Will Spencer talked with John West about his recent book Stockholm Syndrome Christianity, which describes the coopting of Christian leaders by cultural forces, including scientific materialism, that are antithetical to the faith principles they claim to represent. West discusses his own experiences as a professor at Seattle Pacific University, formally a Christian institution, and the shared vision that he and Stephen Meyer brought to the founding of the Center for Science and Culture three decades ago.
Hearing the Sirens
West takes us full circle. He points out to Spencer that, as the conversation is going on, you can actually hear from outside his window the urban chaos of police sirens and anti-ICE rioters and vandals, surrounding Seattle’s Federal Building. This raises a question: Is materialism just a theoretical concern without real-world impacts? No, and Seattle offers a case in point. Dr. West observes:
[Seattle] used to be a beautiful city but it’s not anymore, and it’s a really sad situation. I would tie part of that to our homelessness crisis and the idea that, Well, how do you solve homelessness? You just throw material things at people. You give them housing and shelter, but you don’t care about anything else about them. That’s a materialistic approach coming out of the 19th century, that we’re just blind matter in motion. Our welfare programs, our social programs, should [under that ideology] just be about changing the material input.
The ideology is obviously failing, as the sirens in the background tell you. (See, also, “Homelessness, Intelligent Design, and the Unseen Realm.”) Some religious leaders, not Christian ones alone, rather than challenging the reigning materialism, prefer to make peace with it. The rewards include enhanced esteem and prestige from outsiders. Dr. West’s book details how that has happened, what its consequences have been, and what people of faith can do to improve the situation.
Judenrat Syndrome
I’d like to add something. “Stockholm Syndrome” is a metaphor drawn from an event in Stockholm, Sweden, where employees of a bank, having been taken hostage by bank robbers, came to sympathize with their captors. A related phenomenon is something I’ve been reading about in Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, about the trial of Adolf Eichmann. A shocking thing she reports on is the activities during the Holocaust of community Jewish Councils (Judenrat in German) in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Rather than Nazis drawing up lists of Jews to be deported to the East, it was, under the “leadership” of these councils, typically the Jews themselves who do it, assisted by special Jewish policemen. You could call it Judenrat Syndrome. The head of one Judenrat, a wealthy Jew from Budapest, was the only such figure to testify at the trial. It was the sole occasion when the trial had to be halted, because the audience, who understood his betrayal, was screaming at him in Yiddish and Hungarian.
Image source: Discovery Institute.Is betrayal too strong a word for a weak man who only wanted to be helpful? As West says, he cannot see into the heart of someone like Francis Collins, and I can’t see into the hearts of those Jewish leaders. Perhaps they felt that their cooperation was mitigating the catastrophe, or that it served some other good purpose — good for them, at least. Says Arendt, had the Jews been disorganized and without leaders, the likelihood is that the loss of life would have been substantially less.
I wonder if the same is true of the Christians that Dr. West writes about. Would some of the churches and other organizations be better off if the leaders simply departed, say, to take up a career in golfing, never to be replaced, leaving the people leaderless?