Tag Archives: Christianity and Culture

What Keeps You Up at Night?

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Interviewers often ask FBI directors, generals and diplomats the question, “What keeps you up at night?” It’s a simple way of asking about the most pressing dangers facing the nation or the world. Today I want to answer this question in my own case.

Interviewer: Professor Highfield, as a student of church history, Christian theology, and contemporary culture, what keeps you up at night? What dangers currently threatening the church do you see that less observant people may not see?

Highfield: Indeed, I have given much of my life to study and observation of all things Christian. Also, I have given much attention to the cultures with which Christianity has interacted for 2,000 years. However, despite all that study I still feel like I am groping in the dark. The world is far too complicated for one person to grasp. Nevertheless, I will give you my take on your question.

Interviewer: That is all my audience can ask.

Highfield: One more thing before I answer your question. I want to make it clear that I believe firmly in the comprehensive providential care of the infinitely wise and good God. Nothing can separate us from “the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39).

Interviewer: Understood.

Highfield: What keeps me up at night? I am most alarmed by the rapidity with which the younger generations in the church are assimilating to the mind and behavior patterns of the surrounding culture and abandoning traditional Christianity. In the history of Christianity there have been many crises, defections, and heretical movements. From Judas who betrayed the Lord onward there has been a steady stream of traitors and deserters. I am aware of this. So, I am not claiming that this latest crisis is unprecedented. Only that it is different from anything I’ve seen during my life.

Interviewer: Could you unpack your thoughts for us. What exactly are these young generations finding in the surrounding culture that they are not finding in traditional Christianity? Why? And why now?

Highfield: I will state this as concisely as I can. The secular culture appeals primarily to our lower natures, as John says, “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16). It offers an easy way to pleasure, excitement, freedom, and happiness. Just follow the inclinations of your desires. In an unflattering contrast, popular culture pictures traditional Christianity as unnatural, backward, and unhappy. Christianity’s ethic of obedience, humility, self-discipline, and prudence, contemporary culture sneers, is as boring as it is antiquated.

Interviewer: Is that all there is to it? Young people have always been tempted to “sow their wild oats” before they come to their senses later in life.

Highfield: I was just about to address that issue. The secular culture wraps its sensuality in appeals to youthful idealism. Secular culture was not created exclusively by its rebellion against Christianity’s strictures on sexual excess, drunkenness, and other modes of self-indulgence. It also inherited certain ideals that it combined with its pleasure-seeking core. Among these are freedom, tolerance, respect, and dignity. In Christianity, these ideals fit perfectly with faith, obedience, and self-discipline. Popular culture, however, uses the rhetoric of these ideals to construct a view of the self whose inherent freedom and dignity give it a kind of moral independence that supposedly deserves respect from others. We are told that each individual is unique and must be left free to seek happiness in their own way.

Interviewer: So, secular culture uses Christian ideals to lure young Christians away from their Christianity?

Highfield: Precisely! Well…almost. In Christianity, “freedom” is the God-empowered state of exemption from the destructive powers of sin and death. In popular culture, freedom is the ability to indulge your desires as you please. In Christianity, we are sometimes allowed to tolerate behaviors we condemn. In secular culture, to tolerate means to approve. In Christianity, dignity is rooted in our God-imaging nature. In secular culture, a sense of our dignity comes out in asserting our rights to self-determination.

Interviewer: And young people are fooled by this rhetoric?

Highfield: Sort of. When young people hear these ideals used to justify a life of self-indulgence and criticize traditional Christianity, I am not sure they are completely fooled. The human tendency toward self-deception is very strong. But invocation of these twisted virtues gives the impression of moral superiority. And that moral fig leaf combined with the pull of the flesh and desire for acceptance by the majority culture explains why so many are taken in.

Interviewer: But why are so many so vulnerable to such deception? And what can be done to make them less vulnerable?

Highfield: I wish I knew the definitive answers to your questions. However, I do have some thoughts. First, I think most of us are unaware of how deeply embedded in the Western psyche the ideal of the independent, self-creating individual is, and how anti-Christian it is. Our political rhetoric and all our institutions—even many of our churches—idealize the individual’s freedom to choose their own path to happiness free from subservience to any lord. This pattern of thought is woven into every level of society and every social activity. So, when the time is ripe for secular society to use the rhetoric of freedom and individualized happiness to subvert traditional Christianity, young Christians fall by the millions.

Interviewer: Why now? Why was the time ripe?

Highfield: Again, you are asking a question to which only God knows the answer. I am sure it is much more complicated than this. But I believe this precipitous fall results from generations of ever more thorough assimilation to an ever more secular culture. It was not as precipitous as it seemed. The churches, the grandparents and parents of the current generation failed. They failed to understand and teach the true nature of the inner rot and godlessness of modern culture. They failed to understand and teach the true inner nature of the Christian faith and way of life. They failed to understand and teach the true nature of Christian freedom, dignity, and joy and how these ideals fit perfectly with faith, obedience, and self-discipline. They failed to understand and teach how to love God truly and keep ourselves from idols.

