” and even many of the thinkers in their canon, but found things like its “tone” and endless neologisms (“virality,” “animality,” “spectrality,” etc) grating. It’s highly unlikely I will ever care about someone like Frege or even, outside of necessary-to-be-educated engagement, Wittgenstein; still, philosophers from their tradition often prove to be powerful commentators on and critics—perhaps even the most powerful commentators and critics—of people I do care about.

All of these preferences, though, are matters of taste, as my best and most open-minded teachers have admitted. I know of no case that formal logic is pointless or cultural theory is, as one particularly hostile critic put it, “long on attitude and short on argument.” I can take that on faith, or absorb it by impression, but I really have no clue. The only thing we can honestly say is, “So far, _____ hasn’t interested me enough to make me engage it seriously.” I haven’t read one major work of philosophy that I was able to conclude was utterly fraudulent or a waste of time; sure, perhaps “hard” or “boring” or “irrelevant to my work” or “saying the same things as X,” but nothing on the level of “intellectual fraud” or “dangerous.” Time and attention are limited, and most of our caricatures turn out to be arbitrary borders we erect to limit our ignorance. There’s so much good about letting the methods, styles, and values of the “rival camps,” or perhaps we should call them the “friendly neighboring tribes,” critique your own. Laziness, cant, bullshit and groupthink are not limited to any particular discipline or tradition; we find the one that fits us best, and once we’re there, most of us thinking people are remarkably similar. This is probably pretty obvious to those further along, but I guess we have to master what we love, struggle to be at least conversant in necessary things we don’t love, and refuse to make judgements about the rest.

Consider now the moral of this story. Developing doubts first articulated in Grecian antiquity, we learn that the Enlightenment first established “rationalism, social liberalism, religious toleration, science, the scientific method, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and the separation of church and state.” The Enlightenment is then construed as the backbone of the founding of the American republic, which established the separation of church and state as well as human rights. This was subsequently undermined by Romanticism’s appeal to “human emotions”. In the present day, the lesson continues, American politics has been similarly ruled by “human emotions” and the comforts of religion. Thankfully, the post concludes, a new “Age of Reason” is dawning.

What we are presented with is a popular account of atheism’s history that is intimately connected to a contemporary understanding of American culture and politics, itself based on a particular conception of Enlightenment rationalism and natural rights. It should be noted that this popular construal of the relationship between the Enlightenment and contemporary politics does in fact have echoes in the scholarly accounts advanced in recent years by several prominent historians, most notably in the highly erudite work of Jonathan Israel (The Radical Enlightenment, Enlightenment Contested, The Democratic Enlightenment).  The implication of the popular story of atheism’s history given in this blog post, however, is that religion is little more than an irrational defense mechanism by which disturbing passions and fears are calmed. Religion and Romanticism apparently cloud the human mind’s ability to think clearly and naturally about the world and our place in it. If the USA was founded on Enlightenment principles, the conclusion seems to be that a return to those principles provides the basis on which contemporary challenges and problems can be faced and solved.

The idea of a return to original principles is of course one of the oldest rhetorical tropes in Western thought. In our own day it is often seen as the appeal by which certain religious fundamentalisms try to impose a strict adherence to a given set of beliefs and practices. Yet it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that very many of our beliefs and practices are guided by similar stories. Our stories may not be origin myths, but they might nonetheless be narratives of another kind. What the blog post’s popular history of atheism offers, then, is a reminder of the fact that how we envision our moral and political lives is very often related to a kind narrative, typically one which mediates the past in some fashion and provides a certain amount of the structure for living out our beliefs in the present.

It is worth pausing a moment to reflect on how this particular post and its content came about: a local community is working through its own broader history, its considered convictions, and the kinds of social and institutional practices which sustain them. In this respect an atheist community stands in an analogous position to religious and civic communities. This raises an important and overlooked question: how do such communities affirm and revise their shared considered convictions in light of various kinds of pressures, including the work of scholars, the challenge of public contestation, the pluralistic forms of social life, within a polity framed by liberal democratic constitutionalism? That’s quite obviously a loaded question. As my own brief attempt indicates, it remains a question I think educators, politicians, judges, religious leaders, as well as unbelievers and atheists, should continue to ask within and between the various communities to which they belong.

Unfortunately, in this case, that trust was dashed to the ground. To put it plainly, May’s cover story, “W.W. Jay-Z,” written by Dr. Russell Moore is an unmitigated disaster. And that’s to say nothing of the misleading — but attention-grabbing — title on the cover, “Why the Gospel Needs Hip-Hop.” It is so horrendous that, upon reading it, I knew immediately I had to respond, but I couldn’t figure out where to begin or how to go about responding. A few of my early ideas were as follows: a line-by-line take down in which I painstakingly show what is wrong with just about every sentence. But who has time for that?

Next, I thought I’d just compose the snarkiest, most sarcastic screed of a reply I could conjure, but, considering the source (me), that seemed all too predictable.

