Tag: jonathan haidt

Inhabiting — Chapter Three — the Household

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

I need to give a bit of a content warning — we are talking about family — about parents — and I know some people have had damaging relationships with their parents, so this is a traumatic topic to engage with.

We are also talking about church as family — which, in high-control environments, is language that can be used coercively or abusively — probably in ways that overlap with those family experiences.

I am hoping we will steer clear of these dynamics, but acknowledge there will be an overlap with language that may have harmed you; deforming rather than forming some of us.

There is also a caveat I want to add up front; sermons have limits. The sort of ideas we open up today about our households, and our church as a household, might require deep recalibration of our lives. I am sketching out a framework for how we think of discipleship; our formation as children of God. This is a conversation starter, not a conversation finisher.

I am also opening with a confession. I am worried I am not a good parent; and the more time I spend with those of you whom I love, who have suffered at the hands of bad parents; the more I have seen the cost of these wounds, the more I fear how I am deforming my kids. I need help.

At home I am short-tempered. Distracted. Focused on what I want to do. Trying to cope. Parenting is hard. Kids are always fighting. Always noisy. Always too slow to do what I want. Our house is too small, and we just always feel angry at each other. It is overwhelming… and it needs to change. I need to change.

And look, I am on social media — I know I am not alone in this sort of feeling.

A few years ago Robyn and I visited these psychologists — a couple — who specialise in ministry families. If you have been around for a while you will know I have not always been great at work-life boundaries — another thing I inflict on my kids. Robyn is quite insightful; she had recognised that this was not sustainable for either of us before I did — and one of the things she brought up was that it is a real problem for her, and the kids, when I work from home; from the couch.

I reacted pretty badly to this — some of you will know I am in the family business; as a kid, my dad never felt available. In his first church he had an office across the yard from our house; we knew when he was in the office we should not interrupt. Then, when we moved to Brisbane, his office was downstairs — and the door was always closed. I had decided not to be behind a closed door; to be present and accessible. It turns out a clearly marked-off workspace is probably a wise thing — but — my folks had been looking after our kids, and when we picked them up after our session they asked, “What did you say about us?” — because you always talk to psychologists about your parents.

I told them I had brought up the closed door and how I worked from the couch so I could be interrupted; and Dad explained he had worked from home, in his office, because my mum’s dad — also a pastor — his office was in town, and he was always absent, and Mum did not want that.

Dad worked from home to be available and the door was closed because the air-con was on. I had to re-narrate that closed door… because, as you know, “love is an open door…”

It is funny how much I had been impacted by this part of my habitat; the closed door; and how my own choice with the couch was not a fix. I tell this story because it is a picture of how we learn to be human in a household. And how we set up our households is part of what forms us, and others — perhaps especially kids. And even if you do not have kids yourself, you are probably conscious of having been formed by those around you.

Last chapter we looked at the analogy of the human life as a house; one we each build either on the foundation of Jesus — or something else — where we take responsibility for building wisely (1 Corinthians 3:10).

This week we are mixing our metaphors — or building them up a little — moving from house to household. This is language we find through the New Testament; a picture of the church as a household — the household of God (1 Timothy 3:14-15) — not just a biological family. We modern Western folks are quick to equate a household with a nuclear family — and plenty of our experience of a household is a product of this move; our families — our households — inevitably shape us; our habitats shape our habits; we inherit patterns of life in the world from others — or define ourselves against them — like in my story; three generations of pastor-dads choosing where to work and messing up their kids.

We will look at 1 Timothy here, and while we will look at the content, I also want us to think about the nature of relationships this letter is operating in and trying to create. Paul is writing to Timothy — last week we saw Paul holding up Timothy as his beloved son who follows his example (1 Corinthians 4:16-17); his way of life (1 Corinthians 4:16-17). Also — while we are looking at 1 Corinthians, remember that bit from last week where Paul calls the church the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16). He uses a Greek word for house in this bit where he says God dwells with us; it is maybe more literally translated inhabits; God’s Spirit inhabits the church; and this word, it is all through 1 Timothy; where Paul is writing to his true son in the faith (1 Timothy 1:2). Paul is Timothy’s spiritual dad. We do not know what has happened to Timothy’s biological dad — he is not described as a spiritual influence when Paul reflects on the role Timothy’s mum and grandma played in teaching him God’s word (2 Timothy 1:5).

Anyway, in Paul’s opening words there is a household reference we lose in english that shapes the whole letter. Here in this warning about avoiding faithless controversies that get in the way of advancing God’s work (1 Timothy 1:4), is actually this same house word; oikos — “managing God’s work” is oikos nomia; the Greek word we get economy from; it is the idea of household management. Paul is writing to Timothy — his spiritual son — about building God’s economy; his household, which is what he calls the church.

And, up front, the goal of his instructions — the task of stewarding God’s household — is love (1 Timothy 1:5). Love from a pure heart; a good conscience and a sincere faith — you might summarise that as a transformed mind — this is a particular kind of love too — it is the word for committed, sacrificial, connected love for another person; it is about giving, not getting.

So Paul’s point in writing the instructions for what kind of examples should shape the church — spiritual parents in the household of God — is part of this guide to love; to the sort of conduct that happens — the practices — that produce the character of the household of God (1 Timothy 3:14-15). Paul gives a list of behaviours for men and women who are going to be model parents in a church community — parents who do not follow worldly patterns. In the Roman Empire in the first century there were patterns and expectations for a male head of a household; a patriarch.

Paul subverts a bunch of these as he writes to men who occupy this sort of presumed role about shaping a new type of household by not acting this way; he says these spiritual dads should be above reproach — exemplary — faithful to his wife — not engaging in the predatory sexual power games of the culture, he is to be self-controlled — not violent or striking out in anger like a Roman patriarch could when they felt wronged; hospitable — able to teach — picture taking on apprentices here, rather than just lecturing… someone who is not ruled by alcohol or money or their passions (1 Timothy 3:2-3)… someone already doing this job in their family (1 Timothy 3:4). Again — this is the same house word in Greek — it is not just about the nuclear family; though it mentions his children — a Roman household was a little economic unit; home to multiple generations, single friends and relatives — and often slaves or clients — he has got to be running his little economy — in a manner worthy of respect, of imitation — before he can be an example; a spiritual parent, an economic model in God’s household (1 Timothy 3:5).

This is true for any of the examples Paul uses in the letter; if they are not modelling it in their own households they cannot be models in God’s household (1 Timothy 3:12).

There are not just instructions about exemplary men in this letter — or this passage — some of this feels pretty gendered to us, but I reckon Paul is inverting certain stereotypes that are documented as part of Roman culture — in a patriarchal culture, not universal gender norms — and the idea is really that both exemplary men and women are worthy of respect; and — I reckon this word should actually be translated wives (1 Timothy 3:11) — Paul is mapping out the patterns of matriarchs and patriarchs — patterns — in this new household of connected love — not the self-seeking competition and power in other economies. This is not to say unmarried people cannot be heads of households, or examples to follow — as we will see…

If we flip over a few pages in 1 Timothy, in chapter 5 Paul keeps unpacking the dynamics of this new family system — Timothy is to see those he is in community with as family — older men as fathers; younger men as brothers, older women as mothers and younger women as sisters — with purity — the sort of love that comes from a pure heart (1 Timothy 5:1-2); and this pattern spreads through the community in particular ways — families care for each other — especially when suffering occurs — so we get these instructions for how to care for those within biological families, and without a biological family (1 Timothy 5:4). Kids and grandkids should care for widowed mums and grandmas — practicing our religion — that is another habit word — by caring for those in our immediate household; our families; recognising they have cared for us — this is tricky if they have not; if our family have harmed us and not loved us in ways where this care would be an act of reciprocity — and we will talk more about this; it is a challenge in the face of broken family relationships and trauma and abuse to practice our faith this way — but, just notice — and this is important — Paul has very harsh words for those who fail to care for their relatives — including parents who do not care for, or abuse, their kids — they have denied the faith and are worse than an unbeliever (1 Timothy 5:8); they have put themselves outside this network of connected love; God’s economy; the task of loving people into the love and likeness of Jesus.

Where people in the church community do not have others to care for them — where these households have failed — the church family is their household.

There is a widows list (1 Timothy 5:9-10), where the church will pay exemplary women to keep being motherly or grandmotherly examples in the life of the church — those known for their good deeds; there are big overlaps between the women provided for in these ways and men who are held up as leaders of the church — raising children… showing hospitality… serving others (1 Timothy 5:10)… while younger widows can provide for themselves — whether that is through marriage if that is an option — or through managing their own households (1 Timothy 5:14) — a type of leadership — being exemplary motherly types who care for others, presumably to cultivate this same way of life.

All of this is about the household of God; this new family that we are brought into as God makes his home among us and builds us to be his household (1 Timothy 3:14-15); his children in the world as we learn how we ought to live from people doing it; people embodying godliness — finding it expressed in the foundation of the house — the source of true godliness — Jesus — who appeared in flesh, was vindicated by the Spirit in his teaching and life and resurrection — was taken up in glory and who now forms the basis of our faith and practice; shaping our economy (1 Timothy 3:16).

So what has this letter to Timothy got to do with us — you are not an apprentice or adopted son of the Apostle Paul — but Timothy is an example for the church to imitate; a model for us — that is a lot of pressure for a young bloke — and Paul says “do not let anyone judge you for being young — focus on being an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12) — a picture of life in the household of God; the life of love the letter is designed to produce — this comes through devotion to reading the Scriptures (1 Timothy 4:13). Timothy is to keep the message of Jesus at the heart of the household — but not only this; he has also got to live it; his example; his progress — his growth in maturity — is to be visible to all; we are all learning what it means to grow up and mature in God’s household together — even our leaders — Timothy is to keep his life aligning with his doctrine (1 Timothy 4:15-16). Because this is the pattern we are growing into; our examples and communities form us as children of God.

While perfect habitat will not perfect our heart — that is page 2 of the Bible — our habits, our households are either part of the conforming patterns of the world, or, in the household of God, part of the transforming and renewing of our minds as God’s Spirit makes his home in us. We will be shaped by the household we belong to. To inhabit the world is to be formed by life in a household; the architectures and rhythms and examples of who we live with and where we live — or who we do not live with when we feel disconnected from others.

One of the obvious ways we inhabit time and space is by being born into a family — a household with a story or history — every human has to navigate this reality — whether our parents, or households, aid us or hinder us in seeking God. Someone born into a household in ancient Athens would be shaped not just by the architecture of the city, with its idols and temples, but the architecture of their household — their family gods — shaping their lives too. And this is true for us, and our patterns of worship.

