Photo: Abdu Murray (Center) with me and my wife Pauline.
Increasingly, Western culture embraces confusion as a virtue and decries certainty as a sin. Those who are confused about sexuality and identity are viewed as heroes. Those who are confused about morality are progressive pioneers. Those who are confused about spirituality are praised as tolerant. Conversely, those who express certainty about any of these issues are seen as bigoted, oppressive, arrogant, or intolerant.
This cultural phenomenon led the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary to name “post-truth” their word of the year in 2016. How can Christians offer truth and clarity to a world that shuns both?
By accurately describing the Culture of Confusion and how it has affected our society, author Abdu Murray seeks to awaken Westerners to the plight we find ourselves in. He also challenges Christians to consider how they have played a part in fostering the Culture of Confusion through bad arguments, unwise labeling, and emotional attacks.
Ultimately, Saving Truth provides arguments from a Christian perspective for the foundations of truth and how those foundations apply to sexuality, identity, morality, and spirituality. For those enmeshed in the culture of confusion, the book offers a way to untangle oneself and find hope in the clarity that Christ offers.
NOW SEE SUMMARY OF BOOK BY JORGE REYNARDUS:
Saving Truth: Finding Meaning & Clarity in a Post Truth World (Abdu Murray)
According to Oxford Dictionaries, post-truth means “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
We don’t look to facts to find out the truth. We look at editorialized facts to support our preferences.
“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end,” C. S. Lewis wrote. “But if you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth—only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.”
The answers to life’s questions no longer need to correspond to reality. They need only cater to our desires.
In the full context, we see that Jesus is saying that when we judge, it is to be for the improvement of others, not their condemnation.
The post-truth Culture of Confusion elevates preferences and feelings over facts and truth. holding each questioner’s dignity as sacrosanct.
“On the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Matthew 12:36–37 NRSV). Those should be soul-shuddering words for followers of Christ. Words are meant to convey truth and bring life, not peddle falsehood or foster pain. That’s why God judges careless words so severely. In Christ, God himself is the Word made flesh (John 1:1, 14). If Christians are his ambassadors, then they are called to carefully choose their words. Do our words convey truth? Do they convey life? Only then will our words be wise and clear in a Culture of Confusion.
The post-truth Culture of Confusion is angry at Christians and rejects the message we carry. We must honestly assess our part in perpetuating the confusion and fomenting the anger. Centuries after Solomon, the apostle Paul wrote that when Christians encounter non-Christians, we are to be wise. “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt,” Paul tells us, “so that you may know how you ought to answer each person” (Col. 4:6). Notice that Paul didn’t say that we are to answer each question, challenge, controversy, or political issue. We are to answer people. Questions and controversies don’t need answers. People do.
Confusing Autonomy for Freedom
The current climate, in which people are forcibly prevented from sharing ideas, has arisen because we have mistaken autonomy for freedom. They are related but different concepts. In a post-truth culture, where preferences and opinions are elevated over facts and truth, anything that challenges our preferences, even if a challenge is laced with facts, is deemed offensive and oppressive. How dare someone disagree with my preferences or opinions? Isn’t freedom found in being able to fully express one’s preferences and opinions without challenge? Western freedom is all about the ability to do, feel, and say whatever we want so long as we don’t hurt someone else, isn’t it? Even if we do hurt someone else, it’s only because that someone else isn’t affirming our preferences. And that person is an oppressor anyway. If oppressors get hurt in the process, well, they had it coming. Freedom must have no bounds. Not even reality will be our boundary. But what I’ve just described isn’t freedom—it’s autonomy. While we typically understand freedom to be the power to exercise choice without constraint, as we’ll soon see, freedom becomes chaotic in a system without constraint. Freedom operates at its best within the confines of the truth. Boundaries are foreign to pure autonomy, which means that truth is being sacrificed on autonomy’s altar. The word autonomy is comprised of two root words from Greek. The first root word is autos, meaning “self,” and the second is nomos, meaning “law.” Someone is autonomous if he is a law unto himself. And the pursuit of autonomy—not freedom—is what we are seeing today. I would argue that the pursuit of autonomy is the root of the post-truth mindset that fuels the Culture of Confusion. We have been pursuing autonomy since the beginning of our race. Adam and Eve sought autonomy from God. They sought to transcend the purpose for which they were made so that they could be the definers of their own purpose. We continue that pursuit today. What is the natural result of the unfettered autonomy we seek? Everything becomes subject to our personal preferences, even our pursuit of truth. Jens Zimmermann points out that “we approach knowledge the way teenagers approach parental
authority: ‘no one tell me what to think.’ . . . Consequently, we lump together tradition, Authority and indoctrination, equate them with coercion and reject any intrusion on the pure slate of our autonomous minds.”1 If each of our personal preferences is celebrated without truth as our guide, if we are all “laws unto ourselves,” confusion is inevitable. When my law unto myself conflicts with another’s law unto himself, what can arbitrate between us if not truth? When truth is sacrificed as the burnt offering on the altar of autonomy, the resultant smoke chokes the breath out of freedom. Only chaos remains, which ultimately leads to bondage.
