We all have our ruts we live in.  Some ruts are good for us and other ruts are bad and still others are neither bad nor good. Ruts are habits or beliefs that are hard to get out of or hard to change.  Society or culture helps us set up our ruts.  Those ruts may be good for us or not.  70 years ago it was cool to smoke, however we know now that that is a bad rut to be in. Today, American society is very individualistic.  We like to think we are the master of our own destiny, but are we really? Culture’s ruts have a great influence on our choices.

According to George Barna (now with Arizona Christian University), 92% of American adults have a syncretistic worldview.  What that means is that the vast majority of Americans pick and choose what they believe in.  They will choose various beliefs from a variety of viewpoints from Biblical Theism to Secular Humanism to Marxism to Eastern Mysticism.  They will pick what they like and create their own belief system.  It may be in places contradictory and not logical but it is what they believe.  Now most of us will not sit down and spend time determining what we believe.  We just live our lives, but we are influenced by our parents and friends, and by the culture we live in.  For the most part, these influencers determine our beliefs or our ruts.  

Note George Barna says only 4% of American adults have a biblical worldview, and yet still today the majority of Americans would call themselves Christian.  I would argue most of those who say they are Christian without a biblical worldview really do not understand what it means to be a Christian and are really Christian in name only.  Though I suspect there are some Christians who truly believe but have a messed up belief system and so got labeled as syncretistic.

About 25 years ago there was a study on what teenagers believed.  It was discovered that the majority of teens in general believed to varying degrees in 5 tenets or principles (Creator God watches over us; Be good, nice, and fair; Our goal is to be happy; God is available to help; Good people go to heaven).  And those teens had been primarily influenced by their parents who also believed in these principles.  These 5 principles ended up being called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” (MTD).  In a blog post 5 years ago, I called it America’s civil religion.  Today, I would argue that it was America’s civil religion 25+ years ago, but it is no longer true today and was already not true 5 years ago when I wrote that post.  Note MTD has never been a religion or a formal belief system, but it was what many people believed back then. Or to put it another way it was a major cultural rut for people at the end of the 20th century and start of the 21st century.

With MTD, we drifted away from our Christian heritage, and today, I believe we have moved even further away from our Christian heritage.  Though MTD is still around, culture has moved on to what I call “Critical Expressive Individualism” (CEI).  CEI is a combination of Critical Theory (viewing the world in terms of oppressed people, oppressors and oppressive structures) and Expressive Individualism (looking inside yourself at your feelings and desires to find the authentic you).  You can see the influence of CEI, today, in that 74% of American Adults discern moral truth with their feelings.  Again like MTD, CEI is not a formal belief system or a religion, but it is what many people believe today.   CEI is what culture promotes today.  It is a rut of beliefs we can fall into.

Because culture strongly influences our beliefs, there is a paradox today between being autonomous individuals that culture promotes and the reality that culture influences you. Culture says “You be you” but then tells you how to behave and what to believe.  It expects certain behaviors and condemns other behaviors.  Culture promotes its own ruts even when it promotes being completely independent.

And I need to mention American Individualism (focus is on me). It is a huge rut that goes back many generations. You need to be aware of it.  It colors how we think and act.  Both MTD and CEI are self oriented.  We need to be aware of its effects. Instead of being self focused, we need to be God oriented or God centered.  In reality, individualism goes all the way back to Adam and Eve.  They became self-centered when they tried to become like God. 

We also have our own personal ruts or habits.  Some of them may be good for you (e.g. Bible study, exercise) and others may be bad for you (e.g. watching porn, losing your temper).  These ruts can be hard to get out of too.   I have found that my good ruts are easier to leave than my bad ruts.  Many of my bad ruts keep reappearing.  I think that is because I am a broken sinful person who goes for instant gratification instead of being disciplined.  But if you stick with it and with God’s help, you can put your bad habits behind you.  Do not become discouraged.  Yes, you will fail, but God’s forgiveness is there for you to start again.  

To sum up, be aware of the ruts you are in and the ruts that culture and others promote.  Focused on being in the good ruts that are God centered, like that good “Thankful for Jesus” rut.

The individual is king in today’s Western Culture. I  just finished reading a very enlightening book that made sense of how this messed up world in the West has changed in the last 50+ years.  This excellent book is “Strange New World” by Carl R. Trueman.  While reading it, there were times, I stopped and said to myself, “So that is why those people think that way” and by the end of the book I was also wondering how much of my thinking has been influenced by these ideas. The problem is every good lie has a kernel of truth in it.  That is what makes these false ideas believable for many people.

