Rethinking Community

There’s a scene that occurs in a few TV shows and movies that strikes me as particularly foreign to us, although we do not often recognize it. It occurs whenever characters from one relatively isolated group (say, a family, or a school) interact with characters with whom they would not otherwise interact with if it were not the occasion or situation.

One great example for this is the various town interactions that occur in Stars Hollow in Gilmore Girls. One expects Lorelai to interact with the people at work – Michel and Sookie – and one expects Rory to interact with her peers at school – Paris, for example – and one expects them both as regulars at Luke’s to befriend Luke himself. But who is the figure of Kirk? Or Taylor Doose? Where do they fit in?

Obviously they are figures that aid in our understanding of Stars Hollow itself, a place that exists somewhat independent of Lorelai’s inn and Rory’s school, and, surprisingly enough, a place that exists with its own economy and its own spirit. It is a place that represents a community that truly does exist in all of its quirkiness. The increasing presence of Kirk as the series goes on is an expression of the increasing importance of Stars Hollow as a character for the season (Stars Hollow, of course, personified in the character of Kirk).

But at a realistic glance, one might ask a following question: When do all these people find time to be a community? And why? The TV has cast a spell on us: we recognize that a town existing as a community is a beautiful thing, a quirky thing, and a valuable thing. There’s this quote from G.K. Chesterton in which he observes that the family is a romance because we have no control who our family is; but for Gilmore Girls, Stars Hollow is a romance because these characters have literally no reason to relate or connect with one another at all, not even family relations. Kirk has no relational or identity reason for connecting and engaging with the Gilmores time and again, he doesn’t even have an occupational reason for doing so, since he works a different job nearly every episode. He is neither coworker, nor peer, nor friend (at first at least), nor diner-owner, nor romantic interest, nor circumstantial encounter, even. He just is and he is for no “purpose.”

I’ve been thinking about the problem of community a lot lately. The word is a difficult word to bring up in discourses, probably because it holds with it, in recent parlance, some measure of “left-ness.” In the politicization of the world, “community” is categorized to the left while “individual” is categorized to the right, a false dichotomy that ought to be deconstructed if I’ve ever seen one.

The problem is particularly tricky for the Church. The Church also ought to be a romance, following Chesterton’s terminology. Here we have people who come from every walk of life and in every stage of life who come together to worship the God who has met them all in some, miraculous, incredible manner. These people are called “the Body.” They are not called, if we use the similar language that Paul provides us in Romans and in I Corinthians, “the diverse Body Parts” or “the Members,” although we might refer to an individual at times a “member” of “this or that church.” But the word that the Scriptures use is that this Church is a Body, thus it is a Community.

But we have a hard time being a Community. Individualism dictates that we each must come and each must play our own part, and that if we do so then that is a community: sovereign individuals playing their part on the assembly-line Church. But an assembly-line cannot make a Community any more than it can make a Church, and often in churches that are more individual-focused (think: megachurches that are so big that worship is a wholly private affair because one can get lost in the mass of people) we find that parishioners often have no personal connection with the Church’s mission, or its purpose, or its goals, or even with other people. I have known churches where members come in, they dance for the service, they worship in the privacy of their own seats, and then they leave shortly before any can catch them. It is as those worship is a private matter only. I wonder what coming to church means for these folks; couldn’t they have the same experience from the privacy of their own couch? (And don’t televangelists serve this same demographic?)

Yet stories like Gilmore Girls draw our attention and our hearts, and if we pay attention we might see that they are drawing our hearts for a reason. There is something incredible about being a part of a living Community.

While we have lived in Hyde Park, we have languished – on one hand – because Hyde Park itself is a very dysfunctional “community.” It is not geographically segregated, but it is culturally self-segregated: there are community members and there are university members, there are Christians and there are seculars, and we interact with one another, at most, when we are in the act of purchasing. Our social relationships have become material ones.