The 1st Sacrifice: Our Ability to Reason
The initial detritus that falls next to the altar of autonomy is our ability to think and act clearly and wisely.
feeling-driven irrationality
decay of reasoning / post-truth culture.
But when the same students’ preferences to avoid anything offensive clashed with the right to free expression, reason and truth no longer guided the discussions.
culture where autonomous preferences and feelings prevail over facts,
How can reason survive in such a climate? When we vaunt feelings over facts in our quest for autonomy, reason dies. One is reminded of the words of Thomas Sowell: “The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read or even that Johnny can’t think. It’s that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is. He’s confused it with feeling.”
But at the University of Washington, students affirmed a white man’s self-identification as a young Chinese girl. It should seem obvious that identifying as a person from a completely different ethnicity appropriates far more of a culture than wearing a Halloween costume. Yet the former was affirmed and the latter vilified. Why? Because the magic words “I identify” preceded an outrageous claim, thereby rendering the appropriation inoffensive.
The whole enterprise of self-identification has become arbitrary—especially given that religion is a matter of personal choice that transcends sex, race, ethnicity, and geography.
illogical schizophrenia that underlies our autonomy-obsessed Culture of Confusion.
Indeed, de-gendering language is actually ethnocentric and imperialistic. While English may not be gender based, many other languages of the world are.
And what about the poetry, prose, and other contributions of these languages? In poetry, artistic expressions may depend on the use of feminine or masculine word forms to rhyme or even make sense. This may seem easy for Western English speakers for whom there isn’t a linguistic masculine/feminine distinction. But reconfiguring gender foists upon other cultures something they would find eviscerating. What could be more imperialistic than our society’s autonomy dominating another’s?
The 2nd Sacrifice: Our Moral Accountability
“Man is the measure of all things,” Protagoras
Tom Flynn, “Through a process of value inquiry informed by scientific and reflective thought, men and women can reach rough agreement concerning values, crafting ethical systems that deliver optimal results for human beings in a broad spectrum of circumstances (emphasis mine).
When humanity is the measure of all things, what isn’t permissible anymore? It was Ivan, in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, who said, “Without God . . . everything is permitted.”
When autonomous self-sovereignties clash, reasonless power can be the only arbiter.
When animals collide in nature, power is what decides. But when human autonomies collide with no sense of accountability, the kind of power that can annihilate entire societies decides. Yet here we are now, in a world where practically anything is permissible except the idea that some things shouldn’t be.
The 3rd Sacrifice: Our Sense of Human Value
When we become laws unto ourselves and become the measure of all things, then we determine which humans are valuable and which ones are not. Certain philosophers with the highest academic credentials write with steady pens and argue with straight faces that certain homo sapiens simply aren’t intrinsically valuable. Peter Singer espouses a utilitarian philosophy that says what is “good” is that which benefits the largest number of people, and what is “bad” is that which unnecessarily harms people. And yet Singer argues that human babies—after they have been born—can be killed by their parents.
Those babies, Singer argues, are not really persons because they lack the mental capacity to value themselves. The parents, on the other hand, have the capacity to assign value to the baby. So, if the parents don’t value the baby or find that caring for the baby imposes a hardship on them, then the baby has no value and can be disposed of.
Singer’s conclusion is that “membership of the species Homo sapiens is not enough to confer a right to life.”
In our confused quest to elevate ourselves to deities, we actually have become devils. We’ve commoditized the most vulnerable members of our species and consumed them as a kind of burnt offering to self-appeasement.
What’s the difference between killing a baby that causes me discomfort and letting a suffering adult die for the same reason? Singer may respond that poverty-stricken people are true “persons” because they have the cognitive ability to value themselves. But that distinction is arbitrary. If cognitive ability is the marker for human value, then those who don’t meet that arbitrary threshold would have no value. Less self-aware people would have less value. The less intelligent would have less value. Because cognitive awareness is notoriously difficult to measure, who would get to decide who has value and who doesn’t? Again, we’re back to the law of the jungle where animals eat the weak among their offspring. Only we don’t eat them. We put them in a medical waste receptacle.
