Leadingchurch.com

The Omnivore’s Dilemma 

Most animals are born knowing what to eat. A koala bear’s sensory systems are “structured in advance of experience” to guide it to eucalyptus leaves. Humans, however, must learn what to eat. Like rats and cockroaches, we’re omnivores.

Being an omnivore has the enormous advantage of flexibility: You can wander into a new continent and be quite confident that you’ll find something to eat. But it also has the disadvantage that new foods can be toxic, infected with microbes, or riddled with parasitic worms. The “omnivore’s dilemma” (a term coined by Paul Rozin) 37 is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe.

Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as “openness to experience”), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what’s tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.

The psychologist Mark Schaller has shown that disgust is part of what he calls the “behavioral immune system”— a set of cognitive modules that are triggered by signs of infection or disease in other people and that make you want to get away from those people. 40 It’s a lot more effective to prevent infection by washing your food, casting out lepers, or simply avoiding dirty people than it is to let the microbes into your body and then hope that your biological immune system can kill every last one of them.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (pp. 172-174). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

This polarity plays out in our religious world too. We’ve seen in the story of Israel the religious omnivore’s dilemma. The chief issue of the book of Judges  was the Canaanization of Israel. They were being absorbed religiously into the larger context of Canaan, following the religions of their neighbors. The law of Moses was to resolve that problem if only Israel would keep it.

In another way the chief conflict of the book of Samuel is the absorption of Israel militarily and economically by its neighbors in Canaan. Kingship was to be the antidote to that problem. While there have been problems with the priesthood in Samuel (Eli and his corrupt sons, Samuel and his corrupt sons) the corruption has been common corruption not religious corruption. Eli’s sons were weak towards sex and money not Baal and Asherah. Saul is now the main character through which we will see how this all plays out.

The Presumed Safe Harbor of the Right Church

Traditionally in the US and Canada the CRC was a safe place to be. By virtue of our isolation through Christian schools and churches that very much aligned with family it was easy to see ourselves as always right and everyone else as wrong. Cosmopolitan people might call this provincialism but for many of us in the CRC we simply called it home, a safe, warm place. We read books by CRC authors, sang songs out of CRC hymnals, taught children out of CRC materials. If it came from CRC Publications we were happy because it was safe.

In the broader evangelical world there were other code words of having the same thing. Over the last twenty years “family” works like “CRC” did. “The fish, safe for the whole family.”

Sometimes when people wanted to talk about the right kind of church they’d say “a Bible believing church” and we all knew what they were talking about. This was how to resolve the religious omnivore’s dilemma. Find what’s safe as a community and stick with it.

Pious Safe Saul Continue reading →