Why keep swimming

Why do the majority of Christians doubt the literal existence of the Devil? We’re affected by the pervasive skepticism and disenchantment of our “secular age,” but it’s not just that we’re passively affected by our culture. A lot of us are actively searching for an intellectually honest and respectable faith, a faith that prizes scientific knowledge and literacy. From cutting-edge cosmology to genetics to evolutionary theory to particle physics to neuroscience, Christians want to investigate and enjoy the findings of science and integrate them with faith. But this pursuit, one I heartily approve of as a social scientist, can create tensions and raise hard and difficult questions: How does evolution fit with the book of Genesis? Or neuroscience with the belief in an immortal soul? The pursuit of a scientifically literate faith can move you deeper into doubt and increase the pressures of disenchantment.
Many scientifically literate Christians find it hard to believe in ghosts, and this skepticism affects their beliefs in other supernatural beings— angels, demons, and the Devil. Even belief in God is affected. Across the board in this secular age, doubt haunts belief, which is why many believers are drifting toward agnosticism and atheism. The tide of disenchantment is simply too strong, and faith is swept away. 

Consequently, a large part of being a scientifically engaged and literate Christian is swimming against this tide of doubt and disenchantment, and that’s exhausting. Some days it seems like it would just be easier to stop struggling, to let the tide of disenchantment take you and drift into unbelief. 

So why keep swimming? 

Because the secular age isn’t wholly characterized by disenchantment. Here and there in the secular, we encounter the transcendent, the holy, and the sacred. We encounter beauty and ugliness, love and meaning. We are skeptics, but we are also haunted by the sense that there is something more. 

As [Charles] Taylor describes it, the secular age is characterized by two cross-pressures. On the one hand is the downward pressure of skepticism and disenchantment, where the enchanted world is emptied out and all that is left is the flat, horizontal drama of human action and interaction. This is the trajectory of a Scooby-Doo episode, the journey to discover that, in the end, there are no ghosts or gods or devils. In the final analysis, at the end of the thirty-minute adventure, there are only human beings. 

But here and there in this secular age we also experience updrafts of transcendence, a pull toward the heavens. We’re interrupted by wonder and awe. We’re surprised by joy. We experience a deep-seated ache and yearning, a feeling of restlessness, a longing for home. Even in an age of particle physics and brain scans, we still bump into the magic from time to time, still experience the enchantment of the world. We’re skeptical and scientific people, yes, but we’re also haunted by the suspicion that the universe is more than the sum of its subatomic parts. 

Doubting and disenchanted Christians live at the center of these cross-pressures. We are skeptics, but we are also haunted in ways that agnostics or atheists are not. And that haunting keeps us swimming against the tide of disenchantment, keeps us tethered to faith through a restlessness and dissatisfaction with a thoroughly disenchanted world, a world ruled by the iron and deterministic laws of cause-and-effect.

From Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted, by Richard Beck. 

The Secular Society under attack

...no one can be blind to the evidence that the liberal, secular democratic state is in grave trouble. The attacks on it from powerful new religious fanaticisms are possible only because its own internal weaknesses have become so clear: the disintegration of family life, the growth of mindless violence, the vandalism which finds satisfaction in destroying whatever is comely and useful, the growing destruction of the environment by limitless consumption fueled by ceaseless propaganda, the threat of nuclear war, and-as the deepest root of it all-the loss of any sense of a meaningful future. Weakened from within, secular democratic societies are at a loss to respond to religious fanaticism without denying their own principles. What could it mean for the Church to make once again the claim which it made in its earliest centuries, the claim to provide the public truth by which society can be given coherence and direction?

Certainly it cannot mean a return to the use of coercion to impose belief. That is, in any case, impossible. Assent to the claim of Christ has to be given in freedom. But it is never given in a vacuum. The one to whom the call of Jesus comes already lives in a world full of assumptions about what is true. How is this world of assumptions formed? Obviously through all the means of education and communication existing in society. Who controls these means? The question of power is inescapable. Whatever their pretensions, schools teach children to believe something and not something else. There is no "secular" neutrality. Christians cannot evade the responsibility which a democratic society gives to every citizen to seek access to the levers of power. But the issue has never confronted the Church in this way before; we are in a radically new situation and cannot dream either of a Constantinian authority or of a pre-Constantinian innocence.

