Let me get on my high horse for a second. Modern Christianity in the US is kind of dumb. There’s a small group of academics and scholars saying smart stuff, but the average Christian is probably dumber than the average non-Christian. But, in its defense, most people these days are kind of dumb and there just are a lot of Christians. Think about how smart the average person is, and about half the people are dumber than that. Of course, how smart you are is a product of privilege, education, and being lucky enough to be afforded the time to develop your intellectual capacities. But a lot of people are dumb because they’re lazy. Yet they think they’re morally superior to you. And they’re also not very nice. A lot of these dumb, lazy, self-righteous mean people call themselves Christian. And they make up the institutions of religion, the public perception, and political values that are the face of this warped, mutated leviathan that we call modern Christianity.

Is this whole “self-hating” Christian bit getting old? To be clear, I don’t hate Christianity, I hate Christians and what they’ve done to Christianity. Maybe I’m too conservative for the “so-called” conservative Christians these days. You want to go back to the “good old days”? Me too, let’s go back to the Christian values of the year 30.

You might say that what I’m calling “modern Christianity” is a bit of a strawman or the intellectually weakest version of Christianity. It’s true that there are scholars that have really sophisticated arguments for theism, the metaphysics of God and the universe, or the historical Jesus. But that’s not the Christianity that the two and a half billion people around the world subscribe to. Those abortion protestors aren’t citing Judith Jarvis Thomson; they were told by the church that people are killing babies and they need to go out and stop this evil through showing aborted babies. Personally, it makes me support abortion even more if there’s a chance a baby will end up like those protestors.

It’s the same thing with the average conservative; they aren’t the strongest intellectual representation of conservatives, like the sophisticated political and legal scholars. If you actually read the conservative academic literature or the decisions by conservative supreme court justices, you’ll slippery clever conservative nerd. You side with the racist, gun-toting, red necks, but you sure are the best of them. Anyway, “modern Christianity” is the label I give to popular Christianity or what your average Christian believes. Clearly not the best intellectual representation of Christianity, but from an empirical socio-anthropological perspective, this version of modern Christianity is unfortunately what represents the religion of Christianity today.

Part of the difficulty with the terms here is that religion is hard to define. It’s typically defined as a set of beliefs and practices centered around concepts of the sacred or divine, but how do we fix these beliefs and practices for a particular religion when there’s so much variation within the religion? Is it by what’s widely held? Is it the strongest forms of intellectual argument? Do we make subcategories? There are probably 2-5 major branches in Christianity, but around 50 thousand denominations disagreeing on minor beliefs and practices (again, depending on how we define denominations). The approach I take here when I say “modern” Christianity is just by majority. What do most people in America who call themselves Christian believe and do?

Modern Christianity in the US is an easy targets for edgy internet atheists. “New” atheism gained popularity around 2006 and onward when a bunch of anti-Christian books came out by the “four horseman” of new atheism: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. They’re anti-Christian or anti-religious in the sense that they see most religions as an overall bad thing. Historically speaking, they have a pretty good point: religious institutions have been a source of violence, intolerance, and dogmatic thinking. But I, along with many others, think their philosophical arguments are really bad. But I totally see where the hostility towards religion is coming from.
 

A lot of people, especially a lot of young people with internet access, grew up with religion, were dragged to church on Sunday mornings, and had a lot of questions you weren’t supposed to ask in the church. What’s the relationship between science and faith? Why does the bible seem so misogynistic, homophobic, or generally archaic? Why is the church telling me I’ll go to hell if I touch myself? There’s a bunch of adults yelling at you and scaring you about hell. People feel betrayed church. Once they leave the church, they feel like they’ve been lied to their entire lives and spent all this time and effort believing in something that wasn’t true. People feel hurt by the church. Having their sexuality repressed, being scolded into a puritan morality, or being forced to stagnate intellectually. I get it, it feels like speaking truth to power because you have this large institution with an evil history, an ancient text that doesn’t make sense, and people with very superficial beliefs at a strict social club that think they’re better than you. This is sounding very colonial and, yes, the church was behind that too. Let’s manifest our destiny, besties. Sorry.

Then you see on the news, and maybe even in your neighborhood, people like the Westboro Baptist church hurling homophobic slurs and claiming to do so as Christians. You see fundamentalists claiming the Bible is a literal textbook and that the universe was made in seven days, evolution is fake, and that science in devil talk. In some places in America, this is all around you and you feel like you’re trapped in a cult. The church, in its best light, can be a source of social cohesion, a positive moral force, and provide people with meaning. In its worse light, it can damage people psychologically, it can make people more bigoted, and it can stunt their intellectual growth.

