What Is a Worldview?
A worldview is the pattern of basic beliefs and assumptions through which people and societies understand reality. Every social order rests on these convictions about what is true and good. Nancy Pearcey describes this relationship, saying that visible “current events are surface effects, like waves gliding on top of the ocean,” while deeper worldviews move beneath them like hidden forces shaping the surface of history.1 Social change, then, flows from shifts in these foundational ways of seeing the world.
How Do Beliefs Influence Behavior?
Pearcey explains that “every social practice is the expression of fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human.”2 Laws reflect and reinforce those assumptions. When a society approves a certain behavior—especially when that behavior becomes protected by law—it teaches people what ideas about human worth and morality are acceptable. In that sense, the law itself becomes a moral educator, forming citizens in the worldview that sustains public life. Because of this, moral questions cannot be treated as surface issues alone; they arise from deeper convictions about human purpose and identity.
Can the Idea of “Worldview” Be Misused?
Some writers have cautioned that worldview thinking can become overly focused on reason rather than on the whole of human experience. Trevin Wax summarizes the concern of scholars like Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew: if worldview talk becomes purely intellectual, it risks missing how faith shapes desire and practice. Yet, they conclude that a proper understanding of worldview includes not only knowledge but also the affective and moral dimensions of human life. It involves the full pattern of knowing, loving, and acting, where belief and practice influence each other in a continual movement of growth.3
Does “Worldview” Still Matter?
Goheen and Bartholomew affirm that worldview language, rightly used, remains valuable because it expresses truth as a coherent “true story of the world.”4 They answer the worry that competing worldviews might lead to relativism by grounding the Christian outlook in Scripture’s story of creation, fall, and redemption. Others, such as Oliver O’Donovan, warn that worldview talk must remain tethered to that biblical witness to avoid being shaped by the culture instead of by God’s Word. Wax concludes that because Scripture continually corrects and reforms our understanding, it keeps worldview thinking from drifting with the age.
Every community’s way of life grows out of an underlying view of reality. These foundational beliefs shape laws, customs, and moral habits that express what people believe about human dignity, responsibility, and purpose. Seeing this connection helps explain why cultural debates are so intense—they concern not just external choices but the underlying worldviews that make those choices seem right or wrong.5
References
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Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning (Nashville: B&H Publishing, 2010), 48.
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Pearcey, Saving Leonardo, 67–68.
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Trevin Wax, “Should We Do Away With Talk of Worldview?,” The Gospel Coalition (blog), October 9, 2018, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/away-talk-worldview/.
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Ibid.