Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion

by Rebecca McLaughlin

Independent of whether you believe in the existence of God . . . you have to be impressed with the man described as Jesus of Nazareth. At the time of Jesus’ life, around 4 B.C. to 30 A.D., child abuse, as noted by one historian, was “the crying vice of the Roman Empire.” Infanticide was common. Abandonment was common. Hippocrates, who lived about 400 years before Jesus, often wrote about how physicians should ethically interact with patients. But Hippocrates never mentioned children. That’s because children were property, no different than slaves. But Jesus stood up for children, cared about them, when those around him typically didn’t.24 Offit now calls Christianity “the single greatest breakthrough against child abuse” in history, observing, among other things, that the first Christian emperor of Rome outlawed infanticide in 315 and provided a nascent form of welfare in 321 so poor families would not have to sell their kids.

Atheist psychologist Steven Pinker uncovers one of the inherent fault lines in that conclusion. He points out that if virtue is equated with “sacrifices that benefit one’s own group in competition with other groups . . . then fascism would be the ultimate virtuous ideology.”32 Pinker describes our innate moral sense like this: “Whatever sense of empathy nature bequeathed us by default applies to a very narrow circle of individuals: pretty much, our family and close allies within the clan or village.”33 A convinced secular humanist, Pinker believes that universal human rights can be grounded in reason, without appeal to God, by progressively expanding this circle.

When the city was recaptured by Turkish Muslims in 1076, however, the atmosphere changed. Pilgrims were attacked. The city’s patriarch was kidnapped. Holy places were desecrated. Cries for help from Eastern Christians prompted Pope Urban II to call a conference of European leaders in France in 1095, and after eight days of deliberation, Western Christians resolved to intervene. This conference launched the first Crusade. Its aim was to retake Jerusalem. The first Crusade achieved its goal: Jerusalem fell. But in many other ways it was disastrous.

The article cites Sri Lanka’s civil war from 1983 to 2009, which was fueled by “specifically Buddhist nationalism”; violence in modern Thailand; violence within the Dalai Lama’s own sect; and “a growing body of scholarly literature on the martial complicity of Buddhist institutions in World War II–era Japanese nationalism.”

In Twilight of the Idols, he wrote, “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. . . . By breaking one main concept out of [Christianity], the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.”

33. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” chap. 8 of The Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans, Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1976), 515–16.

The second factor we forget when we perceive liberal democracy as the natural form of government is its questionable compatibility with the second most widespread belief system. Unlike Christianity, Islam prescribes a political structure and set of laws that are hard to wed to democracy. In 2017, only six of the fifty-seven member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation were deemed democracies by the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index 2017—all of them substantially “flawed.”

the protesting factions were led by conservative Islamists seeking to overthrow secular regimes and implement Sharia law rather than establish liberal democracies.

Democracy does not just happen, nor is its spread inevitable. The Economist’s Democracy Index 2017 white paper reported that the average democracy score fell from 5.52 in 2016 to 5.48 in 2017 (on a scale of 0 to 10).44 As Islam continues to spread in the coming decades, we cannot assume that democracy will not see further decline. To hatch and survive, democracy must be nested in the right philosophical foundations.

For many of us in the West today, our selfishness is not served by violence. My life would not improve if I committed murder. But put me in a situation where violence is to my advantage, and who knows what I might be capable of.

20. For an overview of Nazi-era Bibles, see Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 106–10.

For an excellent treatment of Hitler’s relationship with Nietzschean philosophy, see Ronald Osborn, Humanism and the Death of God: Searching for the Good after Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 128–75.

John W. de Gruchy, Christianity and Democracy: A Theology for a Just World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),

Robert D. Woodberry, “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 2 (2012): 244.