We’ve talked many times over the years about how evangelicals love dehumanizing their enemies. This time, though, we have someone doing it who seems to stand well outside of the evangelical end of the Christian pool. Let’s dive into this newest attempt to make nonreligious people look like subhumans—and perhaps figure out why it’s happening this time.
Everyone, meet Lorraine Kisly, who likes dehumanizing people who aren’t like her
For about three months, Lorraine Kisly wrote for Patheos’ “Contemplative” channel. If you’re wondering exactly what that channel involves, you’re not alone. Here’s how the site describes it:
Patheos Contemplative is a forum for the whole contemplative community. We’re monks and meditators, lovers of liturgy and pure mystics, students of ancient texts and studiers of the latest brain science. This channel is a place to share best practices, learn from each other’s experiences, discuss big questions, and most of all, support each other.
Ooookay.
Before that, for a long time she wrote for Newsweek (archive). Though she grew up Christian, she seems to have converted to Buddhism and gone all-in on it. She even edited a couple of Buddhist journals and published Buddhist books.
All of that changed in 2000, when she reconverted back to Christianity (archive). Since then, she’s written books about Christian spirituality and devotions. Her last post for Patheos describes “a first experiment with the Lord’s Prayer” (archive). (For heathens, that’s the one that begins “Our Father, who art in Heaven, shallow be thy game-er, I mean, “hallowed be thy name.” Almost all Christians recite it at some point, some way more than others.)
The experiment involves combining it with Buddhist-style meditation techniques. I can already hear evangelicals bursting into flames over that idea. They don’t even know why they’re bursting into flames yet, but they sure are.
I wonder how she’d feel about my aunt-the-nun reciting her daily Rosary while walking her dog? My aunt sure thought that was a great bit of multitasking!
Kisly wrote the post we’re examining today just before the “experiment” one, in April 2019. Our awesome Discord community found it recently, and it shocked me so much it landed on our dance card immediately.
It also reminded me of a classic Calvin and Hobbes strip from 1992:
Someone doesn’t understand opiates very well
Kisly called her April 2019 post “The Opiate of Unbelief” (archive). It’s a riff on Karl Marx’s famous statement about religion being “the opium of the people/masses.” In her essay, Kisly expresses her indignation about “the widespread and growing and always increasingly adamant denial of God and the repudiation of the spiritual dimension.”
See, she just doesn’t “comprehend” this notion! Even worse, the people who “deny” her god’s existence seem completely certain of their opinion!
This denial is always expressed with total conviction, no agnosticism, or questioning generally admitted.
But far from not “comprehending” such people, she has come up with an explanation for their nonbelief:
It has long seemed to me that the inability to sense the sacred is a disability. The sense of the sacred is inherent in a human being. If this sense is lacking, it is no different from being without the ability to see, or hear, or smell. It is a disability like every other.
I bet people with real disabilities really hate it when Christians use that language to describe nonbelief in their false claims.
In calling religion “the opium of the people,” incidentally, Karl Marx meant that it was people used it to soothe themselves in times of suffering—and that this illusion interfered with humanity finding real remedies for suffering. How ironic that Lorraine Kisly and her pals now accuse the nonreligious of the same thing.
But wait, it gets worse
According to Kisly, nonreligious people are literally disabled because we don’t accept the woowoo false claims that she buys into. Thus, we have no sense of “the sacred” at all, just like a blind person has no clue what differentiates turquoise from teal. In fact, we’re not rejecting so much as denying her claims, which implies that we do secretly believe everything she does—but can’t admit it.
Oh, may our lofty superiors pity us poor, poor widdle heathens mired in our sad, sad widdle materialist lives! May their divine and benevolent wisdom penetrate our dark, bleak little lives!
Indeed, she quotes some other Christian as saying nonbelief is the “religion of consolation” that heathens embrace in hopes of gaining “a palliative for existential grievances and private disappointments!” That guy ends by declaring that heathens:
Those who have entirely lost the ability to see the transcendent reality that shows itself in all things, and who refuse to seek it out or even to believe the search a meaningful one, have confined themselves for now within an illusory world, and wander in a labyrinth of dreams.
Sounds bleak, doesn’t it?
Yes. It’s supposed to.
To summarize, then:
Lorraine Kisly is sad. She is sad because a growing number of people don’t believe the same false claims that she believes. At first, she found the whole notion of disbelief “difficult to comprehend.” But don’t you worry! She figured it out. See, all those people are disabled. Yes, literally! They are physically incapable of perceiving or appreciating what she calls “the spiritual dimension.” And their “denial” of this stuff has risen to become a religion of its own. She quotes someone else who calls it “a religion of consolation.” And she pities them, the poor materialism-addled dears. If only they understood what Queen Lorraine does.
