We are all being influenced.
Advertising, news, social media, teachers, family, friends, movies, music, politicians, religious leaders — even the stories we grew up hearing about ourselves — all contribute to the way we understand the world.
The question behind this conversation comes from someone who wants to stay true to what they already believe:
How do I stop society shaping what I believe?
And that question points to an even deeper one:
How do I recognise what is influencing me, and decide whether I should believe it?
Every message comes from somewhere
Think about advertising.
Years ago, if someone wanted to sell you a drill, the advertisement might have told you how powerful it was, how many drill bits came with it and what size hole it could make.
Today, the advertisement may barely mention the drill.
Instead, you see a dad building a cubby house with his daughter. She runs outside, hugs him, and suddenly the drill has become connected with being a great father.
The advertiser isn’t simply giving you information about a product.
They are trying to shape how you feel about it.
News works in a similar way.
A news organisation has to decide which stories matter, which story leads the bulletin, who gets interviewed, what information is included and even which words are used to describe what happened.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the journalist is being dishonest.
It means information is always being communicated through a framework.
The same is true here.
Hope Unfiltered comes from a Christian worldview. I’m not pretending otherwise. I believe Christianity provides the best framework for understanding reality, so that inevitably shapes the way I approach the questions we discuss.
Everybody has a framework.
The important thing is knowing what yours is.
What has shaped the way you see the world?
You already have a way of interpreting life.
So do I.
Our families have shaped some of it.
Our education has shaped some of it.
Our culture, friendships, experiences, successes, disappointments and the things that have hurt us have all contributed.
That doesn’t automatically make any of those influences wrong.
It simply means none of us approaches a new question as a completely blank page.
What we have already learned affects the way we understand whatever comes next.
This is one of many reasons I don’t find the concept of “unconscious bias” useful or convincing.
Of course our previous experiences and learning affect the way we interpret the world. I think that is obvious.
But describing those influences as an unconscious bias can sometimes make them sound like hidden forces we have little responsibility for. Part of maturity is developing the critical thinking skills to recognise the assumptions we carry, examine where they came from, and decide whether they are actually true.
A worldview is not simply a bias. It is a framework — a way of understanding reality that helps us interpret new information and experiences.
Sometimes the language of bias also becomes a way of dismissing someone without answering them:
You only believe that because of your unconscious bias.
But that tells us nothing about whether what they believe is actually true.
The better question is whether the framework we are using gives us an accurate understanding of reality.
Stories shape us too
Some of the most powerful messages we receive don’t feel like arguments at all.
They are stories.
A movie can make a particular view of humanity, religion, relationships or morality feel completely natural long before anyone actually explains the philosophy behind it.
Take Avatar.
Its story draws heavily on a pantheistic understanding of reality — the idea that the divine is present throughout nature and that all living things are deeply connected.
You can enjoy Avatar without becoming a pantheist.
But the story is still presenting a way of seeing the world.
Star Trek does something similar from another perspective.
I’m a fan of Star Trek, particularly Voyager, but it clearly comes from a particular worldview. Religion is often treated respectfully as part of a culture, while scientific explanation tends to be presented as the deeper explanation of what is actually happening.
You can enjoy a story without accepting its worldview.
But it helps to notice the worldview that is there.
Entertainment isn’t worldview-neutral just because it is entertaining.
Neither is education.
Neither is news.
Neither is a sermon.
And neither is this conversation.
So how do I know what is true?
This is where critical thinking matters.
Critical thinking doesn’t mean becoming cynical and automatically rejecting everything somebody tells you.
It means learning to ask better questions.
Why should I believe this?
What evidence supports it?
What assumptions sit underneath it?
Is there another reasonable explanation?
What happens when I compare this idea with a completely different worldview?
That last question can be especially useful.
If I want to understand a political story, for example, I might deliberately compare the way two media organisations with very different perspectives report the same event.
The differences can tell me almost as much as the similarities.
Then I can begin separating what happened from how different people interpret what happened.
We can do the same thing with much bigger questions.
What is a human being?
Where does morality come from?
Does life have a purpose?
What happens when we die?
Does God exist?
Don’t only ask what one worldview says.
Compare them.
Christianity gives you a framework to test
For Christians, the Bible becomes the primary framework through which we understand life.
That does not mean switching off your brain.
And it certainly doesn’t mean refusing to listen to people who disagree with Christianity.
If something is true, serious questions shouldn’t frighten us.
So if you are exploring Christianity, compare its claims with the alternatives.
Read people who disagree.
Ask uncomfortable questions.
Look at the evidence.
Then apply the same standard to the alternatives.
