Upstream

The Reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy is a fixture of online political debates. It’s used often by secular progressives, who seem to view disagreements with their policy preferences as evidence of Nazi sympathies. The tendency is so common that it has prompted a satirical description known as “Godwin’s Law,” which predicts that as any two people argue on the Internet, the probability that one will compare the other with a certain German dictator approaches 100%.

That the onetime chancellor’s name comes up so often says a lot about people’s moral imaginations—and their deepest fears. As British popular historian Tom Holland points out, Westerners no longer talk of Satan and devils, but about Hitler and the Nazis. Our demonology has shrunk so that the worst villains we can imagine are flesh-and-blood characters from the drama of the 20th century—bad hombres to be sure, but hardly the Father of Lies.

If you ask me, this rush to condemn opponents in the most hysterical terms possible betrays a gnawing fear—a fear that maybe Nazis could win the debate if they were ever given a platform. And this may be why so many left-wing college students are ready to cancel, censor, or punch anyone who questions the ever-lengthening list of “human rights” and protected classes. In their thinking, none of us is ever more than one microaggression away from becoming a monster. They double down on the name-calling because they fear that those who fall out of progressive lockstep will inevitably start to goosestep.

Holland seems to agree. He suggests that one reason secular progressives are paranoid about resurgent Nazism is that they have no foundation for their vast and growing edifice of “fundamental human rights.” In a recent panel discussion, he repeated a claim he makes in his book, Dominion: that human rights and dignity are anything but universal or self-evident and that the only reason Westerners are still convinced such things exist is that we have a Christian hangover:

“Because the West has been hegemonic for so long,” he says, “it’s in a position to assume that its concept of human rights is universal. [Westerners] don’t need to think about it. Of course human rights exist! But what the rise of China and the rise of other civilizational powers is doing is to remind us that the concept of human rights…emerged in a very specific cultural matrix, which is a Christian one. And that therefore, if you want to believe in human rights, you have to believe. It takes a leap of faith to believe that there are things called human rights just as much as it takes a leap of faith to believe that Jesus Christ raised from the dead. They’re both beliefs.”

And herein lies the problem for secular progressives, whose worldview dispenses with the Christian God and His commands. If the basis for human rights is not faith in divine law, then what is it? This problem worsens when we recall that secularism banished God with a materialist account of human origins: Darwinian evolution. But this theory is a double-edged sword. It may drive God from our moral universe, but it drives out human rights with Him. After all, if fierce competition between rival populations leads to the origin and improvement of species, as Darwinism holds, then there is no good reason this process should not continue in our own species. Or will we condemn the very process that created us? If the law of nature is “survival of the fittest” and death to the weak and diseased, then universal rights are not only ethical nonsense—they’re biological suicide.

None of this was lost on the Nazis. As Dr. Richard Weikart explained this week on Upstream, the real-life Third Reich found Darwinian evolution to be an invaluable tool in advancing its program of racial extermination. Actually, his argument is bolder. In his book, Darwinian Racism, he documents how Darwinian concepts and language were woven into every aspect of Nazi ideology, from its science and curricula to its propaganda and military objectives. Key Nazi figures all the way up to Hitler himself were convinced that their project was a natural outworking of Darwinian principles—indeed, that the reassertion of Aryan racial identity was a way of accelerating humanity’s evolution. Likewise, the Nazis saw the notion of universal human rights as both absurd and a means by which unfit groups parasitize the worthy and strong.

Secular progressives—most of whom still cite Darwinian evolution with dogmatic enthusiasm—will find Weikart’s arguments infuriating. Much ink has been spilled in the attempt to distance Darwinism from Nazism and to avoid the conclusions Nazis drew from it. Dr. Weikart has participated in that debate for decades, and he devotes a large portion of this latest book to answering such objections. I found the evidence he marshals convincing, and I suspect you will, too. But that’s not my focus right now.

