Statues and Safe Places

Being missionaries to cults and non-Christian religions we have interesting opportunities to meet and talk with many about what they believe and why they believe it. It is also important to not only know what they believe but why they believe and act on certain beliefs. As Cultural Marxism and Critical Race Theory recently grabbed center stage in culture and the church and interesting alliance between atheist Peter Boghossian, agnostic (former atheist) James Lindsay and some evangelical thinkers and missionaries. Both sides believe in objective knowable truth even though they may not agree on what it is on any given topic. Cordial debate and discussion are welcome. Their alliance was made as culture and segments of the church embraced Critical Race Theory and abandoned objective knowable truth. Lindsay and Boghossian started the website, "New Discourses." It isn't for everyone as some of it is deep philosophy, but there are some real gems as well. A recent posting, "The Most Dangerous Place To Be," by Julia Friedman and David Hawkes. In the last couple of years, we have watched as college students seem to curl up and cry out for "safe spaces" when something they believe is challenged. The act as if the words or even competing ideas somehow hurt them or cause harm. More recently we have watched in horror and dismay as the pull-down statutes which are "harming" them and others.

Most of the young people currently demolishing America’s statues were born too late to have picked up the habit from watching the attacks on statues of Lenin in the early 1990s, or of Saddam Hussein in the early 2000s. Instead, they most likely learned about the revolutionary power of iconoclasm in college. It has become axiomatic among professors of the humanities that symbols do not simply refer anymore; they actually do. They are now invested with the power to achieve real effects in the physical world. In postmodernity, symbols are, to use the academic jargon, “performative.”

The concept of “performative representation” suggests that the words we use and the images we look at do not merely reflect, but actively intervene in and alter, what we perceive as reality. In accordance with that assumption, students throughout the humanities are encouraged to challenge the very concept of objective facts. As a consequence, rational debate has been incrementally, silently replaced by the mantra that reason is Eurocentric and patriarchal. There is a serious risk that education, even knowledge itself, may devolve into a competition between various interest groups, in which every side aims to topple the sacred cows of the others. As Tom Wolfe put in in the title of his final novel, we are going “back to blood.”

In other words, the professors in the universities they attend are essentially conveying a pagan religious view about words and statues. They are not inanimate tools for communicating or informing, they possess power to "perform" and harm others. They are not merely tearing down statues which point to the past but objects which are in some sense alive and a threat to the observers. The individuals so engaged are a mission field with a different worldview and culture.

https://mailchi.mp/e2b5101d24e1/the-enneagram-the-draw-of-mysticism?e=169825fd77