The household we are brought into profoundly shapes our elephants — more than the city; the world around us — we have been thinking about our minds — what we carry into the world using this metaphor of the rider — our thinking brains — and the elephants — our ingrained intuitive responses to the world. That part of our mind is profoundly developed — whether positively or negatively — whether through presence or absence — by those humans who shaped us; and can be reshaped by a new household built around habits of love and connection.

I mentioned Jonathan Haidt’s idea of the brain featuring a ‘rider’ and an elephant, and this book The Other Half of Church in chapter one — which is about how we are not formed just by teaching the rider; the bit of our brain shaped by listening to sermons and talking about stuff; we need to form the bit of our brain that does the heavy lifting; the automatic, intuitive bit that accounts for most of our behaviour.

The authors suggest this ‘fast’ part, or ‘elephant’ comes from who we are; who we have learned to be in our connected or disconnected relationships; this formation begins in our families as babies and infants — but it keeps happening in our bodies as we experience all the way into adulthood; we do not stop being children; we do not stop being shaped by our households. Even in my 40s I am learning that I am a child; a child of my parents; a product of my family system, my household — even as I parent my own children — I just need to keep learning to be a child of God.

My parents were pretty good, really — I have had to re-narrate the closed door and a bunch of other stuff as I have found out how hard parenting is… but there are things I want to do differently as I set an example for others — including my kids — new patterns to learn — and I know that for some of us this is a bigger battle, because the patterns of our families have traumatised us; leaving our elephants scared and scarred. Trauma shapes our elephant; this part of our brains — because trauma is a function of broken relationships; not having a secure way to process suffering.

Humans need a household — whether that is biological or not; the households we define ourselves around — and their rhythms and our experience of embodied life within them — produce our character, shaping our hearts and minds. Children of God need households operating according to the values and conduct of the household of God; his economy, where spiritual parents provide examples of maturity and love for us in secure and connected relationships; love that reflects God’s love. If you are a parent who wants your kids to know the love of Jesus — whether they are infants or adults — you might need to assess where your spiritual parenting is forming those in your household — including you — are you conforming to the patterns of this world, or being transformed by God’s Spirit dwelling among you? What are your routines — when you get up in the morning is it the “get out the door” rush that teaches work and school and success are important — or connection to each other and to your heavenly Father that guides your steps? What do you talk about together? When do your kids experience encouragement and connection? When you discipline are you discipling?

I know I have got some work to do as a parent on this front. I have still got things to learn and unlearn from my own parents, and from other spiritual parents in our community. And I need help. But I grew up in a household that wanted this for me.

If your biological parents have been abusive or harmful — worse than unbelievers — you might — even as an adult — need spiritual parents, in a community lovingly teach you a new way of life as you submit to learning their example rather than imitating or reacting against those who harmed you. Family trauma — broken attachments — not being cared for — stops us growing up because the people who were meant to model these things have failed us. When we are in this situation we need a new household. New models.

Lots of people who have experienced trauma or exclusion from their biological families have created new household structures — using language like “chosen families” — which is great — but often these chosen families are peer networks, often with others who have experienced similar patterns, with an inbuilt suspicion — and trauma response triggered by parent-like figures. I wonder if we do not just need chosen families but chosen parents; those in the household of God who can teach and model life in God’s family for us — and — perhaps — actually start undoing some of the ways we have been harmed. And there is a role here in our community for some of you older folks — or us older folks — to serve as chosen parents or grandparents in the faith. If you are older you might need to take steps to build some of these connections with others, while if you are younger you might need to deliberately ask some older folks to be part of your life; to open their households to include you. Growth groups are part of that in the rhythms of our church family.

I mentioned this book The Common Rule, in chapter one, and this quote from Justin Earley about “the house of his life” being decorated with Christian content while the architecture of his habits was like everyone else’s.

“While the house of my life was decorated with Christian content, the architecture of my habits was just like everyone else’s.”

And because I would like to make changes on this front for me, and for my household, I was excited to read his follow up, called Habits of the Household — it is another book full of quotable quotes and ideas of practices and rhythms to build into home life.

He seems to be zeroing in on 1 Timothy when he says our households should be little schools of love; habitats that teach inhabitants to live our calling; to be formed as lovers of God and neighbour.

“The most Christian way to think about our households is that they are little ‘schools of love’… places where we have one vocation, one calling: to form all who live here into lovers of God and neighbour.” — Justin Whitmel Earley, Habits of the Household

He chose the word “household” not “family” because he reckons we should think bigger than the nuclear family…

“Thinking in terms of the household, instead of just the family unit, encourages us to think bigger about how God is working through our families… People do not join our households just because you wish for them to. They become part of the household because there is a rhythm or a pattern that invites them in.”

But apart from his chapter on hospitality, which imagines making ways for others to become part of the household at the table, his book is really about the nuclear family… and about parenting.

It was disappointing — the households of the first century; multi-generational groups of connected people — not just biologically related to one another — were a brilliant structure, and as we have reduced life to biological families living disconnected lives in the modern world we have created all sorts of problems for ourselves; especially when it comes to learning to be human and the pressure placed on parents, and kids. And plenty of households in church communities are not nuclear families with two parents.

There are some helpful practices in the book that can be applied in various contexts, but if we see the church as the household of God — made up of households — and that this might happen in chosen family groups, and different structures — not just biological families — then I reckon it is worth engaging with The Other Half of Church — and, for homework, I would love you to read it, or listen to The Other Half of Church podcast — especially the episodes on joy and hesed. Hesed is the Hebrew word for connected, committed love — in Greek it is translated into ‘agape,’ the love Paul says is the goal in God’s household.

The writers of this book are incorporating the work of modern psychologists like Allan Schore — I read some of his work this week and he seems legit — his work on attachment theory is built on the idea that we develop attachment through our eyes and our faces — especially through experiencing joy; connection to a person looking at us who is glad to be with us — an open door.

“If Dr Schore is right about the definition of joy being what I feel when I see the sparkle in someone’s eye that conveys ‘I am happy to be with you,’ I was experiencing joy… Our identity is built and formed by joy-bonded relationships. The identity center in our brain grows in response to joy.”

— The Other Half of Church

This is identity-shaping; elephant-shaping… so much of my parenting has communicated the opposite — especially when I have been working on the couch and been annoyed by an interruption; gazing at screens does the opposite — anyway, they reckon our identity; our right-brained sense of self is formed by joy-bonded relationships — they build on this idea that biblically, joy is connected to God’s face shining upon us — and that we experience this in face-to-face community aimed towards this sort of connection — and where churches do not habitually express and include this joy face to face, eye to eye — our ability to produce fruitful life is depleted — they use the analogy of cultivating the right sort of soil to grow towards maturity.

“If my community is not in the habit of expressing what God sees as special in each of us, our eyes do not meet and our faces do not shine when we see each other. Our soil becomes depleted. Soil that is low on joy is primed for growing addictions. When our brain looks for joy and does not find it, we become vulnerable to ‘pseudo-joys.’”

— The Other Half of Church

Where we do not have this joy we start looking for it in pseudo-joys — addictions; things like consuming; looking at people’s faces on social media; porn; the stuff in the list of behaviours that spiritual parents in God’s household should model avoiding. They reckon we need to practice face-to-face “joy transmission” in our households.

“If joy is transmitted primarily through our faces and eyes, we need to practice letting our faces light up with each other… Our brains draw life from our strongest relational attachments to grow our character and develop our identity. Who we love shapes who we are.”

— The Other Half of Church

We share in communion as a community; a household — connected by bonds of love; by God’s love — his Spirit dwelling in us — inviting us to be at home with him as his household. The people around you as you take communion are prime candidates to be this household for you — a community we are attached to, where we experience hesed — this love — God’s love.

Our elephants are formed by the joy we experience in strong relational attachments — who we love shapes who we are. This is true of our attachment to God, but we learn this from each other as we take up the task of forming one another towards maturity; listening to the word of God and taking on the character of Jesus; the source of godliness — and we only do this when we build our community wanting this attachment with each other, where we experience a different economy; one not built on consumption or self-service, but on connected love where we come face to face not just with people glad to be with us, but the God who adopts us into his family.

September 28, 2025 Add Comment

Inhabiting — Chapter One — The Architecture of our Lives

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

If Being Human was about who we are (or whose we are) and Before the Throne was about ‘where we are’ — on earth but also ‘raised and seated with Jesus in the heavenly realm,’ this series is about how we live in time and space; how we inhabit the world as humans, and as followers of Jesus.

The idea is that if we want to be disciples of Jesus — people being formed by him because his love and Spirit are transforming us — this happens as we inhabit time and space, and this happens at the level of our habits.

Forming these habits that form us is tricky, because the world we live in — our habitat — has been set up by humans to deform us with an entirely different set of habits; leading us to worship entirely different gods and so forming different habits in us; habits we have to combat and unlearn.

We are not always good at spotting our habitat and how it shapes us. In fact, often we do not think about habitats or habits. We can slip into the modern, western way of thinking where we do not really reckon with the power of habits — unless we want to change to be “super successful,” where we might buy a self-help book about ‘atomic habits’ or ‘the power of habit.’

Right from school we are taught that we change — we are formed — by thinking the right thing; having the right ideas so we can choose how to live. This is true for how we think of church too — we emphasise content, listening to sermons, reading the Bible, talking about ideas — hoping education about God will transform into our character.

I know we have been combating this idea as a church for a while; thinking about what it means to live before the throne, and to see God’s kingdom on display at the table as we eat together in unity as a family or household united in Jesus. But this has been stuff we have thought about. What does it look like to change the architecture of our lives — our habitats and habits — to reflect these ideas? To move ‘ideas’ into ‘habits’?

And how much is the habitat we live in — our city, our homes — priming us towards different habits; forming us to worship different gods? There is an idea in our world that religion is a private thing best left for church spaces or your home — where the architecture of our world would be “neutral” — nothing like the Athens in our reading — and not like somewhere like Sri Lanka.

If you were the apostle Paul walking through Kataragama last year you would have recognised a community that is very religious — and then you would have seen a procession of elephants getting out of control and trampling the crowd, injuring thirteen people.

This will be a bit of a parable for us this morning. I think there are two principles to pull out: all space is set up to produce behaviours — habits — and these habits are a kind of worship that form and shape us. It is just easier to see how that is true in the stomping foot of a living elephant than in the architecture of our lives. We can try to stop that impact by grabbing the elephant by its tail — but it is better to be consciously deciding where that formation is happening.

Let’s jump into Athens, where the religious architecture is made of stone rather than flesh, and set the scene by looking at the end and beginning of our reading. At the end, Paul has given what looks like a pretty compelling sermon to the council in Athens whose job it is to decide whether a god will get space in their assembly of gods — symbolised by the Parthenon, that massive building that still dominates the skyline in the city of Athens today.

