The atheist's gift (partly a repost)

In an excerpt from her book We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (And Maybe You Should Too), adapted for publication in the Washington Post a couple of days ago, Kate Cohen explains crisply why she calls herself an atheist:

It’s not complicated. My (non)belief derives naturally from a few basic observations:

1. The Greek myths are obviously stories. The Norse myths are obviously stories. L. Ron Hubbard obviously made that stuff up. Extrapolate.
2. The holy books underpinning some of the bigger theistic religions are riddled with “facts” now disproved by science and “morality” now disavowed by modern adherents. Extrapolate.
3. Life is confusing and death is scary. Naturally, humans want to believe that someone capable is in charge and that we continue to live after we die. But wanting doesn’t make it so.
4. Child rape. War. Etc.

Cohen goes on to point out some reasons why, in the USA, atheists might choose not to be very public about their (non)beliefs, leading to her suggestion that surveys may significantly undercount atheists.

Judging by this excerpt, she's not the strongest possible advocate for atheism, but that may not be her main mission. (I've not read the book, just the Washington Post excerpt. If you can't access her article behind their paywall, let me know.) One of her main points is that if atheism can have its public stigma removed, the coercive power of religion in public life can be reduced. This is most likely to happen if atheists come out from undercover: "... the more I say to people that I’m an atheist—me, the mom who taught the kindergarten class about baking with yeast and brought the killer cupcakes to the bake sale—the more people will stop assuming that being an atheist means being … a serial killer."

Her theological critique of faith may be weak in this excerpt, but her political indictments of religion are strong and important—namely the many ways religious people (particularly the Christian right wing) throw their political weight around at the expensive of LGBTQ people, women facing reproductive dilemmas, truth-tellers about racism and its history, and, in general, the constitutional separation of church and state.

The enmeshment of religion and politics is an old story, and by now our defense that "those Christian nationalists are misrepresenting the Gospel" might be wearing thin. To the secular or atheist observer, it's all the same self-delusion under more or less attractive sheepskins.

What responses are we left with?

First, within religious circles, we have every right to confront the misrepresentations, heresies, and counterfeits that threaten the reputation of our faith by all methods consistent with love.

Second, wherever we can make common cause with atheists and others outside organized religion, based on a common commitment to justice and the welfare of the community, we should do so. "Apathy in the face of preventable human suffering is radical evil." (Father Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.)

Third, as individuals, we don't have to cover all of this ourselves. Some of us in the Christian commmunity are more gifted to confront sick theology and biblical malpractice, while others are more gifted to participate in secular alliances.

Finally, instead of marginalizing atheists and contributing to the anti-atheist stigma that Cohen refers to in her excerpt, we should engage with them with respect and gratitude. It's not just that we owe them a coherent and positive explanation of what we really believe. We also owe them a hearing, so they can explain their own position in their own words. As I argue in the following post from 2008, their honest and direct challenge to our beliefs is not an attack, not an insult, not "persecution"; it's a gift.

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The atheist's gift. (Slightly edited from the April 2008 original post with time references brought up to date. Includes some rambling at the end that was fun to revisit, but wasn't directly related to the topic!)

Most believers I know don't spend much time hanging out with atheists, but maybe that's too bad.

Michael Ireland of ASSIST News Service recently interviewed Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine. It's a fascinating, revealing, troubling interview on several levels, which charity prevents me from enumerating. Anyway, I began asking myself the old questions about whether our evangelism is genuinely communicating with unbelievers, or is more an exercise we go through to reassure ourselves. If there's anything that atheists do for us, it is (at least!) to provide that much-needed reality check, providing we don't go out of our way to avoid them!

The whole interview reminded me of a quotation from Nikolai Berdyaev that I've spent a good part of the evening trying to track down. (I read it about 45 years ago.) Berdyaev said something like this: atheism is the dialectical purification of the church's collusion with oppression. (Can anyone help me find the actual quotation?) Thanks to Yakov Krotov's online library, I did find two other relevant quotations from Berdyaev:

Grace has nothing in common with our worldly understandings of obligation, strength, power, causality. Therefore grace is not only compatible with freedom—it is in unity with freedom. But theological doctrines rationalized grace and communicated a sociomorphized grace. For this reason, atheism ('high' atheism, not 'low' atheism) could be a dialetical cleansing of human ideas of God. Those who rebelled against God, because of the world's evil and unrighteousness, were assuming the existence of a higher truth—that is, in the final analysis, God. In the name of God they rose up against God; in the name of a purified understanding of God, they rose up against an understanding of God that had been contaminated by this world. [source]

