Why I Believe, Part Three: Objections to Christianity

Beyond Theological Hand-Waving

To finish up my series on faith, in this article, I will attempt to address objections to Christianity that I’ve struggled at times to explain away. Again, I’ll remind the reader that I am not a professional apologist and the reasoning below is not informed by a formal theological education.

In one sense, that’s a weakness, but it may also be helpful. Professionally trained pastors are constrained by what scripture says, and on many important questions, there are unsatisfactory answers. Since they cannot speculate, they cannot offer as many plausible explanations. I take the liberty to indulge in and share those speculations that better enable me to keep my faith.

For the sake of advancing the discussion, this article begins with the assumption that Christianity is true. To arrive here, I refer the reader back to my previous two columns, the first making the case for theism generally, and the second for Christianity specifically.

At the end of the latter, I posed four questions that, to me, are the most problematic areas of doubt.

1. Does Christianity make us weak? (a response to neo-paganism)

2. If God exists and is good and all-powerful, why is there evil?

3. Why is Christianity non-obvious?

4. How do I reconcile the doctrine of eternal hell with a loving God?

The first two are no longer significant areas of doubt for me because I feel like I have satisfactory, even persuasive, answers. The latter two are more difficult.

Does Christianity Make Us Weak?

This is the neopagan critique of Christianity. According to this view, Christianity is a “slave religion” that elevates the poor and oppressed with promises of the afterlife while suppressing the heroic virtues of the pagan past. While Marx, the ultimate collectivist, critiqued Christianity as an “opiate of the masses” that prevented them from rising up in the here and now to improve their material conditions vis-a-vis their oppressors, individualist critics of Christianity, notably Nietzsche, bemoan what they identify as the opposite problem — Christianity’s rejection of “might makes right” that undergirds the pagan worldview. That both of these extremists blame Christianity for opposite reasons is cause for encouragement and suggests the Christian ethic is a golden mean.

Sometimes one wonders if these critics have read the New Testament, especially the epistles where Christian doctrine reaches application, which are the earliest and most trustworthy source documents of the early church¹. The apostles taught slaves to obey masters, wives to obey husbands, and husbands to obey elders and government officials, all the while reminding those in authority that they too have a master who will hold them accountable. William Lloyd Garrison frustratingly declared that “all reforms are anti-Bible.”

We should not be surprised that positions of authority, in a fallen world, are often abused. Nevertheless, the apostles make abundantly clear that Christianity came not to abolish authority but to redeem it. Christianity granted an unprecedented status of spiritual equality for women and other groups in the ancient world, such as slaves². The apostles, when writing practical advice concerning marriage, general relations between the sexes, and relationships between workers and employers, are seeking to correct a tendency, common then and in subsequent church history, to take this message of spiritual equality and misuse it to undermine social relationships³. As one apostle put it, “Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.”

The thrust of the apostles’ message is that Christianity’s spiritual equality does not do away with earthly hierarchy, but rather enhances and glorifies it. Christians should be better employers, employees, masters, slaves, leaders, followers, husbands, and wives, precisely because they have been redeemed, are being sanctified from the compulsions of the flesh, and have eternal hope in Christ. Furthermore, in confirming such the apostles are not inventing a new kind of morality but reaffirming and applying, for Christians, the essence of the natural (but often abused) moral order that was apparent to everyone before the world went crazy with notions of absolute equality in the modern era. The latter is not an invention of Christians but the speculations of Enlightenment deists and atheists.

Within proper bounds, I argue that Christianity’s modifications to the pagan ethos are helpful and make a civilization stronger, not weaker. Caring for the poor and oppressed is a form of mutual insurance that makes a society stronger and accounts for the random distribution of good and bad fortune. It unifies rather than divides and provides more cohesiveness to a nation. Allowing poor farmers and their children to starve because of an unpredictable crop failure is harmful to a nation and its strength, and the historical Christian practice of alms alleviates temporary situations that can lead to unnecessary death of populations needed say to provide for the national defense.