I think this is why new atheism resonated with so many people. With the rise of the internet, it provided a community for people to share in the hurt and betrayal, like a support group. The four horseman seem like the smart and sophisticated people, and of course you want to be associated with their side rather than the idiots who still believe in fairytales. There’s a satisfaction or feeling of justice in watching the “religious dummy gets owned by facts and logic” compilation. You want to distance yourself as far away from the oppressive religion you grew up with and new atheism is the new identity you can cling to. It’s especially significant for teens and young adults who are still in the process of forming their sense of identity, developing intellectually (maybe for the first time in a critical academic setting like college), and leaving the safety bubble of their parents to see how diverse and vast the world really is.

Atheism is generally on the rise globally and there’s a lot of factors separate from new atheism that are causing this: more education, more individualism and autonomy, and cultural shifts to secular liberal ideologies. New atheism definitely had its impact on millions on people in the 2000s, but now it’s largely died down. But there are still active communities and people who subscribe the to new atheists’ approach to religion. There are a lot of problems with new atheism that led to its weakened influence.

First, their odd hostility and obsession with being anti-religious was cringey to a lot of people, including other atheists. The fedora wearing neckbeard that starts a debate when somebody says “bless you” or ridicules the notion of an afterlife to people who just lost a loved one is just in too poor taste. Even the four horseman seem Islamophobic, culturally insensitive, and just too fixated on the bad parts of religion. There was an ironic dogmatisms forming in new atheist circles where they would be militantly anti-religious and completely dismissive of anything that had to do with religion. And it’s kind of weird to base your entire personality on being anti-religious.

Second, their philosophical arguments are really bad, especially Dawkins and Harris. Obviously I can’t break them down here and others have done a much better job, but the summary is that they don’t really engage in rigorous, academic philosophy of religion and you sort of need to do that if you’re going to make certain philosophical claims or claim to dismiss arguments. Dawkins, he’s a legendary evolutionary biologist and I love his work in this field, but he’s a horrible philosopher–and it makes sense because he’s not a philosopher. Harris also doesn’t really engage with theology or philosophy of religion, and oddly also doesn’t engage with the relevant philosophical scholarship that’s like completely secular, like in morality or philosophy of mind. He also looks like Ben Stiller and I just find him to be the most boring horseman.

Hitchens and Dennett are a bit better (RIP), but they seem to have a different mission. Dennett was my favorite because he was actually a brilliant philosopher of mind and philosopher of science. He doesn’t really engage with philosophy of religion on like whether God exists or not, rather he’s in this camp of people that dismiss religion as a social or psychological phenomenon. Specifically, he looks for the evolutionary roots of religious beliefs and how they emerge as having some survival function. This camp of people don’t really take religious arguments seriously in the first place and they’re more interested in why religion exists at all. Same with Freud who viewed religion as a psychological crutch and belief in god originated from father figure projection. Or Marx who viewed religion as a political tool for coping with social oppressions and economic hardship. Or Nietzsche who viewed religion as a moral tool arising out of  weakness. Or Durkheim who viewed religion as a kind of social glue. All these people don’t care to debate the truth of religion and just dismiss it.

Hitchens was more focused on the social and political harms caused by organized religion throughout history. He was also a really good public speaker and a snarky British guy, like a smarter Ricky Gervais. We already went through all the horrific stuff the Christian church did, so trust me when I say the other popular religions also have a pretty bad history. But it’s a bit of a stretch to say we should get rid of religions altogether because it’s overall a force of bad. People often try to point to all the good that religion did as well, but I’m not sure if it outweighs all the bad it did. So I might agree with Hitchens here in that if we’re doing some utilitarian calculus of all the good vs bad that religion brought into the world, the bad would outweigh the good. But we live in a liberal democracy that affords the freedom of religion. It’s a fundamental right that’s not really appropriate for an utilitarian calculus (or if you had to do it, then the good of having this right probably out weighs all the bad of not having it). Most people, even if they’re not religious, are in support of religious freedom and expression; and, most religious people are in support of a separation of church and state.

I think what’s most important lesson is that the horrific things that religion has done–the terrible people who claim that they’re Christian and claim to be doing the Lord’s work–all these things are irrelevant to the question of whether Christianity is true or not. Just like there are stupid Christians who believe the earth was create in 7 days, there are stupid scientists–PhDs who are anti-vaxxers or think the earth is flat–does that mean all of science is stupid? No, the opinions of a few representative people don’t discount what they represent. I think we all know that bad representatives of a religion–whether it’s a single person, a Westboro Baptist Church, or an entire theocratic institution–doesn’t reflect on the religion. Even if every Christian in the world was a morally perfect force for good and each had PhDs, it still wouldn’t make Christianity any more true or false. The truth or falsity of a claim like, “God exists”, is true or false regardless of whether Christians or the church do bad things or claim some weird things as gospel.

