Whence 'Redneck' Atheism?

by Frank Turk



Vigilant reader ‘Aimee’ who is a High School student asked this relevant question regarding this series of posts:

After all of these highly intellectual people have commented, I feel sort of silly, but I have a question. Why are you calling this series "*Redneck* Atheism"? I am not technically a redneck myself, but I think that you might be misusing the term "redneck". Having been raised in the South, using "atheism" and "redneck" together sounds like an oxymoron to me. All of the rednecks I've ever met were kind, smart, hard-working people, and many were sincere believers. I get that you're not trying to paint all rednecks as atheists or vice versa, but I am honestly confused and would love to hear an explanation. I hope I haven't been disrespectful.

Which, of course, is a reasonable question.

Since I coined the term, I’ll unpack it for y’all.

First, let me say that I would agree with Aimee’s assessment that the people I know who are actually rednecks tend to be salt-o’-the-earth sort of people who work hard, play hard, and love the people they love hard. You shake hands with an actual redneck, and his (no offense, ladies) hand feels like the hand of a man who works – and not at a keyboard all day blogging or some such nonsense. So the usage I’m thinking about here is not regarding people who self-select into this group.

Wikipedia is a good help to start the disambiguation of the matter:

Southern comedian Jeff Foxworthy defines "redneck" as "a glorious absence of sophistication," stating "that we are all guilty of [it] at one time or another."

Redneck has two general uses: first, as a pejorative used by outsiders, and, second, as a term used by members within that group. To outsiders, it is generally a term for white people of Southern or Appalachian rural poor backgrounds. In the West Coast, there are regionally specialized versions of the term, namely Okie and Arkie, for poor rural white migrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas, displaced from the Great Plains by the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.

I’m thinking of the way an outsider to the group would use the term, and the reference to Foxworthy is especially useful – since he is the popularizer of the infamous series of books and jokes which begin “You might be a Redneck if ...”

You know -- you might be a Redneck if:

• You ever cut your grass and found a car
• You think the Stock Market has a fence around it
• Your wife has said, “Come move this transmission so I can take a bath.”
• Your mother-in-law has “ammo” on her Christmas list
• There are more than 5 McDonald’s bags in your car
• You’ve ever financed a tattoo

You see what I’m sayin’? I an sure this will make for a frothy meta to this post.

That said, the point of calling the problems referenced in the top-10 list from the atheists in question “Redneck Atheism” is two-fold:

1. Unabashedly, they are trying to cash in on the popularity of the “you might be a Redneck if ...” meme. In spite of the fact that it’s played out. So pointing out their less-than-timely attempt to ride th coat-tails of a fad is somewhat satisfying on its own terms.

2. But more importantly, the complaints themselves are specifically unsophisticated. They are in their own way, laughably ignorant of the subjects they are speaking of – and the real irony there is that the actual atheists riding this John Deere into their own intellectually-overgrown front yard where they may yet find all manner of items due for the philosophical junkyard are proud to be the purveyors of this sort of ignorance regarding what they allegedly disdain.

Not all atheists are “redneck atheists”. But the ones rolling out this jalopy with the red-tape tail lights, a giant crack in the windshield, and a “Chiggers On Board” window decal certainly are.

So enjoy the spectacle. I admit that I am.

Thanks for asking.

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Ordinary Means

by Frank Turk

God, in his ordinary providence, maketh use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at his pleasure. (WCF, V.3)



I dropped the ball last week on Wednesday, forgetting to post something even though I had a couple of decent things in the hopper.

The one I want to post today is about the singular problem with Calvinism – which is, Calvinists.

Imagine you were talking with two friends: one’s a fellow reformed “Ø” and the other is a marginal believer or an unbeliever. As the conversation turns to something that happens in the real world – something like success at work, or your marriage (which can be good or bad), or how your church runs, or any number of things we live with all the time.

Your unbelieving friend is eventually going to say something like this:

“I really don’t know how to cope with this. I have no idea what I can do to make it right.”

Now, listen: if your Calvinists friend says, “well, it’s all up to a sovereign God anyway, so what ‘you do’ isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be – in fact it may not matter at all. It’s all in God’s hands,” immediately do something to shut his mouth.

Now: why shut his mouth? I mean – God is sovereign, right? God is in charge of the things going on in the universe. God is the creator and sustainer of all things. So when this fellow says, “well, SDG, whatever – it rains on the just and the unjust,” in response to some person’s plea for help, this person’s plea that he cannot control the universe and feels helpless because things are going poorly, it’s sort of “right” to say, “well, God is in control.”

