Why don’t gay groups like calling themselves homosexual? Why should you avoid using ‘capitalism’ to talk about capitalism? And why have evangelicals redefined the word ‘religion’? The answer is that modernism was wrong about language.
Language has drift, and capitalism has a bad rep
One great contribution of Postmodernism has been to point out that language is not neutral. Modernism got it wrong: language is not a transparent medium, words do not represent things unproblematically. Rather, words are steeped in cultural prejudices and loaded with public presuppositions—ingrained grooves that carry one in certain directions.
This is obviously true of certain phrases. If I said that in 2007, CDOs had lulled bankers into a false sense of …, you’d immediately think ‘security’. People rarely seem to be lulled into anything else.
But these ingrained groves don’t just hurry our thoughts towards certain words, but also towards certain ideas. We start to associate particular concepts with words, associations which influence the way we think and speak, associations which are governed by the views of our community or culture.
Take the word ‘capitalism’. It didn’t always conjure up warm feelings before the 2007 crash, it was strongly linked to greedy bankers afterwards, and since Piketty it suddenly sends one off down some mental train track thinking about inequality. If one wanted to praise that ‘economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state’, one might even want to avoid using the word capitalism altogether. As our culture changes, the value and direction of words changes too.
Community meanings and homosexuality
Postmoderns also tell us that every community moulds language to justify its beliefs and practices. Members of different communities might use the same word, but associate with it different ideas or even use it to mean something different. By shaping their language, communities can subtly shape the way their members think, arranging their thoughts so that the community’s values naturally seem correct.
One recent example is the way that certain groups variously call gay people gay or homosexual. I just typed ‘homosexuality choice’ into Google, and four of the top five results were:
Yes, Homosexuality Absolutely Is a Choice - Huffington Post
Being Gay Not a Choice: Science Contradicts Ben Carson
Are you born gay or is it a choice? - PinkNews.co.uk
Homosexuality and choice - Conservapedia
The trend roughly held through the rest of the results. The anti-gay websites call gay people homosexual, and the pro-gay sites call them gay. Why? Well, says Wikipedia,
some recommend completely avoiding usage of homosexual as it has a negative, clinical history and because the word only refers to one's sexual behavior (as opposed to romantic feelings) and thus it has a negative connotation.
Perhaps those who think that being homosexual is a choice prefer the word homosexuality because it sounds more like a curable disease, while those who think that being gay isn’t a choice use the word gay because it sounds more neutral and harmless. This may or may not be precisely true, but I think the general point stands. Different groups are choosing their own vocabularies because those vocabularies subtly support their positions.
The funny way that evangelicals define ‘religion’
Another example is the extraordinary way that many Anglo-American evangelically-leaning protestants use the word ‘religion’. (I’ll call them evangelicals from now on. It’s inaccurate and ludicrously broad-brushed, but the label has some truth and it’s better than AAELPs.) They have developed a new meaning of the word which confuses those outside of their context. They say things like ‘religion never saved anyone’ and make videos entitled ‘Why I hate religion, but love Jesus’. And they use the word in this way because it subtly reinforces some of the distinctive beliefs of their community.
The word religion normally means (according to Google), the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.
On the other hand, when evangelicals use the word religion, they refer to a miserable man-made system of doing good, a laborious legalism by which people try to avoid God’s anger and gain his pleasure. Christianity, by contrast, isn’t primarily interested in what we do. For one, it’s concerned with what God has done for us in Christ’s substitutionary death for our sin. And secondly, it’s concerned with the possibility of joyfully obeying God as one’s Saviour and Lord. Hence, the logic goes, Christianity is not a religion.
Lots of things are now in the religion box that weren’t there before. In addition to all the world religions, there’s any sort of rules-first version of Christianity like those unpleasant American groups who attended church weekly and have very stringent ethics, but who are loveless and sneeringly proud of their personal morality.
It’s not surprising that evangelicals want a word to express the difference between do-gooding and having faith in Christ alone. The difference is critical—so critical that the protestant reformers died for it.
It is odd though that evangelicals have chosen to express this difference with the word ‘religion’. Many religions aren’t concerned with good works in the way that evangelicals understand the term, let alone with doing good works to appease the eschatological wrath of a deity. There are also religions that believe in a kind of grace. Shin Buddhism, for instance, holds that unconditional grace from Amida is a person’s only hope, as humans are too deeply rooted in karmitic evil to save themselves out by good deeds. Yet evangelicals tend to see the grace/works dichotomy in all belief systems.
Another odd thing about the choice of ‘religion’ is that ‘grace not works’ is neither only thing that differentiates Christianity from other religions, nor the most important thing. The Trinity, by contrast, is more central to the Bible’s message and more distinctive than grace, but consider how odd it would sound if evangelicals used the word ‘religion’ to mean ‘a system that denies the triunity of God’. This reflects, once again, the way that evangelicals often place such a heavy emphasis on grace-vs-works that they effectively reduce the Christian message to the doctrine of justification.
The choice also strongly enforces the uniqueness of Christianity, to the detriment of showing how other religions are like it. The usual usage of religion puts Christianity in the same box as all other religions; evangelicals use the word to differentiate it from all other religions. Christ is unique, and salvation is found in no one else, but the religion/Christianity differentiation feels so strict as to suggest there’s nothing commendable in other religions at all. In reality, there’s some bad and some good, and Christians should praise the good while showing how that good is best expressed in the Christian story.
The uniqueness of Christianity is enforced even more effectively because the new definition creates a verbal barrier to talking about Christianity and other religions in the same light. The word that you’d naturally use to compare religions (‘religion’) now means something different, so if you want to use religion in its normal sense, the sense that puts all religions are in the same box, you have to specify which definition of ‘religion’ you’re using. It’s awkward and prohibitive.
So the new evangelical definition of religion promotes the ideas that, (1) grace-not-works is the chief element of the Gospel, (2) world religions are all concerned with doing good works, (3) Christianity is different from other religions primarily because it believes in grace, and (4) Christianity is unique in every aspect, utterly different from other religions. The new definition also (5) constrains one’s language, making it harder to talk about how Christianity and other religions are similar. These ideas subtly reinforce evangelicalism’s emphases on grace/works and the uniqueness of Christianity.
Or, at least, the new definition might do those things. There are ways to use it well, and contexts in which it might be powerful. In Britain, the works-grace distinction is not widely understood among non-Christians. Many do not realise the Bible says that only the cross can put one in the right with God or that grace might be prior to and might motivate doing good. Christians who wholeheartedly follow Christ are often told by non-Christians that they’re ‘so religious’, as if they followed Christ not from joy but rather through extreme willpower or madcap zeal. In this context, to respond by saying that ‘Christianity isn’t a religion’ can be a helpful polemic.
The new definition of ‘religion’ should, however, only be used polemically and irregularly. It’s too imbalancing and too distorting to be useful for making any substantial claim. Even if it was not born out of imbalance, it has grown popular through it and is used so widely and so assertively that it perpetuates that distortion.
Language is not neutral, and communities mould it to their advantage. And modernism was wrong.
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