Proper charity for true misfortune that accounts for moral hazard reminds the rich and mighty that their positions are contingent, only partially earned, and heavily dependent on what we normally call luck. It teaches humbleness to the privileged, which has the very significant benefit of preventing overconfidence and associated errors in judgment. As I wrote in an internal document on business strategy,

It wasn’t until my 30s that I started to see the real advantage of this humbleness. I used to think that humility was some kind of suffering we were called to as Christians, almost a negation of the self, a necessary evil of sanctification, as if we had to become less of ourselves, to give up something precious about our fundamental identity, to be saved. Functionally, the way it really works is that most of us are so ego-driven that even the highest levels of Christian humility just begin to allow us to pull our heads out of our rear ends and see reality more clearly. Seeing reality, in business, means seeing and seizing opportunities, which means profits. Appropriate humility is strength, not weakness.

I would compare the effect of this humbleness to the “follow through” motions coaches commonly teach in sports like basketball, baseball, or golf. Logically, the motion of the body after contact with the ball cannot affect the path of the ball. However, in the athlete preparing to do the follow-up movement, a motor feedback loop is created that improves the consistency of the action before the ball is hit or released. Similarly, when testing some hypothesis (and business is nothing more than the scientific method applied to the economy), it’s extremely helpful to remind oneself rather frequently that “I could be wrong” so that bad ideas are abandoned based on data rather than sustained by bias. This is also extremely helpful in every area of life.

Pagan overconfidence, often tied up with superstitious ideas like “destiny” and the “will to power,” is not helpful for honest hypothesis testing. That kind of thinking, more than once historically, resulted in military leaders achieving mastery of Europe through unexpected boldness, followed by the ruin of starting a land war in Russia right before the onset of winter⁴.

Neo-pagans tend to idolize war-making and the warrior ethos, holding up examples of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar as pagan heroes they claim the Christian worldview would reject for their ego and ambition. Yet too often this manifests as a sort of death wish. The pagan worship of heroes is not a scalable concept for the mass of humanity. If anything, elevating martial glory as the pinnacle of life seduces young, poor men into fighting dumb wars for old, rich men. As Robert E. Lee remarked during the Confederate victory at Fredericksburg, “It is well war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.⁵”

The pagan ambition to seek immortality through fame or deeds, whether politics or going out in a blaze of glory, neglects family life, our only natural fount of immortality. One of Metallica’s most famous songs, “Creeping Death,” describes the perspective of the angel of death in Exodus; it also serves as the name of the holding company for their intellectual property. For me, this phrase also describes the effects of aging. Every gray hair, wrinkle, or minor loss of ability, is death creeping into my body. One can and should attempt to delay its progress, but there are no guarantees and no one can ultimately escape.

But while we all must die, there yet remains in each one of us a continuous germ of life, if we have children. Even after we begin aging and dying at around age 20, we can create new life which can extend us physically indefinitely into the future. Strangely, it is Christianity, that supposed opiate, that paradoxically most tends to orient people to family life. In the West, there are no longer any significant non-Christian populations reproducing above replacement level. It’s almost as if Christianity is true, and when people have a worldview that aligns with the chimerical nature of humanity as both spirit and flesh, they are more able to materially sustain themselves with children than materialists, for whom children ought to be more important as their only real legacy. Further, advanced civilization requires high-investment parenting, not just opportunistic reproduction, which requires the Christian virtue of self-denial.

A recent controversy online highlighted this problem in post-Christian conservatism. A liberal Millennial posted a video discussing the trauma of her parent’s divorce, particularly her “conservative” Dad who abandoned the family to start a breakdancing career. The MAGA crowd engaged in a kneejerk defense of the Dad, who posted a response video defending himself. Of course, who knows what goes on in any given marital failure, and you pity the guy for his daughter putting their family business on the street. It serves as a useful example, though, of the trauma of divorce, even in high-functioning families. An insightful Twitter commenter observed:

If you want to save the world, and you're all fired up about winning back the institutions and retaking the culture, the single most powerful move you can make is to just love and commit to your family forever.

