Introduction - Part 1

[bookhobbit]

Let's get started with a bang.

 

Perusing the offerings at a well-stocked newsstand in downtown Chicago, I discovered a microcosm of the modem world in front of me. Headlines, box scores, still pictures, weird pictures, war pictures, pictures of beautiful people. I saw articles on an array of topics— beheadings, gay marriage, a murdered judge, date rape, a "no rules" restaurant, a child molester—and this was just the beginning.

As I scanned further, I discovered even more disturbing phenomena: The sexual revolution is ongoing; grass, LSD, and homemade meth are the latest therapeutic techniques for relieving depression; teen pregnancy affects 14-to 16-year-olds; porn everywhere; rich denounced, poor praised; school shot up, students dead; teen suicide; a third of all children in U.S. born out of wedlock; world to end early next week; those who believe in truth are the root of all evil; concept of absolute values is for morons; there is no evil or good; no right or wrong; witness lies in court; husband kills wife, dumps body in neighbors' trash bin, gets six years in slammer; twentieth century bloodiest of all centuries; man clones self; world is overpopulated…  

Most of this is pretty obvious, like the fact that gay marriage is mentioned in the same breath as child molestation and date rape and also beheadings. We all know that fundies think drugs, queer people, premarital sex, and porn are signs of evil. But let's pull out some of the more interesting ones to discuss.

• rich denounced, poor praised: You mean by Jesus, who said "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God"? You know, in that whole bit in Matthew 19 where he was demonstrating how wealth holds people back from following God.

• a "no rules" restaurant: Bizarre but funny and illustrative of the authoritarian underpinnings of  Christian fundamentalism. No rules = no morals.

• man clones self: This book is weirdly focused on cloning, which I don't think I've heard a fundie mention since probably around 2013, maybe because it turned out not to be as easy as they were afraid of. I think there are shades of antiabortion rhetoric at play in this, as well as some other stuff. I'll talk more about it when we get to the chapter on Biology.

• world to end early next week: Funny because when they're doing it it's fine. Once we had a chapel where a student's mom came in to give a sermon about how the Rapture was coming soon as we should prepare for it. She was not a pastor.

• school shot up, students dead: And yet fundies are very against gun control, as a rule, and also against other forms of social support that results in a decrease in violent crime. My experience of living through nationwide school shootings is that "prayer" is usually given as the solution. I remember at one point, there was one in the news again, god knows which one because there's so damn many in this country, and my mom said "this country needs Jesus". Because, you know, Christians are never violent. 

• a third of all children in U.S. born out of wedlock: I'm going to generally fact-check easily googleable claims like this. This one's actually true and it's up to 40% now, so at least we've got some moral panic about something that's actually happening. The source notes that economic factors are quite possibly partly implicated, though, so if you happen to be a person who believes that babies should only happen inside of marriage, decreasing the economic burden on and discrimination against Black and Latine people should help!

• those who believe in truth are the root of all evil; concept of absolute values is for morons; there is no evil or good; no right or wrong: 

This is a big one. Let's exit the bullet points. 

These sorts of screeds about how all non-Christians believe that Christians are stupid and credulous for having a concept of right and wrong is one that will be repeatedly posited throughout the book. It's an interesting sleight of hand, because it equates a general loosening of social control with an absolute lack of belief in right and wrong at all and scorn for people who do believe in right or wrong. 

Note "those who believe in truth". Most people, I would wager, have some sense that truth and falsehood are different things; "I can touch the sun" is untrue, and "Air is breathable" is true, and most people over the age of about 5 would generally agree if we're not being too nitpicky about terms. Academically there are definitely theorists who would argue about this in the sense of, like, do our perceptions actually indicate things, blah blah, but if you asked a random person on the street whether they think there are true and false things they would probably say yes.

That is not what this is about. Fundies use "truth" to mean "moral truth". "Not believing in truth" is code for "not having a moral system that relies on absolute answers to big questions". This is also what "good and evil", "right and wrong" are really about.

This underlies a HUGE part of the way the "worldviews" in this book will be presented. Gonna get to it later, when they talk about what they're actually planning to do, but the tldr is that there's several worldviews that the writer posits don't believe in right and wrong, true and false, and good and evil. What he means by this, as it will become clear, is that those "worldviews" do not agree with the idea that religion and God can dictate how we live our lives. This is in contrast to how he treats Islam, which in his framework is a system that says religion and God can dictate how we live our lives but in a BAD way you guys an EVIL way. I cannot emphasize how Islamophobic this book is. It would be cartoonish if it wasn't horrifying.