But – on the other hand – my wife and I have joyed in our church community. Church of the Shepherd is a small church, a small community, and it has all of the joys and struggles that a small church formed mostly of graduate students has: a revolving door of comings and goings, little sets of resources to accomplish our mission, and the constant dynamism of ever-changing worship. Yet still, somehow, we have found a way to be a community. We are inter-connected with one another’s lives. We celebrated a friend’s birthday party last weekend, we mourned in Ash Wednesday this morning, we will eat after service sometime again soon, I am sure.

I do not know how to explain the feeling that I am attempting to explain, nor the spiritual wealth of being in the midst of a community that “gets” community. How can I? I do not have the appropriate language – individualism has robbed me of the ability to communicate it. But here are a few sketches:

+ Our worship is a worship of the Church, not a worship of private individuals. We do worship together; not pretending to be together but worshiping alone. It is a delight. One of the ways we accomplish this is by serving each other in the service – one reads the Scriptures, others lead the songs, others lead the prayers, others take the offering. Liturgos literally means “work of the people”; our liturgy is a work of our community.

+ Our Bible Study is a study of the Church, not a study of private individuals. The pastors prepare together and prepare in the context of commentaries and various evangelical theologians (I get to join them sometimes); and we wrestle with questions rather than lay down solid facts. This gets us into the Word more deeply, and we leave with both the refreshment of the Scriptures in our studies, but also with the refreshment of having wrestled through the Scriptures as a community.

+ Our sermons are of the Church, not of private individuals. The pastors work as a team in preparing sermon series, and members of our church serve one another by preaching from time to time too. We make it a practice to represent various theologians and voices in the messages so that we are embedded not just within our own theological tradition, but also within the “great cloud of witnesses” that has gone before us.

+ We also eat together. A lot.

These sketches serve as introductory thoughts in what it looks like for a Church to become a Community. It is hard to nail down, however, precisely what will and will not work for a given Church; they’re all very different. The crucial thing, however, is that we recognize Sunday worship not as a space for us to have our individual experience with the Lord, but for us to participate in worship as a Body together in His presence. Individual prayer and worship is a thing for daily devotionals or morning Bible studies; Sunday is a time for us to come together as a Community. That distinction seems like a crucial one that is worth making.

Beyond this, too, I am also thinking about what general community – the Community of the town, etc. – ought to look like in a culture as individualized as ours. That will need to be another blog post, once I have thought it through more. For now, however, I will observe that being a Community as a Church is also evangelistic: the world outside is dying for relationship and dying for community, and we have the ability to be that Community for them. Let us be the Body: that in itself is a prophetic declaration.

Strategies of Discourse

I have made an effort to take a step back from my micro-critiques of power (i.e. writing things about the ideology that sprouts from the head of orange hair – albeit not from its mind) in order to wrestle with more fundamental problems of discourse. So far this year the problems of discourse have arrived in the form of “fake news,” in the form of “the media,” in the form of a leader who really does not know heads from tails, and in the form of social media in general.

Keeping the words of Michel Foucault in the back of our minds, one must navigate discourse always with the notion that knowledge and power are correlative matters. That is, that discourses of knowledge disclose themselves as spaces of power, and, vice-versa, that spaces of power always have related discourses of knowledge tied to them. This is why in Discipline and Punish Foucault observes the presence of ultimate truth only within the domain of the public execution; and this is why in The History of Sexuality the notion of a biopower, and its knowledge of objectified life, is so disconcerting.

So the deployment of discourse is always strategic. This should not be surprising to us. I’ve been enjoying reading, as I’ve mentioned before on this blog, Cicero’s speeches against the corrupt Sicilian governor Verres. His strategy is incredibly concise, and every direction that Hortensius might turn to defend his client is removed, step-by-step, by Cicero’s rhetorical brilliance. The speeches of the In Verrem are rightly called those that made Cicero known throughout Rome as the empire’s master of rhetoric. Rhetoric, in the Ciceronian tradition, is always demonstrating some type of strategy to accomplish its ends. A piece of written work is always revealing not only its rhetorical style but also its power and purpose.

