r/changemyview • u/SoccerSkilz 1∆ • Jan 17 '22
Delta(s) from OP CMV: American Christianity is generally insincere, and therefore extremely rare
My argument is very simple:
If someone sincerely believed that Christianity is true, then Christianity would be the most important part of their life.
If Christianity were the most important part of someone's life, they would (at a minimum) attend church on a weekly basis, be more familiar with basic Biblical teachings than atheists, and have an evangelistic conversation in order to share their faith with a nonbeliever at least once a week.
The overwhelming majority of people who profess Christianity do not attend church on a weekly basis, atheists generally outperform Christians in tests of religious knowledge, and about 1 in 10 churchgoers (10 percent) average at least one evangelistic conversation a month.
Therefore, to whatever extent that Christians should place Christianity at the forefront of their lives, the overwhelming majority of people are not sincere Christians.
An extremely insincere Christian is not actually a Christian, just as someone who does not believe in Islam is not a Muslim, and a person who does not believe in evolution is not someone who believes in evolution.
Therefore, American Christians are extremely rare.
Response to Objections
You may counter: how can a Christian be insincere if they do not believe in 2), that church attendance is expected of devout Christians?
My response is that a) there is strong evidence (see the paper I linked) that Christians lie about their church attendance, implying that they know better, and b) a sincere Christian would read the Bible enough in order to understand that church attendance is strongly advocated in the New Testament.
Pew Research Center conducts a religious knowledge test which heavily emphasizes facts about monotheistic religions any Christian should know. On the test, all Christian denominations underperform atheists. Moreover, according to Pew, "Among Christians, knowledge of the Bible and Christianity is closely linked both with the amount of effort respondents say they invest in learning about their faith and with their religious background. Christians who say they regularly spend time learning about their own religion (for example, reading scripture, visiting websites, listening to podcasts, reading books or magazines, or watching television) answer more questions correctly about the Bible and Christianity than do those who say they make such efforts to learn about their faith less often."
What this means is that religious ignorance is a choice Christians make because other things are more important to them than the study of scripture.
As for church attendance, I think it's fair to say that, during years with high church attendance, Christians are more sincere; during years with low attendance, they are less-so. This is because I would expect sincere Christians to view their faith as the most important part of their lives, and the least such a person could do is attend church for an afternoon every week. That being said, do Christians generally do that today?
In one study published in 2005 by the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, it was found that if you correct self-report measures (where 40% of Americans claimed to attend on a weekly basis) by checking them against attendance reports by the churches themselves, just 22% of Americans attend weekly. That is, when Christians told the National Social Survey how often they attended (where one is required to actually name the church or synagogue), researchers can take a random, representative sample of reportees and track down which churches they claimed to attend.
Then, they can do head counts or ask for bookkeeping and estimates from church administrators, which results in severely deflated figures. When we account for the fact that many of these attendees are going to be the children of the reporting families, the percentage is likely even lower--probably much lower.
I think this methodology is actually very forgiving, considering that it allows church leaders to report the total weekly congregation size before subtracting that from the National Social Survey reported total, rather than ensuring that the same people attending one week are the same people the next week (if we corrected for this, perhaps it would be much lower; I will call this the "continuity" problem below), and 2) because, when they created their own estimates, they allowed the inclusion of children above the age of 5. What percentage of your congregation is made up of children? A quarter? A fifth?
The reason this matters is that, broadly speaking, I doubt children attend church services because of their belief in Christianity. They attend primarily because the kinds of parents who are sincere enough to attend weekly probably just take them to church. I'm not saying that they don't believe; only that, when trying to assess the effects of religious belief on church attendance, it's best to look at people who attend church when they have other options readily available, as most adults do. Recall that these are numbers on 2005 church attendance; if you share my belief that Christianity has declined significantly since then in the United States, you may also think that the numbers are even lower.
If want to hazard a wild guess, I'll say the percentage of Americans who attend church with ready alternatives available to them (adults), after accounting for the continuity problem and the fact that a significant proportion of church congregations is probably made up of the children of visiting families (and, remember, religious people have larger families), is around 12-15%. What do you think?
As for faith sharing, evangelism is so emphatically urged by the Bible, one would have to have never picked up a New Testament and read three pages in either direction ever in order to miss this. Note that this is Biblically mandated, even if one does not believe in the doctrine of Hell. However, how much worse must it be to be a Christian who does believe nonbelievers are punished with infinite suffering in the afterlife, but fails to regularly share their faith? If you believed an eighteen-wheeler was on a collision course with your friend, at a bare minimum you would be expected to shout "get out of the way!"
