Recently, Kate Cohen wrote a moving opinion piece for Washington Post concerning atheism. In her essay, she speaks of a number of reasons why atheists should—if they can—be vocally atheistic. All of them sound perfectly fine. I’d like to add one more: the essential nature of diversity in a society that values human rights and civil liberties. That diversity destroys dysfunctional authoritarians’ perceived base of power even as it opens the door to dialogues between different people.
I learned that lesson myself at a very tender age when I got my first taste of being a despised majority.
(Related: Prayer Warriors for Jesus; Biff vs the Dianic Separatist Lesbians; The day I debated my M.Div professor about religion.)
PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS
Set your Wayback Machine for about 1990. Grunge was taking over the world, and yet Princess Di still owned our hearts. The best Total Recall adaptation came out that year, along with The Hunt for Red October. One of the most popular songs that year was “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer.
As far as Gallup knew that year, the percentage of Christians in America had fallen from 92% in 1952 to 81% in 1990.
As far as I knew, though, we were damn near 100% of the count.
That year, I was in college and newly married to my Evil Ex Biff. One day, he announced that he would be starting a prayer group on campus with a weird new-convert friend of his named James. Mainly, this was James’ idea, but Biff loved it.
We attended a very large state-funded university that was very generous to student groups. Thus, it cost Biff nothing whatsoever to start this group. They’d give us meeting rooms, audiovisual materials of all sorts almost upon demand, and even a small allowance we could use for campus events. All they really required in exchange for that largesse were three officers who were actively-enrolled students there, and for us to actually use what we requested from them.
Eventually, the group ran afoul of both requirements.
First of all, there simply weren’t three Pentecostals on campus willing to act as active officers of the group. James wasn’t even enrolled anywhere. And I’m female and therefore was ineligible (in our flavor of Christianity) for any leadership over men, even if my demanding school schedule allowed me to be active in any group. After some fuss, Biff discovered a friend from church who attended our school, then calmed his misogyny long enough to ask me to sign me up anyway. With Tim and me willing to pretend to be officers at least, Biff could file the startup paperwork for the group. He titled it PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS. Yes, in all caps. Of course. Before its first meeting, Biff had already drawn up a logo with impressively sharp, gleaming, sword-like edges to the words.
We officers represented the entire membership of the group. Nobody ever joined for what now seem like obvious reasons.
Undeterred, Biff reserved rooms for our group to use for prayer five days a week.
Now, why did three or four individual Christians need a whole meeting room reserved for prayer? Why couldn’t they just pray anywhere in our school’s expansive, garden-like campus that they liked? Or even, dare I mention, at the school’s beautiful nondenominational chapel?
Because our university printed campus-group meeting schedules every day, then posted them all over the place. Biff wanted everyone to see PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS prominently figuring in those schedules.
This desire of Biff’s had nothing to do with evangelism. Maybe that motivated James, but not Biff, who never once mentioned soulwinning as a motivation. What Biff actually said at the time was that he wanted people to see the name and know that TRUE CHRISTIANS™ were on campus.
Biff’s special calling was apparently to combat atheism on campus
In evangelicalism as well as in other flavors of Christianity, Christians believe that Jesus has created every person with a special role to play in his divine, ineffable plan for Earth. They call this role their divine calling. It represents their main purpose in life. It’s the reason they exist, the mission for which they were born.
At some point, Biff got the idea that his calling involved converting atheists and defeating atheism on our college campus. He very mistakenly thought that tons of atheists attended our university, making atheism a valid enemy to Christians like himself.
Being in Texas, most students there were Christian. But there were some outspoken atheists among the student body, and Biff glommed right onto them.
He’d been unsuccessfully evangelizing atheists for two years by the time we married and he started PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS.
Something strange was happening on campus, though. People did notice the group. They just weren’t reacting as I’d expected. Biff, I think, expected all of the reactions he ever got. He was an experienced RL troll (what people sometimes more graciously term a provocateur and less graciously a chain-yanking asshole). But I sure wasn’t, and so I didn’t.
What it’s like to grow up in a cultural bubble
I grew up before everything, it feels like: Before nearly ubiquitous home computers, before the internet, before cell phones, before smartphones, before AI, before the internet of things. For the first two decades of my life, most libraries used card catalogs with actual typed-up 3×5″ cards in long drawers to keep track of their books. Local-area dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) barely began to pop up in major cities when I was in my teens.
Making my world even more insular, I was also a military brat. My family lived on military bases sometimes, in regular houses other times, but we always tended to center our lives on my dad’s work.
So my entire world was Christian. I didn’t need to attend parochial school to be fully immersed in that bubble!
