According to the description for this episode of UNSHACKLED! titled ‘The Enemy Within,’ “In this homage to CS Lewis’s ‘The Screwtape Letters’, a Senior Tempter instructs a Junior Tempter how to secure the damnation of their latest ‘patient.’ The fact that this patient is part of a Bible study only emboldens their efforts.”
On Ep. 11 of The CR:V Podcast Chris Bolt sits down with Mike Berhow to talk about a whole host of topics relevant to the Christian life of the mind:
New Atheism – Intelligent Design – Intellectual Dark Web – Deconversion Narratives – Identity Politics – Populism
Mike Berhow is Bible Teacher at Calvary Christian High School in Clearwater, FL. He taught philosophy and religion for 8 years at South Dakota State University, University of South Dakota, and Augustana University. Mike was also a church planter within the SBC from 2012-2017, where he planted Veritas Church in Brookings, SD to reach skeptics and seekers at the university. Mike’s research focuses on the relationship between science and theology, philosophical questions related to intelligent design, and the application of intellectual virtues to issues related to faith and culture.
Click here to listen on Anchor or Apple Podacasts.
I love the word “community,” but I hate to see it bastardized into such phrases as “the ________ community” (fill in the blank: white, black, gay, female, non-binary, Christian, minority, etc.). Whenever you put a modifier in front of “community” to define it as a demographic, you have actually changed the meaning of the term. A true community is a local establishment of households who share physical spaces and community traditions. They are invested in local history and institutions. They have flesh-and-blood interactions with one another. They eat together, do business together, send their children to school together, go to town hall meetings together, worship together, attend local public library events together, and thousands of other activities that are entailed in living one’s life locally. A city or town is itself a large community that is further subdivided into communities that exist at smaller levels: districts, neighborhoods, schools, churches, etc.
My point here is simply this: there is no such thing as a “community” of people who are grouped together on the basis of a demographic indicator (skin color, sexual orientation, sexual identity, etc.). The moment we speak of “the gay community,” for example, as a way of linking together gay people across 3.8 million square miles between our national borders, we are speaking of people who do not share common spaces and institutions, who do not (and cannot) have interactions with one another, and who therefore cannot in any meaningful sense constitute a community.
In this article, non-SBC author Rod Dreher explains, “I received the following e-mail from a reader, in response to my “Race, Identity Politics, and Evangelicalism” post. He gives me permission to use it, so long as I keep his name out of it. There’s a lot to think about here. By publishing it, I’m not necessarily endorsing his conclusions. I just think there’s something here worth considering.“