If Christianity is so good, why are Christians so bad?

A couple of days ago, I posted a question that is such an elementary question in any religious philosophy class: If Christianity is so good, why are Christians so bad?

I wasnt trying to be edgy. And certainly not because I was looking for anybody to come and save my soul in the comments or in my DMs.

I asked it because it is a routine philosophical question about the relationship between a moral system and the conduct of the people who profess it.

I use my Facebook not only for punctuated humoristic takes. But also to scratch my itch for intellectual engagement; that face to face human engagements have begun to lack; in our work spaces and in social life in general. We meet for drinks, khebab and kelewele.

There is no salon for intellectuals to meet and ponder over Ibn Khaldun or Thomas Piketty. So we seek these debates on Facebook and Twitter.

Anyway, the reactions have been revealing.

A few people understood the assignment. They engaged the question seriously. They disagreed, in some cases, but they did so thoughtfully. Some pushed the conversation into unexpected but interesting directions. Those responses reminded me that there are still people who know how to think in public; or believe that the public space is as good as any space to think.

But that was not the majority.

The majority came armed with their “intellect.”“Aboa.” “Kwasia.” “Gyimifoɔ.” A flood of abuse from people who seemed to think that outrage is an argument and indignation is evidence of depth. Some pastors and self-described Bible scholars even entered my DMs to call me satanic, an agent of hell, and other dramatic things people say when they have no real answer but still feel entitled to perform certainty.

Others went in the opposite direction and seized on the question as proof of everything they have ever felt about Christians. They, too, missed the point. A philosophical question is not made deeper simply because you pour your personal resentment into it.

Then there were those who took the very act of asking the question as proof that I must be courting controversy for clicks. That reaction, to me, says a great deal about the poverty of our public culture. Some people now assume that whenever a conversation exceeds their intellectual comfort zone, it must be unserious. They cannot imagine that a question may simply be a question. So they reduce inquiry to performance because they no longer have the patience or the discipline to engage it as thought.

My favourites, though, were the people who felt devastatingly clever by replying, “If the law is so good, why are lawyers so bad?” They seemed very pleased with themselves, as though they had struck some mortal blow. But all they really showed was that they could mimic the shape of the question without grasping its substance.

What has disappointed me was how many people could not even stay with the question long enough to think.

They did not ask what distinction the question draws between a faith and its followers intellectually. They insulted their way through it. After all my asking the question must mean I am defective in some form. And I needed reminding of that.

So no, they did not consider the long philosophical tradition of asking why good moral systems so often produce bad practitioners, or why institutions that preach virtue can so easily incubate hypocrisy.

And that, more than anything, is the problem.

We have built a social media culture in which far too many people use insult to cover for intellectual weakness. The old public square has now been digitised. We are all in the agora now, supposedly. But instead of becoming a space for deeper deliberation, it is so often dominated by people whose contributions begin and end with abuse, posturing, and verbal diarrhoea. They flood the comments, not because they have the most redeeming or thoughtful perspectives to offer, but because kwasia, wɔ yɛ too known boy paaa.

That should worry us.

To have so nurtured a society that cannot reason its way through a softball question will struggle to reason its way through legal questions, political questions, economic questions, and moral questions. If every difficult thought is received as an insult, and every questioning is treated as provocation, then public discourse becomes little more than a theatre of wounded egos and verbal diarrhoea

That is part of what I saw under that post.

I also saw how many people have become deeply emotive but intellectually undisciplined. They feel strongly, act certainly but without rigorous. Even for the religious fanatics, their reactions were nowhere Christlike, and only confirmed the question.

The scary part is that they are the majority.

To ask whether there is a contradiction between the claimed goodness of Christianity and the conduct of many Christians is not some radical act of blasphemy. It is one of the most basic questions one can ask about religion, ethics, and human behaviour. It is the kind of question that should provoke reflection, rather than hysteria.

So yes, I came away from the reactions with a few interesting engagements and some genuinely worthwhile perspectives. But I also came away more convinced than ever that we have a serious problem of logic, rational thinking, and public reasoning in our society. And social media, for all its promise, has not cured that problem. In many ways, it has amplified it.

The comment sections are often crowded with people who cannot take a conversation further, but can always drag it lower. That is not just unfortunate. It is socially corrosive.

I have no answers. My only solution now is to make my posts longer so they stop reading midway.