The New Evangelical Other

Brian Flemming recently came out with a new documentary called The God Who Wasn't There.  I have not seen it.  I don't want to see it.  This post is dedicated to its marketing campaign.  This ridiculous little flick is billed as an expose, a brutal truth-telling escapade, a revolutionary documentary, etc. etc.  The tag-line is "Bowling for Columbine did it to the gun culture, Super Size Me did it to fast food, now The God Who Wasn't There does it to religion."  Note the use of the word "religion."  This movie is not talking about "religion."  It has a great big picture of Jesus' supposed face on the cover.  It raves about how it "pulls no punches" with Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ.  The trailer only mentions Jesus' name.  It's talking about Christianity, which, in the modern west, is referred to as "religion" not because the arguments leveled against "religion" apply to all "religions" but as a semantic undermining reminder of the particularism of Christianity's truth-claims, and a subtle reaffirmation of the unfounded notion that to be an atheist or an agnostic is more open, cleverer, and less attached to dogma, which is nonsense to anyone who is willing to think about it.

This movie is bigotry, plain and simple.  It simply treats Christians ("the religious") as the Other, treating us as if we were ignorant, and pissing all over our beliefs without consulting a single respected scholar of those beliefs - not that I want them to.  Why would I want a documentary filmmaker, in the days of willful bias, to go and talk to a true Christian scholar like Wright, Gundry, the O'Donovans, Milbank, or any one of hundreds of skilled historians and theologians, only to do a malicious clip job on their interview without even attempting to do justice to them (such as Expelled)?  They act as if this has never been done before!  It has been done since Christianity saw its advent!  It has been done literally for millennia!  Voltaire made the exact same attack over two hundred years ago, and there has been a heavy and constant flow of "ground-breaking" "never before seen" idiocy ever since Enlightenment scholars realized the public would buy it if they rewrote history around a materialist framework without actually doing any new research.  But of course, this is all very clear - we get a new one every few years, so what's the big fuss about?  The difference between this movie (and the recent atheist movement) that makes it much more dangerous than before is that in all its condescending rhetoric, it is in reality meant for the unwashed masses.

You are meant to believe that if you do not believe in God, you must be smarter than someone that does.  You are meant to fear people that believe in God due to there irrationality and lack of judgement, as evidenced by their belief in God, which is irrational.  The same argument, incidentally, was made by John McCain, questioning Barack Obama's judgement over his association with William Ayers - if you do x, you are irrational and cannot be trusted with y.  Zizek notes in his In Defense of Lost Causes that this case was made against subversives in a certain communist regime, where, if you were not communist, you must be insane, as only someone who was not sane would ever dream of being anything but a communist, and the patients were brutally treated accordingly.  Sam Harris openly advocates the shunning and ridicule of Christians, as if the arguments were just so clear that it should be regarded as a pathology at worst or childishness at best, to be thought immature - the argument is so repetitive that it numbs the mind to have to point it out again and again, and no actual intelligence or information is required for it to take hold.  You just are smarter than those silly religious nuts.

This is extremely dehumanizing to those who still believe in Christ.  The term "belief" has been so mangled that even speaking of "belief in Christ" conjures up arguments about irrationality and lack of evidence.  My point here is not that you respect someone's right to believe that for which there is no warrant - not at all.  My point here is that the discussion has diminished into this hostile top-of-the-lungs shouting with fingers in ears that is not prepared to admit one iota of transcendental truth simply from an irrational unwillingness to reconsider the terms of the argument.  I believe Jacques Lacan said (though one does not need him to point it out) that he who determines the terms of the argument wins.  Well, the materialists have their terms (unaided empiricism), and they are determining them through this backwards propaganda which, in the name of science (that is, the unbridled marketplace of ideas), hypocritically presents one side of the story as not only irrevocable truth, but suppressed, newly discovered truth!  In the mere trailer - the TRAILER - of the movie, it is stated that evangelicals cope with the reality of Jesus' non-existence, which is apparently being spoken about for the first time (otherwise, why would anyone go see this stupid movie?), by ignoring it - as if they all knew and just didn't want to talk about it.  As if they didn't just disagree.  As if, again, you were smarter and more honest than they, humble viewer.

Here's a thought - go read a book.  Go invest your time in some good old cool media, which is what all those people they're interviewing do, instead of allowing people with agendas to force-feed your senses.  Instead of making fun of people for believing in Jesus, why don't you go read the book of Romans, or read some up-to-date scholarship (with a bibliography - emergent church crap doesn't count) just to see exactly how dumb it is - to live in that ignorant evangelical world.  Don't read Matt Taibbi's barbed account of a backward, cultish church - go spend a Sunday morning at a local Anglican or Presbyterian Church, and talk to the pastor.  You will find a) that you actually don't know anything about archeology, b) that neither does Sam Harris, c) that one's ideas are deeply affected by all kinds of unscientific experiences - including yours, and d) that Christians are no scarier than anyone else, and that you will, more likely than not, receive free food when you're hanging around the older ones.