For all Christians, but especially evangelical Christians like me, the ultimate enemy–often lurking beneath other social movements or ideas–is relativism. Relativism is dangerous because it attacks not this truth or that truth, but the reality of truth itself.
As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, in relativism truth is in the mind of the believer. This leads to the phrase some of us have heard when trying to explain our faith to others, “Well, that may be your truth; but it’s not my truth!”
In contrast, evangelicals have always argued for the reality of objective, universal truth that is true for everyone–across all time, history and geography–independent of whatever people may believe. The earth was circling the sun, even though for many centuries most people believed the sun circled the earth.
This belief in objective truth was attacked in the mid-20th century under the name postmodernism. I’ve taught entire classes on this movement, but basically postmodernism is a total repudiation of two millennia of western civilization’s trust in facts, data and human reason as arbiters or pathways to truth.
For the postmodernist, truth is not “out there,” waiting to be discovered. Truth is not something we can pursue together or help each other find. We cannot discover truth by following the Lord’s advice to Israel in Isaiah 1:18:
Here’s what I want to say to my fellow evangelical Christians. In the words of the cartoon Pogo that have become a meme in our culture: we have met the enemy and he is us!We evangelicals have ourselves become the very enemies of objective truth we used to rail against. And, in one of the great ironies of our day, we continue to claim we defend objective truth, even as we destroy it piece by piece.
By turning our backs on objective truth, we place our democracy and all its people in significant political peril, and, as we saw last week in the attack on the US Congress meeting in the US Capitol, in physical peril as well.
But’s here my heart’s cry: we also place ourselves in great spiritual peril.
Continuing the path we’re on is opening an abyss before us that will take generations to close, if it’s even possible; one cannot unring the bell.
This abyss where we lose our Christian faith will not be open denial but the death of a thousand cuts. Indeed, like the proverbial frog slowly boiled in the kettle, many of us will slowly lose our faith without realizing it until it’s too late.
How did we get here?
In trying to explain the nature of reality, Plato told his famous analogy of The Cave.
Imagine prisoners who have lived all their lives in a cave that is completely dark except for a fire behind the prisoners. Images are paraded in front of the fire so that they cast two-dimensional shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. The prisoners, chained so they only see the wall and know nothing of the fire or the images carried in front of it behind them, assume the shadows projected on the wall is reality.
Eventually one of the prisoners breaks free from his chains and escapes out into the sunlight. He is amazed, for the colors and vibrancy of this incredible three-dimensional world are overwhelming after living in the dark cave. He returns to the cave, hoping to free his fellow prisoners, certain that they will want to experience the real world outside the cave.
However, he is startled to discover that his friends are content to remain in the shadows. He describes the light of the sun and the colors of the trees and sky to no avail. They have decided! The cave is all they know; the cave is all they want to know.
Now, if you’ve listened this far, I’m going to say something I hope will surprise you.
I’m not going to use the tragic fate of those caught in the darkness and phony reality of shadows to beat you over the head. [“You poor evangelicals. Why can’t you just come to your senses and join the rest of us out in the light?”]
In fact, this is how Plato himself used his own story. Plato believed it was only the super-intelligent people, philosophers like him, who could escape the cave using their superior reasoning ability. Once out in the light, they then had the responsibility to go back and help all the ordinary people escape as they did.
I will confess that at times I’ve felt this sense of superiority these past four years. My heart grieved as I watched my fellow evangelicals unquestionably and meekly support a man who (in my opinion) is antithetical to everything Jesus taught and did.
But this past week, I’ve realized I need to repent of my own arrogance. Repenting my own superior attitude, I can better understand why some of my fellow evangelicals react as they do.
Over the past week, I have also discovered a huge compassion in my heart for those who have been imprisoned (perhaps unintentionally) in The Cave.
It’s an absolutely dreadful thought to imagine being caught in an environment that exchanges the multi-dimensional, complex, fascinating world that we actually live in to inhabit a world of simplistic, two-dimensional, black and white shadows:
- Immigrants are not real human beings who cut our grass or serve us in a restaurant; they are rapists and gang members.
