John Cooper is Big Mad. Concertgoers at this year’s Winter Jam captured the lead singer for Skillet mid-rant as he let loose some disordered thoughts aimed at those in the process of deconstructing their faith. Fed up with current and former believers with the audacity to think for themselves, Cooper urged his fellow Christians to “declare war against this deconstruction movement.” Over the course of some two minutes and change, he sputtered through a jumble of uninformed appraisals, betraying an acute misunderstanding of the object of his rage. “I don’t even like calling it deconstruction Christian,” he roared. “There is nothing Christian about it. It is a false religion. It is a whole nother religion.”

There’s a whole lot wrong with this take, which we’ll get to in a moment, but for now I’m imagining all his fundie fans suddenly googling ‘deconstruction’ for the first time. Dearly hope they find help leaving the cult. For those who may not know, Cooper has been a celebrity of sorts in the Christian rock scene since the late 90s. I probably saw his band Skillet in concert almost as many times as DC Talk. Feel free to judge, though in my defense I didn’t discover Smashing Pumpkins or Foo Fighters until college.

Zooming out, I can’t help but observe that this is such a common response by fundie Xians to any talk of deconstruction or skepticism directed at beliefs they see as sacred and unnegotiable. That is, they give in to anger, a natural human impulse that bubbles to the surface when confronted with threats to one’s identity or sense of self. And they allow that simmering rage to overpower any latent desire to hear out the other side or actually engage the relevant issues. Too afraid to ask questions and so cocksure they have a lock on truth, they unwittingly commit themselves to a lifetime of self-perpetuated delusion. It’s plain from Cooper’s quasi-coherent tirade here that he’s spent exactly zero minutes thoughtfully reviewing the reasons one might step out from the canopy of organized religion or, indeed, seeking to understand what ‘deconstruction’ even means.

He proclaims deconstruction a “false religion.” It’s…well, not that. Cooper is guilty of what we call a category error, or what a philosopher might label ‘not even wrong’ to indicate levels of wrongness that escape rational analysis. The term ‘deconstruction’ can mean lots of different things to different people. For me it refers to the concerted reconsideration of one’s (typically ‘inherited’) religious beliefs with the intent of reconciling them, to the extent possible, with one’s amassed knowledge and experience. In short, it’s looking at your faith-based worldview with fresh eyes and a questioning mind. For many of us, it entails a lifelong process of unwinding or dismantling a lot of the doctrinal, sectarian, and psychological baggage embedded in the associated subculture. Deconstruction serves as a necessary counter-discourse to the dominant and singularly toxic forms of organized religion whose power structures resist accountability.

Contra-Cooper, asking sincere and probing questions about the affirmations of your youth, skeptically interrogating your faith and beliefs you always took for granted, is not a religion. It’s a process that arises out of religion and the culture that sustains it, but it’s not a religion. It’s turning a critical eye on religion itself, in this case evangelical Christianity, casting a wide Socratic net that encompasses its dogmas, rituals, and sacraments to discern which are worth preserving and which you’re better off without. Deconstruction is simply a formalized way to refer to this process.

It’s precisely the elevation of skeptical inquiry and rational deliberation above tradition and dogma that incenses reactionaries like Cooper steeped in the evangelical ways of thinking. But beneath the surface anger is fear at having to cope with the cognitive dissonance that goes hand in hand with deconstruction — fear of the discomfort that inevitably comes with anatomizing a longtime belief system that has anchored you. Much easier is it to puff yourself up and double down than to roll up your sleeves and take an honest, more panoramic look at the various assertions that have been force-fed to you your whole life.

In accordance with the high-control environment that characterizes fundamentalist communities, most evangelicals are systematically taught to avoid entertaining their doubts, no matter how genuine, and told to keep the faith, whatever the cost to their intellectual integrity and psychological health. They’re counseled to push challenging questions aside and to simply accept that God ‘works in mysterious ways’. For all his demagoguery, Cooper should at least come to terms with the fact that such non-answers will prove unsatisfying to some people, many of whom go on to deconstruct.

Strange as it may seem to agitate against earnest seekers looking to live out a more authentic faith or worldview, the reality is that evangelical hardliners perceive deconstruction as a threat. What Cooper and other figures who espouse his variant of Christianity fail to realize is that it’s attitudes and behavior like this that validate the criticism of the culture they represent. A confused diatribe from someone who’s clearly never even bothered to ask anyone what deconstruction is simply furthers the narrative that evangelical Christians are unyielding and closed-minded. And failing to address the kinds of questions and concerns that prompt deconstruction only makes those wrestling with them more likely to find answers elsewhere. Unless and until the John Coopers of the world understand this, they will continue to be part of the problem.

 
Addendum, 2.15.2022: After posting similar thoughts to Facebook, an extended exchange ensued with a committed Skillet fan. Perhaps because I tagged John Cooper’s official page in my post, a small number of Skillet stans came to his rescue upon seeing the post in his page’s feed. Though the exchange was more respectful compared to many I’ve had in the past, I think it further illustrates how steeped in misconceptions the rhetoric around deconstruction really is among evangelicals as well as their penchant for using the pretext of theology to, among other things, distort and deny science that challenges their narrow view of the world, cover up personal prejudices, and further bigotry against marginalized groups. I’m reproducing it here for posterity. The comments from the Cooper stan are in italics, with my responses below each.
 

“I believe he is angered with the deconstruction movement because so many of the reasons for deconstructing often seem weak. It’s one thing to ask tough questions about the faith, pray to God for wisdom, and come out of it with a deeper understanding and appreciation, and quite another to reject the faith because of questions that have already been grappled with and sufficiently answered by countless theologians.”

 
Care to share which reasons in particular you find “weak”?
 

“Why does God allow evil, why did God order the destruction of the Canaanites, why will God send many to Hell, why is Jesus the only way, etc.”

 
Right so we might want to widen the circle to include the social ills prevalent in and perpetuated by Christian (particularly evangelical) culture. To reduce deconstruction simply to theological dilemmas would be a mistake. Both can contribute in their own way to the process of deconstruction. Any one issue can act as a catalyst for deeper inquiry, which can ultimately lead to any number of ‘destinations.’ It’s — and I can’t stress this enough — not a one size fits all phenomenon.

I think more concerning are the evangelicals who naively assume they’re in possession of tidy, impervious answers to each and every challenge to their faith and ignore good faith objections to the culture of which they’re a part. There’s a unique blend of piety and unfounded confidence that emerges in groupthink-laden fundamentalist movements that often manifests in a failure to self-reflect and confront the toxic and more problematic elements stitched into the culture (e.g. anti-intellectualism, dogmatism, sexism, racism, heteronormativity, gaslighting, hypocrisy, and so forth). In the present case, it tends to lead people away from genuine engagement with the core issues behind deconstruction and the like.

Lastly, it’s not clear what purpose enmity and resentment as responses to deconstruction are supposed to serve. It’s both odd and counterproductive. If someone comes to you with sincere hang-ups with respect to their faith-based worldview, lashing out and responding with indignation while altogether neglecting to address the issues raised gets no one anywhere, it seems to me. A lot of these occasions arise out of a felt insecurity on the part of rigidly anti-intellectual evangelical m-e-n who lack the necessary resources to meaningfully respond to the relevant arguments and engage with the other side. It’s much easier to puff themselves up and pander to their fellow clansmen than do the difficult work of engaging in a mutually respectful dialogue attentive to the concerns of those of us who walked away.
 

“As for the social ills you think are prevalent in and perpetuated by evangelicals, of course some individual churches and people are corrupt, have a dearth of intellectualism, etc., but I don’t see social ills endemic to the evangelical church. And we all know that there are wolves in sheep’s clothing who have infiltrated the church.

I’m not saying that every answer to every theological question is ironclad. Of course there still are questions I have as a Christian and things about God I don’t understand, but they aren’t faith-shaking questions. I think that many theologians and apologists have great answers to many of the tough questions, and for the answers that seem to elude Christian after Christian throughout the generations, I trust that it’s because those are the answers for which we’re not intended to have access. And I think the purpose of that is at least twofold: unlike God, we’re not omniscient, so we shouldn’t have all of the answers to any particular subject in life, and faith requires that we step out with slight uncertainty to some degree. I do think that the faith has to be grounded in solid reasons for believing and that the Holy Spirit convicts of the truth on a spiritual level, but faith is needed to be at rest not having every answer to every question. The Christian journey is a marathon.

Waging war on a movement that is harming people’s faith should not be conflated with enmity for them; rather his fervor is grounded in a genuine concern and love for people and desire for them to come to the truth. I think John is getting the sense that people’s hang-ups are more than just intellectual ones. I believe he thinks the growing deconstruction trend is a heart issue, not just a mind issue. I can’t speak for every person deconstructing and I truly am grieved for those who have been hurt by the church, but as for a number of the celebrities who have deconstructed, their reasons seem to start as intellectual but morph into a devotion issue because the concerns that shake their faith are relatively standard theological questions with sound answers. So it appears that they didn’t do the work of earnestly searching for answers to their questions and crying out to God for wisdom and truth. John is well-acquainted with the likes of Spurgeon and other intellectual giants, so I can assure you that intellectualism is not a stumbling block to him. I’ve listened to many of his Cooper Stuff episodes and can attest to the fact that he regularly addresses concerns of various detractors.”

