When the internet started to become mainstream around 1998 and chat rooms took off, an interesting thing happened to the Mormon church. Their members started taking their whispered conversations public. As more and more Mormons discovered the anonymity of the internet, they began to find fellow disillusioned kindred spirits who shared about the damage they had incurred by being part of what they now believed to be a cult. The not-so-historical story of Joseph Smith began to be looked at in detail and Mormons found that there was a new way to safely get the answers to questions they were too afraid to ask. Today, something similar is happening to the Evangelical church via YouTube.
By the final years of the 2000s, YouTube exploded with content on all sorts of subjects. Among the things that became easy to find were debates between religious people and atheists. It might be Christian William Craig Lane versus atheist Christopher Hitchens, Bill Nye versus creationist Ken Ham, Jewish Rabbi Botech Shmuley arguing against the ideas of Richard Dawkins or something like comedian Bill Maher inviting atheist Sam Harris on his show. For many people, it was the first time seeing Christianity, Islam, and Judaism get challenged significantly. For Christians, however, those debates don’t have much of an impact as they tend to center around creationism or the specific evils of religious institutions. Creationism isn’t that big of an issue for many Christians and most religious people easily separate their personal religious experience from the crimes and foibles of Christian institutions. But the new wave of YouTube atheists are a different breed. They are significantly impacting not just Christianity, but Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism. They are regular people, starting their own YouTube channels, and having conversations that are far more sophisticated than the “brilliant ones” that Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, or Daniel Dennett are having and much more accurate than anything Bill Maher might say on his TV show, YouTube channel, or in the movie “Religulous.” The conversations about religions being a phenomenon based on common ideas of primeval, colorful myth that are then legitimized by the religious mainstream, including Christianity, is getting more sophisticated and reaching deeper and farther than it has before.
This is a subject for a book or even better, a YouTube channel–not an essay. But I will briefly highlight 3 reasons why this new wave of YouTube atheists are successfully converting a lot of Evangelicals and other Christians from the faith.
- They are sincere learners who do their homework. Sadly, many Christians have gotten a reputation for being hot-headed, close-minded, and averse to facts or anything intellectual. It’s a turn-off to inquisitive, young Christians and anyone else on a religious search. Christian defensiveness radiates insecurity and insincerity in the search for truth. Many of those found talking on YouTube now don’t have the bitter, caustic tone of a Hitchens or Dawkins. A great example of this is the YouTube channel/podcast Mythvision. Hosted by a former Bible-believing Evangelical turned atheist, there may be laughing at times at some of the absurdities and logic pretzels Christians get into trying to explain away theological and Biblical textual issues. But in general, he and the guests try to be fair as they explore what pagan Roman, Hellenic, and Ancient Near Eastern cultures believed and where that overlaps with Biblical theology. The tone and level of detail given to texts and to the times, to the audience the texts were written for, and the culture that produced the text is far more exegetically sound than your average Bible study which is more of: “What do you think Jesus meant here?” and “How does it inspire you?” I’ve personally found that most people are starved for deeper more nuanced examinations of the Biblical text than those usually done. They tend to not occur because they require that the pastor know a lot about the various forms of scholarly criticism as well as ancient languages; or they can easily leave behind the less academically and more emotionally inclined. They also take a lot of time to prepare and teach. Consequently, YouTube channels (with all of the religions) offer the believer the opportunity to see that yes, in fact, there was a process of development, adaptation, canonization, and syncretism that permeates the histories of all religions including their own. To say this is eye-opening for most is an understatement. It’s a radical challenge to their fundamental worldview. Sometimes liberating and sometimes soul shattering. The comment sections are always interesting.
