One can certainly be a humanist of an atheistic stripe, but not as a result of a consistent unbroken line of reasoning or scientific discovery. Where then does the ‘secular’ get credibility? The only sound claim to reason is the ignorance, irrationality and anti-intellectualism of its adversaries. This is where it lives and thrives, even if only as a parasite. In thriving, ‘secularists’ have been successful at creating arguments and stereotypes that decouple religion - and Christianity in particular - from reality. For their part, most Christians have been sucked right in. 

In order to accept standing in the world, many Christians have accepted a minimalist view of their faith, making it only relevant to interpersonal human relationships. These communities of minimal faith - Christianity Lite - are most associated with the Oldline/Mainline protestant denominations and liberal side of Catholicism. As they converge upon the spirit of the age, their numbers are dwindling. The children see no reason to return to the spineless church of their parents that maintains the weakest truths and is no longer holy - no longer distinct from the world around them: “If the salt has lost its saltiness, what good is it, but to be thrown to the ground and trampled under foot?”

Christianity Lite - firstthings.com

Other groups, ballooning at the beginning of the 20th century in the wake of Darwinism, incorporate an obscurantist literalistic reading of the Bible that radically separates them from the findings of the sciences. This strategy of interpretation leads either to alternative models of understanding based on authority, Platonic philosophy, or complete disengagement from the world. It is a stereotype of this group that spawned the now obsolete Conflict Thesis, which asserted that religion has always been in direct conflict with science. 

In groups such as the Amish that have intentionally disclaimed modernity and the knowledge project for the sake of community and wisdom, this attitude of disengagement with the world is laudable. For all other groups, it is not. While represented by growing “conservative” protestant denominations, these same denominations have enormous attrition. Anti-intellectualism and hedging have caused them to sacrifice depth for breadth and quality for quantity. The result has been an ever-decreasing ability to discern the ways of the world. The Good News is attractive, but if the seed has fallen amongst the thorns, what good is it?

The Problem of Christians Becoming Atheists - randalrauser.com

These two groups make up the two stereotypes the western world has of Christians. They are the modern analogs of the Sadducees and Pharisees - the two stereotypical groups of Hebrews that John the Baptist and Jesus so often criticized:

But when he [John] saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

“I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” - Matthew 3:7-12

The Sadducees are stereotyped as the elite group in power in the temple and government, accepting only the Torah, but refusing all other writings. They are willing to bend and break for political expediency and, at times, cozy up with Hellenic and Roman ideas and living. For all practical purposes, their end was met when their power was destroyed in the rebellion that led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD.

The stereotype of the Pharisees is something nearly opposite. Accepting the Law, Prophets and Writings as canonical, the Pharisees of Jesus' time were most known for adding nitpicking extra laws and procedures to those in scripture, creating for the people a burden of lifeless details and providing the ground for rampant hypocrisy.

Ancient Jewish History: Pharisees, Sadducees & Essenes - jewishvirtuallibrary.org

Apparently, many of the Pharisees repented as the remnant of the Jews - both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic branches - are the ideological if not actual descendants of the Pharisees.

Pharisees and Rabbinic Judaism by Joshua Ezra Burns - bibleodyssey.org 

I don’t make this distinction to judge individuals. I can claim as brothers and sisters in Christ those of both groups who demonstrate belief in the creed. I can claim many others who don’t. The Christian claim has not been about knowledge acquired, but a life lived. Its hallmarks have been charity, commitment, community, confession, forthrightness, forgiveness, and redemption - in a word, love. 

No one is perfect in their knowledge. No human knowledge can be perfect. But If I’m forced to take sides between the two, I will take the Pharisees. However errant, there is a core that is about saving people from their sins. Christianity Lite is so often about saving people from the consequences of their sins.

Luckily, I don’t have to choose. Both of these stereotypes represent the loudest segments of broader groups which I will call the Moderns and the Conservatives. As their name suggests, the Moderns will readily question the veracity of scripture and are willing to make a clean break at times with the ancient Faith. Because of this independence, they can often have a stronger voice against entrenched evils, at least for a while. However confused, the Conservatives have a high view of scripture and are the keepers of the faith including the creeds, confessions, and catechisms developed over the centuries. They assert that the Faith today should have a direct correspondence with the ancient Faith.

One needs to be careful not to equate the religious Moderns and Conservatives with current political categories. While there is often correlation, it is only rarely a necessary correlation. A concern with both groups is that their prejudices will just devolve into politics in which the Christian message is lost. With the rise of Trumpism and Wokism in the United States it appears many of the guard rails have been broken. This may have finally happened.

Some History

How did we get here?

