This week, Sean and guest co-host Rick Langer discuss:

  • Richard Dawkins Identifies as a Cultural Christian: Dawkins expresses shock over Ramadan lights in the UK, highlighting his value for Christian heritage despite his atheism.
  • Debate on "Sex Assigned at Birth": An opinion piece in The New York Times challenging the terminology, emphasizing biological facts over socio-political agendas.
  • Social Costs of De-Churching in America: An article in The Atlantic by an agnostic author explores the negative impacts of declining church attendance, particularly on community and social engagement.
  • Listener Question: Doctoral Program in Engaging Mind and Culture: The podcast mentions Talbot School of Theology's program aimed at fostering thoughtful and winsome cultural engagement.
  • Listener Question: Spiritual Parenthood in the Church: The importance of the church in providing mentorship and support, especially to young individuals without Christian familial backgrounds.



Episode Transcript

Sean: Richard Dawkins, possibly the most famous atheist in the world, identifies as a cultural Christian. The New York Times runs an opinion piece titled "The Problem with Saying Sex Assigned at Birth." And according to a piece in the Atlantic, written by an agnostic, there's a big social cost for the de-churching movement in America. These are the stories we'll discuss today, and we'll address some of your questions. I'm your host, Sean McDowell, and I'm joined again by Biola professor and author Rick Langer. This is the Think Biblically Weekly Cultural Update, brought to you by Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. Rick, thanks for coming back, my friend.

Rick: Hey, it's great to be here again, Sean.

Sean: Well, let's jump right into this first story that I got to tell you, I did not see this one coming. I wrote a book responding to the new atheist, gosh, in 2010—14 years ago. So, for Richard Dawkins to describe himself as a cultural Christian, it's not an overstatement to say it shocked me and stopped me in my tracks. So, here's the story. This came out in Fox News, and he identifies as a cultural Christian in an interview after learning that Ramadan lights were hung on a street in the UK as opposed to hanging lights to celebrate Easter. So, Dawkins was referring to the mayor of London, a Muslim, who hung 30,000 lights for Ramadan—the Muslim Holy Month—on the cusp of Easter weekend on Oxford Street. Here's what he said, word for word. Dawkins said, "I must say I'm slightly horrified to hear that Ramadan is being promoted instead." He said, "I feel that we are a Christian country," of course, referring to the UK. He said, "It's true that statistically the number of people who actually believe in Christianity is going down, and I'm happy with that.” A few times in this article he makes sure viewers know that he's not becoming an actual Christian. “But I would not be happy if, for example, we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So I count myself as a cultural Christian. I think it would matter if we substituted any alternative religion. That would be truly dreadful," he said. And he goes on, he says, "It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion," referring to Christianity, "in a way that Islam is not." Now, for anybody paying attention, that is a radical turnabout from his criticism of the Bible, of Christians, of Christianity. At the root of the new atheism, was this not only claim that Christianity is false and stupid, but disdainful and harmful. So, this is a different tune. He said, while he believes Christianity is not great about the way women are viewed in terms of female vicars and bishops, he feels the holy books of Islam promote active hostility to women. Again, he qualifies. He says, "I'm not talking about individual Muslims who, of course, are all quite different, but the doctrines of Islam, the Hadith, and the Quran. It's fundamentally hostile to women, yet to gays, and I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country, although again, I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith." Now, if you watched the actual interview, he's very careful and circumspect in his criticism of Islam, which is interesting. He slows down and he qualifies his words, and he offers a critique in a way he never slowed down and cared what anybody said or what he said about Christianity. So, that's a very interesting phenomenon.

Now, I want to get your thoughts on this, but this came out at the same time there was an article in the Daily Mail UK which pointed out not only the 30,000 Ramadan lights across London, but it also pointed out that in Britain, Windsor Castle hosted its first Iftar last week with permission from King Charles, Westminster Abbey, a Christian site for over a thousand years, flew the national flag of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan with a Muslim crescent and star to mark Pakistani day. It goes on to describe that Ramadan lights have appeared also in a city in Germany, and what's fascinating is this article in the Daily Mail points out that some of the downplaying of historic Christianity came in the name of diversity. So people wanted diversity for other religions, and there was a push for some kind of secularism within Europe. Then the article points out that German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened her country's doors to Syrian migrants, primarily Muslims, and there were just hundreds of thousands that have come in, and it's changing the dynamic there. There's now over 6,000 mosques in Europe, which is obviously less than churches, but it's growing quickly.

