Perhaps Christians Ought to Be Sorry!

Imagine growing up in a society where Christianity wasn't really open to question and, if you were controversial enough to do so, then the chances are yours would be a voice that was deliberately ignored. I don't have to imagine growing up in a society like that, because that's exactly what I did. Clerics were seen as authority figures, there was no such thing as the Internet and so no means by which alternative ideas could flourish and take root away from a form of control that was universally applied and stifled nearly all opinion that would have been regarded as controversial. The same society, that I grew up in, had an unreasonable prejudice against Roman Catholics. To this day, I have no idea why this was and I can only assume that the same mistrust and prejudice was applied to Jews, although I confess I didn't see or hear any of this. Such was suburban life in south-east London during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

 

Looking back, there was an astonishing amount of Christian religious content in my primary school education. I'd like to think that (these days) you would never get away with state school education that included content like this as a huge part of its curriculum. If there were voices of dissent, I was certainly too young to know about them. The next school was not quite so overt in the amount of Christian content, but there was a religious assembly, every morning and attendance was mandatory. I can't have been the only person who quietly wondered about this. The only exception seemed to be a bunch of boys who occupied a rank closest to one of the main doors out of the school hall and these would file out, excused (by the headmaster) as "other denominations" and with what appeared to be a palpably peeved attitude. To this day, I'm not sure of all the groupings involved in this. I do know that some Jews formed a part of this group and I suppose it's just possible (albeit unlikely) that some parents had made it their business to make sure that their kids were excused religious assembly, because they were atheists.

 

I was dimly aware of a group of people who would relentlessly proselytise you, if you happened to have ideas that seem to wandered dangerously far from Christianity, although I've really only came into contact with these in early adult life. People who would stop me on the street and want to engage me in conversation about Jesus and so on. By this time I had started to wonder about just what right anybody had to get in anybody else's face with their religious beliefs.

 

I would have been unaware of the contemporary Christian religious history that had started to grow up around me. There wasn't the easy access to information afforded by the Internet and its unrivalled way of facilitating like-minded people getting in touch with each other. I would have been unaware that, as early as 1911 there had been a movement, in England, of a group of people who seriously regarded the Bible is something that contained no errors. That was the smallest and earliest beginnings of the group and it only seemed to pick up some pace at the end of World War II, presumably in the face of those people who, after the end of hostilities, hoped they would come back to a world that they could forge for themselves and I suppose at least part of this came to fruition with the electing of the first Labour government.

 

There was already a growing tendency, by the time I was in my early adult years, of people who were drifting away from Christianity for all kinds of reasons, some of them due to other religious alternatives and still others, that weren't organised, by their very definition, there were people who wandered off and went nowhere in particular (or maybe tried something from each of the growing panoply of alternatives, never really settling anywhere). Unnoticed, by me, a schism had opened up between the so-called high and low churches of the Church of England and I certainly wouldn't have been aware that the latter was well populated with what came to mean owners born-again Christians. This would have been the first of many attempts at reviving interest in Christianity, none of which seem to work to any great extent.

 

I can remember a poster advertising a Billy Graham rally that somebody had defaced with a toothbrush moustache and hair draping down over the forehead, in the style of Adolf Hitler. Some time later, a visiting evangelist named Luis Palau held a series of rallies, with the subtext of "bring your doubts." At the time I was making jokes about not having a suitcase big enough and, although this was still an age well before they even the earliest beginnings of the Internet. There was at least a common perception that it was now okay to have opinions that differed widely from Christianity. Indeed, Luis Palau had a huge rally at a rock concert venue at London's Chalk Farm. It was necessary to cross a bridge between the nearest London Underground Tube station and the venue and some wag had added some graffiti to this bridge that read "there's one born-again every minute!" Of course, the inference being that the only people taken in by these rallies would have been dummies!

 

The writing was on the wall in more forms than simply graffiti and defacing posters and there was a changing mood amongst clerics, who were getting noticeably angry about and because of the very idea that there could be people wandering about their lawful occasions and pretty much treating their churches as places that they could wander in and out of at will. There was, of course, the very beginning of an openly gay community, much to the chagrin of people like Mary Whitehouse and, of all people a deputy Chief Commissioner of police, named James Anderton, who had an openly anti-gay stance and, for quite some time was able to prosecute something of a fundamentalist Christian agenda without too many people objecting to it! Indeed, you would be forgiven for thinking that he ran the whole of Manchester, at one point!