With the Protestant Reformation and the printing press came the idea of “everyman an interpreter” opening up exegesis and criticism to anyone who could read and write. From the Scientific Renaissance coming into the 20th century, there became considerably more pressure to protect the meaning of the text against the liberalizing of the Lites and skepticism of the ‘secularists’. It was no longer enough to appeal to Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic fathers. They were discredited by their reliance on Aristotle when Aristotle was discredited by the Scientific Renaissance. 

Once away from the church centered understanding of the text, a theory of interpretation (ie. hermeneutic) that can be applied reliably in every situation is needed. Many Conservatives took a literalistic view of the text for this reason, categorically refusing all others. 

The literalistic view was not accepted ignorantly or merely for commonality. Rather, literalism is part and parcel of modern knowledge. When you read a math or science book, it is intended to be read literally. As demonstrated constantly in scientific papers, Literalism is built into the modern idea of true knowledge. In the 1920s and 1930s there was even an attempt to formalize literalist methods into an anti-metaphysical philosophy called Logical Positivism. This ended in failure, not the least of which was the inability of Logical Positivism’s Verification Principle to verify itself. Now considered “dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes," the movement did open many doors into the Philosophy of Science such as Karl Popper’s Falsificationism, Kuhn’s Paradigm Shifts, 

Similarly, one doesn’t get too far into the Bible before literalism becomes untenable. The text demands much more nuance than literalism can muster - from seven carnivorous cows coming out of the Nile; to Abraham wrestling with God; to “the trees of the field clapped their hands”; to the Janus Parallelisms in the book of Job; to the creature of clay being reckoned as the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar; to our Lord chastising his apostles for thinking he was hungry when he talked about the Bread of Life - “Are you so dull?” Yes, they were.

Moreover the Bible writers are not writing with knowledge of modern historiography or objective models of science - quite often they are not even writing with ancient models. The text is filled with observations, experiences, and reasoning that fall under the modern label of phenomenology.

Phenomenology - plato.stanford.edu

So strict literalism gave way to preferred literalism - the text should be taken literally unless it is obvious that it should be taken in some other way. As long as a text could be agreed to be literal, the meaning could be reproduced and fixed across a wide swath of individual interpreters. 

Preferring literalism seemed easy because of a more prominent and stricter definition of the doctrine of Inerrancy. Inerrancy is the attitude that scripture is somehow perfect for its purpose, and to be perfect, it must be completely free from all error - historical, physical, or otherwise. For evangelical Protestants in North America who take the authority of scripture head above all other authorities, the doctrine of Inerrancy is codified in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI).

Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy with Exposition - bible-researcher.com

The codification of inerrancy made for an article of faith and the zeroth law of biblical interpretation. No longer must you humbly come to the text; rather, you can assert from the get-go that you should side with the Bible whenever there is an apparent discrepancy between it and a secular account. At least you could do that if the Biblical account you are concerned with is to be taken literally. If not, everything is still up in the air. So, to those who want to argue and debate that the text always produces a crystal clear single meaning, there is an incentive to interpret everything literally, thus preferred literalism.

Although I approach an inerrant view at times, I will never be able to arrive. Disagreements with the CSBI: 

1. Inerrancy could only apply to the relatively few literalistic passages in the Bible. It is completely unclear how fallible humans using literary devices and phenomenological accounts could be inerrant in the CSBI sense. For instance, how do you have inerrant irony?! 

2. One must allow for the natural imprecision and distortion in second-hand accounts. In general, it seems the biblical authors are aware of the problems of second-hand accounts and deflect possible distortion by using literary devices such as numerology.

3. The CSBI is silent on how to treat differences of opinion among Biblical actors and authors.

4. In their protestant zeal to put the authority of scripture above all else, the CSBI seems to be blind to the fact that the Church canonized scripture. Without a clear view of church inspiration, that leaves wide open the question about whether the canon is even closed.

A step down from inerrancy is the misnamed doctrine of infallibility. Misnamed because in nearly all secular dictionaries, it is presented as a synonym for inerrancy. The doctrine of infallibility is the idea that the biblical text is effective for its purpose and without any deceit. The key point is the honesty of the writer or speaker. That is separate from the accuracy of the text. This doctrine leaves open whether there might be unintentional errors in the text.

While this is an article of faith - the Bible must at least be infallible - a good faith first reading of any text requires at least a hypothetical infallibility. To never read a text as if it were infallible is merely to read into it your own prejudices. There may be good reasons for believing the text to be deceitful (Donald Trump’s presidency wasn’t that long ago), but any pretense to objectivity is lost without a good faith reading.