 
“Waging war on a movement that is harming people’s faith should not be conflated with enmity for them…”

This framing is suspect, and for the reasons previously stated. It isn’t the “movement” that’s harming the faith, it’s the moral and intellectual failings of Christian culture, rhetoric, and dogma that give rise to deconstruction. The harm that stems from gaslighting women into believing their place is in the home and must be subservient to their husbands, regarding the LGBTQ community as having chosen a life of sin, or the cult-like predation by preceptors who push creationism and enjoin one’s children to oppose science — stunting the intellectual growth and curiosity of America’s youth in an often irrecoverable way — is where our locus of concern should be, not over people deconstructing. Conversations around deconstruction are healthy to the extent they prompt others to rethink beliefs and assumptions previously taken for granted and lead to a more ethically and intellectually robust worldview that takes into account a larger set of considerations, whether one still situated within the theistic paradigm or otherwise.

“I think John is getting the sense that people’s hang-ups are more than just intellectual ones. I believe he thinks the growing deconstruction trend is a heart issue, not just a mind issue.”

I don’t know what’s meant by “heart issue,” but this notion that deconstruction is a ‘hip’ celebrity trend that people cop to because it’s what’s ‘in’ right now is reductive at best and offensive at worst. It papers over the organic, yearslong process that occasions those raised in the evangelical mindset to rethink assumptions about their faith, about the Bible, about how humans ought to relate to one another, and so forth. And importantly it avoids contact with the issues fracturing and reshaping the Christian community writ large today. You’re not going to change the discourse by bitterly airing your resentments at people leaving or walking away or choosing a different life path, but by actually addressing the longstanding resentments and intellectual challenges behind deconstruction. That’s great that Cooper has responded to certain concerns on his podcast, but content-free rants like these solve nothing and only push people who’ve gradually dissociated further away.
 

“I’m not saying the movement is harming the Christian faith; I think it’s leading some astray under the pretense of faith-shattering questions. When I say that I think the root of deconstructionism is a heart issue, I mean that people who have completely renounced the faith have done so because they don’t want to follow the God of the Bible. Most of their questions could be satisfactorily answered, but it still wouldn’t help because they don’t want to submit to God’s authority.

Additionally, I’m not saying that deconstruction is merely a cool trend that people are latching onto; I do think that it starts with legitimate questions, but I think a lack of trust in God leads people to then not earnestly search for answers to those questions or to hastily dismiss them because they don’t comport with what they think should be true.

The Bible doesn’t say that women are subservient to their husbands. That word denotes that they are inferior to them, which is not so. Husbands and wives are equal in worth but have different roles. The verse you are referencing is the one in which women are called to SUBMIT to their husbands. Submission is yielding willingly; subservience is not. Submission doesn’t mean that the husband gets to make all of the decisions or that the wife has to accept his views, opinions, etc.–far from it. It means that the husband should be submitted to for decisions in which the two can’t agree so long as he is acting in accordance with the Bible. The rest of that verse calls on husbands to love their wives even as Christ loved the church, meaning that they need to be loving to the point of self-sacrifice, if need be.

I don’t think Christianity says that every or even most married women with children need to stay home with their kids, as we all know that’s not even a viable option for many, but I do think that it can be great for many families and that more women would stay home with their kids at least while they’re young if they could.

I think that the evangelical consensus on the LGBTQ community is that there are legitimate issues that such people struggle with but that such entrenched issues don’t give license to sin. When it comes to homosexuality, evangelicals don’t see gay people as any more broken than anyone else. We’re all broken, sinful people struggling with different things. Some struggle with anger, some with lust, some with homosexual proclivities, etc. and some with all of the above. Having homosexual proclivities isn’t a sin unless they’re leading to lust. Homosexual behavior is the sin. It’s a rejection of what God has ordained for sex. I think many recoil at that notion because they think it isn’t fair and that everyone should have romantic love and a sex life, but that’s an entirely human notion. What’s best for everyone isn’t the same. As for those who are transgender, I don’t think that altering one’s body will solve a psychological issue.

As for the false dichotomy of creationism versus science, that subject is too much for a FB post, but suffice it to say that God is the one who established the scientific laws and order of the universe, so science is one of God’s tools for discovery and a reflection of his nature.

“Conversations around deconstruction are healthy, to the extent they…lead to a more ethically and intellectually robust worldview that takes into account a larger set of considerations, whether one still situated within the theistic paradigm or otherwise.” This assumes that there can be multiple morally sound outcomes to the deconstruction process. Truth is truth. If one person deconstructs the Christian worldview and becomes an atheist and another does so and remains a Christian, both views on morality cannot be correct.”

 
This is where we’ll have to end the conversation. I’ve no interest in reenacting debates I’ve had countless times before, particularly on issues that carry tangible consequences for people I care about. It’s clear you’ve swallowed hook, line and sinker the fundagelical posture with respect to the topics I raised, and diving into each would occupy too much of my time and energy. Nor can I allow you to use my wall as a soapbox to spread the kind of toxic apologetics Skillet stans are selling. Feel free to defend complementarianism, heteronormativity, and creationism on your own page, but such unyieldingly narrow conceptions only serve as a reminder of the great harm that can be accomplished when insulated communities are inculcated to otherize minority groups and distort settled science under cover of theology. I draw a line at rhetoric I perceive as instrumental to the furtherance of bigotry and hate, whether under theological pretext or otherwise.

A few parting comments:

“When I say that I think the root of deconstructionism is a heart issue, I mean that people who have completely renounced the faith have done so because they don’t want to follow the God of the Bible. Most of their questions could be satisfactorily answered, but it still wouldn’t help because they don’t want to submit to God’s authority.”

I think those are clear straw men and suggest limited interaction with people in the camp with which you seem so preoccupied. These are the kinds of reductive takes you’re likely to hear on pop-Christian blogs and evangelical media that someone who defends John Cooper would frequent. I’d encourage you to branch out more and engage communities with stronger belief diversity than you have to this point.

“I’m not saying that deconstruction is merely a cool trend that people are latching onto; I do think that it starts with legitimate questions, but I think a lack of trust in God leads people to then not earnestly search for answers to those questions or to hastily dismiss them because they don’t comport with what they think should be true.”

It’s ironic you would level this charge at deconstructionists when it more accurately describes the behavior of fundamentalists like yourself who viscerally reject inconvenient facts and evidence that don’t comport with your pre-programmed view of the world. In fact, sometimes we earnestly search for answers and dismiss what we find not because it doesn’t comport with what we think should be true but because it conflicts with what is true. Key difference. And the mature response to the latter situation is to proportion your beliefs to the evidence, not sweep it under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist or twist and misrepresent the parts of it that cause distress.

The reality is there are tons of examples to date of people enmeshed in evangelical life for decades who went on to discard the very belief system you’re espousing in this thread. People like Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay. People like Kevin Max of DC Talk. People like Phanatik of The Cross Movement. To suggest that such preeminent voices of contemporary evangelicalism merely lacked “trust in God” or were somehow derelict in their pursuit of answers is risible if not borderline nonsensical and betrays an unfamiliarity with their stories. Your eagerness to make blanket assumptions (rooted in misconceptions) about a phenomenon you’ve spent little time exploring says more about the reflexive dogmatism central to the fundamentalist ethos than the people you’re critiquing.

“Truth is truth. If one person deconstructs the Christian worldview and becomes an atheist and another does so and remains a Christian, both views on morality cannot be correct.”

Atheism isn’t a “view on morality.” It refers merely to the proposition that no personal gods exist. The proposition makes no claims with respect to morality, so what we have here is a category error, or what a philosopher might label ‘not even wrong’. You’re once again reasoning from faulty premises and misconceptions. At this point, it’s hardly a coincidence that the Christians MOST vocal and opinionated about what other people believe are the MOST likely to have labored under gross misperceptions pertaining to the object(s) of discussion.

“Having homosexual proclivities isn’t a sin unless they’re leading to lust. Homosexual behavior is the sin. It’s a rejection of what God has ordained for sex. I think many recoil at that notion because they think it isn’t fair and that everyone should have romantic love and a sex life, but that’s an entirely human notion. What’s best for everyone isn’t the same. As for those who are transgender, I don’t think that altering one’s body will solve a psychological issue.”

Strange how it’s only a “proclivity” or “psychological issue” — despite protestations to the contrary by every refereed piece of science available — when it applies to the group you’re dehumanizing and persecuting but “natural” in the context of your own orientation. Maybe that’s what thinking people find unfair? Most Christians around the world reject the perverse conceptions of human nature and biology articulated above, while Christian scholars like Dale Martin and Matthew Vines have made profound, cogent cases for reconciling Christianity and same-sex relationships — pick up Vines’ 2014 book ‘God and the Gay Christian‘ if you’re interested. At any rate, these are precisely the toxic heteronormative attitudes I don’t allow on my wall.

While I appreciate the dialogue, any further comments will be removed.

 
 
Another day, another evangelical notable throwing in the towel on Christianity. This week we heard from Phanatik, aka Brady Goodwin, a founding member of the Philly-based hip hop outfit from the early 2000s known as The Cross Movement. Unlike some other folks in recent years who have publicly distanced themselves from the evangelical Republican approach to church and politics, Phanatik has gone further and explicitly renounced his faith in Christ. On Monday, he shared his extended thoughts in a 24-min video posted to Facebook titled “Unbecoming A Believer.”

