Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions (25 page)

Just the Facts, Ma'am
is
an easy tactic to use. It requires no cleverness or deft maneuvering. Only two things are necessary. First is the awareness that many challenges to Christianity are based on bad information. These objections can be overcome by a simple appeal to the facts. The second requirement is that you need to know the facts. If you do, you can beat the objection. This is not an absolute requirement for this tactic, because sometimes you can spot a wrong answer even though you don't know the right one. But knowing the right answer is central to using Just the Facts, Ma'am, and often that information is just a few keystrokes away.

Let me give you an example of a popular challenge to Christianity that is not based on fact, though many think it is. The protest goes something like this: "More wars have been fought and more blood has been shed in the name of God than any other cause. Religion is the greatest source of evil in the world."

Now, one might point out that even if this were the case, it is not entirely clear what conclusions about religion are justified from that data. You couldn't properly conclude, for example, that God does not exist or that Jesus was not the Savior simply by citing acts of violence done in the name of God or Christ.

Since oppression and mayhem are neither religious
duties
for Christians nor logical applications of the teachings of Christ, violence done in the name of Christ cannot be laid at his door. This conduct might tell you something about people. It tells you nothing about God or the gospel.

So there are logical problems with this complaint, but the bigger problem is that this charge is simply not true. Religion has
not
caused more wars and bloodshed than anything else in history.

Though it is easy to characterize religion as a blood-thirsty enterprise replete with witch hunts, crusades, and religious jihad, the historical facts show that the greatest evil has always resulted from
denial
of God, not
pursuit
of him. In the twentieth century alone, Dennis
Prager
notes, "more innocent people have been murdered, tortured, and enslaved by secular ideologies — Nazism and communism — than by all religions in history."
¹

Grab an older copy of the
Guinness Book of World Records
and turn to the category "Judicial," subheading "Crimes: Mass Killings." You'll find that carnage of unimaginable proportions resulted not from religion, but from institutionalized atheism: over 66
million
wiped out under Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev; between 32 and 61
million
Chinese killed under Communist regimes since 1949; one third of the eight million Khmers — 2.7
million
people — were killed between 1975 and 1979 under the communist Khmer Rouge.
²

The greatest evil has not come from people zealous for God. It has resulted when people are convinced there is no God they must answer to.

I want you to notice something about the facts I cited above. They were as precise as I could make them without being cumbersome. I gave you a specific source with exact numbers and clear-cut dates. Precision is an important element of Just the Facts, Ma'am because of a foundational principle of persuasion: When citing facts in your defense,
precise numbers are always more persuasive than general figures.

Though your memory may not always be up to the task (mine certainly isn't), always use the specific rather than the general when you can. When you communicate with factual precision, you convince your listeners that you know what you are talking about. Saying "Thousands died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11" is not as compelling as saying "2,973 human beings were buried beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001." Each bit of precision — "2
,973
," "September 11, 2001," the specific locations of the attacks — adds force to your facts. It may take longer to say it, but with proper delivery, it is much more compelling.

This kind of exactness can be a powerful persuader. For example, I was once involved in a head-to-head encounter, of sorts, with Pulitzer Prize - winning historian Garry Wills before San Francisco's liberal Commonwealth Club, which was taped for national broadcast on NPR. In his opening salvo on the topic "Christianity in America," Professor Wills disputed the idea that the Founding Fathers of our republic were Christians. They were not Christians, he claimed, but deists.

The microphone was then passed to me. Fortunately, I had my facts. "The phrase 'Founding Fathers' is a proper noun," I explained. "It refers to a specific group: the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. There were other important players not in attendance, but these fifty-five made up the core." I then continued citing from memory, the best I could, the following facts that were a matter of public record: Among the delegates were twenty-eight Episcopalians, eight Presbyterians, seven Congregationalists, two Lutherans, two Dutch Reformed, two Methodists, two Roman Catholics, one unknown, and only three deists — Williamson, Wilson, and Franklin. This took place at a time when church membership usually entailed "sworn adherence to strict doctrinal creeds."
³

This tally proves that 51 of 55 — a full 93 percent—of the members of the Constitutional Convention, the most influential group of men shaping the political underpinnings of our nation, were Christians, not deists.

Virtually every person involved in the founding enterprise of the United States was a God-fearing Protestant whose theology in today’s terms would be described as evangelical or "fundamentalist.”

When I was finished, I set my microphone down and waited, bracing for the rebuttal from my learned opponent. But he said nothing. After a few moments of awkward silence, the moderator moved on to a new topic. Dr. Wills had his facts wrong. Mine were not only correct, but they were precise, adding tremendous persuasive power to my rebuttal.

FOLLOWING A PLAN

Challenges to Christianity that fail due to faulty facts may seem difficult to spot at first, especially if you are not well versed in the issue in question. But the task becomes much easier if you have a plan, a series of steps to guide your effort. For Just the Facts, Ma'am, I use the same two-step plan, whether I am having a conversation or doing a more detailed analysis of a book or article.