Late one evening, as I thought about how disgusted I was by the piece, I even considered challenging Dr. Moore or any of my editor friends at CT to a rap battle. Actually, Ted Olsen, this offer still stands if you think you can hang.

Ultimately, though, those ideas are unrealistic and mostly terrible. I gave it time — which is something I’m trying do more of these days — and came up with a simple three point argument as to why the article, with it’s quest to find compatibility between Christian theology and rap music and its conclusion that rap offers an edge that contemporary evangelicalism is missing, is so awful.

So, here they are…

First, the author. Nothing against Dr. Moore — I follow him on Twitter and he seems very intelligent. I pretty much disagree with everything he says, and I think his characterizations of Brian McLaren border on personal attacks, but that’s not really relevant here. My problem with Dr. Moore authoring the Christian hip-hop story is that, despite his many impressive degrees, he seems wholly unqualified for the subject matter. More on that in a minute.

Because Moore is so unqualified, the following two problems arise. One, he uses Ken Myers as his pop culture expert. This is infuriating for reasons we will soon see. And the second issue that arises as a result of Moore’s authorship is that he seems to have no sense of the three-decade-long history of hip-hop, Christian or otherwise. He never mentions or even alludes to any of the current stock of rappers’ predecessors. I mean, not even dcTalk.

So, let’s start with Moore. When I saw his name attached to the article, I swiped ahead several pages (iPad edition) to get to the end of the article where CT typically puts a blurb about the author. With each swipe my anticipation grew, as did my hope that Moore had begun working on an extensive research project on the history of Christian hip-hop. Maybe I just had not heard about it. Truthfully, I’ve dreamt of writing this book, and even engaged my best friend and fellow Christian hip-hop devotee in the process of composing an outline for it. But now we’ve both had children so that’s probably on hold. Anyway, if we do want to eventually do it we can because, to date, no one really has (actually, Soup the Chemist, formerly of Christian hip-hop group SFC, seems to have written a book like this that he’s trying to fund through Kickstarter). Regardless, Dr. Moore isn’t writing it. In fact, in CT’s blurb about Moore there is no hint as to why he’s qualified to be writing about hip-hop at all.

But fine. That’s not totally necessary. I mean, if I had written the piece I may have asked CT to note that I am a former Christian rapper myself, thus giving me some “cred,” as the kid’s say, but that’s just me. And, who knows, maybe Moore is also a former Christian rapper. If he was, I hope he used the monicker RushMore, because that would be an awesome rap name for him. But the fact is, even if Rush doesn’t have any evident qualifications to write the piece, he could have overcome this by writing a well-researched and excellently sourced piece. But he didn’t.

This bring us to Ken Myers. I should say up front that this is my weakest argument. It’s very likely that some Myers fan is going to want to argue that he is the “pop culture expert” that Moore seems to think he is. And honestly, I’ve never really listened to his Mars Hill podcast, but I have read his pop culture manifesto, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, originally published in 1989 and re-released in 2012. This is a book that Marvin Olasky encouraged him to write (strike 1) and that he felt qualified to do because he “had studied film theory and criticism as an undergraduate” (strike 2). In the book, his basic conclusion is that “the challenge of living with popular culture may well be as serious for modern Christians as persecution and plagues were for the saints of earlier centuries.”

So he’s not a huge fan of the pop culture. It leads to young people being “aimless,” he writes. It renders belief in an objective moral order “entirely implausible.” In fact, he argues, pop culture isn’t really a culture at all. Myers originally came to these conclusions in the late 1980s. More recently, his publisher, Crossway, offered him the opportunity to revise the book but Myers wasn’t up to it. He writes, “an adequate revision would entail writing a new book.” Too much work, apparently. And, he adds, “Having reread it, I think this remains a useful introduction to the subject.” Yes, because pop culture has not really changed much since 1989.

Moore uses Myers to argue that the “feeling” of rap music presents challenges for Christians who want to communicate biblical truth. And, as a person who just spent an entire semester making undergrads read Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, and further trying to convince them of the merits of each man’s argument, I absolutely agree that the medium is hugely important in considering the content. But both Myers and Moore have an embarrassingly limited sense of the medium of rap music. Here’s Myers on the “feeling” of rap music: “Hip-hop is quite successful in [expressing] raw energy barely contained; it is a form that dares its hearers to contradict its address with a threat of escalation or retaliation.”

While this categorization certainly applies to a specific type of rap music, after three decades and thousands of artists creating their own variations on the genre, it is nearly impossible to categorize the “feeling” of rap music in any meaningful way. I don’t listen to rap that threatens me with escalation or retaliation. The rappers I love are hardly “fierce.”

Rather than reference Myers, who obviously lacks the understanding or even desire to understand hip-hop culture (Moore laughably writes at one point that Myers is “concerned for the integrity of hip-hop as an art form”), Moore could have called upon any number of true experts in the field of rap and hip-hop either in the Christian or secular spheres. I would have directed him to Josh Niemyjski, founder of sphereofhiphop.com and probably one of the most knowledgeable people on Christian hip-hop culture in the world. But that’s just me.

