Not to pick on a tangential point, but the following strikes me as false:
"If it’s the case that Christians have supported both liberatory and repressive policies and political movements throughout history, then the causal variable for whether someone supports liberatory policies is not Christianity!"
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that civilizations of every other religious persuasion defended the institution of slavery with religious teaching, and no sizable or successful abolitionist cause was ever mounted. Then suppose that in Christian societies, many observed the civilizational norm, but also a sizable and successful abolitionist cause was mounted.
Surely that'd be *some* reason to wonder if Christianity is causally relevant to abolitionism?
Upon reflection, probably not? Let me dump my whole thoughts on this.
In the abstract it sounds plausible, because Christianity would be an independent variable with a different outcome than other societies. It wouldn't be a correlation of 1 Christianity=1 freedom.
The problem is that there would likely be an auxiliary variable influencing the variation within Christianity. Within Christianity, we would have to identify the causal mechanism by which Christians over there supported liberation, but not over here.
In general, sociological arguments for Christianity (that you'll be happier, have more kids, be nicer, etc.) imply a non-nuanced causality. If we say that Christians as a population are 10% happier than Muslims, that just means individual people who are Christian are somehow happier than Muslims. That could mean that the least happier are unhappy, or the most happy are way more happy, or that everyone is just vaguely more happy. In comparing the two populations, the last example may be the only one arguing the point that "Christianity makes people happier, because it's uniform."
But also, when we are talking about causally relevant variables in comparing societies and populations, the impacts are marginal and there are multiple variables at play.
Long story short, people like to run with the narrative that Christian societies are more liberatory, when there's sufficient variation within Christianity, confounding variables within those cultures casting doubt on Christian ideology being the causal variable, and a lot of statistical games played with such studies (is the average happier/liberatory Christian, the median, modal, or mean Christian?).
We can just look at the historical record to illustrate this. Something changed within Christianity to so radically disapprove slavery in the 19th century. It wasn't there 2000 years prior. It was not uniform across all Christians. Arguably, other cultural trends (who admittedly may have not come to be had second order consequences of Christian societies not arisen...we don't know, but given that we see liberal, democratic values in non-Christian countries like Japan, I'm inclined to disagree) were more influential on being liberatory.
Causality is hard! Given this, I don't think we have good enough evidence that Christianity is that much better than other social or philosophical forces (liberalism, etc).
Thanks for your thoughts. I'm in agreement that assessing the effects of any ideology is very, very difficult. For the reasons you mention, one can't just fix a metric (e.g. happiness) and average over different classes.
The causal story I have in mind with respect to slavery is a little more nuanced than "Christianity leads to abolitionism." It would be that Christianity is particularly suited to the abolitionist cause vis-à-vis other religions/ideologies, and that when combined with the right "other factors" (which we can only conjecture at) societies who adopt it are more likely to pursue abolitionism. Further, this is demonstrated empirically by abolitionism's concentration in Christian societies. So it's not that Christianity is a sufficient condition for abolitionism, but rather that Christianity pushes a society closer toward the abolitionist brink than it otherwise would be by infusing it with the intellectual and theological resources for the cause.
Further still, these "other factors" (e.g. liberalism) may themselves be encouraged by Christianity. I wonder if Japan's adoption of liberal, democratic values had more to do with a desire to appear civilized and modern to Western superpowers than with deeply held philosophical or religious convictions.
The problem with this last point is that there are other southeast Asian countries that have adopted liberal democracy. What's more, cultures sustain themselves and typically don't orient themselves to impress other cultures, unless they are threatened by force (call it imperialism). Think of it this way: I don't think there's a serious aspect of American culture to impress Europeans, or vice versa, so it seems odd to generalize this and say that's what Japan is doing, on top of other Asian societies having similar politics.
What's more, when we are talking about historical events that only happened once, it's extremely hard to generalize. Why is abolition concentrated in Christian societies? Why not other societies? I hate to keep going back to Asia, but it's seemingly the region least touched by Christianity. On a historical level, perhaps Christian societies were built on societies that had more slaves and so the reason why they have lots of abolitionist movements is because they had more slavery. Meanwhile, in other societies like those in Asia, there was less of a backlash against slavery because it just wasn't as common. I'm not saying this is how things happened, but when we are looking at such data when we have a sample of 1, we have to ask these questions.
