Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

I'm joined again today by Nancy Pearcey, the author of Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. Nancy, you talk in your book about the divide that secular culture places between faith and the public arena. Could you explain where we see this in society today and what effect this division is having on the force of Christianity?

Modern definition of truth identifies the bedrock truth as science: whatever is empirical, verifiable, observable. So what does that mean for things that are not empirically verifiable, like moral truth or spiritual truth? Well, these have been put in a separate category of merely private or personal values. In fact, in academic literature it's called the fact-value split -- real truth is a matter of scientific facts, and that values are not really a matter of true and false anymore; they can be personally meaningful, they can be part of your cultural tradition, but they're not really the basis for the public order. But we have to realize that this challenge to Christianity in the postmodern age is really different. It used to be that Christianity was said to be "false." Today it's been taken out of the realm of true and false altogether, and so it's not something that society thinks it has to take seriously. It's been relegated to the realm of merely personal values that belong strictly in the private sphere.

Thank you, Nancy. I really appreciate your example of influencing culture through a life of faith. I'm Mike Farris.