Tag Archives: faith

Mar 31 2026

Christian Nationalism

One of the recurring themes on this blog is epistemic humility — the discipline of recognizing the real limits of what we know. A key part of that discipline is staying genuinely open to perspectives beyond our own. This is harder than it sounds. When a particular view resonates with us, it’s tempting to stop looking around, assume we’ve arrived at the truth, and start filtering everything else through that lens. Once we’re there, rationalization comes easily.

The pattern shows up on all sides. Some Christians seize on a handful of unresolved challenges to evolutionary theory and conclude the whole framework must be false — conveniently setting aside the enormous body of evidence that supports it. Some atheists point to the Crusades and treat that history as a decisive refutation of Christian faith itself, ignoring centuries of counterevidence and the faith’s positive contributions to human civilization. In both cases, a real and legitimate concern gets weaponized into a sweeping verdict that the evidence doesn’t actually support.

Christian Nationalism is a prominent contemporary example of the same dynamic working in a different direction. At its core, Christian Nationalism holds that the United States was specially established by God to fulfill a divine purpose, and that the country should therefore be governed according to Christian principles — either explicitly or implicitly. A softer version of the argument doesn’t go quite that far but insists that America’s Christian heritage must be protected and privileged at the institutional level. Either way, the practical result tends toward a kind of mandated religious legalism.

I think Christian Nationalism is mistaken, both politically and theologically. But perhaps more relevant to the epistemic point here is that many of the ideologies associated with it are rejected by large numbers of Christians and Christian denominations. It represents one particular strand of the faith — a vocal and visible one — not Christianity as a whole. Treating it as the defining face of Christianity is as much an overgeneralization as treating the Crusades that way.

And yet that overgeneralization is increasingly common. Christian Nationalism has become, for many skeptics, the latest exhibit in the case that Christianity is obviously false or obviously dangerous. The move is understandable — these are real and serious problems — but it’s still a logical leap. The failures of a particular political-religious movement don’t settle the deeper questions about the truth of the faith’s fundamental claims. Confident as that reasoning can feel, it mistakes a legitimate criticism for a decisive refutation.

This blog doesn’t traffic in dogmatic conclusions — with perhaps one exception: a fairly firm conviction that dogmatism itself is a trap. So I’m not interested in defending Christian Nationalism, which I think represents a genuine distortion of the faith. But I’m equally skeptical of the move to reject Christianity wholesale on the basis of its worst expressions. The more honest and intellectually productive path is to push past those surface-level examples and engage with the broader tradition and its actual claims. That engagement won’t deliver certainty. But it does require the kind of open-minded, evidence-sensitive thinking that Christian Nationalism, ironically, seems least willing to model.

(Note, this essay was created with assistance from an AI, but the ideas and overall organization are mine.)

Sep 28 2025

Kelvin’s Clouds and Pascal’s Wager

A recent comment on my latest post got me thinking about how Pascal’s Wager compares with the perspective I’ve been developing here.

Pascal’s Wager argues that it is more rational to believe in God than not. The reasoning is that if God exists and you do not believe, the loss is infinitely negative (eternal death). But if you do believe and God exists, the gain is infinitely positive (eternal life). The wager assumes that, since we cannot know the truth with certainty, we must make a choice within that uncertainty.

At first glance, this sounds very similar to the perspective that I’ve been developing here: the recognition that ultimate truth is beyond our reach, and so the real question becomes—where do we place our hope?

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Jan 16 2025

The Paradox of Christian Criticism: A Case for Constructive Engagement

The criticism of Christianity for historical injustices such as holy wars, patriarchy, and slavery presents an intriguing paradox. While these criticisms appear valid through a modern moral lens, they overlook a crucial historical reality: the very moral framework we use to condemn these actions largely emerged from Christian teachings themselves. Taking this into account suggests different ways of engaging in these debates.

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Nov 11 2024

Critical Thinking and Religion

I’ve heard it said by atheists that religion lacks critical thinking. The general idea seems to be that there’s no rational basis for being religious, so anyone who is, must not be thinking carefully about it. If they did think carefully, they would presumably realize that they were in error.

Although the term “critical thinking” is not always used, I think it does capture the essence of the critique.

Obviously, I don’t agree with this viewpoint; I think that there are many religious people who think carefully about their beliefs. While it might be interesting to address this idea directly, when hearing such a statement being made recently, I started thinking about what we mean by “critical thinking” and what some of the challenges are in general with thinking carefully.

A simple place to start is with the Wikipedia entry for Critical Thinking, which lists a number of abilities that critical thinking calls for. These include things like recognizing problems, thinking clearly and logically, understanding and communicating well, and so on.

One particular group of items in the list has to do with the necessity of seeking information on a topic and testing our existing ideas. This group from Wikipedia is:

  • Gather and marshal pertinent (relevant) information
  • Put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives
  • Reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience

These seem to describe the need to look around and get relevant information, use it to test our beliefs, and do this on an ongoing basis as new information becomes available and perhaps as our life experiences grow. Implied in the first bullet, I think, is to make sure the information gathered covers the topic completely and is not cherry-picked such as when we fall prey to confirmation bias and echo chambers.

In a nutshell, to test our beliefs on an ongoing basis.

Whether this is a perfect list or not, I think it presents the idea that we need to be open and that doing so is a deliberate and ongoing choice.

All too often, and perhaps this is one place where religion falls short, we limit our search for information to places that are likely to have the same biases that we do, thereby reinforcing our opinions rather than testing them.

This is well-known behavior for religious people, reinforced by communities of faith, regular church activities, and so on. As a result, it can take real effort for religious people to learn about other metaphysical views and to test their own. Considering the list above, this may, indeed, be one way that religious people lack critical thinking, if they are not engaging with alternate viewpoints.

It’s less clear that secular people encounter such regular reinforcing activities other than the fact that our culture is increasingly secular. However, this is not a trivial influence, especially in today’s science and technology-dominated world. If I was a secular person interested in learning more about carefully considered religious views, I probably wouldn’t know where to start, unless I was lucky enough to know someone.

Certainly the popular presentations of religious beliefs wouldn’t work.

As a result, whether intentional or not, it seems that secular people can fall into the same trap as religious people of not really learning about different views in the variety and depth needed to test one’s own perspectives. Both groups being composed of people, the common tendency to stay in our own intellectual comfort zones likely operates both ways.

Personally, I’ve had a hard time finding places for deep, considered discussions of such metaphysical topics. If we were talking about something that had little or no practical impact on society and life, perhaps like sports, this might not be a big deal. But these issues are society-shaping questions that influence how we treat each other, and they form the basis of our systems of morals and ethics.

It seems to me that if one is going to feel strongly enough about these matters to comment on other’s beliefs and perhaps even work to silence them, then it’s incumbent upon us to think critically about these things from both sides, and this includes listening and learning carefully.