Along with other acts from that era like Mars Ill, LA Symphony, and The Procussions, I listened to everything The Cross Movement put out as a teenager. I’m familiar with Phanatik’s work. What I was less aware of were his extracurriculars after the group disbanded circa 2008. Like many Bible-believing Christians looking to ‘upgrade’ their faith game, Goodwin shipped off to seminary, in his case Westminster Theological in Philadelphia. As he discusses in the video, at the time he saw it as a way to supplement and bolster his twenty-five years of experience in “urban apologetics” — defending Christ on the streets.

It was during his stint at seminary when cracks in his worldview began to form. Hearing his professors give unsatisfying answers to fundamental questions about Christian doctrine fed growing doubts that lingered long after he graduated. He doesn’t elaborate here on which questions troubled him or the particular answers he found lacking, but I have a pretty good guess. From there he went on to teach at a number of Christian colleges and even in secular academia, endeavoring to defend the gospel all the while. Tailoring his apologetics to a secular audience brought out a poignant realization: if the answers he had been trained to proffer weren’t good enough for someone with vastly different theological commitments, “why,” he recalls asking himself, “are they good enough for me?”

Eventually, reason, logic, and critical study of the Bible demanded more than the shaky rationalizations and theological acrobatics in which he was being forced to engage could muster. The seemingly ad hoc explanations employed to maintain sync with the ambitions of his faith became too much to stomach, while imparting those threadbare answers to his students left him with a crushing sense of guilt. If he was no longer personally persuaded by the arguments he was touting from a position of authority, how could he continue the charade in good conscience? In the end, Goodwin chose intellectual honesty over bearing false witness and blind faith in ancient texts.

Goodwin’s journey out of Christianity hums some familiar bars, wherein a skeptical approach to the Bible and certain doctrinal commitments, informed by contemporary scholarship and modern evidences, culminates in a lapse of faith preceded by a prolonged period of disillusionment. In order to maintain our faith, we have to jump through so many hurdles that we feel cut off from our own intellectual and moral instincts. The final hurdle — the only one left to us at that point — is adopting a new worldview altogether. Fundamentalists will attack him for leaving, but Goodwin simply followed his innate, some would say God-given, instincts to their logical conclusion. As Galileo famously said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended for us to forgo their use.”

Others will no doubt blame Goodwin’s volte face on seminary, as though the information gleaned there would suddenly cease to exist had he chosen not to attend. It’s like crooked cops who confiscate phones rather than change their behavior. It’s what was being filmed that matters, not those capturing it, just as it’s scholarly consensus with respect to the biblical texts that’s the central concern here, not the institutions who relay the information. Much of what evangelical hardliners deem a threat to their faith amounts to basic, commonly accepted knowledge for anyone engaged in academic study of the Bible. The evangelical community should spend more time directing their ire toward the pastoral class that knowingly withheld this knowledge from them than discouraging skepticism and shutting down free inquiry.

In hearing Goodwin tell his story, I notice the same hesitancy and reluctance I experienced ~ten years ago, despite knowing full well where I had landed. Just getting the words out can be difficult, even when you know what words to say.

For many of us, deconstruction is a grueling, often lifelong process of inward reflection and evaluation of our beliefs availed of manifold modes of study and inquiry. Markers along the way can vary in their impact to our personal outlook, from disagreements with our church’s position on matters of LGBT equality and racial justice, exposure to convincing arguments against such doctrinal imperatives as creationism or biblical inerrancy, to lucid conversations with members of other faiths. To précis this far-flung odyssey in a systematic way can prove daunting, particularly when those least receptive to it may never have ventured outside the confines of their theological bubble. The tendency for fundamentalists to diminish our stories, their eagerness to dismiss our journey as an overnight, flippant decision, gives us pause.

Indeed, renouncing one’s religion can be high stakes, secular democracy or no. In the context of conservative Christianity especially, making it ‘official’ sets things in motion. It alters relationships, closes off opportunities, can affect the contours of your marriage. No matter how ironclad you perceive the logic behind your deconversion, the hidebound nature of fundamentalism brooks little tolerance for dissent. No matter how heartfelt your perspective, disaffiliating is so often tantamount to self-exile. The mounting consequences, including loss of your community and the thought of having to forge an entirely new social identity, can at times outstrip the intellectual and moral clarity that comes from unburdening yourself of suspect convictions.

You can see the anguish Goodwin has had to plough through to reach these conclusions and affirm them openly. Here’s a guy who made two careers out of championing what he’s now denouncing. As a public figure, he knew the moment he posted this that he’d be subjecting himself to a torrent of bad faith insults and sectarian drivel. While this can’t have been easy, I’m glad he followed his conscience and spoke out. Given the hold organized religion has over people’s lives and the undeserved deference toward faith in this country, more skepticism is always and everywhere appreciated. I trust his story will be a comfort to many struggling through the same questions and obscurantism in their own churches and communities. I know it would have resonated with me back in 2011 when my faith began to crumble.

Goodwin’s far from alone — ex-vangelicalism is a genre unto itself — but it’s not every day that someone of his caliber and notoriety delivers a forthright postmortem on their exodus from Christianity. I look forward to hearing more from him in the future.

 
 
As an ex-vangelical myself, I always feel the need to comment on these sorts of things. I chalk it up to a mix of residual guilt on the one hand and a felt obligation to speak out on the other, each stemming from the fact I once counted myself among the rank and file of this deeply misguided demographic. More than that, I was an active participant on the wrong side of the culture war for several years before I decided to put my nose in a book not called the bible and lend an ear to those outside of my highly circumscribed bubble.

On the plus side, spending those first two decades of my life enmeshed in a retrogressive culture imparted an insider’s perspective that, combined with my post-Christian experience, can serve as a prism through which others may better understand the evangelical mindset. One development people have trouble wrapping their heads around is white evangelicalism’s close ties to anti-mask and other Covid-centric denialism, as covered in the The New York Times story linked above.

With more than a third of the country identifying as “born-again” or evangelical, and nearly half of white evangelicals saying they would decline vaccination, it’s looking more and more like a real possibility that this group could prevent us from reaching herd immunity and returning to some semblance of normal life. We need to talk about it.

It’s not that there’s some innately Christian reason for evincing skepticism about vaccines (or indeed about science), or a longrunning textual tradition that grounds conspiracist ideas about the pandemic. There is, to be sure, an emphasis in evangelicalism on faith healing and divine cures, and indeed some evangelicals may cite such convictions in defense of their contrarianism. There’s also the mark of the beast story from Revelation that some Christian and other groups have worked into their batshit theories about Covid vaccines being vehicles for implanting microchips in everyone (courtesy of Bill Gates of course). But these are not primarily what’s driving resistance within this group.

It’s less about religion than about politics. Evangelicalism is best understood as a political movement at this point in our nation’s history. Over the last four decades and change — ever since the Moral Majority movement in the Reagan years spearheaded by the late Jerry Falwell — especially white evangelicalism has more or less merged with the Republican Party in the US to the extent the two may as well be synonymous. It’s where the term “Christian right” found its origin. The two factions are so closely aligned that they serve as reciprocal echo chambers, each taking cues from the other in a concerted effort to crush liberal progressivism.

Throughout the past year, evangelicals’ preferred partisan authorities (i.e., conservative politicians and pundits) have parroted skeptical noises about masks and vaccines, and they’ve adopted these ideas in turn. Anthony Fauci’s scientific credentials are utterly irrelevant, associated as he is with Democrats and the liberal intelligentsia in their eyes. Even pastors and church leaders have been supplanted by Fox News and radio personalities. Time formerly spent in prayer and religious instruction is now devoted to consuming conservative media in its sundry forms. In short, their religious identity has become subservient to their political identity.

And it’s been this way in evangelical circles for quite some time now. When Trump arrived on the scene, most white evangelicals handed him their endorsement without a second thought: he was merely the next conduit for achieving their political goals and aspirations. That he despised the left as much as they do and rehashed the same familiar rhetoric they imbibe on a daily basis were the only ‘qualifications’ he needed. His religious cred was a factor as immaterial as Dr. Fauci’s scientific expertise. His white identity politics, meanwhile, only seemed to further endear him to this community. Unholy though it may be, the alliance between white evangelicalism and Trumpism was eminently predictable for anyone with insight into the Christian right. Not winning them over would have been the only real surprise, considering how far in advance this particular stage had been set for Trump’s brand of politics, and thus we cannot give him credit even for this.

This all begins to make more sense once you recognize that modern evangelicalism is only thinly related to the forms of Christianity that developed in the centuries since Jesus’ death. It has almost nothing in common, for example, with the more thoughtful piety of Augustine or Origen or Aquinas or Warfield, or even C.S. Lewis, each of whom held views that don’t line up with fundamentalist takes on scripture, salvation, or science. The evangelicalism so prevalent in American society today is more of a social pathology that expresses itself as religion. When you hear from Christians who articulate viewpoints at odds with mainstream science, the focus isn’t so much on religious premises as political ones; their worldview is grounded in a contrarian, anti-liberal, anti-D/democratic ethos that prides itself on anti-intellectualism and culture-war antagonism. The average white evangelical finds his or her central source of energy in political talking points, not religious convictions or creeds, and vaccine resistance is but the latest manifestation of this phenomenon.

Excerpts:

“The deeply held spiritual convictions or counterfactual arguments may vary. But across white evangelical America, reasons not to get vaccinated have spread as quickly as the virus that public health officials are hoping to overcome through herd immunity.

The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories. The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans. And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally.

There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.”

