“The world has turned alien around us”, Tom Gilson complains in a new Stream article.
What he means is that, by his calculations, things have gotten very “difficult” for Christians in the past decade.
And what he really means is that somewhere in the long-vanished American past, being a Christian was an instant status-enhancer in society. Now, very often, it’s just a handicap. This loss of automatic privilege and prestige has provoked something of an existential crisis among many believers— a perpetual chip on the shoulder, if you will.
Christians don’t just want the freedom to preach their message to the masses, Gilson has stated. That’s just not going to cut it anymore! What they want is to control society’s “microphone” again.
To be fair, the fact that the Church is no longer the Bert Parks of the cultural variety show in America isn’t just a figment of Gilson’s paranoid imagination. He’s actually right.
Sadly, the Stream’s response to the waning influence of Evangelicalism hasn’t been self-reflection or doubt. Instead, they’ve doubled down on the Us vs. Them siege narratives, and ramped up the Deep State conspiracy alarms, Civil War talk and the militant (and very literal) call to arms. Not that Gilson or anyone at James Robison’s site will read this, but I made a few suggestions about this issue last week.
Now, a pop quiz !
Gilson’s latest response to the withering of Evangelicalism, is to prep his readers with a list of common anti-Christian challenges, in hopes of keeping them on their toes and perhaps revitalizing their faith in the face of imminent societal collapse. Meditating on these is supposed to be like Christian calisthenics, I think. As a preface, Gilson states:
“That’s why I’m posting this here: So we can all begin to feel the weight of what we’re facing. a barrage: Long, loud, noisy, intimidating. It’s easy to want to cower under it, or even run away. A lot of people have left the faith on account of these things. That’s a shame, because it’s a barrage of blanks. There isn’t a single question here that poses a real problem, if you know how to answer it. I mean really answer”.
Gilson’s answer to the greatest falling away in American church history, is to urge his brethren to be better prepared to respond to annoying skeptics and their intimidating-yet-paper-thin complaints.
One problem with this strategy is that the very recent Burge and Djupe research showed us that:
- People aren’t leaving the Church because of the boogeymen of atheism or Leftism
- People aren’t leaving the Church because they are “done” with God, Christ or the Bible
- Twice as many people on the ideological Right are leaving the Church , as those on the Left
So Tom Gilson feels strange and is alarmed about the diminished influence of Evangelicalism, but his emotional reasoning and political message about why this is happening doesn’t quite map onto some of the data.
Here’s one such “barrage of blanks” from hostile secularists that he intends to explain away, effortlessly and then never does.
- “If Jesus was really God, why didn’t he at least alleviate some suffering by telling people to boil their bandages before they put them on a wound?”
Doesn’t seem like a red herring to me. If someone had all the wisdom of God, they could surely eliminate unnecessary suffering in the ancient world by sharing simple rules of hygiene, could they not?
Gilson thinks it’s an atheist cap gun—noisy, intimidating, but ultimately powerless.
I don’t claim this question is some kind of slam dunk on the heads of theists, but there’s a broader point here that is almost never addressed by believers. Gilson doesn’t even try.
That broader point is this: the Bible claims that the eternal, all-knowing God of the universe actually spoke directly to mankind. Not just through Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago, but face to face with Moses, presumably 1,500 years before that (Exodus 33:11).
God chatted with Moses out of the infinite bounty of His wisdom, and enumerated the essential things that mankind needed to hear– which are written word for word in the five books of Moses. Those books contain some 613 verbatim, detailed laws and commands from the mouth of God.
One can only imagine having a fireside chat with a God of such limitless knowledge and goodness. There’s SO MUCH He could say to primitive people that could alleviate thousands of years of untold suffering, misery and mass death! Just imagine! Tell them about the germ theory of disease and how illness isn’t the result of the devil or secret curses! Tell them to just boil their drinking water! Don’t shit near food or water sources! Weave mosquito nets for your dwellings! Brush your teeth! Or yeah– just boil your bandages, bro!!!
Right there were only six simple bits of fallible human wisdom, which if conveyed 4,000 years ago to a Bronze Age audience would’ve literally saved BILLIONS of human beings from abject misery, suffering and untimely death.
But God mysteriously opted instead to take another path with mankind.
One example of an Absolutely Essential Thing, that God descended out of the cosmos to tell Moses about, is found in Leviticus 19:19. Tom mentions this too. Remember: this thing is SO important to the future of mankind that he had Moses record it word for word so that people throughout the ages could refer to it and stand in awe of His wisdom. To question it, is to find oneself questioning the pure virtue and brilliance of God Himself.
Here it is, for those unfamiliar:
“Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and wool come upon thee.”
Yep. God found it abhorrent that people mixed linen and wool in their textiles and had it written down for the ages.
