NOTES

Preface: The Faith of the Secular

 1. Samuel G. Freedman, “Evangelists Adapt to a New Era, Preaching the Gospel to Skeptics,” New York Times, March 16, 2016. The article is a good account of what goes on in these kinds of discussions sponsored by our church. I would add that the approach described here for talking about faith is not new. It is the only way I have ever talked to others about faith in my forty years of ministry, and I have many colleagues who have done the same.

 2. “Evangelists Adapt to a New Era, Preaching the Gospel to Skeptics,” Reddit.com, March 4, 2016, www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/48zdpe/evangelists_adapt_to_a_new_era_preaching_the/.

 3. These three ways to use the term “secular” are based on Charles Taylor’s analysis in his book A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 1–22. First he gives the two most common definitions of secularity. The first is that a secular society is one in which the government and main social institutions are not tied to one religion. In a religious society all institutions including the government are based on and promote a particular set of religious beliefs. In a secular society the institutions and political structures are disconnected from any one religion (except in historical but not substantial ways, as in Britain and Scandinavian countries). Political life and power are shared equally between believers and nonbelievers. The second is that a secular society is one in which many or most people do not believe in God or in a nonmaterial, transcendent realm. In this definition to be secular is to be personally nonreligious, to not believe in a supernatural dimension to life and the universe. While some secular people may be explicit atheists or agnostics, others might continue to attend a religious service and extrapolate moral truths for living from religion. But ultimately they find all the resources they need—for meaning in life and personal fulfillment, for morality and working for justice—in purely human, this-world resources. Taylor calls this a “self-sufficing or exclusive humanism. . . . A secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable” (p. 19). Even people who retain connections to religious institutions are nonetheless secular if they perceive the fulfilled life in completely self-actualizing, this-worldly terms and reject the idea of self-denial and obedience to God in order to reach eternal life. The culture warns people that self-denial out of service to others or to higher ideals can be emotionally unhealthy and a way to collaborate with oppressive forces. While granting that the word “secular” usually has one of these first two meanings, Taylor offers a third. He considers a secular society one in which the conditions for belief have changed (pp. 2–3). In religious societies faith is simply assumed. Religion is not something you choose. That would be considered a dangerous, outrageously self-centered attitude. In a secular culture, however, religion is seen as something that you must choose, and indeed the pluralism of secular societies does ultimately mean that your religion is something you can choose or lay aside. Therefore, you must have some justification for your beliefs, whether those grounds are rational or more intuitive and practical. In a secular culture belief is no longer automatic or axiomatic. In this sense, says Taylor, we are all (in Western society) persons of a secular age and society.

 4. In A Secular Age Charles Taylor talks about what he calls a “social imaginary,” which is “a way of constructing meaning and significance” (p. 26). It is something like what we would call a worldview—a set of deep background beliefs that shape everything. But Taylor avoids the word “worldview” and instead uses this term in order to get across some important aspects of how we live our lives that the term “worldview” simply does not capture. He wants to get at “something much broader and deeper than . . . intellectual schemes” (p. 171). He says a social imaginary includes not only propositions of how we are to live but also “deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations” (p. 171). What does that mean?

First, a social imaginary is largely unconscious—some of it is identifiable as specific, expressed beliefs, but much or perhaps most of it, like an iceberg, is under the surface. Much of what shapes our view of the world are called by Michel Foucault “unthoughts” (p. 427) or “background”—the “largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation” (p. 173). These deepest “normative notions” are not usually consciously held propositions. They are more like “unchallenged common sense” about what is real, possible, and imaginable. Because they are considered self-evident, they are not based on any thought-out justifications, and the holders often become very defensive if such justifications are asked for. We don’t feel they need them. It is just the way things are. It is literally unthinkable or unimaginable to us that they not be the true. To disagree with them is not to be merely mistaken, but ridiculous and “beyond the pale.”

Second, a social imaginary is much more than an intellectual framework. It is “carried” not in theoretical terms but in “images, stories . . . etc.” It is formed largely through experiences (which we instinctively interpret in narrative form) and stories we are told. It forms, then, not merely (or perhaps not even mainly) the mind but also the imagination (pp. 171–72). It determines what we can imagine as possible and shapes what captures the imagination as good, desirable, beautiful.

Third, a social imaginary is “social” in two complementary ways. It is an “implicit grasp of social space”—it has to do with how we live with others (p. 173). That grasp of social space contains both the factual and the normative—“how things usually go . . . interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go” (p. 172). But in addition, a social imaginary is social because it is a “common understanding,” a “widely shared sense of legitimacy,” which makes possible common practices (p. 172). One of the reasons it is so obvious and needs no theoretical justification is that “everybody I know feels the same way.” So a social imaginary is formed communally—we come to find most plausible the beliefs of the people we associate with the most, and especially of the people and communities of which we want to be an accepted member.

Taylor notes, however, that social imaginaries, while not themselves theoretical frameworks, often begin as such. The way social imaginaries change is that at first a small minority of people do theorize and think them up and out. They come up with new ideas and they argue for them and they produce art to shape the imagination with the ideas. But “what starts off as theories held by a few people may come to infiltrate the social imaginary—first of elites perhaps, and then of the whole society” (p. 172). Eventually the new idea, argued for theoretically, comes to be “the taken-for-granted shape of things, too obvious to mention” (p. 176). In sum: The social imaginary is the “felt context” for life, the way we “make sense of any given act” (p. 174), something that people pick up from others in their social groupings, often without ever really adopting the conscious beliefs that created it.

Chapter One: Isn’t Religion Going Away?

 1. Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “The World Is Expected to Become More Religious—Not Less,” Washington Post, April 24, 2015.

 2. Ibid., https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/04/24/the-world-is-expected-to-become-more-religious-not-less/. See the comments by “KoltirasRip Tallus.”

 3. Maureen Cleave, “The John Lennon I Knew,” Telegraph, October 5, 2005, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandjazzmusic/3646983/The-John-Lennon-I-knew.html.

 4. This is the well-argued thesis of Stephen LeDrew in The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

 5. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) and After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Not only are believers in God producing high-level scholarship, but a surprising number of leading secular thinkers in recent years have argued that science and reason alone cannot answer all the big human questions. They include Jürgen Habermas, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Terry Eagleton, and Simon Critchley. In various ways they make the case that a completely naturalistic view of the world—a world in which everything has a scientific, material cause—cannot explain the reality of moral values or support human rights and a program of justice. See Jürgen Habermas, et al., An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Ronald Dworkin, Religion Without God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2012); Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) and Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). We will be returning to consider each of these thinker’s contributions later in this volume.

 6. The literature on this subject is vast. The first scholarship to catch the attention of many was Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; 3rd ed., 2011). A recent review of the literature can be found in Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Faith: Why the World Is More Religious Than Ever (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2015). See also David Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Scott W. Sunquist, The Unexpected Christian Century: The Reversal and Transformation of Global Christianity, 1900–2000 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015); Peter Berger, Grace Davie, and Effie Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe? (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008).

 7. For these numbers and others in these paragraphs, see the Pew study “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections 2010–2050,” which can be found online at www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/. Keep in mind that other reputable research companies have said that Pew’s projections are, if anything, actually too conservative because they underestimate church growth in China. See this response to the Pew Study by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Boston University and Gordon-Conwell Seminary: www.gordonconwell.edu/ockenga/research/documents/CSGCPewResponse.pdf.

 8. Zhuo Xinping is a member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China, and the director of the Institute of World Religions, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He writes, “Only by accepting this [Christian] understanding of transcendence as our criterion can we understand the real meaning of such concepts as freedom, human rights, tolerance, equality, justice, democracy, the rule of law, universality, and environmental protection.” Zhuo Xinping, “The Significance of Christianity for the Modernization of Chinese Society,” Crux 33 (March 1997): 31. Also quoted in Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin Books, repr. ed., 2012) p. 287. See Ferguson, pp. 256–94, for an overview of the remarkable growth of Christianity in China as well as its broad, positive, cultural impact. See also Zhuo Xinping, “Christianity and China’s Modernization,” a paper that can be found at www.kas.de/wf/doc/kas_6824-1522-1-30.pdf?051011091504. “Since . . . 1978 . . . more and more Chinese people have envisaged that Christian values have a manifold potential influence in the development of Chinese civilization and modernization. Today, the Christian concept of sin helps Chinese self-understanding from a new perspective. The concept of salvation and transcendence inspires the Chinese people moving toward democracy.” Jinghao Zhou, China’s Peaceful Rise in a Global Context: A Domestic Aspect of China’s Road Map to Democratization (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012), p. 169. As an example of the kind of favorable analysis Chinese scholars are giving Christianity, see Zhuo Xinping, Christianity, trans. Zhen and Caroline Mason (Leiden, Germany: Brill, 2013), p. xxv: “The conundrum that Christianity holds to original sin, yet protects and enhances the dignity of human beings, whereas much Confucian thought promotes the original goodness of human nature, yet in practice has undermined human rights.” It is important to keep in mind that scholars such as Zhuo do not expect or want China to be thoroughly Christianized or Westernized, and yet he and others see the growth of Christianity in China as a good thing in that they believe that Christianity provides a better basis than Western secularism for human rights, equality, and rule of law.

 9. For years Habermas argued that by working together human beings could determine how to conduct our lives without any of the deliverances of religion. “The [former] authority of the holy,” he once wrote, “is . . . replaced by the authority of a [rationally] achieved consensus.” (Quoted by Stanley Fish in “Does Reason Know What It Is Missing?” New York Times, April 12, 2010). A brief account of Habermas’s “evolution” on the subject of reason and religion is given in the essay “Habermas and Religion” by Michael Reder and Josef Schmidt, in Habermas, et al., An Awareness of What Is Missing, pp. 1–14. See also Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).

 10. Habermas, et al., An Awareness of What Is Missing, pp. 18–21. Another thinker who has more recently made this same point is historian Karen Armstrong in a November 23, 2014, interview in Salon magazine. She was asked if religion isn’t a “strain of irrationality” in our society and if we should “purge this irrationality wherever we see it.” Armstrong responds that though communism was “said to be a more rational way to organize a society” it was based on a myth of the healing state, and though the French revolutionaries were “imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment” and were strongly antireligious and antichurch and even talked about “the goddess of reason,” they publicly beheaded seventeen thousand people. Armstrong argues that no one is perfectly rational because science and rationality cannot speak to right and wrong, significance and meaninglessness. They cannot ultimately guide behavior beyond telling us what is the most efficient and practical way to reach particular goals. They cannot tell us if those goals are good or right. Human beings, therefore, need “the stories . . . we tell ourselves, that enable us to inject some kind of ultimate significance, however hard we try to be rational.” She concludes that because rationality alone cannot give meaning, and because it is often the only public discourse allowed, “there’s been a very strong void in modern culture, despite our magnificent achievements.” She perceives a “nihilism,” ennui, and aimlessness that are behind a great deal of crime and unrest in our culture. “A lack of meaning is a dangerous thing in a society.” See Michael Schulson, “Karen Armstrong on Bill Maher and Sam Harris,” Salon, November 23, 2014, www.salon.com/2014/11/23/karen_armstrong_sam_harris_anti_islam_talk_fills_me_with_despair/.

 11. Someone may retort that social science can measure happiness and it can tell us how to live life in order to maximize happiness. But that leads to the question—Why believe that human beings should live for happiness? Science cannot answer that question. It requires a moral or philosophical argument. See Miroslav Volf, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), for an extended argument that globalization and secular states need religion to provide what only religion can—a vision of human good and flourishing that puts limits on science and the market.

 12. Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing, p. 81.

 13. Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

 14. Ibid., p. 111.

 15. Frank M. Spinath and Wendy Johnson, “Behavior Genetics,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Individual Differences, ed. Tomas Chammoro-Premuzic, et al. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 295–96.

 16. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers, p. 190.

 17. The full quote: “Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.” Jürgen Habermas, Time of Transitions (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), pp. 150–51. This essay also appears in Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason God, and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 149. In short, even the modern state’s commitment to equal rights, Habermas argues, was inherited from the Bible. Some would say that in this line of reasoning Habermas was following the lead of his teacher in the famous Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer similarly argued that secular reasoning alone cannot honor human dignity nor satisfy our deepest yearnings. He traces out how modern secular reason moved us away from belief in any absolute, mind-independent, and universal truths by which we could determine if a human action was right or wrong. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) and Stephen Eric Bronner, in Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Horkheimer and Adorno argued that secular thought, which denied nonmaterial realities, became “instrumental.” That is, an action was reasonable and right as long as it efficiently served the advancement and preservation of the people doing the reasoning. That “good” was now free to be defined by the majority as anything it deemed in its best interests. It could be argued that starving the poor or removing a particular ethnic minority from the national gene pool was “the greatest good for the greatest number,” and secular reason could not dispute such a conclusion. Science could judge only efficiency and cost-benefit, which could lead to treating people as objects and cogs in an economic machine. Horkheimer and Adorno were writing in the wake of World War II and had seen how both the Left of communism and the Right of fascism had used this understanding of scientific reason to justify violence. See Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947). This led to their critique of all modern economic-political orders—from socialism to free-market capitalism. They all in their own way “transform the qualitative into the quantitative.” They seek to reduce personal, spiritual, moral, and human goods to commodities that can be managed and defined through metrics. They all offer material prosperity as the ultimate good, but it can never fulfill the desire for “eternity, beauty, transcendence, salvation, and God,” or what Horkheimer called “the longing for the totally other” (quoted in Bronner, Critical Theory, p. 92). See also Max Horkheimer, “The Ego and Freedom Movements,” in Between Philosophy and Social Sciences, trans. G. F. Hunter, M. S. Kramer, and John Torpey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, repr. ed., 1995).

 18. Peter Watson also cites Thomas Nagel and Ronald Dworkin, as well as Habermas, as “three philosophers on either side of the Atlantic and each at the very peak of his profession” who are all likewise saying that materialistic atheism simply cannot account for the things we know are true, things like moral value, human consciousness, and free will. All three maintain that they are nonbelievers in a personal God but acknowledge that “we cannot escape the search for transcendence.” Peter Watson, The Age of Nothing: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014), p. 5. Watson is referring to Habermas’s works already cited and to Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, and Dworkin, Religion Without God.

 19. This was a speech written by William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted Scopes. This is quoted in a review of Leonard’s book by Malcolm Harris, “The Dark History of Liberal Reform,” New Republic, January 21, 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/128144/dark-history-liberal-reform. For more of the speech see www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/monkeytrial/filmmore/ps_bryan.html.

 20. Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (New York: Random House, 2016).

 21. Ibid., p. 168.

 22. Ibid., p. 169.

 23. Ibid., p. 169–70.

 24. Ibid., pp. 168 and 171. Once Kalanithi became open to the existence of God, he began to look at the religions and discovered Christianity’s teaching on grace and redemption more compelling than other religions, which stressed earning God’s blessing through moral accomplishment. Chapters 3–9 in this book will cover much of this territory.

 25. Rebecca Pippert, Hope Has Its Reasons: The Search to Satisfy Our Deepest Longings (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001), p. 117.

 26. Ibid., p. 119.

 27. James Wood, “Is That All There Is? Secularism and Its Discontents,” New Yorker, August 14, 2011.

 28. Ibid.

 29. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 571. Quoted in James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014), p. 13.

 30. Lisa Chase, “Losing My Husband—and Finding Him Again Through a Medium,” Elle, October 5, 2014.

 31. Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 3.

 32. Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 54.

 33. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 524 and 537. Quoted in David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2014), p. 67.

 34. Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 607.

 35. C. S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age,” in Present Concerns (New York: Harcourt, 1986), p. 76.

 36. Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 105.

 37. Taylor’s discussion of “fullness” can be found in A Secular Age on pp. 1–22 and in the chapter “Cross Pressures,” pp. 594–617.

 38. Ibid., p. 6.

 39. Frank Bruni, “Between Godliness and Godlessness,” New York Times, August 30, 2014.

 40. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 201. Cornelius Plantinga also writes about this experience in “Longing and Hope,” the first chapter in his book Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 1–16.

 41. Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). A philosopher, Scruton uses the discipline of phenomenology to “make space” for religious belief.

 42. Quoted in Stuart Babbage, “Lord Kenneth Clark’s Encounter with the ‘Motions of Grace,’” Christianity Today, June 8, 1979, p. 28.

 43. Václav Havel, Letters to Olga (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 331–32. Quoted in Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 728–29.

 44. Havel’s prison “conversion” did not result in a profession of faith in Christianity or even in belief in the traditional God of the monotheistic religions. But he developed a view of divine “Being” that lies behind all religions and cultures. See M. C. Putna, “The Spirituality of Vaclav Havel in Its Czech and American Contexts,” East European Politics and Societies 24, no. 3 (August 2010): 353–78, available at http://eep.sagepub.com/content/24/3/353.full.pdf+html.

 45. Kristin Dombek, “Letter from Williamsburg,” Paris Review 205 (Summer 2013), www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/6236/letter-from-williamsburg-kristin-dombek. Note: The online version of this essay reads, “I have been an atheist now for more than fifteen years,” while the print version reads, “It has been fifteen years since I stopped believing.” I used the quote from the former version, though I don’t know which phrase was the revision.