You don't need to read Evola and Spengler or be a bodybuilder or eat daily carrot salads to understand that it's as simple as being there for the people who need you so they don't turn into resentful commies that want to burn down civilization because they associate you with it.

This guy discussed in the video below has spent the last twenty years telling himself he was an OK dad who made a few mistakes because his kids seemingly turned out normal. Nobody died. Nobody OD'd or went to jail. But you can tell behind his daughter's flippant "um, like, whatever" attitude about his misdeeds that the abandoned 5yo girl is still in there, crying out for the security and love he could never promise.

He'll probably chalk his daughter's response up to her having been brainwashed by college and Hollywood. But the seeds of her dysfunction were planted long before she learned to shave her head and read Ibram X. Kendi.

It seems that only a sincere Christian faith can keep families together in the West. Though many would oppose this father abandoning his family, it’s not clear on what basis neopagans would make it morally impermissible.

The neopagans are actually neither new nor pagan; it’s just atheism with pre-Christian Renaissance-Fair-type LARPing attached to it. As far as I can tell, none of them believe in Thor or Zeus as actual existing gods, and cannot avoid the modernizing tendency of seeing them as mere symbols, no different in their spiritual economy than an agnostic Episcopal priest going through the motions, talking of Christ’s “resurrection in our hearts.” They have not escaped the over-extrapolation of Darwin’s surprisingly useful tautology — survival of the fittest — as an explanation for ultimate origins that has disenchanted the non-religious world.

The actual Romans, it turns out, were not agnostics or atheists for whom the gods were mere philosophical symbols. I recently finished a book I picked up at an ACCS conference called The Christians As the Romans Saw Them by Robert Louis Wilken, a religious history scholar at the University of Virginia. The book sympathetically summarizes early pagan critiques of Christianity.

Notably, the ablest defenders of Roman religion affirmed that it was, like Christianity, essentially monotheist, or technically, henotheist⁶. They claimed that the gods of every culture were avatars or manifestations of the one true, entirely spiritual creator god (which is why pagans like Seneca often sound like monotheists). The center of their critique of Christianity was that it was blasphemous to claim that the one true god became a man in Christ⁷. To the Roman view, such a degradation of the one true god, who they believed was aloof from the petty affairs of humans, was unthinkable and disrespectful. The most serious Romans were spiritually akin to deists, not materialists.

But enough with speculation, because it can be shown that, according to the neopagans’ own standards, the weakness of Christianity is empirically false. I’ll give two examples.

The first is that neopagans take a high view of the physical body, of man mastering his flesh to make it the best specimen possible. They’re not wrong about this, and I freely critique the church for its theologically unjustified low view of the body. In some church circles, a physically fit woman who demonstrates virtue and self-control in stewarding her body amongst a self-indulgent society is much more likely to be corrected for immodesty — which, if warranted, is a simple distortion of virtue in displaying too much evidence of it — than a church officer is to be corrected for the gluttony apparent on his 40” vanity-sized waistband.

The problem for the neopagan is that those who have accomplished the most with their bodies and are most in tune with it, elite athletes, are disproportionately religious. If Christianity were a religion of weakness, we would expect to find increasing atheism among those with the most mastery over their bodies. Young men who follow neopagan advice to lift weights and get in shape often find that in enhancing their physical condition, they become more spiritual as well. Or to be more parsimonious, getting in shape makes one less depressed and more likely to stop being an atheist.

