The Heretical Mind

MacKay Coppins at The Atlantic unfavorably reviews the new horror movie, Heretic, with the teaser being “The hollowness at the center of Heretic.” I won’t watch this movie because it sounds dumb, but some of Coppins’s criticisms have a familiar quality to them: disparage the active engagement of scholars and seekers and atheist personalities on the internet. I’ve been a bit disparaging too about some topics, but some of the ideas that she dismisses with a casual disregard are actually quite new and significant, whether relevant to core Christianity or Mormonism.

Coppins starts off, for instance, critiquing the “Reddit-level ideas about religion” and then quotes a Claremont professor about the “neo-Campbellian spiel that distorts Asian religions.” But one of the most interesting achievements of internet atheist personalities is actually the deep-dive into mythological borrowing and flow of religious ideology that is demonstrably present in all ancient religions. Whether the movie does that justice or not I can’t say, but the internet commentariat has effectively surfaced all of the scholarship that the pastors and missionaries didn’t know but now have to contend with. This includes the strong Christian mythicist arguments that Jesus was an invented literary figure; it is of course rejected by believer scholars, but it is only rejected more mildly by secular historians who lean into a few phrase and passage claims to counteract it. But of course, that is just a hyper-personal touchpoint for believers and doesn’t have much purchase against all the obvious mythological borrowings like the great flood, miraculous acts, and virgin birth.

What we in fact see on the modern atheist internet are very deep collective engagements with both scholarship and common sense that look at topics that undermine almost all of the claims of these religions. They are not at all armchair speculations, but instead the product of invested autodidacts who are deeply concerned to understand how a collection of texts can be so flawed yet taken as God’s word. Below are a few of the contemporary topics that are being analyzed in great detail. Note also that I have never encountered a Mormon missionary, a Jehovah’s Witness, or an evangelical Christian apologist on the street or at my door who knew any of this, despite Coppins’s suggestion that missionaries are well-versed on these topics and find them somehow trite.

On Mormonism:

1. Joseph Smith was a con-artist who scammed people with his knowledge of antiquity. He wrongly translated Egyptian hieroglyphics in support of a thesis that was just completely false. Mormon apologetics against this are unconvincing and demonstrate a desire to achieve a theological and hagiographic outcome rather than a careful examination of the evidence.
2. The Book of Mormon is racist in its various explanations of a completely unsupportable claim about the New World. Moreover, to this day Mormon scholars remain undaunted by the genetic and scientific evidence that no such thing took place.
3. Mormon settlers murdered settlers to protect their colonies in Utah from outsiders.

On Judaism:

1. The scholarship surfaced by online presenters concerning what is know about the traditions of Canaanite peoples and how Israel’s cult of Yahweh tried to differentiate itself from the host of heaven is notable as showing the mythological roots of the faith.
2. Moses was likely a mythical figure.
3. The role of slavery in the Old Testament is impossible to reconcile to any contemporary morality. It was allowed, it was cruel, and it had grotesque rules that governed rape.
4. The murderous nature of Yahweh and the tribes of Israel can’t be overlooked, from the Great Flood and its holocide to the massacre of babies and livestock in Exodus-era expansion. Of course, it was likely a myth anyway, which just makes it slightly less grotesque, unless you are a believer.
5. The scholarship on post-Exilic compilation of the Old Testament is surfaced by the mythicists and shows how Persian mysticism likely intermingled with early Canaanite and Yahweh-cultic ideas.

On Christianity:

1. The New Testament is filled with contradictions. Apologists try to “reconcile” or “harmonize” them but they are contradictory and undermine any claims of inerrancy.
2. Jesus supported slavery.
3. There is no contemporaneous support for the core events described in the Gospels.
4. Concepts of afterlife and hell were non-Judaic inventions that leveraged Hellenistic ideas.
5. There is no historical basis for the resurrection. While Bart Ehrman has been writing about this for years—and with significant sympathy—this is part of recent scholarship being promoted by an online atheist who very carefully analyzes various approaches to the topic, including the “minimal facts” hypothesis and finds that the entire faith can be explained by one apostle being sincerely convinced by a post-death bereavement hallucination (and in parallel Paul’s vision).

Jehovah’s Witnesses:

1. Charles Taze Russell just kept making incorrect prophecies. One JW I chatted with once said that he was simply mistaken. I asked why I should believe any of their stuff and she said that everything was true anyway!
2. They treat their own people poorly, from apostates to women.

So Coppins’s armchair dismissal of online efforts to analyze and understand these kinds of religious traditions is really not as easy as the author asserts. This is a common error I’ve seen among believers with a perch like Coppins or Ross Douthat at New York Times. Instead we get what a neutral perspective educated in history and science can plausibly determine: this stuff was invented by men and women (mostly men) to suit their political agendas, though they may also have sincerely believed it as well. For secularists this is not at all surprising and it leads to more interest in the topics at hand, not less. The writers of Heretic may have not discovered the full depth of the arguments, but they are in line with a realistic understanding of these religious traditions as exactly that: traditions entangling in a network of cultural and cultic ideas. They are equally flawed yet revered, but they most definitely do not point to any kind of true assertions without expansive wiggle room that moves them into the realm of archetypal narratives (say, Jordan Peterson) or purely aesthetic and numinous sensibilities about the world.

The final sentiment in the Heretic review is worth engaging given the flaws of the arguments against the movie (I have no doubt it is dull). Coppins wants faith to be deep and meaningful and beautiful as well as a fortress that is unassailable by all these words. It’s a damn feeling, a connection, something that is a “transcendence of the empirical.” But most of the heretics arguing with words against these faith, history, and culture claims are former believers who are actually, gradually but surely, leading people to consider a larger model of how faith operates. Instead of supporting a transcendence fortified by beauty and truth, faith promoters are actually indifferent and dismissive of the most amazing and human truth: that these are wondrous creations made by heretics in their own time.