 46. Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything (New York, Twelve Books, 2014), p. 1.

 47. Ibid., pp. 37–44 and 77.

 48. Ibid., p. 115.

 49. Ibid., p. 116.

 50. Ibid., p. 203.

 51. Ibid., p. 127.

 52. Ibid., p. 197.

 53. Ibid., p. 226–27.

 54. Augustine, Confessions, book VII, chapter 23. This translation is by Maria Boulding in Saint Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions: With an Introduction and Contemporary Criticism, ed. David Vincent Meconi (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2012), p. 186.

 55. Henry Chadwick, Augustine: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 23.

 56. Cf. C. S. Lewis: “An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, King, husband—that is quite another matter.” C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 125.

 57. See the review of Ehrenreich’s book by Francis Spufford, “Spiritual Literature for Atheists,” First Things, no. 257 (November 2015). “Wild justice—justice unmediated and unfiltered—is different than the thing we painstakingly try to make in courtrooms.” Spufford also writes that wild love, a love that searingly insists on our good and will not let us harm ourselves—“is fearfully unlike the adulterated product we are used to. . . . To call the presence you meet ‘amoral’ [as Ehrenreich does] is at least to acknowledge its difference” (pp. 47–48).

 58. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), p. 28.

 59. Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God, pp. 203 and 215.

 60. Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 8.

 61. Mark Lilla, “The Hidden Lesson of Montaigne,” New York Review of Books 58, no. 5 (March 24, 2011), cited in James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014), p. 1.

 62. Matt Ridley, “Why Muslims Are Turning Away from Islam,” Times (London), November 23, 2015.

 63. Peter Berger, Grace Davie, and Effie Fokas, Religious America: Secular Europe? A Theme and Variation (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008), p. 10.

 64. Not only has China become more Christian as it modernizes, but it is understood by Chinese scholars that the growth of Christianity is leading greater modernization and democracy. See the work of Zhuo Xinping and others cited above in note 8.

 65. See sociologist José Casanova’s landmark work Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). He compares Spain, Poland, Brazil, and the United States and finds very different trajectories (both up and down) for religion and churches under modernization. The trajectory depends in great part upon how churches respond to modern culture. In general, churches that are either too hostile (withdrawing or attacking) or too friendly (adapting and assimilating) decline. The path also depends on whether, in the past, religious affiliation has been more traditional and statist or more local and voluntaristic. The more a religion is tied to a national identity through a past monopoly (e.g., state churches), the more religion declines. The more religion is based on free and voluntary associations, the stronger it remains in modern culture. In short, it is not religion itself that declines under modernity but inherited religion. Chosen religion that is based on conversion can thrive.

See also Mark Noll, From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian’s Discovery of the Global Christian Story (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), pp. 72–75.

 66. Eric Kaufmann, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century (London: Profile Books, 2010), pp. 1–45.

 67. Ibid., p. 253.

 68. See Caspar Melville, “Battle of the Babies,” New Humanist, March 22, 2010, http://newhumanist.org.uk/2267/battle-of-the-babies. This is a review of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? as well as an interview with the author.

 69. In fact, those who never go to worship have fewer children than those who go infrequently, and they in turn have fewer offspring than those who go weekly. See the work of German scholar Michael Blume, who has shown that there is a global-level positive correlation between the frequency of worship and the number of offspring. Jesse Bering, “God’s Little Rabbits: Religious People Out-Reproduce Secular Ones by a Landslide,” Scientific American, December 22, 2010: “Those who ‘never’ attend religious services bear, on average, 1.67 children per lifetime [below the 2.0 replacement level]; ‘once per month,’ and the average goes up to 2.01 children; ‘more than once a week,’ 2.5 children.”

 70. Ibid.

 71. See Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (New York: Penguin, 2015) pp. xli–xlii.

 72. Kaufmann, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, p. 45. Kaufmann also writes: “We have a long way to go before all regions of the planet complete their demographic transitions. . . . By the time the transition runs its course in the twenty-second century, the secular nations of the planet will account for a much smaller share of the world’s population than they do today. And this assumes that the West [itself] will remain as secular as it is now: which is unlikely. . . . The ‘browning’ of the West is injecting a fresh infusion of religious blood into secular society. . . .” p. 254.

 73. Ibid., p. 255.

 74. See David Brooks, “Creed or Chaos,” New York Times, April 21, 2011.

 75. Berger, Davie, and Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe? pp. 40–41.

 76. Ibid., pp. 41–42. See also pp. 33–34.

 77. The Pew Center study found that evangelical and Pentecostal churches, those that require decision and conversion, had actually grown by two million people over the previous seven years while both mainline Protestant and Catholic affiliation declined sharply. See Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Christianity Faces Sharp Decline as Americans Are Becoming Even Less Affiliated with Religion,” Washington Post, May 12, 2015.

 78. Noll, From Every Tribe and Nation, p. 130.

 79. “Christianity in Its Global Context, 1970–2020: Society, Religion, and Mission,” Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, June, 2013, http://www.gordonconwell.edu/ockenga/research/documents/ChristianityinitsGlobalContext.pdf, p. 36.

 80. Ibid., p. 22.

 81. Noll, From Every Tribe and Nation, p. 130.

 82. Kaufmann, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, p. 269.

 83. Melville, “Battle of the Babies.”

 84. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence (New York: Schocken Books, 2015), p. 18.

 85. Saint Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions: With an Introduction and Contemporary Criticism, ed. David Vincent Meconi (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2012), p. 3.

Chapter Two: Isn’t Religion Based on Faith and Secularism on Evidence?

 1. S. A. Joyce, “One Night I Prayed to Know the Truth. The Next Morning I Discovered I Was an Atheist,” no date, quoted in “Into the Clean Air: Extended Testimonies,” Patheos.com, www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/essays/into-the-clear-air-extended-testimonies/.

 2. I am aware that this is not the only narrative for a deconversion story. Some are driven more directly by terrible experiences of unjust evil and suffering. Others are triggered by the hypocrisy and even abusiveness of the religious communities in which the narrators grew up. However, these three elements—the rational (lack of evidence), the existential (experience of evil or other intuitions that led away from faith), and the social (unattractive religious people)—are usually found together in one degree or another. The deconversion narrative I relate in the body of the text—that of the rational, thinker type—is, perhaps, more typical on the Internet.

 3. “Barry Benedict,” found at www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/ 2015/11/agnostics_evangelicals_growing.html.

 4. Ibid.

 5. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). “The defense of liberal principles in the modern world cannot . . . be effectively carried out by making abstract arguments. . . . The image [a secularist] employs to present and defend liberalism is . . . ‘making a garden in a jungle that is continually encroaching’ and a ‘world that is a dark place, which needs redemption by the light’” (p. 59). This image is cited in Stephen LeDrew, The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), for use as the title of his chapter 3, “A Light in a Dark Jungle,” pp. 55–91.

 6. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 26–29.

 7. Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God, pp. 37 and 61.

 8. William Kingdon Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” Contemporary Review 29 (December 1876–May 1877): 289, www.uta.edu/philosophy/faculty/burgess-jackson/Clifford.pdf.

 9. Atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell assumed it when asked what he would do if he died and found himself before God. He answered that he would defend himself by saying, “Sir, why did you not give me better evidence?” Leo Rosten, “Bertrand Russell and God: A Memoir,” Saturday Review, February 23, 1974, pp. 25–26.

 10. See Peter van Inwagen, “Quam Dilecta,” in God and the Philosophers: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason, ed. Thomas Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 44–47.

 11. There are some secularists, such as the “New Atheists” Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, who continue to try to apply Clifford-style exclusive rationality to all knowledge. But they are now rare. Van Inwagen’s point is that, while most secularists have abandoned exclusive rationality as a way of knowledge in general, most of them continue to apply it to religious belief. This is at least inconsistent, if not disingenuous.

 12. Doubting that P is true “implies the acceptance of some not strictly indubitable framework within which P can be said to be . . . provable or not-provable.” Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), p. 274.

 13. Michael P. Lynch, In Praise of Reason: Why Rationality Matters to Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), p. 4. Lynch makes a good, pragmatic case that we should use reason in our public discourse rather than simply yelling ideological slogans at one another. Nevertheless, it is striking that Lynch, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, says, “I will not defend reason with a capital R, nor the illusion that reason is value-free—nor that there are unfounded foundations, nor that there is a bare, unbiased ‘given’ in experience” (p. 5).

 14. See Charles Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 1–19. James K. A. Smith makes a Christian case for the kind of knowing explained by Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Bourdieu, and other Continental thinkers in the first half of Imagining the Kingdom (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013).

 15. This is taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. Von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), sections 83–110, pp. 12c–15.

 16. C. Stephen Evans, Why Christian Faith Still Makes Sense: A Response to Contemporary Challenges (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), p. 23.

 17. Ibid.

 18. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991), p. 20. For a summary of Polanyi’s thought and its application to matters of religious faith and doubt, see the first sixty-five pages of Newbigin’s book.

 19. If someone was to counter that the “uniformity of nature”—that “if X is the cause of Y, then Y will necessarily exist whenever X exists”—has been proven, eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume would deny it. He famously and powerfully argued we cannot prove that just because one thing follows another in a laboratory, it will ever do so again. Our belief that causally the future will be like the past is a premise of faith, it cannot be empirically demonstrated. Hume says, therefore, that inferences of cause-effect relationships aren’t “‘determin’d by reason,’ [so] there must be ‘some principle of equal weight and authority’ that leads us to make them. Hume maintains that this principle is custom or habit. . . . It is therefore custom, not reason, which ‘determines the mind . . . to suppose the future conformable to the past’ (Abstract 16). . . . Hume concludes that custom alone ‘makes us expect for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past’ (EHU 5.1.6/44).” William Edward Morris and Charlotte R. Brown, “David Hume,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/. See also the essay “Probable Reasoning Has No Rational Basis.” “Our belief is in the uniformity of nature. By this means, our experience is able to yield us a rich bounty of causal information, which in turn permits us to connect up the reality with which our senses acquaint us (impressions) to the greater reality that lies beyond the purview of the senses, yet, in truth, exists only in our imaginations in the form of vivid ideas. However, although the uniformity principle is the foundation of all empirical reason as such, it is not itself founded on reason, demonstrative or probable.” This essay is part of a course offered by Wayne Waxman at New York University, “The History of Modern Philosophy” found at www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/modern05/Hume_on_empirical_reasoning.pdf.

 20. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 88. Much of the material in this part of the chapter is based on Polanyi’s chapters “The Critique of Doubt” and “Commitment,” pp. 269–324.

 21. “Paradigm” is the term made famous by Thomas Kuhn in Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). “Tradition” is the term used in Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). Robert Bellah defines a “tradition” like this: “A tradition is a pattern of understandings and evaluations that a community has worked out over time. Tradition is an inherent dimension of all human action. There is no way of getting outside of tradition altogether, though we may criticize one tradition from the point of view of another. Tradition is not used in contrast to reason. [In fact] tradition is often an ongoing reasoned argument about the good of the community or institution whose identity it defines.” Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, with a New Preface (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2007), p. 336.

 22. Martin Heidegger’s student Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his influential book Truth and Method, developed this idea of our Vorurteil (literally, in German, “prejudice”). We are all unavoidably situated in cultures and communities and times. There is no “view from nowhere”—we begin with a perspective and we analyze a text by comparing its world with our world. See Robert J. Dostal, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 6. Also see Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2010), pp. 103–22. Many believe that Thomas Kuhn applied Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s hermeneutics to scientific inquiry.

 23. James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Picador, 2010). “Life-under-God seems a pointlessness posing as a purpose (the purpose, presumably being to love God and to be loved in return); life-without-God seems to me also a pointlessness posing as a purpose (jobs, family, sex, and so on—all the usual distractions). The advantage, if it can be described as one, of living in the latter state, without God, is that the false purpose has at least been invented by man, and one can strip it away to reveal the actual pointlessness” (p. 261). Ehrenreich writes that the monotheistic God “can be blamed for natural disasters and birth defects.” Living with a Wild God, p. 226.

 24. Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 232.

 25. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 272.

 26. “Into the Clean Air,” Pathos.com. no date, www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/essays/into-the-clear-air/#sthash.LosBmEcu.dpuf.

 27. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 265.

 28. See A. I. Jack et al., (2016) Why Do You Believe in God? Relationships Between Religious Belief, Analytic Thinking, Mentalizing and Moral Concern,” PLoS ONE 11, no. 3 (2006): e0149989.

 29. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 266. Polanyi claimed that Augustine had initiated postcritical philosophy because he taught that ultimately all knowledge is a gift of God’s grace. Reason works only on the basis of antecedent faith. Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis—unless you believe you will not understand. See also p. 268.

 30. The assertion that secularity is not an absence of faith and metaphysical beliefs but a different set of such beliefs is still highly contested in popular forums, but in scholarly circles the case for this is being made with increasing power and sophistication. To acquaint yourself with that scholarship, a good place to start is Stephen LeDrew, The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). LeDrew, himself an atheist, is highly critical of the New Atheists, who in his view will not admit that their position is not merely one of pure scientific rationality but is rather an ideology, which he defines as “a stable structure of beliefs and attitudes that determine how knowledge is constructed and interpreted to legitimate a form of authority” (p. 56). LeDrew agrees with the contention in this chapter that the New Atheists’ epistemology—its claim that reason does not require faith in order to function—is naive. However, though he does not seem to share the New Atheists’ “naked rationality,” he does share with them their “humanistic morality.” LeDrew correspondingly holds there are “Two Atheisms: Scientific and Humanistic” (p. 32). The other scholarship that LeDrew summarizes and draws upon includes the following: Asad, Formations of the Secular; Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) and Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Craig Calhoun et al., Rethinking Secularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Philip Gorski et al., The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., The Power of Religion in the Public Square (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). LeDrew also draws upon Taylor and Habermas. See Taylor, A Secular Age, and Jürgen Habermas et al., An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion (Cambridge: Polity, 2008) and Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason God, and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). It should be noted that LeDrew is especially concerned with analyzing the “New Atheists,” a strain of what he calls “scientific atheism” that is particularly ideological and that refuses to admit that it is. Nevertheless, LeDrew’s efforts to show the historical genealogy of secularist beliefs applies to all its forms.

 31. “Now the traditional unbelieving attack on religion since the Enlightenment contains . . . the ‘moral’ facet of the ‘death of God’ critique. . . . The unbeliever . . . knows that human beings are on their own [without God]. But this doesn’t cause him just to cave in. On the contrary, he determines to affirm human worth, and the human good, and to work for it, without the false illusion or consolation. . . . Moreover, he has no reason to exclude anyone as heretic; so his philanthropy is universal. . . . So goes one story.” Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 561–62.

 32. Charles Mathewes and Joshua Yates, “The ‘Drive to Reform’ and Its Discontents,” in Carlos D. Colorado and Justin D. Klassen, Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age: Essays on Religion and Theology in the Work of Charles Taylor (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), p. 153.

 33. “Casey K.,” commenting on Tony Schwartz, “The Enduring Hunt for Personal Value,” New York Times, May 1, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/busi ness/dealbook/the-enduring-hunt-for-personal-value.html?_r=0.

 34. Quoted in Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 596.

 35. Jacques Derrida, “On Forgiveness: A Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida,” moderated by Richard Kearny, in Questioning God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 70.

 36. These thinkers include Larry Siedentop (Oxford), Philip S. Gorski (Yale), Eric T. Nelson (Harvard), and Charles Taylor, among many others. Some of their particular works will be cited in these notes.

 37. Again: “The ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. . . . To this day, there is no alternative to it. . . . We continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.” Habermas, Religion and Rationality, p. 149.

 38. Luc Ferry, “The Victory of Christianity over Greek Philosophy,” in A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), pp. 55–91.

 39. Ibid., p. 58.

 40. Ibid., pp. 72–73.

 41. Horkheimer noted that the very concept that each soul, regardless of race or class, could be “the dwelling place of God, came into being only with Christianity, and all antiquity has an element of emptiness and aloofness by contrast.” He adds that the Gospel accounts of “simple fishermen and carpenters” being anointed by God to become great leaders and teachers, healers and preachers, in contrast “seem to make Greek masterpieces mute and soulless . . . and the leading figures of antiquity roughhewn and barbaric.” Ibid. For a full-blown exposition of the biblical, Jewish/Christian roots of Western liberalism, human rights, and individualism, see Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (New York: Allen Lane, 2014). This is not to denigrate Greek philosophy’s contribution to both Western individualism and democracy. Among the aristocracy the importance of the individual was asserted. See, for example, Christian Meier, A Culture of Freedom: Ancient Greece and the Origins of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). But as has been pointed out, the radical idea of equality across the human race is an idea that came from the Bible.

 42. See Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law 1150–1625 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press for Emory University, 1997). Tierney makes the case that it was within Christian jurisprudence of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that human-rights thinking began, rooted particularly in the Christian doctrine that all human beings are created in the image of God and therefore have inherent dignity. See also Brian Tierney, “The Idea of Natural Rights: Origins and Persistence,” Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights 2 (Spring 2004); Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Michael J. Perry, Toward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 18; Martin Luther King Jr., “The American Dream,” preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, July 4, 1965. It can be accessed at http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_the_american_dream/.

 43. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 34.

