When John Stewart recently interviewed Bill Clinton, the former president off handedly said that an ideologue is someone who makes up their mind before looking at the evidence.
In that one statement he summed up the way many people view issues today. They believe what they believe and the evidence be damned. You can believe global warming is a hoax, but the evidence says otherwise. You can believe voter fraud is a serious problem in this country, but the evidence says otherwise. You can believe gay marriage is a threat to the concept of marriage itself, but the evidence says otherwise.
Sometimes new evidence emerges that challenges current evidence, but until that happens, to believe what you believe before you consider any evidence is not having an opinion, it is stubbornly holding to an ideology.
This matters in every aspect of life, but none more so than religion, and that concerns me a lot. People believe what they believe when it directly contradicts the evidence. Consider the way people read the Bible. I often hear people say, ”The Bible says…” No it doesn’t. The Bible doesn’t ”say” anything except what people say it says, which may be correct and may be completely wrong. When I say the Bible says, in effect what I mean is the Bible says what I think it says. But it often doesn’t. Here is an example.
I can say the Bible is the Word of God, but the evidence doesn’t support that claim. We know for a fact that people wrote the Bible, and we also know that not one of them was God. So when I say the Bible is the Word of God I am saying something for which no evidence exists to support. Now, I may believe God gave the people who wrote it the words they wrote, but that is a belief and not a fact. Indeed, if I try to explain how that happened in a way that overrode all the human weaknesses that are part of being human, I will be hard pressed to do so. What is more, we know for a fact that there are some errors in the Bible that make believing God gave the writers the words to write even more complicated.
Certainly people have a right to believe what they want to believe, but that doesn’t make something true, and in many instances it proves they prefer ideology over evidence. Worse, I think it can do serious harm. For one thing, what people believe usually influences what they do, so believing something evidence says is not true is serious business. A lot of racism in my native Virginia was based on the belief that blacks were naturally inferior to whites. We saw where that got us.
But another thing ideological beliefs do is to make religion seem less attractive rather than more. If I had to believe the earth was ten thousand years old, that human beings and dinosaurs co-existed, that evolution is not true, that Jesus is coming back floating down from heaven on a cloud, and a host of other beliefs some Christians insists I should believe, I would not be a Christian. These ideological claims don’t make me want to be a Christian, they make me want to run away.
I wish there were a way to get ideologues to stop being afraid of evidence and realize that real truth, lasting truth, life changing truth can stand up to close scrutiny. It is simply not true that religious faith requires you to quit thinking, to refuse to study history, and to hide your eyes and close your ears to anything that challenges what you already believe. Someone wiser than I am once said that truth can set a person free (John 8:32). Whatever else he may have meant by that statement, I am quite sure he was not urging anyone to become an ideologue.
