The Myth of the Angry Atheist

Lessons from the cradle(s) of secularism

Photo by Dmitry Vechorko on Unsplash

(A seven-minute read.)

A couple months ago, when I was at Oxford, I went to a game night at my college for graduate students. I found myself hanging out with students half my age from all around the world: there was a girl from Australia, a couple guys from America, another guy from Denmark, a girl from Spain, and a girl from the UK. What they all had in common, besides being grad students at Oxford, is that none of them were Christians—or any religious persuasion.

When they discovered I was a pastor, they quickly became intrigued and had all sorts of questions (“What’s the difference between a pastor and a priest?” “What exactly do you do?”). The girl from Australia indicated she’d never set foot in a church, and assured me that there were absolutely no Christians in Australia (she’d never even heard of Hillsong, which I thought was a requirement for Australian citizenship).

It was all very fascinating and fun. We certainly talked about many other subjects, like what we were all studying, but the religious conversation we had was interesting and enlightening. What I found from them was curiosity and inquisitiveness. The last thing I found was anger or disrespect.

The same thing happened a few days later when I sat down with a new friend for a couple hours—introduced by a friend of a friend—who was struggling to find community since starting at Oxford in October. He expressed deep loneliness and feelings of inadequacy, despite having a PhD and being a post-doctoral fellow at one of the world’s greatest institutions. For much of the time we were together, sitting alone in an isolated quintessential English lounge at his college, I just listened to his story and encouraged him.

What was most remarkable was that I encouraged him with religious thoughts, despite the fact that he was not religious at all. I told him how I deal with feelings of inadequacy a lot as well, frequently feeling like an imposter, but how I gain confidence by looking to God, and realizing my value comes from him. I did this gently and without agenda. I was simply speaking about what gives me strength.

And even though he’s not religious, and doesn’t really know how he feels about God, he seemed to want to believe what I was saying.

Again, there was no anger, there was no hostility.

These are just a few of many different experiences I’ve had with non-religious people over the last number of years—and these, at a place that many would consider to be the bastion of secular and anti-religious thought (Oxford is, after all, the home of Richard Dawkins, considered to be the arch-atheist). And what I’ve experienced over and over again, whether at Oxford or in Maine, which is America’s second-least-religious state, or wherever, is anything but hostility or animosity towards faith.

The “secular agenda”

There seems to be a narrative with many religious circles here in America, and perhaps in other countries in the West, which maintains that there is a secular agenda which is trying to destroy religion and faith. There are supposedly all these godless atheists walking around who are out to get our children, plotting and scheming and trying to figure out how to obliterate religion in general and Christianity specifically.

I don’t doubt that there are plenty of non-religious people who would prefer the world existed without religion. I also don’t doubt that there are very intentional ways that secular people—especially those in academia—are trying to undermine a religious worldview. But my (very) anecdotal observations over the last few years have led me to believe that the concern is perhaps a bit overblown and unwarranted.

I say this for a few reasons.

Firstly, in my experience, there are very few people who are consciously committed atheists. Most non-religious people I’ve encountered are agnostic at best, but usually they are simply religiously ambivalent. They don’t care too much one way or another, and don’t spend a ton of time pondering the intricacies of God’s existence—much less feel a burden to straighten every religious person out about these matters.

I think of some good friends of ours here in Bangor whom we met soon after we moved here over a decade ago. They were completely unchurched and, prior to meeting us, had basically zero religious knowledge (they had never heard of Abraham, Moses, King David—and, when one of their daughters was born on Good Friday, they asked me what that even was). While the wife had gone to church a handful of times as a kid, the husband had never set foot in one.

Their religious outlook was not at all one of deeply-pondered atheism. They were simply ambivalent, having never really given God much consideration. Similarly, they certainly had no hostility toward God or religion—as we especially discovered when they gladly accepted our invitation to start hanging out with our missional community to have conversations about God and spirituality.

I’ve found this to be the case over and over again. Many non-religious people don’t have strong opinions against the existence of God or the role of religion; they just don’t give God much thought at all, putting religion on the shelf as they concern themselves with more practical and relevant matters. And even those who do have strong opinions against religion, which is often those who were raised in some sort of religious context but have “deconstructed” and discarded their faith, are rarely as hostile as they seem when we move in close and don’t keep them at arm’s length.

Which leads me to my second point.

The second reason I think the sort of “angry atheist” trope is overblown is because I’ve repeatedly found that when a religious person decides to engage non-religious people as people, rather than caricatures, non-religious people respond with significant respect and even curiosity.

If I were to reduce it to a pithy statement, I would say simply this: don’t be a jerk. In many ways, it really is that simple.

One of the problems is that us religious people think we’re just here to debate and defend ideas rather than to love people. We think Twitter is real life. We objectify the non-religious and think that winning the culture wars, no matter the cost, is what our objective is. We then vilify people we’ve never met and speak in broad generalities about “those people.” We engage in significant “othering.”

But when we actually sit at the table with people, listening to their stories, respectfully hearing their viewpoints, having our own curiosity about what and why they think the way they do, we are astonished to discover that these supposedly godless people are actually just . . . people. They experience sadness like us, have many of the same hopes and fears and aspirations as us. They want to love and be loved like us.

And, just as astonishingly, we discover that when we engage them with great curiosity and respect, they usually respond with equal curiosity and respect.

It’s always amusing to me to meet someone and to carry out a respectful and joyful conversation with them, and to watch the look on their face when they discover I’m a Christian pastor. Usually their response is something along the lines of: but you’re . . . nice. (In fact, I distinctly remember attending the birthday party for the husband of the couple I mentioned above, and the wife introduced me to all her non-religious friends by saying, “Shawn’s a pastor, but he’s actually cool.”)

I don’t share all this to claim that I am this wonderful, charismatic, or awesome person. There’s nothing special about me and I have plenty of faults and make lots of mistakes.

I share it simply to point out that if we religious people commit ourselves to kindness and respect, and relate to people as people rather than ideas, we will usually—though certainly not always—find that kindness and respect is extended back to us (it’s my opinion that most non-religious people, when they do display hostility toward God and religion, it’s because they are often appropriately pushing back against unloving, shame-based, and coercive expressions of religion that often try to dictate everyone else’s morality).

So here’s the bottom line: experience has taught me that there isn’t this vast left-wing conspiracy to obliterate religion from the world. When we move in close (as Brené Brown says, it’s hard to hate people up close), we discover that non-religious people have all the same hopes, fears, and aspirations as religious people. Few of them have much outright hostility toward religion or religious people—especially when they’re sitting across the table and given the opportunity to be heard in a non-condemning way.

So don’t be a jerk; extend kindness, respect, and a listening ear, and refuse to stereotype, vilify, or objectify.

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Just as an addendum today: 13 years ago this very day, at 9:59pm, I became a father for the first time. It was the most surreal moment of my life. And now I am the father of a teenager. It’s so crazy and amazing and still surreal. Life is good.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.