 44. “All mankind stood before the majesty of God as other and inferior to Him. Body and soul faced him together. He had created both and would judge both. Every believer confronted God not as a soul committed, for a time, to the necessary if thankless task of bringing order to an alien body, but rather as the possessor of a ‘heart.’” Ibid., p. 35.

 45. Ibid.

 46. See Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 274–76. This is a necessarily high-level discussion of a complex field.

 47. Henry Chadwick, Augustine of Hippo: A Life (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 93. Chadwick argues that classical Greek and Latin thinkers saw the virtues—courage, honesty, prudence, wisdom, and loyalty—as largely the product of suppressing unruly emotions. “Rationality was the supreme thing.” But St. Augustine taught that “our emotions are disordered, but the feelings are not themselves the cause of the disorder.” They need to be not repressed but redirected away from other things toward God.

 48. Augustine’s Confessions established the importance of understanding one’s self and “pioneered a highly positive evaluation of human feelings” in which the intellect does not “have the last word.” Henry Chadwick, Augustine: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 4. See also Sandra Dixon et al., Augustine and Psychology: Tradition and Innovation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012). Again, we must be careful not to overdraw the distinctions between Christianity and Greek philosophy. The Greeks’ conception of emotion was not completely negative, as Peter Brown points out. See also David Konstan, Pity Transformed (New York: Bristol Classical, 2001) and The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

 49. See Diogenes Allen, “The Christian Roots of Modern Science and Christianity’s Bad Image,” in Christian Belief in a Postmodern World: The Full Wealth of Conviction (Louisville, KY: John Knox, 1989), pp. 23–35; and Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2014). Indeed, as Luc Ferry points out, the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection, and of the eventual perfection of the material world, is “unique among all the major religions.” It gives us the most elevated and positive view of the material world possible. We will live permanently, endlessly, not merely in a nonphysical paradise but in a renewed world with resurrected bodies. This means that ordinary experiences of seeing and hearing, of embracing and eating, of physical enjoyment and pleasure, are so important that God will extend these gifts and goods to us forever. This also means that we will be ourselves in the eternal future. See Ferry, Brief History of Thought, pp. 88–91.

 50. Ferry, Brief History of Thought, pp. 85–86.

 51. Ibid., pp. 60–61.

 52. Ibid., p. 60.

 53. Ibid.

 54. Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 279.

 55. “The modern slide to Deism, and later atheism, integrated a great deal of the original package of changes effected by the Fathers. . . . Modern Deism integrated the first five in my list: the body, history, the place of individuals, contingency [Taylor’s term for the significance of our choices and actions], and the emotions. That is, it integrated these as essential dimensions of our understanding of human life but it excluded them altogether from our relationship to God.” Ibid., p. 288.

 56. Ferry, Brief History of Thought, p. 152.

 57. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Classics, 1990), p. 40. Also cited in a different translation in Ferry, Brief History of Thought, p. 153.

 58. Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, pp. 156–57.

 59. “When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again in spite of English shallowpates. Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands.” Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, pp. 80–81.

 60. “Christianity [and its values of egalitarian benevolence and compassion] . . . possesses truth only if God is truth—it stands or falls on belief in God. If the English really do believe they will know, of their own accord, ‘intuitively,’ what is good and evil; if they consequently think they no longer have need of Christianity as a guarantee of morality; that is merely the consequence of the ascendency of Christian evaluation and an expression of the strength and depth of this ascendency: so that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, so that the highly conditional nature of its right to exist is no longer felt. For the Englishman morality is not yet a problem.” Ibid., p. 81.

 61. “He dismisses conventional virtue in Twilight of the Idols as little more than social mimicry, and in Beyond Good and Evil scoffs at the concept of the common good. Not only is he unconcerned to retain religious belief for social utilitarian reasons, but he regards such a project as self-contradictory. How can selfless values serve self-interested social ends?” Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, p. 163.

 62. Ronald Dworkin, Religion Without God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 2.

 63. Ibid., p. 6.

 64. “What Nietzsche recognizes is that you can get rid of God only if you also do away with innate meaning. . . . As long as there appears to be some immanent sense to things, one can always inquire after the source from which it springs. Abolishing given meanings involves destroying the idea of depth, which in turn means rooting out beings like God who take shelter there.” Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, p. 155.

 65. Ibid., p. 163. This quote is Eagleton’s words, summarizing Nietzsche’s views.

 66. Ibid., p. 161. This quote is Eagleton’s words, summarizing Nietzshe’s views.

 67. John Gray writes that Nietzsche did not escape his own net. “His early work contained a profound interrogation of liberal rationalism, a modern view of things that contains no tragedies, only unfortunate mistakes and inspirational learning experiences. Against this banal creed, Nietzsche wanted to revive the tragic world-view of the ancient Greeks. But that world-view makes sense only if much that is important in life is fated. As understood in Greek religion and drama, tragedy requires a conflict of values that cannot be revoked by any act of will; in the mythology that Nietzsche concocted in his later writings, however, the godlike Superman, creating and destroying values as he pleases, can dissolve and nullify any tragic conflict. . . . Aiming to save the sense of tragedy, Nietzsche ended up producing another anti-tragic faith: a hyperbolic version of humanism.” John Gray, “The Ghost at the Atheist Feast,” New Statesman, March 13, 2014.

 68. Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, p. 161. For further critique of Nietzsche and the school of “Deconstruction” that he founded, see Ferry, Brief History of Thought, pp. 193–204.

 69. Many have claimed that this—the lack of secular grounding for humanistic values—is the greatest problem that the contemporary secularity faces. So we will revisit it in chapters 9 and 10.

 70. See Peter Watson, The Age of Nothing: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014). In his review of Watson’s book John Gray summarizes Watson’s material. “First published in 1882, Nietzsche’s dictum ‘God is dead’ described a situation in which science (notably Darwinism) had revealed ‘a world with no inherent order or meaning.’ With theism no longer credible, meaning would have to be made in future by human beings—but what kind of meaning, and by which human beings? In a vividly engaging conspectus of the formative ideas of the past century, The Age of Nothing shows how Nietzsche’s diagnosis evoked responses in many areas of cultural life, including some surprising parts of the political spectrum. While it is widely known that Nietzsche’s ideas were used as a rationale for imperialism, and later fascism and Nazism, Watson recounts how Nietzsche had a great impact on Bolshevik thinking, too. The first Soviet director of education, Anatoly Lunacharsky (who was also in charge of state censorship of the arts and bore the delicious title of Commissar of Enlightenment), saw himself as promoting a communist version of the Superman. ‘In labour, in technology,’ he wrote, in a passage cited by Watson, ‘[the new man] found himself to be a god and dictated his will to the world.’ Trotsky thought much the same, opining that socialism would create ‘a higher social-biologic type.’ Lenin always resisted the importation of Nietzsche’s ideas into Bolshevism. But the Soviet leader kept a copy of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in his personal library and one of Zarathustra in his Kremlin office, and there is more than a hint of the cult of the will in Lenin’s decree ordering the building of ‘God-defying towers’ throughout the new Soviet state.” Gray, “Ghost at the Atheist Feast.”

 71. David Sessions, “What Really Happens When People Lose Their Religion?” Patrol, April 30, 2013, www.patrolmag.com/2013/04/30/david-sessions/what-really-happens-when-people-lose-their-faith/. Sessions’s account is remarkably insightful and honest, both personally and intellectually. It is a profitable read for believers, nonbelievers, and those in between. He writes: “It has a certain noble appeal: we’re good Westerners who can no longer believe in God, but are still heirs of a great civilization who can press on, being as reasonable and dispassionate as possible, for the sake of humanity. It explains why we used to believe the myths and shrouds our disenchantment in courage and moral duty; it’s no surprise a great number of homeless ex-believers end up there. The point is not to insult liberal humanism; after all, there are far worse things. The point is to remind us that it is a construal in a culture where it tends to assert itself as natural and uncontroversial, to all sorts of cultural and political detriment that I can’t get into here. I hope, if possible, people who have had the privilege of going between, of actually feeling the persuasive power of different kinds of construals that co-exist in our culture, can elevate the conversation above the crude Doug Wilson vs. Christopher Hitchens–type spectacle that is so clickable. I think reading Taylor is an excellent tonic; even a few chapters of A Secular Age will do those hovering between belief and unbelief far more good than the collected works of ‘Ditchkins.’ Ending up in a ‘cross-pressured’ no-man’s land—torn between immanence and transcendence—may feel inconclusive, but it’s creatively productive, and is certainly better than exchanging one half-baked ideology for another. One needn’t remain religious to admit potential harm in the lack of self-awareness in certain secular construals of the world, and to be able to see religious belief, with a kind humility and respect, as a construal that can be equally as plausible as our own. And one that is to be studied carefully, especially by philosophy and politics, for its crucial insights about human be-ing. For those who inhabit a religious construal, and are perhaps working to deepen, enrich, and preserve it, there are also important lessons to be found in Taylor (who is, after all, on your side). I’ll address one to evangelical Protestantism, since I know it best: the unqualified disaster of apologetics that have focused on rational-empirical argumentation as a means of persuasion, intensifying the already-problematic tendency of Protestantism to be in one’s head than in the practices of one’s body. The thrust of ‘resurgent’ evangelical activity in my lifetime has been mostly to embrace and even radicalize the most harmful features of the modern obsession with rational control. If you can begin to pull your religion out of that abyss, there’s no telling what a powerful countercurrent it might become.”

 72. By styling itself as an absence of faith, secularity is doing something that cultural theorists have called “mystification”: taking a contestable viewpoint or belief and denigrating any views that challenge it, marginalizing all rival forms of thought, and denying the social reality that the belief is not universally held. This gives the opinion the appearance of being a universal, self-evident, inevitable fact that may not be questioned. See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 5–6. Critical theorists and their heirs have pointed out that there is a strong tendency to domination in modern Western culture, so that in the name of personal freedom and social emancipation new forms of oppression, marginalization, forced conformity, and dehumanization are continually generated. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s classic Dialectic of Enlightenment. Western cultural elites of both the Left and the Right are generally oblivious to this perennial danger.

 73. I have argued that secularism is a set of new beliefs, but I could go on to add that, like any religion, secularism has “denominations.” The first, using Stephen LeDrew’s terminology, would be secular scientism, one manifestation of which has been dubbed the “New Atheists.” LeDrew critiques this group as believing not in science but in “scientism,” which is marked by the naive belief (which I have critiqued above) in scientific rationality as the only form of true knowledge. He argues that their agenda is to establish the hegemony of scientists and scientific thought as the supreme authorities and arbiters of truth in society. LeDrew says that this position is one of exclusive ideological commitments rather than, as its adherents style it, just one of “openness to reason.” LeDrew, Evolution of Atheism, pp. 32 and 55–91. A second “denomination” could be called secular humanism, the viewpoint of many modern liberals. This group of secularists, like LeDrew himself, are willing to grant that scientific reason is not the only arbiter of knowledge. Their concern is not to see the triumph of science but to work for freedom, equality, and the common good of society. See LeDrew, pp. 44–48. A good example of this denomination, cited by LeDrew, is Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard, who defines secular humanism as “a cohesive world movement based on the creation of good lives and communities, without God.” Greg M. Epstein, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe (New York: Harper, 2010), p. xiv. A third “denomination” of secularism consists of secular antihumanists. This is a small but still influential school of thought, including thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Bataille, who follow Nietzsche very closely. This group critiques modern liberalism as well as religion and in this sense follows the path of Nietzsche and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. See Charles Taylor, “The Immanent Counter-Enlightenment,” in Canadian Political Philosophy: Contemporary Reflections, ed. Ronald Beiner and Wayne Norman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 386–400. In an intriguing passage Taylor rightly points out that the fragmentation of our culture today comes because modern culture is not the scene of a simple “liberal/secular”–versus–”religious/conservative” conflict. Rather, it is the scene of a four-cornered battle. The parties are what he names: (1) “Those who acknowledge some good beyond life” (p. 397), who believe in the transcendent, “a point of life that is beyond life” (p. 387). He believes this includes not only people of all religions but also even less religiously committed thinkers who hold that there is a reality beyond the material, natural world. (2) “Secular humanists,” those who do not believe in a transcendent, supernatural reality yet continue to hold the values of universal benevolence, of the imperative to work for the freedom and safety of all, of the elimination of suffering. (3) The “neo-Nietzscheans,” who question and critique any moral values or claims as exercises of power and who “valorize” death and sometimes violence (p. 397). (4) Then he adds a fourth party by acknowledging that those who believe in transcendence are divided between those who think the whole move toward secularism was a terrible mistake and needs to be wholly undone and those who see good coming out of the move toward secularism, good that would not have come into the world unless the power of religious institutions hadn’t been broken in some measure. Taylor puts himself in that category and adds as an aside, “We might even be tempted to say that modern unbelief is providential, but that might be too provocative a way of putting it.” (Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 637.) Taylor puts into his category of “secular humanist” both groups that LeDrew calls scientific and humanistic secular. If we take into account the very real differences that LeDrew points out, the cultural “battlefield” becomes even more complex than Taylor’s description would have it.

 74. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 147. In another part of the Pensées, Blaise Pascal lays down two principles to guide us as we consider evidence and arguments for God. “If [God] had wished to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, he could have done so by revealing himself to them so plainly that they could not doubt the truth of his essence, as he will appear on the last day. . . . It was, therefore, not right that he should appear in a manner manifestly divine and absolutely capable of convincing all men, but neither was it right that his coming should be so hidden that he could not be recognized by those who sincerely sought him. . . . There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.” Ibid., pp. 79–80. Philosopher C. Stephen Evans gives names to both principles. The first he calls the “Wide Accessibility Principle,” the idea that, if a loving God exists, he would likely not want to restrict the knowledge of his existence to intellectuals capable of assessing complicated arguments, any more than to one gender or to one continent or country. The second he calls the “Easy Resistibility Principle,” the concept that, if a just God exists, he would not want to force his knowledge on people. Rather, this “God wants the relationship humans are to enjoy with him to be one in which they love and serve him freely and joyfully.” C. Stephen Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 15. What Evans and Pascal say here fits in better with a Roman Catholic or Arminian understanding of free will and human agency than with a Lutheran or Reformed view, but Pascal can get some grounding in texts like Mark 4:11–12, where Jesus tells his disciples his teaching was designed to be understandable to some but hard to understand for those with closed eyes and ears.

 75. I will reserve until the last two chapters a fuller outline of the rational case for faith, which I laid out in more detail in The Reason for God. How can we weigh the offers and claims of Christianity and see if they make more sense emotionally, culturally, and rationally than other views of life? Here’s what to keep in mind as you read. Most modern people imagine that the way to test out a comprehensive viewpoint or “worldview” is simply to look at the “proofs” for it. So, it is thought, either the classic proofs of God work or they don’t. If they don’t, we can be atheist or agnostic; if they do, we move on to look at the different religions. But as we have seen, no comprehensive viewpoint or “worldview” can prove its case so that no reasonable person can doubt it. Alasdair MacIntyre points out that Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and David Hume each had an approach to how reason worked that was significantly different from the others’. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). This was because each approach to reason was deeply embedded in a matrix of beliefs about justice, human purpose, the nature of the material world, and how we know things. There are, then, no “standards of truth and rational justification” that are independent and can be used to judge all viewpoints, because any standards you come up with will come from and already assume one of these worldviews and therefore the wrongness of all the others. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. xii. Do we then have any way to proceed and test out different viewpoints? Yes, we do. MacIntyre points to a path forward for persons inhabiting one worldview (what he calls a “tradition”) to assess another one. First they must “come to understand what it is to think in the terms prescribed by that particular rival tradition.” Ibid., p. xiii. They must do everything they can to sympathetically put themselves in the shoes of the other. They should engage only the strongest, not the weakest presentations of the other viewpoint. Second, in both their own worldview and the one they are assessing, they should identify “unresolved issues and unsolved problems—unresolved and unsolved by the standards of that tradition.” Ibid., p. xiii. MacIntyre goes on to say that every “tradition” has such issues and problems. Notice that these are tensions felt by the believers not because of criticisms coming from outside but because of problems caused by holding the beliefs themselves. One kind of problem is inconsistency, so that some beliefs of the worldview contradict others. Another kind of problem is unlivability, so that some beliefs are impossible for the bearer to actually practice. This means the beliefs don’t fit one another internally or the real world externally. The sign that this is happening, according to MacIntyre, is when adherents of one worldview are found smuggling in ideas and values from other worldviews in order to deal with their own tradition’s contradictions and inconsistencies. It is when one worldview “lacks the resources to address those issues and solve those problems . . . so long as it remains faithful to its own standards and presuppositions” and when it becomes clear that “the means of overcoming this predicament” can come only from “that [other] rival tradition” that “it is possible for one such tradition to defeat another in respect of the adequacy of its claims to truth.” Ibid. If, while claiming to have one set of beliefs, you must constantly borrow from another set of beliefs in order to live your life, then you are bearing witness that the other worldview makes more emotional, cultural, and rational sense than yours does. This is what I will attempt to show in the rest of this book, namely, that secularity in particular does this unacknowledged borrowing in a heavy way, and that Christianity makes more overall sense than its rival(s).

Chapter Three: A Meaning That Suffering Can’t Take from You

 1. Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 101.