A good variable (pro-abolition) about culture/institutional causes could be massing a preceding bad variable (pervasiveness of slavery). It would be bad to attribute the good thing to the culture/institution, but ignore the bad thing, and elevating the culture relative to another that did not have the bad thing.
The reason I phrased my original comment in the way I did is because, on a basic level, it demonstrates the spiritus relationship between Christianity and liberation. We can nit-pick and talk about how Christianity may possibly be more liberatory on the margins, but there are all sorts of ways to falsify or problematize that data, leading the Christian to bite bullets they may not want to (i.e maybe Christianity led liberatory movements but it also made people more content with slavery). All of that is an interesting social science conversation, but going down to that level isn't necessary to prove the simple point, and it certainly doesn't disprove it.
I don't think Asian countries modernized in an attempt to passively impress Western countries. I'm thinking of so-called defensive modernization, which is indeed usually driven by force or a desire to avoid, say, colonialism.
The idea that slavery itself drives abolition *is* intuitive, though it seems to be in some tension with your earlier claim that something drastically changed within Christianity in the 19th century (though abolitionist movements were well underway by the 18th, e.g. John Woolman): perhaps what changed was not Christianity but the prevalence of slavery.
I'm in broad agreement with your nuanced claim here about the difficulty of drawing a conclusion about the influence of Christianity on abolitionism, for what it's worth. That would need to be a much deeper research project. The wording in the original post struck me as oversimplified, but I think we're on roughly the same page now!
It’s fine! I think it helps just to point out the dynamic, so people can move up the dialogue tree. I can’t remember if I deleted this part or not, but I think it can definitely be offputting for atheists to constantly bring up Hell, much like a non-believer bringing up other problems of evil - just because it’s unpleasant to think about!
That’s why I’d love to hear a theodicy from a universalist on this problem. I’m sucker for Hell-isn’t-real-you-donuts arguments from Christians and that would confirm some priors.
I'm a Christian universalist with a pretty well-developed theodicy; it was one of my "things" back in the Twitter days. We can chat about it sometime if you'd like.
I have tried. I don't personally like Hart’s writing style. But I have read plenty of universalist literature. From a historical-textualist perspective I find it the most convincing, or at the very least ECT is the least plausible explanation of the data.
However, the doctrinal history of the church and the beliefs of believers (that we can measure), makes me believe ECT is sufficiently mainstream that I'm not confident, conditional on Christianity being true, that ECT is not also true. And so, that's a problem of evil for me, from which I cannot believe in God (among other reasons, of course).
I get it, it’s basically the problem of evil and divine hiddenness condensed and judged against the theological resources Christianity has to explain it.
But how do you go from not-Christianity to not-God?
I find all arguments for God, just really bad! And when I try to conceive of a spiritual force of some sort that I could find plausible, it's redundant and not worth orienting my life around or even thinking about.
You: "This is the subtle assumption of Christopher Hitchens’s anti-theism, and an assumption many axiological anti-theists would agree with: A happy life worth living is one where you are in control of your life, not subject to the whims of an all powerful sovereign leader."
Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin: “The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice.”
For a someone who DOES think that their God fits someone's definition of "tyrant", or that eternal conscious torment is a fact of life, then it's a "deal with it" situation as far as they are concerned. I once raised the problem of ECT with someone and he said "Do you think God cares how you feel?" However, this biting of the bullet means you have to really renegotiate what "omnibenevolence" means. I suspect that may be the easiest of the "omni" chains to break, however.
When it comes to divine sovereignty, I think its certainly possible for there to be moral prohibitions and some sort of punishment without a deity being a tyrant, as long as both are reasonable. The problem with ECT is its duration and intensity seems to be unreasonable given no sin is infinite.
However, I am skeptical of comparing imperfect human political systems to a posited powerful and wise divine sovereign is a fair comparison. However, if we insist on such an endeavor, polytheist or henotheistic systems does have a "nobility" or "assembly" of lesser deities providing either counsel or distributed execution of sovereignty.
