Worldview as Tool

Kant used the word weltanschauung in his Critique of Judgment as a way of simply describing our “sense perception of the world.”Footnote ²⁵ But very soon the term began to be appropriated by German idealist and romantic philosophers to mean something deeper and more comprehensive. In Johann Gottlieb Fichte's hands, for example, weltanschauung became a term that denoted the perception of “the principle of ‘higher legislation’ that harmonizes the tension between moral freedom and natural causality.”Footnote ²⁶ This intellectual understanding of weltanschauung seems to have become part of the common parlance of prominent German intellectuals of the nineteenth century, including Friedrich Schleiermacher, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, Jean Paul, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Joseph Görres, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and others.Footnote ²⁷ By the late nineteenth century, its meaning had become nearly synonymous with philosophy, but without philosophy's rational pretensions.Footnote ²⁸

With Hegel and later scholars, weltanschauung began to transform from a term describing the collective philosophy of a time and place to an individual viewpoint on the world embedded in both the societal and the individual consciousness.Footnote ²⁹ Schelling, for example, used the term to mean something like “a self-realized, productive as well as conscious way of apprehending and interpreting the universe of beings.”Footnote ³⁰ Wilhelm Dilthey used the term in a similar way, beginning with the objective world itself but focusing primarily on the “lived experience” of that world.Footnote ³¹ He argued that worldview questions—the same ones that continue to animate Christian worldview thinkers today—emerge out of the individual's limited knowledge of the objective historical world: “[W]hat I am supposed to do in this world, why I am in it, and how my life in it will end. Where did I come from? Why do I exist? What will become of me?”Footnote ³²

In fact, a specifically Christian worldview is routinely traced back to a group of mostly Reformed theologians who adapted German idealist weltanschauung philosophy from this era— especially of Dilthey's variety—to construct a rational defense of the Christian faith. Scottish Presbyterian theologian James Orr was the first in this line of thinkers.Footnote ³³ Quite familiar with weltanschauung philosophy, Orr interpreted the English word, “worldview” in much the same way that Dilthey would soon use the German term, to denote “the widest view which the mind can take of things in the effort to grasp them together as a whole from the standpoint of some particular philosophy or theology.”Footnote ³⁴ For Orr, grasping reality whole meant holding a certain set of propositions to be true and comparing these propositions to those offered by competing worldviews in order to demonstrate the rational superiority of Christianity.Footnote ³⁵ He took great pains to articulate nine of these Christian worldview propositions in the appendix to his first Kerr lecture, “The Christian View of the World in General.”Footnote ³⁶ These propositions are as follows:

1. 1. “[T]he existence of a Personal, Ethical, Self-Revealing God.”

2. 2. “[T]he creation of the world by God, His immanent presence in it, His transcendence over it, and His holy and wise government of it for moral ends.”

3. 3. “[T]he spiritual nature and dignity of man.”

4. 4. “[T]he fact of the sin and disorder of the world . . . which has entered it by the voluntary turning aside of man from his allegiance to his Creator, and from the path of his normal development.”

5. 5. “[T]he historical Self-Revelation of God to the patriarchs and in the line of Israel, and . . . a gracious purpose of God for the salvation of the world, centring in Jesus Christ.”

6. 6. “[T]hat Jesus Christ was not mere man, but the eternal Son of God—a truly Divine Person—who . . . took upon Him our humanity, and who . . . is to be honoured, worshipped, and trusted, even as God is.”

7. 7. “[T]he Redemption of the world through a great act of Atonement.”

8. 8. “[T]hat the historical aim of Christ's work was the founding of a Kingdom of God on earth, which includes not only the spiritual salvation of individuals, but a new order of society.” and

9. 9. “[T]hat history has a goal, and that the present order of things will be terminated by the appearance of the Son of Man for judgment, the resurrection of the dead, and the final separation of righteous and wicked.”Footnote ³⁷

Of course, the theological content of these propositions was not new; Orr restated claims here that have been affirmed by Christians since the early creeds.Footnote ³⁸ Nor was Orr's idea of defending the rational integrity of these claims against their rivals new. This task had been taken up by Christian philosophers and apologists since at least Saint Justin Martyr,Footnote ³⁹ and had arguably been perfected by Saint AugustineFootnote ⁴⁰ and Saint Thomas Aquinas.Footnote ⁴¹ The real novelty of Orr's approach lay in the fact that, notwithstanding his insistence on “a deep and radical antagonism” between Christianity and modernity,Footnote ⁴² he nevertheless sought to articulate and defend Christian propositions on the ostensibly neutral terms set by the age of “modern science.”Footnote ⁴³ That is, Orr sought to present Christianity as a rational response to the modern, inductive empirical quest for “the unity which pervades all orders of existence,” for a sense of “the coherence of the universe,” and for a grasp of “the one set of laws [that] holds the whole together.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In other words, Orr proposed the Christian worldview as a rational analytic tool: a system of ideas and practices that Christians could articulate and compare to rival systems such as agnosticism, humanism, social Darwinism, and positivism in order to demonstrate the truth of Christianity and the errors of other creeds and beliefs.Footnote ⁴⁵

Greatly influenced by Orr's appropriation of weltanschauung philosophy for apologetic purposes, American theologians Gordon Clark and Carl F. H. Henry also began to embrace worldview as a weapon in their struggle against modernist currents in the United States. If Christianity was to meet the challenge of modernism, Clark argued, “it must be explained and defended in comprehensive terms.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This meant analyzing “history, politics, ethics, science, religion, and epistemology” from a “Christian perspective.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Since this perspective was “the most comprehensive, coherent, and meaningful” one, he argued, it was “the clear logical choice.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Similarly, Carl F. H. Henry argued “for a resurgence of Christian perspectives across the whole spectrum of life.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Defending the Christian worldview against its secular critics, Henry sought to present a rationally compelling alternative that would persuade modern people. In other words, Clark and Henry sought to systematize Christian theological beliefs as a means to an end: to give them an advantage over modern beliefs that they saw as increasingly non-Christian or anti-Christian. This instrumentalist style of apologetics would prove wildly influential for the next generation of American Christian worldview thinkers and activists.Footnote ⁵⁰

Worldview as Lens

The idea of worldview began as an intellectual “tool”—a comprehensive system of ideas through which society attempted to accomplish the task of objective rational self-understanding. After Hegel, and, particularly, after Schelling and Dilthey, this societal or cultural self-understanding transformed into an individual tool through which people tried to accomplish the task of subjectively making sense of their place in the objective order of society or nature. But when this individualism merged with historicism, it changed the very nature of the worldview idea.

The shift from a collective to an individual philosophy focusing on lived experience was hugely significant because it corresponded with the “rise of historical consciousness.”Footnote ⁵¹ Rather than focusing on universal essences and objective metaphysics, as philosophy had since the Greeks, post-Hegelian philosophy focused more on the historical development of ideas and consciousness. The weltanschauung concept aided this transformation because it came to represent “a point of view on the world, a perspective on things, a way of looking at the cosmos from a particular vantage point which cannot transcend its own historicity.”Footnote ⁵² In this historicist transformation, weltanschauung “forfeits all claim to universal validity, and becomes enmeshed in the problems of historical relativity.”Footnote ⁵³

The individual's lived experience of the world increasingly took center stage in existentialist and phenomenological uses of weltanschauung. Kierkegaard, for example, used a Danish translation of “worldview” along with his own concept of “lifeview” to denote the individual's “natural” and “essential” need “to formulate . . . a conception of the meaning of life and its purpose.”Footnote ⁵⁴ According to Kierkegaard, one arrives at a satisfactory worldview not through rational reflection and logical development of thought, but through an “unusual illumination about life, which is granted at a kairos moment in one's experience.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Individual experience comes first, and a worldview is constructed through retrospective reflection on this experience.Footnote ⁵⁶

