Note from an "Intellectual Gimp"

Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost has put me in a rather foul mood this morning. I do my best to be accepting of Christians as people, to take their perspectives seriously, and to listen to them honestly and openly, even when I disagree with them strenuously. But then somebody like Carter always has to come along and write things like this.

First he calls Robert Reich "an intellectually crippled man" for being an atheist--an "intellectual gimp." But then he says Reich "deserves our [Christians'] mercy and compassion rather than our scorn." Furthermore, "atheism is a form of (self-imposed) intellectual dysfunction," and atheists do not possess "properly functioning cognitive faculties." "By ignoring [atheists'] epistemic and metaphysical brokenness," Carter says, "we are shirking our Christian duty to truly show love for our neighbor."

Sorry, but it's hardly merciful, compassionate, or loving to go heaping that kind of arrogant scorn upon people. Carter's attitude is on par with Michael Moore's: If people don't agree with me, it's only because they're not as smart as I am. You won't win any converts that way. I'd like to see Carter go call Robert Reich an "intellectual gimp" to his face, instead of through his blog. In fact, I'd like to see Carter's ideology catch on with Christians, and see how long they can get away with ridiculing the "cognitive faculties" of atheists before they start getting hit with lawsuits for libel and slander.

But then, on top of that, Carter drags out that tired old Christian theory that modern Western society is somehow covert Christianity. He starts by suggesting that Reich (and by extension, all atheists who agree with him, I suppose) "didn't pay much attention during history class." (Another merciful, compassionate, loving way to start a discussion.) Carter then goes on to make some broad, unspecific, and vague statements that basically boil down to the following: Before there was the modern West, there was the Christian West. Therefore, the modern West is a creation of the Christian West, and hence, Christianity in disguise. Or something to that effect.

Except none of the things I love about modern Western society makes an appearance in the Bible. Natural rights? Representative government? Equality? Scientific investigation? Chapter and verse please. Show them to me. Where did these ideas come from? Did they come from the Bible?

The only "natural right" in the Bible is your right to be a depraved sinner. The only government in the Bible is the kind where one leader talks to God and tells everybody else what to do. There's certainly no equality in the Bible, except for that brief moment when Jesus is friendly with women, lepers, the allegedly demon-possessed, and other outcasts. But nobody follows his example, and the moment he's gone they're back to dividing people into categories--male/female, Jew/gentile, believer/heretic, Christian/Roman, etc. Science isn't even worth mentioning, as the biblical cosmology has no place for predictable, material cause-and-effect.

Christians are stuck with a Bible that predicted almost two-thousand years ago that Jesus would be coming back any moment. So what were they supposed to do? Care for each other, bide their time, convert other people, and meet regularly to encourage each other. There was no place for natural rights, representative government, equality, or scientific investigation because Christianity was, from the very beginning, an eschatological religion that believed the end was near. No need for any of those things. Except Jesus didn't come back. What do we do now?

Build a massive institution and use it to bring down the Roman empire, take control of the European continent, and rule the culture for a thousand years, apparently. All while claiming that your every action is inspired by God.

But people invented the great things about the modern West, not God. All those foundational ideas emerged in the struggle to get out from underneath the burdensome institution Christianity had become. People invented things like rights and representative government because they needed new principles by which to organize themselves. Most of those people were Protestants looking to get out from under the thumb of Catholics, but they weren't taking their political theories from the Bible. They were thinking and reasoning and innovating on their own.

Modern society is built on constitutionalism, which puts reasoned, pragmatic documents at the root of our social organization, and which traces back to the Magna Carta (1215), not to the Bible or the Ten Commandments. When English nobility pushed the Magna Carta on King John, they demanded rights and freedoms and powers for themselves. When early Americans signed the Declaration of Independence, and later the Constitution, they demanded rights and freedoms and powers for themselves. In the biblical world, however, demanding rights and freedoms and powers for yourself is tantamount to blasphemy. There is no basis for constitutionalism in the Bible. There is no basis for reason and rationalism in the Bible (but there's lots of places where it says to just do what God says, to stop thinking for yourself, and to "lean not on your own understanding").

Christianity is our historical heritage, not the basis of our society. There is a difference. I live in a country whose sovereignty comes from "We the People," not from "The Lord your God who has brought you out of Britain."

Christians used to recognize that the U.S. Constitution is not a Christian or theistic document. In 1863, a group of Christians organized the National Reform Association to petition Congress for an amendment inserting God into the Constitution. Their idea was to pad the preamble with explicit language to that effect:

We, the People of the United States [recognizing the being and attributes of Almighty God, the Divine Authority of the Holy Scriptures, the law of God as the paramount rule, and Jesus, the Messiah, the Savior and Lord of all], in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

While it was only a small group that made this particular petition, during the 1860s it was a relatively common belief amongst Christians, especially in the Northern states, that the Civil War was God's punishment to the nation for not acknowledging him, for daring to be a secular state (See also the post-9/11 comments by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.) Christian views have certainly changed, haven't they?

Christians seem to have a love-hate relationship with history. When it suits them to be straightforward about the facts, they are. When that tack fails, they go right back to mythology. Consistent honesty would be better.