On that last point, the anthropomorphism of it all is ultimately why I don’t find it likely to be true. And also! why I hope it’s not! If we’re going to have some sort of spiritualism to be true, give me the wooey good vibe pantheistic kind please
We can certainly posit some sort of ultimate principle at the heart of it all (Ma'at of Egypt, the Tao, the Neoplatonic One, etc.), but anthropomorphizing is vital if we are to be able to relate to the stories and symbols of mythos. It's less useful than one might think to just think of a bare archetype or some philosophical being if we are to convey deep values and meaning.
However, we must also be careful with confusing the symbols with what they symbolize. I may find Horus as divine monarch useful and concise to describe concepts of sovereignty, parenthood, rulership and such (especially as the 'good king' archetype), but it doesn't mean I'm going to think that's the model for a contentious human society...just like I don't assume humans have bird heads like Horus does (even if it would be fun).
I have tried to think this way about archetypes, religious symbols, etc, but my brain can't get past the plausibility of the symbolism being literally true.
Could be different experiences, personalities and cognitive styles approach it differently. I've always had a big imagination (or so I've been told), took classes in film and writing, and have experience with RPGs and various science fiction and fantasy fandoms, so I'm used to differentiating "literal" from "literary" and trying to negotiate between the two. I also tend to like ritual and aesthetics, so that could be a factor; I don't consider "LARP" to be a bad word, even if it is four letters.
Meanwhile, someone else may be absolutely fine with just mindfulness or thinking about "God, or Nature" like Spinoza did and call it a day. Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach our relationship to whatever-it-is.
"Part of the reason he is so successful is because he will give more charity to arguments than they deserve. He will throw some good non-theistic arguments under the bus for the sake of having a good conversation with a Christian"
This is a good answer! If only more Christians used the doctrine to reflect as much! This seems very much in the “radical” Christian traditional of saying God gave us this doctrine as a test, which I’m a little sympathetic to.
Not to pick on a tangential point, but the following strikes me as false:
"If it’s the case that Christians have supported both liberatory and repressive policies and political movements throughout history, then the causal variable for whether someone supports liberatory policies is not Christianity!"
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that civilizations of every other religious persuasion defended the institution of slavery with religious teaching, and no sizable or successful abolitionist cause was ever mounted. Then suppose that in Christian societies, many observed the civilizational norm, but also a sizable and successful abolitionist cause was mounted.
Surely that'd be *some* reason to wonder if Christianity is causally relevant to abolitionism?
Upon reflection, probably not? Let me dump my whole thoughts on this.
In the abstract it sounds plausible, because Christianity would be an independent variable with a different outcome than other societies. It wouldn't be a correlation of 1 Christianity=1 freedom.
The problem is that there would likely be an auxiliary variable influencing the variation within Christianity. Within Christianity, we would have to identify the causal mechanism by which Christians over there supported liberation, but not over here.
In general, sociological arguments for Christianity (that you'll be happier, have more kids, be nicer, etc.) imply a non-nuanced causality. If we say that Christians as a population are 10% happier than Muslims, that just means individual people who are Christian are somehow happier than Muslims. That could mean that the least happier are unhappy, or the most happy are way more happy, or that everyone is just vaguely more happy. In comparing the two populations, the last example may be the only one arguing the point that "Christianity makes people happier, because it's uniform."
But also, when we are talking about causally relevant variables in comparing societies and populations, the impacts are marginal and there are multiple variables at play.
Long story short, people like to run with the narrative that Christian societies are more liberatory, when there's sufficient variation within Christianity, confounding variables within those cultures casting doubt on Christian ideology being the causal variable, and a lot of statistical games played with such studies (is the average happier/liberatory Christian, the median, modal, or mean Christian?).
We can just look at the historical record to illustrate this. Something changed within Christianity to so radically disapprove slavery in the 19th century. It wasn't there 2000 years prior. It was not uniform across all Christians. Arguably, other cultural trends (who admittedly may have not come to be had second order consequences of Christian societies not arisen...we don't know, but given that we see liberal, democratic values in non-Christian countries like Japan, I'm inclined to disagree) were more influential on being liberatory.
Causality is hard! Given this, I don't think we have good enough evidence that Christianity is that much better than other social or philosophical forces (liberalism, etc).
