Video Transcript: How Your Social Setting Shapes Your Mind

Believing is not always something that we can control directly. I can't just up and decide to believe something. If I see it to be true, I believe it. If it seems not to be true, then I don't believe it. And to be told to believe something that I don't think  to be true is not going to help me very much, or to be told not to believe  something that I do see to be true is not going to help much. Either you can't  believe just based on being told to believe, believing just happens or does it.  There's a little bit more to it than that. Believing is not just something you can  make yourself do or can make somebody else do, but there are certain things  that shape your mind and that make you either more likely to believe something  or less likely to believe it. And it's important to understand some of these mind  shapers for yourself, as well as the impact they could have on other people,  because there are some things we think we ought to believe that maybe, we sort of think maybe might be true, but we can't persuade ourselves of their truth. And if we knew some of the shapers of our mind, we might be on the way towards  getting a better grasp on reality. Let's think about some things that shape the  mind. In this talk, we're going to be thinking about how your social setting  shapes your mind. In other talks, we'll talk about how your actions, your pattern  of behavior, can shape the way you think and influence what makes sense to  you, and also how your heart, the things that move your deepest self, have a  powerful influence on what you think and know. But for now, let's focus  especially on your social setting, whom you fit in with, and sometimes who you  fight with, who you react to your surroundings. The people you're with have a  profound influence on the way you think. We see this already among little girls.  Little girls will play with certain kinds of dolls because their friends do and they  see their friends doing it, and so they do too. When they grow up, they will  believe that certain things are in style and certain other things are out of style.  And how did they determine that by what other people are doing very few of  them create a style on their own. Their belief about what is stylish, their belief  about what looks good on them, is shaped very much by the society they're part  of and by the circle of friends that they hang out with. If you're going to a school  and you have the wrong brand of clothing or the wrong kind of shoes, it may be  a real problem, because people will believe there's something wrong with you if  you don't fit in, style wise. Style is a big part of being shaped by those around  us. The Bible says we're shaped by those around us, by those we fit in with a  very brief and telling statement is Proverbs 13:20, whoever walks with the wise  becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. That's it in a nutshell, when you hang out with wise people, you're likely to become wiser. When your  best buds are idiots, you're more likely to become idiotic. You grow in wisdom in  a certain crowd, your IQ shrinks in a different crowd. And it's not just the impact  others have on you, but also then you may be having that impact on certain  people around you, where, if you're wise, it'll rub off on them. If you're foolish, it  will rub off on them. One who is righteous is a guide to his neighbor, but the way 

of the wicked leads them astray. And I could give many more examples from the  book of Proverbs, but these make it abundantly clear the impact that your  companions, those you hang out with, are going to have on you. There are a  variety of people in our social setting that shape the way we think our first and  earliest and usually most powerful shapers are the members of our family, our  mother, our father. If we have a mother and a father these days, many families  the father goes missing, but even his very absence can have a shaping impact.  But at any rate, your mom and dad have an impact on you. Your brothers and  sisters shape who you are when you're married to somebody. Your spouse has  a huge impact on the way you think, and after a while, your beliefs can change  because of who you married. And so let's think a little bit more about that a good parental influence is mentioned in the book of Proverbs again and again. Hear  my son your father's instruction and forsake not your mother's teaching. My son, keep your father's commandment and forsake not your mother's teaching. The  father of the righteous will greatly rejoice. That's part of how a social setting  shapes you. You figure out that your dad is very pleased by certain things and  upset by other things, and you like to bring him pleasure. He who fathers A wise  son will be glad in him. Let your father and mother be glad. Let her who bore  you rejoice. Good parents and their instructions and their teachings are a  powerful influence on what we will believe and why we believe it. Sometimes it's  treated as irrational to believe something because you learn it from your  parents. But overall, God gave us parents for a reason, and many of the  important things we learn in life come to us through our mom and dad. When a  father calls his family together and they read God's Word together that has a  huge impact on the children and on his wife and on himself. And God meant it to be this way. God says impress these things on your children when you're at  home and when you're on the road, when you lie down, when you get up, your  family is to be a social setting for your children and to shape their thoughts and  beliefs. And if we grew up in a godly family with godly father and mother  teaching us the ways of God and the truths of God, we're much more likely to  believe those things ourselves than if we grew up in a family that was actively  hostile to the Christian faith, and there is such a thing as bad parental influence.  The Bible does say Honor your father and your mother. It says that in settings  where your mom and dad are good, pay them very close attention, but also  beware of false ideas and bad beliefs that may have come through parental  influence. God warns against forefathers and and previous generations and their blunders. Do not walk in the statutes of your fathers, nor keep their rules, nor  defile yourselves with their idols. If you grew up in a family where idols were  worshiped, where there was false religion, then the best thing you can do is not  to pay attention to parental influence in that particular setting, God says, Do not  be like your fathers. They did not hear or pay attention to me. Peter and the  other apostles would preach to crowds who sometimes wouldn't listen. Stephen,