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the whole existential-phenomenological tradition made this connection between lived experience and weltanschauung a central theme. Nietzsche made copious use of weltanschauung, divorcing the term completely from objective reality and anchoring it instead in one's particular perspective—a perspective thoroughly infused with the will to power.Footnote ⁵⁷ His “complete perspectivism”Footnote ⁵⁸ denied the objective or universal truth of any worldview.Footnote ⁵⁹ The truth of any worldview, said Nietzsche, is merely “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms . . . illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.”Footnote ⁶⁰

The father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, rejected this Nietzschean perspectivism and all “sceptical historicism” as self-defeating.Footnote ⁶¹ He sought instead to separate, or bracket, not only the physical world but also all individual subjective views of the world, including our personal outlook on life, so that we could more clearly apprehend the objects of our consciousness.Footnote ⁶² Husserl greatly despaired over the advance of weltanschauung philosophy in Europe during his time, seeing it as an unscientific, relativistic, and individualistic accomplishment in contrast to the objective approach to consciousness he championed.Footnote ⁶³

Husserl's most famous student, Martin Heidegger, joined Nietzsche in rejecting the attempt to arrive at an abstract, objective view of reality and in embracing a more perspectivist view. But like Husserl, Heidegger saw existing weltanschauung philosophy as an obstacle to authentic understanding of human existence and its relation to the world.Footnote ⁶⁴ Indeed, Heidegger used a related term, “world picture” (weltbild), to describe the modern urge to represent the whole of “the world itself; the totality of beings taken” in a way that “stands . . . before us” as an image.Footnote ⁶⁵ Using a “world picture” meant trying to “place . . . being itself before one just as things are with it, and, as so placed, to keep it permanently before one.”Footnote ⁶⁶ A modern person characteristically sought to place not only the rest of the world in the picture, but also to “put oneself in the picture,”Footnote ⁶⁷ Heidegger asserted. But the modern “‘world picture’ does not [really] mean” that we are able to have a true “picture of the world,” including ourselves, in our minds, but rather that we understand “the world grasped as picture.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In other words, “[w]henever we have a world picture, an essential decision occurs” to turn away from lived experience and toward that portion of life that can be represented.Footnote ⁶⁹ For Heidegger then, a worldview was really an attempt to objectify and immobilize us at a certain point of understanding our world, whereas Heidegger's own phenomenology sought instead an “always provisional” understanding of our existence from the perspective of “absolute immersion in life.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Heidegger thus transformed the German concept of weltanschauung by attempting to investigate human existence at a level below Schelling and Dilthey's idea of worldview, as “a self-realized, productive as well as conscious way of apprehending and interpreting the universe of beings.”Footnote ⁷¹ But this apprehension and interpretation, Heidegger argued, is “not just a matter of theoretical knowledge . . . held in memory as if it were a piece of cognitive property.”Footnote ⁷² Instead, understanding of Being arises, Heidegger argued, “in and from ‘the particular factical existence of the human being in accordance with his factical possibilities of thoughtful reflection and attitude-formation.’”Footnote ⁷³ Heidegger sought an understanding of the “structure and its possibilities” of our being as such—not only our ability to represent the world to ourselves in a worldview or world picture, but also our deeper ability to navigate the world in which we are immersed.Footnote ⁷⁴

Wittgenstein supplemented this phenomenological-existential critique of the old Kantian-Hegelian notion of weltanschauung with a focus on linguistic practices. He agreed with prior worldview thinkers that a “perspicuous representation” of the world “is of fundamental significance.”Footnote ⁷⁵ But he also agreed with Heidegger that modern versions of weltanschauung problematically vaunt seeing the world over living in the world and miss the fact that our language practices construct a “multiplicity of mutually exclusive world pictures.”Footnote ⁷⁶ For this reason, Wittgenstein also preferred the term “world picture” to the term “worldview.”Footnote ⁷⁷ But he defined world pictures differently from Heidegger: as “established patterns of [meaningful] action shared in by members of a group.”Footnote ⁷⁸ “Language games” arise out of these forms of life, Wittgenstein noted, and give concrete expression to the patterns.Footnote ⁷⁹ For example, a language of “orders” and “reports” arises out of and implies a military form of life; and a language of “yes and no” answers arises out of and implies a Socratic form of life.Footnote ⁸⁰

Similar to Heidegger, then, Wittgenstein posited a realm of primary existence or being that lies beneath the level of conscious articulation and representation. This being in the world is the true basis of our understanding how to act, think, and speak. World pictures rest on taken-for-granted “frameworks” and “worldview facts” that are inherited or “swallowed down” from our form of life rather than rationally weighed and verified.Footnote ⁸¹

Here, in sum, is the crucial innovation in worldview thinking wrought by this whole tradition: Rather than worldview constituting a rational ground for believing that certain facts are true, we accept certain facts as being true because they are consistent with our worldview.Footnote ⁸² Comparing worldviews on a purely logical basis is thus ruled out. People do indeed exchange one view for another; but they do so by becoming persuaded to “accept[] in faith” another's picture of the world, not by understanding its logical truth.Footnote ⁸³

This existential-phenomenological-linguistic reformation of weltanschauung philosophy, influenced a host of contemporary social theorists to focus on the tacit, taken-for-granted understructure of worldviews. Charles Taylor, for example, asserts that we make sense of the world and our place within it by interacting with the norms and expectations of others through a “social imaginary.”Footnote ⁸⁴ This imaginary consists of “the way we collectively imagine, even pretheoretically, our social life.”Footnote ⁸⁵ A social imaginary “incorporates a sense of the normal expectations that we have of each other; the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The ways in which people “imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations” structure and guide human actions in a deep way, Taylor argues.Footnote ⁸⁷

In much the same vein, Peter Berger describes a “plausibility structure,” which tells us what is credible to believe about the world.Footnote ⁸⁸ “[W]hat people actually find credible” regarding “views of reality . . . depends in turn on the social support these [views of reality] receive.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The value choices that are embodied in worldviews understood as social imaginaries and plausibility structures are culturally and socially constructed achievements: like all forms of human thought and action, they are situated within particular cultural, linguistic, political, or other contexts.Footnote ⁹⁰

In contrast to Christian conservatives like James Orr, Gordon Clark, and Carl F. H. Henry, and their progeny, who use worldview as an intellectual tool with which to demonstrate the superiority of the Christian way of life, other Christian thinkers have embraced the idea of worldview as a constitutive lens. This tradition of Christian worldview thinking can be traced back to Dutch neo-Calvinist theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper, who inherited the mantle of neo-Calvinist leadership from James Orr.Footnote ⁹¹ Kuyper initially used the Dutch translation of weltanschauung in an instrumental way, arguing that Calvinist Christianity was a complete philosophy “with implications for all of life” including “politics, art, and scholarship.”Footnote ⁹² In outlining those implications, Kuyper agreed with Orr that Christianity could be presented “as an alternative to . . . [secular] ideologies” and that Christians could use their philosophy to “provide cultural leadership in the modern world.”Footnote ⁹³

But the alternative neo-Calvinist worldview Kuyper eventually juxtaposed to the modern worldview was not a mere analytic tool to compare arguments and evidences; it was a deeper understanding of the “presuppositions” that made these arguments and evidences persuasive for their adherents.Footnote ⁹⁴ Put in simple terms, “regenerate people” (Christians who are experiencing the life of God) “produce a roughly theistic interpretation of science” (and politics, philosophy, and the like) “and nonregenerate people . . . produce an idolatrous” version of these activities.Footnote ⁹⁵ The key difference between worldviews for Kuyper and the rest of the presuppositionalist tradition he inaugurated was not the propositional content of the alternative views but rather “the antecedent assumptions that condition all thinking and acting.”Footnote ⁹⁶ In the hands of Kuyper and the presuppositionalists, the Christian worldview became a lens rather than a tool because of their conviction that “[a]ll theorizing arises out of a priori faith commitments” that lie beneath the surface of rational argumentation.Footnote ⁹⁷