Thanks for your thoughts. I'm in agreement that assessing the effects of any ideology is very, very difficult. For the reasons you mention, one can't just fix a metric (e.g. happiness) and average over different classes.
The causal story I have in mind with respect to slavery is a little more nuanced than "Christianity leads to abolitionism." It would be that Christianity is particularly suited to the abolitionist cause vis-à-vis other religions/ideologies, and that when combined with the right "other factors" (which we can only conjecture at) societies who adopt it are more likely to pursue abolitionism. Further, this is demonstrated empirically by abolitionism's concentration in Christian societies. So it's not that Christianity is a sufficient condition for abolitionism, but rather that Christianity pushes a society closer toward the abolitionist brink than it otherwise would be by infusing it with the intellectual and theological resources for the cause.
Further still, these "other factors" (e.g. liberalism) may themselves be encouraged by Christianity. I wonder if Japan's adoption of liberal, democratic values had more to do with a desire to appear civilized and modern to Western superpowers than with deeply held philosophical or religious convictions.
The problem with this last point is that there are other southeast Asian countries that have adopted liberal democracy. What's more, cultures sustain themselves and typically don't orient themselves to impress other cultures, unless they are threatened by force (call it imperialism). Think of it this way: I don't think there's a serious aspect of American culture to impress Europeans, or vice versa, so it seems odd to generalize this and say that's what Japan is doing, on top of other Asian societies having similar politics.
What's more, when we are talking about historical events that only happened once, it's extremely hard to generalize. Why is abolition concentrated in Christian societies? Why not other societies? I hate to keep going back to Asia, but it's seemingly the region least touched by Christianity. On a historical level, perhaps Christian societies were built on societies that had more slaves and so the reason why they have lots of abolitionist movements is because they had more slavery. Meanwhile, in other societies like those in Asia, there was less of a backlash against slavery because it just wasn't as common. I'm not saying this is how things happened, but when we are looking at such data when we have a sample of 1, we have to ask these questions.
A good variable (pro-abolition) about culture/institutional causes could be massing a preceding bad variable (pervasiveness of slavery). It would be bad to attribute the good thing to the culture/institution, but ignore the bad thing, and elevating the culture relative to another that did not have the bad thing.
The reason I phrased my original comment in the way I did is because, on a basic level, it demonstrates the spiritus relationship between Christianity and liberation. We can nit-pick and talk about how Christianity may possibly be more liberatory on the margins, but there are all sorts of ways to falsify or problematize that data, leading the Christian to bite bullets they may not want to (i.e maybe Christianity led liberatory movements but it also made people more content with slavery). All of that is an interesting social science conversation, but going down to that level isn't necessary to prove the simple point, and it certainly doesn't disprove it.
I don't think Asian countries modernized in an attempt to passively impress Western countries. I'm thinking of so-called defensive modernization, which is indeed usually driven by force or a desire to avoid, say, colonialism.
The idea that slavery itself drives abolition *is* intuitive, though it seems to be in some tension with your earlier claim that something drastically changed within Christianity in the 19th century (though abolitionist movements were well underway by the 18th, e.g. John Woolman): perhaps what changed was not Christianity but the prevalence of slavery.
I'm in broad agreement with your nuanced claim here about the difficulty of drawing a conclusion about the influence of Christianity on abolitionism, for what it's worth. That would need to be a much deeper research project. The wording in the original post struck me as oversimplified, but I think we're on roughly the same page now!
I agree there's tension, but I think it can be resolved. Great feedback all around!
Thanks for the exchange! You’ve earned a sub.
I saw myself in the critique of some universalists in this article, and I feel regret there.
It’s fine! I think it helps just to point out the dynamic, so people can move up the dialogue tree. I can’t remember if I deleted this part or not, but I think it can definitely be offputting for atheists to constantly bring up Hell, much like a non-believer bringing up other problems of evil - just because it’s unpleasant to think about!
That’s why I’d love to hear a theodicy from a universalist on this problem. I’m sucker for Hell-isn’t-real-you-donuts arguments from Christians and that would confirm some priors.
I'm a Christian universalist with a pretty well-developed theodicy; it was one of my "things" back in the Twitter days. We can chat about it sometime if you'd like.
