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.
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