Cross Examined by John W. Campbell

Cross Examined: Putting Christianity on Trial
By John W. Campbell
Prometheus Books, 2021

It’s almost 20 years now since the “New Atheism” movement had its first flourishing in a small barrage of poorly-written, poorly-organized, largely ad hominem screeds against the many evils of organized religion. Readers who endured the whole phenomenon as it was happening may remember the vaguely workshop feel of the whole thing, the queasy sense that a great deal of outrage was being overcooked for unstated purposes - probably a combination of Islam-bashing and simple greed. One hint that the whole squall might have been an opportunistic grift: although the abuses of organized religion have only increased in the last few years (notoriously, in Texas, for instance, for explicitly fundamentalist Christian reasons, a woman impregnated in a rape must now carry the pregnancy to term), the book-length screeds have largely dried up. Despite the passions of those screeds, it’s fairly easy, in 2021, to look back on the whole phenomenon as having been conducted in, as it were, bad faith.

Which makes John W. Campbell’s big new book Cross Examined: Putting Christianity on Trial, all the more refreshing. Comparing many of those earlier “New Atheist” books to this tome is like comparing a plastic Nativity church to Chartres Cathedral. 

Campbell, a trial lawyer, opens with a jarring but incontrovertible inference: that Christianity is not only the most powerful and influential man-made social construct in the world today, it’s also the most powerful and influential man-made social construct in the history of the world. It has shaped countless billions of lives over two millennia; it’s determined the rise and fall of nations; it’s created entire ecologies of thought. Given this, it’s entirely warranted to scrutinize it right down to its DNA. 

Cross Examined does exactly this, in elaborate, almost comprehensive breadth. Campbell opens by stressing a key point that will nevertheless be entirely overlooked by his fundamentalist Christian readers: he’s not attacking anybody’s faith. But Christianity makes and always has made a vast array of real-world fact claims, and Campbell leaves virtually none of these unchallenged. He points out that most followers of Christianity haven’t spent a great amount of energy examining their faith. “Although most people adopt their religions as children well before they can critically evaluate their ‘decision,’ most will vigorously defend it into adulthood,” he writes. “Despite their awareness that man has created millions of gods, they will say, ‘Mine is different. Mine is real.’”

He makes up for that lack of examination, in spades. Every aspect of Christianity is scrutinized in these 600 pages - all in clear, forceful, and above all fair prose. The much-vexed topic of the historicity of Jesus is plumbed to its not-very-deep depths; the oft-proclaimed superiority of so-called Christian morality is tested against 2000 years of examples and counter-examples, and the list of familiar Christian apologetics is rifled for anything of substance (that apologetics are needed at all to ‘demonstrate’ the existence of an all-powerful Deity Who actively wants a personal relationship with every human on Earth, that such a Deity isn’t and hasn’t always been immediately obvious without any need for the Kalam Cosmological Argument at all, isn’t so much addressed as allowed to speak for itself). And at every point, Campbell is as clear as a bell-note:

The universe we see is not the universe we would expect the Christian God to create. According to the Bible, all of creation was made to benefit man. This is why the Christian orthodoxy defended the Earth-centered view of cosmology so aggressively and for so long - because it is exactly the cosmology described and predicted by the Bible. What use has man for distant nebulae he can never visit or even see? What use for billions of light-years of empty space? Why would God create a universe in which over 99.999999 percent will be forever inaccessible to man?

Christianity has spawned whole schools of fundamentalist dogmatics who would instantly answer this point by saying those distant nebulae aren’t real, that those billions of light-years aren’t real, that the universe mentioned here is merely a pretty canopy over the only real thing in reality, the Earth, and so on. To his credit, Campbell expends very little energy on Christian apologetics that rely on a denial of visible, measurable, testable reality (although Christian-inspired science-denial and the widespread damage it causes is noteworthy enough). 

Instead, what readers of Cross Examined get is the ultimate case for the prosecution. In his calm and unassuming manner, Campbell has written a Bible of Christianity-analysis for our time.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.