When he is finished, there are a few people who are convinced to change the architecture of their lives; to alter their altars, so to speak. Some want to hear more, some believe, but it seems most of the crowd sneered (Acts 17:32). They are entrenched in their beliefs; their habits. They have been formed as worshippers of the gods of their city; their convictions align with the convictions carved into the architecture of Athens.

What Paul sees in the opening of our reading as he wanders through this city is that it is full of idols (Acts 17:16). I do not know if this is your experience when you wander down the Queen Street Mall, or Boundary Street, or West End, or in Garden City or your local Westfield — can you spot the architecture of these habitats and what it is designed to do to human hearts and minds? The trampling elephants?

It is more obvious for Paul in Athens because it was a city filled with statues and altars and temples — full of things designed to pull people away from the worship of Yahweh, the creator; to form them — or deform them. Paul’s heart is attuned to this, and to the impact of this sort of habitat. He is distressed.

He starts inviting people to meet the living God — he is preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection (Acts 17:18). He ends up with an invitation to the Areopagus, this council — and there is some evidence he crafts his speech according to the rules they used to accept or reject new gods as he speaks to them — but he is also drawing on his observations of their habitat.

“I see that you are in every way very religious”

— Acts 17:22–23.

Now, let us suspend for a moment our belief that our city is not religious; that religion is a private matter — and let us imagine that religion is about what we give our lives to; what we serve because it is what we see as ultimate and powerful. Let us take a moment to consider how our city’s architecture is just as contested and confusing as the polytheism of Athens, and how religious we still are. Our cities are full of monuments to human ingenuity — our capacity to shape the world using technology and technique; to money — banks and skyscrapers named after banks; our belief that education transforms — and so our universities, where the architecture is often similar to the architecture of the Athenian forum — and our belief that we can buy or consume our way to the good life, through pleasure and purchasing. This is before we get into the ground-level architecture of our own lives.

Athens, though, is so religious it has every box ticked — even an altar to an unknown god — which is an opportunity Paul cannot pass up. There is not much architecture in their city pointing to this God — no church buildings, and not many Christians living lives that model the gospel yet.

One of the criteria Athens had for introducing a god via this council was to address the question of what sort of physical architecture they would need — what sort of temple and altar and cycle of sacrifices. Paul challenges this category — not so much by saying “do not think about habitats,” but by claiming that the whole world is meant to be geared to the worship of its creator. The Lord of heaven and earth — the God who made the world — does not live in temples built by human hands (Acts 17:24–25). This is part of the game-changer that happens in the start of Acts, where God’s Spirit comes to dwell in humans who receive life from Jesus as his gift to us. This life is not a thing we earn through ritual; but it is a life that comes with new habits as we are transformed into living temples. We do not serve God the way a pagan god is served through sacrifices on various altars, because the living God has served us through his sacrifice. He is not a taker, like the other gods of Athens — but a giver — even to the Athenians who are not worshipping him. He gives everyone life and breath and everything else (Acts 17:25).

An Athenian believes their prosperity — if they have any — comes from the specific collection of gods they have chosen to serve; to worship; to sacrifice to — that their prosperity is earned through getting the mix right between their efforts — their habits — and what those efforts trigger as they engage in their habitats — these religious spaces. But Paul says everything they have is actually a gift from a God they do not even know, let alone worship.

Here are the key verses for our whole series. Paul says all nations — all the peoples of the earth, who have built all the cities of the earth — all our habitats — all people are made by this one God so that we might inhabit the whole earth. This is a throwback to Genesis and the idea of being God’s image-bearing people who are fruitful and multiply and fill the earth — and it is God who locates each nation — each person — in time and space, marking out the time and the space we will inhabit (Acts 17:26) — with a purpose — so that we would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him (Acts 17:27–28).

Maybe this is why idols are so distressing for Paul — they get in the way of this purpose; they stop people being truly human; imaging the God who made them. These images and the habits that come with them — the habitats we build around idols — stop us inhabiting the world the way God created us to; they deform us; they keep us from reaching out for him and finding him; they blind us to how proximate he is, and even how much he wants us to know the source of our life and breath and being.

And look — maybe you are here with us this morning still searching; maybe you have come along to church because you have noticed that the architecture of our city still includes these spaces and these communities offering some sort of answer; some sort of meaning — and pointing to some sort of God amidst all the other choices you have. I hope you can find meaning and purpose with us — not in us — but in God — the God who wants you to find him, and who gives life.

Maybe you are here this morning as someone who is a Christian but you feel this gnawing sense; this lack of meaning and purpose; or like you are caught between so many choices; so many options; a habitat that is confusing and a set of habits that do not align with who God wants you to be — sins, addictions, wired-in responses to the world based on what you have done, or what has been done to you. This series is an opportunity to take a fresh look at the architecture of your life and to let God do some reforming.

Paul’s message in Athens is a message for us — whether it is about our idols, what we look to for meaning or purpose; or our self-help — our self-actualisation or self-idolisation — where we work on our self-image through sacrifice, even harnessing the “power of habit” out of some legalistic desire to be better.

We are God’s children — this is all humans, not just Christians — and so we should not think that being more human is a matter of human design and skill (Acts 17:29), whether that is idol-building or harnessing the right power of atomic habits. It would be easy, as we talk about inhabiting time and space and the way our habits form us, to become Christian legalists who think nailing good works is a path to the “better us,” the “truer us” — to focus on self-improvement and make us the drivers of our destiny. This is a tension Christians have grappled with for the entire history of the church.

That is not the gospel though. The gospel liberates us from legalism, and from false worship, and from self-reliance because it liberates us from human rule — whether the rulers of the cities we live in, the architects of our behaviours and our slavery to sin and to deforming powers and deadly idols — or just our need to master ourselves through skill — and places us as children who are invited to learn life from our heavenly Father and from his Son — our king — Jesus. This comes with different habits, and it helps us to think about the architecture of our life differently — but hopefully in a way that is liberating and life-giving and re-humanising and good for us, rather than destructive — because we are pursuing what we are made for; not on our terms by discovering the “true self” within and never being sure if we have quite understood ourselves — but by understanding the nature of the divine being in ways that mean we begin to reflect his life in his world.

There is some fun stuff in the background of this Acts sermon around the nations and their gods — and God overlooking ignorant worship (Acts 17:30). I will not go super deep into it, but there is an interesting thing where, if you dip into the Old Testament, the nations do not tend to be condemned for idolatry — they have been given to powers and rulers who are not Yahweh — and you can kind of pinpoint this moment in the story to the story of Babel when the nations are given their boundaries (Genesis 11:9), or to this idea in Deuteronomy that the nations have been given to other powers — “sons of God” — while Israel have been marked as God’s children (Deuteronomy 32:8). The story, though, is that all of these nations are human; all created by God, and that God is greater than all these powers one might worship. In Jesus — and his victory over sin and death and Satan and these powers — God now commands all people everywhere to repent (Acts 17:30); to come back to him and find their humanity in his kingdom; in reflecting him. As we saw in our last series — this is the turning point in the Lord of heaven and earth’s plan to bring heaven and earth back together as one.

This day — this future — is where he will judge the world with justice through the man he has appointed — Jesus — the one raised from the dead (Acts 17:31). This day — this future — is now the guidepost for life inhabiting time and space; a reason to seek out and perhaps find the God who sought us in Jesus.

And if we are those who hear Paul’s message and believe, this comes with a new architecture; because the architecture of the city of Athens — its idols — is a dead end and will not last. You have to wonder what life was like from here on for Dionysius, who was a member of this gatekeeping council, or Damaris (Acts 17:34). Luke, who writes Acts, often does this thing where he names people along the way, where I think he is both indicating they are a source in his investigation and description of the life of the church, and that they are people in these church communities; living, breathing witnesses for his first readers. You can imagine Dionysius going home and cleaning the idol statues out of his home, and maybe renouncing his job deciding which idols do and do not get worshipped, and Damaris rethinking who she turned to in prayer to secure her fortunes — and even what “fortune” looked like — as she worked out how to serve a living God of heaven and earth, not a statue contained in a temple. That this came with new habits and a change of habitat as they discovered what it means to live as children of God; and, hopefully, a sense of liberation from the need to get everything right in order to live.

Their challenge in their city is our challenge in our city: inhabiting God’s world as God’s children. Inhabiting our time as the time God has appointed us to exist in — in history, within the boundaries of our lands. Inhabiting time and space is not a choice; it is a given — given to us by God.

Habits are not just atomically powerful tools for transformation; they are not just areas for legalism and self-actualisation or self-improvement; they are also, to some extent, givens. We are creatures of habit; shaped by the habitats we operate in and our vision of the divine, and what we work towards and serve with our bodies.

The architecture of our lives — the space we inhabit — whether our city, like Athens, or our homes, and how we structure our time — is full of idols. It is geared to produce habits and rhythms, and if we are not deliberate in our choices, or fortunate enough to occupy spaces deliberately shaped to form us in godliness by others, the habitats we operate in deform and trample us like elephants.

In Romans, Paul talks about this architecture as the patterns of this world, and he invites worshippers of Jesus, as we engage in worship — the habitual use of our bodies — in view of God’s sacrifice, his gift of life for us, to not conform to the trampling elephants of this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:1–2). For Paul, this is a product of God’s Spirit being at work in us, transforming us into the image of Jesus.

It is this idea of our minds I want to zero in on today as we begin this series. Preachers get into big trouble trying to sound like experts on brain science — in part because the science itself is always developing and is pretty contested because we are complicated.

One study suggested just using a picture of a brain scan in a news story — and probably a sermon — means you can make just about anything seem plausible; that the image provides a physical basis for something abstract, and that we tend to want simple explanations of cognitive phenomena — brain stuff.

“We argue that brain images are influential because they provide a physical basis for abstract cognitive processes, appealing to people’s affinity for reductionistic explanations of cognitive phenomena.”

— McCabe and Castel, ‘Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning’

But another study debunked this one; they tried to replicate the experiment and found that brain images exert no influence on people’s agreement, but that “neurosciency language” can make bad explanations seem better.

“We arrive at a more precise estimate of the size of the effect, concluding that a brain image exerts little to no influence on the extent to which people agree with the conclusions of a news article.”

— Michael, Newman, et al, ‘On the (non)persuasive power of a brain image’

With all that in mind — and with us thinking about transforming our minds as we inhabit time and space — Daniel Kahneman was a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist who wrote Thinking, Fast and Slow about how our brains work.

He brought in this idea of “System 1” and “System 2” thinking. System 2 thinking is the kind of stuff we aim at in churches when it comes to formation — thinking; rational decision-making where we are conscious and applying principles of logic and agency.

He reckons System 2 accounts for about five percent of our actions, while System 1 does most of the work — it is our intuition and instinct; what we do on autopilot.

