Here’s hoping that I can make a difference

“My kind of town, Chicago is.” Isn’t that how the song goes? It’s my kind of town now, because it’s where I was when I received a telephone call from my publisher, Doug Pepper of McClelland & Stewart, telling me that my book Why Catholics Are Right was entering a third printing and could I write a book in the same vein by the end of the summer. Here’s a tip for aspiring authors. The answer is always yes.

The theme was easy for Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity — which was launched April 24 — in that I’ve been responding to nonsense and nastiness thrown at Christianity for years now. I’d answer those incredibly common, always toxic, seldom challenging myths about the Christian faith. Jesus never existed; if God was good, bad things wouldn’t happen to good people; Hitler was a Christian; Christians supported slavery; Christianity is for the stupid; Christians oppose science and progress; Christians are obsessed with abortion; The Da Vinci Code is accurate, and so on. Give it a catchy, one-word title with an explanatory subtitle, a nice dust jacket, and you’re off.

That I was starting a new television show at the same time presented something of a challenge, but then that’s what Red Bull is for, and the book has just been published. So far so good, and it made the Globe and Mail best-seller list before it was even available! Now come the interviews and the tours. I enjoy them. People are kind, which is nice. And people are sometimes unkind, which is even better.

The far more important point, however, is that I needed to write the book because serious, orthodox, believing Christians are facing a new wave of persecution today, and we need all the tools we can get to be able to resist. Let’s not be proud and neurotic here; in the west, that persecution takes the form of institutional attacks, mockery, marginalization, abuse, rejection and ejection from the public square, and occasional loss of job.

In the developing world, and especially in the Islamic heartlands, the persecution is tangible and violent. Arrest, torture, rape, murder, exile. I have on my desk a collection of shell casings and nails given to me by a friend, who picked them up from the floor of a Baghdad church. The bullets had been fired at innocent Catholic worshippers at a Christmas Mass, the nails had been packed into a bomb that was thrown in amongst the congregation. Let us never have the audacity to compare our plight to theirs.

Nevertheless, Christians in Canada are under attack. Beneath and behind it all is the assumption that to be a Christian you have to be both stupid and intolerant. The former because intelligent people naturally and inevitably become atheists, the latter because we believe to possess the truth and — it always becomes an issue — we do not give full affirmation to homosexuality.

What I have tried to do in the book is to show not only that myriad highly intelligent people are Christians, and that Christianity is entirely logical and intellectually compelling, but also that there is no necessary link between faith, lack of faith, intelligence or stupidity. In other words, there are brilliant and stupid atheists, and brilliant and stupid Christians. I’ve met all four species.

As for intolerance, it’s an imploding concept. You refuse to tolerate us because in your interpretation we are intolerant. We’re all intolerant in that we disapprove of all sorts of things. What the contemporary usage signifies is not intolerance at all, but opposition to the increasingly aggressive and absolutist liberal approach to social, sexual and moral issues. We, you, I know this, but we have to communicate it cleverly, even with humour, always with resolution, to a wider audience.

I’m not sure if Heresy will achieve all or any of this, but I know that the last book made a difference to a lot of people because they’ve told me so. Huge numbers of them. Other people told me things too, but what they said can’t be printed here. I hope they write again — angry opposition means that you’re doing quite a lot right!