As I have noted before, a worldview consists of far more than the thoughts that you think. A worldview consists of more than just one man’s opinions, dogmatically held. In short, a worldview is not an individual event but rather a social reality.
And that social reality consists of four basic components, two of which are propositional, and two of which are enacted, lived out. The propositional elements are catechesis, how the basic questions are answered, and narrative, the story that a people tell themselves about their origins and destiny. The enacted elements are lifestyle and symbolism. Lifestyle includes clothing, food, and so forth, while symbolism would include worship, liturgy, ceremonies, that kind of thing.
And this why I think that a number of conservative Christians I know are in the process of becoming liberals. They do not recognize it because they think that thinking is an antidote to everything else in their lives — and it isn’t. Liberalism has an enacted lifestyle, and by this I am not referring to the flagged and (for now) controversial elements of it — e.g. the homosexual lifestyle, and so on. No, I am talking about the Whole Foods, NPR, burlap shopping bag, fair trade coffee, low flush toilets and trickle down shower heads, reduced carbon foot prints, alternative indie bands, and slow food movement lifestyle. Christians who adopt this kind of lifestyle are, like it or not, in the process of becoming liberals.
To say so is insulting, and you soon find yourself in a heated discussion about it. And at the end of the discussion, you will find them arguing something 180 degrees out from what they wanted to argue at the beginning. In the beginning of the discussion, they were all about an integrated lifestyle, they wanted organic cohesion, they wanted unity. At the end of the discussion, they wanted to say that if they still believe the Apostles’ Creed in this sealed off part of their brains, it doesn’t matter if they dress, talk, and shop like those who don’t believe the Apostles’ Creed at all. Everything is detachable and disconnected for them. Detachability is always necessary to deniability.
It is easy for them to get away with this trick because previous generations of evangelicals have been selling out using exactly the same technique, only with different lifestyle decorations. But it is worse for this generation of incipient liberals because they claim to have seen the necessity of organic connectivity, but then have gone on to do exactly the same thing that their fathers have been doing (John 9:41). But liberalism is as liberalism does.