Nietzsche often put the blame on Christianity when it came to his perceived problems with contemporary morality, over a hundred years after the fact, Christianity is still going strong, where did Nietzsche go wrong when analyzing the genealogy of morals and declaring that God was dead?
Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared in his 1882 work titled "The Gay Science" that “God is Dead” a statement so profound that it echoed across the world during the 20th century. This statement is quite often misunderstood. In his 1887 work, “On the Genealogy of Morals”, he elaborates more on this through an analogous discussion on how morality has evolved. Essentially the shift from a moral sense built up by what made sense in the world to one dominated by Judeo-Christian tradition has opened the door to wide-encompassing nihilism in the wake of the Enlightenment.
Nietzsche paints this “slave revolt in morality” as a bad thing. Affirming that it is reactionary to the old status quo and that participants find pride in saying no to life. There are a lot of ways to view this argument but in my view, I believe that it is a gross oversimplification of the values that Christians hold dear and ultimately redefines what it means to live. Aristotle was right when he stated in Nicomachean Ethics that ultimately a person’s goal is to attain happiness as it in itself is an end rather than a means to an end. Happiness can be defined by many things by many people. It is a subjective concept, there is no concrete definition of happiness and Nietzsche is effectively saying that Christians are not happy because they deny themselves different parts of life that are commonly held to be good and pleasurable.
True Christians are happy because they know what lies ahead of them in a spiritual sense but even in the physical world the denial of earthly goods can still have positive effects on the life they lead now. Take smoking for example, a formerly common practice amongst most people that true Christians would have ignored out of avoidance to indulgence (similar statements can be made to alcohol) the temporary potential disapproval by one’s colleagues was outweighed by the fact that in the long term, the Christian would have the better and happier life due to not smoking since there would be a much smaller risk of adverse health effects due to the initial consumption. Nietzsche proposes that a Christian's avoidance of these kinds of things is due to feeling indebted to God for his sacrifice through Christ and yes there is truth to this statement. True Christians feel sorrow when they go against the wishes of God but they do not hesitate to live life as a result of this rather they just simply value different things in their life. What Nietzsche assumed would happen is that the trend of atheism would continue until there was enough of them to make the questionability of God a highly public matter and it would lead to widespread nihilism as some people wouldn’t have a reason to have values if God was dead. In my opinion, this assumption fails in two key places. First and foremost even 135+ years after publication, Christianity is still the most dominant and widespread religion in the world. Secondly, it is the assumption that a Christian’s morals derive from God. The morals of Christians are certainly backed by God, but they do not come from God himself. If these morals came directly from God then the differing religions would have different core values when in reality they are all the same, there is an innate sense of morality that is present in humans, and modern psychological studies back this claim. A true Christian simply feels empowered through God to display their morality. A Christian and a non-Christian both feel bad for atrocities going on in the world but a true Christian is more likely to do something about it rather than simply stand idle. In this case both the Christian and non-Christian have the same morals but the Christian, feeling empowered by God, does something with it. The death of God therefore wouldn’t alter the morals of a Christian as they would either not accept the death of God or they would carry on with the morals they already have.
Nietzsche’s claims are also operating under another assumption. That the unquestionability of God will lead to a mass hysteria within the believing community. It is certainly true that some may falter when the foundation of their way of life is challenged; this isn’t true for everyone and for some can lead to an even stronger devotion. Not allowing questions to be asked is always indicative of an authoritative institution. Questions allow for proper discourse and discourse leads to research and research to discovery. Many of the revered saints in the Catholic tradition questioned God at first and came away from it with a new understanding and desire to serve God. You don’t even need to be a saint for this to be true, I can attest that the questioning of God has only led me to believe more, my trust in institutions may be shaken but God transcends those institutions and is something bigger than that. From this, the supposed death of God wouldn’t trigger an age of nihilism but it is more probable that it would trigger another great awakening.
Nietzsche was a man of philosophy and he is quite recognizable in the field of philosophy. This, however, doesn’t mean that his ideas cannot be misplaced. His discussion on the genealogy of morals is insightful and provokes a lot of questions to those who read it but I cannot help but wonder if he began writing it with some bias that led to him misplacing some of the ideas about the fundamentals of Christianity. To Nietzsche, God may be dead but to the billions who believe God is very much alive.