Two authors came to my attention while browsing tweets this week. The first is Rachel Hollis, who presents herself as a Christian but who isn’t (see below). The second is by Sarah Bessey, whose book contains a chapter where the author urges God to help her to hate a certain group of people solely because of their skin color. What is causing people who claim to be Christian to buy these books?

I found this list of progressive Christians on Alisa Childers’ blog. Childers is very reliable, having written a detail-filled book about attempts by progressives to distort the gospel.

She writes this about Jen Hatmaker, a progressive:

Since its launch in 2017, Hatmaker’s podcast has been a veritable “who’s who” of progressive Christian leaders such as Sarah Bessey, Rachel Held Evans, Pete Enns, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Richard Rohr, Jeff Chu, Mike McHargue (“Science Mike”), Barbara Brown Taylor, Austin Channing Brown, Lisa Sharon Harper, Rachel Hollis, and Glennon Doyle.

I want to talk about Sarah Bessey and Rachel Hollis. Are these authors working from within a Christian worldview?

Hollis:

Anne Kennedy was bemused to find Rachel Hollis’ best-selling book, Girl, Wash Your Face, in the Christian living section of the bookstore next to the Bibles. Hollis describes herself as a Christian but her self-help advice is anything but Christian, Kennedy believes.

“She does mention Christianity and her faith in Jesus but in terms of the book itself, there’s really nothing that would distinguish it from any other kind of self-help thing that’s on the market and there’s lots of them. She quotes some Bible verses but she doesn’t really rely on a Christian worldview at all to motivate behavior,” Kennedy… said on a recent Christian Research Institute podcast.

[…]“I don’t think she’s a Christian at all,” she commented.

[…]“Her worldview is in no way representative of classical Christianity. She’s inclusive, affirming of LGBT, all religions are fine, doesn’t have any even vague understanding of what redemption and the cross and faith in Jesus were to actually look like. She invokes the name of Jesus periodically, she quotes some verses but nothing that she says at all represents a Christian worldview. So it is interesting to me that she is marketed as a Christian.”

And the Bessey devotion book has this:

“Dear God,

Please help me to hate wh1te people. Or at least to want to hate them. At least, I want to stop caring about them, individually and collectively. I want to stop caring about their misguided, racist souls, to stop believing that they can be better, that they can stop being racist.”

[…]”Lord, if it be your will, harden my heart. Stop me from striving to see the best in people. Stop me from being hopeful that White people can do and be better.

[…]”Let me see them as hopelessly unrepentant, reprobate bigots who have blasphemed the Holy Spirit and who need to be handed over to the evil one.”

Why are these books so popular? I think that the problem is that we’re not reading our Bibles to get the author’s intended meaning. Instead, we’re selecting the parts of the Bible that affirm what makes us feel good and look good to others.

Consider this post from Alan Shlemon of Stand to Reason:

You never open the email, skip the first three pages, and read just one line on the fourth page. No one, in fact, takes that approach with their mail. By skipping the context of the email and ignoring the flow of thought, you wouldn’t know what that line meant on the fourth page. If it’s wrong to read your friend’s mail that way, then why do we read God’s mail that way?

We open the letter to the Philippians, skip the first three chapters, and read verse 13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Message received. Close the letter. We’re done here!

We even plaster that verse on a mug, publicizing our mistake. I call this “Coffee Cup Christianity,” and it’s killing our biblical literacy. We’ve become accustomed to seeing isolated Bible verses and presume we know their meaning. Too often, however, we merely insert our own meaning into a Bible verse, thereby overwriting what God was trying to tell us.

[…]Sadly, Coffee Cup Christianity violates one of the most basic and well-known principles of interpretation: context. It’s a principle known not only among Bible readers. Many people in our culture understand it. Tragically, we apply it when reading man’s word but neglect it when reading God’s word. Coffee Cup Christianity leads to three dangerous problems.

Here are the problems:

• Coffee Cup Christianity overwrites God’s intended meaning with your own
• Coffee Cup Christianity leads to missing important lessons from God
• Coffee Cup Christianity models bad interpretive methods

So, here’s what I recommend. My Bible study partner and I are going through New Testament letters. Our goal is to find out what God wants us to be doing by reading the advice given to early church Christians. We’re trying to learn how to recognize life situations that God has an interest in, and make decisions that respect his values and goals. We want to put ourselves second in those situations. And we’re holding each other accountable to the author’s intent in those books of the Bible.

For each book, we always pick out a good commentary. For 1 Peter, we’re using Joel B. Green’s “1 Peter“, which we got free from Logos Bible study. We read the full chapter, then the commentary, prepare our points in advance. Then meet to compare. We always pray first, and often afterwards. Here’s what we did for 1 Peter 1.

So, that’s our approach. If your Bible study just has people showing up without reading anything, without preparing anything, and then twisting the text to make them feel good or look good, then I think you need to get out of that Bible study. Do better.