Herman Dooyeweerd was next in the line of Neo-Calvinist worldview thinkers, and maybe even its “most creative and influential.”Footnote ⁹⁸ He refined and polished Kuyper's presuppositionalist lens by identifying two basic “ground motives” or spiritual commitments: “the spirit of holiness” and “the spirit of apostasy.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Out of these two ground motives flow two different ways of living and thinking. Seen in this way, he claimed, a worldview is “not so much a matter of theoretical thought expressed in propositions but . . . a deeply rooted commitment of the heart.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

By thus rooting worldview in a “pre-theoretical” commitment,Footnote ¹⁰¹ Kuyper, Dooyeweerd, and the entire neo-Calvinist tradition (including thinkers like Herman Bavinck, D. H. T. Vollenhoven, and Cornelius Van Til)Footnote ¹⁰² appear to have influenced this alternative strand of Christian worldview thinking in a direction substantially close to the existential-phenomenological-linguistic worldview tradition of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. The contrast between the worldview thinking of these scholars and the worldview thinking of Orr, Clark, and Henry is clear. Rather than seeing worldview as a tool or a weapon used to demonstrate the superiority of Christian ideas and practices and to advance or defend it in the cultural marketplace, this other tradition sees worldview as a constitutive lens that conditions and even determines how an individual understands reality, often in an unconscious way. The lens consists of contingent factors such as time, place, language, etc., that deliver the facts of the world to the individual but are by no means universal since the “view” of the “world” will depend on the glasses one wears. Being part of a world is an ontological condition of our seeing anything at all and, as such, cannot be examined and compared to another way of seeing. It can only be lived authentically or inauthentically.

In figure 1, I summarize this historical-philosophical genealogy of the two concepts of worldview visually.

Figure 1 History of worldview concept

Worldview Idea Generation

One of the primary intellectual purposes of Christian scholars and thinkers writing about and discussing the Christian worldview is to generate and clarify ideas and principles that provide distinctly Christian answers to basic theological, social, and legal questions. As noted above, at the most general level is Sire's list of the seven questions that he claims everyone asks: (1) “What is prime reality—the really real?” (2) “What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around us?” (3) “What is a human being?” (4) “What happens to persons at death?” (5) “Why is it possible to know anything at all?” (6) “How do we know what is right and wrong?” and (7) “What is the meaning of human history?”Footnote ¹⁰³

More philosophically and theologically minded Christian worldview thinkers understand the Christian worldview as a means to the end of posing substantive theological answers to these questions. Their answers, to summarize Sire, run something like the following:

1. 1. An infinite personal triune God is the author and source of prime reality.

2. 2. External reality is an originally good creation of God, which has been deformed by human sinfulness.

3. 3. Human beings are rational creatures originally made in the image of God who have also been deformed through sin.

4. 4. At death, all persons are judged by God and based on this judgment either spend eternity in the presence of God (Heaven) or outside the presence of God (Hell).

5. 5. It is possible to know things because God has either revealed them directly in scripture and/or tradition (special revelation) or has revealed them indirectly in nature (general revelation), and because God has created persons with the ability to discern each of these.

6. 6. We know right from wrong because God has given us specific moral commands as well as general moral laws, both of which can be known through the use of human reason.

7. 7. Human history is the story of God's creation and redemption of the world, which includes his miraculous intervention in human affairs over many centuries, culminating in his incarnation, death, resurrection, and glorification, and his invitation for all to share in his divine life.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Moving from these theological worldview ideas to Christian conservative social and cultural ideas, we can easily see the same instrumental dynamics at work. God has created the world a certain way, to operate according to certain natural laws and certain moral laws that are an extension of his own life. Because he wants us to participate in that life, he has given us the capacity to know and follow those laws, which are conducive to our ultimate happiness in this life and the next. It follows, then, according to this Christian conservative understanding, that any human social or political arrangement based on God's moral law is to be valued and promoted by Christians in the interest of the common good, and that any social or political arrangement conflicting with that moral law is to be resisted by Christians for the sake of the common good.

Francis Schaeffer was perhaps the most influential figure in the development of this line of modern Christian conservative cultural and social thought.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ A former reformed pastor who in the 1950s established an intellectual retreat and spiritual community for questioning young people in L'Abri, Switzerland, Schaeffer's books traced the advance and retreat of Christian philosophy and social thinking down through the centuries.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ He argued that the Christian worldview had fostered and sustained the greatest ideas of the Western sociopolitical tradition, but that these ideas were now being challenged and undermined by an anti-Christian worldview, animated by a different set of presuppositions than the ones listed above.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Especially in the 1970s and 1980s, Schaeffer argued for a revivification and defense of social and political action consistent with the Christian worldview, especially in the areas of political philosophy, law, and the arts.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Many Christian conservatives accepted Schaeffer's challenge to translate their theological beliefs into articulate and clear Christian sociopolitical ideals that could compete with and defeat secular worldviews on the cultural battlefield. Schaeffer's influence on contemporary Christian worldview thinkers and activists is illustrated well by Charles Colson's and Nancy Pearcey's book, How Now Shall We Live? The title itself is a play on the words of Schaeffer's famous book title, How Should We Then Live? Colson's dedication to the volume reads as follows: “We dedicate this book to the memory of Francis A. Schaeffer, whose ministry at L'Abri was instrumental in Nancy's conversion and whose works have had a profound influence on my own understanding of Christianity as a total worldview.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The content of the book provides a detailed and exhaustive catalogue of answers and action plans that the authors generated based on their understanding of the Christian worldview. Addressing a host of issues like test-tube babies, creationism, abortion, sex education, substance abuse, poverty, foreign policy, and even music and pop culture, the book even includes a detailed appendix listing hundreds of other books addressing every issue imaginable from the perspective of the Christian worldview, categorized by issue area.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Christian worldview-oriented centers and ministries pick up where books like this leave off, dispensing practical worldview advice in classes, seminars, podcasts, and webinars. The Colson Center for Christian Worldview, for example, identifies itself online as “a ministry that equips Christians to live out their faith with clarity, confidence, and courage in this cultural moment.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Summit Ministries is another great example: Its “mission is to equip and support rising generations to resolutely champion a biblical worldview.”Footnote ¹¹² That “biblical worldview” includes, in addition to all the theological answers sketched above, the conviction that, when government “oversteps its bounds by failing to recognize the value of each person, or by constraining conscience, or by calling good what God calls evil and calling evil what God calls good, we must call it to account.”Footnote ¹¹³

Some of the main social and cultural principles generated by the Christian worldview were encapsulated well by the authors of the Manhattan Declaration, who affirmed three basic ideas: (1) people are created in the image of God and so they possess inherent dignity and the right to life; (2) marriage is a conjugal union of one man and one woman, and is the most basic building block of society; and (3) religious liberty, or the right of all people to believe and practice their faith, is inherent in God's nature and in the nature of the human person.Footnote ¹¹⁴

More concretely, Christian conservatives use the Christian worldview to generate legal principles that flow naturally from some of the above social and cultural principles. At the most general level, Christian conservatives believe that the Christian worldview “includes a distinctive and identifiable Christian view of law.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ They begin with the premise that God's eternal law is the foundation for all human law such that the latter cannot be legitimate unless it accords with the former.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In keeping with earlier worldview thinkers like James Orr, contemporary Christian conservatives also argue that “a society inevitably must choose between” Christian legal principles and merely human legal principles.Footnote ¹¹⁷

In these ways, Christian conservative thinkers and activists treat the Christian worldview as an analytic tool to generate distinctly Christian understandings of reality, society, and law.