So, here's a bottom line trend that I think this is drawing attention to. Islam has surged in the UK and is swelling from 2.7 million in 2011 to 3.9 million in 2021. Christianity is dwindling. 6% identify as practicing Christians and 42% as non-practicing. So, we're seeing this demographic shift, and it seemed like this year, because of when Ramadan took place Easter was in the middle of it. These demographic shifts that have happened for a while are coming to the forefront. And ironically, people like Dawkins, who's been trying to eradicate Christianity, now says, "I might be kind of rethinking this." Not that I think it's true, but Christianity is better for human rights, it's better for women, our country was founded on this. And I kind of want to say, you know what, we saw this coming forever ago. You can't say the things you said about Christianity, and then now turn around and kind of lament where the world has gone. Your thoughts on this story?

Ricky: I'm with you in terms of reading this story and going, "Okay, did not see that coming." In fact, for each and every story we're doing today, I had a little bit of that feeling of I wasn't expecting to read this in an LA and a New York Times opinion piece or whatever.

Sean: Agreed.

Rick: And I think one of the interesting things about the Christian faith, and I would argue about religious faith in general, is that for whatever set of reasons, we tend to isolate our thinking about religion to strictly narrow religious issues. And we think everything else about a religion is kind of plug and play, doesn't matter, all we care about is a narrow thing. But religions are kind of like trees in that sense, where their roots go deep, their leaves go broad, and we may only care about the particular fruit. I like cashews, okay? So, I pull the cashew off the cashew tree, but I don't think about the cashew tree. I don't care. I have no context other than the particular item I want. And I think this is a little bit of what Dawkins and many others have done with Christianity. They don't even know what they like that came from the Christian tree until they see it being threatened, until they realize, "Oh, wait a minute. There's a whole set of things that are woven into my culture that have their roots in the Christian tree." They don't look like the particular fruit, I thought. They don't look like that little cross that hangs on somebody's neck that I don't like. So, they don't recognize it's Christian. And so, a huge amount of things, everything from the value of not only women, but diversity, and that all people are potentially Christian. There's a million things that Christianity has done for our social, political, and economic thinking that has been enormously valuable, but we tend to be blind to it. And I think one of the things that worries me is when people say, "I want to just lift the religious faith part out," they think they'll get everything else intact. And I don't think that's true. The religious faith travels as a broad, huge package.

Sean: That's such a good point, Rick. Justin Briarly, who's been hosting conversations with atheists and skeptics for, gosh, 15, maybe 20 years now, wrote a book called, “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.” And he said, "When the new atheists hit in the early 2000s, there was a sense that God doesn't exist and life can go on as normal without God. In fact, things will be better. And now there's thinkers that are not Christians, people like Tom Holland and Douglas Murray, and now even Richard Dawkins, somewhat saying, "Wait a minute. If we get rid of Christianity, we might lose some other valuable things with it." So this is a welcome conversation. It just makes me fear. I go, "Oh, have we gone so far eradicating it that there's no turning back?" So, great thoughts. Anything else in the story that chucked out to you?

Rick: No, I think we've covered it.

Sean: So, this next one also surprised me as well in The New York Times. And I read this daily for so many reasons. And this is the second story in the past few weeks, both opinion pieces, that are pushing back on a certain transgender narrative and activism. It's the kind of thing that you and I and many others have been saying for years and years. But to see it in The New York Times was a little bit surprising. So the title is, "The Problem with Saying Sex Assigned at Birth." And these are not two Christians writing this, of course, by the way. Here's what he says. "The term ‘sex assigned at birth’ or ‘assigned sex’ has been adopted by the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association, and many others endorse the terminology.” In the article, the two authors say, “This trend began around a decade ago, part of an increasing emphasis in society on emotional comfort and insulation from offense. Sex is now often seen as a biased or insensitive word because it may fail to reflect how people identify themselves." So, one reason for adopting the assigned sex, again, the authors say, “Is that it supplies respectful euphemisms, softening what to some non-binary and transgender people, among others, can feel like a harsh biological reality.” So, basically, the language was adopted out of politeness for people who adopt as transgender. And then the authors say, "The shift to sex assigned at birth may be well intentional, but it is not progress." That line jumped out to me. It might be intentional, it might be well-meaning, but it's not progress. They say, "We're not against politeness or expressions of solidarity. But sex assigned at birth can confuse people and create doubt about a biological fact when there shouldn't be any." And they go beyond saying this is just about facts and truth. The next point they make is they say that there's a cost for shifting our language. So, sex matters for health and safety. So, for example, "Women are nearly twice as likely as men to experience harmful side effects from certain drugs." So we have to know not somebody's gender identity, but their bodily reality. He says, "Males, meanwhile, are more likely to die from COVID and cancer. They also commit the vast majority of homicides and sexual assaults,” which has huge implications for transgender individuals where they're placed in prisons. Talks about the implications for sports, which is a whole other topic. And then they say, "When influential organizations and individuals promote 'sex assigned at birth,' they're encouraging a culture in which citizens can be shamed for using words like 'sex,' 'male,' and 'female.'” Agreed. They say a proponent in the new language might object that arguing that sex is not being avoided, but merely kind of a euphemism for greater empathy. And they make a comparison to what if somebody uses, you know, a euphemism or a term like "larger bodied." You know, that's a way of not calling somebody, say, fat to be frank. We don't want to insult people. You want to be kind and gracious because language matters. But they say there's a difference between a term that's more polite and a term like "sex assigned at birth" that is actually misleading by its very nature. And here's what I love. They say, "Sex assigned at birth can also suggest there's no objective reality behind male and female, no biological categories to which the words refer." Now, one of them, one or maybe both of them, are evolutionary biologists. So, they point to the fact that there is a natural order. And you and I might disagree about where we come from, but we agree with the authors that there's a fixed biological natural order. And somewhat humorously, they say, you know, when a big tortoise is born, no one says it was assigned male at birth. There's a fact about it. If that's true for animals, it should be true for us. And then the last point they make, then I'm really eager for your thoughts, is they said another downside of assigned sex is that it biases the conversation away from established biological facts and infuses it with a socio-political agenda, which only serves to intensify social and political divisions. So, you and I and many others have been talking about the health consequences with this. The loss of objective reality, talked about the confusion that it brings, the socio-political realities behind it for a long time. But for this to show up in the New York Times makes me wonder if this is yet another sign that, you know, the cracks in the ship of some transgender ideology are growing and growing. And we're seeing more pushback. What do you make of this, Rick?