I could go on, but I don't want to spend too much time on it now because it is going to get more obvious as we go further into the intro. Let's move on.

University of Chicago law professor Albert W. Alschuler holds that "[a]lmost every measure confirms that America's youth are in trouble.""

Let's check that citation. I will thank David A. Noebel for using footnotes rather than endnotes. The quote is from Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes. As you might guess, it does not find in favor of Justice Holmes' effect on the legal system. It's sort of relevant, I guess.

Competing worldviews are breaking out everywhere if only we have eyes to see, ears to hear, and minds to think true thoughts. They are propagated at newsstands and on the evening news and played out at the United Nations, in the halls of Congress, and most assuredly at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, UC Berkeley, and yes, even the local community college.

Note that "competing worldviews" are seen as a bad, dangerous thing. Also note "to think true thoughts". Truth and falsehood is determined by proximity to Christianity.

As believers in and followers of Jesus Christ, we need to consider how our commitment to Him affects not only our political and ethical convictions, but also the way we think and act about theology, philosophy, ethics, biology, psychology, sociology, law, politics, economics, and history.

Now…there's a fine line to tread here. It's true that our worldview does impact how we see everything. And I don't want to be like "science is objective actually" because it's not. But the idea that every single person has a single, fixed, homogenous view of the world, and that everyone sees all of those areas totally differently based only on that single homogenous view, is extremely reductive. It's projecting how Christian (and other really) fundamentalism works onto, like…everyone else.

This book is about these competing worldviews. Its goal is to help Christian students recognize the significance of some of the most influential ideas and values prevalent in our non-Christian culture and to understand the unbiblical, unrealistic, and, yes, even irrational assumptions about reality from which they arise.

Several things to note here: the idea that things which are not Christian are inherently unrealistic and irrational. The corresponding assumption that Christianity and especially fundamentalism is the only way to understand reality, and that no other way of understanding the world could be rational. This is pervasive. But also note the ordering of priorities: unbiblical is first. The Bible is the only lens through which the world can be understood. (Most fundies would wholeheartedly agree with that statement.)

political and ethical issues that divide those who hold traditional Christian ideas and values from those who hold various liberal/radical Humanist views (i.e.. Secular, Marxist, Cosmic, and Postmodern) or who espouse the beliefs and practices of historical Islam […] If we understand the real differences between the Biblical Christian worldview and the Secular Humanist, Marxist, Cosmic Humanist (New Age), Postmodern, and Islamic worldviews,

Collated a couple paragraphs here because I need to talk about them together. See, this reinforces what I was saying. We have humanist views, which hold that there is no truth. And we have Islam, which holds that there is truth, but it's the wrong truth. This is all there is. What's missing here?

ANY OTHER RELIGION? Yes. No Judaism. This is not surprising if you know that fundamentalists think of Jewish religion as like "old, debunked Christianity 1.0". It's extremely anti-semitic, and the goal is to legitimize Christianity because of the way that Christianity is built partially on Jewish texts yet also reinterprets them. Building on another religion's texts but reinterpreting them is a VERY dicey position to be in if you believe that there is only one objective religious truth.

Why do we have Secular Humanism, Postmodernism, and Marxism-Leninism as three separate "humanist" worldviews?

I'll give you secular humanism, which is sort of intentionally built as a quasi-religious nonreligion. Seems reasonable to set that up in contrast to Christianity. But postmodernism is a critical movement. Marxism-Leninism is….well…a weird mishmash. Marxism is both a political/economic theory and critical movement. Marxism-Leninism is apparently the state ideology of the Soviet Union, and I think you would get a lot more mileage out of looking at Marxism in general because it's more broadly used in universities today. But while people are still doing Marxist analyses, it's not exactly cutting-edge theory. It's also not exclusive of postmodernism. A secular humanist could be a theoretician who works with postmodernist and Marxist theories in their day job. For that matter, this person could be a Christian or a Muslim.

Let's review. We've got Islam, yes, that's a religion! Good work! We've got Secular Humanism, okay, sort of, close enough. Then we've got two academic movements that people tend to use professionally rather than personally and which are in dialogue rather than being hard-line separate things. Then we've got Cosmic Humanism which hasn't been defined clearly but is mainly the New Age movement.

So this would have been a lot more efficient if they'd just split up the book into "Humanism", "Islam", and, I don't know…a few extra categories that encompass the like HUNDREDS of religions they've erased here. The academic rigor is really quite pathetic. But the point of this book is not academic rigor: it is propaganda. You can't learn about what real people actually believe because it's too risky.

