A brazen assumption

Posted by admin on Mar 12, 2008 in Issues & Ideas | 0 comments

The concept of worldview is commonly used by many evangelicals to signify a set of beliefs and convictions that are personally chosen and acted out. Worldview thinking runs on the unspoken premise that things like religion, morality, and sexuality are personal choices. This type of thinking needs to be assessed and smoked out for what it really is: the reduction of religion to a trifling personal choice that causes disunity and individualism.

The popular internet blog “Stuff White People Like” takes up the task of documenting and commenting on all the inane things that the stereotypical white person in America enjoys. The list is currently at 87 entries but the one entry that caught my eye was entry #2: “religions their parents don’t belong to.”

A typical phase most young Christians will experience in their life is the one where they attempt to define their beliefs in contrast to the beliefs of their parents. Let’s be honest: the current milieu in which we live in generally favours the self-sufficiency of the individual. When it comes to religious belief, the individualistic view is no exception.

The postmodern evangelical Christian obsession with the concept of understanding that you have a “worldview” is one such expression of our individualistic vision of religion. If you’ve taken any IDIS course at Trinity Western University, you will have a good idea of the way the concept of worldview is understood not only here but in the wider circle of Evangelical Christianity. Worldview is proffered as a consciously understood and chosen set of beliefs and behaviours that can be as easily spelled out as your first name or the numbers on your bank card.

The commentary for entry #2 on “Stuff White People Like” argues that white people will often say they are “spriritual but not religious.” If a white person chooses a religion though, entry #2 states that it must be a “religion that fits really well into their homes or wardrobe and doesn’t require them to do very much.”

The process of determining your worldview is a means to make religion a matter of choosing what seems best to your immediate understanding, to fit religion into your wardrobe. However, this immediate understanding is based on a whole set of notions and assumptions that can’t be qualified. These notions and assumptions are the unconscious prejudices that colour our world; they are the assumptions which we can’t analyze or dissect accurately no matter how hard we try, let alone place them neatly in our world-view closets.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant called the individual human collection of un-analyzable assumptions Weltanschauung, which can be translated as “world-intuition.”

“World-intuition,” leads us to the acknowledgment that all our culture and beliefs are not consciously controlled or understood. On the other hand, the assumption of world-view thinking leads us inexorably to a view that culture and beliefs are willfully and intentionally adopted. World-view thinking polarizes individuals and communities by turning every ideological difference into a cultural battle that can be won as long as the other side assumes your specific set of beliefs, but it’s never that simple. Attacking other ‘world-views’ is simultaneously an attack on a “world-intuition,” something that can’t be removed by will or by force.

Part of being a human is acknowledging that we are thrown into our world, we do not choose it. Pieces of our wardrobe are always already given to us and can’t be taken off.