An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
Fred:
Greetings, and welcome to another Author Interview here on Books At a Glance. I’m Fred Zaspel, and our topic for today is culture – our Western culture: just how might we characterize it? Gene Veith in his new book calls it “post-Christian,” and he’s here to talk to us about it.
Gene, welcome, and congratulations on a stimulating new book!
Veith:
Thanks; it is good to be with you.
Zaspel:
Is postmodernism dead? How would you characterize the prevailing thought of today?
Veith:
Well, postmodernism has mutated I would say. The idea that we construct own reality truth is relative, we can no objective truth, and so every truth is a construction. That’s been taken in some kind of new, more extreme ways since postmodernism started back in the earlier part of the last century. So, postmodernism goes by different names. It has become more political or extreme. The old postmodernism is about tolerating all different ideas. The new one is about silencing different ideas including people to hold up absolute truth. So today I characterize the dominant thought as secular mind and specifically what that is and what it entails. By secular I mean people are trying to do without Christianity not just that, but to do without Christianity used to do for the culture, used to do for people, and so many different kind of strains of that and none of them are working out very well to tell the truth.
Zaspel:
Characterize and trace for us the change in the cultural mind from that of modernism to postmodernism and to what you call “post-Christian.”
Veith:
Well, modernism was the view starting with the Enlightenment in the 1700s and continuing through the first half of the 20th century, that science can solve our problems. It is the age of reason—human reason, human expertise, we can figure out things, we can understand truth, and we can manipulate truth to what we want it to be. Modernism is very open to the external world.
The problem with it is that they came to assume that the physical reality is all there is and that if something can’t be perceived and studied empirically by the scientific method that doesn’t exist. The looming problems of modernism excluding God and objective morality, and the like, but at least it was oriented to some kind of objective truth. The postmodernist, starting kind of in the 60s although building on a lot of earlier foundations, taught that reality is a construction, that we can’t know the objective realm, the objective realm itself is shaped by our minds, and so that we construct reality. We don’t discover truth. We make it through our choices, our desires and there are different strains of this on top reality is the cultural construction of the different cultures have different realities that they inhabit. It’s an individual construction. That switch is really a very profound one and it was almost the opposite of modernism.
Now, since then, since the 90s and going on until today, I think that constructivism is taken to new extremes applied to some different things, but the view today that we see in this post-Christian time since that these constructions are political, that people construct reality so that they can exert power over other people or that groups construct laws or morality or religions so that they can oppress other groups. Men oppress women; white people oppress racial minorities; the rich oppress the poor; humans oppress animals; heterosexuals oppress homosexuals. It is applied in many different ways, but the assumption is that all of a sudden these constructions are oppressive. The response is to rebel against them, and to construct your own reality to counter those which unfortunately often made oppressing, other people pressing the people who once oppressed you, but that’s part of it, and so that’s what happened to the postmodernism.
You can see it in other things. For example, when I wrote the book Postmodern Times where I talked about postmodernism, this is the sequel to that and back then, people were constructing ideas. Now they are not only constructing ideas, but they are constructing their own physical world and whether a person is a male or female becomes a construction and if you inside you choose to be the opposite sex, then you are, you’re the body of the objective real tangible thing, but that makes no difference what you choose to be. And you can construct your body so that it can have surgery so that has the features of the other sex, or now you don’t even need that you to do—simply the affirmation in your mind is what determines your identity. And now in the gender-fluid movement, it doesn’t have to be a permanent thing. One time you may choose to be a man. Another time he may choose to be a woman, another time a woman again that you change your dress and your mannerisms accordingly. But what defines, you what you are, again, it does not have with any kind of objective reality, not even with your own body, but only with this inner choice. This inner construction of yourself.
Zaspel:
Just what do you mean by “post-Christian,” and in what way is “post-Christian” both an accurate and a misleading description?
Veith:
Well, I don’t want to create the impression that Christianity is over because it isn’t. What I show in my book is that Christianity is really relevant, and that so many of the secular ideas are crashing and burning. Christianity becomes a very compelling alternative to those, but it’s an accurate description in that people, our society, and culture has lived off the Christian moral and spiritual capital for a long time, so that even people who were Christian a few decades ago, tended to accept Christian morality whether they followed or not, but they thought in terms of moral principles/moral absolutes and in terms of certain assumptions about how the world is. But now those have really faded. And so, in the new secular time, in the post-Christian time, where churches are, especially in Europe and other places, fewer and fewer people are going to churches claiming to be Christian, more and more people say they have no religion at all, though I look at that and find it to be more complicated. In this climate Christian concepts are not followed. You can hardly even bring them up, and the people have no understanding of what they even are, which poses some special challenges for the church, but not unsurmountable ones, I think.
