Well, hello and welcome back to the Speak Life podcast. My name is Thomas Thurgood, media producer at Speak Life. And today Glenn is asking the question: can we use Christianity to save the culture? Some have accused Ian Hersey R. Lee, the woman who was at the ARK conference and wrote the unheard article, Why I Am Now a Christian. Some people have accused her of doing just that, using Christianity purely for cultural reasons, purely for cynical reasons. Glenn examines those claims. Is that really what's going on? But what are the dangers if, say, we were to just use Christianity as an instrumental thing, if we were to have a just a nominal cultural Christianity? And Glenn gets into that and how actually a nominal Christianity can sometimes end up worse than no Christianity at all.
SPEAKER_01Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. Has Christianity built the modern West? I think increasingly people are starting to see the answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. The thesis of Tom Holland's book, Dominion, seems to have carried the day, as many people are coming to see that the values we hold as natural and obvious and universal are nothing of the sort. They have come from the very contingent developments of Christianity down through the ages. The high-profile conversion of Ayan Hersey Ali last year mentions Tom Holland and his marvellous book, Dominion, a number of times, as she came to see that the values she holds dear are not the result simply of enlightenment values, but that those enlightenment values themselves are the fruit of much deeper roots, roots that go all the way back to the Bible. So then the question comes: if our culture has been shaped by Christianity, what is the future of Western civilization now that there is a grand dechurching and rapid de-Christianization? Does Western culture need Christianity? It's a question that I put to Tom Holland at an event that we held back in 2022 with Paul Vandercle and Tom Holland, and I asked him the question, what is the future? If Christianity has got us where we are, do we no longer need it anymore? And he laid out three different options as we go forwards.
SPEAKER_02You know, there are various kind of possibilities. And one is absolutely that uh Christianity has played its part. It's kind of like the you know the rocket booster drops through the atmosphere, and now liberalism can just you know sail its merry way on through the inky vastness of space. You know, maybe. Yeah, so maybe that's fine, or or maybe um you know, uh as basically Nietzsche argued, you can't really have um Christian values without Christian belief. And in the long run, um, you know, if you're if you're not watering the soil, the bloom will will fade. Um and and I think and the implications of that would be very alarming. You know, and we have you know we have seen what that might mean. We've seen what that might mean. Because we've we've we've we've fascism was all about the utter rejection, not just of institutional Christianity, as the French Revolution was and the Russian Revolution, but about the rejection of its core values, so the value that there is no Greek or Jew. Of course, the Nazis completely thought there were differences between the Greek and Jew, and the and and um and the rejection of the idea that the strong have a duty of care to the weak.
SPEAKER_01So those are the first two values uh in my book, The Air We Breathe. So equality, that all people uh share a radical human equality in the eyes of God, and then that becomes secularized as in the eyes of society, in the eyes of the law, that radical equality uh based on the image of God that is in all people. And the second value in the book The Air We Breathe is compassion, the idea that a society should be judged best that treats its weakest members best. Um, and so equality and compassion are at the core of a Christian identity. Therefore, as a society becomes less and less Christian, then those twin values of equality and compassion will fade, and fascist ideals start to become more and more believable, because there does seem to be a default in the human heart towards power, towards the strong, and therefore the elimination of the weak. And of course, there's this biological urgency, isn't there? The survival of the fittest and therefore the sacrifice of the weakest. So Tom is saying option one as we move forwards is maybe we can just have humanism without the Christianity. That doesn't seem to be the thing that Tom himself believes. The second option is that you've got this kind of Nietzschean idea that with the fading of Christianity, a will to power will rise up and replace Christianity.