The second and stronger evidence is the actual historical record of Christian civilizations exerting mastery over the world, that great totem of neopagan virtue. In both Spain after the Reconquista and Northern Europe after the Great Awakening, Christian zeal led to the conquering of gigantic empires. I’ve shown this map to my children just to give the scope of what Christendom used to be:

This is a Risk map with one turn left, except the winners just walked away from the table out of guilt, not defeat, and they lost their nerve at the very moment they lost their faith. In every clash of civilizations except the Russo-Japanese War, Christendom was undefeated. It’s quite the strange “slave religion” that sustains empires that shame Alexander and the Caesars. Regardless of what one thinks of empires and colonies, no one can credibly argue that they represent weakness.

Beyond military prowess, further evidence is Christendom’s exceeding the previous pagan Western world in other measures of strength, from science and technology to art and music.

Natural and Moral Evil: Why Would a Good God Allow Bad Things to Happen?

Warning: In the following paragraphs I critique what I see as common Christian misconceptions of God. If you are satisfied with your answers to this question for particular traumas you have suffered, you may want to skip, as it is not my intention to cause offense or doubt in others’ faith.

This is a question many struggle with, common enough that arguments surrounding it have a theological term, theodicy, coined by Leibniz, the co-discoverer of calculus. Leibniz argued that we live in the best of all possible worlds, despite the presence of undeniable natural and moral evils, consistent with God’s will.

Growing up, when my brother and I would do risky things in nature, say climbing rocks in the Smoky Mountains, my parents would tell us, “Be careful, this isn’t Disneyland.” That is, the natural world is a real place with real risks, not a carefully curated fake landscape lacking meaning. If we assume that God wanted to create moral, mortal, action-oriented beings whose choices actually matter, it was necessary that calamity and evil be possible. Climbing Everest is meaningless without the risk of death, and good and evil choices are meaningless without real consequences to beneficiaries or victims. If we could all respawn in 10 seconds like in a first-person shooter, what meaning would murder have?

The more direct answer is that God allows evil because it is consistent with His will. The part of His will that wishes to see us not suffer is constrained by the part of His will that desires to create living souls with moral freedom, in a world with real danger that demands our risk-taking and dominion, not robots in a sandbox. Somehow, allowing this course of history is optimal from God’s perspective, and it’s not hard to imagine why: any alternative would mean humans would not really be human, and make God’s act of creating seemingly sentient beings with whom He can relate mere pantomime, like a pathetic geek’s AI “girlfriend.” Perhaps the best modern expositor of this view is Alvin Plantinga, and I refer readers to him for a more technical explanation.

One problem I see is the sort of “folk theodicy” common in Christian circles that says that all bad things are actually good for you if you’re a believer. This is unpersuasive to many thoughtful people. The world is an actually dangerous place and horrible things happen to believers and non-believers alike. This kind of happy talk might work for situations like the unexpected death of an adult but becomes increasingly strained in situations like child physical or sexual abuse, where it’s unconscionable to imagine the acts as somehow indirectly beneficial, or even more disturbingly, selectively beneficial depending on the elect status of the victim.

I think it is more precise to say that God can use for our good or at least mitigate the effects of things that are objectively bad, but that doesn’t change their fundamental badness. Bad things happen because of the logical necessity of God’s will, and to me, it’s much more comfortable to think of bad things as a type of “collateral damage,” the price we have to pay for God’s will to ultimately work itself out to the optimal outcome in eternity. Some pain and trauma represent accounts that will never be settled in this life. In many cases, we can play an active role in preventing bad outcomes, and I agree with the Scottish proverb that we should pray like outcomes depend on God but work like they depend on us. That’s all we can do in the face of inscrutable, irresistible Providence, as dark as it can be on this earth.

Arguably, we’re all collateral damage from being born into a world with sin we didn’t choose. Even ordinary loss and death fall into this category. I’ve met so many older people who every day long for loved ones who died decades ago at a “ripe old age.” It doesn’t necessarily make the loss any smaller. Their hope is in knowing those loved ones again in eternity, not rationalizing what scripture describes as our last enemy, death, as a friend. The Book of Common Prayer⁸ avoids happy talk at funerals and focuses squarely on this hope of resurrection, in the words delivered as a body is buried:

Then, while the earth shall be cast upon the Body by some standing by, the Minister shall say,

UNTO Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the earth and the sea shall give up their dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his own glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.

