Is fundagelical Christianity dying?

 "Fundagelical" is an ever-more-common mashup for "fundamentalist" and "(conservative) evangelical," for the unfamiliar. The two groups may differ in some doctrinal emphases; for example, evangelicals like Pat Robertson can be old-earth creationists without any problems, and fundamentalists may worry less about evangelism.

However, their overall largely literalist focus on doctrines and beliefs is pretty much the same. Their politics definitely are.

That said, the "conservative" in parentheses is important. Readers of Sojourners magazine or people like Jimmy Carter, liberal evangelicals who aren't liberal mainline Protestants, still exist in numbers.

With that, let's dig in.

Ex-Southern Baptist Convention ethicist Russell Moore (I don't know if he's ex-SBC by church attendance or not) talks about whether or not Christianity is dying, or will be.

Actually, that's not true.

He talks about whether his version of Xianity is dying, or will be.

And, the rise of the so-called "nones" say that he's probably whistling in the dark more than he'd like to admit.

To riff on Paul and turn him upside down, Christians who have belief in the next life only, and when people are long-term unemployed, can offer nothing more than a Calvinist "will of god," or even a Christian Social Darwinian "maybe you're still a sinner," don't have anything to offer Millennials.

To riff on Russell Moore?

If your witnessing is only a gospel that fails to include a social gospel, it's tohu wevohu, per the Hebrew opening the Torah. 

If your witnessing is a gospel with less tolerance and toleration than Pope Francis, then it's only a clanging cymbal, to go back to Paul.

So, if your Christianity is, if not dying, continuing to decline into a basket case, it's because you're helping strangle it, Moore.

Harvey Whitehouse: Right on defining what religion is, until he went way wrong

Via Pocket, I saw this Nautilus piece, written by Steve Paulson, that at first looked very interesting.

British anthropologist Whitehouse, who has been to hunter-gatherer or mixed subsistence cultures in places like New Guinea, talked about how the power of rituals, especially initiation rituals, and their creation of social bonds, are a key item to the development of religion.

Sounded interesting. That's definitely the case as he further discussed the sociological aspects of this.

Until ... he went wrong.

He first went wrong with the word "transcendence," which he seemed to use even more loosely than Rudolf Otto's "numinous," and which, like the word "ineffable," comes off in his account as "anything that seems unexplainable." So, at that point, we've moved kind of New Agey. (Hold on to that thought.)

That was bad enough, until he went really wrong.

He claimed that footy (football, in the UK) fandom was itself a religion. Oh, wrong, wrong, Not.Even.Wrong. And, not just about footy, but US football or any other sport.

And, I suppose we're at the point of needing to offer my definition of religion.

First, I agree that religion is a group, sociological and social psychology function.

Second, rituals in general and initiation rituals in particular, may be part of religion's coherence. (Etymologists still debate whether or not the word comes from the Latin "religere," which means "to tie together.")

But, that's where we part company.

My definition of religious starts in the world of philosophy, where he seems not to visit, per the story:

Whitehouse directs the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. For years he’s been collaborating with scholars around the world to build a massive body of data that grounds the study of religion in science. Whitehouse draws on an array of disciplines—archeology, ethnography, history, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science—to construct a profile of religious practices.

And, that means that right there, he's going to be lacking, IMO. (I also wonder if, or fear that, "evolutionary anthropology" could wind up coming off like some of the current worst of "evolutionary psychology," but that will be a blog post or three for another time, if necessary. OTOH, it may be something like Scott Atran, who Wiki says, on its Whitehouse page, helped found another institute at Oxford with him. I digress.)

My definition, which I think I've uttered here before, is something like this.

Religion is about:

Metaphysical matters of ultimate concern, within a social group setting; and 

How one orients oneself within that group to a better relationship to these metaphysical matters of ultimate concern.

First, note that "metaphysical" shows we're clearly into philosophy. It means something that "transcendence" does not.

Second, note that "of ultimate concern" shows we're not talking about footy fandom. UK fans who would believe that they can conduct magic rituals to revive the career of a current player, let alone actually revive a dead star of the past, would be considered mentally ill by psychologists, and ministers, and presumably by Whitehouse.

Third, note that I did NOT say "god," or "deity/-ies" or "divinity/-ies." 

This means that Theravada Buddhists who do not believe in a personal deity are still part of a religion. They ARE, Stephen Batchelor, Robert Wright, and Buddhism flirter John Horgan. I also did NOT say "soul." Western monotheisms, and generally Hinduism, believe in some sort of personal soul, as in "your immortal soul," in the Western tradition, but Theravada claims to believe only in a "life force."

