Truth Unites - Is Religion Bad For Society?

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Gavin Ortlund responds to the debate between Ben Shapiro and Alex O'Connor on whether religion is good or bad for society. See the debate here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yspPYcJHI3k Tom Holland's Dominion: https://www.amazon.com/Dominion-Christian-Revolution-Remade-World/dp/0465093507 Glen Scrivener's The Air We Breathe: https://www.amazon.com/Air-We-Breathe-Kindness-Christian/dp/1784987492/ My video on Gregory of Nyssa on slavery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jytXSTLLYEk My article on creation in the image of God: https://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/57/57-4/JETS_57-4_673-88_Ortlund.pdf Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Christian apologetics used to have more to do with whether Christianity is true. Today, it seems like the more pressing question is whether it is good. This is such a common perspective right now. You know, you hear people talking about religion as this, or sometimes religion in general or Christianity as this kind of toxic influence, this oppressive force from which we must be liberated. And so in this video, I want to offer a response to this. Hoping this could be helpful for Christians, knowing how to respond, we're going to hear this. This is huge right now.

Also, maybe it could be helpful for others who have this concern. Right up front, I've got to say there's no desire to minimize evil that happens in religions, as you'll see. But I want to say that really clearly up front. That's not the idea here. What I do want to argue, because especially for someone who's watching this, who's been personally wounded by religious people, believe it or not, I really do understand that. But I don't think the answer is to reject religion altogether.

And I want to explain why in this video. Now this came up in a dialogue between Ben Shapiro and Alex O'Connor. Really interesting dialogue on the unbelievable podcast. I'll link to it. A lot of people talk about how religion can make people happier. It can make people more socially cohesive. It can promote people to start families and have children. This is true of most religions.

This is also true of Islam, which I'm not sure you would want to say, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm not sure you'd want to say as a force for good in the world. I don't think, in other words, that it's always a worthwhile trade of. So the first thing that I want to point out is something that I think would be in a point of agreement with both Alex and Ben, but it needs to be said, and that is this word religion is too broad to make any kind of wholesale judgment about it as good or bad. Alex didn't do this, but you do see this a lot out there. So at times I'm going to be sort of springboarding from that dialogue to some broader trends that you see out there, especially in some of the literature, like the

atheist literature right now. You see this idea that religion is this singular phenomenon that you can evaluate like in one stroke. You see this in Stephen Pinker's recent book, Enlightenment Now. I don't know if you've read this book, fascinating book. Basically throughout the book, he's advocating for enlightenment values like reason, science, humanism, and progress as the key to the future. He's very optimistic that these forces can guide humanity forward and among the counter enlightenment forces that must be overcome, the most obvious one that he thinks is there is religion, which will hinder our progress as human beings. And he sees, religion is this source of war and violence throughout history. He claims that few sophisticated

people maintain robust religious beliefs today. There's lots of eyebrow-raising sentences in the book like this. He talks about how the Trinity is the belief that God is three persons, but also one person. He says that the Bible commanded the Israelites to commit mass rape. When he gets to the cosmological and ontological arguments, he just says they're logically invalid and doesn't say anything about which versions or why they're invalid or anything like that. So there's lots of things like this that feel uncareful, to put it mildly. But the more basic methodological issue in this book is he's treating religion as this singular phenomenon rather than dealing with particular religious ideas or particular religions. So, for example, at one point, he seems to

get the conclusion that God does not exist from the claim that different religions decree mutually incompatible beliefs about how many gods there are, which miracles they have wrought, and what they demand. But this is a thing. This is very strange to think that, you know, different religions must agree with each other in order for any of them to be true or them or religion as such to be valid or something like this. This would be like arguing different nations have different forms of government and they're all incompatible with each other, therefore government is bad or something like this.

Later on when he's responding to bloodshed caused by secular regimes, Pinker says, if religion were a source of morality, the number of religious wars and atrocities ought to be zero. So he appears to be thinking of religion as this singular entity, such that the flaws in one religion will discredit other religions or religion as such. The problem here is that religion is an incredibly diverse phenomenon. David Bentley Hart says religion in the abstract does not actually exist, and almost no one, apart from politicians, would profess any allegiance to it. Religion is as diverse as human beings. It's one of the oldest, most diverse aspects of human culture. It's a fascinating thing to think about this, you know, what is common about all religions, very small set of things that

