A Defense of Christianity

The West was created by Christianity and it remains the most potent myth to organize our civilization.

Written by Bo Winegard.

It was an age of reason; it was an age of superstition. As the supposedly absurd beliefs of traditional Christianity were stripped from intellectual life, many expected a more humane, more enlightened society to follow. At the beginning of the twentieth century, and even as late as the 1990s, such an expectation may have seemed sensible. But today, in a world beset by cultish partisanship and a host of novel superstitions, it no longer does. The Church has been replaced by the omnipresent political tribe, and the miracle of the Resurrection has been replaced by the sorcery of sex change through self-identification.

The slogan “trust the science” remains, but it has been hollowed of content. The militancy of the New Atheists has waned, but no powerful intellectual defense of Christianity, one consistent with the discoveries though not the metaphysics of science, has yet captured the public imagination. Ross Douthat made a laudable effort in his compelling Believe, but his approach leaned too literalist to persuade the skeptical. Treating the dogmas of Christianity as empirical claims is no longer a viable path for an intellectually serious faith. What is needed instead is a mythopoetic Christianity, a faith liberated from narrow empiricism, yet still able to transfigure reality through symbol, story, and ritual.

The rise of novel and pernicious superstitions, and the fervid partisanship in which political leaders are treated as virtual deities, is not an accident. When Christianity retreats, the religious impulse, an inherent feature of humanity, does not disappear; it mutates. Saints are replaced by celebrities. Angels by politicians. Altars and candles by healing crystals. Politics itself becomes a liturgy of denunciation and loyalty, faith and perfidy, in which heretics are punished and loyalists celebrated. The only moral is to defend friends and destroy enemies. Even the language of sin and redemption is transmogrified into a byzantine catechism of social justice and privilege. The point is not that these tendencies are unique to a secular age, but that they are exacerbated by the waning tide of belief like sand that burns hotter when the sea has withdrawn.

The Enlightenment’s attack on Christianity was not wholly wrong. It grew from frustration with very real abuses and scandals and was sustained by a growing sense that the dogmas of Christianity were no longer literally plausible. Of what use was revelation when scientists such as Galileo and Newton (both believers, to be fair) were pulling the veil from the mysteries of nature? What is more, the Enlightenment’s emphasis on terrestrial happiness, on addressing the pains and struggles of this life, was salubrious and led to many important breakthroughs in medicine and political thought. Toleration and reason, within limits, are healthy virtues, and the more moderate voices of the Enlightenment balanced these virtues correctly against man’s flaws and fallibilities, and his perennial need for authority and the sacred.

But if the Enlightenment was largely salutary, the New Atheism was misguided and ruinous from the start. Where many Enlightenment thinkers tempered reason with a recognition of myth and mystery, the New Atheists exalted reason and reveled in a juvenile denunciation of religion, caricaturing it before mocking and repudiating it. Their criticisms, ironically, were seldom informed by the best research on the psychology of belief. Instead, they reduced religion to a meme, a mind-virus that hijacked the brain. Yet even in this withering criticism there is an ironic compliment, for the man who rages against the divine is often more religious than the man who simply shrugs. And the collapse of New Atheism has only illustrated how indispensable religion remains.

Christianity is not a heap of superstitions and antiquated rituals to be cast aside; it is a body of wisdom and sacredness to be recovered. It does not compete with science, for its purpose is not to describe the gears and pulleys of matter, but to ask why there is a universe at all. And more important, to make that universe holy. It sanctifies the ordinary landscape of earth and the trials and tribulations of our lives. It requires neither the abolition of reason nor the rejection of Darwin. For the sacred myths of our ancestors remain as potent today as ever so long as we release them from the shackles of a narrow literalism.

To demand that Christianity speak the language of empirical science, and to subject its myths to historical or rationalist scrutiny, is to misunderstand the nature of religion. It would be like trying to evaluate the magic of Christmas or a wedding with a Likert scale or an MRI. One could, of course, measure serotonin levels or tally retail receipts, but none of this would touch the enchantment of Christmas or the transfiguring reality of marriage. For what makes these meaningful is not chemicals or presents, but their power to consecrate the mundane, to turn a tree into a family shrine, a cold blustery night into a celebration of the eternal, a vow of “I do” into the transformation of social metaphysics. Religion does the same for reality itself. It takes the everyday and elevates it into symbol, into drama, into part of a cosmic pageant. Science can tell us how wine ferments or how water flows; Christianity tells us what wine and water mean.

The same is perhaps even more true of morality. Science can tell us about game theory and the evolutionary history of altruism, but it cannot tell us why justice matters, why human life is sacred, or why we should strive to build flourishing communities. Secular humanism, the most serious rival to religion, borrows the concepts of dignity and universal rights but denies their source. It wants the heat without the fire. The very notions of inherent dignity and rights did not arise from a dispassionate empirical scrutiny of the world, which in fact offers painful evidence to the contrary, but from the Biblical imagination: man made in the image of God; Christ dying to save all men; the first becoming last. Remove this scaffolding and the moral edifice begins to tremble like a rotting tree in a storm. If we are nothing but clever animals, why should the strong not devour the weak? Secular philosophers may attempt substitutes (utility, contract, consensus) but without transcendent sanction their power is inevitably diminished.

The limitations of secular humanism are most evident when we turn to suffering and death. The tools of science can prolong life, ease pain, and describe the psychological and neurological processes of grief; but they cannot tell us what suffering means. They cannot tell us how tragedy might ennoble or why sacrifice might redeem. At its best, secular humanism offers a noble stoicism, a furrowed brow of defiance against an indifferent universe. But Christianity offers more. It offers a cosmic drama in which the forces of evil are ultimately defeated. This is not to say it is easy. Christianity too requires stoic acceptance, amor fati, a recognition that the ways of the Lord can be inscrutable. Yet in the myth of Christ’s suffering and resurrection, the believer sees that even the greatest indignities and torments can be made meaningful. And in the end, Christianity offers not annihilation but reunion. What might be oblivion to the empiricist might be transcendence to the Christian.

The rationalist might still find this perplexing. If the dogmas of Christianity are not literally true, then of what use are its doctrines? Why cling to a superstition that has been vitiated by three centuries of science? The point is that this was always the wrong way to assess Christianity. It is not a failed science; and its myths are not primitive metaphysics. They are the imaginative lens through which a civilization understood the universe, ordered its moral life, and confronted the mysteries of existence. To call them false because they are not literally true is a category mistake, as though one were to shout that The Godfather Part II is a “false film” because Michael Corleone never lived. Our understanding of Christianity is different from Origen’s or Augustine’s, but so too was Luther’s or Rahner’s. Like fluctuating waves on the sea, the meaning of a myth changes across time, but its underlying power endures. And that power, like the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, cannot be fully explained. Its target is deeper than conscious reason and its effects cannot be fully articulated.

It was an age of reason; it was an age of superstition. As is every age. For man is a religious animal and, as the saying goes, lives not by bread alone. The destruction of organized religion, if ever successful, will not abolish bad metaphysics. It will only proliferate them. For man needs myth. Man needs the sacred. And if no ordered and disciplined hierarchy offers it, he will seek it from increasingly desperate substitutes. Perhaps he will even come to worship the immanent world itself, bowing before worldly power instead of looking to the transcendent. And when religion is eradicated, the miracle of Christianity will be replaced by the sorcery of tribal conflict and reckless ambition where man may gain the world, but lose his soul.

Bo Winegard is an editor of Aporia.

---

Support Aporia with a paid subscription:

You can also follow us on Twitter.