Interviewer: What can be done to slow or reverse this crisis?

Highfield: I dearly wish I knew. Until God visits us with revival on a large scale, all I know to do is repent and urge others to repent of our negligence. Church leaders need to repent of their superficiality, get educated, and grow a backbone. Parents need to repent of worldly ambition and childish self-centeredness, teach their children, and get their families involved in a like-minded group of believers.

Interviewer: So, that is what keeps you up at night?

Highfield: Yes. I pray I am wrong, but I don’t see it changing on a large scale until it gets much worse. But it can change for your church and your family. It starts with you and me. Who knows, God may yet surprise us with a great outpouring of his Spirit. Come Holy Spirit!

What Went Wrong in American Higher Education and What to Do About It

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In the previous six essays I summarized Christopher Rufo’s account of how the New Left came to dominate American education, government agencies, and corporations. I will devote this essay to higher education.

Christian Faith versus The New Left Philosophy

Before I discuss higher education, I want to assert briefly and bluntly that neo-Marxist philosophy is incompatible with Christianity. You cannot be a disciple of Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse and be a Christian in any sense close to orthodoxy. Marcuse was an atheist as are most other New Left leaders. As we saw in our previous essays, neo-Marxists are willing to destroy a relatively just, admittedly imperfect, social order in a despairing hope that a perfect one will take its place. The New Left divides human beings into oppressors and oppressed; it further divides the oppressed into a hierarchy of ever more marginalized identities. It explains all human relationships by this narrow category. Moreover, it justifies violence as a means of bringing about its vision of justice. CRT, DEI, and Critical Pedagogy make no sense apart from neo-Marxist critical theory. They cannot be adapted to serve a Christian purpose.

In contrast to the New Left philosophy, Christianity proclaims that God exists and is known truly in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. God is the creator and lord of the world. Human beings are God’s creatures made in his image and subject to sin, corruption and death. There is no hope for salvation except in God. People find their true identity in faith and union with Christ. Jesus calls on his disciples to live in peace and joy, to be peacemakers and extend mercy, to love their neighbors and enemies. There is one church, inclusion into which depends on faith and baptism. Class envy and racial animus are forbidden. Violence in service of supposed just causes is prohibited. In both spirit and letter, Christianity and neo-Marxism could hardly be more antithetical. You cannot serve two masters.

Why American Universities Fell So Readily to the New Left

Why were American universities so easily and so thoroughly conquered by the New Left? Why could they not resist such an anti-Christian, anti-democratic, anti-American, and divisive philosophy?

The New University

The short answer is that in the late 19th century the old American colleges began their transformation into modern universities by adopting the research model of the University of Berlin (1810). They cease assuming the truth of Christianity and argued for professorial and student freedom to teach and learn unencumbered by confessional restrictions. They viewed academic freedom and professional competence as essential because the new idea of the university centered on critique of old ideas and the production of new knowledge. Hence any force that resisted those new goals was considered anti-progressive. And progressive academic leaders thought that orthodox Christianity and conservative politics were the most counter-revolutionary forces they had to fear. To guard against these reactionary forces, modern academic leaders institutionalized such strong protections as near inviolable academic freedom and career-long tenure. The enemies of critical scholarship, value neutral research, and the progress of science, they thought, were all on the right, that is, among those wanting to turn back the clock. Hence all modern academia’s defenses were directed to its right. The values academic leaders asserted were critical, skeptical, purely methodological, liberal, and supposedly metaphysically and religiously neutral; all were designed to defend against traditional religious and political dogmas. Modern academia could not assert positive beliefs, truths, and values without sounding dogmatic and hypocritical. Its only commitment was to make no commitments. It never imagined that it would be attacked and conquered from the dogmatic left.

The Dilemma

As we learned from Rufo, the New Left turned modern academia’s progressive rhetoric, critical methods, and institutions of academic freedom and tenure against it. Because the New Left was neither conservative nor Christian, it caught the liberal establishment off guard.  The New Left painted the liberal order of the modern university as sold out to the white capitalist establishment. The liberal university establishment, in the leftist critique, was not critical enough, not neutral, and not progressive. Liberal academics and university administrators were face with a dilemma. They could admit that they have positive commitments after all and assert those beliefs, values, and truths in its defense against the leftist critique. Or, they could give in to the New Left as the logical outcome of their critical stance toward traditional Christianity and conservative politics. Not wanting to give ground to their old enemies, they chose the latter. To escape Christian dogma and reactionary politics, the nightmares of the liberal establishment, the university mortgaged itself to tyrannical, dogmatic leftists.

Is Reform Possible?

