The Rural Way

The Rural Way

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON 

City-dwellers and suburbanites get a hard lesson in human nature, common sense, and the value of self-reliance.

Almost every national Election Night reveals the same old red/blue map. The country geographically is a sea of red. The coasts and small areas along the southern border and around the Great Lakes remain blue atolls.

Yet when the maps are recalibrated for population rather than area, the blue areas blow up, expanding to smother half the country — a graphical metaphor for the dominant cultural influence of city over country.

Ideological differences are now being recalibrated as rural-urban on issues from guns and abortion to taxes and foreign policy. Red/conservative is often synonymous with small-town and rural. Blue/progressive is equivalent to urban/suburban.

Gone are the old New Deal Democratic coalitions of New England and the South, or the 19th- and mid-20th-century Republican alliances between the farm belt and the mid-Atlantic states.

Instead, globalization has become a worrisome force-multiplying effect of geography, culture, and ideology — not seen since the political differences of the pre-Civil War mapped out two potentially different Americas, north and south of the Mason-Dixon line.

On Election Night, news analysts and talking heads matter-of-factly cite returns as if there is no need to explain that the red areas are more rural and conservative, while the blue cities and suburbs are more progressive. A few small adjustments are made for Republican-run cities in mostly red Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas, and some blue or purple rural states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine that serve as rural retirements and refuges for the nearby blue states of Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York.

The media figures who report on the election are urban denizens. Few have any idea of why half the country votes as it does. So they just assume that pollsters, like themselves, are better educated, smarter, and of greater value to society than those whom they often to fail to find in their surveys.

The cities since antiquity been considered cosmopolitan and progressive; the countryside, traditional and conservative. In the positive appraisal, Western literature always thematically emphasized the sophistication and energy of cities, balanced by the purity and autonomy of the country.

More darkly, in the pejorative sense, the former of the cities were all too prone to Petronian decadence and excess; the latter outside the walls, to Aristophanic parochialism and rusticity. Aristotle adjudicated the divide in his Politics by arguing that the “best” type of democracy was in a sense the least — and thus the most rural (farmers by necessity would have less time to walk into town, loiter about, and as “agora-lounger” busybodies cram the assembly).

Much of these eternal radical differences transcend time and space. Even in the age of a mobile and transient population — and our omnipresent Internet, social media, cellphones, and telecommuting — the material landscapes, population densities, and need for physical work still explain radical differences in outlook and mindset. That eternal divide guided our gentry Framers. In classical terms, they took for granted that their farms and urban lives balanced each other and remedied the limitations of each.

That fact of the rural/urban dichotomy is underappreciated, but it remains at the heart of the Constitution — to the continuing chagrin of our globalist coastal elite who wish to wipe it out. The Electoral College and the quite antithetical makeup of the Senate and the House keep a Montana, Utah, or Wyoming from being politically neutered by California and New York. The idea, deemed outrageously “unfair” by academics and the media, is that a Wyoming rancher might have as much of a say in the direction of the country as thousands of more redundant city dwellers. Yet the classical idea of federal republicanism was to save democracy by not allowing 51 percent (of an increasingly urban population) to create laws on any given day at any given hour.

Few city dwellers realize that half the country probably always found the increasingly hyped burlesque half-time shows of the Super Bowl buffoonish, boring, and a time to wash dishes, make a beer run, or shut off the television. The old network anchors never grasped that plenty didn’t appreciate their snarky frowns and their eye-rolling. Articles written under the masthead of the New York Times mean no more to someone in North Dakota than posts from a blogger with a well-viewed website.

Live in Portland, Seattle, Washington, D.C., or New York, or watch news generated from there, and an American might think that what BLM and Antifa wrought this summer was America’s collective future — until one paused and thought, “Why don’t they try all that across the small towns of Kansas or in the midsize cities of Utah or the suburbs of Oklahoma City?” And, “Why isn’t Antifa taking hold in Tulare County, Calif., or Arkansas?”