you could say are common to every religion. It's incredibly diverse, and any reasonable person can admit there's both good and bad out there in religion, and it kind of depends on where you're looking. You know, it's kind of like saying, are human beings good or bad? Well, it's like, depends on which ones and so forth. So the criticizing religion wholesale like this, this is a really big problem. The technical way to put it is that this is the fallacy of composition where you criticize the whole on the basis of an analysis of some of the parts. So it'd be like saying, you know, I dislike McDonald's and Burger King, therefore restaurants are bad, or baseball and golf are boring, therefore I dislike sports or something like that. So that sets up the more interesting

question that we can ask in this video. Has Christianity specifically been more of a force for good or for evil. Here's Alex. A society today that decides that religion throughout its history has been wrong about the position of women in society, wrong about the mortal fate of practicing homosexuals, wrong about the position of the earth in relation to the sun, wrong about the age of both of those celestial bodies, wrong about the common evolutionary ancestry of every animal, including the human animal on planet Earth, wrong about the ownership of other human beings as private property now has to contend with a religious tradition that doesn't come to us with contrition

and apology and say, well, maybe we were wrong about these things. But no, these are all our things after all. We're going to claim these things. I know that St. Paul says, I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to assert authority over a man, rather she should remain silent for Adam was formed first, then Eve, and that man is the glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. But don't you know that the social justice movement is essentially Judeo-Christian in origin? I know that the Old Testament not only explicitly condones the ownership of other human beings as private property,

but gives detailed instructions about exactly how to buy and indeed take them, sometimes including a sexual property. But don't you know that the abolitionist movement was essentially Judeo-Christian in origin? Yes, I know that Galileo was shown the instruments of torture by the Inquisition for having the temerity to suggest that the Earth might orbit the sun rather than the other way around. But don't you know that the scientific revolution, which he authored, was essentially Judeo-Christian in origin? I'd find it funny if it wasn't so offensive to the people who established these very developments against the very religious traditions that now want to claim them as their own. So the idea here seems to be that there have been these areas of progress and development in scientific discoveries, the treatment of women, the ending of slavery, the societal perception of homosexuality, things like this, and that these developments happen over and against opposition from the church. But now the church is trying to take credit for it.

So I want to get into this a little bit and just walk through why I think that distorts the history. Before I dive in, let me say that two great books on this that I think could be helpful to people, one Tom Holland's Dominion, which Alex actually referenced in their dialogue. Another helpful book is Glenn Scrivener's, The Air We Breathe. Links are to both of those in the video description. They unpack at greater length, and with more specific examples, what I'm going to try to argue here, namely that Christianity actually has been an incredible force for good in the world, including with respect to a lot of these modern Western values like

elevating the role of women, promoting science, promoting values like equality, compassion, freedom, progress, etc. Now that does, again, that does not mean you can't find evil in the church or even opposition to these areas of progress. That certainly exists. But the idea that these values are overcoming Christian influence rather than springing out of Christian influence, really does have to twist the facts. So let me walk through this. And I'm not going to respond to Alex specifically here because he was speaking off the cuff there. And some of his other comments show that he has a more nuanced view of this. He's not just trying to be simplistic. But if I want, so I want to interact with some of the, with this basic perspective that religion is, you know,

is kind of what Alex was saying there. But getting into the atheist literature a little bit where it's documented. So we can drill into some of these specifics and really try to get to a, not just rhetoric, but specific conclusions. So take, for example, remember this book? Anyone ever read through this book? Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great. I actually really like Christopher Hitchens just to listen to him. I think he's kind of a fascinating human being, and just his rhetoric is very gifted. The book is very rhetorical. But the thing is, so this is one of the older books in the New Atheist Stream. And you see the basic idea and the subtitle, religion poisons everything. Throughout the book, he's making claims like this. Religion is not unlike racism. Religion is not just

immoral, but immoral. But the problem is the empirical evidence just doesn't fit with that, so he has to try to stretch it to make it fit. So when he gets to Christian involvement in the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, or in the American Civil Rights Movement, or in opposition to the Nazis, he's constantly downplaying the religious and specifically Christian influence behind this. So, for example, he gets to Martin Luther King Jr., and you can tell he, kind of admires him somewhat. So he has to try to claim that, well, he wasn't really a Christian. He was only a Christian in a nominal sense. And the basis for that appears to be in what's kind of a bizarre paragraph in the book, you can look it up, that Luther King, Martin Luther King, Jr.

