In the beginning, when I was an impressionable high school student some time in the mid 2000s, a foundational text impacted the world and how I saw my views for the rest of my life. It was known as "Understanding the Times". I was a conservative Christian, going to a conservative Christian school, and being taught conservative christian propaganda in my religion classes. I ate that stuff up. And then one year, we had a class on apologetics and this book served as the framework through which we saw the world.
Essentially, understanding the times separates various schools of thought into comprehensive philosophies that influence how we see the world in often radical ways. The class I took worked off of the old version of the book, which had four worldviews: Biblical Christianity, Secular Humanism, Marxism-Leninism, and Cosmic Humanism. However, I recently reread the updated version of the book, and it added two more: Islam and Postmodernism.
Conservative Christians see the world as a war between these ideologies, and to them, conservative Christianity is under assault by these so called false doctrines. Such christians have found that a large plurality of christian high school students lose their faith in college or after, and wanting to teach Christians how the world "really works" and how they should percieve the world, they taught them this curriculum. It was an attempt to innoculate people against other worldview that challenge Christianity. As you can tell, in my case, it didn't work very well, for reasons we'll get to in this article.
The Christian worldview taught in this book is the fundamentalist Christian worldview. It is the view in which the Bible is treated as special revelation from God, and must be followed at all times. They teach that the world is 6000 years old. That evolution isn't real. That the facts are on their side. They attempt to acquaint people with the talking points of other worldviews, in an attempt to make Christians more familiar with these perspectives and resistant to changing their own perspective.
And in this, the Christian worldview sets itself up for failure. You see, a big element of the Christian worldview as portrayed in this book, is that the worldview isn't up for compromise. You either accept all of it, or you accept none of it. The entire worldview is dependent on the truth of the Bible, and it rises or falls based on it. The reason why some Christians are so ride and die on literal 6 day creationism is because of this. 6 day creationism means that Adam and Eve existed, which means that the fall happened, which means sin is real, the flood happened, and we need Jesus to redeem us. If some parts of the Bible are true and some aren't, it weakens the entire argument for the faith. If Adam and Eve weren't real people, was there ever a garden of eden? Did the fall happen? Where did sin come from? What is Jesus saving us from? And while it is possible to try to "compromise" with reality and redefine certain doctrines or claim it was symbolic or something, I mean, it makes sense. The Christian religion is a self contained worldview that becomes significantly weaker if you don't accept many of the premises that it rests on. Yes yes, some Christians will say that fundamentalists are ignorant and don't understand "real Christianity", but what is "real Christianity" if not that? So many Christians claim to support "real Christianity" while claiming versions they don't like are somehow fake or heretical, and honestly, after a while, they all look the same and are equally as valid or invalid. Because if the worldview isn't consistent, then it comes into question.
And this is basically why I eventually lost my faith. While this book did portray other worldviews in an attempt to innoculate me against them, in a lot of ways Christians put up strawmen for themselves to attack, and when you actually engage with these other worldviews in college, they end up making far more sense and are able to successfully argue their points. You see, while Christians love to act like college is hostile to the Christian faith, if anything they handle it with kid gloves, attempting to dance around the worldview question and saying you can believe whatever your faith wants, but that this class is going to come at it from another perspective. But...here's the thing. That perspective often comes from a place of reason and evidence. Academics, while it can have ideological biases at times, often justifies the need for such biases. And all in all, the only worldview they're ultimately interested in is finding out what is true. They told me in college, it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you believe it for good reason. If Christianity leads you to truth then believe that, if something else does, then believe that.
And then that's where the Christian worldview takes a beating. Because the Christian worldview really does rise or fall based on its assumptions. And if the evidence leads to evolution being true, or biblical creationism being a myth, well...the Christian worldview looks more and more crazy. In my first year in college I didn't know what I wanted to major in, and I investigated religious studies. I decided to take classes on the Bible. And give the Bible was the foundation of my Christian worldview, well, finding out how it came about and how all of the pieces fit together and understanding its context basically wrecked my faith in the long term. Because Genesis IS myth. Much of the bible is grossly misinterpreted or mistranslated by Christians, the gospels were NOT written by eyewitnesses but were circulated by mouth for decades before finally being written down anonymously, greatly damaging their trustworthiness, and sorry guys, the second coming of christ as told in revelation isn't happening.
