Fifty Shades of God

I recently heard a Chris­t­ian author pro­mot­ing his book, and in doing so he claimed that the book’s mes­sage must truly be from God since it had sold far more copies than any­one had expected. In essence, unex­pected book sales equaled evi­dence of divine inspiration.

Churches often use a sim­i­lar met­ric. Atten­dance up? We must be fol­low­ing God’s plan. Con­versely, churches that are strug­gling to fill the pews are often looked at askance: that’s what you get for fail­ing to preach the Bible and prop­erly min­is­ter to your flock.

This argu­ment also crops up in apolo­get­ics: Chris­tian­ity suc­ceeded against daunt­ing odds, so it must be true. Early Chris­tians faced hor­ri­ble per­se­cu­tion and death; the nascent faith surely would have fiz­zled out if wasn’t truly from God.

But is this the right way to go about under­stand­ing God? Does he speak to us through book sales and church atten­dance? Does the numer­i­cal suc­cess of a reli­gion reveal some­thing about the truth of that reli­gious belief? These are really just exam­ples of argu­men­tum ad numerum — appeal to the num­ber — a fal­la­cious form of rea­son­ing that eval­u­ates the truth of a propo­si­tion not on its own mer­its, but instead on the basis of its popularity.

The astound­ing and unex­pected suc­cess of Fifty Shades of Grey hardly means that it’s a mes­sage from God, or even that it has lit­er­ary merit. The largest church in Amer­ica doesn’t have a cor­ner on truth over and above all other Amer­i­can megachurches, and isn’t nec­es­sar­ily any closer to God than the neigh­bor­hood church down the street from where you live. Christianity’s suc­cess owes as much to a for­tu­itous con­ver­sion as to divine fiat. And if Islam gains the upper hand in the num­bers, does it then become the “true” rev­e­la­tion of God?

Argu­ments based on numer­i­cal achieve­ments gen­er­ally don’t accom­plish what was intended by those who use them, but such suc­cesses shouldn’t be dis­counted entirely. Book sales and movie box office receipts rarely reflect the qual­ity of the con­tent being con­sumed, but they do say some­thing impor­tant about those doing the con­sum­ing. Such sta­tis­tics mir­ror our incli­na­tions and pro­cliv­i­ties in a way that is some­times dis­turbingly hon­est. And while it might be easy to scoff at the whims of pop­u­lar cul­ture, reli­gious prac­tice is not immune to the super­fi­cial fan­cies of human exis­tence — and all too often seems espe­cially sus­cep­ti­ble to the very worst of cul­tural con­for­mity.

Of course God might speak to us through num­bers — but who’s to say he’s a fan of large num­bers? Maybe he’s root­ing for the under­dog (you know, like the whole deal with Jesus?), so we should be tak­ing a closer look at cin­e­matic bombs and lit­er­ary fail­ures rather than the over-achieving suc­cesses that occupy but a fleet­ing moment in the pub­lic eye.

Or bet­ter yet, maybe we should respond to suc­cesses and fail­ures with gra­cious humil­ity, rec­og­niz­ing that there’s no short­cut to truth, that our own ego and desire for affir­ma­tion often cloud our judge­ment and that God is big­ger than book sales or church attendance.

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Tagged as: books, church, culture, movies, success