A Very Low Tactic

Throughout my years of studying apologetics, I have found one thing to be absolutely disgusting. No party is innocent of this. The crime? Writing mock dialogues where your character makes his or her opponent look like a complete fool. Let me repeat: Every religious group is guilty of this, whether it is in the form of an article, a blog post, a pithy cartoon, etc.

I am firmly against this because I believe that each religious belief should get to defend their own position. Recently I was reading a book entitled John Calvin Goes to Berkeley by James G. McCarthy. James G. McCarthy has written several books against the Catholic Church. He is a former Catholic himself and he left the Catholic Church after attending a Protestant Bible study. His conversion story can be found on his website right here:

http://jamesgmccarthy.com/bio_salvation.shtml

I will write more about McCarthy and his anti-Catholic books in another post, but now I just want to say that he is guilty of this cheap tactic. In fact, I will say that no one is more guilty than him. He wrote this book to attack Calvinism but throughout the book he takes cheap shots at the Catholic Church.

The best example is the ex-Catholic character Angela. On page 240 she is discussing her spiritual journey with a Pastor. She talks about how she went to a Catholic parochial school. She then tells the Pastor: “Our priest sexually abused some boys in my school. I knew all of them.” This is one of the numerous examples of little cheap shots that he takes throughout the book.

Regardless of these little cheap shots that permeate the book(which is about Calvinism, not Catholicism) the prize mock dialogue takes place from page 65 to 69. Angela is home for Christmas and preparing dinner with her Catholic mom. The Father won’t talk to her since she’s left the Church. When reading these pages, I shook my head and laughed. It was that bad.

Angela and her mom go back and forth. They discuss James 2:24, paragraph 1821 of the Catholic Catechism and other things. Angela is made out to sound noble and virtuous while the mother is made to sound crabby, ignorant and annoyed. Naturally Angela gets the better half of the dialogue. It ends when the angry father comes home and she has to go to her room because the father refuses to even see her now that she’s left the Church.

There you have it. A book that’s not even about Catholicism that includes this incredibly insulting and shallow mock dialogue. I know that Angela isn’t real but if she was, I would destroy her in a debate. It wouldn’t even be close. The arguments that she uses are so incredibly bad that she would never last in a debate with any knowledgeable Catholic. However, they’re more than enough to work on her less than intelligent mother.

Why do you do this James McCarthy? Does it give you joy to make your Catholic characters look dumb while your Protestant character Angela wipes the floor with them in a debate which has nothing to do with the main topic of the book? I know that Catholics have been guilty of this as well, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything as bad as John Calvin Goes to Berkeley. It is the most shallow piece of literature I’ve ever read.