Still, one year of that isn't going to destroy my faith, so what happened from there? Well, I majored in political science and sociology, pursing my interest in politics and social sciences. Actually the second major was criminology but it was part of the sociology department. And this gave me access to a lot of different material. Studying politics in a secular university was a lot different than in a religious school. A lot of the myths I was told about the founders quite frankly fell apart. They weren't all Christian, they didn't want to create a de facto theocracy, and they wanted religion and state to be as separate as possible. I actually ended up taking an entire class on the first amendment, studying both the establishment and free exercise clauses in detail, and SCOTUS, up until recently, had it right. I'll be coming back around to THAT mess later on as I feel like this book contextualizes what's going on THERE, but yeah. Let's just say every ruling they had, had logic behind it that was for the greater good. It was intended to preserve peoples' freedoms and liberties, not curtail them. Christians love to portray themselves as victims of persecution but in reality the government is just saying no to them unjustly wanting to push their views on people.
And it just went on and on and on. I studied ethics, being introduced to many systems of philosophy that debunked the idea that this book would give off that without God and divine command theory moral relativism would lead to mass deaths. I studied public policy, which allowed me to be able to design policy and know the difference between good policy and bad policy, apparently liberals wanting government to do things aren't just high minded utopians blind to the consequences of their own ideology, there are whole fields of political science dedicated to understanding policy and its consequences, and as time went on, that entire system weakened and fell apart.
The fact is, the Biblical worldview does rely on a lot of assumptions, and they're all faulty. And while the book did attempt to criticize other ideologies like secular humanism, and marxism, and postmodernism, it did so in extremely sloppy terms that amounted to massive strawmen. Like the idea that without god we would all fall to moral relativism which is bad. And we would all kill each other, which is patently untrue. There are many moral and ethical systems out there behind the natural rights theory espoused in this book that could be used to approach moral questions, and all have pros and cons, and many, assuming you believe in some sort of consequentualist system where morality has to be at least somewhat related to morality, would produce superior results to the christian worldview, which is essentially arbitrary. And as I found the Christian view to be more false and propagandistic, other views such as secular humanism seemed to resonate more and more with me. And that led to the collapse of my worldview.
For me, it came to the point where I had to either be delusional and go crazy, or I had to accept reality and reject Christianity. That was what it came down to. because as the book pointed out at the end, if Christianity isn't true, then Christians must come off as a bunch of crazy people to other people. And yeah, you guys do. No offense to any moderate Christian who reads this that, as I would frame it, tries to compromise with reality, Christianity in its pure unadulterated form a la Biblical liberalism is crazy. And this has major consequences on society.
You see, Christians have a worldview, and this worldview is held by a large plurality of the American population. Around 40% of people still believe that people were created in their present form, meaning evolution is false. And this is correlated with political ideology, with the gap being closer to 30% with democrats, and 50% with republicans. Why do democrats still have creationists you ask? Well, they still have a lot of religious people, especially in their POC demographics. Keep in mind secular humanism is a "white progressive" belief system according to the "postmodernists". And of course, some people just have ignorant opinions. But, this ignorance takes a toll on our politics. If your worldview is not correct, then you can be advocating for disastrous things. The Christians portrayed varying forms of left wing ideologies as doing this, but as a secular leftie, I'd argue the Christians are. Look at the kinds of beliefs that the republican party has had over the years. The idea that climate change isn't real because as Rush Limbaugh would say, god wouldn't create a world that we could destroy. The idea that we need to regulate abortion and gay marriage because of divine command theory or what have you. The idea that vaccines are harmful and that we shouldn't be vaccinated, or that personal responsibility is responsible for most poverty, or that Donald Trump stole the election. Time and time again, this fundamentalist conservative Christian worldview comes back and bites American politics in the butt. Ideology matters, and if your worldview is wrong, then you're potentially advocating for dangerous things and don't know it.
