I wrote briefly on worldview theory in my critique of Neil Shenvi’s work awhile back, but recently the concept of “worldview” has been getting a bit more attention, in part sparked by a new book called Worldview Theory, Whiteness, and the Future of Evangelical Faith by Jacob Allen Cook. Many conservatives have objected to (presumably) the title and premise of this book, and a conflict has arisen about whether the “Christian worldview” exists. Seeing as I haven’t read Cook’s book, my comments here are not going to be focused on his claims. I want to argue here that the more charitably-read version of worldview theory, where it is not some cover for whiteness and is in fact a sincere approach, fails to be a good way for Christians to engage with philosophical, social, or political questions. It does this by portraying the positions it opposes as total rather than local, rigid rather than flexible, and closed rather than open. Worldview theory tends to imagine the philosophies it targets to be like whole, discrete blocks of wood that one chooses between, when in fact it is much more accurate to imagine them as tables filled with Jenga towers: each stack forms a whole, where some pieces are necessary for the structure’s integrity while others can be shuffled or removed.
Worldview as totalization
“Worldview” is a term ordinary people use with some frequency. In common terms, it’s someone’s beliefs or their interpretive frame for events in the world. Crucially, it does not seem like worldviews in the colloquial sense are always singular and coherent. People can describe someone as, for instance, having a “Hayekian worldview” when it comes to economics or a “jaded worldview” when it comes to interpersonal relationships. Even people within, say, a specific philosophical school can be said to have an optimistic or a pessimistic worldview. This is, we might say, the weaker meaning of worldview.
The stronger meaning of worldview is that which the folks I’m terming “worldview theorists” espouse. According to Jeff Myers David Noebel, whose book Understanding the Times was on our shelf at home growing up and which inspired the curriculum of my 12th grade Bible class, a worldview is a “pattern of ideas” which “answers fundamental questions such as Why are we here? What is the meaning and purpose of life? Is there a difference between right and wrong? Is there a God?” (p. 6, emphasis in original). Different theorists phrase this somewhat differently, but at the center of the strong definition of worldview is a set of questions which define the core of a person’s beliefs. A worldview, then, is a total theory, a comprehensive answer to the basic motivating questions.
It is without a doubt true that many, many philosophies can and do behave this way for people. The problem with worldview theory is that once you use it as your filter for examining thought, it becomes plausible for almost everything you encounter to be a worldview. What is at issue is not the descriptive question of whether a given philosophical thought can be used to answer the “worldview questions” for a given person. That is unquestionably the case. What is not demonstrated by this, however, is that this means the philosophical thought itself simply is a total-theory worldview. The question for Christians approaching big ideas is what domain is this idea best suited for? What questions is it better and which questions is it worse at answering?
I’m going to be using philosophies of political economy as my example here. What are these philosophies—say, anarcho-capitalism, social democracy, or left-neoliberalism—best at answering? I could make all of them compellingly answer the typical “worldview questions” with answers that would recognizably belong to those schools of thought. The problem with that would be that of course these theories are best used as patterns of ideas about political economy, not patterns of ideas about all of life. This is true even if they draw upon ideas that claim to be core ethical principles (the non-aggression principle, egalitarianism, individualism)—it would still be accurate to say that these are local theories and not total theories.
When Christians get this wrong, the danger is not necessarily that we reject everything that’s not in the Bible: it’s that we make the things we don’t like into a totalized worldview incompatible with Christianity and things we do like we end up baking into the “Christian worldview,” unable to recognize what has happened: we have made a judgment about individual ideas. There is not a political economy that is a priori the Christian one. Thinking about political economy, just like every other domain of thought, is going to require description of the world as it is and theoretical judgments about the world that are not simple deductions from plain-text readings of the Bible. There were no mechanized factories in the Bible. Wage labor and a money were not the driving forces of the agrarian economy described in the Bible. We have to do the hard work of making judgments about how our economic lives will be lived, of course, in conversation with the Bible and Christian tradition, but that won’t output a single “Christian worldview” and does not permit us to lazily inflate local theories into total ones so they can be more easily rejected.
Flexibility
A second way worldview theory mischaracterizes the patterns of ideas it targets is to paint them as essentially rigid. These patterns of ideas are not only total theories, but all of the pieces are fused together. Their dependence on each other is so strong that if you tried pulling them apart, the whole thing would collapse. This has important benefits for worldview theorists: if there is one part of a theory broadly construed that seems good and true and another part that seems like a problem, worldview theorists can proclaim that you can’t have the one that seems good and true without having the one that seems like a problem. If you adopt one piece, you must adopt everything. This has long been the argument against, for instance, adopting any element of Marxist thought. Worldview theorists speak as if Marxism is so fused together that adopting a piece of Marx’s critique of capitalism means also adopting Marx’s atheism or Stalin’s summary executions.
