The Shack — The Missing Art of Evangelical Discernment

By Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

The publishing world sees very few books reach blockbuster status, but William Paul Young’s The Shack has now exceeded even that. The book, originally self-published by Young and two friends, has now sold more than 10 million copies and has been translated into over thirty languages. It is now one of the best-selling paperback books of all time, and its readers are enthusiastic.

According to Young, the book was originally written for his own children. In essence, it can be described as a narrative theodicy — an attempt to answer the question of evil and the character of God by means of a story. In this story, the main character is grieving the brutal kidnapping and murder of his seven-year-old daughter when he receives what turns out to be a summons from God to meet him in the very shack where the man’s daughter had been murdered.

In the shack, “Mack” meets the divine Trinity as “Papa,” an African-American woman; Jesus, a Jewish carpenter; and “Sarayu,” an Asian woman who is revealed to be the Holy Spirit. The book is mainly a series of dialogues between Mack, Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu. Those conversations reveal God to be very different than the God of the Bible. “Papa” is absolutely non-judgmental, and seems most determined to affirm that all humanity is already redeemed.

The theology of The Shack is not incidental to the story. Indeed, at most points the narrative seems mainly to serve as a structure for the dialogues. And the dialogues reveal a theology that is unconventional at best, and undoubtedly heretical in certain respects.

While the literary device of an unconventional “trinity” of divine persons is itself sub-biblical and dangerous, the theological explanations are worse. “Papa” tells Mack of the time when the three persons of the Trinity “spoke ourself into human existence as the Son of God.” Nowhere in the Bible is the Father or the Spirit described as taking on human existence. The Christology of the book is likewise confused. “Papa” tells Mack that, though Jesus is fully God, “he has never drawn upon his nature as God to do anything. He has only lived out of his relationship with me, living in the very same manner that I desire to be in relationship with every human being.” When Jesus healed the blind, “He did so only as a dependent, limited human being trusting in my life and power to be at work within him and through him. Jesus, as a human being, had no power within himself to heal anyone.”

While there is ample theological confusion to unpack there, suffice it to say that the Christian church has struggled for centuries to come to a faithful understanding of the Trinity in order to avoid just this kind of confusion — understanding that the Christian faith is itself at stake.

Jesus tells Mack that he is “the best way any human can relate to Papa or Sarayu.” Not the only way, but merely the best way.

In another chapter, “Papa” corrects Mack’s theology by asserting, “I don’t need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside. It’s not my purpose to punish it; it’s my joy to cure it.” Without doubt, God’s joy is in the atonement accomplished by the Son. Nevertheless, the Bible consistently reveals God to be the holy and righteous Judge, who will indeed punish sinners. The idea that sin is merely “its own punishment” fits the Eastern concept of karma, but not the Christian Gospel.

The relationship of the Father to the Son, revealed in a text like John 17, is rejected in favor of an absolute equality of authority among the persons of the Trinity. “Papa” explains that “we have no concept of final authority among us, only unity.” In one of the most bizarre paragraphs of the book, Jesus tells Mack: “Papa is as much submitted to me as I am to him, or Sarayu to me, or Papa to her. Submission is not about authority and it is not obedience; it is all about relationships of love and respect. In fact, we are submitted to you in the same way.”

The theorized submission of the Trinity to a human being — or to all human beings — is a theological innovation of the most extreme and dangerous sort. The essence of idolatry is self-worship, and this notion of the Trinity submitted (in any sense) to humanity is inescapably idolatrous.

The most controversial aspects of The Shack’s message have revolved around questions of universalism, universal redemption, and ultimate reconciliation. Jesus tells Mack: “Those who love me come from every system that exists. They were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims, Democrats, Republicans and many who don’t vote or are not part of any Sunday morning or religious institutions.” Jesus adds, “I have no desire to make them Christian, but I do want to join them in their transformation into sons and daughters of my Papa, into my brothers and sisters, my Beloved.”

Mack then asks the obvious question — do all roads lead to Christ? Jesus responds, “Most roads don’t lead anywhere. What it does mean is that I will travel any road to find you.”

