It’s no secret that Christianity’s under attack. Hardly a day passes without a new report of a Christian getting fired due to their beliefs or a church being vandalized. Colorado’s decades-long persecution of cake maker Jack Phillips demonstrates new heights of intolerance and hate. But, fewer people realize that young people are leaving the faith by the millions. Over the last decade, approximately fifty million Americans have lost their faith. According to Pew Research, the percentage of US adults identifying as Christian has declined 15% from 2007 to 2021.

Massive numbers of people are falling away from Christianity due to cultural attacks and a failure of Christians to answer questions about religious teachings, according to Pew Research. In 1 Peter 3:15, Christians are called to think clearly and logically about their faith and always be ready to explain and defend their beliefs.

Popular culture tells us that we shouldn’t believe in God because of science or something. But nothing could be further from the truth. The greatest minds in history, from Aristotle to Einstein, believed in God. As someone who spent a good part of his life as an atheist, I came to become a Christian by studying logic, science, and philosophy. Christians have truth on our side. The real problem is that most Christians don’t think deeply enough or are afraid to defend their beliefs.

SIGAR Club

That’s why Christians desperately need a Society for Intellectual Growth And Reinvigoration or a SIGAR. In this essay, I’ll examine the reasons why Christians are leaving the faith and rebut some of the more popular arguments against our beliefs. But I can’t fight this fight alone. More Christians should educate themselves on our faith and stand ready to heed Peter’s charge to defend Jesus gently yet thoroughly.

Cultural Headwinds

One of the most significant changes is the decline in the popularity of Christianity. Back in the 1950’s Christianity was so popular that everyone identified as Christian, even though many of them probably didn’t believe. I think that’s a good thing and strengthens the faith. Fake Christians give the truly faithful a bad rap. Also, I think open-mindedness and a willingness to discuss complex topics will lead to more believers if Christians take the time to educate themselves and have the courage to stand up for Jesus.

A SIGAR club could fill that gap and provide Christians with the education and support to speak up. We worship the God of Truth and Justice, who has all the answers. We just have to take the time and have an interest in understanding His Truth and the courage of our convictions to speak up.

Christian band members publicly renouncing their faith add to the milieu of anti-christian sentiment today. Being entertainers and public figures, they often denounce the faith by publishing their apostasy on social media. I’ll examine Jonathan Steingard’s (former frontman of Christian Rock Band Hawk Nelson and a preacher’s son) letter explaining why he lost his belief. I think it exemplifies this trend and adds human context to the data reported by Pew Research. Here’s the full text of his statement.

Speaking Truth to Power

I must say Jon’s apostasy makes me sad. His letter seems tragic. He struggled intensely with important questions and seemed to have honestly wanted to believe. I mean, who wouldn’t? God is great! Who wouldn’t want the ultimate power in the universe on their side working to make them happy and successful? Of course, that comes with obligations and sacrifices, something that Jon never enjoyed and rejected. Who knows, maybe he’s just not meant for salvation. He does come across as a rather shallow, superficial person.

But his letter seems like a genuine struggle with important questions to which his church and family failed even to provide rudimentary semi-believable answers. That’s a problem I’ve noticed myself in the three years or so that I’ve been a Christian. Most Christians aren’t able to provide even basic answers to attacks on their beliefs. That’s what inspired me to write this post and why we need a SIGAR club to support intellectual growth and reinvigoration.

Jon seems like a lost soul, genuinely searching for truth. He indicates that he reached out to older Christians and church leaders only to be met with weak tea responses from those lacking the courage or education to give reasons for their beliefs. And Jon’s not the only one. He’s representative of the fifty million Americans let down by the church.

Journey Away from Truth

According to Jon, growing up as a pastor’s son, his life was very embedded in the church, and he believed because everyone else did. He felt a great deal of peer pressure to conform despite finding many religious teachings suspect. At first, he was afraid to raise doubts. Later he approached older and wiser (supposedly) Christians for answers, but they couldn’t give adequate reasons for their faith. A SIGAR club would have provided the support and education for intellectually inclined Christians to understand and practice defending the faith.

His questions aren’t unique. They’re the same objections pushed by popular culture. I’ll address a few of them in later sections of this essay. But my main point is that Christians with the ability and interest need to take a more active role in rebutting these common questions that cause so many to leave God behind.

The search for truth is a core aspect of Christianity. But, the church leaders that Jon confided in seemed not to understand the truth or, at least, were afraid to answer his questions with courage and conviction. For instance, Jon relates one time when he asked his pastor and father-in-law about 1 Timothy 2:12, which prohibits women from being church leaders. Jon explains the exchange as follows:

I was asking about a verse in 1 Timothy that seems really oppressive of women. It indicates that women shouldn’t be in church leadership, shouldn’t teach men, and shouldn’t wear their hair in braids. To me, that seemed less like the message of the loving God that most Christians believe in now, and more like the ideas that would have been present in the culture at the time… a male-dominated society where women were treated less like equals and more Ike property.