There are genuinely sets of ideas that are logically dependent on one another, and there are core beliefs within these schools of thought without which the structure would collapse. For example, it is coherent to say that atheism and orthodox Christianity are not compatible since atheism just is that idea that there is no God, which is plainly irreconcilable with Christianity. But is it just as coherent to say that any version of or element from Marxism is incompatible with Christianity because Marx was an atheist or because Marxism centers around the concept of “dialectical materialism”?
It is not enough to say that “atheism is a block in the Marxist Jenga tower” and complete the argument. We have to answer the question of what weight atheism is carrying in Marxian thought and whether every idea associated with Marx—that capitalist labor is exploitation, for example—fails to make sense if atheism is removed. As a Christian who has read Marx, I will confess that I don’t think it’s difficult at all to remove atheism and still have lots of coherent pieces of Marxism remaining. Does the idea that capitalist labor is exploitation require atheism? The core of Marx’s argument is that all of the productive property of society is owned by a small number of people, and that these people take advantage of the lack of property of the majority of people by giving them the choice either to work for capitalists or to starve. These ideas stand or fall on their own merits, entirely independent from the question of whether there is a God.
And what about “dialectical materialism”? I think much of the worry about this term stems from a misunderstanding of the relevant sense of “materialism.” This is not saying “atheism, but longer”—it’s a position in the debate on whether ideas in people’s heads or material conditions of society are the main drivers of how society is arranged and how human history changes. Dialectical materialism is the claim that material arrangements are the first step, creating the conditions under which ideas develop—which also certainly act back and influence material arrangements, but for Marx, the material comes first. Christians can take either position in this debate, or perhaps even reject the debate and take some other position—it is a matter of judgment and not a matter of whether one rejects the reality of God and other spiritual beings.
Ideas have yet another layer of flexibility, though: even sub-ideas within a larger pattern of ideas can be significantly modified. This is in fact what is usually happening in a tradition: people are making arguments about what exactly constitutes that tradition, comparing ideas against reality, asking how things can be improved, seeing what is necessary to be maintained, and so on. If we think an idea holds promise, but that it is incomplete or in error in some way, there is no law of the universe that prevents us from changing it. One example that motivates many opponents of critical race theory is that many critical race theorists say that you cannot hold to critical race theory’s understanding about race without also opposing oppression based on gender or sexual orientation. Christian conservatives fear that this means critical race theory requires an abandonment of their gender and sexual ethics. But this simply assumes without argument that the way is foreclosed for those who hold Christian conservative positions on gender and sexual ethics to just disagree with critical race theorists on their point. There are several ways of arguing this: one could claim, for instance, that the link between the CRT understanding of race is not as logically connected to positions on gender and sexuality as some are making it appear. One could also argue that while it is the case that opposing racial oppression as described by CRT does require opposing oppression based on gender and sexual orientation but that does not mean abandoning their conservative ethical convictions on those questions. I’m not trying to make a case for these positions here, but I think the burden is on those who claim that ideas are immutable to actually demonstrate their immutability.
Openness
Finally, worldview thinking ultimately leaves many ideas closed to Christians which ought not, a priori, be closed, and imagines these discrete, rigid philosophies to be under glass, unavailable for dialogue other than for opposition. I want to be careful here: it’s clear that we ought to use our judgment and that there are some ideas that are bad enough not to waste much time on. But the vast majority of ideas, even while many of them might turn out to be bad, ought not be so easily dismissed in the facile way worldview theory would lead us to. Pieces of different patterns of ideas can be moved about and modified and adopted and put aside. Most ideas can be arrived at from a wide variety of starting premises. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, Christians throughout history have picked up, modified, and put down so many philosophical ideas, even ones that I would argue could qualify for the strong version of a “worldview”—Platonism and Aristotelianism, for example—because they were useful for describing and approaching the world they experienced. Clearly one should not adopt these views as Plato and Aristotle put them forth uncritically, but it is unquestionable that Thomas Aquinas was an Aristotelian, even though he rejected Aristotle’s vision of human purpose (a central “worldview question” according to worldview theorists!) and other important parts of Aristotle’s thought and replaced them with orthodox Christian conceptions.
I submit that Christians today should engage with philosophy much more like Aquinas with Aristotle. While of course there will be plenty to disagree with, there is no way to automate thought. There is no move that can conclusively demonstrate whatever you don’t like or agree with is actually incompatible with Christianity in terms that every participant in the debate has to accept.