[…]

“White pastors have largely remained quiet. That’s in part because the wariness among white conservative Christians is not just medical, but also political. If white pastors encourage vaccination directly, said Dr. Aten, “there are people in the pews where you’ve just attacked their political party, and maybe their whole worldview.”

[…]

“At this critical moment, even pastors struggle to know how to reach their flocks. Joel Rainey, who leads Covenant Church in Shepherdstown, W.Va., said several colleagues were forced out of their churches after promoting health and vaccination guidelines.

Politics has increasingly been shaping faith among white evangelicals, rather than the other way around, he said. Pastors’ influence on their churches is decreasing. “They get their people for one hour, and Sean Hannity gets them for the next 20,” he said.”

Further reading and resources:

• White Evangelical Resistance Is Obstacle in Vaccination Effort
• The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind
• America may be close to hitting a vaccine wall
• The Right’s Fight to Make America a Christian Nation
• After Trump and Moore, some evangelicals are finding their own label too toxic to use
• ‘American Heretics’ Film Offers a Hopeful Vision for Religion’s Future

Image credit: AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File

 
 
A documentary project that debuted in the summer of 2019 can now be viewed on YouTube in its entirety. Beautifully titled American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel, the film is made available courtesy of Secular Student Alliance. The first hour and a half is the documentary, while the remaining runtime features a Q&A with one of the pastors, Reverend Marlin Lavanhar. The film profiles two different church communities in Oklahoma, one mainline Christian, the other Unitarian, each helmed by pioneering idealists devoted to reclaiming faith from the clutches of right-wing contemporary evangelicalism. It’s a timely and personal glimpse into the hardscrabble realities of establishing a more tolerant church presence in rural America.
 

 
Oklahoma is often considered the “reddest” state in America. Every single county went to Trump in 2016. Naturally, it also happens to be the veritable epicenter of the Bible Belt, with Tulsa occasionally designated the “buckle.” Roughly 79% of Oklahomans identify as Christian, predominantly Southern Baptist. The idea of liberal, justice-oriented churches thriving in such an unwelcoming, if not outright hostile, environment would strike many as preposterous on its face. And yet, as the film shows, that’s just what’s happening thanks to a few blessedly dedicated iconoclasts willing to challenge the statewide hegemony of the Christian right.

The Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City and All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, as havens for free thought and social-conscious messaging, provide a clear contrast to the thousands of Trumpified churches dotting the countryside. Comfortable with doubt and uncertainty, these are places that speak to rational believers who wish to be part of a community that espouses a Christianity decidedly less embarrassing to empathetic adults capable of critical thought. Pastors like Robin Meyers of Mayflower articulate approaches to faith and the Bible that don’t line up with those of Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., Mark Driscoll, Paula White, Robert Jeffress, Joel Osteen, and other evangelical heavyweights.

Central to the fissiparous nature of contemporary Christianity is hermeneutics — or the overall lens through which one views the Bible. The question of inerrancy is the elephant in the room that more often than not bogs down our theological disagreements, and though it’s never mentioned by name in the film, many of the issues explored run right into it. Debates over immigration and foreign policy, same-sex marriage, whether women can occupy leadership roles in the church, wealth and racial inequality, even climate change, all turn on the differing interpretive choices of one Christian tradition or another.

It’s a point of separation that’s highlighted especially well in the film thanks to the inclusion of New Testament scholar Dr. Bernard Brandon Scott. His didactic monologues help drive home that, at bottom, there’s a difference between how evangelical fundamentalists approach the Bible and how mainline Christians approach the Bible, and that difference matters. To be sure, biblical interpretation is a quandary that’s been with the church from the fourth century onward and, indeed, is responsible for much of the major denominational branching observed since that time. But the role of the Bible in relation to Christian identity, and the amount of deference due the texts in resolving the issues of our time, is the gravamen underlying much of the internecine Christian culture war today.

The cardinal theological and intellectual error committed by fundamentalists — apart from their ideological rigidity, perhaps — is their indifference to historical context. A collection of texts divorced from its original setting and intent sets up the expectation that the Bible can speak to whatever modern concerns one wishes to bring to it. Mainline Christians, by contrast, largely understand that a more responsible way to engage the Bible is not with a literal or scientific reading, but rather with one that seeks to understand these writings in light of their ancient context and the perspectives and concerns of its (eminently fallible) composers. The latter outlook allows the mainline Christian to dispense with the notion that the Bible must inform every aspect of modern social, political, and theological life.

Put another way, mainline Christians believe God is larger than the Bible, even while the Bible points to God, while fundamentalists in large part believe God and the Bible to be one and the same. For the evangelical fundamentalist, thus, the Bible is, in effect, an idol. By equating the Bible with God itself, they elevate a physical text to an object of mystical devotion. As Dr. Scott pointedly remarks early on, the kind of idolatrous attachment that treats the Bible as essential to Christianity is an awkward position to stake out since in fact there was no biblical canon until some three centuries following Jesus’ death.

Such a paradigm extends beyond mere theology and into culture, as we’ve witnessed in recent decades, most poignantly over the last four years. The unholy alliance between Trump and evangelicals — and white evangelicals in particular — is a topic that’s been probed at length by folks much smarter than me, but there does seem to be some connective tissue between regarding the Bible as a supreme and inerrant authority on the one hand, and the willingness to not only embrace a coarse strongman like Trump but to overlook his obvious lies and contradictions and insist he can do no wrong in the face of incontrovertible evidence on the other. Amid repeated setbacks in the arena of politics and social mores, evangelicals see in Trump a return to form, a chance to recover the patriarchal, white nationalist paradigm under which they’ve always flourished.

But if the Trump era has taught us anything about religion, it’s that one can no longer compartmentalize their faith from their politics. Self-aware Christians have awoken to the fact that siding with a president who dehumanizes asylum-seeking refugees by separating their families and stuffing them in overcrowded facilities is a monstrous affront to the gospel; that demonizing outsiders and ethnic minorities (categories to which, as a Jew living under Roman rule, Jesus belonged) cannot be reconciled with the texts of the New Testament; that abject cruelty for cruelty’s sake is incongruous with the lovingkindness exemplified in the figure of Jesus. Such Christians exist everywhere in America, including in Oklahoma.

Toward the end of the film, Reverend Carlton Pearson, who once served under televangelist Oral Roberts, says that he believes churches like Mayflower and All Souls Unitarian will be the “premier megachurches in the next 10 years.” I don’t know how his prediction will pan out, but I do think that something has to give in terms of the relationship between evangelicalism and Trumpian politics. For Christianity to remain relevant in a rapidly secularizing society, it must examine its theology in response to new evidence and information and to the forces of social change. It cannot continue clinging to discredited ideas, outmoded belief systems, and archaic cultural conventions while expecting to appeal to informed, rationally minded people in the twenty-first century — not if they want to stop seeing younger people, who tend to have much lower tolerance for bigotry and Trumpist behavior, disaffiliate.

To be sure, the roots of this culture will be difficult to extirpate. Fundamentalist churches have been committing open intellectual fraud on their congregations for decades now, adopting a kind of absolutism to ward off disagreement and branding anyone who disagrees with them as ‘heretics,’ atheists, and the like. As a result, their fervent members are none too disposed to step out of their echo chamber and honestly consider competing perspectives, conditioned as they are to rationalize away whatever dissonance happens to penetrate their carefully managed bubble. I hardly expect this social climate to deteriorate completely in the coming years, and I anticipate the voices that have fallen out of favor will incline toward more incendiary (and more infantile) rhetoric as the cultural battle lines continue to sharpen. But if these communities want to slow the hemorrhaging of young folks in particular, at a minimum they’ll need to shed their Trumpist associations.

As for whether a more mature and sensible evangelicalism will eventually displace what we see today across rural America, I’m admittedly less hopeful. I actually don’t think the regressive, reactionary strand of Christianity can be ‘saved’ from the dishonesty of the antiscience, anti-academia, anti-social justice industrial complex, because the patient could not possibly survive the surgery. The inhumility and incuriosity, to say nothing of the rampant hypocrisy, are too deeply baked into the cultural psyche. My hope, though, is that while evangelical churches may continue to exist, with all their backward ideological baggage intact, we’ll see them become smaller in size and shallower in influence as their more cognizant counterparts leave the fold for more mainline, progressive-postured churches.

Further reading and resources:

• Secular Student Alliance premiere of “American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel”
• Defending God, No Matter the Cost
• Creating a More Inclusive Christianity Takes More than Love Alone
• Review: The Unlikely Disciple
• Review: God Behaving Badly
• Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

 
 
Ever since I wrote a review of David Lamb’s book God Behaving Badly a few years back, I get the occasional email from evangelical apologists eager to defend the violent and vindictive personality of the Old Testament god. Sometimes they’ll send me excerpts of similar treatises in exchange for an honest review. All of them variously yet forthrightly insist that the god of the Old Testament is not actually bloodthirsty and actually he hates violence. There’s never any balance or caveats issued in these responses, only levels of certainty that seem desperate and out of place given the source material.

It reminds me a lot of Trump supporters who insist that 45 never mocked a disabled journalist and actually he didn’t mock Christine Blasey Ford, either. Except he did. How do we know? Because we watched him do it. On camera. We heard it with our ears and witnessed it with our eyes. All of us did. Even you.

