Tag: safe schools

Why, as a Christian, I’m more worried about STEM than Safe Schools

My kids go to a fantastic kindergarten. It’s play based, and it really means it. It has an incredible playground where kids interacting with each other, and with nature, prompt learning opportunities spontaneously and driven by curiousity. It has toys and costumes designed to encourage learning through role play. It fuels the imagination. It sees education as being about forming inquisitive, curious, lifelong learners but also fostering a sense of community and belonging. I love it. I’m convinced about its pedagogy — and convinced this approach to education should extend well and truly into adulthood.

My oldest daughter is enrolled at the public school in our area that we felt was the closest match to this kindy in terms of ethos (the one that cared least about NAPLAN as far as we could gauge from talking to teachers at school open days). It was ‘play based’ (in a different sense to kindy) in grade 1, but that pedagogical method is rapidly disappearing into the rear view mirror, and the parent groups we’re in online are now filled with people handwringing over the school’s (not great) NAPLAN results…

At the same time there’s a nationwide push for standardisation in our education system, a national curriculum in schools and the national ‘Early Years Learning Framework’ setting standards for kindergarten/pre-school, it aims to ensure “all children experience learning that is engaging and builds success for life.” Which sounds like a terrific aim. Education is really important, but how we approach education as a nation (and as parents) reveals lots about what we value, and from a Christian framework, what we value as a nation reveals what we worship.

Our education systems are formative, they operate with a vision of what a person is, how a person functions, and what good people do, and they use practices to get there. These streams come together (especially the practices) to form ‘pedagogies’ — the ‘methods and practices’ of teaching, pedagogies are oriented to outcomes and matched with ‘curriculums’ (what is taught). ‘Play based’ is a pedagogy, so is ‘ROTE learning’…  The push for education based on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) is a ‘curriculum’ push. The combination of ‘pedagogy’ and ‘curriculum’ adopted and assessed in a national approach to education reveals how we see the ‘good life’ for our nation’s citizens, but it also profoundly shapes what we value, because, as Christian philosopher James K.A Smith puts it — we become what we love, and what we love is formed by practices and a vision of the good human life, and the combination of ‘practices oriented to a vision’ embedded in a story is the very essence of worship. I went to a lecture he gave on educational practices (within the context of Christian education) a couple of years ago where he said (these are my notes):

“Every pedagogy implicitly assumes an anthropology.

Every philosophy of education/strategy assumes implicitly/tacitly some model of what human beings are, and therefore what learners are.

The university has assumed an anthropology that is a lot newer than we might realize, that is contingent and challengable. Christian teaching and learning should work from a different model.

The water in which higher education swims is largely, now, a German production. The assumptions about what a university should be are post-enlightenment, 18th-19th German education, which became a model exported into the US, UK, and probably Australia. As an enlightenment institution the assumed model of the human person is the “thinking thing” model — the university model assumes humans are primarily brains on a stick. The task of education and the university is the depositing of beliefs into the intellectual recepticles of thinking things in order to equip them for a particular task. You get the prioritizing of the brain that is then wedded to a utilitarian/pragmatic view of what education is for. Universities become credentialing facilities for brains on a stick.”

It’s not just universities. This happens pretty early on — a utilitarian view of education — that we’re being trained for a vocation in our schools, to participate as economic units within a ‘machine’ is what is driving the push for STEM based education in the early years of primary school, right through to university. If education is ‘jobs focused’ not ‘human focused’ we lose, because we shrink our sense of what it means to be human to how a human contributes to and in an economy. This will have implications for decisions about who we value and what ‘humanity’ is (and about, for example, aged care, euthanasia, abortion), there’s a vicious cycle where education assumes an anthropology, and then it works to reinforce that anthropology.

The ‘culture war’ Christians seem to want to fight often tilts at the sexual revolution and how it has taken its place in our schools via Safe Schools, now, I have some reservations about Safe Schools (both in terms of its pedagogy and curriculum), but I am not worried that my kids are going to come home from school able to empathise with any of their peers who have different sexuality or gender stuff going on (I wrote an article about Safe Schools for Eternity News a while back. Read that). Education should form kids and adults who are able to live together with people who are different to them, and part of living together will is listening carefully and seeking understanding. In many ways Safe Schools offers a much better ‘pedagogical’ framework, a much more appropriate ‘practice’ and imagination driven way of forming kids, than the rest of the curriculum, and perhaps in a world that worships sex, that is what makes it more dangerous than other things on the table presently…

But I don’t think sex is the big alternative god of the west, it’s ‘a big god of the west’, certainly, but the sexual revolution still divides both conservatives and progressives, and Christians and the rest of the world. I think the most sinister ‘alternative god of the west’ doesn’t divide anybody. Conservatives and progressives and Christians and non-Christians are all on the same page… and it’s the god behind STEM. The real ‘god’ of the Babylon of the West.

It’s money. It’s Mammon. It’s the anthropology that measures a person by the contribution they make to digging stuff out of the ground, turning it into technology, and selling it to make our lives more comfortable. It’s the ‘jobs of the future’. It’s that which distracts our kids from thinking about the aspects of education previously known as ‘humanities’ and instead, has us thinking about how we don’t just make machines, but become little cogs in an economy built on the back of making machines. What is the difference in STEM’s anthropology between a human and the widgets the human creates that slot into a smaller piece of technology? Not much.

What’s new about this vision of people? That we are cogs in an economic machine designed to produce goods? Not much. It’s precisely how the Egyptians viewed the Hebrews before they were rescued from slavery and became a nation, and it’s what still leads people to enslave other people. You can only make somebody a slave if your view of humanity is on economic terms… our education system, with its emphasis on jobs, and particularly ‘machine like’ jobs isn’t hugely different, the pay and conditions are just better (mostly, at least here in the west).

