Book Review: The Christian Delusion ed. John W. Loftus

Pages: 422
Pub­lisher: Prometheus Books
Year: 2010
Edi­tor: John W. Loftus

This is my review of John Lof­tus’ The Chris­t­ian Delu­sion This por­tion of the review will serve as a gen­eral and very brief overview of the book, and then in sub­se­quent posts I will more crit­i­cally exam­ine a few of the claims of the book, sec­tion by sec­tion (rather than chap­ter by chap­ter). I was orig­i­nally going to do only the crit­i­cal exam­i­na­tion, but that didn’t strike me as the best ‘book review’ — so I’ll do both.

The Chris­t­ian Delu­sion (here­after TCD) is a col­lec­tion of essays, edited by John W. Lof­tus (ex-Evangelical and pri­mary con­trib­u­tor to the web­site Debunk­ing Chris­tian­ity), which attempt to show that Chris­tian­ity is a delu­sion. When I first heard of TCD my imme­di­ate thought was, ‘here we go again: another book mak­ing mas­sive claims it won’t be able to ful­fill’. That this turned out to be the case was not sur­pris­ing, given that — I hope — the title was more pub­lic­ity than actual hope on the parts of the authors. That is not to say that the essays aren’t well writ­ten, in most cases, they are. Nor is it to say that this book isn’t worth read­ing, it is. Part of the rea­son that the book fails in show­ing Chris­tian­ity to be a delu­sion (as well as fail­ing to show why faith fails) is that it con­fuses Chris­tian­ity with a par­tic­u­lar expres­sion of Chris­tian­ity, such as Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cal­ism. Show­ing some of the notions of Evan­gel­i­cal­ism to be false — not that TCD nec­es­sar­ily has — does not mean that Chris­tian­ity as such has been shown to be a delu­sion. Chris­tian­ity has been prac­ticed many dif­fer­ent ways since its incep­tion, and to show it to be a delu­sion means to show its core beliefs to be false (such as the res­ur­rec­tion, or claims of Christ, which TCD does address). This is an fault of the book that per­plexes me, given the focus placed on cul­ture in the open­ing chap­ters. How­ever it is not a fault such that TCD should be ignored.

TCD is divided into fif­teen chap­ters spread over five sec­tions: Why Faith Fails; Why the Bible is not God’s Word; Why the Chris­t­ian God is not Per­fectly Good; Why Jesus is not the Risen Son of God and Why Soci­ety Does not Depend on Chris­t­ian Faith. In a way, TCD strikes me as a response to books such as God is Good, God is Great (B&H), Pas­sion­ate Con­vic­tion (B&H) and Con­tend­ing with Christianity’s Crit­ics (IVP); books which are them­selves edited col­lec­tions of essays which address pop­u­lar argu­ments advanced by New Athe­ists against Chris­t­ian the­ism. Argu­ments which until The Chris­t­ian Delu­sion had not been col­lected in one place (as far as I’m aware). Some sec­tions are stronger than oth­ers (Why Faith Fails is par­tic­u­larly weak), but the ques­tions raised are well worth reading.

I had two hopes going into TCD: (1) that this book wasn’t  going to be typ­i­cal inter­net / infi­del ‘New Athe­ism’ fare and (2) that the essays — all of them — would be well writ­ten. By ‘typ­i­cal inter­net / infi­del New Athe­ism’ I mean the cer­ti­tude expressed in argu­ments which aren’t deserv­ing of such con­fi­dence. Unfor­tu­nately, that is present to an extent, though it isn’t a major dis­trac­tion. The essays them­selves were cer­tainly well writ­ten, though some of the con­clu­sions didn’t fol­low from the premises given by the authors (such as the open­ing chap­ter, which aside from a bad con­clu­sion wasn’t all that dis­agree­able) — this was really my only com­plaint about the book. In that regard, if you’re inter­ested in books such as this — apolo­get­ics and counter-apologetics? — then TCD is worth read­ing (much more than say, The God Delu­sion) . It’s not amaz­ing or extra­or­di­nary, as some peo­ple are billing it, but it is a good col­lec­tion of mate­r­ial that will get any­one think­ing, believ­ers and non­be­liev­ers alike. It doesn’t show Chris­tian­ity to be a delu­sion, and it doesn’t show why faith fails, but it doesn’t have to.

Con­tribut­ing Authors:

• John W. Loftus
• Valerie Tarico
• Jason Long
• Edward T. Babinksi
• Paul Tobin
• Hec­tor Avalos
• Robert M. Price
• David Eller

Many thanks to the peo­ple at Prometheus and Ed Babin­ski for pro­vid­ing a copy of this book for review pur­poses.

Related posts:

1. “The Chris­t­ian Delusion”
2. Book Review: “No Argu­ment for God” by John Wilkinson
3. And John Lof­tus’ Assessment…
4. Book Review: Doing Phi­los­o­phy as a Christian
5. Book Review: The Last Chris­t­ian on Earth by Os Guinness