I’ll jump right in here… the first is especially for people who lead institutions, but the rest are for anyone. You want inertia and the status quo on your side if you can have it. From a man who almost never tweets (in fact this is his most recent tweet, from March of 2020!), Dan Doriani (who was senior pastor of Central Presbyterian in St. Louis when we attended there):
Re #1: Nuts, similar to a spoiler alert, I actually didn't think about people judging me when I go back to church, or when I attended the men's breakfast.
I'm a cowardly sinner and won't justify myself. Let God be glorified in right judgments of me. I shouldn't get the credit other folks who did keep up attendance, so I don't feel tempted to make an excuse or generate an equivalency for my online attendance.
Aaron Renn had a newsletter last month explaining how cultural power is winning arguments instead of facts and reasoning. He used a church example with Keller, bit I can't recall the issue, but Keller was leveraging power to win. He also mentioned TGC as a party holding cultural power.
I think of cultural power in reaction to Edward Hamilton's fine comment. That is, folks can love the vaccine because of the cultural power strengthens their in-group identity and so counter-facts aren't seen as creating a paradox because the facts are coming from powerless people conducting studies.
The amount of information we have about every aspect of COVID is vastly greater than it was a year ago, and yet from the way it's talked about (in both public and private) shows little awareness of that vast body of information. It's now an identity badge, and its resistance to being updated by new evidence is part of the point.
It's a curious form of integrity, hating COVID so much that you're willing to embrace the paradox that vaccines both work so well that anyone who refuses one is insane, but also so poorly that we'll never be safe enough to stop wearing masks. Questioning the paradox is a flag for weak faith in "The Science"; embracing it is an unusually strong signal of orthodoxy, of the sort that could never be generated by any views with a deeper sense of internal coherence.
Re #1: Nuts, similar to a spoiler alert, I actually didn't think about people judging me when I go back to church, or when I attended the men's breakfast.
I'm a cowardly sinner and won't justify myself. Let God be glorified in right judgments of me. I shouldn't get the credit other folks who did keep up attendance, so I don't feel tempted to make an excuse or generate an equivalency for my online attendance.
Aaron Renn had a newsletter last month explaining how cultural power is winning arguments instead of facts and reasoning. He used a church example with Keller, bit I can't recall the issue, but Keller was leveraging power to win. He also mentioned TGC as a party holding cultural power.
I think of cultural power in reaction to Edward Hamilton's fine comment. That is, folks can love the vaccine because of the cultural power strengthens their in-group identity and so counter-facts aren't seen as creating a paradox because the facts are coming from powerless people conducting studies.
The amount of information we have about every aspect of COVID is vastly greater than it was a year ago, and yet from the way it's talked about (in both public and private) shows little awareness of that vast body of information. It's now an identity badge, and its resistance to being updated by new evidence is part of the point.
It's a curious form of integrity, hating COVID so much that you're willing to embrace the paradox that vaccines both work so well that anyone who refuses one is insane, but also so poorly that we'll never be safe enough to stop wearing masks. Questioning the paradox is a flag for weak faith in "The Science"; embracing it is an unusually strong signal of orthodoxy, of the sort that could never be generated by any views with a deeper sense of internal coherence.