STEM without humanities (and the arts) is part of the abiding myth of the western world, the catechism (the process of educating up worshippers) associated with this particular god. It’s part of what Brian Walsh called Christians to eject from in his book Subversive Christianity in 1994, when he wrote about the dominant story of the west, a story that hasn’t become less dominant just because we now fixate more on sex… it’s just we don’t see that this narrative captured the imaginations of Christians as well, to our detriment:

This story, this Western cultural myth, proclaims that progress is inevitable, if we only allow human reason freely and scientifically to investigate our world so that we can acquire the technological power to control that world in order to realise the ultimate human good, that is, an abundance of consumer goods and the leisure time in which to consume them.

This myth of progress is engraved in our high-school textbooks, proclaimed in corporate advertising, phallically erected in our downtown bank and corporation towers, propagated in our universities, assumed by our political parties, and portrayed in the situation comedies, dramas, and news broadcasts on the popular media. This myth idolatrously reduces human labour to the efficient exercise of power to produce maximum economic good.

Serving the three gods of scientism, technicism, and economism, our work lives (in both the shop and the office) are subjected to scientific analysis by industrial engineers and a whole army of consultants, to determine the most efficient way to accomplish the task at hand using the best and quickest techniques to attain the highest possible economic good… More foundationally this is the worldview that captivates the imagination of our society…Looking at life with this worldview is as natural as breathing for us. Because, after all, it is in the air everywhere, and the church provides no gas mask.

Why is it that when Safe Schools drops into schools we Christians panic, we jump up and down about the corruption of our children? We reach for the proverbial ‘gas mask’ or pull the eject cord and home school, or withdraw into the Christian bubble… but when there’s a push for a STEM driven national curriculum we’re silent?

I was horrified recently when I heard a new set of early school readers Suzie The Scientist were being produced with a STEM focus so that even literacy could be taught with the goal of checking off the STEM box. ‘School Readers’ have a long history (documented here), and the first ones, instead of being produced to serve an economic agenda, featured:

  • classic stories from English literature
  • adventure stories
  • accounts from British, Australian and Queensland history
  • biographies of significant figures in history
  • traditional fairy tales
  • poems
  • health lessons
  • stories encouraging the development of good character.

Now. I don’t want to pretend to claim that these would’ve been perfect… education has long been a tool for social engineering and the culture wars, but the goals of these readers, included “instilling in pupils a lifelong love of literature” and “encourage virtues such as honesty, obedience, bravery and courage,” there were other educational aims in the mix, but the new

  • provide information about a range of subjects including nature study, early Australian history, significant figures in history
  • encourage children to read and enjoy traditional tales such as Jack and the beanstalk, Cinderella
  • inform children of heroic deeds in short biographical stories including one on Grace Darling

The ‘Suzie the Scientist‘ series, instead:

  • Each book aligns to learning outcome statements (i.e. Descriptors) from the Australian Curriculum: Science
  • Unlike other science-based home readers, equal emphasis is placed across all four sub-strands (Biological Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Earth and Space Sciences and Physical Sciences) – 6 books for each sub-strand!
  • In addition, all three strands of the Australian Curriculum Science are also addressed – i.e. Science Understanding, Science as a Human Endeavour and Science Inquiry Skills

They are include information to “empower parents to engage children in exploratory conversations about science… linked to classroom learning via the Australian Curriculum: Science” and are built around “consistent sentence structure and use of high frequency words appropriate to each reading level to help children develop fluency, comprehension and vocabulary” introducing “key scientific words introduced for discussion prior to reading and in context within the book to help children extend their reading vocabulary.”

Spot the difference.

Imagine the difference this produces in terms of people of character rather than people of knowledge.

This is why I was so greatly encouraged by the words of the New South Wales Education Minister Rob Stokes this week (quotes from the SMH).

“From government ministers to journalists – from industry CEO’s to senior public servants – people of influence are piling in to denounce the value of philosophy, the arts, and the social sciences – insisting that only by bowing before the altar of STEM will today’s students be adequately equipped to thrive in the 21st century.”

And then:

“Education is not simply about getting a job. Our educational institutions exist primarily to help educate the next generation to build a more just and more engaged society,” Mr Stokes said.

“They exist to provide students with higher-order skills that are flexible and adaptable to a changing world.”

He said the key to a robust 21st century education system was “not the overt preferencing of STEM” but the championing of a true multidisciplinary system.

“Ultimately, STEM seeks to dehumanise education – reducing it to an equation of inputs and outputs. Yet excellence has always been most evident when education is at its most personal.”

Yes and amen. It’s interesting that he uses religious terminology; the ‘altar of STEM’… because STEM is about worship. It’s about claiming the hearts and minds of our children in service of a particular god.

One of my parenting wins this year was watching the Falcon Heavy launch with Xavi. It’s inspired the building of countless Lego rockets. It’s not that I hate science, technology, engineering, or math — it’s that these disciplines and ways of discovering wondrous and true things about the world need to be paired with education, or formation, about what is good for humanity. Who is going to decide what technology it is good or virtuous to develop? Or how it should be deployed? Or what impact that technology might have on our brains and culture? Technology isn’t neutral, when it enters an ecosystem it reshapes it, and it reshapes us, our habitats shape our habits and our habits shape us, which means we need to be pretty thoughtful about what sort of technological changes we introduce. Which means good education in the technological age won’t just focus on the technique — the engineering — but on the telos, to what end we want to develop different types of technology, which ties into the broader question of to what end we humans live for.

Education should absolutely focus on these questions, on what a good citizen of our nation looks like, and what future we are educating towards… but STEM alone can’t save us, unless all that matters is that the Australia of the future is economically prosperous and good at digging stuff up to turn into other more expensive hardware, or at turning our time and effort into software that people want to use. The best STEM work comes from an ability to imagine, and from the curiousity that drives innovation, which requires a pedagogy that is driven by something other than the regurgitation of the status quo in order to answer standardised tests… it requires, as our kindy director says “being able to deal with problems where we don’t know the answer” so that kids start coming up with new solutions now, so that we normalise that experience, not just maintain some status quo.

