September 13, 2008, here on slacktivist: Weltanschauung
Other Christians may use the word too, occasionally, rarely, in a way that conforms more closely to its usual dictionary definition or to the way the German sociologists used it when they coined the term weltanschauung. But when you hear it used frequently, the way it’s employed by the BJU Press and the Worldview Weekend folks above, it is a signpost term. It helps to show where the user falls on the spectrum between typical Christianity Today/Wheaton College/Ned Flanders mainstream evangelicalism and the scary lunatic fringe of radical separatists, dominionists and third-generation homeschoolers. The more you hear someone talk about “Christian worldviews” or “biblical worldviews” the further to the extreme right of that spectrum you can expect them to be.
Use of the word in this sense tells you that the speaker is almost certainly a persecuted hegemon — someone who simultaneously believes that America is a “Christian nation,” founded on Christian principles and that Christians in America are a persecuted, um, majority. It suggests that the speaker distrusts public schools. That they’re inclined to oppose the separation of church and state. That they likely believe in young-earth creationism, probably even believing that Josh McDowell and/or Kirk Cameron has disproved evolution. They believe in moral absolutes — and have absolute confidence in their ability to know them absolutely. They believe that America’s troubles trace back to Engel v. Vitale and Roe v. Wade and believe that God will bless America once those rulings are overturned.
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