The Consequences of an Intellectual Inferiority Complex
One reason why both Christians and conservatives have gone crazy
Last month, as a part of my manifesto Against American Parochialism, I observed that American Christians with experiences outside of the country tended to remain grounded as the craziness of politics threatened to overwhelm the church.
What I didn’t touch on is how counterintuitive this is. Normally speaking, one would expect that those interested in missions trips to foreign countries would be the most zealous Christians, who would in turn also be the most extreme in all of the ways that Christians are different from non-Christians, including in the political arena.
That post framed the answer as a symptom of an overemphasis on the concerns of American politics, so that spending any significant time (in quantity or quality) outside of the country would lower the temperature or offer alternative approaches that might not otherwise be considered.
At the same time, that can’t fully explain it: Many of the same culture war topics are just as relevant in other countries. The parameters of the fights are different, but in many places, there are many of the same core tensions between liberty and security, a government safety net and taxation, religious freedom and discrimination law, and the life of the unborn and the needs and desires of its would-be parents.
In other words, if a Christian cares immensely about, say, the life of the unborn, looking at the same subject internationally probably wouldn’t temper that care. There are potentially even more pressing matters at the moment in a handful of parts of the world (like Ukraine at the moment), but abortion itself is also a live topic of debate around the world, with court rulings in Colombia, Mexico and Argentina significantly increasing legal abortion access in those countries just in the last year.
So in this post, I want to offer a second possible explanation: Those who are confident enough in their beliefs to evangelize them to the ends of the earth also tend to be intellectually secure enough to interact with the rest of the culture without the fear that drives much of the craziness.
I remember first noticing this in my high school youth group in the late aughts. At one point, we had a series of talks on world religions. I found it very helpful — it’s exactly addressing a common question that many who grow up in the church have. If there are a bunch of different religions out there, and I could easily have grown up believing a different one, why choose Christianity?
Yet at the same time, my mom told me that behind the scenes, there had been a lot of hesitance about that series among the parents involved in running the youth group. There was a fear that by discussing world religions, we might just come to embrace one of those other religions instead of Christianity. There was a lot of fear about this for Islam in particular, which fits both with its overall popularity worldwide and the moral panic around shariah law.
Today, I contrast that fear with the intellectual confidence of Jonathan McLatchie, a friend from my church in Boston who frequently engages in apologetics debates, making the case that the Christian faith is the most consistent with the evidence. His expertise is informed by his understanding of world religions, and he has extensive experience debating Muslims on these matters of apologetics.
If you believe, as Jonathan and I do, that the evidence supports your position, open debate is welcome and likely to lead more people to believe as you do. But if you harbor a sneaking suspicion that your side isn’t smart enough, that your faith isn’t really intellectually defensible, then you will move instead to avoid exposure to those outside ideas, sheltering both your kids and yourself.
It’s inevitable that many of my posts here simply remix a ideas I’ve had for years. In this case, I observed this very trend way back in 2015, before all of this craziness was made manifest:
I opened this post by recounting a sermon illustration that has stuck with me:
A group of hunters (I think they were supposed to be Native Americans) found some ducks which regularly floated in a river to be safe from predators. They released a pumpkin in upstream which would float down the river, but when the ducks saw it, they all freaked out and flew away. They kept releasing the pumpkin past them, though, and eventually the ducks realized that it would just float on by and nothing would happen. So they stopped flying off and just continued sitting there as the uneventful pumpkin would go on past. The next one wasn't be a pumpkin, though: it was a hunter in the river wearing face paint and a pumpkin for a helmet, and they were all... sitting ducks.
I probably don't need to spell out how this is directly related to concerns about gay marriage, but in case it helps, we're the ducks. There are threats out there to destroy us, which will attempt to lull us into a false sense of security. Once we stop reacting to new things, they'll be used against us. When I heard this illustration, I was reminded of another more common folk saying that if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it'll jump out. But if you put it in a pot of room temperature water and heat it up slowly, it won't notice until it's dead.