The Ironic Sacrifice: Losing Our Freedom in the Quest for Autonomy
When autonomy robs us of our reason, our accountability, and our value for individuals, we become desperate for deliverance from the chaos. But with our reason atrophied and our value for each other diminished, it will be easy for a charismatic and powerful individual, or perhaps a group of them, to start undermining some people’s freedoms to serve other people’s autonomy. That may sound farfetched, but it is already happening in our day.
Confusing freedom with autonomy has enslaved our rational minds and our moral senses. And soon it may enslave us altogether.
Not So Out of Touch After All This pursuit of autonomy drives increasingly ferocious attacks against the Bible as the standard for truth and conduct. Many oppose the Scriptures as an outmoded method of control that arbitrarily suppresses human behavior. This stems from the failure to see the differences between unfettered individual autonomy and true freedom. They are not the same. The Bible opposes the former and champions the latter. Lest we think the Bible is too outdated a document to lift us out of our contemporary mindset, let’s consider some biblical examples that speak directly to our contemporary climate.
“In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes”
(1 Samuel 8:4–6). As the Bible puts it, this was a rejection not of the judges and prophets who had guided Israel, but of God himself as the determiner of what is good and valuable (vv. 8–9). It was disastrous. With limited exceptions, the successive kings were wicked despots, guided by their own autonomy. The people did not seek to root out bad leaders with truth, facts, and moral reasoning. Kings seized power through treachery, lies, and murder. It was chaos. Bad leaders were supplanted by equally, if not more, corrupt leaders because truth was no longer the arbiter of human conduct.
History’s most influential person expressly binds freedom to the limits of truth. “You will know the truth,” Jesus says, “and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). Jesus repudiates the post-truth Culture of Confusion’s mindset that refuses to tether freedom to truth.
Freedom to pursue the truth comes only when we recognize that there is an objective truth out there for us to freely pursue. According to Jesus, truth and freedom are always linked. Any attempt to separate them diminishes our ability to enjoy either.
The primer for starting this cycle in the first place is recognizing that there are objective truths that don’t depend on the opinions or preferences we so highly exalt today.
Jesus claims to be the very truth that sets us free. Notice that he doesn’t claim to have the truth that sets us free. He claims to be the truth that sets us free.
Defining Freedom
To help us, Guinness points to Isaiah Berlin’s definitions of negative freedom and positive freedom. According to Berlin, negative freedom is the “freedom from—in essence, freedom from interference and constraint.”2 This is what we typically think of when we think of freedom. And that facet of freedom, on its own, dangerously resembles the sheer autonomy that leads to chaos. What’s needed in addition to negative freedom is positive freedom, which is “freedom for—in essence, freedom for excellence according to whatever vision and ideals define that excellence.”3 Negative freedom and positive freedom go hand in hand. We need freedom from unnecessary restraints and interference so that we can exercise freedom for acting in the interests of the greater ideal. That ideal operates as a self-imposed restraint, keeping us from abusing our negative freedom. In other words,
positive freedom is the ability to do not just what we want, but what we should.
Objective moral truth is, therefore, critical to positive freedom and thus critical to freedom as a whole. That’s why Jesus binds truth and freedom together.
Mere freedom from restraint doesn’t encourage us to engage in the great quests to better society or to help others. Simply put, focusing on freedom from restraint encourages a sort of narcissistic preoccupation on the self and the fulfillment of our private desires. That kind of shallow freedom doesn’t inspire us to do what is best for others or to act in the interests of the common good. We may think we are serving the common good when we champion the freedom of others to do whatever they want, but we’re really just thinking inwardly, trying to prevent others from imposing restraints on what we want to do. In fact, it’s gone further than that. In our obsession with negative freedom, we no longer want the ability to do whatever we want without restraint, we want the ability to be whatever we want without restraint.
Positive freedom to pursue true ideals gave birth to the great movements that restored negative freedom to the disenfranchised and abused.
How gruesomely ironic it is that our one-sided idolization of negative freedom has turned us into the land of the free and the home of the addicted.
Freedom Bound
Single-sided freedom is ultimately meaningless. The paradox we have to wrestle with is that freedom, to be truly life- affirming, must be bound by the moral restraint to act for the benefit of others as well as ourselves. As Os Guinness puts it,
“the only restraint that does not contradict freedom is self-restraint.”
My family enjoys the blessing of a big backyard, but that yard abuts a major road. Now, when our kids were younger, my wife and I set boundaries beyond which the kids could not go. Without those boundaries, we would have been worried that a ball might bounce into the road and kids, being inattentive as they are, might have chased that ball into traffic.