I don’t think the theory of evolution is false simply because Nazis were evolutionists. The point I am making is that secular progressives who treat Nazism as the ultimate evil have no moral basis for condemning what the Nazis thought or did. Human rights require human beings to be much more than animals. No other creature on earth has ever imagined that killing its prey or its competition might be immoral. Yet we seem unable to shake the conviction.

What if secular progressives are so quick to invoke Hitler because they sense their own worldview’s vulnerability to his ideas? What if they rightly believe that exterminating people on the basis of race is evil, but can’t back it up with moral reasoning? What if they know on some level that human rights endowed by no one are a house of cards, but we are already too invested in the game to quit? What if Godwin’s Law is all you have when you want law without God?

These are questions anyone who looks seriously at the 20th century must ask, especially if that person has already jettisoned the traditional foundation for human dignity in the will of God and His image in man. What is to keep those horrors permanently at bay with the wind of Darwinian logic still in their sails, and no anchor in human exceptionalism to hold them back? Certainly not secular pretensions about self-evident rights. We can repeat that line all we like, and sic the ghost of Hitler on all who question us. But as King Saul learned the hard way, those who call up the dead should be ready for the dead to call their bluff.

Shane welcomes historian and author Richard Weikart to discuss his book, “Darwinian Racism,” which argues that the theory of evolution informed and motivated racism, eugenics, and genocide in the 20th century, especially in Nazi Germany.

Wayne Stender asks Shane a host of questions to get further explanation on Shane's conversation with Dr. David Haines. The two explore terms like natural theology and Hellenism while also considering if natural theology has a prominent place that the church rests on to guide the life of the believer.

If you’ve never heard the late Rich Mullins’ song, “Calling Out Your Name,” you should stop reading right now and listen to it. There are few pieces of music that have affected me the way it did from the first time I heard it as a young boy. The message of Mullins’ soaring poetry, untethered as it is from grammar and rushing to keep up with his hammer dulcimer, is simple: the western vistas he loved declare the glory of God. The “rumbling of the buffalo hooves” and the “fury in a pheasant’s wings” told him as clearly as if they’d spoken that “the Lord is in His temple.”

I didn’t recognize until years later that this was natural theology set to music. But like the truths Mullins sang about, the revelation of God in creation is something you know before you are aware you know it. When Christian theologians in ages past spoke of “nature,” they meant much more than prairies and sunsets, but they certainly did not mean less. The awe that spontaneously grips us at the sight of snowcapped mountains, the northern lights, or a tossing sea is a universal human experience that nearly always excites worship. Of course, fallen creatures that we are, we frequently misdirect that worship.

Yet the fact that our need to reverence a higher power is so easily inflamed by natural wonders is itself a revelation. It means we were made to worship. We are creatures whose heads and knees bow by reflex. And as Dr. David Haines explained this week on “Upstream,” Christian theologians have always held that a careful observer can learn something about the God we long to worship just by observing His creation.

This type of theology is anything but optional or supplementary. It is the normal way of coming to believe in God. I think most human beings hear His name in birdsong before they can read it in the Bible. Perhaps that’s why the Scripture itself constantly claims that created things from ants to the starry host “declare the work” of God’s hands, “pour forth speech,” and continually “reveal knowledge” in a way that is more universally audible even than the inspired books. It would be hard to state it more strongly than the biblical authors do. The Apostle Paul famously asserts in the opening chapter of Romans that God’s existence, eternal power and nature, and even His holiness are “clearly seen” in the things He has made—so clearly that those who refuse to acknowledge Him or who turn to the creation in worship are “without excuse” for their idolatry.

Even Christian thinkers best known for their high view of the Bible extoled the clarity of general revelation and the importance of natural theology. In his commentary on the Psalms, John Calvin writes:

“When we behold the heavens, we cannot but be elevated, by the contemplation of them, to Him who is their great Creator; and the beautiful arrangement and wonderful variety which distinguish the courses and station of the heavenly bodies, together with the beauty and splendour which are manifest in them, cannot but furnish us with an evident proof of his providence. Scripture, indeed, makes known to us the time and manner of the creation; but the heavens themselves, although God should say nothing on the subject, proclaim loudly and distinctly enough that they have been fashioned by his hands: and this of itself abundantly suffices to bear testimony to men of his glory.”

