I didn't say anything about the IRS and I didn't say the phenomena should be ignored. I think that the most impactful manifestations of the phenomenon should be the focus of study, on account of being the most impactful.
Cowardice seems likely when somebody ignores the high impact manifestation that enjoys popular support, choosing instead to lampoon the low impact fringe manifestation.
Could just be "this is in my ballpark, that is not".
Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach. There are deep subtleties to it on a sociological perspective that are far more interesting than its extreme fish-in-a-barrel status theologically. Maybe that doesn't interest the author?
Maybe you're right. The impression I got was that the author picked a soft easy target, but maybe that's an uncharitable take.
> Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach
I'm not sure I agree with that though. The same method, pointing out conflict between modern espoused belief and historical reality, seems like it would be equally effective against both.
It is uncharitable. A lot of writing intended for very broad audiences surfaces on Hacker News. Writing intended for much smaller audiences also makes the front page from time to time. This is one of those times.
Diane Purkiss is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and fellow and tutor at Keble College. She holds a doctoral degree from Merton College Oxford, and an honours degree in English and History from the University of Queensland. She has published widely on the English Civil War, and on witchcraft and the supernatural in the early modern period.
She's writing about popular misconceptions relevant to her own specialty. She has no special background to bring to bear on contemporary American megachurch Christianity.
Her critique was published in the Athenaeum Review, "a new journal of arts and ideas for the general educated reader."
It's really not. Christianity is a rather uniquely vulnerable religion to getting rationalist holes poked in it because of its insistence on factual historicality of a particular set of events[1], and megachurch Christianity is a deeply weird, heretical offshoot that barely follows mainline Christianity, and it looks like you could blow barn-sized holes in it with a peashooter, because it's held together with ignorance and baling wire. You will note though, exactly how much historical impact this kind of attack has had, namely none.
Basically what you've got here is a cultural phenomenon dressed up as a religious one, borrowing some religious functions, taking over the public role of religion. But its foundations have a lot more to do with ingroup identity, shibboleths and the peculiar American take on the protestant work ethic. Trying to understand it theologically just hits a blank wall. You have to understand it as sociology.
([1] Other religions not of the same lineage shrug off this class of attacks. Disprove Shinto? Disprove what? It makes no historical claims.)
Christianity does not require insistence on "factual historicality of a particular set of events", or at least not disprovable ones. That's mostly a Western phenomena, to which American protestants seem particularly prone to the most extreme version of.
I think you can ultimately thank Thomas Aquinas for this movement. He was quite fond of a rational basis for God and repackaged the works of Aristotle for this end. But of course once you start down the road of adding rationalism to your religion then the whole mysticism of it can start to stand out to some. So some people started thinking it must be all literal and totally rational...
Eastern Orthodox Christianity still has no truck with that rationalism nonsense.
Yes, there are recognizably Christian subgroups that disavow all historical claims (and reinterpret Paul accordingly), but mainstream Christianity has always affirmed the bodily resurrection of Jesus and that (per Paul) this is essential to Christianity ... long before Aquinas.
N. T. Wright's "The Resurrection of the Son of God" is a very good read on this.
It's been tried. It doesn't work. It doesn't change the minds of Christian believers, just as pointing out the lack of evidence for the Burning Times doesn't change the minds of feminist Wiccans.
People don't follow religions because they're true. They follow them because they offer narratives and social interactions they personally find compelling.
Understanding the social interactions - they're not always obvious - might do more to make religions less appealing than yet another unsuccessful attempt to debunk the core narrative.
Arguably, modern "fundamentalism" of many religious forms is a reaction movement that says "if we cannot have both science and religion, let us abandon science". It's something people back as recently as the Elizabethan era would have disagreed with as heretical theologically. How could God be so untrue that the search for truth had to be abandoned?
Cowardice seems likely when somebody ignores the high impact manifestation that enjoys popular support, choosing instead to lampoon the low impact fringe manifestation.