Shiloh Hendrix and the Existence of God

I am a paid subscriber to Holly MathNerd’s interesting Substack. She is a very effective writer and the pungency of her opinions increases the enjoyment for her readers, much like a dash of spice amps up an otherwise ordinary meal. Holly rarely serves up anything bland.

One of the reasons I subscribe to her Substack is that I find her writing to be something of a bellwether, a kind of Doppler radar, an early warning system for subterranean ideas gathering momentum in the culture and headed our way. Holly works as a professional data scientist, and her mathematical inclinations often lend weight to her analysis. So it was with some surprise, given her background, that I read her recent post, Freedom, by Surprise.

In this post, Holly recounts how recent events surrounding Shiloh Hendrix have freed her from a longstanding, nagging intuition that there could be a God out there who loves us. She did not expect these events to free her from this lingering suspicion, but she was freed and, by her telling, largely because the Christian community didn’t acquit itself well in responding to these events.

If you are not familiar with the Shiloh Hendrix affair, you can count yourself fortunate. The gist of it is that Ms. Hendrix, a young white woman, allegedly mean-mouthed a young black child, whom she accused of stealing something from her toddler. Ms. Hendrix eventually called the child a n****r. This exchange was caught on a cell phone being wielded by a Somalian refugee who himself is allegedly an accused rapist of a 16-year-old-girl. Predictably, the video went viral, at which point Ms. Hendrix was just as predictably set upon by the mob. Threatened. Besieged. Etc. (Does anyone besides me have to actually go to work every day? Where do all these people find the time? Sheesh.)

[I caution the reader that there are multiple facts unverified about these events. Nothing should be taken at face value.]

Holly was understandably appalled by these events, but it was what she perceived as the failure of Christians everywhere that provided a resolution to her lingering questions about the possible existence of God.

Holly has turned comments off on her post because she is uninterested in facilitating a rehash of the Hendrix affair (me too), but also because she anticipates that some commenters will be interested in proselytizing her. This post is not an effort to proselytize Holly or anyone else. It is a post along the lines of everything else I write - it’s just something I’m thinking about.

My surprise about her most recent post is related to some fundamental logic errors she makes that are atypical, given her normal analytical bent. It may be that her customary analytical rigor was overwhelmed by her passion in the moment. Who among us has never done that? I would easily understand. But she is thinking about this in a way that seems so unusual for her that I have puzzled over it ever since.

Alas, Holly’s reasons for finding freedom from any residual suspicion that God may indeed exist are based on a combination of hasty generalization and something very akin to an ad hominem fallacy.

Consider the following from her post:

What I saw, with startling clarity, was this: not one person — not one Christian, not one human who claims to have been transformed, regenerated, made new by the power of a risen God — expressed the slightest concern for a little boy.

Holly is here making a broad, sweeping accusation of comprehensive Christian moral dereliction, merely on the basis of her own necessarily finite exposure to a subset of Christians. She seems to be conflating her own limited encounters with the behavior of a few Christians with Christianity generally. She is manifestly wrong on this point about Christian concern for these and other children. I know this because I myself personally know Christians who have expressed concern for the little boy. And for Shiloh. And for Shiloh’s child (whose mother is a piece of work, apparently.)

Drawing broad conclusions from inadequate data is the definition of a “hasty generalization”. I have no basis for doubting Holly’s characterization of the Christians she herself has encountered. My only point is that her sample size is definitionally inadequate for the breadth of her conclusions.

Even if Holly was not engaging in a hasty generalization, even if all the Christians in the world failed to live up to Holly’s expectations, that would still tell her nothing about whether there is a God who exists and who can transform hearts. It is an error of logic, a type of ad hominem fallacy, to say that the objective, independent existence of God depends upon the moral probity of people who claim to follow him. The existence of crummy Christians offers no insight into the existence of God.

But for Holly, Christian moral failure, exemplified by some Christians’ response to the Shiloh Hendrix kerfuffle, is evidence of God’s absence. (For context, Holly’s comment in the following quote about “making a millionaire” is in reference to a GiveSendGo fundraiser established to help Ms. Hendrix deal with the cancel mob.)

The people of Christ — the One who welcomed children and called them precious — could only talk strategy. They swung between self-congratulatory glee at “sending a message” by making a millionaire of the woman who called a child something Jesus never would, and performative anxiety over whether the optics would hurt their side.

Believe me, I’m not judging. I do not believe human beings are capable of being transformed into creatures who love so radically.

And that’s the point.

That kind of transformation simply doesn’t happen.

It didn’t happen here, not even in the most Christian-majority country that has ever existed.

It might be possible, if deities existed. But they do not.

Holly describes herself as a superior expositor of the Christian bible. She should know, then, that according to Christian teaching, the human transformation she demands as proof of God’s existence is only ever going to exist on earth in the most hodgepodge, mishmash way. It is a core Christian doctrine that this transformation is a process. There’s even a word for it: sanctification. No matter where Holly turns, she will always be able to find moral failures among the Christian community. That she is surprised by this, and finds it dispositive regarding God’s very existence, surprises me.

The late Flannery O’Connor provides a helpful perspective on precisely this point. The following quote is from a letter to a friend of Ms. O’Connor’s, who, like Holly, found that Christians weren’t really living up to her expectations. Ms. O’Connor’s remarks, which were written specifically in regard to the Catholic Church, nevertheless apply to Christianity as a whole.

All your dissatisfaction with the church seems to come from an incomplete understanding of sin. This will perhaps surprise you because you are very conscious of the sins of Catholics...she is a Church of sinners...All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful...To have the church be what you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God in human affairs...Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does. The church does well to hold its own but you are asking that she show a profit...It is easy for any child to pick out the faults in the sermon on his way home from church every Sunday. It is impossible for him to find out the hidden love that makes a man, in spite of his intellectual limitations, his neuroticism, his own lack of strength, give up his life to the service of God's people, however bumblingly he may go about it.

I know personally some of those flawed and faulty Christians possessing the “hidden love” that Ms. O’Connor describes. They are busying themselves adopting children from orphanages in Africa, rescuing various other children from poverty and abuse, and traveling at their own expense to Third World countries to medically assist with corrective surgeries. They are opening U.S. market opportunities for Central American coffee farmers. They are building businesses and providing employment for families. They are inventing things and scattering beauty willy-nilly, wherever they go. This is the norm - has always been the norm - for many people who follow Christ. Almost none of those people in my acquaintance who are doing these things would have time or inclination to take a public position regarding the latest online outrage du jour. Most of them would even suspect that online virtue, which is inescapably performative, is actually a false expression of something more truly sacrificial and discerning that Christians are actually called to be and to do.

No Christian engaging in such acts of constructive love is virtuous in himself, of course. All Christians are, to use Jesus’ own words, “unprofitable servants” — always and ever in need of his mercy.

It would not surprise me at all, then, to discover that the chronically online among the Christian community have acquitted themselves poorly on any number of issues, not least the recent Shiloh Hendrix affair. I have elsewhere described these doings as proof that many users of social media have mistaken the social dynamics of junior high for a how-to guide. The patina of unreality, which coats every event that goes viral online, invariably places such events under a fundamentally dehumanizing lens. So, whether we encounter one crummy Christian next door or millions of them everywhere online, it tells us precisely nothing about whether God is real or whether he loves us.