Our education systems are organised towards a view of what people are, and what a good life looks like. They reinforce both through pedagogy and curriculum. At the moment our pedagogy is driven by the curriculum — by achieving certain outcomes, particularly knowledge in these fields.

What would happen if our education system was built on the anthropology that we become what we love, and with the goal of forming virtuous citizens who have the character and ingenuity capable not just of creating new technology but of assessing what it’s going to do to us?

It’s pretty clear from stories in the news recently about Facebook that there’s a questionable amount of moral philosophy behind the scenes there that has little concern about the impact of social media on neural pathways or mental health, and on what should be done with the data of its products (their view of the people who use the technology)… but I don’t want to single Facebook out, because similar things could be said about just about any (if not all) technological behemoths — the sort of companies crying out for STEM graduates. In Australia we’re increasingly enslaved by the gaming industry; what sort of qualifications are required to build and maintain pokie machines, online gambling, or sports odds?

What in our national curriculum is helping kids identify and avoid parasitic industries that destroy others rather than building them up (and so building our nation)?

What would education look like if we operated with a different anthropology, and so a different pedagogy (and curriculum)?

I have some guesses.

We’d see the STEM-driven curriculum as an ideological danger more compelling than Safe Schools (in part because we as parents are already exemplars of being more bought in to this dangerous system), not a neutral or good thing for our kids.

We’d see kids as more than ‘brains on a stick’ (or mini computers) who need to be aimed at particular careers so that they contribute to our economy, instead we’d aim their hearts towards virtue and the flourishing of themselves and others in more than just economic or material terms… and so we’d see our teachers as something more than programmers or information delivery systems.

We’d have a broader focus in terms of ‘standardisation’ — something more like the classical or liberal arts curriculums of old, but we’d encourage kids to play and explore and learn what they love and what they’re good at more intuitively. We’d have lots more problem based learning where we don’t have pre-conceived answers and where we reward innovation and imagination not just repetition.

We’d celebrate the schools (and kindys) and teachers who get this and we’d champion them and their ideas to grow their reach (and their enrolments). We’d advocate for a better way on P&Cs and other committees, and we’d write to MPs and education ministers (especially when good teaching gets threatened by standardisation or red tape).

We’d be careful about where we enrol our kids, not just to secure the best financial outcome for them job wise, but to be part of providing the best education for their peers.

We’d pay teachers better to be exemplary leaders who emphasise character and who see children both as future citizens and as individuals whose flourishing is best secured not by pumping them into some sausage machine, but by fostering their individual capacity to be curious, to imagine, and to use their gifts and abilities to serve others.

We’d work to free our schools, teachers, and children from slavery to a results driven national curriculum and see the human capital of our graduate-citizens as the product of an education, not test results (we’d have to substantially change our metrics).

We’d take responsibility for educating and forming our kids with the school as partners in that, rather than outsourcing this to schools, and so we’d take a stand against practices that are dumb (like homework).

We’d see that education, or formation, (like virtue) is about habit building and the shaping of loves through a ‘grand story’ not content delivery of disconnected facts.

We’d have teachers who both model and teach that work is a good and rewarding thing not simply because it helps us buy better technology (that we don’t need) but because it helps us build better communities and better homes. We wouldn’t have kids in math lessons asking ‘when will I ever use this’, but have them using math to solve problems or describe interesting reality (like rocket launches, though probably not rocket launchers (though that thing where youth groups used to make potato cannons would make for a good math or physics lesson)).

As Christians we’d be teaching that work is a form of worship, and that the economy isn’t neutral (or naively, that it’s a pure ‘good’), and we’d be valuing, supporting, encouraging, and becoming teachers like this.

We’d pursue real flourishing, which, as Smith put it in his lecture:

Human flourishing is found when we find our flourishing and end in the one who made us and is calling us. To be human is to become creatures whose hearts find rest in the one who has made us and is calling us; finding what you are made for.

The task of a Christian education is to help people find what they are made for.

At present, we wouldn’t necessarily be pulling our kids out of schools where the curriculum is at odds with our beliefs but putting ourselves (and our kids) in and articulating a need for change, and if we did pull our kids out into Christian education institutions it would be because they’re committed to an alternative vision of education for all, not just for enforcing some Christian bubble. What many of our church owned schools currently do, in adopting the national curriculum uncritically and pursuing exclusive excellence on its terms, or in being insular doctrinally-driven schools suspicious about the world won’t really serve anybody. In our homes and churches we’d be helping people not just aim their hearts towards virtue, but towards Jesus, and our own pedagogy wouldn’t be a head-on-stick driven exercise aimed at helping kids know about Jesus, but instead a practice driven, play based, problem solving approach to helping kids live like Jesus and love Jesus.

That’d be a revolution.

March 24, 2018

The Persecution Complex: Everyone has a ‘religious’ agenda, even the secularists

There is always an agenda.

Every person has one. Every group. Every ideology. Mostly every person. But sometimes we can cobble together around an object of common love and push a shared agenda. Usually in doing that there’s a bunch of compromise. So Catholics Anglicans, and even Muslims can come together for certain moral causes while sharing very different — fundamentally different — reasons for doing so. And the union at that point is only as good as the sharing of ‘the agenda’…

This week the Presbyterian Church of New South Wales is in the news because they appear to be worried about ‘the homosexual agenda’ (at least that’s how the story frames it, and they can frame it that way because we Presbyterians used the words “the homosexual agenda”). The lede of this story proclaims:

“Sydney’s most expensive private school has asked the Presbyterian Church for advice on what the church describes as the “homosexual agenda”, in the event that a same-sex couple wanted to enrol their child at the school.”

When I hear the words “the homosexual agenda,” I picture a secret cabal that programs the universal homosexual response to every issue with the end goal of making everybody gay; but I fear the setters of the “gay agenda” may sometimes be as at odds with members of the gay community as the Australian Christian Lobby are with some Christians; and I’d rather listen to what people are asking for and figure out why than simply label every issue someone raises as part of a bigger agenda (though I admit things almost always are part of some bigger agenda).

