Joseph Ring

Fiction needs to be believable.

This is how Christianity failed. Believers see Christianity as revealed truth, but whether you believe or not, religion serves an earthly purpose, and that purpose is to hold civilization and the family together. Understand this — we can argue all day about whether a creator god exists. You think yes, I think no, we debate. But that debate is inconsequential. It's just the high-IQ equivalent of a pick-up game of basketball. Because it's not important what you believe... it's important what your beliefs make you do. For over a thousand years, Christianity held the family together by tying sex to family responsibility, through marriage. And for over a thousand years, Christianity held civilization together by tying marriage to male productivity and prosocial behavior. These two links forged a chain that ran directly from "building civilization" to "getting laid". Men who helped civilization along got laid. Men who didn't, didn't. This supported civilization in two ways. First, in the individual lives of men, it was motivational. Men worked hard and did useful things because that was how you got a pretty wife who was nice to you. Second, across generations, it was eugenic. Anti-civilizational men didn't get to have as many children. That's how Christianity helped build civilization in the West. Now, any religion could have done this, so long as it had certain traits. And in other places and times, other religions did do this. But in the West, it was Christianity in particular that did this job. So why is the non-believer praising Christianity? Because I'm a non-believer, not an angry reddit church-hater. I'm interested in what's actually going on. If Christianity does a good thing, I'm going to say so. Unfortunately, the praise stops here, because the reverse is also true. We have to fearlessly look at where Christianity failed, and why it no longer serves the civilization and family preserving functions that it once did. Having created these two causal links: "If you get married, you can have all the sex you want." and "If you work hard and do the right thing, you can marry a desirable woman." ... Christianity's responsibility was to preserve them. The driving force behind civilization wasn't religious zeal. It was always the male libido. (And yes, later, also love for your children. But that's a different topic for another day.) So long as these two things remained true, the powerful engine of male libido would continue to pull the train of civilization. The responsibility of Christianity, as an earthly institution, was to make sure these two things remained true forever, regardless of what changes technology wrought. It failed. Christianity failed to preserve the second link in its chain. Here's how and why. In any agrarian society, from the neolithic era to early America, a teenage boy is functionally a man. He can do farm labor, he can fight wars, he can serve an apprenticeship and become a craftsman. So if he wants sex, and what teenager doesn't, he can get married. Because he is a productive, respected member of the community, and all the women are socialized to want exactly that. This is no longer true. Christianity failed to defend marriage, because it thought "defending marriage" meant lecturing young people about getting married, instead of making sure they could. Christianity sat by while women entered the workforce and earned as much as men. It sat by while women amassed more political power, social status, and respect than men. When this happens, men can't marry, because women are genetically programmed to marry up. Not down. Not across. Up. If the average woman regards the average man as her equal, weddings are going to become increasingly rare. And the average Western woman does not regard the average man as her equal. She regards him as her inferior. She is egged on in this by every Hollywood movie, every show on television, every book in the bookstore, every story in the newspaper, every speech by every politician, on both sides of the aisle. Christianity failed to stop this. Worse yet, Christianity allowed the age where a man could even afford to marry to increase from 15 to 20 to 25 to 30. With enough lectures and social pressure, you can stop teenagers from having sex until they are 15. In strict religious communities full of zeal, you might even hold some of them back until 18 or 20. But if dudes can't afford a home or a wife until 30 or 35, what the hell do you expect them to do? Of course they're going to fornicate. But Christianity did nothing about this either, because that would have meant taking on people with serious economic and institutional power, the scribes and Pharisees of our day. It was much easier to lecture young people, because young people don't have any power. So the Christians fought a culture war with the left, a war of condom-based sex education versus abstinence-only sex education, over who was better at preventing "teen pregnancy". And no one stood up and shouted the obvious truth, like this: "Teenage girls are supposed to get pregnant, you fucking noodle! What the hell do you think they get horny for?" Nature, or god if you like, programmed teenagers to be horny so that you can have more humans. The command is right there in the bible "Be fruitful and multiply." But somehow Christianity, the earthly institution, twisted this into "keep it in your pants". No religion can fight human genetic programming and win. It's not supposed to. It's supposed to work with that programming, not fight it. It's supposed to channel those instincts into healthy ways of life, not suppress them. But lectures were easier. Christianity forgot that traffic laws are not a highway. You cannot drive on a lecture about traffic safety and get to where you are going. You have to actually maintain a fucking road. The path forward for young men's sexual urges no longer runs through work, marriage, and children. It runs though pickup artistry and looksmaxxing and hookup culture. Christianity is perfectly willing to take on all of these things, but it is unwilling to pick a fight with the real political, economic, and institutional powers that gave rise to them. This is why young people abandoned the church in droves, generations ago. Churches simply no longer had answers to the problems that they really had, and the needs they really felt. Now they're all on reddit making edgy posts about how god is a monster, but that's only what they think they mean. What they actually mean is that the church failed them.