Rick: I do think that there's something that you just said there at the end about what we're seeing in the broader culture, kind of a sense of, wait a minute, I can't quite buy off on the whole transgender package, so to speak. And I've seen articles kind of like this several times. And I do want to say, I bet you and I have been writing and saying things like this for the last 20 years. I mean, we would have been saying it for all of our lives if it weren't for the fact that it wasn't really a thing that needed to be said until recently. And I want to underscore this is separate from a conversation about how do you respond to a transgender individual. But it is a question about is there an underlying reality that then culture builds on and does things with. And I think this is a thing that is kind of a broad pervasive confusion when we realize that people say things like everything we do is a cultural construct. And I want to say everything we do is probably affected by our culture. But that's different than saying when you dig all the way down, you find nothing but cultural construct. I think what cultures do is they take the raw material of creation, and then they do things with it, they embody it into human life. But when you dig down of almost any cultural construct, you will find some underlying reality. And sometimes we've used it well, sometimes we use it poorly, but we don't just make it up and we're using something that's given to us. And I think sex assigned at birth—I think one of things they're putting their finger on here is that that language makes it sound like there is not an underlying reality that we have used for good or for ill without even begging the question of what do you feel about it. They're just saying there's something there and we have to do business with what's there and not just act like this is a creation out of nothing.

Sean: That's a really important distinction. And they make the point in this article that saying that someone was assigned female at birth suggests that the person's sex is a matter of educated guesswork. Assigned can connote arbitrariness as in assigned classroom seating. So, when you decide where somebody sits, you and I, if we do it in a classroom, it's generally arbitrary, unless some kid is talking more, maybe we want them in the front, I don't know. But it's arbitrary. There's nothing fixed about it. That's what sex assigned at birth communicates. But the reality is sex is not assigned. Sex is discovered. It's a fact built into the world itself. And of course, as Christians, we believe that the natural world, and this is Romans 1 and Psalms 19, the natural world reveals truths about God's character. It reveals the truth that there is a creator outside of us. And Romans 1 makes it clear that even when it comes to the function of our bodies, there's a truth embedded within reality. And we're only free when we call truth what it is and live according to it. So the authors of this probably differ this radically on other philosophical and political ideologies. That's fine. In fact, I think they kind of embrace a larger inclusive perspective towards LGBTQ causes that you and I would have paused towards. But I celebrate the fact that they're saying, wait a minute, politeness can only go so far. And we cannot sacrifice truth, because truth matters. But second, truth also has implications for health and sports, and on and on. That's what I loved about this article, because we've kind of seen a shift in culture from truth being something we discover and conform our lives to, to phrases like live your truth. That may be true for you, but not true for me. Now, we don't talk about that with gravity, but we've shifted in this area to talking about it with biological sex. And so, this pushback is welcome and important. Ironically, I think even for individuals who are transgender and beyond, we can only get healthy if we recognize there's such a thing as truth. Now, I've got one other comment I want to make on this, but anything else you want to weigh in on that jumped out at you?