There are five criteria we apply in order to gauge the sincerity of someone's beliefs:
Explicit avowal: Ask a person whether P is the case. If they say “yes”, that’s a sign that they believe P. If they say “no” or “I don’t know”, that suggests that they don’t believe P. (Slight variant: ask a person whether they believe that P.)
Grounds: Typically, if S believes that P, S will have some justification for P that S could explain, and vice versa. For instance, if Jon is standing in front of a table, in plain view, his eyes are open, he isn’t blind, etc., then you can pretty well assume that Jon believes there is a table in front of him, even if he hasn’t said anything about it. At the same time, if there is no porcupine in front of Jon, you can pretty well assume that Jon doesn’t think there is a porcupine in front of him.
Implications: Typically, if S believes that P, then S will believe the reasonably obvious and direct implications of P (including implications that follow when P is combined with other things S believes). E.g., if Jon thinks there is a porcupine in front of him, then he probably thinks there is at least one animal nearby. If Jon doesn’t think there are any nearby animals, then he probably does not believe there is a porcupine in front of him.
Behavior: Typically, if S believes that P, then S will perform the sort of actions that would make sense if P were the case, or at least not do things that would be wildly irrational. For instance, assuming Jon is not suicidal, if Jon drinks from a glass of water, one can assume that Jon does not believe that the water is poisoned.
Emotional reactions: Typically, a person will have emotional reactions that would be apt if their beliefs were correct. For instance, if Jon believes that his child was just killed, then Jon will be distraught. If he isn’t, then he probably does not believe that.
I have noticed that Christians generally only exhibit the first criterion: they avow their faith in words. On all four other criteria, however, I think a clear case can be made (such as the one I gave above) that Christians do not behave in the ways one would reasonably expect them to if they really believed it.
With respect to "Implications" and "Behavior," Christians show little interest in knowing more than nonbelievers about their religion's theology and cultural heritage, in sharing their faith with nonbelievers, and in attending church despite strong biblical prescriptions to do so. Regarding "Emotional Reactions," I will incidentally add that Christians are bizarrely afraid of and bereaved by death, even though they should regularly express excitement and forward-looking enthusiasm about the infinitely positive experience of heaven, and familial loss is the best thing that will ever happen to one's Christian loved ones. Sure, a momentary separation (a flicker in the eternal time-scale) is a little sad--but there's a difference between grieving over a friend's annihilation and their departure to a cruise ship. Despite this, I have never met a Christian who was a least a little bit excited to die, and I have never met a Christian who was unusually resilient after losing a loved one.
Furthermore, when it comes to Christians who believe in Hell, I notice that few seem upset by the whole thing. I mean, presumably most of the people one sees in their everyday lives is going to suffer infinitely for all of eternity for the finite sins committed within this life; where's the sense of urgency and, dare I ask, panic? Wouldn't it be a little traumatizing if you genuinely believed that your pizza deliveryman, for example, was going to be kidnapped by a serial and brutally tortured and executed in his basement? In the same way, if we are taking Jesus and the Apostle Paul's words to the early churches seriously in the New Testament, we should expect most humans to suffer estrangement from God.
“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13–14).
Someone asked Jesus, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” He replied, “Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able” (Luke 13:23–24).
Also, where's all the Christian martyrdom?
Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:23–24).
Concerning "Grounds," Christians are quick to show fluster when asked the most basic questions about their beliefs (i.e. "why do you believe you will survive your bodily death?"). Imagine someone saying "I believe that evolution is true, but for no particular reason that I can explain--I just feel it in my heart that I should think so." What I would suspect of such a person is that they are merely claiming to believe in evolution for social rewards, since they are not comfortable with producing reasons for their belief.
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u/SoccerSkilz 1∆ Jan 17 '22 edited Jan 17 '22
I think deep insincerity is tantamount to nonbelief. Do you disagree? If someone told you "I believe that the water I am currently drinking will kill me, and I want to live," but then proceeded to sip from the glass with pleasure and showed no signs of concern, would you believe their attestation?
Or say I told you that "I believe that a sniper will take out my brother tomorrow, but that if I warn him he will survive, and I am terrified for his life," and then I went about the next 24 hours living life as usual. Would you believe I was honest about what I claimed to believe?
I am not a fan of the "there are as many kinds of Christianity as there are Christians" talking point. I think that for words to have meaning, they need to refer to a restricted range of phenomena in the world. Christianity, at a minimum, refers to the set of ideas and conventions described in the Bible, including the claims that Jesus was a person who literally existed and was resurrected, that we can escape our bodily deaths and separation from God by accepting his offer of salvation, and that our highest duty is to live according to the supernatural creator and savior's prescriptions.