Before tempering out in my later college years, I was a very angry and arrogant person. I had an ax to grind, but I did my grinding chiefly for the Lord. My anger and arrogance were directly tied to my identity as a passionate, “superstar” Christian who knew the right stuff and did the right stuff. I don’t say that as a point of bragging–far from it. But by most objective measures, I was doing the Christian thing at a whole other level.
College broke me down, chiefly because I realized there were a lot of people smarter than me so I should learn some humility. I eventually mellowed out. I mostly no longer launch personal attacks of people on Facebook, I mostly no longer fume when someone speaks an opinion I disagree with, and I am mostly willing to admit when I have erred. Hey, I’m still working on unlearning bad habits.
I’ve grown in my faith too. When coming face-to-face with Scripture in a new light, I realized that I knew all the stuff but I still wasn’t acting like Jesus. I had the faith, but not the works, which means I really didn’t have the faith. I hadn’t grasped what it meant to love.
Recently, I’ve been reflecting back on my past self, the guy who would Hulk Out over Religious Disagreements. The guy who, in middle school, became known by what he was against more than what he was for. The guy who very liberally threw around the word “heretic” to all those that dared move an inch from his interpretation. So I’ve been thinking… where did that guy come from?
Unapologetic Apologetics
I only recently found what I believe to be the cause of my bad behavior. Where did my hate originate? It wasn’t my parents–my parents were not hateful people. Yeah, my parents hardly modeled nor taught hate.
My church isn’t likely to bear the blame either. I saw so many truly loving people and sermons never were done with harsh judgment; many times, the church avoided the most contentious conversations in public services.
Now, it wasn’t schooling either. I was a public school kid from kindergarten until I went to a private Christian college. Growing up in the most populated areas of Oregon meant that schools lean progressive and there was little talk of religion. They weren’t going to give me a pro-Christian bias!
So… what was it?
I think, as the title of the post suggests, I have to blame it on apologetics.
Simply put, apologetics means “defending the Christian faith.” In the second century when total bosses like Justin Martyr were writing apologetics works, he was defending the goodness of the Christian faith by arguing that Christians were morally superior because we don’t leave babies to die of exposure and we give agency and freedom to women and slaves.
But in the last 200 years, apologetics has taken on a new flavor. In a world that doesn’t take for granted the presence of the supernatural, apologetics is now chiefly concerned with topics like the existence of God, the inspiration of Scripture, and ways in which Western cultural norms differ from conventional Christian morality.
Because the gap between the believer and the non-believer is wider than ever, apologetics has largely adopted a combative tone (early apologetics was “come and see the goodness we offer” but now it’s “go and fight the heretics”). They have begun drawing hard battle lines on a number of issues, typically even slicing up the Christian camp into who really is Christian and who isn’t. This is engagement in what’s often dubbed “Culture Wars” where it’s a fight to win culture with certain morals and ideals.
But I believe it is because the apologetics world is steeply embedded into a fight to the death ethic when it comes to cultural conversations that it began to push me toward extremism and anger. I learned to hate my enemy although I was told that I was just “telling the truth.” But when it comes to wartime, you have to hate your enemy or you won’t have the courage or will to fight.
So for the remainder of this essay, I will point out a few specific examples of how apologetics made me a worse person. My hope is to rescue others from the same forces in apologetics that make me lose the plot of the Christian life.
1. Apologetics Gave Me A Poor View of Opponents
As mentioned above, I believe that if you frame something as a war, you essentially have to vilify whoever is on the other side. It’s propaganda 101. It helps inspire your troops. And it’s going to be especially important when the group you are a part is the minority, as many conservative Christians would claim they are compared to the amorphous secular culture they point to as the enemy.
In my hardcore apologetics days, especially within creationist circles, I encountered a lot of memes and videos that poked fun at people who didn’t hold to certain beliefs. The common suggestion was that non-Christians were either stupid or blind to not be convinced by the evidence of faith. Scripture like Romans 1:20 and Pslam 14:1 was used as proof that atheists and evolutionists were ridiculous for not seeing what is plain as day.
