Is Christianity Dying?

well good evening everybody and thank you so much for joining us on this solas webinar tonight we are asking the question is christianity dying and we've already had one objection to that question even being asked somebody said solas come on what are you doing asking a question like that well let me explain why we're asking that question this evening at the end of last year we did a poll online to ask what topics we should look at in our webinars over 2021 and one of the atheists who follow us follows us on twitter said what you should really be looking at is the inevitable decline of organized religion and as you look at his twitter feed it was quite obvious that what he was suggesting across several of his comments was that christianity it's its time is gone you know we are as christians on the wrong side of history he alleges that our ideas are bankrupt that our churches are emptying and if we'd come back in 20 or 30 years time every christian place of worship would be like a pine furniture showroom a block of flats or an art gallery the accusation then is that secularization is inevitable that the christian face really has no future and that is a great question one and a some one sort of accusation that we face all over the place where solas works it is a very common assumption so thank you so much for putting that question in and raising this issue it really is something very important that we should be looking at in our webinars we always have great guests and this one is no exception at all this evening i'm absolutely delighted that dr rebecca mclaughlin one of my favorite authors is going to be joining us this evening to discuss this question rebecca comes from these shores although she now lives in the states she did a phd at cambridge in english literature before moving to the united states to work for the veritas forum in 2008 working at the place where christian faith interacts with the whole world of academia working in campuses in universities across the states in 2017 she founded a communications company she's married with three children living in the states and her book confronting christianity was one of my favorite reads of last year a really interesting read in which she looks at 12 of the hardest questions that christians have to answer everything from science to morality to isn't religion harmful does does christianity denigrate women and more questions that's a terrific read and great that we're having the author of that great book joining us this evening rebecca are you are you there can you see us i am well i'm here excellent thank you for joining us whereabouts are you joining us from this evening i'm joining from new cambridge which the locals call cambridge massachusetts but actually it should be new cambridge because it's a new england so it should be new cambridge and it's what mid-afternoon something like that with you it's three o'clock in the afternoon yeah tea time so i have my cup of tea with me i've lived in america for 12 years and i still don't drink coffee and are you facing a lockdown in your state there like we are in scotland or are you a bit freer not not as such um the area where i live is an area where people are very scrupulous about wearing masks and doing all the good things but at a governmental level it's actually relatively non-enforced compared to the uk in all good sorts of of the free here apparently well thank you so much for joining us it really is appreciated i'll hand over to you in just a second but before i do that just want to say to the folks watching at home this is not going to be just a monologue there is an opportunity to join in the discussion and the way that we do that is we use a website called pigeonhole if you've been on our webinars before you'll know just how that works but bear with me please if you haven't been on a solos webinar before and you're not sure so just let me explain if you go across on your web browser to pigeonhole dot a t it will ask you to put in a code and if you put in the code solas 25 feb that will open up a little q a panel just for this evening's discussion and you can ask rebecca any a question around this whole topic of secularization the death of christianity and any of the things that she's going to speak to us about in the next few minutes the joy of pigeonhole is you can also vote for comments or questions so if you log into pigeonhole and you see the question that you're going to ask instead of repeating it click on it vote for it comes to the top of the list and we'll get through as many of those questions as we can in the second half of the webinar our producer david will put that up at several points during the evening so don't worry if you didn't catch the pigeonhole bit and the code at this stage that will be repeated you will have an opportunity to see that again later on but without further ado i'm going to hand right over to rebecca now and she's going to take us through the first half of our webinar rebecca is our atheist friend right has christianity got no future is it are its ideas redundant and are christians on the wrong side of history rebecca no but i will say more [Laughter] one of my uh favorite things in life is to have friends who are much cleverer than i am or in america we say much smarter which is very confusing but much cleverer than i am and a guy who i picked up along the way when i was doing a phd at cambridge is now a professor at harvard university which is is close to where i live very dear friend of mine from my my graduate studies days and uh he grew up in a practicing jewish family but where it was very clear in his family that nobody actually believed in god and so as we got to know each other in grad school in proper cambridge in the uk we frequently had conversations about faith and when i moved over here to cambridge mass one of the really fun things was reconnecting with him and having some more of these conversations with him and a few years ago i invited this friend with his then girlfriend to an event at harvard in which a new testament scholar um based in scotland actually named empty wright was in dialogue with the agnostic chair of the harvard philosophy department and the title of the event was bible gospel guide or garbage and after the event i said to my friend i know that you think that what i believe is crazy and his then girlfriend he was a much gentler soul than either of us said oh i'm sure he doesn't think that i said yes he does i believe that the entirety of human history revolves around this first century jewish man known as jesus christ who died on a cross and was supposedly raised from the dead three days later crazy right my friend said yes i said the problem is i think that you believe some crazy things as well now many of us who grew up in the west and though this was certainly my experience growing up in the uk i've been taught to believe that there is a perfectly coherent secular belief system that does all the work that christianity does for us except without us having to believe crazy things like people rising from the dead and this more coherent way of understanding the world is is growing and growing as religion in general and christianity in particular shrinks and shrinks but i want to suggest today that there is no such belief system and rather than christianity dying out it is actually growing in the modern world in ways that nobody expected in our short time i want to touch on four areas