Given the context, it is impossible not to draw essentially universalistic or inclusivistic conclusions about Young’s meaning. “Papa” chides Mack that he is now reconciled to the whole world. Mack retorts, “The whole world? You mean those who believe in you, right?” “Papa” responds, “The whole world, Mack.”

Put together, all this implies something very close to the doctrine of reconciliation proposed by Karl Barth. And, even as Young’s collaborator Wayne Jacobson has lamented the “self-appointed doctrine police” who have charged the book with teaching ultimate reconciliation, he acknowledges that the first editions of the manuscript were unduly influenced by Young’s “partiality at the time” to ultimate reconciliation — the belief that the cross and resurrection of Christ accomplished then and there a unilateral reconciliation of all sinners (and even all creation) to God.

James B. DeYoung of Western Theological Seminary, a New Testament scholar who has known William Young for years, documents Young’s embrace of a form of “Christian universalism.” The Shack, he concludes, “rests on the foundation of universal reconciliation.”

Even as Wayne Jacobson and others complain of those who identify heresy within The Shack, the fact is that the Christian church has explicitly identified these teachings as just that — heresy. The obvious question is this: How is it that so many evangelical Christians seem to be drawn not only to this story, but to the theology presented in the narrative — a theology at so many points in conflict with evangelical convictions?

Evangelical observers have not been alone in asking this question. Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Timothy Beal of Case Western University argues that the popularity of The Shack suggests that evangelicals might be shifting their theology. He cites the “nonbiblical metaphorical models of God” in the book, as well as its “nonhierarchical” model of the Trinity and, most importantly, “its theology of universal salvation.”

Beal asserts that none of this theology is part of “mainstream evangelical theology,” then explains: “In fact, all three are rooted in liberal and radical academic theological discourse from the 1970s and 80s — work that has profoundly influenced contemporary feminist and liberation theology but, until now, had very little impact on the theological imaginations of nonacademics, especially within the religious mainstream.”

He then asks: “What are these progressive theological ideas doing in this evangelical pulp-fiction phenomenon?” He answers: “Unbeknownst to most of us, they have been present on the liberal margins of evangelical thought for decades.” Now, he explains, The Shack has introduced and popularized these liberal concepts even among mainstream evangelicals.

Timothy Beal cannot be dismissed as a conservative “heresy-hunter.” He is thrilled that these “progressive theological ideas” are now “trickling into popular culture by way of The Shack.”

Similarly, writing at Books & Culture, Katherine Jeffrey concludes that The Shack “offers a postmodern, post-biblical theodicy.” While her main concern is the book’s place “in a Christian literary landscape,” she cannot avoid dealing with its theological message.

In evaluating the book, it must be kept in mind that The Shack is a work of fiction. But it is also a sustained theological argument, and this simply cannot be denied. Any number of notable novels and works of literature have contained aberrant theology, and even heresy. The crucial question is whether the aberrant doctrines are features of the story or the message of the work. When it comes to The Shack, the really troubling fact is that so many readers are drawn to the theological message of the book, and fail to see how it conflicts with the Bible at so many crucial points.

All this reveals a disastrous failure of evangelical discernment. It is hard not to conclude that theological discernment is now a lost art among American evangelicals — and this loss can only lead to theological catastrophe.

The answer is not to ban The Shack or yank it out of the hands of readers. We need not fear books — we must be ready to answer them. We desperately need a theological recovery that can only come from practicing biblical discernment. This will require us to identify the doctrinal dangers of The Shack, to be sure. But our real task is to reacquaint evangelicals with the Bible’s teachings on these very questions and to foster a doctrinal rearmament of Christian believers.

The Shack is a wake-up call for evangelical Christianity. An assessment like that offered by Timothy Beal is telling. The popularity of this book among evangelicals can only be explained by a lack of basic theological knowledge among us — a failure even to understand the Gospel of Christ. The tragedy that evangelicals have lost the art of biblical discernment must be traced to a disastrous loss of biblical knowledge. Discernment cannot survive without doctrine.