- A large number of them are former believers. Both the scholars and the YouTube hosts are almost always people that were once Muslim believers, or Christian believers, or escaped from some other faith. In some languages like Hindi or Arabic, a YouTube search will yield stories and testimonies of people damaged by Hinduism and Islam, who have taken that pain and done a deep dive into their own faith tradition and found not only that it’s not rational or logical, but that it has been excessively tampered with or that their religious texts are riddled with errors, bad copies, and intentional maliciousness by religious scribes. YouTube becomes a light to shine on texts that they and their people, culture, or civilization have held sacred for millennia. Did Buddha really exist?Was there a historical Lao Tzu? Did Mohammed and Paul have schizophrenia or seizures–issues that doctors now believe may make the brain have hyper-spiritual visions? What is the role of mental illness in the lives of religious prophets? These YouTube channels are led by hosts that have gone on the journey of betrayal, disillusionment, deconstructionism, and (in their opinion) freedom from a religion that was oppressing them more than they ever realized. That is impactful and it is a journey many Christians are on and is the reason I wrote my most recent book No Religion Required.
- They focus intently on the inconsistencies and textual problems in the Bible (or other religious texts). These shows may highlight in detail the inconsistencies in the four Gospels, or in Paul’s theology in comparison to what Jesus and other disciples believe; or inaccuracies in how ancient Roman Law and Jewish Law worked compared to how it’s presented in the Bible. There’s a big examination of motifs, genres, and ancient religious tropes that the Bible seems to replicate. Scholars among us may say, “this is old news. Haven’t you ever heard of the Jesus Seminar or the Quest for the Historical Jesus, or read Iranaeus and the Church Fathers? We’ve been dealing with this stuff all the time. What makes this any different?” Well, in this new era, these atheists tend to find scriptures that Christians are not accustomed to defending or are not even familiar with. If they talk about a Bible story with cannibalism (2 Kings 6:28-29), for instance, they will not only highlight a distasteful moment in the Bible as Hitchens and Dawkins might, but they will also examine how Christians have explained many of these moments away as aberrations or “textual, grammatical, and language” issues. They will go for the deep-dive, highlight illuminating passages or traditions from other pagan beliefs that precede Judaism and Christianity, and introduce the viewer to the complicated rabbit-holes one can go down in religious studies of the Ancient Near East. They will often teach the viewer that Judaism and Christianity are far less different from pagan religions than usually thought. Whether it’s the virgin birth, descending into Hades for three days, or being taken up in the clouds, the answer is, “We’ve seen all this before the time of Jesus and Judaism.” Why is this different? Because they are often engaging in conversations that don’t even occur amongst the academics who study the Bible. They are viewing that group of academic Bible scholars as epistemologically closed as well–and sometimes they are right. Ancient Near Eastern historians don’t always have a lot of time for the already determined “pre-suppositions of Bible scholars” (be it liberal or conservative). So in this sense, they are both popularizing Bible criticism and expanding and challenging it significantly.
This essay is already a lot longer than I hoped. So, to bring it to a swift conclusion: YouTube channels are challenging religions and their texts in a new way. While many Christians may be set in their ways and some Christian academics might view this as nothing but the same battles they have always engaged in, for many wounded Christians and especially millennial and Gen-Z Christians, these videos are fresh manna from YouTube. They are viewed as effective, enlightening, educational, and liberating. Your grandparent may not be in danger of losing their faith, but your grandkids are if the local church can’t up its exegetical game.
It will be a tough road toward finding solutions because the church has not exactly been rushing to develop Christians who truly know their Bible. Most still view it as one book and are not truly that conscious of genre, symbolism, allegory, poetry, or much else that gives the text nuance. Memorizing verses and knowing Bible stories is one thing. Understanding the history of the text, language and translation issues, and Near Eastern culture is another. Since most Evangelical churches cannot even agree or define what they mean by “literal,” “inspired,” and “inerrant,” in regard to the Bible, it will be a tough slog to deal with many of these issues the YouTubers address and which we may start getting in our churches. A large majority will always be happy just believing and trusting in the Bible (viewing it as God’s Google). But many of their kids and grandkids will not feel that way and will increasingly have more complicated questions about the Bible than just, “Was the Earth really created in six days?” We need to be better prepared.
Patrick Nachtigall is the author of six books dealing with religion and globalization including, “In God We Trust: A Challenge to Evangelicals” and “No Religion Required, a Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Chocolate Milk, and Untimely Death.”