Category: Politics

Sex drives conservatives wild. It drives conservative Christians really wild. But it doesn’t drive them wild in a good way. Many of the social issues conservatives are most concerned about involve sex in one way or another. Pornography, promiscuity, pre-marital sex, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage all clearly involve sex. Other hot button issues are more of a by-product of sex. Abortion for example. Conservative Christians may say it’s about ‘life,’ but the whole issue clearly starts with sex. If you pin them down they’ll often say something along the lines of ‘well, they shouldn’t have had sex’ or ‘those are the consequences of having sex.’ Most conservatives hate former President Bill Clinton for many reasons, but they’ll never forgive the fact that he had sex in (or near) the Oval Office. They find it much easier to forgive former President Bush his many transgressions, not simply because he shares their views, but because his trespasses didn’t involve sex.

Conservatives complain about the moral decline of America over the past fifty years, and most of their complaints touch on sex. They hate the vulgarity of modern music, the provocativeness of modern fashion, and the tawdriness of contemporary television. I agree with them about television, but find it telling that they’re so outraged by sexuality on the small screen, but largely unconcerned by the pervasive violence on many television shows.

What is it about sex that drives conservative wild?

They’re wild about sex because, well because when you’re having sex, you are wild. You are fulfilling a wild, natural, animalistic urge. Biologists know that the sex drive is one of the strongest and most primal force in nature. Sex is life. Sex creates life. The main function of all living organisms is to pass genes on to the next generation, and most living organisms do this through sex. Therefore, sex is life, and life is sex.

Conservative Christians fundamentally disagree with this. They disdain Darwin, and abhor the idea that humans are animals. But here’s the problem: when they’re humping, they are animals. They might call it copulation, they may confine it exclusively within marriage, and they might do it staidly in the missionary position. But when they’re going at it, their hips are rocking, their butts are bouncing, and they’re grunting and groaning. Even the most religious person must understand, or at least feel, that they’re acting like an animal when they’re having sex.

It’s not surprising that European missionaries taught African natives the “missionary position.” Other positions are clearly animalistic. Seeing people copulate ‘doggy style’ is like watching … well, like watching dogs go at it.

Sex is a deeply natural urge. No one is taught how to have sex, they just figure it out. Perhaps two virgins will fumble around the first couple of times, but with very little practice they’ll be happily humping like rabbits. No one has to explain it because the conscious mind doesn’t really control it. The body insists on friction, and the hips comply. Even if you are conscious of what you’re doing, there comes a point when the body takes over and it’s almost impossible to stop. The body moves virtually on its own, often with a certain amount of animalistic moaning.

During sex, even the most committed conservative Christian must feel in his or her loins that the body has taken over. They must realize on some level that they’re doing what nature intended them to do. They may take comfort in the belief that God is the author of nature, and therefore what they’re doing is Godly, but they also must know that they’re behaving like an animal. And if they’re no different from an animal, then they are not a uniquely Godly creature, separate and apart from the animals.

Let me be blunt: sex is Darwin’s friend. There’s an old saying many Christians like to quote to justify religion: “There are no atheists in a fox hole.” It’s a cliché of dubious accuracy, but the point is that in certain situations there is doubt. Under fire everyone may seek divine intercession, which purportedly proves God’s existence. Let me suggest a corollary: “There are no creationists in the sack.”

Religious people sense this, and it worries them. The Catholic Encyclopedia’s definition of “Lust” talks about the inherent nature of sexual desire: “The pleasure which this vice has as its object is at once so attractive and connatural to human nature as to whet keenly a man’s desire, and so lead him into the commission of many other disorders in the pursuit of it.” Sex is gateway sin. It’s so desirable that people will engage in other sins – adultery, dishonesty, etc.—to get it. But perhaps the real problem is that once you’ve committed this sin and realized how un-sinful it really is, you may question the other teachings on sin.

Conservatives’ sex troubles don’t end there, because sex doesn’t just tug at your loins, it can pull at your heart and soul as well. This challenges many deeply held conservative beliefs, starting with the way that they believe that people interact with the world around them.

There’s a moment during intercourse when it seems as if everything in the world disappears except your own body, and the body in your arms. At that moment your only connection to the world is through another human being. You’re not connected to humanity by a shared acceptance of religious doctrine, or a shared sense of being one of God’s creatures. You are connected to humanity by a person. We’re Darwinists during the throws of passion, but at the end we’re Humanists.