And this leads us to the final point. Although Moore refers several times to the contemporary crop of Christian rappers as “new,” he shows no evidence that he’s aware of what was “old.” In fact, I’m not even sure after re-reading several times if he is calling the whole phenomenon of Christian rap new, or just this most recent manifestation. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that he’s just saying that Lecrae and Shai Linne and Trip Lee and their ilk are the newest brand of a Christian hip-hop culture that is just about as old as hip-hop in general. But if he knows this to be true, why not mention this long lineage? How can you have a meaningful conversation about the interplay between gospel message and rap music without looking at those who have both succeeded gloriously and failed miserably before this most recent crop?

If he had any knowledge of those that came before, the question of whether or not the gospel can be communicated through rap lyrics would be moot. He could have skipped that question altogether and looked instead at the ways it has been done. If he wanted to see his bias about rap being bolstered by threat of retaliation, he could have looked at how Christian groups like Gospel Gangstaz, T-Bone, and C.M.C’s (among others), appropriated (badly, as if that wasn’t obvious) the “gangsta” style for Christ. But from there, he would have had to acknowledge that there’s not just one feeling of rap music, and as such, Christian rap groups ended up being quite diverse, particularly through what I call the golden age of Christian hip-hop, the mid- to late-90s. Good luck trying to group LA Symphony, Tunnel Rats, Grits, or Cross Movement under one general “feeling.”

And speaking of Cross Movement, to not even acknowledge that the current stock of rappers, with their theological preoccupations and “young, restless, and reformed” flavor, were made possible by the advent of Cross Movement in 1997, is a huge oversight.

Ultimately, the answer to the question that Moore set out to answer — whether hip-hop is “legitimate Christian art” — is much simpler. Thirty years of history, and a number of legitimate Christian hip-hop artists, answer with a resounding “True dat!” Or, “Yes.” They’d probably just say “yes.”

And rather than try to find any kind of necessary correlation between the “fierce” sound of rap music and the particular Christian theology these new Christian emcees espouse, Moore could have simply realized that rappers fundamentally rap about what they know. This is the essence of “keeping it real.” Inauthenticity is pretty much the only sin in rap music. Lecrae and the like haven’t stumbled upon some magical relationship between reformed theology and rap music, they’re just rapping about what they know — just like every other rapper, Christian or secular, has done before them. But, then, you’d have to know that there were other rappers in order to reach that conclusion.

Eighteen hundred words later, I probably should have just challenged MC RushMore to that rap battle.

If you do know such a person or if that person happens to be you, I hope what follows—some fragments from my reading of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, illustrated with my own religio-biography—will urge you to pick up the doorstop of a book that we’ve referenced several times on this blog, and which will only by superhuman effort be surpassed as the most significant contribution to philosophy of religion in the 21st century. I will be cutting and pasting and crudely lopping off corners to serve my purposes, but hopefully it can still provide a taste.

Toward the end of the book, Taylor attempts a textured, multidimensional account of why so many Westerners increasingly see “closed-world structures”—worldviews that posit nothing beyond the natural world—as unquestionable, established matters of fact, as “the way things are.” His argument in the preceding pages has been that there is nothing in our modern scientific understanding of the world that gives us definitive answers about whether there is anything “out there.” Both belief and unbelief are “construals” of how and why we are on this planet. Taylor wants to understand how the closed-world “spin” on the facts has, particularly among the Western educated and élite, become virtually unrecognizable as one explanation among others as opposed to the supreme, unquestioned one.

Taylor argues that our “immanent frame”—our “disenchanted” modern understanding of ourselves in a world operating by natural processes without magic or divinity—does push us toward denying any “beyond” to our universe. Absorbed in the narrative of materialist progress from birth, many Westerners consider themselves rational agents who know, thanks to the “facts” discovered by natural science, that myths and religion are obsolete:

…the central idea seems to be that the whole thrust of modern science has been to establish materialism. For the people who cling to this idea, the second order of conditions, the contemporary moral predicament, is unnecessary or merely secondary. Science alone can explain why belief is no longer possible … This is a view can be held by people on all levels; from the most sophisticated: “We exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of physical relations among material entities,” to the most direct and simple: Madonna’s “material girl, living in a material world.” … Religion or spirituality involves substituting wrong and mythical explanations, explaining by “demons.” At bottom it’s just a matter of facing the obvious truth. (8893/561) [1]

This view, according to Taylor, does not follow from the evidence provided by natural science, which is inconclusive on questions like “Does God exist?” or “What is good?”[2] Nevertheless, many people who live in a materialist worldview believe that science has, for example, “disproven” that God exists. And around this construal of the situation has grown up a powerful story about why other people continue to believe in gods despite the overwhelming “evidence,” and why even some hardened materialists are prone to have moments of doubt: we want to make up myths about reality to give ourselves the illusion of meaning and purpose in human life. But on this view, which goes back as far as the Victorian era, it is our duty to “put away the childish things” of religion and face the pitiless reality that “God is dead.” Mature adults have the courage to live without the illusions of religion, and to “affirm human worth, and the human good, without false illusion or consolation” (8905). This story is so dominant in some parts of society that no one who believes it sees it as a story about reality that is, as Taylor puts it, “shot through with values” and “leaps of faith.” Even former religious believers tend to take it up as the reality that’s left when the illusions of religion are subtracted; countless loss-of-faith stories follow the familiar path of an earnest believer agonizing with the realities of science and concluding he must grow up and give up his childish religious illusions.

