Last week I spoke at length about an upcoming panel here at SMSU, called ‘Absolute Relativism: the New Dictatorship and What to do About it’.  A few nights ago I attended the presentation, hoping to bring up some of the concerns I had.

Well, I was pleasantly surprised.  The speaker, Chris Stefanick, raised a lot of good points, although I’m still skeptical.  The thing that unsettled me a little was that he started the panel right off the bat with a prayer.  Now, nothing on the posters or little table-top triangles advertising for this event said that it was specifically Christian, just that he was a Christian speaker.  There were quite a few prayers, actually, and being someone who does not pray like that, I felt a little awkward during each of them.  But that’s beside the point.

Some of the points he brought up were convincing.  It takes a special speaker to make close-mindedness sound good, but he posed it with this story; as a kid, you’re open-minded about everything.  You’re open-minded about touching hot surfaces.  You touch one, and get burnt.  From then on, you’re close-minded about touching hot surfaces, because you know they will burn you.

Of course, I couldn’t get over the fact that it was a suffocatingly Christian presentation.  He had to get all the fundamentalist Christian quips in there.  He mentioned a few times that he spoke to teens about celibacy, and painted premarital sex as something unconditionally bad, that no matter what it is damaging to the woman’s health, security, and reputation.  No exceptions for consensual, loving relationships?  He mentioned that abortion is legal because or relativism, that it even destroys the right to life.  Towards the end he explained why he didn’t believe in gay marriage.  He even threw in a little jab at atheists, saying we should represent all religions during the holidays: baby Jesus in a manger next to a menorah, next to… a plot of grass for atheists, or whatever they want.

Here are some other holes I had to poke in the presentation: he claimed that relativism didn’t work for math or science.  Two plus two always equals four.  Faith should be the same way, absolute.  But science isn’t absolute… it’s based in doubt.  Scientists make assumptions, theories, but admit they might be wrong and are always willing to forget everything they thought they knew and start from scratch.  So while the argument works for math, it doesn’t for science.

Another hole I found comes from one of his metaphors.  You trust God, you have faith, just like a baby trusts that the cereal his parents are feeding him isn’t poisoned.  Well, that kind of faith isn’t necessarily a good thing.  What about the parents who pump their kids full of sugar only for them to get diabetes?  Or the ones who let their kids play with Thomas the Tank Engine toys, only to find out that they were made with lead paint?  While parents may always have good intentions, they don’t always understand the consequences of their actions.  Christians don’t know the consequences of arbitrarily following the Bible.  What if abstinence-only sex education doesn’t work, as so many studies are showing?  You started on that crusade in God’s name.  But when the statistics start to stack against you, your choices are changing what you believe or charging blindly forward.  Absolute trust isn’t always the best.

Overall, though, it was better than I thought it would be.  The speaker raised a lot of good points that make relativism look pretty shaky, although it didn’t make me any closer to being a Christian.  He emphasized that disagreement isn’t the same as judgment, that people shouldn’t be afraid to say what they believe because they’ll sound like jerks.  I totally agree.  Just don’t go about it like a jerk.  Chris Stefanick went about it in a very good way, leading by example, opening it up to questions at the end.  He didn’t shove anything down my throat.

So while relativism might not be the soundest philosophy, I think Christians have learned one very important lesson from it.  Intolerance will get you nowhere.  Neither will bigotry.  Relativism helped to balance that out, to force Christians to question their beliefs and come out stronger on the other side.  It isn’t the greatest threat to our generation, as Pope Benedict XVI said.  It’s the stepping stool that the religion needs to survive our modern world.