Over a decade ago, Pope Francis slammed what he called practical atheism. With this phrase, he referred to Christians who don’t focus every single moment of their lives on Christianity, but rather live mostly like normal people. The idea caught on quickly with the right-wing Christ-o-sphere, whose inhabitants to denounce it to this very day. But they denounce it in vain. Today, let me show you how almost all Christians are practical atheists, and why that’s actually a very good thing for them and heathens alike.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 1/20/2026. They’re both available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: The most cringe dinner party in the history of the world
While researching our previous topic (ex-atheist testimonies), I ran across an evangelical man’s account of the most cringe dinner party ever, over at The Gospel Coalition (TGC):
My wife and I regularly have meals with good friends who are not believers. Although they can be quite resistant to talking about Christianity, my wife had the opportunity to speak of how God had helped us with a challenging family situation. You could have heard a pin drop.
Regarding the utter silence of the non-believers in the face of this rudeness, he “guessed” that they were so busy absorbing the story that they couldn’t speak. My best guess—stunned silence in the face of an unwanted recruiting attempt—sure didn’t look anything like that! But he continues, accidentally revealing that another friend will likely ghost him soon:
On another occasion a non-believing friend said to me: ‘Don’t talk to me about doctrine, talk to me about your life.’
From these anecdotes, he offers a stunningly poor takeaway:
[A]s a starting point, people are often genuinely interested in our personal testimony.
This post got me thinking about evangelical leaders’ constant exhortations to the flocks to Jesus up their lives 24/7. The flocks must always be selling their beliefs to others. They must center their lives around Christian devotions: prayer, Bible study, evangelism, etc. They must make every single decision based on their supernatural beliefs. In essence, they must perform their faith constantly.
The person who wrote this TGC post is a pastor. He clearly wrote it to model the 24/7 recruitment behavior he wants out of his flocks. However, it’s hard to believe he really has that many non-believing friends if he acts like this toward them. And his attempts to recruit his “non-believing friends” have so far failed completely, or else he’d have noted their conversions.
But then, evangelical leaders’ exhortations to always be Jesusing have failed, too, especially evangelism-related Jesusing. Their response to that ongoing failure is to try to shame and harangue the flocks into doing it. And one of the outgrowths of those exhortations is a loudly-growing denunciation of practical atheism.
Their flocks don’t want to be practical atheists, now do they? That’d just be terrible! That’d be awful! Far be it from them! They can’t just let themselves be like that! The only way to avoid it is to evangelize 24/7 at everyone and make sure everyone knows you center your whole life around your fandom!
In truth, though, almost all Christians are practical atheists—even the hardline ones like the TGC writer. They just all have different breaking points marking where their beliefs stop intruding on reality.
Practical atheism and a cold case murder mystery
A friend offered up this idea years ago, and I loved it:
Imagine you’re a private detective hired by a devoted Christian family to figure out who murdered one of their members. In your investigation, you learn that the victim was found shot dead in a closed, locked room. The room was locked from the inside, and there aren’t any other ways in or out of it (so there also aren’t any windows, fireplaces, balconies, etc). Additionally, authorities found no guns in the room at all. The family members all have airtight alibis and so do any other people of note in the victim’s life.
What will the family do if you, the detective, tell them a demon appeared in the room, shot the guy, then vanished with the gun?
Will they believe that? Will they be happy with you closing the case with that conclusion?
No, of course not. They may officially believe demons are totally real, but in reality they know when to draw the line and rely only on physical explanations for these sorts of events.
That’s practical atheism. It just means living life as if objective reality is all there really is.
And to right-wing Christian leaders, practical atheism is a very scary idea indeed.
In the wild: Formal definitions of practical atheism
The phrase practical atheism goes back centuries, at least. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously used it in one of his sermons in 1954. But it’s come into vogue over the past 14ish years.
In 2012, Pope Francis named his enemy:
The practical atheism of those who say they are Christian but live as if God does not exist is a greater threat than actual atheism [. . .] While actual atheists often think deeply about God before rejecting belief, practical atheism “is even more destructive … because it leads to indifference towards faith and the question of God,” the Pope stated. [ Catholic News Agency, 2012]
Nothing changed, of course. By 2018, evangelicals had learned to use practical atheism as an accusation to shame Christians who weren’t involved in their culture wars—or worse, fought on the other side. One evangelical, Bill Muehlenberg, liked that strategy, though he didn’t use the entire phrase. Just accusing them of atheism seemed to be enough for him.
One of the biggest problems we find in the Western church today are countless people claiming to be Christians who are living like atheists. There is no discernible difference between how they live and how any pagan lives. The lifestyles are largely identical, and one would never know they were Christians simply by observation.
