Chapter 3 of the philosophical quest continues. What do you think of something like this as a title: I'm Right. You're Wrong: A Pilgrim's Philosophical Progress
1.1 Unexamined Assumptions1.2 "Unitary" Thinking
2.1 Binary Thinking in Ethics
2.2 Contextualization in Missions
2.3 Beyond Relativism and Absolutes
3.1 Setting the Stage for Political Conversation
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6. In the early 2010s, I was teaching a class in Indianapolis. During a break, a side conversation turned to things political. I mentioned to a student that I was a Republican. His response was completely sincere and quite striking. "How can you do that as a Christian?"
I chuckled inside. I was far more used to the opposite question in my circles -- "How could a Christian possibly be a Democrat?" In fact, I know a professor at a Christian college who regularly gives a presentation to his students on why a Christian has to vote Republican.
When I was teaching this class, it was a quite different setting for me. In this class, I was the only white person. Everyone else in the classroom was African-American. The students were all devoted followers of Christ. In fact, they were all pastors or studying to be pastors. But they grew up and lived in a quite different culture than I did even though we all lived in the same country.
In these early chapters, I've been talking about binary thinking. I've suggested that we may start off in life not knowing that there are other ways to do things than the ways we grew up doing them. We may not even realize there are other ways to think and behave. In recent days, this is far less the case than before it became so easy to travel and communicate across long distances. For example, one of my grandmothers never left the state of Indiana until she was in her early 70s, as I recall.
We may start off in life not knowing any other option than our ways of thinking and behaving. By default, we are unreflective on many, many things. We are "unitary" thinkers in the sense that we only know one way of thinking and acting. We might have heard about "those people," the weird ones across the world, in another state, or "on the wrong side of the tracks."
When it comes to politics, social issues, and matters of economics, feelings run strong. Probably even more than ethics, people can become extremely belligerent or defensive when a different perspective is raised in these areas. I'm trying to tread very lightly as I write this chapter because people get very upset when you go poking around these subjects. I suspect that many people who go by the name Christian are far more "religious" in their political devotion than they really are in their spiritual life.
On the campus of the college I attended, there is now a church building with bullet holes in it. The pastor at that church preached against slavery in North Carolina in the days just before the Civil War. One white member of that church was lynched and left for dead, but he ended up surviving because they needed the rope for another lynching and took it before he had fully died. Feelings run high when you mess with people's herd mentality.
7. The area of philosophy that reflects on these subjects is called social and political philosophy. It stands alongside politics, economics, and sociology and asks what the assumptions are behind people's thinking and behavior in these areas. Philosophers in these areas also ask questions like, "What would be the ideal way to structure a society or for people to live together?" or "What is the ideal economic structure?"
Most of the time, we don't have much choice in these areas. You could argue that one of the reasons the New Testament largely takes a "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's" perspective is because they did not live in a world where they had much say in how the world was run. Taking over the government wasn't really much of an option. [11] Even in the representational democracies of the West, there are rarely moments when dramatic changes will take place, although some argue that we are in one of them as I write in 2025. But most of us do at least get to vote. [12]
Binary thinking seems pervasive in these areas more than in most. I mentioned some binary thinking above. One group thinks that Democrats are the righteous ones, and Republicans are a force for evil. Another group thinks that Republicans are the righteous ones, and Democrats are a force for evil. These positions are often inherited, unreflective ones.
I might say, I am not a pluralist, which is someone who more or less considers all viewpoints valid. You may have heard the idea in religion where a number of blindfolded people are all touching different parts of the same elephant. The idea is that all religions are valid but just all touching different parts of the elephant. Pluralism is the philosophy that all religions are equally valid.
On the contrary, I do believe there are wrong or at least "more wrong" answers on many issues. In the political controversies of this moment, I tend to think there are at least "more right" and "more wrong" positions to take from a Christian perspective. Binary thinking is a step on a journey that can end up with a more objective, more self-aware perspective that is more likely to be correct than other options. So, I hope you won't take me to be arguing for a false equivalency between all perspectives.
8. For example, take the question of God's existence. When I say, "God exists," I am not talking about a feeling I have (although I think some are -- more on that to come). We are saying that you could actually meet God as a Being who is not you. He's actually "out there." For me, it's a similar question to whether I exist. You wouldn't say, "Some people think Ken is a tree. Others think he is a truck. Some don't think Ken is real. You can't say one view is more correct than another." I'm right here people. I'm not a tree.
