Why the Atheist is Right--Part II: The Malicious Christian

Who tortured countless people to death during the Inquisition? Who accused thousands of women and executed them as witches? Who used the crooked concept of Manifest Destiny to steal a whole continent?

Christians.

Or rather—“Christians.”

It’s important to add the quotation marks. Those four tiny curls of punctuation make all the difference in the world.

Most atheists have no use for these blips of ink. For them, there is no distinction between someone claiming to be a Christian (i.e. “Christian”) and the person who is genuinely following Jesus (a.k.a. Christian). This leads to a common disreputable tactic.

Anything even remotely connected with the idea of Christianity—anything that ever used the name of Jesus as a pennant for the darkest of causes, and all things even vaguely associated with the church, are wadded up into one hideous atrocity. All the hypocrisy, all the scandals, cruelty, and viciousness ever perpetrated by every poser wearing a cross or sporting a fish on his car—this is the target. This is lugged out into the arena as the representative of Christianity.

Not every atheist will resort to this, but many do. Often enough, it is this composite deformity of Christianity that’s allowed to speak its wild and vicious mind. It is a monster that any rational person would consider appropriate for the crosshairs. It is something clearly deserving to be put out of its misery. Or out of our misery.

Criticism of Christianity is rarely leveled at a fair representation. The worst of the worst is generally the target of choice. For example. “We know where this option [Christianity] has led: to holy war, the systematic extirpation of heretics, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, witch-hunts, the cultural genocide of Mayan civilization, the brutal conquest of the Aztecs and the Inca, religious support for ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, slavery of Africans in the Americas, colonist tyranny across the globe, confinement of the Jews to ghettos, and periodic pogroms against them, ultimately preparing the way for the Holocaust. In other words, it has led to centuries steeped in bloodshed, cruelty, and hatred without limit across continents.”*

This is called a Straw Man Argument. You set up the flimsiest rendition possible of your opponent and then you knock it down. It is a lesser strategy and it is used on both sides. As one atheist correctly pointed out, a religious proponent often does the same thing by “setting up popinjays to shoot at, for the sake of confirming the ignorance and winning the cheap admiration of his evangelical hearers and readers.” This approach doesn’t make any real headway for anyone. It is only the means to win “cheap admiration.”

Regardless, a Christian would be foolish to ignore the parade of atrocities carried out by quote-unquote Christians. It would be foolish to deny they happened. It’s all painfully true. There have been a lot of dumb things done in the name of Christianity. There are a lot of dumb things still being done in the name of Christianity.

Everyone sees the prevalent hostility among numerous religious people toward outsiders. As one outsider put it, this makes Christian love come across as very exclusive. “But the love thus taught is the love of the clan, which is the correlative of antagonism to the rest of mankind.” Raving picketers gleefully scribbling damnation with magic markers promote the idea of hatred toward sinners—which no real Christian would ever support.

So it’s important to help skeptics consider distinctions. The general hubbub of quasi-Christianity is a horrible mess. But what if in all the tangled malignancy there is something being overlooked—something real? To lump everyone together is bad form. Holding a modern scholar accountable for the obsolete embarrassments of phrenology and spontaneous generation would be no less dishonorable. No evolutionist deserves to be automatically associated with Hitler. No scientist deserves to be grouped with scientologists. It isn’t fair to make blanket assumptions just to round off the edges of your argument.

But it’s complicated. Sad to say, it’s not just the Christian-ish who are unkind. Actual legitimate Christians can be hateful. And not just to “outsiders.” You don’t have to look very hard to find Christians who mistreat other Christians. This is very apparent to unbelievers. “I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.” It’s a tough lesson for any Christian to inevitably learn. Some of the greatest acts of unkindness will come from fellow followers of Jesus. David knew this feeling of betrayal all too well (Psalm 55:13). Let’s face it. Christians can be mean.

However, for any genuine follower of Jesus, this will be a temporary glitch. Any true Christian lives by two basic commands. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37) and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39). Love God and love people. These are not just what a Christian does. It is his definition. Anyone who fails to obey these on a regular basis is not obeying God and therefore not a Christian. It all leads back to the catch-phrase, “Hate the sin, love the sinner.” Whether or not the scowling picketers got the memo or not, this is what embodies Christianity.

There is a great deal of damage being done by people who have anointed themselves with righteous indignation. They have forgotten that without love, they are nothing (I Corinthians 13). You can sometimes hear it in jokes we make about atheists. We try to be clever at the expense of maintaining a real compassion for the lost (something the previous blog entry was probably guilty of doing). This is not conducive to building bridges. There are enough jagged edges in the religious conflict as it is.

If we really are sincere about reaching those who are lost, it would serve our purpose well if we learned to do something very important.

Be nice.

There’s plenty of childish meanness going around. We stir ourselves up into religious zeal. Restraining yourself is especially difficult when the opposing side is unfair or mean. We might want to retaliate in similar fashion, but this is the moment when a Christian can make a real distinction. In the midst of the fiery mob, one thing that will make you stand out as a potentially viable voice—even to an atheist—is a lack of animosity. It’s not a matter of being a sugar-coated referee, but someone making an authentic effort to understand and to help with the search for answers. A ranting fanatic screaming Scriptures and insults only meets expectations.

Anger is the weakest of positions. As one atheist put it, anger is often an indication there’s something precarious about your position. “If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If someone maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger.” In all the brutal debate, it’s easy to get mad. But anger is typically a symptom of bad reasoning.

There are at least two things in which a Christian and an atheist might see eye to eye.

This world is filled with bad things.

Lots of so-called Christians are mean.

Take note that behind these two issues is the admirable quality of compassion. Someone who doesn’t believe in God often has sympathy for suffering. Say what you will about the grim agenda of atheists, some of them are driven by compassion. And that’s a good starting point for everyone.

At the very least, it might help to realize that an atheist wakes up every day to a kind of limited purpose. “Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.” There is an admirable passion to make the most out of this life. But whatever excitement can be derived from living life “more intensely,” as far as an atheist is concerned, everything still trails off into oblivion.

They might make you angry. They might treat your conclusions about reality with disrespect, but they are moving through the days in pursuit of a fleeting existence, convinced that there is nothing more. That alone could use a little compassion.

* Quotes are taken from a variety of writers anthologized in the book The Portable Atheist, edited by Christopher Hitchens.