SPEAKER_02And that there's value in weakness. The Nazis obviously completely rejected that. And I think the shock and the horror of that was so intense that we, as a society, are now kind of living off the capital of that. But it may be that that will fade, and and and the kind of I think the kind of natural instinct of humans, which is to is to worship the strong, will will come back in, and particularly if things start to go really really wrong with the economy and with you know, I mean, go wrong than they already is. Um we may enter very dark times from a Christian perspective. Yes. Um but but but uh but the third option is to make a virtue of the fact that you know the Nietzsche in a point that you can't really have Christian, you know, that the these values are all fundamentally theological. If you want to believe in human rights, the point will come when, and I think you can see that already happening in India, say in Turkey, where people will turn around and say, what about that, you know, or the secular or anything like that. Uh, you know, these are just kind of mad Western imports. Um and people who want to defend that will have to start looking at the the history, the origins of these things, and that may well lead them to come back to the church. I mean, that's certainly the path that I've been on is you know, I I recognizing that these beliefs that are reported to me, that the rocket fuel for these beliefs is not what I thought they were. And I want that rocket fuel therefore to be as strong as it possibly can be. And I I I you know, maybe I mean there's always the risk of identifying your own feelings with the broad sweep of history. So I don't want to do that. But I think I bet but it may well be that that what I'm going through is something that lots of people are going through because we're all experiencing the same kind of thing. So I I so maybe it won't maybe maybe it will, you know, maybe Christianity will die, as John Lennon said. Um maybe it will mutate into something the worship of the strong, uh, the validation of differences between you know the abandonment of the idea that that all uh human beings have an equal value, um, or maybe the sense of strain that these values and beliefs are coming under will prompt a return to the source, yeah. Um and and a kind of recognition that actually the the Christian story is the best version of all these other stories that are starting to emerge from it. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Well said.
SPEAKER_01I find that fascinating, especially when you put that into conversation with Ayan Hersey Ali's conversion, when she wrote in Unheard at the end of last year, Why I Am Now a Christian, she did point to some of these geopolitical forces that were going in some very disturbing directions. And at that point, I think she's identifying point number two that Tom Holland is referring to here. Remember, he thinks that history can go in one of three ways. Perhaps we do not need Christianity anymore, and we can just ascend into a secular humanist uh utopia without having all the religious baggage of Christendom. Um that's option number one. Option number two is Nietzsche is proved right, and that with the death of God will come a completely different kind of moral framework, one that privileges the strong over the weak. And Ion Hersy Ali is kind of looking at a world that is going in that direction. And that's waking her up to option number three. Option number three is a return to the source and to come back to the roots that have produced the fruits of secular humanism and to discover in Jesus a way forward. And Ion Hersy Ali has gone for option three. Tom Holland is attempting option three. At that point, though, a lot of people are nervous and understandably nervous because they worry that the reasons why people are going to Christianity are merely instrumental. We just want to use Christianity in order to save the West. One person says, you know, the reason why Ion Hersley Ali is converting to Christianity is geopolitics. And a lot of people have worried that those who get onto the Tom Holland train are just using Christianity for very instrumental reasons, very practical reasons, pragmatic reasons, cynical reasons. Really, what they want is to win a culture war, and Christianity will help them to do that. I don't think that is really what's going on. And one way of demonstrating that I don't think that is what's going on is that Tom Holland himself seems very aware that uh a shallow Christianity is not going to solve anything. In fact, a shallow Christianity could lead us to some very dark places. Um he retweeted Joachim Voth um just today on Twitter. He says he he finds that Joachim Voth's uh tweet thread is simultaneously fascinating and wholly unsurprising. Let me show you what this uh tweet thread says. God is dead, Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed in 1882, what happens to politics when societies become increasingly secularized? That's the question we've been asking throughout the video. In a new working paper, Esso Becker and I examined the case of Germany. And of course, we always go back to Germany and the Nazis because this is the other founding myth of Western civilization. Um, really, there have been two great moral figures in the history of the West, Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. And for 1900 years, we wanted to see what Jesus did and copy him. And uh, in the last 100 years, we've looked at uh what Hitler has done and tried to do the exact