Reading Dawkins’s Delusion Drives Christian College Student to Commit Suicide

Posted by Anthony on November 21, 2008

Here is one of those stories that is tragic on a variety of levels.  There is of course the raw event.  There is also the fact that Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion is one of the sorriest pieces of atheistic argumentation that I have ever seen.  And yet- people are impressed.  Here is a bit of the story, which I found on WorldnetDaily:

“Three people told us he had taken a biology class and was doing well in it, but other students and the professor were really challenging my son, his faith. They didn’t like him as a Republican, as a Christian, and as a conservative who believed in intelligent design,” the grief-stricken father, Keith Kilgore, told WND about his son, Jesse.

“This professor either assigned him to read or challenged him to read a book, ‘The God Delusion,’ by Richard Dawkins,” he said.

Jesse Kilgore committed suicide in October by walking into the woods near his New York home and shooting himself.

The story expands on the connection between Dawkins’s Delusion and Jesse’s suicide.

It would take a number of blog entries to address every matter of substance that this incident raises.  I have decided just to focus briefly on one aspect- Christian vesus secular education.  From the article:

[Jesse's father] He suggested the moral is for Christians simply to abandon public schools wholly.

A time may come for that but I think there is a better solution:  transform the public schools.  This will require some ‘get tough’ action by concerned individuals in this country by people who generally aren’t ‘activists.’  They generally try to mind their own business, unlike the other side, which is filled with rabid ideologues who, literally, take to the street if they don’t get their way- or worse.   A story like this one helps illustrate the stakes involved.

But the story does illustrate the near abject failure of Christian education today. By this I do not mean Christian schools or educational institutions.  I mean how the Christian church transmits the faith to the next generation as a whole.   It is not uncommon for me as an apologist to have conversations with pastors and church leaders in various denominations who dismiss what I have to say with the quaint argument:  “But that isn’t the church’s job.  The Church’s job is to preach the Gospel” [and depending on the denomination, add: "and rightly administer the sacraments."]

Well, with that attitude one may well expect the Church to utterly disappear in a generation or too.  But no worries!  The Gospel was preached in its purity up until the last man!

I say this in relation to this post because if something like The God Delusion is persuasive to people, that is a testament to a nearly complete abandonment by the Christian Church to communicate what it believes and why it believes it.   If The Delusion be found formidable, that is like being so out of shape that a spit ball can knock you over.  The problem is not The Delusion, per se, but the creation of people ill equipped to spot the fallacies and inaccuracies that populate the arguments of the ‘New Atheists.”

And whose job is it to do this equipping?  The Church.  Whether a person goes to a Christian school or a public school, the Church has the obligation and duty to transmit the faith to the next generation in a robust form.  This duty should not be delegated to other institutions.  Right now I would say the Church transmits the outlines of the faith.  And this is not enough in a climate such as ours, where there is intense ideological competition and wide access to information about other ideas.