But creationists, and to a lesser extent more general apologists who didn’t get bogged down in Genesis stuff, had a favorite way to paint the enemy: as Nazis. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve heard, in various lectures and books and articles, that Nazi extremism and their master race plan is the logical conclusion of Social Darwinism, which is a strategy to get people scared of evolutionists (because no one likes Nazis). Also teachings in textbooks that didn’t line up with the Christian worldview, whether about evolution or sexuality, were often compared to Nazi propaganda. Hitler did say, after all, “Those who control the textbooks control the state.” Funny, though, those same culture warriors never applied that to Christian homeschool textbooks famous for teaching that “slavery wasn’t that bad” and saying all kinds of erroneous things to make Christians look good…
So while I “loved” my enemy in theory–and I would always say that–in practice, I viewed many of my opponents as Nazis. Which, btw, is not loving your enemy.
A Selection of Creationist Books and DVDs About the Relationship of Nazism and Evolution
- From Darwin to Hitler
- Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism
- Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview
- Evolution and the Holocaust (DVD)
- Eugenics, Abortion, and Genetics (DVD)
As of the publication of this article, searching “Hitler” on Creation.com produces 681 results. And 588 results for “Nazi.” If you are in this circles, trust me, your opponent is being compared to Nazis.
2. Apologetics Told Me Authorities Were Wrong (and Evil)
If you adopt a view of the world as “Christianity against the secularists” and take it to the extreme, then you have to deeply mistrust authority. For me, the big issue was evolution–the vast majority of the scientific community believes it, but the Bible seems to say different, so what do we do? Well, it’s easy. You just make broad-sweeping generalization that the scientific community is filled with indoctrinated dupes, Bible-haters, and a few absolutely evil people who know they are wrong but teach evolution because…errr…not sure what the motive is.
Let’s look at one such quote from Answers in Genesis that attempts to explain how most scientists are wrong:
Most scientists, even those who are Christians, have chosen only to view the evidence and interpret it using human reasoning alone! They have bought into the idea that God’s Word is irrelevant when it comes to studying the earth’s history.
That’s how most scientists are wrong. They have chosen finite, fallible man’s word over the Word of the infinite, infallible, all-powerful Creator God. It’s an issue of who is the ultimate authority.
Andrew Snelling from the article “How Could Most Scientists Be Wrong?“
The suggestion is that scientists should take their cues from the Bible first as if it’s a textbook (which its not) and scientific reasoning and experimentation later… So any scientsit who didn’t start with the Bible in their research is automatically suspect. (Oh man, I just realized I took my drivers test at 15 without consulting the Bible first… oh wait…)
Because I had studied apologetics books, I, as a teenager, felt smarter than 97% of scientists who recognize biological evolution as an accurate description of origins (real stat, from 2009). Granted, I do believe that a) majorities can be wrong and b) experts can have biases. Of course! But it’s still a very precarious position to put a teenager into and expect him not to get arrogant.
I legitimately hated an Old Testament professor my freshman year of college because he explained why taking the six days of creation as a snapshot of some historical reality was ignoring how Genesis was meant to be read. I considered him a heretic for a time (ironically, I go to church with him now). Doesn’t matter he knew nine languages, most of them dead ones, and went to a very prestigious school to get his Ph.D. in the Old Testament… I obviously was smarter. Because it was me who know God’s Word.
Because that’s what apologetics told me.
It’s no secret that conservative Christianity often begets distrust in various institutions such as government and medicine. But in the bubble I put myself in, it grew even worse because I felt like I HAD to fight these big powers because salvation for the world was at stake. I had the truth, they were lying and/or stupid, and the only way to stop Goliath is to kill him… The culture allowed me to rationalize arrogance and check my critical thinking at the front door.
3. Apologetics Left No Room for Compromise
There was only one thing worse than being an atheist: being a Christian who believed in evolution. Or, so I thought. That was the information I was fed.
In creationist circles, the word “compromise” is thrown around a lot. It’s a world that only has negative connotations. One of my favorite authors in my youth even wrote a book called Refuting Compromise that was attempting to refute arguments that would allow evolution and the Christian faith to happily coexist. Other books like Already Compromised or A Pocket Guide to Compromise existed too. Think about it: if your opponents are basically Nazis then yeah why would you want to budge even a little?
Like most hardline views, it’s an all-or-nothing thing. There’s no wiggle room. No middle ground. No compromise.
