Why Do Christians Keep on Being Christian?

There is so much wrong with their version of reality

 
Of course, there’s something seductive, irresistible, about believing you’re on splendid terms with the creator of the Cosmos. How great it is to be able to communicate—through meditation and prayer—with the force that guides the affairs of the world. But it’s an uphill battle to maintain that this is not delusional. It’s the gimmick that clergy of so many different religions have convinced their followers to embrace. Christianity is especially guilty.
 
 
So much wrong, 1: The Jesus Problem: We have no idea who he actually was
 
The devout Christians who show up for church, regularly or even occasionally, have no clue about the ongoing turmoil in Jesus studies. That is, among scholars—Christian and secular—who make it their business to study the New Testament, especially the gospels. It has proved to be impossible to verify any Jesus quote or event in the gospels. Devout scholars want to believe that the gospel stories are based on eyewitness accounts or on reliable oral tradition, but coming up with actual evidence that this is so has never been done. In fact, it would be dangerous to the faith to claim that many supposed Jesus-quotes are authentic, e.g., Luke 14:26 (you have to hate your family and life itself to be a disciple) and Mark 13:12-13 (the horrors and suffering that will accompany the arrival of the kingdom). There is far too much material in the gospels that reflects very poorly on Jesus. Here’s a list of 292 examples of Jesus-script that qualifies as bad, mediocre, and alarming. Devout scholars, carefully selecting texts that they want to believe are authentic, have come up with many different versions of who Jesus was. 
 
In fact, it’s more complex than that. Perhaps Jesus was a peasant preacher who attracted a following, people who believed in his connections with the divine, and who persisted in this belief after his death because they were convinced that he was resurrected. But dying-and-rising savior gods were popular in the ancient world, as Richard Carrier made clear in his 2018 essay, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. Several of these cults pre-date the rise of Christianity. Or as Carrier puts it, “Jesus was late to the party.”
 
Adding even more to the complexity, quite a few scholars have advanced arguments suggesting that Jesus never existed at all. The devout are likely to ridicule the very idea, yet are unwilling to read/study the case advanced by these scholars. Books by Richard Carrier, Earl Doherty, David Fitzgerald, and Raphael Lataster are powerful introductions to this topic.
 
So much wrong, 2: Priests and ministers, propagandists and even liars for Jesus
 
Back in the day when I was in the Methodist ministry, the clergy in town would occasionally arrange for ecumenical services, presumably to make the point that we were all followers of Jesus. So the various clergy participated in the service, but we never actually discussed theology—because we knew there were so many disagreements. So we just put on the show. 
 
But each one of us had been hired by our congregations to speak our denominational truths to our flocks. People respected our knowledge of the Bible, and trusted us to have wisdom derived from our knowledge of god. After all, we had seminary degrees. It never seems to have occurred to the folks in the pews that we were actually paid propagandists. Our role was to perpetuate the beliefs embraced by our denomination. There’s no doubt in my mind, however, that these local clergy were sincere and dedicated. 
 
However, it goes beyond that. There has been a lot of lying going on in the defense of Christian beliefs. Just a few days ago, John Loftus published here a compilation of articles on the theme of lying for Jesus. Indeed, lying has been rampant among apologists who are obsessed with defending the faith. He notes that apologists claim superior knowledge in a wide range of fields: they claim to know more than specialists:
 
“They always judge which of these scholars are correct based on their previously adopted faith with its sectarian interpretation of an ancient pre-scientific book, written mainly by anonymous people! This is either truly amazing or utterly ignorant! It's what you get by pretending to know that which you don't know, rather than practicing the virtue of authenticity. Defending the Christian faith requires special pleading. We already knew that. It's also an exercise lacking the virtue of authenticity, the antonyms of which are found online, with words like, counterfeit, fake, concocted, deceptive, delusory, disingenuous, inauthentic and misleading. ‘Liars for Jesus’ seems to be a phrase that fits.” (from one of his own articles, titled, Why Do So Many Christian Apologists Act Like Know-It-Alls? October 19, 2017)
 
There is another reality that is not as offensive as lying for Jesus, but which also causes damage. There are clergy who decline to enlighten the folks in their congregations about the turmoil in Jesus studies. Maybe they even had blinders on when they attended seminary, and didn’t really tune in to the profound disputes about Jesus. They wanted ordination, and careers designed to convince the faithful that Jesus was a living presence in their hearts. But honesty suffered.
 
So much wrong, 3: Christians have never been able to agree on the basics of their faith
 
By some estimates there are now 30,000 to 40,000 Christian denominations, divisions, sects, and cults. The splintering began at the very beginning—reflected in the contradictions that are so obvious in the New Testament. Just one example:
 
How do humans achieve eternal life?  
 
·     By eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus (John 6:53-58)
·     By saying with your lips and believing in your heart that Jesus was resurrected (Romans 10:9)
·    By being very compassionate—if you fail at this, you’ll end up in eternal fire instead of blissful eternal life (Matthew 25:31-46)
 
Naturally, Jews and Muslims disagree with Christian theology, but the most colossal idiocy is that Christians themselves disagreed on Christianity theology. Hence the endless arguments and splintering for hundreds of years. Sometimes Christian rage—at other Christians—can be lethal. The Thirty-Years War, 1618-1648, based largely on Catholic vs. Protestant strife, claimed four to 8 million lives. 

I grew up in a small town in rural northern Indiana, in the middle of the last century. There were only 1,600 people in the town, and yet we had four different Christian denominations: Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Christian—that is, there was a denomination that identified simply as Christian. Folks had no trouble forging strong friendships across these religious divides, but we were all pretty damn sure that the denomination we belonged to was the right one. How did we not see that there was something terribly wrong, terribly inappropriate with this divisiveness?  
 
 
 
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes:
·      Guessing About God (2023),
·   Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also available. 
·      Everything You Need to Know About Prayer But May Not Want to Admit (2025)
 
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
 
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.