Apologetics: Fun, but flawed

HERESY: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity, by Michael Coren. Signal, 2012. 256pp. ISBN 978-0771023156

Reviewed by Günther Simmermacher

Canadian media personality and author Michael Coren has built a career on being provocative. A social conservative, he has had an on-off relationship with the Catholic Church. At present, he is batting zealously for Rome.

His new book of apologetics, Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity, reflects much of that Catholic grounding, though it is clearly intended to appeal to all Christians.

And the enemy, the ”they” of the subtitle, is the atheist who tells lies about Christians. Therein resides the first problem with Heresy: just as Coren lumps together all Christians — from Catholics to those who hate Catholics — so does he treat all atheists as some vague but monolithic entity, thereby perpetuating the same error he accuses atheists of making.

With so broad a target, he can’t fail to hit a few bullseyes. He shoots down several strawmen along the way, but does anybody really need to be persuaded that The Da Vinci Code is a load of hokum? And does the historically so self-evidently mistaken idea that Hitler and the Nazis were Christians have any traction outside the lunatic fringe?

Still, that discussion brings up one of the best points Coren makes in his book: “Evil has been committed in the name of Christianity, just as it has in the name of non-Christianity or anti-Christianity. Evil is committed in the name of pretty much everything. It demonstrates the fallen nature of humanity, and precisely why we need Christ.”

If only the book was as good as that throughout. A few pages later Coren admiringly quotes Rabbi David Dalin’s absurd statement that all those liberal Catholics — the enemy within, apparently — pursue the libel of Pope Pius XII as an anti-Semite as a device to “smash traditional Catholic teaching”. It’s not the only time that Coren glances with angry suspicion at fellow Catholics.

Coren is very good in his discourses on questions such as the existence of God and on life issues, especially the moral problems with euthanasia. It will not persuade many atheists, but it might convince the undecided whom the likes of Richard Dawkins are so actively courting.

However, Coren misses several opportunities to suitably confront intellectually dishonest canards, such as the notion that religious faith is irrational and inane, that it is anti-science or that it is anti-progress. Instead of engaging with these statements, which is not terribly difficult to do, he offers a roll-call of very clever Christian writers, scientists and pioneers of social progress. That line, however, is not going to win any arguments.

Here one presumes that Coren is aiming to provide Christians with ammunition in their debates with atheists, or those who are attracted by the atheist philosophy. If so, then the absence of an index is an inexcusable omission.

In apologetics, the defender of the Church ought to be crystal-clear in proposing tight counter-arguments, and absolutely not include easily disputed error. Coren occasionally fails in that requirement.

In his first chapter he demolishes the already feeble case that Jesus didn’t exist and that the Church is a later invention. He refers to all the right extra-biblical sources — and then quotes the discredited quote attributed to Josephus Flavius that describes Jesus as the Christ, a passage generally accepted, even by Church historians, to be a later addition by an overzealous Christian scribe.

Coren tends to distort and generalise atheists’ arguments against Christianity much in the same way as he accuses atheists of distorting and generalising Christianity. So as an entertaining point-scoring polemic that dispenses with accuracy when that gets in the way, Heresy is great fun. As a serious contribution to the body of apologetics, however, the book is sadly limited.