I bring Foucault and Cicero together here because I think it is worthwhile to observe the ways in which modern discourse functions, and I do this because I think that discourse functions in accordance with its internal rhetorical-strategy even in spite of its writer’s intentions. We like to think that our words function as we like them to; but the severe truth that any writer who is worth their weight knows is that words have more life than we can bridle, and that the skilled writer must recognize the living qualities of words, respect it, and “tame” it, if possible, in order to accomplish their ends. Cicero was the master of this (so was Petrarch; and the Apostle Paul, I must add). Yet most modern discussants are not Cicero.

Instead, we literary-hacks, we half-bred writers are throwing words out into space that have no relation with one another. In moments of brilliance or genius – but not of talent or skill – we finally communicate what it is we mean to communicate; but most of the time we miss entirely how to operate within our own discourses. Social media aggravates this, of course. Whereas in a blog post – like this one – or a journal article, the audience is some neutral, unengaged spectator whose responses, if they happen, occur in another medium – a journal article response, or a comment on Facebook – in social media, instead, the audience is a thoroughly engaged and absolutely non-neutral figure. Even moreso, the audience is no “faceless” mass; they are definitionally “faced.” They have some real presence on the discourse being presented, not as neutral discussants or interlocutors, but as people who disagree.

And as such, the strategies of discourse are dislocated and unbalanced. Rhetorical methods that have historically been tried and true do not fit this new space, and when they are attempted to be brought into it, they transform that space and provide it with some moral or intellectual character that is not intrinsic to it. This, too, further perpetuates the alienation that exists within the social media.

So words, maybe targeted and planned, come under different powers when planted in the worlds of social media. Somehow their rhetorical structures divide and are dismantled. Discourse that would have been effective as standard oratory (in Ciceronian ways) or as an essay becomes different, with different implications and underlying meanings, in the social media. To follow Foucault again, Power is at play here, in some manner.

Power, in the traditional discourses, is located in the speaker, or in the powers-that-be that allow the speaker space (e.g. editors, reviewers, publishers). But in these new discourses, power is located in the community at large. Power is distributed across many discourses, many specialties, and many voices. It is a little confusing and a little off-putting to be surrounded all at once by so many voices speaking all at the same time. They are all clamoring for Truth because there’s a way in which their Power could be held onto if they can manage to grasp Truth.

But Truth in the social media discourse, in the new discourses, is harder to hold on to. Maybe this is the more disconcerting undercurrent beneath all “fake news” / “post-truth” phenomena: not that we have become such relativists that Truth is up for debate, nor that we have created such untrustworthy powers that claim non-truths as Truth, nor that we have political engines that declaim what is and is not Truth, but instead that our very discourse has become a continual reaching-for and grasping-at Truth without ever actually holding it. It’s a game of hot potato.

It’s a game of Power, of course, too.

Where is Cicero?

Last night I read one of Cicero's speeches.

For those unfamiliar: Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, a prolific writer, a true Republic-an (i.e. man of the Republic), and, without any doubt, the foundational rhetorician underneath all of Western thought, argument, and discourse. He was later loved and received by such great minds as St. Augustine and Francesco Petrarch.

In the speech, Cicero is stating the case against Verres, a corrupt governor of Sicily. Verres was an inexcusable man - he stole money from the coffers of the state, he imprisoned and executed peasants at random, his actions resulted in the decimation of the Sicilian navy. And, yet, he was also a very wealthy person. At the time of his trial, it was well known how easily a jury could be bought and bribed. However, unfortunate for him, the jury so-selected at the time of Cicero's charge against him was one unfavorable to bribes. His strategy - and the strategy of his consul Hortensius - was simple: Let Cicero make his remarks now (in late summer), and we will give the full time to respond. That will put us into the upcoming series of festivals, the trials will be placed on hold, and, come January, we will have a new jury, one more pliable by money.

