Berating the Godfearers

Pursue conversation, not conversion.

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Last week, a group of young men with shared interests in self-improvement, virtue, and masculinity gathered in a Zoom meeting for an evening discussion. While they found common ground on their shared interests, the discussion took a turn when a difference emerged between one of the members, Brent, and the rest of the group. While the leader of the group, and the majority with him, held to a six-day-creationist, literal reading of Genesis, Brent was a devotee of Jordan Peterson’s evolutionary path to the divine.

Quickly, discussion soured. Brent was cast as the resident believer in “Science,” a local Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Richard Dawkins. Voices were raised. Enraged, the six-day-creationist Christian leader muted Brent on Zoom. The night ended at a standstill.

The next morning, at a group writing session at Other Life, Brent (not his real name) told me about this unnerving experience. I shook my head, not in disbelief, but in quiet disappointment at a kind of behavior that did not surprise me in the least.

I am sure these young men meant well. In fact, I warrant that they meant to be “defending the faith.” But what they actually ended up doing was berating a Godfearer.

Rushing the Unprepared

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According to the predominant evangelical theory, there are just a handful of worldviews out there, and the question is which worldview to adopt. In the simplest form, the only options are secular humanism and Christianity. The Christian argues that secular humanism actually reduces to atheistic nihilism, and this leads the humanist, in the face of the loss of meaning, to adopt conservative American evangelical Christianity wholesale.

In this worldview-thinking, there is a demand for consistency. But consistency is, first, rather inhuman; we’re all a little inconsistent. And second, the world is a complex place, and there is no guarantee that it is as consistent as our purest mental models of it.

This results in a kind of all-or-nothing mentality and an impatience with the human beings we encounter. Brent himself told me that it felt like his interlocutors were “immanentizing the eschaton”: “Become a six-day-creationist literalist Christian…right now!”

This mode of engagement is also sub-intellectual. I can illustrate this in relation to my studies in philosophy. In academic philosophy, there is, on the hand, a rigorous demand for consistency. But at the same time, there is a rigid, almost atomistic separation of one intellectual point from another. Five thoughts that most people hold together are revealed to be distinct doctrines that can come apart. In analytic philosophy, you’ll probably find people who hold any combination of these views. To the amateur, this is inconsistent. To the philosopher, this is interesting. Things we thought stood or fell together turn out to vary independently. Two things might be true together that we thought were mutually exclusive. Or an inference that we thought was obligatory turns out to be optional or even flatly fallacious.

Theologically, we are also neglecting the necessity of preparation in order to receive the gospel: in Latin, the preparatio evangelium. The fact is, the Christian message is not a worldview. The gospel is a message of salvation. It assumes or presupposes a certain picture of the world, and especially of God, creation, nature, the moral law, man, sin, and misery. Strikingly, that world-picture is shared to a great degree across Abrahamic religions, different Christian denominations, and even some of the Christian offshoots that evangelicals call “cults.” It was also shared, to a certain degree, with Platonic and Stoic philosophy. According to some of the church fathers, what the Old Testament was for the Jews, in preparing them for Christ, philosophy was for the Greeks and Romans, preparation for the gospel.

This means that we are not only permitted but even required to be patient with people as we discuss with them the deep questions that lead to Christianity. Furthermore, we are required to operate in a piecemeal manner. We cannot require people to adopt a whole worldview. We must be content to discuss a single truth at a time.

Help Egyptians Plunder the Christians

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One unique aspect of the misunderstanding above is that the mental model of “atheists vs. Christians” just doesn’t work when you include people who, like Brent, are following the “Jordan Peterson path” to God. While conservative evangelical discourse had failed to appeal to Brent, Jordan Peterson used the language of evolutionary biology and empirical science to argue a great many otherwise secular folks to an appreciation of the moral necessity of religion.

According to the worldview-model, evolution is a tenet of a materialist worldview, an obstacle to Christian belief. But in this actual circumstance, the theory of evolution has been a tool for opening Brent’s mind to the way in which religion is baked into human nature. For him, evolution has been a stepping stone toward God.

While I have registered my own objections to the embrace of evolution by Christians, I have no objection to the embrace of God by evolutionists. After all, most of Jordan Peterson’s observations about human nature derive from biology and psychology, not the theory of evolution, per se. (The evolutionary story that is used to defuse the worry that biological complexity might indicate design is, as my friend Mason Bruza wrote, a “retcon.”)

Jordan Peterson’s approach to the presentation of Christianity is, unlike much Christian theology, “from below.” It meets contemporary secular Westerners where they are and builds from things they already believe to new (and old) things they may not yet have considered.

In this, Peterson’s words are able to get a grip on the minds of his audience in a way that most Christian discourse fails to do. Similar to instances of “Christianese,” much Christian discourse and even evangelism and apologetics serves less as a foundation for further thought and discussion and more a marker of tribal identity, one that leads outsiders to perceive a threat rather than be provoked to thought. (“Uh oh, I’m being proselytized,” or, “I see, you’re one of them. I guess I can tune you out.”)