There are many aspects of religion. People are religious because it provides lessons in morality, it provides historic continuity, and it provides social companionship. Some people seek tradition, some a sense of the supernatural or a way to understand things that seem inexplicable. Others seek moral clarity. But one common element is that religion provides a sense of connection to humanity, and an explanation for that connection.

Every person feels, on some level, that they’re connected to other people. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that empathy is universal, and extends even to people we’re not related to or don’t even know, though it’s stronger the closer we are and diminishes the further a person is from us. This innate sense of empathy provides a connection with other people, and creates a sense of the external. It makes us feel that there is something beyond ourselves. Throughout history the most common way to explain this feeling was through the divine. We are connected to each other because God made us all. We feel connected because we are mutually connected to our common creator.

But what happens when we feel that connection in a different way? What happens when that connection occurs during sex? We’re connected at the groin, but in that perfect moment when the world slips away and all that remains is what you hold in your arms, at that moment we’re connected to humanity not through God, not through shared beliefs, but through the person in our arms.

It shouldn’t be surprising that many young adults lose interest in religion at about the same time they become interested in sex. It’s no wonder that the least religious group is the most sexually active. According to a study by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, young adults age 18 to 24 are the group least likely to attend church, and a majority of people 18 to 34 don’t attend church.

Young people often feel adrift, and clearly church and religion don’t provide a sufficient sense of connection, so some kids search for this connection elsewhere. Some find it through sports or drugs or gangs, or a variety of positive and negative associations. Any many kids find this sense of connection through sex, and the relationship that often comes with it.

But once these young adults begin to marry and have children, their attitudes change. According to the Evangelical Lutheran study, church attendance begins to rise when people have children, and becomes a majority when those children reach the age of six. These young parents are worried about how their kids will deal with society. No parent wants their child to venture out into a crazy world. Parenthood is the time when people start to wonder about the behavior and motivation of other people. It’s the time when parents want to start teaching their children more stable and traditional values, and religion certainly provides all of those things. It provides an easy and convenient framework for lessons about human behavior, as well as a safe social environment for children to interact.

But the cycle repeats. When these children reach adolescence, and have their first sexual experience, they turn away from religion. But the reason they turn away from religion is not simply that they gain a sense of human connection with another person, or feel the Darwinian tug in their loins. The reason they turn away from religion is that they are often pushed away. One of the reasons they abandon religion is because many religious people, particularly in deeply conservative denominations, have a convoluted, contradictory, and even hypocritical view of sex. Young adults abandon religion because it is through sex, more than anything else, that many religious leaders expose their base hypocrisy.

Young people turn away from organized religion at this point because of the illogical and inconsistent teachings they are hearing from religious leaders regarding sex. And this makes them question religion in general. The problem is that the Bible offers very contradictory lessons about sex. Conservative Christians promote abstinence, and justify it with scripture. “Don’t be immoral in matters of sex. That is a sin against your own body in a way that no other sin is.” (1 Corinthians 6:18 CEV) “Let there be no sexual immorality, impurity, or greed among you. Such sins have no place among God’s people.” (Ephesians 5:3 NLT) “Give honor to marriage, and remain faithful to one another in marriage. God will surely judge people who are immoral and those who commit adultery.” (Hebrews 13:4.)

The problem is that while the Church and parents push this view, any mildly curious kid can read the Bible and find wildly diverging lessons about sex. Kids this age are curious about many things, and this curiosity certainly extends to the Bible. The Bible contains rigid rules regarding sexual morality, but there are also stories of wild promiscuity by some of the most famous men in the Bible, including Abraham (the father of the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), King David, and King Solomon.

There are some choice lessons about sex in the Bible. For example a man who rapes a woman is to pay her father 50 shekels and marry her. (Deuteronomy 22:28-29.) That might have made sense in ancient times, but it sounds horrific today.

The Old Testament condemns adultery, (Exodus 20:14, Lev. 18:7-17, Deut. 5:18) but seems to defined it exclusively as a married woman having sex with a man not her husband. (See, Leviticus 18:20, 20:10 and Deuteronomy, 22:22-23.) Nothing prohibits a married man from having sex with a woman not his wife. In fact there are many examples throughout the Old Testament of men having concubines, like Abraham, or multiple wives, like Solomon and David. This double standard sounds grotesque to modern ears.