Turns out, that idea can lead you to become a person who stubbornly won’t change their mind nor allow any nuances in the conversation. Suddenly, there’s no middle option or third way. Like, I generally believed that if someone were to view Jonah as something other than a historical account or recognize evolution as a scientific fact or even vote Democrat, they were well on their way to being a God-forsaken atheist. They were, really, already gone.
I think there are times when we need to draw firm lines. And totaly God lays down some rules. However, always shutting down conversations about finding a middle ground is a great way to isolate yourself from the truth and polarize yourself even more. Refusing to even allow someone to believe differently than you and still be a certified Christian or rational human being means you’ve check your brains out the door.
I’ve learned that often truth is found right between the screaming sides, right where both extremes ignore. But that’s the one place I was never allowed to look.
4. Apologetics Put Too Much Emphasis on Intellectualism
It wasn’t until a couple of years into getting a Bible degree in college that I realized I really didn’t have a faith in God. At least, I didn’t experience the fullness of faith. For years, I knew all the right stuff and pretty much did all the right stuff. But despite all that, it was hard to describe what God and I had as a “relationship.” It was like I was more of God’s campaign manager than I was a friend or follower.
I’m a deeply intellectual guy, but diving deep into apologetics had the unhealthy effect of making it ALL about knowing. I once recall a church member saying that she just believed by faith and didn’t need the evidence of apologetics–but that didn’t fit with my schema one bit! Christians had to know all the right stuff or risk falling away! Not knowing every detail was too dangerous. Knowledge was salvation (a heresy called gnosticism, which the Church condemded in the 2nd century).
Surely, I don’t want to question the faith of those in the apologetics world. But since the content I was being fed had the recurring theme of promoting an intellectual version of faith, it hindered many aspects of my spiritual development. Every crisis in my life led me to try to know more instead of relying on God to take control. Prayer felt useless because I was convinced I just needed to try harder and seek out an answer on my lonesome.
When I did my master’s work, I chose to write my thesis on 1 Corinthians 3:1-3. I’ll be honest, I kind of wanted my exegesis to reveal that the secret to “growing up” was to know more stuff. That it was all about knowledge and learning and understanding. But after spending a year writing that paper I realized that Paul wasn’t urging Christians to know more stuff. He was inviting them to experience Jesus more. We need to put our identity in Christ, which involves orienting our minds, behaviors, and feelings toward Christ–all aspects of ourselves.
I’ll admit that of the all the problems I’ve identified with apologetics, this one is most on me. I got too obsessed with apologetics and ignored the devotional and spiritual aspects. Still, apologetics had no problem feeding me more and more information, a practice that suggested it was the information that mattered.
A Conscientious Objector from the Culture War
So I left my position as a soldier in the Culture War. I no longer identify as captain of the apologetics battalion. I eventually realized that the “culture” of apologetics–the lectures and publications and media and memes–was not shaping me into the person God wants me to be. As I studied the Scriptures and Christian theology more deeply, I realized that apologetics had distracted me from the whole point of faith.
I do want to make clear my issue is not necessarily with the arguments but with how they were presented that’s what shaped me. And there are apologists who don’t buy into the culture war mentality. In fact, the college professor who taught an Evidence of Christianity course to me in college just came out with a great article about the dangers of intellectual individualism and how science works by community consensus (view Dr. Baird’s article for free here). He’s someone who never saw apologetics as a weapon, but as a nice tool to have.
But you may say that what I’ve identified isn’t an intrinsic problem with the apologetics I engaged in. Or maybe it was all my fault, I just processed it all poorly or missed out on all the positive stuff apologetics offer. Or maybe I just wasn’t mature enough to “handle” it.
And I’m willing to admit that those excuses may be part of the story. But I think that it is a grave tragedy to ignore the way in which we broach important subjects and how that impacts us. I was enmeshed in this culture–I consumed an incredible amount of content on this subject. In fact I just turned around and counted 20 apologetics books on my bookshelf, which is just a fraction of my original collection. And I was involved with plenty of other people, many kids as well, who turned out similar to me. So I don’t think we are looking at a fluke, but a feature.
Just like I was told all my life that watching certain shows or listening to certain music would “influence” my behavior, so engaging with Us vs. Them apologetics shaped my soul. And not for the better.
I wish I could time travel and tell past Jake to “chill out.” But I can’t change who I was. I can only change who I am.
And, hopefully, I can change how other people are affected by these same forces.