And, "karma."

To put it another way, Tottenham fans have not devised a god called "Spurs," have not devised a karma about relegation, have not recruited a community to believe this, and have not developed a cultus of worship, prayers, etc.

Rabid fandom is an "-ism," like Nazism or Communism. Neither of those is a religion, either.

And, that leads us to point the second, of the two main parts of my definition.

Karma is itself a metaphysical entity throughout Hindu and Buddhist belief, and basically similar among Jains, from what I know. Given that these religions claim one can be reincarnated as a piece of shit, or more literally, a dung beetle eating that shit, without knowing what one did wrong in a past life, or, per Theravada, even having a personal soul from a past life that COULD remember, is why I've said that karma is more offensive than original sin, following on an earlier post. But I digress.

Anyway, ethical actions, and beliefs and doctrines, are, as defined by the religious-sociological group (that's how religion is not individual) are how one "orients oneself to a better relationship" with these metaphysical entities, whatever they are in that religion. (Buddhism and Judaism have doctrines as well as ethical practice, as I said before, let's not pretend otherwise, it's called "orthodoxy" vs "orthopraxis" in philosophy of religion and critical religion, and refusal to accept that is stereotyping.) Speaking of that, Whitehouse himself, per this "modes of religiosity" Wiki page, differentiates between what he calls "imagistic" vs "doctrinal" systems. Frankly, seeing that he's also missing scholars of religion and philosophers of religion from that institute, I think this is poor language usage. It's also not good division, per a follow-up to my "as I said before"; for many a Catholic, the ringing of the transubstantiation bell is NOT Pavlov's dog, which IS what it reminds me of, nor just doctrinal, but is "imagistic," aural division. The elevation of the host certainly is imagistic. I could also mention Catholic Penitentes, Protestant "holy rollers" and "speaking in tongues," Shi'ite flagellators and more. 

Wiki then mentions a "cognitive science of religion," which has Whitehouse and another, like Atran, long-ago read, Pascal Boyer, mentioned. Cognitive science has in the past offered some insight for philosophy and probably can for religion, but its devotees often overrate it, too. That's especially true if, per Wiki, these ideas originate in ev psych. And, thus, my original worries about Whitehouse's evolutionary anthropology gain more foothold.

Yes, human psychology evolved; as a scientific and philosophical naturalist, I totally accept that. But, modern ev psych as a discipline, with its pseudoscience, sexist ideas and more? I reject.

And, with that, I'm more than done with Whitehouse.

Final sidebar note. If you claim to be "spiritual but not religious," but still follow religious leaders on social media, though not going to a church or temple, you're religious. If you claim to be "spiritual but not religious," but attend a Wiccan coven or a neo-Druid gathering? You're religious.

Actually, second sidebar note: Whitehouse reminds me a lot of James Harrod and his claim that chimps are religious, debunked by me here.

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Update, May 10, 2024: Per a piece by Ed Buckner on Substack, where I posted a link to this, no, I do not at all think secular humanism is religious. Nor atheism in general. 

That said, certain types of Gnu Atheism that approach Camus' "antitheism" of "The Rebel"? They're close, to be honest. It's an "antibelief," or belief against, but it is a belief against metaphysical entities of ultimate concern, generally with all the communal aspects etc also listed above.

Unmaking the myth of the "white Christian worldview"

 Robert P. Jones, an ex-fundagelical of some sort, talks at Time about escaping the "white Christian worldview."

But, as two Tweets of mine say to him, to avoid typing twice, the piece is problematic and simplistic.

First, the reality of American Christianity today is more complex than his Mississippi birthland:

.@robertpjones .. several things in your piece are mix of fallacy & overstatement. Reality?
1. Not all white Xns are Protestant
2. Not all white Xn Protestants are conserv. evangelical or fundamentalist.
3. And, more and more whites are "nones" not Xn. 1/xhttps://t.co/ZWyJI9Bic2

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) September 30, 2021

My midwestern Lutheranism, while socially and religiously conservative, was nothing like his religious childhood. (I've been to white and black Baptist services, I'll add.)

Within the piece, he mentions the recent sharp decline of Southern Baptists. Yes, and mainline Protestants declined before that. And Catholics are declining as well. And, as time and motion studies have shown, Americans have long lied about frequency of church attendance, even before the rise of the "nones." (That said, the rise of the nones is NOT all it's sometimes cracked up to be.)

Second, the reality of American Christianity when he was a young'un and St. Ronald of Reagan was running for president was more complicated outside the South than he notes, which leads to this.

