Debate Me!

YouTube, Apologetics and the New New Atheists

William Lane Craig and Bart Ehrman debate the historicity of Jesus c. 2017

I disappeared down a YouTube rabbit hole. This has happened before. Previously, the topic had been cooking. As is the escalating logic of the Algorithm, I had started with light and practical pasta meals and ended watching a man make an unholy roast out of half a cow (a beefcetta). My brain felt as bloated as his stomach.

But the gluttonous buffet that is YouTube is difficult to renounce for long. This next trip was not mere physical nourishment but spiritual. Not lockdown-cursed sourdough starter but the very Bread of Life. I had found my way into Religion-AntiReligion YouTube.

On the one side, were the Apologists - who, despite the name, aren’t saying sorry to anyone. “Apologetics” means the defense of religious doctrines through reason and argument. There are many channels devoted to this activity on YouTube - e.g. those run by Frank Turek, Sean McDowell, Alissa Childers, Mike Winger, William Lane Craig, Cameron Bertuzzi, Trent Horn, Justin Brierley, etc. Some of these channels are affiliated with the wealthy institutions run by their owners and therefore can summon up decent production values. Others are simply people talking to a camera. Such is the democracy of new media. The ones I’ve picked are Christian - although there are proselytizers of all faiths on YouTube*.

There are fundamentally two audiences that religious media can talk to: either fellow believers and non-believers. For the believers, these channels provide content that is relatable, entertainment that is safe and sanctioned, and general positive reinforcement. One undercurrent is the requirement to police the believers of the flock. How should you handle doubts? What are permissible and non-permissible beliefs and behaviours to have? While the slumping religiosity of Europe is old news, even in the heartland of America, growing numbers of people have a declining interest in Christianity. Many channels talk about deconstruction (nothing to do with either Jacques Derrida or Steve Bannon) which refers to the process of questioning your faith. There is a delicate path to be trod between ignoring doubts on the one hand and feeding them on the other.

If the first part is literally preaching to choir then the second is evangelism - the spreading of the good news. From my perspective, these channels are not very good at this activity. While they have deep insight into the hopes and fears of those who share their pews, they show little understanding of those who don’t. At their worst, they view non-believers as fools, liars, or depraved sex maniacs whose convictions are only the products of their genitals (“Atheists only renounce God so they can have pre-marital sex”). If you want to persuade a group of people to your point of view then starting from a position of contempt rarely ends well. It should be noted that not all of the ApologistTubers** are ignorant of the world outside the Church. The likes of Justin Brierley seems genuinely interested in understanding the positions of others. Although you can’t shake the feeling that the end goal is to nab another soul for the Lord***.

ApologistTubers have a problem though. The universe may or may not remain in motion due to Divine Will but the internet runs on beef(cetta). It thrives on debunkings and call outs and reaction videos and then discussions about the debunkings and analyses of the call outs and reaction videos to the reaction videos and so on. And science says that perpetual motion machines are impossible.

There is some intramural debate between Christians and it can get heated - e.g. Ken Ham calling out William Lane Craig for being insufficiently young earth. But no one wants a virtual Thirty Years War. So you need enemies from outside the Church. And while the godless liberal media is absolutely out there, you need enemies who will engage with you and most of these famous people are too busy. Harry Potter may be luring our children into Satanism by making magic seem fun, but where’s the satisfaction in smiting a franchise whose creator seems to be hellbent on smiting it herself (with lame prequels if nothing else). Won’t someone think of the Reaction Videos?

Which brings us to AntiReligion YouTube. But first we need to talk about the New Atheism.

The New Atheism was christened as such in 2006. Although its commencement can be dated to the 2004 publication of Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. Its primary public faces were the “Four Horsemen” - Harris, journalist Christopher Hitchens, biologist and science communicator Richard Dawkins, and philosopher Daniel Dennett. “Four Horsemen” was a very metal-sounding name for a group of men who looked like they should be in a ukulele quartet. Occasionally while viewing their performances or reading their work, I thought of Don Quixote on Rocinante**** rather than a Pale Rider heralding the End of Days.

Many commentators repeatedly noted that there was little “New” about the New Atheists in terms of content. That didn’t invalidate their arguments (some of the arguments of the Apologists are millennia old) but it also missed the point. Above all, the New Atheists were about attitude. They were aggressively, angrily, emotionally rational. It was public verbal combat that seemed to turn them and their audiences on. In particular, Christopher Hitchens had a primal need to argue with people on a stage. If there is a god and she has chosen to punish Hitchens for his blasphemy (and appalling dress sense) then doubtless he will have been sent to a place where everyone agrees with him.

They also emerged in a particular political and cultural moment. The proximate cause was the 9/11 attacks. These presented religion, specifically Islam, as an enemy of Americans, conservative and liberal alike. No matter that this framing of Islam vs America was the framing that Al Qaeda wanted to achieve, a common enemy had presented itself. The New Atheism cut across political lines in unpredictable ways. As a result of the Cold War, socially conservative Christianity had found itself fused with free market economics and a hawkish military outlook. Friedrich Hayek and Billy Graham made uncomfortable bedfellows unless there was a red under that bed to scare them close. But the Cold War had been won (allegedly) and we lived in The Great Moderation, where economic crises were a thing of the past. Old alliances were fracturing and new alliances were up for grabs.