Worldview Comparison

Once Christian conservative thinkers have settled on theological, social, and legal ideas, they also use the Christian worldview instrumentally to rationally compare their ideas with those of other worldviews. In fact, this focus on the rational comparability of different worldviews seems to be at the very center of Christian worldview thinking. Theologically and philosophically, for example, James Sire's The Universe Next Door, one of the most popularly cited worldview texts among Christians, carefully catalogues the substantive claims of various worldviews like “deism,” “naturalism,” “nihilism,” and “postmodernism” and tries to demonstrate the intellectual differences between them and Christianity.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Mary Poplin does something similar in her book Is Reality Secular? although she goes much further in defending the rational superiority of the Christian worldview against these other claimants.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Moving beyond theological and philosophical analysis, Francis Schaeffer engaged in a pioneering comparison of the cultural and artistic effects of the Christian worldview to the cultural and artistic effects of other worldviews. For example, he attempted to demonstrate that modern art, including music, poetry, painting, and literature, demonstrated the futility of Western culture's increasing desperation and aloneness.Footnote ¹²⁰ But, for Schaeffer, art and popular culture only illustrated the devolution of social practices, such as sexuality, education, and law, as human beings increasingly cut themselves off from the objective, biblical source of divine human meaning and embrace alternative worldviews like existentialism and nihilism instead.Footnote ¹²¹

Taking up this same instrumental project of comparing how society looks when guided by a Christian worldview to how it looks when guided by non-Christian worldviews, Colson and Pearcey compare the transcendent, objective social standards of the Christian worldview against the subjective relativism of worldviews such as multiculturalism, pragmatism, utopianism, and postmodernism.Footnote ¹²² Their overall goal here is to “understand the great ideas that … inform the mind, fire the imagination, move the heart . . . shape a culture” and “move us to act.” Rational comparison of the social implications of these worldviews is essential, they argue, precisely because these social ideas lie beneath the legal controversies in which Christian conservatives are engaged: ‘The culture war is not just about abortion, homosexual rights, or the decline of public education. These are only the skirmishes. The real war is a cosmic struggle between worldviews—between the Christian worldview and the various secular and spiritual worldviews arrayed against it.’Footnote ¹²³

Legal philosopher and Christian apologist Francis Beckwith is another good example of a thinker who uses the Christian worldview as a tool for objectively comparing and defending Christian conservative social positions against rival ones. In fact, the main goal of his book Taking Rites Seriously is to show that legal claims motivated by Christian faith are not only rational and defensible but that they have great instrumental value in supporting a flourishing liberal society.Footnote ¹²⁴ For instance, Beckwith defends the Christian conception of human dignity against its materialist critics, and he applies this conception to socio-cultural debates over issues like embryonic stem cell research and abortion, showing in each case how the Christian conservative position is rationally superior to the alternatives.Footnote ¹²⁵ More specifically, Beckwith defends a Christian understanding of human nature against both the worldview of scientific materialism and the worldview of secular liberalism, drawing out the ways that the Christian worldview generates better answers on education, same-sex marriage, adoption, and public accommodations.Footnote ¹²⁶

In this comparison between conflicting social foundations, Christian worldview thinkers conclude that the Christian view of society and law is “vastly superior to all alternatives: it is empirically defensible, internally logical, [and] comprehensive in scope.”Footnote ¹²⁷ In keeping with earlier worldview thinkers like James Orr, contemporary Christian conservatives also argue that “a society inevitably must choose between” Christian socio-legal principles and merely human ones.Footnote ¹²⁸

Worldview Talent Incubation

Countless Christian ministries, churches, and other organizations engage in practical worldview training courses, workshops, seminars, and other encounters. At the theological level, groups with names like the “Biblical Worldview Institute”Footnote ¹²⁹ and “Worldview Matters”Footnote ¹³⁰ offer courses such as “Worldview Basics”Footnote ¹³¹ and “The Worldview Course”Footnote ¹³² with the mission of training people to understand and utilize the answers provided by the Christian worldview, compare Christian answers to those of other worldviews, and demonstrate the superiority of the former.

Translating Christian worldview ideas onto the social level, one group even offers a worldview testing instrument that purportedly measures the match between a Christian's personal beliefs and the Christian worldview in “five key areas: Politics, Economics, Education, Religion and Social Issues [PEERS].”Footnote ¹³³ Like “an eye chart at the doctor's office,” they note, “the goal isn't to beat the test, but to identify where there's room for improvement. PEERS is about bringing all of life into focus through the objective standard of God's word.”Footnote ¹³⁴

Reaching a broader audience than do these smaller Christian ministries, some of the national social and political organizations already mentioned also offer worldview training. The Colson Center offers the Colson Fellows Program, which “equips Christians with a robust Christian worldview so they can thoughtfully engage with post-Christian culture, inspire reflection in others, and work effectively toward re-shaping the world in the light of God's kingdom.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Summit Ministries is probably the biggest organization conducting such training and the one with the greatest reach. It holds a variety of seminars and training programs, including a renowned residential summer program aimed at teenagers, and they publish Christian school curriculum aimed especially at teenagers and young adults, educating them, in part, to “defend a Christian worldview against other belief systems” and to use that worldview to “stand for truth and justice.”Footnote ¹³⁶

Moving from theology to society to law, some Christian conservative legal organizations also train young people to become social and legal activists who know how to translate the Christian worldview into practical action. For example, Alliance Defending Freedom runs the Areté Academy, “a one-week leadership development training program for highly accomplished college students and recent graduates who are interested in future careers in law, government, and public policy.”Footnote ¹³⁷ In this program, “[d]elegates . . . engage the foundations of law and justice, natural law principles, and biblical worldview training [and] explore how these foundational principles apply to some of the most pressing issues facing society today, including religious freedom, intellectual tolerance and academic diversity, marriage and family, as well as the right of conscience and the sanctity of life.”Footnote ¹³⁸

These sorts of worldview training programs do not just propagate and teach ideas consistent with the Christian worldview. They socialize people into the Christian worldview as a way of life. None of this practical training would be necessary if these groups thought of the Christian worldview as a preexisting lens through which Christians see the world. Training is seen as necessary because these ministries and groups assume that the Christian worldview is an externally acquired tool with which trainees need to be “equipped” so that those trainees can, in turn, use that worldview tool to “re-shape” the world.

Worldview-Legal Argument Synthesis

Moving from theory to practice, Christian conservative groups and leaders use their worldview as an intellectual tool for connecting Christian theological and social ideas to live legal controversies. The Colson Center, for example, often urges Christians through its radio program and blog Breakpoint to apply worldview ideas in favor of or against substantive legal positions.

