The Logic of Intersubjectivity. Darren M. Slade
strain of Christian tradition. Not only do the events in McLaren’s life explain the shaping of his personality and temperament, but his life experiences also explain the more idiosyncratic elements of his religiosity that would, otherwise, seem eccentric to conventional theologians. They reveal why McLaren cherishes interreligious dialogue (§5.3.1), an allegiance to Christ but not to any Christian denomination (§6.1), a rejection of ontotheology (§8.1), a love for the marginalized “other” (§8.4), and an emphasis on the intersubjective and existential aspects of religious faith (§8.2). Nonetheless, it is important to remember that McLaren’s perception of conservative Christians is a result of his personal upbringing. While it may not be everyone’s experience, his writings do reflect an honest appraisal of his many encounters with fundamentalists. Consequently, since no person is detachable from their experiential knowledge, McLaren’s biography explains why he would seek out an alternative Christian paradigm. In other words, McLaren naturally sought out an approach to faith that would cognitively, affectively, and socially align best with his experiential knowledge.145 In this way, McLaren’s sense of compassion and dialectical temperament forecasts his subsequent moral disillusionment with the Religious Right and their adoption of neoconservatism.
94. McLaren, “Everything Old Is New Again,” 23.
95. While a brief biography is standard in other studies, they seldom make an overt connection between McLaren’s life experiences and his theological inferences. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to present only those biographical details that directly contributed to McLaren’s religio-philosophy (cf. Christy, “Neoorthopraxy and Brian D. McLaren,” 3‒10 and Blackwell, “Return or Rereading,” 15‒19). For a detailed and comprehensive biographical sketch of McLaren and his career, see Burson, Brian McLaren in Focus, 10‒12, 31‒66.
96. See Sperber, “Intuitive and Reflective Beliefs,” 67‒83; Kahneman, “A Perspective on Judgment and Choice,” 697‒720; and Stanovich and West, “Individual Differences in Reasoning,” 645‒65.
97. Schwarz and Clore, “Mood, Misattribution, and Judgments of Well-Being,” 513‒23; “How Do I Feel About It?,” 44‒62; Clore and Gasper, “Feeling is Believing,” 24‒25.
98. Frijda et al., “The Influence of Emotions on Beliefs,” 1‒9.
99. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Cf. Festinger et al., “When Prophecy Fails,” 258‒69.
100. See esp., Eller, “Agnomancy,” 150‒80 and McLaren, Why Don’t They Get It? In one study, for example, it was revealed that those who accept the divinity of Christ, when presented with disconfirming information, paradoxically intensified their conviction in Jesus’ divinity once they also accepted the truthfulness of the dissonant information (Batson, “Rational Processing or Rationalization?,” 176‒84). See also the numerous studies cited in Harmon-Jones, “A Cognitive Dissonance Theory,” 192.
101. Cf. Aronson, The Social Animal, 185 and Harmon-Jones, “A Cognitive Dissonance Theory,” 185‒211.
102. McLaren comments, “Show me a person who has rejected faith, and nine times in ten I will show you a person or group nearby who turned him or her sour with their example of bad faith.” He also remarks in the same book, “The search for a faith that makes sense has been the most challenging and life-changing quest of my life” (FFS §Intro, 18; §1, 46). As Roger Olson explains, theologies do not develop spontaneously. All arise from the experiential challenges to the church as perceived and felt by particular theologians (Olson, The Story of Christian Theology, 15).
103. See for example, Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, xvii‒xxi.
104. Accordingly, as McLaren developed an interest in science, he grew weary of hearing anti-evolution rhetoric (NS §1, 7). He recounts, “When I was 13 my Sunday school teacher said: ‘You can either believe in God or evolution’, and I remember thinking: ‘Evolution makes a lot of sense to me’” (McLaren, “Changing Faith, Staying Faithful,” 14). Elsewhere, he comments that evolution “seemed elegant, patient, logical, and actually quite wonderful to me, more wonderful even than a literal six-day creation blitz” (GO §1, 44).
105. McLaren describes this period as “a full-dose, hard-core” style of fundamentalism that compelled its congregants to attend numerous church services, revivals, prayer meetings, youth programs, Bible studies, and devotionals. For more details on his personal life journey, see Brian D. McLaren, “How I Got Here,” Progressing Spirit (blog), April 11, 2019, https://progressingspirit.com/2019/04/11/how-i-got-here/; AMP §16, 245; FFR §9, 180‒81; FFS §3, 87; MRTYR §Intro, 11; and NS §1, 5‒6. Elsewhere, however, McLaren labels the Plymouth Brethren as only “mildly fundamentalist” (FOWA §6, 56).
106. McLaren explains, “To a teenager in the early 1970s, church culture seemed like a throwback to the 1950s—or the 1850s, or the 1750s, take your pick” (NS §1, 7). Developmentally, it is common for teenagers to question the religious beliefs of their chronosystem, especially as their cognition expands to include more analytical discernments. See King and Roeser, “Religion and Spirituality in Adolescent Development,” 435‒78.
107. Cf. Jones and Gerard, Foundations of Social Psychology, 191.
108. See also, McLaren, foreword to Generous Orthodoxies, xiv.
109. Like McLaren, few adolescents actually reject the religion of their childhood, particularly if they have a good relationship with their parents. See Kim-Spoon et al., “Parent-Adolescent Relationship,” 1576‒87.
110. See the multiple polling data in Kinnaman and Lyons, Unchristian, 26‒30 and Wright, Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites, 14‒15, 186‒90, 200‒202.
111. McLaren, preface to Blue Ocean Faith, xiv.
112. McLaren states, “I became a committed Christian during the Jesus Movement in the early seventies, a context in which being a Christian felt more like following a leader than accepting a code or creed” (COOS1 §13, 207). He describes the experience elsewhere, “It was a movement known for being hip, not ancient; contemporary, not contemplative; and oriented around evangelistic practicalities, not spiritual practices” (McLaren, “Everything Old Is New Again,” 23). For a history of the Jesus Movement, see Hubery, “Jesus Movement,” 212‒14 and Lyra, “Rise and Development of the Jesus Movement,” 40‒61.
113. Cf. McLaren, foreword to A New Kind of Youth Ministry, 6‒8.
114. For McLaren, his exposure to deconstructionism was not an accident. Instead, much like the prophet Moses, whose Egyptian education prepared him for revolution, McLaren