 2. Ibid.

 3. Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Faith, p. 211. See the charts 213–222.

 4. Cited and summarized by Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 12.

 5. Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), p. 112.

 6. Ibid., p. 113.

 7. Ibid., p. 125.

 8. Anton Chekhov, Three Plays: The Sea-Gull, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 89.

 9. Franz Kafka, The Trial (New York: Tribeca Books, 2015), p. 32.

 10. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 615.

 11.  Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1955), p. 21.

 12. “I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me, it is a closed door. . . . If I had to speak of it, I would find the right word here between horror and silence to express the conscious certainty of death without hope.” Albert Camus, “The Wind at Djemila.” “And what more legitimate harmony can unite a man with life than the dual consciousness of his longing to endure and his awareness of death?. . . . [This desert landscape] took me out of myself in the deepest sense of the word. It assured me that but for my love and the wondrous cry of these stones, there was no meaning in anything. The world is beautiful [but] outside it there is no salvation.” Albert Camus, “The Desert.” Both quotes are from Harold Bloom, ed., Albert Camus, Bloom’s BioCritiques (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003), p. 59.

 13. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York, Vintage, 1992), p. 261.

 14. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” 1903, available at www.skeptic.ca/Bertrand_Russell_Collection.pdf and many other places on the Internet.

 15. Eagleton, Meaning of Life, p. 16.

 16. Nagel, What Does It All Mean? p. 101.

 17. Eagleton, Meaning of Life, pp. 64 and 17.

 18. Stephen Jay Gould was one of numerous “scientists, authors, and artists” who answered the question “What is the Meaning of Life? Why are we here?” in “The Meaning of Life: The Big Picture” in Life Magazine, December 1988.

 19. Many prefer the term “late modern” to “postmodern” in order to emphasize not the discontinuities but the continuities between our current cultural climate and its roots in the Enlightenment. I have the same preference, but for the rest of this chapter I follow Terry Eagleton, who shows the great changes made within the last generation in how the “meaning of life” question is regarded.

 20. Quote from Fargo, season 2, episode 5, See Fargo (2014) Episode Scripts, http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=fargo-2014&episode=s02e05.

 21. Quote from Fargo, season 2, episode 8, See Fargo (2014) Episode Scripts, http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=fargo-2014&episode=s02e08.

 22. Quotes in this paragraph and the last are from Fargo, season 2, episode 10. See Fargo (2014) Episode Scripts, http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=fargo-2014&episode=s02e10.

 23. Eagleton, Meaning of Life, p. 58.

 24. Jerry A. Coyne, “Ross Douthat Is on Another Erroneous Rampage Against Secularism,” New Republic, December 26, 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/116047/ross-douthat-wrong-about-secularism-and-ethics.

 25. Daniel Florian, “Does Atheism Make Life Meaningless?” Patheos.com, August 5, 2009, www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2009/08/does-atheism-make-life-meaningless/.

 26. Eagleton, Meaning of Life, p. 17.

 27. Ibid., p. 67.

 28. Ibid., pp. 69–70.

 29. Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd,” in The Meaning of Life, ed. E. D. Klemke and Steven Cahn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 146–47.

 30. Many have criticized Shakespeare’s definition of meaninglessness in Macbeth, act 5, scene 5: “Out, out brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.” The question is posed—why does the brevity of life make life meaningless? Just because a drama lasts only an hour and then ends does not mean that the drama was meaningless. But the drama, though ended, is not meaningless because the spectators continue. There are still people who exist who remember the drama with profit. What Nagel and others are arguing is that it is not merely our own deaths but the inevitable death of everyone and everything that makes life meaningless.

 31. Nagel, What Does It All Mean? p. 96.

 32. “I guess (strict sense) that you think man a more important manifestation than I do. . . . Of course from the human point of view he is important [to himself]; he would hardly live if he didn’t think so. Also I hasten to admit that I don’t dare pronounce any fact unimportant that the Cosmos has produced. I only mean that when one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand. But the time approaches when I must go down stairs and play solitaire I fear.” Richard Posner, ed., The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 108. Also see where he writes: “My bet is that we have not the kind of cosmic importance that the parsons and philosophers teach. I doubt if a shudder would go through the spheres if the whole ant heap were kerosened. . . . Man of course has the significance of fact: that he is part of the incomprehensible, but so has a grain of sand. I think the attitude of being a little god, even if the great one has vanished, is the sin” (p. xxvi).

 33. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library), 1998, p. 16.

 34. C. S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age,” in Present Concerns (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Books, 2002), p. 76.

 35. Eagleton, Meaning of Life, p. 21.

 36. Royce’s book is discussed in Gawande, Being Mortal, pp. 115–16.

 37. Ibid., p. 116.

 38. Ibid.

 39. Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1991), p. 14.

 40. Ibid., p. 18.

 41. Ibid.

 42. Ibid. Much more on this secular problem with moral values will be presented in chapter 7.

 43. The speech is easily found in many places on the Internet. See, for example, www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm.

 44. Eagleton, Meaning of Life, p. 22.

 45. Ibid., p. 24.

 46. Charles Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?” in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011), p. 173.

 47. Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square, 1959).

 48. See the dramatic account in Man’s Search for Meaning at p. 96. A fellow inmate confided to Frankl that he had had a dream that they would be liberated by February 1945. When the month came and went, the man almost immediately ran a high fever, then became unconscious and died. Chapter 8 will further discuss the importance of hope.

 49. Ibid., p. 24.

 50. Ibid., p. 54.

 51. Ibid., p. 90.

 52. Ibid., p. 104.

 53. Taylor says our secular age is marked by “the widespread inability to give any human meaning to suffering and death, other than as dangers and enemies to be avoided or combated. This inability is not just the failing of certain individuals—it is entrenched in many of our institutions and practices—for instance, the practice of medicine, which has great trouble understanding its own limits or conceiving of some natural term to human life.” Taylor, “Catholic Modernity?” p. 176. See also his comments that “clinging to the primacy of life in the second (let’s call this the ‘metaphysical’) sense is making it harder to affirm it wholeheartedly in the first (or practical) sense” (p. 177).

 54. See Richard A. Shweder et al., “The ‘Big Three’ of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering,” in Richard A. Shweder, Why Do Men Barbecue? Recipes for Cultural Psychology (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2003); and Timothy Keller, “The Culture of Suffering” and “The Challenge to the Secular,” in Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering (New York: Dutton, 2013), pp. 13–34 and 64–84.

 55. Shweder, Why Do Men Barbecue?, p. 113. This is quoted and explained in my Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, pp. 30–31.

 56. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Edna Hatlestad Hong, Howard Vincent Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

Chapter Four: A Satisfaction That Is Not Based on Circumstances

 1. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom and Philosophy to the Test of Modern Science (London: Arrow Books, 2006).

 2. Ibid., p. 82. I have added the italics.

 3. Ibid., p. 89.

 4. Quoted in Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis.

 5. From the Dhammapada, verse 83, in J. Mascaro’s translation (1973), as quoted in Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, p. 81.

 6. Ibid.

 7. Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, p. 82.

 8. “If you want to predict how happy someone is, or how long she will live . . . you should ask about her social relationships.” Ibid., p. 133. See also Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, chapter 6 (“Love and Attachments”), pp. 107–34.

 9. De Botton thinks that every adult life is defined by two love stories—the search for love and affirmation through sex and romance and the search for those things through success. “This second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important, or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful.” Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 5.

 10. Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, pp. 90–91.

 11. Julian Baggini, What’s It All About? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 97.

 12. Thomas Nagel, “Who Is Happy and When?,” New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010, www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/12/23/who-happy-and-when/.

 13. Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 81.

 14. Horace, The First Book of the Satires of Horace, www.authorama.com/works-of-horace-6.html.

 15. Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/sunday -morning.

 16. For the song lyrics, see www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/peggylee/isthatallthereis.html. For a great, world-weary rendition, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCRZZC-DH7M. For the historical connection to Thomas Mann, see David E. Anderson, “Is That All There Is?” Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, Public Broadcasting Service, July 24, 2009.

 17. Cynthia Heimel, “Tongue in Chic,” Village Voice, June 2, 1990, pp. 38–40.

 18. Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck, trans. Christopher Hampton (New York: Samuel French, 2014), p. 108. This line is spoken by the character Dr. Relling in act V.

 19. C. S. Lewis, “Hope,” in Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 134–38.

 20. James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Picador, 2010), p. 261.

 21. Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 86.

 22. Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), pp. 27–28.

 23. Tony Schwartz, “The Enduring Hunt for Personal Value,” New York Times, May 1, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/business/dealbook/the-enduring-hunt-for-personal-value.html?_r=0.

 24. See Charles Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?” in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011), pp. 181–87.

 25. Quoted in Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), p. 48.

 26. Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, pp. 83–84. Modern psychology often tries to explain various human traits as adaptations of natural selection. It is helpful to keep in mind that these theories of what evolutionary function various human features may have served originally are untestable hypotheses.

 27. Henry Chadwick, Augustine: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 11.

 28. Ibid.

 29. Enchiridion, chapters 31, 117. See Augustine, The Augustine Catechism: The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, trans. Bruce Harbert (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1999), p. 130.

 30. Augustine called virtues “the various movements of love” and described the four cardinal virtues in terms of love: “I hold that virtue is nothing other than perfect love of God. Now, when it is said that virtue has a fourfold division, as I understand it, this is said according to the various movements of love. . . . We may, therefore, define these virtues as follows: temperance is love preserving itself entire and incorrupt for God; courage is love readily bearing all things for the sake of God; justice is love serving only God, and therefore ruling well everything else that is subject to the human person; prudence is love discerning well between what helps it toward God and what hinders it. Augustine, Of the Morals of the Catholic Church, chapter XV, section 25, available at www.newad vent.org/fathers/1401.htm.

 31. Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 278 (book XIII, chapter 9).

 32. Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 21.

 33. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin UK, 1961), pp. 228–29 (book X, chapter 22).

 34. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London, Penguin Books, 1972), p. 637 (book XV, chapter 23).

 35. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Chadwick, p. 3 (book I, chapter 1).

 36. Augustine, Commentary on the Psalms, Psalm 35:9. This is a modernization of the translation in Phillip Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, vol. 8, available at www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf108.ii.XXXV.html.

 37. C. S. Lewis, “Hope,” pp. 136–37. In a personal letter Lewis puts this argument even more succinctly: “If you are really the product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don’t feel at home here? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet?” See “A Letter to Sheldon Vanauken, December 23, 1950,” in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 3, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 75.

 38. Lewis’s famous chapter “Hope” in Mere Christianity has been called a form of his “Argument from Desire.” For a summary and analysis of that argument see Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994), pp. 78–81.

 39. This follows Ferry’s discussion of Augustine and the Christian supplanting of the older, classical view of happiness. Ferry, Brief History of Thought, pp. 80–81.

 40. We don’t merely need “somebody to lean on.” Serving and caring for others is more conducive to physical and mental well-being than being cared for. See Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, p. 133.

 41. Ferry, A Brief History of Thought, pp. 83–84. The quotes by Augustine are from the translation used in the Ferry chapter on these pages.

 42. Luc Ferry, an atheist philosopher, adds here to his survey of Augustine’s view of love: “[In the Christian view] no one can lose the individuals he loves, unless he ceases to love them in God; in other words, ceases to love what is eternal in them, bound to God and protected by Him. This promise is, to say the least, tempting.” Ibid., p. 85.

 43. Miroslav Volf, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 204. The substance of this paragraph, and the use of Paul Bloom’s work, is from Volf’s book, pp. 203–4. Volf uses Bloom’s idea to refute the critique that religion devalues ordinary pleasures and drains them of joy because it elevates the spiritual and demotes the physical. Volf agrees (as do I) that much religion can indeed be antipleasure, particularly those more legalistic religions that see salvation as being earned through deprivation. In these religions ordinary life is just a “discardable ladder for the ascent to the divine” (p. 198). Nietzsche calls this the “passive nihilism” of religion, something that “bleaches value and beauty out of ordinary life” (p. 198). Nietzsche is quite right to flag religions that have this shape and effect. But Volf argues two things: First, that secularism can also bring about “active nihilism” that literally sees no point to life and no purpose to anything. That, obviously, can also drain life of joy and satisfaction. Second, he argues compellingly that Christianity does not participate in either form of “nihilism” toward pleasure and satisfaction. Loving God more than material things enhances the joys of ordinary life because they are seen as free gifts from our Father. This is in Volf’s epilogue, pp. 195–206. Also see Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

 44. Volf, Flourishing, p. 203.

 45. There is much more to say about what “loving God” entails in the Christian Augustinian view than can be said here. Here are two brief, important points to make. (1) Loving God means loving him with the whole heart. In the Bible the heart is the seat of the mind, will, and emotions, together. The Hebrew leb (“heart”) is the center of the entire personality. The heart’s “love,” then, means much more than emotional affection. What the heart most loves is what it most trusts (Proverbs 3:5) and delights itself in (Proverbs 23:26). Matthew 6:21 says, “Where your treasures is, there your heart will be also.” What you treasure is what absorbs your attention and commitment the most. Whatever captures the heart’s trust and love controls our thoughts, feelings, and behavior too. What the heart most loves and wants the mind finds reasonable, the emotions find valuable, and the will finds doable. (2) Loving God means loving him for himself. In Augustine’s theology, to love God supremely is to love him for himself alone, and not just for what you can get from him. “For there is a joy that is not given to those who do not love you, but only to those who love you for your own sake. You yourself are their joy. Happiness is to rejoice in you and for you and because of you” (Confessions, book X, chapter 22). Notice that it is possible to be very religious, to do prayers and religious observances, to be very ethical—but all so that God will give you good things. It is to use God rather than to love him, which Augustine says must never be done. See Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green, p. 9. Conditional service to God—serving him as long as he is answering prayers and giving you a good life—is a sign you are using him. When you stop obeying him when things go wrong in your life, that reveals that the good things and circumstances are the real nonnegotiables, your real loves. You were using God and loving things, rather than using things to love God. To love God for his own sake is to find him beautiful. It is to find our delight in what delights him, to find our pleasure in what pleases him, and not to serve him only as a means to get something that is more delightful or pleasurable to us than he is.

Chapter Five: Why Can’t I Be Free to Live as I See Fit, as Long as I Don’t Harm Anyone?

 1. Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. xlvii–xlviii.

 2. See Keith Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World, 140 B.C.–70 B.C. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

 3. Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 2. Quoted in Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 475.

 4. Ibid., p. 484.

 5. Ibid., p. 224.

 6. Ibid., pp. 165–66.

 7. Ibid., p. 484.

 8. Stephen Eric Bronner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 1. Bronner is here describing the work of the Frankfurt School at the Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923. While the scholars in the institute were humanist Marxists, the events of World War II showed them the limitations of both capitalism and state socialism. Bronner writes that their turn toward critiquing all systems of politics and thought and all absolute claims as potentially oppressive and destructive of freedom was highly influential in the later development of the suspicion of postmodernism and poststructuralism toward all absolute claims and all systems of authority and power.

 9. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwells, 1996), p. 41. See Eagleton’s chapter “Ambivalences” on the paradox of freedom in late-modern or postmodern times, pp. 20–44.

 10. Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1991), p. 3.

 11. Eagleton, Illusions of Postmodernism, p. 42.

 12. Taylor writes that John Locke would have said that to give the individual total freedom to choose his or her own moral values would be “not so much to seek one’s happiness as to head towards perdition.” Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 485.

 13. It might be more accurate to say that there are two interdependent cultural narratives: freedom (“No one has the right to tell me how to live my life, unless I hamper the freedom of others”) and the other being identity (“I ought to be true to myself and express my deepest desires and dreams, no matter what others say”). We will examine that in the next chapter.

 14. Mark Lilla, “Getting Religion,” New York Times Magazine, September 18, 2005.

 15. John Michael McDonagh, screenplay for Calvary, 2012, available at http://d97a3ad6c1b09e180027-5c35be6f174b10f62347680d094e609a.r46.cf2.rackcdn.com/film_scripts/FSP3826_CALVARY_SCRIPT_BOOK_C6.pdf.

 16. Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), pp. 139–40.

 17. McDonagh, Calvary.

 18. John Donne, “No Man Is an Island,” Meditation XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), available at https://web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/island.html and elsewhere online.

 19. Charles Taylor calls this the “harm principle” of John Stuart Mill. See Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 484.

 20. Michael J. Klarman of Harvard Law School says that by itself negative freedom—freedom from without any definition of what our freedom is for—“is an empty concept,” a wax nose. Some people see freedom as a freedom from government interference in their lives, which comes from shirking federal agencies and reach. Others define freedom as freedom from discrimination, which comes through increased government regulation and enforcement. Some desire “freedom from want” and poverty while others desire only freedom of opportunity in the free market. Everyone insists that they are for “freedom,” but Klarman says that the term is meaningless unless you look at the value or good that the freedom is being invoked for. “Whether freedom is good or bad depends entirely on the particular substantive cause on behalf of which freedom is invoked.” See Michael J. Klarman, “Rethinking the History of American Freedom,” William and Mary Law Review, vol. 42 (October, 2000). This paper can also be accessed on the Web site of the Social Science Research Network, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=223776.

 21. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom and Philosophy to the Test of Modern Science (London: Arrow Books, 2006), p. 134.