opposite. But of course we default back to Hitler because Hitler is the one who overturned the central tenets of Christianity, equality, and compassion. Jochim Voth says in his second tweet, most people stayed nominally Christian for the longest time. So Nietzsche was was noticing de-Christianization in his day in like 1882, and he was able to proclaim the death of God way back then, and yet institutional Christianity was still going on. It still had incredible heft, and people stayed nominally Christian for the longest time. So what happens in Weimar Germany as they're starting to consider Hitler and and whether to vote for him in the 20s and 30s? Um well, he does some study and he says that they first created some measures of shallow Christianity, indicators of a lack of deep-rooted religious belief in interwar Germany. So they wanted to go and and figure out, okay, Germany was sort of a Christian country, but what does that actually mean? And they figure out that there's a lot of shallow Christianity going around. There are naming patterns, like whether you name your children Christian names or not, um, speaks to something about the Christianity of your household, um, interaction with superstition, and thirdly, the share of notables who enter religious professions. So they kind of come up with this metric of shallow Christianity, and then they kind of plot shallow Christianity against pro-Nazi votes. And he says there are big differences in how shallow the religiosity of Germans was. The figure below gives a first view for names and superstition. Strikingly, and this is the key tweet, I think, shallow Christianity is highly correlated with Nazi voting in the 1930s. Where Christian religiosity was only skin deep, people voted for the Nazis or joined them in droves. The two maps here give a first impression. And then in his thread, he starts to talk about ways in which Nazism uh piggybacked on a shallow Christianity and tried to offer uh a replacement to Christianity. And he asks, why what did the Nazis do to get so much support in areas where Christian religiosity had largely died? The Nazi Party used a heady mix of religious language, imagery, and rituals to set itself up as a substitute religion. Here's the party's bloody banner from the 1923 Putsch. It's used to sanctify another Nazi flag. The movement celebrated its martyrs. Crucially, Hitler was cast as the Fuhrer endowed with supernatural superhuman powers, Germany's redeemer who would resurrect it from the shame and impotence of Versailles. He ended many of his speeches with Amen. And this I found fascinating. The Hitler Youth official song made the idea explicit. Um here are the words for the official song of the Hitler Youth. We are the happy Hitler youth. We have no need for Christian virtue, for Adolf Hitler is our intercessor and our redeemer. No priest, no evil one can keep us from feeling like Hitler's children. Not Christ do we follow, but Horst Vessel, away with incense and holy water pots. Can you imagine? Can you imagine like the equivalent of the scouts kind of singing that? No need for Christian virtue, for Adolf Hitler is our intercessor. And so where there is shallow Christianity, where there is nominal Christianity, um the strong teaching of fascism comes in and tries to adopt that kind of Christian-ish mentality. And it is incredibly successful at winning votes, and the Nazi Party Party is elected into office in 1933. So here is something that should cause all of us much pause for thought. If we think we need cultural Christianity to save the culture of the West, we might find ourselves heading down very unchristian paths, right? That actually a shallow Christianity, uh a merely cultural Christianity, is not going to save the culture of the West. It might actually undo everything that's been Christian about it. And as soon as Tom Holland drew my attention to this on Twitter, I started to think of other ways in which a shallow Christianity does not lead us towards further Christian morals and virtue. It actually takes us very far away from Christian virtue. It made me think of uh my interview with Nancy Pearcy, who wrote The Toxic War on Masculinity. We had a fascinating conversation. She quotes from the work of Brad Wilcox, who's a sociologist, and he finds that committed evangelical men are most loving to their wives, most engaged with their children, least likely to divorce, and they have the lowest rates of domestic abuse and violence. Now that can often be a surprising result because people often hear stories of Christians are the worst. And Nancy says, no, look, sociologists have started to discern between nominal Christianity and committed Christianity, and they've found vast differences between those two things. Nominal evangelical men, those who claim the label but hardly ever show up in church, if at all, they are more abusive than both committed Christians and than non-Christians. The most violent husbands in America, says Brad Wilcox, are nominal evangelical Protestants who attend church infrequently or not at all. So I I find that a fascinating and devastating finding, really, that a nominal Christianity is worse than no Christianity. Claiming the label of Christian while not owning the reality of it is worse than if you'd never bothered at all. Didn't Jesus say that you need to clean the inside of the cup, not just the outside of the cup? Isn't there a tremendous problem with hypocrisy that Jesus identifies in Matthew chapter 23? There are whitewashed tombs out there. Inwardly they are full of