The Western exegeses of these differences was often simplistic. Rural people, with or without proximity to the frontier, had to rely more on themselves for their own defense, for obtaining their water, for disposing their sewage, for feeding themselves. What they did not make or grow themselves, they saw produced by others living around them — minerals, metals, fuels, wood — to be sent into the city.

Nature for them was not distant, not a romance, but a mercurial partner to be respected, feared, and occasionally with difficulty brought to heel and for a while harnessed. When you see, firsthand, wondrous life born around you, from the barn to the woods, and rural underpopulation not overpopulation is an ancient worry, abortion is not just a moral crime, but a tragic loss of a precious resource, a needed voice, another ally in an eternal struggle.

From that autonomy or autarchy came a distrust of larger government redistribution and dependence on anonymous others. Self-sufficiency was an impossible luxury for dependent city-dwellers in a dense Athens, Constantinople, Rome, Paris, Venice, or London, whose sophistication, talents, and scientific knowledge came at the cost of being entirely reliant on the extramural activities of those with less impressive speech, appearance, and manners.

Bottom of Form

For the ancients, living in the same place as one’s parents was not proof of parochial mediocrity (although Jefferson thought that a farm was a refuge from failure elsewhere), but an obligation to allow the next in line to have the same chance to live apart from the city. And indeed, even in our increasingly urbanized world, the lessons of vestigial agrarianism still can echo and permeate our society in the most unexpected ways.

In our time, savior-designate candidate Michael Bloomberg blew $1 billion without winning one delegate. He poured $100 million into Florida and Ohio to see both states go for Trump far more easily this year than in 2016.

Bloomberg could ridiculously lecture an audience of Oxford sophisticates that farming was just a simplistic matter of dropping a seed in the ground and watching it sprout automatically (“You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn”) — without being laughed out of the lecture hall as a dunce. Imagine if a farmer had said of stocks, “You just make a call, place your buy, and up comes the dividend.”

In other words, Bloomberg was a man unaware of his own limitations. The ability to navigate Wall Street, or the financial markets of communist China, or A-list dinners, or the New York–Washington media, or to be courted by Aspen and Davos did not mean that he had any appreciation for the tenuousness of his own existence, that all his billions could not guarantee him water, food, or sewage removal during a COVID lockdown, or that in extremis he could secure his family without the NYPD. Had Bloomberg in 2010 just taken care of the snow first, and fatty foods and super-sized drinks second, he might have avoided the disastrous effects of the blizzard that paralyzed New York.

We can see this incidental dichotomy between pragmatism and accepted authority almost everywhere today. In the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings, crusty old farmer emeritus Chuck Grassley drew on common sense and a knowledge of human nature; urban sophisticate Dianne Feinstein, on ideology and current fad. Missouri’s Josh Hawley recently sliced and diced the masters of the Silicon Valley Universe, because he was able to reduce all their arguments from authority and esoterica about social media into the pragmatic: These billionaire modulators of influence had no defense of their own power to adjudicate the free expression of millions of Americans. Read dairy farmer Devin Nunes’s final memo concerning the Russian collusion hoax and compare it to that of his counterpart Adam Schiff. The former is blunt, truthful, and logical; the latter rhetoric is a dishonest mess masquerading as an exposé.

In other words, there is still much value in vestigial Americans countering the increasing legions of apartment-living, densely packed, and mass-transit-community urban dwellers, as we saw during the COVID epidemic and subsequent quarantine. A Governor Noem of South Dakota, despite a media hit campaign, radiated steady and consistent confidence in her own people, Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio were a maze of contradictions and policy incoherence, as their yesterday’s gospel became tomorrow’s heresy.