Dehumanizing heathens isn’t new, of course
We’ve certainly seen a fair number of Christians dehumanizing those who reject their claims. Back in the 2000s and 2010s—the era of the Great Evangelical-Atheist Keyboard Wars—it wasn’t unusual at all to see pompous Christians declaring that atheists were incapable of human emotions like love. Here’s a typical example from a 2014 blog post (archive):
The blogger wasn’t sure if this guy was a long-game troll or an actual Christian expressing actual beliefs, but I’m leaning toward the latter due to the length of the game.
Lorraine Kisly’s specific claim isn’t even new. Back in 2013, I wrote a post about Oprah Winfrey doing the exact same thing. In it, I described other Christians who accused atheist ex-Christians of having lost various emotions, particularly love and wonderment. On an evangelical blog’s commbox, I even watched in shock as one TRUE CHRISTIAN™ even told an atheist that he might as well rape his wife as give her presents, because love now meant nothing to him. That Christian declared that ex-Christians lost the very capacity to feel love. (<— In fact, that exact encounter became one of the sparks that brought Roll to Disbelieve to life!)
In the years since then, I’ve seen fewer accusations about love, but continued accusations about atheists and nonreligious people lacking morality itself. (Don’t miss this hilariously overblown 2012 Liberty University paper about it. It’s a solid strawman all the way through.)
Despite studies repeatedly showing that religious people aren’t more moral or virtuous (archive) than nonreligious ones, Christians keep insisting that they are. Even more astonishingly, Christians claim to have a stranglehold monopoly on morality itself (archive). To them, any atheists claiming to have a non-Yahweh-derived sense of morality are simply suffering “delusions” locked within “the folly of atheism.”
So in a lot of ways, Kisly is late to the party.
What exactly are we heathens incapable of perceiving though?
Going back to Kisly’s essay, I tried to understand exactly what she thinks my “disability” is. Here’s what she asserts about nonreligious people:
Our “always increasingly adamant denial of God.” It’s not denial. Rather, nonreligious people reject Christians’ claims about Yahweh/Jesus. No objective evidence supports his existence. Without a good reason to accept an idea, I can’t force myself to believe it. And of course it’s an “adamant” rejection, too: All too often, erstwhile soulwinners won’t leave us alone unless rejected very firmly.
Our “repudiation of the spiritual dimension.” She doesn’t define “spiritual,” but I can help her out here. “Spiritual” is another way to say “imaginary.” Nobody has ever found any objective evidence to support the existence of any realm but the material one. People don’t “repudiate” Christians’ claims about imaginary realms so much as find ourselves unable to accept them without evidence.
“This denial is always expressed with total conviction, no agnosticism, or questioning generally admitted.” I’d like her to cite sources, please. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an atheist refuse to allow someone else to express agnosticism or good-faith questions. I’ve seen plenty of people—including myself—refuse to allow Christians to pose bad-faith ones, though, and that is very clearly what she has in mind here.
Our “inability to sense the sacred.” She doesn’t define “the sacred,” either. Like “supernatural,” it likely simply means “stuff that she imagines.”
Our inability to “see the transcendent reality that shows itself in all things.” This is a quote from Kisly’s pal. She doesn’t define this lofty, fart-huffing phrase, and neither does her source. Then again, I’d never expect them to try; it’s just more meaningless blahblah from the Christian blahblah factory.
Then Kisly starts slamming nonreligious people for our “materialism.”
Those who believe in imaginary things hate materialism
Materialism means having a very high confidence that everything that is real exists in the physical universe. Thus, everything that’s real can be measured, studied, and perceived with physical senses and instruments. If something cannot be measured, studied, and perceived that way, then we can have a high confidence in it not being real.
You can probably already see why Kisly and her pals have a lot of problems with materialism! Their god isn’t real. He cannot be measured, studied, or perceived with any physical senses or instruments. He’s never left any footprints behind to attest to his existence. Nor can his followers even agree with each other about his commands, opinions, or desires, even when each and every one of them is certain that he has personally communicated with them each.
Christians desperately want their god to be real—meaning, for him to exist in the real universe. But they also need him to be exempt from the usual requirements made of claims about stuff in the real world. They need him to be totally real, and yet totally imperceptible to any reality-based means of observation.
By slamming “materialism” and insulting those who demand objective evidence for Christian claims, Kisly and her pals hope to make their claims sound more plausible. That’s the only way they can sell their belief system. They want atheism to look pitiful and sad compared to their false claims.