This is the story I would have told about myself at a certain point: I grew up in an environment where not believing in God was unimaginable; plenty of people weren’t “right with God,” but they still knew he was judging them. I had a primary education most people would consider fundamentalist (Darwinism was a hoax, Columbus was a God-ordained missionary to the savages, the American founders were Biblical literalists, liberal elites were trying to set up a “one-world government,” etc.) though, thanks to Francis Schaeffer, it fatefully included Greek philosophy and existentialist literature. At some point during and after college, I became aware the extent to which conservative evangelicals made up facts to support their predetermined beliefs, many of which had little basis in scripture or church tradition. I became aware of the difficult theological questions that never got satisfying answers, like why a loving, omniscient God would set humankind up to plunge itself into unimaginable tragedy. I experienced the power of alternative answers to the deepest questions in films and novels; books on history, anthropology and natural science convinced me that the only religious belief possible was a weak, theologically empty one whose pointlessness was almost immediately obvious. I was an accidental materialist, a believer overwhelmed by the facts.

The problem with this, in Taylor’s account, is that it’s only one side of the story, the side that gets privileged in our “theory-oriented” enlightened culture, where we “live in our heads, trusting disengaged understandings of experience” (8792). People who have given up Christianity because of science often feel they have simply surrendered to obvious facts, which in a sense means they have. But only in a sense, because our construals of how and why the world is meaningful are “anticipatory,” meaning they run ahead of our rational explanations. The background world of what makes sense to us shifts ahead of us having theoretical reasons for why we changed our mind. So the poor Christian victims of Darwin are not in fact forced to abandon their faith because “science disproved the Bible”—it didn’t. Natural science is, in Taylor’s view, neutral on the God question. We feel a change in our pre- or sub-theoretical understanding of the world (which may have at least something to do with intellectual engagement), and the story about why that happened comes afterward [3].

Several years and some graduate school after my “deconversion,” I began to realize the story I had told myself of a systematic changing of my beliefs through argument was about as accurate as most movies that claim to be “based on true events.” In one sense, that theoretical story was true: intellectual advances I made during high school and college and after continually forced me to rethink my faith, and factual information and rational arguments played a significant role in undermining it. But my experience of the world also dramatically expanded during that time (through moves and travel), and my milieu changed significantly several times on the path from a tiny, homogenous conservative Christian town to an enormous, multicultural secular-progressive city. I experienced more places, people, art and information in a period of a few years than in my previous life combined, which shattered many of the stereotypes, prejudices and preconceived notions that made up the environment where my faith had once made sense. My “world”—in the Heideggerian sense of our “lived experience,” the non-theoretical background way things make sense to us—shifted to the extent that things I previously believed would eventually come to seem unimaginable.

But this did not happen primarily on an explicit, theoretically-engaged level; it happened “in the background,” in routines of daily life. Religious critics suggested as much—that I was sliding away from “the truth” only because of my environment, because I wanted to be “cool.” I strenuously objected that all this was, on the contrary, the product of Serious Reading and Good, Solid Intellectual Arguments. Most of us like to believe we have well-grounded, dispassionate reasons for our behavior and beliefs. But Taylor, following Heidegger, says this doesn’t really get at why we slide around the belief scale; rational explanations “give too much place to changes in belief, as against those in experience and sensibility” (9092). My critics were correct that something else besides just theories and arguments was driving the shift [4]. The intellectual dimension was a real, but it was pulled along by massive changes in experience, and my changing sense of what kind of person I wanted to become.

Another of Taylor’s observations is that people like me don’t just convert out of Christianity, we convert into something else, usually an “exclusive humanist” worldview. It’s not a matter of coming out of the cave into the daylight, it’s a matter of a new, more or less equally faith-based story eclipsing the old one’s explanatory power:

What happened here was not that a moral outlook bowed to brute facts. Rather we might say that one moral outlook gave way to another. Another model of what was higher triumphed. And much was going for this model: images of power, of untrammelled agency, of spiritual self-possession. On the other side, one’s childhood faith had perhaps in many respects remained childish; it was all too easy to come to see it as essentially and constitutionally so.

