Bulwarks of Unbelief: How modernity creates atheists
by Jonathon Van Maren, The Bridgehead:
Growing up regularly attending church and attending a Christian school, I never questioned whether God exists or whether Christianity was true. I assumed these things and assumed that those who did not believe them had, at some point, explicitly rejected them. Upon arrival at university, I swiftly realized that most of my peers had grown up with precisely the opposite assumptions. Most had never explicitly rejected Christianity; that had been done by their parents or, far more likely, their grandparents. The existence of God and the truth of Christianity were, to them, perhaps the precise opposite of obvious. I went looking for apologetics to prepare myself for discussions.
I thought at the time that most people rejected Christianity for specific reasons: that they didn’t believe in miracles, or the existence of a personal God, or in the historicity of the biblical accounts or the Resurrection. While that was partially true, I soon discovered that most people had never really considered those questions, either. The reality is that most people are atheists or agnostics because the existence of God doesn’t feel plausible to them. God doesn’t seem relevant to their lives, and the very best of C.S. Lewis, John Lennox, or William Lane Craig isn’t going to persuade them. Christopher Hitchens could get systematically dismantled on every point by a winsome Christian apologist, and it didn’t budge a single one of his fans.
I was struck by the Dutch historian Geert Mak’s book Hoe God verdween uit Jorwerd (How God Disappeared from Jorwerd). He describes how the advance of technology eliminated the villagers’ sense of dependence on God, and how the prayer services for successful crops and other religious traditions slowly disappeared from the churches. “Fate seemed no longer to exist in the modern welfare state,” Mak wrote. “Medical techniques and social security had provided people with the means by which death, disaster, and misfortune could be banished, controlled, or at least removed to the margins of existence.” Religion became, for most, a choice rather than a self-evident—or relevant—reality.
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