On Yoga: A Call for a Christian Imagination

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

A brick may be used in a pagan temple, but then reverently placed in a Christian church. A cave may be used as a stable, but then turned into the birthplace of God. No metaphysical system is safe from plundering by Christianity, because Christianity is afraid of no good idea, object, or word.

The system in which a great work of art is trapped may be corrupt, but we can reinterpret that work and so redeem it for Christ.

Is this process dangerous? Of course, because there is always the danger of being corrupted by the object of redemption before it can be reimagined. What is more dangerous is the cowardice that would leave any good, true, and beautiful thing to the Evil One. We must reclaim everything for King Jesus.

All religions that have lasted for a very long time will contain valuable insights and great ideas. These wise ideas will be deeply embedded in demonic wickedness and vice, but a Christian that engages their culture must work to redeem what is good and not leave it to empower and attract others to evil.

A culture that takes a beautiful mountain and names it for their pagan god does not thereby force us to blow up the mountain. We need to reinterpret the mountain for the people in a way that enfolds their history and insights into the broader story of Christendom.

Christ’s Kingdom makes no colonies, it redeems nations. The nationals of every land reimagine their God given insights to make them part of the Christian story.

We must acknowledge that many good things come to mankind through the common image and grace of God in each human being. Christians of all stripes would never want to hide the truth that some great idea or good thing came from another faith. That is the false path of those Muslims who take Christian churches, turn them into mosques, and then bury the earlier Christian history as if it did not exist.

Better is the acknowledgment of what a thing was and then a joyful description of what it now is.

For example, in the United States of America the art of some city landscapes was often built on materialist or secular assumptions and ignored the needs of human beings. It needs imaginative redemption and artistic reconceptualization.

Such an appropriation of the best of the cityscape cannot be syncretistic, but must condemn the greed and the materialism that sent money makers soaring over cathedral domes. This can be done, however, without tearing down a single beautiful building or covering up their sordid histories. Just as the Narnia stories redeemed the image of Bacchus for generations of children, so better Christian story tellers can redeem the best of the skyscrapers in our cities.

As the King’s College develops in the bosom of the Empire State Building it will perform this deeply Christian task.

As this dangerous work is done, we must listen to the prophets who will warn us of the danger of adopting the evil systems along with the singular ideas and works that we intend to redeem. One such faithful prophet is Al Mohler. The traditional Church must admire his courage in restoring a lost seminary and in reclaiming much that the world was appropriating from us.

Recently, Mohler wrote a courageous post condemning the importation of Yoga into the church. If a blog post was to be judged by its enemies, then Mohler is on the side of the angels. Some people who care nothing for the Bible, doctrine, or even Christian tradition have been livid. They are angry because they measure the worth of an idea only by whether it immediately helps them.

Yoga has done them some good, so it must be all good. This is fallacious, however. A system may be deeply evil, but still make trains run on time or improve education for serfs. Many of Mohler’s critics are wrong, and he is right to warn us: historic Yoga, as practiced for centuries, cannot be brought in totality into a Christian life.

But this does not mean that many insights of Yoga and all that is good in it, and there is some good, cannot be appropriated by the Church.

Mohler lacks imagination in this regard. The man who imagined that Southern could be returned to traditional Christianity should find faithful men and women who can appropriate what is good, true, and beautiful in Yoga and turn it to Christ. It was Christ who gave men of old the insight to do good through Yoga and devils that corrupted that insight into a false religion.

Can Southern purge the evil and bring out the good in Yoga? It is exactly what Christians did with the very notion of the academy when we created the modern university out of what was best of the philosophical academies.

This is normal Christian behavior, as a thought experiment would show.

If Mohler took over a town built by the Bolsheviks, he would not tear down the school buildings just because Stalin built them. He would not dishonor the blood of the enslaved who built those works with their blood by failing to keep them, redeem them, and turn them to their true purpose.

Mohler would never ignore the good done in those buildings, even while utterly damning the system that built them. The schools were not the problem, communism was. He would take those schools and turn them to good works.