My father in law asked me if I had been reading the King James Version – because he felt that King James had put his own spin on a lot of things, and that version couldn’t fully be trusted.

“You have to go back to the original Greek,” he said. This is something I’ve heard a lot over the years.

I asked him, “So it sounds like you believe that modern translations can’t fully be trusted, because they are human, flawed, and imperfect? I am simply taking that thought to its net natural conclusion – that the original Greek is also human, flawed, and imperfect, and also can’t fully be trusted.”

He replied, “Well, if you believe that, what do you have left?”

 

Christians Must Speak Truth to Power

Jon’s concern clearly echoes popular cultural claims that there’s no difference between men and women, and having different roles for different people is somehow oppressive. Jon internalized popular culture leading him to believe that the bible’s instruction that men and women play different roles, which does not include women as church leaders, means that they’re somehow unequal and should be objectified and treated as property. Jon’s equating separation of roles as a justification to own women doesn’t follow from the scripture.

Separation of roles happens everywhere. The US Constitution lays out different roles for the Executive and Legislative branches of government, but that doesn’t make the President the property of Congress. Jon’s role in the band was as a singer, but that doesn’t make him the property of the guitarist. Any claim that Christianity advocates for objectification and treating women like property is ludicrous and ignorant. But, the bible does lay out different roles for men and women because men and women are different.

Despite popular culture’s insistent to the contrary, anyone that’s ever taken an anatomy class or spent any time talking to men and women knows that they’re different. And that difference has nothing to do with ancient languages or King James, as Jon’s father-in-law claims. It seems most likely that Jon’s father-in-law didn’t have the testicular fortitude to state a plain fact because he was too beaten down by woke rhetoric to speak truth to power. Instead, he picked a safe, albeit false, answer which may have condemned his son-in-law and daughter.

Christianity as a Counterweight to Evil

Speaking truth to power is one of the central tenants of Christianity. So much so that Jesus Christ, in large part, died to call out the hypocrisy and corruption of the religious establishment of his day. Christianity has always acted as a counterweight to an evil world. Christ and countless martyrs were killed living out the truth of their faith. I’m ashamed to say that many Christians today have lost the courage of their convictions. Perhaps Jon and his family are just fakes through and through. Regardless, we true Christians have a moral obligation to speak truth to power.

Common Arguments Rebutted

The purpose of this essay is to issue a call for Christians to educate themselves and to have the courage to speak truth to power in the face of cultural headwinds prevalent today. But, I do feel compelled to respond to a few popular arguments against Christianity here.

Prominent atheist and woke activist Sam Harris restates popular cultural views against God in the below video. Although delivered with a hateful heart and personal attacks on people instead of ideas, some of his points can seem convincing at first. Yet his arguments fall apart upon further examination.

Here, Sam summarizes many popular arguments to reject Christianity. The two I hear most often are

1. There’s no proof of the existence of God.
2. How can a just God allow evil to exist in the world?

The Nature of the Creator

A lot of wokesters think Christians believe in a fairy tale man with a long beard sitting on a throne in the clouds. But that’s not true, and it is insulting to suppose we’re that naive. Christianity is a complex and sophisticated intellectual framework. Human intelligence limits what we can understand about God. Our intellectual minds can understand a lot, but there are some limits to what we can know. Those limits are where the ‘faith’ part of Christianity comes into play. That’s not a limitation of God’s truth; it’s a human failing in our ability to understand. A SIGAR Club could also help believers understand God better.

As the creator of the universe, God’s intelligence is vastly beyond our understanding. Us trying to understand God is like me trying to explain the internet to my dog. She’s sweet and caring, but my dog’s never going to understand the internet because she’s a dog. Just like we’ll never understand all of God because we’re humans.

However, God has given us intelligence, so there is a lot we can understand. And Christians, who God has gifted with an intellectual inclination, are under an obligation to do so. In any event, I can easily disprove Sam’s arguments.

There’s No Proof of the Existence of God

This is the ‘don’t believe in God because of science or something’ argument. And it’s clearly false. But I believed it when I was an atheist. And a few million Americans a year fall for it.

As every SIGAR club member knows, there’s overwhelming evidence for the existence of God. And the greatest minds, from Aristotle to Einstein, knew it. Anyone who believes there’s no God does so in opposition to the thinking of the greatest philosophers and scientists the world has ever known. In a letter laying out objections to quantum mechanics, Einstein famously quipped that ‘God doesn’t play dice with the Universe.’ Einstein citing his belief in God as an axiom to support his scientific theories proves he did very deeply believe in God. Belief in God has been thoroughly discussed and debated throughout the millennium, and no serious thinkers are atheists despite elitist propaganda to the contrary.

Actually, my research into this question is what led to my becoming a Christian. In his book, 5 Proofs for the Existence of God, Edward Feser eloquently summarizes major philosophical proofs for the existence of God. The first argument in the book is an elaboration on Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover Argument for the existence of God. This book convinced me there is a God, and no intellectually honest person can believe otherwise after reading it. The proof for the existence of God is incontrovertible.

Why Does God Allow Evil?

