Jeremy L. Berg

I have found it necessary to spend the first couple classes laying some groundwork about healthy attitudes and approaches to learning, and naming and avoiding unhealthy approaches and attitudes that stunt growth. Toward this end, I have found one book helpful.

In their book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting up a Generation for Failure, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt identify three ‘Great Untruths’ that have spread widely in recent years, and have proven especially problematic when young people show up on college campuses unprepared to navigate new ideas, diverging viewpoints, and potentially offensive ideas and people. The 3 Great Untruths are:

1. The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
3. The Untruth of Us-versus-Them: Life is a battle between good and evil people.

Now, it’s important to know that students are not encountering these Great Untruths for the first time upon entering college, though many professors will reinforce them while there. No, young people have been groomed at home by so-called “helicopter parents” and cultures of “safetyism” in public schools and general attitudes and trends in the culture at large.

An example of the trend toward treating children as “fragile” and needing to be coddled and protected from the big-bad-world continuously can be seen, for example, in the age at which my generation was allowed to go roam the neighborhood unsupervised by a parent compared to the age at which we now allow our children to free-range neighborhoods, ride their bike to the park down the block, etc. Many of us who were kids in the 70s and 80s were playing ball at the city park unsupervised by age 6-9, while we don’t let our kids roam the neighborhood unsupervised often until 10-13 years old despite the fact that the raw data reveals our neighborhoods and streets, in general, are far more safe today than when we were kids (e.g., child abduction rates, etc.). The perception may be different, but the data shows our kids are safer to roam than we ever were.

Switching to the fragility of students on campuses, we are creating the least optimal environment for students to grow stronger in their beliefs, convictions and ability to navigate a pluralistic world full of divergent opinions by protecting them from potentially offensive speech. Campuses should keep students safe physically, but not ideologically. We are stunting the growth of countless young adults by reinforcing the great untruth that “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” while the age-old adage (“whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”) is being drowned in the cup of milk and cookies we’re feeding fragile and easily offended minds entering higher education. I have my students watch this video clip by Van Jones on “Safe spaces on college campuses” and we discuss together.

Next, a good Christ-centered education rooted in the ancient wisdom of the Scriptures must resist the second Great Untruth to “Always trust your feelings.” Jeremiah says, “The heart is deceitful above all,” and therefore not the most reliable source of truth. The Christian worldview warns us to take every rogue thought and make sure it aligns with the truth of the Scriptures. “Test all things, and hold fast to that which is good” (1 Thes 5:21). Not “Avoid all new things, and hold fast that that which is familiar and reinforces your opinion.”

As a person who has spent many hours on the therapist’s couch, tallying up and trying to tie down, all the unhelpful negative self-talk and distorted beliefs that have dragged me down into the mud of depression and anxiety, let me testify first hand to the destructiveness of this Great Untruth being propagated widely. The great sages through the centuries are rolling in the graves and shaking their heads as we let our lives be guided by vaporous pop music refrains and wishful gobbledy-gook such a “Go with your gut,” or “Listen to your heart,” or “speak your truth,” or “Be true to yourself,” and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

Listen: there is nothing wrong with listening to your soul’s longings, and trusting your gut only after you have spent considerable time immersing your heart, soul and mind in the life-giving, truth-saturated wisdom of the ages. The authors introduce and teach the value of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to help people navigate distorted feelings and thoughts.

And Christians must resist the unchecked individualism at work in this culture, where my personal conviction or latest whim is the highest law without any checks and balances provided by the broader community. Christians realize that we are designed for life in a community that will lovingly hold us accountable, gently and graciously confront us when we’re beginning to chase after lies and conspiracies, providing a chorus of wise voices to steer us back on track when we begin straying from the Great Tradition, etc.

Finally, the third Great Untruth is crippling our cultural conversations and possibly chipping away at the foundation of our very democracy. Call it tribalism. Call it echo-chambers. Call it talking passed one another. Call it demonizing our opponent. Whatever we call it, we are all feeling it — and sadly often contributing to it. This book calls it “The Great Untruth of Us vs. Them.” This is the belief that life is a battle between good people and evil people. Not misguided people. Not people who happen to have a different opinion than us. No, EVIL PEOPLE who must be silenced, cancelled.

This is the zero-sum game we’re playing, but its not a game. It’s our civilization beginning to crumble under our feet for lack of civil discourse, an inability to “come and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18), an unwillingness to listen, and a stubborn refusal to give an inch, never admit complexity and nuance, and keep building our ideological walls up higher and higher until we can’t see or hear our opponent anymore, and therefore are forced to put words into their mouth and never hear them out.

I don’t have a quick solution to this crisis, as even the algorithms and social media ‘bots’ are conspiring against any future possibility of have a meeting of the open-minds. I only intend to call people of faith to be different, to take serious our central call to be ambassadors of Christ and agents of reconciliation. We are to form little pockets of charitable conversation, and train up an army of peacemakers who value winning others over with love more than they value winning arguments at the expense of relationship.

As I teach in premarital counseling, “Would you rather win the argument at the expense of your relationship, or win your marriage back by forfeiting the argument?” Or, as I teach my students and church, “You can be theological correct, and still an a@# hole pushing others farther from faith.” As Ephesians 4 puts it, we will only grow into Christian maturity as we learn to “speak the truth in love.”

Let all Christians who have been coopted by the culture war mentality that puts conservatives against liberals, demonizing the other side, remember that spiritual wisdom teaches us that “our battle is not against flesh and blood (that is, other people!), but the principalities and powers,” the divisive and deceptive and therefore satanic ideologies at work in people and groups and universities and partisan politics that are seeking to “steak, kill and destroy” (John 10:10) human flourishing and societal health.

As I try to remind my kids regularly, as they come home complaining about the class bully they wish to obliterate or “cancel” if they could, we are not to “return evil for evil,” but rather rise above our pain and hurt, and begin to “pray for those who persecute us” and “love our enemy/bully,” for only love has the power to turn an enemy into a friend. But only when we have the courage and real wisdom to move beyond the Great Untruth being embodied on every cable news outlet, on Twitter and Facebook, in the banter around the water cooler, or in our own private thoughts — that is, the untruth that “life is a battle between good people and evil people.”

A deeper, more ancient wisdom would echo forth through our present cacophony of folly, reverberating through the halls of higher learning and hubris, touching those who would have ears to hear. Life is not a battle between good people and evil people; just good versus evil in every human heart. Remembering the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

I’m honored to be teaching college students at two schools, and I don’t take this task lightly. May God give me wisdom and discernment, and create a sacred space for good learning to take place.

I have written elsewhere about The Coddling of the American Mind book here.