As Dr. Haines acknowledged, the theology produced by reflecting on nature cannot save anyone. It can only take sinful human beings so close to the Divine throne—certainly not close enough to see that the One who sits upon it is also in another sense Three, or that a Nazarene is among them. That’s what special revelation is for.

But living as we do in a time when many claim not to hear the works of God declaring His glory, it is vital to remind ourselves how seriously Christians in past centuries took natural theology, and follow their example. God is not hiding. He wants to be known. He has revealed Himself in ways so obvious that it takes waxy plugs of sinful self-delusion to drown out His song.

As much pressure as we sometimes feel in a secular age to “prove” that our faith is rational, we must never forget that we are not the ones working overtime to muffle reality. Suppressing the knowledge of the truth is hard work, and it’s not very rewarding. It leaves behind a world that no longer sings, and worse, is no longer worth singing about.

There’s much more to natural theology than that, and my conversation on Upstream with Dr. David Haines is a great invitation to go deeper. His book, “Natural Theology: A Biblical and Historical Introduction and Defense” may change the way you think about creation, church history, and Scripture, itself. Yet this vast and oft-neglected branch of Christian wisdom has a message as simple as the spontaneous praise of anyone who has ever seen a sunrise and credited its true Maker: God isn’t hiding. And neither should we.

Is Scripture our only source of knowledge about God? Shane welcomes Dr. David Haines, author of “Natural Theology: A Biblical and Historical Introduction and Defense,” to explain how God has revealed Himself to all mankind outside of the pages of the Bible.

Shane welcomes producer Wayne Stender to ask a host of questions after his interviews with Dr. Catherine Wheeler and Dr. Tara Sander Lee. The two walk further upstream to ideas that guide the Pro-life movement, and how a view of philosophy, theology, and even eschatology impact how we process and engage the pro-life movement.

Why do women choose to have abortions? In one sense, it’s a question with as many answers as there are women who seek abortions. One may have found herself with a so-called “crisis” pregnancy, unattached to the father and unprepared to be a mother. Another may feel she has too many children, already. Another may have received a frightening prenatal diagnosis and not want that kind of life for her child. Another may have been the victim of a sexual assault. But I think there’s a belief that unites most or all of these stories: the belief that certain lives are not worth living, and that some whose lives have already begun would be better off dead.   

Writing this week at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher shares a letter he received from a reader describing a twenty-two year-old woman seeking sterilization. This young woman was going to the gynecologist to get a tubal ligation because “the world is too awful and…no more children should be brought into this hellhole.” 

I’ve heard and read similar sentiments on many occasions from fellow millennials and gen-zers. They say things like, “I don’t want to mess up a kid as badly as I was messed up,” and “I don’t have the time or the money to be a parent,” or “I don’t want to pass on my psychological issues,” or “The world is already overpopulated and the environment dying.” No matter what the reason, these young people’s back-of-the-napkin calculations on parenthood yield the same answer: that allowing life would be irresponsible. As with the women who decide death is preferrable for their child, these young people renouncing parenthood think non-existence would be preferrable. 

Obviously, the two situations are different in important ways. It is not always right to bring a child into existence. It is always wrong to kill one who already exists. And today’s culture is saturated with the assumption that sex is a birthright—a recreational or self-expressive activity in which everyone has the right to engage without reference to its purposes or consequences. The idea that deliberately childless sexual relations are easy comes naturally to a 21st-century mind. The same assumption would have sounded like reckless idiocy to someone more than fifty years ago. Our technology has loosened, not tightened, our grip on reality. 

There’s also an undeniable element of selfishness. Raising children is difficult. They restrict your freedom. They make demands on your time, your energy, and even your body. They make it exceptionally difficult to pursue self-expression and pleasure as your central goals in life. It would be easy to dismiss both abortion and intentional childlessness as mere products of self-centered hedonism. Many people do. But I think that’s a mistake. Selfishness certainly plays a part in these decisions, but I believe there’s a much deeper worldview assumption at work, here.  