 

There wasn't much of a need to organise, the paranoia with which the clerics responded with such that you would be forgiven for thinking that there was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to undermine Christianity, when the real truth was that a lot of the wheels were starting to come off.

 

Finally, the Internet did come along and a lot of the material that objected to the stance taken by born-again/fundamentalist/evangelical Christians, that studied their claims and exposed many of the institutionalised lies, came into being and have never really gone away. You could say that a large gulf opened up between those people who now felt free to self define as atheists and the evangelical That espoused views that started to sound increasingly desperate and appear to favour noise over substance. What substance there was, had foundations in some shaky and rather circuitous reasoning, that would convince you only if you were prepared to ignore some rather compelling evidence to the contrary (and this was now increasingly easy to find). It's fair to say that evangelical/fundamentalist Christians have had to close ranks to the extent of excluding a great deal of academia and many of the most vociferous proponents of the evangelical take on Christianity have published books that include numerous sideswipes at college professors that are usually not named (neither are the academic institutions that they come from) but are nonetheless characterised as blustering and ineffectual opponents of a truth that will overcome everything (even if that truth happens to crumble into dust if you subjected to fairly minor amounts of scrutiny.

 

I can't remember when I first heard the term "Apologetics" coined, in modern times and as a means of trying to encapsulates the thrust of the previous born-again/evangelical/fundamentalist Christian ideologies. I can tell you that I have met many people who now identify as apologists and then seemed to launch into an almost immediate definition of what an apologist is. It's possible there are some people, out there, who still don't know and still fewer who would readily identify such people without knowing the right label to use. Just the once, I did interrupt somebody by telling them that I was fully aware of what an apologist was and why apologetics exists.

 

For my money there is one inescapable truth coming out of Apologetics that does stand up to examination (apart from the singular lack of substance to what it represents). If apologetics is supposed to be something that you sign up for in order to defend Christianity, then it does seem to me that they may have overdone it a bit. If there was ever a group of people who richly deserved a long-running and comprehensive beating up, purely as retribution for all the years of having to suffer under its excesses, then it has to be the closest thing that Christianity has to offer by way of fascism. Despite having done just about everything to provoke a nasty backlash, most of what Apologist Christianity has received is nothing more extreme than some rather well placed reasoned argument, which it hasn't much liked (and, arguably, with good reason).

 

So, apart from apologetics seeming to consist mainly of Christians who preach to each other and sometimes pretend that they have got cogent arguments that go outside Christianity and can touch the hearts of nascent converts, what has apologetics got to offer. A rallying cry against an opposition that isn't trying its best to tear Christianity to shreds, given enough time, it will probably do that to itself. The most that can be said for those people who hold views that differ from Christianity (not all of them atheists) is that they might provide robust arguments to refute the claims of Apologist Christians who decide to engage them in debate. As the very best that seems to be on offer is the likes of Lee Strobel and William Lane Craig, the non-Christian community has not got a great deal to worry about. This doesn't leave a lot, saving just than one point, the irrefutable truth that apologetics does provide a platform for Christians to play the victim, to howl and scream about how it is that they are being ill treated by people who are, for the most part, slightly more than in different (but not by much) to the fundamentalists claims put up by Christianity.

 

Christian Apologetics, why this idea fails

I've heard Apologetics described as explaining the ideas underpinning Christianity (or even a particular understanding of it), with the goal in mind that the dialogue will have the outcome of something akin to conversion. The linguistic roots of the term suggests something else entirely, merely defending Christianity if it is attacked, for any reason. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the Apologetics camp suggests that they sea battle lines being drawn up, where none exist.

 

It's probably easier to refer to those people who appear to worry fundamentalist/evangelical Christians, as simply non-apologists. This would have to be a rather crude and disparate grouping of people who believe in God, but don't align themselves with any one religion (including Christianity), atheists, agnostics, Christians who don't want to be described as Apologists and so on.

