Why I get annoyed with (Popular) Christian Apologetics
We Can't Turn Back The Clock
The Christian apologist project today is not what it was in ancient times when they argued to be treated fairly by the Romans, assuring them that Christianity did not threaten the empire. Instead, today's Christian apologist advocates for Christian supremacy, by colonizing secular spaces with evangelism and secular reason with Christian theology.
I’ll admit this is a bold claim, but hear me out.
A typical non-believer agrees that no one knows for certain about the nature of God, and so we should protect freedom of religion and not make public policy based on religious doctrine. An apologist, on the other hand, asserts that we can’t have a proper account of science, morality, or politics without Christianity.
More specifically, they say that physics and biology don’t make sense without God, and that God must exist for any sort of workable morality to exist. One does not need to be a political philosopher to realize that there are political implications of those beliefs being true.
As a society, we already deprive people of their rights if they have inferior capacities for reason, like children, the mentally insane and deficient, and the comatose. They cannot and should not be making decision about their own life, let alone setting the agenda of public policy. Given this political and legal precedent, if it is true that the world doesn’t make sense without Christianity, we should also deny certain rights to non-Christians.
Sure, the apologist never directly says that non-Christians can’t be moral, properly know science, or shouldn’t have the right to vote, but these are the logical conclusions if one believes all the things the apologist says. They’re not merely saying there is reason to believe in God, but that it is unreasonable to not believe in the Christian God.
Watching Christian-Atheist dialogues and debates are always frustrating because the Christian apologists dances around this fact. They don’t ever say it out loud, likely because it would make them look bad.1
In contrast, secularists accept that we can’t know or rationally explain everything, and we grant freedom of conscience and religion to allow individuals to explore existential issues for themselves. In this way, secularism exists to acknowledge uncertainty and establish social equality among different religious groups.
Today, countless non-Christian or non-religious people live moral lives and make sense of the universe just as well as Christians do.2 For everyone, Christian or not, life is just better due to secularism. We’re spending less time enforcing arbitrary religious morals and more time solving actual problems, both with the government and the market.
You can say “we owe our prosperity to our Christian heritage,” but the problem with that is culture is multifaceted and complicated. Christians owed their cultural success to Greco-Roman values that they appropriated, and over time transformed them into their own. Secularism has done the same thing with Christian values, and added other virtues to the cultural canon, like skepticism.
All to say: the apologists insists that we can’t live good lives or make good sense of the world without believing as they do. This is obviously wrong! It’s annoying!
As someone who’s studied ancient philosophy, Christian theology, and modern philosophy,3 to say that you need to be a Christian to be moral or make sense of the world is obviously wrong and probably motivated by anti-atheist bigotry. And yet they keep saying it and implying it in public spaces and are treated like smart, non-bigoted people.4
Just as you don’t need to study ancient philosophy to live as a Christian, you also don’t need to be a Christian to be a good secular citizen. You don’t need to appeal to the book of Genesis, the Gospels, or the Epistles of Paul, to understand the logic of free speech, separation of powers, property rights, or the scientific method. You just don’t.
Dancing around implicit assumptions when discussing any political issue with far-ranging implications is obviously frustrating, but it’s especially frustrating when talking with Christian Apologists and Christian Conservatives. They can come off as quite reasonable if you don’t examine their assumptions; so reasonable, in fact, that I delayed posting this because I thought I was wrong on my characterization of Christian Nationalism. Silly me: the Christian conservative was just bad faith.
Albeit on only an undergraduate level.
Obviously, not all Christian Apologists believe this. Not every theistic philosopher or philosophy enthusiast believes this. But the most popular ones do, and that’s why I add the (popular) distinction in the title.
This is an interesting post for me as I work on basically Christian apologetics of my own. I think that if Christians see a danger (from a Christian perspective) to Christian dominion, they might naturally build into their projects an openness to there being critics of Christianity. For instance, they might believe that fake Christianity deceives people into thinking they really love God when they don't, and this is as dangerous, or even more dangerous, than explicit atheism. Fake Christianity not just in the "you believe the wrong doctrines" sense, but "you think you believe [a set of doctrines that are in fact correct], but you don't really". Sort of a "be hot or cold, but not lukewarm" idea. People disaffected with Christianity as a whole (outsider Christians, ex-Christians, atheists in general, etc.) are the kind of people who would most easily push back against a hegemonic fake Christianity. So if Christians want to establish Christian beliefs in the wider culture, at the risk of creating Christian hegemony, if they are wise they might want to make sure that it's easy to defect from Christianity and exist outside of it.