When I say, "God exists," I'm saying something similar to saying that Ken exists. You could meet him (and will, according to Christian faith). There are views of God that see him as a language game. More on that to come. But that is not what I mean when I talk about God. Christians believe that God objectively exists, not that he just exists subjectively in your mind or community practices.
Accordingly, the varying views of God between different religions cannot be equally valid if we are talking about an objective Being who truly exists. Pluralist perspectives implicitly have a subjective view of God where God is a matter of the person doing the worshiping rather than objective reality. Like beauty, they see God as existing in the eye of the beholder. They are implicitly assuming a false answer to the question of God's objective existence. But the question of God's objective existence is not an opinion question. Either he does or he doesn't.
Postmodernism largely rejects this objective-subjective distinction. I would never deny that they certainly blur in our minds. What I would say as a critical realist is that it remains a useful distinction. The model that I am a real person who is different from you is an incredibly useful one (and of course particularly meaningful to me). I do not disappear when you are not thinking about me. But if I have an existence apart from you, then there is a objective reality beyond your thinking -- even though you cannot know it with full objectivity.
8. I would like to convince you that neither of the American political parties has a complete corner on righteousness. In fact, later in the book I will try to convince you that we as Christians should much more think of ourselves as citizens of God's kingdom than a citizen of some earthly realm (cf. Phil. 3:20) -- let alone just one political party. Binary thinking would have us believe that the true Christians are only in my party. Perhaps we could be persuaded that there are some deceived (but wrong) people in the other party. But we'll probably have to live for all eternity with people who were in the other party and still made it into the kingdom with God's full acceptance.
Hold your breath for a second and try not to get too defensive. We are trying to expose hidden assumptions so that we can see ourselves. Remember, the pursuit of truth is the pursuit of what God thinks, recognizing that we are bound to have aspects to our thinking that are unexamined and incorrect. We should not fear objective thinking if we are truly convinced our positions are right.
For example, Christians in both parties would no doubt claim to be pro-life -- and they would both critique the way they perceive the other party to do it. Republicans tend to focus their pro-life energies on the unborn. Democratic Christians might claim to focus their pro-life energies on those in need. Republican Christians tend to emphasize biblical norms in areas of sexuality. Democratic Christians tend to emphasize biblical norms in terms of the poor, the immigrant, and the needy.
Both sides would no doubt critique the other for the way they pursue these values, and I'm assuming that some of those critiques may be valid. But I suspect that the Christians on each side agree more on the core values than they might like to admit.
Abortion is of course the elephant in the room, the trump card. Since the late 1980s, the issue of abortion has led most white evangelical Christians to conclude that they must always vote for the Republican candidate for president. [13] In the 2016 election, I know of many evangelicals in my circles who in their minds could not vote for either candidate in good conscience. They would say that they couldn't vote for the Democrat because of abortion, but they couldn't vote for the Republican because of what they thought were anti-Christian values expressed by the candidate in the lead up to the election. So they either didn't vote or voted for a third party candidate.
Binary thinkers on both sides now grab their weapons. If 82% of evangelical Christians voted for Trump in 2024, then there are clearly many Christians who do not see his rhetoric or positions as antithetical to Christian values. By the same token, there are many other Christians who would claim that Democratic values are far more aligned with Scripture than the values of today's Republican party.
When I teach philosophy, I often give an assignment in which students are asked to identify logical fallacies from public figures. The fall of 2024 was of course a golden opportunity because it was a presidential election season. For example, the ad hominem fallacy is when you attack the person making an argument rather than the argument itself. Politicians use this one all the time, attacking the politician rather than their positions.
As someone who at least tries to be objective, I see all sorts of rampant fallacies and unexamined assumptions among political tribalists. Another fallacy is the "straw man" fallacy. That's where you misrepresent the position of the other side. I could probably beat up a straw version of Dwayne the "Rock" Johnson or Arnold Schwarzenegger. But I don't think I'd do very well against the real ones. Often the way we portray the positions of the other side skew what their actual positions are. They are more easily vanquished that way.