the first martyr, spoke, and he warned people, too, you always resist the Holy  Spirit as your fathers did, so do you? So it's just not automatic that mom and  dad are always going to be right. It is just about automatic that mom and dad are going to have a powerful shaping influence on you, and you're often going to  follow in their footsteps. The apostle Peter wrote, you were ransomed from the  futile ways of life inherited from your forefathers a futile way of life, and this is a  profound part of our social setting, either the true beliefs we get from mom and  dad or the false beliefs we get from them. And as well, when we become  parents, the way that we shape the children whom God gives us, not only is  their parental influence, but another aspect of family is, of course, is the person  you marry. Proverbs speaks often of the influence of a great wife, as well as the  downside of a wife who's not so great, an excellent wife who can find she is far  more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and she will  have no lack of gain. Her husband is known in the gates. When he sits among  the elders of the land, she opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of  kindness is on her tongue. There's a story about a woman who had one  boyfriend in high school, but she ended up not marrying him, and wound up  marrying another guy from her high school instead, and then years later, at their  class reunion, they were together again. By this time, the woman's husband, the one whom she married, had become a senator and a very influential and  important man, and the other person who had been her previous boyfriend in  high school had not amounted to very much. And the man said to her, well,  aren't you glad you married me? I turned out to be a senator. And she said, if I'd  have married him, he'd have been the Senator. Well, that's just a story, but here  we see her husband is known in the gates, and he sits among the elders of the  land. But he's that kind of husband, that kind of man, perhaps because she's  such an excellent wife and she opens her mouth with wisdom. And many a  godly woman has helped her husband to believe many wise and important  things, not through nagging Proverbs, warns against nagging and all that sort of  stuff, but she has wisdom in her mouth and in her life, and a man is going. Be  very much shaped by his woman now a woman too by her husband, and that's  why it's so important. When you're choosing a spouse, you might just be  choosing a whole new way of thinking, a whole new world view somebody else's thoughts that are going to rub off on you. So choose wisely, because there is  such a thing as bad spousal influence. An excellent wife is the crown of her  husband, but she who brings shame is like a rottenness in his bones. It's better  to live in a desert land than with a quarrelsome and fretful woman. There's  warning not just about bad wives, but about bad women who aren't your wife  that are trying to get you Why should you be intoxicated my son with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress. He who commits adultery  lacks sense. He who does it destroys himself. So there's this negative influence  as well, and many is the sad story of someone who kind of thought they were a 

Christian, but married someone who was not and eventually lost their faith  entirely. When your faith is not very strong, if you have any at all, and you marry  somebody who's hostile to the faith, it can have an utterly devastating and  destructive influence on what you believe. And it's not that you were introduced  to new evidence, that new data came your way. It is the person, and being with  that person that shapes who you are. Again, you're not a thinking machine. You  are a human being, and the human beings that you're with will shape your  beliefs. You don't wake up one day and decide to believe it, necessarily. You just find yourself believing it based on the family members that you grew up in, as  well as the person whom you married. Family, of course, isn't the only kind of  influence, and Proverbs talks about that quite a bit. In fact, Proverbs 1, warns  against a gang. Hey, gangs aren't something new. Young men tuffs who run  together and beat up on other people and swipe their goods and get their sense  of belonging from their Fellow Hoodlums. That's a very old thing, 1000 years  before Jesus, Proverbs warns against gangs and says, don't walk in the way  with them, my son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. If they say, Come with  us, throw in your lot with us, my son, do not walk in the way with them, because  bad companions can get you to do bad things, but also to think wrong things.  Leave the presence of a fool, for there you do not meet words of knowledge.  Don't hang out with somebody whom you know is going to have a bad influence  on your beliefs. Be not among drunkards, says the book of Proverbs. One way  to become a drunkard yourself is to hang out with a crowd of drunkards. And to  become foolish is to hang out with a crowd of fools. These days, the power of  companionship goes far beyond family, friendship and even the lure of gangs.  Has always been an issue, but the ability to connect with other people is greater  than it's ever been. Not only do you connect when you're with them, but you can be in your own room, connecting with lots of different people. Choose the ones  you connect with well and be aware of your impact on them. The ability to  connect via computer, through email and Facebook and other social networking  groups has really changed the equation somewhat for kids growing up, even  when they're at home, they're often not at home. They're with their friends.  When they're on the road, they're with their friends and they're texting, they're  with certain friends, and then they're texting other friends. And so there's always  opportunities for interconnecting. And it's not to say that these things are bad or  that they're evil of themselves. It is to say that companionship has new  technology, and this new technology makes the power of companionship even  greater in shaping the way we would we will think and what we believe. Now,  people who study sociology, great authority in sociology, such as Peter Berger,  they talk about a plausibility structure. Now that's kind of a mouthful. What is a  plausibility structure? Well, the fact is that a system of meaning makes sense  and it becomes plausible. It becomes believable within a particular social  setting. In a certain society of the people you hang out with a group's relational 