The boundaries protected not only their safety but also their freedom. Without those boundaries, our kids wouldn’t have had the freedom to enjoy the yard for its intended purpose.
G. K. Chesterton explains why: “The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.”
Think of what the Culture of Confusion’s focus on autonomy has resulted in. We have given negative freedom a steroid- infused shot of adrenaline. We now want to be free from any restrictions on what we can be, not just what we can do. That isn’t a real freedom if what we want to be doesn’t line up with the reality of what we are. We may remove social boundaries, just as we might free a tiger from his cage. But we can no more free ourselves from our nature as humans, male or female, than we can a tiger from his stripes or a camel from his hump. If we barrel through the boundaries of what we are, we may free ourselves from what we were meant to be in the first place. The pursuit may be intoxicatingly liberating. For some it will feel like the ultimate achievement of self-deification. For others, it may seem like the answer to a lifelong struggle with self-identification. But if the statistics are to be taken at all seriously, the hard reality is that for most people, unbounded freedom results in emotional and spiritual enslavement. Reality is full of limitations. No amount of desire or drive can alter that reality or remove those boundaries.
Contrary to contemporary belief, the Bible doesn’t set up arbitrary boundaries to oppose our freedom. Its boundaries favor our fulfillment.
The process of winning freedom as told in the Gospels is the foundation, but the understanding of what to do with that freedom and what limits it might have on our ethics and behavior are given just as much focus in the New Testament.
For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. (Galatians 5:13–15) The wisdom of holy writ shows itself again. Paul tells us about the need to self-restrain our negative freedom so that we can act in each other’s best interests, which is positive freedom. If we don’t, if we worship freedom in the service of self-gratification, we’ll end up devouring each other. How remarkable it is that God, knowing us, has established the boundaries of freedom that keep us from running blindly into traffic, childishly chasing after the bouncing ball of our liberty.
Freedom’s Foundation in God
How do we have rights if nature is red in tooth and claw, mindless of the morality of mass extinctions and—as atheist Richard Dawkins says—is blind, pitiless, and indifferent?12 Indeed, fellow atheists Raymond Tallis and Thomas Nagel admit that unguided evolution can’t even endow us with conscious power.13 How then can we give ourselves rights? Without God, the right to liberty is simply vaporous.
Consider this: Why would we resort to less moral behaviors once we abandon belief in free will? Why would our brain chemistry suddenly revert to selfish and less socially responsible behavior if we fail to believe in moral accountability? Why don’t we suddenly become more socially responsible instead of less? A naturalist might say that evolution is all about DNA propagation, which leads us to act selfishly. But that same naturalist also would argue that we are socially responsible animals because evolution has driven us to protect ourselves and ensure our survival through self-nurturing groups. Well, which is it? Might it be instead that we have a sinful nature and that in accordance with that sinful nature we choose to act immorally if we think that we won’t be held accountable? We use our freedom to deny that free will exists so we can absolve ourselves of our selfishness. Might it be that Jesus was right when he said that the human heart is in desperate need of redemption from outside itself?
There is a balance here. Our sinful nature and our physical nature influence our behaviors, but we also choose to act in submission or rebellion to those natures based on our beliefs about the world. That much is evident in the fact that we act more or less morally depending on whether we think we have free will. Our volition is only strong enough to
overcome our sinful nature and physically driven desires temporarily, however, which makes a human-invented freedom so fragile. I think of a scene from the Oscar-winning film Gladiator. Just
Tom Flynn’s starry-eyed optimism that we’ll reach “rough agreement” concerning values without God’s help remains nothing more than a romantic notion.
Clarity about Freedom, Found in a Person
With a clearer, fuller view of freedom, let’s revisit Jesus’ words in John 8. Both negative freedom and positive freedom must be exercised within the boundaries of the truth. Our negative freedom from restraint must be bound by the truth that unfettered autonomy leads to chaos. Our positive freedom—our freedom for the greater good—must be bound by the truth that we can’t forcibly coerce a good conscience into someone.
Jesus’ resurrection gives us the ultimate reason to trust him.
“Do unto Others As You Would Have Them Do unto You.” Inset into the beautiful visual art are the artful words that have come to be known worldwide as the Golden Rule. The mosaic has become one of the U.N. headquarters’ most popular attractions.
Fundamental questions need re-answering. Do we have free will or are we just chemical machines? Are humans special in some way apart from other animals? If we’re not special, do we have anything like a sacred value? How can we justify our moral outrage at bigotry, racism, and the like if what it means to be human is a matter only of molecules in motion?
