Victims of Truth

Truth is an arbitrary thing, a force, a lifestyle that makes demands of us. If we fail to follow truth, we become liars. If we want not to be liars, then we must be subject to the reality of truth and become victims of its force.

I was standing in Barnes and Noble, glancing at the classic philosophical works— you know, those books that people like to quote, but few like to read—stacked there alongside some younger philosophers. On the bottom shelf, turned spine outwards against the hush of the bookstore, was a smaller book entitled The Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam by Michel Onfray. I picked it up and read the publisher’s blurb inside the dust jacket.

"Documenting the ravages of religious intolerance over the centuries, the author makes a strong case against the three religions for their obsession with purity and their contempt for reason and intelligence, individual freedom, desire, and the human body, as well as their disdain for women, sexuality, and pleasure. In their place, all three demand faith and belief, obedience, and submission, and extolling the next life to the detriment of the here and now.

"Tightly argued, this is a work that is sure to stir debate on the role of religion in American society—and politics."

Stir debate is right. Onfray had me on the defensive before I finished reading the publisher’s take on it. I put the book back onto the shelf, changed. He was accusing me—that’s how I took it—for “contempt of reason and intelligence” and more: a set of nicely polished fighting words.

Even though I have a small interest in Christian apologetics and believe Christianity to be a reasonable faith, and even though I like to pretend to have a dim understanding of a few of the objections to Christianity, this book spooked me. Mainly because who was I, this rustic hick, to singlehandedly debunk this “tightly argued” case by a French philosopher? What do we as Anabaptists do with accusations like this? The easiest way to rest our minds would be to blame the religious intolerance on the nominal Christianity of the Bible belt, the Christianity that amounts to a life hack, used as a strategy and mascot in politics and war, the one symbolized on the flags of the Crusaders. “We are Anabaptists,” we could say. “Our Christianity is entirely different than the militant version Onfray is describing.” Having thus written the book off on such a major premise, we could rest easy, shelve the book, and call the rest hooey. After all, a book is a passive object, never demanding we answer it. Or does it?

A lifestyle of truth is a demanding one. Truth is not passive but a consistent call to action and direction, no matter the media. All of it calls our name, and a honest man finds he must answer. A truthful man is morally restricted from lapsing into comfortable erstwhile ignorance. If truth is of God and lies are of the devil, and if God cannot lie and the devil can only lie—or when he does use truth it is to lie—then truth must tend to Godliness and all untruth to the devil. Taking it a step farther, if we refuse a truth—ignoring it as uncomfortable, difficult, or painful—we turn against God, whose personhood is to truth as wetness is to water.

If this is not heresy, then, all truth must be entertained by the God-fearing man. Perhaps we refuse to read C.S. Lewis because he married a divorced woman, or we categorically reject a criticism like The Atheist Manifesto because most of it is a lie. But we shortchange ourselves. An atheist may be our most objective critic. We would lose much in the way of spiritual insight if we decided Lewis’ mistake was flagrant enough to cancel out all he has contributed to Christian literature. If we only read books by Anabaptist authors, get our theology in-house and secondhand, and carefully Bowdlerize and sanitize all forms of media, we begin the entropic spiral of a closed system.

In 2014, when fundamentalist darling Ken Ham went up against Bill Nye the Science Guy to debate Creationism v. Evolution, Nye asked Ham, “What would change your mind?” The public interpreted Ken Ham’s reply as, “Nothing.” There was a bit more to his answer, but that was the gist given to the public.

As a debating strategy, Ham’s response was blow to his credibility: it merely showed his opponents that he had more allegiance to his Version of Truth than to Truth itself. For our purposes, let’s twist the structure of this concept to suit our needs. Would this be a healthy filter to read The Atheist Manifesto through? Nothing shown here will change my mind.

Strapping down our brains, believing harder, shutting our minds off to the flow of uncomfortable truth, only to avoid doubt, is an escapist tactic that gets us a simplistic theology and an entrenched culture and, in the long run, a dogma that caricatures the living, proactive, and radical teachings of Jesus Christ. Doubt, and the search for truth it demands, can be the impetus for the propagation and internalization of our faith. Truth thrown into our path conflicting with our current mode of life does not mean we become indiscriminate iconoclasts destroying all tradition and prior modes; neither does it mean wallowing in the ambivalence of not knowing. We pursue God, He is Truth, and that is an active and desperate process. However, not knowing is a tenable position, if a dire one, demanding at once of us humility and the responsibility to seek and find.

“If I know anything of intellectual honesty,” Thomas Merton writes in No Man is an Island, “I do not intend to divorce myself from the Catholic tradition, but neither do I intend to accept points of that tradition blindly, and without understanding, and without making them really my own.” How will the living, historical faith go on if we do not make it our own? And how will we make it our own without allowing truth to lead us in scary places? Perhaps we, or at least a few of us, should have the ability to read The Atheist Manifesto and be willing to take the objective view, grant validity to some of its claims, and have the basis of truth to debunk the rest.

I have not read The Atheist Manifesto. Maybe I am fearful I would be led into fantastic lands of abstractions and unreality. Or maybe I am being realistic with my current purchase on truth, waiting until I have more stomach to digest truth from nonsense. Maybe I am waiting until I can dissect heresy with my Sword, or until I have such a deep, existential relationship with Jesus Christ that such an argument is irrelevant. Or, maybe, I am afraid the truth might change me.