 

In truth, I think you only have to behave in a way that slightly out of the ordinary to be viewed as some kind of threat. This has certainly been my experience. So, who has the leading edge in defending Apologetics? Well, you have people like Lee Strobel, William Lane Craig and Frank Turek. It's interesting to note that the only people who appear to believe that these gentlemen do a sterling job of convincing non-apologists (non-Christians in particular) are people who are already convinced Christians! At one time Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ" was reckoned to be the go to publication. Hand a copy of this to somebody who wasn't a believer and they would go away, read the book and come back ready to join the fold. Unfortunately, this reputation was purely mythological and it took some time before the Apologetics community woke up to the idea that this was something that not only didn't work as advertised, but was far more likely to turn a simple non-believer into a slightly more entrenched and pissed off non-believer.

 

The reason for this response is so simple that it might sound trite. All of the arguments used to support Apologetics do not make a good case for them being correct. If something sounds as though it won't stand up on its own, you cannot add to its substance or veracity, by quoting from the Bible.

 

I had a discussion with a cleric, just recently, about how it was that Christians seem happy to break the fourth commandment (this is the one about keeping holy the Sabbath day and refers to the Jewish sabbath, meaning Saturday). Along with some boilerplate concerning the new covenant (none of which mentions changing to Sunday is your day of worship), I got back a couple of biblical quotations that was supposed to support the use of Sunday in place of the Jewish Sabbath day. I have a feeling that it's enough to include a couple of biblical references, as a means of knocking over an inconvenient point of view. In this case, as with a couple of others, I bothered to look up the quotations in question and discovered that neither one of them supported the idea of having a day of worship on Sunday.

 

My original reason for contacting this cleric was that he had opened up an evangelical church in my area, and I wondered whether this was one of those places that I couldn't visit, by reason of people seizing upon me as not only are likely convert, but for the purposes of a miraculous cure. I haven't had any body want to smear soil into my eyes and spit in them, although this is one way in which Jesus is supposed to have cured blindness! However, I have heard of other blind people being offered a cure, for there to be lots of praying and then, when the cure doesn't work, the blind person is blamed for not having enough faith. It's hard to imagine something worse that you could do, to a blind person (with the possible exception of the soil and saliva thing)!

 

I'd had a brush with being "cured" when I was offered such a thing by a Pastor, hereabouts. I declined as gracefully as I could (at the time, knowing nothing about these other cases involving blind people and following my own instincts, which turned out to be right on the money)! The preacher was down on me straight away "so, you don't believe it would work?" he asked in a way that sounded rehearsed. If I'd had time to think through my attitudes, then I suppose I would have admitted that I didn't think the cure would work. As it turned out I had an honest answer that brought the rehearsed progress to a screaming halt. I wouldn't have the first idea on how to play a crowd and I was only dimly aware that there was a group of ladies busily making the tea and in earshot of the conversation that I was having with this cleric. I said that I preferred to exchange my failing eyesight for increasing vision and the Scot a chorus of quite spontaneous hallelujahs from the ladies that I mentioned earlier. The pastor found himself flat on his face. He did tell me, in passing, that he would convert me to Christianity and it did seem as though I would have little choice in the matter. Of course, I did have a choice and I didn't go back for a very long time.

 

The failure of Apologetics can be traced to a single cause. Apologetics is not something that appears to have been put together with the purpose of doing anything more than preaching to the converted. If you try to use it for anything else, then it just plain doesn't work. Unfortunately, there seems to be no convincing Apologists that they are not under attack, don't need to defend themselves, we have all got better things to do with our time and that the arguments contained in Apologetics will not work on those people who have either no belief in God, or some kind of belief system that doesn't include Christianity. You cannot use verses from the Bible as though they are forensic evidence and yet Apologetics seems to begin from this flawed premise.

 

This didn't stop Lee Strobel from misquoting an Oxford historian, (named A.N. Sherwin-White) in advancing a non-existent crackpot theory that there was some kind of minimum amount of time, in recording historical events, inside which you could guarantee that legends and other apocryphal stuff couldn't creep in. The theory is made up balderdash and the historian was at pains to point out that stories passed on as an oral tradition could be corrupted in the re-telling and in the process of writing down. There is convincing scholarly evidence (not even argued with by Apologists themselves) that later additions and insertions have been made, to the Gospels. Yet, the idea of Evangelical Christianity is that you ought to regard such writings as inerrant. I can't help feeling that there's something wrong with this picture.