We must liberate the idea of God from sociomorphism that distorts, degrades, and blasphemes that idea. Human beings can be horribly dehumanized; just so, God too has humanness and demands humanity. Humanity is the image of God in humans. Theology must be freed from sociology, which reflects the fallenness of the world and of humanity. Apophatic theology must go hand in hand with an apophatic sociology. This means purifying our perception of God from any hint of worldly theocracy. The absolutist-monarchist understanding of God has spawned atheism as a justifiable revolt. Atheism (not the vulgar, malicious kind but a higher atheism, acquainted with suffering) was a dialectical turning point in understanding God; it had a positive mission. In this atheism, a cleansing of the idea of God from false sociomorphism was accomplished—cleansing from human inhumanity that had been objectified and carried over into the realm of transcendence. [source]

Once again, a century later, atheists are reminding us that our faith cannot depend on self-contained systems of ideas—the "the self-contained, internally-coherent belief system that is Christianity"... and that ultimately proved unsustainable for Shermer.

We are right to want to base our most intimate communities on a shared faith, but if those communities seal themselves off from any intellectual challenge, they will become micro-tyrannies, substituting group-think for actual knowledge of God, and unable to discern their drift away from the living God.

As Shermer points out from his own experience, "The study of comparative world religions and mythologies from around the world showed me that other people believed just as passionately as I did that they were right and everyone else was wrong about religious beliefs that are mutually exclusive...." We are followers of Jesus not because the church has somehow patched together a religion that's superior to all those other religions—better art, architecture, ethics, miracles, divine beings; nor did we commit ourselves to Christ because someone held a winning hand of dazzling argumentation. (Well, I guess I'm speaking for myself!) We are followers because we are called and we are in relationship to the One who called.

This is why discipleship is far more important for the future of genuine Christianity than any vain attempt to maintain a higher social status or privileged position in society. Grace and relationship are the closest we can come in this life to "proof" of God's promises in Jesus. I can't blame anyone or any group for not taking us seriously if our relationship with that person or group has no grace in it.

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It was a lot of fun going through some of my old books in search of that Berdyaev quotation. I found a dusty copy of his Slavery and Freedom that I bought at the Book Exchange on Charles St., Boston, nearly 45 years ago. Next to it, equally dusty, was Nicolas Zernov's The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century, that I bought 46 years ago with my employee's discount at Canterbury House Bookstore in Ottawa.

I had made notes in both books, mostly on notecards, and I had that odd sensation (described beautifully in Milan Kundera's Ignorance) that someone else had written those notes in my handwriting. I found a Berdyaev quotation in my handwriting with the annotation "page 180"—but page 180 of what book? Not one I own. And more intriguing references with page numbers to some book somewhere: "Freedom as burden (Dost.) 28-9." "Moral action—bridge from necessity to freedom (Kant) 41." And I can see that I was already interested in the theme of objectification, which is still important to me.

And here are three cards with a whole sermon in my own handwriting, but I cannot remember writing or delivering that sermon, even though it's not bad. (It's hard to take credit for something I have no memory of composing!)

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Looking through an issue of Charisma magazine, I saw a reference to Barack Obama as "just another pawn in Satan's kingdom who adheres to destructive liberal ideas." How those Christians love one another!

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As I thought about that Obama reference, a caution just hit me: to relate with grace and courtesy to atheists does not mean to run down other Christians. There's plenty of stupidity in churchianity, and we're right to point it out, but to tear down actual people—those (fill in the blank with the category of your choice)—neither demonstrates graciousness nor builds credibility. With all my heart, I believe that President Bush and the neocons made terrible choices in response to 9/11, and their methods verged on the demonic (employing deception to unleash a lethal conflict that continued to bleed us dry humanly, morally, financially, while not hesitating to use Christian celebrities to puff their case). But I will not call them pawns of Satan or any other name that implies I know more about their spiritual situations than I actually do.

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Related posts: 

Worship and offense.

Faith and certainty.

William Barr, Max Boot, and "the vapor trails of Christianity."

(Last week) Hostility "to the Christian faith."

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The 2023 Nobel Peace Prize announcement will be streamed here tomorrow morning.

Greg Morgan reflects on the first anniversary of his Elder Chaplain blog.

Speaking of confronting bad theology, once again Beth Felker Jones shows how it can be done.