didn't threaten hellfire upon his opponents. That seems to be the basis for this claim. And then when he gets to the transatlantic slave trade, he basically says this was blessed by all the churches. For a long time, there was no religious opposition and so forth. So then he has to try to downplay, you know, the Quakers and the Mennonites who, various abolitionist sentiments and movements that are going on, William Lloyd Garrison, the American abolitionist and social reformer, he tries to downplay his influence amazingly. He doesn't even discuss William Wilberforce, more on him in a moment. When it comes to opposition to the Nazis, he mentions Dietrich Bonhofer and Martin Niemöller and people like this, but he says, the chance that it was

their Christianity that inspired their resistance to the Nazis is statistically almost negligible. They, you know, they must have been acting from other motives and that kind of thing. See what he's trying to do. He's trying to downplay the religious element. But if Hitchens had engaged the particular ideas that motivated these specific figures, he would have found that the motivation in each case was explicitly religious. William Wilberforce, you know, thoroughly set against the slave trade because of the the gospel. He thought God gave him a mission for opposing that as well as other areas of social reform. And you can read his biographies and see all he was involved in. It was amazing. Prison reform,

reducing the quantity of capital punishment, improving education, alleviating poverty, so many other things. Together with his friends, these were like evangelical Christians who were leading the cause on this. And their specific belief in creation in the image of God is motivating their efforts. Martin Luther King Jr. You know, one of my favorite documents ever written is his letter from a Birmingham jail, absolutely beautiful, just well written. It's rhetorically beautiful, but it's also the vision of it is so beautiful. And it's thoroughly religious. The whole idea is this philosophy of civil disobedience, okay? The whole idea is you disobey unjust laws and you obey the just laws, and you know the difference between the unjust and the just laws by whether they

measure up to the eternal law of God. It's an explicitly theological argument. He is quoting from Christian philosophers and theologians. He's giving biblical examples like the refusal of Daniel's friends to obey Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel, early Christians who were fed to the lions for disobeying the Roman emperor, things like this. The whole idea is basically when do human laws deviate from God's law? And that's when you practice civil disobedience. So when Hitchin says that King's legacy has very little to do with his profess theology, he would have served his readers better by at least giving some kind of guess as to how Martin Luther King Jr's philosophy of civil disobedience could have survived without that foundation in this vision of the eternal law of God. Same with Bonhofer.

I might do another vision on Bonhofer specifically because I admire him so much, but his opposition to the Nazis was because of his theological commitments, especially his ecclesiology. He's very ecumenical, actually, but his vision of the church. And I'll just give one quote here, Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Now, again, none of this is to deny that grave sins have been committed by the church, absolutely. But what we're proposing here is a more complicated picture. So just as it's simplistic to say that religion is good, or Christians are always the good guys in the story, not true. So it also is simplistic in the opposite direction. To act like Christianity, specifically, or religion generally is this evil toxic force. It depends on what you're talking about,

and the simple fact is when it comes to the particular areas of social progress in the modern West, Christians have been at the forefront on many of these areas because of their Christianity. Furthermore, stepping back a little bit, we can ask this more basic question. Why did these areas of progress happen to begin with? Where do the ideas that undergird them come from? Today, we just take it as self-evident that something like slavery is wrong. So we find these passages in the Bible about slavery and they're appalling and so forth. But so much of this is because we are in a society that has been shaped by Christian influence.

For example, with its emphasis upon creation in the image of God, if you look at ancient history, And this is what people like Tom Holland and Glenn Scrivener do so well. They show that the values we just take for granted today are historically rare. They're not common sense to most people throughout history. Taking the issue of human equality, for example. Scrivener gives these examples from philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, which are in no way exceptional from other thinkers at the time or societies at the time that basically, it's just assumed.

It's just trivially obvious that slavery is just. some people are born to be slaves, and that's just the ancient way of thinking, and that's pretty much everywhere in the ancient world. It was the Genesis story of creation in the image of God that elevated humanity and described divine value to each particular human being, and thus it was Christians who, from that basis, first began to oppose slavery in the ancient world. You can see my video on Gregory of Nisa and his opposition to slavery for more on that, or you can read an article that I wrote on the meaning of the image of God.

in the video description. Basically, I just discuss how, to summarize it, Genesis 1 democratized this idea of creation in the image of God. It made it for everybody. In other ancient, near Eastern creation accounts, there was this idea, same idea, creation in the image of a deity, or being made as the offspring of a deity, but that would just be reserved for the royal figures. Christianity made it for everybody, everybody's royal in the vision of Genesis 1. If you look at, so the point is, if you at the ancient world, you can see the uniqueness and the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition directing us toward the values that we take for granted today. I think this was a point that Ben made very well about religion in their dialogue. The great philosophers we like to cite

in the sometimes in the secular tradition are big fans of slavery. And that's true virtually up until the 18th century. Yes. So the idea would be, is this verse attempting to move people away from a tradition of slavery or to humanize the slaves, or is it attempting to reinforce that by making it harsher and more difficult? And that's why actually one of the things I enjoy doing in terms of how I study the Bible, for example, is I like to look at contemporaneous religious texts of the time.