dead men's bones. Outwardly they are gleaming in the Mediterranean sun. And so often we use religious labels like that whitewash, and underneath there is just death and all sorts of uncleanness. Therefore, if we're going to go for Tom Holland's third option and go back to church, that should not be simply as a shallow thing, as a nominal thing. We must actually return to something heartfelt. And let me let me give you a third example of why it's so important to distinguish between a nominal Christianity and the real thing. Just yesterday in the New York Times, Ruth Graham wrote an article entitled Trump is Connecting with a Different Type of Evangelical Voter. And in the article, she's noticing that actually what the label evangelical now means, especially in an American context, is a voting block. And it is often quite a detached thing from anything theological, anything committed to actual church attendance. The subtitle to this article is These Trump supporters are not just the church-going conservative activists who once dominated the GOP. This article is noticing something that Brad Wilcox has been talking about, that Michael Graham's been talking about. We had Michael Graham and Jim Davis on our channel talking about the great dechurching of America. In America, 40 million Americans have left church this century. It's the greatest demographic shift in US history. It is a greater spiritual shift than either the first or second Great Awakenings or the Billy Graham revivals put together, and it's in the opposite direction. And it means that there are a whole bunch of de-churched evangelicals, or perhaps never churched evangelicals, but evangelical has become a label. It's a nominal Christianity. It's an incredibly shallow Christianity. And Ryan Burge, who's the sociologist that was a co-author on that great dechurching of America, he's quoted in this New York Times article. He says, Politics has become the master identity. Everything else lines up behind partisanship. And then you've got a Donald Trump figure who wants to go after the evangelical vote, but what does the evangelical vote even mean? And you've got large swathes of the US population identifying as pro-Trump and evangelical, and they might not have seen a church in the last decade. What is going on with that? And again, it it is the great danger of a shallow Christianity, a nominal Christianity. As we look at Tom Holland's three paths forwards, you know, path number one, maybe we never needed Christianity, or maybe we just needed Christianity for one phase of the moral development of human civilization. And now the booster rockets have got us clear from the gravity of the earth and off we go into a bright new tomorrow. Maybe that's. I think that's unlikely. Second option, maybe it's the Nietzschean option, and maybe we're better off without Christianity, and we should all just become the the supermen, the overmen that Nietzsche was was calling us to become. Or option three, if we do want to return to the source and go back to church, we need to do so, but not as a pragmatic thing, not as a cynical thing, not as an instrumental thing, because a nominal Christianity will not save us. And this is this is the irony that I I want to finish on. You might think you need Christianity in order to save the culture. That is to put the cart before the horse, really. A merely cultural Christianity can leave you in some very unchristian places. Didn't Jesus say you are the salt of the earth? And as John Stott in his commentary remarks, salt in the ancient world was used as a preservative for the meat. And John Stott uses this very memorable line, don't blame the meat for going off, blame the salt. So, okay, so we need to rub of the church, of Christianity, of Christ and him crucified. We need to rub the gospel into the meat of culture in order for it not to go off. And if it is starting to go off, don't blame the meat, blame the salt. Salt can preserve meat, but not if it loses its savor. And Christianity can preserve cultures, but not if it is merely a cultural Christianity. We need the salty kind. Or it might prove worse than nothing. As Jesus says, Matthew chapter 5, verse 13, you are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. A merely cultural Christianity will not save the culture. You need the salty stuff. So if culture and politics and history are making you rethink spiritual matters, if they're making you take the third option that Tom Holland has laid out, um then make sure you're getting into the real thing. Make sure you're not just getting into a shallow Christianity, into a nominal Christianity, into a savorless Christianity. You need the salty stuff. And if we can help you at Speak Life, we would love to help you do that. And if you want to dig into that third option and figure out what true Christianity is, the deep kind, the salty kind, then why not go to 321course.com and you can take this course called 321, and it's really life according to Jesus. We're gonna go deep into the scriptures. Start an account, it's entirely free. We won't spam you, there's no in-app purchases, it's completely free. There are loads of resources there, but it's just Jesus' vision of life. Because Jesus shows us a radical vision of God, a radical vision of the world, a radical vision of ourselves. Why don't you get acquainted with Christianity? The real Christianity. If you want more of this content, please do hit subscribe, tap that bell, and click like on this video. 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