"I’m Not a Christian Because I Found a Better Way to Live."
The knife of pluralism cuts both ways | Deconversion Series
Beliefs Used To Be More Stable
In pre-modern times, it was less likely that you would meet someone with a radically different view of life and God. Most people lived and died in the same village in which they were born, having never traveled far from it. This led to a narrower breadth of possible beliefs to which one might be exposed. Religion could be more easily mapped onto geography. The greatest times of belief-shift were the result of military conquest, not evangelism. The ideological and geographical boundaries of faith were much more fixed; it took armies to break them down.
As a result, the beliefs of any but the most cosmopolitan communities tended to be more static because they were faced with less opposition. It was less likely that you would meet someone with a radically different view of life and God. It was more difficult to question the faith of one’s family and culture in the face of a more unified religious consensus. As philosopher Charles Taylor wrote, “When everybody believes, questions don’t easily arise.”
Even if adherents of different faiths lived near one another (as in New Testament Palestine), the deep cultural divisions of everyday life still made less of an impact on the plausibility of the religion of “the other.” Taylor continues:
“...the multiplicity of faiths has little effect as long as it is neutralized by the sense that being like them is not really an option for me. As long as the alternative is strange and other, perhaps despised, but perhaps just too different, too weird, too incomprehensible, so that becoming that isn’t really conceivable for me, so long will their difference not undermine my embedding in my own faith.”
But we are far from that time now.
Modern Pluralism Makes Changing Your Beliefs a Viable Option
Unlike pre-modern times, unbelief has become a more viable option today because it is much more likely to be embodied. Today we live in pluralized, globalized societies. It is much more likely now that you will meet someone with radically different views than your own. You will go to school with them, work with them, and fall in love with them.
Nearly all Christians today are like diners at a buffet. We sense that there are many different options for good ways of life than the one in which we happened to have been raised. We can’t help but cast a sidelong glance at the other options from time to time.
When the other is a distant reality (either geographically or culturally), their otherness becomes more malleable to the imagination; you can make of them and their ideas whatever you want. But when the other is near, easy distortions about who they are and what they believe become less plausible.
The Secularizing Effect of Pluralism
Secularization theory is the idea that, as the modern age dawns, the secularizing effects of modern life will put an end to religion once and for all.
Pluralism has a role to play in that narrative. It is thought that religion could only survive if its plausibility structures were left untouched and intact. Once the children of religious parents were exposed to enough of the modern world, however, the structures that perpetuated faith in those communities would fray and come undone.
The prophecies of secularization theory have not come true. They still seem plausible in some countries in Europe, some parts of the U. S., and in secular academia. However, in most of the world in the 21st-century, they seem wildly unlikely.
However, one thing is clear: in such a pluralized environment, a life sheltered from diversity is exposed to new pressures and tensions. When you encounter another beautiful way to live, the experience can be an argument for that mode of life, even if it is drastically different from your current life and beliefs.
When the other becomes embodied as people with names, faces, feelings, smiles, and brilliant ideas, ideas and modes of life that are opposed to the ideas and modes of life embodied in the other can become more fragile.
God’s Fullness Allures Us Wherever It Is Found
God’s goodness always beckons and allures us, even if it comes without Christian trappings. Plausibility follows fullness (goodness, beauty, and truth); it always makes us want to believe in it. We want to rearrange our categories to account for it and to get more of it. Fullness is its own justification and does its work at both the conscious level and the preconscious level.
It is harder to believe something is untrue if we have experienced it to be good. It is harder to believe something is wrong if we have seen its beauty.
The challenge pluralism puts to Christian plausibility structures comes when one encounters fullness through a channel or a category outside one’s current plausibility framework.
For instance, let’s say you are taught that atheists are ungodly misanthropes who don’t have good reasons for their lack of faith, then you actually meet one of these people and find that they are… great. They make you laugh or help you out or teach you something. Perhaps you even fall in love with one of them and find out that they (and those like them) aren’t the misanthropes you thought, but live lives full of beauty, truth, and goodness. The experience of encountering fullness in the other puts pressure on your whole framework to make room for it. If it is strong enough, it can even overturn the framework.
This isn’t an uncommon experience in our day and age. The stories of those who have deconverted from Christianity are full of exactly that experience.
Every Good and Perfect Gift Is From God
In the book of James, we find an idea that has the power to act as a theological lever to pry apart the idea that pluralism will inevitably lead to secularity.
“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” -James 1:17
If it is good, it is from God. If it is true, it is God’s truth. If it is beautiful, it is a refraction (however ephemeral and fragmentary) of God’s beauty. If we approach God’s beauty and feel compelled to remove our shoes, we shouldn’t be surprised. All fullness is holy ground and all of humanity stands on it.
God does not limit his graciousness only to those who go to church. He casts it broadhandedly throughout all of his creation. Remember Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount: “God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”
If anything, Christians should be better at recognizing and rejoicing when they see God’s beauty wherever it happens to be. After all, they are the ones in whom his image is being restored, whose character and sensibilities are being conformed to his, whose wayward loves are all being in-gathered to their bright, blazing source, God himself.