So I like to study the Bible alongside, for example, Hamarabi's Code. And it's really interesting to notice the differences and where the Bible is liberalizing Hamarabi's Code, for example. And so the idea that a divine revelation has to be given to human beings who are capable of following that in the time, Again, that's part of the difficulty of, I think, rebutting religion in a certain sense,

because, again, it seems wiggly, but it really isn't in the sense that if you believe, as I do, in a God who spoke to human beings in some form or fashion, and has to speak to them on a level that they can understand, in ways they can understand, then that immediately is going to discount the ability to do a lot of very radical things that would have appeared radical in 1,200 BC, but now appear to be commonplace. But here I want to highlight this concern in another way, not just by looking at least, looking at the ancient world, but by looking at modern secular atrocities. Because basically, this religious, this religion poisons everything mentality has to answer this question. Why is

it that when religion goes away, values like compassion and equality don't just roll on, uninterrupted and assumed by everybody, but they tend to dissipate? Why is it that humanity's most secular century is simultaneously the bloodiest, the 20th century? In this final stretch, I just want to talk about this of the video here. I want to talk about the Soviet Union in particular, a particular area where I've done just a little bit of research enough to be kind of, I could put it like this, I'm profoundly gripped and concerned that today in the 21st century, we've forgotten what happened just 100 years ago or even less. And much of the buoyant optimism of 21st century secularism subsists by forgetting this very recent history. because basically the bloodiest chapter in all human history was simultaneously an experiment in secularism on an unprecedented scale. Humanity at her most ruthless was without gods or temples.

Christopher Hitchens references this question of what about the Soviet Union as the most common question that he and his atheist friends get asked by religious audiences. Sam Harris in the new afterward to the book, The End of Faith. he wrote a, I guess this is the second edition, and I don't know if there's other editions, but he's addressing this and he notes the same thing, that the most common response to the book's first printing, this was his first book, is what about secular regimes? And one of the things he claims in this book is, well, Stalin and Mao were just leaders of a political religion. Bill Maher, same thing. Back in, I think, 2012, Bill Maher had Ross Douthit on real time,

and I wish I could still find this clip on YouTube, but it's been taken down, I think. Dautha did a fantastic job. This issue came up. He brought up the Soviet Union as a counterpoint to this idea that religion is the cause of violence. And Bill Maher said, well, the Soviet Union was just a secular religion. Okay. Now, the problem is, however you define a secular religion, whatever you mean by that, using that label for the Soviet Union is too convenient.

the complete elimination of religion was a fundamental tenet of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy that was embraced as the official state ideology of the Soviet Union, various other countries in the Eastern Bloc, in early portions of the 20th century. So you can read this classic text on the Marxist-Leninist outlook, and the whole first chapter is devoted to philosophical materialism, and it's showing the importance of materialism, a materialistic worldview, for that whole system. Or you can read Lenin's writings themselves, where he addresses this.

I'll never forget. I did a study on this a while back, and it was just amazed at how we, again, we forget this. But Lenin explicitly said any comparison between religion and communism is a despicable flirtation with God. Here's how one historian puts it. I'll put it up on the screen. I won't read all these quotes, but basically he's saying, religion and communism are completely different.

The difference is not trivial. One is an illusion. the other is based on science, so on and so forth. You can pause the video, read the whole quote. So the point is, the official Soviet policy was explicitly materialistic and atheistic at its core. So this idea that, well, the Soviet Union is just another kind of religion. This is kind of like saying, well, Martin Luther King, Jr. was not really a Christian. It's, you have to twist the historical facts to make it fit,

and to try to make it more neat and tidy for your worldview. it's actually more complicated. Now here's the reality, and this is the brutal, absolutely. I mean, it grips me every time I consider it. The Soviet Union engaged in a persecution of religious belief and practice that is of such proportions that it's hard to take in. From several decades, there was a ruthless campaign of propaganda, ridicule, harassment, incarceration, and mass execution. This is going on from when the Bolsheviks take over in the Russian revolution in 1917 up until Stalin's death in 1953, with another revival in the 1960s a little later.

And then you can see these aggressive spikes of persecution during this time frame, especially from like 1928 to 1941. Late 20s to World War II, there's these various anti-religious campaigns, and they're just brutal. It's been a while since I read through this, but I'll put up the sources and you can kind of look into it for the details. I remember reading just in 1937 alone. That year alone, the numbers, the thousands and thousands of Russian Orthodox priests who were executed.

