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Is Christianity Rejected Because It’s a “Low Status” Signifier?
I came across this intriguing post from Patheos’ site. The thesis is that in the aftermath of such things as the Scopes monkey trial, being a Christian has become a marker of low status, and that this explains both its decline and lack of appeal as well as the failure of attempts to “engage the culture” by making it appear hip.
The idea behind the “engaging the culture” movement was that, rather than withdrawing from the surrounding culture as their fundamentalist cousins did, evangelicals should go forth to meet it. The expected outcome of this going forth was a revival of Christian faith.
It sort of makes sense. If enough evangelicals, the idea was, could be trained to engage the surrounding culture, especially in the culture-making arenas of politics, education and the media, eventually these well-placed agents of change could turn things around.
What this plan never took into account is the dynamics of social status. Evangelicals sought to engage the culture by being relevant, by creating works of art, by offering good arguments for their positions. None of these addressed the real problem: that Christian belief simply isn’t cool, and that very few people want to lower their social status by identifying publicly with it.
I suspect that there is some truth to it. Your thoughts?
Published in Religion & Philosophy
I’d give it a 0%. ;)
Low. But only because I know you.
I got 15/15 :p
There are a lot of self-identifying denominationalists who rely on preachers to tell them what the bible says rather than reading it themselves.
It wasn’t surprising to me as being well versed in anything is kind of a nerdy thing and widely looked down on by just about everyone except fellow nerds.
No one wants to play Bible Trivia.
On the other hand, if you play Bible Trivia the way @amyschley does, it’s awesome!
As a Jeopardy! aspirant, it is practically obligatory knowledge.
Majestyk (View Comment):
So, Dennis Prager’s Townhall article today prompted this response from Robert Verbruggen.
While not as muscular as I would like such a response to be, he pointed out something which I found incredible – although I shouldn’t in hindsight – that being that the secular generally know more about religion than the practitioners themselves. Here’s the Quiz questions. I would be curious to see what people here got as a score.
I’m an Evangelical Christian who scored 15 out of 15. FWIW.
I would be stunned if most members of Ricochet didn’t achieve similar results.
I think it would be interesting to find out the average IQ of a Ricochetti. I would guess it’s two standard deviations to the right or so.
“Deviations to the Right” would make a fine name for a Ricochet Group.
Is there a reason you should assume that Plato and Aristotle and the followers of Confucius communicated Socrates’ and Confucius’ ideas faithfully despite [etc.]?
In other words, do you recognize historical testimony as a source of knowledge of this sort of thing?
“these days”: They’ve been going on for centuries. The death of faith keeps getting put off till tomorrow.
Yes.
Ok, but Cato’s right at least up to a point: If your brother goes to church weekly and lives in a culture that has these verses in Deuteronomy as a standard, even if it falls short of that standard, he will still have a fair amount of biblical language, stories, and doctrines in his head. John the fisherman has plenty of references to the Torah.
Yes.
15/15.
Yes. But they also deal with eyewitness testimony and archaeology plenty of times. I wouldn’t be a Christian if the Resurrection were based on hearsay alone.
Like the story some years ago about some percentage of Americans who thought “Joan of Arc” was Noah’s wife.
And the New York Times claim that Easter is when Christians celebrate Jesus’ “resurrection into heaven.”
And then just in the last week NPR made the same mistake!
Then the answer to your question can only be one of two things:
–no, because you’re being quite consistent and treating three instances of the same kind of historical evidence with similar skepticism.
–yes, because you should recognize that Plato, Aristotle, and Confucius’ disciples are at least somewhat reliable sources of information on the ideas of Socrates and Confucius.
I favor the yes answer, but as long as you stick with the no answer I don’t know what else to say.
Because I read about Socrates, of course. Didn’t you ever try this in law school?
Oy.
The operative term being “somewhat.” I don’t doubt Plato was influenced by Socrates. I don’t doubt the gospel writers were influenced by Jesus. Plato was purportedly a student of Socrates, which one would expect would imply some influence. I’m not honestly clear on who the gospel writers were, but they were clearly close enough in time and to some degree a product of the tradition that was developing around Jesus, so likely some influence.
But I’d expect that influence to be filtered through their own experiences and views and values and concerns, and probably altered as the mind tends to do with the passage of what I understand was likely at a minimum multiple decades of time. It’s just not a recipe for getting the testimony all that right. Compounding that with the fantastic nature of some of the claims, I don’t find them high on the reliability meter.