Jonathan Haidt is another psychologist — he is going a bit viral at the moment because of his book on social media and anxiety — but before that book he wrote a couple of books about how our brains work and how they shape our moral actions and judgments.

He used a metaphor that is a bit easier to grasp for System 1 and 2 thinking: the rider (System 2) — the conscious part of our brain — and the elephant (System 1) — the automatic part — where the idea is that it is nice to think that the rider is in control; that we steer our elephants towards goodness and truth, but really so much of who we are, and what we believe is right and wrong, happens at the level of our emotions and guts.

I reckon this is true of our discipleship too — the question of what god we serve and how we live that out. I do not know if this is your experience with sin, but I reckon I can be believing, in my rider-brain, all the truths I get up and preach and read and speak, while at the same time feeling pulled again and again into anger and lust and all sorts of patterns of this world and passions of the body — ruts, addictions, bad habits — that deform me and harm others without conscious thought.

The battle to be in control feels like a battle to steer an elephant before it tramples me, or others — trying to grab its tail while it is stampeding.

So here is my theory: the architecture of our idolatrous world is set up to feed our elephants and steer them in destructive ways.

Idolatry and worship work not just on the conscious mind, but our whole minds — our intuitions and instincts. These are the patterns that need renewing and transforming, not just our thinking. While it is great to get our brains in control and try to steer the elephant, maybe we also need to work at training the elephant with a new architecture — to pull us towards godliness; to keep in step with the Spirit so God produces fruit in us, rather than us producing destruction.

One of the ways we feed this elephant is through habits. It used to be a criticism of churches that did lots of ritual stuff that, over time, the repetition became less meaningful — but I wonder if that is because it moved from being conscious to automatic, and whether we live in a culture that puts a disproportionate amount of importance on the conscious bit of our brains because we like the idea that we are masters in control with the right information.

The Other Half of Church — a book about brain science and how we think about church and discipleship — is worth grabbing if you are interested in thinking through some of this.

We will dip into it throughout the series. The authors take the same model — the slow and fast parts of our brain — and suggest we have built churches to cater just for the bit that is impressed with good arguments and logic and stories and strategies, at the expense of shaping our intuitions and relational depth.

They reckon this part of the brain — the elephant (though they do not use Haidt’s model) — is shaped through attachment; through schooling our emotions and our intuitions by feeling secure, and connected, and attached to God — like children to a loving, nurturing parent — and in a community where we are being shaped and nurtured.

The problem is that often how we approach church is about our rider; the slower system — and we live lives that are hurried and almost constantly on autopilot — another function of our habitat. We can try to put the rider in charge but, to do that, we need to be slow and unhurried, and not anxious or panicked. That elephant stampede happened when loud noises startled the elephants.

“We were pursuing discipleship by focusing on strategies centered on the left brain and neglecting the right brain.”

— Jim Wilder, Michel Hendricks, The Other Half of Church.

So this series is an invitation to slow down, to be deliberate; to try to get the rider in control — to use our time and space to make conscious decisions aligned with the truths we believe, but also to bed down habits and security into the elephant so it does not get panicked and crush us or others; so we automate godliness rather than sin.

It is to discern some of the habitats we live in — the idols in our architecture — the patterns of our world — and their deforming power, and to make decisions about our habitats and our habits. It is to take up this search we were made for; reaching out for and finding the God who lives; who is in heaven; who is not destructive like a rampaging elephant, but a generous giver — who gives us life and breath and everything else — because we are his children (Acts 17:28). When we find him we find a good Father, who is also seeking and reaching out for us, delighting in a relationship with us.

Repenting means turning from the gods and patterns — the elephants — who stomp us into their image, and returning to him as our Father, the giver of our life, and being shaped accordingly. It means restructuring our lives — how we inhabit time and space — as those who have found life with him.

Justin Earley has written a couple of resources we will look at this series for how we live together in time and space. In his book about building habits of purpose for an age of distraction, he talks about realising how the shape of his own life was a bit like Athens. His house might have been decorated with Bible verses and imagery — Christian content — but the underlying architecture of his habits, his habitat, was like everyone else’s.

Repenting involves transforming not just the decorations in our life, but our structures and rhythms — how we live in the place and time God has put us, with our bodies and our time, as children of God; knowing what he is like and experiencing joy through our attachment to him as those who can come before his throne.

“While the house of my life was decorated with Christian content, the architecture of my habits was just like everyone else’s.” — Justin Earley, The Common Rule.

When we are imagining what life might have looked like from then on for Dionysius and Damaris in Athens, I reckon it is safe to assume the pattern of the first church — its habits and habitats — might have shaped their lives. Those who repented and found life in Jesus devoted themselves not just to learning — shaping the rider through the apostles’ teaching — but to connection: fellowship with God and each other, the breaking of bread, and prayer (Acts 2:42). They met together as a rhythm; not just in the temple — which they could do in Jerusalem — but in homes, around tables, eating together, praising God, experiencing joy and security and connection (Acts 2:46–47). Inhabiting time and space together with God; learning to be like Jesus.

The final resource we worked through in small groups during this series was the Practicing the Way course. We used their material in Growth Groups — meeting in homes — where we are not just learning information, but experiencing this connection. We used this video as an introduction to assessing the architecture of our habits; trying to spot the way elephants are stampeding us.

September 26, 2025 Add Comment

The church of the excluded middle

If there’s one thing we learned in the recent Australian election, just one ‘take home’ message, it’s that there aren’t just deep fault lines between religious and non-religious Australians, but, increasingly, there are fault lines running through the Christian community. I’m not sure ‘right’ and ‘left’ in Australian politics — or within the Australian church — have ever been more polarised. But then, I am still reasonably young…

The stakes seemed pretty high for religious Aussies, what with lobby groups like the ACL doubling down on ‘religious freedom’ and ‘keeping the Lord’s Prayer in parliament’ as two of their top five areas of policy concern for Christians’ (which led them to hand out how to vote cards that supported One Nation in certain ‘battleground’ seats (for what it’s worth, Tony Abbott’s pugilistic campaign page ‘battlelines.com.au’ seems to have been a misfire)).

The Labor Party’s policy on abortion was also an issue of widespread concern amongst Christian voters — but that tends to be one that crosses the right/left divide amongst Christians in lots of cases. Meanwhile, my friends on the left seemed keen to play down religious freedom as an issue (especially as it connects to the ongoing imbroglio surrounding ex-Wallaby Israel Folau), even as Labor Party insider after insider comes out flagellating the party for ‘disconnecting’ itself from the average religious punter (and, for what it’s worth, in my little bit of political punditry in my previously linked piece on abortion, I suggested Labor’s platform revealed they believed the Christian constituency to be so insignificant a force that they could not just ignore it, but trash it and ‘wedge’ Christian conservatives as the ‘bad guys’…

It turns out if that’s the strategy, they were wrong, the Christian vote appears to have been significant in the election, and I remain curious about the impact Israel Folau had on this miss-read…

That said, my friends on the left are dismayed by the failure for, in Abbott’s words, the issue of climate change to be treated as a moral issue not an economic one, for a lack of movement in Australia’s generosity via foreign aid, and for many of us with friends who sought asylum in Australia there’s a particular grief about more years of limbo and dispassionate dehumanisation of these vulnerable members of our community (calculated dispassion at this point seems morally worse to me than passionate objection to the issue — plus, if boat turnbacks have “stopped the boats,” the whole rationale for keeping people from settling in Australia permanently is gone; either that policy is working or it isn’t). 

The stakes seem high for fellowship amongst Christians who are ideologically convicted or partisan, or even just ‘centrist’ (and not in the sense of trying to find a synthesis between every policy issue, but rather, in the sense of recognising that where the right tends to focus on individual responsibility and a conservative impulse, and the left tends to focus on systemic issues and solutions, and a progressive narrative, there’s actually truth and wisdom to be found in holding those poles in tension). People on either pole seem keen to take to Twitter to disavow the political other — to pull the church in a political direction based on an ideological assumption of ‘Gospel truth’ linking up with a particular stance, and in doing so, to dismiss the good faith reasons their brothers and sisters in Christ give for holding different convictions as matters of liberty, wisdom, and an application of our limited, creaturely, ability to actually know how to tackle incredibly complex questions in an increasingly globalised world. 

At the same time as political questions get treated as though the answers must be found at the ‘poles’; theological questions are also being resolved in the same way; ‘tension’, ‘mystery’ or ‘paradox’ are increasingly terms to be viewed with suspicion. Where once unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, and charity in all things might was an ‘ideal’ — it has been replaced with a sort of philosophy that looks like:  ‘unity is essential, charity towards those who disagree with us is unnecessary and perhaps unfaithful’. This seems to come from a growing fear that our churches are like the lifeboats dropping off the sinking Titanic of Christendom which has just crashed into the iceberg of secularism — means everybody is clamouring to clearly mark out their space.

The way this plays out is in a phenomenon observed by James Davison Hunter in his To Change The World; he was writing about the polarising nature of public life once everything in public life is ‘politicised’ — where we outsource all major decisions and recognition of what matters to law makers — but this observation is also true of the institutional church as it adopts the ‘politics’ of the world around it. Hunter says:

“If modern politics is the sphere of leadership, influence, and activity surrounding the state, politicisation is the turn toward law and politics—the instrumentality of the state—to find solutions to public problems. The biggest problem is how to create or reinforce social consensus where little exists or none could be generated organically. This is demonstrated by the simple fact that the amount of law that exists in any society is always inversely related to the coherence and stability of its common culture: law increases as cultural consensus decreases.” — James Davison Hunter

In a time where we feel a need for certainty within our church structures — the sort you want when you jump in a lifeboat hoping it will hold up your weight — our churches seem to be turning to writing ‘policies’ or ‘statements’ (or feeling the pressure to sign up to competing statements like the Nashville Statement or the Revoice Statement on sexual ethics) where once there was liberty. We’re running to the poles and creating ‘laws’ or ‘lines’ or ‘boundaries’ on questions where uncertainty might not have been such a bad thing; partly this is a pressure placed on the church by external political forces — the more our civic life is subject to legislation around what behaviour and expression is welcome in public, the more clearly we will be compelled to outline our ‘doctrinal positions’ in the face of legal action, like, for example, whether or not a Christian school’s treatment of a same sex attracted staff member or transgender student is an expression of its doctrine; that these questions are now viewed through a political or legal lens rather than a pastoral one is one of the great failings of the church as we’ve been co-opted into this new reality. 

