Perspective and Apologetics, Part 2

I was standing in line at a coffee shop the other day…week…month, maybe.  Time seems to be flying of late.  A man barged in front of me and insisted that the barista give him a refill.  He had a fairly thick accent, so it took me a minute to realize that he was asking for Starbucks dark roast.

It took the barista a couple more repeats.  Finally she said, “I’m sorry, we don’t have that.”

The reason for that was pretty simple: I was standing in a Caribou Coffee.[1]

Mr. Starbucks begrudgingly took a refill of not-Starbucks coffee and walked away.  I stepped up to the counter, looked at the barista and said, “Wait, did you just apologize for not being Starbucks?”  She just kinda shrugged.

I’m sure that anyone who read my last post on this subject and/or the title of this one can see where I’m going with this.

Your average religious apologist wants you to apologize because he[2] is in the wrong place at the wrong time.  That’s really all evangelism amounts to.  You are walking around, enjoying your day and he pops out and says, “Did you know you’re a sinner?”  It’s really kinda cute, but in an, “Aww, bless your heart,”[3] sort of way. Your would-be evangelist is trying to get you to agree to terms, those terms being, “What you are doing is wrong because according to my interpretation of the world it is.”  That interpretation of the world is, of course, firmly grounded in the Bible as that guy understands the book.[4]  Or, at least, as he understands the Bible according to the few pages he’s actually read and how an accepted authority claims the Bible is laid out.

If you choose to engage Annoyie McEvangipants[6] he’ll try to get you to assent to his interpretation of reality.  If you don’t, he’ll try to get you to apologize for having the temerity of being in Caribou Coffee when he really fucking wants some goddamn Starbucks.  When it gets right down to it, I’m not sure what “apologist” actually means, but I’m pretty sure it ought to mean, “Dickbag who wants you to apologize for not being exactly like him.”

The fascinating thing about apologists, though, is that they don’t actually draw a line between, say, “Christian” and “Muslim” or “Christian” and “atheist.”  The line they draw is between “me” and “everyone else except maybe those people right over there.”  For instance, Tim Tebow and his dad are heavily involved in Christian missions to the Philippines, which is kinda weird when you consider that the Philippines have a long tradition of Christianity.  They’re 95% Christian, in fact, which makes the Philippines more Christian than America and its 80% Christianity.  The problem, though, is that the Philippines are overwhelmingly Catholic, which is the wrong kind of Christianity.

Statistically speaking, the Tebows are engaged in a worthless mission.  If they pull aside 20 people in the street in Manila, 19 of them are likely to be Christians.  That’s just how the math works out.  What makes that mission worthwhile (in the eyes of, um, someone, I guess) is that bit where the odds are also really good that most of those 19 Christians will be the wrong kind of Christian.  It’s this distinction that makes all the difference.

Christianity is all a big game of identifying the tribal markers.  You can even widen that out from “Christians” to “proponents of Abrahamic religious traditions” and say basically the same thing.  You can further widen that from “proponents of Abrahamic religious traditions” to “people who are religious and/or believe in some sort of higher power.”  A Baptist and a Catholic will agree that there’s a god and Jesus is the path.  A Methodist and a Shi’ite will agree that the Bible is the foundation of tradition.  An Orthodox Jew and a Hindu will agree that there is some sort of supernatural power keeping an eye on things.

The labels, however, matter.  The apologists want to be able to lie with statistics and that’s really hard to do if you only take the big or the small label.  If the apologist wants to push that there really should be prayer in school because it’s a Christian nation he needs that 80% number that includes Baptists and Catholics and Lutherans and Episcopalians and what have you.  If the apologist wants to push the breakdown of society angle, then he needs to go with the, say, 20% of society who are the exact same type of Christian and complain about all the non-his-type-of-Christian heathens out there ruining it for everyone.

