“Evangelicals love to believe bad things about themselves,” says Kevin DeYoung. “And often what they believe about themselves is not true.”
Everyone seems to love stats about bad Christians. Non-Christians like to see that we really are fakes. Christians like to think the sky is falling.
The journalistic approach to such studies is troublesome in itself. When our first instinct is always to play up the “scandal” we not only contribute to the secular impression that Christians are all fakes, we also contribute to our own impression that the Christian life is bound to end in failure. We need to find better ways to motivate toward holiness than utter, shocking shame.
Just as important, we need to examine whether our alarming conclusions can hold up under close scrutiny. We need to ask: are these stats about bad Christians themselves bad stats?
Or to ask the question more clearly: what should we think about the claim that “Christians are having premarital sex and abortions as much (or more) than non-Christians”?
December 15th, 2011 | 9:13 am
“The National Survey, like most surveys, simply measures those who self-identify as evangelical”
The no-true Scotmans fallacy.
December 15th, 2011 | 9:35 am
A reputable institute, Pew, made headlines some time ago by finding that something like 20% of atheists believe in God, and even more prayed regularly.
From this, most rational people would conclude either that more than 20% of self-identifying atheists are morons, or that asking people to self-identify as a certain religious group is not going to obtain accurate results.
I’m not saying that Michael B. is irrational, but I do think it odd that he would apparently conclude via the No true Scotsman fallacy that 20% of atheists really believe in God, just because a statistical survey reports that.
December 15th, 2011 | 10:20 am
I don’t doubt that these reports are a bit distorted, but neither do I think they are far off the mark. Christians who adopt a shoot-the-messenger mentality need to think very carefully about what they’re doing, and engage in more serious pastoral reflection.
Film, television, and music pump out a powerful message that sex is not special; it’s as routine and necessary as eating and breathing. Our culture glorifies a false virility, and, not content to abandon the concept of dignity, is hostile to it. Post-pubescent teenagers are told in not-so-subtle terms that it’s more mature to have lost one’s virginity than not. We delude ourselves by pretending this message has no impact on our children.
Twelve years ago, I was chatting with a fellow online who was shocked to learn that I was still a virgin at 27 years old. “I didn’t think that was possible,” he wrote. He was in his late teens; it’s tempting to mock our intelligentsia and ask whether anyone had explained the facts of life to him.
Nor was he out of the norm, in my experience; one correspondent even mocked me for my desire to remain a virgin until marriage.
My wife is, in fact, the only woman I have shared that part of my life with. I am not ashamed of it; I do not think I have missed out on anything by waiting for her. By contrast, my wife once surprised me by saying that she missed out on something special by having been with someone previously to me.
There’s an old Italian belief that consensual pre-marital sex is a form of cheating on one’s future spouse. Most Italians have abandoned that idea, but Christians would do well to resurrect and embrace it.
On the other hand, we do not need a cult of false perfection. We need to remember that we are repentant sinners who have a beautiful ideal that is impossible without grace, and we stumble at times.
December 15th, 2011 | 10:39 am
“The National Survey, like most surveys, simply measures those who self-identify as evangelical”
The no-true Scotmans fallacy.
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The No True Scotsman fallacy by is referring to things that are irrelevant to the definition of Scotsman. It is perfectly true that no true scotsman is bereft of ancestral, territorial, and/or cultural connections to the area between Hadrians Wall and the North Atlantic.
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