The Stubborness of Christianity
April 14th, 2008 by tempe
I recently purchased a copy of Tim Keller’s new book The Reason for God. At this point I’ve only managed to make it through the introduction and part of chapter one, but so far, so good. Keller’s book is primarily aimed at the skeptic, but he also is writing for the Christian who has perhaps not “thought out” the reasons for the faith (per 1 Peter 3:15). For those interested, Keller has also posted a series of sermons in conjunction with the topics in the book, and they are available for free here.
While reading the book this morning, I came across this quote which I found interesting and encouraging:
… A widespread belief in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century [was] that religion would weaken and die out as the human race became more technologically advanced. This view saw religion as playing a role in human evolution. We once needed religion to help us cope with a very frightening, incomprehensible world. But as we become more scientifically sophisticated and more able to understand and control our own environment, our need for religion would diminish, it was thought. But this has not happened and this ’secularization thesis’ is now largely discredited. Virtually all major religions are growing in number of adherents. Christianity’s growth, especially in the developing world, has been explosive. There are now six times more Anglicans in Nigeria alone than there are in all of the United States. There are more Presbyterians in Ghana than in the United States and Scotland combined. Korea has gone from 1 percent to 40 percent Christian in a hundred years, and experts believe the same thing is going to happen in China. … In most cases, the Christianity that is growing is not the more secularized, belief-thin versions predicted by the sociologists. Rather, it is a robust supernaturalist kind of faith, with belief in miracles, Scriptural authority, and personal conversion. … Religion is not just a temporary thing that helped us to adapt to our environment. Rather it is a permanent and central aspect of the human condition. This is a bitter pill for secular, non-religious people to swallow. Everyone wants to think that they are in the mainstream, that they are not extremists. But robust religious beliefs dominate the world. There is no reason to expect that to change.
The thing that struck me most in this quote is the sheer numbers of Christians in places like Nigeria and Ghana. We Americans tend to focus our gaze too much on our shores, and we often fail to see what the Lord is doing in other parts of the world. It reminds me when I was informed a year or so ago that there were more ARPs in Pakistan than in the US (about 4 to 1 if I remember correctly)!
The predictions of religious extinction (to borrow a line from Mark Twain) have not only been greatly exaggerated, but apparently did not end in the early 20th century. For example, Keller cites a book by an anthropologist named A.F.C. Wallace , where Wallace states:
The evolutionary future of religion is extinction. … Belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as the result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge.
The book in which those words were written was published a year before I was born, in 1966. The prediction has not come true, and the evidence speaks to the contrary, as Keller notes.
Later, while each lunch with my wife, I was reading a newspaper published by a local giga-church (yes, they are that large, and yes, they have their own weekly newspaper!) and saw an article about the upcoming controversial movie, Expelled. I have commented briefly on this elsewhere, and the blogosphere is seemingly ablaze over the movie already, so I see no need to add to the fervor. However, there was one quote in the article, taken from atheist/evolutionist P.Z. Myer in his interview with Ben Stein in the film, that I thought meshed nicely with the quotes above:
What we have to do is get to a place where religion is treated at the level it should be treated. That it’s something fun that people get together to do on the weekends and really doesn’t affect their life as much as it has been so far. … [Greater science literacy] is going to lead to the erosion of religion … and we’ll eventually get to the point where religion has taken that appropriate place as a side dish rather than a main course.
Given the observations above, not only does that sound hollow, but it sounds like the atheist version of Hal Lindsey, waiting for the consummation to come any day now, getting it all wrong again and again, but still persisting in the same old claims. I wonder if atheists have their own version of Dispensationalists? 
It’s this sappy kind of functionalism and utilitarianism that has led to western decline. Religion is only true in the way that it serves as an emotional crutch (thanks, Obama, for the PA comments) or that it explains scientific phenomena which we don’t understand.
That same postivistic skepticism has now invaded science and logic and threatens to overturn rationality as an impulse in Western Civilization.
And they call us Christians the barbarians….
Some religious believers can be very dumb and some can behave very badly. Some secular/atheistic people can be very dumb and behave very badly. (I am all too often pretty dumb, and have behaved badly at times, though I try not to win too many races to the bottom.)
Whether the dumbest and the worst of either group represents the essence of their world view or even what is most typical of it is an interesting and difficult question.
For example, as a non-believing person who never felt any attraction toward Communism, I become weary of the frequent characterization of atheism as inevitably leading to the tyranny and horror of such societies as the USSR, Red China, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
Turning it around, while I realize that Christians consider themselves as nothing like fanatic societies such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, not to mention the cult of death promulgated by Osama bin Ladin; as I’ve irritated people here before, I am not sure the course of Christian history on the whole is as reassuring as many Christians think it is.
I do think it’s safe to say that tides of belief and behavior fluctuate wildly over time, and I also feel fairly safe in saying that as each group waxes strong for a while, many of its members gloat triumphantly over how they will continue to swell and their opponents will shrivel into the dustbins of history. As you point out, secularists predicted the collapse of religion, now proved to be a hollow boast.
Of course, you seem to be sure the current surges in religious belief will thrive and grow (of course, you focus on Christian growth and slide over a huge growth in Islam, as well) and never ever find itself once again withering in the cloudy beams of skepticism and doubt.
A couple of things, Random:
1) No one that I know of is actually equating communism and atheism. Certainly, the communists were atheists, and that is not undeniable. Certainly, Marx called religion the opiate of the masses, so it was not just that he was not religious; he, like a host of other atheists, hated it. He reasons might have been different from theirs or even atheists today, but there is some overlap, to be sure. But we can both agree (I hope) that Marx was wrong, and his predictions, like those of others I referenced above, can be seen as erroneous in our day.
2) Which leaves me to a second point: it was not my intent to “slide over” the growth of Islam. I was focusing on the claims of secularists, nothing more. But one of the reasons that Islam has grown and continues to grow is that secularism has actually provided a fertile ground for it to grow. In some places in Europe, for instance, there is no competition with Islam in terms of birth rate, and the numbers will take over sheerly through births and immigrations if nothing else. Without much in the way of Christianity to stand in the way, secularism does not exactly provide much hope to combat (forgive my use of terminology) this.
3) Christians are not innocent in all of this, of course. The abuses of the Middle Ages (which are actually exaggerated in many cases, but that is another matter) do testify to all this. But you must continually be asking the question whether the way the church functioned at that time was consisted with the way the church was intended to function. In other words, was Christendom consistent with Christianity? If not, then it cannot be used to discredit Christianity (if anything, it proves that the Bible is right about the vileness of human nature). Was communism consistent with atheism? I would argue that it is/was.
4) My confidence is not simply based upon observation. Observation shows that the secularists were wrong. But confidence stems from the words of the Lord Jesus, who declared in Matthew 16 that the church will not die. Yes, there will be dark times of skepticism and doubt (as there have been in the past), but those times are continually swept aside and the Christian church continues to grow.