Such overt and shameless gaslighting is prevalent in apologist circles as well. Even once we peel past the multiple layers of historical-critical study, the Hebrew texts present an unambiguously bloodthirsty, jealous, vengeful, capricious, ableist, sexist, and provincial god who evinces no apparent continuity with the moral and social sensibilities many of us (especially self-described progressives) possess today. It is there on the page, in every translation, as pervasive as it is troubling. Unless you’re willing to forego intellectual honesty and simply disregard or ignore dozens of stories and passages, I don’t see how one could conclude otherwise.

Now you can say that a lot of what’s described in the Old Testament didn’t actually happen and was merely symbolic anthropomorphism common to the era. Like maybe Samson didn’t actually bludgeon 1,000 men with a donkey’s jawbone. Maybe God didn’t really summon a bear to maul forty-two young boys. Perhaps the Israelites weren’t out there slaughtering their enemies in the hundreds of thousands as the texts allege. Maybe God wasn’t as much of a fan of cannibalism as the prophets seem to think. Maybe it was the ancients, and not the gods in which they professed to believe, who valued virgin daughters as salvageable plunder. Perhaps Bronze Age tribesmen really were just virulent homophobes and imputed these attitudes to the local deities. Perhaps.

But most of the apologists I come across never gesture towards this possibility, declining even to entertain it as a way of defusing the perennial concerns that undermine the Bible’s reputation as a portrait of morality and goodness. No room for fallibility, human or otherwise. It’s inerrancy or bust. Still. In 2018.

One email I received over the summer, which I recently got around to reading, was a mini-pamphlet of sorts which argued that in fact the Old Testament advocates for nonviolence, because Jesus was a pacifist and since Jesus is part of the same triune entity of which the OT god is a part, the OT god must be a god of love also.

I expected a punchline but none were forthcoming. Rather than attempt to piece together that trainwreck of a syllogism, I left it alone to wallow in its own cesspool of surface absurdity. But maybe that’s the point? Provide a few neat and tidy answers to soothe the doubts of uncritical readers. Never mind that these content-free, semi-comprehensible explanations aren’t taken seriously outside fundamentalist circles. Time and again, when faced with difficult questions concerning biblical violence, evangelicals twist themselves in logical knots in their attempts to defend the indefensible.

What the author never seems to address head on is this: If Jesus stands against violence, then why is the Old Testament chock full of it? Instead he shoehorns in a number of undefended presuppositions that, it goes without saying, would almost certainly be rejected by the Jewish community, and inconsistently applies them, all while neglecting Jewish perspectives on the Torah (something I’ve grown particularly interested in as of late).

Through it all, the impulse to justify God’s illustrious roster of misdeeds is ever-present, this despite the fact that most sane-headed people wouldn’t think of justifying such atrocities in any other context. Can you imagine evangelicals defending a state-led policy to cleanse a neighboring territory of their firstborn children, simply because they believed in different gods, as described in Exodus 12? Or a military invasion, rationalized on similarly religious grounds, that razed entire cities — its people and its livestock — à la Deuteronomy 13? Stripped of its biblical trappings, would they endorse the intolerance of Leviticus 21 in which the handicapped and disabled are denied food and other aid because of their physical ailments?

That Jesus embraced and healed the blind and the crippled on multiple occasions only serves to underscore the disparate nature of these texts and why the problem of harmonization remains as hot a topic as it has always been. One is either willing to compromise their values arbitrarily or they aren’t. And the Bible offers a salient litmus test for measuring one’s commitment to moral truth.

Pressed long and hard enough on their forlorn attempts to justify Old Testament violence, evangelicals will at some point invariably punt to the aura of mystery, arguing that God’s will is complex and cannot be deciphered by mere human reason, after which they will no doubt proceed to tell us all about the mind of God — his wishes and desires, his intentions and motives, his values and politics, his gender.

That is, when apologists find themselves beaten back by historically informed argument, they retreat to uncertainty. ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ But not, of course, when it comes to things like gay people and evolution, apparently. You cannot declare God mysterious, ineffable, and unknowable and in the next breath give his Wikipedia bio. ‘We cannot comprehend God. Now I’ll go on to explain what he’s all about.’ No. That’s not how this works.

In the end, Christian fundamentalists want it both ways. They use uncertainty to shield off thorny questions, but on matters that cut close to their personal convictions and theological tenets the indefinite becomes fixed and non-negotiable. Suddenly God’s will is self-evident; skepticism is abandoned for marks of group identity. Beliefs arrived at through such desultory, schizophrenic means become dangerous when pushed into contexts where they do real harm. Far better is it, as many theologians both Jewish and Christian have urged, to grapple honestly with doubt, allow it a seat at the table, than to run circles around it and compromise your moral integrity in the process.

Note: This article is adapted from a Facebook post here.

Further reading:

• Ten Common Misconceptions About the Bible
• CNN: Do agnostics know more than believers?

 
 
To the enduring saga of faith-filled folks who mistake ancient creation myths for science, we can now add this spasm of befuddlement. Pastor Gene Kim of San Jose Bible Baptist Church has thought it necessary to bring his remarkably low brow mockery of evolution to a wider audience. In a six-minute argument from incredulity, Pastor Kim juxtaposes a selection of fairy tales alongside caricatures of the science he — and his narrow Christian worldview — need to be wrong.
 

 
Yikes. Hard though it may be for this pastor to wrap his head around evolutionary biology, it is surely harder to imagine that fellow Christians would find him a serviceable spokesman for the cause. Leaving his reverse eloquence completely to one side, it’s obvious he has no interest in understanding that which he must reject, and engages the opposition only long enough to quote-mine from them. Pairing silly fables with overwrought distortions of established science is then used as a ruse to sow doubt among unsuspecting believers. Poking fun at major evolutionary transitions is meant to create the impression that the underlying science is nonsense on its face — no further inquiry necessary.

Richard Dawkins, in his sweeping book, The Ancestor’s Tale, addresses this tendency to equate evolution with myth and fantasy. In “The Axolotl’s Tale” he writes:
 

“Fairy stories are filled with frogs turning into princes, or pumpkins turning into coaches drawn by white horses metamorphosed from white mice. Such fantasies are profoundly unevolutionary. They couldn’t happen, not for biological reasons but mathematical ones. Such transitions would have an inherent improbability value to rival, say, a perfect deal at bridge, which means that for practical purposes we can rule them out. But for a caterpillar to turn into a butterfly is not a problem: it happens all the time, the rules having been built up over the ages by natural selection. And although no butterfly has ever been known to turn into a caterpillar, it should not surprise us in the same way as, say, a frog turning into a prince. Frogs don’t contain genes for making princes. But they do contain genes for making tadpoles.” (p. 314)

 
Dawkins’s point is that evolution has an internal logic to it. The diversity we observe across nature can be readily explained through the interaction between genes and the environment in which they operate. Caterpillars morph into butterflies because that change has been written into their genes over millions of years. Tadpoles likewise mature into frogs and toads because they possess the necessary DNA for doing so. Indeed, we can identify the specific genes responsible in each case. A report that claimed to have reversed the physiological development of butterflies, turning them into caterpillars, would not be unthinkable on its face, for reasons that bear no relevance to the regime of myth.

Never mind that the transition from land back to the sea by our mammalian ancestors involves a series of some of the most brilliant discoveries in all of science. Or that bodyplans subjected to environmental changes can shift over time and diverge from earlier lineages in accordance with natural selection is as well documented a theory as any other in the literature. That barriers to gene flow encourage population splitting and divergence, and so forth.

One could proceed endlessly with evidence-based rebuttals, but anyone who’s been roped into this rodeo long enough knows that it’s never ultimately the scientific evidence that compels creationists to reject evolution so much as their rigid attachment to doctrinaire Christianity. It’s about faith, not evidence. And evangelical faith, particularly among Americans, is tied to specific and narrow interpretations of the biblical texts. Information, no matter how neutrally presented, is only given a fair hearing if it is not perceived as in conflict with the set of Christian doctrines they consider non-negotiable. The unfortunate corollary is that delving into the science can only prove effective for someone who cares more about what the science says than what (they think) their Bible says.

It cannot be emphasized enough how damaging this can be to one’s intellectual development. When seeking out new and different ideas, vetting your beliefs, and adjusting the strength of your beliefs on the basis of new evidence are systematically discouraged, growth becomes impossible. And the longer one is locked into an echo chamber of like voices and ideological conformity, the more difficult it becomes to break free and adopt new ways of thinking — and the more extreme the response once that freedom comes. As the canny Jane Smiley wrote, “A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes — and it will come — may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system.”

In one sense this young man is absolutely right: of course it is easier to dodge the difficult questions than to expend effort in answering them — especially when so much is at stake. A worldview reorientation can seem too high a cost to bear. Faced with these anxieties, and the complexities of science and philosophy, why not embrace the soothing balm of the supernatural? Why not opt for the comparatively simpler explanations offered by creationism? Why rock the boat when it’s easier to go on believing what your pastor and parents say is true? The thought of acquiring the resources to approach these questions differently can be intimidating, and many choose to avoid the process altogether.

Misspent Youth

Fear of the unknown can be a powerful demotivator, but it can also come at great cost. How many lifelong fundamentalists could have spent their years not attacking science but doing something truly worthwhile? How many of them could have been placed in professions for which they were better suited and contributed meaningful discoveries to the human condition? How many might have spent their careers fostering a generation of open-minded, tolerant men and women instead of misleading innocent youth?