uh science psychology ethics and sociology and and i want to make four quite controversial claims the first is number one science hasn't disproved god number two humans aren't happy with that god number three humans aren't better without god number four christianity isn't shrinking it's growing now i'm speaking from a christian perspective as i speak it in the q a but from the answer i want to say none of these claims is actually made on the basis of faith in fact all of them are ones which leading experts in those academic fields would have to agree so number one science hasn't disproved god a new atheists like richard dawkins have spent decades proclaiming that science offers us an alternative hypothesis to a creative god a hypothesis which unlike christianity is backed with actual evidence dawkins and his friends proclaimed that science works and that it gives us an alternative explanation for everything that used to be explained by appealing to god so so that there's now actually no longer any need for us to believe in a creator god infinitely intelligent being you made the universe and everyone in it the belief in a created god is actually irrational unfortunately there are multiple problems with this hypothesis the first problem is that the folks who developed what we now talk about is science this process of testing a hypothesis expand against experimental data actually came up with that idea because they believed in the created god of the bible the first person i learned this from was a guy called hans halverson who's a professor at princeton university over here he is a professor of philosophy and mathematics and he's one of the top four philosophers of science in the world and he explains that the people who first developed the empirical methodology lying what we now call science believe from the bible that there is one god who made all things and that this god is is extremely intelligent rational and consistent so they concluded that this kind of god made the universe according to to rational principles but because god of the bible is also completely free he could have made the universe any way he liked so the only way for us to find out what those laws are is for us to go and look now once more professor halverson again as i say one of the top philosophers of science in the world argues that even today theism belief in this creator god offers a better philosophical foundation for science than atheism does in fact he says science doesn't actually give us a philosophical foundation for ap sorry atheism doesn't give us a philosophical foundation for science at all of course there are many leading atheist scientists like like my friend over at harvard but at a philosophical level atheists just have to say well aren't we lucky that science works now if we look back over the history of the last 400 years of modern science we'll certainly see multiple examples of christians arguing against scientific discoveries and and if we listen to new atheists like richard dawkins we'll imagine that believers of god are kind of like children standing on sand castles um like i used to do as a kid counting a number of waves that would knock over my little sand castle and we're kids standing on these sand castles of faith as wave after wave of scientific discovery wears us down until we're standing on a castle of faith that's flattened the christians like me are too arrogant or too deluded to acknowledge that our faith has failed but if we look more closely at the history of science and faith we'll find that christians have actually been at the forefront of scientific discovery and in every supposedly science versus christianity debate whether it's the age of the earth or evolution or the big bang they've actually been bible believing christians on both sides as mentioned earlier i spent nine years after i moved to to the us working for something called the bearish ass forum and there i had the chance to interact with world-class scholars at the tops of their fields in in all sorts of fields i i met with christians who are professors in every scientific discipline that is supposed to have disproved the christian faith be it cosmology or biology or evolutionary psychology these folks are serious christians often at the very top of their field and rather than having come from christian families and just never having kind of got around to shedding their childhood faith many of them actually become believers and followers of jesus in adulthood one famous example over here is a guy called francis collins who used to be the director of the the human genome project that first sequenced human dna and is now the head of the national institute for health in america so one of the most influential scientists in the world today and he became a christian when he was a junior doctor having grown up in a secular home over here after a not very educated patient of his he was suffering from severe and untreatable pain and was crying out to jesus in her pain asked her a simple question doctor what do you believe and that simple question from a much less educated patient started him on a void of discovery that ended up with him abandoning atheism and embracing christianity science hasn't disproved god in fact contra richard dawkins and the the new atheists the very idea of modern science came to us from christianity some of the top scientists in the world today state their lives their faith in a creative god so that's our first point to consider as we as we wonder whether christianity is dying out science hasn't disproved god second point is almost as surprising if you've listened to new atheist folks and that's that humans aren't happier without god now dawkins and his friends don't just think that the idea of a creator god is stupid and unnecessary they've also argued that real psychological damage is done by this idea especially by the the unavoidable christian belief that you and i are deeply morally corrupt in the bible the language of that is talking about sin sinfulness i have three kids who are a ten eight and two and as a christian i'm bringing them up to believe that there is a creator god who made all of the universe and them but also that they like me are not essentially good but their their entire nature is shot through with sin like a bag of flour crawling with maggots and i'm telling them that their only hope of escaping the rightful judgment of an omnipotent creator god is if they put their trust in jesus christ the son of god who died on the cross to take the punishment their sins deserve now richard dawkins says that raising kids on on beliefs like this is tantamount to child abuse think of the psychological damage what i could be doing by telling my kids that they are by nature really very bad so bad that someone had to die we think of what that could do to their self-esteem problem is when we look at the actual data surrounding the psychological well-being both of kids and of adults we find some surprising and sometimes counter-intuitive results kids raised in religious homes attending religious services weekly are significantly less likely to suffer from depression than their non-religious peers and we see similar effects in adulthood for example a large scale done study done by a group at harvard uh again down the road from here showed that women in america who attended church weekly five times less likely to kill themselves and their non-religious peers there's been study after study that's