And if far too many Christians are living like atheists, there are certainly too many thinking like atheists as well. They claim to be Bible-believers but when push comes to shove, their worldview is really indistinguishable from the world’s.
In 2019, an evangelical essay about practical atheism caught many Christians’ attention. Its authors complain:
[W]e live in a world where the assumptions that govern how we think and what we do are almost always secular ones. [. . .] Good things result from our hard work and planning, we think, not from the gracious hands of our loving Father.
A “preacher,” Ken Weliever, soon expanded on the essay. He offered a listicle of how Christians lived like atheists. In his view, practical atheists didn’t pray much, didn’t read or study the Bible, lived “without Him” six days of the week, don’t hold “family devotions,” and “focus on this life.”
Hilariously, an ultra-hardline evangelical accused the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in 2021 of being full of practical atheists. His reason? He felt they were dangerously sympathetic to the idea of female pastors.
Around 2024, Renew.org published yet another “types of atheists” listicle that specifically shamed “the atheist Christian,” which its writer claimed was the largest segment of his six named types of atheist.
And lest we think Catholics have forgotten about the idea, a Catholic site complained about practical atheists again in 2024. (BONUS: Their writer tries to pull the Law of Conservation of Worship!)
What practical atheism actually is
First and foremost, practical atheism serves as a gatekeeping and shaming tool. If the flocks won’t obey, then they shall be cast into the ranks of their worst enemies, atheists.
But the signaling going on behind the scenes of this accusation fascinates me. It whispers of growing hostility between Christians about how to express their faith in the modern day.
All Christians live in reality. The laws of cause and effect work the same for them as they do for literally every other human in the world. Praying won’t change anything, except subjectively. Bible study doesn’t do much more than waste time, for everyone except perhaps preachers crafting sermon outlines. Marking oneself as part of a weird little group works great when you’re with your ingroup all the time, but if you spend time mostly with outgroups, it alienates people. Evangelizing alienates even more people.
Worse, miracles don’t really happen. Angels and demons don’t ever manifest. “Hard work and planning” makes things happen, not “the gracious hands of our loving Father.”
So when Christians’ kids get sick, they almost never just pray for magic healing. No, they almost always take their kids to the doctor, just like everyone else does. And they consider the prayer-only approach to be barbaric and abusive, just like everyone else does.
When almost all Christians face a major time crunch in their lives, they know to put superfluous, extraneous stuff on the shelf for a bit, just like everyone else does.
Presented with a mystery in the real world, like who ate the last lemon bar or dented their car or let the cat get into the resting roast turkey, Christians respond as someone in the real world, with only real-world explanations satisfying them, just like everyone else does.
And when Christians want to be decent human beings, they support causes that reflect that desire even if their religious leaders don’t approve, just like everyone else does.
As a way to soften and lessen the sting of cognitive dissonance, it works. Cognitive dissonance is the severe discomfort that results when someone tries to hold two different, mutually exclusive beliefs in their head at the same time (like “my god does stuff in the real world” and “nothing supernatural ever happens”). There’s already a dealbreaking amount of cognitive dissonance in Christianity. The less Christians face, the easier their lives are.
Why it’s really good that Christians are drawing a firm line between belief and reality
It’s a good sign that practical atheism has become evangelicals’ new bête noire. As my first Pentecostal pastor liked to say, dogs don’t bark at what don’t move. Their attacks on this enemy speak volumes. The most hardline Christians are increasingly aware of Christians who hold different political and social positions.
It’s an even better sign that Christians as a group are indeed living in the real world. That’s where I want them. That’s where they’re safest from religious abuse.
So they’re not evangelizing at dinner parties, like we saw in the essay that kicked off our topic. They value their friends too much to alienate them that way. The guy who wrote that essay isn’t going to come over and hang out with them if their friends ghost them for unwanted recruitment pitches—just as a pastor won’t write checks for church members going bankrupt after spending every penny they had on warning normies about the Rapture. If Christians don’t watch out for themselves, nobody else in their churches will.
We’ll talk more next time about how hardline accusers evaluate proper Jesusing. For now, I just want to note that it feels like even Christians increasingly recognize the very performative and hollow nature of TRUE CHRISTIANITY™, and they want no part of it.
Practical atheism might not make hardline Christian leaders happy, but it definitely allows Christians to behave like decent human beings—and follow their faith on their own terms, as they see fit. No wonder it aggravates the hardliners so much!
NEXT UP: Yes, it really is just an aesthetic with alt-right Christian lads. (Ft. KANYE) See you soon! <3
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