ties and its institutions and the traditions of that group, these things socialize  newer members, so that some things seem self evident, you don't even question they're so obvious, and other things just seem downright silly. For instance, if  you're born into a certain group of people, and you grow up in that group of  people, and someone in your group gets sick, one of the first things they will do  is to try to figure out who put the evil eye on that sick person who casts an evil  eye on them and made them sick. Now, if you come from a different social  group, you'd say, Who in the world came up with such silliness evil eye? What a  bunch of garbage we know people get sick because of germs and bugs and  biology, not because somebody looked at them in a certain way or tried to cast a curse on them, but if you're part of a particular plausibility structure, casting the  evil eye is just an obvious truth, and if you're part of a different group, it's  complete nonsense, and it's silly, and very many things that we think more than  we realize are matters that we believe because of that plausibility structure,  because of the way the society around us and the people around us have grown up, and not all of them thought about it. It's something they inherited, maybe,  and partly were shaped by and so we need to understand a plausibility  structure. Now, one of the primary institutions in a modern society is a school  that's a major plausibility structure. In Europe and in much of North America,  schools have been structured not to teach Christianity as the truth it is to be  taught instead as a religious opinion, among other religious opinions, Darwin's  theory of evolution will be taught as truth. The Christian doctrine of creation will  be taught as religious opinion. It is structured into the way government schools  now operate, and we need to understand that these plausibility structures are  going to shape the way that we think another institution that's really important is  simply various forms of books and other kinds of media that kids have exposure  to, the kinds of textbooks that we read in school as well as the things that we  read for enjoyment. These are part of the institutions and and the things that  have been passed along in our particular society. Government is a major part of  modern societies. It's a big part of us of a plausibility structure. Government  encourages certain beliefs and discourages certain others. It is the government  that lies behind the schools that teach Christianity as mere opinion and many  non Christian things as fact. The role of government and its expanding role,  along with the doctrine of separation between church and state means that  government has gotten into more and more areas of life and where people of  faith and their beliefs have been forced into a smaller and smaller corner. Now  how does government actually work in what you believe certainly not everything  you believe is believed just because government says you have to believe it  again. It's very hard to believe things just on command, but government  institutionalizes certain things, so that after a while, that set up is taken for  granted. For instance, when the government makes a court ruling, it may be a  very, very controversial decision at the time, with tons of debate, and some 

people believing it's a good idea, other believing it's a horrible idea, but when  the government decides it and forces it to be that way, then after a few decades, that's just the way things are, and almost everybody takes it for granted. It's  taken for granted by many in Western societies that the primary education of  their children will be done by government schools. It was not always that way. It  was pretty controversial when the idea first came out. Now it's just taken for  granted. Nowadays it's taken for granted in Europe that health care is the  government's job to pay for and provide. That was once a very controversial  assumption. It didn't used to be done by government. Now it's just taken for  granted in the United States. It's controversial idea that government would get  very, very, very involved in health care, but the more it becomes institutionalized, the more it becomes accepted. Now those are just matters of governing. There  have been countries that made the Christian faith illegal and that killed  Christians. Some communist countries did that. There are Islamic countries still  today where it's illegal to have a Bible, where you will be killed if you convert.  And so you live in a society where anti Christian belief is institutionalized by the  practices of government. There are still believers in those societies, but you're  not going to be a believer, just because you kind of caught on from being in that  society, and it was the natural thing for everybody in the society to believe  government has a powerful impact on what is believed and what's recognized as truth, perhaps maybe even more powerful in government in our. Thinking is  media, movies, film, TV. What captures our imagination, the storytellers that we  have and the things they display. We watch a certain number of movies, and  people all behave the same way, perhaps, and they after a while, give us the  notion that the beautiful people all do this. The beautiful people all think this way. And so we are really shaped by media. And when it comes to the way religion is  treated, the media can have a powerful impact. For instance, when radio first  was invented in the 1900s the British broadcasting corporation, the BBC  government entity pretty well ran broadcasting, and they ruled that certain kinds  of religion could not be on the air, the kinds that were more controversial. And so any religion with kind of sharper edges that warned more about hell, for  instance, or that said certain things were serious errors, would not be on the air.  And so most of the religion that made it onto the BBC was kind of generic. There were some exceptions and some excellent programs as well, but there was an  approach to religion which made it seem that only certain kinds of religion are  worth considering, not even making arguments for it, just making it part of the  social setting that you don't even hear the voice of certain kinds of faith on the  radio or later on television. These things have a very profound influence on the  way we think, and they're part of our social setting, our institutionalized way that  our society communicates. And so we need to ask when we ask, Well, what  shapes my belief? Why do I think the way I do? Why do I take certain things as  certain other things as totally impossible? A lot depends on what world you 