As an aside, before the story about Scots falls too far into the background — I find it profound that a school that charges more than $30,000 a year is more worried about homosexuality than greed, or the idolatry of education…

I’ve always found it odd when Christians speak of a ‘gay agenda’ — not because I don’t think there are groups out there who have united around a common cause — but because it seems an easy way to not listen to people, or to dismiss a ‘counter-agenda’ simply on the basis of an ad hominem style “well, we know they are simply representing their own interest” dismissal. There are groups like GLAAD and Australian Marriage Equality who are out there trying to further ‘an’ agenda, just as there’s a National LGBTI Health Alliance. These groups definitely advocate particular ‘agendas’ for the sake of their community. And probably with good reason. I’m not sure we can ever treat agendas as totally homogenous (even for individuals, because we often have agendas that compete for our time and attention, and with each other in contradictory ways).

We seem to use ‘agenda’ as a pejorative — a reason not to listen — especially if it competes with our own agenda (though because an agenda is a thing we treat as a negative we always want to pretend we are unbiased, either with no agenda or an agenda purely for the common good). That a position is put forward by people with ‘agendas’ is an odd reason to push back rather than listen. And an even worse reason to exclude their position from a place in the metaphorical ‘public table’… That we disagree with an agenda is also not a great reason to exclude it from this public table unless we can show it isn’t for the common good, or rather, that it causes harm. So. For example. We get enough people behind agendas that rule out murder or other common objects that we consider ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ — and that would rule out pro-murder agenda should it ever appear on the scene. And that’s good. It’s also why the worst thing you can do to an alternative agenda is suggest that it is actually harmful (and that’s the strategy people are adopting over and over again to silence the church).

Perhaps the ‘homosexual agenda’ is simply an attempt by a community within our civil society to provide a better life for homosexual people according to a particular vision of what it looks like for people to thrive or flourish. It’s not nefarious or secret. Even if there are people setting some sort of agenda in meetings somewhere. It’s consistent with a view of the world and the human person and what ‘good’ is. And so agendas aren’t just to be dismissed out of hand because we have a different view. We have to work out how to live at peace with one another. There’s another constructive reason I think we should listen to people that I’ll outline below that lines up with our ‘Christian agenda’… Agendas are everywhere. But to speak of ‘agendas’ as though they’re the product of some cabal somewhere rather than just a product of our humanity is odd, and an exercise in ‘othering’ rather than listening. We all have agendas. There’s a homosexual agenda to provide better health and happiness for homosexual people (including to push for marriage/social inclusion/safety for LGBTIQA people). There’s also a ‘queer’ agenda (articulated quite directly in various places by Roz Ward from Safe Schools) that would like sexual fluidity to be the norm; for us all to be queer, which rather undermines the idea that to be queer is to be different; it is possible that this agenda might say some interesting and valuable things that we should listen to in order to understand the queer community too…

We can’t be naive about agendas that are operating around us. But nor is an ‘agenda’ in and of itself a bad thing, and a secular society probably has the responsibility to accommodate as many competing and conflicting agendas as possible.

Our agendas are set by our worship

Let’s try replacing the idea of an agenda with the idea of all of us being homo liturgicus — creatures who worship.

Let’s assume that each of us worships something, and that this object of worship orients our hearts, minds, and lives. That it captures our imaginations and our desires. Let’s assume our worship supplies our agenda. Whoever we are. We’re pushed out into the world with an ‘agenda’ — a picture of human flourishing; first for ourselves, as worshippers, but then for others, as image bearers of our objects of worship who are living breathing ambassadors of our chosen deity. Let’s also assume that most of us think love for other things is ordered by our love for the thing we love ultimately. That all of us order our love, and understand love, based on this object of worship. So the thing that is first in my heart defines not just how I love other things or people in my life but what I think love looks like when I direct it to them. If I love money above all else, then that frames how I treat money, but it also means I show love for others by giving them money, or not taking money from them unfairly. If I love my sexuality above all else, if my fundamental desire is for sex and freedom to pursue sex and identity where I see fit, then the way I love others involves either sex (drawing them in to a shared act of worship) or fighting for their sexual freedom. That’s the gay agenda. Or one of them.

Here’s how James K.A Smith puts it in You Are What You Love:

If you are what you love, and your ultimate loves are formed and aimed by your immersion in practices and cultural rituals, then such practices fundamentally shape who you are. At stake here is your very identity, your fundamental allegiances, your core convictions and passions that center both your self-understanding and your way of life. In other words, this contest of cultural practices is a competition for your heart—the center of the human person designed for God, as Augustine reminded us. More precisely, at stake in the formation of your loves is your religious and spiritual identity, which is manifested not only in what you think or what you believe but in what you do—and what those practices do to you…

We become what we worship because what we worship is what we love. As we’ve seen, it’s not a question of whether you worship but what you worship—which is why John Calvin refers to the human heart as an “idol factory.” We can’t not worship because we can’t not love something as ultimate…

Our idolatries, then, are more liturgical than theological. Our most alluring idols are less intellectual inventions and more affective projections—they are the fruit of disordered wants, not just misunderstanding or ignorance. Instead of being on guard for false teachings and analyzing culture in order to sift out the distorting messages, we need to recognize that there are rival liturgies everywhere.

To be human is to be a liturgical animal, a creature whose loves are shaped by our worship. And worship isn’t optional. Even a writer like David Foster Wallace, who had no theological agenda, recognized that to be human is to worship.

 

Every idol has an agenda. There is no space that contains people that is a ‘worship free’ zone. Every time we gather at a table with others, each person’s agenda, in some way, is driven by whatever they view as ‘ultimate’ — the ultimate picture of the ideal person, the ideal community, the ideal shared way of life.