The idea that there are exactly six worldviews through which everyone or even the majority of people in America see the world! The idea that your religion is what makes your worldview (i.e. all Muslims, and for that matter all Christians, have similar worldviews). The idea that Marxism-Leninism and Postmodernism are equivalent to religions! Lot to unpack here, folks.

There are 60 sections in the book: the 10 disciplines listed above each get a look through the 6 "worldviews". That's the book's structure. Yes, Marxist and postmodernist biology are things this book talks about. Look, I'm not saying people haven't done critical work about it, I'm just saying most people don't do it. 

As Christians, our worldview should be based on the Bible and constructed around the person of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). 

Just highlighting it because it's central to fundamentalist theology and also confirms what I said about the Bible. Nothing can or should exist outside the Bible.

The current conflict of worldviews engulfing Western culture is designed to dethrone Jesus Christ (Psalm 2) and replace the Biblical Christian worldview with the ideas of fallible but very clever human beings. The conflict pits the wisdom of God against the wisdom of the world.

"Designed." "Pits." This language is deliberate. It is written this way to encourage the idea that Christianity is under siege and to promote the idea that different worldviews cannot coexist. That they have to be at war. This is another thing that "truth" language is doing.

There's a long quote in this next bit and I'm going to get heated so hold onto your hats.

Richard Rorty outlines the Postmodernist battle plan in the struggle for students' allegiance: "The fundamentalist parents [i.e.. Christian parents] of our fundamentalist students [i.e.. Christian students] think that the entire  'American liberal establishment' is engaged in a conspiracy. These parents have a point. When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of [humanistic] secularization. Rather, I think these students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [teaching] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents."

Rorty further defines his teaching goal as enticing students to read Darwin and Freud "without disgust and incredulity" and to "arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists [i.e. Christian students] will leave college with views more like our own."" Because of views like Rorty's, which are antithetical to the goals of Christian education, this book has become necessary.

The fundamentalist parents [i.e.. Christian parents] of our fundamentalist students [i.e.. Christian students] think… bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists [i.e. Christian students]

I'm going to scream into a paper bag.

This is the AUTHOR equating fundamentalism with Christianity. Rorty does not say Christian. He says fundamentalist. The AUTHOR parses this as "Christian". Fundamentalists HATE it when you call them fundamentalists because it makes them feel like their view of Christianity isn't the only view of Christianity and they HATE that. They think they're the most correct, the most righteous, the most godly. I am engaging in rhetoric. This is because I lived it. I lived it every day for almost 25 years straight. We never called ourselves fundamentalists. We called ourselves Christians. The first time I remember becoming aware that we were fundamentalists was my stepdad saying, "You know, fundamentalist really just means dealing with the fundamentals." I was not aware there was another way to be Christian. I was not aware there was any other way not to go to hell. I was, like, 18.

Anyway. Rorty is fucking right. Those parents are frightening, vicious, and dangerous. I know because I lived with them. And I know because it wasn't just my parents. The entire structure of the kind of church I grew up in is designed to discourage critical thought. I know that sounds like rhetoric, but I don't mean it to be that this time. It is a fact. You are not supposed to think about things in ways that their view of the Bible doesn't teach you to.

And I DID go through this experience in college, with the help of also online friends. I generally find this kind of attitude patronizing, so I'm reluctant to make Rorty as much of a savior as he thinks himself, but I do owe a lot to my teachers who gently showed me the benefits of secularization. That will not be true for every religious person because many religions are genuinely marginalized and being told "think of this secularly!" is violent, but for me it was a way to escape.

Also lol @ Noebel equating homophobic with Christian. 

Then we have the old eye canard. 

An excellent example of human wisdom involves a discussion of the evolution of the eye. The conclusion was reached that it would take approximately 300 million years for a fully functioning eye to evolve by chance and accident (to which a wit quipped that a father and a mother can produce a fully functioning eye in nine months!).

Yes. Now that we've evolved it, the code is in our genes. That's how it works.

Then there's a whole long section of "attacks on Christianity". It's going to be hard to sum this up but I don't want to quote the whole thing because it's like an entire page. So I'm going to quote two sections to show the kind of problems at play throughout the section.

Jesus tells us He is the resurrection and the life (John 11:25). But Dewey, Rorty, Foucault, and their followers insist there is no resurrection and that life itself is an accident of nature.