Would love to hear/read it!
Have you read David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved?
I have tried. I don't personally like Hart’s writing style. But I have read plenty of universalist literature. From a historical-textualist perspective I find it the most convincing, or at the very least ECT is the least plausible explanation of the data.
However, the doctrinal history of the church and the beliefs of believers (that we can measure), makes me believe ECT is sufficiently mainstream that I'm not confident, conditional on Christianity being true, that ECT is not also true. And so, that's a problem of evil for me, from which I cannot believe in God (among other reasons, of course).
I get it, it’s basically the problem of evil and divine hiddenness condensed and judged against the theological resources Christianity has to explain it.
But how do you go from not-Christianity to not-God?
I find all arguments for God, just really bad! And when I try to conceive of a spiritual force of some sort that I could find plausible, it's redundant and not worth orienting my life around or even thinking about.
You: "This is the subtle assumption of Christopher Hitchens’s anti-theism, and an assumption many axiological anti-theists would agree with: A happy life worth living is one where you are in control of your life, not subject to the whims of an all powerful sovereign leader."
Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin: “The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice.”
Good to see you give the argument in a more measured way.
The biggest objection I have is you say this is an argument against God, but it’s not, it’s an argument against Christianity.
For a someone who DOES think that their God fits someone's definition of "tyrant", or that eternal conscious torment is a fact of life, then it's a "deal with it" situation as far as they are concerned. I once raised the problem of ECT with someone and he said "Do you think God cares how you feel?" However, this biting of the bullet means you have to really renegotiate what "omnibenevolence" means. I suspect that may be the easiest of the "omni" chains to break, however.
When it comes to divine sovereignty, I think its certainly possible for there to be moral prohibitions and some sort of punishment without a deity being a tyrant, as long as both are reasonable. The problem with ECT is its duration and intensity seems to be unreasonable given no sin is infinite.
However, I am skeptical of comparing imperfect human political systems to a posited powerful and wise divine sovereign is a fair comparison. However, if we insist on such an endeavor, polytheist or henotheistic systems does have a "nobility" or "assembly" of lesser deities providing either counsel or distributed execution of sovereignty.
On that last point, the anthropomorphism of it all is ultimately why I don’t find it likely to be true. And also! why I hope it’s not! If we’re going to have some sort of spiritualism to be true, give me the wooey good vibe pantheistic kind please
We can certainly posit some sort of ultimate principle at the heart of it all (Ma'at of Egypt, the Tao, the Neoplatonic One, etc.), but anthropomorphizing is vital if we are to be able to relate to the stories and symbols of mythos. It's less useful than one might think to just think of a bare archetype or some philosophical being if we are to convey deep values and meaning.
However, we must also be careful with confusing the symbols with what they symbolize. I may find Horus as divine monarch useful and concise to describe concepts of sovereignty, parenthood, rulership and such (especially as the 'good king' archetype), but it doesn't mean I'm going to think that's the model for a contentious human society...just like I don't assume humans have bird heads like Horus does (even if it would be fun).
I have tried to think this way about archetypes, religious symbols, etc, but my brain can't get past the plausibility of the symbolism being literally true.
Could be different experiences, personalities and cognitive styles approach it differently. I've always had a big imagination (or so I've been told), took classes in film and writing, and have experience with RPGs and various science fiction and fantasy fandoms, so I'm used to differentiating "literal" from "literary" and trying to negotiate between the two. I also tend to like ritual and aesthetics, so that could be a factor; I don't consider "LARP" to be a bad word, even if it is four letters.
Meanwhile, someone else may be absolutely fine with just mindfulness or thinking about "God, or Nature" like Spinoza did and call it a day. Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach our relationship to whatever-it-is.
"Part of the reason he is so successful is because he will give more charity to arguments than they deserve. He will throw some good non-theistic arguments under the bus for the sake of having a good conversation with a Christian"
This, exactly.
I suspect he would agree with my criticisms fwiw
Being agreeable to everyone is a key to popularity! ;-)
This is a good answer! If only more Christians used the doctrine to reflect as much! This seems very much in the “radical” Christian traditional of saying God gave us this doctrine as a test, which I’m a little sympathetic to.