Truly ‘secular’ space isn’t freed from religion and thus ‘neutral’ — it allows space for these competing agendas, and works toward a ‘common’ good. Often these agendas will have very different visions of good — but sometimes they’ll dovetail; like in the case of Roz Ward whose (self acknowledged) Marxist agenda saw her views align with others in the LGBTIQA community, and educators, who want to make schools safer for LGBTIQA students. But though Ward is a member of the LGBTIQA community her particular Marxist/Queer agenda is at odds with other members of the ‘T’ community like Catherine McGregor, who says she believes strongly that gender being a binary thing is important or she wouldn’t have transitioned… We always line our agendas up with others for convenience, but that allegience will only take us so far if we don’t share a common object of worship (not just love).

We shouldn’t ‘fear’ agendas, or try to silence them simply because our ‘agenda’ may happen to be true, or simply because we believe it leads to good things, and other view. True secularism is about figuring out how competing agendas — competing visions of human flourishing (and personal flourishing) — views including our own — might exist side by side. But we should be prepared, as a society, to discern what agendas involve harm, and that might bring many agendas together, and we should, as Christians, consider how much it is possible for us to share agendas — or platforms — with other idolatrous views in order to respond to a particular idolatrous view as though the harms can be easily ordered simply because some moral visions line up with our own.

 

Why we should listen to, and how we should live alongside, other agendas

It has always interested me that Paul, as a faithful Jew who no doubt loved Deuteronomy 7 and its call to purity from idols, didn’t walk through Athens with a sledgehammer, but with open eyes and ears. And that when he speaks, he speaks in a way that articulates the Gospel as the answer to the imagination and desire of the Athenians, and the Athenian Agenda. I think this is because he’s carrying out the Christian agenda — which is no less than the Deuteronomic agenda to topple idols. But the thing that topples idols is a toppling of stone hearts formed by the worship stone idols, that comes from the Spirit (Ezekiel 36:26), who comes via Jesus. Make no mistake. Paul topples the idols of Athens in the hearts of those who turn to God. But he’s happy not to topple them for anyone else. He’s happy to be another voice in the marketplace of ideas and in the courtroom that decides which gods have legitimacy — the areopagus.

Our agenda, as Christians, is clear. It’s to worship God, and in doing so, to bear his image. To glorify him. And the result of doing that faithfully looks, I think, a lot like what we are re-created to do as Christians. Our new cultural mandate. The Great Commission. This sets the agenda for us.

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” — Matthew 28:19-20

We’re Great Commission people; sent out into a world full of worshippers who are being formed into the image of their idols. Discipled by counter-liturgies. Pursuing counter-agendas.

One way we fulfil the great commission is, I think, by listening well to the world we live in and seeing the universal human desires at the heart of people’s agendas — seeing where God’s design is being distorted by idolatry so that we can invite people to rediscover the telos — the purpose and fulfilment — of that desire in having their loves and desires ordered around Jesus. Listening and understanding is also, in itself, an act of love. Its a way that we can show people we care; that we want to understand their wants and needs, and that we want to live at piece not conscript their desires and imaginations in order to force a conversion. Attempting to make people live as though they worship God isn’t our job — and trying to do that is bound to be frustrated anyway given that Romans 1 says people love and worship what they love and worship because God has given their thoughts and desires over to their idolatry.

Instead of dismissing the ‘homosexual agenda’ perhaps we should listen to what objects of common good those pushing that agenda are pushing for — like more safety for kids who don’t fit the norm — but we should also listen for the desire for love, intimacy, and a sense of satisfying identity that people are craving so that we can connect those desires with where God designed them to be ultimately fulfilled. Not in sex. But in an intimate relationship with our creator.

And listening informs our speech. We aren’t called to speak to caricatures, but to people. People who worship. And our message must be one that replaces a false god with the real one; or rather; God does away with these idols via our preaching with what Thomas Chalmers calls The Expulsive Power of a New Affection; a sermon in which he points out our task is not simply to fill an empty space in a person’s heart with a new God, but to replace an old object of worship with a new, better, more complete, God.

“And it is the same in the great world. We shall never be able to arrest any of its leading pursuits, by a naked demonstration of their vanity. It is quite in vain to think of stopping one of these pursuits in any way else, but by stimulating to another. In attempting to bring a worldly man intent and busied with the prosecution of his objects to a dead stand, we have not merely to encounter the charm which he annexes to these objects – but we have to encounter the pleasure which he feels in the very prosecution of them. It is not enough, then, that we dissipate the charm, by a moral, and eloquent, and affecting exposure of its illusiveness. We must address to the eye of his mind another object, with a charm powerful enough to dispossess the first of its influences, and to engage him in some other prosecution as full of interest, and hope, and congenial activity, as the former…”

This act of ‘encountering the charm’ and the ‘pleasure’ in order to dissipate them means listening well to what is driving other agendas, and observing what they do and don’t deliver; not simply dismissing them. In a secular world it means (so long as we have a place at the table) finding a place at the table for agendas we disagree with even when we believe all such idolatry leads to eternal harm; because we have no tool to fight idolatry but the Gospel. Silencing or dismissing other agendas rather than generously engaging with the people behind them isn’t love. Everyone has an agenda. Maybe we should start being more open about our own, and more worried about who we’re worshipping and what we’re seen to be worshipping if we make morality or natural law our tool for taking down idols — not the Gospel of Jesus.

June 9, 2016

When Henny Penny meets 1984’s Winston: The sexular age and seeing the world as it really is

The sky is falling. We must tell the king — Henny Penny & Chicken Little

hennypenny

I feel a little like I’m a chicken, just kicking back in the coop, chewing some corn or something, and watching Henny Penny running around yelling that if I don’t get off my perch and spit out my corn the sky will fall on my head.

Do you ever feel like that?

There’s a fair bit of hysteria in my coop about life in this new sexular age. The result of the secular world we live in where reality has been flattened so only the material questions of here and now matter, butting up against the sexual revolution, where only sex really matters. Materially speaking. Stephen McAlpine sums this sexular age up best. So read him (see also Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age and James KA Smith’s How (Not) To Be Secular). But we Christians are the enemies in this revolution, perhaps rightly so, because we keep standing against it, and when we’re not standing, we’re running around trying to convince one another that the sky is falling in, and we must do everything in our power to stop it.