And that sums up the modern GOP. These kinds of fundamentalist Christians have forged an unholy alliance (or is it "holy") with the republican party, and have wedded their ideas to otherwise conservative attitudes. And this is shown in the book. Christianity in this book is the champion of conservatism. They portray themselves as gandalf rejecting the one ring, knowing that if they embrace it, it would corrupt them. So they nominally support "small government". They claim not to want church and state to mix, but as we know, on issues that concern religion, they often are fine with imposing their views on everyone. Again, see abortion and gay marriage. They also claim to support capitalism. They claim it's the only system that brings prosperity, and encourages people to work, while leftist ideologies don't. They equate all of these ideologies with the former soviet unions, claiming theyt're utopian and doomed to failure, while free market capitalism might not be perfect, but it is the best ideology we have, because it encourages people to work.
Here we see a clear evolution in my views too. Back in the day, this kind of narrative appealed to me. Because this book made little to no distinction between liberalism, social democracy, socialism, etc, and approached them as a huge leftist blob, talking about redistribution of wealth one minute and stalinist communism the second and seemingly melding them together, pushed this narrative that any non conservative economic policy is disastrous and that conservatism is the only way.
And for a while I accepted that. After all, in the biblical worldview, we live in a fallen world. Because we sinned against God and ate some fruit, we all have to work for a living. And that;s why the world is as it is. In the Christian worldview, work is prescriptive. Those who dont work dont eat, and those who work are guaranteed prosperity.
But, as we've seen, this narrative fell apart. As I've gotten older, I've realized liberalism isn't communism. hell, not even mass redistribution of wealth is communism. You can give people a UBI and most people WILL STILL WORK. And if anything most poverty in our system is because we dont have enough work, and we force people to work in a market system where the market guarantees massive power imbalances and poverty.
And honestly, the christian worldview focuses too much on individuals. It has the conservative mantra of personal responsibility and free will, amounting to "sociology doesn't real." Seriously, while they had a chapter on christian "sociology", it basically amounted to a rejection of the idea that societal structures or the environment are in any way responsible for our conditions. '
And as you can see, this worldview, basically affects every aspect of life. It leads to a conservative social policy, with an overemphasis of the traditional family unit and an obsession with sex (ALWAYS an obsession with sex, i'd like to see freud analyze these guys). It leads to a fiscally conservative economic policy based on the idea of individualism, obsession with work ethic, and limited government. And on foreign policy, they seem to paint the other ideologies as all supporting some form of new world order and one world government, so they seem to be nationalist in nature.
A lot of people are freaking out over majorie taylor greene embracing the term "Christian nationalist", but isn't this what the religious right always been? if we actually take this worldview theory seriously and apply it to the conservative movement, it explains why they are so bonkers. Because they tend to have a political ideology that leads to these conclusions.
Again, if the christian worldview is DEMONSTRABLY TRUE, it's all well and good, if their worldview is aligned with reality, they're the good guys, because their views represent how the world really is, and how us secular liberals are all wrong and misguided and paving the pathway to hell with good intentions. BUT, if the christian worldview is false, and it is, then it means they're the delusional ones.
And I feel like this is a fight a lot of people on the left don't realize we've been in for a long term. The right is informed by these nutcases and they see us as delusional whackos, and they're playing for keeps, getting more aggressive and authoritarian as time goes on. I've been aware of this threat for a while. But the left...has its own problems. And I could do an entire analysis on the state of the left based on this book and applying my knowledge and understanding to it.
But first, let's just go over the other 5 worldviews.