- Elections are not the beating heart of democracy; either my side wins or they are rigged and a fraud.
- Jesus Christ is not the person we meet in the gospels; he is our tribe’s mascot leading our cheering section.
Friends, politics outside the Cave is not a fight between absolute evil and absolute good. It’s a process of give and take, where each side offers facts and makes good points, thereby uniting the best of different, counter-balancing perspectives so we can achieve actual progress that helps real people in real life.
Human life outside the Cave is not people “like us” who are totally good and all those “others” who are totally evil, but, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously expressed the biblical view:
When we are forced to stare at shadows until we actually believe them, we behave as if our side is totally pure, righteous and patriotic, while the other side (whoever is out of favor at the moment) is totally defiled, evil and the enemy of all we hold dear. [Imagine how poor Mr. Pence feels right now?]
That’s living in a kind of hell. How awful to wake up in that kind of world every morning? It’s certainly not the real world where all human beings are created in the image of God.
I’ve tried to imagine the despair some must feel who say they believe in the sovereignty of God, yet in practice act as if the sovereign God of the universe cannot help them: Donald Trump is their last and only hope. It’s Donald Trump or the abyss.
Last Wednesday, in a brazen attack on the US Congress, we saw a little of what the abyss actually looks like.
[Yes, it was an attack on the Capitol building, but the reason it happened was the US Congress was meeting inside to officially declare Biden the winner of the election. It was an attack on our democratic constitutional system, first and foremost.]
Perhaps for you it was no big deal. Stunningly to me, 45% of Republican voters supported the attack in a recent poll.
The famous phrase in George Orwell’s classic book 1984 “sanity is statistical” was a precursor to postmodernism. Get enough people believing anything and it becomes “true.”
We have met the enemy and he is us.
But the greatest danger in denying the very existence of objective truth is losing our own faith.
Perhaps you remember a famous epitaph about Nazi Germany written by a Lutheran pastor named Martin Niemoller. He was initially enthusiastic about the Nazi regime, then grew to deeply question it as years passed. In 1946 he wrote one of the first books after the war confessing how the German church had been complicit with the Nazis, leading to the murder of eight or nine million people. Niemoller described that slow process this way:
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I gave up on science–I decided climate change or covid would not impact me… I can pick and choose when to believe in science.
I gave up on moral character–I decided it’s a transactional world where everything is for sale, even Supreme Court judges…only losers will sacrifice their success for ethical principles.
I gave up on constitutional democracy–I decided my future vision is America’s only hope…no election or rule of law will hold me back.
Finally, I gave up on Jesus Christ–what I want to believe had become my only truth… the only Jesus I now believe in is the one I have re-made in my own image.
Friends, we will either believe in an objective truth outside of ourselves, or the only allegiance we will ultimately claim is what we believe, what we want to believe.
There are some Christian cynics in our world, and I confess that I have been one of them at times. Christian cynics say: “just compartmentalize.”
Many evangelicals say we believe in the universal, objective, historical truth of Jesus’ bodily resurrection. At the same time we blithely, even proudly, ignore all facts, evidence, reason or objective truth that contradict what we want to believe in many other areas of life, especially politics.
The Titanic was supposedly an unsinkable ship because it was compartmentalized. And yet when it struck the iceberg, icy water that initially entered only one compartment quickly overflowed that compartment and then moved on to the next, and then the next. The unsinkable ship sank in 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Compartmentalization may work for a while. But not forever.
Compartmentalization leaves us teetering on the edge of the abyss.
When the pursuit of any objective truth outside our own prejudices and perceptions slowly erodes away inside us, eventually we lose connection with truth altogether. “A man cannot serve two masters.”
When this happens–and it can and will happen–all we will have left is what is in our own minds…believing only what we want to believe…into all eternity.
Please change course before it’s too late.
