by Os Guinness
The response was remarkable. The traditional independence, if not rivalry, of these two departments is well known and has long provided us at the CSC with an extra source of criticism for all our planning. But in this case their reports revealed an unusual, early degree of consensus.
Each had arrived independently at the same conclusion. The plan to subvert the Church by infiltrating it through culture was not only a striking strategic opportunity as we had expected; it also exposed the surprising defensive vulnerability of the Church. All our data and experience since then have confirmed the accuracy of those early reports. In our subversion through culture, we had stumbled on a front where the Church was habitually asleep and nearly defenseless. Hence “the sandman effect”; the way in which contemporary Christians have a habit of falling asleep, even in the face of extreme danger.
Doubtless you have read regular intelligence reports on the derelict state of the Christian mind. In the early days the Council had checked similar reports to see whether the Church was likely to respond critically and coherently if our proposed approach through culture were to be discovered. (Of course, your former Bureau has played a magnificent part in creating the disarray that has existed since the Enlightenment. I need not remind you of that.) It was then that we found what no one had anticipated. The Church’s defensive vulnerability in the area of culture was so complete that Christians were never likely even to detect our operation, let alone to respond. That is still the case.
In the end, what finally convinced several of the Council to proceed with Operation Gravedigger was the unusually low budget submitted by Propaganda and Disinformation. For once they had proposed no grandiose schemes and no padded expense accounts. Their plans were built on the recognition that, once the process of cultural subversion had gained momentum, little extra effort would be required. Ninety percent of the resources needed to dig the Church’s grave would be its own.
Their original assessment of the Church’s vulnerability to cultural subversion was based on two crucial factors. Taken together, these factors produce the curious sandman effect. Instead of the Church becoming more alert as cultural danger approaches, she falls into a deeper and deeper sleep. This makes it almost impossible for her to detect any subversion along cultural lines. I want to lay these factors out for you here, partly to demonstrate how the Operation has proceeded and partly to show you what this switch in strategies will mean for you personally. Remarkably enough, the two factors are as relevant today as they were at the genesis of the Operation 250 years ago.
Forgotten Dimensions of Believing
Not surprisingly, Christians see themselves as “believers,” and for most of them that is about all that matters. They may be vague about what they believe, and vaguer still about why they believe, but they believe, and that is all they worry about. Fortunately for us, very few of them bother to look into the deeper dimensions of believing. After all, how can they be expected to understand the subtleties of belief in a world in which believing itself is hard enough? Down the centuries a dedicated minority always explored the intellectual dimensions of belief, and this has been dangerous to us at times. But even they mostly tended to overlook the social dimensions. This oversight was our opportunity.
Let me tell you a little of my own experience to make clear what I mean by this first factor. It will also show that I appreciate how demanding the switch in strategies will be for you. You may know that before being appointed to the CSC, I had worked for more than 20 years on the Left Bank in Paris. What you would not guess is that it was there, in that high-octane cerebral atmosphere, that I learned to go beyond subversion by purely intellectual means.
You can imagine my pleasure when, straight out of training, I was assigned not only to France but also to Paris, and that tiny strip of Paris from which has flowed so much of its brilliance, creativity and skepticism. At first, the assignment was all I had expected and more. The Bureau chief was a protégé of the Director. It was the early 1930s, and a dazzling array of “committed intellectuals” was assembling—Gide, Picasso, Malraux, Buñuel, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and a score of lesser lights.
The combination of illustrious minds, formidable gifts, passionate debate and international influence was intoxicating. Every gesture and word from the Rive Gauche seemed to secure an immediate worldwide audience. I thought that there in that scintillating “republic of professors” was the potential for a worldwide movement of militant skepticism in the best tradition of earlier Left Bank heroes such as Voltaire.
I could not have been more naive. The Left Bank was to be a crucial influence, all right—for two-and-a-half fascinating decades—but not at all in the way I had expected. In spite of all the reputations and the promise, no great work of art was produced by those committed intellectuals during those years. Only loners, such as Camus, were exceptions. (The London equivalent of this—“Soho-itis”—was the contagious disease of talking books and art but never getting any work done.1) More extraordinarily still, our Bureau chief hardly bothered to encourage any major arguments against faith. He was after a different end.
The longer I served in Paris the more I understood and respected his strategy. In the first place, he was always as much interested in intellectual style as in the substance of intellectual debate. Long after the details of arguments were forgotten, he said, their aftertaste would linger, affecting the memory far more than the details ever had.
Think of the reputation of the Left Bank in the 1930s and 1940s. Yes, there was brilliance, but its darker side was the empty rhetoric, the hypocritical poses, the shabby compromises, the betrayal of friends and causes, with some people fellow-traveling with the Communists, and others more or less sleeping with fascism.
As the chief anticipated, the legacy of this kind of general mood became a more effective inoculation against faith than a hundred Voltairean arguments. The desire for truth itself went out of fashion and the way was paved for the postmodern movement, which itself is more a mood than a clear philosophy.