A balance between real and urban, Homo rusticus and urbanus is, of course, needed. But in our currently globalized and bifurcated society, the influence and power of our coasts have vastly overshadowed those of the interior. We have measured worth by money, credentials, and titles and inordinately been awed by the veneer of cosmopolitanism that surrounds them. Losers never learned to code, winners thought mere coding was quaint. Welding and plumbing were drudgery; a barista with $100,000 in debt from her women’s-studies major was considered the next angry Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Few pondered whether a good welder might make a far better congressman than an indebted sociology graduate, angry that the word had not appreciated his singular college-branded degree.

So much of the absurdity of the modern world relates to a culture entirely divorced from the commonsense audits of 2,500 years of rural pragmatism. Antifa is the ultimate expression of tens of thousands of urban youth, many deeply in college debt, many with degrees but little learning — and oblivious of how they are completely dependent on what they despise, from the police to those who truck in their food and take out their waste, to those who make and sell them their riot appurtenances and communications gadgetry.

Listen to the automaton Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey masquerading as a bewildered Robinson Crusoe, and one shudders that elites like these massage what millions think and how we communicate. The current fear is not just that America is becoming an urbanized and suburbanized nation — in the manner that many of the Founders feared would make our nation a European replicant. Rather, what is strange is that so many who are not rural are becoming fearful of their cannibalistic own, and what they have in store for the suburbs and cities — and thus are becoming desperate either to graft the values of the countryside onto the urban sprawl or leave the latter altogether.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of THE SECOND WORLD WARS: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. 

 Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/the-rural-way/

Coffee Cup Christianity

This might sound a little creepy: I know how you read your email. I promise I’m not stalking you, but I know there’s something you never do when you get a message from a friend.

You never open the email, skip the first three pages, and read just one line on the fourth page. No one, in fact, takes that approach with their mail. By skipping the context of the email and ignoring the flow of thought, you wouldn’t know what that line meant on the fourth page. If it’s wrong to read your friend’s mail that way, then why do we read God’s mail that way?

We open the letter to the Philippians, skip the first three chapters, and read verse 13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Message received. Close the letter. We’re done here!

We even plaster that verse on a mug, publicizing our mistake. I call this “Coffee Cup Christianity,” and it’s killing our biblical literacy. We’ve become accustomed to seeing isolated Bible verses and presume we know their meaning. Too often, however, we merely insert our own meaning into a Bible verse, thereby overwriting what God was trying to tell us.

It’s not just on coffee cups. We see isolated verses on calendars, walls, phone cases, and just about anywhere you can post text.

Sadly, Coffee Cup Christianity violates one of the most basic and well-known principles of interpretation: context. It’s a principle known not only among Bible readers. Many people in our culture understand it. Tragically, we apply it when reading man’s word but neglect it when reading God’s word. Coffee Cup Christianity leads to three dangerous problems.

First, Coffee Cup Christianity overwrites God’s intended meaning with your own. The verses before and after a Bible verse are the context. They clarify what the author is talking about. The word “buck,” for example, means dollar if the context is about money but means deer if the context is about hunting. Notice that changing the context changes the meaning of the smaller unit of text.

The same is true with Scripture. That’s why you want to first read the context of any verse before trying to understand what it means. In the Bible’s case, it’s the Holy Spirit who inspired not only the verse you’re trying to understand, but also the context to help you understand it. Coffee Cup Christianity often ignores the Spirit’s inspired words, leaving a context vacuum, which we quickly fill with our own context from our own life situation. Since context drives the meaning of a verse, your own life context may be changing the true meaning of the words of Scripture, overwriting what God intended to tell you. In effect, we’re infusing our meaning into Scripture and granting it divine authority.

Second, Coffee Cup Christianity leads to missing important lessons from God. My daughter was taught a Sunday school lesson on Jesus’ parable about the “night neighbor” in Luke 11:5–8. The story is about a man who is woken at midnight and resists giving his neighbor some bread but eventually shares it. If you read the parable in isolation from its context, the lesson seems obvious: sharing is a virtue. But when you read the context (Luke 11:1–4 and 9–13), which is about Jesus’ teaching on prayer, a different lesson emerges: the importance of the persistence of prayer. Coffee Cup Christianity makes you miss important lessons the Holy Spirit intends to teach.