It makes sense, if this sexular age is a real thing, that the people of this age will seek to indoctrinate the children of this age to worship the god of the age. It makes sense that the people of this age will set out patterns of relationship that conform to the image of their god. That’s how idolatry works. Always. Alternative patterns. What doesn’t work is calling people to follow our pattern of life without giving them the way in. To do that is just cruel.

There’s a fair bit at stake. Potentially. So it makes sense. But I think our best bet, and the thing we’re actually called to do as followers of Jesus, is to spread our wings and give Henny Penny a comforting hug, but also reach out to those doing their best to bring the sky down on us. Those driving the revolution. Because they’ll need a hug when they realise the revolution doesn’t deliver (and it’s just our job, metaphorically) even if they don’t.

Just to be clear — the hug I’m talking about is extending the love of Jesus to the people of our world, the knowledge that he is the real king, and the only lover capable of meeting the expectations people are heaping on their sexual partners. We get so worried the sky is falling in we forget our job is to love those who are afraid, and love those who its going to fall on, even as they pull it down on our heads.

If you’re reading this and you feel like you need a hug because of how Christians keep telling you to live — where you can or can’t stick your bits, or how to think about who you are, then I’m sorry. All this stuff we believe about sex and gender and life in this world we believe because following Jesus makes us see everything differently. If you’re not prepared to accept that God might have something different to say about sexuality to the inner workings of your mind, or to the education system in Australia, then you’ll probably find this post super awful and hate me. I’m sorry. But I’m writing specifically to Christians, basically to tell them to stop telling you to live like you’re a Christian.

I’ve been particularly struck by the intra-Christian hysteria this week when it comes to our snowballing response to the Safe Schools material being introduced in our secular (sexular) schools, and to preparations for the plebiscite on gay marriage. There are plenty of these out there, some of the more measured responses include this blog post from Akos Balogh that has gone a little viral asking for the Christian position to be respected — for our students to be safe from bullying, and this story from the Presbyterian Church’s Moderator General (the guy responsible for chairing our national assembly who functions as a bit of a lightning rod for the denomination) David Cook about a meeting with Malcolm Turnbull seeking clarity about a gay marriage plebiscite.

“We want all students to be safe at school and free from bullying, whatever their identity. But my concern is that your material risks not only causing harm to some of the vulnerable LGBTI students (e.g. through the minus18 website), but it also creates another class of ‘outcasts’, whose only crime is to hold a different view of sexuality/gender than Safe Schools.” — Akos Balogh, Dear Safe Schools: I have questions

David Cook describes meeting the Prime Minister, in a delegation put together by the Australian Christian Lobby. He reports:

The issues which concerned us were:

  • The framing of the question to be answered in the plebiscite.  Would we have input into this so that it did not unfairly encourage the preferred response of either side?

  • The question of religious freedom both during and after the debate, if the plebiscite is lost.

  • If the Commonwealth was  to provide funding for campaigns, how would such funding be allocated?  The campaign in favour of single sex marriage in Ireland outspent the traditional campaign, 15 to 1.

  • When will the proposed Bill to change the Marriage Act and enable the plebiscite, be available?

  • Will the PM do all in his power to ensure equal access to media for both sides of the argument? — David Cook, Malcolm in the Middle

 

I have a huge amount of respect for David Cook (and for Akos), but especially for David’s contribution to the church in Australia in training up Gospel ministers — evangelists. I know both these guys to be pretty reasonable, and what they’re asking for seems so reasonable. Fair even. I don’t entirely share some of their thinking, because I keep remembering how poorly we stewarded the ‘public square’ for the sake of minority groups being safe, when we were the dominant social power. We were probably especially, at least anecdotally, damaging to the LGBTIQA community, who are the primary beneficiary of both these current issues.’

It’s certainly not just Christians who make the world feel unsafe for people at the margins, but we’ve been a bit culpable either in participating in bullying, or not using our power to stop it (and then you’ve got boxing champions and professing Christians like Manny Pacquiao and Tyson Fury kind of proving the point that the link between Christian faith and bullying can be quite direct). This is why we’ve got to be careful when Christians are allowing for hate speech laws to be thrown out so we can debate the plebiscite robustly. There’s a fine line between debate and debasement when some people claim to be speaking for God.

For David Cook, at least, the fear that the sky will fall seems quite palpable, and it seems to miss the point that the sexular age is already here. It’s not going to be brought in by this vote, this vote will simply codify what Australians already think (whichever way it goes). And I suspect because the average Aussie’s pantheon of gods includes freedom, sex, and free sex, they’ll be voting for the side that best represents their objects of worship.

“Changing that Act will change society; genderless marriage will lead to genderless families, no more mothers and fathers, just parents; genderless living will be used to encourage children to choose whichever gender they would like to be.” — David Cook

Both David Cook and Akos Balogh essentially mount arguments against change on the basis of protecting our personal freedom, or liberty, as Christians. Which sounds noble, and I totally agree with their thinking. I just don’t think it’s going to work (have a look at Stephen McAlpine’s aforelinked post for a start). I think we’re trying to topple one modern idol sex with another freedom when they’re so closely interconnected that the alternative idol is more likely to consume us as we wield it, than destroy the arguments we are deploying it against. If this makes sense… An argument for individual liberty ends up becoming an argument for people being free to choose their gender and their approach to marriage.

“There is no doubt we are facing a very different Australia in the future when such curbs on liberty become part of the policy platform of a mainline political party.

Neutrality will not be an option in the debate leading into the plebiscite.  The church, usually reluctant to enter into politics, needs to take the lead in having an educative role.

We need to be much in prayer at this time and the silent majority need to speak up.” — David Cook

I’m a bit confused. Do we want groups of people curbing the liberty of others, or not? If we make the argument about liberty and are only worried about our liberty then we’re falling into the trap of being pretty inconsistent.