King David, one of the greatest heroes of the Old Testament, had multiple wives. The Bible names at least three: Michal, Abigail, Bhinoam, (1 Samuel 25:42-44). But that wasn’t quite enough for David. A woman named Bathsheba caught his fancy, but she was married to one of David’s soldiers. So David sent the man to die in battle so that he could have Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11:2-27). Of course the Lord was displeased, and punishes David by killing the child he had with Bathsheba. (2 Samuel 12:15-16). Not only does this story make David sound like a total creep, it also makes God sound a bit misogynistic.

David’s son Solomon decided to outdo the old man, and had “seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines.” (1 Kings 11:3.) Solomon clearly had an erotic bent, which can be seen in his poems, collected as the Song of Solomon. “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.” Song of Solomon 1:2.

Giggling teenagers might like this stanza:

I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on?
I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?
My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door,
and my bowels were moved for him.
I rose up to open to my beloved;
and my hands dropped with myrrh,
and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh,
upon the handles of the lock.
[Song of Solomon 5:3-5 KJV]

Plenty of Biblical scholars believe that “my bowels were moved for him” implies an orgasm. Dirty minds throughout the ages have read that passage as a not so veiled metaphor for sex and its sticky byproducts.

Curious young minds are hearing parents and preachers promote abstinence with carefully selected scripture, while Solomon seems to encourage them to get their freak on. Teenagers are particularly aware of the hypocrisy of adults, and just at the time when they are skeptical of authority, authority figures give them ample reason to be skeptical.

It’s hard for anyone reading these stories not to conclude that the Bible is inconsistent, if not hypocritical about sex. And if it’s so inconsistent and wrong about sex, couldn’t it be wrong about other things? And if the Bible is wrong, could other aspects of religion be wrong as well? So the inconsistency about sex undoubtedly leads some kids to question not just the Bible, but also religion.

It seems strange that someone would give teenagers a reason to be skeptical, but a rigid adherence to inconsistent Biblical rules does exactly that. If, as the Fundamentalists say, the Bible is Truth, then how do the rules for sexual morality set out by Paul coexist with the rules applied to David and Solomon?

If David can pretty much get away with having a sexual rival killed, your average teenager might wonder, how much trouble can I get in to for a little tumble after school?

In his letter to the Galatians, Paul said that sex, or sins of the flesh leads to: “immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions, occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies, and the like.” (Gal. 5:19 – 21.) It also leads one to question authority, and in particular Biblical authority.

For Paul, sex was a gateway sin which leads to other transgressions. For modern conservative Christians, sex leads to curiosity and doubt. And so sex must be stigmatized, demonized, and punished. But the problem, as the Catholic Encyclopedia pointed out, is that sex is so central to human nature that it can’t be completely suppressed. It turns out that the harsher the attack, the greater the hypocrisy, and the more people are repelled. And so the harder conservative Christians fight, the more people they turn away. It’s enough to drive you wild.

In an increasingly secular and non-religious society, why should anyone care about religion, why should they learn about Christianity and Jesus?

The reason is that modern society is the product of its history and what came before. A person can’t truly understand the modern world without understanding the ancient world, and religion shaped ancient societies and was a major force in the ancient world. A person can’t truly understand the modern Western world, the world we live in today, without understanding the development of “Western Civilization,” and a person can’t understand “Western Civilization” without understanding Christianity. Christianity is one of the major foundations of the Western world. Christianity planted the seeds which flowered into the Enlightenment, which is the foundation for the modern liberal democracies that we live in today, and the scientific revolution, which created all of the technological marvels that define our world. So to understand the modern world a person needs to understand the influence of Christianity on the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. A person will only understand those eras if they have some understanding of Christianity itself. So even atheists should learn about Christianity. But they should understand the reality of Christianity, and not the Christian myth of Christianity.

To truly understand Christianity a person needs to understand Jesus his life and his teachings, Paul and his teachings, and the history of the early church.

My point here is not to explain Christianity for the non-religious but to explain why Christianity is important. Christianity is important in the creation of political liberalism and the scientific revolution.