Everybody I knew was Christian. Everything in my world centered around Christianity and its rituals, its myths and folklore, its rules, its culture, its entire worldview. The only real question to ask was what flavor of Christian someone was, not whether they were Christian at all. We all already knew the answer to that.
(This is how I suspect Southerners picked up the habit of asking newcomers to their communities what church they attend. They still do it. Long ago, it was a legit question. Nowadays, it’s much more of a veiled interrogation.)
Until I went to college, I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t at least nominally Christian. If I ever ran into anyone who wasn’t, I didn’t even think about them. They were exceptions; they fell out of my mind and memory. Confirmation bias ensured that.
Nowadays, you’ve got to be a religiously-homeschooled evangelical kid with particularly controlling parents to come even close to this level of insularity. Back then, though, it was normal for kids in my area and circumstances. We just didn’t have any counterpoints or other frames of reference.
Well, college fixed that for me in a hurry.
My worldview takes a roundhouse to the jaw
I attended a couple of prayer meetings myself, but very soon I became entirely too busy for it. (I had also gotten weirded out at how non-divine prayer looked and felt when performed in a corporate meeting room.) That was fine, though. The entire idea was really the Biff and James Show, live every weekday at 12:00 noon.
One day while relaxing in a student lounge, I opened our campus newspaper. I was (and still am) a readaholic who must read All. The. Words, so I started with the letters to the editor. A minor funding squabble had erupted on campus over an increase in student fees covering campus groups, so most letters addressed that subject. One in particular stood out to me: A student making the point that that fee covered all students, even those with groups diametrically opposed to the views of any one particular student, and that this was a good thing because it encouraged diverse opinions in an educational setting.
She used PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS as a specific example of what she meant in her own case.
I just stared at that letter for a long time. My brain had gone into vapor lock. My entire worldview had just tilted on its ear and divided by zero.
It’s not like I hadn’t recognized the group’s name as an attention-seeking tactic from my supremely narcissistic then-husband. But the way that student talked, she wasn’t even Christian at all.
Atheism is part of the human situation
By then, I’d been in college for two years. However, I still perceived Christianity as the default state of humanity. When I considered the overall arc of human history, I still put Christianity front and center. Though I’d met any number of atheists and pagans and Muslims (oh my!) by then, I still generally perceived them as pre-Christian. Even the other Christians I met got judged by my own doctrinal beliefs, even if I wasn’t arguing with them for anywhere near as long as Biff did.
Yes, I was exactly that Christian kid in the iconic “Jesus is so lucky to have us!” cartoon:
As if by magic, that student’s letter pulled me out of my entire way of thinking. Perhaps it was because I didn’t have any idea who she was. She could have been any woman I walked past on campus. Any woman I walked past on campus, in other words, could be thinking that PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS was dumb, irrelevant, and utterly counter to her own worldview. For that matter, any person period could be thinking that.
With that, my perception of myself began to subtly alter. The arrogance and privilege of my presumptuous placement of Christianity as the default began to fade. It could not survive my sudden realization that lots of people lived in this world and all had their own ideas about religion.
I suspect most people learn similar lessons in childhood. Somehow, I’d avoided that one until I was twenty. But better late than never. My world became a tapestry of living colors as if I was an extra in the movie Pleasantville.
Just a couple of years later, when my slow-burn deconversion began in earnest, I still didn’t know anyone who’d deconverted. For a long time, I thought I was the literal only person in the history of Christianity who’d ever believed what we called the full gospel and then realized it wasn’t true. I didn’t meet another ex-Pentecostal for a long time, and when I did, she had thought the same about herself!
We ex-Christians had to forge a path from scratch, just about, on an individual basis with each one of our deconversions. Nowadays, that’s nowhere near as common a story. There’s such a painful sense of sheer isolation when you’re positive you’re the only one who ever.
It’s not just atheism. The world needs everyone who can do so to be vocal about who and what they are.
As Kate Cohen notes in her essay, lots of people even in America aren’t free to express their beliefs/nonbelief. Anyone who’s done hard time in the Deep South likely knows this truth painfully well. It can be risky to declare one’s status as out-of-step with the lockstep march that evangelicalism in particular demands.
Insular religious communities like those are risky precisely because the members of the perceived majority like it that way. They like there being no other options besides the one they offer. There’s way less chance of someone veering out of step that way.
When someone isn’t keeping the beat, it’s glaringly obvious to everyone else. That poor schmuck stands out! As a result, it doesn’t take much effort from the rest of the group to get that person back into line. Social freezing-out, nasty comments, loss of customers, maybe trouble fomented at school or a little “evandalism” of the black sheep’s possessions: it’s minor stuff that functions as a prelude to the big guns: mysteriously losing one’s job, marriage, kids, and community standing.
