Christians Are Taking Atheists’ Jobs!

By David Madison at 2/08/2024
By Robert Conner

I’ve been writing about early Christian belief since 2006, not professionally or as a side hustle, but more as a hobby. While the serious hobbyist must remain cognizant of academic opinion and have sufficient knowledge to navigate the relevant professional literature, as a dedicated dilettante I was free to explore the byways, guided principally by my language aptitude and interest. 
 
After following the twists and turns of the “secret Mark” controversy for a number of years, I wrote The “Secret” Gospel of Mark: Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria, and Four Decades of Academic Burlesque, released in 2015 by a niche publisher in the UK. Although Morton Smith had written both scholarly and popular books describing his discovery and interpretation of extra-canonical passages attributed to Mark, it could be safely assumed that exeedingly few people outside the area of New Testament textual studies were even aware of Smith’s claims or had followed the tortuous progression of the ensuing debate over the authenticity of his find. I assumed the teapot tempest triggered by Smith’s work would blow over soon enough and be forgotten, but discovered quite by accident that my translation of Clement’s letter to Theodore had been used by historian Donald Ostrowski in his 2020 book, Who Wrote That? Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov. Who knew?
 
In 2006, my first book on magic in early Christianity, Jesus the Sorcerer: Exorcist and Prophet of the Apocalypse, included a chapter, “The Resurrection as Ghost Story,” that drew attention to the several similarities between Jesus’ postmortem appearances in the gospels of Luke and John and Greco-Roman ghost lore. In 2018, I expanded that discussion to include a probable charge of necromancy made against Jesus in Mark 6:14-16. Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story — which contains 275 references from the professional literature — argued that the parallels between the gospel accounts and ghost stories are no accident of free composition but are the result of the incorporation of universals tropes that occur again and again in reports of ghost sightings both ancient and modern.
 
By 2022 my writing had assumed an openly counter-apologetic character. In The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days, I argued that Christian belief as described in the letters of Paul of Tarsus had features currently associated with extreme religious cults from its very inception. Paul had little regard for the “historical Jesus,” Jesus “according to the flesh” (2 Corinthians 5:16) — Paul’s epistemology was simple: belief in belief. Today some Christian apologists dress up this appeal to self-canceling ignorance as “presuppositionalism,” but Paul said it first: “the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God” (1 Corinthians 3:19), a call to reject autonomous reasoning and independent evidence. Paul’s appeal to belief is the epistemology of a cult.
 
In The Jesus Cult, I stumbled upon another realization in a brief flash of lucidity: “…the antics of religious shills, grifters, frauds, reactionaries, and crazies are driving rational people away from churches in droves.” (page 6) In 2023 I expanded that borrowed insight in The Death of Christian Belief where I urged readers to examine the Seven Deadly Gospels of hate, grift, lawlessness, lies, division, submission, and violence. “Christians,” I concluded, “are determined to put Christianity itself out of business — surveys of attitudes about religious belief in many countries suggest the drop in church membership is less a repudiation of Christian doctrine, which even most Christians barely understand, than a rejection of Christians themselves. Christians are toxic.” (page 7) 
 
I suspect most anti-theist writers, myself above all, applaud the idea that our steady barrage of facts and logic have the True Believers™ dropping their Gott mit uns banners and deserting the trenches pews en masse, but I doubt sober analysis would support such a self-congratulatory fantasy. No doubt the hundreds of books included in our bombardment have helped the cause of secularization, but it appears Christians themselves are inadvertently inflicting the heaviest damage to Christian belief in the form of “friendly fire,” racking up a level of casualties the most ardent atheist could only dream of. 
 
Case in point, the sexual molestation scandals of the Catholic Church. When, in 2002, the Boston Globe began reporting on a massive coverup of serial sexual predators in the local Archdiocese, the team of reporters thought it was an aberration, but their report, which won a Pulitzer Prize, spurred similar investigations around the U.S. and eventually around the world, particularly in heavily Catholic countries. The results for the Catholic Church were catastrophic: billions of dollars in civil lawsuit awards, sales of Church properties, bankruptcies, parish church closures, and the passage of lookback laws that reopened the statutes of limitations for cases of sexual assault. The reputation of the Catholic Church was shredded; in 2015 the film Spotlight, named for the Globe series of reports, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Today when they hear “Catholic priest,” millions of people automatically think pedophile.
 
