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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 doubt both, but I doubt the new testament writers more for several reasons: 1) greater temporal distance, 2) in at least some cases lack of first hand knowledge; and 3) most of all, the fantastic (read: bizarre, implausible, impossible) nature of some of the claims made for Jesus.
Could it be that Maj wasn’t specifying the scope of “no relevant evidence”? After all, it’s possible to believe there’s plenty of evidence, corroborated by archaeology, that a man named Jesus existed, and even had followers who believed him divine, but to also consider the evidence supporting that to be inapplicable to establishing Jesus’ divinity.
No Auggie, it really doesn’t. Because not all characteristics are equal. You’re fond of banging on about characteristics that I, and it appears Maj, don’t find to be terribly important. And we keep going back to a single characteristic that seems — to us at least — to be the elephant to your handful of fleas: the impossibility, under the physical laws of the universe as we understand them, of the claims in question.
I’ll speak just for myself now but the following are among the things I don’t believe can happen: dead people teleporting from tombs in the near east to North America and back, life forms surviving long enough or traveling fast enough to reach earth from light years away, and people rising from the dead. When those are the three claims under discussion, the only relevant likeness is their physical impossibility. Any other effort to identify likenesses or differences is rendered nugatory up against that critical similarity.
Yeah, maybe so. I guess # 279 did say “for the most part.” But the relevant sentence did says that “the testimonies of Jesus from the Bible . . . are textual claims alone.”
I disagree. Socrates has maybe three eyewitnesses, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes. He has two giving anything resembling serious history, Xenophon and Aristotle. That’s only one eyewitness giving us serious history. His death has no eyewitness at all.
The Resurrection has letters of Paul to match Xenophon and Luke’s histories to vastly exceed Aristotle’s. The accumulation of John, Jude, Peter, Mark, Matthew, James, and the author of Hebrews is much better than Plato’s philosophy + Aristophanes’ comedy, even if we accept the skeptical accounts of the origins of their texts.
I’ll grant your third point (if we use adjectives more consistent with empiricism), and I’ve granted it, and responded to it, these three years.
Well, it was Maj’s objection, wasn’t it, and this is the nature of his objection, isn’t it?
That is, no doubt, why he does keep trying one of those two approaches (albeit with weak arguments).
Sorry, man. I cannot reject empiricism so easily as you!
That, my dear sir, is precisely what you are doing, as I have explained.
I have not rejected empiricism. You have.
My dear sir, do you not exclude evidence of the miraculous on the basis of its being evidence of the miraculous? This is to rule it out a priori, which is to abandon empiricism.
Would you care to make some objection to my reasoning in the earlier post, or to let it go?