How to respond when skeptics claim our faith is dangerous

Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. Survivors marked the seventy-fourth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, where more than a million people were killed. Six million Jews in total died in the Holocaust.

Closer to home, Dakota Theriot was captured yesterday afternoon at his grandmother’s home in Virginia. The twenty-one-year-old is believed to have killed his parents, his girlfriend, and her father and brother.

In other news, at least fifty-eight people are dead and at least three hundred are missing after a dam collapsed in Brazil on Friday. This morning’s Wall Street Journal reports that the rushing wall of mud was enough to fill a football stadium more than six times.

And ISIS has now claimed responsibility for the bombing of a Catholic cathedral in the Philippines during Sunday Mass. At least twenty people died in the double bomb attack.

Skeptics often ask what difference Christianity makes in a world like ours. If our God apparently cannot “fix” the world he made, how does faith in him change anything? Isn’t religion just the “opium of the people,” as Marx claimed?

In fact, isn’t religion not just irrelevant but dangerous to our progressive society?

Is religion dangerous?

When Christians like Karen Pence choose to follow biblical morality in ways the culture finds offensive, the outcry is deafening. Commentator Matt Walsh: “Gone are the days when leftists pretended to see religion as a thing that should be relegated to homes and churches and private schools. That very small amount of extremely limited and qualified ‘tolerance’ is gone. They will not tolerate Christianity in any forum, especially a private school” (his emphasis).

The “religion is dangerous” movement has been gathering momentum for several years. Critics such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris claim that religion is not just irrelevant and outdated but positively dangerous to society.

Religion flies planes into buildings and causes 9/11s,…