shown that actually regular religious participation and not just having a general sense of spirituality but actually kind of showing up to church once a week has a really positive correlation with good mental and physical health outcomes and it's not just down to community there's another professor at harvard um named tyler vanderbilt who is a leading expert on on these questions and he's shown that the social support that you derive from showing up to see the same group of people once a week accounts for only about a quarter of the positive effect of religious service attendance on health and happiness so what else is at play and perhaps it's a sense of meaning the belief in a creator god can bring perhaps it's knowing that my life has purpose even when it's hard and the god who made me knows me completely and nonetheless loves me enough that he sent his son to die for me perhaps it's believing that my story is part of a much bigger story that god is telling throughout history and that whatever happens now my story's ending will be unimaginably good call it delusion if you like but study after study has shown that actually humans aren't happier without belief in god quite the reverse and that brings us to our third point which is that contrary to many people's expectations humans don't behave better without god then if you remember back to the 1970s i don't i don't personally um but in 1971 the beatles star john lennon had a very famous dream uh 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 i will spare you singing the song imagine but i'm guessing that many of you will be singing it in your heads right now this song became an anthem to usher in a brave new world in which religion would finally be a thing of the past you may remember that the famous line you may say that i'm a dreamer but i'm not the only one i hope someday you'll join us and the world will be as one 50 years later this brave new world has not materialized for two reasons firstly contrary to popular belief the world hasn't become less religious and it isn't going to any time soon and i'll talk about that more in a few minutes secondly the brave new better non-religious world hasn't come because taking away religion doesn't seem to make people behave better after all even richard dawkins himself in his latest book outgrowing god a beginner's guide had to acknowledge the evidence that religious people tend to behave better than their non-religious peers now he says he finds it rather patronizing to say well of course you and i are too intelligent to believe in god we think it would be a good idea if other people did but in light of the evidence that's actually the most rational position for a convinced atheist to take looking at data from america um atheist social psychologist jonathan height puts it like this surveys have long shown that religious believers in the united states are happier healthier longer lived and more generous to charity and to each other than a secular people religious believers give more money than secular affected secular charities and to their neighbours they give more of their time too and of their blood and when we dig down through the top soil of ethics we find an even bigger problem for atheists like my harvard professor friend it's not just that religious people tend to behave better toward their fellow humans in a range of ways it turns out that even our definition of what it means to behave ethically has come to us from christianity now in america where i live the the declaration of independence declares we hold these truths to be self-evident but all men are created equal but actually turns out that that's not a self-evident truth at all the idea that all human beings have equal worth regardless of their race or sex or age or capabilities the idea that the strong and the rich and the powerful have a moral responsibility to care for and not trample on beacon the poor and the dispossessed the idea of basic universal human rights these all actually came to us from christianity and without christianity we have no fundamental reason to believe them anymore i've found this this book fascinating uh you'll know harari's best-selling book um sapiens a brief history of humankind global bestseller written a few years ago by an atheist israeli historian and as harari puts it homo sapiens has no natural rights just as chimpanzees highness and spiders have no natural rights it was realizing this that drove a friend of mine who was one of the the only people who knew both me and my husband before we knew each other um from atheism to christianity uh sarah and i met when um we were both doing phds at cambridge and she's now a history professor at a university in australia where she comes from and and she was she was a convinced atheist when she came to um to cambridge to do her phd she was convinced atheist when she went to oxford to do her post-doc but while she was at oxford she went to a series of lectures by a fellow australian and world-famous atheist philosopher called peter singer and as she listened to singer talk she experienced what she later described as a sort of intellectual vertigo and she realized that her atheism stuck a knife in back of all of her deepest moral beliefs she had thought that christianity was the enemy of racial justice care for the poor equality for men and women but she gradually discovered it was the basis for those things and so she ended up becoming a christian she describes her process of discovering christianity like this christianity was to my surprise radical far more radical than the leftist ideologies to which i'd been previously enamored the love of god was unlike anything which i expected or of which i could make sense in becoming fully human in jesus god behaved decidedly unlike a god why dane to walk through death's dark valley or hold the weeping limbs of lepers if you are god why submit to humiliation and death on a cross in order to save those who hate you god suffered punishment in our place because of a radical love this sacrificial love is utterly opposed to the individualism consumerism exploitation and objectification of our culture as sarah realized that this sacrifice of jesus on the cross which lies at the heart of christian ethics and which according to one of jesus first followers actually defines what love is a follower of his called john wrote in the new testament this is how we know what love is that jesus christ laid down his life for us and so we ought to lay down our lives to one another this this lies absolutely at the heart of christian ethics now don't get me wrong i've been a christian for a long time and i failed to live like this every day if you knew my thoughts you would probably be shocked by how morally bad i am and the message of christianity is is absolutely not that we christians think that we are so good that we get to live with god forever it's actually that we realize we're so bad that jesus had to die to make us right with god but owning jesus as lord means you have to take seriously his call to sacrificial love and all the data shows that humans don't behave better without belief in god in fact in a 2018 book um by the philosopher christian miller called the character gap how good are we he observes that literally hundreds of studies linked religious participation with better moral outcomes so that's our third point humans aren't better without god and that brings us to the last and fourth point um which directly