In the same way, Christians can and should take the insights of Yoga and turn them to good.

Mohler’s essential argument against Yoga seems to come to three main points: Yoga involves internal meditation, Yoga conflates the spiritual and the physical, and Yoga necessarily implies a non-Christian view of sexuality.

No Christian can oppose meditation per se. We are taught to meditate on the name of Jesus, the Word of God, and His precious inerrant Words in Sacred Scriptures. It is true that no Christian could meditate on meaningless phrases or the names of pagan gods, but meditation itself is not the problem.

It is not hard to find a long Christian tradition of helpful spiritual formation through meditation.

Second, Mohler is no gnostic. He knows that bowing the knee in an attitude of prayer puts the physical symbolically in line with the spiritual in our culture.

Every culture develops physical acts that bring the outer into conformity with the inner reality. Kneeling may be a sign of adoration to Zeus in one place and time, but the problem is not the kneeling, rather with the demon to which men are kneeling. So the positions of Yoga, which are just physical positions after all, need reinterpretation by men and women steeped in the culture that created them, but also deeply Christian.

We need no superficial work, but a reimagining that is true to the original insights of the creators of Yoga while also true to Sacred Scriptures. This work has not been done, so Mohler is right to express prophetic concern about members of the Church who lightly sprinkle the Yoga imagination, but do not baptize it.

To give just one example, if Yoga implies a sub-Christian view of sexuality, then it is bad for a person and ultimately for a culture. Yet Yoga has also helped men and women with sexual dysfunction as well. Can Christians find a way to reinforce the good insight of the basic wholesomeness of sexuality without allowing base and depraved ideas to infect it?

Surely we can.

The genius that could work to reclaim the Baptist convention can also reclaim what is good, true, and beautiful about Yoga. Justin Martyr was right when with confidence he could claim anything worthwhile for Jesus, because those good things came from Jesus at the start. No logos without the Logos.

Most of the online opponents of Mohler would throw holy water on Yoga and bring it into the Church. This light and careless attitude is destructive to the Faith. It is bound to lead to syncretism and the destruction of the Church. That is the path of the Episcopal Church in the United States and it is best labeled “Ichabod.”

But shunning Yoga is not the best idea for Christian academics. Instead, with pastoral oversight, we must find what the Logos initially said to the wise, which demons turned to folly in the unregenerate sages.

As for me and my house, against all attacks, we will serve the Lord God. If an idol must be destroyed, we will get an axe, but we will also save what can be saved and appropriate what can be redeemed.

This house is afraid of nothing that is good, true, and beautiful. It is easy to imagine Yoga dying, because Christianity has enfolded all that is good in Yoga within the embrace of its true home. May some Indian genius do this very task.

On Hell or: is Plato There?

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Americans are much less sure of the existence of Hell than of Heaven. Hopefully this is because they have had such glimpses of the Divine that Hell seem fuzzy to them. There seems, however, some chance that it is because they have become too nice to believe anyone is in Hell.

In chatting with regular folk, not the sort that teach at colleges, often one only need mention Hitler to convince them that someone must be in Hell. Do we really want to ruin Paradise by potentially having Adolph (and Eva!) as neighbors?

This argument might be effective, but it is not an argument Christians can use. Called to love even our enemies, we know somebody is in Hell, but really shouldn’t root for any particular person to be there. With the exception of Judas, Christians don’t know that anybody is there for sure. It is none of our business and given the nature of Hell there is something inappropriate for wishing for a specific man to go there.

If this is so, then why do Christians believe in Hell?

First, God told us Hell exists and He is in a position to know. You might not want a place to exist, for example Cleveland, but you might be reliably informed it does exist. God told us Hell exists in the Bible and that some humans will be thrown into it, so we accept this as a given.

Second, wicked actions deserve punishment. Hell exists to punish sin that has not been forgiven. Justice demands that if you want the benefits of freedom, you should be willing to pay the price. We have been warned that certain deeds are wicked and are happy to enjoy what pleasures come with them, so we shouldn’t complain too hard when the bill comes due.

