It takes five seconds for a 24-year old girl to condemn herself to an eternity of punishment. Or perhaps, it takes five seconds for a 24-year old girl to take a courageous stand against a centuries-old superstition. Last month, a YouTube user named “menotsimple” did one or the other when she submitted her first film to the popular video-sharing site.
Her film was simple: no fancy lighting, no elaborate sets, no additional actors or actresses – just the filmmaker, staring directly into her camera phone, saying, “Hi, my name is Lindy and I deny the existence of the Holy Spirit and you should too.”
She is not alone either. In fact, she is one of nearly five hundred people from all over the world who have participated in The Blasphemy Challenge. Co-founded by Brian Flemming, director of the anti-religion documentary, The God Who Wasn’t There, and Brian Sapient, the found of the popular atheist website, RationalResponders.com, The Blasphemy Challenge encourages young atheists to make a video of themselves performing the ‘unforgivable sin’ (which Mark 3:28-29 ambiguously refers to as “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit”), post it on YouTube, and as a reward for “selling their soul,” win a copy of Flemming’s documentary.
As much as it sounds like a simple grassroots campaign, the Blasphemy Challenge is actually a small part of a growing movement known as “New Atheism.” Previously, Christians shared the common ground of critical thought with atheists – both groups essentially denied the existence of countless gods, Christians just denied the existence of one less God than atheists. However, New Atheism rejects not only the existence of that one God, but also respect for the existence of God.
Biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, is one of the most outspoken members of the New Atheist movement. Not long ago, Dawkins produced a two-part film series for BBC entitled ‘Religion: The Source of All Evil?’ The focus of the series was on the negative effects that religion has had throughout the ages. He examined fanaticism across a spectrum of religions and reached the conclusion that when people commit their lives to something that is unfalsifiable, the result is chaos. For example, Dawkins suggests that if there were no religion, there would have been no 9/11, no troubles in Northern Ireland, no Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no partition of India and Pakistan, and no “shiny-suited, bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money.” And those are just the recent examples of conflict.
A number of surveys have been cited as defense for Dawkins’ claims as well. An extensive study entitled “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” published in the Journal of Religion and Society, concluded that there is a positive correlation between religiosity and homicide rate, that religious societies have higher abortion rates than secular ones, and that secular societies have fewer teenage mothers than religious ones.
In a word: Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists consider findings like these grounds for a revolution against religion as we know it. And, as a matter of fact, they are convinced that the end of organized religion is not far away.
Daniel Dennett, a philosopher and author, believes that within the next 25 years religion “will command little of the awe that it seems to instill today.” He also claims that “the spread of information through the internet and mobile phones will gently, irresistibly, undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance.”
But this is good news, right? We are critically thinking, holistic Christians. We are different from the fanatical and intolerant Christians. And isn’t religion bad anyway? That’s what the t-shirts say: Religion kills; Jesus saves. Right?
Sort of. Even though this may be true, the mindset of New Atheism is not one of reconciliation and dialogue, but rather one of unwavering proselytizing. In a sense, New Atheism is very similar to the dark side of Christian fundamentalism: both views are more concerned with conversion than understanding, both views are not interested in making friends with people who think differently, both views are stubborn and unyielding, and both views are not concerned with grace.
So how are critically thinking Christians supposed to react to New Atheism? This is the question that is plaguing many Christians at the moment – and will continue to plague more Christians as the movement continues to expand. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong said in a recent Newsweek article, “I am confident that a dialogue with those who call themselves ‘atheists’ would not only be good for the church, but would also allow deep and profound truth to emerge.” However, while this sounds good – and perhaps is a good start – it is too simplistic: everyone has experienced the exasperation that comes with trying to dialogue with someone who is not interested in discussion and learning, but solely in conversion and changing minds.
It seems, then, that our reaction must be twofold: first, to initiate graceful conversation and action that will slowly break down the stereotypes and straw men that lie at the heart of the New Atheist gospel; and second, to graciously admit where we, as Christians, have failed to live out our call to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.
There is a connecting factor between these two steps toward reconciliation and it is a factor that is perhaps as profane and sacrilegious as atheism itself: the economics of religion. The economics of religion have nothing to do with money or finances, but rather incentives. People respond to incentives (financial, moral, social, political, et cetera) and they choose among various options according to which of these incentives is most beneficial to them.
As such, an economical view of religion states that when people join religious groups, they are often acting on incentives, not beliefs. This is where New Atheism breaks down. People like Richard Dawkins see religion as inherently dangerous because people are committing their lives to irrational and unfalsifiable beliefs. But perhaps, he is giving religious people the benefit of the doubt. Certainly, Christians may claim that they act in certain ways because a religious text tells them to, or because they believe it is the will of God, but this is not always the entire story. For example, if religious people truly believed that an all-powerful God was individually and personally angry with them because of their sinful actions (as some religions posit), they would not be so easily tempted into sin.
When competing incentives come into play, they often easily overpower religious incentives. So perhaps, when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred, it was not simply an act of Islamic religious fundamentalism or extremism, but rather an example of political and social incentives overtaking religious ones.
The solution then, is not to eradicate religion altogether, which is the ultimate end of New Atheism, because this ignores the philanthropy, charity, and altruism that occurs when people act upon religious incentives without interference from other motivations. Instead, the solution is understanding that ridding the world of religion will not solve all of our problems, because other incentives will still exist – incentives that can be equally (if not more) destructive. This is where New Atheism fails.
However, just as we do not want New Atheists to throw the baby out with the bathwater, Christians too must take an honest look at the criticism offered by the movement and embrace the parts that are true. In many cases, Christians have acted irrationally. Christians have been ignorant. Christians have been intolerant, bigoted, narrow-minded, arrogant, and deceptive. And as much as we would like to push the blame on other sects of Christianity, we have a responsibility to ourselves, to each other, and to God to own up to the actions that the body of Christ on earth has committed – both the good and the bad.
Just as branches of Islam have allowed political incentives to overshadow religious ones, Christianity has allowed moral incentives (which is a polite way of saying revenge) and politics to overtake our religious incentives. Religion should be the most powerful incentive. If Christians were truly living the lives that they profess to be living, the religious incentives would never be trumped. However, it appears this is not the case. And it is not until we admit that we have turned our God into a socio-political tool for advancing our own personal agendas and into a shield for ignorance and anti-intellectualism that we can begin the process of reconciliation with our New Atheist neighbors.
God is not pleased when we enact war on foreign countries for obscure and constantly shifting reasons. God is not pleased when we refuse to admit that we have made a mistake. God is not pleased when we suppress women in the name of biblical patriarchy. God is not pleased when we are so deeply homophobic that oppressing homosexuals becomes the defining issue of church life. God is not pleased when we divide the scientific study of God’s creation against God himself, as if the two were in contradiction with one another. God is not pleased when we see our brothers and sisters struggling and we do not help them.
New Atheism has provided a service to us as Christians. It has unknowingly challenged us to stop living static lives and to begin living as we were intended to live. New Atheism has called for an end to religion as we know it, and maybe they are right to do so, because religion as we know it is not religion as it was intended. We are not called to live bound by incentives of politics, but by love, grace, and humility. This is true religion.