The duck story illustrates the fear with a bit more specificity, though. It's important that the evil here is personified, and stronger or smarter than us. To defeat an evil like that, we have to trust our gut instinct, because that's what's kept us alive as a species so far. Trying to carve out exceptions for pumpkins is only inviting hunters into our midst.
I don't really like to perpetuate any stereotypes, but if the US were divided into a Red America and a Blue America, which one do both sides think would be smarter? Who would be the ducks and who might they fear are the hunters? What responsibility do those of us who think of ourselves as smart have to prove our trustworthiness?
In that post, the big news of the day was Obergefell v. Hodges, the marriage equality Supreme Court ruling. I pointed out that most of the conservative reaction I heard was not, as some progressives expected, rooted in disgust, but was rooted in fear. “This may sound innocuous, but what’s next?”
While some might have feared a turn towards legalized polygamy, it seems like much less of a stretch to place the current conversation around transgender issues as the obvious natural next step, not least because of the framing of the LGBTQ acronym.
Let me contrast two ways of thinking about this progression:
The LGBTQ movement started with the most clear-cut problems with minimal downside. Having succeeded there, it’s moved on to areas with some clear upside but a bit more significant downsides. It will naturally encounter more resistance and see significantly less success.
Gay marriage was just the beginning. It’s all part of a master plan to completely transform the way our culture thinks about sex and gender.
Both perspectives acknowledge that marriage equality made it easier for transgender rights to enter the conversation. But they disagree on what they expect of the resistance going forward. The former expects that when the issues are not as obvious, resistance will be greater. But the latter expects that having acquiesced on marriage equality, the conservative position will enter a free fall and progressives will get to enact whatever they want.
Of course, both conservatives and progressives could adopt either of these perspectives. But considering which position conservatives might adopt, the more intellectually insecure one is, the more the latter position would feel plausible, and the more that might therefore tempt one to catastrophize about every issue.
Since that post in 2015, that catastrophizing has reached a fever pitch. The next year, we heard conservatives convey the importance of the presidential election by comparing it to Flight 93, the fourth hijacked plane on 9/11. Passengers rushed the cockpit, to their own demise but which saved a further atrocity. If Hillary Clinton had prevailed, conservatives would lose everything, the logic went.
The Supreme Court provided the most plausible model for such catastrophizing. If Clinton had gotten to appoint Antonin Scalia’s replacement, the median court seat would shift from Anthony Kennedy to Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan or the replacement, significantly to the left.
But it’s important to note how conservatives’ intellectual inferiority complex relates to how they view the Court. With the conservative majority as has existed for the last few decades, it always remained a cognizable possibility for the Democratic appointees to pick off one or two of the Republican appointees for key cases, if not outright convert them (a la David Souter).
The reality is that the same sort of poaching happens the other direction, too. Kagan and Breyer voted with the conservatives on Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and Fulton v. City of Philadelphia was unanimous. While members of the minority joining the majority is admittedly lower stakes, these examples suggest that the conservatives could still plausibly win a reasonable fraction of the high profile Supreme Court cases with only 4 Republican appointees on the Court.
Importantly, though, that claim is plausible only if you believe that the conservative case could be made convincingly enough to win over at least one of the liberal justices. If you inherently suspect that all of the smart people are on the other side, you absolutely need to have someone you trust in that median seat.
The latest manifestation of these trends has been the growing censorship movement on the right. What I think is going on is that conservatives have woken up to the fact that they actually hold significant political power, especially in red states like Texas. And they’re seeking to use that political power to make up for what they perceive to be their own deficiencies in other realms, such as education.
These laws are of course controversial in the broader public, but have also sparked some disagreement among those who agree with their motivations. The lightning rod of the dissenters has been David French, a conservative lawyer and commentator for The Dispatch. Of course, as a lawyer, French takes most issue with the poor drafting of the laws themselves, and predicts a lot of unintended consequences.