addresses the the question of this session christianity isn't shrinking it's actually growing now 40 years ago pretty much every sociologist of religion agreed that as the world became more modern more educated more scientific religious belief would naturally decline it's what had happened largely in western europe and so the theory was where western europe led the rest of the world must follow but that prophecy has failed what's more as sociologists now look out over the next 40 years to 2060 they anticipated an increasingly religious world today christianity is by far the largest and most racially and culturally diverse belief system in the world but about 31 of the world identifies as christian and that proportion is set to increase slightly to 32 percent by 2060. islam is is the second largest belief system and islam is expected to increase significantly from about 24 of the world today to 31 by 2016 making a very close competitor with christianity buddhism and hinduism each set declines slightly and the proportion of people who don't identify with with any religion which includes atheist agnostics and just folks who would say that they're nuns in modern terms they don't identify with any particular religious group that proportion is set to decline from 16 to 13 so the tide isn't going out on religion globally it's actually coming in and one of the most surprising parts of this story is what's happening in china china today is that is the global center of atheism but the church in china is growing so fast that experts think there will be more christians in china than in america by 2030 and some even think that china could be a majority christian country by 2016. at that point as much as 40 of the world's christians are expected to be living in sub-saharan africa as well so far from being declining religion of white westerners christianity is a growing religion of the north south east and west this has massive implications for how we think especially those of us in any way involved in the academic world you see but for decades the idea that modernization would bring global secularization has operated in the university not just as a diagnosis but also as a prescription it's not just what will happen but what should happen so what a western intellectual is going to do when they realize that it isn't happening and far from atheism being the belief system of diversity and progress it's actually the belief system of white western men and communist regimes professor fan gang young is a leading sociologist of religion in china and he argues that the western academy is going to have to go through a paradigm shift much like a scientific revolution that's his comparison when the failure of the the so-called secularization hypothesis this idea that religion in general is declining uh comes home to roost we can no longer act like belief in god in general and christianity in particular is going to be driven out by more education more understanding of science greater racial and cultural diversity more concern for people's mental health or better ethics because christianity it turns out is by any reasonable measure the greatest intellectual and ethical history is it crazy for me to believe that a middle eastern jewish man who lived two thousand years ago was truly create the creator god in human form yes is it crazy for me to believe that his death on the cross pay the price for our sins so that anyone who put their trust in him can be forgiven yes is it crazy for me to believe that he was raised from the dead to conquer death and to bring new life to broken people yes all these are crazy unbelievable beliefs the problem is there is no more rational alternative francis collins who i mentioned earlier the director of the national institute of health over here one of the most influential scientists in the world um summarized how he thought about his faith like this um he said that actually as he began to try and understand why intellectually sophisticated people can actually believe in god whose dismay he found that atheism turned out to be the least rational of all the choices now at the beginning of my talk i claimed that science hasn't disproved god rather that belief in a creator god is is the best foundation for science point two i said that humans aren't happier without god rather regular religious participation correlates with more happiness and better mental health point three was that humans aren't better without god but the actively religious people behave in more pro-social ways and that christianity is also the basis for our fundamental moral beliefs and number four that christianity isn't shrinking it's growing and i'm i'm sure that i've raised a lot of questions and a host of objections so i look forward to q a time um i just want to end with this don't dismiss the possibility that there is a creator god who loves you enough that he came to die for you because some of the cleverest people in the world think that that's true in fact they would stake their lives on it thank you so much for that rebecca well that has really stirred things up on the q a board brilliant that's exactly what we want um you have divided your audience i can see by the questions coming in of some people who are agreeing with you some people who really want to push back there is another couple of minutes if you want to get involved with the uh the question and answers i know some people like to wait to the end of the talk before going across to pigeonhole and putting their questions in or voting for other questions so if you'd like to do that now is your kind of good opportunity before we get into some of those questions david i wonder if you could put up those two website addresses uh for us and for rebecca while that goes on because if you want to find out more about rebecca and about some of the work that she's doing her blog some of her publications that is all there at rebreakablecocklin.org if you want to find out any more about us at solas we are there at solas hyphen cpc.org and then very quickly rebecca before we get into the q a could you just tell us a little bit about your new book which is coming out is it in april is that right yes yeah um i it's a strange thing over here that people often express their political and other views with things called yard signs which i i don't think they certainly don't exist in england i'm guessing they don't in scotland either but in america people call their garden their yard and if they feel sort of strongly about something they'll stick a little sign in their yard on two little legs that often as i say traditionally it's which political candidate they're voting for but in the part of america where i live most common sign that i see says something like this in this house we believe that black lives matter love is love women's rights are human rights and then fascinatingly there are sort of usually three other claims but it can totally depend on the yard side it could be like diversity makes us stronger or no human is illegal or science is real or water is life um but those three black lives matter love is love and women's rights human rights are often first and foremost in that mix so i've written a book coming out in april called the secular creed and examining five contemporary claims where i look at those three and others um and what i'm doing is sort of saying from a christian perspective what do we make of these claims um spoiler alert from a christian