This is why I tend not to share in the chorus of laughter that often accompanies creationist antics like these. What others find “hilarious” I find profoundly sad. I see lost potential in those formative years of carefully cultivated intellectual deprivation that inevitably culminate in an army of mindless drones who shy away from questioning authority and examining their inherited tradition. Fundamentalists like Kim have been lied to about science and about evolution from an early age, and now take it upon themselves to share those lies with others on the earnest belief they are doing ‘the Lord’s work’. The next time we’re given cause to wince and chuckle, we might take a moment to imagine what a refocused zeal, as opposed to an unkindled curiosity, could look like.

This intergenerational problem of trickle-down ignorance — not unique to America but thoroughly typified here — won’t end until we cultivate a world where the concern for what is true supersedes the felt need to be right, even if it means we abandon those beliefs we dearly wish to be true, no matter how long we’ve held them or how cognitively comfortable we find them.

External link: Pastor offers hilariously bad takedown of evolution: ‘It’s more easier to believe in something supernatural’

This post was featured on HuffPost’s Contributor platform.

 
 
Here’s my submission to John Loftus’ call for responses to a Q&A in an upcoming Christian documentary on miracles and the evidence thereof. What follows is probably not sound-bitey enough to be used, but I was on a roll and couldn’t stop. Do take note of (7), as it draws from personal experience growing up as a fundamentalist Christian.

(1) Why do you believe I should not believe in God?

You’re welcome to believe whatever you want, and in any god of your choosing. But whatever you believe should be preceded by honest engagement with the evidence, defensible by way of rational argument, and continually challenged and interrogated in the form of skeptical inquiry. That last bit is critical. After all, if your beliefs can’t stand up to scrutiny, the scrutiny is not the problem. And regularly having to explain away inconvenient evidence is a good sign that your beliefs are ready for revision. Such insights can and should be exported far beyond the matter of belief in God.

(2) What’s a miracle?

This is less a historical or scientific question than a philosophical or metaphysical question. How to approach miracles and the supernatural in a formal sense remains a methodological challenge upon which none of us wholly agree. One commonly given definition of a ‘miracle’ is that it is a suspension of the natural order or the known laws of physics, often attributed to supernatural as opposed to natural agencies. This definition places the referent outside historical and scientific methods.

For example, the question of whether Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, and raised bodily from the dead; whether the angel Moroni appeared before Joseph Smith; whether the prophet Muhammad split the moon in two and ascended to heaven on a winged horse — conventionally these aren’t questions that either historians or scientists are methodologically equipped to answer. Rather, these are theological questions with philosophical underpinnings that go beyond what the historian can attest.

The reasons being that (1) these disciplines lack the critical methods to resolve questions of metaphysical complexity and (2) such questions imply certain realities that run counter to the factual uniformity of nature and our current rational scientific understanding. While we hang a question mark over miracle claims of the past, we do acknowledge the presence of theological elements and incorporate how beliefs about the supernatural operated within their historical context. That is, historians can address how ancient peoples understood concepts of the divine, how widespread such beliefs were, what effects they had on society and culture, and how those effects informed, set the stage for, and enabled us to make better sense of later events, without rendering a verdict on the historicity of individual theological perspectives.

The key point here is that answers to questions about the supernatural cannot rest on historical or scientific evidence alone. As the biblical scholar Dr. James Tabor writes:
 

“As far as the subjects of the miraculous and the supernatural, historians of religions remain observers. The fact is we do not exclude religious experience in investigating the past–far from it. We actually embrace it most readily. What people believe or claim to have experienced becomes a vital part of our evidence…Historians likewise deal with “beliefs” about the afterlife and the unseen world beyond, but without asserting the historical reality of these notions or realms. We can evaluate what people claimed, what they believed, what they reported, and that all becomes part of the data, but to then say, “A miracle happened” or this or that “prophet” was truly hearing from God, as opposed to another who was utterly false prophecy, goes beyond our accessible methods.”

(3) What is knowledge?

Another philosophical question with few convergent answers. One definition which gained steam during the Enlightenment, and may date as far back as Plato, is this notion of ‘justified true belief’. This formulation calls for a belief to be true insofar as one’s belief that it is true is justified, either by evidence, argument or otherwise.

I will typically simplify things by saying that one’s claim to knowledge is justified provided it adheres to one or more basic standards of intellectual honesty: namely that we proportion our beliefs to the evidence and adjust our conclusions to the strength of that evidence. Echoing the late philosopher John Dewey, the idea is not to invoke beliefs we merely wish to be true, or latch onto any compelling or fanciful notion that comes our way, but rather to withhold judgment until justifying reasons are found.

(4) Under what circumstances would it be rational to believe a healing miracle occurred? When would it not be rational?

The latter question is easier than the former. It would not be rational to accept claims of healing miracles for which perfectly reasonable natural explanations are readily available. For example, appealing to supernatural agency to explain the recovery of a cancer patient is not rational since we know that spontaneous remission from cancer is a natural process that occurs with some regularity.

Miracle claims associated with Lourdes are of this variety, as Michael Nugent has pointed out. Of the 200 million or so people who’ve traveled to Lourdes, there have been 69 recognized miracles since the Middle Ages — a 1 in 3 million chance of being cured. That’s considerably less than the natural rate of recovery for common illnesses like cancer. It’s also difficult to explain, by way of supernatural agency, why 90% of those cured happen to be women.

A circumstance in which an amputee regrows a lost limb would constitute more compelling evidence that a miracle claim had occurred, since this is not known to happen among primates. This is just one example that could meet certain criteria for a healing miracle. For a comprehensive exploration of what evidence for the supernatural might look like more generally, see my essay What Would Convince You in which I outline the kinds of claims that, if true, I would find convincing, regardless of whether they were to point to the God of Christianity or any of the other deities to which humans have ascribed such claims.

That said, the bar for validating claims associated with miracles and supernatural meddling should be tremendously high at this point in human history, owing, among other things, to their historically fraught track record. No examples exist of phenomena once explained by science that were later found to be better explained by the supernatural, but plenty of examples exist in reverse. It’s no accident that as science marched ahead, miracle claims took a nosedive.

As William Inge writes in Christian Ethics and Modern Problems (1930, p. 198):
 

“Spinoza, who identified the divine will and natural law, had to pronounce miracles a priori impossible: but the Rationalist, who does not see the logic of believing in an omnipotent power and then limiting its capabilities, makes it entirely a question of evidence. There is no more sound evidence of such things at Lourdes than in the Middle Ages or ancient Judaea, and the fact that they were once understood to happen daily, and to have decreased with the progress of exact inquiry, is significant enough.”

 
Were we presented with observational evidence more denotative of supernatural as opposed to natural phenomena, would it then be within reason to lend credence to the miracle claim? Well, maybe, maybe not. It would depend on the specifics of any single occurrence. But in practice, how would we know what to look for?

And therein lies the dilemma. The abstract nature of the “supernatural” as a concept beleaguers our ability to intelligibly discuss it. Since the referent(s) the term is meant to describe has never been quantified in any formal sense, it’s doubtful we would possess the means to identify such a thing were it to occur. And even if we did, we’d still have little reason to opt for the supernatural explanation over the natural one given our vast capacity for error on this score. Absent any especial characteristics, we would always be left with the nagging suspicion that anything attributed to supernatural causes would inevitably fall prey to Clarke’s Third Law, destined to serve as yet another placeholder for a more informed appreciation of the natural world.

(5) Why should I have a bias against supernatural claims?

See (4) above. Rather than “bias,” I prefer to say that any claims of the miraculous or supernatural ought to be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism simply due to the longrunning trajectory of mistakenly ascribing phenomena to non-natural and religious explanations only to later be accounted for by natural processes. Scientific discovery has consistently raised the curtain on our intuitions and our hard-wired predispositions to patternicity and agenticity, among other ornaments of human cognition.

Put simply, when we lacked answers, we invented our own. Science offered a way forward by testing the received wisdom against observation. But old habits die hard.

As Sean Carroll has put it:
 

“There is no way of proving once and for all that the world is not magic; all we can do is point to an extraordinarily long and impressive list of formerly-mysterious things that we were ultimately able to make sense of. There’s every reason to believe that this streak of successes will continue, and no reason to believe it will end.”

 
In the natural sciences, we tend to adhere to a rubric known as methodological naturalism (MN). This is not necessarily taken a priori but it is one that gradually caught fire in the scientific community because we found that invoking the supernatural didn’t aid in our ability to do science. That such explanations didn’t augment the scientific process in any way — that they didn’t help us in understanding how the universe works. Our theories work just fine without them.

Of course, the ultimate irony lies with those who in one breath decry MN and in the next declare that miracles, gods, and the like are questions that lie outside of science. That can’t be right.

(6) What are natural occurrences that people often mistake for miracles?

The tendency to assign ordinary workings of the universe and the human body to supernatural causation is ancient, and observed as far back as we have historical evidence. A return to health after suffering illnesses from which people naturally recover — from cancer to the common cold — are often attributed to divine intervention. Fundamentalist types take seemingly every opportunity to ascribe natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes to God’s wrath or vengeance. This is perhaps a slight improvement over pre-Socratic Greece, where earthquakes were pinned on Poseidon stomping around like a madman drunk with rage — or maybe just drunk.

