Christians, Atheists, and Gnostics: Christian Co-Belligerency and the Possibility of Based Belief
Is there such a thing as based belief? Or is the only way to be based to be an atheist?
James Lindsay discovered the Christian Nationalism discussion. Having opposed progressive denial of nature as implicitly religious, Lindsay is ready to hurl the same epithet at some of the Christians who were, until very recently, on his side: Gnostic.
There are Christians who merit the term Gnostic, including those who denigrate the body and insist upon the old taboos of fundamentalism, but also those who deny the public character of Christian truth - a rather wide swath. Stephen Wolfe is not among either of these groups. In fact, the point of his project is to affirm the public character of Christian truth to the point of political affirmation.
Yet some are jumping straight to thinking the end of anti-woke Atheist-Christian co-belligerency has come. This is too much of a jump. But it provides an opportunity to consider the conditions and the theological foundation of co-belligerency.
There are Christians who merit the term Gnostic, including those who denigrate the body and insist upon the old taboos of fundamentalism, but also those who deny the public character of Christian truth.
I was told repeatedly during my seminary education that there was no common ground with unbelievers. This was the official position of the seminary. If a non-Christian magically said something true this was put down to hocus pocus. I mean - “common grace.” There had been some interference in the ordinary course of things (nature) in order to get a non-Christian to believe something true.
The summer after seminary I began to see this ideology disproven by a slew of non-Christians to whose commentary I listened, Jewish Ben Shapiro (oh, but he has half the Bible - that’s cheating), Jungian evolutionist Jordan Peterson, Gay Liberal Dave Rubin, Gay Conservative Douglas Murray, Secular Liberal Atheist Carl Benjamin, and the list continued. I did not strike me that their truth-telling was a departure from the ordinary course of nature but a return to it from the perpetual interference in nature of secular progressive programming.
What is more, I realized that there was a certain gravitas and moral authority to the pronouncements of those who had come to truths I had been taught through experience rather than Christian teaching. Not only didn’t conservative Christians have a platform to say such things and actually affect the mainstream, the statement, “I read in this magical book that there are only two genders,” is simply less compelling than, “I can see with my eyes that there are two biological sexes, and I’m going to interview those whose bodies have been mutilated in the course of the pretense that things are otherwise.” In short, the witness to the truth of those who had learned from experience (or science) gave the impression of being more based in reality than the witness of those who presented truth as only discoverable in the Bible.
I realized that there was a certain gravitas and moral authority to the pronouncements of those who had come to truths I had been taught through experience rather than Christian teaching.
This brings me to this recent spat. This sort of divide has been long coming. Lindsay’s, not to mention Boghossian’s, critique of the woke left has been that it is quasi-religious. This critique obviously cuts in other directions. I’ve seen Christians warn against adopting that critique of the woke left for exactly this reason. In short, while Lindsay and others are lobbing a reality-based critique against the religious woke left, Christians cannot offer that critique but only a religiously based critique of the distinct, false religion of wokeism.
But Christianity does not require us to offer only religiously-based arguments and critiques, and the critique of the woke left as quasi-religious is absolutely correct. That critique cuts two ways: One is an accusation of hypocrisy against otherwise secular lefties. The other is a critique of a certain characterization of religion in general. To criticize something as religious is to say that it is not based in reality and plays instead a game of internal ideological coherence. It is also to identify this ideological perspective as having lead to or being likely to lead to fanatical behavior, including the policing of boundaries for blasphemy.
There are plenty of Christians who fall into this critique of religion, and to that extent, they are deserving of this critique. The question is whether Christianity can escape this critique, which is closely related to the question of whether Christianity allows for reality-based rather than religiously-based arguments. In fact, these are the same questions: Is there such a thing as based belief? Or is the only way to be based (Lindsay would add, af) to be an atheist?
The answer is that, either Christianity is based - reality-based, that is - or it is false. If Christianity is based, then we can make, not just arguments with similar conclusions, but the same arguments as atheists, especially about empirically knowable reality.
Now, I won’t say that it’s our job to persuade James Lindsay that we’re the based type of Christian, rather than the non-based, Gnostic type of Christian. But I will say that we had better be based Christians, not Gnostics.
Theologically, the project of becoming based Christians requires the formulation of the relation between nature and grace in a way that does not empty nature of its integrity. Happily, that’s the core of my own intellectual project. Follow the development of this theological account on this Substack. Start with my critique of CGT, Common Grace Theology, one of the main forms of non-based Christian theology out there today (linked above, part 2 below).
Really enjoying your writing. Thank you!
Have you considered perhaps that the insistence on “Common Grace” in Reformed circles has do so with the theological doctrine (or, I would argue, pre-supposition) of Total Depravity. It seems to me that if the will and mind are so corrupt as to be useless for interacting with truth as expressed in Nature, then “Grace” is indeed the proper term when an unbeliever sees a truth in Nature.
Perhaps I’m mixing categories though. I’m no philosopher!