Cicero, of course, sees through this mockery of justice, and he makes his own plans in order to counter his opponent.

What struck me as absolutely incredible, however, is the way in which Cicero frames his argument. He tells the jurors that their ability to administer justice has lost its value in the eyes of the Romans people. If they fail to indict such a damnable person as Verres then they will prove the uselessness of the Roman courts, discredit the value of Roman justice, and tell the whole world that Rome is such a place that money can buy one's innocence, rather than the exercise of true, just, wise judgment.

But if they successfully indict Verres, then they will declare the opposite claim to the Roman people: we will not accept bribes, nor will we accept money, in order to influence our beliefs of what is just, what is right, and what is acceptable in Rome.

What struck me in this speech - something that always strikes me with Cicero - is how truly a "man of Rome" Cicero is. In a later speech against Marc Antony - a speech that would cost him his life - Cicero declares that a person who assaults him is also a person who assaults Rome. How many men could say this with regards to their country? Or, more importantly than the "nation," with regards to the relationship they hold with the ideals embodied by their country? For, truly, Cicero is not nearly as much a "true Roman" (although he is) as he is a "true Republic-an," a true believer in the ways of administering secular justice. He is aware of man's fallible, weak, and evil nature, but he is convinced that men still have the ability to judge amidst themselves well.

Maybe Cicero is a little idealistic. Maybe he has read Plato too much. But it strikes me that in the sort of season of American history wherein we find ourselves that we have a great many Verres-es about. Verres exists on the Right, in the forms of, say, individuals whose financial contributions secure votes; Verres exists on the Left, in the forms of, say, individuals whose received financial contributions secure foreign policy. But where is our Cicero? What has become of him?

Truly, I am concerned that the bifurcation of our society into camps - Left, Right, Libertarian, Socialist - prevents the true administration of Justice, in the commonly-held, commonly-understood, secular manner. The political "tribes" (or totems) have their own epistemologies, entire ready-made worldviews that are accessible not via reasoning, nor debate, nor discourse, but via microwave, through fast-food, as it were. Most political commentators - professional and Facebook - are not true debaters or discussants. Most are tribalists, fed the same way we feed our children at McDonald's: crap that doesn't cost much, doesn't provide much nutrition, and gives you a little toy to make you feel special.

A true Cicero of today would eschew the paltry boundaries of tribalism within the American political discourse and would resolutely stand firm upon the foundational claims made by the American political experiment - something liberty and justice for all, or the inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. A true Cicero of today would not be a pundit of the sides, but would point out the evils of corruption regardless of its colors.

Truthfully, I am tired of Veres, in his various forms, buying off jurors and stealing from Sicily. Would that we would see new modern Ciceros arise to combat these foes, whose aim is their own bellies and whose fruit will be our destruction if we do not respond to them.

A Short Poem. On Writer's Block.

(02/06/17)

My mind is too full.
But my paper is too empty.
My pen stands still.

Being-a-Writer

I find Jean-Paul Sartre to be horribly mistaken about the problem of mauvaise foi (bad faith). Not completely mistaken, of course, as I have said in times past how I find his notion of “bad faith” – bad faith being, as simply put as possible, the way the self lies to the self about who it is in order to become who it thinks it ought to become – to hold up with man’s general inability to live authentically, nor mistaken in a philosophical way, given the ways in which the ontology presented in Being and Nothingness is so meticulously put-together that it seems difficult, to me, to surpass or reject.

But maybe I speak not just as a reader of Sartre but also a reader of Frantz Fanon, who himself seems to also have a problem regarding bad faith – that is, that as a black man in “not-that-racist” (re: racist) France, Fanon found his overdetermination coming from without rather than simply from within. Is it bad faith if one is not who the World say is? I will leave that one for the readers and interpreters and interlocutors of Black Skin, White Masks to decide.