I’m reminded of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s famous statement (or infamous—opinions vary) that “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”3 Surely that can’t be correct. That kind of self-definition is at the heart of autonomy, not liberty.
We don’t have the intellectual foundation from which to ask basic questions about human dignity if an essential part of each person’s liberty is to decide what they are and what other people are.
To be fair, Justice Kennedy’s next sentence reads, “Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.” He meant to advocate for freedom from government intrusion into personal decisions. But his words go well beyond that and imply that individual human beliefs determine and define reality, including personhood. His statement could be the Culture of Confusion’s creed. Every individual person can define existence, the universe, and human life.
In later Supreme Court decisions, Justice Kennedy has taken this principle of self-definition and applied it to human dignity. Most notably, he wrote the court’s majority opinion striking down voter-ratified constitutional amendments in six states defining marriage as between one man and one woman.4 It’s ironic that according to Justice Kennedy, the majority voters in those states did not have the liberty to define their own concept of existence, meaning, the universe, and the mystery of life. But Justice Kennedy, an agent of the state, had the right and power to do it for them. In his decision, Justice Kennedy used the term dignity nine times. But what did he mean? Reading his opinion reveals little except, apparently, that we have dignity only if everything about us is celebrated. It’s my firm belief that everyone, regardless of beliefs, orientations, and preferences, has inherent dignity and intrinsic value. But can I respect that dignity only if I affirm everything about another person? Or is it the case that acknowledging and respecting another person’s dignity springs from something far deeper than human opinion?
Pushing Reset: Does Being Human Really Mean Anything?
common desire among the religious and nonreligious to affirm human dignity. Yet at the heart of secular attempts to affirm objective human dignity lies a confused incoherence.
The bars of a theoretical cage will not contain the consequences of believing that we are merely chemical machines or sophisticated animals. Those consequences roam wildly into the professions that affect our lives.
As our institutions of higher learning embrace a philosophy that reduces us to meat computers or gifted animals, all of their fields of study lose meaning. All notions of sacred callings and noble professions must go out the window.
The reality is that not only is strict determinism philosophically untenable, it’s also scientifically unprovable. Raymond Tallis, an atheist neurologist, picks apart the various brain scans and psychological studies that attempt to prove we are nothing more than brain chemistry.19 In fact, quite the opposite is true. An impressive body of scientific evidence demonstrates that the mind is not the brain and that human mental activity survives brain death.20 While no friend to theism, Tallis acerbically critiques today’s fashionable reductionism: “Neuroscientists who think they have found the circuits in a brain corresponding to wisdom seem to lack that very quality, as a result of which they are oblivious even to what the more critical minds in their own discipline are saying.”
Yet while everyone seems to agree with Jesus that humanity has a heart problem, everyone seems to resist the necessary truth that we need redemption from a source outside ourselves. Harvard psychologist and secular humanist Stephen Pinker thinks that as a species, we’re getting better—that violence is decreasing and poverty is being addressed. The evidence suggests quite the opposite, actually, which is why John Gray strongly critiques Pinker’s optimistic humanism as a “resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts.”26
If we are inherently sinful—and history proves that we are—we cannot possibly be our own saviors. Note: Then the free will argument dies.
The cross is where human depravity and human dignity collide, where the contrarieties of human existence find their resolution. It is where the historical reality of human evil and the historical reality of God’s intervention come together. It is at the cross where justice is given and mercy is extended.
According to the Bible, good and evil don’t exist as two opposing yet equal powers. Evil is a perversion of the good, a diminishment of what was intended. C. S. Lewis observed that good is original and evil is merely a perversion, “that good should be the tree and evil the ivy . . . that good should be able to exist on its own while evil requires the good on which it is parasitic.”
If I claimed to love a person, but felt no impact when that person rejected me, how could it be that I truly loved that person? How could it be that the person had any dignity in my eyes if his or her betrayal left me unaffected? The cross is where God demonstrated that sin is so serious and grievous that it has eternal consequences. Jesus’ hands, feet, and torso are eternally scarred, showing us that our moral actions have eternal importance. The cross’s gravity demonstrates our dignity.
Note: Jacob I loved but Esau I hated
But the heroism ascribed to being gay or sexually confused makes these identities morally attractive. Instead of being just expressions of one’s sexuality, they are seen as expressions of one’s virtue.
When Christians think of others as more broken than them, they flirt with an unbalanced view of biblical sexuality and the sinfulness of humanity. So many Christians seem to forget their own brokenness in self-righteously judging those with same-sex attractions. I find this so very odd because the gospel is good news for sinners, not the righteous.
What would you began to do on my place?