Become a Clash Insider!
Don’t let Big Tech pre-chew your news. Sign up for our free email newsletter, and we’ll keep you in the loop.
It’s one thing for skeptics to scoff at God and think traditional Christians are somehow repressed and deceived … but what does the objective data say?
Jesus once said ‘But wisdom is justified of all her children.’ What he meant was that the wisdom of someone can often be measured by the fruit that wisdom bears.
For example, the ‘wisdom’ of doctors suggesting smoking as a weight suppressant turned out to be bad advice with bad effects while having a healthy weight and exercise is good for heart health.
It’s one thing for the skeptic to throw up objections to the claims of God’s deity, or even His existence. That’s the sort of question that can have theologians and philosophers dancing around each other for hours.
It’s quite another to use actual data points to put the results of living by that faith up against the results of living by other worldviews.
Scripture calls us to ‘taste and see that the Lord is good’.
This article calls you to something similar that can be used by an outsider: look and see that living the way Christians are called to live actually leads to a richer and fuller life.
An article by Josh Howerton covers a number of ways that Christians live lives whose results would surprise many of their accusers.
We will summarize just three of those points. You can find full story here.
Do Christians have second-rate sex-lives?
To hear the various ‘sex-positive’ activists mock the Christian sexual ethic, you might assume that being called to a faithful, married life in a monogamous relationship between a husband and wife is somehow a sentence to a romantic life about as exciting as the color beige.
But what do the statistics say?
Fortunately, we’ve got a helpful chart to make sense of it.
We have three categories, with each category subdivided between the results of male and female respondents.
The three categories are the completely irreligious or secular couples on the left hand side, the very religiously observant on the right-hand side, and the middle group being less religious or a mixed secular/religious couple.
It will surprise those who dismiss Christians as laughably prudish, with outmoted sexual ethics that both men and women report the highest levels of personal sexual satisfaction if they consider themselves to be in the ‘very religious’ category.
The most stable relationships — Christians Or Secularists?
Ok, maybe the sexual satisfaction one was a win, but in terms of stable relationships? Surely the progressive secularists have a lock on this one, right?
After all, they’ve got enlightened feminism and equity, and deep understanding of all the patriarchal traps that riddle every sort of relationships, including romantic ones, right? Traditionists affirm old-school gender roles where the husband leads and provides while the wife is the mom who may or may not work outside of the home, but often takes the lion’s share of looking after children and meals.
What would such a couple — possibly even complementarian! — have going for them in terms of stability that could hold a candle to a progressive, secular, tolerant worldview?
As it happens, quite a lot. By the numbers, the Progressives come up more than a little short in this one.
Like the last one, this splits respondents into male and female categories, as well as the less religious, most religious or somewhere in the mushy middle.
But there’s a third axis of division now — Progressive versus traditionalist.
And the results are more than a little interesting.
Anyone with a Women’s Studies major would probably have predicted with near-perfect certainty that the traditionalist, conservative home would have some sort of a repressive ‘toxically male’ figure running the show with an iron hand, and most likely a ‘wife-beater’ shirt.
But the statistics do not bear that out, do they? In fact…
Contrary to the narrative, theologically conservative, gender-traditional, church-attending women are in the category of the happiest relationships with the least abuse in the country. — Gospel Coalition
But suppose the objections continued.
That’s just feedback on relationships. What about the usefulness in situations of actual hardship.
Was there any benefit to religious belief, say, during the Pandemic?
The media seldom missed an opportunity to pile on Christians and Trump voters through the lockdowns, pointing the finger of blame for spreading the virus in their direction, and sometimes openly rejoicing when religious leaders succumbed to the complications of being sick, as though they were lesser people who deserved to die.
But none of that measures the effects of religious belief (or disbelief) on those who went through the stresses associated with the illness, the lockdown, and the disruptions — financial and otherwise — on those who endured the pandemic itself.
There are figures that measure those results.
The chart pictured above shows a number of ways in which the mental health of Regular Church attendees was far better supported through the pandemic than those who had never gone.
Categories included a 33% reduced chance of death for regular attendees as compared to their counterprarts, and 84% reduced chance of suicide compared to non-attendees, 29% reduced chance of depression, 50% reduced of divorce, 68% reduction in ‘deaths of despair’ for women, 33% reduction in ‘deaths of despair’ for men, 33% reduced chance of illicit drug use for kids, and 12% reduced risk of adolescent depression.
By the popular metric of ‘thriving’ in life, these are at least three meaningful ways in which Christian life has the god-less counterpart beat hands down.
If wisdom truly is judged by her children, it’s the secularist, not the Christian who has some hard questions to ask himself at the end of an article like this one.
We leave you with words from the Apostle Paul to reflect upon.
The judgment of God on the unrepentant doesn’t necessarily work the way you THINK it does. Notice the phrasing Paul used in Acts 13:46 when he was addressing his Jewish countrymen on this very topic:
Then Paul and Barnabas grew bold and said, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first; but since you reject it, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles.
It isn’t God who condemns the perishing. It’s those who say ‘no’ to the gift God so freely offers.
Check out ClashRadio for more wit and wisdom from ClashDaily’s Big Dawg. While you’re at it, here’s his latest book:
If Masculinity Is ‘Toxic’, Call Jesus Radioactive
Much of the Left loathes masculinity and they love to paint Jesus as a non-offensive bearded woman who endorses their agenda. This book blows that nonsense all to hell. From the stonking laptop of bestselling author, Doug Giles, comes a new book that focuses on Jesus’ overt masculine traits like no other books have heretofore. It’s informative, bold, hilarious, and scary. Giles has concluded, after many years of scouring the scripture that, If Masculinity Is ‘Toxic’, Call Jesus Radioactive.
