As our social, economic and political worlds fracture we keep wondering - why do they think that way? Then, how can they change, what will reverse their opinions?
The ease with which our government administrations lied to us over COVID origins, lockdowns, vaccine efficacy is ever more evident with recent US declassified documents (see discussion). Almost every area of national life has been misrepresented and mismanaged: the economy is failing (in the UK £270 per taxpayer per month going just on debt interest!!), we are too tied to the CCP, too influenced by Islam, the Net-zero fallacy is destroying our industry, our Police and legal institutions are actually against us…
The truth about these things can be found - it just requires a bit of digging, the kind we expected main-stream media to do in the past. Thankfully new sources of factuality have emerged and have not yet been suppressed - people who do know a little of what is going on and have the independence of mind and courage to speak up. The recent ARC conference is full of them.
But how do people change?
Christians are aware of the profound need for change - they recognise that they were lost and have been found, were blind but can now see. They know about repentance - not just regret but turning around, going a better way. We realise that our 'freedom' from God's ways was a heavy addiction to another's. God does not offer 'utopia' on earth but a yoke that is easy, a burden that is light, simply a life with Him.
How does this genuine enlightenment come? Paul the missionary sees it as:
by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God
Almost everyone in the West have been bought up as Secular-Humanist - that is our world-view, but the Spirit of God creatively challenges the blinkers to our understanding.
Browsing the library of a new school, I found Homer's Odyssey - the story of a teenage boy (like me) trying to find his father who had not returned from the Trojan wars. This was written way before the later part of the Bible (the oldest thing I'd heard of) and yet the human emotions and sensibilities were the same as now. Man had not evolved from primitive dullness to modern maturity. Maybe the Bible had credibility too. Getting a modern translation I found Jesus was not a wimp in a nightdress but rather fine and brave. Maybe other things in there were true too. So the Spirit of God is active.
A small notice was put up in school advertising a Christian group. I turned up. They probably all knew each other outside school. They were kind and no-doubt a bit wary of me - but there was an authenticity about them that they seemed unaware of. They even prayed together - ordinary words! You felt you could trust them. It was not just their words, their deeds had integrity. You begin to have a sense of something miraculous and challenging going on.
I was doing mainly science subjects for exams but also 'English Lit'. I started to think about these writers - who of them reflected a Christian understanding? Some did - echoes in GM Hopkins, vagueness in Wordsworth, Shakespeare? In Alexander Pope you had piercing satire. Whatever his faith, he was righteous in his observations. He'd have been invited to ARC! Milton was later seen as brilliant.
The intellect is important, God made it, but we need to have the mind of Christ. The Prodigal Son 'came to his senses'
Are emotional attachments stronger than intellectual ones?
Studying for a Systems Science degree we were asked how new theories are accepted. The scientific method, we'd reply, induction or deduction. No, said our professor - it's because those who hold the old theory die off!
That tells you two things - that theory, science, is not as clear-cut as you learnt in school - all those Laws aren't necessarily so. Also that people are strongly affected by pride, and their need for income and influence affect their judgement. We've seen this in following 'the science' where the authoritarian instincts of science bureaucrats are misplaced and deadly. Their capacity to lie openly is so shocking (discussion), scientific journals losing centuries-old credibility.
In 'Climate' suddenly the UN/WEF have decided de-carboning is not so important - generating power for AI computers is. The IPCC has spontaneously downgraded its worse predictions. The scientists who once were said to have agreed don't have to now, since Donald Trump was elected. When Joe Biden was challenged on his climate policies by a Nobel Physicist, he said theirs was 'right-wing science'. But the current UK energy minster wont give up his ideological attachment to net-zero.
One of the problems with ideologies is that they cannot prove themselves so rely on blind assertion - which is driven by something else - usually the prejudiced dislike of others. As it is said of Dworkin - whatever conservatives were for, he was against.
Roger Scruton noted Left-wing people find it very hard to get on with right-wing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with left-wing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.
Joe Boot draws an additional conclusion: And that is a worldview issue. Marxism holds those who disagree to be obstacles to man's realisation of himself in history - an oppressor who must be destroyed. The left has always believed in the sanctity of violence.
If it's not violence against the unborn, the adolescent, the elderly, the slightly more (or less) wealthy, those they perceive as a moral threat - it's against anything other than themselves.
This is not specifically a left/right issue nor an intellectual/anti-intellectual one (there are plenty of intelligent frauds) but an ideological vs moral-intellect divide.
