Together, Without God

Last Thursday evening I drove my rattletrap Volvo into downtown Portland. I had to run out of a book release party for one of my closest friends in order to make it to an event downtown.

I parked my car as close to the venue as possible, more than five blocks away, and began the trudge to the evening’s festivities. I was going to the historic Portland landmark, the First Unitarian Church. I was going at the invitation of Tom Krattenmaker.

If you don’t recognize the name, Tom Krattenmaker, let me tell you a bit about him. He is a member of the Board of Contributors for that beacon of the liberal agenda, USA Today. Not only does Tom write for them, he is their most prolific writer on the topic of religion in America. He writes more often than not with a piercingly critical eye toward American evangelicalism. Tom would never join a Christian church. While he speaks with respect for Jesus as a teacher and ethical-leader, he finds the supernatural and incarnational Jesus-teachings of the Christian church to be little more than fantasy. He is a self-proclaimed secular progressive. He has little use for God.

The thing that makes The New Atheism an eyebrow-raising opponent is not their caustic campaign to caricature the church … it is the way that it looks like they are beating us at our own game.

Now, if, based on that last paragraph, you judge Tom to be an enemy of the evangelical church, you could not be more mistaken. Tom Krattenmaker may be one of our most trustworthy friends.

When I say that Tom writes with piercing criticism, that blade cuts both ways. Yes, like any good friend, he points out the foibles and gashes in the American church, but he is just as likely, if not more likely, to proclaim the often overlooked beauties of the evangelical church. In fact, even risking heavy backlash from his progressive colleagues, Tom has made it his personal mission to illuminate the laudable in evangelicalism to the broader culture through his writings, most notably doing so in his book, The Evangelicals You Don’t Know (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013).

When, I got to the stately brick Unitarian Church, I was surprised to find a significant line waiting to enter. It was so long that it snaked the length of the block and continued well around the corner. Lucky for me, Tom had secured a press pass for me. I was able to enter immediately and found a seat in the fifth row.

I sat down in one of the fold-down wooden theater chairs, like we had in my middle-school auditorium. I took in the wide, aesthetically muffled room with its broad wrap-around balcony, imposing pipe organ and taupe walls. As we waited, I witnessed the room fill with a quintessential collection of Portland’s progressives, academics, and activists. All of us, myself included, were there to hear a self-proclaimed opponent of the Christian church, Sam Harris.

Church critics

Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004)) is one of the strongest voices and brightest stars of “the New Atheism,” a movement that is growing in popularity and political/rhetorical power.

When I say that Sam is no friend of the Christian church, I am not being euphemistic nor am I exaggerating the facts. His words are clear. Through the evening I heard him make numerous statements like:

“The belief in revelation is the most destructive of beliefs.”

“It is better to care about people than to share the gospel of Jesus and sort of care about people.”

“(Richard) Dawkins has that amazing paragraph where he absolutely destroys Yahweh … and beautifully so.”

He says such things with slicing wit and more often than not garners an approving laugh from his enraptured audience.

It gets worse.

Think about how you found a home in the Christian faith. Your intellect no doubt played a role, but wasn’t it the feeling of belonging, the experience of celebration, the sensation of meaning or the participation in a greater story that played a greater role?

Harris is very concerned about religiously fueled terrorism around the world and is certainly critical of the sort of beliefs that create groups like ISIS or the Taliban. But he places the greatest blame for this violence on everyday and moderate believers in churches everywhere. He blames, well, people like me, for every suicide-bomb that explodes or helpless child that is gunned down. From his perspective, it is us, the purveyors of everyday faith, that provide the covering for religious extremism with our absurd claims of the supernatural. We moderate believers enable the violence by normalizing the very possibility that the Divine exists or that God speaks. I don’t think it’s a misrepresentation to say that to him, Evangelicalism is worse than Al Qaeda.

But don’t be fooled, it is not the acidic criticism that makes people like Sam Harris evangelicalism’s new competition. It is, in truth, something much, much more dangerous.

Christianity has always had its critics. In this sense, New Atheism is nothing new. It is not smarter, not larger, and no better organized than other competing ideologies throughout church history. The thing that makes The New Atheism an eyebrow-raising opponent is not their caustic campaign to caricature the church … it is the way that it looks like they are beating us at our own game.

Community. Competition?

Sam Harris is a great example of this. The End of Faith, his anti-religion manifesto, was written a decade ago. While he still takes shots at theistic religions, today Harris is spending a great deal of his energy promoting prayer.

His most recent book, Waking Up (Simon and Schuster, 2014), is a thoughtful, scientifically supported exploration of the power of meditation. Not just meditation as an intellectual procedure, he espouses it for its impact on personal wholeness, enlightenment, correcting self-addiction, and creating a greater capacity to love … some of the best impacts of Christian prayer.

Additionally, Harris and others like him are beginning to promote lifestyles marked by interpersonal gatherings (small groups), community engagement (“love thy neighbor”), and justice activism (“as much as you have done it to the least of these …”).

It goes further. Many leaders in the growing movement of New Atheists are repenting of a past (misguided) emphasis on intellectual debate, public disparagement, political organizing, academic domination, and focus on the printed word. In its place, their note-worthy changes include encouraging regular local gatherings based in community, testimony and celebration (areas long regarded as the property of organized religion.)

Are we leaning on the True Initiator, the one who makes the very question of competition disappear?

Here in Portland, several “secular churches” have been popping up to supply local atheists and their friends (evangelism?) a communal and even spiritual home. One such “church-plant” is called Sunday Assembly Portland and meets in one of Portland’s iconic landmarks on Sunday mornings at 11am. This is no lecture on atheistic ideology—there is emotional group singing, testimonials, a short message on being spiritually whole, and invitations to small groups and justice programs throughout the week.

Think about how you found a home in the Christian faith. Your intellect no doubt played a role, but wasn’t it the feeling of belonging, the experience of celebration, the sensation of meaning or the participation in a greater story that played a greater role? The New Atheists seem to understand that.

If you have any doubt about the intentionality of this work, take a few minutes to listen to Bart Campolo, a leader and apologist for secularism, speak to the Secular Student Alliance:

“You’re not going to draw anybody in unless you can offer for them identity and relationships and a sense of mission that is about making the world a better place.”

As I write these thoughts, I have not forgotten that a life of prayer, worship gatherings, mission trips, messages of meaning or even personal wholeness are not the centerpieces of the Christian faith. In fact they are tertiary at best. The essence has nothing to do with our activities or ability to organize. In fact it has nothing to do with us at all. We are not even the most important characters in the story. Ultimately, God is the protagonist. God is the one in pursuit. God is the one speaking. God is the one organizing. God is the source.

As I observe the tactics of the New Atheism, it causes me to wonder. Are we, the Christian church leaning on our services, on our rhetoric, or on our programs as the hope for our neighbors? Because if we are, we may find ourselves with some increasingly stiff competition.

Or are we leaning on the True Initiator, the one who makes the very question of competition disappear?