Is Christianity True or Just Useful?

In Converation with Konstantin Kisin

If you don’t know him, Konstantin Kisin is a Russian-born satirist, podcaster, author and political commentator living in the UK. He wrote the very popular An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, he is a big advocate for free speech (check out this video), and runs his own substack. I enjoy reading him and watching him on various platforms.

In a recent post, Konstantin describes himself as a “lapsed atheist” who has become disenchanted with the new atheists and what they represent. He writes:

Born in the Mecca of non-belief that was Soviet Russia, my view of religious people as ignorant, obscurantist and doctrinaire was only reinforced by watching my comedy heroes like Bill Hicks and George Carlin take big and legitimate swings at the disconnect between the teachings of religion and the behaviour of the religious.

Kisin then gives the three reasons causing him to doubt the dogmas of the new atheists.

First, “In seeking to liberate us from the tyrannical instincts of dogmatic Christians, the new atheists delivered us into the hands of a different and far more pernicious religious zealotry from which the ordinary citizen has no security at all.”

I think that’s a valid point. If you think the religious right is bad, wait till you meet the unreligious right and the anti-religious left. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, for all their failures and distortions of the Christian faith, were not in the league of a Mussolini or Mao.

Second, “This view of the Holocaust, Stalinism and the Great Leap Forward as accidental by-products of a non-complicit atheism is, to me, a complete misunderstanding of the impact a lack of religious faith has on the way we think about other human beings.”

Yes, atheists have their own crusades and jihad, they just don’t call it holy war, they call it “progress.”

Third, he wonders if “irrespective of how scientifically true religion may or may not be, it is nonetheless both useful and inevitable.”

On this, I’ll agree to a point. There is the Kantian view that belief in God is practically useful as an anchor point for moral guidance. In favour of such a view, I’d argue that Christianity specifically undergirds our notions of human rights, secularism, liberal democracy, and the intrinsic worth of human beings. If you don’t believe me read Larry Sidentop’s The Invention of the Individual, Tom Holland’s Dominion or James Simpson’s Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism. It is a disconcerting fact for atheists that liberal democracies have grown from the roots of missional Protestantism.

Christianity is, to use Plato’s categories, the “brilliant myth” that undergirds our civilization in the West. BUT I’d want to add, with a wry Tolkien grin, that Christianity is a true myth, it is true on an existential level with points of contact in real history and lived experience. I’d love to see Kisin read N.T. Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus or even just hang out with a Christian congregation for a while to see what all the fuss is about.

There was one further remark that Kisin made that is spot on. He writes:

The reason new atheism has lost its mojo is that it has no answers to the lack of meaning and purpose that our post-Christian societies are suffering from. What will fill that void? Religious people have their answer. Do the rest of us?

If there is no God, no purpose in life, if the universe is utterly indifferent to our birth, life, and death, then what’s the point of it all? What does that mean for our instinctive hunger for justice? Is love just a bunch of chemicals squishing around in our brains? What is beauty and friendship beyond banal constructs of feeble minds attempting to rationalize a purpose for a purposeless existence? That is what atheism requires, but nobody can really live that way. We would be left to immerse ourselves in complete hedonism, drugs, sex, and pleasure to dull the numbing pain of an existence that is cruel because it is nakedly pointless.

And that’s the thing, even if you eliminate religion, you end up religionizing whatever you replace it with. If there is no God, Jesus, Allah, or Buddha, then people will make gods out of the things that give them pleasure and power. As I’ve argued, A Religionless Society Will Still Have Gods, because: “What replaces religion then is either the quest for power or the lust for pleasure, the clenched fist or a phallus, an M-16 or sex toys, Putin or Lady Gaga.” On that point, I think Kisin would agree!