Such a command seems so baffling, petty and arbitrary that if you weren’t careful you could almost confuse it for the words of ancient, ignorant men. According to Gilson, it exemplifies the essence of divine wisdom. He quotes the late theologian Gordon Fee on this question and then plants a flag. “Why would the Bible have a law against wearing clothes of mixed fabrics?“
“These and other prohibitions were designed to forbid the Israelites to engage in fertility cult practices of the Canaanites. The Canaanites believed in sympathetic magic, the idea that symbolic actions can influence the gods and nature…. Mixing animal breeds, seeds, or materials was thought to ‘marry them’ so as magically to produce ‘offspring’, that is, agricultural bounty in the future.“
Ah. This command was allegedly given because the practice of mixing wool and linen was a “sympathetic magic” ritual that the ancient Canaanites engaged in. A form of Satanism, if you will.
Sounds legit, at least to the the average Evangelical apologist looking for a ready-made, pseudo-academic retort to shut the mouth of their opponents. But in this case, there is no evidence that Fee’s explanation is anything more than creative speculation, well-intended though it might be (Back in the day, I used to very much enjoy Fee’s work). I am aware of no actual historical evidence of “sympathetic magic” — i.e. ritualistic mixing of crops or textiles– among the Canaanites. So while this is certainly a creative explanation, it doesn’t appear to be a valid explanation.
The fact is, theologians have been grappling with scores of Old Testament laws in similar fashion, for centuries. They’ve had a lot of time to build a case for why the irrational or absurd might really be God’s amazing wisdom in disguise. For example, Hebrew scholars regard Leviticus 19:19 as a chok, a divine law or command that has “no rational, modern explanation but must simply be obeyed by faith, unquestioningly.”
What Gilson ignores wholesale is that Leviticus 19:19 isn’t some bizarre outlier in the five books of Moses. It isn’t a case of a random Bible command with no rational internal explanation in the text itself. There are large numbers of other similar ritualistic and dietary commands and restrictions which defy known conventional concepts of logic or reason.
The books of Moses are filled with minutiae about fabrics, food, observance days and ritualistic ceremonies. For example, Exodus 23:19 famously interrupts details about feast days, with a stern admonition not to boil veal in its mother’s milk. Go figure.
“Thou shalt not seethe a calf in its mother’s milk.”
Remembering for a moment that this verse is supposed to be a direct transcription of Yahweh speaking to mankind, believers are forced to figure out reasons why God would issue such a non sequitur dietary criticism in the middle of His speech.
Some claim this command was given because milk and dairy are difficult to digest together. If this is true, you would do well to ponder why indigestion or the perils of excessive farting would be foremost on the Almighty’s mind.
Similar to the Gordon Fee quote above, some modern Bible defenders have thrown out the “Satanism alibi”, which if you didn’t know is the ultimate Evangelical trump card in these scenarios. God apparently despised the milk/veal combo because it was some kind of Satanic practice used by the Hebrew’s pagan neighbors. Remember there is no evidence, either inside the Bible text or extra-biblically, that this specific recipe was practiced as a form of witchcraft. None. Only speculation. But when backed into a corner, blaming witches or Satan worship for the nonsensical and evil behavior endorsed in the Bible, actually works! It’s consistently used to justify God’s biblical command for merciless genocide of neighboring tribes, enslaving foreign virgins, slave wives, etc…
Others suggest boiling the calf meat in its mama’s milk was “desecrating the sacredness of the parent/child relationship” and God supposedly hated that. Of course that bizarre justification doesn’t explain why it was perfectly OK, according to God, for a human parent to bring their rebellious child to the community elders, and watch thru the gate as they were bludgeoned and mutilated to death (Deuteronomy 21:18-21).
The religious community has had a few millennia to figure out self-styled explanations for many of these absurd commands, but again we must never confuse the abundance of explanations for the dearth of valid explanations.
Ultimately, this practice of trying to backwards-engineer Bible commands is the urgent task at hand for those who subscribe to biblical inerrancy. It’s an exhausting and ultimately fruitless enterprise, just like Tom Gilson’s list of 100 Challenges.
Postscript and clarification: To those reading this, I am not an atheist nor am I lifelong critic of religion. I am 20-year veteran of Evangelicalism, who was for most of that time very active in teaching, missions and evangelism. I didn’t leave because I got “burned” or became disillusioned with church culture. I left because I slowly stopped believing in essential Christian doctrines.
I respect my Evangelical and Catholic friends and while I do strongly criticize the common expressions of conservative theology and biblical inerrancy, I still acknowledge that the Bible contains a fair amount of literary, cultural and spiritual concepts that are valuable and significant.
The modern Church of MAGA is the most heartless, widespread anti-Christian movement America has ever encountered. For those who truly cherish historical Christian doctrines, my heart goes out to you. For you I say, this site does not intend to pile on. Know that, in spite of criticisms of the Bible, many agnostics and atheists are on your side in this regard.
This site is a feeble attempt at pushback on this insane, authoritarian death cult; which appears to be driven largely by the Evangelical Right.
