The Overview (Monday, March 15)
Shadi Hamid on America's new religion, Beth Moore leaves the SBC, and the importance of male friendship
Last week brought big news from John Brown University: several hundred staff, faculty, and students received their first or second dose of Moderna’s COVID vaccine. I was among the group receiving their second vaccine, and though I didn’t encounter any adverse effects the last time around, this time was different. Aches and chills set in around 18 hours after the shot, and they didn’t let up for a day and a half. It was a rough couple of days but, all things considered, totally worth it.
It’s surreal to compare where things stood one year ago to where they stand now. While we’ve undeniably witnessed an incredible amount of loss and suffering, we’ve also seen remarkable scientific, policy, and social achievements. There’s even the possibility that JBU will finish the semester maskless, depending on how many of our students are vaccinated when their turn comes sometime next month. There’s work to be done, for sure, but goodness, it’s hard not to be optimistic about the months ahead. What a blessing.
In that spirit, here’s the Monday, March 15 edition of The Overview:
1) The Atlantic has been on an absolute tear lately, producing article after article demanding to be read. In fact, it was this stretch that finally convinced me to become a subscriber after years of trying to avoid the paywall. Here’s a sample of their best recent work…
Shadi Hamid highlights a troubling trend in America: the decline of religion (or at least religious affiliation) combined with the rise of politics. Of course, politics is a part of our nature, but when it is the source of our values and identity, it becomes problematic. People, he argues, are wired to worship, whether it is God, self, or something else. As religion is slowly and slowly pushed out in favor of other belief systems (like politics), our society is worse off for it. He asks,
Can religiosity be effectively channeled into political belief without the structures of actual religion to temper and postpone judgment? There is little sign, so far, that it can. If matters of good and evil are not to be resolved by an omniscient God in the future, then Americans will judge and render punishment now.
Hamid is not the first to articulate such a problem, but he is the latest to identify the stakes. And given the direction American society appears to be heading, his is a concern we would do well to acknowledge, consider, and try to defuse.
Tim Keller reflects on his cancer diagnosis, encouraging Christians (and all of us, really) to approach evil, death, and the time we have left on this planet both intellectually and emotionally, via “head work” and “heart work.” Regarding the former, Keller cites philosopher Charles Taylor’s writing on how society has all too often rejected the necessity of an omniscient, omnipotent God in favor of logic and rationality. Keller responds,
If there is a God great enough to merit your anger over the suffering you witness or endure, then there is a God great enough to have reasons for allowing it that you can’t detect. It is not logical to believe in an infinite God and still be convinced that you can tally the sums of good and evil as he does, or to grow angry that he doesn’t always see things your way. Taylor’s point is that people say their suffering makes faith in God impossible—but it is in fact their overconfidence in themselves and their abilities that sets them up for anger, fear, and confusion.
Later, Keller explains how his “heart work” has prepared him for the inevitable death that awaits him, whether it is at the hand of cancer in the next couple of years, old age in two decades, or a freak accident tomorrow. He notes that he has spent a great deal of time in the Psalms as of late. “The Psalms show me a God maddening in his complexity,” Keller says, “but this difficult deity comes across as a real being, not one any human would have conjured. Through the Psalms, I grew in confidence that I was before ‘him with whom we have to do.’” He later highlights a prayer he prays daily:
And as I lay down in sleep and rose this morning only by your grace, keep me in the joyful, lively remembrance that whatever happens, I will someday know my final rising, because Jesus Christ lay down in death for me, and rose for my justification.
Amen.
Arthur Brooks writes that people should be more willing to change their minds, if for no other reason than it can make them happier. Drawing on research from psychology, Brooks says that people who are open to reevaluating their perspectives via new information are often less anxious and more happy. Brooks explains,
Being closed off to being proved wrong or to having our beliefs challenged has huge costs. Leaders who surround themselves with yes-men have been shown to make costly—and sometimes catastrophic—mistakes…. If your goal is to find the truth, admitting you are wrong and changing your beliefs based on new facts makes you better off in the end.
Humility, it turns out, is healthy. And while Brooks provides specific steps for embracing this notion of epistemic humility, he encourages people to not be afraid of being described as a flip-flopper upon changing their mind. After all, if better and more convincing information is available and you still maintain a now second-tier belief, who is actually worthy of criticism?
2) Bob Smietana, editor in chief of Religion News Service, breaks a major story in conservative evangelicalism: Beth Moore, perhaps the best-known woman in American Christianity, is leaving the Southern Baptist Convention.
In a lengthy interview with Smietana, Moore details the conditions that led her to conclude that she can no longer affiliate with the SBC or with Lifeway Christian Resources, the organization within the SBC that has published and distributed dozens of Moore’s studies and books over the years. And while Southern Baptists’ embrace of Donald Trump was not the sole reason for her departure, Moore said it did play a role, as did issues over gender and race within the SBC. “At the end of the day,” Moore said, “there comes a time when you have to say, this is not who I am.”