Also, and here again I came to see the influence of the Director, the chief was always more concerned with creating a whole world of skepticism than with merely producing a handful of skeptical individuals one by one. This was the finesse of his strategy on the Left Bank. He knew that seen one way, the Left Bank was just a narrow strip of old houses and even older streets along the Seine where writers and artists lived and worked. But seen another way, it was a world of shared schools, such as the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure, shared literary salons, shared bookshops and publishing houses, and shared cafes, such as the Deux Magots, the Flore and Brasserie Lipp.
What was the effect? The Left Bank was not so much an address as an ambiance and an attitude of mind, not so much a place as a philosophy of life. “Revolution,” as Clara Malraux observed, “is seeing each other a lot.”2
Plausibility, Not Just Credibility
Do you see how all this applies to you? Los Angeles (or London or Shanghai or Dubai, for that matter) is important to us, not so much as a location as a mentality, a way of life, a world of its own. Yet that is exactly what Christians overlook, because they have no feel for the social dimension of believing. Let me explain.
In a world unaffected by either our infiltration or our propaganda, the credibility of any belief would be determined simply by whether it were true or false. It would be believed if, and only if, it were objectively true; and if it were false, it would be quite literally incredible. I don’t need to belabor the point. If something were true, it would be true even if nobody believed it. If it were false, it would be false even if everyone believed it.
Needless to say, such a state of affairs would eventually place us in rather an awkward light. But an excellent consequence of an earlier operation, which Christians aptly call “the Fall,” has been that this handicap has been lifted. It does not take a cynic to see that, since the truth requirement has been lifted, a climate has been created in which flagrant nonsense or complete erro
r can be believed, and incontrovertible truth, in turn, can be disbelieved—without the question of their being objectively true or false being raised at all. In short, we have created a climate in which a thing’s seeming to be true is often mistaken for its being true.
How have we done this? By stressing and distorting non-rational dimensions of believing. The best-known cases of this are from the field of psychology. It’s common knowledge now that people have non-rational, psychological grounds for believing and disbelieving things. A person may be an atheist, for example, without ever looking into the truth or falsity of faith, but simply because his or her father was a religious hypocrite who alienated the family from God as much as from himself. Such psychological factors lie behind the ostensible reasons they give for believing a particular thing and have nothing whatever to do with the beliefs being objectively true or false. A particular belief merely seems true or seems false because of a psychological state of mind that wishes or fears it to be so.
Freud called attention to this as “rationalizing,” and his well-known exposé of the technique threatened to uncover our work. What has saved us is that the category of rationalization has been applied so selectively, partly because of Freud’s own bias. When believers wanted or needed their faith to be true, skeptics derided it as “rationalizing.” But when unbelievers wanted or needed faith to be untrue, the same skeptics, abandoning their skepticism, described it as tough-minded and applauded. In the shuffle, of course, we have conveniently obscured the fact that the Christian faith actually claims to be true.
Fortunately, Christians are almost completely unaware of sociological examples of the same thing. Again it was touch and go as to whether our cover might be blown; and, curiously, the person who has best uncovered the importance of the social dimension of believing is one of their own intelligence experts—Peter Berger, of Boston University.3 As he has seen correctly, the degree to which a belief (or disbelief) seems convincing is directly related to its “plausibility structure’’—that is, the group or community that provides the social and psychological support for the belief. If the support structure is strong, it is easy to believe; if the support structure is weak, it is difficult to believe. The question of whether the group’s belief is actually true or not may never become an issue.
You see, then, how our Parisian skepticism was more likely to seem true on the Left Bank than on the Right. On the Left Bank it was a whole, shared, inevitable-seeming world, not just an intellectual idea that you could choose to believe or not believe. In the same way, Roman Catholicism is more likely to seem true in the Vatican than in Las Vegas, just as Mormonism is in Salt Lake City than in Singapore, and Marxism in North Korea than in North Dakota. In each case, plausibility comes from a world of shared support. Coach it with care, and plausibility will upstage credibility. It then becomes for the belief not just a cradle but also a crutch without which the believer would be stranded.
This is why the Left Bank philosophy could never cross the Seine, but reigned supreme on its own bank. And this is the real reason why the “new atheists,” such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, have been so troubling to Christians. The danger does not lie in their arguments. As we all know, their arguments alone are often as weak as they are strident and intolerant. The danger lies in the ambiance in which they speak. In circles sick to the teeth of fundamentalists and fanatics—“faith-heads,” as Dawkins calls them—any glass raised to the demise of faith is guaranteed an approving toast, just as any witty rant is accorded an instant “Hear, hear!” just as if it were a verified truth.
If this social dimension was vital in an intellectual milieu like the Left Bank (it is also true in Oxford, if you think about it), how much more will it be true in an area like Los Angeles, which puts such a premium on things with no substance—image, gossip and celebrities (“well known for being well known” and all that).