What I converted to was not, as I understood it at the time, some sort of objective “view from nowhere” outlook that only had beliefs to the extent their truth could be demonstrated empirically. It was rather, as Taylor puts it, “a certain package uniting materialism with a moral outlook, the package we could call ‘atheist humanism,’ or exclusive humanism” (9034), or, as we could perhaps even better call it, “dull, platitudinous liberalism.” It’s amusing now how little this new philosophy intrinsically had to do with the materialism I’d become convinced of. Nothing about individual liberty, human rights, or civilizational progress follow automatically from the fact that “God is dead.” The new picture is “shot through with values” (8869), however insistently it takes itself to “emerge out of careful, objective, presuppositionless scrutiny” (8890). There are as many value judgements in liberal humanism as there are in its parent religion, and many people who come to the point of unbelief are happy to accept them despite objecting to the similar ungroundedness of Christianity. It has a certain noble appeal: we’re good Westerners who can no longer believe in God, but are still heirs of a great civilization who can press on, being as reasonable and dispassionate as possible, for the sake of humanity. It explains why we used to believe the myths and shrouds our disenchantment in courage and moral duty; it’s no surprise a great number of homeless ex-believers end up there.

The point is not to insult liberal humanism; after all, there are far worse things. The point is to remind us that it is a construal in a culture where it tends to assert itself as natural and uncontroversial, to all sorts of cultural and political detriment that I can’t get into here. I hope, if possible, people who have had the privilege of going between, of actually feeling the persuasive power of different kinds of construals that co-exist in our culture, can elevate the conversation above the crude Doug Wilson vs. Christopher Hitchens-type spectacle that is so clickable. I think reading Taylor is an excellent tonic; even a few chapters of A Secular Age will do those hovering between belief and unbelief far more good than the collected works of “Ditchkins.” Ending up in a “cross-pressured” no-man’s land—torn between immanence and transcendence—may feel inconclusive, but it’s creatively productive, and is certainly better than exchanging one half-baked ideology for another [5]. One needn’t remain religious to admit potential harm in the lack of self-awareness in certain secular construals of the world, and to be able to see religious belief, with a kind humility and respect, as a construal that can be equally as plausible as our own. And one that is to be studied carefully, especially by philosophy and politics, for its crucial insights about human be-ing.

For those who inhabit a religious construal, and are perhaps working to deepen, enrich, and preserve it, there are also important lessons to be found in Taylor (who is, after all, on your side). I’ll address one to evangelical Protestantism, since I know it best: the unqualified disaster of apologetics that have focused on rational-empirical argumentation as a means of persuasion, intensifying the already-problematic tendency of Protestantism to be in one’s head than in the practices of one’s body. The thrust of “resurgent” evangelical activity in my lifetime has been mostly to embrace and even radicalize the most harmful features of the modern obsession with rational control. If you can begin to pull your religion out of that abyss, there’s no telling what a powerful countercurrent it might become.

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1. Citations are from the digital edition, which unfortunately doesn’t include original page numbers.

2. Where Taylor might be critiqued is in his account of contemporary natural science; I think many people working in the rapidly-progressing and mind-bending scientific disciplines would very much dispute his insistence that they do no particular damage to a religious construal of the world. Of course they do, and I say that as someone prepared to keep a pretty tight rein on what science is allowed to be said to “explain.” Contemporary science is so mind-boggling that it’s driving even Continental philosophers, so recently (in)famous for being the deconstructors of scientific hubris, to bow to it. It may not tell us anything in particular about how to leave meaningfully or ethically, but it can make it virtually impossible to believe we can know anything in particular about some real divine being, much less communicate with it. But Taylor’s probably got me again here: I’m not doing those experiments myself, I’m taking scientists’ word for them, I’m taking massive leaps of faith, believing a story I’ve chosen to believe. Science may make it virtually impossible to believe for a person like me living the kind of life I live, but that’s not the same for everyone in my own country or even my own family.

3. This parallels somewhat Jonathan Haidt’s argument in The Righteous Mind that we make moral decisions based on intuition, and work out reasons for those judgements afterward.

4. A version of this same dynamic played out in the recent dust-up over the pastor Tim Keller’s reported comment that a major hindrance to Christian revival was the fact that a majority of young believers are having premarital sex, and his reference to a pastor friend who said there was usually a connection between young evangelicals’ “sexual sin” and the emergence of religious doubt. It’s always struck me that evangelical leaders are so eager to attribute questioning to “sin” or “worldliness” or desire to fit in, perhaps to avoid having to give serious answers. But on the Taylorian view I’m presenting here, something like having premarital sex against the teachings of your religion could in fact lead to a “shift in experience and sensibility,” and thus spark new intellectual activity.

5. There’s really nothing quite as pathetic. See, for example: David Mamet, Frank Schaeffer, and on and on.

If I had to guess what was going to emerge from evangelicals under 30, it would be something like a bell curve: a large loop of silence and relative apathy with tails of committed support and opposition trailing off each side. The supporters are perhaps the least surprising and least interesting, and I think it’s fair to say they will eventually make the bell somewhat lopsided, i.e., there will be a larger number of open, committed supporters of gay marriage than there will be opponents.

