Bill Maher accidentally stumbles into Jesus

[Valin]

The Washington Examiner/Restoring America

Peter Laffin
March 20, 2024

Bill Maher came this close to understanding Christianity during the most recent episode of his show Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO. 

During his signature “New Rule” segment, America’s most outspoken atheist wondered why so many people are dissatisfied with President Joe Biden’s job performance despite the supposedly strong economy and why so many are depressed despite modern advancements in technology. 

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Though unintentional, it would have been difficult for Maher to articulate more eloquently what modern theologians call the “myth of progress” — the idea that utopia awaits a human race that invents its own values and prioritizes material gain above all else. This post-Christian moral vision eschews traditional prescriptions for human flourishing such as social bonds, the pursuit of virtue, and a relationship with the transcendent. As Maher aptly described, “happiness,” according to this moral vision, is measured in the availability of legal marijuana, cheap televisions, and hardcore pornography. 

To say that this vision has failed to produce a healthier and happier nation is to say little. Indeed, blind allegiance to the “myth of progress” has butchered the American psyche. As Maher correctly noted, people now suffer from mental illness at unprecedented levels. Forty-two percent of teenagers report feeling “persistently sad or hopeless.” Such a statistic would shake a healthy culture to its core. It stands to reason that ours is anything but. 

It is no small irony that Maher’s decadeslong preoccupation with the supposed evils of Christianity played a determinative role in convincing the public to embrace the very rudderless hedonism that makes everyone miserable. His 2008 hit documentary Religulous, which came at the zenith of the “New Atheist” movement, featured “gotcha” interviews with low-educated Christians who couldn’t articulate the intellectual foundation of the faith, cultivated and developed over the millenia, let alone its civilizational value. 

Had Maher undertaken a more serious investigation of the faith, he may have stumbled upon the authentic Christian answers to the questions posed in his latest “New Rule” segment. 

For instance, he may have encountered a Christian thinker who could explicate the meaning of Jesus’s encounter with the woman at the well in the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel. Having married five different men, the Samaritan woman, whose renunciation of moral law and blind pursuit of pleasure had left her empty and embittered, was ostracized and forced to journey to the well alone in the midday sun. But Jesus’s offer of “living water” in place of the ordinary water of the well acknowledged the longing in the human heart for a greater satisfaction. 

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