Here is an interesting historical fact that explains why it is important to understand Christianity: the “scientific revolution” only happened in Europe, in Christendom. It did not happen in the Arab world, despite their illustrious scientific history, and it did not happen in China despite its technological achievements.

There were many amazing Arab scientists, and the foundation of modern mathematics and chemistry were laid by Arab thinks and scientists. (And the Arabs learned a great deal about math from the Indians.) Yet for some reason Arab scientists never produced anything akin to the European Scientific Revolution. For some reason, around the 12th Century, scientists in Arabia seemed to stop in their quest for new discoveries. But European scientists and thinkers took those Arabian discoveries and developed modern science.

It is also important to understand that many important technological advances were first developed in China. The Chinese developed the printing press hundreds of years before Gutenberg. But they didn’t use it to print books to disseminate scientific, theological, and philosophical knowledge. They used it to create beautiful posters. The Chinese also developed gun powder hundreds of years before the west. But they didn’t use it to create weapons that allowed nations to expand, or explorers to venture into hostile lands. They used it for fireworks. Europeans took those technologies and created the modern world.

There was something about the West that made it particularly open and amenable to scientific advances. One component is the legacy of the ancient Greeks. But another is Christianity.

Christianity opened the door for the scientific revolution. It began with Martin Luther who began the Reformation by challenging the control of the church over the religious beliefs of individuals. Luther’s idea, that Christians had the inherent freedom to develop their own understanding of God eventually morphed into the idea that thinkers could explore ideas outside of the confines of religious teaching. And this led to a flowering of both scientific and political thought. One branch led to the scientific revolution and the other led to the development of political liberalism and the era known as the Enlightenment. Just as the scientific revolution only developed in Christendom, the Enlightenment and political liberalism only developed in Christendom. There is no parallel in any other religious tradition. Political liberalism is the end product of the Reformation. Luther liberated believers from the Church, and subsequent thinkers liberated individuals from the state.

It is also important to understand that many of the early European scientists were deeply religious and thought that their discoveries were glorifying God’s creation. Galileo and Francis Bacon were deeply devout. Isaac Newton wrote more about religion than about his scientific discoveries, and he was absolutely convinced that his discoveries were merely revealing God’s genius. Charles Darwin first studied theology and intended to become a priest until he became interested in biology. He too thought he was revealing the miracle of God’s creation, up until he put together his basic idea of how living organisms change over time. Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, was a monk.

The hatred that many Christians have for science and liberalism is curious because both are the product of Christianity. And the antipathy that many scientists and liberals have for religion is also strange because their beliefs only exist because of Christianity.

I talk about this a bit more in The Paradox of Christianity [link]

So to understand the modern world, the world of science and the world of political liberalism you have to understand the influence of Christianity on the development of those ideas during the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. And to understand the Enlightenment you should understand the Reformation, and how Christianity split into Catholics and Protestants. And that requires an understanding of the central teachings of those branches of Christianity.

But in order to understand any of this it is clearly necessary to understand Christianity. And to understand Christianity is it necessary to understand Christ, and to understand Christ we need to understand Jesus, and how he became Christ. And that is what I have tried to do in my novel

This past summer the ACLU of Kentucky sent a letter to Kentucky school districts reminding them that if they allow Christian groups, like the Gideon’s, to distribute Bibles in school they also have to allow other religious organizations, including from other religions, to distribute their religious texts. When this made the news the response was pretty predictable. The newspaper was full of letters to the editor saying that the ACLU in particular, and liberals in general, hated Christians. There are similar letters whenever the paper reports on scientific discoveries that challenge or threaten Christian belief or doctrine, but those letters say that scientists hate Christians.

I always wonder if the letter writers know that both liberalism and science arose out of Christianity. That’s right. The grand paradox of the modern world is that Christianity laid the foundation for both liberalism and modern science, and then both turned on their creator. Let me explain.

The first people to call themselves “liberals” was a group advocating for individual liberty during the French Revolution. They said that a liberal is someone who seeks liberty, and coined it as a political term. But they were not the first people to seek liberty. That distinction belongs to Martin Luther, who, after breaking with the Church over doctrinal matters, called for Christian Liberty, or the liberty of each individual Christian to define his relationship with God. Luther said that each individual was created by God, and therefore had the God-given ability, and right, to define his relationship with God, and should not be subject to acquired dogma, or other arbitrary external restrictions. The only guide should be the word of God, from the Bible, and individual consciousness. The Church in Rome (later to redefine itself as the Catholic Church) pushed back, but Luther eventually prevailed.