The expressive individual wants to be authentic and to express the real person they are, so they look inside themselves to find their core feelings and intuition, while dismissing any external influences, such as the surrounding culture. That defines them and gives them their identity. The person then expresses their inner core to be an authentic individual. The authority is only in themselves.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) developed the idea and you can see his influence in the following centuries.  The traditional identity authorities of nation, family and faith would say of me that I am an American, son of Erwin and Irene Hein, and a Christian.  And there are also other ways to identify oneself (e.g. occupation, sex, marital status, etc).  Whereas the expressive individual rejects all that and only looks to oneself as the only authority.

Along comes Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx who both said that morality is society’s way of oppressing or controlling the individual.  In other words, they believe that there is no natural morality. It is only a societal construct used to oppress or control us.  That idea is present in today’s culture.  Also today’s cultural thinking was strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud, who declared sex is fundamental to human happiness.  He considered that the inner self was primarily defined by our sexual desires. Because of Freud, our identity became our sexual psychological self,  His student, Wilhelm Reich, a Marxist, put it all together to form the intellectual underpinnings of today’s culture change.  Only one thing missing was the technology to make it practical.  The birth control pill allowed sex to become much more recreational, and the internet allowed the porn industry to easily reach us and influence us in all things sexual.  (Note the author of the book, Carl Trueman, said the evolution of this culture change is more complicated than his broad overview, and in this post I have significantly simplified it a whole lot more.)

So an expressive individual today will usually look inside oneself and decide one’s identity with the eye on one’s sexual desires. With the collapse of the traditional identities (nation:loss of trust in government, family:high divorce rate, and faith: church scandals), the LGBTQ+ community has stepped in to encourage the individual to consider their alternate sexual identities.  They have become a major influencer, in part, because they also provide a sense of belonging as they praise you and validate your chosen sexual identity.

With the individual being the only authority, it has left Western Culture in a very unstable fluid state.  Your self, your identity, is fluid.  It can change. It can be anything.  Nothing seems to be solid. You get to decide.  With your identity being personal and psychological (and many times sexual) that sets situations where one’s identity can offend another identity. Or one finds a viewpoint to be oppressive to them and an attack on who they are. Dealing with a variety of identities can be tricky business. This is especially true with transgender people. How do you handle a boy who identifies as a girl or vice versa? Do you let a transgender boy, who is biologically a girl, use the boy’s locker room? Or let a transgender girl, who is biologically a boy, use the girl’s locker room?  This is happening today.

Also today’s thinking is that moral codes of society are oppressive and  support the (past) status quo (where white heterosexual males dominate). So then, one needs to rebel against this systematic bias, and oppose all institutions (like the Christian Church) who were part of the old culture.  They declare that they are victims of this systematic bias, and therefore deserve our support.  If this sounds a lot like Critical Theory, that is because it is at least related to it.  Anyone who does not support them is an oppressor who is attacking their identity, the core of their being.  Those whose identity is found in the past status quo could be considered to be a threat to the emerging status quo and must be censored and in this way prevent hurting the feelings and thus the identity of the oppressed victims. Thus, this radical freedom of the individual can end up restricting freedom of speech, in the name of preventing an attack on an individual’s identity and feelings.

As Christians, we need to realize that this emerging culture is not friendly to the Christian Faith. Because of this we need to have strong communities in our local churches. We need solid meaningful worship services. We do have our identity as forgiven and loved children of God, being found in Jesus Christ.  We are his. We need to know that and have a firm foundation in the who, whats, and whys of the Christian Faith.  Though the Bible is our authority, it is not an authority for many people today, so we will need to also use Natural Law to help share our Christian ideas.  Those ideas are quickly becoming lost to Western Culture.  We need to stand firm in the Christian Faith.

The book ends with this paragraph:

The world in which we live seems set to be entering a new, chaotic, uncharted and dark era. But we should not despair. We need to prepare ourselves, be informed, know what we believe and why we believe it, worship God in a manner that forms us as true disciples and pilgrims, intellectually and intuitively, and keep before our eyes the unbreakable promises that the Lord has made and confirmed in Jesus Christ.  This is not the time for hopeless despair, nor naive optimism. Yes, let us lament the ravages of the fall as they play out in the distinctive ways that our generation has chosen. But let that lamentation be the content for sharpening our identity as people of God and our hunger for the great consummation that awaits at the marriage feast of the Lamb.