A recent Breakpoint episode, for example, recounted particular cases involving Christian photographers from Wisconsin and Minnesota, a Christian t-shirt maker from Kentucky, and Christian bakers from Washington and Colorado.Footnote ¹³⁹ All of these cases involved Christians who defied state civil rights laws by refusing to provide products and services to gay customers seeking to use those products or services in an activity the Colson Center finds contrary to the Christian worldview. These cases, says the Breakpoint host, “point to the enormous importance of the [then-pending] Supreme Court case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission [which] might very well be the religious freedom equivalent of Roe v. Wade.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Another major example of the Colson Center translating the Christian worldview into a legal position was their 2017 statement in opposition to sexual orientation and gender identity (or SOGI) laws protecting gay and transgender people from public and private discrimination.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The statement began with an affirmation of one of the principles discussed above, coming from the Christian worldview idea-generator, regarding sexual identity and gender expression: “[P]eople are created male and female, [and] this complementarity is the basis for the family centered on the marital union of a man and a woman, and . . . the family is the wellspring of human flourishing.”Footnote ¹⁴² Having established the correct principles and ideas, the Colson Center then moved to a discussion of how to apply those principles and ideas: Christian “professionals, wedding chapels, non-profit organizations, ministries serving the needy, adoption agencies, businesses, schools, religious colleges, and even churches,” they informed the reader, who hold to Christian conservative views of sexuality, gender identity, and marriage, are increasingly being subjected to “personal and professional ruin, fines, and even jail time.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Because of this conflict between the demands of the Christian worldview and the demands of the alternative worldview underlying SOGI laws, the Colson Center's statement concludes, “SOGI laws . . . threaten fundamental freedoms, and . . . should be rejected.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Christian conservative law firms and legal groups perfect this instrumental modality of the Christian worldview by bringing lawsuits and making legal arguments on behalf of Christian conservative parties. Groups like the American Center for Law and Justice, the Alliance Defending Freedom, Liberty Counsel, and other legal organizations are daily engaged in the work of Christian worldview litigation.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ For example, before he made the news as President Trump's personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow founded the American Center for Law and Justice, and he described its mission as defending people “who have a Christian worldview [and] are facing significant harassment and discrimination.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Through these and other lawyers and law firms, Christian worldview ideas find their way into legal briefs filed in cases of interest to Christian conservatives. For example, in the years before the Supreme Court established the constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry, several Christian Conservative organizations filed amicus briefs in Hollingsworth v. Perry Footnote ¹⁴⁷ and United States v. Windsor,Footnote ¹⁴⁸ both of which involved challenges to bans on recognizing same-sex marriage. One brief articulated a series of substantive theological positions informed by the Christian worldview, and then compared that worldview with a rival worldview:

In Obergefell v. Hodges, where the Supreme Court finally established a same-sex marriage right, a number of amicus briefs by Christian conservative organizations followed the same line of logic, using substantive elements of the Christian worldview to support legal arguments against rival claims.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ One amicus brief, filed by Texas Values, illustrates the way that the concept of worldview can be used as a tool to explain and compare the different legal outcomes preferred by each side:

The same pattern can be observed in the religious exemption cases, starting with Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.Footnote ¹⁵²

Of course, it makes sense that Christian conservative individuals and groups might mention the Christian worldview as evidence of their religious reasons for refusing to engage in actions that they consider sinful, such as funding insurance policies that cover birth control and/or abortion. As a group of Christian radio and television broadcasters noted, for example, in their Hobby Lobby amicus brief, “[t]he fact that some Americans, or even many of them, no longer integrate a Bible-centered, Christian worldview into their everyday lives does not change the fact that the owners of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga, as well as many others who operate closely held companies, still do.”Footnote ¹⁵³ But the broadcasters went further in their brief, identifying the Bible-centered, Christian worldview as the main historical foundation for the religious conscience protections built into the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Citing John Jay's comments as the head of the American Bible Society and Alexis de Tocqueville's observations of the place of Christianity in early American life, the broadcasters argued that the Christian worldview was not only “vibrant and pervasive” at the time of the writing of the First Amendment, but also that the Christian worldview is “joined at the hip” to legal protections of religious liberty under US law.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Therefore, “[t]he restraining force of religious conscience upon the practical, business decisions and actions of the owners of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga is in keeping with the earliest American experience, and must surely be deemed to be part of the ‘historical function’ of the guarantee of free exercise, going back to the Founding.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵

More recently, in Arlene's Flowers, Inc. v. Washington,Footnote ¹⁵⁶ where a Christian florist was suing to overturn state fines punishing her for refusing to serve a gay couple, the Family Research Council co-filed an amicus brief, identifying itself as an organization “that exists to advance faith, family and freedom in public policy and the culture from a Christian worldview.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ They then argued on the basis of the Christian worldview that Christian business owners have a First Amendment right to be exempt from obeying civil rights laws.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Just like the Christian broadcasters had argued in Hobby Lobby that the Christian worldview had shaped the American conception of religious liberty, the Family Research Council argued in Arlene's that the Christian worldview has “shaped views of sexual morality for centuries,” such that “[g]overnment has no right to legislate a novel view of sexual morality and demand that religious citizens facilitate it.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹

This trend of Christian conservatives using their worldview as a tool to achieve legal leverage continues to the present. Just last year, in a trio of cases, the Supreme Court decided that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination “on the basis of sex,” protects gay and transgender individuals.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Over forty religious colleges and universities, most of them Christian institutions, filed an amicus brief in those cases, in which they noted their obligation to defend a “Christian worldview” and, on the basis of that worldview, argued against the proposed interpretation of Title VII.Footnote ¹⁶¹

In sum, then, Christian conservatives heartily embrace the idea of worldview as a tool. That is, they believe that their worldview is a comprehensive and systematic set of propositions that provides answers to all relevant metaphysical and theological questions as well as all social, political, and legal questions. Further, Christian conservatives believe that this worldview can be objectively compared to other rival worldviews that offer competing answers. When this comparison is made, they believe, the Christian legal worldview will be vindicated as intellectually and legally persuasive. They actively seek to train people to engage in this intellectual and legal vindication, and this training eventually bears fruit in court cases and legal briefs where Christian conservative lawyers use these worldview ideas to persuade judges of the legal merits of Christian positions. Whether Christian conservatives win or lose in court, their practice of treating the Christian worldview as a tool or instrument that is superior to other worldviews resembles a kind of intellectual arms race that continually spills over into actual conflict on legal issues such as religious freedom exemptions, abortion restrictions, transgender rights, and many other issues.

Critiquing the Christian Worldview's Instrumental Logic

The general concept of worldview has not been universally embraced by Christian thinkers and scholars.Footnote ¹⁶² Some critics have rejected worldview thinking wholesale, arguing that its inherently philosophical orientation is antithetical to the Christian way of life.Footnote ¹⁶³ Other thinkers, while not rejecting the concept of a Christian worldview entirely, have nevertheless been critical of an overly broad formulation of the Christian worldview as a single system of metaphysical ideas that one can access through a transcendent mode of reason.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Still others have taken this critique of totalism and transcendent logic a step further, arguing that all views of the world, including the Christian view, are products of contingent cultural and historical perspectives.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

These are compelling critiques of the Christian worldview idea in the abstract, but they are almost uniformly aimed at the Christian use of worldview as a tool. Too little attention has been paid to the implications of seeing the Christian worldview as a lens, and as far as I know, no attention has been paid to the implications of this alternative understanding of worldview for Christian conservative social, political, and legal activism. In what follows, I adapt the existing critiques of an instrumentalist conception of worldview to Christian conservative legal logic. But rather than reject worldview thinking outright, I defend an alternative version of worldview as a contingent, socially, and culturally constructed lens. As I demonstrate, this alternative understanding of worldview as a lens is compatible with the authentic aims of Christianity. Even more, by appreciating the contingent, partial manner in which we humans come to know things and establish standards of credibility, understanding worldview as a lens may be the only way to respect Christianity's fundamental injunction to respect the dignity of the other as a person created in the image of God.

Using worldview as a tool, on the other hand, is less a Christian project than it is a modernist project: it commits its adherents to “a subject/object dichotomy and a dualistic relationship with the world.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Using a worldview as an intellectual tool for generating answers to theological, social, and legal questions, comparing those answers to others, training others in those answers, and synthesizing those answers into legal arguments assumes the ability of the person using the tool to transcend their existing worldview, assuming a neutral and objective stance on reality. For example, the reason I would need to become “equipped” with a particular worldview is because I am not already equipped with it, meaning that I stand outside of it in some way. For someone who is already a Christian to become so “equipped” would mean setting aside their already existing way of thinking and taking on a new way of thinking. But even seeing the need to take on a new way of thinking requires an ability to transcend the old way of thinking—to stand apart from it at least enough to be able to judge its soundness. The same is true for comparing one worldview to another. I have to be able to stand apart from my worldview, assess the evidence for the claims of alternative worldviews, and decide which one is superior. Even in the case of a more gradual and fluid transition from partial acceptance of a worldview to a more complete acceptance of it, the worldview holder must still be able to stand aside from it enough to judge its completeness. On the other end of the process, in order to pass on a worldview in a training session or in a legal brief, I have to be able to stand aside from that worldview enough to be able to evaluate its value and usefulness.

