Don’t Bite the Book That Feeds You, Part IV:
“Your Family and Culture Made You a Christian!”
If you reject Christianity’s exclusivity because it is the dominant system of belief in your culture, as that presumably would encourage you to look down upon non-Christian cultures, you won’t have avoided the charge of ethnocentrism. Tim Keller again helpfully explains why:
Most non-Western cultures have no problem saying that their culture and religion is the best. The idea that it is wrong to do so is deeply rooted in Western traditions of self-criticism and individualism. To charge others with the “sin” of ethnocentrism is really a way of saying, “Our culture’s approach to other cultures is superior to yours.” We are then doing the very thing we forbid others to do.
In short, patronizing other cultures by virtue of a relativistic Western mindset is no less ethnocentric than outright disagreeing with the religious views of such cultures.
If you fear ethnocentrism, you may also feel that confidence in the bible is purely the result of social conditioning. The thinking goes, “Naturally, people who grow up in devout Christian families and in countries where Christianity is the dominant religion, like America, are much more likely to become bible-believing Christians, apart from whether it’s true or not.”
That’s a far more tenuous argument today, as Christianity has fallen into disfavor in America and other Western cultures, where church attendance and the bible’s cultural relevance have been on a steep downward trajectory. If you want to be part of the smart crowd in America, it’s probably best to keep your biblical faith on the down low.
While Christianity is declining here, though, it is growing explosively in predominantly non-Christian areas of the world like Africa and Asia. It is not uncommon in these places for converts to Christianity to face rejection, disapproval, and even brutal persecution from their own cultures, and even within their own families. If Christian faith is merely an effect of social conditioning, these dangerous and costly conversions to Christianity are rather curious.
Nonetheless, it’s certainly true that Christianity is often transmitted through families and culture. But isn’t atheism also passed on that way?
Sociobiologists would go even further and contend that religion is not really chosen at all; instead, it’s programmed into our DNA as an inherited trait, just like hair and skin color. Of course, that would make unbelief part of one’s genetic inheritance, too.
But neither theory – whether one believes faith is purely the product of social conditioning, or solely the result of genetic transmission, or some combination thereof – comes anywhere close to debunking Christianity. Each has significant evidential and logical flaws. Moreover, adopting any of these theories would mean our “free-thinking” atheist friends may not be quite as “free-thinking” as they’d like to believe, and also make their antagonism to theism quite predictable.
End of Part IV (Stay tuned for Part V: Don’t Assume that Grace and Judgement Can’t Co-Exist”)
SpoofsandProofs.com is written and produced by David Culver Brenner. To learn more about his recent novelette exposing the dangers of socialism, visit UnsocialistChickens.com. For a free subscription to SpoofsandProofs.com, enter your email in the “Subscribe” box on the right sidebar.