But if a solid 25% of the marchers lose step and start veering off-course, the majority suddenly has a whole bunch of problems. Now there are too many targets for the tribe’s usual methods of retaliation. They can’t focus properly on any one person, much less on all of the people requiring their Christian love.
It’s like adding another person to the safety net’s edges to hold it out for the others
Oh, but matters get still worse for the majority. Thirty years ago, a whole bunch of Christians didn’t even know anyone who wasn’t Christian. Now, with so many more non-Christians floating around in the mix, Christians can’t help knowing at least one person who isn’t like themselves. In fact, they probably know a lot of non-Christians by now.
The tribe’s party line about outsiders can hold only when there aren’t a lot of ’em around. The more Christians learn about outsiders, the more they’ll realize the party line isn’t correct at all. Once one false belief gets shaken, let me tell you from painful personal experience along exactly these lines, it’s a lot easier to shake the rest.
Those false beliefs have lasted for many years precisely because the majority group heard next to no pushback about them. The sort of Christians who want to rule over everything, in particular, tend to assume that if they don’t hear any pushback, then whatever they’re doing is A-OK.
So if it’s safe for anyone to start being vocal and open about their worldview, that makes the waters just a tiny bit safer for every other person who wants to do the same, but can’t right now.
(In other words, don’t ever wonder why it’s those Christians who viciously fight against diversity and anti-racism measures.)
Whether someone is simply an ex-Christian, a None, an agnostic, an atheist, a pagan, or whatever else, they have a part in this glorious multicolored tapestry that depicts the human situation. With every new, colorful thread woven into it, it becomes progressively more difficult for the one-time majority to go back to their monochrome world.
The more hands we can get on deck, the better it’ll get for those who must watch quietly from the shore.
28 Comments
ericc · 10/19/2023 at 8:24 AM
Did Biff ever realize that getting a record of his meetings in the campus announcements was not “combating atheism” any more than a chess club announcement is “combating checkers playing”? I’m guessing far more nones were annoyed about the all caps title of the club than what it was formed to do.
Kevin R. Cross · 10/19/2023 at 9:02 AM
There is a faction (and I won’t call it more than that) in Christianity that view things in a purely dualistic fashion. Either you are Christian, or you are the enemy to be smote hip and thigh and converted by any means necessary. (To be fair, I have met their equivalents in Islam and Hinduism.)
Another rather similar faction views all non-Christian believers as fodder to be converted but Atheists as THE ENEMY.
I bring them up because they both seem to believe that somehow getting their particular activities or actions in the public eye or acknowledged by someone with “authority” is a victory over THE ENEMY. My guess is that Biff was psychologically as one with one or possibly both of these factions.
ericc · 10/19/2023 at 1:03 PM
I understand the ‘with or against.’ But even from a purely PR perspective, it pays to know your audience and what will pull them in. Biff didn’t seem to have any awareness of how to change nonbeliever minds…or any interest in figuring it out.
But I guess this is similar to the “apologetics are really made for wavering Christians, not the atheists they are seemingly addressed to” thing. Maybe the point of his efforts is to impress himself and other Christians with his Christianness, even if when you ask him he tells you the point is to sway nonbelievers.
jennny · 10/19/2023 at 11:36 AM
Yes, after deconversion from fundyism, I realised how I was brainwashed into believing that the least thing, the most trivial or risible thing we did, above all, had to be ‘A Good Witness.’ For decades we kept the sabbath, never mowed lawns, hung out washing, did any work on the house, like repairs or painting it, never went to a shop, cinema or restaurant on a Sunday……and believed firmly that the lawd would honour these silly things and heathens seeing them would get converted. I like the chess analogy. I once had a long spat with a x-tian troll on the old Patheos/NR and was told kindly by others I’d won the encounter cos I said that soccer lovers don’t go on tennis blogs to tell tennis enthusiasts they’re All Wrong, they should convert to Soccer right now or carnivores to tell vegetarian bloggers they must start to eat meat immediately….!
ericc · 10/19/2023 at 12:59 PM
‘Living your faith’ is IMO a great way to get people interested in it…for aspects THEY think are positive. Not for aspects you think are positive but they could care less about. The latter includes most religious proscriptions or weird rules like the sabbath rules you mention.
So things like volunteering at soup kitchens leaves a positive impression of what people of your local church group or denomination are like. Biff might’ve made headway doing that. But putting an announcement in a campus paper about your prayer group does not, because practically by definition of ‘nonbeliever,’ nonbelievers don’t think a prayer group is doing anything positive.