Even if dead weight of tradition makes point three nugatory? Especially outside the South, points 1 and 2 were in effect when you and I grew up. A better piece would separate out regional and cultural politics being fused with religion and nationalized.

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) September 30, 2021

It's true that Reagan (maybe told so by his horoscope, and yes, he believed them, as he turned Nancy on to astrology, not the other way around) pandered to the Religious Right and helped fuel this fusion, but that helps make the point of my second tweet! Especially when you tie this to the lying about church attendance. It's cultural Christianism, a fundagelical version of Samuel Huntington's angle.

That said, in some way, shape or form, that's been the case in much of the Christian world since Roman emperor Theodosius made Christianity the state religion of the empire nearly 1,650 years ago. Political types (and, yes, politics exists outside democracies) have long grifted on cultural Christianism. It hasn't had racism attached to it; "racism" as we know it today didn't really exist in antiquity, after all.

But, if he wants to talk about real Christian sins, he should deal with that.

Since I'm a secularist, I've written enough about another rescue attempt for American Christianity.

Note: This is part one of a three-part series. The second will expand on the decline of evangelical Christians. The third will note that the rise of the Nones has itself hit a speed bump. Both will rely on new polling and analysis from this summer by Jones' outfit, PRRI.

Sobriety for BuJews

 For those who don't know, the "BuJew" is a portmanteau, a mash-up of Buddhism and Judaism for Jews who normally have a Reform Judaism background, want something more "substantial" than that, but want something that's "spiritual, not religious," and so glom on to Buddhism.

The problem?

Buddhism IS a religion, first of all, something I eventually reiterated. Your counterarguments aren't accepted, either. Please don't reference the likes of Stephen Batchelor or Robert Wright, either. I've read both long ago and crushed Wright here, something also eventually reiterated. Also, beyond its being metaphysical, it's questionable as to whether it teaches everything that some claim. Take universal love.

So, sobriety recovery?

Refuge Recovery would certainly appear to be BuJew. Founded by Noah Levine, son of poet Stephen Levine. 

I guess Noah's a true "western Buddhist" guru in another way. Allegations of sexual misconduct, that seem to be credible.

And, going by birth family surname? I wouldn't be totally surprised if Pema Chodron is also a BuJew.

No, Luther wouldn't have agreed with Calvin on the Eucharist

Even though that new-to-me argument is making some rounds in recent years.

Many post-Zwinglian Calvinist Reformed argue that Luther actually accept Calvin's spiritual presence, while noting Zwingli believed the same, but involved in direct disputations with Luther, focused on the "no bodily presence." See here, near the end.

Yes, Melanchthon did, but ... IMO, Luther more ignored Calvin in silence than anything. He was focused on intra-Lutheran issues post-1530 more than anything else. And, this is itself a claim from silence.

Sure, Luther accepted Calvin's "spiritual presence" — as far as it went. But, that wasn't far enough. 

He explicitly condemned it for not going further. In reality, Calvin stood with Zwingli and against Luther on "local presence" vs "illocal presence," and on rejecting Luther and Rome on what's technically called "oral manducation" or similar. See here. Let us not forget that, while it was Zwingli's idea, Calvin also never explicitly rejected "finitum infinit non capax est," an idea that appalled Luther. Let us not forget that running until Barth or beyond, the Reformed have held to this.

Indeed, until writing this post, I'd never heard of claims that Calvin and Luther agreed on the Eucharist. Tosh!

That said, as noted most in my Roper Luther bio review, Luther was wrong and Karlstadt was right on this issue.

Throw out much of what you thought you knew about the human brain

More and more research shows not only that brains are not massively modular, but that the whole old functional diagram of brains, including the alleged primary function not only of the cerebral cortex's different surface areas, but also separate portions like the cerebellum and amygdala, is so out of whack it's probably at Paul's Not.EvenWrong. stage. As part of this, just as we know that "one gene ≠ one phenotypic expression" in both that some expressions need multiple genes coding for them, but more to the case, one gene can be part of coding for several expressions in combo with other genes, so, those functional areas of the brain can express multiple mental workings. This Quanta piece has plenty more.

Some of the "more" is that, as we already know that analogizing a brain to a computer is wrong (at least those of us who know it's wrong know it's wrong), but that trying to describe the functioning of the brain in terms of how it APPEARS to function in producing human consciousness versions of phenotypic expressions is probably ALSO wrong.

In short, to stand Dan Dennett on his head, and who doesn't love that? A lot of past descriptive neuroscience is probably now best categorized as folk neuroscience. 