Ok, so on what grounds would you accept that Plato faithfully (or somewhat faithfully) communicates Socrates’ ideas but not the New Testament writers Jesus’ ideas?
If you doubt both, I think you’re wrong but don’t know what else to say.
If you accept one but not the other, why?
I accept both because both are, as far as I can tell, at least somewhat reliable historical sources on the ideas of those men.
You do keep indeed objecting to the historical testimony–with weak arguments, on which see below!
But if you think I’m neglecting the importance of archaeology and other relevant forms of verification or falsification of historical claims, think again. (As Socrates said, “what sort of a moron do you think I am?”)
And if you have some specific objection on the archaeology, you are welcome to make it.
This is not how to make it:
Good grief. What do you think motivates apologists like N. T. Wright and William Lane Craig? Do you really think they don’t care about archaeology?
Yes. This is in no small part why I am a Christian.
Who says I’m a learned professor? I know a few things here and there, and I taught logic regularly at my last two jobs.
What you should assume is that I mean what I say. I keep talking about the logic, and I mean it. And you should not assume that I’ve made a logical case I have not made. I’m not attacking Mormonism. You are attacking Christianity on the grounds of its evidence being similar to that for Mormonism. So you ought to make that case.
This is all off topic, unless you can show how it fits into your case.
Ah! So you have a new objection to the first of the five or six characteristics of the New Testament testimony (listed at # 159 of the earlier thread).
In no small part my responses to earlier objections (in #s 182-183 of the earlier thread) apply here: Even if there is a distance in time, even two or three well-established witnesses (those gained from well-established writings of Paul and Luke, for a start) will go a long way–much longer than the evidence for the death of Socrates, for example.
In addition, I am quite skeptical of the modern fashion of reading the New Testament as written late. Others may keep the details in their heads; I don’t generally, but I could probably track down some of the relevant information about how old some of the manuscripts are and that sort of thing.
Moreover, even a distance of 50 years to writing would, in a culture with a strong oral tradition, not be such a disadvantage.
Perhaps, however, the more important point here is simply one of treating like claims as like: Even conceding a distance of 50 years before anything was written down, we still have better sources than virtually any other ancient event can dream of having–including the events which common sense correctly says we know, although Cato may have his doubts about that.
On the contrary, they agree quite a bit.
But if you’d care to make the case that the biblical testimonies conflict, why don’t you make the case? You could easily enough do so by pointing to some examples.
Only if the observers are filthy liars about the historical facts. You must do better than the New York Times and NPR, my dear sir: You must keep in mind the meaning of Christian theology! There may be any number of spiritual events, but there are factual, historical claims aplenty.
Those who tout them are either telling the truth, madmen, or filthy liars.
There you go again, so there I shall go again. Please see below.
Maj, you continue to make a case based on epistemic parity, in other words based on treating like claims as like. More specifically, you continue to allege that the New Testament testimony has more or less the same relevant characteristics as the stories of Joseph Smith or alleged alien abductees. It falls to you to show that these are like claims.
I have pointed out 5 or 6 of the relevant characteristics of New Testament testimony, so it falls you either to show how the abductee and Smith testimonies have the same characteristics, or to show how the New Testament testimony lacks those characteristics.
In all this time, it seems that you have only mentioned one characteristic in addition to the number of witnesses which is shared by the New Testament testimony and the Smith and abductee testimonies. As documented in # 255, you have not yet demonstrated that one, and your # 263 only manages to change the subject.
You usually prefer to argue that the New Testament testimonies lack those characteristics. As shown in #s 238-239, you had up to that point raised objections to only two of the characteristics, and done a poor job of that. In your # 263 you raise a new objection to one of those two, and I have considered it above.
Auggie, I think Maj doesn’t see the evidence about life in Jesus’ time as as corroborating as we see it, and so to him, it doesn’t form a holistic narrative which has a great deal of explanatory power.
I find that it does form a holistic narrative with a great deal of explanatory power – transcendent explanatory power, in fact. Though I suspect that for Maj, the fact that a portion of the explanatory power does presume to address transcendent things is part of the problem.
That sounds fine. However, # 279’s “textual claims alone” amounts to a denial of any archaeological evidence of any sort–from the tombs of New Testament characters and the mere existence of the Temple Mount to the empty Garden Tomb itself.