Yes, BUT –

Part of the way God is in control of things is by His revelation of decrees (like the Law) and "good advice" (like the Proverbs). That is: part of the way God is in control of the Cosmos is that there are ordinary means for achieving ordinary parts of His sovereign will for all things.

For example: your marriage. There’s no question that it’s really impossible for two people to have a wholly-holy marriage apart from the sanctifying grace of God. Cannot happen.

BUT many people who are not even believers have a marriage that works insofar as it actually follows the purpose and guidance God has given for such a thing. That is, even if it is not spiritually profitable, it turns out to be materially profitable and emotionally profitable and relationally profitable.

This is because after the primary purpose of Scripture (that is: being about Christ; revealing him to us), there is another purpose of Scripture, that being as our tutor. It teaches us how people who believe this stuff live as if it is true. There are ordinary means, ordained by God – that is, the normal way things work. So, for example, if you train up a child in the way he should go, ordinarily when he grows old, he will not depart from them. Ordinarily, when you teach your children diligently what the law of the LORD is, it will go well for you. Ordinarily, If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task.

And in all of this, we take refuge in a few things:

[1] That we obey not for the sake of what it ordinarily accomplishes, but because we believe that God is wiser than we are. We shouldn’t have to invent what it means to believe him over and over when he has already spelled it out. His sovereignty actually starts in the means and doesn’t just reside in the ends. He’s not God just because what he wanted to happen was finally accomplished: he’s God and sets forth for us all the works, too.

[2] That we obey knowing this is actually how God ordinarily accomplished his plan, trusting and actually placing our hope in him and not in the work. Sometimes the work looks completely foolish. Since we are fools anyway, we should be glad that God can use even that for His ends – and they are His means after all.

[3] The sovereignty of God gives us hope and does not put us in a place where we are humiliated or over-awed into inaction or despair. In fact: we need to see all the means God uses to instruct as the way He reveals that there is hope for those who believe Him.

It is utterly true that God may do as he pleases: God is free to work without, above, and against normal means, at his pleasure. But He is also not a capricious being. He is a savior to the weak, and a God who loves those who have hated him and even still today do hate him.

This is why He is great and we are not. And this is why it’s critical to believe in his sovereignty – not to believe that we are somehow merely pawns, but to know that in doing what the maker and sustainer of all things has prescribed, we demonstrate our love and trust in him.

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Shining a Light before men

by Frank Turk

We get letters. I got a version of this one today, which I’d like to share with y’all because I think there’s some profit in it (there may also be some prophet in it, but I’ll leave that to the reader and the Holy Spirit to decide):

I'm a reader of your work over at TeamPyro (awesome stuff) and I'd like to ask for your help on an issue I'm currently facing.

It's about the book "Pagan Christianity" by Frank Viola and George Barna. It was recommended to me by a friend for discussion. We're specifically talking about the gospel (what it really means) but the conversation is spilling over to the church, about which he has some very passionate, but not altogether great opinions on.

Anyway, while looking for reviews of Mr. Viola's book, I stumbled across a comment you made in a Pyromaniacs comment feed saying that basically Frank Viola is a "kook" and has got his church history all wrong. I'm wondering if you could kindly:

1. elaborate a little more on why that is so and
2. lend me your take on this whole "I'm too cool for church/church should be like it was in the NT/we should abandon institutionalized and flawed churches" attitude that is sweeping many young people, especially those infatuated with emergent thinking.

your encouragement and solid thinking on this issue would be very much appreciated.

Well, as “kindly” as possible, here’s what I have to say about that:

This (meaning #2, above) is not a particularly “emergent” stream of thinking

Truth be told, this goes back even to Anabaptist conceptions of what it means to be a “church”, and maybe back even to monastic views of piety – so this is not hardly a new way to see things. The problem is that it is a view of what God has done without a lot of reference to what God says about what God has done.

I’ll cover that more in #3, below.

This is not a particularly mature stream of thinking

I can be honest: while people have to take responsibility for this kind of thinking in themselves, they didn’t invent it: they were taught it, either by example or explicitly. But if they were mature in their approach to this topic, and were taught by others who were mature, they’d not atomize the faith the way this approach atomizes faith to a primarily-personal experience.



