On being a Christian atheist

[ljwrites]

I am a Christian atheist.

Let me state up front what I don't mean by that; I don't mean I believe in the obscure branch of Christian theology which states that God is dead and we must love each other and save each other in that absence. While I admire the poignancy of it, it doesn't gel for me even as metaphor because I don't believe God is dead but rather that he never existed, at least in any physical sense outside the sensemaking that we do through story.

I also don't use "atheist" as a pejorative here, as a Christian pastor does in his book The Christian Atheist criticizing Christians for living as though God does not exist. I don't think it's morally or intellectually inferior or superior not to believe in God.(1) By atheism I mean, simply, the lack of belief in God as a supernatural being. I don't assign any moral or other value judgment to it.

Fortunately, Christian atheism seems a lot more visible than it was back when I was first searching for the term back in 2013. The above two senses were the only ones I could find at the time, but now I am able to find entire articles on cultural Christianity(2) and more expanded information on Christian atheism itself, not to mention modern Christian atheists openly expressing their convictions.

How does Christian atheism work, though? Christianity, unlike Judaism or Buddhism, is not a tradition that is friendly toward atheism. Calling oneself a Christian requires a belief in certain tenets of faith including, at minimum, a belief in an all-powerful and perfect God.

I imagine it works differently for everyone, but for me one big conceptual step was separating Christianity as a culture and Christianity as a religion. I am no longer religious but I am still part of a culture shaped by Christianity, from Korea's long history of Christianity to my own family's faith going back generations. It never felt right that I would have to leave behind such a big part of my heritage, which is very much grounded on Earth and on real people, solely because I no longer believed in the supernatural.

Recognizing Christianity as a culture as well as a religion is also important, I believe, because Christianity in many contexts is afforded the privilege of being the invisible default, much like whiteness, maleness, or heterosexuality. Cultural Christianity much like religious Christianity has a number of issues that need to be discussed and unlearned, such as its casual social domination, cheap grace, misogyny, and lionization of suffering.

None of this discussion and unlearning can happen while we deny the existence of cultural Christianity, especially as Christians in the West are increasingly secularized and lose even the visibility afforded to them through religious Christianity. Too many culturally Christian atheists deny their ties to Christianity and make cultural Christianity even more invisible, obfuscating criticism and debate.

Another big part of being a Christian atheist for me is the reclamation of Christian theology for a Godless worldview focused on this world and on fellow living beings. I do not believe in heaven or hell as (meta)physical places in the afterlife, any more than I believe in an afterlife itself. However, I do believe we can choose to live in heaven by choosing love and truth, and in hell by serving hatred and lies.

I don't believe in original sin as something to be ashamed of or equivalent to being a crime; rather I believe that sin is shame, the fear that we do not deserve love just as we are. By truly understanding that we are worth everything including the life of God himself we lay down that burden of shame, the conviction in our own fundamental unlovability, and know the myth of deserving love for the lie that it is. That is how we become truly free to love each other and create communities of compassion and courage.

That is what being a Christian atheist means for me, a hodge-podge as it were of history, culture, and religion. It is both my heritage and my idea of a good life, and it works for me--for now.

Notes
1. No I don't believe atheists are smarter or better, don't @ me. I believe this also clears up the question of whether I am one of those anti-theist New Atheists; I hate that movement and have so many objections to it on intellectual and moral grounds.
2. Also may I say how happy I am that literally a picture of Richard Dawkins comes up when you look up cultural Christianity? Sure he's a garbage human being, but his openly identifying as culturally Christian makes it harder for other Islamophobic and otherwise bigoted atheists to distance themselves from their cultural dominance because they have "nothing to do with Christianity" durr hurr.

Comments

[loopy777]

I don't believe in original sin as something to be ashamed of or equivalent to being a crime; rather I believe that sin is shame, the fear that we do not deserve love just as we are. By truly understanding that we are worth everything including the life of God himself we lay down that burden of shame, the conviction in our own fundamental unlovability, and know the myth of deserving love for the lie that it is. That is how we become truly free to love each other and create communities of compassion and courage.

While I appreciate the overall sentiment here, I'm not sure I understand the point about sin being shame. I think you're conflating sin in general with the legacy/consequences of Original Sin, but the Original Sin was the actions of Adam and Eve (which I know are up for a lot theological and philosophical debate), and sin itself is an action. It's funny you mentioned Terry Pratchett the other day, because I think he summed up the basic concept behind sin better than anything else I've ever seen, via one of his best characters: "And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is."

The reason sin is against the religion is because God wants us to love Him and love each other. Granted, there's also the whole Obey God thing in play, but I like to examine the root behind a given sin being a sin: why did God tell us not to do that? (Which is where I get skeptical of a lot of the Catholic Church's rules around sexuality. I'm not convinced that Jesus had a strong opinion about birth control within marriage.) To me, there's no real reason to attach shame to sin, other than the usual reason of feeling bad for hurting people, which I don't think is unreasonable, but that shame is still something that one should eventually get over. (Which gets into the Reconciliation process, the form of which is one of those things I think the Catholic Church really needs to have a long think about, but that's another discussion.)