Hunter sees this ‘politicisation’ emerging as a result of an increasing trend for people to process truth through the shortcut of their ideological framework. We no longer have shared beliefs about much of what was once held in ‘common’ which means everything is contested; and if truth is contested, especially in the public, and especially where the ‘public’ is the same as ‘the political’ — you’re better off being a ‘winner’ than a ‘loser’; and ultimately we lose (as we seek to find) our ‘self’ as it becomes subsumed into an ‘ideology’ and then an ‘identity,’ he says:

“Politicisation is most visibly manifested in the role that ideology has come to play in public life; the well-established predisposition to interpret all of public life through the filter of partisan beliefs, values, ideals, and attachments. How does this come about? My contention is that in response to a thinning consensus of substantive beliefs and dispositions in the larger culture, there has been a turn toward politics as a foundation and structure for social solidarity. But politicisation provides a framework of expectations and action and very little substantive content. In a diverse society, ideological polarisation is a natural expression of the contest to provide that content.

Taken to an extreme, identity becomes so tightly linked with ideology, that partisan commitment becomes a measure of their moral significance; of whether a person is judged good or bad. This is the face of identity politics.” — James Davison Hunter

In his book The Righteous Mind, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt says there’s a ‘religious’ fervour at the heart of polarisation in the west; he sees it as a product of a political Manichaeism — where ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are polar opposites at war with one another and the ‘good life’ or ‘good society’ is about victory over evil, not compromise. His model of human behaviour — where ‘the rider’ (our reason), tries to control but is ultimately pulled about by ‘the elephant’ (our emotions and desires), suggests attempts to negate polarisation without tackling this ‘religious’ elephanty disposition towards combat will be pointless. He also says that in this climate using reason alone in political (or theological) disagreements won’t persuade the other, because discussions in this context will feel, and often be, combative. 

“If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own.” It’s such an obvious point, yet few of us apply it in moral and political arguments because our righteous minds so readily shift into combat mode. The rider and the elephant work together smoothly to fend off attacks and lob rhetorical grenades of our own. The performance may impress our friends and show allies that we are committed members of the team, but no matter how good our logic, it’s not going to change the minds of our opponents if they are in combat mode too.

If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way—deeply and intuitively—you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.”

He, like Hunter, sees polarisation coming as a result of ideology — and his book makes interesting observations about the different moral foundations brought to bear by the left and the right on each issue (and Christians can readily affirm each category). The catch is, those different foundations gear us to respond differently to the same facts — and our view of what is ‘true’ in areas of dispute will be affected by these foundations not just our theological system. Haidt says:

Several studies have documented the “attitude polarization” effect that happens when you give a single body of information to people with differing partisan leanings. Liberals and conservatives actually move further apart when they read about research on whether the death penalty deters crime, or when they rate the quality of arguments made by candidates in a presidential debate, or when they evaluate arguments about affirmative action or gun control.

As this politicisation, polarisation, and move to ‘lawmaking’ plays out at a ‘structural’ level in the institutional church, it also hits home in the local church. I can speak from personal experience that to either deliberately not adopt a position (as our church did during the plebiscite), or to adopt a ‘nuanced’ theological position (as our church does on the question of same sex attraction — where our public teaching has been more aligned with Revoice than with Nashville in that particular part of an inter-nicene ‘culture war’ (I am way prouder of that pun than I should be), comes at a cost.

People leave.

People want the certainty of a floating lifeboat with high rigid walls, not a rubber dinghy that might get tossed about a bit, but that might also allow a few more people to cling to the sides because it’s closer to the waterline.

This too, is a failing of the modern church — a failing to understand who we are called to be; and what sort of community we are meant to be united in Christ, by his Spirit, maintaining fellowship as our chief expression of that unity when it comes to ‘disputable matters’ (note Paul’s ethical approach in Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 10-11).

To leave a community over a political issue or an attempt to be accommodating to people with multiple views is to tear apart the body of Christ that the Spirit of God is knitting together and taking towards maturity; and this maturity is the sort that comes from bumping into one another; from disagreement with a commitment to relationship in Christ above our political concerns, or even matters of disputable doctrine in areas where our knowledge or certainty is limited, like, for example, if intersex people are intersex because their bodies have both male and female characteristics, and we are forced to accommodate such a reality in our theology, how is this definitively different not so much from the ‘psychological’ reality of a transgender person but the physical and neurological realities that we can observe with brain scans?

How can we speak with dogmatic certainty on that issue, or, like the current debate around the language of ‘gay Christian’ adopted by same sex attracted people who hold to a traditional Biblical teaching on sexual ethics, but nonetheless want to make claims about their experience without making a claim about their ‘identity’ or ‘ontology’ (a group explicitly excluded by the Nashville Statement, and a position championed by Revoice (which has now been rejected by the Central Carolina Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church of America whose panel again (which included the Gospel Coalition’s Kevin DeYoung), seems to have brought their conclusions to the table before listening to the people they’re engaging with on ‘their’ terms).

Why must we draw ‘lines’ on these issues? What purpose does such line drawing serve except to move more into the ‘essential’ category, bound by ‘laws’ that suddenly exclude those previously included in liberty or treated with charity?

There’s a law in logic, that when falsely applied creates a fallacy — the law of the ‘excluded middle‘. 

“In logic, the law of excluded middle (or the principle of excluded middle) states that for any proposition, either that proposition is true or its negation is true”

When we reduce our beliefs to propositional statements; to ‘law’; we don’t just codify a position, we negate other positions. Nashville does this with a series of ‘we affirm’… ‘we deny’ statements; but even simply by affirming a particular propositional truth and not bringing the denial to the table we necessarily exclude. 

The ‘fallacy of the excluded middle’ kicks in where a propositional statement creates a false dilemma; where we create ‘poles’ where no poles were necessary and declare the other pole ‘negated’. It’s this rush to the poles that is excluding so many Aussies in the political process, so that many of us report being disenfranchised and disillusioned; but it’s a similar rush to the poles that is destroying unity and fellowship the same way a mad rush for the lifeboats at the expense of all one’s fellow travellers ‘excludes’ those who don’t get a berth. 

So many of our present political and theological dilemmas are built on false dilemmas; on zero sum games that simply fail to imagine third options. Talk to people occupying those positions — like those in the Revoice Movement, or other ‘celibate gay Christians’ and you’ll hear they feel stuck in the middle of the full blown ‘affirming’ movement — the iceberg — when it comes to questions of sexual ethics and desire, and the ‘negative’ movement which has us running to the life boats on the HMAS Christendom. Not just ‘stuck in the middle’ — but ‘excluded in the middle’; and this seems true in my experience of so many other ‘flashpoint’ issues in our churches and especially in the church’s relationship to worldly power and politics. 

It is hard to be a ‘church of the excluded middle’ — because both poles don’t want to make space for you; nobody is sure if you’re an ally or an enemy. You catch friendly fire and unfriendly fire, and it’s almost impossible to tell the difference. People flee the ‘uncertainty’ of no man’s land for the trenches on either side of the culture war, when it’s actually drawing combatants from either side together in no man’s land that might create the conditions for a cease fire in the culture wars, not a ‘total defeat’ of the other, but a figuring out how to live side by side, peacefully, in disagreement. It’s precisely those who don’t have a ‘polarised’ position (and the centre probably is a pole all of its own) who might actually help persuade your ideological enemy of the benefits of your position, if they can draw you from your ideologies long enough to talk to one another.  

Here’s my hunch though; and it’s one that I’d say is a driving philosophy behind how we’re trying to approach being the post-secular-iceberg church — a ‘church of the excluded middle’, one that rejects the push to polarisation and to ‘legislating’ on issues of liberty is better placed for both discipleship and evangelism.

It’ll keep more people afloat by being less brittle or rigid, and it’ll allow more people to cling to the sides before pulling themselves on board. A group of churches — or Christians — functioning this way will also be the sort of group that can accommodate people who have ideological convictions built from different moral foundations that would otherwise throw them to the poles; and this will be for the good of our shared moral vision.

More than this, a church of the ‘excluded middle’ that is clear on the essentials will cling to Jesus as the author and perfecter of our faith; it will see unity in Christ and in the truth of God’s word as timeless, and so be less shaken by the winds and waves of the freezing and deadly water we now navigate.

It will listen to those voices that might otherwise be swamped — like those occupying the middle ground in the sexuality debate who are clinging both to Jesus and the traditional teachings of the Church seeking to faithfully interpret the Bible. It will conserve what should be conserved as conservative voices are heard charitably, and will reform what needs to be reformed as progressive voices call for change.

It’s a utopian vision, to be sure, an ideal of its own; an ideology to be pursued in ways that might ultimately also exclude ‘truth’ or certainty. But it might just be the sort of community that Paul is imagining in 1 Corinthians 12 as he’s just outlined some real issues around the disputable matter of idol food in the city of Corinth; the sort of community that is to find its unity in Christ, by the Spirit, and use that unity as a foundation, or corrective, in all their disputes (like those Paul addresses in the rest of the letter) as they grow towards maturity and the most excellent way of love (1 Corinthians 13). This necessarily requires people living together in disagreement and working out how to love one another in disagreement not just running to lifeboats where you agree with everyone else on board. 

This is also the picture Haidt paints of the sort of community that might escape the destructive ‘religious’ spirit of our age; and the sort that might be not a lifeboat escaping an iceberg, but a lighthouse pointing people from it; the sort that might model an alternative to the politicisation of everything and the reduction of each person to a combatant — enemy or ally — in some culture war. Here’s Haidt:

“Each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).”

June 3, 2019

Christian, is there room in your church for an ____ voter? Would they feel welcome?

Our desire to verbal process the world, and our almost frictionless ability to process the world verbally in front of crowds of people on social media is a funny modern novelty. My wise old dad, he’s 60 soon, once said to me that for the vast majority of his life in ministry he’d have had no idea how his friends and ministry colleagues voted; politics just weren’t a thing that mixed with the pulpit.

How quaint, I thought.

And then I decided I’d dearly love to not know how a preacher votes. In a great twist of ironic fate, an article might come out elsewhere in a couple of days where I explain not ‘who I vote for’ but ‘how I vote’ (I’ve covered this in depth here previously). You may think you can guess how I vote from what I write, and what sort of moral matrix or grid I appear to filter things through, and that would, I think, represent a failure on my part. My prior training as a journalist, my career in a not-for-profit ‘apolitical’ lobby group, and my current vocation all require, I believe, a certain sort of objective detachment from the cut and thrust of party politics; a detachment that means it would be inappropriate for me to hold my job and be a member of a political party, or obviously partisan.

I’m not saying I’d love preachers and Christians to not be engaged in political issues — I’m with sociologist/theologian James Davison Hunter on the criticism of a modern attitude that leaves complex social and political issues to politicians and lawmaking; I’d love the church to be modelling an alternative vision for life together as the kingdom of God in this world, and for us to speak winsomely on political issues in the public square as ambassadors for Christ, trying hard to persuade our neighbours of the truth, goodness, and beauty of life with Jesus as king. I’d love us to be participating in, or creating, institutions that seek ‘political change’ or to impact the public, or commons, in positive ways as a way of loving our neighbours and testifying to the lordship of Jesus. I’d love us to speak widely, beyond just the few issues that seem to be identity markers for ‘left’ or ‘right’ or ‘centrist’ politics to model what ‘Christ centred’ politics looks like; where there is no inch of life in this world that Jesus does not declare ‘mine!’