For example, once upon a time I was surprised to learn that Roe v. Wade really only gave complete freedom with regard to abortion in the period before a child could survive outside the womb. Somehow, I had grown up thinking that Roe v Wade automatically allowed unlimited abortion up to the day of birth. I was surprised to learn that it was actually a compromise Supreme Court decision, potentially giving rights to the child after viability but deferring to the rights of the mother before that point.
That doesn't make Roe v. Wade the right decision, but it obviously paints the other side as more evil if you think they are arguing you can kill a baby for any reason up till the day he or she is born.
I've already mentioned the New Testament Survey position papers I used to receive on the topic of abortion. It was eye-opening to me to see how little Scripture there usually was in such papers. The reason is that the New Testament doesn't really address the topic directly. Similarly, there are some Old Testament passages that were sometimes mentioned, but most of them were taken out of context to address an issue they were not really addressing. [14]
My point is that, if we are objective, our strong position on abortion comes from a theological assumption that is not made explicitly in the Bible. This is the assumption that a child from conception to viability falls under the category of "Thou shalt not murder." I have no desire to argue against that assumption. But I will nervously point out that it is not as clear in Scripture we might like to think.
9. We are trying to move beyond binary thinking. Is it possible that the "other side" is not always as demonic as we assume it is? Could it be that there are individuals who love God, their neighbor, and believe the Bible is without error who come to different political conclusions than I do?
What are some biblical social values? Hebrews 13:4 says that marriage is honorable along with sexual faithfulness. The Bible consistently prohibits homosexual sex. The Bible forbids murder. The Old and New Testaments have core values of standing up for the poor, the immigrant, the widow, and the orphan. The New Testament says to pay your taxes. It says not to withhold your resources from others when you have excess.
Christians in both political parties may argue that they vote the way they do because they believe in the Bible. A Republican Christian might say, "I see my party in the list above." But a Democratic Christian might say the same thing. Neither party owns the biblical list. And parties change their emphases over time.
I can hear both sides saying, "The other side says it stands for those things, but it really doesn't." Often we agree on the values, and disagree on the methods to live them out.
And of course we are often self-deceived. In the end, I strongly suspect that we often take the positions we take not because they are biblical or because they are our deepest values. I suspect we sometimes take political positions because they are the ones our group currently has. At the very least, they are not the positions of that other group. How many issues might just as well be championed by the other side if history had just gone a little differently?
10. When my denomination formed by merger in 1968, some did not join because they thought the new denomination was going to be too liberal. Some joined a splinter group that represented some of the more conservative values in one of the merging denominations. One issue on which they took a hard line was divorce. They did not allow divorce for any reason and certainly not remarriage after divorce. The merging church allowed for divorce and remarriage in the case of marital unfaithfulness.
It's easy to take a hard line on an issue that doesn't affect you. As it turned out, the daughter of the leader of this new group wanted a divorce. The leader supported his daughter. He felt that her situation merited an exception. The new denomination disintegrated, one of the shortest lived denominations I've ever heard of.
We are such funny creatures, we humans. Our ideas are often a game we are playing that is really about our tribes and relationships. Our professed reasons aren't always our real ones, and we sometimes don't even realize it. We can change our positions on a dime if the conditions are right.
[11] At the same time, we don't get the impression that Christians were very involved in the Jewish War, from AD66-72. It is curious that one of Jesus' disciples was known as "Simon the Zealot" (cf. Luke 6:15; in Mark 3:18, Cananaean may be Aramaic for Zealot). None of the Gospels were written prior to the Jewish War.
[12] I grew up in a context where the herd mentality against Democrats was so strong that there was resistance even to calling America a democracy. "We're a Republic, not a democracy!" was the immediate response. For this reason, I always say "representational democracy." The people elect our representatives even though they make most of the decisions. We are not a Republic like Rome, where the "senators" were there primarily because of their social status.
[13] I can also say with great confidence that my family always had reasons to vote for the Republican candidate prior to the abortion issue -- going all the way back to the Civil War era. The reasons changed over the years; the vote was always the same.
[14] For example, the use of most Old Testament passages on this subject typically jumps from statements about God valuing particular individuals in the womb to the conclusion that God commands the preservation of all children in the womb. This may be true, but it goes beyond what the text is actually saying. Most fertilized eggs of course do not survive to birth. Again, pointing out this "hasty generalization" doesn't disprove the evangelical understanding. It's just pointing out bad reasoning.
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