perspective black lives absolutely matter 100 no question and one of the things i look at is how how that claim has sort of been tied especially in american consciousness i think somewhat true in the uk as well through the claim that love is love and i actually don't think those two statements belong together so there's a whole another couple of areas of controversy you like controversies that's great so the secular creed rebecca and when is that published that's coming out in april april excellent okay q a time are you ready there are some there are some interesting questions in here i hope you're ready for this okay let's just start at the top the the voting is kind of moving the questions around even as we speak so steve right so i agree that god's work continues but our christians and in particular bible believing christians too enculturated that their witness is terribly weakened and their message compromised uh yes and i think you'd like tribes do that i think um one of the one of the brilliant things about christianity uh and i think this is sort of objectively true as well as something that i believe because i'm a christian is that it is it has never been um culturally specific what i mean by that is if you look at the bible itself you see from the beginning that the church was multi-ethnic multi-racial multicultural multiple languages being spoken people from all sorts of different places that shouldn't have got on with each other um there was this this coming together of people from different backgrounds and and christianity has spread since then all sorts of different countries and has no problem at all with being fully in that culture and whether it's the the language that the bible is is read in and translated into or whether it's the set of clothes that christians should wear or whether it's the food that christians should eat many things about christianity they're completely kind of trans cultural or adaptable to different cultures and that's that's a beautiful ethic actually that comes out of christianity this this belief in love across difference whether it's racial difference or cultural difference or natural differences deeply entrenched in new testament ethics um but one of the things that the bible warns against in particular whatever culture you're in is the danger of being rich and the way that that plays out is folks like me and most likely like others on this call is that if we have um material comforts we in biblical terms are actually the sort of the spiritually disadvantaged and that there are real real risks to being wealthy and and i think especially um as a christian living in a country where not only do i sort of material benefits but i also have um protections of my faith you know i'm not i'm not a christian in china today where actually you could be arrested for being a christian i'm a christian in america where that's extraordinarily unlikely to happen and i i think there is a real danger of complacency and of a comfortable christianity that has very little to do with jesus of nazareth and is actually saying so i think the risk is is very real fortunately i don't think the hope for the church globally is actually rich comfortable christians i think it's for persecuting christians um thank you for that okay i want to come down to uh a question here it was also sort of voted to the top of the pile uh clem was right but uh the board is moving as i speak as people are voting so clem writes christianity is not dying in the developing world where but it is where we have access to education as professor dawkins has shown the more degrees we have the fewer faith heads we get bright not bishops please yeah so so again dawkins um he tells a good tale but frankly his data is often pretty faulty and i say that it was interesting reading his his latest i think it says i don't think he's written since outgrowing god his kind of youth version of of help helping young people realize that they don't need god anymore um because there for the first time having read some of his other books for the first time he was having to acknowledge some things that previously frankly wouldn't have acknowledged like for example that actually people who believe in god do behave better than people who don't um and so but he has this this strong push that that links religious belief to lack of education now there's there's a strand of truth in that connected to what i was just saying which is actually the bible is very strongly on the side of the poor against the rich and globally and like in any society the likelihood is that richer people are going to be more educated so it is true that if you did a you know if if you monitor the educational levels of christians around the world you find many who are poor and uneducated however if you look globally today christians are some of the most educated people globally actually more educated on on average than atheists so um to pull some exact stats on this um but there's um especially as well christian women are as much more likely to be educated and relative to christian men than um some folks in other kind of religious and non-religious belief settings and what's interesting as well um and these figures are from the us but while nominally religious people are more likely to declare themselves than non-religious if they get more education actually um professing christians who are regularly participating by going to church like active christians are not less likely to be active christians if they're more educated in fact um highly educated christians are more likely to be church goers in the us for example so it's actually not the the tale that dawkins tells is is quite misleading um because yeah i think he under he recognized or he notices the fact that more religious people i'm sorry more educated people are more likely to be sort of clear about what they don't believe if they're not believers rather than just sort of save their christians when clearly they're not frankly i think that's a good thing but it's not true that there's a sort of simple correlation between like the more educated you get the less likely you are to believe that's very interesting um thank you for that clem you may want to come back on that and question some of those things if you missed any of that this is recorded and so if you're on our youtube channel you can't just rewind and go back to the beginning and catch any of those things because that was quick and there's a lot in there okay moving on thank you for that clem sign on that gavin almost everything i say not quite the vast majority of things i've said today the footnotes are in my book so if you do actually want to kind of figure out um you know what what i'm citing here it's all in the footnotes that's genius product placement thank you for that okay joy has joy hadn't has put in a thing here saying if what you've just said is true um are the media the press somewhat to blame for so many people thinking that christianity is dead and how do we get better christian pr in in the the broad kind of media is this a media problem more than a factual problem thanks joy yeah i say it it's definitely true that the story like the headline uh christian gives to charity isn't good like that's not an interesting news story right it's much more interesting if you can find you know study shows that christians are less altruistic than atheists like certainly everybody wants to hear about that because it sort of feels