I don’t want you to believe something simply because I said it.
You should be able to ask:
Why should I believe Jason?
Good question.
Don’t make me the ultimate authority in your life either.
Test what I say.
Check whether I have represented the Bible accurately.
Compare Christianity with other explanations of reality.
Ask whether those explanations remain coherent when you follow them through.
Your worldview determines where you look for meaning
This matters because worldview is not simply an intellectual exercise.
How you understand reality eventually affects how you understand your own life.
Consider atheism.
An atheist can love their family deeply.
They can live generously.
They can sacrifice for other people.
They can have very strong moral convictions.
That isn’t really the issue.
The deeper question is:
What makes any of those things objectively meaningful or good?
If there is no God and no reality beyond the physical universe, then there is no creator who has given human existence an ultimate purpose.
We live.
We die.
And whatever meaning we attach to the time in between has to come from us.
You might choose family as your purpose.
Someone else might choose achievement.
Another person might choose pleasure, service, knowledge, wealth or helping humanity.
But what makes one of those purposes more objectively meaningful than another?
Our preference for it cannot make it objectively true.
Where does morality come from?
The same difficulty appears when we talk about good and evil.
An atheist can choose a moral framework and sincerely regard it as objective.
But calling a standard objective does not make it objective.
We still need to ask:
What is the standard being measured against?
Perhaps we choose human flourishing.
But why is human flourishing objectively good?
Perhaps we choose social consensus.
But societies have agreed on terrible things throughout history.
Perhaps we judge actions by their consequences.
But we rarely know all the consequences of our decisions.
You might buy a product believing you have made an ethical choice, only to discover somewhere in its supply chain that cobalt was mined in dangerous conditions by a child.
Your intention may have been good.
The consequences were more complicated than you could possibly have known.
That doesn’t mean consequences are irrelevant. They obviously matter.
But they cannot give us a perfect moral standard because we cannot see them all.
At some point, if the final authority is the human mind, we are still asking the human mind to decide which moral standard the human mind should trust.
That is a serious problem.
Christianity makes a different claim
Christian ethics begins somewhere outside us.
Good and evil are not categories human beings invent.
They are grounded in the character of God.
Human life has value because God created it.
Love matters because God is loving.
Justice matters because God is just.
Truth matters because God is true.
Self-sacrifice has meaning because our lives are not ultimately our own and because Jesus Himself demonstrates self-giving love.
That does not mean Christians always understand God’s moral standard correctly.
Clearly we don’t.
Christians can misunderstand Scripture, rationalise our own behaviour, follow cultural assumptions, or simply choose to do what we know is wrong.
But Christianity gives us something outside ourselves against which our choices can be tested.
The standard does not depend on us agreeing with it.
Our choice is whether we trust God enough to submit ourselves to it.
Don’t outsource your thinking
Perhaps the biggest danger is not that society influences you.
It is that you stop doing the work yourself.
Don’t let a teacher tell you what to believe simply because they are your teacher.
Don’t let a pastor do it either.
Don’t let a university professor, politician, celebrity, journalist, TikTok creator — or podcast host — become the person who thinks for you.
Listen.
Learn.
Ask questions.
Then test what you have heard.
Your worldview should be strong enough to be challenged.
In fact, testing it is part of how it becomes stronger.
As we get older, many of us discover that the world is more complicated than we thought it was.
At twenty, it can be easy to think everything has a simple answer.
Experience has a habit of changing that.
A good worldview does not remove complexity.
It gives you somewhere to stand while you work through it.
So how do I stop society changing who I am?
You probably can’t stop society influencing you completely.
Nor should you.
Some influences will be good.
Some people will correct things you have misunderstood.
Some will introduce you to ideas you have never considered.
The goal is not isolation.
The goal is discernment.
Know the framework you are using.
Understand where it came from.
Be willing to test it.
Listen seriously to competing ideas.
And keep asking one of the most important questions you can ask:
Why should I believe this?
For me, Christianity is the framework that has survived that testing and continues to make the best sense of the world I experience.
You may not have reached that conclusion.
That’s okay.
But don’t simply inherit your worldview from whichever voices happen to be loudest around you.
Investigate it.
Challenge it.
Compare it with the alternatives.
And make sure the beliefs shaping your life are beliefs you have good reason to think are true.
Keep the conversation going
Maybe you’re not sure what your worldview actually is.
Perhaps you’ve realised how strongly your family, education, politics, religion, entertainment or social media have shaped the way you think.
Or maybe you disagree with something I’ve said here.
That’s okay too.
Ask the difficult question.
You don’t have to agree with me before we can have the conversation.