Another example would be “close calls,” as exemplified by one of the characters in the recent Netflix original drama series Ozark. Jason Bateman’s character meets a pastor who recounts a harrowing story that ultimately led to his religious conversion. Years earlier he had waltzed into a convenience store in the midst of being robbed. The thief had a gun, and shot him in the chest. The bullet narrowly missed his critical arteries and he survived. Only a heavenly Providence could explain this apparent miracle that allowed him to survive while two others bled out on the floor around him.
 

Oldie but a goodie.

(7) What advice would you give people in the Pentecostal/Charismatic tradition?

As someone who grew up in the Charismatic tradition of Pentecostal Christianity, I would encourage people to question the teachings and those who offer them. Question your youth leaders and question your pastors. Engage your peers in theological discourse. Pose skeptical questions and counterarguments. Esteem your beliefs by challenging them. Put the doctrines and dogmas of your church under the microscope and ask whether they pass logical and moral muster. Evaluate whether they can be squared with a rational understanding of the physical world. Research, research, research. Subject your faith to a skeptical examination of the Bible — its origins, authorship, composition, and preservation. Study up on other world religions and their sacred texts.

Pursue knowledge for its own sake. Be open and willing to revise those beliefs that fall astride of the facts. Learn to favor doubt and residual uncertainty, to resist blind dogmatism and stubborn absolutism. Seek out democratic discussion over echo chambers free of dissent. Step out of your ideological comfort zone, thrust yourself into new contexts, and seek out people of differing perspectives and worldviews. If you only entertain views you already agree with, you will be ill-equipped to make an informed decision. Making an informed decision only works when you have alternatives to choose from.

Never suppress the urge to question or pass up an opportunity to critically examine your beliefs. Wield skepticism like the virtue it is, and steer clear of those who condemn you for it. Refuse to accept convenient answers and recycled rationalizations that only validate your existing biases and deeply held convictions. Follow the evidence.
 

Joel Osteen is an anti-intellectual demagogue. Don’t be like Joel Osteen.

Further reading:

• Do Historians Exclude the Supernatural?
• The Historian and the Resurrection
• Alex Malpass and Arif Ahmed: On Miracles

Feature image credit: Supernatural, Sn. 9. Credit: Diyah Pera/The CW © 2013 The CW Network. All Rights Reserved

 
 
More than 200,000 gathered in DC for the People’s Climate March last month, with sister marches taking place in 370 cities across the nation. Accompanied by lively chanting and clever signage, activists, demonstrators and concerned citizens showed up en masse to communicate the importance of protecting our environment and our way of life from a rapidly changing climate. Many also came out in protest of Trump — who continues to dither on whether to pull out of the Paris accord — and an administration that sees climate funding as a “waste” of taxpayer money. More than anything else, it was a day dedicated to speaking out on behalf of future generations and jump-starting a more solution-focused conversation on climate.

Shortly before the march I put out a call on Facebook to watch for and promote coverage of bipartisan turnout. One of the reasons talk about climate change remains a hot-button issue in Washington — other than the hegemonic sway of the fossil fuel industry, of course — is that conservative voices who speak sensibly on the subject aren’t given any visibility. And that’s not because such voices don’t exist. At the grassroots level, and even in the halls of Congress, there are conservatives and evangelicals committed to shaking up the status quo. The more we prop up the bellwethers and nonconformists the sooner telling the truth about climate will be seen not as a contentious political act but as an essential public duty.

If last month’s Climate March is any indication, there are promising signs that the sea change we’ve been waiting for may already be underway. PBS NewsHour aired a story yesterday on the conservative face of the environmental movement, showcasing a number of conservative and evangelical activists who organized and demonstrated in DC. Meet the “Eco-Right,” as they’ve come to be called, a motley, big-tent community united by the conviction that climate change represents an existential risk and policy priority that transcends party lines.

We have Saskia De Melker, NewsHour videographer and journalist — and a good friend of mine — to thank for this story. As she writes on Facebook:
 

“It’s no surprise that climate change has been one among the many issues dividing Republicans and Democrats here in the U.S. But there are a growing number of conservative voices rising up to address climate change….. and they’re proposing solutions and talking about the issue in a way that resonates with those on the right side of the aisle.

Stephanie Sy, Laura J. Fong and I have spent loads of time these last couple months learning about and documenting the views and work of key leaders in this growing “eco-right” movement including young Christians and House Republicans, an influential Republican donor and Reagan’s Secretary of State George P. Shultz.”

 
One group they profile is Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, who see stewardship of the planet as a central obligation of their faith, along with the Christian concern for “the least of these.” The effort to harmonize the ethic of environmentalism and conservation with the Christian message places groups like YECA largely outside the evangelical mainstream. According to the latest Pew poll, just 28% of white evangelicals, for example, accept that rising temperatures are due to human activities, while 37% say there is no solid evidence the planet is even warming. Despite these cultural impediments, YECA leaders like Kyle Meyaard-Schaap hope to mobilize a new generation of climate-oriented evangelicals.

George Shultz, former secretary to Presidents Reagan and Nixon, and Andy Sabin, a moneyed GOP donor who hopes to one day bend Trump’s ear on climate-friendly policies, are interviewed as well. Shultz now heads up the Climate Leadership Council, an international research and advocacy group who recently published a conservative, Paris-compliant case for carbon dividends.

Perhaps the most exciting news on the bipartisan front is the Climate Solutions Caucus in the House. It was founded just last year by two representatives from Florida — one Republican and the other Democrat. New members must abide by the same pattern; in order to join, you must recruit someone from across the aisle. House membership currently sits at 38 representatives.

These are refreshing flickers of hope at a time when resentment and disillusionment seem more accessible options. We often wonder what progress we might have made were our elected leaders en bloc committed to taking climate change seriously. We consider where we’d be under a Congress in which wholesale denial of the underlying science didn’t dominate the thinking of one of the two major parties, a world in which caring about the environment wasn’t counted as a “liberal” cause. Building bridges across ideological lines has become more important than ever in forging this reality.

The recent Climate March is a single, albeit high-profile, measure of success, but if the right voices catch momentum we may soon find that sanity on climate has at last found a home among mainstream conservative thought. Faced with mounting ecological risk and a crisis with intergenerational ramifications, millennials of all stripes are no longer willing to sit idly by as we continue down the path of environmentally unsustainable energy sources long past their expiration date. Innovation and progress are well within the realm of plausibility, and it’s joint solutions that will get us there. Trump & Co. may be choosing to bury their head in the sand, but the increasingly bipartisan call to action is a story that can hardly be ignored.
 

External link: Rising conservative voices call for climate change action

Further reading:

• Christian Earth Day lessons: worship by protecting creation
• Republicans Offer to Tax Carbon Emissions
• Depressing Video Tracks Shift in Conservative Leadership on Climate

 
 
Friend Cory Markum is launching an exciting new project called Hinge — a collaboration between an atheist and a pastor exploring questions of religion and philosophy concentrated on the figure of Jesus Christ. Cory and his co-host Drew Sokol will travel around the country, interviewing such high-profile names as Stephen Law, Matt Dillahunty, Philip Yancey, Michael Shermer, Craig Blomberg, Mike Licona and Robert Price. Check out their intro and pitch below.
 

 
The pitch:
 

“In one sense, Hinge is a story-driven podcast about this enigmatic and incomparable historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth. Who was he? Why do historians come to such opposite conclusions about what he said and did? Why has the story of his life had such an enormous impact on the world? Is it right to call him the hinge of Western Civilization itself? And what on earth do we do with the miracle claims?

But in another sense, Hinge is about so much more than that. Beyond historical inquiries, Hinge is about people and the human experience. As engrossing as the story of Jesus is, what’s just as gripping are the experiences of people who wrestle with the claims about his life. We want to tell their stories–powerful stories of belief, doubt, and the manner in which they govern our lives, for better or worse. These stories, sometimes humorous and uplifting, other times heart-wrenching and hard to listen to, will be weaved into a captivating exploration of history, religion, and even scientific discovery about the most revered man in the history of our species.”

 
While I support the aims of the project in principle, I do take issue with two of the above names straight off the bat: Mike Licona and Robert Price. As I see it, these are two sides of the same problematic coin in that neither represent mainstream biblical scholarship. Not even close, in fact.

Licona is a professor at Houston Baptist University who earned his MA at Liberty University, both right-wing fundamentalist institutions existing far outside anything resembling mainstream academia. His book on the resurrection is a piece of fundamentalist propaganda dressed up as historical-critical work (he even misuses the term “historiographical” in the title), and a sign of the weakness of the boundaries of the discipline. This is not a scholar committed to keeping his biases in check. He’s a biblical theologian, at best, and no amount of puffery about his book will make it into something it isn’t.

As for Price, he’s a favorite of Christ mythicists: those vocal skeptics who make the claim that no historical Jesus underlies the New Testament gospels. It’s of paltry concern to the mythicist base that the vast majority of relevant scholars — including Jews, atheists and agnostics — reject this proposition, in keeping with the methodological principles employed in the field. That the number of scholars who share Price’s views on the historical Jesus aren’t enough to fill a tinfoil hat is explained away by charges of institutional bias. The academy, they say, is stacked against mythicism, and systematically suppresses dissenting voices — which of course is the same line peddled by creationists and climate deniers.1

Like his ideologue-in-arms Richard Carrier, Price is regarded for straining evidence and reasoning beyond their breaking point. Most importantly, his conclusions have failed to convince historians who have taken the time to look at his work. Now knowing what I do about the gentlemen involved, I doubt this podcast will seriously entertain mythicism. But the reality is that Price’s views are so wacky and schizoid that his inclusion will inevitably muddle the conversation for listeners and could actually impair the podcast’s credibility by virtue of false balance. The fact that there exists an opposing view, regardless of its merits or lack thereof, does not mean it should be cast as legitimate as any other in the field. And since lay listeners are unlikely to know about Price’s standing in the field, they’re therefore unlikely to detect the false balance.