This is not a particularly biblical stream of thinking

The way this approach to “church” works is to see what God has done for “me” as the starting point of Christian life and then maybe one tries to extend what God has done for “me” to include what God has done for “you” on a provisional basis. When I think God hasn’t done it for you anymore, I can therefore not care about you anymore – at least in the church sense.

The Bible, for those of you who have read it (and specifically for those who have not), goes about the matter in a completely different way. For certain, the place where the rubber hits the road is where “I” do something. But the way we are taught to reason by the Bible about our faith is that Christ has died for us, and that Christ sees his bride as an assembly, and that God has a whole people who are purchased as his own possession.

Does Christ save each one? Sure: certainly. But the formula that you might hear popularly that Christ would have died if the only one he was going to save was me is absolutely not found in the Bible.

The Biblical approach to what it means to have church starts with the fact that Christ died for the elect, which is not a statement of individualistic grace but a statement of a singular act of grace for the sake of all who would be saved.

When Paul riffs on this in Eph 5, he makes it clear that Christ died for the church and gave himself up for her. This has to make us consider that Christ’s work somehow is for all of us on purpose.

Candles on a birthday cake vs. a city on a hill

When Christ talks about who we are in him, he doesn’t say, “you are the light of the world, like little birthday cake candles which people will encounter here and there and I hope that’s enough to get the message across.”

Christ says instead this: “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.” You know: You-Plural. Y’all. The city on the hill and the light on the lamp stand is the church and not the individual believer. So our light shines before men when we are together being the people Jesus died to make us.

Institutionalism vs. community

So how do we carry that over into the real world 2000 years later? Should we then embrace whatever institution has risen up – should we not have had a reformation? Should we never-ever leave the local church?

The truth is that the Bible gives us a lot of liberty for the local church – with some guidelines. We should have elders who teach us the faith, reprove us when we are wrong, guard the word of God, love people, and train up new elders; we should follow them. We should bear one another’s burdens. We should stand against error but seek to reconcile brothers who are turning away from the faith. We should love one another. We should worship in spirit and in truth (and in good order).

After that, it’s sort of open as to how we administrate that.

But factually the church has to be a local body – full of real people. It has to be visible and distinct from Kiwanis, the Lion’s Club, and the temple of Athena. It should be calling people into Christ and therefore into itself.

What it forms is a community which is (without going all eschatological on you) an expression of the coming kingdom under Jesus Christ, the King of kings. If we keep our eye on that objective, we avoid it becoming the kingdom which the brilliance of our pastor’s preaching, our elder’s leadership, and our own wonderful community outreach (which will create an institution) has formed. God forbid that our churches are “the church which we made for Jesus” rather than “the church which Jesus made us for”.

Anyone who would tell you otherwise is selling a book or a research project – and there’s no one saved by that.

Hope that helps.

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A Reasonable Question

by Frank Turk

Someone shrewdly asked this question in the meta yesterday:

Do you think that the "insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers" were Christians or false teachers?

And my response was, "That's a great question."

Because a question like that deserves at least more than a one-line answer, I'm back today to give you some things to think about here.

So here's my first thought: the apostle Peter was a Christian man.

Now, I bring him up because, sadly for him, he went to Galatia Antioch (corrected, thx CB Shearer), and while he was there (this being the alleged holder of the keys to the kingdom of heaven as first Pope, they say), he decided he couldn't eat with the Gentiles because of the influence of some Jews among the Christians.

In that small respect, and for what appears to be a notable but brief time until Paul came around and fisked him publicly for it, Peter was a small-time false teacher. His actions and practices briefly taught others something which Paul said, in words to this effect, "voided the Gospel".

Peter did. And he was a Christian. It wasn't either/or for Peter, though we have to at least admire him for admitting he was wrong and repenting when he was rightly-ashamed for his cultural concessions.

What? Don't look at me that way. I'm talking about Peter.

So I use that Bible example to bring us to a contemporary example: John Stott is, unequivocally, a Christian man. And I can hear the wolves at the door already, but I can hold them off long enough to explain to you what I am saying and where I am going.


Stott is by almost any account a hero of the faith. His writing has been formative for many of us, and informative for many more, and he's also one of the better men among the Anglicans. D.A. Carson and J.I. Packer both speak highly of him, so F. N. Turk isn't going to try to pull the rug out from under those guys, who have probably thrown away better 3-pages essays than I have ever posted on this or any blog.