Zaspel:
In many ways, it’s like the early church where the surrounding culture which is not biblically literate, at all.
Veith:
That’s right. And yet, that turned out to be one of the best times for the church, one of the times when evangelism grew at an incredible rate. Which is why my book, although it poses challenges, it is somewhat optimistic about how Christians can function after all in the long run.
Zaspel:
I think that’s an important point to stress because when we look at the what we have to say from a Christian standpoint, what’s been the denigration of our culture and whatnot, it can seem depressing, but that doesn’t mean at all that of the gospel is going to lose.
Veith:
That’s right.
Zaspel:
Take a few minutes here and highlight your book for us in broad strokes – the major sections, how you proceed in each, and what you are trying to accomplish.
Veith:
Okay well, it has four parts. In each part, there is an arc of development. Where I pose the issue, pose the problem, but then in another chapter, I’ll show how the strain of secularism is facing problems, starting to contradict itself, to change in a way that undermines the start of it, and then I show a Christian response to it. In each section, there’s that movement. I have a part one is about reality where I talk about science—and even that the changes in science. Science used to disenchant the universe in the modern era. People thought that science just dispelled all mysteries and that now we understand everything perfectly, we don’t need a god and reason can understanding, but then it makes it less significant. One of the reasons postmodernism grew up is this view that reality had no meaning. Therefore, we have to create our own meaning, but now science is becoming more and more the universe gives more and more mysterious given the quantum physics, the strange behavior of subatomic particles, and astronomy, gravity, slowing down time around the black hole, and these incredible mind blowing things, that I think is kind of re-enchanting the objective world, though I do not that has filtered out in the cultures yet.
There is a chapter on nature and a chapter on technology which is an important part. And I talk about recovering reality and bringing back the proper sense of the external world. I have a section on the body, a section on chapter on the end of sex, how sex was separated from its real-life natural created function of creating new life, and sex is a distinguished and separated from that, how sex is been turned into something barren and infertile and gone from change-making and having children an unfortunate side effect of sex that can be solved by abortions in the last minute, which led to the sexual revolution, but also have there’s a sexual counterrevolution receiving the #metoo movement where sex is a big deal and does have a set of moral consequences. Then I have a chapter on repudiating the body and how yet people do have the need to the yearning to have children, create new life and that in how that manifests itself sometimes and twisted ways to see with the genetic engineering like and then talk about towards the theology of the body, bringing Christianity into these issues and how that redresses those problems.
I have a section on society, culture and anti-culture, a chapter power politics and the death of education of the things of manifesting itself in education coming apart. Then I talk about rebuilding civilization options for the dark ages had. Finally, I talk about in the fourth part is about religion, about the spiritual but not religious. The religion of the nones. The category of public of the nones say they have no religion and yet they do have a lot of spiritual beliefs they believe in and new age ideas, reincarnation, and things like that. The greater rate than any other demographic, 78% believe in some sort of new-age pagan kind of ideas which fits in with what you said, that the nones are not materialistic. There are very few atheists around the secular world. Christianity is all been very effective in reaching pagans once we mobilize to do that. And I have another chapter religious but not spiritual. The new gods, people are trying to create a religion out of technology and so what people would look to God for and how looking for technology, that technology doesn’t make a very good god. The people who try to worship artificial intelligence have created a very maligned deity and they are putting their faith in that and finally, on the positive, I talk about post-Christian Christianity about the need to the secularized the church. Part of the reason Europe is become so secular is because the state churches of Europe have gotten so liberal that they hardly even teach Christianity any more. So, of course, in those societies with others in the church on every corner, they are all mostly of the state church variety, the church stopped teaching God’s Word. Of course the society is going to go secular because there’s no real alternative, and yet even here, even in those countries, there are Christians and Christian movements that are really under the radar that are very exciting when you get to know about them. And then finally, I have my conclusion toward the post-secular. A lot of people are saying, “What will be after what will be next?” Some, for the cutting-edge thinkers, are saying that after the secular will be a time of post-secular because they are seeing that pure secularism cannot give society what it needs it cannot ground moral truth or even intellectual truth in any kind of way. We need something the goes beyond the secular of course of Christians, we know what that is.
