What’s That Giant “t” On Your Roof?
By: Stephen McAlpine
So a Canadian pastor got in touch with me a few days ago to say that he’d discovered my blog (always nice), and that he liked what I wrote (even nicer), and that it rang true for the Canadian scene as well (nicest of all!).
What “rang true”? Well many things, but increasingly the post-Christian frame in which a younger generation of never-churched people, with zero understanding of the Christian faith, are the new norm.
The technical term for not knowing that you don’t know something, is “unconscious incompetence”. We move from not knowing that we don’t know, to knowing that we don’t know (conscious incompetence), to knowing that we know (conscious competence), to the final stage of “unconscious competence” where the thing is almost second nature to us. If you still don’t get it, recall the stages for how you learned to ride a bicycle.
When it comes to many things political and cultural, Canada and Australia have similar trajectories. And that means when it comes to Christianity many people – especially many younger people – are in the unconscious incompetence stage, they don’t know that they don’t know.
How are we like Canada here in Australia? For one, like Canada, Australia is decidedly not the USA, even though many of us take reference points (rightly and wrongly) from the States.
But secondly, the progressive agenda that is antithetical to the Christian understanding of what it means to be human that Canada experiences (witness its huge uptick in euthanasia and the slackening of its boundaries) is also similar to ours in Australia.
And what about the big questions: What is a human? What is a human for? Who is a human for? The whole anthropological tool-kit that the Christian frame gifted to the world is missing many of its tools in Canada and Australia. Meanwhile many of the tools that remain are mis-used for purposes the Christian frame did not intend. Read Glen Scrivener’s The Air We Breathe.
We have moved well beyond assuming that Christianity gave the West a framework that secularism can take from here on in. We have moved to a point that we are becoming completely ignorant about the faith.
What were some of the signs for this pastor? Well he dropped some examples:
The pizza delivery guy who asked me what that giant “t” in the parking lot stood for. Then my wife and I were out for dinner recently, and I noticed a gold crucifix around the neck of our server. I tried to strike up conversation with the roughly 20 year-old young lady: “Thats a lovely crucifix!” I remarked. The server was a bit baffled but polite. “Thank you…what is? What’s lovely?”, she asked. “The cross…your necklace” “Oh!” She replied, “This?” I asked her what it meant to her, or what the man on it meant to her. She sort of blushed and just responded “I just bought it because I thought it was pretty.”
The big “t”!
“it was pretty!”
That’s wild eh? Well it’s wild for us marinated in the faith and who are equally ignorant about niche anime movements emanating from South Korea (though some of you may be unconsciously competent about such matters!).
How far has the gospel imagination left our culture, that the very instrument of torture that Jesus died upon, and which was famously lampooned in the celebrated Alexamanos graffito, should be so devoid of meaning to a post-Christian?
How little do the artefacts of Christianity bear any weight to modern young people that they should buy our most precious artefact because it was pretty to them. Or that, with no guile, they should ask why the lower-case letter “t” is placed upon a roof?
We’ve certainly come a long way since crucifixion was a no-go subject in polite Roman society. Now this Canadian pastor, living as he does in a more urban area, knows that such unconscious incompetence is not the norm everywhere, and is less likely to occur in the “prairie” towns (the equivalent I guess of our Bible Belts and smaller, conservative regionals). But it’s a thing!
With the increasing urbanisation of our young populations, it will also become a growing thing. But here’s another thing: this unconscious incompetence has an upside to it. And I hope as people involved in – or at least interested in – Christian ministry, you can see it.
For just as the Quiet Revival has brought a trickle of “never churched” back to churches in the UK (and seen a corresponding jump in what we can call ‘full-fat-faith” rather than the lame, liberal offerings of the past thirty years), so too elsewhere.
And indeed, there’s something kinda cute and worthy of a gentle giggle (if eternity were not at stake), in what this Canadian pastor went on to tell me. Here are some of his examples about how this “unconscious competence” – or what he calls in a less pejorative way “holy naivete” is doing in his part of Canada:
The University student who live-streamed her workout run to visit a church for the first time in her life, literally jogging into our lobby to try church.
Whole atheist families who through some realized but previously-unknown threshold for progressivism show up en-masse to convert to that which they barely understand.
The Wiccan woman who decides her whole family ought to convert to Christianity, shows up, front row, every week. Comes to saving knowledge and trust in Christ. Next thing you know she’s bringing complete strangers from Facebook Marketplace to church each week, because she’s trading her expensive occult supplies for church visits.
That last anecdote is almost a mirror of Acts 19, where Paul brings the gospel to Ephesus, resulting in ignorance and superstition being evicted from the lives of so many. And like that Wiccan woman, the new converts in Ephesus burned their expensive magic books.
This Canadian pastor finishes with this:
It’s astounding how genuinely white the fields are for harvest, but the direction of the flow is so contrary to what we were ever told to expect in the West.
Yep. Something is definitely happening. And he’s right – so much of it has gone against the grain of how we thought we might reach the West again. But that’s probably how God works, right? And we don’t want to overplay it and say that we are seeing wholesale revival.
The cloud on the horizon may only look like the size of a man’s fist. It could come and shower us in the West with revival’s refreshing rains, or it could dissipate altogether. But events in the world in recent years have pushed people to ask serious questions.
I believe that this was brewing just before COVID, and then the sheer scale of that event, the anguish and anger, and the deep politicisation it induced, moved things along rapidly. But we’ve also had the murder of an outspoken young Christian man, who for all the politics you don’t agree with, have a cheerful naivete about sharing the guts of the gospel to hostile crowds.
My mum told me just last week that a woman in her fifties turned up at mum’s tiny reformed, ageing, Baptist church after the Charle Kirk assassination. Turns out this woman has been going around the local churches in the weeks after that event, wondering if there is something to Christianity after all.
For those of you who didn’t like Charlie Kirk, then at least be like Paul in prison writing to the Philippians and rejoice that the gospel was preached whether for good intent or bad intent. If you can’t do that, then you may be more politicised and partisan than you care to admit.
So that’s unconscious incompetence. That big “t” on your roof. That “pretty” pendant around someone’s neck. That Wiccan who suddenly realises there is a power beyond the dark arts that can liberate her. That fifty something Aussie woman suddenly wondering whether Christianity is real. Perhaps we should not be surprised though. Isn’t this what we read in the Scriptures?
And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The god of this age has blinded the minds unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:3-6)
Moving from unconscious competence is not a graft, it’s a gift! Shifting from not knowing that you don’t know, to knowing, is about God’s gospel work. Always was. Always is. Always will be.
As the late Tim Keller would put it, “No one becomes a Christian, until they do.” And when they do, they move from asking “What’s that big “t” on your roof?” to praising and glorifying God for what that big “t” has achieved for the cosmos.
Article supplied with thanks to Stephen McAlpine
About the Author: Stephen has been reading, writing and reflecting ever since he can remember. A former church pastor, he now trains church and ministry leaders, and in his writing dabbles in a number of fields, notably theology and culture.
Feature image: Canva