For me, however, I find a different struggle with the idea of bad faith. Sartre’s bad faith functions as a problem that entraps us within certain modes of being. The most famous example, of course, is the waiter who is playing at being-a-waiter. His essential being, of course, is not as a waiter, but when he dons his clothing and waits tables he assumes the character and nature – even the being – of a waiter. This, Sartre would assert to us, is not the waiter as he really is nor is it the waiter as he ought to be. The waiter is likely being-a-waiter in order to fulfill some other purpose in his life (probably paying the bills). But, as Sartre often remarks, he has radical freedom to be what he wants to be. He could doff his waiter-ing garb and thrust his plates upon the faces of the café’s patrons and then off and become… something else.

Yet, deep within my soul, I find in myself the reality of being-a-writer. I have not donned any writerly-garb in order to become a writer. Nor have I really written anything suitably worthwhile to become a writer. I enrolled in a graduate program that improved my writing, no doubt, and that allowed me to become the sort of reader who is able to begin tackling Being and Nothingness, amidst others. But when I say that I am a writer, I mean something more essentialist rather than existential. I am not describing something that is definable or describable through external sources of knowledge and knowing. Rather, I am actually describing something more like the framework of my soul. As a Christian, I call this something a little more like “Calling” or “Vocation” or “Purpose.” There’s an Image that I have been made in – the Image of the Logos Himself – and that Image imprints upon my very being something of a distinct personal character.

No doubt, and I see proof for this too, I often live out of some kind of bad faith. I do not think that Sartre’s observation is wrong; I think that bad faith is the sort of relationship with freedom that mankind has under the domain of sin. I would even go further and assert that Sartre’s radically-free subject is always-already a subject of some kind of bad faith. Here I’d follow Louis Althusser in his description of the subject of ideology, but I would, using my fancy Christian language, replaced ideology with the true power that undergirds this bad faith: that is, Idolatry.

Bad faith for me, however, manifests in my incessant struggle to write. While Sartre’s waiter is playing at being-a-waiter and lying to himself that his internal nature is truly a waiter, when he is not, my true being of being-a-writer (that is, being-a-writer-in-itself, rather than for-itself) is constantly doffed in my life for the sake of other ‘beings.’ I will, for a short time yet, be-a-lab-manager, or be-a-Chicagoan. Maybe too I wrestle against the seductive ontological claim that calls itself ‘being-not-a-writer.’ This is the most devastating ontology.

I find it hard to be me, that is, Ian-who-is-a-writer. Part of it has to do with the stunning amount of inauthentic and haphazard writing that exists out there these days, both in journalistic and in academic circles. And do not get me started on “Christian writing,” because it’s a crapshoot nine out of ten times.

Here I am faced with a stunning reversal of Sartre’s bad faith: I cannot be what I really am, and instead I continually struggle with the becoming of what I really am. I am not becoming that which I wish to be or that which I radically choose to be. To risk sounding deterministic, I am becoming what I was already and am, but I am not that being right now.

This, to me, is the greatest difficulty.

For the Conservative Christian Dissenter. A Letter.

I want to give a hearty shout-out to those conservative Christian friends of mine who, seeing the temptation for power have rejected it, hearing the loud voice have stopped their ears from it, and being surrounded by the whispers of those who "call evil good and good evil" have said "No, that is not the way" to them.

It is easy for a liberal to reject and not support a person like Trump. I don't applaud my liberal friends for their courage, necessarily. And principled moderates (like me) are simply disgusted by bad debaters and charismatic passion without substance. I don't applaud them either.

I applaud those conservative Christians who, standing on their Bibles, leaning into their Scriptures, think that there is a point where you can no longer espouse "conservative values" without espousing them with your lifestyle; those who think that it is not enough for a candidate to mime the right words and say the right things, rather it is necessary for a candidate to behave in a manner befitting the office.

