Is the Death of Christian Belief Coming Soon?

Cheap knockoff superstitions are taking over

This really is a puzzle: why haven’t decent devout believers—by the millions—founded an organization called Christians Against Televangelism? They should be so appalled/enraged that televangelists have turned the faith into a showbusiness money-grab, enabling so many of them to become multi-millionaires. They’ve reimagined Jesus as big business, exploiting magical thinking found in the New Testament: believe in Jesus to get eternal life. This turned out to be a major made-for-TV gimmick. 

 

But televangelism is actually the crass culmination of the church’s centuries-long embrace of show business. Millions of churches have been built, the theatres—the stages—for performances. Among these are the spectacular cathedrals, with magnificent stained glass, paintings and sculptures. No one has been able to surpass the Catholic church, in terms of costuming, props, and ritual. All this makes it so easy to get away with magical thinking.

 

 

How long can this last? In his new book, The Death of Christian Belief, Robert Conner makes this point:

 

“If the history of religion teaches anything, it teaches that religions die. In the imagination of their adherents, religions are eternal, but they obviously aren’t—the world is strewn end to end with the temples, shrines, megalithic dolmens and stone circles, pyramids, inscriptions and images of hundreds of dead religions. No matter how completely religious belief and ritual command the present, there is never any guarantee they will command the future.” (Kindle, p. 68)

 

In my article here last week I commented on the first half of this excellent book, now let’s look at the last half. 

 

Chapter 4 is titled, Certifiably Crazy for Jesus, and at the outset, Conner observes:

 

“Speculation about the intersection of religion and insanity has obviously been around for a while and the connections (or lack thereof) continue to be vigorously debated in the present. Whether religious belief technically qualifies as psychosis we can leave to the professionals to thrash out, but it is beyond dispute that religious belief is—as often as not—functionally insane.”

 

Then he cites the horrible news from Kenya earlier this year that a cult had convinced people that starving to death for Jesus was a way to earn eternal life. Within a month it was determined that 201 people had died, and that 600 were missing. It’s not hard to figure out “…that literally anything—no matter how comically absurd, abysmally stupid, completely unhinged, or easily disproved—can be asserted under the aegis of ‘sincerely held religious belief’ clearly refutes any notion that religious belief is the product of common sense.” (p. 106, Kindle)

 

Conner notes that so many Jesus-believers “couldn’t pass a basic quiz about what the gospels say about Jesus.” (p. 106, Kindle) He points out that “the New Testament is a cookbook of crazy,” a primary example being Jesus-script in Matthew 18:3: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” This is typical cult technique: please don’t think about what we’re telling you—just take our word for it. One result of this approach is that so many laypeople don’t bother to read the gospels, and remain unaware of so much in the cookbook of crazy. 

 

Here's a sample: In Mark, Jesus transfers (presumably by a magic spell) demons from a man into pigs; he glows on a mountaintop while god speaks from water vapor (a cloud); in Matthew, at the moment Jesus died, dead people came alive in their tombs, then on Easter morning walked around Jerusalem; in Luke, the resurrected Jesus appeared to two of his followers on their way to Emmaus—but they didn’t recognize him. At dinner, as he broke bread, they suddenly knew who he was, and—poof—he vanished. (See Conner’s book, Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story) Luke also has the extreme cult teaching that hatred of family, and of life itself, is required for Jesus followers. In John, we find the ghoulish pronouncement that eternal life happens when cult members eat the flesh of Jesus, and drink his blood. 

This is just a sampling—and many more examples will jump out—the more folks read the gospels carefully, confirming Conner’s verdict that the New Testament offers “crazy with a side order of extra-crazy crazy.” (p. 120, Kindle)

 

Maybe the death of Christian belief is on the horizon because people are reading the cookbook of crazy.  “In 2022, polling showed that ‘among all U.S. adults, only 20% say the Bible is the literal word of God, which is a historic low… A record 29% of Americans say the Bible is a collection of ‘fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.’ Only 30% of Protestants and 15% of Catholics currently believe the Bible is literally true.” (p. 114, Kindle)

 

In Chapter 5, Where Christianity Goes to Die, Conner provides a brutal dose of reality about the state of humanity. I remember reading, some twenty years ago, the prediction that by 2025 there would be a billion Pentecostals in the world. Much of the growth that it has experienced has been at the expense of the Catholic church. Conner quotes an article by David Masci of Pew Research:

 

“The music that you hear in Pentecostal churches has the same rhythms that people enjoy outside of church. In fact, in only a century, Pentecostalism has become indigenous, or ‘Latin Americanized,’ to a greater extent than Roman Catholicism has in four centuries in Latin America… And the Pentecostal preachers tend to sound more like their congregants. They are often unlettered, and they speak to their flock in the same way that people in Latin America speak to each other. They also tend to look like their congregants. So in Guatemala, many preachers are Mayan, and in Brazil they are Afro-Brazilian.” (pp. 122-123, Kindle)

 

They are often unlettered. This is emotion-based religion, fed by the cookbook of crazy. The crazy isn’t even noticed. I am reminded of Josiah Hesse’s experience, growing up in apocalyptic evangelism (my article here on 11 August was about his painful childhood):

 

“I would say that some of the most emotionally rapturous moments of my life were had in Pentecostal church services, where the loud and hypnotic music, speaking in tongues, primal dancing, shaking and collapsing to the ground, caused explosions of sensory transcendence in my little body. I’ve since had glimmers of these moments on a dance floor, a rock concert, or moments of exceptional sexual climax, but nothing has come close to the indescribable high of a frenetic religious service laced with an uncut dose of pure belief.”

But indescribable highs count for nothing when we’re trying to figure out how the cosmos works. For that we need reliable, verifiable, objective evidence. 

 

Earlier I mentioned Jesus transferring demons from a man to pigs—which we find in Mark 5. In fact, Mark’s gospel could be subtitled, Jesus and the Demons. Pentecostalism thrives on such superstitions. Conner describes the widespread belief in witch children, and the horrors they’ve suffered at the hands of exorcists. He quotes from an article by Cosima Lumley:

 

“Thousands of children every day are being branded witches and consequently tortured into confessing non-existent crimes, forced to undergo horrific ‘exorcisms’ by preachers, and even abandoned or killed by their own families or communities…The practice of branding children witches has also become a very lucrative one for Pentecostal preachers who are able to ‘exorcize’ children of the influence of Satan for a price, or as they call it, ‘enact deliverance.’” (p. 130, Kindle)

 

Conner also discusses the role that homophobia plays in the promoting of fanatical religion. American evangelicals have played a major role in stoking these hatreds in Africa especially. “Queerbaiting as a political tactic never seems to age. Fomenting hatred and violence is not a measure of last resort in societies where national politics is driven by religious fundamentalism. It’s their first move. It’s their path to power. To the extent this tactic loses traction in democratic countries, it must move to more hospitable climates to survive.” (p. 142, Kindle)

 

One of the major themes of Chapter 6, The Valley of Death, is the assumption among fanatics that climate change is real because it fits with apocalyptic doom scenarios. In other words, we shouldn’t even try to resist god’s plan—as outlined by the cookbook of crazy. Is such foolishness the fate of Christian belief? At the outset I asked why aren’t Christians furious with the corruption of their religion by televangelists. Likewise, Conner wants to know:

 

“When priests by the hundreds molest children and bishops cover it up, why aren’t Christians stunned? When Irish nuns raffle off the babies of unwed mothers, why aren’t Christians stunned? When unmarked graves of children are discovered around Canadian religious ‘schools,’ why aren’t Christians stunned? When embezzlement and sexual assault by preachers gets reported on an almost daily basis, why aren’t Christians stunned? When evangelical leaders gather to lay hands on figures like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, why aren’t Christian’s stunned?” (pp. 106-107, Kindle)

 

Given its ongoing degeneration, we can be sure that Christian belief will end up on the scrapheap of history:

 

“In the developed world, Christianity is losing traction for reasons that are now familiar: churches are dying because elderly Christians are dying, and Christian belief increasingly incorporates toxic elements of sexism, racism, and reactionary nationalism. But more importantly, the Christian gospel is simply irrelevant—thoughts and prayers don’t address poverty, discrimination, gun violence, failing government, or climate change.” (pp. 150-151, Kindle)

 

Here is the link to an interview that Robert Conner and I did together, with Derek Lambert of MythVision.

 

 

 

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 two books, 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, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 

 

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.