surprising somehow or it feels like a takedown of christianity there's actually a famous one of those that went around a few years ago um claiming to show that that uh religious people were less so religious religious kids than religious families were remarkably less altruistic than kids raised in atheist families and this was sort of trumpeted abroad by every leader outlet that could get their hands on it subsequently turned out there were massive flaws in how that study was done and it's it's been actually kind of had to be reacted because it's so like caught in its methodology you don't get the headlines that then say actually that thing that we trumpeted abroad a couple years ago has been substantially discredited now there's an extent to which it's true and and you know we hear the headline news like major celebrity pastor caught in terrible sex scandal is news um pastor liv's faithful life and dies um faithful death is just kind of that's not news so it is true with christianity and with life in general that the newspapers are more likely to report negative stories than they are to report positive ones um in terms of of pr i think it's also true and worth acknowledging that christians say and do some really stupid and bad things often in public um i mean i live in america where there's no shortage of this possibly even more so in the uk of people identifying as christians doing really stupid and or immoral things in public and and so i think we have to we if those of us who are christians sort of have to own that to some extent and say this is our mess that we are making i don't think we can just sort of blame it on the media out there um i think in terms of how how christianity can have kind of quote better er um i think part of it is is by cultivating the sorts of um character traits that the bible calls us to including humility actually i think we're too quick often as christians to be flame-throwing and arrogant um when actually we should cultivate humility especially as we are disagreeing with others and speaking across ideological differences yeah thank you for that now you know you made those four kind of very bold stark claims in your talk and during that talk this this comment came in uh which i think um sort of picking up on that and says all this sounds good so this is what you were saying that all this sounds good until you see the church and christians they look like they don't even believe it themselves and there's certainly plenty of sin there so how would you respond to the idea sounds good but what i see in practice just just horrifies me so yeah any thoughts on that important question and i think there are two strands to it if i'm hearing it correctly one is christians looking like they don't really believe it themselves um it's funny that the church that i go to here delightfully has people worshiping who come from all sorts of different countries and cultures um so like the bible study group that i lead you know we have a brazilian lady we have a ghanaian korean lady we have an ethiopian lady we have um people from eastern europe and latin america like it's sort of all all comers which is is fabulous um and one of the questions that i sometimes ask people who have grown up or become christians and other other countries and continents and move to my little parts of the world here is how do they experience church here differently from where they come from and what i often hear them say is people here are far like far less enthusiastic in church than where i come from whether it's ghana or whether it's peru right um and that that's striking to me i suspect it's also true in the uk that often um the way that we worship may it may not always look like we believe that we are meeting with the creator god that we believe in a man who was raised from the dead that we are filled with the holy spirit like these crazy things that christians believe it doesn't always sort of light up our faces as as it should i think there's room for cultural difference there that like a a very enthusiastic british man might you know put his hands in his pockets in a especially excited sort of way while um you know latin american woman might be waving her arms in there and i think that's that's fine um so if if your experience with christians is that they lack physical visible enthusiasm for their beliefs then uh maybe go to a more multi-cultural church where you'll see people um operating in different ways the second part of the question um you can maybe read it again to me again but i think it was about like churches are full of sinners yeah everything you said sounds good until you see the church a they don't look like they believe it themselves and there's lots of sin there yeah and so this is the the paradox of um one of the paradoxes of being a christian is that as a christian i believe that i am i have been completely forgiven for my sin because of jesus's death in my place and that in um in a meaningful and important sense it's been taken away from me as far as the uses from the west as the bible puts it or it's been like thrown into the bottomless sea there's as as god looks at me simply because i trust in jesus he sees only jesus goodness and not my sinfulness but the bible also teaches and i'm thankful because otherwise i would not think that i was a christian like the bible also teaches that that i will till the day i die struggle with sin and it's like a kind of old nature and a new nature sort of battling it out together and as i participate even as i individually participate in local christian community here i i'm meeting other people who are sinful and i'm bringing my own sin into the equation and often that is not pretty the the comparison that i'd make is that um and this is a comparison the bible makes as well the the church is like a family i i'm sure if we sat down with every person on this call and asked them about the family and ask them about bad things that have been done in their family or experienced like really negative experience that they'd had in their families we would have story after story we might have very good stories as well we'd have lots of stories people whose father abused them by like beating them or whose um mother struggled with alcoholism and neglected them or whose sister completely um you know abandoned them um emotionally as they're growing up probably all of us or at least many of us would have really painful stories to tell about our families the conclusion from that is not that families are bad but that we need to work towards being healthy families and so similarly i think with churches any church that i join is gonna have at least one sinner which is me and actually any person in that church is also going to be a sinner um and we can we can work together to to grow in our likeness to jesus um what we're aspiring to as christians is very gradually become a little bit more like him um but we are always going to have the struggles of of sin and sometimes that will be sort of private and invisible and sometimes it will be very public and visible i i don't think we should be surprised like i think we should lament it but we shouldn't be surprised by it from a tells us christian perspective okay thank you for that right moving on because the clock is moving and we can do some more questions roger marshall here is a very interesting question he refers to the the well-known writers um douglas murray and tom holland who you may well have come across