Misexplaining the Trinity: The Doctrine No One Could Make Sense Of
David Tynan O’Mahony, the Irish comedian and satirist better known by his stage name, “Dave Allen”, hilariously explained the perils of teaching theology to a child, particularly the concept of a Triune Godhead. Allen built an entire career on this kind of material, provoking indignation across a four-decade run on British and Irish television by highlighting political hypocrisy and treating religious authority with open disdain. His routine on trying to explain the Trinity to a child is not an isolated joke. It sits squarely within a body of work that consistently found the doctrine, when stripped of ecclesiastical solemnity and explained in plain language to an actual child, considerably harder to defend than its defenders ever admitted. Thomas Jefferson Made the Same Point Two Centuries Earlier, Without the Laugh Track In his letter to James Smith, on the 8 th December 1822, Thomas Jefferson elaborated on his hatred for the Pauline Christian doctrine of the Trinity...