Given the pain and suffering of even ordinary life, I see no need to concede to Leibniz’s position that we in fact live in the best of all possible worlds. We live in a world a sovereign God prefers for reasons known only to Him. I’d compare the travails of this world to a billionaire who checks into a swanky hotel, racking up enormous charges for room service and other luxuries that would be reckless for a man of lesser means. At the end of the stay, however, the bill will be paid, and it’s an insignificant fraction of our billionaire guest’s net worth. I feel the same way about God and the evil in this world.

In the common law, civil cases generally are resolved with money damages, even in cases where money doesn’t make someone whole. It’s the best humans can do in our limited power to render justice. God, however, is not so limited.

We read St. John’s final vision of eternity in the Apocalypse:

Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea. Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”

And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him. They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads. There shall be no night there: They need no lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light. And they shall reign forever and ever.

This is highly symbolic language but nevertheless clear that healing, true restorative justice, will make us whole again and that all the evils of this world will be resolved. God can pay the bill.

Why must it be this way? There is no complete answer, but I think a clue can be found in our subjective experience of pleasure in art. The greatest pieces of music tend to be written in minor, not major, keys that we experience as sad. The incredible, unexpected chord change in the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in D minor, where the bottom seems to fall out of all of the tension in the piece, leading to the glorious major-dominated “Ode to Joy” finale, only makes sense against the backdrop of the dark and frenetic build-up of the previous three movements. Wagner achieved greater heights of ecstasy in his careful, measured use of dissonant chords in Tristan und Isolde, and in the finale of the Ring Cycle. Most of our beloved Christmas carols are rather dreary and sad, yet make us feel warm and safe inside. The greatest dramas are tragedies, not comedies. Great cooking combines unpleasant combinations of bitter, sour, and savory rather than being uniformly sweet. Perhaps the good is most intelligible in contrast to the bad.

Why Is Christianity Non-Obvious?

Christianity makes bold claims and demands as to its truth and the consequences of its rejection. Given this, why is it non-obvious? Why can’t people test whether it’s true or not? Why, given the stakes, is it so easy to deny?

Humans, after all, can arrive at a consensus on testable facts. Sure, a few cranks believe the Earth is flat, but most do not because we can demonstrate that it is spherical. Yet, if Christianity is true, its truth would be the most important fact we could possibly know, and given that, why does a loving God only make it plausible instead of obvious?

This is a hard one to answer. The best I can offer is a form of abductive reasoning, borrowing from Christianity’s diagnosis of our spiritual disease.

Our problem, as described, is not one of belief per se, but rather sickness. We have original sin, and an independent desire to do evil beyond what is required for survival. Since our problem is internal, we need medicine itself, not a belief in the medicine’s efficaciousness. Still, though, we usually have an obvious belief in a medicine’s effectiveness — for example, that penicillin indeed kills bacteria — before we consent to take it.

But this sickness is one of our will and desires, core to our being, not in a peripheral body system of which we have no conscious knowledge. It could be compared to new management attempting to fix a toxic culture at a poorly performing company. The behavioral patterns are so ingrained that simply changing leadership, or convincing people they need to change and that things are bad, is insufficient. A successful approach will involve a gradual approach of change through doing things differently, not intellectual assent.

If Christ were visibly on Earth right now, sitting on a literal throne somewhere, visibly omnipotent and omniscient, would that be sufficient to cure the disease? According to Christianity’s diagnosis, it would not. Overt power warps belief.

We saw this demonstrated during the Covid crisis. It would be impossible to believe, given the near-weekly whipsaws in “expert” advice — masks don’t work, oh wait they do, vaccines prevent Covid, oh wait they don’t — that the obedient majority were rationally considering claims and assenting to them, rather than just submitting to power and authority.