You can read about that in this book if you're interested. If you want to get a phase-by-phase overview, see the article by Philip Walters in this book. It'll give you that was one book that I found that really kind of walks it through well. The net result is that the vast majority of churches, mosques, and synagogues were shut down by the start of World War II. From 1917 to 1914, for example, the number of Russian Orthodox churches. had decreased by 95%. The number of active bishops went from 130 to somewhere between four and seven. The number of priests went from over 51,000 to less than 500. And the amount of bloodshed is hard for us to get a handle on. When we talk about, when I was saying a moment ago

that like this is humanity at her most merciless and so forth, you could read this book by R.J. Rummel, who's an authority on genocide and government mass murder, It'll give you a sense of the scale of things. He points out that Marxism has been the bloodiest force in human history. He estimates the number killed by the Marxist regimes of the 20th century as over 100 million for proportion. That's way more than all fatalities from World War II, civilian and soldiers and everybody, famine, all the causes from World War II,

and World War II is the deadliest war in human history. So again, the question is, if the bloodiest chapter in the human story was simileged, simultaneously, this experiment in secularism. The question, it's one way of raising this question that we should be nervous about. Why should we assume that the modern Western values that we take to be self-evident will be self-evident once the metaphysical substructure that has grounded them is taken away? You know, it's not to be assumed that those values are just going to keep rolling on.

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the Templeton Prize in 1983, he can speak to this with greater authority. than me or probably anybody who watches this video because he lived through it. And his interpretation was all this has happened because men have forgotten God. Now, I think it's hard to establish some kind of airtight case for a causation like that. But at the very least, it raises the question. If you think that, you know, religion is the force holding us back, religion is this corrosive, oppressive force that once that's taken away, then mercy and rationality, and tolerance will just roll forward unhindered. You know, what is your basis for that?

What is the grounding for those values? In this book, which is punchy, as all his writings are, David Bentley Hart's atheist illusions, he's talking about this confidence that people have that that will happen. And he says, given that the modern age of secular governance has been the most savagely and sublimely violent period in human history by a factor or body count of incalculable magnitude, it is hard to identify the grounds of their confidence. Now, again, I'm not trying to say that religion is always a force for good. I'm trying to say it's more complicated, but I'm certainly trying to say religion is not

the problem. The problem is evil, and evil has religious expressions, but evil also has secular expressions. But here's the thing that's interesting to think about is, where do these values come from? That Alex mentioned in his clip, you know, equality, valuing women, the elevation of women, whereas women were often treated as kind of second rate in many places in the ancient world. Where did it come from that we have this value for equality on that issue, many others? Science. What was it?

Why did the scientific revolution happen when it did and where it did? Those are totally valid questions. And I think someone like Tom Holland makes an incredibly powerful case for Christian influence. Now here's, you know, I haven't gone into that case fully here, but I'm trying to put it out on the table, encourage you read Tom Holland's book. Here's my closing thought, though. Suppose you're sympathetic to that idea, like, okay, maybe Christianity has had some kind of influence like that.

The question we could ask to close is, why is that the case? Why has Christianity had that kind of influence? One idea we've already mentioned is this beautiful idea of creation in God's image, but there's more. The fundamental Christian truth is that God died for me. Basically, there is a creator God, there is something transcendent that made our world that is it is personal it is a personal god this is the christian view and that god entered into creation as one creature and that's whom we call jesus and he died this horrific death dying on a cross

being crucified out of love for us for our salvation now whether you think that idea is true or not you got to admit it's the most powerful idea you can think of i mean of course the idea of an infinite God sacrificing himself in love for his enemies. It's not surprising that that is going to be a force for social good. And the deeper question that I've given my entire life to, and I love to invite my YouTube viewers to give their lives to with me and join me and just giving yourself to this true, giving yourself to this, is what if it's not just a beautiful idea that has inspired good? What if it's actually true? And I think there's good reasons to believe it is. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Hope this video will be of interest to people who are wrestling with these questions. At the very least, hopefully this should... At the very least, we need to puncture this kind of self-righteous confidence with which religion is lambasted. Looking at the Soviet Union and how brutal it was, there's one way to make us all slow down and say, wait a second, let's make careful distinctions. The problem that we all want to get rid of is evil. But evil has secular expressions, just as it has religious expressions. and the fascinating thing to think about is the values that we have in the modern West,

where did they come from? Read Tom Holland's book before you dismiss that idea. It's a pretty powerful case. All right, thanks for watching, everybody.