From the piece, here's a good example of what that means.

“I don’t think any of us would want to tell people: Don’t use the word ‘memory’ anymore,” he said. But to understand the brain, we might need to challenge our intuitions about how it works — “in the same way that quantum mechanics is challenging to comport with our understanding of physical phenomena in the world.”

In short, we're been barking up the wrong tree. We need to find a new one that's not only not the same species, but a different genus and probably even a different family. Conifers instead of deciduous trees.

At the same time, per quantum theory and beyond, any new tree-barking must have some insight relevant to us as conscious human beings.

Richard Carrier thinks ancient Christians thought Jesus was a space alien

No, really, that's the claim in a sad piece at Wired, sad from Wired giving him a platform and also from letting him call himself a historian, with the professional implications that may have. I guess calling himself "Jesus mythicist," or "Gnu Atheist," let alone "liar about interpreting the Hebrew Bible" would be too much. (I now realize this is my first time to directly blog about him, though I kicked his butt repeatedly, via idiotic nonsense of his anally-retentive worshiper Coel at old blogs of Massimo Pigliucci. He is the first and second, and occasionally a troll as both, and was busted in the past, as discussed at one of Massimo's old sites, misinterpreting Aramaic Targums and eventually admitting by silence that he didn't know Biblical Hebew.)

Enough prologue, though. On to the piece.

It actually doesn't start with that claim, though. Carrier, presumably trying to spread his Bayesian erudition bullshit across a broad area, first puts the old "you killed your grandma" worry about backward time travel into a new twist. He says time travelers would risk this by taking modern viruses to the past, riffing on the title of the piece.

Let's take a look at an extended excerpt, because there's several issues.

In general Carrier thinks that science fiction authors tend to underestimate the difficulties a time traveler would face surviving in the past. “It would take you a while to get settled,” he says. “You’d have to figure out the customs, the language, how to get money so you could eat. There are a lot of things you’d need to sort out, because it’s basically an adventure mission. You’re basically going into the Congo with whatever’s on your back, and then you need to get your base of operations and figure stuff out, and then you can relax and wait for whatever scene or event you’re trying to watch.” 

One of the biggest threats would be viruses, an issue that’s seldom tackled in science fiction. “The problem with time travel is that if you went back in time, you would probably wipe out the whole population then, and they would probably kill you within months with viruses that you have no immunity to,” Carrier says. “So note to time travel authors: You have to come up with a universal immunity so that the time traveler who goes back is not bringing viruses that everybody is not immune to, and is immune to viruses that his body has never encountered.”

OK?

The first graph? Pure absurdity. A Borg-like chip or something would address the language issue, and would be used to augment something like Rosetta Stone training. Money? Said time traveler would be equipped with shekels, talents, sesterces, or whatever, upon being sent backward. Also, as with Apollo 8 and 10 scouting things out before Apollo 11, a first time traveler would get the lay of the land for followers.

Viruses? Nonsense. The time traveler would be vaccinated against all the major ones, and be slipped some gamma-globulin etc. in the backpack for viruses without vaccines. No "universal vaccine" involved. As for the flip side? He's ignorant of vectors. Disease spread was only a problem in truly urban areas in antiquity. So, that's dismissed.

Next, there's straight-up Carrier arrogance:

“If I had to go into the past, and it had to be the Roman Empire, I would probably pick right after the victory of Vespasian, because from everything I’ve read, Vespasian seems a very pragmatic fellow. I feel like I could go there and convince him to institute a proper constitutional government, in exchange for certain technologies of empire, like the railroad, for instance, and the printing press. Possibly gunpowder. That wouldn’t fix every problem—it would turn the Roman Empire into the British Empire, basically, which is a slight improvement, but still pretty far back—but if we could get that constitutional government set in, we could have social progress as well as scientific and technological progress a thousand years earlier, and we could bypass the hell of the Middle Ages.”

Gee, what a shock that Carrier thinks he's smart enough to advise Vespasian.

If this happened, I'd slip in right behind Carrier, and whisper to him a riff on the old Latin proverb: Memento insanitate.

Oh, we're getting close to the "Jesus was Klaatu" (no, really) but not there yet.  We are in mythicism territory, though:

“We have the complete Babylonian Talmud, and it does mention Jesus and Christians, but weirdly it always places the story of Jesus’ execution a hundred years earlier. It puts it right after the death of Alexander Jannaeus, in some sort of Hellenized Jewish context. [Jesus] is stoned by the Jewish authorities—there are no Romans, because Romans aren’t there yet—he’s stoned by Jewish authorities in Joppa rather than outside Jerusalem. So there’s this whole different narrative. He’s placed in a completely different century. And it’s definitely the same guy—Jesus of Nazareth, mother was Mary, the whole thing. … It’s usually just dismissed as some sort of change or error or whatever, but it’s actually hard to explain if there was an actual historical Jesus.”

