Maintaining a Plausibility Structure for the New Cognitive Minority (Part One)
CARL E. ZYLSTRA
No one really disputes any longer that convictional Christians have become a cognitive minority in Western cultural thought and practice. True, Christians generally regret this state of affairs while the dominant neopagan/secular culture honestly think, “Well, it’s about time.” But both agree. Traditional convictional Christian thought is quite a different way of thinking than the thought patterns that now dominate what remains of traditional Western thought and culture. (1)
Notably Rod Dreher has been advocating that convictional Christians adopt a new “Benedict Option” by acknowledging that they’ve lost the culture wars and so are left with the option of either submitting to the dominant ways of thinking – or creating alternative communities of thought and life to sustain biblically shaped convictional ways of living and thinking.
Not all Christians are quite ready to accept Dreher’s proposal. To the question of whether there is any room in the public square for living out authentic Christian convictions, while Dreher loudly asserts, “Is not” while his critics simply retort, “Is so.” And so that discussion gets about as far as similarly worded arguments tend to get you on a middle school playground.
So that’s where Carl R. Trueman’s book is so helpful. (2) Professor Trueman takes the time to painstakingly (sometimes in excruciating detail) describe the intellectual history that has led to the point where it’s not just the living of Christian convictions that gets one squeezed out of the public square. Trueman demonstrates (if you accept his narrative) that the real issue is that actually there is no longer any room in the public square for even thinking as a Christian. In fact, Trueman argues, rather persuasively it seems to me, that the dominant culture probably no longer can even understand what Christians are trying to say.
Particularly helpful is Trueman’s discussion of the “social imaginary,” a concept developed by philosopher Charles Taylor. Trueman points out that any community needs a “social imaginary” of common assumptions in which it carries on ordinary discussions and on the basis of which it makes everyday life decisions. And it is that “social imaginary” that has changed over the centuries to the situation where there is no longer any room within Western culture’s common way thinking for traditional Christian thought and life.
In this essay I’d like to take Trueman’s point one step further and point out that this “social imaginary” described by philosophers functions pretty much like, what sociologists describe as “plausibility structures” that enable any community to cohere and flourish. Any sustainable community needs a set of common assumptions and frameworks by which they think and live. It could be argued that the “social imaginary” Trueman describes is really just another word for the core “plausibility structure” by which Western Civilization sustains itself.
What this essay now argues is that, if Trueman is right, then convictional Christians probably have no more urgent task than to develop ways to sustain an alternative social imaginary that can function as an alternative plausibility structure that will maintain the convictional Christian community in its life and witness. Failing to do so will, or so it seems to me, ultimately undermine any sense of an authentic Christian community that lives and serves out of a biblically formed social imaginary.
That doesn’t mean that maintaining an alternative and biblically shaped social imaginary requires the Christian community to descend into a solipsistic mindset that no longer understands nor is unintelligible to the dominant culture. But it does seem clear that if convictional Christians ignore Trueman’s description of the radically changed social imaginary within Western thought and, instead, decide to continue working within that dominant social imaginary, then we will have given up the argument even before the discussion begins. More seriously, we will have deprived the Christian community of the intellectual foundations necessary to maintain an alternative social imaginary/plausibility structure that can sustain a true community of biblical faith.
Certainly any biblically convictional community will want to continue engaging the dominant culture even while recognizing its currently marginalized status as one based on an alternative worldview.(3) Yet, given the radical change in the social imaginary of Western thought that Trueman describes, any biblically based engagement of that dominant social imaginary will, in fact, be mounting a direct assault on the plausibility structure on which the dominant culture currently depends for its very thought and life. And so, no matter how winsomely that alternative is presented, its radical antithesis to the dominant mindset of the age cannot be avoided.
Consequently, those who operate out of an alternative biblically shaped social imaginary will have to be prepared to be considered literally “crazy,” given that they are not likely even to be understand by anyone operating from the dominant cultural ways of thinking. Yet that’s not new. Already in the first century, the Apostle Paul was told by Festus that “you are out of your mind – your great learning has driven you mad.” (4)
Nor is that battle of cultural mindsets restricted to Christian communities as witness the current “Retraining Schools” for Uighurs that have been set up to take direct aim at destroying an Islamic social imaginary. Clearly the mindset that creates a plausibility structure for traditional Uighur society has been judged to stand in the way of enforcing the common social imaginary on which can be built the New China.
Moreover, the current radical woke/cancel culture of the West insists, as Trueman also points out, that it is an act of oppression even to suggest that an alternative social imaginary may possibly have any validity at all. Yet, once again, that’s not really new. Recall that the Apostle Paul’s greatest desire was to confront the regnant social imaginary of his day at its heart in Rome itself. And yet the only way he was permitted to do so was in handcuffs and chains.
Don’t forget that it is really only contemporary Western culture that Trueman is describing. It is Western Culture that over the centuries has moved from what Trueman calls the “First World” of paganism to the “Second World” of Christian dominated Western thought and now faces a “Third World” of an uncertain future as Christian thought is chased out of the public square. Yet while Trueman takes pains to insist that we can’t depend on “going back” to the “First World” before Christianity began to shape Western Thought, nonetheless he does conclude his postscript by indicating that with the collapse of Christian influence in the social imaginary, Christians really are, in effect, back in the 2nd century. So the question that I will take up in the next installment in this series is whether there may be a modality by which the Christian community can maintain an alternative social imaginary in order to maintain a plausibility structure that will sustain that biblically formed community in the midst of the present “Third World.”
My next blog post will discuss what I am convinced is the key way the Christian community can organize to sustain its social imaginary in ways that recognize its status as a cognitive minority, namely formal Christian education. Then the concluding installment will address why maintaining a biblical view of human sexuality will, of necessity, have to be at the heart of such a viable alternative social imaginary.
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(1) For those interested in my own take on the intellectual history road map of Western thought that leads from the Justinian revolution to the present, see my earlier series in this blog.
(2) Carl R. Trueman. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Crossway (2020)
(3) It should be acknowledged that this series of blog posts presumes the abiding nature of the Original Great Commission, the so-called Cultural Mandate given in Genesis 1.28.
(4) Acts 26.24.
Carl Zylstra serves as the Vice Chair of the IACE Board of Directors. He is the past president of Dordt University.