So, I’ve noticed that lately, many Christian, conservatives express Christian and conservative convictions when they are in a Christian, conservative audience. But when they are in the company of secularists, feminists and socialists, they keep quiet. In this post, I’ll explain why I think that using evidence from studies helps us to be bolder, then we’ll see a study about homeschooling.

Well, I can only explain why I am so inclined to fight. Just because I have an alias online, that doesn’t mean that I don’t fight for what I believe in under my real name in person. I take every opportunity to push for authentic Christian (not woke) truth claims and values in person. It’s especially important for Christians and conservatives of color to do this, in the current culture.

But how can you fight with people? I recently faced off against a bully in my company at a large company meeting. I had heard that this guy was a yeller, and had previously yelled at other employees. And that he was extremely progressive, and in a liberal echo chamber where he never heard any intellectual conservatives or Christians. I attacked him on two issues: socialized medicine and gun control. By using studies to explain how I changed my mind, I was able to escape his caricature of Christian conservatives as stupid fundamentalists who don’t think critically.

With that said, here is a report from the Wall Street Journal about a new study that you might be able to use to be bold with people who oppose homeschooling. (Full text of the article here)

It says:

Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard Law School professor, sparked debate in May 2020 by calling for a presumptive ban on home schooling. Home-schooled children, Ms. Bartholet asserted, are less likely than their school-attending peers to receive a “meaningful education” and more likely to be subject to physical abuse or indoctrination by “extreme religious ideologues.”

[…]Ms. Bartholet criticized home schooling for both diminishing children’s educational attainment and undermining their physical and mental health. One of us (Ms. Chen) recently examined how school type affected adolescents on a range of long-term outcomes into young adulthood, including educational attainment, mental health and social integration. Looking at data on more than 12,000 children of nurses (mostly white and mostly well-off) surveyed from 1999 to 2010, we estimated the effects of school type independently from other factors such as socioeconomic status, race and region.

To the extent that college graduation is a fair proxy for having received a “meaningful education,” Ms. Bartholet was right to point to a disadvantage for home schooling: The home-schoolers in our sample were 23% less likely to attend college than public-school students. This may reflect lower attainment in learning or less interest in attending college, but it may also be a result of admissions policies at some U.S. universities that disadvantage home-schooled students.

Parents want their kids to be well-educated and professionally successful, but they also want them to be healthy, happy and virtuous. By this broader measure of success, home schooling has advantages. Among the students we examined, home-schoolers were 33% more likely to volunteer, 31% more forgiving and 51% more likely to attend religious services in young adulthood than those who attended public school. (“Levels of forgiveness” were measured on a self-reported four-point scale, which other research has shown predicts some subsequent health and well-being outcomes.) The difference in religious participation has public-health implications, since those who attend services regularly have substantially lower risks of alcohol and drug abuse, depression and suicide. They also have a lower risk of premature death for any reason than those who never attend.

The picture of the home-schooled student that emerges from the data doesn’t resemble the socially awkward and ignorant stereotype to which Ms. Bartholet and others appeal. Rather, home-schooled children generally develop into well-adjusted, responsible and socially engaged young adults.

The libertarians at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) reached out to the researchers, and they got more information about that concern about lower rates of university attendance:

I reached out to Case and Chen for additional comments on their study’s findings, including how they think the homeschooling data and outcomes might have changed since 2010, when their data set ended.

“We are also glad to see that some colleges, including some top-tier colleges, have become more flexible in their admission policies for homeschoolers over the past years,” Chen responded.

Indeed, more colleges and universities have implemented clearer guidelines and policies for homeschooled students in recent years, and many are now eager to attract homeschooled applicants. In 2015, Business Insider noted that homeschooling is the “new path to Harvard,” and in 2018 the university profiled several of its homeschooled students.

The researchers also suspect that the well-being gap between homeschoolers and public school students has widened over the past decade, with homeschoolers faring even better.

“For instance, social media apps have come to smartphones over the past few years, leading to their widespread adoption by teenagers and even younger children,” Chen told me this week. “Some prior studies suggested that such increasing smartphone use may have contributed to the recent huge spikes in adolescent depression, anxiety, and school loneliness. Cyberbullying, sexting and ‘phubbing’ have also become more common in children’s daily lives, especially in school settings. We might expect that these issues may be less common among homeschoolers than their public school peers.”

I think if you are going to do homeschooling, it will have to be very practical. I think the world is too dangerous right now. We need to focus on learning practical skills that pay. So, don’t focus on things classics and Latin early on. I love the classics, but only the classics that teach something practical should be relied on. Instead, math and computer science should be the most important subjects, along with economics. Or choose the hard sciences like biology, chemistry, physics, etc. Get your STEM degrees, get your private sector work experience, then homeschool your kids with a focus on STEM.

I do think that after you get a job, then you should go back and work on the classics, literature and philosophy. But the financial situation we are in – with so much government debt, so many people in debt, and so many people on welfare – suggests that we should make sure that we are independent of the government and debt-free as quickly as possible.

(Image source: NHERI.org)