On Christianity and Culture
John Mark Reynolds
Culture
05.20.2008
In his book God Is Not Great professional man about town, Christopher Hitchens opined that religion has never done anything good for the world. This sort of extreme claim has the immediate benefit of being totally immune to contrary evidence. The more offensive an argument, the more likely an opponent is to stutter or become distracted by the sheer outrage of the claim. A Christian, unused to such an abandonment of reason, often feels compelled to defend every detail of two thousand years of Christian history.
Hitchens is happy to hear his opponent stutter. He is ready with even more extreme claims.
Any Christian, Hitchens says, who has done great good in the name of Faith could have done the same (it is claimed) with secular reasons. Many great men who were Christians from all available evidence must have been secret secularists . . . since Hitchens knows that only secularism is reasonable.
Hitchens is a true believer in his unbelief and nothing we can say will persuade him. This chapter is for those who know such debates solve nothing. Cultures are not created by clever quips on talk radio about the devils in the details of the great cathedral of Christendom, the area of the world deeply shaped by Christian ideas. Instead, Christian civilization was created by the love of God and of mankind. It produced the glorious cathedral of Notre Dame, invented the idea of the university, and made modern science possible. The good things of this culture are nearly endless.
Of course, defending Christendom does not mean defending everything Christians have done. When Christianity is most popular, it attracts sycophants and nominal believers, but it is also capable of finding a Saint Francis to rebuke power hungry popes and materialistic citizens.
It does not mean defending every idea that Christians have had. It also does not mean a hazy ecumenicist hug where every Christian group is given equal status with every other. Some groups calling themselves Christian have cut themselves off from the long conversation about what God revealed to mankind in Christ Jesus. Our focus will be on the groups the writer C.S. Lewis called 'mere Christians,' because they accepted, despite their differences, a core set of ideas, the 'mere' in mere Christianity. Today groups like the Fellowship of Saint James with its fine journal Touchstone act as meeting places for Orthodox, Catholic, Evangelical, and Protestant Christians.
Given the glories of Western Christendom, which he admits, or with the example of some really good Christian person, Hitchens eventually will concede that the art, buildings, or other treasures are all very glorious and (with some prodding) that some religious men or women are very good. But then Hitchens will slyly suggest that, after all, whatever the motivations of people actually involved, secularism could have provided just as a good a reason for their good deeds.
He has invoked what as a parent I learned to call 'the lazy kid defense.'
The Lazy Kid Defense
If my parents asked my brother and me to do a job, both of us were happy to say we would comply. We had good parents and both of us wanted to please them. However, while my brother Daniel was likely to do it, I was almost certain to be distracted by something else. When the job was done, it was easy to claim that I would have done it, could have done it, if only Daniel had not been so quick. The problem with this lazy child defense (as any parent learns) is that there is no way to know whether it is true.
The lazy child does not act, so there is no way to be sure that he could do what he claims.
Secularism, without Christianity, has never produced an attractive and viable civilization (at least yet) and so like all the work the lazy kid would have done, its good deeds must remain legendary. It has been content to be parasitic on Christian wealth, Christian ideas, and Christian labor.
The twentieth century produced several officially atheist regimes, but they were best known for mass murder. As for decaying Western Europe, it was religious in the lifetime of Pope Benedict XVI and is just about done eating up its seed corn. It has not had the cultural energy to reproduce itself in either babies or greatness. We will see if secularism has the power to save it, but the outlook does not look good. Instead of a thriving secular civilization in places like Sweden, many Christians and those outside Europe see effete secular people living on the heritage of their more godly ancestors unable to defend or reproduce what they made.
On Bad and Very Bad Christians in History
If Christians have not been worse than everyone else, one wonders if they have been better. Not all good people have been Christians and I have personally known many fine atheists and agnostics whose personal behavior was much better than my own. The difficulty is that the culture in which Americans and Europeans live is so pervaded by Christian ideas and so shaped by people who were heavily influenced by Christianity (including those who rejected it outwardly), that it is essentially impossible to imagine the world without it.
The 'lazy kid' defense does not help skeptics, because so much of history is simply the story of Christianity. It is possible that the world of science, liberty, and medicine would exist if it were not for Christianity, but sadly for the skeptic, there is no such world except in the imagination of the skeptic.
Of course, the skeptic totally discards the supernatural or spiritual benefits of Christianity with the assumption that there are no such benefits to be had. Christianity is not mostly about making life better now, though it does, but about making life better in the world to come. If there is such a world, and there is good reason to think there is, then this is of inestimable value.
Secularists dismiss such benefits and possibilities. They are sure that there are not any things in heaven or earth than are dreamed of in their philosophy.
Humility is not a “new atheist” virtue.
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