 22. Ibid., p. 133.

 23. Ibid.

 24. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, p. xlviii. See also Marc J. Dunkelman, The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014) and Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in an Age of Individualism (New York: Basic Books, 2016). Each of these books details the ways in which the emphasis on unconstrained individual freedom has eroded human community. Dunkelman and Levin make the same analysis, though the former is politically liberal and the latter conservative.

 25. In Taylor’s The Malaise of Modernity, he also cites Tocqueville. Taylor believes that the rise of “self-determining freedom” means that democracy will break down. First, many people will not “want to participate actively in self-government,” will not feel part of a community or body, but will expect the government only to give them the freedom to pursue their own lives as they see fit. Also, because people will not be able to agree on shared values, there will be polarization and a lack of consensus. So through indifference and anger democratic institutions will cease to really function. This will lead to a “soft despotism.” “It will not be a tyranny of terror and oppression as in the old days. The government will be mild and paternalistic. It may even keep democratic forms, with periodic elections. But in fact, everything will be run by an ‘immense tutelary power’ over which people will have little control. The only defence against this . . . is a vigorous political culture in which participation is valued, at several levels of government and in voluntary associations as well. But the atomism of the self-absorbed individual militates against this. Once participation declines, once the lateral associations that were its vehicles wither away, the individual citizen is left alone in the fact of the vast bureaucratic state and feels, correctly, powerless.” Taylor, Malaise of Modernity, pp. 9–10. For more on this, see Taylor, Malaise of Modernity, chapter 10, “Against Fragmentation,” pp. 109–21.

 26. Quoted in John Stott, The Contemporary Christian (InterVarsity, 1992), p. 55. The interview’s English translation appeared in the Guardian Weekly, June 23, 1985.

 27. See Ian Carter, “Positive and Negative Liberty,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/liberty-positive-negative/. Carter says in this article that philosopher Isaiah Berlin taught that negative and positive liberty are not just two sides of the same coin but can be rival ways of thinking about freedom. Berlin, like Bellah, argued that an overemphasis on absolute negative freedom can lead to self-interested behavior that requires the government to pass more laws and regulations and become more totalitarian in law enforcement. So negative freedom can lead to the loss of democratic freedom.

 28. Gawande, Being Mortal, p. 140.

 29. Both the “dust dancing” and the “freedom demands closure” quotes are from Eagleton, Illusions of Postmodernism, p. 42.

 30. There is, arguably, another major problem with modern secular freedom. If we are free because we are strictly the product of materialistic, evolutionary forces, then it could be argued that our freedom is an illusion. Everything that our brains tell us—everything that makes sense to us or seems desirable to us—is so only because that neural pattern helped our ancestors survive. Our choices are therefore determined by our genes and biological impulses. There is no free choice. Steven Pinker of Harvard represents many scientists when he claims that our actions are triggered by chemical events in the brain before we choose them and that free will is therefore a myth. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2002). Philosopher John Gray, in The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), looks beyond neuroscience and evolution to make his case that freedom of choice is an illusion and myth. He points (1) to the power of the unconscious, (2) to how society and culture work to conform and control us, and (3) to how our psychological defense mechanisms hide the truth from us. He makes a powerful case that we simply do not have the freedom of choice we think we have, and “in a kind of godless religiosity” he urges us to “accept our fallen [unfree] state.” (Julian Baggini, “The Soul of the Marionette by John Gray; The Challenge of Things by A. C. Grayling—review” in The Guardian, March 21, 2015). The irony is that the scientists who speak of the illusion of free will are only accepting the implications of a materialistic worldview that originally was promoted, in part, to free us from any outside constraints on our choices. These assertions about free will have not penetrated the public consciousness at all. Part of the reason is that our intuition that our choices are free is extraordinarily strong. Any claims to the contrary, no matter how well reasoned and seemingly grounded in science, have no plausibility. Interestingly, even some secular thinkers argue that if free will does exist, it means that the current, dominant atheistic account of a completely naturalistic world must be false. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 113–15. Despite the serious implications, these debates about free will and determinism in the rarefied circles of academia have not really registered in the popular imagination or made a dent in our powerful belief in our free agency.

 31. David Foster Wallace, commencement address at Kenyon College, May 21, 2005, available at http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words. See also a printed version in Dave Eggers, The Best Nonrequired Reading 2006 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), pp. 355–64.

 32. Tony Schwartz, “The Enduring Hunt for Personal Value,” New York Times, May 1, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/business/dealbook/the-enduring-hunt-for-personal-value.html?_r=0.

 33. Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015).

 34. For a survey of the biblical view of freedom, see the chapter “Human Freedom” in G. C. Berkouwer, Man: The Image of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1962), pp. 310–48.

 35. John Newton, The Works of John Newton, vol. 3, Olney Hymns (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1985), from “We Were Once as You Were,” p. 572, and “Love Constraining to Obedience,” p. 635.

Chapter Six: The Problem of the Self

 1. Tony Schwartz, “The Enduring Hunt for Personal Value,” New York Times, May 1, 2015.

 2. Philosophers give most of their attention to the former issue—the persistence of the sense of being the same self over time. Psychologists give their attention more to the latter issue—the question of self-esteem or self-worth. Sociologists give their attention to the question of the relationship of the individual self to the community and its social roles. For classic early- and late-modern philosophical essays on the concept of personal identity, including those by Locke and Hume, along with Bernard Williams, see John Perry, ed.. Personal Identity, Topics in Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). See also the older volume, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). For a classic sociological perspective on identity, individualism, and American culture, see Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). For two Christian approaches, see Rick Lints, Identity and Idolatry: The Image of God and Its Inversion (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), and Dick Keyes, Beyond Identity: Finding Yourself in the Image and Character of God (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 1998). Lints’s book is a scholarly survey of the biblical material, and Keyes’s book is an accessible, practical Christian treatment.

 3. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 35.

 4. See chapter 3, “Finding Oneself,” in Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 55–84. Taylor writes that the social order—from kings down to servants—was seen as embedded in a higher spiritual order, a chain of being, of which human social order was just a reflection. Taylor, Secular Age, p. 25. The Greeks (Plato in particular) believed that behind the physical universe there was a set of metaphysical essences/forms/universals of which every individual in the world was just an expression. This meant that every person occupied a place in society—peasant, artisan, noble, king, male, female—that also existed in the spiritual realm. By fulfilling your social role—knowing your place and doing your duty—you were contributing to universal harmony, you were connecting with your own essence, and you were assuming your rightful place in the cosmos. That meant that you did not relate to the rest of society as an individual but rather through your social class or grouping. No one thought of their individual interests as being in any way distinct from the good of their family or tribe or nation. Only if your community thrived could you even survive. If someone strayed from faith and proper fulfillment of their station—it was thought—it brought judgment on the whole community. The pressure toward orthodoxy and submission to one’s lot, then, was enormous. The idea of individual choice did not exist, let alone the concept of creating one’s own beliefs. Taylor, Secular Age, pp. 42–43. Because society was grounded in a spiritual order and could be maintained only with everyone submitting to those above them and to God, it was impossible to imagine a society “not grounded in common religious beliefs.” Taylor, Secular Age, p. 43.

 5. According to Taylor, in older cultures the self was “porous.” It had to align itself with spiritual and social realities—with God and moral truth and spiritual forces and family and social structures—in order to find meaning and happiness. The modern “buffered” self, however, is not vulnerable to or dependent on outside spiritual and social forces in this way. “My ultimate purposes,” Taylor writes, “are those which arise within me, the crucial meanings of things are those defined in my responses to them.” Taylor, Secular Age, p. 38. Taylor uses the example of melancholy or depression. Ancient people would feel despondent or guilty because of certain events. Taylor says that the modern person who is depressed, with a “buffered self,” can “take a distance from this feeling.” He may say, “Things don’t really have this meaning—it just feels this way.” He may decide that he will not feel guilty over this or that action or that he will get another job. This is because the modern buffered self is understood to have the power to assign and create meaning within (p. 37). “By definition for the porous self, the source of its most powerful and important emotions are outside the ‘mind’” (p. 38). But today we decide what things mean, whether to be sad or happy, what is right and wrong. We create our own meaning. “The [buffered] self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meaning of things for it” (p. 38). The older porous self, for example, was subject to sin. When we sinned, it led to wrath, emptiness, guilt, and shame. But the buffered self feels it has the right to define what sin is for itself (p. 39). Taylor says that to have a porous self was “inherently living socially” (p. 42). Feeling vulnerable to outside forces of good and evil—which we did not define but had to deal with—gave everyone a sense that “we’re all in this together” (p. 42). If meanings are “out there”—not self-created but with their own mind-independent reality—then we share them. Demons are demons for us all, and God is God for us all. If, instead, meanings are created within, and therefore every person worships God “as they conceive of him,” then we are ultimately alone.

 6. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, pp. 333–34.

 7. Ibid., p. 55.

 8. Ibid., chapter 3, “Finding Oneself,” pp. 55–84.

 9. M. H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Revised, vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 99.

 10. Sung by the mother abbess at the close of the first act of the musical The Sound of Music, by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, 1959, lyrics available at www.metrolyrics.com/climb-every-mountain-lyrics-the-sound-of-music.html.

 11. Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, “Let It Go,” available at www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/idinamenzel/letitgo.html.

 12. Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1991), p. 26.

 13. David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Chappell’s book stresses what most secular thinkers have not seen about the history of the civil rights movement, namely the importance of biblical “prophetic” religion. In the November 2003 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, in the “New & Noteworthy” column by Benjamin Schwarz, Schwarz summarizes: “Chappell’s is one of the three or four most important books on the civil-rights movement, but because its conclusions will unsettle, or at least irritate, much of its natural constituency, it will surely fail to gain the attention it deserves. This unusually sophisticated and subtle study takes an unconventional and imaginative approach by examining both sides in the struggle: Chappell asks what strengthened those who fought segregation in the South and what weakened their enemies. His answer in both cases is evangelical Christianity.”

 14. Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), p. 28.

 15. Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 35. The rest of this chapter’s material on Freud is taken from Rieff’s landmark book.

 16. Ibid., p. 60.

 17. Ibid., p. 375.

 18. Ibid., p. 343. For Freud’s pessimism and realism about human nature in contrast to the modern “culture of the therapeutic,” see Rieff’s classic chapter “The Emergence of Psychological Man” in Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, pp. 329–57. In this chapter Rieff provides a justly famous thumbnail sketch of Western cultural history. He calls premodern civilization, with its belief in normative moral orders grounded in tradition and religion, “Political Man”; he calls early-modern culture, with its normative moral order of self-interested, individual rationality, “Economic Man”; he calls late-modern (or postmodern) society, with its lack of any normative moral order outside the self, “Psychological Man.” Rieff and others have pointed out that Freud sowed the seeds of this latest stage, which Rieff calls, in a later book, “the Triumph of the Therapeutic” (also the title of the book). Freud believed all guilt was “false” guilt—imposed coercively by some power in order to keep power. But he also believed false guilt was necessary for civilization. Today our culture believes the first view—that all guilt is false, imposed on us by others in a power play. But it doesn’t believe Freud’s second view. Our culture naively thinks that we will be happy if we throw off all guilt and social strictures and express our inmost desires even against family or cultural expectations. Rieff believes that this therapeutic stance—making no value judgments at all, leading the person to look inward and identify their deepest desires, and siding with them against any sense of binding moral absolutes—which once was deployed only in the counseling room, has now become the method by which society and all human life are being ordered.

 19. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, pp. 78–79.

 20. Ibid., p. 80.

 21. Ibid., p. 75.

 22. Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), pp. 364 and 513, quoted in Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, p. 79.

 23. “There is no such thing as inward generation [of identity], monologically understood. My discovering my identity doesn’t mean I work it out in isolation.” Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity., p. 47.

 24. Quoted in Philip G. Ryken, City on a Hill: Reclaiming the Biblical Pattern for the Church in the 21st Century (Chicago: Moody, 2003), p. 92.

 25. Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode 1.18, “Coming of Age,” 1988, written by Sandy Fries. The quote can be found at www.imdb.com/character/ch0001464/quotes.

 26. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, pp. 334–35. This is his definition of a “tradition.”

 27. Ibid., p. 65. “The American understanding of the autonomy of the self places the burden of one’s own deepest self-definitions on one’s own individual choice. . . . The notion that one discovers one’s deepest beliefs in, and through, tradition and community is not very congenial to Americans. Most of us imagine an autonomous self existing independently, entirely outside any tradition and community.”

 28. Ibid., p. 81.

 29. Ibid., p. 84.

 30. See Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), pp. 45–72.

 31. Ibid., pp. xiv–xv.

 32. Ibid., p. 15.

 33. Ibid., p. 81.

 34. Taylor, Malaise of Modernity, pp. 48–49.

 35. Quoted in Peter C. Moore, One Lord, One Faith (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1994), p. 128.

 36. Benjamin Nugent, “Upside of Distraction,” Opinionator (blog), New York Times, February 2, 2013.

 37. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), p. 160.

 38. Ibid., p. 167.

 39. Ibid. Becker’s brilliant analysis merits being quoted at length. “Once we realize what the religious solution did, we can see how modern man edged himself into an impossible situation. He still needed to feel heroic, to know that his life mattered in the scheme of things. . . . He still had to merge himself with some higher, self-absorbing meaning, in trust and gratitude. . . . If he no longer had God, how was he to do this? One of the first ways that occurred to him, as [Otto] Rank saw, was the “romantic solution.” . . . The self-glorification that he needed in his innermost nature he now looked for in the love partner. The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life. All spiritual and moral needs now become focused in one individual. Spirituality, which once referred to another dimension of things, is now brought down to this earth and given form in another human being. Salvation . . . can be sought in the ‘beatification of the other.’ . . . To be sure, all through history there has been some competition between human objects of love and divine ones—we think of Heloise and Abelard, Alcibiades and Socrates. . . . But the main difference is that in traditional society the human partner would not absorb into himself the whole dimension of the divine; in modern society he does. . . . Modern man fulfills his urge to self-expansion in the love object just as it was once fulfilled in God. . . . In one word, the love object is God. . . . Man reached for a ‘thou’ when the world-view of the great religious community overseen by God died. . . . [But] sex is a ‘disappointing answer to life’s riddle,’ and if we pretend that it is an adequate one, we are lying both to ourselves and to our children. . . . If the partner becomes God he can just as easily become the Devil; the reason is not far to seek. For one thing, one becomes bound to the object in dependency. One needs it for self-justification. . . . How can a human being be a god-like ‘everything’ to another? No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood. . . . God’s greatness and power is something that we can nourish ourselves in, without its being compromised in any way by the happenings of this world. No human partner can offer this assurance. . . . However much we may idealize and idolize him, he inevitably reflects earthly decay and imperfection. . . . If your partner is your ‘All’ then any shortcoming in him becomes a major threat to you. . . . We see that our gods have clay feet, and so we must hack away at them in order to save ourselves, to deflate the unreal over-investment that we have made in them in order to secure our own apotheosis. . . . But not everyone can do this because many of us need the lie in order to live. We may have no other God and we may prefer to deflate ourselves in order to keep the relationship, even though we glimpse the impossibility of it and the slavishness to which it reduces us. . . . After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption—nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, our feeling of nothingness. We want to be justified, to know that our creation has not been in vain. . . . Needless to say, human partners cannot do this. The lover . . . cannot give absolution in his own name. The reason is that as a finite being he too is doomed, and we read that doom in his own fallibilities, in his very deterioration. Redemption can only come from outside the individual, from beyond.” (pp. 160–68.)

 40. Taylor, Malaise of Modernity, p. 43.

 41. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, p. 72.

 42. Taylor, Malaise of Modernity, p. 43.

 43. See especially Bellah et al., “Preface to the 2008 edition” and “Preface to the 1996 edition,” in Habits of the Heart, pp. vii–xlv.

 44. Ibid., p. xvii. Bellah’s provocative thesis is that America is the product of four “traditions.” There are two forms of individualism—one hard (for the public life) and one soft (for private life). “Utilitarian individualism” analyzes everything in terms of cost-benefit. It is the way public life is conducted. Everything is weighed as to its efficiency and maximum profit. Your work, for example, can have a “social benefit” only if, in the end, it brings more income to you. “Expressive individualism” is the way the private life is conducted. It thinks of everything in terms of “feeling” and happiness. What matters is what makes you happy, fulfilling your inmost desires and dreams. To become your authentic self, you must assert these desires over and against societal expectations and social roles. Together these two forms of American individualism make individual interests more important than any social tie, any group identity, or the common good (pp. xiv–xv). Because individualism does not recognize the reality of human interdependence and tends to valorize success and to shame and punish the poor and the weak (p. xv), why has it not wreaked more havoc on our social fabric, creating a more brutal, dog-eat-dog society than we have? The answer is the counterweight of two other cultural traditions, both of which offset radical individualism with appreciation for the social dimension of human beings (p. xv). Bellah calls these the biblical and republican traditions.

The biblical tradition teaches the dignity and worth of every individual, not because of their reason or other capacities but because of their relationship to God. This tradition obligates respect and compassion for all persons. It puts a great check on selfishness (which expressive individualism can increase) and exploitation by the strong and successful of the weak (which utilitarian individualism can increase).