But the neutral space required to perform these instrumental worldview moves, along with the neutrality and objectivity necessary to pull them off, simply does not exist. A worldview is not something I can stand apart from, but something in which I am always enmeshed, something that constitutes the unarticulated background precondition for my knowing anything in the first place.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ A worldview is coextensive with “the totality of the culturally structured images and assumptions . . . in terms of which people both perceive and respond to reality.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Even a worldview held by an individual “is communal in scope and structure” because it results from community expectations and norms about what it is appropriate to believe, do, and say.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Since the “basic tenets” of a worldview “are not argued to but argued from”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ in this way, we cannot arrive at the right understanding of marriage or sexuality, for example, as we would calculate the proper weight-bearing tolerance of steel for a bridge. We simply do not have that kind of “present-at-hand” access to the value and qualities of these social practices that we do with objects in the world.Footnote ¹⁷¹

The persuasiveness of this lens-like understanding over the instrumental view cannot be demonstrated through an objective, propositional, approach. That would be self-refuting because it would employ the same sort of transcendent logic that the lens-like understanding denies. Instead, in what follows, I illustrate the persuasiveness of worldview as a lens by describing its negative and positive implications for assessing Christian conservative socio-legal claims—showing how it rules one project out but leaves open the possibility of another.

What We Cannot Do: Objectively Compare Worldviews

The impossibility of objectively comparing worldviews in the way Christian conservative activists seek to do becomes apparent once we examine their claims more closely. To do this, I examine two socio-legal issues of great importance to Christian conservative legal activists: opposition to SOGI laws and support for religious conscience protections. The stand that Christian conservative activists take on both issues is based on several premises that lead to particular legal conclusions. Consider the Colson Center's argument, for example, which runs as follows:

1. 1. People have a fixed biological sex—they “are created male and female.”

2. 2. This fixed biological sex corresponds to a fixed biological and social relationship—“the family centered on the marital union of a man and a woman.”

3. 3. This fixed biological/social relationship is necessary for societal survival—“the family is the wellspring of human flourishing.”

4. 4. New anti-discrimination laws punish people and organizations who prefer this fixed biological/social relationship—they are increasingly being subjected to “personal and professional ruin, fines, and even jail time.”

5. 5. Therefore,

1. (a) these laws threaten societal survival and “should be rejected” or

2. (b) Christians should be exempted from them.Footnote ¹⁷²

In this argument, the Christian worldview could act as a tool—an intellectual device that rationally demonstrates the superiority of the Christian position—only if it were possible to take up a position outside of any worldview and examine the evidence for the propositions contained within different worldviews. And this is precisely what many Christian conservative legal groups purport to do in speeches, interviews, legal briefs, and other writings: they point out the overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence that male and female biological sexes actually exist, that the vast majority of people have one or the other before they are even born, that heterosexual marriage and parenting have been the norm for centuries, and so on.Footnote ¹⁷³

But the real question is not whether evidence for these propositions could be adduced. The real question is what legitimately counts as evidence in favor of or against these prevailing cultural norms. And what counts as evidence will depend on one's background presuppositions and assumptions about the world—in other words, the way one's worldview acts as a lens to enable one to see some things and not others as significant and persuasive.

Christian views of sexuality, gender identity, and marriage are presented in articles, books, and legal briefs by Christian conservatives as ideas and practices that should be preferred because they are more in touch with the reality of how things actually are. Thus, we are told that, for the Christian worldview, marriage, government, and church are not merely social constructions that can be shaped in any way . . . but rather are natural institutions in which and by which human beings ought to learn what is good, true, and beautiful. . . . They are part of the furniture of the universe, and their continued existence is essential to maintaining the moral ecology of human society.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

The same is true for issues like abortion, religious conscience protection, lower taxes, and a host of other positions: these positions are not presented as the products of a dialogue where people from different worldviews interpret reality as they see it, but rather are presented as the practical implications of a factually accurate and comprehensive understanding of how the world really is.

Consider, though, how the same issue—antidiscrimination laws protecting sexual and gender expression or identity—looks through the lens of an alternative Queer Theory worldview. For a person situated within this worldview, the evidence cited by Christian conservatives concerning the existence of biological sex and reproductive complementarity is merely an illustration of how culturally powerful the discourse about binary sex and gender categories has become. However, according to Nikki Sullivan, Queer Theory opposes the notion that sexual identity, gender identity—or any other identity for that matter—is a clear and unambiguous result of physical reality.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Queer Theory seeks to subvert all binary divisions and to demonstrate the inherent instability of all seemingly natural distinctions,Footnote ¹⁷⁶ seeing “the existence of transparent, natural, timeless, and purely descriptive” identity categories like male/female and even homosexual/heterosexual as “a modernist myth.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ As for external behavior and action, its “forms, meanings, and social formations . . . are culturally and historically contingent.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Rather than being fixed, “identity and subject position are multiply determined, dynamic, and fluid.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹

For Queer Theory, “the existence of a unitary and coherent” gay, straight, homosexual, heterosexual, male, or female category is an illusion.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Indeed, Queer Theory, at least in the hands of leading legal theorists like Susan Burgess, “contends that there is no tidy resolution of the problem of sexual identity” because the “instability of identity” in general and the exercise of social power “make stable resolutions of that sort impossible.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ Instead of “identifying an authentic self” upon which policies and laws may be staked, “queer theorists opt for creating performances that reveal the irony of the search for the authentic self and the ideal political order.”Footnote ¹⁸² The creation of such ironic performances plays such a big role because of the more basic Queer Theory claim—building on Simone de Beauvoir's foundational insight—that identity itself is performative through and through.Footnote ¹⁸³

While binary terms like male and female or heterosexual and homosexual may appear natural, obvious, objective, and universal, Susan Burgess and other Queer Theorists claim that these distinctions are instead contingent products of specific times, places, communities, and circumstances.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Communities and groups “tend to reproduce themselves” and so preferred categories like male and female prevail over time, making “the meaning of their central binaries appear to be given or natural, rather than politically contingent.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ This, Judith Butler argues, is why the evidence of traditional male and female roles seems so strong even though such identities are really quite plastic: because the performance of these roles helps to regulate and channel sexuality in ways that further biological reproduction and reproduction of the gender hierarchy and power dynamic.Footnote ¹⁸⁶

Given the performative quality of all identities, a Queer Theorist might argue, SOGI laws make perfect sense. Such laws create a legal space that protects the ability to experiment with the construction of and performance of new identities. Such laws also partially disrupt the (re)production of binary social identity categories by suspending the social privilege associated with adhering to and promoting these categories.

Deciding between these Christian conservative and Queer Theory worldviews as applied to the new antidiscrimination laws cannot involve neutrally comparing evidence for and against their claims and logically deducing the correct policy option. In fact, Christian conservatives and Queer Theorists have very different ontological ideas about what is real and very different epistemological ideas about how logic works in this context. As for what is real, Christian conservatives assume an essentialist ontologyFootnote ¹⁸⁷ by claiming that certain human traits and qualities, such as biological sex, gender expression, sexual complementarity, heteronormativity, etc., are real truths about human beings that transcend cultural and individual preferences. Queer Theorists, by contrast, have an anti-essentialist view of these same traits and qualities, seeing them as socially constructed discourses that privilege one identity performance over others that are equally valid. As for logic, Christian conservatives prefer a foundationalist epistemology,Footnote ¹⁸⁸ constructing legal conclusions (opposition to SOGI laws and support for religious exemptions to those laws) based on what they believe are objective truths. Queer Theorists, on the other hand, adopt an anti-foundationalist epistemology, using reason in an ironic and playful way to deconstruct the apparent objectivity of truth claims and legal outcomes, attempting to demonstrate the subjectivity of these things.

