McLaughlin Confronting Christianity

12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4335-6426-0
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

Although many people suggest that Christianity is declining, research indicates that it continues to be the world's most popular worldview. But even so, the Christian faith includes many controversial beliefs that non-Christians find hard to accept. This book explores 12 issues that might cause someone to dismiss orthodox Christianity-issues such as the existence of suffering, the Bible's teaching on gender and sexuality, the reality of heaven and hell, the authority of the Bible, and more. Showing how the best research from sociology, science, and psychology doesn't disagree with but actually aligns with claims found in the Bible, these chapters help skeptics understand why these issues are signposts, rather than roadblocks, to faith in Christ.

Rebecca McLaughlin (PhD, Cambridge University) is the author of Confronting Christianity, named Christianity Today's 2020 Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year. Her subsequent works include 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (and Answer) about Christianity; The Secular Creed; and Jesus through the Eyes of Women. Rebecca is the host of the Confronting Christianity podcast.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McLaughlin, Rebecca

Leseproben

Introduction

In 1971, Beatles star John Lennon had a dream. Closing his eyes to the atheist regimes of his day, he dreamed of a brotherhood of man with no heaven, no hell, no countries, no possessions, “nothing to kill or die for,” and “no religion.” This dream persists. “Imagine” was sung reverentially at the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea. Despite prescribing an antireligious pill swallowed by only a tiny fraction of the world, it is seen as an anthem of unity across ideological differences. As its notes rang out in PyeongChang, the sister of the supreme leader of North Korea—a state that has tried “no religion” and still found much to kill and die for—graced the crowd.

Eight years before “Imagine” was released, another prophet shared another dream. He dreamed that “one day in Alabama . . . little black boys and black girls [would] be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”1 But in the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision, peace and brotherhood sprang not from the loss of faith but from its fulfillment. King dreamed that “one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed” (Isa. 40:4).

Who was right?

At the time John Lennon dreamed, another set of prophets spoke. Sociologists of religion foretold that global modernization would drive secularization. As the world became more educated, more advanced, more scientific, religious belief would retreat. It had happened in Western Europe, so the rest of the world would follow. There was only one problem with the so-called secularization hypothesis. It failed.

In Western Europe and North America, the proportion of people identifying as religious has certainly shrunk. But at a global level, not only has religion failed to decline, but sociologists are now predicting an increasingly religious world.2 While numbers do not tell the whole story, by 2060, the latest projections suggest, Christianity will still be the largest global belief system, having increased slightly, from 31 percent to 32 percent of the world’s population.3 Islam will have grown substantially, from 24 percent to 31 percent. Hinduism is set for marginal decline, from 15 percent to 14 percent, and Buddhism from 7 percent to 5 percent. Judaism will hold stable at 0.2 percent. And by 2060, the proportion of humanity identifying as atheists, agnostics, or “none” will have declined from 16 percent to 13 percent. Yes, declined.4 For those of us who grew up under the secularization hypothesis, this comes as a surprise—pleasant or otherwise. So, what is happening?

Part of the answer lies in the link between theology and biology: Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Jews outbreed the nonreligious.5 Sixty percent of the world’s religiously unaffiliated live in China, where fertility rates have been deliberately controlled. But even within the United States, religiosity correlates with fertility.6 This may be a comfort to secularists, who would rather imagine believers outbreeding them than outthinking them. But the presumed link between education and secularization is weak. While the gaps are closing for younger generations, Jews and Christians are still the most educated groups, with the smallest educational gap between men and women.7 In the US, while nominally religious people are more likely to declare themselves nonreligious if they are more educated, professing Christians with higher levels of education appear to be just as religious as those with less schooling. Indeed, highly educated Christians are more likely to be weekly churchgoers.8

Furthermore, while many Americans are becoming nonreligious, the traffic flows both ways. A recent study found that nearly 40 percent of Americans raised nonreligious become religious (typically Christian) as adults, while only 20 percent of those raised Protestant switch.9 If that trend continues, my secular friends are twice as likely to raise children who become Christians as I am to raise children who become nonreligious.10 And the kind of religious beliefs people hold today are not the kind that fit comfortably into the “Coexist” bumper sticker. In North America, partly thanks to immigrant believers, full-blooded Christianity is outcompeting theologically liberal faith.11

But perhaps the biggest shock to the secular system is China, a country that has tried hard to imagine and enforce no religion. Conservative estimates from 2010 put China’s Christian population at over sixty-eight million, representing 5 percent of its vast population.12 But Christianity is spreading so fast that experts believe China could have more Christians than the US by 2030, and that it could be a majority-Christian country by 2050.13

Fenggang Yang, a leading sociologist of religion in China, argues that we need to undergo a paradigm shift akin to a scientific revolution as we adjust to the failure of the secularization hypothesis.14 Much academic discourse rests on the assumption that religion is withering under the scorching heat of modernization. Secular humanism is seen as the shared ground on which we all can stand. But this framework has crumbled. Today, we must wake up to the fact that Lennon’s dream was a fantasy. What is worse, it was a fantasy fueled by white Western bias and grounded on the assumption that the world would follow where Western Europe led. The question for the next generation is not How soon will religion die out? but Christianity or Islam?

For many, this is a troubling thought. Full-blooded religious belief worries us. We envisage extremism and violence, the stifling of free thought, and the subjugation of women. In some parts of the world, the resurgence of traditionalist Islam has borne this unappealing fruit. But for many raised in the secularizing West, biblical Christianity also triggers moral and intellectual objections: What about science, suffering, and sexuality? What about the Crusades? How can you say there is one true faith? How can you take the Bible literally? Doesn’t the Bible justify slavery? How could a loving God send people to hell?

If you resonate with these questions, this book is for you. I feel their weight. If I give smug, simplistic answers, I have failed. I have spent decades of my life engaging with brilliant friends who have principled reasons for dismissing Christianity. But I have also spent years working with Christian professors at leading secular universities in fields ranging from physics to philosophy. Some grew up in the church. Others encountered Christianity later. All have found that their faith has stood the test of their research and left them more convinced that Christianity represents our tightest grasp on truth and our best hope for the world. This book aims to look closely at important questions through the lenses these friends have given me, and to share that experience with you.

Often, when we observe from a distance, we misinterpret. Look up at the night sky and you will see much darkness. But train a telescope on the blackest patch, and a million galaxies explode into view. John Lennon dreamed of a religion-free world where there would be “nothing to kill or die for.” Staring into the dark night of segregation, Martin Luther King preached an antithetical message: that “there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they are worth dying for. And I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”15

1. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream . . .” (speech delivered at the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” August 28, 1963), https://www.archives.gov/files/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf.

2. See “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050,” Pew Research Center, April 2, 2015, http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/.

3. See “Projected Change in Global Population, 2015–2060,” Pew Research Center, March 31, 2017, http://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-religious-landscape/pf_17-04-05_projectionsupdate_changepopulation640px/.

4. See “Size and Projected Growth of Major Religious Groups, 2015–2060,” Pew Research Center, April 3, 2017, http://www.pewforum.org/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-religious-landscape/pf-04-05-2017_-projectionsupdate-00-07/.

5. Global fertility rates are as follows: Muslims (3.1), Christians (2.7), Hindus (2.4), Jews (2.3), unaffiliated (1.7), Buddhists (1.6). See “Total Fertility Rate by Religion, 2010–2015,” Pew Research Center, March 26, 2015,...