Most of all, we should use this approach when the person in front of us has already shown an interest in learning more about Christianity. I understand that when a person is not interested in Christianity, there are fewer non-confrontational means to invite a discussion of “higher things.” But when someone approaches a discussion with Christians out of curiosity, to continue to use the combative approach of apologetics can only be read as indicting a larger mentality.

In the New Testament, these types of individuals might have been called “Godfearers.” In the Roman empire, these would have been Gentiles who were sympathetic to Judaism or had fully come to believe in Yahweh. In our time, the Godfearers, at least in one corner of the Internet, are fleeing from errors they have seen on the secular moral left and finding wisdom in both evolutionary science and psychological readings of Scripture, as exemplified best by Peterson, but also a few others.

If we berate the Godfearers, you have to ask what objective we have in mind. It sure looks like we are dogs marking our territory, rather than thoughtful Christians inviting further discussion.

Among those Christians who, like me, emphasize the truth that can be found outside of Christianity, we often speak about Augustine’s phrase “plundering the Egyptians.” This is certainly one of the tasks of “natural theology.”

However, it turns out that another task is that of helping the Gentile, or Egyptian Godfearers to plunder the Christians. What if we offered them nuggets of Christian truth, without asking them to “change religions” first?

Instead of waiting for Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, or Leon Kass to offer a psychological reading of the Bible to secular people eagerly waiting to hear whether religion has anything of practical significance to say, we could simply embrace the earliest forms of biblical interpretation, the allegorical and moral interpretations of Scripture, and with Augustine, show that Scripture actually teaches things that even unbelievers can recognize as true.

Reclaiming Conversation

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Let’s reclaim conversation.

Sherry Turkle wrote a bestselling book recently by that title, indicating the obstacles to conversation broadly in the present day. But for evangelicals, we introduce our own obstacles to conversation by conceptualizing discussion across religious boundaries in terms of either evangelism or apologetics. In doing so, we neglect the possibility and the promise of conversation.

Over the course of my education, I’ve been on a search for a better theory of how to interact with non-Christians. One of the things I’ve realized along this quest is that there are very few opportunities in general for conversation on a theological and philosophical level. There are also many preconditions for having such conversations. In academic philosophy, a system of complex social expectations and intellectual requirements makes interaction across religious division possible. In rare non-academic intellectual contexts, people choose to have conversations that potentially challenge their prior beliefs. And this is not to mention the obstacles to ordinary conversation on a broader societal level, the infrequency of having people at one’s dinner table, the elimination of time when we bump into strangers and aren’t looking at our phones, et cetera.

This obligates Christians to seek out and find and to foster the creation of spaces in which such conversation occurs. Currently, I have found this, to some degree, in the university in the discipline of philosophy. I have found it through the online community Other Life, where I recently, with Brent, hosted a philosophical salon discussing political philosophy. And I have found it through Substack, as writers and readers of different beliefs seek to broaden their minds and sharpen our thinking on the hard edge of other people’s thinking.

If I think of evangelical examples of this, the most prominent one is L’Abri, Francis Schaeffer’s center for intellectual conversation and communal living. In its early years, L’Abri was, if anything, at the forefront of the 1960’s counter-culture, in spite of Schaeffer’s adherence to evangelical or even “fundamentalist” Christianity. In a different way, Wheaton College, in spite of its predominantly evangelical make-up, facilitated conversation and allowed me to build friendships in a way that I, like most other college graduates, seek to replicate, with some difficulty.

Part of the difficulty with reclaiming conversation and finding space for it is that conversation is slow. The word “school,” as Josef Pieper once wrote, derives from the Greek word for “leisure.” In order to have patient and fruitful conversation, we need to make space outside of the daily grind. We need to decrease the urgency with which we urge people to convert. I linked it above, but watch this clip from the musical The Book of Mormon that illustrates the futility of this kind of urgency: [Buzzzzz] “Hello, would you like to change religions!? I have a free book written by Jesus!!!”

In fact, no one would like to change religions. It’s too destabilizing. How then do people - particularly, adults - change religions? Well, as a first approximation, they see something in the world that requires them to consider that their previous way of life is inadequate. A lot of time and experience leads them to begin to rethink what they once thought. After a decade or two, they find that they are Christians. See Molly Worthen’s conversion, Paul Kingsnorth’s, Tammy Peterson’s, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s, Winston Marshall’s, Candace Vogler’s, Justin Murphy’s, Mary Harrington’s, Luke Smith’s, Abigail Favale’s, and archetypically for the modern intellectual conversion, C. S. Lewis’s.

Christians should seek the opportunity to be one of the patient conversation partners along that decade-long journey for the adult Godfearer. Instead of berating the Godfearer, invite him to have a conversation.