Why do arrogant Christians think they're right about everything?

Some of this is fair. Christians have been smug, dismissive, and loud, and the complaint usually comes from a real encounter rather than a caricature. But notice what the complaint is about: posture, not evidence.

1. Concede that arrogance is real. If you have been condescended to by someone who assumed your questions were stupid, that happened, and it was wrong. Jesus reserved his harshest words for the religiously confident, not for the doubter. So the charge lands where it lands, and pretending otherwise would prove the point.

2. The charge is about tone, not truth. Nothing in the objection argues that God does not exist or that the tomb was not empty. It argues that certainty is a vice. But a claim can be examined and a tone cannot. The first question is which claims are true. Manners matter, but they are not a substitute for an argument.

3. The objection is self-defeating. You should not be so sure you are right is itself a confident claim about how the world works, delivered with no hedge. If certainty is arrogance, then anyone certain that there is no God is arrogant too, and so is anyone certain that arrogance is wrong. The objection condemns every person who has ever held a conviction, including the person making it.

4. Everyone who believes anything thinks it is true. This is sometimes called the paradox of the preface: I hold each of my beliefs as true while admitting my whole set probably contains some errors. The Christian is doing nothing different. To believe at all is already to believe that something is the case. The alternative is not humility. It is having no view.

5. Conviction is not conceit. A doctor who says the test shows cancer is not being arrogant. She is reporting what the evidence shows, and softening it would be a betrayal. Paul was as convinced as any man alive and called himself the least of the apostles (1 Corinthians 15:9). Confidence about a fact and vanity about yourself are different things, and they often run in opposite directions.

6. Exclusivity is what a truth claim is. Two plus two equals four excludes every other answer, and nobody calls arithmetic bigoted. When Jesus said, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me (John 14:6), he made a claim of that kind: exclusive because it claims to be true. The right response is to test it, not to resent its shape.

7. The faith commands the opposite. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves (Philippians 2:3). Pride goes before destruction (Proverbs 16:18). Whoever exalts himself will be humbled (Matthew 23:12). An arrogant Christian is not being a consistent Christian. He is contradicting the book he claims to follow, and you are entitled to say so.

8. The loudest are not the most representative. The Christians you meet online are a selected sample. The ones who run hospices, teach in under-resourced schools, and quietly foster children rarely trend. Judge a position by its stated standard and its best representatives, not by whoever shouted at you first. That is how you would want your own views judged.

9. The standard is gentleness, not silence. Peter tells believers to be ready to give a reason for the hope in them, yet to do it with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15-16). The command is not to be less convinced. It is to be more kind. Where Christians fail at that, the failure is real, and the New Testament agrees with the critic.

The objection is a fair complaint about a real vice and a poor argument about truth. Arrogance is a human problem that Christianity diagnoses and forbids rather than one it produces. Judge the claims on their evidence, and judge the claimants by whether they obey the man they say they follow.

Sources: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; Gregory Koukl, Tactics; Stand to Reason.

Related challenges:
• What does it mean to be a Christian? There are over 30,000 different groups, all of which answer this question differently. If agreement cannot be found on THIS issue, can the claims of Christians themselves be taken with any degree of seriousness?
• ALL sins are forgiven if you ‘accept Jesus as your savior’, right? What about the non-forgivable sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit? We have a little CONTRADICTION problem here?!
• Religion has caused most of the wars and evil in the world. Why do you want to perpetrate this?