True Christians

True Christians. It's a phrase I'm sure you've all heard before. Do I even need to provide examples of how it is used?

"I agree, most people behave badly, but then, most of those people aren't true Christians."

"Hitler wasn't a true Christian (he was Catholic!)."

You get the idea.

This is a really silly piece of rhetoric to use on an atheist. What do I care which Christians are "true" and which are "fake"? I don't have any reason to think that "true Christians" are any better than just regular old Christians. Just because it has the word "true" in it doesn't really mean they are any more truthful. I could define the "perfect numbers" to be the set {6, 28, 496, ...}, but that doesn't actually mean that my life would be made more perfect if I worked six days a week instead of five.

Even if I do take the word "true" seriously, the phrase "true Christian" only seems to mean someone who is true to Christianity. I believe Christianity is a mistake, therefore, I believe true Christians are true to a mistake, more so than the fake Christians. Is this supposed to impress me?

And even if I did think Christianity were essentially good, this piece of rhetoric would still fail at its basic goal. The basic goal is to say, "I am different from those other people. I am on God's side." What is wrong with all those other people? They only claim to be Christian. They're not actually Christian, in essence.

But if you claim to be a "true Christian", you're still in the same boat as all those other people. You only claim to be Christian. How do I know that you are actually, truly Christian? You think I'll take your word for it? In fact, how do you know? How would you know you are truly Christian, if you think the vast majority of Christians do not know? In a misguided attempt at arrogance, you've ended up disparaging a group which, as far as anyone knows, includes yourself.

And if you define true Christians to be those Christians which do good works, then how do I know that the set of all true Christians has any relation to the set of people who claim to be true Christians? How do I know that it has any relation to any particular set of Christian doctrines? I rather doubt that it does, considering how many doctrines there are which have no relevance to anything outside of religion.