What are the Social Sciences? Why are they Important?

By Caitlin Halfacre
August 7, 2024

Do you ever hear teenagers talking, or stumble across a conversation on Twitter (X, the artist formerly known as) and feel like you’re reading a different language?

  • What is a woman?
  • Fragile masculinity
  • Toxic culture
  • Neurodiversity
  • People of colour
  • Racism
  • Intersectionality
  • Class traitor
  • Self-identification
  • Discrimination
  • Diversity
  • Tolerance
  • You do you
  • Live your truth
  • Cancel culture

Some of these seem right, some seem wrong, some on the surface seem innocuous but there’s something underneath that we feel like it’s to be straying away from a biblical understanding of the world. Do you wonder ‘where has this come from?’, ‘how did we end up here?’? How have we ended up with redefinitions of words that I thought I understood, and how are we in a society that is so far from what I recognise from 20 years ago, and even further from what I can connect with a Biblical view of humanity and human interaction? 

A society changed

In an answer that feels slightly self-important, the answer is often the academy, or more specifically, the humanities and social sciences.

We are three, what you could call, ‘Early Career Researchers’, three women with academic training and a passion to bring together our faith and our research. We don’t believe in a sacred-secular divide and would like to help you see that one isn’t necessary to understand the world. We spend much of our time inhabiting one sphere, academia, but truly think that not only can we do our research with a Christian worldview, but also that for you, in Christian ministry or training, can be served by understanding how academic research is shaping our modern world.

Caitlin Halfacre – Research Associate in Linguistics, Manchester Metropolitan University. My academic interests are in accent and social structure including how social factors affect regional accent variation.

Magriet Cruywagen – PhD researcher, School of Education, University of Glasgow. I am a social researcher and systemic coach working at the intersection of education, social and health policy and practice, with a central interest in the design and implementation of research-practice collaborations and other collaborative research strategies as vehicles for collaborative knowledge discovery and stewardship.

Sarah Barnett – Lecturer and researcher in Speech and Language Therapy, Newcastle University. My academic interests include language development through parent-child interactions, behaviour change, and philosophy in speech and language therapy.

When discussing this series together, we all felt like we were unqualified to write it, partly because none of us felt like our area of expertise was ‘social science-y’ enough, that we were each at some strange edge of the field. One reason for that is that the realm of study described as ‘Social Sciences’ is big and broad, and intersects strongly with both the natural sciences and the humanities, and those lines are rarely clear. But we think this work is both valuable and useful and we’re going to do our best to help you engage with the social sciences and show you why engaging can serve Christian ministry.

What are the Social Sciences?

In a simple sentence, they are the study of human beings, society, and interactions. Social scientists seek to observe, analyse, understand and explain these things. As someone in Christian ministry in any way, this understanding can show us people’s wants and desires in their time and space. It also gives us the opportunity to see the explanations people are giving, the ways they are understanding the human state. Through understanding we can see idols; we can see the explanations with which people replace the knowledge of God (Romans 1v23), and what they are worshipping in place of their creator. It is often said of the physical sciences that scientific discovery is thinking the thoughts of God after him. The social sciences are too – they’re the study of the creatures made in his image and also the culture they are building with or without him.

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God gave the earth to human beings to rule, fill, and subdue (Genesis 1:26-28) and put Adam in the garden to tend and work (Genesis 2:15-25), or to cultivate. In English the word ‘cultivate’ has the same roots as agriculture, and culture. Culture is something that human beings create and so can be created good or bad and understood in light of God’s word. Culture is created at many levels, from art, poetry, and fashion, to community customs and practices, to political discourse and protest, and many other things in between.

There is a surprisingly strong trickle down effect from humanities and social sciences in the academy to every area of society – education, healthcare, public discourse, and eventually the underlying assumptions of our society. Those who do research in this area are actively analysing society and culture (Dray, 2016) and so framing definitions and discourse that are shaping every part of modern society, including our churches. As a Christian navigating the world it is important to both understand the idols being preached from outside the church but also to realise that we (individuals within the church) can end up taking on the definitions, and frameworks given to us by our surrounding culture. A really powerful tool to preaching the Bible’s corrections to culture and society is to understand the nature of the culture that every one of us is steeped in.

Why does it matter?

I want to briefly consider an example as to why this is important, for discipleship as well as evangelism. I’m not going to tell you my views or answer to questions like this, but attempt to explain why engaging with the social sciences can serve those in Christian ministry.

It is not unusual for someone in an evangelical church to describe themself as a socialist, or a feminist, (or another -ism, many of these will come up later in this series) but you’ll also have many people vehemently disagree with those labels or those who have no strong reaction either way. We need to ask what the label means. But not only what the label means, but what it claims about the world. When someone claims a label like that there are multiple things going on. They will have a picture of what that label means, and for different people will have varying depth, and they will have more or less knowledge of how far it goes.But underneath that is a whole claim, a history of societal analysis and worldview that in effect has its own gospel. Every claim like this will have critique of the world, and explanation for those wrongs, and a solution for them. Those critiques may be rooted in sin but the explanations and solutions will not be the gospel, they will not be the transformative work of the Holy Spirit that we long to see in people. If we are using and experiencing labels that are so prevalent in our culture, we need to understand all that they promise and will fail to deliver.

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield (2023) discusses the dangers of our Christianity becoming a sociology. It is not one option, one way to view the world, differing from others by only opinion, the gospel is power and “unleashed into the world changes everything” (2023, p.187). We need to see the opinions, the ways people view the world and in our teaching let them be shaped by the gospel.

“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Hebrews 4:12 (ESVUK)

References

Champagne Butterfield, R. (2023) Five lies of our anti-Christian age. Wheaton, IL: Crossway.

Dray, P. (2016) Studying … The Social Sciences?, bethinking.org. Available at: https://www.bethinking.org/your-studies/studying-social-sciences (Accessed: 06 August 2024).