Modern Christianity As Self Deception

In this article I’m going to explain why I think there are almost no people remaining (in the West) who are really Christians. Instead, I’ll suggest that nearly all people who call themselves Christians are people who have convinced themselves to think they are Christians despite the fact that, even given their own understanding of their religion, they are not. This view is somewhat speculative and somewhat odd so I don’t think it warrants a high degree of confidence. Nonetheless, I find this issue intrinsically interesting and was further motivated to write about it because some people on the religious right have argued that pushing religious politics is pragmatic because most Americans are Christian and I think a clearer understanding of the unserious nature of people’s religious beliefs undercuts this view.

To begin with, it’s worth examining nominal religious belief. Using data going back to the 1630s, we can see that identification as religious is at an all time low (Stone, 2020). We can also see that church attendance is lower than it has been in more than a century, but is not at unprecedented levels.

Looking at young people today we see reason to think these trends are likely to accelerate. In terms of religious identification, we have good reason to doubt that America will be majority Christian in coming decades (Burge, 2022).

Perhaps even more importantly, it is already true that the majority of people who identify as Christian do not take their religion seriously. By “taking their religion seriously” I firstly mean accepting not only the postulates of Christianity that make people feel good, such as that life doesn’t end when the body does or that belief in Jesus grants access to heaven, but also making an attempt to believe the obvious logical implications which must also be true if these feel-good postulates are true.

But most people don’t take on the obvious moral implications of Abrahamic religion. For instance, around 70% of Americans claim to be Christians but nearly 70% of Americans also find nothing morally wrong with divorce, homosexual relations, having a child outside of wedlock, and pre-marital sex, despite these things being morally condemned by most popular interpretations of Christianity (Gallup, 2018; PPRI, 2020). These moral commands are sufficiently well known that these numbers suggest to me that there are many Christians who know their religion says these behaviors are immoral but who deny their wrongness anyhow.

Notably, these numbers will overcount the number of people who think these behaviors are wrong because their religion says so. This is because some people will think these actions are immoral for other reasons, such as a natural feeling of disgust towards them, and so will agree with their religion by accident, or perhaps will have chosen their religion in part because of this agreement.

It also seems obvious to me that most Christians know their religion says the best use of their lives is spreading the gospel and make absolutely no attempt at doing so. Many of them also know the bible says rich people will have a harder time getting into heaven, but I’ve met nearly no Christians who act as if this is true. Christians also seem roughly as afraid of death as do atheists. The list could go on.

Some people I’ve discussed this with have suggested that to most people Christianity just means you should act lovingly towards other people. It is relevant then that being religious seems to have roughly no effect on people’s moral behavior. Kelly (2019) meta-analyzed 179 effect sizes from previous longitudinal literature and found that religion correlated at 0.15 with self reported pro-social behavior but only insignificantly at 0.04 with objectively measured behavior. Galen et al. (2022) reported similar results in a set of studies which were pre-registered and so not subject to publication bias. Other research has found that national changes in religiosity fail to predict variation in homicide rates in nations with reasonably high IQs (Clark, 2020). So it may be true that there are very pro-social people who say they are Christians and this means loving others, but their pro-social behavior is seemingly not caused by their religion and I think is more plausibly the cause of their religion or at least their interpretation of it.

If this analysis is correct, Christians today exhibit a rather odd form of pseudo-belief in their own religion. Generally, if we believe something that implies another thing we immediately come to believe that implication. Because we think our initial belief is true, our belief in its necessary implications is normally not contingent on how much we like them. This process is subconscious and involuntary.

Because this is how genuine belief usually works, I’d speculate that what is going on here is a kind of self deception. Most, and really I mean nearly all, people who identify as Christian are people who falsely believe that they think Christianity is true when in fact they do not.

Motive wise, there are obvious reasons why people might want to think they are Christian. Maybe they think they are supposed to be or maybe they think non-Christians are bad people, or maybe they think they’ve had spiritual experiences that they’d have to deny if they weren’t Christians, or maybe they want to avoid trying to figure out what they really do think is true, or maybe they think Christianity is a convenient justification for their moral intuitions, etc.

Because there are plausible motives and self deception in general is something we know happens, this seems to me like the best explanation for why it is that Christians don’t believe the things Christians are obviously supposed to believe, don’t seem to even try and live the lives Christians are supposed to live, and don’t alter their moral behavior in response to changes in their religiosity.

The major alternative explanation is that Christians are just bad Christians with little self control, but if that were true we’d expect some efficacy of religiosity on behavior and a more coherent set of beliefs. To make an analogy, most people are bad dieters, but diets still have some impact on weight and people certainly come to think things they would rather not when adopting a dieting ideology. The difference between Christians and people on the Atkins diet is that people on the Atkins diet actually think the diet works and, even if imperfectly, come to accept some foods they like are bad for them and consequently eat less of them. Given that Atkins dieters usually don’t think that Atkins was an infallible deity, if anything we’d expect far larger effects to flow from genuine belief in Christianity, but instead we find none.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that most people are actually materialistic atheists pretending to be Christians. Most people seem to believe in magic and supernaturalism and are at least seriously open to the idea that there might be an afterlife and a reason behind existence. I’m just saying I don’t think they are Christians.