As well, that’s why Kisly builds a strawman out of atheism itself, citing a pal who calls it “not a philosophy but a therapy” when it is neither. Later on, she sneers at “the mechanistic view,” then quotes the same pal’s second strawman:
We tend to presume that if one can discover the temporally prior physical causes of some object—the world, an organism, a behavior, a religion, a mental event, an experience, or anything else—one has thereby eliminated all other possible causal explanations of that object. But this is a principle that is true only if materialism is true, and materialism is true only if this principle is true, and logical circles should not set the rules for our thinking.
Big talk for people who can’t offer a shred of objective support for a single religious claim they make.
It’s incredibly sad to see someone accomplished demonstrating this level of intellectual cowardice and dishonesty. But really, Kisly’s not doing anything new here. She’s in very good company with evangelical apologists in particular.
Denying nonreligious people’s capacity for appreciating wonder and grandeur is dehumanizing
As mentioned, Kisly chose not to neutrally define a single important term in her entire essay. She steers very clear of defining “the sacred,” the “supernatural,” and “the transcendent reality.” When she does define anything, it’s so she can build a strawman out of it that she can knock down. If someone told her atheism isn’t a “denial” of her god but a simple rejection of Christians’ poor-quality claims due to a lack of real-world support, I really don’t know what she’d do.
All that said, I take exception to her dehumanization attempt. She’s trying to paint nonreligious people as having what she calls “a handicap” and “a disability.”
Yes, it’s incredibly ableist.
It’s also simply wrong.
I don’t know how many of the scientists in this short video are atheists, but I defy Lorraine Kisly and her snooty pals to watch it and come away thinking there’s no wonderment, no appreciation of the grand, in materialism:
That blonde lady in the thumbnail (lower right) looks like she’s about to cry, she’s so overwhelmed. For that matter, the scientist behind that famous black hole image, Katie Bouman, looks pretty excited as years of hard work takes form in the next video:
Or Lorraine Kisly could just ask one of us. She could ask us if we feel wonderment, if we can find ourselves in awed silence before the vastness of the night sky or the green wildness of the forest. Or if we can be overwhelmed by love, or dazzled by beauty, or blown away by ancient poetry, art, and even music speaking to us across the millennia.
Or even if we can feel like links in a long, long chain of humans over tens of thousands of years, each building a foundation for the next link to form, all of us part of something glorious and unexpected—and entirely natural.
She doesn’t have to do any of that ickie fact-finding work, of course. She can also keep assuming that nonreligious people are somehow very different from her, that we fundamentally lack some essential component of humanity that she only possesses through her acceptance of false claims.
Kisly sells Christian books these days, and I guess they sell better if someone’s on board with her mindset. That said, it’s hard to imagine her target market. She acts really evangelical, but evangelicals would rather set her books on fire than read them—her understanding of Christianity sounds very syncretistic, primitive, and eclectic, to put it as gently and graciously as I can. And I’d really hope that liberal and progressive Christians would reject her strawmanning. I sure can’t recall any of them talking like this.
Maybe dehumanizing the nonreligious has gotten harder these days
What’s funny is that Kisly’s post is from 2019. She might have been one of the last hurrahs in strawman-building. In the last few years, Christians haven’t been quite as interested in strawmanning nonbelievers as they once were.
For one thing, nowadays there are simply too many nonreligious people floating around in America. In the lead-up to the Great Keyboard Wars, plenty of Christians could honestly say they didn’t know anyone who wasn’t Christian. (I didn’t know any non-Christians until college, myself!) Though we were numerous online, we ex-Christians were few and far between in meatspace. So that first wave of deconversions likely took Christians by surprise.
But in the years since—particularly with Gen Z and Gen Alpha shaping up to be very and increasingly nonreligious—it’s gotten harder for Christian hucksters to sell strawmen. Even when they’re Christian themselves, young adults know very well that nonreligious people aren’t lacking in morality or compassion or wonderment. They know better, because almost all of them have nonreligious friends and loved ones now.
Nowadays, you’re far more likely to see evangelicals dehumanizing their political and culture-war enemies than their overtly-religious ones. I’m not surprised by that idea, either. Dehumanizing works best on unfamiliar and rarely-encountered people. Dehumanization works least on people who are familiar and commonplace. And perhaps it even backfires sometimes when one of the dehumanized speaks up to say “Hey, that isn’t true.”
The ones doing the dehumanizing probably won’t change after such a challenge, but the people around them just might learn something new.
NEXT UP: And hot on the heels of a survey that might make evangelicals happy, one that will probably not make them very happy at all.
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