Christians don’t “do” faith in a corner.
A guest post by Stephen Rankin, PhD, head of the Spiritual Maturity Project
“Indeed the king knows about these things … for I am certain that none of these things has escaped his notice, for this was not done in a corner.” This announcement (Acts 26:26) from the Apostle Paul to King Agrippa just before Paul sails for Rome gives us something very important to consider as we think about Christian witness in the twenty-first century.
The world’s dominant intellectual values relegate distinctively Christian thought about public matters to the domain of the private. In other words, Christians are free to think and believe virtually anything they wish, so long as they don’t try to insinuate those beliefs into public discussions. Christians should stand firm against this prejudice. The Christian faith brings rich intellectual resources to public conversations about the common good.
Photo by JACQUELINE BRANDWAYN on Unsplash
I spent twenty-five years working in higher education and saw how the bias that separates faith and knowledge preempts many potentially fruitful conversations. It certainly truncates students’ educational experiences. Two examples help us understand how the bias works.
The late Jean Bethke Elshtain, a prominent Christian ethicist, reflecting on how she (temporarily) jettisoned her faith during her graduate school experience, used the illuminating term “sensibilities” to describe the intellectual environment in which she studied. She dropped her faith not because her faculty mentors openly attacked it. Rather, they simply ignored the great Christian intellectual tradition, and she began to do the same, gathering from her environment that her faith was intellectually inconsequential. Again, not hostility, but disinterest. Elshtain eventually realized that this sensibility—an unreflective assumption that seems just to go with academic culture—hid from her view ample and important resources that related exactly to her intellectual interests.
A second example comes from a 2007 survey of college and university professors by the Institute for Jewish & Community Research. They discovered that less than half (45% to be precise) of all faculty, including self-identified Christian faculty, believed that “a strong religious background is necessary for developing strong moral character.” We need to grasp this point. A significant percentage of Christian faculty think that a strong moral foundation for life can be formed quite apart from religious faith. The word “sensibility” applies here too. In my own experience, the large majority of faculty were not hostile to religion, not at all. It is more often the case that they are apprehensive about the risks of conflict and acrimony assumed always to lurk around faith discussions in public. And there is plenty of evidence to justify that concern.
Squelching or avoiding conversations that involve religious—and specifically Christian—faith is ultimately fruitless. It is impossible to keep faith-based convictions out of important public conversations. While we understand that gone are the days when Christians could assume a shared Christian language to discuss public matters, this admission does absolutely nothing to blunt the mandate that we engage them in full view of the robust intellectual resources rooted in the Gospel. It means, then, that more of us need to acquaint ourselves with the intellectual resources of our faith. The work is too important to leave only to experts.
It has been said many times that the world we now inhabit is much like the world Paul inhabited. We should take his lead. Christians do not “do” their faith in a corner. Jesus’ story and all that it proclaims is a very public one. May we all learn to be more appropriately public in our bearing witness to it.
