In Defence of the Christians

Part 1: We all worship something

When we hosted our first Free Speech in Medicine conference in the fall of 2022, I noticed something curious about the speakers and attendees. A disproportionate number of them—people like Jay Battacharya, Francis Christian, Trish Wood and many others—were Christians. Not just people who went to church on Sunday or grew up in nominally Christian families, but genuine, resolute people of faith. It got me thinking. What was it about Christians that allowed them to avoid—at least in greater than average numbers—the “groupthink” that seemed to be sweeping over most of our fellow citizens? What was it that gave them the courage to speak up and resist, when so many others gave in to irrational fear and the will of the mob?

At first glance, I wouldn’t have pegged this potty-mouthed rebel as a Christian…

The answer might be found in psychologist Mattias DeSmet’s description of what he terms “mass formation” – a kind of collective, population level delusion or quasi-hypnotic state which leads susceptible individuals to go along with the crowd rather than think rationally for themselves during times of uncertainty and stress. The factors that predispose a population to the development of mass formation, according to DeSmet, include widespread feelings of social isolation, absence of a sense of meaning and purpose in life, high levels of free-floating anxiety (i.e., anxiety which is not attributable to any specific thing) and high levels of free-floating frustration or aggression. When these conditions are met in a large enough percentage of the population, he says, the mob is easily led to seize on a specific fear — such as a novel coronavirus or “systemic racism”— to the exclusion of common sense and balanced, rational thinking.

Oddly, once a specific fear has been identified, it can provide a measure of relief because:

1) the anxiety and frustration is no longer “free-floating,” but attached to something concrete and therefore potentially controllable

2) a war against this newly identified threat can then be fought alongside fellow citizens, thus ameliorating the sense of social isolation and

3) the fight against this “threat” provides a strong sense of meaning and purpose.

We Are All in This Creepy Mass Formation Together….except for the witches and anti-vaxxers, whom we shall hunt down and burn at the stake

So, back to the Christians. Why do Christians seem to be in a better position to resist the will of the mob when it comes to things like pandemic policy and identity politics—and, relatedly, why do they keep showing up on our conference speaker list? (Hint: It’s not because we went looking for them. In the vast majority of cases we knew nothing about their religious beliefs when we first reached out to them.)

One reason might be that Christians—and people of faith in general—have better than average coping skills and overall mental health. They have improved feelings of social connectedness and a greater sense of purpose than the non-religious. They report less depression, and have an improved ability to cope with adverse events. (They also make better lifestyle choices and live, on average, four years longer than non-religious people, but I digress). All of this is backed up by mountains of data.

Exactly why religious people experience better mental health has never been fully sorted out, but there are some plausible theories. It could the deep social bonds formed within religious communities. Or the emphasis on gratitude, which has been independently shown to reduce stress and feelings of depression. Or perhaps the sense of purpose which accompanies the belief that we’re created to serve something higher than ourselves.

Whatever the underlying reason(s), highly religious people are significantly less likely to meet DeSmet’s preconditions for susceptibility to mass formation and “groupthink.” Perhaps this is what GK Chesterton was getting at when he famously said: “When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

A corollary of Chesterton’s dictum might be that if you want to make people believe “anything” (women can have penises, masking your toddler will save grandma, math is racist, this time communism really will lead to utopia, 2 + 2 = 5, etc.) you should first get them to stop believing in God.

Karl Marx hated God, and argued that religion simply created an “illusion” of freedom. The religious were too damned content to start a revolution! The Christian emphasis on forgiveness, humility, and the idea that we are all tainted by sin (“judge not lest ye be judged”) certainly made it difficult to divide people up neatly into victims and oppressors—and then to summon up sufficient resentment among the former to overthrow the latter. Only by giving up religion, Marx believed, could a glorious utopia on earth be achieved. Not surprisingly, the high priests and priestesses of post-modern victimhood culture—arguably Marx’s intellectual successors—also seem to have a hate on for God, and for Christianity in particular, as evidenced by the widespread tendency for Canadian churches to “mysteriously” burn to the ground while our “progressive” Prime Minister sighs dramatically and says this is unfortunate but “understandable.”