First ask,
"What is the claim?"
This may seem like an obvious initial step, but you'll be surprised how often we charge ahead without having a clear fix on a target. Take a moment to isolate the precise point being made. Write it down in unambiguous terms if you need to. Sometimes the claim is clear, but not always. Assertions are often implicit or hidden under a layer of rhetoric and linguistic maneuvering. Pay careful attention to get a clear fix on exactly what the person is asserting.

For example, a piece written by a student in a university newspaper claimed that pro-lifers had no right to oppose abortion unless they were willing to care for the children born to mothers in crisis pregnancies. Notice that the author was making two assertions here. The first was the obvious moral point, which was easily dispatched. In my written response to the paper, I pointed out that it simply does not follow that because a person objects to killing innocent children, he is obliged to care for those that survive. Imagine how bizarre it would sound to argue, "You have no right to stop me from beating my wife unless you're willing to marry her." Clearly, the offender is not off the hook simply because others won't step in to take his place. Implicit in the challenge, though, was a second assertion: the claim that pro-lifers were
not
doing anything for pregnant women who carried their babies to term. The student therefore felt justified criticizing the pro-life movement.

This brings us to the second step of our plan. Once the assertion is clear, ask,
"Is the claim factually accurate?"
Sometimes answering this question takes a little investigation. A short trip to the Internet revealed there were roughly four thousand national and international pro-life service providers dedicated to the well-being of mothers in crisis pregnancies who choose life for their children. They provide medical aid, housing, baby clothing, cribs, food, adoption services—even post-abortion counseling services—all at no cost. Amazingly, there were more crisis pregnancy centers in the country than abortion clinics. A quick check of the local phone directory showed there were ten
right
in the same city as the university. I pointed out each of these facts in my response to show there was no factual basis for the student's objection.

CRACKING THE CODE

I followed my two-step plan when evaluating the historical claims of the blockbuster novel,
The
Da
Vinci Code,
whose broadside on Christianity and the Bible created a public sensation, along with tremendous turmoil for Christians. First, I isolated the claims. The author, Dan Brown, made it simple in most cases by stating his contentions clearly.
⁴
Here are some of them:

•    In the first three centuries, the warring between Christians and pagans threatened to rend Rome in two.

•    The doctrine that Jesus was the Son of God was fabricated for political reasons at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 and affirmed by a close vote.

•    Constantine arranged for all gospels depicting Jesus as a mere mortal to be gathered up and destroyed.

•    The Dead Sea Scrolls found in a cave near Qumran in the 1950s confirm that the modern Bible is a fabrication.

•    Thousands of Christ's followers wrote accounts of Jesus' life. These evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version.
⁵

Because I now had specific items to assess, my job was much easier. The first challenge was simple. Even a cursory analysis of this period of history reveals there were no wars between pagans and Christians, and for a very good reason. Jesus' followers had neither armies nor the will to resist. Instead, they considered it a privilege to be martyred for Christ. They wouldn't even fight tormentors like Diocletian, who executed Christians by the thousands just twenty years before Constantine.

The Council of Nicaea was not an obscure event in history. We have extensive records of the proceedings written by those who were actually there: Eusebius of Caesarea and Athanasius, deacon of Alexandria. Two things stand out in those accounts that pertain to Brown's claims. First,
no one
at Nicaea considered Jesus to be a "mere mortal," not even Arius, whose errant views made the council necessary. Second, Christ's deity was the
reason
for the council, not merely the
result
of it.

After a pitched debate, the orthodox party prevailed. The vote wasn't close at all; it was a landslide. Of 318 bishops, only the

Egyptians
Theonas
and
Secundus
refused to concur.
⁶
The council affirmed what had been taught since the beginning. Jesus was not a mere man; he was God the Son.

Regarding the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, Brown might be forgiven for not getting the date right (the first scrolls were discovered in the 1940s, not the 1950s). There is no excuse, however, for another misstep:
The Dead Sea Scrolls say nothing of Jesus.
There were no Gospels in Qumran. Not one shred or shard mentions his name. This is a complete fabrication.

As for the rest of the claims, I want to let you in on a little secret. Answering the second question —
Is
the claim factually accurate?
— does not always require investigation.
I mentioned earlier that sometimes it is possible to spot a wrong answer even when you do not know the right one.

Before beginning any research, first ask,
"Does anything about the assertion seem suspicious or unlikely on its face?"
For example, early in
The
Da
Vinci Code,
Brown claims that over a period of three hundred years the Catholic Church burned five million witches at the stake in Europe around the fifteenth century.
⁷
I was immediately suspicious of this "fact," so I quickly took out my calculator and did the math. Rome would have to burn forty-five women a day, every single day, non-stop for three hundred years. That's a lot of firewood.

Furthermore, a quick Internet search revealed that the population for Europe at the time was about 50 million. If half were female (25 million) and half of those were adults (12.5 million),
then
something like
40 percent of the entire adult female population perished
at the hand of the Vatican. That's more carnage than the Black Plague of 1347, which killed only one-third. Let's just say this seems highly unlikely.

Many of Dan Brown's other claims can be quickly dispatched using the same technique:

• If the deity of Christ was an idea invented by Constantine and completely foreign to Christ's followers who viewed him as a mere mortal, what explains the "relatively close vote" at Nicaea?