Third, Coffee Cup Christianity models bad interpretive methods. Despite the faulty approach to understanding the Bible, people assure me that we can still glean valuable lessons even if we miss the point of the passage. They tell me, It’s no big deal. Even if Jesus wasn’t teaching about sharing, it’s still an important lesson to follow. I vigorously disagree. I do agree sharing is an important virtue. If you want to make that point, though, use a passage that specifically implores us to share (e.g. 2 Cor. 9:7). It’s unethical to take a text that teaches one lesson and force it to teach a different one. That twists God’s Word and models a dangerous interpretive method for others.

If we handle God’s Word in this manner, we hand young believers faulty tools, rendering them incapable of accurately handling the word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15). They’re the most important generation because they’re the next generation. We’re short-circuiting the health of tomorrow’s church if we give them license to replace God’s words with their own meanings.

Coffee Cup Christianity needs to end. It’s lazy, unethical, and dangerous. It elevates our own meaning above God’s and passes it off as divine writ. We don’t read what our friends have written with such carelessness. Let’s no longer do it with what God has written.

Source: https://www.str.org/w/coffee-cup-christianity

God Loves Enough To Warn

 My friend posted this:

I’ve watched this twice and have been wanting to share...this message weighed heavy on me. It made me stop and really think and really pray.

I don’t know when Jesus is coming back or when I will take my last breath, but either way, I believe with all of my heart that one day, I will face God as my judge. I’ve been reading in Deuteronomy and have read over and over how God loves his people enough to warn them...of the benefits of obedience and staying in a relationship with him and the heartbreaking consequences of sin. Jesus, being God in human form, did the same thing. He loved people and reached out to the outcasts and sinners and forgave and healed (and still does today, praise God!!). But he also spoke the hard truth: there will be a judgement day. And people will stand before a Holy God and account for their actions. I pray that if you have read this far, it means you might watch this video and think about eternity. It’s more important than the pandemic or the election. I am praying for both of those things, daily. But more than that, I am praying for people to come to Christ and walk in freedom from the pain of sin and eternal death. I share this with love friends.

This has been on my mind lately too. A really good follow-up is this from J. Warner Wallace (3:24 minutes). In order to overcome people’s indifference towards Christianity, we have to get beyond just telling them what is true about Christianity and ask two why questions: Why is this true? and Why does it matter to me?

https://youtu.be/rhOXqtHLbaY

What Drives Soros and the Left?

 A couple podcasts regarding this topic:

Podcast - Part 2:

Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. Hebrews 3:13

Last week we learned about George Soros, a Hungarian-born, Jewish-yet-atheist 90-year-old who amassed billions in investment trading and funds Leftist organizations—including Evangelical ones—who further his mission to transform into a socialist state.

So what motivates Soros and the Left? After all, it’s obvious that the Constitutional Republic of the United States has provided more individual liberties, opportunity, products and services, and charity than any nation in history. Then why the relentless effort to “fundamentally transform” it, as President Obama promised?

The Christian Worldview · George Soros Part 2: What Drives Soros and the Left?

Podcast Part #1

GUEST: FRANK WRIGHT, President, D. James Kennedy Ministries

The drive to “fundamentally transform America” takes lots of money and organization.

Whether funding those who…

• deconstruct the discovery, founding, and existence of America as white supremacist and systemically unjust,
• push unbiblical marriage and morality and abortion,
• consolidate government control over health care, education, and the environment,
• squelch freedom of religion, speech, and the right to bear arms,
• pressure corporations, non-profits and Christians organizations,
• foment the burning and looting on the streets,

…one man—billionaire George Soros—arguably exerts more power and influence in his mission to fundamentally transform America than anyone else.

This weekend on The Christian Worldview, we are going to profile the life, worldview, and deeds of George Soros. Frank Wright, president of D. James Kennedy Ministries, an organization that has just produced several materials exposing Soros, will join us to discuss what we need to know about him, including the Evangelical organizations he funds and influences.