The republican tradition teaches the importance of government by both the consent and participation of the governed. The republican tradition puts great emphasis on liberty, but a liberty of self-government that is exercised through strong involvement in politics, both local and national.

In the second chapter of Habits of the Heart, Bellah profiles four early Americans who each typifies one of the traditions—John Winthrop (biblical), Thomas Jefferson (republican), Benjamin Franklin (utilitarian), and Walt Whitman (expressive) (pp. 27–51). Each of the traditions defines success, freedom, and justice differently. Yet it is these conflicting “central strands” of our culture, in creative tension with one another, that have produced the American experiment. Individualism can tend to destroy community, but the counterbalancing traditions may tend to limit too much personal freedom. It is only when these traditions conduct intense debates and arguments with one another that America “remains alive” and thrives (p. 28). The crucial conclusion of Bellah’s study is that the individualistic traditions are now overwhelming the counterbalancing, socializing traditions and that there are many resulting problems in our culture.

Chapter Seven: An Identity That Doesn’t Crush You or Exclude Others

 1. Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 261.

 2. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, trans. and eds., Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 19, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 35.

 3. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, vol. 2, The Two Towers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 291.

 4. See Anthony A. Hoekema, Created in God’s Image (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994); and John F. Kilner, Dignity and Destiny: Humanity in the Image of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015).

 5. The essence of this verse is expressed vividly in William Billings’s early-American (seventeenth-century) hymn:

Can a kind woman er’e forget the infant of her womb?

And ’mongst a thousand tender thoughts her suckling have no room?

Yet, saith the Lord, should nature change and mothers monsters prove,

Zion still dwells upon the heart of everlasting love.

See “Africa” The Complete Works of William Billings, vol. 1 (Boston: The American Musicological Association and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1981), p. 88. Hear it sung on the album A Land of Pure Delight. William Billings Anthems and Fuging Tunes, performed by His Majestie’s Clerks, conducted by Paul Hilliar, Harmonia Mundi, 1993.

 6. The first question of the seventeenth-century German catechism written for the Lutheran and Reformed churches is “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” The answer is “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.” Notice that the first words of this classic expression of Christian identity contradict the modern view bluntly. I am infallibly assured and secure in the love of my Father because “I am not my own” but his. This is the translation used by the Christian Reformed Church. It can be found at www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/heidelberg-catechism.

 7. Eric T. Olsen, “Personal Identity,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/#UndPerQue.

 8. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959).

 9. This translation is from The New English Bible with the Apocrypha (Oxford and Cambridge: Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, 1961), p. 54.

 10. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 226–27.

 11. For a survey of recent thought on this subject, see Mark Currie, Difference (London: Routledge, 2004).

 12. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). “In dichotomies crucial for the practice and vision of social order, the differentiating power hides [its existence] as a rule behind one of the members of the opposition. The second member is but the other of the first, the opposite (degraded, suppressed, exiled) side of the first and its creation. . . . The first depends on the second for its self-assertion” (p. 8).

 13. Claude Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996), p. 75.

 14. These four forms of exclusion are outlined by Volf in Exclusion and Embrace, pp. 74–78.

 15. Vamik Volkan, quoted in Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, p. 78.

 16. See Bauman’s list in Modernity and Ambivalence, pp. 8–9.

 17. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, p. 20.

 18. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwells, 1996), pp. 25–26.

 19. Ibid., p. 26.

 20. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, p. 21. The italics are Volf’s.

 21. Ibid., pp. 22–25. See also Volf’s discussion of the ways that faith in the cross “breaks the cycle of violence” (pp. 291–95) and John Stott, “Self-Understanding and Self-Giving” and “Loving our Enemies,” in The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986), pp. 274–310.

 22. Ibid., p. 67.

 23. Ibid., p. 124.

 24. Ibid.

 25. Stott, Cross of Christ, pp. 278–81.

 26. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, p. 71.

 27. Donald B. Kraybill et al., Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010); Mark Berman, “I Forgive You: Relatives of Charleston Church Shooting Victims Address Dylann Roof,” Washington Post, June 19, 2015.

 28. Kraybill et al., Amish Grace, pp. 114 and 138.

 29. These are average figures from Pew Research Center, “Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population,” December 19, 2011, www.pewforum.org/2011/12/19/global-christianity-exec/; Center for the Study of Global Christianity; for more detailed statistics on the world Chrisitian population, see the resources at www.gordonconwell.edu/resources/csgc-resources.cfm; and Todd M. Johnson et al., The World’s Religions in Figures: An Introduction to International Religious Demography (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

 30. Richard Bauckham, Bible and Mission: Christian Mission in a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2003), p. 9. Bauckham’s call for a “non-modern metanarrative” (pp. 83–89) is also relevant to our discussion. Bauckham’s point is that without a “metanarrative” of some kind, you slide into soft relativism and individualism and this paves the way for oppression and inequality. But a “modern” metanarrative, in Bauckham’s analysis, is one used to oppress others. He argues that the Gospel of Jesus Christ provides a nonoppressive absolute truth, one that provides a norm outside of ourselves as the way to escape relativism and selfish individualism, yet one that cannot be used to oppress others, because at its heart it has a man dying for his enemies to forgive them. See chapter ten for more on this theme.

 31. Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), p. 43.

 32. It may be fair to say that Islam is more of a “hyperidentity” that removes Muslims from local cultures because of its emphasis on salvation through obedience. See Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), pp. 129–31.

Chapter Eight: A Hope That Can Face Anything

 1. Sabrina Tavernise, “U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to 30-Year High,” New York Times, April 22, 2016.

 2. “Bookends: Which Subjects Are Underrepresented in Contemporary Fiction?” New York Times Book Review, April 12, 2016.

 3. See Robert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson, How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2016), for a review of the apocalyptic turn of contemporary popularculture.

 4. E. Tenney, J. Logg, and D. Moore, “(Too) Optimistic About Optimism: The Belief That Optimism Improves Performance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,108, no. 3 (2015): 377–99.

 5. In After Virtue Alasdair MacIntyre famously illustrates how stories are necessary if we are to assign significance to anything. He imagines standing at a bus stop, when a young man he has never met comes up to him and says, “The name of the common wild duck is Histrionicus histrionicus histrionicus.” How does he make sense of this incident? Even though he knows what the young man’s sentence literally conveys, he cannot understand it without placing it into a narrative. One possible story is that, alas, the young man is mentally ill. That sad life story would explain it all. Another possible story is that the young man has mistaken him for someone he had a conversation with the day before. He thinks he is completing the discussion but he doesn’t realize the two have never met. Another more sinister and exciting story is that the young man is a foreign spy “waiting at a prearranged rendezvous and uttering the ill-chosen code sentence which will identify him to his contact.” The point is that, if there is no story, then there is no way to understand the significance of what happened. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 210.

 6. Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 1.

 7. Ibid., p. 4. Delbanco is quoting Michael Oakeshott, who insists that hope depends on finding some “end to be pursued more extensive than mere instant desire.”

 8. See N. T. Wright, “Stories, Worldviews and Knowledge,” The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), pp. 38–80.

 9. Ibid., pp. 1–2.

 10. Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980).

 11. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 716–17.

 12. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 530.

 13. Eric Uslaner, “The Real Reason Why Millennials Don’t Trust Others,” Washington Post, March 17, 2014.

 14. Adam Davidson, “Why Are Corporations Hoarding Trillions?” New Yorker, January 20, 2016.

 15. Lasch, True and Only Heaven, p. 78.

 16. Robert Bellah et al., The Good Society (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 180.

 17. Ibid., p. 80.

 18. Eric Kaufmann, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 260.

 19. Lasch, The True and Only Heaven, p. 530.

 20. Ibid., p. 81 (note).

 21. Ibid., p. 81.

 22. Howard Thurman, A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life, Walter Earl Fluker, ed. (New York: Beacon, 1991). See “The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death,” pp. 55–79.

 23. Ibid., p. 77.

 24. Ibid., p. 71.

 25. Delbanco, Real American Dream, p. 89.

 26. Ibid., pp. 4–6.

 27. Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (London, Jonathan Cape, 2008).

 28. Epicurus’s position is summarized in Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), p. 4.

 29. Diana Athill, “It’s Silly to Be Frightened of Being Dead,” Guardian, September 23, 2014.

 30. Diana Athill, Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter (London: W. W. Norton, 2016), p. 159.

 31. See www.lionking.org/scripts/Script.txt.

 32. The story is told by Peter Kreeft in Love Is Stronger than Death (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1979), pp. 2–3.

 33. Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined, and Explained (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993), p. 141.

 34. James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (London: Penguin Classics, 2008), p. 665.

 35. Osborn Segerberg, The Immortality Factor (New York: Dutton, 1974), pp. 9–13, cited in Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, p. 3.

 36. Ibid.

 37. From Dylan Thomas, In Country Sleep, and Other Poems (London: Dent, 1952). Also available at www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night.

 38. H. P. Lovell Cocks, quoted in Stuart Barton Babbage, The Mark of Cain: Studied in Literature and Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1966), p. 80.

 39. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections (New York: Vintage, 1965), p. 314, quoted in John W. de Gruchy, Led into Mystery: Faith Seeking Answers in Life and Death (London: SCM Press, 2013), pp. 178–79.

 40. Quoted in Stuart Barton Babbage, The Mark of Cain: Studied in Literature and Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1966), p. 90.

 41. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act III, scene 1.

 42. John Dryden, Aureng-Zebe, IV, I, quoted in Babbage, Mark of Cain, p. 91.

 43. Babbage, Mark of Cain, p. 90.

 44. T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, in The Complete Plays of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1935), p. 43.

 45. The Greek word is embrimaomai, a word that in extrabiblical Greek could refer to the snorting of horses and when applied to human beings always meant anger. Jesus’s anger was toward the “sin and death” he saw around him. D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity, 1991), p. 416.

 46. I have inserted the word “champion” for the the more frequently employed words “pioneer” or “author” to translate archegos. Here I follow the translation and commentary of William L. Lane, Hebrews 1–8, Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word Books, 1991), p. 56. “The language of Hebrews 2:10, 18 displays a close affinity with the descriptions and panegyrics of some of the most popular cult figures of the Hellenistic world, the ‘divine hero’ who descends from heaven to earth in order to rescue humankind. Although Jesus is of divine origin, he accepts a human nature, in which he can serve humanity, experience testing, and ultimately suffer death. Through his death and resurrection he attains to his perfection, wins his exaltation to heaven, and receives a new name or title to mark his achievement in the sphere of redemption. . . . Hearers familiar with the common stock of ideas in the hellenistic world knew that the legendary hero Hercules was designated α’ρχηγοʹς, ‘champion,’ and σωτηʹρ, ‘savior.’ . . . They would almost certainly interpret the term α’ρχηγοʹς in v 10 in the light of the allusion to Jesus as the protagonist who came to the aid of the oppressed people of God in vv 14–16. . . . This representation of the achievement of Jesus was calculated to recall one of the more famous labors of Hercules, his wrestling with Death, ‘the dark-robed lord of the dead.’ Euripides, Alcestis, ll. 843, 844; see below on vv 14–15. The designation of Jesus as α’ρχηγοʹς in a context depicting him as protagonist suggests that the writer intended to present Jesus to his hearers in language that drew freely upon the Hercules tradition in popular Hellenism (cf. W. Manson, The Epistle to the Hebrews, 103–4; see Comment on 12:2). A translation of α’ρχηγοʹς sensitive to the cultural nuances of the term in Hellenism and appropriate to the literary context of v 10 is ‘champion.’ Jesus is ‘the champion’ who secured the salvation of his people through the sufferings he endured in his identification with them, particularly through his death” (pp. 56–57).

 47. Christian F. Gellert, “Jesus Lives, and So Shall I,” 1757, translated by John Dunmore Lang (1826). Available at www.hymnary.org/text/jesus_lives_and_so_shall_i.

 48. George Herbert, “Time” (1633), in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 432.

 49. John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 204.

 50. See David Skeel, “Is Heaven a Cosmic Bribe?” in David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2014), pp. 140–44.

 51. C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” Theology 43 (November 1941): 263–74, available at www.verber.com/mark/xian/weight-of-glory.pdf. The italics are mine.

 52. Updike, Self-Consciousness, p. 204.

 53. Jonathan Edwards, “Heaven Is a World of Love,” in The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, Kenneth P. Minkema, Douglas Sweeney (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 242–72.

 54. Ibid., p. 245.

 55. Ibid., p. 248.

 56. Ibid., p. 245.

 57. Ibid., p. 254.

 58. Ibid., p. 252.

 59. Ibid., p. 253–54.

 60. Ibid., pp. 252–53.

 61. Ibid., p. 249.

 62. Ibid., p. 252.

 63. Ibid., pp. 257–58.

 64. Ibid., pp. 260–61.

 65. Updike, Self-Consciousness, pp. 216 and 239.

 66. Ibid., p. 206.

 67. Vinoth Ramachandra, The Scandal of Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001), p. 24.

 68. Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, Signet Classic (New York: Penguin, 1996), pp. 92–99.

 69. For an elaboration of this argument, see Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996), pp. 303–4.

 70. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Tree and Leaf (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 13.

 71. Ibid., pp. 13 and 68.

 72. Ibid., pp. 15 and 66.

 73. Ibid., pp. 56–69.

 74. Ibid., p. 72.

 75. Ibid.

 76. Ibid.

 77. Ibid., p. 69.

 78. Ibid., p. 73.

 79. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 343–63; N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003).

 80. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (London: Fontana, 1960), p. 163.

 81. William R. Moody, The Life of Dwight L. Moody (Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1900), unnumbered page, second after title page.

Chapter Nine: The Problem of Morals

 1. A. N. Wilson, Against Religion: Why We Should Try to Live Without It (London: Chatto and Windus, 1991).

 2. A. N. Wilson, “Why I Believe Again,” New Statesman, April 2, 2009.

 3. The first quote is from A. N. Wilson, “Religion of Hatred: Why We Should No Longer Be Cowed by the Chattering Classes Ruling Britain Who Sneer at Christianity,” Daily Mail, April 10, 2009. The second quote is from A. N. Wilson, “It’s the Gospel Truth—So Take It or Leave It,” Telegraph, December 25, 2013, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10537285/Its-the-Gospel-truth-so-take-it-or-leave-it.html.

 4. Ibid.

 5. Wilson, “Why I Believe Again.”

 6. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), p. 589.

 7. See Jonathan Haidt, “Religion Is a Team Sport,” in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012), pp. 246–73. Jonathan Haidt and other social scientists point to studies that show the not surprising finding that strong religious beliefs across a community create much less individual selfishness, and much more social capital and social cohesion, than secularity. He points to the frequently cited research that shows that the more often a person attends religious services, the more generous and charitable they are across the board (p. 267). This research could be used to make a case—and it often is—that religion is crucial for the functioning of a healthy society. It does not, however, prove that secular individuals are less honest and moral than religious individuals.

 8. Julian Baggini, “Yes, Life Without God Can Be Bleak. Atheism Is About Facing Up to That,” Guardian, March 9, 2012, www.theguardian.com/commen tisfree/2012/mar/09/life-without-god-bleak-atheism.

 9. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 695–96.

 10. Ibid., p. 588.

 11. Ibid., p. 581. “Once human beings took their norms, their goods, their standards of ultimate value from an authority outside of themselves: from God, or the gods, or the nature of Being or the cosmos. But then they came to see that these higher authorities were their own fictions, and they realized that they had to establish their norms and values for themselves, on their own authority. . . . They dictate the ultimate values by which they live” (p. 580).

 12. Mari Ruti, The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 36.

 13. Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1991), p. 18.

 14. In contemporary academic reflections on ethics and morals, this kind of self-contradictory rhetoric is common. In an introduction to poststructuralism and the work of Jacques Derrida, the question arises: Is there any basis for ethics, any way to talk about “right action in a world without foundational truths to constitute a ground for choice”? Catherine Belsey, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 90. After acknowledging that we can no longer ground moral in “universal and ultimate . . . absolute reality” such as “the will of God . . . or the moral law, or . . . the laws of nature,” the question remains: Is ethics possible at all? The answer: “Values not only have a history, they differ from themselves. They can therefore be changed in the future, if not in the light of a fixed idea (or Idea) of the good, at least in the hope that the trace of an alternative inscribed in them might one day be realized. Derrida calls this way of thinking ‘messianicity’: not the promise of a specific messiah, who would fulfill and individual scripture . . . but the hope of a different future ‘to some.’ . . . Deconstruction, then, is not incompatible with moral . . . choice” (pp. 90–91). This seems to be saying that because we now know all values are changeable, not absolute or ultimate, we are thus free to change them for the better. But how will we know what is better? What lies behind all the changeable socially constructed moral norms that would make it possible to know whether we are moving toward something better than we had before? The only way to know would be if there was Moral behind the morals that, according the poststructuralism, doesn’t exist.

 15. See Christian Smith, “Morality Adrift,” in Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 19–69. Smith’s findings are that about 30 percent of younger adults are very strong relativists (p. 27). Most say they believe in morality but define it as behavior that makes people thrive and be happy (p. 51).