Some argue that it is unjust that the pleasures of sin are so short and the wages so long, but this seems a mistake. Sin is a bad deal, but God has done all He could to warn us against making such a deal. God insists on treating us as if our decisions mattered and of course if He did not do so, then people would complain about this!

If we don’t wish eternal torment, we need merely avoid doing the things that will lead to eternal torment.

Given the way humans are, though, we seem very apt to sin . . . to do one of the things that deserve punishment. Is it fair that sin is so easy to commit? It is certainly not fair, but it is the result of our inherited nature. We are not born as a blank-slate; all of us inherit traits or tendencies from our parents. One such trait is settling for what we want instead of what we should want. We settle for passion when we could have true love.

Even a small crime warps the soul of a man further and no warped thing can enter into the Kingdom of God. God is not willing to ruin the perfection and joy of Heaven by ignoring our self-created stench.

This is tough, but that is the way it is. This is why God cannot merely “forget about” our sins. We are broken and we would go on being broken if He did nothing about it. He simply could smite us and start over again, but He loves us and would save all He can of the good work He made in the beginning.

We must be “born again” . . . which will include the “legal” acquittal for our sins, but also will result in the Word of God coming inside us and changing us. The best analogy to the process is being “born again” so that we can start over with a new parent (God) and a new family (God’s church).

God suffered in order to make a way for man to enter this relationship. God came and became fully human; He did not just put on a skin suit like Zeus or the pagan gods. He lived out a perfect life, but then allowed us to kill Him. The God-man could die as a man, but God-man could not stay dead. He came back to life and created a new set of possibilities.

Men and women are separated from God by their actions and their heritage. God will forgive their actions and give them a new spiritual heritage.

When younger, I worried often about those who never got a chance to experience this new relationship. Wisdom finally taught me that I did not know any such people exist. The hypothetical “person who never heard in x” (insert the distant land of your choice for “x”) is a speculative proposition. Name one. Who is that person? What ideas did they hear? What was revealed to them in their dreams? What happens to a man or woman at the moment of their death? I don’t know for sure, but for all I do know all are given a chance to see clearly and to choose wisely.

Given the charity of God, there is no reason to assume that any man is not given a choice. They cannot hear without a preacher, but if those of us who know the truth fail them, there is no reason God cannot preach His own sermon or allow His holy angels to do so.

What of those who lived before the coming of the Christ?

Christians believe that the dead before Christ confronted Christ when He died and the faith of some saved them. This was certainly true of Abraham. What of those not under God’s covenant with Abraham? What of the noble pagans like Plato?

There the mind of the Church has been divided. Scripture says nothing for certain, but there are two big ideas to keep in mind. First, God desires that nobody should perish eternally. Second, some people will perish eternally and those people will perish in punishment for their sins and because they are unfit for Heaven.

Plato cannot go to Heaven simply because he was better than most. Paradise is not gained on a curve. The joys of Heaven are too awesome for us if we have not been changed. The beauty of Heaven would burn us as surely as the fires of Hell, and be unfitting on top of it, if we remained the little souls that dabble in the “pleasures” of sin in this life.

Could Plato have been born again before the coming of Christ?

Justin Martyr put Plato in Heaven, because Plato loved the Word and lived before the Incarnation. He walked in all the light he had been given. Dante put Plato in Hell, because Plato had never been changed from the inside through baptism. If a man is not born again, then he is not fit for Paradise.

Who is right?

A charitable man roots for Justin, but a thoughtful man suspects that Dante is correct. Why?

It is faith and an appeal for mercy that will save us, but Plato may be too sure that his works will be enough. In Republic he accepts that there must be punishment for evil, and even eternal punishment for some badly broken souls, but he does not think his soul is that badly broken.

We are badly defaced, monstrous, according to Plato, but he hopes the dialectic might save us from doom. Sadly, there is not time enough and even following the Word as closely as possible cannot fix the rot. It goes too deeply.