When news of the Catholic debacle arrived, those of us who tally the manifold grotesqueries of the Christian religion calmly marked our calendars and waited for the Protestant shoe to drop. Soon reports began to trickle in: youth pastors, Sunday school teachers, and church bigshots were being arrested, arraigned, convicted, and sometimes packed off to prison for possession of child pornography or serial sexual assault. To basically no one’s shock and dismay, in 2019 a series of reports duly appeared in the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News that exposed lurid scandals in the very heart of the evangelical fever swamps, the Southern Baptist Convention. 
 
Following pollsters and sociologists out onto a sturdy limb, in The Death of Christian Belief, I predicted the functional demise of Christian belief in the developed world was already in sight and discussed some contributing factors. Central to most factors is some flavor of Pentecostalism — sociologists of religion have started referring to more and more evangelicals as NCPs, Neocharismatic Pentecostals. Given Christians’ well-known tendency to break into bum-fight factions, there are naturally subtypes of NCPs, but the various breeds share traits: fixation on “spiritual warfare,” healing and prosperity, and the “signs and wonders” hoo-ha like that attributed to the early church. As I noted in TDoCB, Christianity in the global South is heavily infiltrated by charismatic lunacy, but even American denominations that oppose Pentecostalism in principle are infected, as in the case of the “Bapticostals,” the Labradoodles of evangelicalism.
 
As an author, I’m naturally curious about what motivates readers to buy books. Why would a person buy a book that refutes Christian belief? To put the matter in perspective, I asked myself if I would read a book debunking Mormonism, Islam, Sikhism, or Hinduism. The answer was a flat No and the reason is simple: I’ve never, even for a moment, taken any of these religious movements seriously — I’ve never read a book that refutes the existence of elves because I assume only children and crazy people believe in elves. In fact, I’ve long presumed that to take any of the religions I’ve mentioned seriously, one would have to be a child or an idiot and that those religions persist because there is no shortage of children or idiots. Increasingly, however, it appears ever fewer children take Christianity seriously which has narrowed its appeal to the idiots — listening to the ravings of the NCPs these days is like listening to Jon Voight screaming random passages from the manifesto of a school shooter.
 
The young may be fascinated by Hogwarts and the Potterverse, but fewer are buying into the Christian magic kingdom. Around 17% of Americans are 65 and older, but “33% of U.S. congregations are senior citizens…Among mainline Protestants, 42% of churches are at least half 65 and older.”[1] The non-affiliated are diverse, but “one trait they do share is a distaste for organized religion: its cruelty, its antiquated and dogmatic morality, its power-obsessed politics, its hypocrisy, its greed.”[2] Mutatis mutandis, as generational churn occurs, the number of churchgoing believers is fated to keep dropping
 
To the horror of Christian leadership, the “Nones,” who accounted for 16% of Americans in 2007, are now 28%, a larger cohort than either Catholics (23%) or evangelicals (24%). “Nones are young. 69% are under the age of fifty. They’re also less racially diverse. 63% of Nones are white.”[3] “In 2008, the nones were a minority in every state. Even in the liberal New England states they were a fraction of the population. In 2022, the nones have become an outright majority in seven states— Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Alaska (!), Montana (!), New Hampshire and Maine. Several other states, including California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, are in the high forties.”[4]
 
Given these stats, it appears the foaming-at-the-mouth Christians have relegated us anti-theist writers to the back bench where we must resign ourselves to a supporting role. Although it stings to admit it, let’s give credit where credit is due! In yet another victory for the Christians, it turns out the True Believers™ are more effective at destroying belief than we atheists could ever have hoped to be. Drat, and double drat!
 
 

[1] Aaron Earls, “Average U.S. Pastor and Churchgoer Grow Older,” research.lifeway.com, November 1, 2021.

[2] Adam Lee, “The nones aren’t going anywhere,” onlyskymedia, October 16, 2023.

[3] Jason DeRose, “Religious ‘Nones’ are now the largest single group in the U.S.,” npr.org, January 24, 2024.

[4] Adam Lee, “New map captures explosive rise of the nonreligious,” onlyskymedia, January 26, 2024.


0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)