Islam- islam was not mentioned in the original book I read in high school, but was added in the post 9/11 version published in 2006. They discuss Islam because of its influence in world politics. A lot of the book seems to be Christians just spatting with islamists over doctrines, like a bunch of nerds arguing over which fandom is better. But generally speaking, they portray islam a bit harsher than it probably deserves. While Islam is a brutal and barbaric religion in my eyes, they seem to be obsessed with jihad in the book. While they mention moderates discussing how jihad means personal struggle, they also link it to Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. Now, here's the problem. Bin Laden's opposition to the US was not fully based on Islam. This book seemed to be regurgitating Bush era lies of "they hate our freedoms" and stuff, when in reality, OBL was protesting US global dominance, and more specifically our creation and operation of bases in Saudi Arabia. Now, OBL's views were very islamic. He saw us as infidels invading his holy land and believed that muslims should deal with problems of the muslim world. Not the UN, and not an imperial power like the US or previously the USSR who he fought against in the 1980s in Afghanistan. So, his behavior against the US was an act of protest against our foreign policy, and while we can absolutely condemn him as one of the worst terrorists the US has ever deal with, let's not act like his behavior was simply because he was committed jihad against the west to spread his religion. He wasn't. If you dont believe me, read the book War Inc. by Peter L Bergen. Another book I read in college. Yay college for actually teaching me about REALITY once again.
Secular humanism-He seems to conflate the secular humanism a lot with the marxism-leninism worldview, even sharing a conclusion chapter between them. Much of what I wrote above describes their issues against the secularists, but basically it comes down to having a subjective morality based on moral relativism, and basically being left wing. While he understands that there's more nuance among the secular humanist worldview, with some merely being "interventionists" (liberals) and some being more socialist (particularly the demsoc variety), he seems to put us in the same category as the stalinists, believing that our ideas will be just as disastrous in reality. But honestly, this book strawmans hard. Secular humanism is the ideology of the six I champion most (although my ideology IS a mix of various ideologies presented here), and it generally is the most reality based, and has the less politicized assumptions of the atheistic left wing ideologies. And I would argue that the secular worldview has been vindicated by reality and generally does lead to the best quality of life overall. Because it's progressive, while not being so rigidly ideological. I mean, despite how great noebel and others like him think that the US is, godless scandinavia seems to be much different than both the US, and the marxist hellhole of the nearby soviet union (when that was a thing) and seems to produce a better quality of life than both.
Marxism-leninism- I kind of have to ask why focus on the most deadly and ideologically rigid form of marxism. After all, marxism is a broad topic, and you can be a liberal or post modernist and use marx in your analyses, you can also be a less harmful democratic or market socialism, or even, dare I say it, a CHRISTIAN socialist (they did admittedly mention christian socialism existed at one point but acted like it was a heretical deviation of the christian worldview). But then again, MLs make their point best. I mean, why attack all of socialism when you can just point to the body count of the tankies? Anyway, this book seems to have a weird fixation of dialectical materialism and the whole "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis" mentality. And of course on economics they portray their system as hell on earth, but not necessarily for the right reasons. Again, they seem to conflate state run economies with no work incentive and everyone gets paid the same, and giving people free money. Blaming work incentive or lack thereof on its failure economically. While there is a lot to be said about the authoritarian nature of the USSR trapping people in situations not conducive to them putting effort into making their work good (and capitalism does have an advantage there), I feel like the repression was the problem more than anything. They also portray the tankies as having the end justify the means and that's why their policies failed. While I WOULD describe the USSR as a high minded utopia that went wrong, I really think that we can leave its failures with marxism-leninism. That model is responsible for its own failures. It embraced radical revolution to overthrow capitalism, leading to "socialism" (ie, state run control of the economy), and descending into a utopian hellhole from there. I mean, this book is right on this. The marxist-leninist model of change and governance is DANGEROUS. But that doesn't mean other forms of left wing politics, or even more mild forms of socialism are dangerous.