Also problematic was that while Islam was the primary source of anxiety for some, it does not have much of a presence in America. However Christian adherence had been in decline for some time. As Alec Ryrie writes of previous centuries: “The conventional story has it that philosophers attacked religion and the people therefore stopped believing. But what if people stopped believing and then found they needed arguments to justify their unbelief?” I suspect that most people who bought the books by Hitchens et al didn’t read them and then dramatically deconvert but were looking for words in which to clothe ideas that they already had. And by 2006, the persistent screw-ups of a loudly Christian President and the abuse scandals that rocked many religious institutions just sealed the deal. So Christopher Hitchens ended up debating William Lane Craig, not Osama bin Laden.

As social media was still developing when New Atheism was at its height, the public theatre of the debate was the primary way that the New Atheism played itself out. This was the debate as gladiatorial combat (“For those about the propose a motion, we salute you”) where the primary goal sometimes seemed to be the ritual humiliation of the opponent and all they stood for rather than a forensic examination of the truth. Don’t get me wrong, debates are not automatically a bad thing. Debating is a valuable skill - or rather two sets of valuable skills. The intellectual framing of propositions and counter-propositions, the marshaling of evidence, the probing of a position with questions on one hand. And the reading and manipulating of an audience on the other. A debater like Hitchens could switch artfully between the two - and only occasionally did he meet his match.

Now an irony here was that while the New Atheist crew were loudly pro-science, the public debate is not how questions of science are generally handled. Their public debates had more in common with politicians in parliaments or preachers in pulpits than a research paper or a meta-analysis. While I do not wish to denigrate the debate as a form, our culture seems to have fastened onto this one form of inquiry as the only tool that matters. How do we decide whether something is true or someone is right? We should have a debate. Someone will be DESTROYED. And someone will win. After the gladiators come the lions. Someone can clip the DESTROYED bit for YouTube. The beasts demand red meat. Perhaps there are other ways of exploring and deciding.

Inevitably the New Atheism burnt itself out. Anger can only keep you going for so long. The memory of that bright, clear day in September 2001 was muddied by the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq. Even moreso, a group of people whose primary traits are that they are contrarians who like arguing with others are never going to be happy agreeing for long. Some of the subsequent journeys were surprising. The only thing more unlikely than Harris’s reinvention as a wellness guru and SBNR podcaster - a Joe Rogan without the standup comedy and wrestling stories - is the rise of Rogan himself. On the other hand, the only thing more likely than aggressive sexual harassment occurring in macho atheist spaces was Richard Dawkins handling it badly. At least Dennett had the good taste to lower his profile and Hitchens had the good taste to die.

Sorry, this is turning into the end credits of Animal House. The life trajectories of the New Atheists seem to obsess those who write about the movement but I’m more interested in the legacy that they left. They undoubted had an impact on a generation of young people, often (but not always) men. You find them combining a commitment to rationality, a disdain for religion, and desire for verbal combat. The internet seems to teem with the bastard children of Hitchens and Dawkins. There are only a few professional atheists around - Matt Dillahunty being perhaps the most prominent. A broader contingent are part of the broader sceptic / rationalist community (Genetically Modified Skeptic, Emma Thorne, Cosmic Skeptic, RationalityRules), some are science communicators (Professor Dave). In most cases, religious controversy is only part of what they do. They seem drawn to bigger questions in philosophy, science or politics beyond dunking on Christians. There are likely reasons of personal satisfaction and audience engagement for moving on. Christian Apologists often accuse atheists of being evangelical but the more intelligent and ambitious in this community seem to want more than another rerun of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. But there are still enemies to be fought. Reaction Videos to be made.

A great, natural source of beef for Apologists, And vice versa.

Generally (but definitely not always), the relationships between Religion and AntiReligion YouTube are more cordial than in the time of the New Atheists. After all, they provide each other with priceless sources of content. But the connections go deeper than that. The truth is that most Christians are as interested in theology as Unbelievers are interested in philosophy. These are (exceptions like The Good Place aside) niche interests. William Lane Craig has more in common with Graham Oppy than the Duck Dynasty. And while the afterlife may have different destinations for each, it is this world that we all live in now. Please Like and Subscribe is the mantra for all.

What next?

Apologists have been around for a long time. The current crop are the children of the likes of CS Lewis and James Dobson with a long history to draw on. The future of Christianity in the English-speaking world is likely one of continued, managed decline over the next couple of decades, however there will still be audiences for reassurance. The challenge for  those without institutional support will be that apologetics follow a standard format and can easily be automated. This may push them to be more adventurous in their content.

The AntiReligionists mostly lack institutional support and therefore the most competent will continue to diversify their work into different domains. Some are already journalists and storytellers in their own right. But I am certainly wrong about all of this.

Then I arose, and rent my mantle, and shaved my head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, and said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Algorithm gave, and the Algorithm hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Algorithm. In all this I sinned not, nor charged the Algorithm foolishly.

Please, under no circumstances, ask to debate me about this.

FOOTNOTES:

*Presumably the adherents of the Flying Spaghetti Monster could do an awesome crossover event with the cooking channels.

**ChristTubers? Creators for the Creator? Contentment Content Makers? I’m struggling here…

***Do Apologists have a soul count like Pick Up Artists have a body count? Are there spreadsheets involved? There’s certainly a fair bit of negging.

****FXXX you Hitchens, I can do pretentious literary allusions too.