An Anglican Church burns. “Understandable,” says Justin Trudeau.

For many decades now, it has been unfashionable to call yourself a Christian on most university campuses. The so-called “new atheists” (or as I prefer to refer to them, fundamentalist atheists) led by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, have perpetuated the idea that religion is nothing more than out-dated superstition, mere fairy-tales that have been superseded by science; that if we could only rid ourselves of the last vestiges of these primitive, divisive beliefs, we would emerge into a world dominated by rational thinking and scientifically derived ethical principles. (This didn’t seem to work well for Harris, as Chris wrote about in a previous Substack…)

What Dawkins, Harris and other prominent atheists seem unable to grasp is that the core Western humanist values they embrace and take as self-evident—“the worth and dignity of the individual and the right of every human to the greatest possible freedom and fullest possible development compatible with the rights of others”—are inherently, undeniably Christian values. They do not derive from science or “nature,” they derive from the Bible. Across history and across cultures, these values are decidedly unnatural. They only seem natural to us in the West because we are immersed in a Judeo-Christian tradition so old and so pervasive that we can’t conceive of anything different.

Tom Holland, an historian who spent his early career studying ancient Greek and Roman history, came to this conclusion after unsuccessfully trying to inhabit the thinking of the ancient pagan peoples he was studying. Holland, a nominally Christian but (at the time) non-religious Englishman, found it impossible to get inside the mind of an individual (or a society) who felt it was perfectly acceptable, for example, to rape one’s slave girls and, when they became pregnant, commit infanticide without even the slightest tinge of guilt. In his 2019 bestseller Dominion, he wrote:

The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilisation into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organised, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted.

Whether you are a religious person or not, the question to be answered now, the question on which the fate of what we call the West (or what used to be known as Christendom) may depend, is whether the Judeo-Christian values which have long defined us can be maintained in the face of declining religious belief and practice. Can a culture which has lost its connection to the source of its values protect those values against the onslaught of new pseudo-religions like wokeism, or (as Ayaan Hirsi-Ali has recently highlighted) the determined march of radical Islamism?

Has the West’s “God-shaped hole” become a portal through which monsters can rush in? Tom Holland certainly fears that this is the case:

“There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.” These words…were spoken by Heinrich Himmler. Here, in his conviction that Homo sapiens had no claim to a special status, and that it was conceit for humans to imagine themselves somehow superior to the rest of creation, was all the sanction he needed for genocide.

He, at any rate, had understood what licence was opened up by the abandonment of Christianity. Perhaps it is this that lies behind our readiness to accuse those with whom we disagree of being fascists, or Nazis, or Hitler: the dread of what might happen should such words cease to be taken as insults. Certainly, the humanist assumption that atheism and liberalism go together is plainly just that: an assumption. It is not truth that science offers moralists, but a mirror. Racists identify it with racist values; liberals with liberal values. The primary dogma of humanism — “that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others” — finds no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated. The well-spring of humanist values lie not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history: the history of Christianity.

“Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” —David Foster Wallace

“The decisive question for man,” Carl Jung asserted, “is this: Is he related to something infinite or not?” For decades, perhaps centuries, our secular rationalist culture has told us that the answer to this question is “NO.” The story we were told is that science could give us all the answers and provide us with a moral framework, that drugs and psychotherapy could heal our lost and troubled souls, and that “progress” would continue to improve our lives forever. Meanwhile, we’ve grown increasingly miserable and depressed, we numb ourselves with more and more drugs and alcohol, we fall prey to irrational, cult-like ideologies, and we kill ourselves in record numbers—with and without the government’s help. It’s hard to avoid the sense that our culture is falling apart around us. As Paul Kingsnorth puts it, “We once thought that by abolishing religion we had got ahead of the rest of the world. But suddenly, this story is being told less confidently. The wind has changed, and secular liberal modernity no longer looks like a good bet for winner of the End of History board game.”

But perhaps this is not the end of history. Perhaps, as Oswald Spengler and others have asserted, history moves in cycles, with the next cycle destined to bring a swing back toward a relationship with the infinite. Are we already seeing signs of this?

More on this in Part 2!