The difference between these two ontological and epistemological views on the issue of SOGI laws is just one example among many that could be given to demonstrate the futility of the Christian conservative idea of worldview as a tool—a way of rationally and neutrally comparing claims. Demonstrating the superiority of one substantive legal claim over another would require, first, proving to the other side that a wholly different view of reality and logic are superior to the views they already hold. But there is no neutral space of no reality in which someone can exist while they choose which alternative vision of reality they prefer.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Relatedly, the only ways to choose between two alternative forms of logic are to adopt a third form of logic or to choose in a non-logical way. Both choices, between different visions of reality and between different forms of logic, can still be made, but the crucial point is that the choices can only be made by using criteria for evaluation that exist independently of the options being chosen between. But those criteria are not free-floating outside of any worldview; they are themselves based on certain assumptions and convictions about reality and certain ways of knowing and thinking about that reality. Thus, Christian conservatives are right that the controversy between themselves and the LGBTQ community, like so many other controversies that plague our culture, is premised on a deeper conflict between different worldviews. But they are wrong to think that these worldviews can be objectively and neutrally compared to one another. Any sort of comparison and evaluation of worldview lenses would involve the use of another, different worldview lens consisting of different commitments and presuppositions about what counts as evidence and different ways of reasoning based on that evidence.Footnote ¹⁹⁰

What We Can Do: Listen and Learn

The fact that we have different worldview lenses does not mean that communication and persuasion are impossible. To facilitate this communication and persuasion, some Christian critics of modern worldview thinking have embraced a postmodern understanding of worldviews as cultural and historical perspectives on reality and have abandoned the search for a single, unified knowledge of all reality.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Such perspectivism, including the acknowledgment that Christian conservatives and their antagonists both begin from a particular socially and historically constructed place, is a helpful antidote to the instrumental understanding of worldview. But perspectivism can be just as much of a dead end as instrumentalism if we focus only on the fact that we each have a perspective and do not focus on the substance of what each of us sees through our perspective. The perspectives of foundationalism and essentialism certainly matter to Christian conservatives as the seemingly necessary philosophical conditions for making and recognizing true statements about reality. But while philosophical conditions can enable someone to know the truth about God, nature, sexuality, gender, marriage, and the like, philosophical conditions cannot bring about a personal encounter with, and acceptance of, these truths. Similarly, the perspectives of anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism matter to many in the LGBTQ community as the seemingly necessary philosophical conditions for rejecting traditionally accepted gender and sexuality norms and opening up a space for repressed identities to emerge and flourish. But while philosophical conditions can enable this critique and clear the way for new expressions, they cannot bring about the personal understanding and acceptance of new identity claims that the movement most desires.

A more personalistFootnote ¹⁹² approach is needed to find our way out of both the instrumentalist and perspectivist dead ends. A personalist approach would acknowledge, as an integral aspect of our humanness, that we assess knowledge, faith, values, law, and everything else, from our perspectives as particular creatures living in a particular place and time, in a particular culture or society, with a particular language and history, all of which comprise our worldview lens—the window through which we view the world.Footnote ¹⁹³ But acknowledging that we are persons with perspectives does not have to mean that we focus only on our perspectives themselves, any more than we would focus only on the window while trying to see out of it. It is also integral to our humanness to look through our perspectives at the different things we see, including the substantive religious, political, and legal claims we want to affirm.Footnote ¹⁹⁴

Also, since worldviews consist of deep presuppositions that human persons (not groups or systems) have about the meaning of reality and what counts as evidence about that reality, a personalist approach requires that we try to understand the practical existential experiences that make those presuppositions meaningful for the persons who hold them. Instead of merely examining the public justification for Christian conservative cultural and legal claims (or LGBTQ legal claims or any other legal claims) in the abstract, we should be “taking seriously [the] self-descriptions and the meaning” that those who hold them “attach to their practices and beliefs.”Footnote ¹⁹⁵

These characteristics of a personalist approach follow Heidegger's advice for dealing with a “what” differently from dealing with a “who.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ In dealing with an object or a thing in the world, we can isolate certain aspects and operations—such as their worldview or their logic—and analyze them separately from the whole. But to be a person means not only that something can be true about me, but also that something can be true for me as a whole, integral, self-reflective organism. Indeed, being a person in the first place means being concerned about my own existence.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ And concern for my existence assumes in turn a “world” toward which that concern is directed, a world composed of both objects and other persons.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Understanding worldview in a personalist way, then, requires starting with my own personhood—my own concerns about being in the world—and from that starting-place seeking to understand my relationship with other persons who are also doing the same. In this way, rather than seeing the other as a problem for me to solve, I can proceed “from a relationship with the other as person” and move “to an account of the other still as person.”Footnote ¹⁹⁹

Seeing worldview in this personalist, lens-like way rather than as an analytic tool requires increased sensitivity to the stories that people use when speaking from their particular perspective about what they see through their perspective. Instead of treating the components of their worldview as a collection of doctrines or propositions, I can try to make sense of the self-understanding of the person holding that doctrine or proposition—what larger story do they see themselves as part of, and how does the doctrine or proposition fit into that story?Footnote ²⁰⁰ This kind of storytelling and narrative approach can give witness to the truth in a more powerful way than focusing on seemingly straightforward propositions.Footnote ²⁰¹

Of course, good lawyers have always known that narrative and storytelling are central to their craft, whether the stories clients tell or the stories lawyers tell to juries and judges.Footnote ²⁰² More recently, critical legal theorists have highlighted the role of legal storytelling for marginalized groups reacting to a hegemonic legal discourse that possesses “the power to create fact” and to relegate “those whose stories are not believed” to the sidelines.Footnote ²⁰³ Under these circumstances, telling their own stories that run counter to or resist the hegemonic legal story can be the only way for marginalized groups really to be heard and taken into account by the legal system.Footnote ²⁰⁴

Christian conservative and LGBTQ legal groups both already use such outsider stories quite effectively to evoke public sympathy for their causes. Whether they are the love stories of gay couples seeking to have their marriages recognizedFootnote ²⁰⁵ or the persecution narratives of small business owners punished for following the dictates of their conscience,Footnote ²⁰⁶ personal stories of alleged injustice help the movements to put faces on the injustice they argue about in court and to evoke a sense of empathy.Footnote ²⁰⁷ But, once again, these stories are being used instrumentally, as a tool to achieve success in a court of law or a court of public opinion.

If members of the Christian conservative and LGBTQ communities could instead find a way to really encounter and engage one another's stories on a personal level outside of the legal system, they might actually be able to understand and persuade more effectively. Consider, for example, the role that personal conversion stories play in the Evangelical Christian community and the parallel role that coming-out stories play in the LGBTQ community. At least in North America and Western Europe, faith and religious institutions no longer comprise the primary shared social experiences in which we find authenticity, purpose, and significance. This is not to say we lack authenticity, purpose, and significance, or that we do not seek them; it is only to say that authenticity, purpose, and significance have become more individualized quests that must be justified to others on the basis of personal experience.Footnote ²⁰⁸

Whether they are stories of sinners getting saved or stories of LGBTQ people coming out of the closet, personal conversion stories have both an individual and a social function: they affirm the personal convictions of the storyteller about their own identity, and they strive to communicate this identity to others in a way that promotes empathy and acceptance.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Hearing someone else's story, I naturally try to make “present to my mind” the vantage point of the storyteller, and I use my imagination to consider “how I would feel and think if I were in their place.”Footnote ²¹⁰ Each of us can still defend and compare the ideas about sexual identity, equality, conscience, and sexual complementarity that form the conceptual and legal apparatus of our instrumental legal worldviews. But sharing the lived reality of how those ideas are experienced can create a sense of shared humanity, leading to the kind of cross-worldview understanding, and maybe even persuasion, that motivates Christian worldview advocates in the first place.

