Note: This blog is usually about education, but this post is only tangential to that. This is just something I have been mulling in recent weeks.
In the 80s, the American church went through a period of anti-intellectual elitism. I was blessed enough to not know this until the mid-90s because it was not happening in my church. I was spoiled by a smart pastor who preached intelligent, well-written sermons, some of which I can still remember today. It wasn't until I was in a Christian college that I found out that most 80s kids were raised without any knowledge of how to think about Scripture. They had never been taught how to tell what a verse meant, only how they felt about it. Their pastors routinely said something along the lines of "Well, you may have a Ph.D., but I believe in WWJD." I don't know if this was a backlash to evolution in science education or something else, but it made me sad to think that God had gifted people with charisma and communication skills only to have them use those talents to denigrate the intellectual gifts God gave to others. Instead of exhorting them to use those powerful gifts as Daniel did, to glorify God and influence culture, these ministers mocked the gifts that God meant for them to use. This led to a generation of therapeutic moralists, people who believed God wanted them to be happy and that being good would make them happy. They didn't think about theological doctrines or context or meaning because that might interfere with how a verse made them feel about themselves (which was clearly the only thing God cared about).
Then, it seemed there was a time of change. At least in my circles, pastors used sermons to appeal to doctors, lawyers, and academics to meet their world where it was and use their minds and credentials to bring light into dark places. Leaders like Tim Keller and Christian colleges like Kings College in New York trained educated people to go into a variety of fields because their voices were needed there. As I wrote last week, the vision of my Christian school is to help our students achieve academic excellence and develop their gifts while being grounded in God's word so that they can carry out the plan God has for them and to "impact their world for Christ" as our mission statement says. The shift was to mock celebrities (which I am also not okay with because, again, these are people who could be very influential in the use of their gifts), but I hadn't heard an outright mockery of scientists and other academics for a while.
I hadn't heard it, that is, until the pandemic.
It seems there is nothing that we won't make political. Taking precautions against getting a virus shouldn't be political, but there are people who thrive on chaos and, thus, foment division about things we should all be united about. In order to make it an "us vs. them" situation, there were some who insisted on painting epidemiologists as stupid and/or self-serving. Men and women who have learned and forgotten more science than I have ever learned are being called stupid by high school dropouts and self-serving by megachurch pastors. Then, it stopped being directed at the one man who had the audacity to publically question a questionable statement and became directed at all scientists. Nurses are being told to change out of their scrubs before leaving the hospital and are being escorted by security to their cars because of dangerous protesters. Doctors who are destroying their own health for the sake of ours are being accused of diagnosing patients out of greed. There is a church in California whose pastor has screamed at the top of his voice that anyone entering his church with a mask will be turned away. (As Jesus would? Wait, that doesn't sound right.)
As a science teacher and a Christian, this resurgence of anti-education among American church leaders is heartbreaking. At a time when we most need these people and their work, influential leaders of the church should not be looking down on them. I'm not saying everyone has to agree. Even among scientists, there will be differences in interpretation. I'm not saying science isn't sometimes flawed. It is a field of study being carried out by fallen human beings, so of course, there are errors. I'm not trying to place the highly educated above anyone else, but it is crazy that anyone would put them under others in the name of faith.
Christian school teachers, it is our responsibility to fight this. When a student believes their Google search is more credible than the words of an expert, it is our job to push back. When we teach students to analyze literature for meaning, we must make sure they understand how to do the same thing with God's word. When we teach math and science, we must not say faith and science are different things that don't influence each other because that's just hiding from the hard work of grappling with difficult issues. We must teach them that it is both academically important and God-honoring to dig into those issues and that they may spend years working on them. When a student answers a question with the lazy answer "because God made it that way," it is critically important that we push through that and say, "Sure, but how did He make it that way?" All Christian teachers, it is important that our students see our example as Christians who live by faith, but it is equally important that we model thirst for the knowledge God has given humankind. We should never teach them to ignore God's gifts.
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