Rick: Just a little bit of a different angle on this. America is known as a culture of individualism, and actually we'll get to that in one of our next articles here. But historically, when I think about this, even when I'm saying historically, I'm really thinking just of even my own lifetime, the way we have pictured individualism has been kind of the rugged individualist. The person who says, "You know what? I'm going to make my way. I may be going out as a pioneer across the Western Prairie. I may be doing my own thing, but by golly, I'm going to do my thing." And it's that kind of a—not that you don't care about the world, but you're not going to let the world control you, and you're going to go ahead and walk your own path, maybe march to the tin of a different drummer. So, that's been a historical sort of individualism. What we have manifested, I think in the last 20 years, and this is identified in this article with the language of the culture of safetyism, is that everybody wants to be completely unique. They want to have the sense of, "I am the magic one creation. I have all these special things about me." But the weird thing is they don't want to be the rugged individualist about that. They want their unique individualism that is panically scared to be, quote, "defined by someone else," or have some external imposition put upon them, be forced to deal with a given rather than a chosen. They have this huge desire not to be constrained by that, but ironically, at the same time, they want their idiosyncratic choice to be validated by legal structures, government structures, by social media outlets that punish people who don't honor their distinctions. And so, we have a weird paradox, kind of an anti-rugged individualism, an individualism where I want to be a radical self-expressive individualist, but I want all of my unique individual choices to be validated governmentally to show up on my driver's license. I never want to feel at odds with the broader culture. And I'm like, "I don't know how that works. How can you possibly have both of those choices?" Rugged individualism I get. You just have to take the consequences so you don't fit with the structures. But the idea that I want all of the structures to accommodate me for the sake of my unique individualism seems paradoxical and also like it just plain won't work.

Sean: I think to back that up, that is just pushed and pushed in our culture. We have music feeds that we can personalize exactly to the music that we want. We can buy products on Amazon, what we want, when we want, how we want it, where we want it. The world, I mean, even sodas today, right? It used to be Coke versus Pepsi. Now buy your own soda making machine, the fizz level, the size, the flavor, or get a Coke with your actual name on it. So some of this is just so deeply embedded in the waters in which we swim and the air we breathe that we see that hyper individualism just manifested in this particular issue because so much is at stake in maybe ways we don't with others. So, I think that's a really important lens.

I had one other thought that jumped out to me at the end of this. It's interesting. Again, these authors come completely from a different worldview than you and I do here at Biola and Talbot. And they say this, they say another downside of assigned sex is that it biases the conversation away from established biological facts and infuses it with a socio-political agenda, which only serves to intensify social and political divisions. I agree, 100%. My question is how far would these authors take this? Because that's exactly what happened at Obergefell versus Hodges, which is the Supreme Court ruling in 2015 making same-sex marriage illegal in all 50 states, is biological facts of the unique complementary union of a man and a woman in marriage was ignored for socio-political ideas about what love is and about what marriage should become, and in many ways intensified social and political divisions by ignoring objective reality. So, if we're saying we shouldn't use sex assigned at birth and we should use birth sex, in other words, your actual biological sex, because biology and objective truth matters, then this has implications for the marriage debate as well. Because a man and a woman bodily have different sexes built into the world and have a different bodily union than a man and a man or a woman and a woman and objectively contribute to society in a unique fashion. Hence marriage has been defined as a man and a woman. Now, I'm not saying legally we should go back and do some big campaign to change the nature of marriage. That's not my point. I'm just saying it's very interesting that we're seeing bubbling up this argument that there's male and female differences and they objectively matter and our bodies matter. That is going to have implications for other issues such as marriage. So, I wonder how far they'd be willing to take this. Any other thoughts or you want to move to our third story?

Rick: Let me just pick up on one thought from what you just said. It really is interesting to apply this to the issue of marriage. And one of the things I've talked about with a lot of my students over the course of years was that the way you define marriage makes a huge difference in just the kind of argument that you were talking about. Because if you define marriage in the way that I was talking a little bit earlier about the government validating my personal idiosyncratic view of a person, everybody needs to be validated by this. If marriage is defined as the government blessing your particular romantic or erotic commitments or pleasures or desire to have this sort of a relationship, if marriage is only about the government blessing my romantic interests, then it's really hard in a pluralistic society to figure out why you shouldn't be able to be "married to" a man, a woman, and any variety of other things that you have, which people have kind of run off the extremes on here, if you have that romantic interest, if that's all it is. But on the other hand marriage is actually about not so much romantic love in this generation, but rather the social goods and the production of the next generation. And that's why we create marriage and family structures. That's why we baptize them with legality issues. That's why we have a government that settles court issues because of the next generation. And marriage is inherently an institution historically that is next generation focused. It hopes and trusts that romantic love will travel with that package, but it is not the defining essence of it. So, you can be married to a person you're really not that much in love with anymore. You can be married to a person who you had an arranged marriage with. You didn't have any romantic affection for them at all because you never met them. But now you're in an arranged marriage and you grow to love them and you realize that the marriage in that case precedes the love. So, therefore, the love can't be the essence of marriage. Marriage is going to be a broader social thing and will have a different focus than just your internal preferences. In that structure, it's really easy to identify, as you are doing there, marriage having a particular kind of identity that this particular version doesn't qualify for. And you may allow for the institutions to provide for some kind of a domestic partnership or other language. But marriage itself is the thing that had a particular meaning or has had up to this point.

