Joe looks at three takeaways from Rhett McLaughlin’s deconstruction.

Transcript: 

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to do something a little bit different today. If you are like me, there’s a good chance that in the good old days of YouTube you watched a fair amount of Rhett and link, and one of the things about Rhett and Link is that both of them, they kind of oozed evangelical Christianity. It was pretty obvious even though they weren’t super open about it, that these were people who came from a Christian background. And sure enough, they not only were evangelicals, they’re former missionaries,

CLIP:

We were all in, we were on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ, we were missionaries for a couple of years. We trained people in evangelism.

Joe:

But today, neither of those gentlemen identify with Christianity at all. They’re both Christians and they’ve been pretty open about their deconversion and a lot of people have responded within the broader Christian YouTube world of pointing out areas that we disagree. And understandably, I think there are plenty of things that you could critique in their stories, but I want to do something different today. I want to focus on three areas that I agree with, three areas that I think we as Christians need to actually take to heart and need to actually learn from. So what kind of things I would start with this. This is a broad point I’ll kind of explained as we go. Number one, we need to stop binding heavy burdens. Now, in the particular case of Rhett and his is the journey I’m going to focus on. He talks a lot about the role of evolution for both himself and by extension also for his wife in sort of the crisis of faith that this caused as they came to see the evolution was true

CLIP:

When I told my wife that I thought evolution had happened, she burst into tears. I just want to give you an idea of where we come from.

Joe:

So yes, he is talking to Howie Mandela from Bobby’s World again if you’re of the right age to get those references. But what is it about evolution that is making her cry? What is a bit about this that’s leading to this crisis of faith? Well, I want to talk about this. I’m going to let him talk about this. I’m going to respond to that, but I also want to recognize this as something much bigger than the particular question of evolution, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. But first, here’s his explanation for why his wife was crying and for why this was a crisis of faith For both of them,

CLIP:

She just starts crying because this represented, she knew what this represented right? This was the seismic shift. And I think a lot of people that I tell this story to are like, what do you mean? There’s all these Christians that believe in evolution. I can’t believe that this was so significant for you. But I think the reason it was is because at that point I realized how wrong I could be about something so fundamental and I never ever considered that I might be wrong about something so fundamental. And then not only was I wrong, but all of these Christian apologists who were so sure about their critiques of evolution, they had missed the boat so significantly on this that suddenly I was like, can I trust anything else they’ve got to say about this? So that was the first big domino.

Joe:

Now even in his explanation there, you’ll notice that he acknowledges, look, this is somewhat specific to the form of Christianity that he was brought up in the form of Christianity he kind of inhabited at this time in his life. And if he’d not come from this background, if he’d come from a different Christian background, he might still be a Christian today and particularly as a Catholic, we would look at that and say, what’s the problem with just saying evolution could also be true? I’ll get into this a little bit. I’m not trying to persuade you here of evolution, but just to show that this idea that evolution and Christianity are incompatible is not an idea that most of the world’s Christians actually accept. This is pretty specifically American and pretty specifically evangelical Protestant. Benedict the 16th back when he was Pope in 2007, talked about how he saw in Germany, but also in the us this somewhat fierce debate raging between creationism and evolutionism as if they were mutually exclusive.

It has to be one or the other. And that if you believe in the creator, you wouldn’t be able to conceive of evolution and those who support evolution would have to exclude God. And of this contrast, Benedict called it absurd that it’s absurd to suggest you have to choose one side or the other in that question. Those are strong words from the Pope to be like, what’s the problem? Where’s the issue here? And he gave this explanation. On the one hand, there’s so many scientific proofs in favor of evolution, which appears to be a reality we can see and which enriches our knowledge of life and being as such. But on the other hand, the doctrine of evolution doesn’t answer the deeper philosophical questions of life. Where does everything come from? How did everything start which ultimately led to man? And that these are these questions of utmost importance.

In fact, this is one of the points that Benedict talks about of the relationship between faith and reason that one thing we can see from reason is that reason without faith isn’t able to answer the deeper questions of life. It can explain how things happen, but it doesn’t really have the mechanism by which to explain why things happen. And he says Though our reason is broader and can see that our reason is not basically something irrational, a product of irrationality, but that reason creative reason precedes everything and we’re truly the reflection of creative reason. In other words, the answer here isn’t to treat reason as the enemy of saying, well, don’t do any scientific investigation. Don’t look into the research on evolution. Don’t use your reason, just have faith. But rather the existence of reason should point to a belief that not only my own individual’s subjective self has reason, but that there is reason behind the whole cosmos and that this should lead us into a belief in a personal and reasonable God, not a reason to reject reason that with reason.

