Christian Corner Solutions

 

It’s been a long term venture of mine, trying to understand why people believe so many crazy things, especially in religion and politics. Bear with me, and I’ll suggest something fascinating about things that unbalance Christians and cause them to adopt strange beliefs, and why.

If you have studied economics, you may have come across corner solutions. Corner solutions are extreme choices where a constraint limits options to a single point, not along an indifference curve (i.e. not conforming to the typical trade-off between goods based on preferences). An indifference curve is a graph representing combinations of goods providing equal satisfaction, outlining preferences, and optimising consumption analysis. If you got your child to draw it in relation to their desires in a toy shop, they would draw a line showing different options that make them equally happy, helping them decide what to ask you to buy for them.

With my high tech post-it note and pen, I’ve drawn an illustration, where you’ll see that to have all the things in your ideal spending session (what’s called an optimal consumption bundle in economics) the tangency condition between the budget constraint and an indifference curve is indeed a necessary condition for an optimal consumption bundle (a tangency condition is the point where the budget constraint touches an indifference curve, indicating optimal consumption).

Last technical point– consequently, the optimal consumption bundle may occur at the aforementioned corner solution, where the indifference curve is not tangential to the budget constraint, but touches it at a bent or a flat portion. When this happens, the consumer is likely to choose to consume all of one good and none of the others.

Christian corner solutions
I think we can analogise a way in which the corner solution example in economics of consuming the maximum amount of one good within the budget constraint has parallels in Christian belief. Here budget constraints could refer to things like church or family pressures imposed upon your viewpoints, dogmatic cultural or denominational legacies, low intellectual competence, issues in one’s personal life that influence beliefs and viewpoints, or an insecure hankering for a black and white theology for self-preservation – things that sway a Christian’s ability or incentive to believe the right things or cause them to adopt very excessive positions against mainstream alternatives.  

Examples of views and beliefs that could be seen as a corner solution within various Christian individuals are Biblical inerrancy, opposition to second marriages, opposition to women in leadership, opposition to contraception, mistrust of medicine, denial of scientific facts to do with evolution and the age of the earth, to name a few. These corner solutions most frequently occur, I’d suggest, because of the following overlapping phenomena; 1) remaining ignorant is preferable as a ‘path of least resistance’ strategy to minimise stress and contention; 2) unease and insecurity regarding the perceived challenges of reconciling faith with empirical evidence, especially in light of family, church and peer pressures; 3) psychological and emotional relief in taking over-simplistic stances or interpretations at the extreme end due to the complexities of the issues at hand; and 4) strict adherence to denominations or theological traditions that have consistently enhanced individual utility through inculcation and conditioning even when empirically false or excessively extreme.

A full unpacking of these is beyond the scope of this article. But it’s clear to me that corner solutions are pervasive in Christian churches across the globe, and consideration of their impact on Christians can shed light on why so many absurd beliefs are adopted among the ecclesia (ditto the same kind of analysis in political spheres).

Finally, though, it doesn’t just mean that corner solutions amount to the extremist views that are driven by those susceptible to absurd thinking – corner solutions can also occur in those more noble but almost opposite extremes, like believing in and practicing chastity, traditional values around marriage and the family unit, forgiving the most evil people in the world, and the sanctity of life as an infinitely valuable proposition, to name but a few.