But as all the watchbloggers and discernment ministers know, Stott is sort of an unrepentant annihilationist. That is, he believes in a final judgment of the lost by Christ, and when Christ pronounces, "away with you - I never knew you!" to them, they are greeted with the momentary realization of what they have done, and then they are simply snuffed out of existence forever.

So John Stott, the Christian, is also a false teacher.

Now look: in one sense, this should be of no shock to you. Everyone reading this blog ought to believe some version of this:

The purest churches under heaven are subject to mixture and error; and some have so degenerated as to become no churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan; nevertheless Christ always hath had, and ever shall have a kingdom in this world, to the end thereof, of such as believe in him, and make profession of his name.

Some of you have the "Synagogue of Satan" part there sort of printed in raised letters and highlighted with neon colors as if that was the point of this section of the LBCF, but the underlined part is actually the point: the church is not hardly perfect, but Christ will always have a kingdom in this world which he has called out to profess Him and make him known.

So you know about "mixture and error" in the church. But some of you fail to see that this is because every single one of us is also in the throws of mixture and error.

So in that respect, you're like John Stott, and nobody's running you out of the church yet, are they?

"But cent," says someone gravely concerned, and troubled, and deeply, deeply watchblogging, "are you saying that we should do nothing about someone like John Stott who is a leader in the church?"

Well: No.

I'm with Paul on this one, who instructed Titus to rebuke the ones who needed rebuking sharply. Rebuke the false teacher as one who is full of God's word and all the mature fruit of the spirit.

Peter needed a rebuke. John Stott prolly needs a rebuke. God knows that Frank Turk needs more than one rebuke -- all of them, for false teaching. That doesn't mean that any of them are not Christians.

Some false teachers are Christians. It disqualifies them as teachers, not as men or women who are being saved by grace. Some non-Christians are also false teachers. If we can keep that straight, we will avoid a lot of personal experience as false teachers.

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How the Other Half Lives

by Frank Turk

I admit it: yesterday’s post from Dan bothered me because of the frankly-inane meta which followed it.

So we’re going to take a one-week break from Titus to look deeply into the eyes of our non-calvinist friends (in spite of the way they treat us, btw) and give them the opportunity, which they have often and never seem to use very well, to get themselves together and really hand us evil and theologically-wanton Calvinists our head, and to move on past the reformation.

So here’s the deal:

[1] I will only have access to the internet for about an hour around lunch, and around an hour around dinner time, so I’m asking Dan to simply delete any comment to this post which doesn’t abide by the spirit of these rules. If I stop by and find someone fudging, I will delete their comment with no warning.

[2] We get it: you think Calvinism misses the boat. We get it and you don’t have to reiterate it. In fact, I insist: anyone blustering about the failings of Calvinism will be deleted.

[3] Your first task is this: in less than 150 words, define the objective of the Bible as intended by its author, who is God. I can do it in less than 50 words, so I am giving you enough rope to hang yourself. If you do not start there, you will be deleted.

[4] Your second task is this: define the phrase “free will” in less than 150 words in such a way that it underscores the strength of non-Calvinistic theology, and so that an actual Calvinist would deny your definition as biblically sound. If you cannot do this, your comment will be deleted.

[5] Your third task is this: given [3] and [4], explain how these two facts are bound together either narratively or systematically in the Bible. That is, if your [3] answer is, effectively, “The Bible is a book about how God and man relate”, and your [4] answer is, effectively, “’Free Will’ is the image of God in man so that man can actively choose between good and evil and make a decision where either outcome can be rightly selected,” your [5] will be your brief soliloquy explaining how both can be true at the same time. Your word limit is 500 words, more or less. People who abuse the word limit will be deleted.

Here’s my theory: no one who is Arminian, Semi-Pelagian, or Pelagian can answer [3] and [4] and then harmonize them credibly in [5]. The explicit purpose of the Bible, regarding God’s purpose in revelation, decimates the non-reformed position; the biblical definition of the nature of man's will obliterates the non-reformed position. These are key apologetic issues (and not the only ones) which work against all theologies except foundational reformation theology.

So no grandstanding. Answer the two key questions and then provide your thoughts on how these two critical issues relate to each other in brief form. If you’re not one of these people who have so many harsh words for the “calvinists”, I’m asking you to resist your urges to fly to the defense of the Gospel and Jesus and all that’s holy and let these people have their say. I promise you: if anyone takes up this challenge, they will do far more harm to their own confession than you ever could by arguing with them. In other words: no rebuttals in the meta. I’ll delete those as well.

Now have at it. And mind your P’s and Q’s.

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