This is where it gets convoluted.  Most people only see this interaction on a macro level.  Basically, this whole thing boils down to harnessing the wallets of the 20% of real Christians to remind the country that 80% of everybody is a Christian in order to marginalize and/or take away the rights of those poor saps who simply aren’t Christian at all.  It works at the local level, too, though.

If you see someone out in the street evangelizing there’s a pretty good chance that a church somewhere sent that person to that street.  At the very least that person is going to be getting the blessing of the church at some point, usually by showing up, delivering a message as an itinerant evangelist, and then asking the people in the pews for money.  This works on several different levels.  Big churches support missionaries.  The church I grew up in financially supported a whole bunch of missionaries and had a yearly missions week, wherein the missionaries came back and preached and let everyone know how great their work was and asked for money.  I also knew a guy when I was in college out in the vast cornfields of western Illinois who went to all the tiny, local churches and did special services where he talked about all his great missions work and then asked for money.

In case you’re wondering, the, “Asked for money,” bit is kinda key…

This whole system only works in a world where people believe that somewhere out there right now there are scores of people just ripe for the Christian harvest.  In reality, the apologist is actually that angry, confused man demanding Starbucks coffee in a Caribou.  Hell, depending on who he’s talking to he could be more akin to an angry man demanding Starbucks coffee in a library.

I want to unpack the attitudes of apologists.  I want to attempt to convey the perspectives of those who attempt to peddle their beliefs out in the public sphere.  It’s why I’m going to keep running the perspectives and apologetics posts.  It’s why I’m going to start looking at specific apologetics books.  I don’t so much care about the arguments themselves as the attitudes.

Oh, and I don’t intend to focus solely on Christian apologetics, either.  I won’t say I’ll be equal opportunity, but I’m sure as hell going to try.  The problem as I see it isn’t with Christians, it’s with apologists.

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[1]To the uninitiated: Caribou Coffee is a not-quite-national chain.  It’s basically Pacific Northwest, Midwest, and maybe a bit on the West Coast and East Coast.  I forget.  The primary benefit it offers over Starbucks is that it doesn’t sell over-roasted crap and call it “coffee.”

Given a choice I’ll take a good independent coffee shop every time.  After that I’ll take Caribou, Dunkin’ Donuts, or LavAzza (that might be Chicago only, I’m not sure).  Given a choice between Starbucks and no coffee, I’ll take no coffee.  That said, for Frappucino-type stuff it’s kind of a wash, but you’re not really buying such things for the coffee, anyway.

[2]I’ma use the masculine gender pronoun in this one BECAUSE IT’S EASIER, OKAY?  Gosh, leave me alone, Steve.

[3]For the uninitiated, “Bless your heart,” is Texan/Southern for, “Fuck you, sancho.”

[4]All such discussion needs to be based in this simple fact.  The evangelist is saying that the world is X because the Bible says X, but what he’s actually saying is that the world is X because he thinks the Bible says X.  This is how there are approximately 14 more Christian denominations than there are Christians in the world.[5]

[5]Not intended to be a factual statement, but intended to be humorous hyperbole.  Deal with it.

[6]You, of course, don’t have to.  A couple Fridays before Christmas I was about two steps behind my sister as we crossed State Street in Chicago.  Some guy popped out of the early-Friday-afternoon-Christmas-on-goddamn-State-Street crowd and said to her, “Excuse me, can I ask you something about your hair?”  She said, “No,” and just kept walking.  This was the correct response, but by the same token if he’d popped out and done the same with me and I wasn’t busy hanging out with my family I would have totally said, “Sure,” because it would have been amusing as hell.  There was zero doubt in her mind or mine that this was some evangelist and he would have had nothing worthwhile to say but managed to be a major annoyance.

Comments

[Michael Mock]

"This is how there are approximately 14 more Christian denominations than there are Christians in the world."

I LOLed.

[Janet]

I will defend your use of the masculine pronoun, Geds. Call me odd, but when I see the new fashion of writing 'she' where one would have traditionally used 'he', it actually feels patronizing. I don't want a separate but equal pronoun. Equality of the sexes means that anyone can be a he.