This isn't…that's not…this is false equivalence?? These two statements are not actually linked and it makes no sense to connect them. "I am the resurrection and the life" refers to Jesus's capability to save humans from their own sin, whereas "life is an accident of nature" is a biological statement. One regards the spiritual dimension,

Jesus says we should love God with our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:30-31). But Marx and Lenin assert that there is no God and that we must eliminate the bourgeois class, by violence if necessary. In another arena, the Qur'an teaches that non-Muslims (Christians and Jews) are the enemies of Allah and may be killed

FIRSTLY THAT IS NOT TRUE ABOUT ISLAM!!! I am very heated about this because this is a really dangerous and cruel lie that people tell to justify fucking. HATE CRIMES. This is not true!! You won't be surprised to learn that this is based on a misunderstanding of what "jihad" is. 

Okay, moving on to the first part, which is less dangerous and more ???what. The connection between Mark 12:30-31 and "eliminate the bourgeois" is not clear to me. You could believe that both were true at the same time. I am guessing that this is supposed to involve not loving your neighbor as yourself, but you'd have to do a lot more analytical work to make that clear. It's just randomly throwing together Bible verses with economic philosophy. 

The influence of the Secular Humanist worldview is prevalent in every sector of our lives. Consider, for example, the way atheistic evolutionary thinking has become the accepted and undisputed truth within the scientific establishment and for those who are teaching the next generation of young people. 

Although the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in the existence of God, 94 percent of the leadership of the National Academy of Science consider themselves atheists. 

James Dobson is the source for this, which makes me not trust it. But the idea that atheists have gone into the sciences to take over and suppress Christianity is... This kind of thinking only works if you have never personally met large bodies of scientists. It relies, like many fundie "truths", on a lack of experience with the world.

Their atheistic dogma reaches into every public school in America via naturalistic evolutionary propaganda. Evolution is not treated as a theory, but as an unquestioned scientific fact. 

Misunderstanding of what a "theory" is in science. Misunderstanding of how broad "evolution" is as a category of science. "Naturalistic evolutionary propaganda" aka teaching evolution. If you say that teaching creationism is "Christian propaganda" they get really mad. Some double standards at play here.

Ironically, a Chinese paleontologist writes, "In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America you can criticize the government, but not Darwin."'

No source is given for this. Also, criticizing Darwin can happen in other ways than "creationism is real, actually". Evolution has moved beyond Darwin. It has been over one hundred years. Fundies have a hard time understanding the idea that a text can be central and yet be criticized because they themselves believe in Biblical inerrancy as a primary tenant. 

Then they get into some bits about how Darwin Was Wrong, Microevolution is True but Macroevolution is False. Not going to go over that now because we'll get into it in Biology. Let's look at this, though:

We were not happy to learn, however, that the editor of this Smithsonian publication was forced to leave his position in spite of the fact that he possesses two earned Ph.D.s in science. Humanists cannot tolerate any opinion that weakens Darwin's hold on their worldview.

You can have Ph.D.s and still be wrong, and also they don't stack. A Ph.D. is just research training in a field. In "science"? In what science? The "Smithsonian publication" itself is not cited, just the source for the quote, which as far as I can tell (my footnotes are slightly corrupted by the formatting) is Jonathan Wells' Icons of Evolution which has been, well, panned, for its lack of rigor. 

In the current politically correct environment, in which all cultures are created equal and beyond criticism (except Nazi culture, which is selectively condemned)

The idea that Nazism is specifically a culture equivalent to, like…a country's culture…??? The vague implication that it's not fair to criticize a movement that was built on genocide????? They murdered millions, dudes.

The ideas and philosophies of men and women such as Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche, Lenin, Stalin, Russell, Heidegger, Adomo, Lukacs, Gramsci, Sanger, Dewey, Kinsey, Sagan, Derrida, Foucault and others have led to an array of practices and lifestyles contrary to biblical values. These practices include free love, pornography, aberrant sex education, homosexuality, shacking up, teen pregnancy, abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia, unrestricted embryonic stem cell research, cloning, out of wedlock children, irresponsible parenting, etc.

So…most of these people are philosophers or some kind of scientists. I think off the top of my head Sanger (Margaret I assume) is the only one who's an actual activist. The idea that Foucault has had an impact on the everyday person's lifestyle is fucking…….look. Okay. Academic theories aren't completely removed from everyday life. And science isn't, either. But the idea here is that there's these big thinkers who come up with theories that change America's or the world's way of relating to social values. That's just not how it works. Theorists are in dialogue with the society around them, they do not create it. This is something that fundies are not equipped to understand because they cannot understand a nonprescriptive viewpoint.

Clearly the moral values espoused by Secular Humanist thinkers have recently exerted a much greater impact on our culture than have the traditional Christian worldview and its system of ethical values that, to a large degree, have been eradicated from the public square. Secular Humanists have cleverly and methodically gained ascendancy over Christianity in the past two to three generations.