Is it legitimate to draw connections between contemporary white Christian nationalism and Nazi Germany? (Thanks to Faith on View for the link.)

Matt Rosen on convincement and belonging in Quaker community: a First Monday lecture at Pendle Hill, available in person and online on November 6. Thanks to Chris Stern for the link.

Many Friends are grieving the death of Mariellen Gilpin this past summer. For twenty years she devoted herself to helping Friends share their mystical experiences through the What Canst Thou Say newsletter and Web site. The site will be republishing many of her contributions in upcoming months, including this powerful essay on prayer.

Becky Ankeny on God's Repair Shop. "Imagine God asking us, what do you want me to do with you?"

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The original 2008 post included this clip of Jr. Walker and the All Stars. (Another artist whose recordings I cherished as a teenager, but kept hidden from my family.) I'm surprised this clip remains online fifteen years after I first posted it.

Faith and certainty, part one

Today I stopped by our beloved branch library and picked up a copy of Chris Hedges' I Don't Believe in Atheists [republished as When Atheism Becomes Religion]. Most of my friends would probably classify Hedges as a liberal, which is not altogether unjustified, but how many liberals are this blunt about sin?

We have nothing to fear from those who do or do not believe in God; we have much to fear from those who do not believe in sin. The concept of sin is a stark acknowledgment that we can never be omnipotent, that we are bound and limited by human flaws and self-interest. The concept of sin is a check on the utopian dreams of a perfect world. It prevents us from believing in our own perfectibility or the illusion that the material advances of science and technology equal an intrinsic moral improvement in our species. To turn away from God is harmless. Saints have been trying to do it for centuries. To turn away from sin is catastrophic. Religious fundamentalists, who believe they know and can carry out the will of God, disregard their severe human limitations. They act as if they are free from sin. The secular utopians of the twenty-first century have also forgotten they are human. These two groups peddle absolutes. Those who do not see as they see, speak as they speak and act as they act are worthy only of conversion or eradication.

We discard the wisdom of sin at our peril. Sin reminds us that all human beings are flawed--though not equally flawed. Sin is the acceptance that there will never be a final victory over evil, that the struggle for morality is a battle that will always have to be fought. Studies in cognitive behavior illustrate the accuracy and wisdom of this Biblical concept. Human beings are frequently irrational. They are governed by unconscious forces, many of them self-destructive. This understanding of innate human corruptibility and human limitations, whether explained by the theologian Augustine or the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, has been humankind's most potent check on utopian visions. It has forced human beings to accept their own myopia and irrationality, to acknowledge that no act, even one defined as moral or virtuous, is free from the taint of self-interest and corruption. We are bound by our animal natures.

After I got over my minor irritation over the corruption of the word "fundamentalist" (which among Christians once stood for a fairly precise theological position that did not necessarily involve the arrogance and narrow-mindedness the word now implies), I began thinking about Hedges' first implication, that belief or lack of belief in God has, by itself, negligible social impact.

I think I know what he means. He doesn't deny the impact of great religious prophets--he cites a string of Christian heroes, including Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day. However, he would also assert that Christianity has no monopoly on such heroes, and in fact some great moral heroes had no overt religion at all. He doesn't (at least so far) provide a comparative census (how many heroes belong in the Christian camp, the Muslim camp, the atheist camp, etc.)--but his argument doesn't depend on statistics. He's saying that religious faith as the sole category of analysis isn't a predictor of whether a person is to be "feared," despite the charges of the "new atheists" (Dawkins, Hitchens & co.) that religious faith is a malevolent social force.

Instead, Hedges fears the sinful power of certainty in the social arena. And it's a legitimate fear. The inward certainty of a powerful intellectual or emotional conversion, presumably, is one thing. Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, among many others, both tell stories of having to come to grips with doubts before being able to move forward with courage; they reached a measure of certainty that empowered them for their public ministries. I had to make a decision to trust Jesus without reservation before I could overcome the principal block to faith, which was my deep and angry suspicion of all authority. However, that inward certainty may or may not lead to certainty of action--particularly of categorical and coercive action in the social arena.

Certainty is a slippery quality. In my experience, it comes and goes--and returns. More importantly, it is relational rather than operational: I can be certain that God wants the best for you and me, and that God will be with you and me as we work for that best, but I'm hardly ever certain about what concrete steps to take next. For that decision, I need a mix of intuition, prayer, plain secular fact-checking, the wisdom of others, and a willingness to risk being wrong.