Cosmic humanism- Basically, this is new age ideology. And I really question if this should be considered a full ideology. I mean, they seemed to struggle to have much to say on the subject, because it really is amorphous. While it has a lot of implications in terms of cosmology and how the world came to be and works, it doesnt really translate well to politics. Because while it portrays a pantheistic version of god, where we're all god, and we all reincarnate and blah blah blah, it doesn't really say much on politics. I mean, it's this soft anything goes, we're all on our own life path and all ideas are valid and we're all learning type ideology. If anything it's almost anarchistic in nature. Anyway, if anyone is wondering where I get my current spiritual side from, it most closely aligns with this ideology. However, it really rarely conflicts with my secular ideology on anything, and that is by design. As I can tell, my entire experience of leaving Christianity was to teach me something and to develop my own worldview and political ideology in order to later potentially influence the world. I don't know. But I am led to believe that what I learned as an atheist is by design, and that even being spiritual again, like 99% of that just isn't going to change.
Postmodernism- At first I was wondering why this was included because it's basically the "anti worldview worldview", and it didnt even seem to be a fleshed out ideology. Basically it came off at first as like symbolic interactionism from sociology where everything is subjective and meaning is derived from personal experiences. But then as noebel put it together and laid out the political implications it became something else...SJW ideology. He admitted, this is an offshoot of marxism, based on thinkers like michel foucault. And ultimately, with this ideology, identity politics reigns supreme. Objective reality isnt important, it's all peoples' experiences. Remember how last year I ripped BLM for rejecting vaccines on the basis of past racism like the tuskegee experiment in america? Yeah, that's post modernism in a nutshell. basically, feels over reals. Objective reality doesnt matter, what matters is black peoples experiences with medicine in america. Or how about the argument that pisses me off about how a man can't have an opinion on abortion because it's a woman's issue? Again, post modernism. The feelings of women is more important than the feelings of men on this issue. Feels over reals. And obviously this leads to a left wing politics, but it's one based on identity and society redressing past oppression based on identity. And you know what? I'm gonna puke. Because one thing I will say this book gets right, is that if you're the dominant group, like me, being white and male and straight, you're gonna be hardcore alienated and turned off by these politics. Because you're gonna be expected to pay for solutions that dont benefit you and might actually cost you either money, or opportunities in the economy, and that's going to alienate people big time.
And with that, we can finally explain what's going on in the dumpster fire that is the democrats.
The democrats are a big tent party. The republicans are MOSTLY driven by the conservative christian worldview above, but the democrats are a mixture of the other ideologies and are actually pretty moderate.
Secular humanists are actually a small minority of college educated white progressives like myself. And we actually wield very little influence in the party at large. I imagine most like candidates like sanders or yang, or even warren, but end up settling for hillary. Some could like hillary. There's nothing suggesting secular humanists cant be moderate or even conservative (see Ayn Rand types, which are common among the secular community), but yeah. I think the stereotype here would be white male progressives, and sometimes white women too. I remember when I was in the atheist community that we noticed POC were rarely among us.
Marxists at large (NOT discussing MLs in particular as it seems to be beside the point) are in the democratic party, and also largely not welcome. Their ideology being too extreme. While Sanders' candidacy has led to a resurgeance of marxist ideology in America, they also dont wield much influence and are aligned with the left.
Christians are actually pretty plentiful. And it should be noted, moderate christians are often moderate political figures, believing in a mishmash of conservative ideology and other belief systems like post modernism or some elements of secularism. They tend to cede to reality when necessary to avoid going as insane as the GOP is, but they often support a more sane, reality based version of the same thing. These are the people who normally vote for people like clinton. Although it varies. As I said you can even get christian marxists. I have a friend like that. He's kind of all over the place on social issues due to his christianity but he has a very leftist worldview on economics. But on the whole, I'd argue christianity is a moderating force on the democratic party, keeping the bulk of believers believing similar things as conservatives, just in a less extreme form.
Cosmic humanists are largely irrelevant. I mean, we had marraine williamson run for president. Not much amounted of that.