Sean: This article is lamenting that we've moved from objective truth, biological sex, to a subjective kind of realm sex assigned at birth. It's exactly what happened in marriage. Marriage moved towards, and I read the Supreme Court ruling, two people who love each other, which is understood subjectively, not behavior, but subjectively how you feel. Well, if it's about two people loving each other, moving away from male and female, and objective truth doesn't matter anymore, then three people can love each other, four people can love each other. Hence, we're seeing the debates on polyamory. So, if we're going to move in the direction of subjectivity, then you have to be open to the idea of sex assigned at birth. But then you also have to be open to polyamory and all these other kinds of relationships. You can't have one without the other. So we welcome a shift back towards objective reality built into the world and what that means on all fronts. Good stuff, right?

Here's another one that—I don't know that this surprised me as much, but I just found it so interesting. This is in the Atlantic and it's called the true cost of the church going bust. So, we have had on this podcast multiple times, and I know you and Tim have talked about kind of the de-churching movement on the Winsome Convictions podcast as well. But this is written by an agnostic and here's what made it so interesting. He says, "As agnostic, I spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed to me beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics." So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? And by the way, there is some truth to that. I'm going to have to say before we go any further. We've had our share scandals and our noxious politics. So there's some truth in that. So, he says, "What do I really have to mourn? In the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion." And he really does mean Christianity. "For all its faults works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence." So, he makes a few stats. He won't spend much time on this, but more Americans today have converted "out of religion" than have converted to all forms of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. No faith's evangelism has been as successful in this country as religious skepticism. Not true worldwide, but true in the States. This emerged in the 90s when I was in high school and at Biola. The ranks of non-believers surged. That's true. But then he gets down to this point where he says, "This study found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services is quote, “experiencing religion in a community, instilling values in their children.'" He said, "When I read this study, what caught my attention was the emphasis on community." He said, "The U.S. is in the midst of a historically unprecedented decline in face-to-face socializing, and this collapse is steepest for some of the groups with the largest declines in religiosity." And here's a fascinating quote. He says, "There's no statistical period of any in U.S. history where more young people were less likely to attend religious services and more likely to spend time on their own." Very interesting. He says, "What's deniable is that non-religious Americans are less civilly engaged. The Pew Research reported that religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, more likely to say they feel lonely." And he gives a really cool thought experiment. He said, "What if we had a parallel universe where we got rid of sit-down restaurants?" You know, think about the amount of community that would be lost. He said, "Imagine sociologists note that the demise of restaurants has correlated with the rise in aloneness and an increase in anxiety and oppression." He says, "This is akin to what's happening with the loss of organized religion." And so, he says, "It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what was lost."

Now, in part, I picked this, Rick, because I thought, "Wow, here's somebody like Richard Dawkins who was excited about the loss of Christianity, worked to end it and goes, 'Oops, religion gives us human rights, at least value for women, gives us history, gives us identity.'" And then here's another agnostic who was happy to see a religion decline and goes, "Oops, we're also losing a sense of community." I think there's more and more people waking up saying, "You know what? For all its faults and scandals and shortcomings, there is a value in organized religion and, again, specifically Christianity that we can't lose." Tell me your thoughts as you saw this piece in The Atlantic.