Both of these picks represent highly fringe scholarship, and I’m not the first to express concern that fundamentalists and other ideologically driven “scholars” are fractionating the field by substituting ideology for pragmatic historical method. In my mind, Price and Licona are two clear examples of this. But I suppose that’s a discussion for another day.

Despite the above reservations, the message of this project is more important than any of the guests they’ll be interviewing. The goal, I take it, is not ultimately to convert the other to their way of thinking, but rather to demonstrate the possibilities of civil conversation on polarizing issues. Confining ourselves to ideologically pure bubbles helps no one. This project should serve as a model for forging real connections across the aisle by highlighting the central human experience of grappling with belief and doubt. You can read more about their story on their Kickstarter page. Consider contributing if you’re so inclined.

1. Remember that appeals to majority are justified when the majority in question is the consensus of experts. A consensus in science or history exists for a reason. As in the case of climate change, a consensus this strong can only reflect the strength of the evidence on which it is based. Mythicists and deniers alike make it sound like these questions are based purely on a public opinion poll. But academic consensus is not based on popular opinion; it is based, in this case, on the historical evidence. And we cannot claim to value scholarship in one breath and then dismiss an entire field in the next. An overwhelming consensus is a powerful heuristic for deriving truth because it is based on comprehensive consideration of the available evidence.

 
 
In evangelical circles the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement — of Jesus serving as scapegoat for our sins — is more or less taken as a given. It is the essential theological mold from which the significance of the Cross is shaped, the canopy under which salvation and redemption converge in fulfillment of God’s will. God, through Jesus, paid the ultimate price for our sins by taking on a burden that no one else could carry. And only through God’s sacrifice were justice and forgiveness for our sin necessarily accomplished.

That this is just one way of seeing Christ’s death is often neither stated nor implied. An evangelical, particularly one growing up in so-called nondenominational Christianity, will no doubt be surprised to learn that not only does their model have a name, but that there are multiple other models (read: plural), in which penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) is a relative newcomer alongside ransom theory, Christus Victor, the moral influence view and others. For most of the Early Church period, ransom theory and moral influence theory held sway; PSA did not set down roots until the Reformation.

But this post is not primarily intended as a dig on evangelicals or a bemoaning of religious literacy. It is mainly to call attention to the problems and implications of the penal substitutionary view as preached from megachurch pulpits around the country, regardless of its basis in scripture. It was inspired, moreover, by a recent post from Benjamin Corey on Patheos. He does a decent job articulating the more frontal concerns of PSA, in particular its tension with the Jesus of the gospels:
 

“Here’s a question: if penal substitution is true, wouldn’t that make God a hypocrite? After all, it would mean God either cannot or will not do the very thing he asks us to do: forgive without demanding something on the part of the one who offended us.

Jesus tells us we are to forgive over and over again. He tells us that we should be loving toward our enemies to emulate God who is “kind to the ungrateful and wicked.” He tells us we should walk the extra mile, turn the other cheek, and to freely give without expecting in return.

However, if God demanded a blood sacrifice and was unwilling or unable to extend forgiveness without it, God himself is unwilling to follow the teachings of Jesus.”

 
These thoughts resurrected questions I had as a teenager. Why was a death — anyone’s death, especially the death of an innocent — required in order to redeem? Why couldn’t an omnipotent god, who repeatedly preached forgiveness and nonviolence and turning the other cheek, freely forgive sans the bloodshed? And was God’s “sacrifice” really a sacrifice at all? One might say he “rose” to the occasion a mere three days later. If, it could be argued, this is more akin to being spanked and sent home with a warning, this seems like a trivial punishment for an ultimate burden.

The substitution component should immediately strike us as strange. If a neighbor runs over my mailbox on the way home from the bar, I don’t go across the street and punish a different neighbor in his or her stead. If a crime is committed, we don’t jail a knowingly innocent person and let the felon off scot-free, even if they volunteer to do so as a courtesy to the felon. Notice how we have not adopted the biblical concept in criminal justice systems around the world, where the legal principle of personal responsibility predominates over ancient concepts of vicarious satisfaction and scapegoating.

But the bigger problem lies with PSA’s fundamental premise: that sin needs to be punished. From whence this cosmic statute, and why must God be bound by it? True forgiveness need not require anything in return. That’s what it means to offer something freely. A forgiving nature with no strings attached is a mark of good character, one admittedly difficult in practice but worthy of emulating.

Consider that when someone insults you, this can come with a personal cost to your self-esteem. The impulse to retaliate may be strong, but overcoming that impulse by walking away is an ethic of virtue. By contrast, the idea that this cost must be redressed through punishment to achieve some kind of restitution more bespeaks petty vindictiveness than goodness of character. This concept, moreover, surely was foreign to the canonical Jesus (Cf. Matt. 5), who expressed a Ghandi-like commitment to nonviolence and grace.

Now, I don’t think this principle runs through in every situation. If we take something like sexual assault, for instance, the moral imperative is not first to forgive and walk away, but to report the offender and, if possible, press charges so as to prevent the person from reoffending. (Though we should recognize that these are not always feasible or emotionally available options for the victim.)

Yet even if we qualify the ethic in this way, where does that leave us? Was our sinful nature curtailed through Christ’s death? No. Sin continued, just as it had before. So what did the Cross achieve? Remember that PSA teaches that Christ’s sacrifice was a prerequisite for grace and redemption. But then we’re right back where we started: why this prerequisite, and why must God be obligated to follow it? Why must forgiveness be conditional? What’s wrong with forgiveness without asterisks?

Aquinas saw these flaws clearly. The idea that there is a necessary connection between sacrifice and justice/forgiveness didn’t compute in his mind. He saw the two not as complementary but antithetical. In Summa Theologica III Q.46 a.2 ad 3, he writes:
 

“But if He had willed to free man from sin without any satisfaction, He would not have acted against justice. For a judge, while preserving justice, cannot pardon fault without penalty, if he must visit fault committed against another–for instance, against another man, or against the State, or any Prince in higher authority. But God has no one higher than Himself, for He is the sovereign and common good of the whole universe. Consequently, if He forgive sin, which has the formality of fault in that it is committed against Himself, He wrongs no one: just as anyone else, overlooking a personal trespass, without satisfaction, acts mercifully and not unjustly.”

 
On Aquinas’ view, it is of no cost to God to forgive us our sin without sacrifice, as God’s sovereignty is infinite. God’s answer to sin isn’t punishment, substitutionary or otherwise; it’s grace. And he gives it freely.

This is where an alternative conception like the moral influence view is advantageous. It doesn’t require us to explain the Cross in terms of God meting out justice for a sinful creation, or for that matter to awkwardly account for Jesus supposedly atoning for “original sin” in the context of an Old Earth complete with evolutionary processes. The moral influence perspective, rather, looks to Christ’s character and the example he served for humanity. It was this bold example — a seditious one given the historical context — for which he was ultimately put to death, and his legacy that we must continually strive to live up to each day. Christ’s death is no longer central to the narrative as with PSA, but a single data point in relation to Jesus’ teachings, the life he lived, the movement he founded, and his later resurrection.

On Faith and False Dichotomy

However we are to make sense of Christ’s death, contending that it was necessary for salvation and redemption seems to me a non-starter. That God’s sovereign plan would involve creating more death and violence and bloodshed in a world already shot through with mortality and suffering does not appear to be a good or sensible doctrine for the world to embrace. Nor are concepts like gruesome blood sacrifice and capital punishment qua righteousness particularly good messages to be taught to children. This always bothered me as a Christian.

The extreme penalty of carnage by crucifixion sits comfortably within the historical context in which Jesus emerged, as do Hellenistic and pre-Hellenistic motifs of scapegoating, martyrdom, and other sacrificial systems. These concepts do not, I think, sit well with the moral intuitions and ethical sensibilities of those of us living today.

We should further recognize that substitutionary atonement as a theological concept is a relatively recent innovation, rising to orthodoxy in the Reformation period through the work of Luther and Calvin and, later, Charles Hodge. As such, it represents a primarily Protestant evangelical understanding of the atonement which differs, in some ways dramatically, from Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox understandings as well as the liberal Protestant understanding which tends to affirm the moral influence view — the dominant view of the early Church.

I think there is a more crucial danger, however, in presuming the penal substitutionary view is the only view available to Christians, that it is the only valid view, that it originated with the early Church, or that it is less recent than competing views. These presumptions are dangerous because if a Christian who is put off by this particular theology, unable to square it with their faith in an unconditionally loving and forgiving God, believes it is the only view available to them, they may choose to dispense with their faith altogether rather than adopt a different understanding of the Cross.

We see precisely this same phenomenon all across the country in those who were brought up with a fundamentalist faith and taught that evolution is incompatible with Christianity, or that creationism is the only valid position for a Christian to affirm. Faced with the conflict between empirical reality and faith, many choose the former and leave their faith behind. If Christian leadership wishes to avoid turning away young people, they should be wary of setting up false dichotomies to appease their narrow theology.

External link: Some Problems I Have With Penal Substitution Theology of Atonement