An Essayist Evangelizes Readers For Atheism
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(OPINION) The Washington Post recently featured an unusually lengthy newspaper essay by Kate Cohen, a Post contributing columnist.
The essay was adapted from her new book, “We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (and Maybe You Should Too).” The newspaper’s headline read, “America doesn’t need more God. It needs more atheists.”
You can probably get the gist of the piece from those titles. Cohen writes nimbly, and her essay is chock full of statistics, implying an impressive level of research, or the appearance thereof.
Why the Post devoted so much space to what should be described as evangelism, atheist style, isn’t clear. I can’t imagine the paper would have given similar space to, say, a call for Christian conversion by a Southern Baptist preacher, no matter how many stats he threw in.
Cohen’s takeaways are that religion is irrational, there are a lot more atheists out there than you’d imagine, that they should share their beliefs widely and that atheists make demonstrably better citizens than do the religious.
But for me — a faithful Post subscriber who happens to also be a Pentecostal pastor — Cohen’s essay is also misleading. Among other things, it fails to understand how people of faith really function in the world.
Cohen, who was raised as a Reform Jew, says she’s been a de facto atheist since childhood. The birth of her children was the catalyst for her emergence from her atheist closet, because she didn’t want to tell her kids anything but the truth.
And the truth is that God doesn’t exist.
How does she know this? Here’s one of several ways:
“The Greek myths are obviously stories. The Norse myths are obviously stories. L. Ron Hubbard obviously made that stuff up. Extrapolate.”
By which she means, extrapolate to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and so on.
But despite what Cohen tells one of her children, “myths” aren’t necessarily ancient tales nobody believes — except, as she adds, when the myth has become something called religion.
Well. The word “myth” basically has little to do with a tale’s literal truth or falsity. A myth is, as Britannica says, “a symbolic narrative” by which people make sense of life. Some myths weren’t intended to be taken literally.
Besides, an ancient story — the Genesis account of creation, let’s say — might or might not be factual in a scientific or historic sense, yet could be profoundly true in a spiritual sense, as a metaphor about God, humans and the world.
While some fundamentalists would disagree, many Jews and Christians today might tell you the writer (or writers) of Genesis weren’t trying to compose a scientific textbook. These adherents don’t even care if the world was created in six 24-hour days. That’s not the point of the story, they would say.
It’s the same with several of Cohen’s other points: noticeable bugs. I wish I had more space here to explore them.
If I understand her correctly, as I hope I do, she assumes that anybody who isn’t sure about God’s existence is an atheist, whether that person identifies as one of the “nones” who are religiously unaffiliated or as a Presbyterian. That’s a troublesome, and inaccurate, definition.
She writes: “Do you know what some … atheists call themselves? Catholics. And Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. General Social Survey data back this up: Among religious Americans, only 64 percent are certain about the existence of God. Hidden atheists can be found not just among the ‘nones,’ as they’re called — the religiously unaffiliated — but also in America’s churches, mosques and synagogues.”
If not being sure about God’s existence means you’re an atheist, then I’m surprised the number of atheists in the pews isn’t much higher still.
After four decades of leading churches and three decades of writing about religion, my experience is that the majority of churchgoers are doubters. It’s been said that nearly all of us are agnostics to one degree or another. I don’t trust people who don’t doubt.
Doubt is part of any healthy faith. We live in a goofy and violent world. A thousands things happen every news cycle that make you wonder if anybody, especially God, is in charge down here. If you’re not confused, you must be asleep.
When parishioners ask me about my own views on some spiritual matter, I nearly always begin my response with, “Well, on the days that I believe, here’s what I believe.”
One of Cohen’s children asks her, “How do we know there’s no God?”
I almost blurted aloud to my laptop’s screen, “Exactly. You don’t know that there’s not, and I don’t know that there is. Nobody knows, especially those who are certain.”
That’s the conundrum about faith that evangelizing atheists and religious fundamentalists alike tend to miss.
Real faith is complex. Some myths are just old stories, and some myths are eternal, cosmic truths, and you’ve got to decide which are which. Most believers regularly doubt, but doubting doesn’t mean you’re an unbeliever. Indeed, you can doubt and believe at the very same moment.
Or, as the supplicant in the Gospels cried to Jesus: “I do believe. Help my unbelief!”
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.