If, as Christianity claims, our primary problem is a sinful nature, then overt demonstrations of its truth, beyond the signs and miracles necessary to seed the early church, might undermine its effectiveness. Christ time and again employs gradualistic, agricultural parables of exponential growth to explain the coming of His Kingdom. Because the cure must be applied to our very natures, our hearts so to speak, it must proceed bottom-up, not top-down, otherwise, the result would be obedient hypocrites, submitting based on might makes right, not a true moral transformation of the individual and society.

One might ask why, if this is necessary, an omnipotent God would bother with a gradual process instead of instantly transforming us. I think I have a plausible answer to this, strangely borrowed from the tech weirdo transhumanist subculture.

The most direct way many see to achieve immortality through technology is by uploading one’s brain to a computer. This assumes, of course, that the self is no more than the brain, but let’s grant that to extend the discussion. Let’s say computers and diagnostic imaging become advanced enough such that the structure of the human brain can be simulated on a computer. However, there’s still one problem. If a brain is replicated in a cloud simulation, it’s merely a copy, and the human whose brain was uploaded would see it as a copy, not “me” in the sense of consciousness. At death, no matter how convincing the brain simulator was, there would still be the perception of the end of the self, as there is no experienced continuity between the original and the copy.

One solution proposed by transhumanists is to first augment the brain with external cloud processing capability (Elon’s Neuralink is a first step in creating a brain-computer interface). By introducing additional simulated neurons gradually, it is thought, the experience of consciousness would become continuous with the expanded, artificial neural enhancement. Over time, they hypothesize, the center of consciousness would be experienced in both the original and augmented brain space, and perhaps eventually predominantly in the simulated brain, since presumably it would have more advanced capabilities and not be subject to the vagaries of aging.

At some point, say ten years after augmentation, the center of consciousness moves to the artificial brain and the biological brain becomes a mere external hard drive of sorts, and a slow and buggy one at that. Then, they suppose, their center of self would be liberated from the confines of the body and death would not interrupt their continuous experience of self, which would be continued indefinitely in the cloud, or perhaps augmented with a new, robotic body. You can see why this stuff is mocked as “The Rapture for Nerds.” And to be clear, I don’t think this will ever work, it’s just an analogy.

My idea relating this to the necessity of a bottom-up, gradual approach to what St. Paul called sanctification is that it might be necessary due to the design constraints of human consciousness. If we change too fast, perhaps our experience of self is interrupted and what comes out the other side is no longer us, but someone else. I believe the gift of selfhood is God’s most profound gift to us, and He would not destroy us to save us. Gradual change through which we experience some agency, both individually and collectively as the influence of the Church spreads, not sudden or coerced change through overt displays of power, is necessary to achieve God’s purposes, and thus the deniability and non-obviousness of Christianity are useful. There are certainly aspects of my sanctification that, though accomplished gradually, feel discontinuous with the me of twenty years ago.

To return to my previous speculation on the necessity of evil, it would certainly be more dramatically satisfying, like a great novel, for the plot to be partially hidden, for clues to be present but incomplete, and only revealed in its fullness by a great denouement at the end. Perhaps God is a great artist before anything else.

I admit these are speculations and not necessarily satisfactory answers. Ultimately, for both this question and the next, I have to fall back on my reasoning for theism and Christianity as the only plausible religion and take much of the rest on faith.

But this concept of the continuity of the self as our most precious possession will help inform Part Four of this series when I attempt to deal with what is for me, and many people I’ve met, the most potent objection to overcome, the doctrine of eternal hell.

1. Serious secular historians affirm that the canonical epistles were written by their claimed authors and date to the first century.

