That Christianity lies at the roots of western values and assumptions is something we’ve often posted about on Think. It’s been the observation behind some fantastic books we’ve profiled (hello Siedentop, Holland, Trueman and Scrivener), and other excellent ones we haven’t (like those by Hobson and McLaughlin). Christianity is ‘the air we breathe’ – without it we simply wouldn’t assume that freedom, equality and consent are values everyone holds, and should hold.

Often the purpose of the books we’ve highlighted and posts we’ve written has been to point out not only western society’s debt to Christianity but the way in which the very values conceived by Christianity are now being distorted and threatened. That this is the case is all too evident.

We may be WEIRD but it is surely absurd that (as currently in Scotland) it is considered ‘righteous’ to earnestly believe someone with a penis can really, truly, be a woman, but to believe that marriage should only be between a man and a woman, and that children should be born to those so married, is morally repugnant. When WEIRD-ness morphs into absurdity we have a problem.

This is not a problem only for those like Kate Forbes who wish to lead political parties but for society at large. It risks putting a hole below the waterline of the very things that explain our success.

As I watch the debates in Scotland, and talk with my Anglican friends – agonizing as they are over the implications of their bishops’ absurd decisions around same-sex blessings – I grieve but also feel a growing conviction that we shouldn’t take any of this too seriously. The devil loves to be taken seriously, he hates to be mocked. What we are living through is ridiculous, absurd, and passing. Christianity gave the world an enduring model for success; the current distorted representation of that model will limp on only briefly. We need to be more Luther-like and laughingly defy what is so self-evidently preposterous.

We also need to see that the best hope for our world is the true message of Christ. We are not single-issue fanatics, except about the gospel, because we believe the gospel is good news for all the world. As Carl Trueman writes,

We can become so preoccupied with specific threats that we neglect the important fact that Christian truth is not a set of isolated and unconnected claims but rather stands as a coherent whole. The church’s teaching on gender, marriage, and sex is a function of her teaching on what it means to be human.

We’re not the absurd ones. We have the message that speaks to the heart of what it is to be human. That’s not absurd, it isn’t even WEIRD: it’s beautiful.