I’m afraid that all too often in our youth ministry and parenting efforts we are tempted to soften the truth so as to not alienate or lose our kids. I get it. Been there myself. The temptation is real. And when living in a cultural moment where feelings are the final arbiter of truth, the temptation becomes something more than just a temptation. It is acted upon. It’s one of the most effective ways to lead kids away from embracing and living out the Gospel.
Case in point. . . and just one example among many: the willingness among many in the church to use preferred pronouns, which is as Miriam Grossman wisely tells us, not at all helpful to kids or adults who are confused over matters of identity and gender. Grossman says that in our misguided efforts “to help,” we are actually doing damage by lying to them about who and what they are, thereby putting them on what she calls the transgender assembly line. I would add that doing this is a very clear-cut way for us to break the ninth commandment.
There are a couple of mantras I’ve been repeating to myself and others in an effort to avoid acting on this temptation, and to even mortify the temptation itself. “I love you enough to tell you the truth!” is one. And while we must affirm that Yes!, God has created us with feelings and emotions, they need to be guided by that with is true, rather than flipping it all around by allowing our emotions to guide us into what we come to believe is true. The latter is a dangerous way to lives as “my truth” will be changing from moment to moment based on how I feel. Feelings are all too often the devil’s playground. . . . and he loves playing there!
This is all fresh in my mind as last night I read a short piece in National Review from Princeton University professor, Robert George. The article’s title captures the reality of this cultural moment well: “The Age of Feelings: Recovering The Truth.” As I read and re-read the article, I couldn’t help but think that this is something all parents and youth workers should read, ponder, and act upon. It’s a great piece of cultural exegesis that not only states what is, but concludes with directives about what should be.
Here’s what Robert George has written. . .
Some historians divide the epochs into the “age of this” and the “age of that.” And so we are sometimes told that the medieval period, at least in Europe, was the Age of Faith. The general idea is that in that era the touchstone of truth was conformity to religious doctrines. Now, this is certainly an oversimplification, at least to the extent that it suggests that the medievals — especially the great Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers of that period — did not hold natural reason and the power of human intellect in high esteem. They certainly did. Still, it is not flatly false.
Faith mattered to the people of the Middle Ages. The great thinkers of the era — Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Anselm of Canterbury, Maimonides, just to name a few particularly influential ones — were people of faith. They believed (as I myself believe) that there is harmony, rather than conflict or even tension, between faith and reason, and that faith can and should be reasoned and reasonable. What’s more, they regarded the apparent incompatibility of a proposition with the doctrines of their faith as indicating a problem with the proposition, just as they regarded a proposition’s apparent incompatibility with a principle of logic or other norm of rationality as indicating a problem with the proposition.
Then we are sometimes told that the Enlightenment period was the Age of Reason (or the Age of Science). The idea here is that in that era the touchstone of truth was conformity to what reason establishes or confirms. This, too, of course, is an oversimplification, at least insofar as it suggests that people in the period of the Enlightenment (or, better, the period of the various European and British Enlightenments) were all strict rationalists who saw no legitimate role for faith in the quest for truth. Still, the idea of the period of the Enlightenments as an Age of Reason is not flatly false. Even the religiously observant among the great thinkers of the era placed an extremely high premium on rational inquiry, deliberation, and judgment in every domain of knowledge, including the theological.
Well, if the medieval period was, at least in some meaningful sense, the Age of Faith and the Enlightenment era was the Age of Reason, what should be said of our own time? How might we label our age? My answer is that we are living in the Age of Feeling — and of Feelings. A great many people today have come to suppose that the touchstone of truth is not faith or reason (or, as I myself believe, faith and reason) but rather feeling and feelings.
Because feelings are subjective, what this development has produced is a widespread subjectivism or relativism. But to say that is itself to oversimplify and potentially mislead. Things are more complicated. That is because most people today do not believe that their personal values and convictions, though the products of feeling, are subjective or relative. They believe, or are at least prepared to act on the belief, that those convictions are, in some sense, objectively true. And not only that, in practice many people treat their beliefs as infallibly true and thus treat their feelings as if they are infallible sources of truth. And so, we witness the spectacle of many people embracing a fierce moral absolutism based on beliefs that are the products of nothing more than subjective feelings. It is this aggressive — and, let me add, rationally indefensible and dangerous — absolutism that undergirds people’s willingness to toss out basic civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, and to join “cancellation” mobs determined to ruin the reputations and destroy the careers and lives of people whose ideas they regard, often quite absurdly, as “hateful” and “harmful.”
The antidote to all this is . . . keep reading here