But his underlying worldview, which some have pejoratively called “David Frenchism,” I think, is an intellectual confidence that conservative ideas can win a fair fight. In French’s own case, this confidence is born of his legal victories in the cause of free speech in prior decades. And many of his opponents have a corresponding intellectual inferiority complex, believing that conservatives need to use whatever means we can to achieve the outcomes they want.
Turning back towards the question of faith, French identified his grounds for this confidence in his upbringing in this week’s Good Faith podcast (quoting from which has become a weekly occurrence of mine):
I was deeply influenced by CS Lewis as a kid. I feel like that was a great gift for me, because in my experience, a lot of folks who have been really influenced by Lewis have not approached the world from a defensive standpoint. They’re not afraid of the world. There’s something about that Lewis approach that says you don’t have any grounds for an intellectual inferiority complex or any grounds to fear the ideas that are out there. For me, that was Lewis’s real gift. […]
One of my foremost wishes for the church is just to stop dwelling in that atmosphere of fear and inferiority. I really wish that one of the first questions I get wouldn’t be “How are we going to protect ourselves against X idea or Y idea?” which is a manifestation of that. But yeah, Lewis was so critical in my formation.
That podcast also featured similar observations from guests David Brooks and Peter Wehner, both high profile Christians who write for national audiences deeply influenced by Lewis. Here was Brooks reflecting on his own conversion to Christianity in light of the appropriate emphasis on small groups that I discussed last week:
Social capital is not enough. I call it “get-togetherism” — we should all get together. There has to be a strong philosophical return. We probably all read the same sorts of books. I came to faith nine years ago now, and when you’re wandering, one of the nice things about Christians is that they send you books. And so, in the three month period when I was a searcher, I got about 600 books, only 350 of which were [CS Lewis’s] Mere Christianity. So you’ve got to have that theological, intellectual strain in the middle of the get-together.
The most analogous figure to Lewis today is Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, the author of the apologetics classic The Reason for God. Keller’s own story of moving to Manhattan to plant a church embodies that same intellectually confident ethic.
Unsurprisingly, he has remained grounded in the midst of this political upheaval, to the point that some frustrated conservative Christians have started calling him “woke” for perspectives like “How Do Christians Fit Into the Two-Party System? They Don’t” in the New York Times in 2018.
What can be done about this inferiority complex, among both Christians and conservatives? We have to recognize that there are no easy answers to such a deep-rooted problem. It took decades to develop and it’ll take decades to reverse.
For the church, one obvious remedy is that Christians need to learn the deep intellectual justifications for our faith. We can tend to treat such apologetics as important mainly as talking points to raise in discussions with non-Christians. We often assume that people who are already Christians don’t need additional argumentation — they’ve already converted.
At the same time, though, many Christians wrestle with doubt, and if Christians aren’t addressing those doubts, they might turn elsewhere. Beyond that, though, some who don’t actively wrestle with doubts have nagging suspicion that their faith wouldn’t stand up to intellectual scrutiny, and feel that they must resort to other means of defending it, including but not limited to joining the personality cult of an amoral philandering liar.
On the political side of the question, academia desperately needs to diversify intellectually, a cause the Heterodox Academy is doing great work to promote. There’s definitely been progress already — I experienced a much less hostile campus environment in both undergrad and grad school than I had been led to expect from my parents’ generation. But especially for those who are more conservative or less confident than me, there’s a very reasonable fear that such views will make them pariahs in the university. Just the example of a handful prominent conservative professors will go a long way in assuaging the fears of conservative students, which will also be good for the university.
At the very least, recognizing the role that this intellectual inferiority complex plays in both conservative and Christian spaces should help to explain why we are seeing many of the convulsions that make the headlines.
The Veritas Forum organization has a lot of great TED-talk like content with dialogue on the Christian faith from a more confident stance. I think they're under-recognized. :-)