We atheists
Back in the first century, columnists in the Roman newspapers weren't quite sure what to make of the ‘Christians’—this upstart movement that rejected the pantheon of gods, loved the unlovely, and met unobtrusively for mutual encouragement.
In fact, so confounded were the commentators by the anti-religious weirdness of this new group, they ended up calling them ‘atheists’. Edwin Judge comments:
[It] is hard to see how anyone could seriously have related the phenomenon of Christianity to the practice of religion in its first-century sense. From the social point of view, the talkative, passionate and sometimes quarrelsome circles that met to read Paul's letters over their evening meal in private houses, or the pre-dawn enclaves of ethical rigorists that alarmed Pliny, were a disconcerting novelty …1
Christianity is hardly a novelty any more, but do we still defy what people expect of a ‘religion’? Or have we reverted to type?
I say this because in my recent reading of the ‘militant atheists’ (like Dawkins and Dennett and, more recently, Christopher Hitchens), I find myself in large agreement with their critique of religion, cheering on their determination to reject it. Here's Hitchens, for example, on what ‘we atheists’ are like:
There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be ‘holier’ than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty …
The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.2
Of course, like Dennett and Dawkins, Hitchens says much else that is blinkered, hypocritical and intellectually lazy. For example, he argues (asserts would perhaps be better) that religious faith is both the result and cause of dangerous sexual repression—as if an intellectual commitment to atheism is entirely free of sexual motives. And he engages in what I can only assume is a deliberate bit of Christian-baiting by labelling Bonhoeffer's faith as “an admirable and nebulous humanism” and CS Lewis's apologetics as “dreary and absurd”.
All the same, it's hard to disagree with his rejection of religion or to quarrel with the vehemence with which he rejects it. I only wish I could show him that Christianity is not these things. I wish he could see that the way of Jesus rejects man-made religion with its persistent idolatry, fussy regulations and futile attempts to please the deity; it says ‘No’ to evil and wickedness and injustice, but ‘Yes’ to all created life and beauty and truth; it prompts its followers neither to squirm and grovel in unworthiness, nor to exalt in their rectitude; it has no holy days, no shrines, no priestly hierarchies, and no ceremonies; it has no beef with science and no distrust of reason; it stands on certain foundational truths but recognizes that there is much that we do not know.
The trouble is, I think I might find it difficult to persuade Hitchens that Christianity is not these things simply because in so many places it has been and is. When people think ‘Christianity’, they often think of an institution (whether Catholic or Orthodox or Protestant) with special religious buildings, or the conducting of religious events and ceremonies, with special religious practitioners officiating, or perhaps they think of a shrill rejection of science and intellectual enquiry, or of a right-wing political movement.
“If only”, I find myself thinking.
If only, when people heard the word ‘Christian’, the first thing that came to mind was “the talkative, passionate and sometimes quarrelsome circles that met to read Paul's letters over their evening meal in private houses”—a bunch of people with strong convictions and a powerful love for others who didn't at all fit with the current view of what it means to be ‘religious’—and so much so, they might be labelled ‘anti-religious’ or even ‘atheists’.
Maybe if we were those kind of atheists, even Christopher Hitchens might want to join us for an agreeable lunch.
1 E. A. Judge, ‘The social identity of the first Christians’, Journal of Religious History, 11/2, 1980, 212.
2 Christopher Hitches, ‘Religion poisons everything’, an excerpt from a forthcoming book, published at http://www.slate.com/id/2165033/entry/2165035/.