Zaspel:
Talk to us about “the secular hypothesis” and whether it has proven true.
Veith:
That is a great question. The dominant scholarly conclusion through the modern and even most of the postmodern era was that as societies get more and more modern, they become less and less religious. And so the assumption is again that religion looks to supernatural causes for things, science progresses and education progresses, they will know science can account for all of that, and so religion will decline.
Now, but what scholars have found, and I’m not talking about Christian scholars, as such, that the consensus among sociologists of people, who study this is that the secular hypothesis is not true, particularly when applied to the rest of the world. In Africa, for example, what personal everywhere in the world, people seem to be getting more religious as they become more modern. Now Europe and a lesser extent America, have kind of been that way, but today are the outliers on the whole, if you look at societies as they become more and more modern in Africa and Asia, and Latin America and other places in the world. Not only are they becoming less religious, but religion is helping them to become more modern. That certainly is the effect of Christianity which when it comes into society like that brings modern healthcare, modern education, and attitudes that bring more freedom and more democratic kind of societies, and religion becomes a very important part of that.
And so in the rest of the world, this is true especially Christianity, Christianity is booming in Africa, Asia, Latin America all over Christianity is really growing. it’s here in the United States and Europe that it seems to decline. Scholars are even pointing out that even in America and Europe, it is not that we are seeing a complete loss of religion. Despite what we say about secularism and post-Christian because again religious beliefs are persisting again, but they are more of a reversion to paganism than to atheism, and so again I think Christianity has a good chance of reviving even though societies and in fact I think we are starting to see some signs that it is happening.
Zaspel:
Do I understand correctly that it like even in our society when we hear statistics about Christianity declining in the less church attendance and whatnot. Isn’t it true that within the more robust evangelical Christianity is still growing?
Veith:
Yes, it definitely is, most of the so-called decline in Christianity, and the rise of the nones, those check none, when they are asked about their religion most of that is coming from mainline liberal churches and by people who at best were nominal Christians who were on the church row, but never come, never really believed much, and so when that happens, now it’s more socially acceptable to not be a church member, so many of those people that way don’t really believe, are just saying that admitting it that they really don’t have religion. But the people who really do, who are really committed to their faith, who really believe the Scriptures, who go to church, and make it an important part of their lives, that demographic has not declined at all over the last several decades, and that’s holding strong even in light of all the other pressures that the Christian space in our culture.
Zaspel:
Let’s finish up on a critical note. You say that “our culture has become anti-culture.” What are you getting at?
Veith:
Well, every culture in the world, whether you’re looking at tribal cultures in Africa or ancient cultures in the different parts of the world, they all have had moral values of some kind or another. They all have had marriage of one kind or another. They’ve all had sexual morality of one kind or another. None of them have had gay marriage. Some have been relatively tolerant of homosexuality. But they have never had gay marriage, but now contemporary Western culture is trying to do without all those things, and trying innovations like gay marriage that no other cultures ever had before. And so, it’s hard to even see our culture today, it is a culture without a culture. It is a culture without community, except for virtual realities and virtual communities which are not the same as real communities and real realities. And so I don’t know how long we can last that way, unless we turn back to having culture, for that you need foundations, and for that you need faith and family and a lot of other things, that people are trying to do without that that may be a futile endeavor.
Zaspel:
So there’s something suicidal about post-Christian culture.
Veith:
Yeah, that’s a great way to put it, something suicidal. I start my book with a quote from Shakespeare. From one of his plays, where it was Ulysses the great wise hero the Odyssey in this play. He warns what happens when you believe that there is no more order in nature. And he says that the result will be discord, and everything includes itself in power. Power into will, will into appetite, and appetite a universal wolf so doubly seconded with will and power must make reports a universal prey. It is a universal wolf of just appetite, whatever I desire is what I have to have, it devours everything, and then it finally eats up itself. It devours itself, and this kind of what we see in like the suicide of the many of these ideas.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Gene Edward Veith, author of the insightful new book, Post Christian: A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture. It’s very well informed and an excellent guide to a Christian understanding of Western culture – highly recommended.
Gene, thanks so much for your good work and for talking to us today.
Veith:
Well thanks for having me.