3) Writing for the New York Times, Leigh Stein introduces us to the world of “Instavangelists,” women on social media who offer “religion” to a generation of (mostly) women, turned off from institutional religion yet still seeking deeper meaning in their lives. “Our screens may have shrunk,” Stein writes, “but we’re still drawn to spiritual counsel, especially when it doubles as entertainment.” If you’re looking for a timely and convincing diagnosis of America’s religious malaise and complexity, Stein has you covered.
4) Andrew Walker, writing in The American Conservative, critiques the Equality Act on both policy and spiritual grounds. The Act, recently passed by the House of Representatives and awaiting a vote in the Senate, would, among other things, formally adopt sexual orientation and gender identity under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, making these akin to race in terms of antidiscrimination law.
I have explained elsewhere why I am not as worried as Walker about the implications of the Equality Act—or Bostock v. Clayton County, which did much of what the Equality Act would do but through judicial fiat—for religious freedom. Nevertheless, Walker’s response to the Equality Act here is an important one. Consider this:
The Equality Act is an assault on the Christian imagination, and this is where its long-term consequences are most dire and calamitous. It aims to reconfigure not only the foundation of family life and biological connections to gender, but to catechize, inculcating a different way of conceiving one’s place and orientation to the world. Moral imaginations are guided by normative constraints, which give them definition and direction. Ideally, a human imagination ought to comport with what is good, true, and beautiful. To educate the moral imagination is to seek a shared imagination, rooted in a shared account of the world, and therefore binding and persuasive to all of the citizens beholden to it.
One need not agree with every aspect of Walker’s criticism of a singular piece of legislation to wrestle with what this paragraph means for the future of Christianity in a pluralistic (and increasingly secular) age.
5) Mere Orthodoxy’s Ryan McCormick details a struggle that I (and most men, I presume) have routinely faced: developing and maintaining friendships. In high school and college this was not a problem I dealt with, but as an adult (and a married parent at that) it has been a constant challenge.
McCormick suggests that this is due to the lack of “third spaces” in American society. Whereas previous generations of men could meet and converse at social clubs, bowling leagues, and related institutions, in recent decades these have collapsed. Given that male friendship is different from female friendship, these kinds of intentional spaces are crucial to men cultivating meaningful relationships. And for reasons that McCormick later explains, relying solely on the church has not proved to be a suitable catchall. Importantly, the result is not just that men have fewer deep friendships; the result is that women end up supporting men and their emotional needs more than they should.
I’ve been more intentional recently about spending time with men outside work and church. It’s been helpful to gather weekly to talk about all sorts of things — McCormick notes, “Spiritual friendship does involve room for vulnerable conversations, but it also involves room for conversations about theology, politics, movies, Major League Baseball, and the brewing of beer.” Maybe that’s why I found this article so timely. At the very least, it’s an excellent diagnosis of an underdiscussed problem in our culture.
I went ahead and read the article about "Third Places" and male friendships, and I couldn't help but be stricken by the audacity of the Harper's article to declare that women were somehow the primary victims of men being lonely and without friends. I almost can't assault that statement for how blatantly it seems to ignore men and the fact that they are the ones who are lonely and without emotional support. I couldn't even shed crocodile tears for these women who are so emotionally drained from having to support their life partners. It's almost as if that kind of emotional support is a foundational element of serious relationships. I'm not saying it's okay to be emotionally immature, but it seems to odd to focus on the the people who ought to help as the true victims of the situation.
On another note, regarding the actual Mere Orthodoxy article, I found paragraph about the church functioning due to women's involvement to be truly fascinating. There was a book I read recently that talked much about men and democracy. I found the conclusions reached there to be echoed in some way in this small paragraph. Men do form relationships very differently from women, and it stretches back to our very early history. Men formed bonds and tribes because it was easier to work together than it was to compete. In places like church, there's simply no threat of competition and so there's no one that you might need to ally with. This type of analysis might seem very outmoded or emblematic of "toxic masculinity," but I'd be damned if I didn't see this type of thing borne out in my everyday life. Men do need to step forward, but the right incentives and disincentives simply aren't in place, so we shouldn't expect them to behave any better than they currently do. Why participate in church activities where it's difficult to be oneself and you're constantly under some expectation of behavior when you can hop on Discord with your friends and have absolutely tons of fun doing nothing in particular?
The natural social competition that persists amongst men could potentially be a fantastic incentive for building friendships. Go outside and play basketball on a court with a bunch of strangers. You might have to humble yourself tremendously, but getting crossed up will light quite the fire of motivation inside you to get better, which means that you'll want to play basketball again, which in turn means you'll invite everyone back to the court. Friendship started! If you don't want to play basketball, go bowling, and make it competitive (perhaps only to a light-hearted extent). Maybe the person bowling the worst has to pay for everyone's beer or something. The core of the matter is that you'll be engaging men's deep-seated push for competition. The truth is, most people don't engage out of anxiety and pride. Too often, people refuse to choose to step into experiences because they don't want to fail and they don't want to publicly admit that they're bad at something, which, though totally understandable, is deeply flawed and unhelpful. The potential negative outcomes of most social interactions simply aren't that bad, but they get blown way out of proportion in people's minds. This can happen to a greater extent when more innocuous behaviors are penalized, for instance, in a church environment.