Total Truth

I am currently rereading a powerful and provocative book by Nancy Pearcey called Total Truth (2004). It's a book that deserves at least two readings because it discusses the split between the sacred and the secular in today's society—a major problem. Does God belong in the public square in areas of politics, business, law, and education? Or is religion strictly a private matter? Secular thinkers have ruled Christian principles out of bounds in the public arena. According to Pearcey, we need to unify our fragmented lives and understand there is such a thing as total truth that applies all across society, not just in religious matters.. This is a worldview book, dealing with the importance of how we see and understand the world. In the next few blogs, I would like to mention some of the highlights of this book.

She says the first step to form a Christian worldview is to overcome a sharp divide in our society between the public and private. We are told there is a public sphere which is scientific and value-free. It is made up of facts and scientific knowledge. It is rational and verifiable. It is objective and universally valid. Then we are told that there is a private sphere made up of personal preferences, values, individual choices that are full of subjective feelings. It’s nonrational and noncognitive. This divide is the single most potent weapon to delegitimize the biblical perspective in the public square today. Most secularists consign religion to the value sphere, treating it as if it has no relevance to the public realm.

Pearcey believes Christians have to find a way to overcome this dichotomy. She turns to a classic book called The Christian Mind by Harry Blamires, in which the author claimed there is no longer a Christian mind. He meant there was no shared, biblically based set of assumptions on subjects like law, education, economics, politics, science, or the arts. Christians follow the Bible and pray, but outside of church they succumb to secularism. We need to understand that Christianity gives truth about the whole of reality. She warns of a particular danger here -- if Christians do not consciously develop a biblical approach to all aspects of their lives, they will unconsciously absorb some other philosophical approaches.

Pearcey offers three examples of how Christians need to influence their culture based on a worldview that sees the value of Christianity in all aspects of life. Her first case involves the way Christians are taking over philosophy departments and universities across the country. Why is this happening? Largely because of the work of one Christian philosopher – Alvin Plantinga. He writes well and has shown that Christians are capable of using their work to influence society, in this case academia. Another example is the work of David Larson, who turned around the medical community on the subject of religion and health. His studies found that religious beliefs actually correlate with better mental health, in contrast to Freud, who had said belief in God was a neurosis. The final example is Marvin Olasky, a former Marxist who analyzed American welfare policy. He discovered that churches didn't just hand out money to the poor. Instead, they helped people change their lives, focusing on job training and education. Churches required that the poor do some useful work, giving them a chance to rebuild their dignity by making a worthwhile contribution to society. On the other hand, government aid to the poor actually makes things worse by rewarding antisocial and dysfunctional patterns. It was Olasky who came up with the term "compassionate conservatism." This concept resonated with George W. Bush, who attempted to make changes in dealing with the poor based on this concept. So these three examples illustrate the way people's Christian beliefs can go beyond the private realm to make positive changes in the public sphere.