both those gentlemen so roger marshall writes this doug murray refers to the god-shaped hole in the world but why are former skeptics like him and tom holland so reluctant to follow this perception to a god conclusion uh i confess ignorance of the other gentleman you mentioned but tom holland i haven't been right here but it's it's worth reading and partly because it makes the case at much greater length that i i very briefly sketched out when i was talking earlier which is that the reason that we believe in things like universal human rights or equality and care for the poor and love all these kind of things that we think of basic moral common sense are actually christian beliefs and he makes that case by looking back over two thousand years of christian history thoughts and all but says actually when when we look at the world into which christianity was born we don't find a world in which people believe these things and help them to be self-evident and if we look at cultures untouched by christianity day we don't see that either so for all the failures of christians over the last 2000 years actually christianity has defined what goodness is and given us an opportunity to participate in that now i don't know tom holland personally my sense from sort of watching the things that he's saying is that he is gradually progressing toward a place where he would want to identify as a christian and so i uh you know wouldn't lose hope for somebody like him yet um i do think that especially those of us who who grew up in in a world that expected that religion was declining um and that it probably wasn't intellectually tenable even if it was sort of desirable like even if we don't want even if we don't want to believe in in your harare's world of sapiens without god where there is no good and no evil really there's just sort of animal uh interactions and atoms and molecules that that we're sort of not allowed to because um yeah christianity just isn't sort of intellectually terrible i think the relief valve can be kind of taken off off that um if we start listening to the thousands of christian intellectuals who god has placed at the top of all sorts of fields at all sorts of universities across the world and started to see that actually christianity when you look closely at it holds up very well intellectually for all its strange claims actually it helps it holds up better than any other system i think what he's pushing out there is is there a limit to how far apologetics and the life of the mind can take you towards god is something more needed can you argue your way to say i i need this it fits it works but i'm not convinced it's true and i can't actually plant my flag there is there a limit to apologetics on its own is something more needed you know one of the odd uh beliefs that christians like me hold is that we're actually all spiritually blind until god opens our eyes um so there is a reality that no the most persuasive argument in the world wouldn't actually cause somebody to put their trust in jesus and if god hasn't opened their eyes so there's truth to that i think there's also the reality which um jonathan hyde who i mentioned earlier atheists social psychologists is very interesting that we like to think of ourselves as predominantly rational beings with also some sort of emotional social things thrown in but like really where you know our thinking happens here and our heart is you know sort of following along like to think of ourselves that way actually the metaphor that jonathan high uses is that well if you imagine a rider on top of an elephant the little rider sitting on top is our rational self and the elephant is our kind of everything else like our emotional and social instinct self and that often what we do when we're trying to persuade somebody else's is we speak only to the rational rider on the top and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that if if you speak just to a rational writer on the top and try to tell somebody that everything they've ever believed is not actually correct or at least a substantial proportion of it um whether it's on a political question or on a question of religious belief and they're not going to listen unless you talk to the elephant um and and they're really all of us like however much we think that we're independent agents we actually make our decisions in the context of our communities and so i i think sometimes the missing link for folks is um if we only focus on a sort of purely intellectual rational argument piece and we're forgetting that human beings are much more than that rightly so like i don't think it's a bad thing that we're much more than that um but then actually our social and emotional self is um at least as important probably more so and that um that's that's why christian hospitality in its various forms is so important thank you gordon has uh picked up on something he's saying to talk about the the growth of the chinese church let me read you gordon's question because he's picked up um particularly something you said about the potential and in 2016 of chinese christians outnumbering american christians and he says what will the impact of that be on world mission and how will the american church react when they are a minority and they are outnumbered by chinese christians yeah so there are two separate claims that i said quickly together which is probably why they got mixed up the first is that it seems highly likely that by 2030 so a little less than a decade from now there'll be more christians in china than in america now china as you probably know is an extremely big country so that doesn't mean that most chinese people will be christians but it does mean that actually if you prepare the church in spanish america church in china will be bigger frank young who i mentioned who's one of the leading experts of sociology of religion in chinese a professor at purdue university over here he says that if the chinese church continues on anything even close to its rate the rate of growth that it's seen since the 80s i think there's several decades now that if that continues that by 2060 there could be more christians in china than anything else as in they could be more than 50 of people identifying as christians in china now fascinatingly and this is something i i haven't touched on on this talk but i find it so interesting christianity's always been a majority female movement you know no offense to you guys um but but actually from the from the first it seemed like there were disproportion disproportionate number of women following jesus versus men and the church in china is is very much following that pattern as well but it seems probably at least two-thirds of folks identifies christians china are women which is particularly striking given that there's a disproportionate number of men in china due to selective abortion and infection in the world child policy um so yeah by by 2060 it seems like there could be productions in in china than anything else um what impact will that have on the world gosh uh all sorts right i mean it's sort of amazing to think even even if i sort of take off the hat of somebody who actually believes in jesus and thinks that is truly the most wonderful thing in the world anybody becomes a christian like even if i set it aside and imagine i'm looking at this purely from a like practical perspective to have china be largely framed and informed by christian ethics rather than by communism