belong in. The Bible says, Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing, you may discern what the will of  God is, if you're part of a world that ignores God, and it's not just talking about  the Earth in general. We all live on Earth, and it's fine to be on earth and to  enjoy life on this earth and the things God has created on this earth. When it's  talking about the world, it's talking about a system, social context that is  opposed to God, do not love the world or anything in the world. And I John 4  says they are from the world, these folks who are opposing the truth of Jesus.  And therefore they speak from the world's point of view. And the world listens to  them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us. And there he's  speaking about us being the apostles of Jesus Christ, there's a certain social  setting where we is the world and whatever the world around us is telling us.  And there's another social setting where we is the Christians, the apostles,  those who believe the truth of Jesus Christ. And if you're from one kind of world,  you speak one way and you believe one way. If you're from that other social  world, you speak and believe a rather different way. Again, it's a plausibility  structure. Your system of meaning makes sense, and it becomes plausible  within a particular social setting, a group's relational ties, its institutions, its  traditions, they socialize newer members, so that some things seem self evident and other things seem silly. And that means we really do have to ask the  question, What world forms your worldview? What is my social setting and  what's going on in it? I need to understand my family, social setting, my circle of  friends, social setting and my society, social setting with government, school,  media and the institutions of that social world. And here's a very important thing  to notice, the Christian community, the Christian family and Christian Church,  the Christian community is the plausibility structure for the gospel. It's the social  setting where biblical belief makes sense, and outside that social setting, the  Gospel often makes less and less sense, because you're in the company of  people who do not believe the gospel in I Corinthians 15, the apostle Paul writes a tremendous chapter about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and he writes it  because some people are doubting or denying completely that resurrection  happens, that Jesus was raised, or that anybody else is raised, they're denying  bodily resurrection. And at one point Paul says, Do not be deceived. Bad  Company ruins good morals. He says that in the middle of that resurrection  discussion, it is their bad company that is making them less willing to believe in  the resurrection. Now we should understand that this is often overlooked,  Europe has much less Christian belief now than it did 150 years ago. What  happened? Did people discover lots of new evidence, and then they decided,  You know what, Christianity just doesn't have much evidence in favor of it, and  this way of just believing in almost nothing, or having a generic belief in maybe  some higher power out there, or just being an atheist, that's a more sensible  way to believe. Many, many people did not think it through at all. I did a lot of my

doctoral work in what happened in European belief and behavior over the last  150 years. And here's the fact of the matter, that in most cases, people kept on  believing for a while, even after they stopped going to church, and even after  they stopped reading the Bible together as a family, they did not stop going to  church because they had stopped believing in Christian ideas. They did not stop reading the Bible at home because they said, Oh, Christianity is not true  anyway. They simply stopped doing those things. And one of their mottos was,  you can be a good Christian without going to church, the failure to be involved  with God's people, and the loss of ritual in the family daily time of reading the  Bible together and praying together and praising God together, these things  were given up. And in the wake of giving up that social support for praising the  Lord and honoring him and believing in Jesus. Belief followed a generation or  two later for a while. There you'd have one generation that said it still believed  something about Jesus and about God. The next generation that never was  involved in church and where the Bible was not read at home, believed less and  then less, and then less and then less. 150 years ago, 60% of people in Britain  attended church. Today, 8% attend church. And as people do not hang around in the company of God's people, they less and less believe what God teaches. So  again, there are some people who give up on church because they don't believe the truths that are taught, but in far more cases, they first forsake the gathering  of God's people, and then they start losing the truths as well. The Church is the  plausibility structure where the gospel makes the most sense, and that's why  Hebrews 10 says, Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering,  for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir one another to  love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some,  but encouraging one another. The Church is the place where we encourage  each other, and the Christian family is the place where we encourage one  another. When you gather together to worship with God's people, the fact that  you're there with them means that it's part of God's design. You see, God didn't  design us to be individual believers on our own just discovering all truth for  ourselves. Your social setting is going to influence how you think and what you  hold to be true, and so you better choose your social setting. Well, pay very  close attention to the family you grew up in and see whether they were in error.  But then, when you marry somebody, choose the right spouse. When you  choose companions, hang out with them and hang out in the plausibility  structure of the gospel. That is the church, where you're with fellow believers,  where you're praising God, where God's Holy Spirit is helping you to build up  each other's faith and confidence and knowledge of God. And when you're in the home, read the Bible. Spend that time, as Deuteronomy says, spending time  impressing these things on your children, and talk about talking about them  constantly, special times of reading the Bible together. These are the things that  cultivate the ability to believe. I can't just tell you, hey, you've got to believe this. 