The Christian Worldview · Who Is America’s Top (Human) Destroyer? Hint: George Soros

Biblical Judgment in a “Don’t Judge Me” World

from here: https://wellwateredwomen.com/biblical-judgment-in-a-dont-judge-me-world/

by Alisa Childers

"YOU SHOULDN'T JUDGE."

Once upon a couple of years ago, there was a wildly popular book written by a self-professed Christian author. It was released by a Christian publishing house and marketed on Christian platforms and websites. It was a fairy tale come true. Crushing it at the top of The New York Times Best Seller list and winning the hearts and minds of millions of women, it was featured in countless small group Bible studies and conferences nationwide. 

The only problem is that the core message of the book is the exact opposite of the biblical Gospel. So, I decided to write a little review of it and post it on my blog. I didn’t anticipate this “little review” going viral, nor did I predict the boatloads of hate mail that would sail into my inbox in the following weeks. 

Some of the emails cannot be repeated in polite company. But the bulk of the pushback can be distilled down to three fateful words: “You. Shouldn’t. Judge.” 

The message I received loud and clear was that it was wrong of me to criticize unbiblical ideas in a popular book. After all, Jesus would never be such a “McJudgypants.” With love redefined to mean the affirmation of a desire or an idea, it’s easy to see how “judging” has become the unforgivable sin in our culture. 

But Christians live by a different standard than the world. When someone says, “You shouldn’t judge,” they are actually contradicting real love, the Bible, and plain common sense. So, the next time someone pulls out this particular conversation-stopper, remember these three things: 

SAYING “DON’T JUDGE” IS NOT BIBLICAL.

It seems like everyone’s favorite Bible verse (at least when they’re trying to keep someone from telling them they’re wrong) is Matthew 7:1. The words, “Judge not, that you be not judged,” come from the lips of Jesus himself. 

Mic drop. End of conversation—right?

Well, that only works if you scribble out the next six verses, along with some other things Jesus said, and a good portion of the New Testament. In fact, just after saying, “Judge not,” Jesus lets his audience know that when they judge, they should be very careful to make sure their judgment isn’t hypocritical. “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye,” Jesus instructs in verse five. In other words, don’t point out a sin in your sister’s life before you confront the bigger sin in your own. 

But the whole point is to help your sister take the speck out of her eye, which requires you to judge that it’s there. So, Jesus isn’t saying that it’s always wrong to judge. In fact, verse six tells us to “not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs.” How can one identify “dogs” and “pigs” unless they first judge correctly? 

JUDGE THE FRUIT

If there is still any confusion, just a few verses later, Jesus tells us to recognize wolves, or false teachers, by their fruit. Again, this requires us to judge whether or not these teachers are speaking truth or deception. Then, in John 7:24, Jesus couldn’t say it more plainly. He directs his listeners to “not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.” 

Later, in Matthew 18:15–16, Jesus gives instructions about how to confront a fellow believer if they’ve sinned against you. (Don’t forget to take the log out of your own eye first!) The apostle Paul echoes this sentiment in Galatians 6:1, by telling Christians how to handle a brother who is caught in a sin. He writes, “You who are spiritual”—think log-less in the eye—“should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.”

In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul tells the believers in Corinth that it’s actually their job to judge other believers. He writes, “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?  God will judge those outside.” 

Telling someone they shouldn’t judge is not biblical. In fact, Scripture actually commands us to judge, but to do it carefully, rightly, humbly, and without hypocrisy. 

SAYING “DON’T JUDGE” IS NOT LOGICAL.

Imagine you are home alone and your doorbell rings. You peek through the window and observe a very large man with a gun in his hand, wearing an orange jumpsuit. He’s sweating and looking around nervously. Be honest. Are you going to open the door for him? My guess is … probably not. But wait. Why are you being so judgmental? Maybe he’s not an escaped convict but simply enjoys wearing orange jumpsuits and carrying his weapon while out for a jog. Who are you to judge? 