But perhaps, just perhaps, the end of the Republic indicates that Plato knows this. He appeals to religion and myth in the end and might (if one reading of the text is followed) combine a hope in God with the dialectic. If so, then Plato may have seen what needs to been seen: we need mercy and not just good works.

In any case, Plato is where he is and my worry about him may be a false one. It might distract me from working out my own sanctification with fear and trembling. Plato will stand before the judgment seat of Christ, but so will I. I can do nothing for Plato, but I must realize that my problems, my sin, goes so deep that I can do nothing that matters for me.

I fear Hell. I fear separation from all that is good, true, and beautiful. I fear the end of the dialectic in the static narcissism that is the fate of the damned. I would not lose the good of the intellect for the glories of this present age.

I must daily pray: Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.

Pluralism?

By Gregory Koukl
Stand to Reason

One of us must be wrong, at bare minimum. Maybe we both are. But one thing that we can never say is that we're both right.

I want to continue to pursue this concept of pluralism. Triggered by a comment made last week: "They may not believe in Jesus, but they love God and serve God with all of their hearts. They love God. You love God. How can you say one is wrong and the other is right?"

This kind of comment is so common and, on the surface, so reasonable, that to question it immediately brands you as some kind of religious fanatic, someone so blinded by his narrow-minded convictions that he has no tolerance for other's beliefs.

Now here is the hitch in the new pluralism. Tolerance used to mean that everyone has a right to their beliefs. It doesn't mean that anymore, because all of these Christians who are considered intolerant still believe, as far as I can tell, that everyone has a legitimate right to his own beliefs.

No, the new pluralism demands that you must not say that anyone else's belief is inferior or, worse yet, flatly mistaken. To say someone is wrong is to be intolerant, to be close-minded and provincial, to be extreme and is impossible to reason with.

How can I say one person's view is wrong and the other is right? Very easily. Precisely because reason and rationality demand it. Here's what I mean.

I'm praying to God who is Jesus. They're praying to God who isn't Jesus. God can't be Jesus and not be Jesus at the same time. therefore, we both can't be praying to, loving, or worshipping God. One of us must be wrong, at bare minimum. Maybe we both are. But one thing that we can never say is that we're both right, that we're both worshipping God.

This underscores the irrationality of this kind of pluralism, an irrationality that is based, I think, on an errant understanding of what it means for something to be true.

To many, the concept of truth is deep, esoteric and indefinable. Let me give you a definition in one syllables. It's from Aristotle, I think. If you say "It is," and it is, or "It is not," and it is not, then you speak truth. If you say "It is," and it is not, or "It is not," and it is, then you don't speak truth. This is called correspondence, in other words, a thing is true if and only if it actually corresponds to what is really there. Truth, therefore is not determined by opinion or belief. Believing something to be so doesn't make it so. It is not true merely to me. It might be true to me and still entirely false.

By the way, in saying this I am making what I'd consider a critical distinction between fantasy and reality. When someone starts talking about what God is to them, they're talking about their fantasy. I'm not really interested in fantasy; I want to know what truly is.

This is so fundamental it should go completely without saying, but nowadays our thinking is so befuddled and cock-eyed about fundamental issues that people can merely voice their beliefs and think it ends the discussion. If believing something makes it true, then there's nothing more to talk about. And persistence in the issue violates pluralism because you're implying that your view is better than someone else's.

But because another's beliefs may differ doesn't need to mean that discussion is at a standstill. Beliefs may be equally valid in that they are consciously held by sincere people, but they can't be equally true if they are contrary beliefs.

How do we get past the impasse? How do we determine whose view is the right one/ The same way men and women of sound mind and judgment have done for thousands of years: with reason and revelation.

If everyone's opinion was equally true, there would be no point to the art of persuasion. I'd have no place in the marketplace of ideas trying to reason with people, if all beliefs were equally true, and neither would you. There would be no meaningful discourse to have on issues. We'd all just state our opinions and beliefs, nod, smile, and then go home, none the wiser.

The reason that we discuss, debate, banter about is that some beliefs are better than others, in other words they're more worthy of belief, they are more sensible, they are more sound, more credible, more noble, more moral, more right, more true.