The large, complex middle tells the story of the past 15 years. There are lots of different stripes of people who make up this center: some silently supportive of gay marriage, some privately opposed. Probably the largest group is those who feel a unsettled mix of apathy and indecision: their theology is relatively conservative, but the proximity of their gay friends and co-workers and the radical shift in the surrounding culture’s attitude has done its work. Most of all, the legacy of the religious right still haunts; it’s difficult to overstate just how deeply the rejection of the politicized fundamentalism of the past three decades has shaped them. Even if they remain theologically opposed to gay marriage, they are likely to be aware the battle is lost and unsure it’s all that big a deal. I suspect we’ll hear—are already hearing—excuses like, “the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage anyway” or “divorce is worse for marriage than the gays” or “we should focus on religious freedom.” Because of how deep the rejection of and apathy about politics goes among this group, there will be virtually no civic participation in any direction; they’re likely to mostly lay low until this is such a non-issue that no one really talks about it anymore.

What will be the most unpredictable and interesting will be the right-wing tail: the committed opponents, like those profiled in this New York Times piece and the previously mentioned World story. It’s difficult to know what the motivations are here—conviction, careerism, the glory of holding out for a lost cause, or maybe all of the above. These guys will continue to have jobs and funding and pats on the back from the evangelical establishment as it further fades in relevance. But it seems inevitable that they will become more and more isolated from anything like the evangelical mainstream, and that this will provoke radicalizing delusions that could harden into a kind of intellectual far-right that’s different than the one we’re used to—better educated, more savvy, but darker because they’re more realistic about what they’re up against. But then again, the pull of the Christian-right lobbying machine in Washington may co-opt the careerist among them and produce another generation of Tony Perkinses. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Learning a foreign language as an adult has provoked lots of thoughts on these questions. The value of multilingualism hardly needs a defense; on a global scale, better knowledge of foreign languages facilitates commerce and makes international political relations more democratic by mitigating the effects of linguistic imperialism. On an individual level, it’s one of the most mind-opening intellectual experiences a person can have; there’s no better way to find the edges of your own mental universe, and to discover how profoundly your language shapes your worldview. You will probably learn the nuts and bolts of your own language’s grammar in ways you never understood previously. It actually makes you smarter. It makes you feel cultured; there’s nothing quite like reading books and conversing with people in your second language.

But it’s very, very hard. Or perhaps more precisely, it’s long. I don’t think language study is actually that difficult, but learning it outside an immersion environment takes a long time and a level of effort that is rarely advertised in Rosetta Stone ads. As Coates points out, even if you took two or three years of a foreign language in high school, and even if you had a great teacher who used an immersion method, it’s still unlikely you would come out confident enough to have a conversation in a foreign country. So if primary education is going to do the job, it’d take a lot more resources beginning a lot earlier on.

Then there’s the global reality: if you’re a native English speaker, you have very little external incentive to master a second language, and that will continue to be so even as China and India rise in economic stature. Sure, we’re basically a bilingual (English-Spanish) nation already, and there’s work to be had for people who know French, Arabic, or Chinese. Of course more bilingualism would make Americans more culturally unified and economically competitive. But it’s impossible to say it’s a necessity, or that the U.S. suffers any great political or economic harm if most of us don’t learn any of those. English is on top, and way on top, for the forseeable future.

So the picture is a bit disheartening for those of us who have been converted to the glorious possibilities of language learning: most of the benefits are personal and intangible, and educating large numbers of Americans in foreign languages is expensive, requires considerable effort from students, and is not obviously “necessary.” Considering that we already so woefully under-invest in even more basic foundations of education in this country, is there any hope whatsoever that it could be a priority? What’s a reasonable expectation?

A few thoughts:

— We should continue to advocate for language study on the basis that is culturally enriching and intellectually stimulating, both of which are at least as important as any instrumental economic concern. It makes kids smarter, more culturally aware, and (perhaps less importantly) gives them an advantage if they need a second language in their future line of work. I think Spanish should be mandatory in most of U.S., and others should be available as resources allow. Even if the fight against education becoming instrumentalized knowledge-production is ultimately quixotic, let’s resist as long as we can.

— Language education would be much more effective if it began at the beginning, and that wouldn’t necessarily be expensive. You don’t need a fluent Spanish teacher to teach preschoolers uno, dos, tres, or that a dog is also a perro. (As much as we all love to hate it, think Dora the Explorer.) The internet and iPads exist, and that means every Disney movie ever dubbed in every language ever is right there on YouTube. The younger the kids, the faster they learn, and it would probably be relatively painless to have many American kids knowing basic Spanish before they even get to high school.

— High school curriculum should focus on interaction rather than book-work. (See this article I wrote recently about why the French school system fails at teaching English.) You shouldn’t get a “lecture” in Spanish class, and shouldn’t be spending most of your time memorizing rules. High school students should be doing interactive activities, watching movies with subtitles, and practicing with not-very-hard-to-find native Spanish speakers. If all they’re getting is a few semesters, it should be like a “travel Spanish” or “travel French” class: focused on learning basic interactions that might actually happen in their future. (I realize this is more difficult for harder languages like Arabic or Chinese, which may require more years of groundwork and extracurricular study.)