In other words, you can hit a point where you realize somebody is smarter than you or you can use reason to determine something was created with reason. I’ll give you a couple examples. Anytime somebody says, trust the science and they haven’t done the science for themselves, whatever you may think of that what they’re doing is saying, my reason has taken me far enough to believe there are experts in this field and I’m going to defer to their superior knowledge and authority because I can’t run every test myself. And whatever you think in the particular cases that comes up, that is a normal reaction of reason. It’s not an abandonment of reason. One of the things you come up against in reason is you can’t possibly investigate everything for yourself individually. So there are these areas where you just have to say, okay, I have to take this thing on faith because I don’t have direct access to the evidence or I don’t have the skills to figure these things out.

And so in all these areas, history, science, whatever, there are many things that we accept on faith. And I don’t mean here the theological virtue of faith. I just mean the natural disposition to trust people who’ve proved themselves trustworthy. And there’s something a little bit analogous when it comes to the relationship of reason and faith. We have enough evidence from reason to say this is a reasonable act of trust to place in Jesus. This is a reasonable act of trust to place in the revelation of God. Now we are aided by divine grace. You can get a lot deeper into the weeds theologically with that. But the point there is that reason recognizes its own limits, but that doesn’t mean reason is bad. The other thing is that reason points to reason that you as a rational person can tell if you are reading something, if it’s just a random assortment of letters or whether it’s arranged in a meaningful way, you’re able to read it and decipher it and understand the meaning.

You’re able to draw all of that out and you can thus say, okay, I don’t see the name of the author on this book, but it clearly is authored by someone who has intelligence and this is a work of reason and so on. So you can use reason to recognize the working of reason. And so the cosmos themselves appear to be the reflection of creative reason as a rational being who uses creativity and reason to make things. I know what it looks like when things are made with creativity and reason and the cosmos, they reflect that. In fact they are that in a way we can’t even replicate. We can’t make anything as amazing as the universe. And that’s a good evidence that the universe isn’t just random chance, it’s also the result of creative reason. But the point there is notice Benedict’s position on evolution is that yeah, this is just one of those things we know from reason and that’s not a threat to faith.

That’s one of the reasons we have faith is because we recognize that reason itself needs an explanation. Now, there’s a cool argument you could make here, but I don’t want to get too in the weeds. I’ll save this for another time, but CS Lewis talks about how if reason is itself merely the productive evolution, merely the product of purely natural forces with no outside intelligence at all, then you would have reason to doubt your reason. But I’ll leave that for a deeper explanation at another time. Benedict says, though we were thought of and desired, thus there is an idea that preceded me, a feeling that preceded me, that I must discover that I must follow because it will at last give meaning to my life. This seems to be the first point to discover that my being is truly reasonable. It was thought of, it has meaning, and I give this here not to convince you of Benedict’s brilliance or of evolution or anything like that, but just to say if you are a Catholic, you don’t have any need to choose Christianity or evolution because we would say they’re not answering the same questions.

You can believe both that God created the heavens and the earth and that he used natural means to do so in the same way that you can believe God created you and your neighbor and he might’ve still used natural means to do so like your mom and dad. So it’s not an either or. And when you insist that everyone has to agree with a certain view of creation, not just in terms of the theological answer, but in terms of what mechanism did God use, it can’t have been evolution. When you start making those claims, you’re binding people with this burden that they shouldn’t be bound with for now, I’m really just trying to stress this point that not all Christians feel the weight of that burden, but many people come from an evangelical background of a certain type where this was taught as this non-negotiable, fundamental part of Christianity where if evolution is true, that would disprove Christianity. And that’s why Rhett’s wife is crying. And so Rhett is able to even say if he’d come from a different background, he might still be a Christian.

CLIP:

I don’t know. I can only guess as to where I might be if I came from a different Christian background or if I had a different set of beliefs or I approach this differently. There’s definitely, if multiple world theory is true, there’s definitely a lot of ratts out there who are still Christians. It could have gone a different way when the evidence for common ancestry became indisputable and overwhelming. I couldn’t reconcile it with the view that I had of the special creation of animals and especially people. And that was only a problem because I was an evangelical Christian. If I had been Catholic, then I would’ve been like, oh, the Pope already said that evolution happened, so this isn’t a problem for me. This doesn’t change anything, right?