But in order for this sort of narrative encounter to be productive, an obstacle must be cleared away.

What Stands in the Way: Misguided Fears of Relativism

Many Christian thinkers who embrace the idea of worldview as a pre-theoretical commitment nevertheless balk at the idea that the truth of a political or legal position is relative to the perspective from which it sprang. Sometimes this ambivalence appears in the same document. For example, in the preface to their book Politics as Soulcraft, Francis J. Beckwith and J. P. Moreland embrace the idea of the Christian worldview as a “plausibility structure” that makes certain things believable and other things not.Footnote ²¹¹ But later in the same preface they argue that seeing Christianity as a subjective, socially constructed point of view “should be resisted by Christian intellectuals.”Footnote ²¹²

Similarly, David Naugle—the preeminent Christian chronicler of the worldview concept whose subtle and thorough work I have relied on often in this article—at one point agrees with the Nietzschean insight that “all human beings see things aslant, Christians included.”Footnote ²¹³ Indeed, he notes, “[t]his is what having a worldview, biblical or otherwise, is all about. It has to do with viewing the cosmos and all things within it through a particular set of lenses or from a specific point of view.”Footnote ²¹⁴ In other words, we tell the stories we tell about the world because we see the world through our particular worldview lenses. But Naugle also worries whether “believers [are] aware of the relativistic and privatized connotations” this idea of “‘worldview’ has acquired over time.”Footnote ²¹⁵

Another preeminent Christian worldview chronicler, James Sire, is similarly ambivalent about seeing worldview as a socially constructed narrative presupposition. Just like those thinkers who “see worldviews as linguistic structures by which we construct our world and come to control it,” Sire argues, “a Christian definition of worldview will depend on its prior commitment” to the story of God creating an “intelligible cosmos.”Footnote ²¹⁶ But in the very next paragraph, Sire denies that a narrative orientation commits “Christians to relativism.”Footnote ²¹⁷ And elsewhere in the book he flatly concludes that “[i]f the concept of worldview commits one to relativism, it cannot be used as a tool within the workshop of a Christian mind.”Footnote ²¹⁸

Still another Christian worldview thinker, Albert Wolters, agrees on this point: “To the degree that ‘worldview’ carries overtones of [a perspective] which does not allow for perduring constants, it needs to be redefined or reformed in the light of the biblical ideas of creation and revelation.”Footnote ²¹⁹

Christian conservative thinkers who are most active in legal debates usually go much further than these scholars do, staunchly rejecting any notion that worldviews are socially constructed and denying that value judgments are relative to those worldviews. One need not look far to find Christian conservatives denouncing relativism. Headlines like “How Relativism is Destroying the Christian Worldview” abound in this subculture.Footnote ²²⁰ Francis Beckwith even co-wrote an entire book warning Christians of the dangers of relativism.Footnote ²²¹ Christian conservative writers and activists get quite exercised about these supposed dangers, especially in legal argumentation. The alternative to moral absolutes, they argue, is not just a multiplicity of perspectives but anarchy:

Christian conservatives are right that the concept of worldview as a lens entails some version of relativism. As I argued in the previous section, since everyone is enmeshed in a worldview, and since worldviews are made up of the backgrounds, experiences, and sociohistorical situations of those who hold them, there is simply no neutral space outside of any worldview from which we could evaluate and assess worldviews. We can certainly evaluate and assess worldviews, but the standards we use to conduct this evaluation come from within a worldview, not from outside a worldview. Our culturally contingent background and experience form the preconceptions and presuppositions that determine what evidence counts and makes sense to us.

Notwithstanding the contingency and relativity of worldviews, though, the truth claims made through these different worldview perspectives can still be engaged. In fact, serious, respectful consideration of another person's perspective and story entails at least some consideration of the possibility that they might actually be right and we might actually be wrong. Otherwise, we risk condescension at best and imperiousness at worst. Engaging properly with another's worldview means changing our attitude from treating them as a feared other and seeing them instead as a potential discloser of a valid alternative way of being in the world, which might speak to our own predicament.

Relativism is not the main obstacle that prevents us from inquiring into the truth of any worldview, as Christian conservatives fear. The main obstacle is that we do not take the idea of relativism far enough.Footnote ²²³ When we “see the relativity business through to its very end” by accepting the idea that all worldviews are bound by time, language, culture, and so on, “a rather strange thing happens”: “the question of truth reasserts itself in almost pristine simplicity.”Footnote ²²⁴ Rather than eliminating our need for evaluation, the knowledge that our standards for evaluating our own or another's worldview are themselves worldview-contingent actually highlights and sharpens the question of whether we have good reasons after all for accepting or rejecting the worldview in question.

As long as we consider our own worldview as the only game in town and have no reason to question our standards of evaluation, we are like fish in water, content in our own everydayness. But once we realize the relativity and contingency of our worldview, we are washed ashore for the first time. And the shore is not any more neutral a space than is the water; there are always other choices—up on the mountain, sailing over the surface of the water, flying through the sky, and so on. The choices that confront us continue to multiply. We can say one choice is as good as any other, and we may even be right about that. But what we cannot do is live suspended in the air without any choice being made. Our very existence requires that we live in one state or another. We can say that our standards for choosing our current state are determined by how we have lived to this point, and we may be right about that too. But this only tells us how we choose; it does not tell us what we will choose.

This question of which worldview makes the most sense is just as poignant for the Queer Theorist who sees sexuality and gender identity as fluid and malleable as it is for the Christian conservative who believes these things are fixed and inviolable. And as we all investigate whether we still have good reasons to hold our contingent worldviews, we may not privilege modern over ancient reasons, since both are equally socially constructed. Both the contemporary critical worldview and the Christian conservative worldview are “constructed and maintained by the same kind of social processes. . . . Each has its appropriate plausibility structure, its plausibility-maintaining mechanisms.”Footnote ²²⁵

When we approach our worldview this way, we are no longer free to act out of modern arrogance. We academic critics are no longer free to act as if our realization that all worldviews are socially constructed makes us superior to those Christian conservative simpletons who think that knowledge and belief are based on objective inquiry into foundational facts and self-evident natural principles. We may say that those facts and principles are relative to a certain time, place, culture, and the like, but we are still left with the questions of whether we will accept those facts and principles, and if not, why not.Footnote ²²⁶ Once this is understood, the appeal to any critical consciousness that is ipso facto superior to a religious one “loses most of its persuasiveness.”Footnote ²²⁷ The argument about social contingency and relativism thus “bends back upon itself” and becomes relativized and liquidated.Footnote ²²⁸

Therefore, what follows from the claim of worldview relativity is not, as Christian conservatives fear, the end of the debate over rival worldviews or agnosticism about the substance of those worldviews. What follows instead is “a new freedom and flexibility in asking questions of truth,” including questions that could have religious answers.Footnote ²²⁹ In short, when all our worldviews have been relativized in the abstract, we can once again meet on the equal footing of human beings who have something concrete to offer: our particular stories. Others are still free to find these stories persuasive or unpersuasive, moving or unmoving. But this sort of evaluation does not take place on the terrain of abstract argumentation, where I see the other as a representative of a concept rather than a person. The evaluation of our different stories takes place instead on the terrain of empathy for the other as a person like me.