{"id":36856,"date":"2024-03-19T14:12:05","date_gmt":"2024-03-19T21:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=36856"},"modified":"2024-03-19T14:12:05","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T21:12:05","slug":"the-ideology-underneath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/the-ideology-underneath\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ideology Underneath"},"content":{"rendered":"

With American public schools falling behind and an increasing distrust of the public school system, Emma Green, a columnist for The New Yorker<\/em>, spotlights a trend in American education: families are substituting public schools with charter schools that focus on the classics.[1]<\/a> With a foundation of ancient Greek and Roman writers, the pillars of classical education include a commitment to knowable objective truth and the cultivation of virtue.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

An Unavoidable Question<\/strong><\/p>\n

This shift is producing remarkable benefits. However, it is not without its critics. One voice Green highlights is Diane Ravitch, an education activist and scholar. \u201c[Classical charters] have become weapons of the Right as they seek to destroy democratically governed public schools while turning back the clock of education and social progress by a century.\u201d[3]<\/a> It is worth noting that \u201cdemocracy\u201d and \u201csocial progress\u201d are indebted to the thinkers studied as \u201cclassics.\u201d Granted, with classical education\u2019s emphasis on the Western writers of Greece and Rome, there is a lack of balance with non-European thinkers. This is a growth area classical education ought to explore. Nevertheless, there is a question we must face when we heed Ravitch\u2019s critique of classical education utilizing the values of Western culture (such as social progress and democracy). It is the same question we face when contemplating the values passed on as \u201cthe good life,\u201d morality, via classical education. The question is \u201cWho determines the values?\u201d<\/p>\n

What we have is an ideological breakdown. When morality and values are disembedded from an originating, benevolent Creator, we are left with deciding for ourselves what is honorable and good. When I was in graduate school at Talbot Seminary, I had a theology professor tangentially and surprising give statement of intellectual humility: \u201cEveryone\u2019s theology leaks.\u201d By this, he meant we all have theological beliefs that are wobbly. If I can be so bold, this is even more evident in ideologies that are not within the Christian tradition.<\/p>\n

Petrusek’s Evangelization and Ideology<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This is what Matthew Petrusek highlights in his recent book Evangelization and Ideology<\/em>.[4]<\/a> What Petrusek desires for his readers is a robust understanding of the epistemological underpinnings and pitfalls of the most influential ideologies shaping today\u2019s political discourse. Petrusek contends that the contentious and divisive nature of our political conversations presents an opportunity to provide a better story, a more robust and beautiful \u201cideology\u201d of faith: “In ways that may not have been possible in previous decades, when secularization trends were palpable but not yet dominant, the Church has a unique opening to re-enter the sociopolitical fray, re-engage the secular mind, and call the culture back to Christ-provided we can effectively understand and respond to the contemporary ideological battlefield.”[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

Petrusek\u2019s work highlights four influential ideologies of our day: utilitarianism, classical liberalism\/libertarianism, progressivism, and non-theistic conservatism. For the purpose of this blog, I will engage with non-theistic conservatism as it is, in my opinion, the most insidious for the American Church.<\/p>\n

Non-Theistic Conservatism and the Church<\/strong><\/p>\n

Petrusek describes non-theistic conservatism as \u201cAristotelian aristocracy and Lockean hyper-individuality\u201d[6]<\/a>, or, in other words, dependence on privilege and individual economic advancement.[7]<\/a> The Church has become culpable of not only giving in to this ideology, but perpetuating it.[8]<\/a> The Church has not always been an agent of this ideology of non-theistic conservatism masked in \u201cGod\u2019s provision and blessing for hard work.\u201d The early church demonstrated a community that dismissed hierarchy based on means and status. It was a family that has \u201ceverything in common.\u201d[9]<\/a> The Church also elevated the poor, which was a radical in those days (and still so today), and lambasted the sin of greed and covetousness. However, Lesslie Newbigin points out a shift that happened:<\/p>\n

The eighteenth century, by a remarkable inversion, found in covetousness not only a law of nature but the engine of progress by which the purpose of nature and nature’s God was to be carried out. The enormous consequences that have followed from this reversal of traditional values are familiar to us. It has shattered the age-long assumption that the world we inhabit is basically stable and finite and that consequently economics is mainly about the sharing of limited resources. It has shifted the focus of attention from distribution to production. It has made us familiar with the idea of ceaseless and limitless growth, of unending possibilities of increased mastery over nature that provides increased resources of food, materials, and energy. This is a world in which economics is mainly about increasing production, and it is assumed that if everyone pursues his rational self-interest, production will grow and distribution will take care of itself. Two hundred years after the Enlightenment, we live in a world in which millions of people enjoy a standard of material wealth that few kings and queens could have matched then, but in which the gulf between the rich minority and the abjectly poor majority is vast and growing, a world therefore threatened as never before by destructive violence.[10]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reality is our ideology provides a hint at our idolatry. And when one possesses an ideology of market-based aristocracy, the god becomes the market, or fortune.<\/p>\n

This is an invitation for the Church to consider where we have had our hearts entangled with the market, thus causing idolatry. Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, goes from the subject of money to anxiety. \u201cYou cannot serve both God and money.25\u00a0<\/sup><\/strong>Therefore I tell you: Don\u2019t worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Isn\u2019t life more than food and the body more than clothing?\u201d[11]<\/sup><\/a> The anxiety highlights the idolatry. My argument here is not to say those who are diagnosed with a mental health struggle like anxiety just need to “check their idols.” Rather, it is to highlight the connection between what worries us and what our hearts love the most. \u201cFor,\u201d as Jesus says, \u201cwhere your treasure is, there your heart will be also.\u201d[12]<\/a> What if what we treasure gives us a hint at our ideology? And what if, as Petrusek contends, ideology is a critical space for evangelism? But this starts with the Church examining our hearts, repenting of our unconscious (or conscious) ideological allegiance to non-theistic conservatism, and invite people into a better story to live out.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Emma Green, \u201cOld School: Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?” The New Yorker<\/em>, March 11, 2024, 12.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Ibid., 13.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid., 12.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Matthew R. Petrusek, Evangelization and Ideology: How to Understand and Respond to the Political Culture<\/em> (Park Ridge, IL: published by the Word on Fire Institute, an imprint of Word on Fire, 2023).<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid., 3.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Ibid., 372.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> My words summarizing how I understood Petrusek.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a>By \u201cthe Church,\u201d I am speaking of my context of American pre-dominantly white, western Church. To see an in-depth pathway for how this happened, see Jason Paul Clark, “Evangelicalism and Capitalism: A Reparative Account and Diagnosis of Pathogeneses in the Relationship” (2018). Faculty Publications – Portland Seminary. 132. https:\/\/digitalcommons.georgefox.edu\/gfes\/132<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Acts 4:32-37.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture<\/em> (Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 1986), 109-110.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/sup><\/a> Christian <\/em>Standard<\/em> Bible<\/em> (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Mt 6:24\u201325.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Matthew 6:21; Luke 12:34.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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