But I’m concerned, with James Davison Hunter, about ‘the culture wars’ (he coined the phrase back in 1991 in his book Culture Wars: The Struggle To Define America). He described these wars as “political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding” and emerging from opposing “assumptions about how to order or lives – our own lives and our lives together in this society.” It’s fine to morally disagree with people, across political, philosophical, and religious lines — the art is figuring out how to live in disagreement, and listen to the other, without adopting a winner takes all approach to wiping out those who disagree with you. Our desire to wipe out the other, the ‘culture war’ is a product of a polarisation that treats ‘other’ as enemy, and then justifies their extermination, or forced conversion via the threat of excommunication or exclusion from ‘society’.

Here’s what Hunter wrote in 1991:

But there is still another factor that contributes to the polarisation of public discourse and the eclipse of the middle. The polarisation of contemporary public discourse is in fact intensified by and institutionalised through the very media by which that discussion takes place. It is through these media that public discourse acquires a life of its own; not only do the categories of public rhetoric become detached from the intentions of the speaker, they also overpower the subtleties of perspective and opinion of the vast majority of citizens who position themselves “somewhere in the middle” of these debates…

“Middling positions and the nuances of moral commitment, then, get played into the grid of opposing rhetorical extremes.”

The problem with this last bit is that if this grid exists, and people place themselves in a position to listen to voices that reinforce their particular cultural convictions (including a position on ‘the other’), then nothing that is said, whether extreme or ‘middling’ is ever heard properly, it simply reinforces the polarisation. This is damaging for society at large, but it is even more deleterious to the project of unity in Christ within a church community. Is it possible for a church in this cultural climate to be a place where individuals from the left and right come together in fellowship, in a way that allows both left and right — all our politics — to be transformed by our union with Christ, through the Spirit, shaped by the ethics of Jesus’ kingdom as revealed at the cross?

What makes this vision for church community even trickier is when Christians leaders, or individuals, adopt combative positions in the culture war in ways that alienate the other, or worse turn the ‘other’ into an ideological enemy to be defeated rather than embraced.

What also makes this difficult is where the ‘culture wars’, politics, and the media have gone since 1991. Hunter describes the general tone of public discourse, in 1991, pre-social media as: “…elitist, sensational, ambivalent, suspicious of new voices, and intensified and further polarised by the very media by which such discourse takes place.”

This was before social media, which exists to serve up users more of what they want, which tends to be ‘more of what they have expressed an interest in’ that the algorithm can measure, which tends to be ‘more of what they already think but packaged in more sensationalist and titillating ways that retain attention by amplifying feelings (especially feelings of outrage)’… The mass media was bad for polarisation — targeted, algorithmically driven, social media that fragments right down to the individual level is worse. I wrote a series about social media, outrage culture, and virtue back here. Especially when the sort of positions that Hunter suggests represent the majority, de-escalate polarisation, and cultivate virtue and civility, the “middling positions’ that involve nuance take time and attention and space to think and process were hard enough in traditional media contexts, but are anathema to our infinite scrolling through social media newsfeeds.

Mark Zuckerberg once described the ‘self interest’ at the heart of Facebook’s newsfeed by saying:

“…a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

This is also why you’re likely to see more online about New Zealand than about religious killings in Nigeria; this is the algorithmically perfected editorial policy of most major commercial news services — such services exist not for civic good, but for profit. Our media platforms serve up stories that appeal to their audiences. It’s now on us, the public, to cultivate the sort of consumption of media, and lives, that de-escalate the culture wars — especially those of us in churches where we’re first focusing on relationships in church.

In a 2018 interview about where these wars have gone since Hunter coined the term, he said the cultural conflicts in this war have amplified and intensified, and this is because ‘culture’ is actually profoundly important — it sits upstream from politics and law because it shapes our moral imagination.

“That’s because culture is not a marginal concern, as many educated people profess to believe—even as they often espouse their own dogmatic cultural positions. Rather, culture is “about systems of meaning that help make sense of the world,” Mr. Hunter says, “why things are good, true and beautiful, or why things are not. Why things are right and wrong.” Culture “provides the moral foundation of a political order.”

It’s not just Hunter who predicted the culture wars in ways that seem prophetic now, especially with the addition of social media.

Back in 2006, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a prescient piece about the polarised nature of two-party politics, and how the two parties rely on such polarisation fuelled from within, and by a war footing of sorts, to continue to exist. This leads to the destruction of public, political, conversation — and especially shapes how we see ‘the other’.

“The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalise their behaviour by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverising rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.”

Sadly, he predicted what might happen if his invented ‘moderate coalition,’ the ‘McCain—Lieberman Party’ (Republican senator John McCain and Democrat senator Joe Lieberman), did not get ‘absorbed’ into the policy platform of one of the major parties. This was pre-Obama, and certainly pre-Trump.

“The McCain-Lieberman Party … sees two parties that depend on the culture war for internal cohesion and that make abortion a litmus test. It sees two traditions immobilized to trench warfare.

The McCain-Lieberman Party is emerging because the war with Islamic extremism, which opened new fissures and exacerbated old ones, will dominate the next five years as much as it has dominated the last five. It is emerging because of deep trends that are polarising our politics. It is emerging because social conservatives continue to pull the GOP rightward (look at how Representative Joe Schwarz, a moderate Republican, was defeated by a conservative rival in Michigan). It is emerging because highly educated secular liberals are pulling the Democrats upscale and to the left. (Lamont’s voters are rich, and 65 percent call themselves liberals, compared with 30 percent of Democrats nationwide.)

The history of third parties is that they get absorbed into one of the existing two, and that will probably happen here…

But amid the hurly-burly of the next few years… the old parties could become even more inflamed. Both could reject McCain-Liebermanism.

At that point things really get interesting.”

And, so, Brooks predicted Trump. The collapse of the political middle into a zero-sum culture war that sees the ‘other’ side as an enemy to be polarised, whoever or whatever the other side stands for. A politics filled with political actors who’ve lost touch with the ‘moderate and nuanced sensibilities’ that produce stability and a ‘commons’ of sorts between right and left, in exchange for an entrenched flame war.

And here we are 13 years on from Brook’s piece. And the flames are burning. And violent political language and battlelines being drawn begets violence in the real world. I highlight that link only because it was particularly pugilistic, and it appeared in my Facebook feed for no reason that I could fathom. You might say ‘that’s just hyperbole’ — but it’s hyperbole that fits a trend that has been recognised and described for some time, and while it’s the nature of the business of Aussie politics, with our two party system, for politics to involve a certain sort of adversarial ‘theatre’ and an ‘us v them’ mentality, in order to divide and conquer… that’s not the business of the Aussie church.

Political idealists, especially partisan ones, whether left, or right, are now turning on the centrists — those who try not to play the culture war, or who seek moderation in all things — idealists on the extremes are increasingly suggesting that to adopt a ‘neutral’ or ‘apolitical’ stance on an issue — to not speak or act — is to adopt the status quo. This is not just a new type of ‘culture war’ against the middle, which was previously just eclipsed (Hunter) or encompassed (Brooks). It’s a deliberate move to exclude the middle in the name of the greater ideological conflict between the poles.  It’s an insistence that to be moral one must pick a side, and that to be a moderate is to attempt to sit on the fence on all things. It is to insist that the ‘other’ is evil or complicit, and to stay on the fence makes one complicit too. This classically works better from the left, who tend towards systemic views of evil, and to annoy the right, who tend to see evil as an individual, personal, choice — where if you aren’t making it, you aren’t evil… but that’s changing the more the conflict ramps up, the more there’s an apparently clear ‘us’ and ‘them’… Quite apart from this turn towards resentment of the moderate position being a damaging move when it comes to individual conscience (you ‘must’ choose a system that tells you how to think), and our creatureliness (we must act on every injustice to be moral, if to not act is to participate in evil), and our limited ability to know and form thoughtful positions on many, often competing issues (ideology is a nice shortcut to deal with this), these idealists would say (and do say) that to listen to the concerns of the ‘other side’ is to legitimise those concerns (not simply to see the ‘other’ as a human worthy of love, attention, and understanding). This move is a move to dehumanise or dismiss every other who does not share your convictions. Christian idealists of any variety — those who ‘baptise’ a particular political stance as representative of the kingdom — would have us eradicate political difference as part of the kingdom of God; this makes Christian ‘how to vote’ cards, from the left, or the right, very simple to produce because voting as a Christian, and participating in the polis as a Christian, is quite simply a matter of adopting the ideological platform, and fighting the opponent. I think this approach is wrong for a bunch of reasons alluded to above — but I think it also reinforces the culture war by amping up polarisation — the way to minimise the rapid run to the poles is to resist those forces that fling us there. It’s to engage in careful listening; to pursue understanding, and to arrive at conviction making sure you’ve charitably understood the position of the other. This is where the best sort of disagreement is possible, the sort that actually has the possibility to persuade the other, not just to re-convict them of their prior convictions (in other words, it’s not just a more virtuous, less vicious, strategy, it’s also more effective). Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind, talks about the polarisation of left and right and how each group tends to assess morality using different categories and frameworks that mean we often use the same words to talk past one another. He talks about how we humans are less purely rational and in control of our decision making than we might think, and how ‘wars’ and ‘tribalism’ feed our decision making instincts, which are profoundly ’emotional’ — he talks about our emotions as a rampaging elephant in our decision making and our reason as the rider trying to tug on some reigns.

He says, in The Righteous Mind, “the persuader’s goal should be to convey respect, warmth, and an openness to dialogue before stating one’s own case,” he says our inability to understand another person’s point of view, to see the world their way, is at the heart of the polarising force of our political ‘culture war’ — suggesting we should seek this as a baseline for political and moral conversations, or arguments.

“It’s such an obvious point, yet few of us apply it in moral and political arguments because our righteous minds so readily shift into combat mode. The rider and the elephant work together smoothly to fend off attacks and lob rhetorical grenades of our own. The performance may impress our friends and show allies that we are committed members of the team, but no matter how good our logic, it’s not going to change the minds of our opponents if they are in combat mode too.”

If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way—deeply and intuitively—you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathise across a moral divide.

It is very difficult. Imagine being called to not just ’empathy’ but to ‘having the same mind’ or ‘the one mind’ or the ‘mind of Christ’ with people where there’s a moral or political divide (ala Philippians 2:1-11). Imagine having to navigate that! Haidt even envisages the goodness that such a community might bring to this fracturing world, he’s not specifically describing the church, although he kinda, sorta, is.