Rick: I think it's an example of a kind of, almost a genre of literature that is out there in the academic world where people will study some particular issue and it might be physical health, it might be mental health, it might be socioeconomic well-being and things like that. And they'll find what they will sometimes call the religion benefit. So, religious people have better higher incomes, they have all of these other benefits that are, they assume accidentally somehow connected to their religious belief. And this goes back to the earlier articles we were looking at. It's like, it's great to say it's just accidental, but the weird thing is religion is like the full-blown tree, not just like the particular cashew you pick off of it, but it gives shade, it preserves the soil, it creates opportunities for birds and other things to live in it. And we don't think of our religions as a tree, we think about it as this little tiny ornament. And every time you think about the tree-ness of a religion, you begin to be unsurprised by an article like this where it's, "Oh yeah, it is a place where we gather, it's a gathering place." And again, trees are actually like that, right? If you're in the middle of a plain or something like that, you see the trees and you're drawn there and that's where people are going to gather. They provide shade, they provide all these other wonderful things and so you just gather there. And I think our religious services, and I'm not using this in this case to argue particularly for Christianity versus other things, because I would argue that most of those other things are kind of imitating or repeating those same kinds of benefits in their own realm because they do provide all these things. They provide meaning for our activities, they provide places for us to gather and build relationships, there's places to go when we feel loss and rejection from other places. There's all of those benefits that come from religious thinking or religious life and they tend to manifest themselves in a crazy variety of places.

Sean: About two years ago, I interviewed a young African-American Ivy League trained thinker by the name of Coleman Hughes—

Rick: Oh yeah.

Sean: —has a podcast, has a book, and we put it on this podcast, I think maybe as a bonus come to think of it, and he's an atheist. I asked him, I said, "Is there anything about the world that gives you pause about your atheist beliefs?" And one, he said, "Consciousness. We just can't explain how consciousness and self-consciousness emerges through matter." I totally agree. But he said, second, the social function of religion, how it decreases mental health, gives people community, is correlated with happiness. He says there's no secular equivalent of this. We haven't done it well. And it just got me thinking, in our age where people are criticizing scandals, political noxiousness, what is it about Christianity that will give people pause to maybe reconsider it? And I think one big thing is genuinely meeting bodily in community, genuinely reaching out to the community, in some ways just living out the faith that Jesus and the rest of the New Testament taught and modeled is a powerful draw today. So, I'm an apologist. I think we need to keep making the case that Christianity is true. And I don't think just because there's something about organized religion, in particular Christianity, that fills a need, that doesn't mean that it's true. But it does suggest questions like, what does it mean to be human? Why do we thrive in community? And, of course, Christianity has an answer for that because God is triune, we're made in his image, and the purpose of life is to love God and love other people. So, these kinds of studies that show that anxiety and depression and loneliness are increasing as face-to-face relationships are decreasing doesn't surprise me at all because we are built for relationships. So, amidst all of the political drama going on and those issues, which of course Christians need to weigh into, what if we just lived out the gospel, loved our neighbors, and met in community like they did in the New Testament? That's becoming a counter-cultural way of actually living today. Any other thoughts on this one?

Rick: I just can say in many ways it has become one of our most powerful apologetics, simply the fact that Christian life lived is a healthier life. And I don't just mean that physically, it is more conducive to human flourishing. And one of the tragedies is the more we follow our culture—and I think one of these things, animosity, anger, a bunch of these things that are destructive to a community. They're what you might call the anti-community vices that are the inverse of the community virtues that you find listed in places like Colossians chapter 3 where we're supposed to be loving, kind, compassionate, forgiving one another. These sorts of things that build community. There's a bunch of vices that destroy communities that by and large in my Christian life, I've always been thankful that I've worked and lived and dealt with people who don't practice a bunch of these things. And I feel like in the last six to eight to ten years, the church has become more and more marked by those. And I think we should be really worried about that, both as a failure of discipleship, because these things are fruit of the spirit, also as a failure of our apologetic admission function, because if we aren't actually exhibiting love, if the hallmarks of love and the fruit of the spirit aren't found among us, we won't have an effective witness.

Sean: Amen. Amen. Good word. Well, let's shift to questions. But first, I want to give folks an update on Scott Rae's health. My typical co-host now you think, wait, Scott Rae's health, what happened? Well, he actually about two weeks ago, exactly two weeks ago, donated a kidney to his brother. It's a long process. And we're actually doing an upcoming show, bringing his brother on, who's been a pastor for many years. Obviously, Scott was the perfect candidate to do this, the amount of tests that he went through is remarkable. He is on track healing as expected. He called me earlier this week. He said, I really want to do the cultural update. I said, okay, on a scale of one to 10, 10 being the highest, how much energy do you have? And he goes, I'm a two. I said, Scott, get rest, get better. That's the most important thing. I'm so glad you want to be here and you're eager to be back. But there will be plenty of time. Rick and Thaddeus have done awesome filling in. So, hopefully, if all continues to go as planned, Scott will be back next week, but he would appreciate your prayers. He's really just exhausted when your body gets used to operating on one instead of two. So that's where Scott is at, but we'll be back as soon as possible.