I may be misinterpreting what you're saying, but I couldn't really find another meaning.

Overall, I admit that as a religious type (an a very unusual type of religious, I think), I find the concept of a culture derived from a religion that becomes separate from the religion itself is rather odd. However, I'm mystified in general by Identity as something external, or built on external elements or labels. Shared culture does nothing for me, and I sometimes wish less people liked to do the things I like to do; that might be the engineer in me. But lots of people seem to take really comfort from it, so I'm not inclined to condemn it, and I'm happy that people at least take a sense of morality from those religions. I'm a big fan of humanism, whether or not it's attached to a religion.

Hm, there's a label I might be able to take on: Engineer Christian. We tend to ask lots of annoying questions, but then we go on to try to improve things using the answers we got. And sometimes things explode if they aren't built to our specs.

[ljwrites]

I mean there's the whole "no God" part of my beliefs that I imagine is a slightly bigger problem, religion-wise, than the interpretation of sin :P But to actually argue the point, I think sin is used in at least two different senses in the Bible, as the human condition persisting since Original Sin and as wrongful actions/crimes, what you mentioned as treating people like things. In the former sense, we're told we're all born in sin and everyone is just as sinful as everyone else, like a seven-year-old who was murdered without being "saved" is just as sinful as the person who murdered him? I can't accept that.

My solution is to interpret sin-as-condition not as a crime but as a condition that separates us from God, because it is ludicrous and counterfactual to argue that all humans are equal in their acts. We can all, regardless of our actions, be equal in the condition that separates us from God, however; and since God is love the condition must be one that keeps us from love. Sins-as-crimes are simply an offshoot of sin-as-condition, the actions that some (but not all) of humanity take as a response to the pain caused by separation from the unconditional, all-encompassing love of God.

And the thing is, Original Sin itself cannot be construed as the crime of treating people as things. Who did Adam and Eve treat as things by disobeying God? Each other? It doesn't fit. What disobedience did introduce to humanity, however, was shame: The shame of nakedness, the fear, for the first time, that they were not fit to be seen by God. For the first time a condition was introduced for their being in God's company, and that was what separated them from God where they never had been before, not some crime or inequity.

I would also argue that it was the sneaking beginnings of shame that led Eve to eat the fruit in the first place: The Serpent reminded her of how ignorant she was, and she thought that if she knew more she would become more like God and be fitter for his love. Hence, sin-as-condition is the idea that we are not fit for love exactly as we are; we have to be better/smarter/clothed/more beautiful/etc. etc. in order to walk in the presence of God, who is love.

Re the religion/culture divide, as I said in the original post the idea is not much accepted in Christianity but is more common in other cultures/religions such as Judaism. Christians in the West generally had the privilege of having culture and religion together, but it is my understanding that with Jewish people's history of cultural and religious diversity, forced conversions, and an understandable "fuck you" attitude toward the divine the relationship between culture and religion has been more complex. I find this framework works well for me, too, because Korea has not been religiously monolithic for 1,000+ years (if ever) and I see different cultures and religions and culture shaped by religion etc. running around every day.

[loopy777]

Ah, I see the confusion. I'm Roman Catholic, and we haven't done that 'Original Sin means you can't go to Heaven' thing for a while. So, no, according to my faith, a seven-year-old who was never baptized and thus hasn't had Original Sin taken away is not the same as an unrepentant murderer. I admit that the mechanics around that, though, are very shaky, up to the point where there's a legitimate debate to be had about whether Jesus making himself a sacrifice on the cross is literal in that he's a real blood sacrifice to atone for a real sin, or whether it's more about making himself an example that uses the metaphor of sacrifice and sin.

As for the "things" simplification, I would argue that Adam and Eve were treating God as a Thing in that case. But that could be a massive conversation/debate unto itself that would probably get very snaky, in more than one way. XD

I actually think Christians are starting to get to the same point of the kind of atheist Jewish culture you reference, with things like weddings that people want to have in churches despite never going to church or even having faith/belief. I have a half-sister who had her second wedding in a church for a religion she's never been simply because she wanted a church and the Catholics wouldn't recognize her divorce. Even the concept of a wedding itself separated from spirituality is odd to me; why is there a distinct legal status for a romantic pairing that can't be applied to any other kind of pairing? Why can't any two - or more - people be One in The Law? A lot of culture really needs to be reverse-engineered and questioned, IMO.

[ljwrites]

Looks like there's an upside to the whole "Catholics don't read the Bible >:(" (at least not in a literal sense) thing that kind of tore Europe apart back in the day XD I like the flexibility in that line of thought! Admittedly it's my Protestant and Calvinist background that has to get the text to Make Sense and be internally consistent--which is sort of a joke when you have a collection of fragmented texts, chosen for arbitrary and political reasons, that span millennia.

Heh, major customs die hard. People frequently want their pairings to be blessed and celebrated by family and close friends, and even for a lot of people without faith the template for that is a place of worship of some kind. People's conceptions aren't that rationally engineered, though I agree going back to the basics and questioning assumptions is necessary when there is injustice going on, i.e. with the former prohibition on same-sex marriage.