Oh, let's start with the fact the Babylonian Talmud was written 500 years after the Christian gospels, Carrier. And, contra you on it, and contra former mythicist R. Joseph Hoffman on Toledoth Jeshu, while these Rabbinic Jewish writings may have elements that trace back earlier, they're less historic than the gospels, and ultimately have polemicist roots. Like these:

In the 1230s Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, pressed 35 charges against the Talmud to Pope Gregory IX by translating a series of blasphemous passages about Jesus, Mary or Christianity. There is a quoted Talmudic passage, for example, where Jesus of Nazareth is sent to Hell to be boiled in excrement for eternity. Donin also selected an injunction of the Talmud that permits Jews to kill non-Jews. This led to the Disputation of Paris, which took place in 1240 at the court of Louis IX of France, where four rabbis, including Yechiel of Paris and Moses ben Jacob of Coucy, defended the Talmud against the accusations of Nicholas Donin. The translation of the Talmud from Aramaic to non-Jewish languages stripped Jewish discourse from its covering, something that was resented by Jews as a profound violation.

Beyond that, it's not hard to explain at all. This site sort of takes care of the rest of his claims about the Talmud.* (I once was tempted by the Alexander Jannaeus idea, as it provided an extra century for Christian growth to develop. But, all the Xn gospels anchor on John the Baptizer as well as Pontius Pilate as well as Caiaphas. Plus, Acts talks about disciples of John "versus" disciples of Jesus. And, it talks specifically about Apollos as one of them, and Paul mentions him, though without a tie to John.) This site takes care of the reliability of Jewish sources in particular as well as Carrier's sources in general, and puts the lie to Wired calling him a historian.

OK, and now, from a book I shall never read, referenced by Carrier.

The first Christians were preaching that Jesus was a space alien, he was like Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still. That was their view. You really don’t understand the origins of Christianity if you don’t understand this. There’s a lot of pushback against it, because of the anachronistic belief that he didn’t come from ‘outer space,’ he came from ‘heaven.’ But back then that was outer space.

What bullshit.

Ancient people in general did not believe in "outer space" in this way. I guess Carrier is now channeling his inner Erich von Däniken. Metatron from Qumran was no more a space alien than this. Basically, this is drawing a caricature of the ancient world. It also ignores that the people intelligent enough to not only be literate but the ancient world's intelligentsia certainly weren't so simplistic.

And, yes, the Erich von Däniken of Gnu Atheism and Jesus mythicism is believed to be a historian by Wired. And accurate by the likes of Coel.

To wrap up? Back to this historian stuff. He is not, and he is even less a biblical scholar. His degrees may be in history, but his polemicist attitude undercuts his claim to be a historian. (Also, at the height of his mythicist high priesthood, he didn't peddle himself as one. He holds no tenure nor tenure-track academic position. He lists himself as "independent lecturer" through the present, which means nothing. His academic publications are few and far between. His only full books appear to be from a quasi-vanity press that focuses on Gnu Atheists and whose Wiki page doesn't even list Carrier! (Also, the founder of Pitchstone appears to have published his own dad as one of his first projects. And, some of the authors in the stable, like Peter Boghossian, are wingnuts, and Shermer's a full-on libertarian.)

I want to tackle "liar" one more time, though. He's a liar if he really believes that non-mythcist actual biblical scholars run scared of mythicism. No, it's more that with mythicists, especially ones like him that are Gnu Atheists as well, it's as much a Gish Gallop to engage them as it is Duane Gish.

Updated side note: While Paul says he doesn't really know any biography of Jesus, he DOES clearly state that Jesus was "born," and was a human being, normally born, in Galatians 4:4.

* I updated this to say "sort of" takes care of Carrier and the Babylonian Talmud because it doesn't fully address the BT's lack of historicity. Also, the guy's a nutter on Xi Jinping Thought.

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Other updates: For a VERY interesting take on not just proto-Rabbinic era Jewish literacy at the time of Jesus but a hot take on "the disappearance of half the Jews" and why, read this piece.  

And, as a placeholder for future blogging, via that piece? The Jewish shtetl of "Fiddler on the Roof" et al was as much fabrication by photographer Roman Vishnaic as reality.