Therefore, those with bad beliefs (that is, unsound beliefs) are not merely different, they are wrong; and we should not be squeamish about that kind of language.

Friends, I'm not trying to persuade you of a particular religious point of view; I'm trying to get you to think of ultimate issues and ultimate questions in a particular way .

Why is this important? If a person is persuaded that belief doesn't make something true, then maybe he will employ himself in finding out what is true , not merely in waste time fabricating opinion.

At least, that's the way I see it.

Trivia Kings, But Bad Thinkers: Understanding Over Facts

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

As a boutique belief system in the United States, atheism has a good many advantages. There are so few atheists and agnostics that they do not run all the risks of a populist movement. Not for them is the burden of dealing with the masses of a global population, their idiosyncrasies, worries and all.

Since Christians make up three-quarters or more of the American general population, we have the burden of accounting for almost everybody’s problems. Sadly, we are much less well represented in elite education, media, and government. This is not because religion is incompatible with elite education, but because “skepticism” about religion has become a sociological way for the elite to mark themselves off from the rest of us. In this sense, anti-religion (and in particularly anti-Catholicism) serves the same function that joining the “right” church used to serve in another era.

The secular elite have provided most of us with wretched religious education by all but banning it as a topic for serious enquiry or discussion. Meanwhile, they know just enough about religion to get some “facts” right on a pop-religion quiz, but have no grasp on why, despite all temptations, some thoughtful folk remain religious. They know some of the lyrics of religion, but cannot hear the music.

You might blame Christian education in churches for this problem, except a culture of entertainment has reduced most Americans ability to tolerate difficult discussions. Pity the pastor, with seminary training in ancient languages and a carefully constructed sermon, who must face a congregation taught by television to anticipate education with Muppets and Katy Perry.

The rise of fundamentalist sects of religion may have more to do with this culture of entertainment than anything else. The kind of religion hucksters sell on television in the same time slot as quack diets is offered as religious as entertainment.

If atheism ever catches on, you can be sure that it too will suffer from hucksters and cultural deprivations. Google the music of atheist Dan Barker to see what the future may hold if atheism gets big enough in the general population to get some of the ills they have foisted on us.

On the ground, government school teachers also are shackled by the same dulled students. Too much entertainment has made many students like the burned characters in an Oscar Wilde play without any of the wit. For that reason, most of us who teach rejoice in any student who challenges anything. As the default belief of American history, the cause of theism is supplied with students who affirm belief in a Creator, but are oft too numbed by cultural ugliness to grasp the beautiful idea that He has “endowed them with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Nor is it that serious intellectual endeavor and Christianity are incompatible. Safe to say few of us outthink Jonathan Edwards, let alone contemporary religious scholars such as Alvin Plantinga and Francis Collins.

Serious Christians do exist. I visit many churches where regular folk are carefully reading great books and wrestling with great ideas, but this activity is not encouraged in the broader culture.

Weirdly, Christians must clean up the mess of broader culture, but we have had little power to create pop culture in the last fifty years. The poor and the disadvantaged are always the first to bear the brunt of bad cultural ideas and only the religious remain on the ground to try to help. Christians, for example, try to keep people from doing the things that get men sent to prison, but then work hard to help prisoners once people fail.

In this sense it is easier to be an agnostic or atheist. You have rejected the mainstream of American history, which means you don’t have to take responsibility for its failures, though you can appropriate its successes.

In my experience an atheist or agnostic is mostly a Bible Baptist looking for social mobility, a function the Episcopal Church used to play before theological liberalism made it too nineteenth-century to take seriously in the twenty-first. If you want someone to provide intellectual uplift to Appalachia or to the inner cities, you are going to have to look to a graduate of Al Mohler’s seminary, because the “skeptics” will have all moved to gated enclaves where the only theist that will clutter their conversational space will be the man cutting their grass.

To their credit, secularists have rejected something, and this generally means knowing something about what one has rejected. This is true, if by “knowing something” one means getting quiz show questions right—not understanding.

