Thinking Out Loud with Alan Shlemon - How to Prepare for the Next Cultural Revolution

Episode Date: October 18, 2020

Alan talks about how Christians were caught off guard by the current cultural revolution sweeping society today. He offers a two-step strategy to prepare for the next revolution and to protect believers from succumbing to its ideas.

Welcome to the Thinking Out Loud podcast. I am your host, Alan Schliemann, and this is the episode for October 2020. And so I want to think out loud about how to prepare for the next cultural revolution. And the reason is because I think Christians have been largely caught off guard by the courage revolution that's been sweeping our society today. You know, I think it's, for the most part, it was largely unexpected by most believers. Now, in one sense, I want to say and confess that's understandable, right? I mean, nobody's a prophet. You know, who knows what new philosophy is going to capture the culture's attention at any given time. But in another sense, I think it is our fault that so many believers have embraced a false philosophy, that is the philosophy of critical theory, and are now attempting to parrot it back into the church.

Now, I have a thesis that I think explains why why this happened and it's a rather simple thesis and that is it happened because of a lack of training a lack of training now sadly my suspicion is that this thesis is doomed from the get-go right because claiming that christians need more training is a is a yawner, right? Mention the word education and yeah, eyes will glaze over. Boring! It's like there's no pizzazz to claiming that the antidote to our failure is training. Virtually nobody gets excited when you suggest that adding theology and apologetics classes

to our weekly diet for believers is the way to go, right? But this is precisely why we fail to protect believers from succumbing to critical theory. Now, few Christians even knew what critical theory was before it came crashing on the scene. But critical theory is basically a philosophy that is at odds with the Christian worldview, right? So for example, with regards to critical theory, instead of teaching that humans are valuable creatures made in God's image, critical theory says that we are defined by our classification in groups, right? Whether it be sex or race or class or gender identity, and there's a whole list of them, okay? or gender identity, and there's a whole list of them, okay?

And so instead of the main problem also being that we've committed sin, we broke God's laws, critical theory says that the main problem is the oppression of other people. Instead of the solution being divine and, of course, human forgiveness, critical theory says the solution is activism to overthrow those in power and to correct this inequality. Instead of the ultimate goal being a restored relationship with God, critical theory says the goal is liberation from oppression. And so critical theory obviously differs from Christianity in fundamental ways. So the question is, well, why did all these Christians begin embracing it, right?

And I'm, again, here to tell you that I think it's because they didn't recognize its ideas before they became mainstream. And so instead, believers became intrigued by this really novel thing that's coming around. And they thought of ways in which they could kind of syncretize it with their faith. You know, talk about how Jesus, you know, cared for the oppressed and so on and so forth. And so they just kind of lumped it all together with their Christian faith. And so this is why I'm saying we need to be ready

for the next false philosophy that's going to come in a year or in five years or in a decade and will be the philosophy that will spawn the next cultural revolution. Now, as I said, I don't know what is a prophet here. I can't predict what that philosophy will be, but I know it's gonna happen, right?

And I also know that we can do things to be ready for it, to prevent Christian defectors, and to be able to answer the challenge when it arrives. So let me offer you two ways that we can practically prepare for this next cultural revolution. Here's the first thing. Number one, we need to inoculate, not isolate. We need to inoculate, not isolate. We need to inoculate, not isolate. Okay. So the point I'm making here is that Christians are going to be exposed to false ideas. All right. That is a certainty, right?

It isn't a matter of if, but it's a matter of when. Now, the problem with the current approach that we have, which isn't for every, you know, it isn't every Christian's doing this, but a lot of Christian circles employ the approach where they isolate believers from false ideas. Now, this is dangerous because we think we're doing these believers a favor by sheltering them from the harm of mistaken ideas. Now, that also seems easier because it requires less work. But this kind of a strategy is only going to work for so long and in the case of critical theory we've known about this idea for decades but mostly ignored it and so when it showed up on our streets and when it showed up in our churches christians were caught completely flat-footed right right? And what ended up happening is we didn't recognize it. And so we didn't know what it was. And we didn't realize it was embedded in a false worldview.