Post modernism actually is a huge ideology that has gained ascendancy on the left in recent years. Once fringe and mostly those weird PC police people, they are commonplace and are making aggressive inroads in the democrats, especially given the diverse big tent that it serves. I mean, if you cant have a coherent progressive social and economic ideology that unites people what do you use to TRY to unite people? Postmodernism. It appeals to all weird identities in culture, racial, sexual, what have you and serves as a uniting force between say, African Americans, hispanics, women, LGBT people, etc. But who DOES IT NOT appeal to? Cis white males. They're gonna end up getting sick of this crap and leaving for the republicans. And even people like me who technically stay, we're not happy, we're not welcome. Because this ideology does nothing for people like me. I came over to the left through secular humanism, and I developed a progressive vision based on that specific school of thought. And now this other school of thought is supplanting that school of thought, rendering people like me politically homeless.
So, despite this book being a weird fun house of strawmen, I do still tend to see the world through these worldviews, and seeing them interact with each other can be interesting. I mean, almost no one is going to fit neatly into one of these six worldviews except for maybe the most extreme members of each worldview. Christians are going to end up compromising with reality and adopting other worldviews such as aspects of secularism, marxism, or postmodernism into their perspectives. Secular humanists actually can embrace some conservative aspects of christianity on stuff like say, economics (ie, capitalism, since in this book the only defenders of capitalism are christians and everyone else is a dirty socialist). And it just goes on and on. I do plan on doing a future article discussing my own worldview and how the various influences interact and inform it. And again, I have to say, Im glad they edited the book in the second edition to include postmodernism. It really does deserve its own worldview, and doing it that way actually gives me clarity on the dumpster fire that is democratic party politics.
Anyway, one last thought on that subject. Remember that article I wrote a couple weeks ago talking about how I'd gladly cede the identity issues in order to have a fight on religious worldviews? Yeah, this is why. As I've seen politics for much of my life, both on the left and right, it was largely a fight between christianity and secular humanism. And secular humanism was winning. I left christianity and became horrified by how dangerous that perspective is. So I redesigned my worldview on secular humanist terms and much of my current ideology came out of that. And I even ended up aligning with some socialist types to get the kind of progressive change I wanted.
In 2016, bernie was my guy. But...Bernie wasnt a post modernist. And that's why he lost. He was only able to capture the one third of the party who was young and progressive and interested in change and unmoored by current social norms dictated by more conservative worldviews. But instead, postmodernism derailed the whole thing, leading to an identity politics crapfest. And I'm gonna be honest. As you can tell, not a fan of post modernism. I do believe it has SOME intellectual value but I cant imagine making a stable worldview based on it. But given the "big tent" nature of the democratic party it seems to be the only thing that unites the voters. This leads to a culture war, with the far right republicans still embracing the christian worldview but with more and more white identity politics involves, and the left embracing post modernism at the expense of economics and other major concerns that influence my perspective.
Hence why I'm homeless, independent, and aligned with the forward party. And yes, I know yang is a christian, but his human centered capitalism is based, and his fact based governance standpoint are very compatible with my ideology. I'm not opposed to working with moderate christians (ie, non fundies) to meet my goals. If anything, no one is really perfect, and honestly, being the "cosmic humanist" that I am on spirituality, uh im not really fully a secular humanist at this point either.
And yeah, that's understanding the times, and despite its flaws and biases, it has been a book that impacted me a lot as a high school student, and I still see value in it now. It actually does help me understand the times, even if i dont agree with its fundamentalist christian conclusions. Because there is a war between competing ideologies out there. And that's basically what our politics and social strife come down to. The book helps explain the GOP and it being out of touch with reality (assuming you reject the christian worldview) and it helps explain why the democrats are going in the direction they are. And for me, it also explains why I feel so politically homeless and why my own ideology doesnt seem represented by either party at the moment. Because let's face it, it isn't.
No comments:
Post a Comment