Is this kind of "provisional" certainty debilitating for social action? Can great social movements be propelled by leaders who are modest and self-consciously fallible? I don't object to a leader who competently communicates a powerful vision and tries to persuade me to sign on. For me, the most basic red flag is how leaders see their opponents. Do they objectify those who don't agree, those who stand in the way, and even those they seek to convince? Do those leaders try to apply scary categories, emphasize how alien the "enemy" is?

The rest of us need to wrestle with certainty, too. "Fundamentalist" leaders, religious and atheist, will rise up despite eloquent authors' warnings, but maybe our message can empower ordinary people against falling for the charms of their certainty. My understanding of Christian Quaker evangelism is that we proclaim a different kind of certainty--not that we evangelists have the whole story, not that we can do the thinking for you, not that we have a great plan for your life summarized in this brief tract, but we are certain that you are made in God's image, and you already have the capacity to become aware of that image, that Light, in you. It is not an issue of whether our Light is better than someone else's. Instead, if we trust the Holy Spirit and the promises of God, our sole responsibilities are to invite you to turn to God for inner confirmation of God's already-existing constant and loving invitation, to tell you our community's resources and experience in accepting that invitation, and extending our community's hospitality as we together (jointly, humbly, imperfectly) try to work out together the awesome implications for ourselves, each other, and the world. Don't you think this kind of inward convincement might inoculate us against the claims of overconfident, presumptuous leaders?

Our resources as a community are not modest. They include the Bible (which is utterly trustworthy when we don't wield it with inappropriate certainty), our history of discipleship as a faith community, and the diverse gifts present among us today--especially when we use them with mutual forbearance and a respectful division of labor. Given all this, it's hard for me to understand why we Quakers sometimes seem so collectively timid. For example, I really thought that when Friends United Meeting formally joined the Christian Peacemaker Teams, we would significantly increase their enrollment, and it was sad to read this past week that CPT closed their Hebron program for lack of workers. [Note: It did reopen, and I served there in 2019.] We Friends need more certainty, less diffidence. But maybe it is a different kind of certainty, because too often I've seen evidence that we feel superior, less evidence that we expect God's promises to the world to be fulfilled through us.

Later in his book, Chris Hedges repeats some powerful historical arguments against Christian pacifism. However, his indictment of pacifists is almost the same indictment made by Quaker writer R.W. Tucker (see "What are we afraid of?"). The kind of pacifism that George Fox advocated did not depend on the kind of optimism Hedges condemns, but on a certainty that doesn't blink in the presence of sin--an awareness that we are peaceable soldiers in the Lamb's War under the captaincy of the Prince of Peace. This is a kind of certainty that can be deployed with humility and a crucial awareness that the war is not just outward, but inward. When we "get in the way" alongside Christian Peacemakers, when we refuse to pay war taxes, when we publicly resist objectifying those who are "different," when we rise up against unjust wars and counsel conscientious objectors, and when we evangelize with integrity, telling people the whole salvation message (not just its individual dimension) AND inviting them to experience the message in community, I think we can make "certainty" both modest and powerful.

(part two; part three)

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Righteous links: The Obama corner .... Is Barack dull? ~~ Barack's 20-year-old good deed, in English and Norwegian. (Thanks to Kathy Torvik.) ~~ More on Barack Obama overseas: Readers of the Russian-language Washington ProFile bulletin voted 61-39% that Obama would be "better able to exercise a positive influence on relations between the USA and the countries of the former Soviet Union." And here's an unrighteous link: several Russia online media sources used this terrible Reuters photo of John McCain (first in gallery). Who at Reuters thought this was a usable photo??

Paul Krugman explains, in plain English, the work for which he received the Nobel prize in economics. ~~ Andrew Sullivan writes a candid and useful piece on "why I blog." I don't have the time or drive or freedom to post several times a day, as he does, but in my own modest once-a-week fashion, I scratch a lot of the same itches. ~~ Never in my memory have the USA media so UNDERreported a Canadian story: the country had a NATIONAL ELECTION THIS WEEK! ~~ Christian Peacemakers continue their important ministry in At-Tuwani. You can download a report at this site. I have mixed feelings about the format of this report (are bar charts really the most effective or credible way to deliver this data?) but have no doubts that the report deserves attention.

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Considering the state of the world, I am still certain that I'm advancing the right kind of music in these entries--the supremely evocative form known as the blues. Especially today's clip. Alice Stuart sings, "I'm going to show you more money than Rockefeller's ever seen." Well, at least I'm not claiming certainty about that.