This argument seems logical and goes something like this:

1. God is supposed to be all-powerful, just, merciful, and all loving.
2. Yet, evil and suffering exist in the world.
3. Therefore, either God can’t stop evil and suffering in the world, thus discrediting Him as an all-powerful God, or God could stop evil and suffering but won’t, which makes Him unloving and unjust.

 

Although seemingly convincing at first glance, I will dismantle this notion. First, the argument rests on the premise that all suffering is bad when that’s simply not the case. God is merciful and loving, but he’s also the God of justice and righteousness. Which means evil should be punished. I’m personally glad that people like Adolf Hitler died miserable deaths and are burning in hell. But that also means God punishes good people when we make mistakes. I’ve made more mistakes than most folks in my life. But I feel like I’ve learned and grown a lot from my mistakes, so I’m grateful for the bruises and hurts that helped me grow and mature, at least in the long run. Thus, suffering is often justified and righteous in its negative consequences.

Most readers would agree that Hitler’s miserable death and burning in hell are deserved. But what about all the Jews he killed, were all of their deaths justified? No, they weren’t all justified. Although some Jews killed in the concentration camps might’ve deserved it, most were probably innocents. But, their suffering resulted from Hitler’s (and the Nazi’s more broadly) free will. Unfortunately, the introduction of human free will into the universe comes along with people’s ability to use that free will to do evil.

Life in the Basement

God created us in His own image. He didn’t create us to be robots or animals, only living by instinct. He gave us free will, intelligence, curiosity, etc. I’m glad I’m a human instead of a robot. Unfortunately, an unintended side effect of free will is that it includes the ability to hurt others.

How would the world look in a universe where God never allowed us to get hurt? It’d be like overprotective parents who forced the kids to live in the basement and never come out. Keeping them in the basement their whole lives would protect them from harm, but a god that does that would be tyrannical and oppressive. God cannot be tyrannical and oppressive because he’s the embodiment of justice and righteousness. Thus, He lets us out of the basement (i.e., allow us to have and exercise our free will) to experience all the beauty and wonder that the world has to offer, which comes along with the risk of getting hurt.

In a way, God is limited in his fight against evil while at the same time being all-knowing and all-powerful. God is only limited by Himself and His righteous character. He gave us free will and created a universe in which to exercise that gift, which necessitates the possibility for evil to exist. Although, God exhorts us to be just and righteous like Him and do no evil.

Majority of Evil Explained

So far, I’ve provided reasons explaining most of the evil in the world as consistent with Christians’ view of God. We’ve seen that sometimes suffering is a justifiable outcome of bad behavior. And, sometimes, bad people use free will to do evil, which God is limited in preventing due to his own righteousness and goodness. Finally, we have the category of suffering that isn’t deserved and is not the result of the evil use of free will. Why does God allow things like natural disasters or car accidents to happen?

Take it on faith

That’s a tricky question and one that I can’t logically explain away as easily as I did with the first two categories. One answer is that God created a certain degree of randomness or uncertainty in the universe that allows for things like natural disasters to occur. Perhaps one aspect of having an atmosphere to protect us from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet rays and solar detritus also carries the inherent possibility of tornados that sometimes get out of hand and hurt people. But, of course, that begs the question of why God didn’t devise an atmosphere that precluded that possibility. That’s a question that humans can’t answer. We cannot devise and create any sort of planet, let alone a new and improved earth with a beautiful, protective atmosphere yet with no possibility of tornados.

Another explanation is that a bad thing happening is part of a broader chain of events that will ultimately result in good in ways that we don’t understand. That’s certainly been my experience in life. I have a great life for which I thank God. But I’ve certainly had my share of hardships, failures, and setbacks that were extremely challenging in the moment. Yet, as time passed, I’ve come to understand how each of them resulted in good because I’ve learned, matured, or made needed changes to get even better results later.

It’s possible that we will never understand the good that comes about as a result of something like, say, a child dying in a tornado because we can’t perceive the chain of events relating to something like that as clearly as God can. Not a satisfying answer, I know. But, we as humans are limited in what we can understand. So, that’s where we, as Christians, just take it on faith.

Conclusion

The tide is turning against Christianity. Lies, manipulation, and deception drive millions of people from the one true faith every year. But unfortunately, Christians seem to lack the insights and courage needed to stand up to and call out the lies driving people away from God, despite biblical commandments to do so.

Christians need a SIGAR club to provide the needed education and insights to explain to young people like Jon Steingard the reasons and justifiableness of our beliefs. A SIGAR club could also provide the community and emotional support for the inevitable fallout from speaking truth to power against cultural attacks on God’s truth.

What do you think?

Thanks for reading to the end! This blog is my project in the pursuit of truth. I spend dozens of hours researching each blog post, so I hope you found something useful.

Our click-bait culture needs good ideas in an increasingly complex world. That depends on good men and women engaging in intellectually honest discussions, sharing ideas, and challenging each other’s thinking. Writing out my thoughts in detail, along with lots of research, helps me arrive at a more accurate view of truth based on well-documented facts.

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