Bullshit Meter

Coping mechanisms are skills an individual or group develops as self-preservation measures in the face of mortal attack. They may be innate in individuals, such as the biological fight or flight response which produces changes in hormonal levels like adrenalin and cortisol in response to stress. Typically, though, coping mechanisms are associated with psychological tools employed to fend of attacks that cut at the heart of the beings or groups ego.

No group or organization has a chance of persevering for centuries without developing a sophisticated level of coping skills to address changes in the social and political environment that pose threats to the group. Likewise, an over reliance on one set of mechanisms can produce a major crisis if those particular options are removed.

In its infancy Christianity coped with a hostile environment with isolation, a tight knit bunker mentality and a veneration for martyrdom, which essentially removed the risks of torture and death by guaranteeing a reward in the afterlife.

As Christianity ascended to the official religion of the empire and later most of Europe, isolation and martyrdom became obsolete. In its place the Church's best defense became a good offense. They used the complete arsenal available to a group in complete control in order to stifle and eradicate any challenges to its authority. Unfortunately for the Universal Church this method was so successful none other was required. Its most formidable challenge (the Protestant Reformation) produced disastrous results with its offensive response. This foreshadowed worse things to come as its offensive weapons were gradually stripped away by modern states. The Catholic Church simply never developed other coping mechanisms and this is showing with its steady and surprisingly rapid decline.

Protestantism, on the other hand, has enjoyed the domination option only sporadically. Protestantism's birth occurred when Christianity was already dominant. Protestantism emerged essential from a war and separated from Catholicism into pockets where it was still dominant. The consequences of this are that defense mechanisms were not really necessary for most of their history. As a result, when pushed into the defensive by the scientific revolution they have scrambled to set up defense mechanisms, almost as an afterthought. Being in this position is a new experience for Protestants and their method of coping has not been particularly sophisticated. They have taken a bunker mentality approach, playing up a persecution complex and highlighting how the world is out do get them. This has played well among the already loyal but the persecution angle has a whiff of the incredulous that has drawn little more than sarcasm from outside the fundamentalist Christian community.

Their approach to an intellectual defense has been even weaker. The spokespeople that have stood up in the face of the evolution challenge have been little short of pathetic, which has produced a shift in the Christian population. As statistics from the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) show, Christianity is becoming more fundamental and less educated. Their unsophisticated defense mechanisms require a less educated, less sophisticated audience. Attempts by writers such as Ken Miller, Larry Witham, Denis Alexander and other to reconcile science with religion have generally fallen flat in both communities.

One sees a typical pattern in most Christian writings that attempt to address challenges to Christian faith. The first is the statement: "trends are changing". This is an acknowledgement that a particular critique had merit coupled with the reassurance that the tide is changing. Invariably no evidence is provided to substantiate a shift in thinking with the shift generally representing the wishful thinking of the author more than anything else. Seeing these types of responses should immediately set off the bullshit monitor for anyone that wonders about what the Christian response is to a particular critique.

More than anything else Christian defense mechanisms have tended to fall back to topics that non-Christians find of no particular interest. This gives Christian authors and defenders plenty of discussion material in areas few outside the Christian community care about. Arguments among themselves usually produce Christian victories and a boost in their confidence. A prime example of this is the debate over moral relativism and absolutism. Aside from philosophy 101 classes in college this debate commands almost no interest from anyone outside the fundamentalist Christian community. The debate is typically framed in a manner to allow for Christian reductio ad absurdum - framing their opponents views in order to reduce them to the absurd. Nearly every Christian author discussing moral relativism finds a way to demonstrate that anyone holding this view sanctions Nazism and Hitler's atrocities. Since few of their opponents either care about this debate or hold anything close to the views attributed to them by the Christian writers, Christians always come out on top, at least in their own writings and among Christian judges and juries.

These types of arguments as well as the "trends are changing" points should set off the bullshit meter for anyone following the debates. What they truly represent is the Protestant means for coping with a world that is trying to move beyond the constrained world view put forth by fundamentalist Christianity.