I should note that there were many other thinkers and theologians pushing similar ideas. Men like Erasmus,Thomas More, John Wycliffe, and Pico della Mirandola, also were discussing changes to the church, and ideas about the dignity and liberty of individual Christians. But Luther was the most forceful, and most successful, and became the father of the Reformation.

After Luther other religious leaders sought liberation from excess control from the one Apostolic Church (as the Catholic Church defined itself). Many religious leaders in different countries sought to allow the teaching and preaching of religion in the native language. This push meshed nicely with efforts by secular leaders to free their nation from fealty to Rome. King Henry VIII’s push to create a Church of England was as much of a power grab as an attempt to gain favorably ecclesiastic support for his personal affairs. Similar fights were taking place in many of the other nations of Christendom.

Soon other thinkers started taking Luther’s idea of individual consciousness and extending it to other areas of life and human affairs. First political philosophers suggested that people had a right to choose their religion, then that was extended to the idea of the right of freedom of conscious, or freedom of belief and thought in areas outside of religion. Eventually some thinkers came up with the idea that individuals had a right to think about their government, and then had a right to participate in their government. (Some counter-revolutionaries suggested that Kings ruled by divine right, so people had no right to any input.)

Liberalism’s early spread was based largely on variations of Luther’s ideas, and in fact many early liberal writers and philosophers – like Locke, Hume, Mill, Montesquieu – based their theories, in part, on teachings from scripture.

One area where the idea of liberating thought from scriptural dogma quickly spread across Europe was in science. Luther’s ideas spread quickly because of the recently developed printing press. Gutenberg perfected movable type in the early 1400’s. Luther presented his Ninety-Five Theses to church leaders on October 31, 1517. It was quickly reprinted and spread throughout Europe within a matter of months. Printing allowed all sorts of ideas to spread. It allowed scientists to share their discoveries, and this allowed other scientists to learn about, apply, and refine those ideas. Many of these early scientists thought that their discoveries were glorifying the wonders of God’s creation. In fact, for a long time many early scientists were deeply religious and many were priests and members of the Church. Copernicus was a lay church official, Mendel (the father of genetics) was an Augustinian monk, Mendeleev (the creator of the Periodic Table) was trained at a seminary. While Isaac Newton is most famous for his theories about gravity, optics, astronomy and mathematics, he actually wrote as much about religion, theology and the Bible.

But it wasn’t long before scientific discoveries began to contradict Biblical teaching. Copernicus’ heliocentric theory of the solar system was one of the first, but many others soon followed. One of the first was the development of the geological theories of a British scientist named James Hutton in the 1780’s. Hutton observed that layers of rock in the mountains had fossils, and wondered if some of the rocks had once been on the sea floor. As he observed exposed strata in the mountains around Europe he developed the idea that the earth had moved dramatically, and that this must have occurred over great lengths of time. The earth, he surmised, was very very old. This meant that it could not be the age suggested by the Bible. Some thinkers at the time dubbed this concept “deep time.”

At about the same time as Hutton’s discoveries, a British astronomer named William Hershel began building increasingly powerful telescopes, and peering further and further into space. He discovered, among other things, the planet Uranus, and star nebulae, or visually undistinguishable astronomical objects. Scientists at the time had a rough understanding of the speed of light, and Hershel knew that he was looking thousands, if not millions, of years into the past. Once, when asked about what he was seeing in deep space Hershel replied “I have searched through the heavens, and nowhere have I found a trace of God.” [Holmes, Age at 198].

Scientific discoveries were challenging and disproving religious theories, and many scientists were increasingly skeptical of religion. One of the more famous stories (which may be apocryphal) involves the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace. Laplace published a book on astronomy in 1799, and Napoleon Bonaparte read it with great interest. He invited Laplace to his palace to discuss the book. Napoleon noted that the book never mentioned God, and supposedly said that even Newton described God in his works of astronomy. Supposedly Laplace replied, “I have no need for that hypothesis.”

