Why You’re Christian

Author: David Perell URL: https://perell.com/essay/why-youre-christian/ One-line: Even self-described atheists in the West have unconsciously inherited a Christian moral framework — belief in human rights and human equality is “self-evident” only if you smuggle in God; to be an educated citizen you must understand the lineage of your own beliefs.

Key claims

• Becoming an educated citizen starts with understanding the lineage of your beliefs. Most people never ask “why do I believe what I believe?” Every worldview is worth breaking down to First Principles.
• Western law and the idea of human rights rest on Christianity, not just the Enlightenment. John Locke’s theory of natural rights assumes God owns us; “human equality is self-evident only if you assume, as Locke did, that God has given us the natural rights that modern Americans take for granted.” John Adams: the Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious People.”
• Without an eternal construct, Morality is just consensus — and consensus shifts. “Today’s virtues can become tomorrow’s vices. Like a sand castle, the tenets of morality can be destroyed by the tide of public opinion.” “Without the word of God, all we have are opinions.”
• This is the Fyodor Dostoevsky problem: absent God and an afterlife, why live righteously? “Why shouldn’t I cut another man’s throat, rob, and steal?” Echoes Pascal’s Wager.
• Science can’t ground values. In the language of David Hume, science tells us how the world is, not how it ought to be.
• You can’t pick and choose theology. The “spiritual but not religious” crowd treats religion as a “useful lie” — community without communion, the kingdom without the king, morals without miracles. But “you can’t pick and choose theology without becoming a slave to intellectual fashions or destroying the integrity of those ideas.”
• Christianity has a self-destruct mechanism. 1 Corinthians 15:17 — its truth hinges on the literal historical reality of the Resurrection. Even Christopher Hitchens conceded that without belief in the risen Christ “you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”
• The closing irony: society’s loudest secular critics often hold the most Christian values of all — “they want Christianity without Christ” and are “intellectually bankrupt on the topic of human rights.”

Highlights

• Becoming an educated citizen starts with understanding the lineage of your beliefs.
• John Locke, whose intellectual ink is tattooed all over the Declaration of Independence, knew this. His theory of natural rights is based on the idea that God owns us as property. Human equality is self-evident only if you assume, as Locke did, that God has given us the natural rights that modern Americans take for granted.

  Kyle: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

• To that end, the pillars of American law rest as much on the Bible as on the writings of Enlightenment thinkers.
• While they might not realize it, nine times out of ten, they’ve unconsciously inherited a belief in human rights and are unaware of the foundational ideas which underpin that belief.
• In other words: If you believe in human rights but don’t believe in God, you need a logical explanation for why they’re self-evident.
• Tom Holland has called it the “most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history.”
• Yes, we credit the Greeks for shaping our view of the good life. But even they were interpreted through a Christian lens. Aristotle through Aquinas, Plato through St. Augustine.
• If humans are in the same category of every other animal, there is no intellectual scaffolding to uphold either human rights or the legal equality of man.
• Even if a group of people can agree on how to treat people in the moment, consensus can change at any moment. Today’s virtues can become tomorrow’s vices. Like a sand castle, the tenets of morality can be destroyed by the tide of public opinion.

  Kyle: Does Morality exist without an eternal construct? #Gospel Topics to Explore

• Without the word of God, all we have are opinions.
• This problem is one of the central themes of Dostoyevsky’s writing: in an 1878 letter, he asked why he should live righteously in a world without a god. Assuming that there is no afterlife and that the police wouldn’t catch him after a wrongdoing, he asks: “Why shouldn’t I cut another man’s throat, rob, and steal?”
• To Fyodor Dostoevsky’s point, without the hand of God to shape human morality, many people will conclude that the benefits of a righteous life aren’t worth the costs.

  Kyle: Pascal’s Wager: “Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas if God does exist, he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell).”

