In a world where news is constantly streamed, the sheer amount of information can leave many of us feeling overwhelmed and unsure of how to filter what is true. Journalist Bonnie Kristian joins Today’s Conversation to discuss how this issue is leaking into churches and becoming a discipleship challenge.
Drawing from her book, “Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community,” Bonnie unpacks the knowledge crisis and explores ways to combat it in our own lives, families and church communities.
Hosted by NAE President Walter Kim, you’ll also learn:
How an overload of information results in an inability to properly assess quality;
How time-use habits of the culture have penetrated the Church;
Why having a deeper knowledge on a few topics instead of broad knowledge on many topics is better for us; and
What daily rhythms can help us stay grounded in truth.
Read a Portion of the Transcript
Walter: You’re saying that it’s not merely something that’s polluting our politics, which we all sense deeply, particularly at this time period the conflicting nature of what has happened in our political situation. But you’re saying that something is actually seeping into the church. What is that?
Bonnie: I think as Christians, we think of ourselves as people of the truth, we ought to have some sort of special understanding of the truth, right? But the fact is that we we don’t actually seem to be much better on these kinds of thing than our secular counterparts, and, in fact, there’s some polling … that suggests that evangelicals may be even more susceptible to unjustified conspiracist thinking than other Americans. There are reasons for that — reasons that are sympathetic and make sense — but the fact is that we don’t necessarily have a better handle on our information environment than other people, and to have knowledge of the “Truth” doesn’t necessarily make us experts in in lower case “truths” out there in the world, right?
And if I had to describe what it looks like in our our churches, I think the thing that that always comes to mind for me is again and again as I was researching and writing this book … is that [pastors] get people an hour or two a week. But Facebook, Twitter, Fox news, MSNBC or Talk Radio, whatever their preferred medium of choice, gets them 10, 15 or 20 hours per week, and [pastors] just can’t compete with that. What they meant was competing for discipleship, and for forming people’s lives and forming their thoughts and their ways of being in the world.
And that sense that pastors had over and over again, I think, is really core to the way that this knowledge crisis affects us in our churches, because even if we’re still showing up in the same place week after week, if it is by portion of our time and investment, and the shaping of our thoughts so much smaller than these other influences, that can’t help but have an effect over time.
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Bonnie Kristian is a journalist, author and editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today. She is also a fellow at Defense Priorities. She previously was a writer and editor at The Week, and has written extensively at Reason and The Daily Beast. She has been published at outlets including The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, NBC and Politico. Kristian is the author of “Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community” and “A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today.” She holds a master’s degree in Christian thought from Bethel Seminary.
Walter Kim became the president of the National Association of Evangelicals in January 2020. He previously served as a pastor at Boston’s historic Park Street Church and at churches in Vancouver, Canada and Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as a campus chaplain at Yale University. He preaches, writes and engages in collaborative leadership to connect the Bible to the intellectual and cultural issues of the day. He regularly teaches in conferences and classrooms; addresses faith concerns with elected officials and public institutions; and provides theological and cultural commentary to leading news outlets. He serves on the boards of Christianity Today and World Relief and consults with a wide range of organizations. Kim received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, his M.Div. from Regent College in Vancouver, and his B.A. from Northwestern University.
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