Your reasons for rejecting this man are diverse - for some of you, he's an affront to true conservatism (c'mon y'all: here's big government in just a different way); for some of you, he's just simply disgusting. But I suspect that at least one common thread links my conservative Christian friends who reject this man alongside my liberal and moderate Christians friends who do the same.

That is: we are citizens of another nation. We are not here for petty political squabbles. We are here to bring salt and light to the world. And my conservative Christian friends who are rejecting Trump are doing so also because they love God's Church, and they see the kind of damage that Trumpism can do to our mission.

This is not some abstract, theological premise, folks. I don't get on a soapbox to expostulate to you or preach to you. I do it because I love God's people and I love God's mission, and I think that nothing hurts our mission more than when we find ourselves in league with those who are the antithesis of our values. It is simply enough, for me, that I see a man who is the distinct apposite of Jesus' Beatitudes. That is enough for me to say "Nope. I cannot support him. Nope. I cannot sign off on his values. Nope. If that's what 'conservative' means, then please take me off your list."

And my sense is that, more than not, my conservative Christian friends who have rejected Trump and his ways are doing so because of their deeply-held, Bible-centered beliefs about what is Good, what is Evil, what is Just, and what is Lawless.


I want you to know that I am encouraged by you. I want to you know, too, that those around you see. Your moderate and liberal friends who do not follow Jesus (yet), will see your stand, and they will say "Ah, maybe there's more to this Jesus person that a political claim." Or, "Maybe Jesus isn't interested in hatred like I think he is." Your stand, declaring "This man is not representative of what I believe" is what the Bible calls "salt and light." You refuse to let your salt become unsalty, to let yourself be sullied by 'the cares of the world.' That is a courageous thing.

I set these words out here not because I want to make a political claim. This is not politics. If it were politics, then I wouldn't have posted anything at all over the past year on this topic. This is about theological courage, it is about standing up for what you believe in, it's about not backing down when peer pressure and social movements want to take you where do you not want to go. Your congregations and communities, unfortunately, are being ravaged by an ideological force that is foreign to the Gospel - that good, sweet, pure Gospel that you received and held onto and clung to. Do not let go of that Gospel, because it is life, it is grace, and it is peace.

Do not be conformed to the pattern of the world, my friend. And I am encouraged to see that you are already standing against "the pattern of the world." Know that there is spiritual warfare all about with this Trumpism thing. It is a real ideological force, and that means that it is a real spiritual force. Dig into that Bible, spend time in prayer, lean into your brothers and sisters whom you love, gather as the ekklesia, take and imbibe the Sacrament, and worship the Lord. These things will encourage you and strengthen you against the powers of Nero.


And you know, and I know, that we are, too, called to pray for our leaders, just as (I hope) we prayed for our past leaders - irregardless of ideological or spiritual bent. So do that also. Let us not stop praying for Trump. But let us be careful how we pray. In days past I would hear leaders (ones who are now convinced of Trump's faith) say "We must pray for the conversion of Obama." Brothers and sisters, let's be real: that is letting our politics invade our private place of prayer. Do not let politics invade your place of prayer. Do not pray "That righteous man" or "That wicked man." Pray, as Paul commands us, "for the emperor," for kings, for all those who are in authority.

Continue to bear the light, my conservative brother and sister. Continue to shine God's good Gospel to those who do not know Him. Reject anything that comes from fear and hate, because those things wish not just to make you miserable and into a political scoundrel, but because those things wish to destroy your witness before men. Remember that it is the Gospel you must hold up for the salvation of many, not political ideas or political claims. No conservatism, no liberalism, no moderatism, no centrism, and no libertarianism has the powers to save a man's soul. Only the Gospel can do that. So be committed to evangelism and to the proclamation of the Gospel.