And if you say, Well, I just can't believe I'm wondering if there might be  something to the message of Jesus, but I really can't believe it. Well then hang  around with some of God's people for a while, hang around at church and see  what happens to your ability to believe it's ultimately going to be the work of  God. But more than once, a person who hung around with God's people found  out that, yeah, they have a way of life and a way of believing that does make  sense of things. Makes better sense than the other groups I've been hanging out with. And then once you understand the role of these plausibility structures in  your ability to believe, in your ability to think, and how it shapes your mind, then  think about your own influence on others. Again, he walks with the wise  becomes wise the companion of fools will suffer harm. So you need to be very  aware of the impact of others on you, but then also of your impact on others.  One who is righteous is a guide to his neighbor, but the way of the wicked leads  them astray. And so you, by attending church, are encouraging others to believe. By leading your own family, you're encouraging them to believe. And by getting  involved in the wider structures of your society, you can make a difference. If  you become a public school teacher, you can be influencing a plausibility  structure in a positive way. For the Lord, if you get involved in the business  world, the way you think and act can rub off on the way other people think and  act, and what makes sense to them. Don't just think about the books you can  read that might have an impact on you. There are some people who are given  gifts, and it's the books they can write that can make a difference. C, S Lewis  was somebody who understood a little bit about the role of plausibility  structures. He knew the importance of bringing the Gospel directly to people and telling them and explaining the truths of the gospel, but he also knew the value  of an indirect approach. He called it creating an atmosphere that's more  favorable for people to hear the gospel. And one kind of writing that was very  popular in his time was science fiction, H, G, Wells and some atheists had been  writing science fiction, and Lewis said he would like to claim some of that  territory for Christian truth, and so he didn't write a long sermon. In that case, he  wrote some very interesting and gripping science fiction stories out of the silent  planet paralandra, that hideous strength, and in that cosmic trilogy of science  fiction, he wrote in a way where his own Christian thinking filled that fiction, and  people who read it are just a little more likely to take Christianity seriously when  they're finished. Now he was not only a great imaginative writer, as he did in the  science fiction, or in his Chronicles of Narnia, children's stories, where, once  again, he said that many children you know who have a hard time believing  Christianity or it just seems boring to them, if it were presented in a little different way, you might steal past those watchful dragons and get a hold of their  imagination and open their minds. And that was all part of influencing the  plausibility structure of this society at a different level. Lewis was a great scholar, and so he wrote books such as the discarded image, an introduction to Medieval

and Renaissance literature. And he wrote the Oxford history of English literature  in the 16th century, and he read every book in the whole Oxford library from that  century. He did huge amounts of scholarship and research, and he didn't preach the gospel in such books, but he thought and wrote the way a Christian thinks  

and writes. And he suggested that Christians could do a lot of good, of course,  by direct preaching and witnessing, but he thought they could also do a lot of  good by establishing magazines on various subjects and writing books and  writing plays and being involved in the media in ways where a Christian  message would come through, not directly, but in a more indirect manner, as  people had some of their old prejudices undermined and as they learn to think in new ways. Now Lewis, of course, is not the only one who has done that. Is an  extremely talented person, but God has each of us with a calling. How am I  going to first of all, think within the social context that I'm in? I need to  understand the dynamics of it, and then, how can I change the dynamics of it for the better? How can I be an influencer in my marriage, in my family, in my work  situation, by being involved with the people of God in the church, helping the  wise to become still wiser?