In C. S. Lewis's book Mere Christianity, he addresses the question of why there are unkind and unpleasant Christians (and, conversely, kind and pleasant atheists) by claiming that we should be making a comparison instead with how the people in question would have acted otherwise. He uses the analogy of a toothpaste's advertising claim to give you healthy teeth:
Even then we must be careful to ask the right question. If Christianity is true then it ought to follow that any Christian will be nicer than the same person would be if he were not a Christian… Just in the same way, if the advertisements of Whitesmile’s Toothpaste are true it ought to follow that anyone who uses it will have better teeth than the same person would have if he did not use it.
But to point out that I, who use Whitesmile’s (and also have inherited bad teeth from both my parents), have not got as fine a set as some healthy young African boy who never used toothpaste at all, does not, by itself, prove that the advertisements are untrue. Christian Miss Bates may have an unkinder tongue than unbelieving Dick Firkin. That, by itself, does not tell us whether Christianity works. The question is what Miss Bates’s tongue would be like if she were not a Christian and what Dick’s would be like if he became one.
The fact that we have no way of knowing what they would have been like had their beliefs been otherwise -- that C. S. Lewis himself wrote, "To know what would have happened? No, no one is given that" -- is a snag here (and awfully convenient to his argument), but we'll leave that aside for the moment.
Miss Bates and Dick, as a result of natural causes and early upbringing, have certain temperaments: Christianity professes to put both temperaments under new management if they will allow it to do so. What you have a right to ask is whether that management, if allowed to take over, improves the concern. Everyone knows that what is being managed in Dick Firkin’s case is much ‘nicer’ than what is being managed in Miss Bates’s...We must, therefore, not be surprised if we find among the Christians some people who are still nasty. There is even, when you come to think it over, a reason why nasty people might be expected to turn to Christ in greater numbers than nice ones. If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is. ‘Why drag God into it?’ you may ask. A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easily to you. You are not one of those wretched creatures who are always being tripped up by sex, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad temper. Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them. You are quite likely to believe that all this niceness is your own doing: and you may easily not feel the need for any better kind of goodness. Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognise their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered. In other words, it is hard for those who are ‘rich’ in this sense to enter the Kingdom.
It is very different for the nasty people – the little, low, timid, warped, thin-blooded, lonely people, or the passionate, sensual, unbalanced people. If they make any attempt at goodness at all, they learn, in double quick time, that they need help. It is Christ or nothing for them. It is taking up the cross and following -- or else despair. They are the lost sheep; He came specially to find them. They are (in one very real and terrible sense) the ‘poor’: He blessed them. They are the ‘awful set’ he goes about with-and of course the Pharisees say still, as they said from the first, ‘If there were anything in Christianity those people would not be Christians.’
As a person of faith, I have been horrified to watch Christianity’s fall from grace in mainstream America today. Having mentioned my church in passing to a group of peers, I was once recently met with surprise—surprise that I’m a practicing Christian because, I “seem like a nice person.” I’m no biblical scholar, but I’m pretty sure that if people conflate your religion with being a terrible human being you’re probably doing it wrong. Yet in recent years that has arguably become the face of mainstream Christianity, and any Christian who cares about the future of our faith should be deeply concerned.
But... other than a handful of exceptions, they're not. The vast majority of them are completely unapologetic about their hatreds, whether it's toward minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, liberals, or just anyone who's not a straight white conservative American.
Yesterday I drove past a house where there was a huge flag flying saying "God, Guns, and Trump." How can this now be the rallying cry for people who claim to follow the same man who said "Turn the other cheek" and "Bring unto me the little children" and "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth"?
Or is that "Woke Jesus," and now we have to follow the new and improved gun-toting, anti-immigrant, Murika-loving, queer-bashing Jesus?
Given that this is the new public face of Christianity in the United States, it is perhaps unsurprising that churches are hemorrhaging members. Goff quotes statistics that there has been a twelve-percent decline in self-identification as Christian just in the last decade; New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof stated that "More people have left the church in the last 25 years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening and Billy Graham crusades combined."
I find this encouraging, but perhaps not for the reason you might be thinking. It's certainly not because I'm a nonbeliever myself, and have some misguided desire for everyone to think like me. I honestly have no issue with what answers people come up with for the Big Questions, about the meaning of life and their place in the universe and the existence of a deity. We all have to figure those out (or not) as well as we can, and who am I to criticize how someone else squares that circle? What I judge people on is not belief but behavior, and if the ugly, vitriolic diatribes of the likes of Kenneth Copeland are inducing people to say, "this is not for me," then... good. That should be your reaction to ignorance, nastiness, and intolerance.
And if the leaders of the Christian churches who are seeing their congregations shrinking don't like this -- well, they'd best figure it out.
As I mentioned earlier, however, I'm not optimistic about their coming to the right conclusions. Today's Christian leaders seem to excel at considering the question and then getting the wrong answer -- blaming it on secular education, the gays, the liberals, or even kicking it up a level and blaming Satan himself. That the fault might lie in their own hateful, exclusive, judgmental attitudes doesn't seem to have crossed most of their minds.
C. S. Lewis at least recognized this much -- that if you're on the wrong road, you don't get to your destination safely by continuing to forge doggedly down the same path. In The Great Divorce, he writes:
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' -- or else not.
No comments:
Post a Comment