According to Rufo, the only possibility of overturning the neo-Marxist hold on the American university—if there is a possibility at all—lies in the democratic process. The public must reassert its control and reimpose its values on the education system. It will have to insist that primary, secondary and college education should stop working to create activists for the left’s utopian vision of social justice and take up again its traditional task of preparing productive and informed citizens for the constitutional republic of the United States of America. The value of tenure for securing the quality of education and as protection from arbitrary dismissal should be obvious, but it must be granted and maintained only under specific and clearly stated contractual obligations consistent with the stated mission of the university. The protection of academic freedom should not be extended to efforts that subvert the academic mission of the university by redirecting the educational process toward non-academic purposes. Moreover, universities should make it clear that freedom of speech applies not to the classroom but to public spaces. In staff, administrative, and bureaucratic positions, where academic tenure and academic freedom do not apply, legislatures, Boards of Regents, and administrators have much more freedom to reorganize and reform the educational bureaucracy. Shutting down all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices would be a good start.

An Uphill Climb

But I am skeptical that the public, elected officials, and Boards of Regents will carry out these measures. I could list many reasons for my pessimism, and so could you. But from an insider perspective, this one stands out: there is a deeply rooted assumption in higher education that there should be a single academic culture that sets the standards for the whole nation. Each university, it is assumed, should embody those standards. As long as this assumption holds sway, it is impossible for any one university to assert positive beliefs, values, and truths against the New Left. In a diverse society like ours, it is unlikely that a set of beliefs, values, and truths strong enough to resist the New Left can emerge as a national consensus. The only way forward is to reject the assumption of the necessity of one uniform definition of sound education. Individual universities must assert their right to define their own standards.

Next Time: The New Left and The Christian College

Introducing a New Series: The Christian Moral Vision and the Ironies of “Progressive” Culture

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The Heart of Progressive Culture

After thinking for months about social justice and critical race theory in relation to biblical Christianity, the church, and parachurch institutions, my mind has turned again to the deep moral crisis that has engulfed our culture, especially the culture of the USA. My intuition is this: The center and driving force of the ascendant culture that dominates higher education, many state and local governments, most of the media, nearly all the big cities, popular culture, and entertainment is a moral vacuum that has been eating away for centuries at the moral foundation that guided Western civilization for sixteen hundred years. Despite its utopian rhetoric to the contrary, the ascendant culture offers no alternative moral vision to replace the one it is destroying. Its central moral principle is wholly negative: we must remove all limits and destroy all oppressors and oppressive structures. Supposedly, once all oppressive structures are removed, the authentic human self—hitherto suppressed—will be free to find complete happiness in expressing itself in uninhibited external activity.

The Secret

However as I will argue in this series, a principle that defines all limits as oppressive will also destroy the self, efface the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, wisdom and folly, reason and impulse, and being and nothing. The secret of the ascendant culture—supposedly progressive and enlightened but actually primitive and dark—is nihilism, the universal critical principle, the enemy of all being. In principle it negates God, creation, nature, moral law, community, and every other objective structure that it thinks constricts the self from becoming whatever the imagination envisions and desires. The arbitrary human will to power over itself and all being is its god. This god can create nothing, but it can destroy everything.

I’ve written on this subject in previous essays, and I want to incorporate some of those thoughts into this series. On April 04, 2014 I began an eleven part series on “Faith and the Contemporary Moral Crisis.” I see no need to rewrite those essays. So, I will begin this new series by reblogging edited versions of the essays in that series. Interspersed with and following those essays I will post new material that expands on some theoretical points and addresses our new situation seven years later.

New Developments

There have been four developments in the intervening years that I found surprising, though in hindsight I can see that they were predictable seven years ago and indeed inevitable. (1) The racialization of all social interactions. In the last few years, the liberal ideals of a colorblind society and merit-based economic advancement have been rejected by the ascendant culture as manifestations of white privilege. (2) The mainstreaming of the intersectional notion of personal identity. Since proving that one is a victim of oppression has become a ticket to recognition by progressive culture, the more oppressed groups to which one belongs the higher one’s status in this culture.

(3) The exponential growth in the popular acceptance of the complete disjunction between biological sex and gender identity. Of course, acceptance of transgenderism and gender fluidity was preceded over the last 30 years by acceptance of LGBQ identities and inevitably will be succeeded by other gender identities and those that transcend other boundaries. Again, given the moral nihilism at the heart of modern culture this development is perfectly understandable. For in principle, progressive culture finds all limits oppressive, and there are many boundaries that have not yet been recognized as limits. And for progressive culture only the oppressed have the right to identify their oppressors. No one is allowed to argue with them.

(4) Most surprising and disheartening is the rapid acceptance of the three developments mentioned above by people who claim to be Christians, especially from younger generations. In the 1960s there was a movement within academic theology called “Christian Atheism.” What I am seeing now is a popular as well as an academic movement I call “Christian Nihilism.” These people and those tempted to join them are at the center of my target audience. I hope I can help them see what they are doing. Perhaps they will reconsider their path.

Once you recognize the nihilism at the heart of progressive culture, all becomes clear. And there is no escape from the iron logic of nihilism from within progressivism. For to escape it, you would need to limit it. And that cannot happen because progressivism admits no limiting principle! There is only one way out: we must reject nihilism completely and rediscover the Creator.