And so consequently, many believers succumb to it, right? This is the danger of isolation, right? So as I said, we need to inoculate, not isolate. Okay, so the solution then, the better approach is to inoculate. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, inoculate, not isolate So the solution then, the better approach Is to inoculate Now what do I mean by that? Well, inoculation is similar To how we protect our bodies against a virus So for example If you want to inoculate yourself

Against polio What you do is you ingest Or you get injected, I'm not sure which one they do An attenuated Virus Now attenuated just means like a weakened but still alive virus, all right? So they literally inject you with actual polio. And what happens is your immune system responds by producing an army of antibodies, which are basically these killer cells that are created specifically to destroy the polio virus.

That way, when you go off to another country and your body's exposed to polio, well, your immune system isn't caught off guard. It completely recognizes, oh, I see polio has now entered into this body. It recognizes the virus and then it marshals this army of antibodies that is already prepared to neutralize the real polio virus before it can seriously infect you. Now, the same is true with false ideas. We can inoculate with false ideas in the same exact way.

And what we do is, we teach believers false ideas and philosophies. We teach believers why people believe these false ideas and philosophies. We teach believers why people believe these false ideas and philosophies, and then we teach them what's wrong with those reasons. And that way, when a believer comes across a false idea or a false philosophy in the future, they can identify that idea and then they can destroy that idea, right? Colossians 2.8 talks about the importance of identifying false ideas so that we don't succumb to them. And 2 Corinthians 10 verses 4 through 5 talks about how

we're supposed to destroy these false ideas when we come across them, right? And so had we taken this approach with critical theory, had we inoculated rather than isolated, we would have had fewer Christians advocating for critical theories ideas within the church. All right. So that's my first solution is to inoculate and isolate. And the second one is to teach worldviews. All right. We need to teach people, Christians, worldviews. I think one of the best ways to inoculate against a false idea is to equip believers in worldview training. Now, what is a worldview? It's just simply

a collection of attitudes, beliefs, and values that each person has about the world around us. Now, every single person on earth who's conscious has a worldview, whether they realize it or not, right? Francis Schaeffer is known for saying that worldviews, quote, bring forth with inevitable certainty, end quote, ideas that play themselves out in culture. In other words, if you have a worldview or if a culture is bought into a worldview, its ideas will play themselves out in culture. They'll be manifest in the behavior of its citizens. And this is exactly what happened with critical theory. Critical theory is embedded in a worldview of Marxism,

which is in turn embedded in the worldview of naturalism. And because a culture has been adopting these ideas, it's now playing those ideas out in our society. So studying worldviews then is going to be strategic for this very reason, right? Because what worldviews do is they help you to categorize ideas according to certain subjects, right? Now, there's tens of thousands of ideas in the world, right?

Some good and some bad, of course. And of course, that would be overwhelming to think that you can learn all of them and understand each of them and all their nuances, right? But there are less than a dozen worldviews, right? There's like, I don't know, nine or so. And so learning all these worldviews is a much more achievable task, right? You learn the worldviews and you can then therefore categorize and organize all the ideas that flow from each of these worldviews, right? This is a very doable thing.

So once a person has studied worldviews, then it makes spotting a false philosophy a lot easier because if you see an idea being played out in society and then know it flows from a false worldview, then you can immediately determine whether it's wise to adopt or reject that idea being played out. And so you see, it makes the task of discerning truth from error achievable. Had believers studied worldviews, they would have recognized that critical theory is embedded in naturalism, which is a false ideology, a false worldview that denies the foundations of the Christian faith. And so now that we know the importance of worldview training, we can prepare for the next cultural revolution. All right. Inoculate, don't isolate and teach worldview training. These are two keys to preparing for the next cultural revolution. All right. Inoculate, don't isolate, and teach worldview training.

These are two keys to preparing for the next cultural revolution. All right. That's all I have for you today. Thanks for listening, and we will see you next time.