Science did not become directly hostile to religion, but increasingly saw religion, or more particularly religious teaching, as largely irrelevant to their activities. But a strong relationship between science and religion remained, particularly since most of the universities of the time were run by religious orders.

But increasingly scientific discoveries contradicted religious teaching. Far and away the most prominent was Darwin’s theory of evolution, which was published in 1858. (I’ll note briefly that Darwin was deeply religious early in life, and had considered the ministry. He, like Copernicus delayed the publication of his theories out of concern for its impact on religion.) Evolution described the development of life in a way that directly contradicts Biblical teachings. This was a scientific discovery too far, and religious leaders struck back, vigorously challenging Darwin’s discovery. They knew that if this theory was right, or if people began to believe it was right, it would invalidate much of their teachings regarding all living creatures on earth, including man.

But this wasn’t the only scientific challenge to religion. During this era of broad scientific exploration some scientists began to evaluate the Bible based on new scientific teachings about history, archeology, and linguistics. What they found directly challenged long held views about the Bible, particularly regarding when it was written and by whom. (The famous scientist and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer was a prominent scholar in this area.) By the end of the 1800’s an increasing numbers of scientists were openly skeptical of, if not hostile to, religion. And in response many Christian denominations became hostile to science. A new strain to theology, Fundamentalism, argued that the Bible was literally true, every word of it written by God. The battle between science and this new fundamentalist view hit the headlines in the 1920’s with the Scopes “Monkey Trial” where a school teacher was tried for teaching evolution. By the early Twentieth Century the split between science and religion was largely complete.

But science was not purposefully hostile religion. Science simply pursued science, and in many cases made discovered that directly contradicted religious teachings. Scientists were not doing these things out of some animus towards religion, they were simply engaged in scientific inquiry. But many religious people didn’t see it that way and felt that it was the product of hostility. And so, since the 1920’s, many Conservative and Fundamentalist Christians became deeply hostile to science. I should note that the Catholic Church does not share this hostility, and has accepted the teachings of evolution.

The relation between political liberalism and religion did not devolve in quite the same way as the relation between science and religion. Well into the 1800’s, most political liberals were deeply faithful. But things began to change, as so much did, with the French Revolution. Religion was seen as justifying and supporting the old regime, and so political revolutionaries began to attack the Church as well as the state. As revolution spread across Europe in the 1840’s many took on an anti-religious tone because of the Church’s support for the existing order, and hostility to the demands of the reformers. Things soured considerably when Karl Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses,” there to keep the people in a stupor so that they don’t complain about their lot in life and challenge the existing order.

The hostility between religion and reform did not take the same tone, or follow the same path in the United States. In fact, most of the reform movements were driven by people of deep religious faith. Perhaps the most important example involves the fight to abolish slavery. The fight over abolition, however, marked the beginning of a turning point between religion and political liberalism. Most of the abolitionists were deeply religious and used scripture to oppose slavery, but many southern churches also used scripture to justify slavery. And so denominations were set against each other. Increasingly the opponents of change, those who wanted to stop or slow the growing movement for more liberty and autonomy, relied upon religious teaching to oppose these movements. Religion began to change from a source of liberation of the individual to an opponent of liberation. The opponents of abolition used scripture, as did opponents of women’s suffrage. This split became more pronounced over the years. In the 1950’s the Civil Rights movement was largely dominated by Black and Progressive Churches and church leaders. But there were many other prominent religious figures, particularly but not entirely in the South, who opposed civil rights. Martin Luther King’s seminal “Letter for a Birmingham Jail” was directly addressed to the leaders of many southern churches that opposed civil rights for African Americans.

But as liberation movements moved into personal liberty issues, like women’s rights, sexual freedom, and gay rights, the church increasingly became the opponent of expanding liberty. As more churches moved away from the expansion of liberty, liberals moved away from the church. And as conservatives Christians increasingly justified their policy positions on scripture, liberals became increasingly hostile to religion.

And here we are today. Science, and political liberals, are largely contemptuous of religion. And some of these liberals now even suggest that religion, in and of itself, is a bad thing. What they don’t seem to understand is that without religion, and more specifically without Christianity, they would not be here today.

This paradox cuts both ways. Many conservative Christians disdain science and liberalism without understanding that Christianity laid the foundation for both. And many liberals disparage Christianity without understanding the debt they owe it.