In the same way, each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).

I think it’s very possible to be partisan and a Christian. I’ve often suggested one of the best things individual Christians can do to embrace James Davison Hunter’s motif of ‘faithful presence’ is join a, any, political party and then be part of policy discussions. I just don’t think the church — be it a denomination, institution, or local gathering — should be marked by a partisan approach to politics. And I fear, because I know how too many leaders of churches vote (both on the left, and on the right), that we are buying in to culture wars in a way that buys into the devil’s hands. The best form of Christian community is one where partisan Christians who are seeking to maintain a faithful presence in our political and cultural institutions shaped by convictions about Jesus and his kingdom, and personal convictions about how that plays out within and against these institutions, whether on the right or the left, can come together in fellowship in a way that models the way forward outside the community of believers — our ability to unite, to listen, to co-operate, and to disagree with one another with love and charity might be a beacon and a blessing to our neighbours. And yet, there seems to be no will to extricate ourselves from the culture wars — especially when it comes to the way Christian leaders (myself included) use social media. This is the sort of time when people say ‘you’re talking in generalities, prove it’ — and at this point I’d suggest that our denomination’s recent statement on abortion, while it adopts a position I agree with, had the unfortunate effect of equating a vote for or presence within the Labor Party as being a participant in evil, and I’d point to this cultural warrior, a Presbyterian minister, who wages the culture war in a media channel that is famously partisan, and I’d ask — could anyone outside the hard right comfortably attend a church where such views are linked inextricably to the pulpit?

Is this what we want?

I am certain that I’m perceived by many to be partisan when it comes to politics; I’ve been described by a dear Christian brother as ‘the left’s form of the ACL’. I felt misrepresented (if the interview I mentioned up top gets published you might see why), and like I was being interpreted through a particular grid, at that time, but I certainly do embrace issues and positions championed by the left (I’d like to think I also do that with the right). I’m distressed that taking a position, a political one, on an issue — even a moderate one — is seen as divisive and a reason for breaking fellowship. And I’ve experienced this as people exited our church community over my (and our) stance on the postal survey. Other friends who don’t buy in to the culture war have experienced a similar ‘exodus’ — these exoduses always end up creating little tribes within our church networks; little homogenous political communities, or demographics, that don’t have the opportunity to be the alternative polis modelling life across divides that we so desperately need. So I apologise and repent for those times when my rhetoric has fuelled partisan division, rather than calling us to a better conversation (note, I’m not apologising for convictions on issues, or for saying things people disagree with).

I fear that part of the alternative community that the church offers to the world is a community where people come together from different positions and backgrounds, with different convictions about political problems and solutions, and find unity in a king.

I fear that church is meant to be a community where people can belong and find their commitment to certain civic goods re-shaped, re-ordered, and transformed by the king — in ways that simultaneously affirm and invert good and not so good things about ‘left’ or ‘right’ or ‘centrist’ solutions.

I fear that the church is meant to be a place of re-imagining and re-imaging life in ways that might re-animate our political right, political centre, and political left, and yet we are a place that too often has our imagination co-opted by a political ideology from the world, rather than by the life, death, resurrection and rule of Jesus.

I fear that our rhetoric and culture war fighting as ministers, preachers, or vocally partisan Christian punters fuels the division of our society into tribes even as we call people to follow the king of the universe.

I fear that whether a church leader is known for being partisan in any political direction, that the climate that creates is a drawing in of people who agree with that stance, at the exclusion of those who disagree.

And yet, I am also hopeful.

I hope that church communities can emerge that are the sort of communities Haidt describes — committed to truth, and to listening to the other.

I hope that our churches might be communities that are not ‘apolitical’ or defined by a particular partisan outlook — but rather be models of places where people can come together finding unity in Christ and his kingdom, to be sent as ambassadors into the institutions and political parties of our world.

I hope that we can lead the way for our wider community who so desperately need models of rich, loving, disagreement and co-operation around what we hold in common.

I hope that we can practice listening not just to one another, but to our neighbours who are not like us — that we can model ‘loving our enemies, and praying for those who persecute us.’

I hope that we can steer clear of playing the culture war and power politics game that so defines our civic life now, in favour of patient listening and the pursuit of nuance and wisdom.

I hope that we can look to voices not just explaining the cost of extremes, from the other side — ie listening to those voices we most naturally exclude, but also that we might listen to those voices who are pushing back against the idea that understanding the other is evil, unnecessary, or to be complicit in some horrid status quo (the status quo that conservatives are inherently seeking to uphold and defend).

I hope that we Christians can affirm that there are good things in creation, and in this status quo, things that have been hard won through the influence of Christians in our politics (both on the left and the right, and for progressives and conservatives). I hope that we can also admit that there are areas where progress towards our vision of the good, true, and beautiful — towards the kingdom of God, or shalom, are still possible and that the way forward isn’t simply to shift to maintain some vision of political utopia that we achieved in the past.

I hope that as well as listening to the voices we might normally exclude from our thinking — the voice of ‘the other’ — we might listen more to voices like James Davison Hunter who diagnosed and predicted this cultural problem almost thirty years ago. Here’s something he wrote in his more recent To Change The World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World:

 “It isn’t just the Constantinian temptation the church must repudiate but, more significantly, the orientation toward power that underwrites it. The proclivity toward domination and toward the politicisation of everything leads Christianity today to bizarre turns; turns that, in my view, transform much of the Christian public witness into the very opposite of the witness Christianity is supposed to offer.

A vision of the new city commons, rooted in a theology of faithful presence, certainly leads to a repudiation of ressentiment that defines so much of Christianity’s contemporary public witness.

Yet it also leads to a postpolitical view of power. It is not likely to happen, but it may be that the healthiest course of action for Christians, on this count, is to be silent for a season and learn how to enact their faith in public through acts of shalom rather than to try again to represent it publicly through law, policy, and political mobilisation. This would not mean civic privatism but rather a season to learn how to engage the world in public differently and better.”

March 18, 2019

Dizzy about Izzy: Why ‘religious freedom’ is much less important to our society than being able to discuss questions of substance

The fallout from Israel Folau’s un-nuanced (both theologically and pastorally) comment on social media last week continues. Lines have been drawn. On the one hand, he’s become a champion for free speech and religious freedom, amongst pastors, political conservatives, and Libertarians… on the other, he’s become a homophobic ‘demon’ in the eyes of atheist commentators (and former Wallabies), sponsors, and the LGBTIQ+ community.

Sydney Anglican Archbishop, Glenn Davies, said:

“Israel Folau should be free to hold and express traditional, biblical views on marriage and sexuality without being penalised, just as other players have spoken out with their differing views…”

Peter FitzSimons weighed in on why ‘religious freedom’ shouldn’t cut it (along with this, he asks some legitimate pastoral questions about the way Folau’s un-nuanced answer might cause damage, that are worth hearing and heeding):

“…the greatest of all rugby values is inclusion. We want everyone on board: white, black, tall, small, fat, thin, abled, disabled, straight, gay, men, women, young, old, etc. Saying gays will burn in hell really is anathema to that. What has shielded Folau from a stronger reaction, so far, of course, is the ‘‘freedom of religion’’ line.

See, if any other famous sportsperson had said: ‘‘I think people who are gay should be roasted on a fire forever more, because, well, that’s just what I think,’’ their own lives would be hell in an instant. It would be classic homophobia, and we just don’t do that shit any more, and certainly not in the public domain.

But, if you say: ‘‘I seriously believe, as a grown adult, that there is a really good supernatural being, called ‘God’, in a paradise above the clouds called ‘heaven’, and a really bad one beneath us, called the ‘Devil’, living in ‘hell’, and though God must have created some beings as being attracted to their own gender, because he created everything, he still so hates his children for having that same-sex attraction, he will send them to hell …’’ we’re all meant to back off.”

MP Tim Wilson, a gay man with a particular expertise in human rights (and the way they bump against each other), and some strong opinions on the necessity of religious freedom came out in defence of Folau’s right to say things he disagrees with…

“Respecting diversity includes diversity of opinion, including on questions of morality… Targeting Folau falsely feeds a mindset that he is persecuted for his opinions. Everyone needs to take a chill pill, respect Folau’s authority on the rugby field, and also recognise that he is employed in a profession that values brawn over brains… It is ridiculous for sponsors to walk away from Rugby Australia because of Folau’s opinions,” he says. “Companies have the freedom to sponsor organisations that share their values, but it would be absurd to make a collective sponsorship decision based on an individual player who isn’t hired based on his opinions. If Qantas and other sponsors punish Rugby Australia they’d be saying Australians can’t associate with them if they have religious or moral views.”

Folau, himself, has tweeted since the scandal, suggesting that he is being persecuted for righteousness. I see his point, in that he has attempted to speak truth about the eternal destiny of a segment of the community, and what could be more loving and righteous than that… and yet, I don’t think he answered the question well — and my problems with his answer are largely aligned with the pastoral objections FitzSimons raised:

“But whatever happens, you must reflect on the effect your words have most particularly on troubled teens – many of them, undoubtedly in your own community – struggling with their sexuality.

Do you have the first clue of the agonies they go through? Do you know how those agonies must be compounded by a respected figure like yourself saying they deserve to burn for all eternity? Most of us can laugh off such nonsense. But what of the kids who are 14, raised in it, and born gay? What of them right now, Israel? How can you visit such pain upon them?”

This is exactly why I think Folau should’ve been much more careful not to create (or legitimise) a separate category of person called ‘gay people’ — while sticking with his truth claim that those who reject God face death and judgment, while those who turn to God (repent) are given eternal life through the loving sacrifice of Jesus. It would’ve been nice for his response to be about good news — that we are all sinners who face a shared future without Jesus, but God loves all people enough to offer us a way out… Jesus’ love is for gay people, straight people, and “white, black, tall, small, fat, thin, abled, disabled, straight, gay, men, women, young, old, etc” — he’s much more inclusive than the Australian Rugby community (who only want you if you love Rugby).

If there’s one thing you can bet on in the current political climate it’s that haters are gonna hate; or polarisers are gonna polarise. On any issue. The collective ‘righteous mind’ kicks into overdrive on any issue that can be turned into a political football that can serve a cause.

We’ve lost the ability, as a community (and as individuals) to talk about things that matter — rather than how we feel about things that matter.

But here’s the thing… Debates about free speech, freedom of religion, and the polarised nature of any public conversation in the current environment are getting in the way of our ability to exercise free speech, and religious freedom, and to actually have conversations about things that matter… and maybe what we should do is just model those conversations, rather than speaking about why they’re important. Obviously all these issues are like a scrambled egg; and they’re very difficult to unscramble… but we perpetuate the scrambledness by scrambling to talk about those secondary issues and how this is an exemplary case, rather than dealing with this as a legitimate public conversation that needs having.