Sure. That's why 70% of Americans are Christians. 25% Evangelical by the way, biggest group. This is just not true, and it's again put that way so that you will feel under siege. It's also carefully designed so that people who do not have a "traditional" Christian worldview (so for instance Christians who believe in theistic evolution) do not count. 

This is something they have to balance carefully! Because Christians have to be a minority and under fire if they want to be an underdog. But there also have to be a large enough population of them that the majority of "the leadership of the National Academy of Science" being atheists is unrepresentative.

In our book Mind Siege, Tim La Haye and I prove that Secular Humanism, for example, is a religious worldview.

Tim LaHaye is the guy who wrote the Left Behind novels, just so you know what company the author is keeping.

Oooh god. And now we get to the section on Islam which is titled, no kidding, "Out of the Desert". It's brief, claiming that radical Islam dominates Muslim spheres in the United States. Not true, but an interesting projection, since evangelicalism is, as discussed, the largest group of Christians in the USA. It also does some stuff about how Islam is bad because it's a whole worldview, not just a religion. You know. As opposed to Christianity. Which is also a whole worldview and not a religion but in a good way.

I wish I was exaggerating.

Some of you may question whether or not Marxism should still be included in our list of influential worldviews, believing as many do that Marxism came crashing down with the Berlin Wall in 1989. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Although the political and institutional forms of Marxism may have changed, Marxism still exerts a huge influence in the academic world and in various political and economic ideologies.

True! But not the same as Marxism-Leninism and not a religion. There's a lot of Red Scare about the way they talk about it, you won't be surprised to learn. I would disagree that it's necessarily a "worldview" in the sense this book means for every critical scholar that works with it.

Then we have postmodernism. 

Postmodernists deny the existence of metanarratives and all grand narratives.

This is not true. I checked this with my lit crit partner because I am but a humble linguist and he said, backing up my intuition: "Postmodernists think EVERYTHING is metanarratives." Really, postmodernism is all about the meta. It doesn't operate on the level of everyday interactions.

Postmodernists may contend that all truth is relative to one's peers or community, but they nevertheless insist that atheism, skepticism, relativism, and evolution are true around the world. […] The only truths Postmodernists see as relative are truths supporting Christianity.

Again, this is just….not true? Complete misunderstanding of postmodernism? Again, I have to reinforce that postmodernism is not a personal philosophy, it is a critical one. It is a way of looking at the world IN AN ACADEMIC SETTING, not a personal one. Your academic work can certainly influence your worldview, but it is not guaranteed to create a static worldview based on that academic work. Also "relativism is true" is logically incoherent, and "skepticism is true" makes no sense whatsoever. There's a lot of this type of misunderstanding throughout this section. There's also no sense that someone can believe something without wanting to impose it on someone else, because fundies don't think that's possible. For them, not being allowed to impose their beliefs on others IS oppression.

One last section that's basically just a call to action that backs up what I'm saying. The author says that we can't just stand by and let other worldviews take over, we have to fight for ours:

We must do no less than Elijah, Jesus, and Paul did as they withstood those seeking to destroy the wisdom and knowledge of God. If we fail, we will lose every idea and belief that Christians hold dear, as well as the institutions based on them (i.e., home, church, state, education, occupation). It is no accident that wherever Christians establish themselves they build homes, churches, and schools and then work hard for the glory of God. In fact, it is safe to say that Christians founded the first 150 colleges and universities in the United States and all the major universities across Europe.

Regarding the influence of Christ, most of these institutions have been lost. The One who is most responsible for Western Civilization and culture has been shut out and replaced with the follies of humanity. We cannot afford to lose any more territory, and indeed, we must begin reclaiming what we have lost.

Effective, extremely Christian Nationalist framing.

• Invoke heroes of the past

• Compare ourselves to them

• Establish high stakes

• Reference a time of previous glory and achievement

• Suggest urgency through positing a decline

• Call to action

This is funny, too: "In fact, it is safe to say that Christians founded the first 150 colleges and universities in the United States and all the major universities across Europe." It's true, but this is another balancing act. You have to establish that most of the Good Institutions were founded by Christians, but you have to elide the fact that most of the Bad Philosophies were also founded by Christians. Margaret Sanger was Catholic. Acknowledge the dominance of Christianity in Western culture without acknowledging that that means everything you hate about contemporary Western culture is in dialogue with Christianity.

Anyway. That's the end of the first section of the introduction.

Woof.