To use a twist on an Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen line, millions of people hate what they think Christianity is. Far fewer people hate what Christianity actually is.
Bringing this to mind, again, is a comment I recently came across from an avowedly “non-religious” mother who was upset that her seven-year-old’s Mormon best friend wouldn’t stop talking to him about Bible stories and Jesus. “I don’t want him to be religious, honestly,” the woman wrote to an advice columnist in April. “I want him to learn that you should be a good person and do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, not because God will punish you if you don’t.”
This is a common atheist perspective, one sometimes expressed even by Christianity’s more intellectual critics, such as the late essayist Christopher Hitchens and biologist Richard Dawkins. Yet it reflects a comic-book understanding of faith.