The choices to foreswear children and to abort them because their lives would supposedly be too miserable both confuse kindness with love, and happiness with meaning. To say that a child would be better off dead or non-existent because of how hard the world is or how difficult its life would be is to assume that kindness is the highest virtue. It is to treat a child—actual or theoretical—as an animal; as something without intrinsic moral worth, whose comfort overrules its value as an individual.  

It is certainly kind to put suffering animals out of their misery or to prevent their existence through sterilization. This is why we spay, neuter, and sometimes euthanize our pets. This is a true kindness, because while animals are not moral agents, they do have senses. And when pain overwhelms pleasure and nothing can reasonably be done to relieve it, a quick death is often kind. 

But humans are moral agents and do have intrinsic moral value, as well as senses. We are the sort of creatures whose natures transcend sense experience, who can connect those experiences into narratives, and whose decisions in response to those narratives are the raw material of virtue. That’s why it not only makes sense to allow human beings to live knowing they will suffer physically or emotionally, but why we find the greatest meaning in stories about redemptive suffering. Humans exist on a plane where pain and pleasure are not the highest realities or goods.  

It will surprise no one at this point that I want to quote C. S. Lewis. His discussion of the difference between kindness and love in “The Problem of Pain” applies wonderfully to this question. Lewis thinks there is something “more stern and splendid” in love than in mere kindness. The former will tolerate pain and suffering in order to bring its object into maturity and glory. The latter will settle for much lesser goods: 

“…Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering…It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most memorable sense.” 

If it is true that love transcends mere kindness—that the moral thriving and eternal good of a being like a human child are more important than its comfort—then the excuses so common today for aborting or renouncing children (even children born with disabilities or into difficult circumstances) fall flat. No child is better off dead, and even a world with political or environmental challenges deserves the chance and hope embodied in a new image-bearer of God.  

Believing this won’t often lead us down the easiest path. It may compel us to do the hardest things imaginable—like bringing a child into a world that is less than ideal, or putting that child’s needs permanently ahead of our own. But the “intolerable compliment” of intrinsic moral value is the very thing that makes us human. And that is why choosing life is more than just a recognition of what the unborn or unconceived baby is. It is a recognition of what we all are. 

Shane welcomes two pro-life voices to explain why children our society wants to discard deserve protection—even if they test positive for a disorder or simply weren’t planned. Dr. Tara Sander Lee with the Charlotte Lozier Institute reveals the inaccuracy of prenatal screening, while Colson Fellow Kerson Hering tells her incredible story of being rejected by her family but called by God to defend the unborn.

I have a great appreciation for apologetics. Scripture calls us to “always be ready to give a reason” for the hope that is in us, and many apologists have done this admirably, defending the claims of the Christian faith with evidence, reason, and appeals to necessary truths. But we must never confuse our defense of the faith with the faith, itself. A worldview can’t consist only of arguments against competing claims any more than a city can consist only of a wall.  

There was a time when no one needed to state this truth. When Christianity was the dominant or in many cases the official view in the West, no Christian had to defend his entire public theology, ethics, or lifestyle in every conversation. Two people could meet and simply assume certain shared ideas, like the existence of God, the reality of moral truth, and the unique place of mankind in the universe. Dialogues and even debates could begin much more quickly because participants weren’t forced to “lay again the foundations.”  

All that has changed. Living in what Charles Taylor calls a “secular age,” we can no longer assume any shared beliefs with those we meet. Conversations can’t begin without working out what the person opposite from us believes about things as basic as the soul, the existence of objective right and wrong, or the fixity of male and female. All of these are now in dispute, which means we must embark on an inventory of what our neighbor, coworker, or date believes. It’s exhausting. And it trains us to shift our posture from always being ready to give a reason for our hope to always crouching with our apologetic shield at the ready, prepared to do battle over every tenet of our worldview. That is, if we don’t just choose to quietly act like secularists.   