WisdomJusticeLove · 10/23/2023 at 2:34 PM
Results aren’t necessary. Performative display is. Like an adolescent, with no tenable position arguing with an adult. They’re happy to be “doing something” / “fighting” ( activity === progress). They need not meet any objective measure for progress, growth, or success (notice I said “success” instead of “winning”). All they need to do is “FEEL” like they accomplished something. SOP for theists. Like “speaking in tongues” and being congratulated for it.
Astrin Ymris · 10/19/2023 at 10:09 AM
Very true! I suspect that at least a part of the Rise of the Nones is that nonbelievers used to simply identify themselves as whatever denomination they were raised in on surveys, even if they hadn’t set foot in a church except for weddings or funerals in decades. But when the Culture Warriors started doing increasingly repellant things, they increasingly decided to disassociate themselves from a political agenda they found horrendous.
I also suspect that liberals and moderates chased out by steeplejacking makes a bigger segment of the Nones than people realize.
Syncretocrat · 10/20/2023 at 9:14 PM
Back in my childhood, the joke was, “”Church of England” is what atheists write on their census forms.”
Astrin Ymris · 01/20/2024 at 11:45 PM
You can’t have extreme points of view in the Church of England. “Cake or Death!” ;-D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVH0gZO5lq0
smrnda · 10/19/2023 at 11:01 AM
If anyone thinks colleges are centers of atheism, they’d have to explain why Christian orgs have such a visible presence at colleges. The PWFJ group likely failed because there were already Christian groups with more members and longer histories, and to many of those people, and without the all caps ‘is this a real thing or a joke?’ name.
Wandering Spider · 10/22/2023 at 6:50 PM
Pretty much. Every time I’m on a campus there’s signage representing almost every conceivable combination of Christian meetup group.
I know it didn’t change their minds, but I still enjoyed flipping off Turning Point. I would’ve preferred to stick around and argue with them but I was in a hurry that day.
Houndentenor · 10/23/2023 at 1:38 PM
I don’t know where people get this idea that college campuses are wall to wall atheists or even agnostics. That doesn’t describe any college I ever attended (I have three degrees.) Now maybe if I’d been in a STEM field I might have seen less religiosity, but most of my colleagues (at a state university in a red state) are regular church-goers and quite a few are vocal conservatives. I’m sure some of what people say about universities is true somewhere but it’s not the norm from what I can see. (And that’s state universities. A large percentage of our colleges are affiliated with religious organizations.)
OldManShadow · 10/19/2023 at 11:32 AM
[It represents their main purpose in life. It’s the reason they exist…]
Of course, if God wanted all of us to act out a part in his play, why bother with free will at all?
Oh… so we can choose it?
Well, then if I choose differently, then God’s idea wasn’t my main purpose in life.
All seems a bit absurd.
I know some parents plan out their children’s lives from birth, but that’s highly dysfunctional. Your role as a parent is to guide this little monster from infancy into becoming a functional adult and decent human being no matter what they choose to ultimately do with their lives.
So I would like to think if there is some good sort of deity responsible for our existence, they would be less like a chess master and more a guide trying to get us to expand our horizons and grow up into a functional one of Them one day.
WCB · 10/19/2023 at 5:26 PM
Jeremiah 31
31 Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah:
32 Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord:
33 But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.
34 And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
See also Ezekiel 11:19, 36:26, Hebrews 8:1, 10:16.
This list is not exhaustive. With the new covenant, The Great Commission, God could have put his spirit, his laws, and commandments into the hearts of all mankind. Free wiil is not important to God. Who has predestined all things. Including the elect, and non elect.
Really. People don’t read the Bible carefully with full understanding.
jfnavin · 02/14/2024 at 3:18 PM
When all things are restored. Dispensationalism. Or, there are distinct phases in God’s economy. I’m no expert, but I think there are divisions or periods of time when, for example, the new earth and the new heaven will be established. His children will dwell in paradise with him on earth. There are “end time” conditions when God will be finished with one dispensation, will close off what has gone before and those who are redeemed shall live forever with him. I think the promises you refer to may describe the “end of time” as we know it.
Khanhhho · 10/22/2023 at 5:46 AM
The idea that there’s a god is absurd. More absurd is the one that says the god of Israel is God (as in the god of all people). Most absurd of all is the idea that this god is an omi benevolent one considering how blood thirsty He is. Free will got invented much later in an attempt to square that impossible circle when applying the Problem of Evil to this particular god
WCB · 10/19/2023 at 3:46 PM
Being a religous demogogue like Franklin Graham, Charlie Kirk, Kenneth Copeland et al is hard work. You can’t just form a penny ante do nothing organization and get followers. Biff was lazy and didn’t have a clue how it all worked. The fundy clowns on campus screeching hateful rants at passing students doesn’t work either, but at least these clowns are putting in real effort.