would be an extremely good thing both for china and for the world in general how america would feel about that and i partly don't care like no strongly put um i i think one of the the big switches that needs to happen in the white church in america and i it's a loaded term but um church in america that are majority white is to recognize that christianity is not and ever has been actually a kind of white man's religion say that white people haven't been christians they absolutely have to say that western culture and white western culture hasn't been shaped by christianity it absolutely has but actually christianity has always been multi-ethnic multicultural multi-racial and the the summer the the history of white supremacy and racism in america that's been sort of intertwined with with white churches in many ways is utterly apparent to the what the bible teaches us like completely irreconcilable um so i think there are some sort of wake-up calls that need to happen within america itself and i think recognizing actually many of the people who um are serious followers of jesus don't look like the white evangelical american i my hope is that it will be an encouragement and a help to white christians in america um i think some who are maybe obviously less committed to jesus than they are to their own um sort of ethnic identity it'll be a struggle that's interesting that links into a question that's been kind of working its way up the board as you've been speaking because you've talked about growth in other parts of the world in the church and this one's anonymous um and it reflects on the fact that we do have you know long-term decline in church attendance in certainly in scotland um to what extent is the western church to blame have we become too comfortable too materialistic and far too lazy so are we the weak part of a global movement that is thriving and is it actually a problem that we've got to deal with i mean yeah basically um that's not the that's not the only answer um what's happening in in the west for sure is a decline in kind of cultural christianity so if far fewer people are showing up to church just because it's what you do if you're scottish or what you do if you're english or what you do if you're american um and i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing i i think from my perspective as someone who takes the claims to the bible very seriously i would actually rather somebody knew they weren't a christian than somebody who thought they were when they're not and often um often this sort of cultural framework my husband for example grew up in oklahoma in the bible belt in america and then he went to cambridge for his phd and it was sort of a real shift for him because in oklahoma like a lot of most of his friends went to church even though he didn't kind of respect the fact that he did and when he went to cambridge it was like you're totally a weirdo for going to church like it was just an odd he looked around church on a sunday and he was like everybody here really wants to be here they're like truly serious about this following jesus stuff because otherwise it doesn't make you cool like it did in oklahoma he remembers then going back to oklahoma and it'd be kind of unsettling to think you know the reality is i think some of my friends it doesn't i mean you can't judge someone else's heart but it doesn't seem like they're actually necessarily authentic followers of jesus i mean they're just kind of going along with what people are doing and you know this is kind of what the cool thing to do is um as i say i think that that sense of cultural christianity uh has been declining for a while um both in the uk and and in the us and i don't think it does i don't think it's a terrible thing i i think it's an opportunity for um us to to actually focus on real christianity um and to take seriously the the bible's call on us um in all sorts of dimensions um both ethical and also in terms of like sharing the message of jesus with others outside the church and i don't think it does us any harm to feel a sort of loss of cultural power um because the first christians weren't operating in a world where they had cultural power quite the reverse um and you know jesus says that anyone who wants to come after must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow him in his day that could mean literally being killed in china today that could mean literally being killed in many many parts of the world where christians are living as a persecuted minority that could be literally being killed there's something very clarifying um about knowing that your life could be on the line for following jesus that none of us growing up in the west have experienced um so is it a problem that we need to own yes um is it only a bad thing i don't know that it is and i haven't looked at the stats on england recently but in america at least um folks regularly participating and going to church um like churches that are teaching the bible actually hasn't declining like that that number's been been holding pretty steadily as folks going to kind of more theologically liberal churches or folks just sort of culturally identifying as christian christians has declined our time has gone i just want to say thank you to you for joining us rebecca that was really as controversial as we hoped wonderful thank you that was great um can we put up the slide please david of some further uh resources would like to point people in the direction of some things that might be helpful for them if you want to read a bit further obviously rebecca's book which i was waving around earlier on confronting christianity he's got loads loads more on all these big questions that face the christian faith god's unwelcome recovery by sean oliver d looks at some of the stats and the things that are going on behind the picture of church decline that we often hear and then whose religion is christianity by lamin cena looks at the way that christianity isn't owned by any one group such as white middle-class evangelical americans for example but moves from continent to continent and is owned by the whole world i've put rebecca's um website address up there again for you so anything else you want to know about what she does including her new book which is coming out in april she said the secular creed want to add to confronting christianity there so that just leaves me to point out that we've got a conference coming up soon online the confident christianity conference was going to only be with churches in hereford but because we can't travel to hereford it is now open to the whole world via the internet if you want to join andy bannister gareth black and christy mayer there for confident christianity follow the link that you can see on the screen a whole day of this kind of thing that you've been enjoying for the last hour that just leaves me to say thanks again to rebecca mcloughlin for joining us that was hugely appreciated thank you to all those of you who contributed to the q a both voting for the questions and firing in some really really helpful questions this evening thank you to david hartnett for producing and thank you for watching we do hope we pray that this has been a useful session for you and may god bless you good night

Channel: SolasCPC

Views: 519

Rating: 4.1111112 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: jj-fZtjJG_E

Length: 66min 36sec (3996 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021