Obviously, this is an extreme example. No one would open the door for that guy. But this goes to show that literally everyone judges. We all make judgments about people every single day. It would be beyond illogical, and sometimes unsafe, to not judge. 

Plus, to even tell someone they shouldn’t judge is to judge that they are judging, which is considered judgmental, which requires making a judgment about all the judging. You get the point. But that whole logical mess can be avoided by simply taking Jesus’ advice to “judge with right judgment.” 

SAYING “DON’T JUDGE” IS NOT LOVING.

When I was younger, I was trapped in a toxic cycle brought on by an eating disorder. One of my good friends, an eternal people-pleaser, worked up every last bit of courage she could muster to confront me. To put it lightly, it didn’t go well. I not-so-politely invited her to stop “judging” me and back all the way off. 

Nevertheless, she persisted. Her determination to make sure I was not only helped but held accountable literally changed my life. I ended up confessing my secret and getting counseling as my healing began. To this day my eyes mist with tears when I think about how much she loved me to do such a difficult thing. 

According to the Bible, love is patient and kind. It’s not arrogant or rude. 1 Corinthians 13:6 goes on to tell us that “love does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.” My friend couldn’t rejoice at my wrongdoing. Had she simply ignored the “speck in my eye,” and chosen to not judge, my life could have gone down a very different path. 

She judged me because she loved me. And it quite possibly saved my life. Judging with right judgment is not only biblical and logical, but it’s also the most loving thing you can do. 

COURAGEOUS JUDGMENT

Culture will always have its slogans, mantras, and catch-phrases. But haven’t Christians always been countercultural? Sometimes Jesus calls us to judge each other. As difficult as it may seem, obeying his commands will keep you from being tossed about by the whims of a fickle culture. After all, that culture won’t be there for you when your life (or the lives of the people you love) falls apart from following its advice. Jesus will.

from here: https://www.str.org/w/we-need-to-elevate-debate

We Need to Elevate Debate

I’ve seen a lot of debates in my life, but last week’s was one of the best. Both sides were clear about their positions. They offered a premise and defended it with reason and evidence. There was no illogic, no disrespect, and no name-calling. By the end of the debate, both cases were so compelling, it was hard for me to figure out who “won.”

Of course, I’m talking about my son’s recent tenth-grade debate. With his debate partner, he took on two other classmates with the resolve “The United States federal government should remove all Confederate statues from federal buildings.” It lasted an hour and a half, and there was a volley of reasons and counter-reasons from each side. It was clear precisely what was being argued, and it was evident precisely how it was argued.

Not so with the first presidential debate. With nearly unanimous consent, it was considered the worst presidential debate in history. The candidates were rude, talked over each other, and either name-called or put the other person down. What were their arguments? I could hardly tell if they had any. I was so distracted by their rudeness and posturing.

Out of curiosity, my wife and I watched a portion of the 1980 Reagan-Carter debate. It was night and day. There was no talking over each other. I could hear every spoken word. They were both respectful. What has happened?

The presidential candidates could learn a lot from my son’s tenth-grade class. I’m not bragging. They just knew when to speak, when to listen, and how to appropriately respond. They articulated their position and cited research to support their side. No one belittled another person.

Sadly, it feels like the presidential debate mirrored what I routinely see transpire on social media: showmanship, put-downs, and gotchas. Even if someone presents a well-reasoned argument in an online forum, it often comes with a side of snarkiness.

There’s no need (in fact, it’s wrong) to be rude or demonize our opponents the way we do. We can disagree—even vehemently—with a person but still speak respectfully to him. That’s called civility. C.S. Lewis wrote:

I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man.... I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

Although it would be nice if presidential debates were improved, I’m more interested in elevating debate in everyday conversations. It would make society much more civil. I’m not suggesting that every engagement is a debate or should be a debate. I’m simply referring to the situation where two people hold different positions and discuss their views. That happens all the time.