And continue, as you are doing, holding the standard of Scripture against a leader that some of our Christian voices will not hold the standard to. This is not judgmental nor is it 'whiney.' It is what it means to live our lives based on the Word of God. Hold that Scripture with firmness and with authority, with confidence and with boldness, and with bold, crazy, courageous, and evangelistic love. Lean into the Holy Spirit, and He will take you into Truth, rather than into the nonsense that some espouse to be Truth.


As to your relationships - those that have broken and distressed because of your stance - lean into Grace. But more importantly, remember that letting your light shine is also, let your fruit bear witness of the work of the power of God's love in you. It is more provocative that a person full of love bear strong spiritual fruit versus a person who is full of worldly hate, than all of the words and conversations and provocations in the world. Be the Gospel witness that you have been called, pre-ordained, anointed, and set apart to be, and your Trumpist neighbor, if they be saved, will see. Maybe even repent. Maybe even open their own hearts and learn what it means to love the lost, to seek salvation for the poor, to feed the hungry, to care for the widow and the orphan.

This is a hard thing to live, but when one lives their lives in accordance with the Gospel it is not only Good News to the lost, but it is Good News to the found who have confused themselves with the ways of the world.

So, Go! and be Good News. And thank you for staying and standing True to the Word you have received.

On Inarticulate Critique

I encountered a problematic gesture today. It was on a FB group that I frequent and, most of the days, enjoy. The post was a typical kind of communication within a certain conservative Christian demographic – that is, the “disdain and disbelief” sort of post. I could probably write a large amount regarding the nature of the Christian “disdain and disbelief” post, since it appears to be the majority of the sort of communications that social-media-engaged-self-identifying-as-Christian people do. You know this sort of post, if you do any social media at all: “Can you believe this?” or “How long until that?”

The question at the heart of this particular “disdain and disbelief” post was:

So, how long do you think it'll be before you can choose more than two genders in a create-a-character mode?

The implied feeling of this post is meant to confer a particular "doom-and-gloom" response to the “rampant liberalism” and the “siege against Christian morality standards.” (Or insert your own fun phrases inside of those quotation marks.) The question isn’t actually a question; it’s a statement that says, instead, “The culture is increasingly becoming secularized; I bet we’re going to encounter this secularization in the multiplicity of genders in our character-creation screens. How annoying and bothersome that they are imposing their beliefs on us.” This is a perfect example of a "disdain and disbelief" post.

There is a deep problem with this “disdain and disbelief” post. Rather than seeking to understand the claims of the LGBTQ community regarding gender, this Christian person has thought that he already understands their claims. But gender theorists would claim that gender is “performative,” meaning that it is something that a person acts in accordance with. This is like when Jean-Paul Sartre says in Being and Nothingness that the waiter is just “performing” at “being-a-waiter,” when, in reality, he would not have to “be a waiter” if he were already – in essence – a waiter. (This is part of a description of what Sartre calls “bad faith.”) In gender theory, particularly that of Judith Butler, the case is made that there is no “essential” feminine or masculine and that a person is a “male” or a “female” or "other," with respect to gender, based on how they disclose themselves to the world around. The claim is that gender is a performance, whilst biological sex is a physical trait.

Yet, is not a video game avatar already a performance act? If someone were to play, say, Skyrim, they could play as a male or a female, and they can pursue romantic relationships with male or female partners (within the confines that have been programmed into the game). Skyrim does not need a “third gender” or “intersex” parts in the character creator – a player can make their character look like they want them to look like. In short: no gender theory academic would suggest that video games need the very thing that this Christian disdained.

Now, let me be clear: I do not buy the popular claims that the queer academic world and gender theorists makes regarding gender. It seems to me, often, that they are simply replacing one set of performative modes of life with another set of performative modes of life, without giving a case for why those performative modes or the experienced ‘freedom’ that accompanies those modes are “better.” While I understand their reticence against Platonic "femininity" and "masculinity," it seems to me that they do not call their existential gender claims to any suitable universal authority, something which is problematic. I also find there to be an implicit benefit to capitalism tied up within the modern queer discussions on gender, something that, if I were to make a case following the notion of ‘intersectionality,’ would be deeply problematic to the LGBTQ community itself. These critiques would be another essay if I were to delve into them.