Third reason why new atheism isn’t as popular anymore is that people moved on and people stopped caring. There’s more to life than debating religion with people on the internet, and at a certain point you don’t bother trying to change people’s beliefs. For one, people rarely change their beliefs, and, another, is that it takes so much effort to change people’s beliefs; and, finally, you learn that, outside of the internet, normal people don’t really care if you’re an atheist or what you believe in. You don’t win friends talking about Bertrand Russell or the cosmological argument.

There’s an apathy or ennui with all things religious. Maybe it has to do with postmodern values. Maybe we’re all just jaded from all the institutions, politics, denominations, religions, and there’s an informational overload. They all seem to be doing something spiritual or something, maybe they all probably are the same and all truths lead to the same place or something. Why would I engage with all this stress and complexity? My life is fine without more work into apologetics, biblical scholarship, or brain hurting philosophy. I’m barely surviving a full work day, so I really don’t have it in me to add another problem in my life. If it makes you happy, sure, I’m open to the existence of God; but I don’t know, I’m an agnostic, or an apathetic agnostic.

But there’s some need for spirituality these days… There’s a functional argument for religion like many secular scholars suggest, but it has nothing to do with truth or meaning. It has to do with making your life easier. And whatever meaning based things seems to always end up kind of cult like. It’s serving cult.

But I agree with the neckbeards on the point that whether Christianity is true or not is a question worth asking and investigating. As a Christian, I think it’s the single most important question, but I’m not here to proselytize. What I’m here to do here is to argue that people have not seriously considered whether Christian is true or not because people don’t know what Christianity really is. You’ve been fed what Christianity is as an institutional religion. You’ve been fed Christian nationalism, puritanical church values, and a corrupted version of so-called modern Christianity. It’s what I’m calling groups like evangelicals or Roman Catholics in the U.S., and I’m lumping in a lot of people together for simplicity. The institution of the church, the people, or “modern” popular forms of Christianity, I am arguing, is not really Christianity. True Christianity follows Jesus Christ and “modern” Christianity is so inconsistent with the life and teachings of Jesus Christ that it can’t possibly reflect the “Christianity”, the “little or follower of Christ” that emerged around 30AD.

Are you just making a new sect and claiming this is what “true” Christianity is? I’m not trying to define doctrine or solve theological problems. I’m returning to what CS Lewis calls “mere” Christianity. The bare bones of what Christianity is and the minimal things you need to believe and behave like to be a Christian. To follow and be like Jesus.

Why should you care about finding the “true” Christianity and weeding through the bad PR of modern Christianity? Who cares? I know who I am, my life is fine, and my schedule can’t fit an abstruse philosophical exploration into the truth of religion. Totally fair, but here I want to suggest something like Pascal’s wager, because I love gambling: [matrix]

You take the red pill: you try to investigate what “true” Christianity is. First scenario, you find out it’s a lie and worst case scenario is that you wasted some time learning about the true depths of one of the world’s most influential religions; you go on with your life a bit more educated, but we’re all going to die anyway. Second scenario, you find out true Christianity is pretty legit. Your whole view on the universe is turned upside down by the notion of a personal God existing, forming a relationship with this God through this historical figure named Jesus Christ, and having eternal life and meaning pursuing this truth.

You take the blue pill: you don’t investigate what “true” Christianity is. You go on with your life and what you think Christianity is through the lens of “modern” Christians or critiques of them, and trust that these secondhand accounts is all there is to this religion call Christianity. If Christianity does turn out to be true, you missed the boat because you couldn’t be bothered. You stay in your bubble of undeveloped philosophical views of the universe, meaning in life, and everything else through bits and pieces of media that you consume. The popular post modern view is that we’re all going to die anyway, life is meaningless so make up some meaning for your life to kill time, and try to have a good time with other people.

I’m wording it in a very leading and bias way because the matrix would have been really boring if Neo took the blue pill. I know, we’re all busy, and your schedule can’t fit in an inquiry into a radical existential transformation. But please consider this route before going into some weird hippy spirituality self-help journey or telling the universe positive affirmations or, worse, astrology (ugh, red flag).

If you’re a Christian and still watching… are you mad at me? Listen, I can’t say anything about the relationship between you and God. But you have to be careful about conflating church morality with Christian morality; they are not the same and you need to do the work in finding out how to follow the teachings of Jesus and the ethical values that flow out of it. You call yourself Christian, but that’s not enough; you also need to find out what “true” Christianity and be better at exemplifying Jesus to the world. 

People don’t trust Christians to be like Jesus anymore. There are too many historical failures, there are too many bad representatives, there are too many bad relationships the church, and people get on guard if they hear you’re Christian like you’re Ned Flanders. Christianity has a PR problem.