Lesslie Newbigin. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, pages 223-4

Plausibility structures

Clearly it is such a claim to universal judgement that is embodied in the often expressed idea that all claims to revealed truth must be judged by the canon of reason.  There are no canons of reason which are not part of a socially embodied tradition of rational debate.  It is especially important to say this because, as I said earlier, we who are Western Christians are also part of an international culture which uses the European languages as its medium of reasoning and which makes claims to universal validity – claims which are made more plausible by the success of this culture in establishing itself throughout the world as the standard of what is called ‘modernization.’  It is this way of understanding the world which provides the ‘plausibility strucutre’ for most of the educated and urbanized peoples of the world.  It we adhere to the Christian tradition we thus do so in conscious recognition of the fact that this is a personal decision.  In contrast to the long period in which the plausibility structure of European society was shaped by the biblical tradition, and in which one could be a Christian without conscious decision because the existence of God was among the self-evident truths, we are now in a situation where we have to take personal responsibility for our beliefs.  When we do so, we are immediately faced with the charge of subjectivity.  In a consumer society where the freedom of every citizen to express his or her personal preference is taken as fundamental to human happiness – whether this personal preference is in respect of washing powder or sexual behaviour – it will be natural to conclude that adherence to the Christian tradition is also simply an expression of personal preference.  The implication will be that claims to universal truth are abandoned and that we are back again in a relativistic twilight.  The only firmly established truth is the truth of the reigning plausibility structure, which is bound to deny the Christian’s claim that God has acted in historic events to reveal and effect his purpose for all humankind.

In some situations it is possible to escape from this problem by withdrawing into a ghetto where, in a small community, the Christian tradition can function as the plausibility structure which is not questioned.  There are places where that can happen, but they are few.  How then do we deal with the threat of this relativism of a consumer-oriented society?  In following the argument of [Alisdair] MacIntyre I have suggested the answer.  It is that one learns to live so fully within both traditions that the debate between them is internalized.  As a Christian I seek so to live within the biblical tradition, using its language as my language, its models as the models through which I make sense of experience, its story as the clue to my story, that I help to strengthen and carry forward this tradition of rationality.  But as a member of contemporary British society I am all the time living in, or at least sharing my life with, those who live in the other tradition.  What they call self-evident truths are not self-evident to me, and vice versa.  When they speak of reason they mean what is reasonable within their plausibility structure.  I do not live in that plausibility, but I know what it feels like to live in it.  Within my own mind there is a continuing dialogue between the two.  Insofar as my own participation in the Christian tradition is healthy and vigorous, both in thought and in practice, I shall be equipped for the external dialogue with the other tradition.  There is no external criterion above us both to which I and my opposite number can appeal for a decision. The immediate outcome is a matter of the comparative vigour and integrity of the two traditions; the ultimate outcome is at the end when the one who alone is judge sums up and gives the verdict. 

From The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, pgs 64/5, by Lesslie Newbigin. 

The everyday

The last place most people look is right under their feet, in the everyday activities, accidents, and encounters of their lives.... My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul.  What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world.

Barbara Brown Taylor
An Altar in the World

Christianity in America...

We have come with some confidence to believe that a significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that it is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.... It is not so much that U.S. Christianity is being secularized. Rather, more subtly, Christianity is either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself or, more significantly, Christianity is actively being colonized and displaced by quite a different religious faith.

Christian Smith with Melinda Denton
Soul Searching

Preaching the Gospel

"The ultimate goal is to preach the gospel. But the gospel is not simple to those whose background prevents them from understanding it. Today's global secular culture has erected a maze of mental barriers against even considering the biblical message."

Nancy Pearcey (Saving Leonardo, p.15)