Here are five (of course there are more) quick suggestions to elevate debate in a healthy way.

1. Let the other person make and finish a point.
2. Assume the most charitable interpretation of the other person’s view.
3. Offer reasons and evidence for your opinion.
4. Don’t demean people who hold a different position than you.
5. Concede an opposing point if it has merit (that doesn’t mean you “lost”).

We can do this.

A Parent’s Guide to the 5 Skeptics Who Want to Shame Your Kids for Being Christian

from here: https://www.str.org/w/a-parent-s-guide-to-the-5-skeptics-who-want-to-shame-your-kids-for-being-christian

AUTHORNatasha CrainPUBLISHED ON06/19/2018

Having blogged for over six years now, I’ve received hundreds (and hundreds) of comments and emails from skeptics of Christianity. Once in a while, I receive one from a pleasant non-believer who is truly interested in discussing evidence, asking reasonable questions, and engaging in thoughtful discussion.

But that’s the exception.

Those who contact me typically wield the tool of shaming to make their point - something highly ironic given how much skeptics talk about the importance of evidence.

To be clear, none of the non-believers I personally know would use shaming tactics in person. But when people are behind their screens, it brings down the “barrier” of civility, and faith conversations often look very different. You can see it on social media (even with friends who wouldn’t say such things in person), comments on news articles, blog posts - everywhere.

Kids need to understand these emotion-laden shaming attempts they’ll encounter. Like so much else, this is something parents can and should prepare them for. Here are the five most common skeptics who want to shame your kids for being Christian.

1. The Science Thumper

Shame Tactic: Making the child believe they don’t have enough scientific expertise to understand that belief in God is unnecessary and silly.

The Science Thumper applies some notion of science to each and every conversation about Christianity, making it the final word on any given topic, and implying that science and Christianity are at irreconcilable odds.

For example, in response to one of my blog posts about the meaning of life in a theistic worldview, a skeptic commented:

You need to study the mechanisms of replication, mutation, natural selection if you want to understand why life exists and is the way it is. If life and existence are too amazing, astounding and astonishing to exist naturally...then how much more complex is god [sic] for having created it?...Did you invent superman as a panacea answer for everything you don’t understand?

Questions of faith and science are very important, but framing faith and science as a choice - one option for the unsophisticated and one for those in the know - is a cheap and false dichotomy.

Parent Solution: Thoroughly address faith and science topics so kids understand how shallow and unnuanced the Science Thumper’s claims are. See this post for more on how to do that.

2. The Indoctrination Informer

Shame Tactic: Informing the child that the ONLY reason they believe in Jesus is that they’ve been “indoctrinated” by their parents.

Indoctrination is a word that both Christians and skeptics use wrong. Skeptics often think a kid has been indoctrinated any time they’ve been taught a given religion is true. Christians often think indoctrination means teaching kids Christian doctrine. These misunderstandings lead to conversations that unfortunately sound like this:

Skeptic to Christian parent: “You’re indoctrinating your kids [by raising them in a Christian home]! Let them think for themselves.”

Christian parent to skeptic: “You’re right! I’m teaching my kids Christian doctrine, and I’m proud of it!”

Both skeptics and Christians need to understand that indoctrination means teaching someone to fully accept the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group and to not consider other ideas, opinions, and beliefs. In other words, indoctrination is a problem with how you teach someone something. It is not inherently related to any particular belief system, though religion is one type of belief system where indoctrination is possible.

Parent Solution: Intentionally introduce your kids to skeptics’ challenges so they never feel the need to question whether you tried to shelter them from other beliefs. For more on the importance of this, see the post “If Your Kids are Someday Shocked by the Claims of Skeptics, You Didn’t Do Your Job.”

3. The Miracle Mocker

Shame Tactic: Making the child feel gullible for believing something that doesn’t happen according to natural laws.