 16. Ibid., p. 52.

 17. Another example of this moral inarticulacy is “Brian Palmer,” one of the four persons profiled in Robert Bellah’s first chapter of Habits of the Heart as representative of our culture’s approach to morality and society. After overwork led to the breakup of Brian’s first marriage, he chose a new source of meaning and satisfaction in life—not career success and money but instead an affectionate marriage and family marked by mutual affection, complete honesty, and “being involved in the lives of my children” (p. 6). Brian does not justify this shift—from living for his work to living for his family—as being right or as a recognition of “any wider framework of purpose or belief” (p. 6). Rather, he simply found it was not as personally satisfying as devotion to his family. When asked about his value system, he consistently failed to give any explanation for it. For example, when asked why he thought lying was wrong, he says, “I don’t know. It just is. . . . It’s part of me.” Then he says, somewhat inconsistently, “I don’t think I would pontificate . . . to establish values for humanity in general . . . [but] if the rest of the world would live by my value system it would be a better place” (p. 7). Bellah concludes that Brian lacks the language to explain his life commitments and so they are “precarious” (p. 8). They could quite easily shift and change if they don’t seem to be “working” for him.

 18. My friend’s experience and frustration is well explained in James D. Hunter, The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good and Evil (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

 19. Philip Gorski, “Where Do Morals Come From?” Public Books, February 15, 2016, www.publicbooks.org//nonfiction/where-do-morals-come-from.

 20. Ibid.

 21. David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 252. See also Evans’s assessment of the effort to ground moral obligation in evolutionary traits in C. Stephen Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 116–21.

 22. The “social contract” theory holds that culturally constructed moral intuitions should be seen as authoritative. Thomas Hobbes famously argued in Leviathan that if human beings lived according to the laws of the wild, the survival of the fittest, we would be perpetually at war with one another and life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 89, quoted in Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God, p. 121. It is beneficial to everyone that all in a society adhere to moral norms of honesty, peacefulness, self-control, hard work, the honoring of human rights, and so forth. This “social contract” of moral values is so important, and so widely agreed upon, that compliance should be seen as a moral obligation, our duty. However, this view has the same fatal weakness as the effort to find moral obligation in evolutionary traits. If the reason for these moral values is that they serve my self-interest, then what generates my duty to perform them when I feel they do not? Why can I not lay aside society’s norms whenever it is of advantage to me? Someone might retort, “If everyone did that, where would you be?” But that, again, is nothing but an appeal to self-interest. It is wrong because it hurts me. All right, if that is what makes an action wrong, then I can do anything that doesn’t hurt me, anything that I can get away with. The problem with the social-contract theory is that the moral obligation that is the common experience of the human race does not work like that. When we feel a moral duty, it is that we act in a certain way even though it does not benefit us at all. So the social-contract idea cannot generate moral obligation either. See Evans’s assessment of the effort to ground moral obligation in social contract and in “self-legislation” in Natural Signs and Knowledge of God, pp. 121–30.

 23. Gorski, “Where Do Morals Come From?”

 24. Wolterstorff is quoted in Ronald J. Sider and Ben Lowe, The Future of Our Faith: An Intergenerational Conversation on Critical Issues Facing the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2016), p. 44.

 25. Gorski, “Where Do Morals Come From?”

 26. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2013), p. xix. For Leff’s discussion, see Arthur Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal, vol. 1979, no. 6 (December 1979).

 27. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (January 1958), Available at www.pitt.edu/~mthompso/readings/mmp.pdf.

 28. One typical answer has been what Anscombe calls “consequentialism.” Some say something is morally wrong not because it violates some absolute standard but because its consequences practically harm people. But, Anscombe asks, how do you know what hurts people unless you can define what a good and thriving human life is before you evaluate the consequences? And where does that definition come from, given that it is already filled with value judgments before you can check out the consequences? Finally, this approach assumes it is immoral to harm anyone. Many cultures have thought it was permitted to harm some kinds of people, so the no-harm principle is not self-evident. What grounds that assumption? This is all viciously circular reasoning. “Consequentialism” is a broad term for a number of approaches, the most famous of which is utilitarianism, “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Anscombe’s critique of consequentialism works for utilitarianism as well. For a thorough critique of consequentialism in general and utilitarianism in particular, see Bernard Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” in J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 75–150.

 29. “This word ‘ought,’ having become a word of mere mesmeric force, could not, in the character of having that force, be inferred from anything whatever. . . . A real predicate is required; not just a word containing no intelligible thought: a word retaining the suggestion of force, and apt to have a strong psychological effect, but which no longer signifies a real concept at all. For its suggestion is one of a verdict on my action, according as it agrees or disagrees with the description in the ‘ought’ sentence. And where one does not think there is a judge or a law, the notion of a verdict may retain its psychological effect, but not its meaning.” Ibid., pp. 6–7.

 30. Ibid. Elizabeth Anscombe had not read or written much in moral philosophy before the mid-1950s, but she was outraged by Oxford’s decision to give an honorary doctorate to former U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who had dropped atomic bombs on Japan. Her outrage moved her to begin reading in modern moral philosophy, and the fruit was a series of short, influential exposés of how subjective and thin modern moral reasoning had become. On the connection between the Truman doctorate and her writing, see Duncan Richter, “E. E. M. Anscombe (1919–2001),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, no date, www.iep.utm.edu/anscombe/.

 31. MacIntyre acknowledges his debt to Anscombe in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 53.

 32. Ibid., p. 54.

 33. Ibid., p. 55.

 34. See chapter 1, “A Disquieting Suggestion,” ibid., pp. 1–5.

 35. See chapter 5, “Why the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality Had to Fail,” and chapter 6, “Some Consequences of the Failure of the Enlightenment Project,” ibid., pp. 51–78.

 36. Ibid., pp. 57–58.

 37. Ibid., p. 59.

 38. If the secular person responded that human beings do have a telos, or purpose—to survive and pass on our genetic code—this would not help in the discovering a basis for morality. If our only purpose is “the survival of the strongest,” then any behavior, however cruel, that helped us survive would be “good.”

 39. Smith, Lost in Transition, p. 27.

 40. Ibid., p. 28.

 41. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, quoted in Smith, Lost in Transition, p. 110.

 42. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, cited in Smith, Lost in Transition, p. 111.

 43. Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 163. Another early proponent of Nietzsche’s position was the Marquis de Sade, in his novel Juliette. “Justice has no real existence. . . . So let us abandon our belief in this fiction, it no more exists than does the God of whom fools believe it the image: there is no God in this world, neither is there virtue, neither is there justice. . . . Self-interest . . . is the single rule for defining just and unjust.” Marquis de Sade, Juliette (New York: Grove, 1968), pp. 605 and 607, quoted in James D. Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 313.

 44. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin Books, 1990). See also his chapter “The Argument from Queerness,” pp. 38–42. There he argues that moral entities—objective facts and obligations—would be exceedingly “queer,” unlike anything else that science can confirm, and because there are no moral facts there can be no moral obligations.

 45. Ibid., pp. 30–33.

 46. Ronald Dworkin, “What Is a Good Life?” New York Review of Books, February 10, 2011, quoted in C. Stephen Evans, Why Christian Faith Still Makes Sense: A Response to Contemporary Challenges (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), p. 50. The italics are mine.

 47. Ibid.

 48. Hart, The Experience of God, p. 257.

 49. See George Mavrodes, “Religion and the Queerness of Morality,” in Robert Audi and William Wainwright, Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 213–26; Robert Adams, “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief,” in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 144–63; Mark D. Linville, “The Moral Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 391–448; C. Stephen Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp.107–48. See also C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), which is devoted to making the case for premise number one, that moral obligation depends not necessarily on belief in God but on the existence of God.

 50. Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God, p. 109. In this section I am following Evans’s exposition of the moral argument (pp. 107–48).

 51. Mavrodes, “Religion and the Queerness of Morality,” pp. 213–26.

 52. At the very least, if we believe that “some moral ideals are objectively binding . . . regardless of how we think or feel,” then belief in God and the supernatural makes more sense of our world than a secular view. Evans, Natural Signs and the Knowledge of God, p. 113.

 53. I think testimony to what Mavrodes and C. Stephen Evans are saying can be found in Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, which has the subtitle Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Nagel agrees that moral value really exists. While continuing to assert his atheism, he concludes that the reductionistic view of the world so dominant now—that life consists of nothing more than physical, chemical, and biological substances—cannot account for human consciousness, the validity of reason, or moral value. He admirably and honestly admits he doesn’t have good answers to the many questions this raises. But he concludes that because of moral reality, there must be something more to the universe than we can see now. He denies the current naturalistic (and [Bertrand] Russellian) view of the world. See Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 97–126.

 54. Wilson, “It’s the Gospel Truth.”

Chapter Ten: A Justice That Does Not Create New Oppressors

 1. David O’Reilly, “A Study Asks: What’s a Church’s Economic Worth?” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 1, 2011.

 2. On this very important subject see Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), and Robert Bellah, “The House Divided: Preface to the 1996 Edition,” in Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, pp. xxii–xxviii.

 3. See Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). See especially chapter 16, “Pastors and Flocks,” pp. 196–209. Stout explains that community organizing seeks to mobilize communities of need against the power interests of government and business. To do that requires networking and organizing of not just the poor individuals but also of the institutions and associations within the needy communities. The overwhelming majority of these organizations, which are created by and directed by the poor themselves, are churches. Stout notes that the decline of church in our society spells the decline of community organizing and grassroots democracy. It means growing inequality, with more and more power going to big government and big business.

 4. Nicholas Kristof, “A Little Respect for Dr. Foster,” New York Times, March 28, 2015.

 5. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) pp. 4–6.

 6. The document is available at www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf.

 7. Michael Ignatieff et al., Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

 8. Charles Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011), p. 123.

 9. Ibid.

 10. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Journey Toward Justice: Personal Encounters in the Global South (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), p. 131.

 11. Ibid., p. 132. For a much more extensive argument that human rights cannot be grounded in “capacities,” see Wolterstorff, Justice:Rights and Wrongs, chapter 15, “Is a Secular Grounding of Human Rights Possible?” and chapter 16, “A Theistic Grounding of Human Rights,” pp. 323–61. See also N. Wolterstorff, “On Secular and Theistic Groundings of Human Rights,” in Understanding Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 177–200. See also Christian Smith, “Does Naturalism Warrant a Moral Belief in Universal Benevolence and Human Rights?” in The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion, ed. J. Schloss and M. Murray (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 292–317.

 12. Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, chapters 2–5, pp. 44–132. See Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law 1150–1625 (Atlanta: Scholars Press for Emory University, 1997). Tierney points as an example to the early 1300s, when a dispute arose between the Franciscans and Pope John XXII over the order’s vow of poverty and rights to the use of property. A member of the order, William of Ockham, argued that the Franciscans had not simply a “positive right” (one that was created and bestowed by rulers or institutions) but a “natural right” to the use of property in times of extreme need, because such a natural right to basic sustenance could not be renounced and was irrevocable. See Tierney, Idea of Natural Rights, p. 122; also cited in Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs pp. 46–47. This idea of natural rights, which Tierney argues was not present in Roman jurisprudence, was already evident in the work of some of the church’s early fathers. Ockham based his arguments on language in Gratian’s Decretum, a compendium of canon law writings compiled by canon jurists. Much of the Decretum consisted of quotes from the early church fathers. One example is St. Basil the Great, Bishop of Caesarea (AD 329–379) who preached the following to his people: “Tis the bread of the hungry you are holding, the shirt of the naked you put away in your chest, the shoe of the barefooted which rots in your closet, the buried treasure of the poor on which you sit!” Quoted in G. Barrois, “On Mediaeval Charities,” in Service in Christ: Essays Presented to Karl Barth on his 80th Birthday, ed. J. I. McCord and T. H. L. Parker (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1966), p. 73. Striking a similar note, the great preacher of the Eastern church, John Chrysostom, preaching in AD 388 or 389 in the city of Antioch, challenged his listeners: “This is also theft, not to share one’s possessions. . . . To deprive is to take what belongs to another, for it is called deprivation when we take and keep what belongs to others. . . . I beg you to remember this without fail, that not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth but theirs.” Quoted in Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs pp. 60–61. Repeatedly the early church fathers told listeners that a failure to give to the poor was not just a lack of charity but theft, because the basic means of sustenance belongs to the poor. Drawing on Scripture, they preached that some of their people’s wealth they owed to the needy as an obligation. Though Chrysostom and Basil did not use the language of “rights,” it was natural for the canon jurists of the Decretum and William of Ockham to recognize the concept in the earliest Christian interpretation of the Scriptures. Tierney tells another interesting story in his chapter “Aristotle and the American Indians” (Idea of Natural Rights, p. 255). The European discovery of America suddenly moved the relatively abstract discussion about human rights into new territory. A debate arose in Spain over the status of the indigenous peoples they found there, American “Indians.” Were these people the natural slaves Aristotle talked about? (Aristotle famously taught that some people were made for servitude.) After all, they were idol worshippers and cannibals. Could the developing concept of human rights be truly universal? Would these rights apply to them? Bartolomé de las Casas argued that “all the races of humankind are one,” and from this premise he claimed that the American Indians had the right to liberty, to property, to self-defense, and to their own government. See Brian Tierney, “The Idea of Natural Rights: Origins and Persistence,” Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights 2 (Spring 2004): 10–11. He was opposed by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who took Aristotle’s position and called the indigenous people natural slaves and barbarians. Las Casas wrote an entire shelf of books in defense of the Indians. Though the ultimate foundation of his conviction was his religious beliefs (“They [the Indians] are our brothers, and Christ died for them.”), he was carefully grounding his argument in the juridical tradition of natural rights that had been developing, by now, for centuries in Christendom. He drew from Gratian’s Decretum and said, “Liberty is a right instilled in man from the beginning.” Ibid. Tierney points out that though Las Casas and his allies won the debate intellectually, they lost it politically. The Spanish defenders of the “Indians” did not provide much help to the people on the ground, because the ruling powers backed the conquistadores. Nevertheless, this debate in Spain gave new life to the idea of natural rights. Elsewhere Tierney traces out how the idea of natural rights, which was a medieval concept based on Christian theology, made its way into the modern world.

 13. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), pp. 118–23.

 14. Michael Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009), pp. 248 and 261.

 15. Sandel lays out three current views of justice, which he calls “maximizing welfare,” “respecting freedom,” and “promoting virtue.” According to the first view, following utilitarianism, the most just action is that which brings the greatest good to the greatest number of people. According to the second view, following Immanuel Kant, the most just action is that which respects the freedom and rights of each individual to live as he or she chooses. According to the last view, following Aristotle, justice is served when people are acting as they ought to, in accord with morality and virtue. Ibid., p. 6.

 16. There is another problem with Rawls’s approach that has often been pointed out. He argued that violating human rights cannot be seen as immoral (because that would be to bring religious/moral values into the argument). Rather, he says, it is irrational. Why? It is so, he says, because if you stood behind the “veil of ignorance,” you would want to support human rights, for—who knows?—you might end up being one of the powerless in society and might need to assert those rights for yourself. But when Rawls says that reason would lead us to support human rights, he means we would create them because they serve our interests. We should value the interests of others because it is the best way to secure our own. But this is actually an appeal to selfishness. We should treat others as if they have rights not because we are under a moral obligation to respect their worth, not because it is wrong to do otherwise, but because it will benefit us. We should behave this way not because we value others for who they are but because we value ourselves. But if that is the only reason to honor human rights—that it serves our interests—why not trample on somebody’s rights if we know we can get away with it? So this effort to create a solid, compelling basis for human rights, without any religious grounding, fails.

 17. The sermon was preached by Martin Luther King Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, July 4, 1965. It can be accessed at http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_the_american_dream/. Many Christian thinkers, like Martin Luther King Jr., ground human rights in the imago Dei. Wolterstorff makes an interesting and unique argument that two things give human beings their unique worth. See Wolterstorff, Journey Toward Justice, pp. 136–39. First is the fact that God wants a relationship with us and has made us all capable of that relationship. The image of God, of course, could be part of what makes humans able to have such a relationship, but Wolterstorff is keen to avoid turning the image of God into just another set of “capacities” (such as rationality, personality, morality, etc.), so that very young or very old or very injured do not have the full image. Second, Jesus Christ, the Son of God and second person of the Trinity, took on our human nature in the Incarnation. “We each have no greater dignity than that. To torture a human being is to torture a creature whose nature he or she shares with the Second Person of the Trinity” (p. 139).

 18. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream.” This speech is available many places on the Internet. See http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm.

 19. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury, 1973).

 20. Stephen E. Bonner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 6–7.

 21. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xxiv.

 22. Richard Bauckham, “Reading Scripture as a Coherent Story,” in The Art of Reading Scripture, ed. Richard B. Hays and Ellen F. Davis (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), p. 45.

 23. Catherine Belsey, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 99.

 24. See the entirety of Hedgehog Review 17, no. 2 (Summer 2015). The issue is titled “The Body in Question.”

 25. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwells, 1996), p. 41.

 26. Ibid., p. 26.

 27. Ibid.

 28. Ibid., p. 41.

 29. Peter Wood, “The Architecture of Intellectual Freedom,” National Association of Scholars, January 26, 2016, www.nas.org/articles/the_architecture_of_intellectual_freedom.

 30. Edward Docx, “Postmodernism Is Dead,” Prospect, July 20, 2011, www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/postmodernism-is-dead-va-exhibition-age-of-authenticism.