Pew has released a study that shows if the average atheist and the average theist appear on religious Jeopardy, the theist is in trouble. However, wisdom and understanding are different from “just the facts.” It is good to know facts, but that doesn’t mean you get it.

Every year I have students who can tell me many of the details of the Republic, but cannot read a dialogue as a dialogue. They are worse than useless in any discussion, because once they have given us a Wikipedia overview of the text, they have nothing left to say. They have memorized an opinion (“Meno is about recollection. Recollection is an epistemological view that . . . “) and nobody is going to get them off topic. If you want to win Platonic Trivial Pursuit, they are your man, but if you want to understand Plato they are quickly left behind.

My experience is that “street level” atheism is often just this way. At some point, usually in junior high, the street level atheist sees intellectual problems in his childhood faith or the “hypocrisy” in the church. These problems, sadly, get no real answers and it does not occur to the young person that any group that upholds any standard will attract hypocritical behavior.

The budding secularist gets the delightful feeling of intellectual superiority and then does a Google to discover the fabulous world of Internet atheism! When you combine this new found sense of being an “insider” with relief that all those nasty religious demands to love the weak and to moderate one’s desires can be dismissed, you have a powerful force in anybody’s life. At this point, even exposure to the religious intellectual tradition will not help, as the trajectory has been set.

Of course, there is a wholly different secular tradition that came to atheism and agnosticism after hard work and thought. They might not believe in God, but they understand why some of their colleagues do. They get what is good about religion as well as its difficulties. These secular voices are too often drowned out by the bleats of Dawkins and the Internet atheists.

What should be done?

First, Americans must recognize that nothing has been done to us that we have not allowed. We must reject being entertained and demand to be educated. When television personalities like Glenn Beck sell tens of thousands of serious books by authors such as Hayek, I am more hopeful.

Second, religious Americans must reject the temptation to retreat into a comforting anti-intellectualism. For Christians at least, we are called to live by faith and faith is intellectual. It is not merely intellectual, it is driven by love, but head and heart can never be separated.

Third, we must demand that our government schools teach religion, not just the “facts” but with understanding. Wisdom will only come when we recognize why billions of the world’s people believe what they do. This means that majority Christians must also accept charitable expositions of other faiths. When the state of Texas demands less coverage of Islam this is a bad step.

We must do unto others as we would have them do to us. We must allow students to read books that come from different traditions, from atheism to paganism. The intellectual growth that will result will not be the sort that can be captured in a fill-in-the-blanks or multiple choice exam. Instead, we are going to have to support government school budgets that to allow for small discussion classes that can produce a deeper understanding of important ideas.

Ignorance about things vital to our fellow citizens is harmful to the Republic.

For example, one of the most influential books first published by an American is the Book of Mormon. It appears in almost no American government school curriculum, though it exercises a global influence and impacts the lives of millions of Americans. This is foolish. I am, to say the least, no Mormon partisan, but there are entire states in our nation that cannot be understood without some grounding in Mormon thought.

How many American college graduates have a more charitable comprehension of the indigenous culture of Paris than of Salt Lake City? Mormon Utah can only wish it were treated as gently as “other cultures” are in a politically correct curriculum.

Finally, Christians, the vast majority of the population, should demand that their churches do more intellectual work. Most pastors would be eager to teach more doctrine, if they thought their congregants would tolerate it. We must make sure they know we will not tolerate the Church worshipping at the altar of the entertainment idol.

The Pew Study demonstrates that facts are not enough. We need people that know the facts, but also know the meaning those facts have. All of us must recognize that the meaning we give “the facts” has been and will be challenged by other well informed citizens.

Last night hundreds of regular Evangelical people took precious free time to come to a university to hear a first-rate theologian, Fred Sanders, teach from his magnificent new book on the Trinity. Daily Sanders moves his high level scholarship into the pews and eventually this work with show up in surveys from Pew. Fred Sanders and the ministries springing up all over America like his prove there is a hunger for religious knowledge and this gives me hope for the coming generation.

They will be capable of winning Trivial Pursuit, but too busy pursuing wisdom to play.