Tag Archives: Apologetics

News

Dr. George Yancey: advice for responding to hostility from non-Christians

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Dr. George Yancey
Dr. George Yancey

This article contains an interview with Dr. George Yancey, who does research on bias against Christians. It appeared in the Christian Post.

Here’s the introduction to the interview:

What should Christians do about the hostile environment they increasingly face? In a Christian Post interview, professor George Yancey talks about his new book written for fellow Christians, Hostile Environment: Understanding and Responding to Anti-Christian Bias.

Christianophobia exists among a powerful elite subculture in the United States, University of North Texas sociologists Yancey and David Williamson wrote in So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States? While that book was written in an academic voice, in Hostile Environment, Yancey writes as a Christian speaking to fellow Christians, and offers some guidance on how Christians should respond to that anti-Christian hostility.

In an email interview with CP, Yancey said he appreciated the opportunity to speak from the heart to fellow believers about how he thinks Christians should respond to Christianophobia.

The early chapters summarize much of his work in So Many Christians, So Few Lions and helps readers understand the sources of Christianophobia. The middle chapters, “Are Christians Responsible for Christianophobia” and “Trouble Within” discuss ways to deal with hypocrisy, sin and dysfunction within the Church. The latter chapters deal more specifically with ways to confront anti-Christian bigotry.

Yancey is also careful throughout the book to distinguish between the discrimination against Christians in the United States and the violence against Christians in other parts of the world. He does not use the word “persecution,” for instance, to describe the negative experiences of Christians domestically.

“Christians are not being persecuted, but religious discrimination and bigotry in our society can affect us. We should combat that discrimination and bigotry when it rears its ugly head,” he wrote.

Here’s the part that I thought was the most interesting:

CP: What do people with Christianophobia want from Christians?

Yancey: In a nutshell they want Christians to shut up and stay in their homes and churches.

Individuals with Christianophobia have a great deal of pre-capita social and cultural power as they are more likely to be white, male, educated and wealthy than other Americans. They indicated in my research that they believe they know what is best for our society, and perhaps that is because they possess such power.

They also argue that Christians are leading us back to the “Dark Ages,” want to set up a theocracy, and oppose science. They also demand that Christians do not proselytize others since they believe that Christians are not very intelligent or are trying to manipulate others for money or power.

These beliefs and stereotypes provide them with justification to assert that they, and not Christians, should run our society and government. For this reason it is not surprising that they want Christians to stay out of the public square.

People with Christianophobia at least superficially value the ideals of religious neutrality. They perceive themselves as non-biased. So while they want to exclude Christians from the public square, they are unlikely to support measures that overtly single out Christians for punishment. This allows them to hold on to a social identity that is linked to “tolerance.”

However, they have a willingness to support measures that disproportionately punish Christians, or remove Christians from the public square, as long as such punishment or removal can be justified with non-bigoted reasons. This is similar to the concept of disparate impact that has been discussed as a part of the racial problems in the United States.

Other Christian apologists who read my blog sometimes ask me why I write so much issues outside of Christian apologetics, since that’s what I am most interested in. Well, I have encountered the attitude that Dr. Yancey is talking about when I was in university, and in the workplace as well. I understand that these very educated non-Christians think that Christians have no reasons for believing what we believe. They think it’s all superstition and bigotry. And so, they are alarmed by the idea that we are voting for public policies based on irrationality. One reason why I talk a lot about politics to get Christians thinking about policies, and reasons why we should support and oppose specific policies. Specifically, I want Christians who believe in policies that are consistent with the Bible to be able to discuss those policies with non-Christians by appealing to public, testable evidence.

But there’s another reason to talk about evidence outside of the Bible on this blog. And that reason is so that Christians understand that their faith is not private, nor is it meant to produce good feelings, nor to make them feel liked. Christianity is about truth, and we need to be studying science, history and philosophy, and making connections between what the Bible says to public, testable knowledge when we talk about our faith. We need to counter the perception that we are “dangerous” because we are irrational by being skilled at having conversations about what we believe and why. It can’t just be superstition or “this is how I was raised”. That’s what atheists find scary. They do not find it scary when we can explain ourselves. And that’s why we need to get really good at explaining how Christianity relates to these other areas. And not just explaining, but being persuasive using arguments and evidence, too.

News

J. Warner Wallace: 10 reasons why you hesitate to share your faith

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Want to be brave? Then talk about things you know
Want to be brave? Then talk about things you know

He has links to 10 articles in his post.

Here are the titles:

  1. We mistakenly think our beliefs about Christianity are entirely subjective
  2. We think we have to be a theologian or apologist to share effectively
  3. We aren’t sure who we should share with
  4. We are simply afraid to take the first step
  5. We think we have to know someone well before we can share the truth
  6. We’re not sure how to engage people (especially people we don’t know well)
  7. We’re afraid of feeling uncomfortable at any point in the process
  8. We hold pessimistically low expectations of being successful
  9. We have been conditioned to speak a Christian language foreign to the secular culture
  10. We think our success as evangelists is entirely dependent on our individual effort

Number 1 is the most important to me, but the one that I am seeing the most in church is number 7.

The biggest problem I am seeing is that people think that Christianity should make them feel good, and that it should make other people like them. Even if we are doing spiritual things, the overall goal is for us to feel good and be liked as we do them. Well… people are reacting very angrily to Christianity these days, so normal Christianity is not going to make you feel good or be liked by others. The animosity to Christianity is primarily for one reason – our moral rules on sexuality. A lot of people are not interested in hearing about the truth claims of Christian theism, e.g. – Jesus is God stepping into history, since they are already blocked off from Christianity because of their commitment to engaging in sexual activity.