Renewing the mind
Francis Bacon is credited as being the intellectual foundation of modern science in Britain in the early 1600s (the century of revolutions). Michael Shellenberger, in his book Apocalypse Never says: When Sir Francis Bacon urged that the quest for truth be balanced by morality, he quoted the apostle Paul: “knowledge bloweth up, but charity buildeth up." Bacon didn't call for hard limits on knowledge ... The “corrective spice" to science … was “charity (or love)" p275
Shellenberger is an Environmentalist who actually goes to the places he researches, and has changed his mind based on actual evidence. This seems to have made him wiser, more considered and more effective in seeing the hidden motivations behind things. He sees the 'apocalyptic' narratives are usually pushed by vested interests - whether financial or emotional (wanting to do something meaningful, be a hero/heroine). The real tragedy is that the 'solutions' rarely meet the needs of those they are supposed to - vast sums of our money is misdirected by World Bank/UN agencies when it could do so much good.
Shellenberger sees secular humanism as the problem as it tends to nihilism and a denial of human dignity, 'we must ground ourselves first in our commitment to the transcendent moral purpose of universal flourishing and environmental progress'. He calls himself an 'Environmental Humanist', his intellect and insight has taken him this far.
The shock of bad deeds
God is providentially raising up many more who have come to recognise that official 'secular humanist' inspired dogmas don't make sense. This might be because they have spotted an objective truth and when discussing it are shutdown and threatened by the establishment. They are shocked, it wakes them up, things come into focus. Almost every aspect of COVID was marked by this. Ordinary health professionals challenging the no-vaccine-harms, pills-by-post, or lockdown logic, an MP horrified enough by rape gangs to pay for an investigation, ordinary people unable to deny the 2-tier biases of the police.
A problem at the heart
Many of the 'recovering' academics may look to the church for some sort of wisdom. They all recognise that the freedoms and prosperity of the West were forged by Christianity. It was a long process worked by God through individual people in politics, civil administration, science, literature, economics, industry, defence, education.
Thankfully there are many scientists and professionals who have Christian backgrounds and have recognised God's hand in their work. The Discovery Institute is a great example in the Natural Sciences - the Christian approach actually providing more scientific insights than the atheistic.
But all too often the seekers don't get what they need, they ask for a figurative egg and get a scorpion. Huge parts of the church are more interested in placating the secular world than challenging it. The cognitive-dissonance that workers in industry have encountered is not felt in the 'social' sphere. When I encountered challenges at work with how to respond to transgenderism the leader of our popular church declined to speak about it. When the world was bowing to BLM, I thought something wasn't right and looked around for possible critics to confirm this. I found them in the US - mostly among 'conservative' evangelicals (Founders Ministries) and later in the UK (Christian Concern, Christian Institute).
I began to realise that these rather looked-down-on groups were more in tune with God than the fashionable ones. My prejudice being wonderfully challenged.
Sadly today few of the church-leaders' attitudes have changed, they still do all they can to avoid being 'right-wing' without being able to articulate what that is. So the real issues of the day are not discussed, preached or prayed about.
The church leaders say they have wisdom and conscience, but wisdom has to come from God and must be articulated from His Word and conscience is not ours to decide. Their responses to polite and logical requests are often perverse and unfriendly (as Joe Boot notes above), by their fruits you will know them
Challenges to the use of Critical Race Theory in the wider church get the same treatment. The bitter-sweet vindication of Rev Bernard Randall after the 7-year betrayal by his own church leaders, a more profound example.
Finishing up
We might have hoped that intelligent debate of facts would resolve things - if only. We've seen that self-interest beats intellect and that it takes a personal shock to open our eyes.
But in all this we should not be surprised. Reading the Bible, God's ways are relentlessly resisted, but He works them through anyway - a remnant who have not bowed the knee, and he calls us to give account of the hope that is in us.
Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good.
As in Paul's words at the beginning, this is all the Lord's work. Sometimes He blinds eyes, allows trials so we can see the consequences. So much of this is recognising His work and embracing it:
- When we ask and see Him speak clearly in a way that leads to flourishing (if not keep asking and looking)
- When good deeds, love, accompany the speaker (many secularists have terrible private lives)
- When we see miracles, signs, encouragements, prophecies occurring (if not keep praying and asking, expect a miracle)
- When lives are being made more Holy by the Spirit, marked by humility (if not don't quench promptings to repentance)
And keep praying for those in authority - they will have to give account of themselves to God.