• But in practice, no matter how much we’d like it to be otherwise, an objective and unchanging belief in human rights can be justified by faith and faith alone.
• Maybe it’s because, as a post-Enlightenment society, we crave scientific explanations for our beliefs.
• In the language of David Hume, science can tell us how the world is, but not how it ought to be.
• One reason we underestimate how much Christianity has influenced our thinking is that we’ve removed religious education from our schools.
• That thinking continues into adulthood, where we’ll binge-read biographies about some hot new tech CEO while skipping the one about the most important figure in Western history: Jesus Christ. #Biographies
• We should study religion not to dogmatically accept faith, but to understand the foundations of our worldview. As we do, we should ask ourselves: “Is Christianity true?” And if you think it’s bogus, then: “Why do I let these ideas influence my worldview so strongly?”
• Intellectuals in particular have tried to silence religious explanations for the creation of the world, and the decline of religious affiliation shows that their ideas are catching on.
• The problem is that you can’t pick and choose theology without becoming a slave to intellectual fashions or destroying the integrity of those ideas in the first place.
• When this “spiritual, but not religious” crowd compliments religion, they do it backhandedly. Religion is a “useful lie,” they say. The argument goes like this: Even if religious ideas aren’t literally true, the world is a safer and more prosperous place when we buy into them. Thus, we should deceive ourselves and become religious even though — wink, wink — it’s false.

  Kyle: Reminded me of the Cecil O. Samuelson talk, “Testimony of Jesus Christ” (link). Samuelson, as Europe North Area President, was invited to a “alternative religions” seminar at the University of Nottingham’s Divinity School. After explaining Latter-day Saint beliefs, the central question came: “In light of the many differences… how do you justify calling yourselves Christians?” Helped by heaven, he borrowed a Bible and asked the clerics and divinity students three questions — to answer only to themselves: Kyle: (1) “Do you accept your Bible’s version of the origins of Jesus Christ?… that He was literally the physical Son of God the Father and Mary, a mortal mother?” — Latter-day Saints accept this without reservation. (2) “Do you accept your Bible’s account of Jesus’s mortal ministry?… the miracles He performed and the organization of His Church with Apostles having His authority?” — accepted without qualification. (3) “Do you accept your Bible’s account of Christ’s Passion, His experience in the Garden of Gethsemane, His Crucifixion on Golgotha, and His literal Resurrection on the third day?” — the most agitated wanted to call the Resurrection merely symbolic; some doubted individual life after death. Samuelson bore testimony of its literal truthfulness, then asked: “Given the answers to the questions I have just posed, who do you think deserves to be called Christian?” One graduate student elbowed the man who had asked the original question and said, “It looks like he got you there.”

• Christopher Hitchens, who was one of Christianity’s fiercest critics, responded by saying: “I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”

  Kyle: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. … But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” — C.S. Lewis #Mere Christianity Kyle: “The fundamental principles of our religion are the testimony of the Apostles and Prophets, concerning Jesus Christ, that He died, was buried, and rose again the third day, and ascended into heaven; and all other things which pertain to our religion are only appendages to it.” — Joseph Smith

• Echoing Hitchens’ point, Christianity is unique among religions because it has a self-destruct mechanism. The book of Corinthians says that the truth of Christianity hinges upon the resurrection’s historical reality — meaning that the story of Christ dying on the cross and coming back to life must be literally true.

  Kyle: 1 Corinthians 15:17. And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.

• I realized that society’s most passionate critics, most of whom claim to be secular, usually have the most Christian values of all. Though they pride themselves on evidence-based thinking, they’re intellectually bankrupt on the topic of human rights.
• Religious Atheists: It’s a group of people who want Christianity without Christ. They want community without communion, the kingdom without the king, and like Thomas Jefferson, morals without miracles.
• Though I’m closer to an atheist than a believer, I shiver at the nihilistic conclusions of a world without God.
• They don’t believe in God because there’s no empirical reason to believe in him. But at the same time, they believe in human rights, which can be justified only by the very God they don’t believe in.

How it connects

• David Perell — author; pairs with his other faith-and-ideas pieces (e.g. Peter Thiel’s Religion).
• Christianity / Morality / First Principles — the core argument: examine the lineage of your moral beliefs.
• Tom Holland — the “most transformative development in Western history” framing of Christianity’s legacy.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky / Pascal’s Wager — the wager that a world without God can’t ground righteousness.
• C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity) — the “liar, lunatic, or Lord” trilemma Kyle pairs with Hitchens.
• Christopher Hitchens — the atheist who concedes the literal Resurrection is the dividing line of being Christian.
• Cecil O. Samuelson — the Nottingham “are you Christians?” story Kyle annotates this essay with.