The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims

by Rebecca McLaughlin

The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are “equal”?

In fact, the dehumanizing ways in which black people were treated by white slaveholders were only truly wrong if human beings are truly more than animals, if love across racial difference is right, and if right and wrong are universal. The rational atheist can cling to none of these things.

When we step into the pages of the Scriptures, we’re all immigrants.

When we read this story, we hear a call to care for strangers in need. But Jesus’s first audience heard more. They heard a story of love across racial, religious, and political difference, in which the moral hero was their sworn enemy. This story isn’t just a call to love. It’s a call to love across racial, cultural, and ideological barriers built up over generations.

But dismissing Christianity because of the failure of white Christians means silencing the voices of black believers and acting like only white voices matter in considering Christ.

in reality, most black churches in America are theologically evangelical, even if that increasingly politicized word isn’t a comfortable fit.

85 percent of members of historically black churches see the Bible as the Word of God, versus only 62 percent of mainline Christians.12 Meanwhile, 82 percent of Christians at historically black churches believe in the reality of hell: the same percentage as among self-identifying evangelicals.13 To listen to black voices, people on all sides must reckon with the gospel-centered, Bible-believing stance of most black churches.

the loudest voices of protest against white Christian racism have been from fellow Christians.

Civil-rights heroes like Fannie Lou Hamer and the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. are rightly celebrated by secular people. But their message was unrelentingly Christian. Like Old Testament prophets, they called out the sin of those who claimed to know the Lord but were not living in his ways. They called for Americans to be more Christian, not less.

Living as a disciple of Jesus includes preaching the gospel (Matt. 28:19), pursuing justice for the poor, oppressed and marginalized (Matt. 25:31–46), and practicing love across racial and cultural difference (Luke 10:25–37).

Yuval Noah Harari points out, “belief in the unique worth and rights of human beings . . . has embarrassingly little in common with the scientific study of Homo sapiens.”19 In fact, if we look to evolution as our only origin story and try to squeeze our ethics from its scientific husk, we have (at best) the idea that one should sacrifice only for members of one’s genetic group. The idea of loving those whose origins lie in a different continent is dead in the primeval water. In fact, as atheist psychologist Steven Pinker observes, if virtue is equated with “sacrifices that benefit one’s own group in competition with other groups . . . then fascism [is] the ultimate virtuous ideology.”

Historian Tom Holland explains that our basic moral beliefs about human equality came to us from Christianity, but that they have been deliberately rebranded as secular. In the late 1940s, with the world reeling from the horrors of the Second World War, Eleanor Roosevelt gathered representatives from various nations to establish a universal declaration of rights that would work in different cultures, including those in which Christianity was not dominant. So, Christian thinking had to be repackaged in non-religious terms. “A doctrine such as that of human rights,” Holland observes, “was far likelier to be signed up for” if its Christian origins could be concealed.22

Without Christianity, belief in human rights, in racial equality, and in the responsibility of the powerful toward the victimized becomes blind faith. The claim that black lives matter is at heart a Christian claim.

Black Lives Matter organization presents racial justice as a package deal with celebrating LGBT+ romance and identity.

I gladly affirm that black lives matter, despite the fact an organization with that name expresses other beliefs I cannot embrace.

we must also recognize that from a consistently atheistic perspective, no lives ultimately matter.

Ultimately, black lives matter not because progressive people have told us so, but because the equal value of every human, regardless of race, walks off the pages of Scripture with the sound of a trumpet. Black lives matter enough for the Son of God to shed his blood, so that black men and women might have eternal life with him. Black lives matter because Jesus says so.

Christians must work for justice for historically crushed and marginalized people, because Jesus came to bring good news to the poor and to set at liberty those who are oppressed. Christians should be the first to fight for racial justice and to pursue love across racial difference, not because of any cultural pressure from outside, but because of scriptural pressure from inside. “Black lives matter” is at heart a Jesus song, and we must sing our Savior’s songs, no matter who else plays the tune.

There is no doubt from his writings that if Paul had witnessed the race-based, man-stealing, chattel slavery practiced by self-identifying Christians in America he would have condemned it outright. But he would also have condemned the ways in which many churches today condone sexual immorality for Christians, both heterosexual and homosexual.

The very idea of human rights is, as Harari argues, a Christian invention. So we need Christianity to be right for human-rights abuses to be wrong.

the fact that nearly half of all black Americans still do not support gay marriage is a major problem for the claim that the gay-rights movement is the new civil-rights movement.

Loving a person doesn’t mean affirming all that person’s actions.

if we abandon Christianity, we will not find ourselves in a brave new moral world, better able to support equality for all. No, we will find ourselves unable to justify human rights for anyone. Without Christianity, human beings have no natural rights, just as chimpanzees, hyenas, and spiders have no rights. And there is no moral arc to the universe. There is nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

without the Bible, there is no basis for women’s rights

That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely a self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle . . . lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.

One study found that female-to-male trans adolescents had an attempted suicide rate of 50.8 percent—the highest of any category—followed by those who identify as neither fully male nor female (41.8 percent) and then by male-to-female trans adolescents (29.9 percent).

while it is certainly possible that trans homicides have been underreported, the available evidence does not show that trans people are murdered at a disproportionate rate.

“Transgender women are women” reinforces the idea that one is either male or female.

Stripped of belief in a creator God, modern secular thinking cannot give us a coherent account of what a human being is, why we are more than a collection of cells, or how we are any different from animals. No wonder it can’t tell us what it means to be male or female.

God’s rule over our lives is heresy to modern, self-determining ears. But we must speak the truth with tenderness and not let our sin take the wheel.