2. Slavery was eliminated by all Christian nations peacefully, except the United States, before the close of the 19th century, and is practiced today only in non-Christian countries. I think what’s lost in the abolitionist debates was that the practice was becoming both economically and morally obsolete as the Industrial Revolution ramped up in the 1800s. I find the most persuasive anti-slavery argument to be embedded in Huey Long’s famous “BBQ speech.” A prosperous society, ridiculously materially blessed compared to the Malthusian past, can afford to and should have softer edges, especially once the historical social insurance aspects of feudal-type labor, for example, protection against famine, were remote risks. It is interesting that the most intellectually original defender of slavery, George Fitzhugh, used the abolitionists’ own words — who were, almost uniformly, socialists and proto-Communists who critiqued the Northern free market system as strenuously as the “slave power” — to show the deficiencies of free labor, where workers were costs rather than assets, that were later taken up as causes by Long and his contemporaries. The destruction of slavery, what Fitzhugh called “private communism,” would, he predicted, result in demands for public communism. However, Fitzhugh misjudged the ease with which modern governments could provide benefits like unemployment, old-age pensions, and disability insurance through taxation and administration without resorting to full communism, and with much more human dignity for its beneficiaries than either overt slavery or communism. In a sense, progressive Southern Democrats like Long and Sam Rayburn were reintroducing their cultural paternalism through government programs. As Charles Murray noted in his book calling for replacing all welfare benefits with a universal basic income, one thing the government is pretty efficient at is collecting and redistributing cash. The long-term viability of this system, which has required unsustainable debt to finance, and whose social effects have undermined the family, is still an open question.

3. The epistles are so frank about this stuff that it can make modern readers rather uncomfortable. One of the most pointed sermons I’ve ever heard was Voddie Baucham, a black Reformed pastor, preaching on St. Peter’s first epistle’s teaching on marriage roles. Without apologizing or equivocating about the passage at all, he links Peter’s previous words about slavery to the marital relation:

By the way, when he says, “Likewise, wives,” do you ever wonder, “Like what?”  If you go back to the previous chapter, and the previous paragraph, he’s talking about slaves who have evil masters and how a slave, with an evil master, should submit, even to the evil master.  It’s after that that he says, “Likewise, wives.”  I don’t write the mail; I just deliver it. 

The sermon was featured on Dennis and Barbara Rainey’s podcast, who are nice, middle-class white people Christians who felt a strong need to prepare their audience for Baucham’s frankness, saying “There’s a lot about the Bible that causes the hair on the back of my neck to stand up.”

Now, before you all hit the comments section to call me names, I’m not here to debate Baucham’s teaching, and there are different interpretations of what exactly “likewise” means here; he’s definitely one of the most conservative voices in modern Christianity. I think even Baucham would agree this entails a lot of asterisks about abuse, abandonment, and general “good faith” engagement in the marriage, and to some degree if a marriage gets to the point where this comes up as a live issue, there are usually deeper, possibly intractable problems (the best marriage advice for men and women is: be very careful who you marry). The point is, it’s undeniable that the plain words of the New Testament are deeply conservative, indeed too conservative for most modern Christians, and arguments saying it’s some kind of leveling, proto-communist collection of teachings are laughable.

4. This can be contrasted with Christian leaders like Franco and Bismarck, who sensed what was achievable and managed to walk away with house money instead of doubling down in the casino of war.

5. Lee’s service was in a war between elites prosecuted largely by poor men without a dog in the fight, who were mercilessly crushed if they dared exert their human rights to not be maimed or killed in a war not of their choosing. The crony capitalists and plantation owners, Puritans and Cavaliers again settling scores using poor Celts as cannon fodder, were largely exempt from service, not unlike the college deferments of the Vietnam era.

6. This feature is shared with Hinduism, which is why Vivek could somewhat credibly claim to believe in God despite Hinduism’s apparent polytheism.

7. Interestingly, Roman critics did not deny the miracles of Christ but rather claimed this proved little since Christ lived in Egypt and must have learned magic as a youth. The past is very much a foreign country.

8. Why anyone would want to wing it with their own goofy vows or rites at solemn occasions like weddings and funerals when the older versions of the BCP have already said it as best as it can be said is beyond me.