In that apologetic crouch, Christians often find ourselves fortifying our worldview. “Wouldn’t this belief be easier to defend if I simplified it?” “Wouldn’t this passage of Scripture be more defensible if I took only the most minimal interpretation?” “Do I really need that fourth Gospel to defend the Resurrection?” “Wouldn’t Christianity be tougher to climb and conquer if I sanded off all its rough edges?”  

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, we begin choosing what we believe or are willing to publicly profess based not on what Scripture, reason, and tradition teach, but on what’s apologetically expedient—what would be easiest to defend against secular attacks. Compromise by compromise, our Christianity becomes nothing but a response to critics. Brick by brick, our worldview becomes nothing but a wall.  

Here’s the problem: The easiest belief to defend isn’t always the right one, because a skilled scoffer can make even true things sound ridiculous. C. S. Lewis knew this. In “The Silver Chair,” he vividly illustrates it when the Green Lady—a subterranean enchantress “of the same crew” as the White Witch—places the four main characters under a spell that clouds their minds. The spell (a barely-disguised metaphor for secularism) induces a stupor that causes them to question even things they know by experience. The Witch, pressing her advantage, questions the existence of the sky, the sun, the stars, and the trees. She convinces the heroes that Narnia is a figment of their imaginations, and that even Aslan is merely their childish embellishment of a house cat.   

In the end, Puddleglum breaks the spell by resorting to an argument from desire—by baldly asserting that the Witch’s world of skepticism is simply boring compared with the sunlit world he half remembers but has given up defending. His apologetic walls breached, he chooses to go on professing the faith in defiance of her atheistic onslaught. And we cheer, not only because we admire ‘Glum’s courage, but because we have also seen the sky. 

In my discussion this week with Natasha Crain on Upstream, she pointed out how difficult it is to believe the Christian faith when we live in a culture that constantly forces us to defend it. We can take very little for granted. We really are different—cutting against the grain, swimming upstream—and being “faithfully different” takes a lot of work.  

That’s why when apostates who “deconstruct” their faith express a sense of “happiness” and “relief,” we shouldn’t be surprised or impressed. Of course they are relieved! For the first time in their lives, they are enjoying the ability to assume beliefs they don’t need to defend constantly. They have stopped swimming against the cultural current and are lazily drifting. They have decided the entire faith is indefensible and surrendered it. And when surrender puts you in the majority, it can be thrilling. But it doesn’t make you right.  

Christians who know that there is more to reality than our debate with secularism shouldn’t let secular doubts reshape what we believe. Nor should we respond to those doubts by wrapping the faith in apologetic razor-wire or jettisoning any doctrine we worry might present a soft target. Many of Christianity’s most beautiful and profound truths are not at all defensible in front of an unregenerate audience. There are palaces, gardens, art galleries, and cathedrals within our faith’s apologetic walls—treasures meant to enrich the faithful, not to repel invaders. When we try to fortify these treasures, we often ruin them. When we give them up in order to dodge secular criticism, we give up the very things our walls were built to protect. The real danger of living in a secular age may not be exvangelical surrender, but apologetic militarization. In our zeal to defend the faith from doubts, we may leave our children with a doubt-shaped faith. 

That’s why I think being “faithfully different” in a secular age means insisting on truths our neighbors can’t believe we believe, and not feeling compelled to prove each to their satisfaction. Apologetics isn’t the sum of the faith any more than a wall is the sum of a city. In some ways, the wall is the most superficial part of the city, and only exists for the sake of what’s inside. We must never forget that.  

I hope you’ll listen to my discussion with Natasha Crain about her new book, “Faithfully Different.” Our talk and her book will help you understand the cultural pressure you feel each day to hide your beliefs, and encourage you to live them out confidently, instead. And if you’re like me, you’ll feel a strange relief in realizing that truth doesn’t hang in the cultural balance, and it is perfectly capable of self-defense.  

Order Faithfully Different by Natasha Crain>>

Shane welcomes Dr. Catherine Wheeler, an OB/Gyn who once performed abortions but is now using her story and her training as a Colson Fellow to champion the lives of the unborn.