Icon depicting the First Council of Nicaea. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This week’s DOMA hearings have prompted the Evangelical blogbuddies to gird their loins and defend the ranks of the faithful few; that is, those who have not “rejected the faith of historic, orthodox Christianity,” even when all others (including many apparently poser-Christians) just didn’t have the stamina. Joe Carter, blogger for the Gospel Coalition, has graciously reminded his fellow believers that even in the face of conflict, such orthodoxy is worth fighting for.

The only problem is that it doesn’t exist.

At least, that is, not as Carter is presenting it. He would have his audience believe (and, I can attest, much of it does, my former self included) that Christianity is an eternal and monolithic entity, whose doctrine and practices—what’s important or central about them—has remained unchanged since the Pentecost. Now, it is quite clear that the doctrine and practices of the Christian church today (in all its forms) have been inherited from some form of historic Christianity, but the real questions here are how much of it, and which parts.

For example, many Christian churches today would affirm the Nicene Creed (though there’s some debate about the “c” in “catholic”), whether or not it is affirmed weekly in their worship. Creedal points like the coeternality of all three persons of the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, or the Resurrection of the Dead (among others) have been proclaimed and celebrated by Christians throughout the centuries. But Carter’s blog post argues not simply that Christianity has maintained its heritage through these broad strokes, but also in some of its finer points, such as the role of Scripture, down to even the most minute, like the definition of idolatry and (for Carter) by extension, marriage.

Don’t get me wrong here: the Bible has been a very important part of the Christian church in almost all of its forms, but claims to inerrancy (not only the term, but also the concept) are a relatively new, and therefore relatively late, conviction of certain churches. For example, Augustine believed the Bible was an authority, but that its authority and (most importantly) its interpretation was given by the Church, which stood as the greater authority. Evangelicals today argue that he had it backwards, that the Bible should be judge over the church. My point is not to take sides in this debate, but to note that such a debate exists: not over some ‘secondary’ doctrine, but over the source of that very doctrine with which we begin.

Carter accuses many American believers of having “exchanged the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for the God of faux-love, cultural acceptance, and open theism.” Presumably, he excludes the Gospel Coalition from this accusation, but his selection of American Christianity’s failings is revealing. It seems to escape Carter that he has communicated via blogging (vs. say, an encyclical), or that Evangelicalism/the Mega Church movement has succumbed to the American culture of the commodification of everything—from flashy book deals (have you seen some of those covers?), to sermon-series and conferences that look like corporate ad-campaigns (does it matter if people fill your pews for the same reasons they purchased Coke over Pepsi—something sexy told them to?), to worship session rock-concert-laser-light-shows (guitar solos for Jesus). There are many more examples that could be employed, and my goal here is not to condemn the Evangelical church, but only to make clear that it, too, is largely affirming of the culture and ethos of 21^st century America. We cannot lament that “what is considered sin changes based on the fickle attitudes of Americans” while wearing swimsuits that make the 1920s blush and clothing made in southeast Asian sweatshops. Christianity, like the cultures in which it takes form, is tradition that, like all traditions, changes.

The problem, then, is not that Evangelicalism has failed to resist American culture, but that it pretends that it has resisted. It pretends that it has not surrendered to the “the secular liberal-libertarian conception of freedom” while picking and choosing those Biblical commands which ought to be followed, and those which can be safely ignored. We can endorse our neighbors’ decisions about divorce and remarriage, we can support companies that make a profit exploiting the poor, or wear braids in our hair and jewelry around our necks . God didn’t really mean those ones.

I take issue with Carter (and much of the Evangelical church) not for simply taking a stand, but for taking a stand on this issue while refusing to ask the harder questions. If today’s church affirms marriage as God has always ordained it, why is its position on divorce so similar to that of 21^st century America? Why does the ordained, marital sexual relationship look so much more like the one displayed in our pornographic culture than those of “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?” If Carter is right that marriage proposed by “the God of the Bible, a God that is the same yesterday, today, and forever,” has always been amenable to a “clear and concise definition” (which he does not provide), why does it often look so different from Evangelical conceptions of marriage today? Why does Jacob get two wives? Why does God “give” Saul’s wives to David (2 Sam 12:8)? Why does Peter consider the marital relationship analogous to that between slaves and masters (1 Pet 3) or that between Christ and the church (Eph 5)? Surely, even the more complementarian marriages endorsed by mainstream Evangelicalism today do not function with such radically unequal modes of authority and submission.

The point of all of this is that marriage, like Christianity, has never been a monolithic, eternal entity (or even concept) that transcends the movements of cultures throughout time. In fact, one of the few things we might be able to call ‘unchanging’ about the Christian tradition is its very ability to change—to adapt and evolve—and this is a very good thing. A Christianity that can meet the needs of its surrounding society (think Jesus eating with the sinners despite the protestation of the Pharisees, or Paul’s being weak to save the weak) is a Christianity that has shown up in its own, individuated ways, under different sets of particular circumstances; and it is a Christianity that will continue to show up a little bit differently every time. My Christianity is in some ways similar, but in some ways radically different than the faith of Augustine, whose practice of Christianity was different than Calvin’s, whose is different even than Paul’s. And this is not something the church should try to hide. But this is a Christianity (yes, one among many forms) that I want to be a part of.