Joe:

So that’s what I mean about binding heavy burdens. Now I’m drawing that language from Jesus in Matthew 23 where he is accuses of Pharisees of sitting on Moses’ seat. So they have a seat of authority, but they’re misusing it. They don’t practice what they’re preaching, and he says that they bind heavy burdens hard to bear and lay them on men’s shoulders. When you set the bar too high, you’re doing real damage to people. Now, that’s true in a lot of different ways. If your moral standard is impractically high, then you can have people who get just incredibly discouraged. This is true in all these contexts. If your approach to parenting is I demand perfection of my kids all the time and I make them feel bad when they fall. Short of that, you’re binding a heavy burden hard to carry. And if your approach to Christianity is you have to agree with me on all of these things that I read the Bible this way and you have to agree with my reading of it, or you’re not a true Christian that’s binding a heavy burden.

But on the flip side to that, the answer can’t just be to have no standards. That’s true. Whether we’re talking about parenting or Christianity or whatever it is, you can’t just say, that’s just my read. You do whatever. We intuitively recognize that there are parts of Christianity that we actually need to agree on. There are essential doctrines in other words. And so here the question becomes, well, who has the authority to determine what is and what is not an essential doctrine? Now, this is a question I’ve asked before I can link to it at the end, but that question is one that many people struggle to answer because you might have your own list of doctrines you think are essential. Your list might be shorter or longer than your neighbors. But the question becomes, well, how do you know that those are the essentials just because it seems clear to you or is there something deeper?

And so here I would say that this question of well, what is or isn’t essential is something that you need an actual authority to answer and that you and I don’t have the authority to do this. So as I said, the question can’t just be answered with saying nothing is essential, and red actually points this out that evolution is one part of the story. But then you say, well, what about Adam and Eve? What does this mean for original sin? And so can you write off the whole thing as just a fable? The answer to that would be no. He’s right to recognize the bar for him as an evangelical Christian in the particular kind, that he was unreasonably high, and if he’d not been an evangelical Christian of that variety, it wouldn’t have been there. He’s also right that you can’t just set the bar at the ground.

You can’t just say none of this matters. It’s all just a fictional story that rather some things need to be bound, some things need to be loose. And the point I would just draw is that St. Peter and the church, collectively we find Jesus giving that authority first to Peter in Matthew 16, and then to the church collectively Matthew 18, not to you and me. And so that’s not my place to draw those boundaries. So this is something I always try to avoid and that I encourage other Christians to avoid too. It’s a lot to get someone to accept the gospel. It’s a lot to get someone to accept Jesus Christ. Don’t also make them accept your particular readings of the Bible in order to be a true Christian because now you’re imposing not only the gospel, but also you and the gospel is inspired and without error and you’re neither of those.

So you need an actual standard. The standard cannot be yourself. And I think Rhett’s deconstruction shows you the danger of what happens when Christians just start willy-nilly putting the standards wherever they want them to be. Some Christians put them way too high. Some Christians put them way too low, but that’s a problem either way. But as I said, this is actually just scratching the surface. While this is ostensibly about evolution, this really gets to this deeper issue about trustworthiness. Now it turns out what I thought would be a good take and oh, we should talk about the danger of young earth creationism being too doctrinaire. And I’m not arguing. You can’t believe in a young earth. I’m not arguing. You can’t believe in creationism and you can’t reject evolution. I’m not imposing that burden on you. That would be the opposite of what I’m trying to do. What I am saying is don’t impose your own reading of Genesis as if you have the ability to make everyone else agree with you. And that’s true across the board on issues that aren’t settled dogma.

But when I went to make this video, I found out that a gazillion other Christian apologists had already made somewhat similar points, although maybe not in that exact way, and Paolo Gia argued that they were missing the point. And I think that he’s right that there is more to re’s point than just evolution. Although evolution is a particular issue, he comes back to a lot that I think something deeper is at play and that something deeper needs to be addressed directly. So here’s kind of Paolo’s apologist roundup, and then we’ll look at what that deeper thing is.

CLIP:

I think we can all agree that younger earth creationism is goofy. This issue of evolution played a key role in rets deconstruction.

