Can Christianity Survive—With So Many Problems and Scandals?

2,000 years of momentum probably can’t save it

Surely the clergy, those most in tune with God, must be the happiest people on the planet: they enjoy a personal relationship with their creator, nurtured through years of prayer and pious study. How can their constant refrain not be, “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it”? (Psalm 118:24) But this doesn’t seem to be the way things are working out. A few weeks ago I published an article here titled, The Morale of Christian Clergy Is Taking a Big Hit, 

based partially on a study that many clergy aren’t doing so well. Then I came across this article, United Methodist pastors feel worse and worry more than a decade ago:

“A survey of 1,200 United Methodist clergy found that half have trouble sleeping, a third feel depressed and isolated, half are obese, and three-quarters are worried about money...[they] feel worse and worry more than they did a decade ago.”

I suspect that the vulnerability of Christianity might be a contributing factor—and its weaknesses had not been so openly discussed just a decade ago, although that discussion had been stimulated in 2001 with the publication of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Sam Harris followed in 2004 with The End of Faith, and Christopher Hitchens in 2009 with God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Never before had the Christian faith been critiqued so publicly, so devastatingly—and other secular authors have been encouraged to add their insights. There are now well more than five hundred books—most published since 1999—that explain, in detail, the falsification of theism, Christianity especially. And, of course, the Internet has provided a platform for atheist/secular thinkers to spread the word that belief in god(s) is hard to justify.

 

And the books keep coming. A few days ago, Robert Conner’s new book, The Death of Christian Belief was published. Do a search on Amazon for Robert Conner books to see his full output. I recommend especially The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days (2022) and Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story (2018).

In this new book, Conner describes Christianity as we find it in the world today, but it’s not a pretty picture. In his opening chapter, Fade to Black—a theatrical term meaning that the lights go out at the end—Conner describes the struggle, the losing battle, of Christianity to survive in its traditional strongholds. In Europe, above all. This is hardly a mystery, since Europe was devastated by two world wars, with tens of millions of people killed—six million of whom were brutally murdered during the Holocaust. How can god-is-good theology maintain its grip in the face of such horrors? 

Conner mentions watching the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, with all the pageantry, ritual, and costuming that royal funerals entail—and the pious assurances that she must now be with God:

“Yet as I watched these solemn ceremonies, I wondered how many of those gathered really believed the queen had entered the Pearly Gates. Based on recent polling, almost certainly less than half—including the child choristers—at best. Some 2000 churches in the UK have closed in the past ten years and a recent survey paints a bleak picture of current Christian belief…church membership in the UK has plunged to less than ten percent…” (p. 7, Kindle)

Conner notes that, “Across most of western Europe the numbers are similarly grim.” (p. 8, Kindle) He provides statistics about the situation in Belgium, France, Spain, Ireland. Even in super-Catholic Poland there is slippage in belief. He also mentions the hit Catholicism has taken in Canada, in the wake of the residential schools scandal, which even prompted a papal visit to apologize for what had happened: “Priests and nuns from various religious orders systematically brutalized and sometimes raped these children, some 3000 of whom died of disease and neglect while in the custody of the Church.” (p. 11, Kindle) Connor mentions the dramatic decline in church membership and attendance in America as well. 

In Conner’s giant Chapter Two, Death by a 1000 Cuts, he describes the really ugly manifestations of Christian belief. He lists the Seven Deadly Gospels, i.e., the gospels of hate, grift, lawlessness, lies, division, submission, and violence. Given the wealth of information that Conner provides here, it can surely come as no surprise to devout nice Christians that their church and their faith are in deep trouble. 

For example, the gospel of hate has been horrifying, in our modern era demonstrated by Fred Phelps, founder of the Westboro Baptist Church: 

“The Westboro Baptist’s ministry of hate rose to national attention in 1998 when Westboro members picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay university student abducted, tortured, and left tied to a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming. Shepard died of his injuries in a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. Westboro Baptist, which preaches that AIDS represents God’s righteous judgment against homosexuals, often picketed the funerals of AIDS victims where members held up placards that displayed their trademark, GOD HATES FAGS.” (pp. 16-17, Kindle)

Just one more example, from the gospel of violence. There is quite enough in the New Testament to fuel violent behavior, including Jesus-script: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34) This results in “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war…” and worse, as Conner notes:

“Gospel Jesus told his disciples, ‘You are the light of the world.’ (Matthew 5: 14) Sadly, there is little evidence from history to support that claim. Indeed, the history of Christianity is a nearly unbroken history of moral darkness. In the 1930s, Das Licht der Welt in Germany united behind an authoritarian regime that unleashed the darkest era in world history. The leading German theologians of the day threw their support behind Hitler’s rise to power, and soon German forces invaded their Christian neighbors, repeating a slogan from the Thirty Years War, Gott mit uns, ‘God with us.’”   (p. 59, Kindle)

Perhaps Christianity has been losing ground because there is growing awareness that theology can manifest in such destructive ways. But die-hard believers tend to shy away from facing realities. And one of the major realities is that the New Testament itself is failed theology. 

Conner deals with this in his Chapter 3: The Clothes Have No Emperor, which opens with the heading, “The New Testament isn’t history.” There is commonly a knee-jerk reaction among the pious to such an assertion: “Yes, it is—who in his right mind would make such a claim?” The blunt answer is: New Testament scholars themselves, many of them devout Christians. Conner traces some of the history of critical analysis of the gospels. He mentions Bart Ehrman, who has published so many books describing the faults and failures of the gospels especially (check out his list of books on Amazon). 

For a long time, devout scholars have been trying to justify taking the gospels as history, but without much success. The first three gospels share so much in common, because Matthew and Luke copied so much from Mark. Conner points out that the author of John’s gospel added 

“…a thick layer of theology to the stories, but we’re still left with a question that has no answer: where did Mark get his information? If Mark was written about 70 C.E. and Jesus died around 30 C.E., at least a generation passed before anyone thought to collect the stories about Jesus and put them into a gospel. To make matters worse, in the years between Jesus’ death and the writing of the first gospel we know a destructive war supervened that devastated the cities of Galilee and Judea, killed thousands, and scattered the survivors which presumably included potential witnesses to the career of Jesus.” (p. 73, Kindle)       

Conner also discusses the confusion added by the apostle Paul, who never met Jesus, and bragged that he didn’t find out anything about Jesus from the disciples. His knowledge of Jesus came from his visions (= hallucinations). This undermines the claim that the New Testament is history. 

The very helpful information in Chapter 3 is precisely what Christians don’t want to hear, acknowledge, or think about. When I was working on my first book (Ten Tough Problems in Christian Belief), I asked a few devout believers to review and critique a few of the chapters. Oh, no, they couldn’t do that! They had to focus on strengthening their faith. I sensed their doubts lurked just below the surface—and they didn’t want to check below the surface. I gave copies of my 2022 book, Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught, to several Christian friends. The response was silence. They didn’t want to think about the issues I raised. 

But they’re not alone, as Conner notes:

“In many cases the problem with Jesus Studies begins with scholars merely seeking confirmation for their presuppositions, but arguably in every case a related problem lies in the very nature of the evidence, evidence that has passed through multiple hands, is possibly (or definitely) corrupted, or evidence that it was simply a pious story to begin with.” (p. 81, Kindle)

I would say that Conner’s Chapter 3 is a must read—but I fear that devout readers will consider it a must not read.

In my article here next week, we’ll take a look at Conner’s next three chapters: Certifiably Crazy for Jesus, Where Christianity Goes to Die, and The Valley of Death.  

By the way, I suggest that Conner’s book can be paired nicely with Tim Sledge’s book, Four Disturbing Questions with One Simply Answer: Breaking the Spell of Christian Belief. Of all the hundreds of books out there that make powerful cases against belief in the Jesus cult, these two deserve high ranking.

Full disclosure, by the way: I wrote the Foreword for The Death of Christian Belief, at Robert Conner’s invitation. He and I were interviewed together by Derek Lambert for a MythVision podcast. In his Chapter 3, he recommends my book, Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught—as well as Seth Andrews’ brilliant Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot. 

No, not even 2,000 years of momentum can save the faith! 

I’ll close today with this insight from Conner:

“Churches retain power partly by keeping believers in the dark about the crazy stuff the New Testament says, as well as keeping their financials opaque and concealing the sexual predators within their ranks. “The wisdom of the world is foolishness with God” (I Cor. 3:19) is an affirmation of ignorance and an inadvertent admission that knowledge is the mortal enemy of belief.” (p. 104, Kindle)

 

 

 

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.