Christians in the West: Victims or Victimizers?

When Christian evangelism is tone-deaf

Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash

(A seven-minute read.)

Every once in a while you read something that is an absolute grand slam. Such was the case two weeks ago when I came across an article, published on Patheos, by someone I’m now friends with (after reaching out to him in response to his article). The title of the article is, “From Truth to Trust: Reimagining the Future of Christian Apologetics,” and it is basically a short and compassionate plea to Christians to exercise more humility and repentance when trying to persuade people of the Christian faith.

Written by Daniel Montañez, who is a doctoral student at Boston University, researching the “intersection of theology, ethics, and migration,” it’s an absolute masterpiece and I wish I could simply re-post the whole article for you to read it. Just about every line is saturated with brilliance.

Go read the article! It’s remarkable.

In the meantime, let me try to also summarize it and highlight what I thought were the most important points.

In the article, Montañez tackles the question of “Christian apologetics,” which is a practice that can be traced back to the first Christians, when Peter encouraged Jesus-followers to be ready to give an “answer” (Greek, apologia) for their faith, doing so with “gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15). Montañez happily acknowledges that there’s a place to publicly promote and defend the Christian faith, but he argues that our context is vastly different from Peter’s day, when he was writing in a pre-Christendom context.

Today, we are living in a post-Christendom context in the West, where most people have already had some exposure to Christianity and, as a result, have great suspicion toward the claims of the Christian faith because of the destruction it’s left in its wake. Comparing the pre-Christendom period, when Peter wrote, to our own era, Montañez notes that “what separates these two communities is a near 1700-year history of political turmoil, religious violence, and colonial domination that is often associated with the period of Christendom.”

Thus, what Christians need is much greater self-awareness. “Like a bull in a China shop,” he writes, “the apologist often enters into the room unaware, not only of its size within the historical narrative of Western thought, but also of the wreckage it has left behind, across marginalized cultures and communities, on its path to becoming a religious majority.”

As an example of this idea, Montañez cites the practice of Spanish rulers who, in their attempts to subjugate natives in the New World and convert them to the Christian faith, resorted to barbaric practices like cutting people’s hands off, trying to force them to convert. One indigenous person, responding to such threats, said he didn’t want to go to heaven anyway, lest he run the risk of encountering such “Christian” people. Hell was more appealing to him if it helped him avoid such people.

Montañez brings home the point here.

The problem with contemporary Christian apologetics is that in its attempts to give a defense of the Christian faith, it lacks the understanding that it is no longer perceived as the martyr, but as the executor. No longer the victim, but the perpetrator. As the Christian apologist enters into the postmodern public square, it does so with an audience that will no longer believe in [G. K.] Chesterton’s assertion that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting,” but instead the Christian ideal has been tried and found unwanted.

American Christianity, in Montañez’s telling, has only exacerbated this issue, with its nearly-endless train of leadership scandals, including Ravi Zacharias, who was known for much of his career as perhaps the world’s most famous evangelical apologist (before being “outed,” so to speak, for living a life of sexual debauchery and abuse). Again and again American pastors and evangelists have made Christianity literally unbelievable by the conduct of their lives.

As a result, in the twenty-first century, Montañez submits, “the new skeptic of the Church in our postmodern age is no longer the atheist, but the Christian. It is the brother or sister in the faith who has been hurt or abused by the family of God and calls the Church to account for its actions.” In one of the best lines of the whole piece, Montañez drops this idea: “Perhaps the greatest question Christianity should answer today is not whether or not it is true, but whether or not it is trustworthy. Perhaps the greatest threat to the Church is not the skeptic, but itself.”

What the Christian needs to do more than anything in promoting the faith, he insists, is to operate with humility and repentance, seeking “forgiveness, justice, and reconciliation for those who have been negatively affected” by the Church. Christians also need to move beyond the concerns of traditional apologetics, which answers questions—like the existence of God, the historicity of Jesus, and the veracity of Scripture—which were the product of the Enlightenment, when everyone was concerned with “rationalism and scientific empiricism.”

Not that we must abandon such concerns altogether, but Montañez proposes that the types of questions skeptics are really asking today related to Christianity are more like:

1. How do Christians account for the colonization of the Western world, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of Black people, all in the name of the Christian faith?

2. Is Christianity the white man’s religion?

3. How should Christian leaders respond to the sex scandals, racism, and abuses of power that have left a generation of believers disenchanted with the institutional Church?

4. How should Christians respond to the cries for justice among marginalized communities, rather than merely dismissing them as liberal?

5. How can Christians preach a message of unity and reconciliation when the Church itself is so divided?

“These are the types of questions being asked by the postmodern skeptics of our time,” Montañez argues, “Christian and non-Christian alike.” But we need not fear such things. As Montañez says in his last sentence, “the same God that gave wisdom to the early Church and to the Christians of the modern era, is the same God that will give wisdom to the Christians of [the] postmodern era, and for whatever future era may come.”

A few reflections

As I said, I think this piece is a brilliant piece—and if you’ve been reading my newsletter for any length of time, you’ll no doubt recall similar sentiment in my writing. I really do think that to whatever degree Christianity is having a hard go of it in the postmodern West, it has no one to blame but itself for its own challenges.

What has been especially puzzling—and frustrating—to me lately, and is a theme I’m sure I’ll return to in the near future, is the sort of “Christian victimhood” that is present within many circles of American Christianity. There seems to be a narrative among conservative Christians which maintains that Christians in the West are the most, or among the most, persecuted people in the world. We play the “victim card” and feel sorry for ourselves, often using such a claim as a basis for grabbing for more political power.

There’s little doubt that Western society in general has less openness to the claims of Christianity than it did, say, 300 years ago. But to whatever degree that’s true, I think that, as Montañez has persuasively pointed out, engaging in a little “Step 4” work is what is required. We can’t control the way non-Christians react to the Christian message. We can only control ourselves, sweeping our side of the street and asking ourselves what we can do better to present a more persuasive apologetic to the onlooking world (which, most likely, will actually have very little to do with what we say and more to do with how we live).

In a little book called Thoughts From the Mount of Blessing, which is my favorite book by Ellen White, she expounds upon this idea. I happened upon the quote this last week again soon after I read Montañez’s article. I’m tempted to quote the one sentence, full of punch, but I think the whole paragraph provides an even bigger punch:

The standard of the golden rule is the true standard of Christianity; anything short of it is a deception. A religion that leads men to place a low estimate upon human beings, whom Christ has esteemed of such value as to give Himself for them; a religion that would lead us to be careless of human needs, sufferings, or rights, is a spurious religion. In slighting the claims of the poor, the suffering, and the sinful, we are proving ourselves traitors to Christ. It is because men take upon themselves the name of Christ, while in life they deny His character, that Christianity has so little power in the world. The name of the Lord is blasphemed because of these things.

So let us move forward with humility and self-awareness, taking the posture of listeners rather than lecturers. Let us truly practice the “golden rule,” choosing to prioritize lives of other-centered love that put actions ahead of words. Only then we will become true apologists for the faith.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.