 31. Ibid. Fuller quote: “For a while, as communism began to collapse, the supremacy of western capitalism seemed best challenged by deploying the ironic tactics of postmodernism. Over time, though, a new difficulty was created: because postmodernism attacks everything, a mood of confusion and uncertainty began to grow and flourish until, in recent years, it became ubiquitous. . . . And so . . . in the absence of any aesthetic criteria, it became more and more useful to assess the value of works according to the profits they yielded. . . . By removing all criteria, we are left with nothing but the market. The opposite of what postmodernism originally intended.”

 32. Ibid. Richard Bauckham makes a similar criticism: “[Postmodernism] appears liberating in its valorization of consumer lifestyle choices but it is oppressive in the much more realistic sense that affluent postmodern theorists are liable to ignore: it enriches the rich while leaving the poor poor, and it destroys the environment.” In this way it continues the kind of oppression that the modern narratives of progress have always legitimated. Bauckham, “Reading Scripture as a Coherent Story,” p. 46.

 33. Ibid.

 34. Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso Books, 2012).

 35. Ibid., p. 24.

 36. Ibid., p. 8.

 37. Critchley speaks about the “infinite ethical demand” repeatedly in The Faith of the Faithless. See pp. 7 and 17 where he introduces it, but then also pp. 146, 220, 227. Terry Eagleton comments that Critchley’s book characterizes “a whole current of recent leftist thought” in that it “sees the limits of any entirely secularist worldview” for a politics of social justice. He notes how remarkable it is that a range of prominent left thinkers, “from Badiou, Agamben, and Debray to Derrida, Habermas, and Žižek,” have thus turned to “questions of theology,” now “speaking in strenuously Protestant terms of the ‘claims of infinity,’ ‘heeding the call,’ ‘infinite responsibility,’ and the like.” Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 203–4.

 38. Bauckham, “Reading Scripture as a Coherent Story,” p. 46.

 39. Ibid., p. 47.

 40. Ibid., pp. 49–50.

 41. Ibid., pp. 47–48.

 42. Ibid.

 43. Ibid., p. 52.

 44. Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 128.

 45. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982), p. 215.

 46. Psalm 138:6 is quoted from the King James Version. The Old Testament prophets are famous for their denunciations of oppression both inside and outside the believing community. One of the most attractive figures in the Old Testament, Daniel, speaks truth to power, telling a nonbelieving emperor in God’s name that he must stop ruling unjustly (Daniel 4:27). In Amos 1, God denounces the nations surrounding Israel for trafficking in human slavery (Amos 1:6,9), for war crimes (slaughtering innocent noncombatants) (Amos 1:11), and for imperialistic foreign policy (Amos 1:13). Then he turns on Israel, the community of faith, but he goes no easier on it. “They trample on the heads of the poor as on the dust of the ground and deny justice to the oppressed” (Amos 2:7).

Most penetrating is the Old Testament’s use of social justice as a gauge of a person’s true heart faith in God. When the suffering Job faces friends who are skeptical about his love for and faithfulness to God, he points to his zeal for lifting up the poor. He says, for example, that it would be a terrible sin to think of his goods as belonging to him alone. If he had not shared his bread and assets with the poor and the widow (Job 31:17, 19), it would have been a violation of God’s justice (Job 31:23, 28). Had he failed to help the orphan get justice in court, it would have been a great evil (Job 31:21–22). Even more directly, the prophet Isaiah says that God will not regard the prayers of the most religiously observant and otherwise moral people: “When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you. . . . Your hands are full of blood! . . . Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:15–17). When some people point out that they have prayed and fasted religiously, God says: “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter?” (Isaiah 58:6–7).

Jesus continues and extends the Old Testament emphasis on justice. In Mark 12:40 and Luke 20:47 he denounces the religious leaders who “devour widows’ houses” and oppress the poor. This means that, for all their religiosity, they are strangers both to God’s grace and to God’s heart. If they really saw themselves as spiritually bankrupt and in need of God’s free riches of grace, they would be generous and just to those without power or resources (James 2:14–17; 2 Corinthians 8:8–9). According to the Bible, a life poured out in deeds of compassion and justice for the poor is the inevitable sign of a heart changed by the grace of God through faith in Christ.

One New Testament book that is striking for its emphasis on justice for the vulnerable and poor is the gospel of Luke. It shows Jesus’s love and concern for social and racial outcasts such as the immoral woman (Luke 7:37), the collaborators with the Romans (tax collectors) (Luke 19:1-9), and the despised Samaritans (Luke 10:25–37). He infuriates a mob to violence (Luke 4:28) by telling them that God loves other races (Luke 4:25–27), and he says he comes to bring “good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18). Luke records many parables about the importance of giving away one’s money and caring for those in need (Luke 14:15–23). Biblical scholar Joel Green summarizes much of the teaching of the gospel of Luke: “The disposition of one’s possessions signifies the disposition of one’s heart.” Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997), p. 471. If your heart has been changed by grace, and your identity is in Christ, then money and status are no longer matters of either pride or security.

 47. Bauckham, “Reading Scripture as a Coherent Story,” p. 52.

 48. Ibid.

 49. Ibid. Bauckham’s illuminating essay provides more inferences regarding how the biblical metanarrative undermines the tendency to domination. Postmodernists claim that a metanarrative or claim of “truth oppresses because it delegitimizes difference” (p. 52). Bauckham points out how the biblical story does not suppress diverse voices and difference. The Hebrew Scriptures, for example, provide multiple perspectives on the same history. So 1–2 Chronicles reports on the same span of history as Genesis through 2 Kings, offering significantly different views and interpretations of events. In addition there are three short stories—Ruth, Esther, and Jonah—that offer significantly different angles and viewpoints on Israel’s history from those presented in the other books that cover the same histories. And notice that two of those three books give women’s perspectives. The book of Proverbs teaches that, in general, right living produces a good life, but the book of Job speaks of mysterious, innocent suffering and provides a counterpoint. In the New Testament as well the life of Jesus is covered four times by four different authors, providing different emphases and interpretations of the same man’s life, not to mention that Paul often gives us his own commentary on the sayings and events of Jesus’s history. Bauckham argues effectively that, despite all the diversity, there is a unity, and there is a single story line. The effect of the different voices, genres, and viewpoints of the biblical authors is not ultimately discordant, though it is often striking and challenging and ultimately provides an endless richness of insight and understanding. And so the very character of the Bible as literature makes “the biblical metanarrative . . . a story uniquely unsuited to being an instrument of oppression” (p. 52).

 50. Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, pp. 201–8.

Chapter Eleven: Is It Reasonable to Believe in God?

 1. See David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God, pp. 1–86.

 2. C. Stephen Evans, Why Christian Faith Still Makes Sense: A Response to Contemporary Challenges (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), p. 23.

 3. See Richard Swinburne’s unpublished academic paper, “The Existence of God,” available on the University of Oxford users Web site, http://users.ox.ac.uk/~orie0087/pdf_files/General%20untechnical%20papers/The%20Existence%20of%20God.pdf. He writes that theories in physics are considered established by their explanatory power—if they explain what we see. “An inductive argument from phenomena to a cause will be stronger the better the four criteria are satisfied: (1) the more probable it is that the phenomena will occur if the postulated cause occurred, (2) the less probable it is that the phenomena will occur if the postulated cause did not occur, (3) the simpler is the postulated cause, and (4) the better the explanation fits with background knowledge. The better the criteria are satisfied, the more probable it is that the purported explanation is true.” This is how a physical cause can be inductively and rationally inferred from data. In the same way, God as a hypothesis can be compared with other possible accounts of reality.

 4. For a thorough exposition of this argument, see Hart, Experience of God, pp. 87–151. Also see William Lane Craig, The Kalam Cosmological Argument (London: Macmillan, 1979); William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair, “The Kalam Cosmological Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, pp. 101–201; C. Stephen Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 47–73; Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds: Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), pp. 3–25; William C. Davis, “Theistic Arguments,” in Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael J. Murray (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997), pp. 20–46; Robert J. Spitzer, New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010), pp. 105–43.

 5. Evans cites Camus in this way in Why Christian Faith Still Makes Sense, pp. 41–42.

 6. For a thorough exposition of this argument, see Roger White, “Fine-Tuning and Multiple Universes,” Noûs 34, no. 2 (2000): 260–76; William Lane Craig, “Design and the Anthropic Fine-Tuning of the Universe,” in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, ed. Neil Manson (London: Routledge, 2003); Richard Swinburne, “Argument from the Fine-tuning of the Universe,” in Physical Cosmology and Philosophy, ed. John Leslie (New York: Macmillan, 1990); Richard Swinburne, “The Argument to God from Fine-tuning Reassessed,” in Manson, God and Design; Robin Collins, “A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God: The Fine-tuning Design Argument,” in Murray, Reason for the Hope Within; Robin Collins, “The Teleological Argument: An Exploration of the Fine-tuning of the Universe,” in Craig and Moreland, Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, pp. 101–201; Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God, pp. 74–106; Plantinga, God and Other Minds, pp. 95–114; Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 193–306; John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2009), pp. 57–97; Spitzer, New Proofs for the Existence of God, pp. 13–104.

 7. Alan Lightman, “The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2011, http://harpers.org/archive/2011/12/the-accidental-universe/.

 8. Lewis Thomas, “On the Uncertainty of Science,” Key Reporter 46 (Autumn 1980), quoted in Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God, p. 99.

 9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. William Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan and Co., 1929), pp. 30–31. The quote is taken from Kant’s preface to the second edition, B xxxii–xxxiii, and is also quoted in Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God, p. 101.

 10. For full expositions of this argument, see Linville, “The Moral Argument,” pp. 391–448; Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God, pp. 107–48; William C. Davis, “Theistic Arguments,” in Murray, Reason for the Hope Within, pp. 20–46; Hart, The Experience of God, pp. 251–76; George Mavrodes, “Religion and the Queerness of Morality,” in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, ed. Robert Audi and William Wainwright (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 213–26; Robert Adams, “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief,” in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 144–63.

 11. Evans, Why Christian Faith Still Makes Sense, p. 47

 12. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 110.

 13. Ibid.

 14. Ibid., p. 35.

 15. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” in Mortal Questions, Canto Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 166.

 16. Hart, Experience of God, pp. 172–201.

 17. Plantinga, “IV: Mathematics,” in Where the Conflict Really Lies, pp. 284–91. Plantinga’s entire chapter 9, “Deep Concord: Christian Theism and the Deep Roots of Science,” gives a number of arguments regarding how the existence of God better explains the human ability to do science and mathematics, learn from experience, do abstraction, and perceive beauty and simplicity. See pp. 265–306.

 18. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 521 and 525, quoted in David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2014), p. 40.

 19. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 3.

 20. Skeel, True Paradox, p. 44.

 21. See also David Bentley Hart, “Consciousness,” in Experience of God, pp. 238–92; Thomas Nagel, “Consciousness,” in Mind and Cosmos, pp. 35–70; David Skeel, “Ideas and Idea-making,” in True Paradox, pp. 37–62; J. P. Moreland, “The Argument from Consciousness,” in Craig and Moreland, Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, pp. 282–343; Robert C. Koons and George Bealer, eds., The Waning of Materialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

 22. Plantinga’s latest published version of this argument is called “The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism,” in Where the Conflict Really Lies, pp. 307–50. See also Victor Reppert, “The Argument from Reason,” in Craig and Moreland, Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, pp. 344–90.

 23. Quoted in Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, p. 315.

 24. Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, p. 27.

 25. Skeel, True Paradox, p. 65.

 26. Ibid., p. 67.

 27. Hart, Experience of God, p. 281. Hart describes the work of Dutton.

 28. Ibid., p. 283.

 29. Ibid., pp. 279–80.

 30. Skeel, True Paradox, p. 76.

 31. Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), pp. 236–37.

Chapter Twelve: Is It Reasonable to Believe in Christianity?

 1. C. Stephen Evans, Why Christian Faith Still Makes Sense: A Response to Contemporary Challenges (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), p. 27.

 2. Ibid., p. 75.

 3. See Pew Research Center, “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2015,” April 2, 2015, www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/.

 4. Richard Bauckham, Jesus: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 1.

 5. Ibid., p. 2.

 6. This paragraph is based on material in Bauckham, Jesus, p. 3.

 7. James Allan Francis, The Real Jesus and Other Sermons (Philadelphia: Judson, 1926), p. 124.

 8. Even Bart Ehrman, who is highly skeptical of orthodox Christian belief and of traditional Christian interpretations of the Bible, wrote Does Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (New York: HarperOne, 2013). “The view that Jesus existed is held by virtually every [historical] expert on the planet” (p. 4). In the book Ehrman argues very powerfully and vigorously that the evidence for the existence of Jesus is decisive. He also laments that the view that Jesus is a myth is disturbingly resistant to the evidence. Because he himself is agnostic or atheist, he knows that those who hold those views would find it convenient to dismiss Jesus as a mere legendary figure. But, he insists, that is impossible (p. 6).

 9. See Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007); Paul R. Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007); Paul Barnett, Finding the Historical Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009); Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006). A very short but helpful overview of the critique of form criticism is found in Bauckham, Jesus, pp. 6–17.

 10. Bauckham, Jesus, p. 13.

 11. Ibid.

 12. Ibid. See also Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, pp. 240–89.

 13. Bauckham, Jesus, p. 14.

 14. Ibid., p. 14.

 15. Ibid.

 16. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, pp. 39–92.

 17. Eddy and Boyd, Jesus Legend, p. 452.

 18. Ibid.

 19. Jonathan Edwards, “The Excellency of Jesus Christ,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Sermons and Discourses 1734–1738, vol. 19, ed. M. X. Lesser (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 565. The rest of the ideas in this paragraph are from this great sermon by Edwards.

 20. It is well known that the episode of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1–11) is not found in the oldest New Testament manuscripts, so most scholars believe it was not originally part of the Gospel of John but rather is a very old account, from another source, that became attached to the Gospel of John. Also, the Greek grammatical constructions and vocabulary do not match well the rest of the book of John. Nevertheless, “there is little reason for doubting that the event here described occurred” and was preserved accurately. D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity, 1991), p. 333. It is quite in line with the rest of the Gospels’ testimony to Jesus’s character.

 21. See Craig Blomberg, Contagious Holiness: Jesus’ Meals with Sinners (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005).

 22. Michael Green, Who Is This Jesus? (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1990), p. 14. For the ideas in this paragraph I am indebted to Green, pp. 13–14.

 23. Spufford, Unapologetic, p. 109.

 24. Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, 50th anniversary ed. (New York: HarperOne, 2009), p. 83.

 25. Ibid.

 26. For the material in these two paragraphs on the claims of Jesus I am indebted to John Stott, “The Claims of Christ,” in Basic Christianity (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1958), pp. 21–34.

 27. C. S. Lewis, “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1970), p. 168.

 28. Cited in Michael F. Bird et al., How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014), p. 14. See also Martin Hengel, “Christology and New Testament Chronology: A Problem in the History of Earliest Christianity” in Between Jesus and Paul (London: SCM, 1983), and The Son of God: The Origin of Christology and the History of Jewish-Hellenistic Religion (London: SCM, 1975).

 29. Bird, et al., How God Became Jesus, pp. 13–16. See also Larry Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, 2nd ed. (London: T&T Clark, 1998); and Richard Bauckham, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1998).

 30. See the previously cited works by Hurtado and Bauckham on Christology, as well as N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003).

 31. Wright, Resurrection of the Son of God. Also see the more recent Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2010). For an overview of this brief argument in the next few paragraphs, see Bauckham, “Death and a New Beginning,” in Jesus, pp. 104–09.

 32. Celsus (a second-century critic of Christianity), cited in Bauckham, Jesus, p. 105.

 33. Ibid., p. 109.

 34. Quoted in Bauckham, Jesus, p. 108.

 35. On evil and suffering, see my summary of the Christian responses in “The Challenge to the Secular” and “The Problem of Evil,” in Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013), pp. 64–111. On holy war in the Bible, see Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? Coming to Terms with the Justice of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2014); and Joshua Ryan Butler, The Skeletons in God’s Closet: The Mercy of Hell, The Surprise of Judgment, The Hope of Holy War (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2014). On the record of the church in history, see David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); and Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). For a variety of objections to Christianity, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Exposing Myths About Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2012).

 36. D. A. Carson, Gospel According to John, p. 226.

 37. Lewis, God in the Dock, p. 171.

Epilogue: Only in God

 1. Langdon Gilkey, Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).

 2. Ibid., p. 7.

 3. Ibid., p. 16.

 4. Ibid., p. 14.

 5. Ibid., p. 75.

 6. Ibid.

 7. Ibid., p. 74.

 8. Ibid.

 9. Ibid., pp. 68–70.

 10. Ibid., p. 75.

 11. Ibid.

 12. Ibid., p. 76.

 13. Ibid.

 14. Ibid., pp. 77–78.

 15. Ibid., p. 115.

 16. Ibid., p. 90.

 17. Ibid., p. 116.

 18. Ibid., p. 92.

 19. Ibid., pp. 91–92.

 20. Ibid., p. 93.

 21. Ibid., p. 242.

 22. Ibid., p. 192.

 23. Ibid., pp. 197–98.