In one of the threads here the other day, a reader posted a quote from the theologian Stanley Hauerwas, who said something like: “‘Make up your own mind’ is the stupidest advice you can give to a college student. As a college student, you don’t have a mind worth making up. You have to learn how to think.” Hauerwas said it more eloquently, but that, as I recall, was the gist of his message. Thought is like a craft: you have to submit to certain disciplines in order to produce thoughts worth thinking.

I thought of that just now when reading David Brooks’s latest. Brooks is talking about how so much contemporary protest and activism is ineffectual because it’s based entirely on emoting. He brings up that red-hot viral video (18 million+ views) from Jefferson Bethke, the young Evangelical who explains why he loves Jesus but hates religion, and points out something I bet you didn’t know about it: when someone more knowledgeable about Christianity explained all that Bethke got wrong about historical and Biblical Christianity in that video, the Bethke politely folded, and repudiated his video claims. He didn’t stop to figure out if he knew what he was talking about before he made that video. (I won’t say Moralistic Therapeutic Deism! I won’t!)

Brooks says there’s a lesson here for us all:

For generations people have been told: Think for yourself; come up with your own independent worldview. Unless your name is Nietzsche, that’s probably a bad idea. Very few people have the genius or time to come up with a comprehensive and rigorous worldview.

If you go out there armed only with your own observations and sentiments, you will surely find yourself on very weak ground. You’ll lack the arguments, convictions and the coherent view of reality that you’ll need when challenged by a self-confident opposition. This is more or less what happened to Jefferson Bethke.

The paradox of reform movements is that, if you want to defy authority, you probably shouldn’t think entirely for yourself. You should attach yourself to a counter-tradition and school of thought that has been developed over the centuries and that seems true.

If there are traditions of thought that have stood the test of time, or that once made sense to a lot of people, maybe there’s something in it worth thinking about. Maybe those ideas can shed new light on contemporary challenges.