DodgyRog · 10/20/2023 at 7:10 AM
I read this and then I’m back in that Christian vortex I grew up in and it’s suddenly hard to breathe. Yes, I thought I was doing the Lord’s work and all that crap which is so batshit mad, but seemed to be right when everyone else was the same.
RainbowPhoenix · 10/21/2023 at 7:27 AM
I never had that sense of being the default. First I was the only kid in class with hearing aids, then I had to figure out why puberty wasn’t going the way I was told it would (and I’m old enough to remember when the president of the US got bent out of shape because states weren’t allowed to outlaw the existence of LGBT people), then my early twenties came with a long-overdue autism diagnosis.
My mom has shared a similar experience with growing up in a fatherless family before second-wave feminism. The reason for Grandpa’s absence – dying in a work accident – only mattered for momentary sympathy.
Wandering Spider · 10/22/2023 at 4:31 PM
My default has always been a long explanation when I bother with giving one and I think that anyone’s likely to be listening (and quite frequently: they really aren’t as much as they pretend otherwise)
Khanhhho · 10/22/2023 at 6:13 AM
I don’t want to bring religion or politics to work. I expect my coworkers to not bring religion or politics to work. A lot of my coworkers wear t shirts with religious prints and imagery which temts me to brandish my Satanist shirt at work. I don’t want to be an ah, but their Jesus saves shirts is such a sore in my eyes.
WCB · 10/23/2023 at 2:18 PM
Moar off topic news. From our friends at Lifeway.
…..
A recent survey by Lifeway Research found that 52 percent of American churchgoing Protestants say their church teaches God will bless them if they give more money to their church and charities. That figure is up from 38 percent of churchgoers in 2017.
……
https://www.yahoo.com/news/evangelicals-calling-war-poor-people-100000188.html
BensNewLogIn · 10/23/2023 at 4:05 PM
A good column, as usual.
“So if it’s safe for anyone to start being vocal and open about their worldview, that makes the waters just a tiny bit safer for every other person who wants to do the same, but can’t right now..”
The same thing applies absolutely to gay people. They took people coming out of the closet, and sometimes they’re in consequences for doing so, but a lot of the time not experiencing much of anything, to make it possible for other people to come out of the closet, which intern made it possible for the success of the gay rights movement. I came out 52 years ago. It was scary, but I knew I needed to do it, and I know that my activities for the last 52 years have made it possible for other people to come out.
this is indeed the secret. We people in the out group need to find each other, but more importantly, people in the in-group need to find us, and we need to find them.
BTS · 10/27/2023 at 2:03 PM
You figured it out in your 20’s. Well done. Took me until my mid 40’s to open my eyes.
Captain Cassidy · 11/10/2023 at 3:35 AM
As long as you get there, that is what matters!
jfnavin · 02/16/2024 at 3:20 AM
Captain, Can you put into words what it was about Jesus that convinced you to love and to follow him? During the phase when you were devoted to Christ, did you have normal doubts about him, dedicating everything, your entire life, to living for him? Did he answer your prayers to your satisfaction, or did you just ignore the fact that he never answered you, even once? Did it seem odd or was it troubling when you never found any joy or satifaction in knowing him, when your Christian friends were grateful and appreciative of all he was doing for them and in them? Did you discuss your doubts with anyone?
cavebearreader · 10/27/2023 at 10:49 PM
The hardest part of being an atheist for me is trying NOT to feel pity for some good friends of mine who are still in the ‘believing” stage of theism. I love most of them but I feel sorry that they are still under that theistic umbrella.
jfnavin · 02/14/2024 at 3:06 PM
When my friends, mom and dad, my sister, co workers discover(ed) I was a Christian, disapproval doesn’t cut it. From then on I was a target for mockery, disgust, contempt, ridicule, avoidance, you get the picture. Not from all of of them all the time, but I was no longer regarded as one of them any more. But, I knew that was going to happen when I realized that Christ was indeed the Son of God, risen from the dead. I would have treated me the same way. I’d be repulsed by me!
I don’t understand what happened to your walk with Jesus. Did you at one time love him? Was He your friend, your personal dear companion? Did you share your life, your thoughts and dreams, your joys and fears with him throughout the day?
Where did He go? He never was? You were deceived? Can you explain that, if you don’t mind?