All right. As always, we got some great questions. I think this first one is for me and then I'll throw the next two to you, Rick. Somebody says, I'd appreciate it if you can articulate the goals of your podcast. I understand you're doing your best to equip us to think biblically, but often you give a platform to authors of recent books, providing only a little pushback against their positions. What am I, the listener, supposed to do when I hear thoughts and ideas from your guests that appear contradictory to Bible teaching or to the views of well-known, respected theologians and pastors?

Well, I really appreciate this question. Here's the purpose of our podcast. Number one, is we want to have charitable discussions about a range of different views. We are professors, so a lot of what we want to do is bring ideas and perspectives to you and not necessarily always tell you what or how to think about them. Scott and I at times even differ on some issues that you hear on camera and off camera, so to speak. So, our first goal is just to have charitable conversations. So we talk about books like Peter Singer's “Animal Rights” and we have massive disagreements with him, but we really lean into seeing where we agree and find common ground and try to highlight positives. Now with that said, interestingly enough, Scott and I have had some conversations recently about how we actually want to push back more. I think on some episodes we've done this well. Other episodes when we're done, I thought, you know what, we should have asked a few other tougher questions of our guests just for clarity and I think our listeners would appreciate that. So, that's something we're working on doing better and I think you can expect that as it comes up. The other thing, keep in mind, 30 minutes of our normal episodes and these cultural updates are going 40, 50, 55 minutes, but our normal episodes are about 25 to 30, sometimes 35 minutes. That's really fast. So, that's why on my YouTube channel I have hour-long conversations where I can slow down and I can go into depth and push back even more. But appreciate the question. We really want charity. We want to summarize key books, bring arguments to you, bring biblical principles, but we're going to work on even doing better at pushing back at times and areas that we disagree with.

With that said, let me go to this question for you and see you think Rick, and say, could you say something about the topic of spiritual parenthood? I'm not asking how we be spiritual parents towards our own biological children. We live in a culture that's more and more fragmented, de-churching, socially atomizing, individualism, etc. Many teenagers and young adults come to the church without their parents without having been raised in a Christian context or with Christian values. So, in other words, she's saying, how do we have the faith passed on and kind of a spiritual parenting in the church in a way that's not biological parenting? What does that look like today for so many hurt, broken young people coming to church?

Rick: I mean, we've just spent time talking about issues about the rising loneliness and things like that of our culture. And I look at this question and I go, yes and amen. I mean, I really do think that the church needs to be a place where we have hundreds of surrogate parents, so to speak. I mean, that term isn't the best one to use there, but the point is that we are a culture that needs mentors, we need parents, we need companions. And, in general, I think human beings were not simply meant to be social creatures, were not simply meant to be creatures who were born into a nuclear family. In other words, people who share our exact genetic lineage, but also we were meant to grow up in communities. We were meant to be part of extended families. And the church is one of the most wonderful places for that to happen. There was a lot of research done—I think it was in the early 2000s about, I think they called them authoritative communities, but it was a study sponsored by the YMCA and I think Dartmouth or some Ivy League medical school were doing these things. But they were talking about the need for these authoritative communities that provided, on the one hand, love, acceptance, and a place to be and to flourish. But on the other hand, guidelines and boundaries. And when they were going through their list of these things, of course, they were sponsored by the YMCA, so that had to come up. But the bottom line is almost everything they talked about was related to churches or whatever communities of worship, by and large in America when you're studying, you're going to be studying churches. And that context is simply incredibly valuable, particularly for youth. And so this focus was on trying to raise healthy teenagers in the midst of a culture that seems to be tearing them apart. And this was a big thing they pointed to, they need membership in some kind of an authoritative, but at the same time loving community and churches provide that. So yeah, this is a huge issue in creating structures for pastors to actively think, what am I doing to foster intergenerational relationships that go beyond just the nuclear family? I think it's a wildly important thing to do.

Sean: I think that study was called “Hardwired to Connect” from the early 2000s. We are built for relationships with human beings and like a desire for a connection with the divine, which is really interesting coming from Dartmouth Medical School. One quick biblical point is that in the Old Testament, to not have children was considered like a curse. It was terrible because the nation of Israel, God worked through and they emphasized biological seed. Now, when it comes to Jesus, they say, "Your mother and father and brother are waiting to talk to you." And he says, "Well, who is my mom and my brother and my sister?" And he pointed those around, he says, "Those who do the will of my father in heaven." He redrew family lines in a culture which understood its identity primarily by biological parents. So, no one in the church can replace a biological dad. I think it can be unhealthy to try to do so because of expectations that can come, but a role like a father and the kind of relationships we're meant to have in the biological family must be a core part of the church today for people just to be healthy. So, good word.

