A Discussion Of The Eye Of The Beholder

Lydia McGrew will be on Cameron Bertuzzi's YouTube channel at 1 P.M. this afternoon to discuss her book, The Eye Of The Beholder (Tampa, Florida: DeWard Publishing, 2021). It argues for the historicity of the fourth gospel. It's a great book, and you can order it here.

There's Always Another Election Just Around The Corner

One of the reasons for the problem I referred to in my post yesterday is that the media, talk radio, and other sources keep treating political issues (and some cultural ones) with such disproportionate urgency. Last year, I wrote some posts about how people don't have enough urgency in religious contexts (here and here). But there's so much more urgency in other contexts, like politics. And the nature of life and our political system is such that there's always going to be another election, another legislative controversy, another court decision just around the corner. We should have urgency about those matters up to a point. But that urgency needs to be less than the urgency we have for religious issues.

One of the questions Evangelicals (and everybody) should ask themselves is how much the work they're concerned about is already being done. How we ought to proportion our work to the work of others is one of the factors we should take into account, yet it's often neglected. People keep giving disproportionately more attention to political and cultural issues that are already getting far more attention than religious issues that are more important. They'd rather be the fifty-millionth person to comment on an issue in presidential politics than be the fifty-thousandth person to comment on a religious issue that's more in need of attention. They'd rather be the thirty-eight-millionth person to comment on the latest racial controversy the media (including the conservative media) are telling them to be so concerned about than be the thirty-eight-thousandth person to comment on a religious issue that's been far more neglected.

It makes sense to discuss more popular and less neglected issues to some extent. Sometimes we can't avoid it even if we wanted to, for example. But we need to be careful about it. Part of being careful about it is to take these proportioning issues into account. And we should recognize how misleading the culture's urgency about politics and other matters can be and often is.

Religion Is Upstream Of Culture

It's true that culture is upstream of politics. But that fact should be supplemented by the more important fact that religion is upstream of culture (e.g., religion is more important; religion has more potential to be influential; religion has been more influential in some significant contexts). Yet, on television, Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, people give far more attention to political issues and non-religious cultural issues than they do to religious ones. That includes the large majority of Evangelicals.