How Non-Christians Hear Christians

With all the hoopla about religious freedom and the persecution of Christians, a post by Tim Challies about the dangers of separating the sacred and the secular caught my eye. In this piece, Challies quotes Nancy Pearcey, the worldview proponent extraordinaire, on why Christians so often talk past non-Christians:

Listen to what Pearcey says: “This same division also explains why Christians have such difficulty communicating in the public arena. It’s crucial for us to realize that nonbelievers are constantly filtering what we say through a mental fact/value grid. For example, when we state a position on an issue like abortion or bioethics or homosexuality, we intend to assert an objective moral truth important to the health of society—but they think we’re merely expressing our subjective bias.” When we see design in the universe, we are making a testable and verifiable claim, but they hear only religious irrationality. When we say that homosexual marriage is against God’s design, they see irrational personal preference creeping into the public discussion. As Pearcey says, “The fact/value grid instantly dissolves away the objective content of anything we say…”

So what should we do? Again, Challies relies on Pearcey:

“We have to reject the division of life into a sacred realm limited to things like worship and personal morality, over against a secular realm that includes science, politics, economics, and the rest of the public arena.” We have to understand that the Bible describes a way of looking at the world that is perfectly unified, where both facts and values flow from the same Source and achieve the same great end. Today more than ever, we must be people who know and love and live the Word of God. And then we must be prepared to stand on, and suffer for, what we know is true.

But another way to avoid being misunderstood is to do exactly the opposite, namely, to recognize the proper distinctions between public and private life, or to acknowledge that what someone believes or does as a Christian is not the same as what Americans believe or do. And such a distinction might prompt Christians to hold their holiday services not in public spaces but in private ones. Consider the following:

On Sunday the 37th annual Lincoln Memorial Easter Sunrise Service, hosted by Capital Church, gathered a record breaking crowd. Service organizers reported an estimated 8,900 people awoke “dark-thirty” to travel into downtown Washington DC to participate in the Easter Sun Rise service and worship celebration. Millennials represented an overwhelming portion of the participants huddled among the plastic chairs, ground and steps surrounding the Lincoln Memorial.

I understand that many American Christians revere Abraham Lincoln whose life in 1865 ended tragically on the night before Easter. But what exactly does Lincoln or the Memorial have to do with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ? Might not Christians have places more fitting for such a service other than one that they share with Americans who are not evangelical or Christian?

Nancy Pearcey might have a point that competing worldviews explain why Christians and non-Christians don’t understand each other. But her notion of worldview (popularized by the likes of Tim Challies) may actually prevent Christians from considering how they really do come across. If Christians think (naively in my estimation) that they are merely expressing objective truth, then they may not be capable of sensing the subtext (or extratext) of their assertions. For instance, Christians may think that they are merely defending religious liberty (in the case of Indiana’s proposed law) without ever considering how such concerns come across to gay rights advocates and homosexuals.

Of course, sensitivity to other people’s points of view should go both ways in civil society. But don’t Christians have higher standards?

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