We shouldn’t really get bogged down into the conversation about whether or not Folau should be allowed to say what he says (clearly he should), our time would be better spent on whether or not what he says is true or helpful. The best way to honour his speech and legitimise it, is to engage with it.

If we make religious freedom, or the freedom to not be offended, or popular community held beliefs the issue we discuss in the fallout of Folau’s comments, and not their substance, we’ve already lost. The conversation about what sort of speech we should allow is a ‘secondary’ matter; and it fills almost all the airtime that we should be given to the primary matter; if we had public conversations well (and if we’d stewarded our place in public conversations better in the past) we wouldn’t have to spend all this time talking about what is or isn’t acceptable. If Folau is being ‘persecuted’ because people are trying to exclude him from the public conversation, then the LGBTIQ+ community has been, historically, persecuted in exactly this way in Australia for years; excluded from conversations about what is good, true, and beautiful, when it comes to life in this world…

What’s really at stake here is a conversation about whether there’s any legitimacy to religious belief, or any possible truth at the heart of Folau’s view of the world, and the default assumption from people like FitzSimons is that there isn’t — and that such speech has no place in the hard secular world we now live in, by making the case for free speech, or religious freedom, rather than for religious truth (or even the legitimate place potential religious truth has at the table in a pluralistic society), we’ve allowed FitzSimons and others to move the goalposts from a world that may include a transcendent reality, to a world where only matter matters — a material world.

The tragedy here, is that whatever truth, or untruth, or lack of nuance there might be at the heart of the substance of Israel Folau’s comment on the eternal future of ‘gay people’ gets lost in the noise. And I’d have thought the possible eternal destiny of anybody was maybe worth pondering before we jumped in to temporal tribes and started beating the stuffing out of this football in order to score as many points against the dreaded ‘other’ as possible.

It’s one thing to talk about what Folau got right, or wrong, it’s another thing entirely to argue about whether he was right or wrong to say it; and whether such speech should be allowed; I fear that we Christians have jumped into the second conversation, rather than showing why the first type is actually profoundly good and valuable to our society.

This isn’t about religious freedom; or it shouldn’t be. It should be about whether or not Folau’s statement is true.

We’ve jumped to asserting that Folau should’ve been able to say what he believes, rather than trying to establish the goodness, truth, or beauty of what the Bible actually teaches about life, death, and judgment — about the potential eternal destination of all people.

We’ve, by default, slipped into discussions of a temporal, or immanent, nature — political or secular concerns — rather than talking about things that are transcendent or spiritual. Which is to play the game on the wrong terms; to adopt a ‘limited end’ or a truncated, flattened, vision of the world.

How will we then pull back the curtains of reality and try to talk about the substance, and the legitimacy of ‘transcendence’, if first we’ve adopted a posture to this conversation that makes the important bit ‘should Folau be allowed to speak’ rather than ‘was Folau right in what he said’?

Isn’t the latter of much more importance to everyone?

Isn’t that importance what actually legitimises the offence his free speech may have caused?

I’ve always loved the way atheist magician Penn Jillette (who often reminds me of Peter FitzSimons) responded to being given a Bible by a man who believed he was going to Hell…

“It was really wonderful. I believe he knew that I am an atheist. But he was not defensive, and he looked me right in the eyes and he was truly complimentary, it didn’t seem like empty flattery… and then he gave me this Bible. And I’ve always said, I don’t respect people who don’t proselytise. I don’t respect that at all. If you believe there’s a heaven and hell, and people could be going to hell and not getting eternal life, or whatever, and you think, well, it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward, and atheists who think that people shouldn’t proselytise ‘just leave me alone and keep your religion to yourself’ — how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytise? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them? I mean, if I believed, without a shadow of a doubt that a truck was about to hit you, and you didn’t believe it, and that truck was bearing down on you, there’s a certain point when I tackle you… and this is more important than that… this guy was a really good guy… he was a very, very, very good man… and with that kind of goodness, it’s ok to have that deep of a disagreement, I still think that religion does a lot of bad stuff, but in the end, that was a good man.”

I’ll be banging on about Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind for some time, I reckon, but his work on moral psychology and the way we polarise and how dangerous that is, should be a must-read for anybody interested in public conversations and civility. Here’s a quote that I reckon cuts both ways in the fallout around Folau — the public conversation is full of blind people with different views of what is sacred, and so different participants who see the ‘other’ as deluded.

I call it a delusion because when a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. The true believers produce pious fantasies that don’t match reality, and at some point somebody comes along to knock the idol off its pedestal. — The Righteous Mind, page 33-34

When he says this he’s not talking about religious delusions, but the common Western myth that the rational mind is a bigger deal than ‘the passions’; the “worship” of reason in western philosophy, it’s not a long bow to draw to make a connection between the worship of reason and the modern western blindness to the possibility of transcendence, or supernatural or religious truth (though Haidt, himself, is not religious). He talks about this tendency we humans have to hold things as sacred, and what that means for our ability to demonise the other in a way that explains the zealous and religious nature of the fallout around Folau’s comments, from FitzSimons, Qantas, and the rest, as much as it explains Folau’s comments.

Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities. When someone in a moral community desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is sure to be swift, emotional, collective, and punitive. — page 174

Haidt makes the point that rich, robust, committed disagreement — deep disagreement like Jillette talks about — is actually vital for the pursuit of truth and goodness; but this requires people speaking from conviction in conversation together with people who hold different convictions, not speaking about civility, or pursuing some sort of uniformity of opinion and declaring that civil. He says we need to listen to people who don’t think like us if we genuinely want good outcomes.

“… each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).” — Pages 104-105

When it comes to middle aged white atheists and their concerns about people talking about Hell, we need a public conversation shaped more by Jillette than FitzSimons. The only way for us religious types to get there is to be more like that bloke with the Bible.

Image Credit: Flickr user Tim Snell, under Creative Commons license

April 10, 2018

Something strange is happening at the ACL…

If you’ve been around these parts for a while, then you know that I’ve been vociferous in my criticism of the Australian Christian Lobby — not so much for its politics (though it should be reasonably clear by now that I think their platform is too narrow when it comes to issues that Christians should be politically engaged on, and that some of the positions they take are more identifiably ‘conservative’ than ‘Christian’), but for its co-opting of the word ‘Christian’ and its inability to connect the positions it advocates with the Lordship and way of Jesus. I’m still uncomfortable with the idea of lobbying if it represents a sort of use of the power of numbers and claims some sort of Christian constituency who should have our way in politics, rather than advocacy where we make a case for what is right for all (and especially if it is at our expense, and for the sake those at the margins of our community)…

But.

It’d feel a little remiss not to acknowledge that this change is happening.

There’s been a regime change at the ACL, with longtime director Lyle Shelton taking a step that I think had a particular sort of integrity — making it clear that his platform and concerns align with conservatism, not just Christianity — by jumping to the Australian Conservatives. A new director, Martyn Iles, has emerged in his place and there has been a subtle, but significant, tone change in his approach to politics and Christianity… he keeps writing about Jesus.

For years it felt like Jesus was ‘he who should not be named’ in ACL publications, but in blog after blog, Iles is grappling with how the Gospel shapes his politics. Now, I’m not sure I land on the same positions on most things having done that grappling, and doing this runs the risk of co-opting Jesus to a political agenda rather than having Jesus set the political agenda… but it is refreshing (and the Christian Left in Australia could learn something from this).

Here’s a paragraph from a recent post on identity politics in our universities:

The problem is resolved through character, especially the kind of character that Christ gives us.

Indeed, we are called to follow Christ’s example who, although He was omnipotent (all powerful), He “made Himself nothing” (Phil 2:6-8) for the sake of others. “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus…” says the Apostle Paul (Phil 2:4-5).

All people, regardless of privilege, status, or tribe are capable in Christ of individually growing in character. The uniqueness of Christ-like character is its deeply others-centred, self-sacrificing quality. It places the real interests of God and neighbour at the very core and kernel of our being…

… The great tragedy of the postmodern world is that the call to character is rejected. People are exponents of their tribe and the only real way to improve your moral standing falls to the powerful to change their political beliefs and acknowledge the culpability of their tribe. This is infantilising. It denies the truth about human beings. It denies the possibility of real character. It denies the gospel.

How refreshing — the example of Jesus, on the cross, being held up as an example for us to consider, and a call to others-interest above self-interest; which does have to be the foundational principle for how we approach the fraught territory of identity politics, and current conversations about gender and sexuality. Here’s more from the follow up post (it’s not just a one off).

Flag-wavers from the various movements that spring from a postmodern base claim that their end goal is equality.

If only they knew that the greatest equality in the world is found in Christ, who is Himself the Logos who they reject.

All are made in the image and likeness of God, born into one human family (Gen 1:27). That is equality.

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Rom 3:23). That is equality.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is the power of God for salvation to all who believe (Rom 1:16). That is equality.

For those believers, all are one in Christ (Gal 3:28). That is equality.

The utopia the postmodernists seek is found in the Logos, not outside of it. John saw a vision of His coming kingdom and it was a mish-mash of minorities “from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev 5:9).

Again, I’m not endorsing the position they adopt (or not not endorsing it — I would point out that the ‘mish-mash’ of identities represented in Revelation don’t lose their tribe, language, ‘people’ or nation, but rather bring those to the table in something bigger), I’m simply pointing to a refreshing change in modus operandi for a peak lobby group seeking to operate in our political sphere as Christians. Christian politics is bigger than deciding if you’re from the Christian right, the Christian left, or the Christian centre — though our theological positions will often land us more naturally in one of those camps… it’s about the pursuit, for anyone who follows king Jesus, of a politics that is Jesus-centred (not just ‘centrist’ politics). It’ll mean we bounce to different positions on the political compass, or spectrum, on different issues, and if you’re predictably right or predictably left on every issue then there’s probably some work for you to do in assessing how much that is a product of a political ideology that isn’t the ideology of the Gospel. It’d be nice for the ACL to be less predictable… and this seems a step in the right direction.

It also seems to represent a movement away from playing the game of secular politics on hard secular terms that exclude religious ideas from being discussed, and I welcome that, and the idea that being shaped by Jesus should impact the way we Christians participate in the world (and in politics). It also makes the grounds for dialogue between Christians much more fruitful because we’re being asked to work from our shared assumptions about Jesus to develop a Christian position (whether we agree with where Iles and the ACL land or not, at least we can engage from some shared presuppositions). What it does for dialogue between Christians and non-Christians remains to be seen, but the next step might be to work out how to do the ‘Righteous Mind’ thing from psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who points out that having some empathy for the other is vital to effective persuasion (but it might require that you, yourself, be persuaded):

“If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way—deeply and intuitively—you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathise across a moral divide.” — Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind

April 4, 2018