For the benefit of anyone who is trying to find information about enthusiastic dualism on the internet and coming up with nothing: Sparticus' Guide To Enthusiastic Dualism.
Disclaimer. All this information has been gathered from lecturers and off the internet. I haven't seen a copy of the orginal article that first talked about it. This may be completly wrong, but I don't think it is.
Enthusiastic dualism seems to be a term first coined by a guy called Laurence Singlehurst. He wrote about it in a Youth With A Mission mailing. Possibly an e-mail mailing or a postal mailing, I'm not sure. Enthusiastic dualism is basically when young people act like Christians one day and don't at all the next day, but importantly they don't see this as being a problem and have no moral qualms about this.
This is a section I've found of the original article on the internet
Enthusiastic dualism is the capacity, particularly seen amongst young people, to hold Christian views and beliefs in the Christian part of your life (the youth meeting and church), but when at the night club (or school, university or whatever) with your non-Christian friends, hold the beliefs and values of the night club and do what everybody else does. Your values, beliefs and behaviours are those of your friends. You move between worlds with no sense of conscience, and hold inconsistent viewpoints. This will stagger many of you reading this, because you grew up in an age when people believed in a big story, a meta-parable, and consistency was important.
However, what I have described about young people is increasingly alive among adults in our churches as well. It manifests itself partly as consumer church. We feel our church ought to deliver certain kinds of teaching and great programmes, and our leaders ought to do this or that; when they donít, this justifies our lack of involvement. Worse still, perhaps we have consumer God ñ where God ought to do certain things, behave in certain ways, and provide certain products, happiness and blessings. If weíre sick, or experience hard times, we feel that God has failed, and therefore we donít have to be so committed. Finally, some adults are living in two worlds at once. Though Christian at church, their Christianity doesnít go to work with them ñ they leave it behind. They do not have a holistic approach, and are not being salt and light outside the Christian environment.I've emailed YWAM requesting they put the article back up online, but no luck as of yet. I will update if I recieve a reply
Personally I've never seen this behaviour, and I'm a bit suspicious as to whether it actually exists (but then I'm always suspicious when people say about how stuff is a new post-modern trend and use words like 'meta-parable'). Sure there are people who act like Christians one day and then don't the next, but I've yet to see someone feel completely happy with this and not feel any moral qualms about it. It also sticks out against my understanding of predestination/salvation/santification. Surely if someone is genuinely saved then they'll be convicted of guilt about this enthusiastic dualism and if they aren't genuinely saved then they'll still be being taught that what they are doing is wrong. It just seems like it's not the big new thing that I've been led to believe it is and rather just another old occasional thing.
Update
I've been e-mailed the article in full and will put it online at some point.
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(t) Zoe
Well you just proved me entirely wrong. I guess the experience of Sparticus the mighty trainee youth worker doesn't count for much after all. Oh well. I've got the full text of the article now, it was e-mailed to me, so I may upload it and link to it or something.
I remember Sparky or his brother Eponymouse coming him annoyed from school. They had had a good argument with a teacher on some issue and charged him or her with being inconsistent. The riposte was 'And who says I have to be consistent?'
I suspect that consistency is integral to theism. Theism's child Modernism holds to it but the bastard grandchild Post-Modernism has no such allegiance.
I've actually decided I stand by my original claim of Enthusiastic Dualism being more made up than real. If those people were really enthusiastic dualist then they would conform to the Christian world view when in a Christian world view setting. They don't, so they aren't being enthusedly dualely.
I've actually experienced something similar to this at University. A friend who had been a Christian for years before coming to University went to church and was quite religious in that way every week in the first year, she also would often be found with her head in a bible. For some reason this was all abandoned in the second year. I still haven't found out why.
I would say that the youth one sounds more like social conforming.
I think I agree with Mr. Singlehurst, actually. I see it all the time, pretty much.
It's too simple to say that they're not being proper Christians or that they don't mean it on Sunday. It's a classic example of that fantastic post-modern phenomenon, cognitive dissonance.
I was just reading "loving the lost" by Laurence Singlehurst and came across the term "enthusiastic dualism". I believe it exists based on 7 years experience as the music director in a church. Many examples have come across my path.
The example that immediately sprang to mind was that of a young drummer who was playing. Passionate was he about worship and God. Genuinely so. Yet he quite happily and enthusiastically drank himself into a stupour and slept with his girlfriend no problemo. He did his best to keep the two worlds segregated, but I knew what was going on.
Whatever guilt might have existed did not amount to enough to cause any change. I seriously doubt that he did actually feel guilty.
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Naming no names, I have plenty of friends who appear to be in this kind of life. In the context of a Youth Leadership program run by my youth group, a group of sixth formers considered spiritually mature enough to be involved in leadership discussed, among other things:
- how many girls one guy had kissed at a party the night before
- how drunk he was
- how drunk the girls were
- what his feelings were about all this.
The conclusion, if I remember correctly, was that he was sorry he was as drunk as he was because he didn't enjoy the kissing as much as he could have done. He was perfectly glad the girls were drunk though because it gave him the opportunity to kiss them. This from a guy who has played the role of minister in a youth service at our church.
I have no idea whether he felt any guilt or not, but I would have imagined that in a group of Christians (including the youth leader) any guilt present might have shown itself. I also have no idea if he has a personal faith or not, because everything in our youth group is so experiential many people must believe they are Christians just because singing Matt Redman songs makes them feel good.