An Obadiah Slope column
A mob of deists? Could the recent ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) Sydney conference, which featured John Howard and Tony Abbott and was headlined by Jordan Peterson, be just a warmed-up Rotary or Lions club? This occurred to Obadiah on reading a revealing account of ARC by David Robertson, who regularly writes for Christian Today and attended the invitation-only gathering. His latest column included this observation: Peterson has not yet truly encountered Christ.
“It is clear that while Peterson grasps and appreciates much of Christian teaching and the value it brings, he still does not grasp much of its basic message,” Robertson wrote. “We were told that ‘if we conduct ourselves according to the highest ethical principles there is no desert, we cannot turn blue … that’s the better story that ARC hopes to tell’. But that leaves us with the question of what the highest ethical principles are. And more importantly, dooms us – because none of us are capable of living to that standard. The law shows us our need; it does not, and cannot, save us. Peterson teaches a form of moralistic therapeutic Deism with a dose of tough love thrown in. But it’s not enough.
“His key misunderstanding is about the Cross. To Jordan, it is primarily exemplary. It is the greatest example of the self-sacrifice that we are all called to. It is almost as though he seems to believe that by taking on our own form of sacrifice, we, too, can atone not only for our own sins but the sins of the world. It’s no wonder that he looks and sounds like a heavily burdened man. Indeed, that is part of his great appeal. He is a deeply compassionate man who cares for others and wants to help others. But he cannot be the Saviour.”
“The [Presbyterian] Shorter Catechism, in its famous first question, asks, ‘What is the chief purpose of man?'”‘ and answers, ‘to glorify God and enjoy him forever.’ Peterson asks ‘what is our meaning?’ and answers ‘meaning is to be found in the adoption of maximal voluntary responsibility’. That’s more likely to lead to a form of self-flagellation than it is to lead to salvation.”
Obadiah is grateful to David Robertson, the Minister at Hamilton Presbyterian in Newcastle, who is an acute observer.
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There’s a great divide between journalism and PR, and one of the surest ways to spot the latter is the use of a non-denial denial statement. This week there was a great example of the genre.
Melborne’s Herald Sun newspaper published a story saying that students at MLC School had been told that they could not wear crosses because the cross was offensive. “One student who spoke to the Herald Sun on behalf of a small group of year 12s said girls are told to “take off their crosses by teachers when other students complain they are offensive to non-Christians”.
Baptist blogger Murray Campbell has independently verified the central allegation “Hun” story as accurate.
But the PR aspect fascinates Obadiah. The school statement says “MLC is a proudly Christian girls’ school. We do not find Christian symbols offensive.” It goes on to point out that all visible jewellery apart from ear studs is banned, something MLC has in common with many schools.
If you squint, that almost seems to address the student’s story. But it doesn’t. It is a non-denial of what students told the paper, namely, that the cross was described as offensive, and for that reason, they were told to remove their crosses.
Reading well between the lines, it seems that a teacher or someone else in authority responded to some girls objecting to crosses, with the complaining students saying they found the crosses offensive. The teacher could have simply reponded that the crosses as visible jewellery were against school rules. There was a school rule to enforce. But they should not have said to the cross wearers that they needed to remove the crosses because people find them offensive – this was an overreach, possibly in a heated moment.
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Triggered: One of the interesting things about the MLC story was the online responses, which included a sharp, instant division over it. Was the Herald Sun credible? Did the school rebut it? Vehement spilling of pixels occurred.
Evangelical Christian and New York Times columnist David French put forward an explanation of why we are so polarised in an intriging discussion of the growth of polarised views in the US and US-like societies.
He starts by recounting how he used to be shouted down by the left – as a an anti-abortion conservative. “But in 2024, I have a different thought. I have seen and endured right-wing institutions engaging in the same (and sometimes much worse) intolerance as left-wing institutions. When I wrote about my own recent cancellation at the hands of my former denomination, I was flooded with hundreds of personal emails relating similar stories. Even the smallest deviations from the required right-wing orthodoxies were being met with a withering response in conservative churches and conservative religious organizations across America.”
Referencing the bloated and ineffective DEI bureaucracy at Michigan State University that The New York Times has reported on with black student numbers remaining very low, French continues, “The campus D.E.I. bureaucracy was attempting to address an almost impossibly difficult and important task from within an ideological monoculture. It was doomed to fail, and it was doomed to fail in toxic ways.
“It’s not because the D.E.I. bureaucracy is leftist. It’s because it’s full of human beings. It’s a fact of human nature that when like-minded people gather, they tend to become more extreme. This concept — called the law of group polarization — applies across ideological and institutional lines. The term was most clearly defined and popularized in a 1999 paper by Cass Sunstein. The law of group polarization, according to Sunstein, ‘helps to explain extremism, ‘radicalization,’ cultural shifts and the behaviour of political parties and religious organizations.’
“In my experience, the more ideologically or theologically “pure” an institution becomes, the more wrong it is likely to be, especially if it takes on a difficult or complex task. Ideological monocultures aren’t just bad for the minority that’s silenced, harassed or cancelled whenever its members raise their voices in dissent. It’s terrible for the confident majority — and for the confident majority’s cause.”