Now this last one, I think you filled in three or four times for us, Rick. You're literally an honorary member of this podcast. You're our go-to guy when one of us is sick or traveling, but two people asked basically the same question and literally you're the perfect person to answer it. Basically, both of them were talking about how Christians often carry themselves in a negative way, dismiss atheists, and undermine Christians. And one said, "Can you recommend," both of these are aspiring students, one is a pastor, "Can you recommend a doctoral level program that could help me but that won't train me to be another angry, off-putting, overly combative Christian?" And another said, "Does Talbot have a doctoral level program designed for thoughtful and winsome cultural engagement?" There is your softball, Rick, run with it.

Rick: Wow! Thank you very much. I should have just written the question for myself. This is perfect. So. I teach in our D.Min. program, among other things that I do here at Biola, and the track that I teach is called "Engaging Mind and Culture." And it's exactly geared to these kinds of issues. And the beauty of the D-Men is that it doesn't go into the kind of narrow depth that a Ph.D. does. So you and I both have gone through a PhD program. And the joke about a PhD program is that you learn more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. And I literally did my dissertation on a single philosophical article related to the issue of abortion, but it was a single article that was published in 1973 and has become the most widely published article of 20th century philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition. So, you study these incredibly narrow things, but when it comes time to live life in the church and to guide kind of a church in terms of cultural engagement, you almost never have the luxury of doing that kind of a deep dive. So, the D.Min. is a perfect place to do, I don't know what to call it, a medium dive or something like that, but not just to stick your toes in the water, but to actually jump in and sometimes to jump in over your head, but not to have to go through this, you know, put on your scuba gear and go down to the thousand feet below sea level. And so what we've done with Engaging Mind and Culture, say let's just organize this around doing a series of dives into compelling issues that we're actually facing. So, in the last two years for the track I'm doing, we've talked about critical race theory, we've talked about LGBTQ issues. We've done a deep dive into Christian nationalism and some things about politics. We are doing one on transhumanism and technology. We're doing a set of readings related to deconstructing our faith, one on social and ethical issues, just kind of a practice. How do you develop a Christian mind for thinking and answering Christian kinds of policy issues from abortion issues to environmental issues? So, we're doing all of these that's associated with reading probably a thousand pages of literature and three full days, eight to five days of kind of in-depth conversation and interaction. So, you get a lot more than just a skim over the surface, but at the same time you're not suddenly locked into only one thing that you're gaining perspective on. So, it's a wonderful thing for those who are actively in ministry.

The other thing that we do is we work really hard to respond to steel men rather than to straw men. So, we just like you were talking about a minute ago about giving a sympathetic reading, giving a positive reading before you do the critique. And the way I argue for this, as I said, we have to achieve disagreement before we can give a good response. In other words, what do we actually disagree about? If I can't state what you believe in a way that you nod your head and say, "Yes, that's right. That is where I believe," then I don't know what you believe yet, so how can I disagree with what you believe? So, I need to keep working at putting your beliefs in a way you would nod your head and say, "Yes, that's it." And part of that's intellectual, part of that's emotional. But we work pretty hard at that as saying, "Let's give this a sympathetic reading that's stated in the way the advocates of this position would do it, and then let's give it our best biblical critique."

Sean: Give us the title again so people can search for it.

Rick: So this is the Engaging Mind and Culture track of the Talbot DMin program, and I think you'd find that on our website in the DMin thing. And we go through a three-year cohort. It's really fun because you develop relationships with a set of other people who go through this whole thing, and then we press the go button again and start with a new cohort. But it's just a great way to do this kind of education, particularly for people who deal with these issues.

Sean: And it's not a PhD, but it is a legitimate doctoral level program, and it's demanding oftentimes for pastors and others not going into academia, but who want to do rigorous work. So check it out. Rick, always enjoy having you. I realized I mixed my metaphors when I said, "I'm giving you a softball to run with it." I teed you up. [both laugh] You run with a football, not a softball, but it is what it is. Well, thanks for joining us again. Always do a great job. If you're willing, I'm sure we'll have you back. But folks, in the meantime, please be praying that Scott just recovers and his brother does as well.

Sean: This has been an episode of the podcast Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture, brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. We have full-time programs like we talked about, master's programs, theology, Bible, spiritual formation, apologetic and more fully online. Check them out. To submit comments or ask questions, please email us, thinkbiblically@biola.edu. That's thinkbiblically@biola.edu. Please consider giving us a rating on your podcast app. Every single rating helps, and consider sharing this episode with a friend. We appreciate you listening, and we'll see you Tuesday when our regular podcast episode airs. In the meantime, remember to Think Biblically about everything.