I am not, and cannot be, a member of the unchanging stream of historic, orthodox Christianity, because such a thing does not exist. I am a Christian that affirms the radical love of Jesus Christ, who defended the weak and stood up for the oppressed in the face of all the protesting by the surrounding religious elite. I am but one piece, one thread, of a tradition that, praise Jesus, has been adapting and evolving since the minute it began. And thus, I don’t need to make a theology that claims to be identical with 2000 years of a tradition. I am not a Christian of the past 2000 years. I am a Christian in the 21^st century.

I selected a video that promised a “story of courage.” In the video, we meet a soldier who fought in Afghanistan and learn, among other things, that he’s a fan of professional wrestling. Next thing you know, he’s being offered an oversized ticket to Wrestlemania by one of his WWE heroes. The confusion on the veteran’s face mirrored the looks on my students’ faces perfectly as I turned the lights back on after the clip had ended.

What they had just witnessed, they concluded after a brief discussion, was infotainment — some kind of amalgamation of a news story and an entertainment piece.

I offered this object lesson to exemplify the often ridiculous lengths the news media will go to keep audiences entertained just one week before the 24-hour news cycle gave itself over to constant coverage of Pope Benedict’s retirement and the subsequent process to select the next pontiff. If I had selected a video from CNN last week or the week before, I might have treated my students to such clips as “Our five fave celeb reactions to Pope’s election,” “Comedians crack jokes at new pope,” and “The pope’s first day.”

Sure, you’ll say, that’s entertainment masquerading as news, but that’s television news for you. And yet, print media was on the bandwagon as well, contributing breathless speculation over who would be selected as the next pope — would he be a non-European? An African? Would he be a she?

The thing is, for most Americans, the selection of the next pope matters as much as say, the selection of the next president of Kenya — a process that was also taking place last week, but one that earned very little media attention. For most of the year, the goings-on of the Roman Catholic church are, at best, ignored and, at worst, considered dangerously passé. Additionally, only about 20% of American adults are Catholics, and among those, the number that actually know who the pope is at any given time is far fewer. And yet millions of Americans were inexplicably glued to their televisions and computers, watching the slowly unfolding events in Rome like it was the latest reality TV craze. A friend who admits to paying very little attention to current events told me she and her officemates kept checking The Guardian’s site IsThereWhiteSmoke.com “Just for fun.”

Henry David Thoreua once wrote, as telegraph wires began criss-crossing the United States in the 1800s, that Samuel Morse’s invention made communication between such distant places as Maine and Texas possible, but, he writes, “Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” This passage, as quoted in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, came to mind last week as I tried, fruitlessly, to avoid the wall-to-wall pope coverage. Postman famously laments the way the telegraph, in partnership with the press, helped create the category news of the day. “Within months of Morse’s first public demonstration,” Postman writes, “the local and the timeless had lost their central position in newspapers, eclipsed by the dazzle of distance and speed.”

The accuracy of Postman’s observations regarding the rise of what he called “context-free information” from the mid-1980s, before the internet became the main source of news and information for most Americans, has been noted by plenty of other scholars. My students think Postman was cranky about TV; can you imagine, I ask them, if he had written Amusing Ourselves to Death about the internet?

If “information derives its importance from the possibilities of action,” as Postman writes, any context-free information that can not lead to action is entertainment. In this light, the selection of the next pope is as unactionable, and thus unimportant, to most Americans as the next Kenyan president. But, for a week in March of 2013, Pope Francis was the world’s hottest celebrity.

After showing my students the videos from CNN, lecturing on Postman and Marshall McLuhan, and requiring them to respond in essay form, I’m torn as to how to further direct them. As the semester’s end quickly approaches, I feel like I should leave them with some practical wisdom for how to consume news conscientiously, being careful not to get pulled into the media madhouse. But where can they look? I worry that they’ll hear me echoing Postman’s curmudgeonly warnings and they’ll conclude that they shouldn’t bother paying attention to current events at all. I can hear them now, most of what they report on NPR has no immediate bearing on our lives, so why should we listen? 

Honestly, sometimes I feel this way too — a weary wanderer in the desert of context-free information. After all, context is what is so often missing when any news story is only afforded, as the entertainment adage goes, 15 minutes of fame. In these times, it seems certain that there’s no turning back; the “information glut” has only become more gluttonous since Postman referred to it that way in the 80s.

But there are signs of hope; the existence of sites like Cognoscenti, the popularity of #longreads, and the proliferation of tablet-based magazines and journals like “The New Inquiry” and “The Magazine,” which eschew the news cycle for deeper commentary, are encouraging indications that the “news of the day” can be contextualized in such a way that it has actual bearing on our daily lives.

It is to these places, I think, that I’ll point my students when it comes time for us to part ways in May.