I don’t like the idea of being related to apes. I think they’re gross, but I think it’s true because the science supports it. But nine times out of 10, I’m talking to people like this because they have gone through this kind of stuff and they have been told by young Earth creationists evolution is of the devil. It’s evil, it’s incompatible with the scriptures.

I want us to feel the psychological and social effects that it has when we make the issue of evolution, a kind of Christianity versus unbelief issue.

Certain young earth creationists, like apparently RET himself at one time have a distorted understanding of the web of beliefs. They think that right at the center of the web is belief in special young earth creationism, and therefore if that’s given up, it has enormous repercussions throughout the web of belief.

Don’t let this kind of stuff deconstruct you just because these apologists who were not experts in evolutionary biology got evolution wrong. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong on everything.

Joe:

So in Red’s telling though, the issue isn’t just, oh, I was wrong about evolution or, oh, these people who I had trusted about evolution or about the age of the earth, they were wrong. The point there is if I can be wrong about all these things and if Christian apologists can be wrong about all these things, what does that mean for everything else that they’ve been telling me is true? And what does this mean about the basic relationship with the truth?

CLIP:

Learning that there was all this evidence that kind of pointed pretty clearly to the earth being old and then realizing that there was a really large contingent of Christians who just denied that and didn’t believe that it was alarming. It was alarming for a couple of reasons. I mean, first of all, maintaining that young earth view, it requires sort of dismissing or reinterpreting a lot of evidence that has been gathered and you got this big umbrella of Christianity and the whole idea is that we’ve got the truth. The whole point is we have the ultimate truth, right? As Christians, God has revealed the ultimate truth to us. This is what I believed, but yet within that camp, there are these two wildly different perspectives on basically the entire natural world. And I was like, something about this is alarming because this isn’t as clean as I thought it was.

Joe:

So one final point about faith and reason, and then I want to actually make it a much broader point because I think red is keyed in on something that we need to be a lot more keyed in on ourselves. First, we should take the approach that St. John Paul II talks about in Fetus Aio, that faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises the contemplation of truth and that God is placed in the human heart or desire to know the truth in a word, to know himself so that by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves. Now, this is a point that Rett makes in slightly different words in his recent interview with Alex O’Connor where he talks about how we need to have a greater fidelity to and love for the truth that we shouldn’t treat truth whether we know it by faith or by reason with suspicion or derision or be threatened by it, that the truth is something we should be lovers of.

But there’s this corollary point, and he’s talked about this as well in the recent Alex O’Connor interview, and I want to just make sure we have it central in frame. If you associate Christianity too much with anything, and that can be a doctrine, that can also be things like a political view. If it’s not something that is actually central to Christianity, if it is your own idiosyncratic view and you say, everyone should agree with me on X, you can quickly associate Christianity with this heavy burden that I have to accept both Jesus Christ and your preferred political candidate. I’ve got to accept Jesus Christ and your political platform. I’ve got to accept Jesus Christ and your conspiracy theory or your view of the world on whatever issue. And so I think we do tremendous damage in this way. I quoted this earlier, but when he talks about how as Christians we’re supposed to have the fullness of truth, then if you see Christians living in non-reality, that’s not just an issue of faith.

First reason. If you live in this world where you’re completely detached from the goings on of what’s actually happening in society that undercuts the claim that you’ve got the truth now on this channel largely steer away from politics for precisely this reason. My political takes are probably not that intelligent, and I say that because when I watch other people talk about politics, when that’s not their full-time job and they just throw in their political views the number of times I’m like, oh, wow, that was a thoughtful and reason take is dwarfed by the number of times where I’m just aggravated that they inserted politics where it didn’t belong or how stupid and simple their view of the world is, regardless of which side they’re on, regardless of what the topic is, it usually isn’t something where I’m impressed by the thoughtfulness of the person. Instead, it often undercuts their expertise in the actual area that they’re meant to be speaking on.

I’ll give you an example just because it’s an area where I don’t even in t Wright, the Anglican bishop back in some of his earlier books would include these potshots about the Iraq war, and I agreed with him that the Iraq war was unjust. I agreed with him that we shouldn’t be in the Iraq war. I think we’re far enough away from that that there aren’t a ton of people still defending that as a good idea. And it was still an absolute distraction from a book about St. Paul or whatever it was that it was in where it just was so tonally off it so did not belong in the proclamation of the gospel and the way that he was doing it, it just didn’t fit. And now Wright has done things like weighted into the abortion to debate, to defend abortion, and it just completely undercuts his Christian witness.

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