“I would rather stay home and read a book but that is not an option for any of us.” — David Cook

“The sky is falling in. The sky is falling in. We must tell the king.” — Henny Penny

When the sky is falling in, we certainly can’t just stay home and read a book. We have to do something. We have to change people’s minds! And the Sky is falling in. It is. But we seem to be making Henny Penny’s mistake and turning to the fox — in this case, the state — to deal with the problem, not the king. You don’t help people when the sky is falling by putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.

We need to do something, but getting out the vote isn’t it. At least I don’t think it is. When we say things like this and expect to be convincing, we’re missing two fundamental Biblical truths.

  1. In response to human sin. God gives us over to a broken way of seeing the world, with new (broken) hearts and minds (and we used to be part of this ‘them’). See Romans 1.
  2. In the transformation and renewed mind God brings via the Spirit to those who follow Jesus, God changes the way we see the world back to how it should be seen by giving us new (new) hearts and minds. Without this mind following God’s pattern for life is simultaneously impossible and futile. See Romans 8, 12

Idolatry and Double-Think

War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery. — George Orwell, 1984

Up is down. Black is white. God is sex…

This Romans 1 passage works corporately, it’s about all of us in Adam. Since the beginning of the Bible story people are born seeing up as down. Seeing things as God, and God as some small thing. We’re not born knowing who God is from his world, though we might have an inkling, we’re born already suppressing the knowledge of who God is because that’s human culture. That’s how we get sexular ages. Consensus views that are opposed to God. To deny this is to deny that sin affects every human heart and mind from birth. But this isn’t a get out clause because we all repeat that deliberate act of suppression, so Paul says:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. — Romans 1:20

When we humans invert the created order and make created things into our gods — which is the hallmark of the sexular age, where our worship is directed towards sex, and our sexuality frames our understanding of who we are at our most fundamental level — our thinking changes. It’s natural that our thinking is shaped by our love and habits — by the story we see ourselves living in… but it’s not just that. This re-seeing the world, re-imagining the world, isn’t just us choosing to see the world through the lens provided by our new god — sex — the real God is also, at least according to Romans 1, confirming these new patterns for us. This is part of the judgment of God that comes on people when they turn to idols… There’s this repeated statement in Romans 1, the idea that God gives us, humanity, over to a new way of seeing when we exchange him for idols. He ultimately changes the way humans (and so, human cultures) see the world. Our hearts and minds are shifted by what we worship, and by God to what we now worship, as a punishment.

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another…  Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. — Romans 1:24, 28

This is talking about every single person in this world. The only thing that changes the way we see the world — helping us see war, peace, strength, freedom, and sex, rightly, is that we see the world as God made it to be seen because he first works in us. We can’t do this seeing on our own, nor can we expect our arguments to make people see their own way out of their idolatry. This requires, as an old school Christian dude Thomas Chalmers put it “the explusive power of a new affection’ — until someone loves Jesus more than they love sex, or another idol (perhaps individual freedom), more than they love sex, these very reasonable arguments we make seem like doublethink. I can no more convince someone that I should be free to disagree with their view than I convince them that up is down.

This truly expulsive power comes from one place. God. And it comes as we share the love of Jesus, the Gospel of Jesus, not as we call people to simply change the way they see the world starting with sex. We just look like panicked chickens when we do that…

The Noetic Effect of Sin meets Common Grace

There is a sense, I think, where living out and speaking about sex following the pattern of the created order, not our sexular age’s order, does bear witness to God and his goodness. This is why I’m so keen for Christians to stay involved with marriage for as long as possible — rather than pulling stunts like getting divorced or withdrawing from the Marriage Act if our sexular government broadens the definition of marriage. People do still, despite the warping of our minds, have a taste of what has been lost. I think this is actually what Paul is talking about in this hotly contested passage in Romans 7.

For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. — Romans 7:18-19

I think what he’s talking about here are two aspects of every person’s humanity — what it means to be like Adam and Eve. We’re made in the image of God, so know what we ought to do; but we’re also made in Adam’s image, and shaped by our idolatrous hearts, so keep doing what we shouldn’t. This reading fits with the way Paul appears to hark back to the Fall and the way he describes human behaviour that parallels the unfolding of human history in Romans 1, and the way he contrasts Adam and Jesus throughout the argument. Plus it works with where he goes in Chapter 8, and the solution to the problem — for both Jew and Gentile — being the Spirit of God marking out the children of God who will restore creation from its cursed frustration.

I think he’s talking about these two big theological concepts — the noetic effect of sin and common grace.

The noetic effect of sin is basically the Romans 1 thing — our ability to know God from what has been made has been utterly frustrated by sin’s effects on our thinking. This effects every sphere, though some smart people suggest it particularly affects issues of morality and the heart, where our idolatry is most likely to be at play, rather than in ‘objective’ areas like math, science and geography, where we’re most likely to be able to infer true things about God’s invisible nature without our human desires and idols getting in the way.

Common Grace is the sense that God remains good and true to all people, even as we become bad and turn on him (even as he ‘gives us over’ to that turning). It’s the sense that God sends rain on everyone, and allows us to figure stuff out about how rain works. It’s that sense that his image remains in each of us, despite our best efforts to shape ourselves into the image of our idols, and that this means we still have some sense of right and wrong…

So in Romans 7, I think that’s what is going on, it’s the tension in every human heart, a tension we appeal to as we live faithful lives and proclaim the Gospel, and a tension that is only really resolved with the solution Paul talks about in Romans 7 and 8. It’s this common grace, the image of God in all people, that gives me some hope in this sexular age, not for the society at large necessarily, but that our faithful witness is not wasted, because God will use our faithful witness to draw people to himself and renew their way of looking at the world by his Spirit.

 

The Gospel leads to right-think

“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.” — George Orwell, 1984

Something massive changes in our humanity when we trust Jesus. Something changes in the way we see the world. We get the ability to start valuing the righteousness of God rather than the counterfeit righteousness and rituals of our idols. Our stories change, our pattern of behaviour changes, our hearts change, our minds change. Not completely drastically, the ‘delight in God’ that is latent in all of us is reawakened by his Spirit.