Fortunately too, although the clearest analysis of plausibility is by an enemy expert, his own side will be the last to see it. Even that diehard band of Christians still concerned to defend the faith intellectually are almost totally preoccupied with the credibility of the faith (an intellectual problem) and have little concern for the Church’s plausibility (a problem with social dimensions as well). To be sure, there is some slight new interest in “cultural apologetics,” but we are working to block its growth.
There is a double irony in this preoccupation with the intellectual: first, that Christians, who are generally so resistant to thinking, have developed an intellectualist bias of any kind; and second, that they have gone overboard by being too theoretical, even though the Adversary’s warnings against this are so clear. He himself is no stranger to the idea of “fleshing out” theory. His directive was always that faith be truth that is practiced (giving it the necessary social dimension) and not merely professed, propounded, proclaimed (or some other purely theoretical response). It was once hard work to break the hold of this idea in the Church.
Even their arch theoretician, that bombastic little Jew from Tarsus, saw this point clearly. He knew it was the Church itself, not theory, which was “the pillar and bulwark of the truth.”4 Of course he did not mean that the Christian faith was true because the Church was strong. He was not stupid, only stubborn. He would have believed his faith was objectively true if he had been the last one left convinced of it. But just as the Party is the plausibility structure for Marxism, and the Senior Common Room (or “faculty lounge” as you will have to call it now) can be the same for secular humanism, the Church is the plausibility structure for the Christian faith.
That wretch Paul realized this. The Church is the Christian faith’s working model; its pilot plant; its future in embryo; its colonial outpost. So, if we can work on the Church as a social body until it is weak, shallow, distorted, hypocritical, or whatever, then it’s all up with the truth of the faith. Christian apologists can muster all the best arguments in the world, but they will not seem true. More accurately, they may be credible intellectually. But they won’t be plausible, and credibility without plausibility is tinny and unconvincing.
You can understand, then, our need to undermine the Christian faith through the Church, not so much at the level of truth as at the level of plausibility. Uproot Christians physically from a well-functioning community or alienate them inwardly from a poorly functioning one, and the rest of our job will take care of itself. There is a French saying that the Breton peasant checks his faith at the left-luggage office in the Gare Montparnasse on arriving in Paris.5 But the same is true of the student from a Christian home checking his faith at his first university seminar, or of anyone changing worlds. On entering the new world, the old becomes implausible, and soon its faith becomes incredible too.
Irony apart, the Church’s preoccupation with credibility and neglect of plausibility is typical of her cultural weakness. Without a feel for the social dimension of believing, the Church is like a person paralyzed from the neck down—quite insensible to the further damage being inflicted on her.
Wrong Tool for the Job
“If you want to know what water is, why is a fish the last one to ask?” The old Chinese riddle captures an essential difficulty that Christians have in becoming aware of their cultural context—they know it so well that they do not know it. Put differently, they have no counter-environment to give them a perspective on their environment. But I might add another old saying: “To the man with a hammer, everything is a nail.” If Christians have a tool that works, they tend to use it and use it and use it, including in situations where it does not do the job.
These two simple points are an excellent introduction to the second reason we can subvert the Church while Christians sleep: They are not using the right tool.
It is relatively easy to understand an exotic culture—in other words, the culture of another people, especially when it is sufficiently distant or different. In that sense, culture, if understood as primitive African masks or the sexual habits of South Sea Islande
rs, would be easy for Christians to grasp. It is conveniently distant in time and space. But understanding their own culture is quite different. It is the water in which they swim and the mold by which they are shaped, so it is not easy for them even to see it. Culture is therefore a ridiculously easy way to influence Christians without their realizing it.
In theory, that should not be so. Culture-blindness should be less of a problem for Christians than for other faiths. You would expect them to deduce from their own notion of “worldliness” that they do not live in a vacuum, that their cultural context is never neutral, and that the worst dangers are often the least obvious. But then, of course, today’s sophisticated Christians have consigned “the world,” along with “the flesh and the devil,” to the doctrinal attic to collect dust. So they are not on the lookout.
Reducing worldliness from a serious to a trivial category was a subtle but easy step that we completed in the 1960s. Slowly, Christians liberated from the old legalisms began to talk disdainfully of worldliness as something they were freed from. It was always a matter of “those old nonos”: “Don’t drink. Don’t dance. Don’t smoke. Don’t play cards.” After that, it was simple to dismiss the notion of worldliness as one of the despised legalisms of the “bad old days” before Christian freedom dawned. From our viewpoint, that was a simple but devastating shift.
An understanding of their cultural context should be a basic stock in trade for Christians. Such an awareness would affect not only their notion of worldliness and witnessing but also their discipleship, theological self-understanding, missionary outreach and ethical decision-making. Occasional stirrings toward cultural analysis do occur from time to time, and in fact, such a stirring is happening in mission circles today. This might pose a serious threat to us, were it not for two things.