Wallace’s solution is for us to get used to the fact that Christianity is not supposed to make us happy, or make people like us:

So my first goal in training yesterday was to simply help these young men and women get comfortable with discomfort by taking their eyes off themselves and placing them firmly on God. I tried to remind them that character is more important than comfort. It’s easy to get caught up in thinking that our worldly image is more important than our heavenly mission. As Christians, we ought to know better:

1 John 2:15-17
Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever.

James 4:4
You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

Sometimes our fears expose what’s really important to us, so they’re a good place to assess and address our priorities. What are you afraid of? What’s keeping you from sharing the Gospel with the people in your life, even the strangers who you meet every day? It might just be that (like me) you’re often more concerned with your own comfort than you are with the cause of Christ. It’s easy to worry more about the world we see than the Kingdom that matters. But we can change all that. We can conquer our fears by simply changing our focus.

Yes, Christianity is not meant to be fun. If you are asking yourself how to merge Christianity with your desire to be happy and to feel good, you’re doing Christianity wrong.

My solution to the problem of feeling uncomfortable when talking about Christianity to non-Christians is to talk about science. Specifically, to talk about mainstream scientific discoveries around cosmology, biology, paleontology, embryology, and so on. No one is going to get mad at you for that – not even at work. The best way to be able to get to Christian specifics, especially the resurrection, is to first establish the existence of a supernatural Creator and Designer from mainstream scientific evidence. Then we can talk about whether history shows us that miracles have occurred, e.g. – that Jesus rose from the dead. Before you can have miracles, you need God right? Otherwise, who is there to do the miracles? So, start with the easy stuff first – science. People feel more comfortable talking about science because the findings of science are universally accessible to all religions, and even to no religion at all.

The secret to talking about God with strangers is not to talk about things that are private and subjective. Don’t start with your subjective Christianese testimony – that just makes them uncomfortable. As uncomfortable as you would be if a witch doctor or voodoo priest started telling you their testimony with all their weird spiritual language. So don’t do that. Talk about pure science using pure scientific language, until you defeat the presumption of naturalism. When the naturalism is dead, turn your attention to the historical claims of Christianity. When the historical claims are defended, then turn to defending Christian theism from philosophical arguments like the problem of evil, the hiddenness of God, and so on. Start from the things that even non-religious people accept, and they will discuss them with you easily. Don’t annoy them with Christian theology and your religious experiences. That just makes them uncomfortable, because they can’t see how any of what you are saying is connected to reality. It’s like you are trying to get them to take your make-believe seriously – they don’t know what to say back without offending you.

The only downside to this approach (which works, trust me) is that you have to study first. Which is probably why some Christians don’t want to do it.

But, I have books to help you. Wallace actually has a new book out where he goes over the scientific arguments for a Creator and Designer. It’s actually on sale (pre-order) on ChristianBook.com right now. If you want to read something easy and good right now, get yourself a copy of Lee Strobel’s “The Case for a Creator”. You should also get the 3-DVD pack on intelligent design from Amazon.com if you want to watch something instead of reading.

Videos

William Lane Craig: Christians are idling in intellectual neutral

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The video is 40 minutes long.

The full transcript is available here on the Reasonable Faith web site. (H/T Think Apologetics)

Excerpt:

No one has issued a more forceful challenge to Christians to become intellectually engaged than did Charles Malik, former Lebanese ambassador to the United States, in his address at the dedication of the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois. Malik emphasized that as Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. Our churches are filled with people who are spiritually born again, but who still think like non-Christians. Mark his words well:

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy.

Malik went on to say:

It will take a different spirit altogether to overcome this great danger of anti-intellectualism. For example, I say this different spirit, so far as philosophy alone—the most important domain for thought and intellect—is concerned, must see the tremendous value of spending an entire year doing nothing but poring intensely over the Republic or the Sophist of Plato, or two years over the Metaphysics or the Ethics of Aristotle, or three years over the City of God of Augustine. But if a start is made now on a crash program in this and other domains, it will take at least a century to catch up with the Harvards and Tübingens and the Sorbonnes—and by then where will these universities be?

What Malik clearly saw is the strategic position occupied by the university in shaping Western thought and culture. Indeed, the single most important institution shaping Western society is the university. It is at the university that our future political leaders, our journalists, our lawyers, our teachers, our scientists, our business executives, our artists, will be trained. It is at the university that they will formulate or, more likely, simply absorb the worldview that will shape their lives. And since these are the opinion-makers and leaders who shape our culture, the worldview that they imbibe at the university will be the one that shapes our culture.

And:

The great Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen warned on the eve of the Fundamentalist Controversy that if the Church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism would become immeasurably more difficult in the next:

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.

The root of the obstacle is to be found in the university, and it is there that it must be attacked. Unfortunately, Machen’s warning went unheeded, and biblical Christianity retreated into the intellectual closets of Fundamentalism, from which it has only recently begun to re-emerge. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance.

This lecture is an excellent opportunity for us all to ask ourselves: what are we doing to influence the university? Do you have a plan?

Many of the strongest people who are now opposed to Christianity raised in two-parent Christian homes, and went to church for a decade before going off to the university. I’m thinking especially of people like Tim Gill, in Colorado. At university (and even increasingly in high school) they turned away from Christianity. All their peers and the adults could not answer their questions. As adults, they were able to get money, power and influence. Many of them are using it against Christ and his kingdom – kicking away the ladder that they climbed to success on. Why is this? Unfortunately, many of us are not willing to do what works – pick up the Lee Strobel books and read them. Especially “The Case for a Creator”.