“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,2 because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.”  Romans 8:1-2

Here’s why we’ve got to stop pretending the world around us should live like us, and why we should stop pretending they should think like us or even listen to us, if our message is one of individual freedom, or if it challenges the idols of our age. It doesn’t matter how hysterical we are, or how reasonable… it’s the Gospel that is the ‘best book that tells people what they know already’ — that does what books in 1984 do, opening people’s eyes to the truth… our other arguments will fail. Inevitably. So we’re stupid to keep making them.

Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God. — Romans 8:5-8

We’ve got this whole new way of seeing the world because we’re newly human, so we’re actually meant to look different to the world around us.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. — Romans 12:1-2

We serve a totally different God. Our acts of worship don’t look like the pursuit of sexual freedom for all, but the gift of ourselves to God. We’re supposed to love differently. To understand marriage and gender and safety in different ways. Not call other people to sameness, or call them to respect our ways. Our ways are foreign and weird and involve the death of the gods of the people around us…

The way to help people see things this way is right back at the start of Paul’s letter. It’s the Gospel. Not a call to human righteousness first, but to Jesus.

So where to now?

Here’s what got Paul up out of bed in the morning, and got him loving and talking to a bunch of people whose age was every bit as sexular as our own…

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God— the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures  regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. Through him we received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for his name’s sake… That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” — Romans 1:1-5, 15-17

Maybe if we started being eager to preach this like Paul was, and kept reminding ourselves both who we were, how we became what we are now, and where we’re going, we’d all be a little less anxious about sex, and a little more anxious to see people come to faith in Jesus.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” — George Orwell, 1984

In a real way, both the Henny Penny — the concerned Christian who thinks the world will fall apart if people stop being righteous, and the Winston, (the main character in 1984)  the person living in this sexular age, being massaged by the patterns of this world —  have confused ideas about God.

Where Henny Penny convinced herself that the sky was falling in, and got in a tizz; Winston in 1984 was the product of a system that was deliberately designed to control people via confusion. Henny Penny misunderstood reality, and needed to be calmed down by the king. Winston needed to be drawn from the way he’d been seeing the world by having his eyes opened, bit by bit. Before their epiphanies, that help them both see the world as it really is, both Henny Penny and Winston need love and hugs from those who’ve already found clarity when it comes to seeing the world, and freedom. They need Jesus. They need to be set free. There are lessons to be learned in both these stories about the way idols, or false ideas, plant themselves in our heads. Whether its by misunderstanding something God made (like a nut falling on your head), or being shaped by an oppressive system (like Big Brother), there are things in this world that shape us and take us away from seeing the world truly.

The danger for Henny Penny, in listening to Chicken Little (who doesn’t know better), and leading a band of terrified animals to find the king, is, as the parable goes, that they end up in the fox’s den. The fox capitalises on Henny Penny’s gullibility, and gets to eat a bunch of scared animals.

They ran to tell the king. They met Foxy Loxy.
They ran into his den, And they did not come out again. — Chicken Little

What Henny Penny should’ve done, in the story, was given Chicken Little a hug. She should have told Chicken Little to calm down; that even if the sky was falling, the King would have things under control.

It’s not that the sky isn’t falling. It is. It’s just that we’re actually Chicken Littles, and if we react the wrong way, we’re leading a bunch of people to their doom, straight to the predator’s gaping maw. Big Brother is real. It’d be naive to suggest that people in our sexular age aren’t going to use their power to conform people to the image of the age. To advocate for their idol. Safe Schools is just the beginning. And that will be painful for us as we resist in our own lives, and as we teach our children to resist (by teaching them to follow Jesus). Costly even. But resist we must  — in that we are not to be transformed, ourselves, to be like idols, by these uses of worldly power into the ‘patterns of this world’. That’s a real danger Paul identifies, but the fight is not one fought on our own steam. It happens as the Spirit works in us to shape our minds in a new shape of God’s choosing. That is God’s power. It trumps the power of the world of idols, even if it doesn’t feel like it. I should also say I don’t think resistance means telling people not to be sexular without offering them the expulsive power of a new affection, something to pull them out of their way of seeing the world and into something more positive. This conversation is doomed to failure if we frame it as being about individual liberty — that just pits two modern idols against one another (even if we find one more palatble).  So. Since we’re not in the building of wielding human power, but relying on God’s power as we preach the Gospel — the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.” — George Orwell, 1984

Can we please stop calling people to live out obedience to God in their sexuality? Can we please stop acting as though the people we live in are on the same page as us when it comes to sex just because we all live in the world God made? Can we stop acting as though happiness is found in moral obedience, not the freedom the Gospel brings from slavery to idols? Or as though people can simply act their way out of idolatry without God.

If people are worshipping at the altar of sex, or individual freedom, or whatever, then they’re seeing the world through that lens  — and God made them that way, it’s unloving to pretend he didn’t, and pretend they should be like us, without Jesus. It’s impossible. So, can we renew our focus on the Gospel, which makes this possible? Which provides the expulsive power of a new affection?

You can, because of your renewed mind, obviously see what sex and marriage are meant to be, and how idolatry smashes God’s design. But if you try to fight the new sexularism, or any idolatry, on your own steam — whether we’re talking about how we understand sexuality in schools, or what we call marriage — you won’t beat it. Not without God transforming a person’s heart, by his Spirit. The way to ‘win’ is by pointing people to Jesus.

Next time someone is running around as though the sky is falling in because kids in sexular schools are being taught sexular ethics can we remember that nothing changes without the Spirit, and it’s faith in the Gospel that brings righteousness, not righteousness that brings faith in the Gospel? Can you just give the Henny Pennys in your life a hug and ask them to calm down for a minute… The king knows the sky actually really is falling in, and he knows what is going to put the world to rights. He’s already done it, and the invitation to safety and true seeing is there for everyone.

 

 

February 20, 2016