The book of Revelation renders that idea in apocalyptic neon:
“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”... The kings of the earth will bring their splendor into [the city of God.]” -Revelation 7: 9,10 and 21:24
The end of the book of Revelation paints a picture of the new creation in which every tribe, tongue, and nation throughout history brings in their distinct contributions to his glory.
God is not a spendthrift. He has scattered his truth, his wisdom, his beauty throughout creation and human culture. Those seeds have landed farther and wider than our narrow categories might predict and everywhere they land, they grow. Every culture in every time and place have been heirs of fragments of God’s goodness. Those hints of goodness allure them to find the source of all goodness.
If you are taught that atheists are nasty misanthropes, you were taught something that a careful reading of the Bible should correct. When you meet a real-life atheist and find, to your surprise and chagrin, that you like them, it might not be because you’re “backsliding.” You might just be having a God-ordained collision with reality.
So you may not need to avoid the other, nor be surprised at the beauty, goodness, and truth you find in their ideas and in their lives. It doesn’t need to destabilize your embeddedness in your faith. Christianity comprehends the fact of that experience, predicts it, and places it in a sensemaking theological framework.
This should be incredibly liberating for Christians who have been fed ideas that only demonize the other. When we find truth outside the bounds of what we’ve come to think of as Christianity, it can be a cause for joy and the impetus for worship to God who is generous even to those who give no thanks.
The Door of Pluralism Swings Both Ways
The pluralism of the modern world has not yet put paid to religion and it never will because pluralism always works both ways.
My wife and I had a dear group of friends when we lived in South Korea who were not Christians and one night after dinner one of them was making fun of Christianity. After he had gone on for a while, I interrupted him and said, “Sean, you know we’re Christians, right?”
His response was, “Yeah, but you aren’t real Christians.” I think what he meant was “You are not like my reduced idea of what a Christian is.”
And I said, “Yes, Sean, we really are Christians.”
Sean had an idea of what it meant to be a Christian that was cobbled together from brief experiences, stereotypes, and soundbites on social media. For most of his life, Christianity was the other and he was able to live a life that was insulated enough from “real Christians” that his stereotypes remained intact. Then we all met in South Korea and he actually got to know his first Christians and found they were not the nasty misanthropes he had been led to believe. He liked us; we were friendly, kind, and basically normal. And, in his mind, that meant that we couldn’t be “real Christians.” The experience put pressure on his framework to make room for it. Some of his previous ideas about Christians became more fragile, primed to shift.
Just as Christians who in a former age might have been insulated from other religious frameworks, so followers of other religions (or none) are being exposed to a lot more Christians these days.
And wasn’t this always the idea? That Christ’s church would be a scattered people and would demonstrate the reality of God in their lives and communities? Isn’t this what Jesus meant when he said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35)
Pluralism Isn’t the Problem, We Are
If people are leaving the faith because they have encountered a more beautiful way to live elsewhere, it may not be a part of an inevitable process of secularization that will spell the doom of the church. It might be because the Christian church has failed to live up to its own ideals.
So pluralism itself is neither the great danger nor the great hope of Christianity because, as Francis Schaeffer said, “the central problem [facing the church] is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.”
The Christian church was supposed to be a colony of heaven—social and physical space in which different rules applied. It was not meant to be limited to holy ghettos and cultural silos. The people of God were always supposed to be moving throughout the world, like, in Paul’s words, “The aroma of life among those who are being saved.” (2 Corinthians 2:15)
But there is a catch. And it is a big one.
Exposure to Christianity won’t automatically have a positive effect on the plausibility of Christianity. It only works if when someone meets a Christian, something good, beautiful, and true happens.
Make Your Life a Plausibility Structure
Plausibility is the believableness of beliefs—how much credibility, worth, or trustworthiness we assign to a belief or view of the world. In our pluralized world, all of us inhabit many layers of diverse plausibility structures. They vie for dominance within and around us.
When Jesus said that the world would know his disciples by their love, he was issuing a call that his people would become embodied plausibility structures of a better way to live.
Your life can be a plausibility structure of its own. When people come near you, they can find parts of their own selves altering as the beauty of your life draws them into a liminal space.
If you are worried about someone you love who is leaving Christianity, the best thing you can do for them is to live a beautiful life. If you are surrounded by people for whom Christianity is a stain on the world, not the hope of the world, live a good life—demonstrate the truth in the cathedral you make of your days.
Show hospitality to the people around you. Don’t just invite them to a church service, have them around your house for meals. Let them see behind the facade not over the span of an afternoon, but over the span of decades. Take questions seriously and sweat with people as you struggle together to find adequate answers. Be human. You don’t have to become anything spectacular to become a winsome picture of Christianity, just live a normal life well. Be a shelter for people, but don’t be sheltered. Subject your faith to all the world’s winds. Take on doubts in their strongest forms and see how Christianity fares against them.
If you live your life this way and a friend, a colleague, a parent, or just an unexpected onlooker says, “I don’t agree with your ideas, but I love the way you live,” something has been achieved.
Perhaps then when someone in your life finds a better way to live because of pluralism, it will be the way of Jesus.
Read more from Andy on The Darking Psalter (commentary, translations, and poetry about the Psalms) and Three Things (a monthly digest of worthy resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God.)