The problem is not that Christians should not critique gender theories – we ought to, since we have resources to describe sexuality in a more thorough and complex manner than secular gender theories have – but that when we critique we should critique in a manner consistent with the claims that are being made. It is useless to moan about gender theory by wondering aloud if Elder Scrolls VI or the next Mass Effect game might have multi-gender character creation options; no one in gender studies would even think about requesting that because they view gender as performative in the first place.

A Christian critique of gender would need to begin with our admission of unbiblical gender standards that we have set upon men and women ourselves first, and then an honest discussion, treating the Scriptures consistently, of what human sexuality and human sexual difference implies for our day-to-day existences. This doesn’t mean that we need to arrive at the Platonic conclusion of “feminine essences” or “masculine essences,” nor do we need to arrive at the conclusions of John Piper, questioning whether women should be policemen or not; but we will likely conclude something different than the anti-essentialist claims made by, say, Judith Butler. (And, again, there is another line of critique one could follow that involves the problem of radical individuality under a democratic-capitalist state.)

My point here is not actually about gender theories at all. The bigger point is that Christians – and Christian theologians and Christian apologists – often do not understand those who they critique in the first place. It is easier to say, for instance, that Friedrich Nietzsche is just wrong when he says “God is dead” than to admit that his claim is right, given its political-social context, and not actually reflective of a theological assertion in the first place (re: he's talking about modernity). The more atheistic claim that ought to be refuted is the one by Ludwig Feuerbach regarding man projecting himself onto God. (By the by, I just heard a great argument the other day against Feuerbach’s claim from the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.)

Inarticulate critique – critique that is ignorant of the argument’s claims and grounds as well as critique that is poorly communicated – does not advance the Christian Gospel. If anything it makes the caricatures against the Christian Gospel true; it makes it easier to describe your given Christian Church as just another gathering-place for not-quite-the-Westboro-Baptist-Church types of folks.

Another example could be the way that modern Christian apologists use the terms “subjective” and “objective” to mean “opinion” and “fact” respectively, when the terms refer more accurately to modes of discourse, the discourse of language and the discourse of science, to put it really briefly. No wonder the atheist philosophers cannot take the Christians seriously – all-too-often, our Christian thinkers speak words they do not actually understand. It should be of no surprise that the words of our apologists are incommunicable with the liberal academia.

The Christian scholars who understand this problem – folks like Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Miroslav Volf, Charles Taylor, and I’ll include Tim Keller, even though he’s not an academic – are well-received when they debate and discuss their ideas in the public square. I saw a great discussion between Tim Keller and several liberal thinkers who thought of him as particularly wise, even though they disagreed, something that we cannot say regarding that debacle between Ken Ham and Bill Nye.

Inarticulate critique damages our witness because it shows that we are not willing to listen to those with whom we disagree in order to understand them before we challenge their ideas. It is not that we ought not challenge. The Christian faith makes specific claims about very contentious topics. But it is necessary that we understand the claims that are being made so that when we challenge them we can challenge in an articulate manner. Articulate critique, engaged critique, understands the stakes of a claim and challenges it from within its own system. This is part of what makes Jesus so incredible. Holding up a denarius He says: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s.” To the Sadducees, He says “I am the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. God is the God of the living not of the dead.” To the man trying to justify himself, Jesus points to a good Samaritan. Jesus understands the stakes of the claims He’s being asked to make; and, instead of dismissing those arguments forthright, He jumps into the midst of the theology and philosophy underneath the argument and makes a radical claim.

That is the sort of apologetic work that we ought to do as God’s people, rather than making inarticulate claims and remarks that aren’t even representative of the claims of our opponents.