Here’s a recent comment a skeptic left on my blog:

Just because some so-called holy book says something is true doesn’t make it true. Why do you believe outlandish claims about a god [sic] speaking things into existence, or about a man being swallowed by a fish for a few days and surviving, a worldwide flood [and ark] that fit all of the animals in it and eight people, or a story about a virgin getting pregnant? None of that makes sense, you don’t have any proof that it happened, but you still think it’s true. Why do you prefer to believe outlandish claims because they’re religious?

The logic here is what’s “outlandish” (no one believes all miraculous claims simply because they’re religious), but my point is not to critique the details of this particular comment. My point is to show how skeptics present miracles in a way that parades them as “obviously” absurd because (and by definition!), they don’t follow the course of nature.

Parent Solution: Teach kids the basic logic that if God exists, miracles are possible, and if God doesn’t exist, miracles are not possible (for more on this, see chapter 24 in Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side). This brings the question of miracles back to the underlying question of the evidence for God’s existence so kids understand that the person claiming miracles are silly is simply presupposing God doesn’t exist.

4. The Self-Sufficient Scoffer

Shame Tactic: Boasting that the skeptic doesn’t “need” God - and implying that anyone who does has an inferior need for an emotional crutch to get through life.

Oftentimes, when ex-Christians recount their deconversion story, they conclude with a glib comment of how they moved on because they no longer “needed” God. The subtly condescending implication, of course, is that those who believe in God do so because they don’t have the emotional resources to make it through life admitting that we live in a universe of pitiless indifference.

This is a strange conclusion that betrays a lack of deeper insight.

If God exists, we need Him. All things were created through and for Him; He is the Source and sustainer of everything by definition. Therefore, if God exists, it’s not a choice to need Him...it’s simply a fact that we do.

If God doesn’t exist, we don’t need Him. We cannot need Him. We cannot need something that doesn’t exist.

In other words, saying that you don’t need God anymore is a nonsensical conclusion. Of course you don’t need God if He doesn’t exist. And if He does exist, you can’t choose to not need Him.

What this kind of statement betrays, therefore, is that the skeptic originally believed in God based on felt needs (desires) rather than on the conviction that He truly exists. When they realized they didn’t need to believe in God to satisfy those felt needs, they simply eliminated Him from the picture and met those needs in other ways.

Parent Solution: Be mindful of helping kids build a faith based on the conviction of God’s existence and the truth of Christianity - not on felt needs for things like being happy, being a good person, or finding meaning in life. In other words, if anyone ever asks your child why they’re a Christian, you should want their response to be, “Because Christianity is true!” For more on escaping the felt need pattern, see the post “Do Your Kids Know Why They Need God?”

5. The Tolerance Enforcer

Shame Tactic: Making the child feel like they are unloving and hateful for taking a biblical stance that doesn’t approve of all choices as morally acceptable.

In a spectacular display of irony, the Tolerance Enforcer shames kids into believing that they must be horrible people for disagreeing with non-believers on the morality of various issues. By labeling kids hateful and unloving rather than thoughtfully discussing the evidence for the truth of the underlying worldviews that produce divergent moral conclusions, they rely on purely emotional attacks. Kids without an intellectual foundation for the Christian worldview are left feeling that they must be wrong about the truth of their faith.

Parent Solution: Help kids understand the irony of a person championing tolerance who won’t tolerate Christian beliefs without labeling disagreement hateful. Then demonstrate how Christians and non-Christians will necessarily disagree on moral issues because we have a different source of authority - the Bible. Here’s an example.

In all of these cases, remember that shame, by definition, is “a painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarrassment, unworthiness or disgrace.” In other words, the root of shame is feeling inadequate.

In order for our kids to feel (more than) adequate when they encounter shaming attempts, they need to have the deep conviction that what they believe is really true. Only then will they be able to fully see these shame tactics for what they are - shallow and baseless emotional attacks - and be able to say confidently with the apostle Paul, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16).