One of the remarkable features of the argument between “Christians” and “atheists” is how much they agree on. Perhaps too much. Although I’m theist, I often feel I have more in common with people who are atheist than people who refer to themselves as Christian. The polarised nature of discourse nowadays means this shouldn’t come as a surprise, and before I get going on it I want to specify what seems to be the nature of the opinions which they tend to hold.
It should first of all be noted that in both cases these are in a sense strawmen. Neither of these represent real Christians or real atheists, and part of my point is that these are overlapping categories anyway. There are several distinct ways of being an atheist Christian which I suspect many people would prefer to be ignored. They are actually the images each group tends to have of the other and they’re a subset in each case, if that. Atheism as such is not the point either. Atheism is nothing other than the opinion that no deities exist, and theism is nothing other than the opinion that at least one interventionist deity exists, very often an Abrahamic God. Many would say that the burden of proof is on theism, as our belief is more complex than atheist belief and entities should not be unnecessarily multiplied, but if so, arguably it’s also the case that the burden of proof is on non-solipsism, as believing there are other minds is more complex than believing that there aren’t. Nonetheless, solipsism is generally stated to be false when the subject comes up. The set of beliefs I’m talking about is more restricted than mere atheism. It’s metaphysically naturalistic, scientifically realist, non-religious, anti-theistic atheism which accepts the historical-grammatical approach to sacred texts and also tends to be politically liberal in the American sense of the word. That’s six or seven qualifications, although the political angle is less central than the others. Christopher Hitchens was an example of a non-liberal such atheist and in fact many atheists of this kind do believe it’s important to focus on what they see as the essential belligerent, sexist and homophobic nature of Islam, which takes them away from the left wing mainstream in this respect. They may or may not be secularist. On the side of Christians, again these people are a subset. They’re politically conservative Biblically literalist fundamentalist pre-tribulation post-millennialist historical-grammatical evangelical Protestant Christians who may also believe in the prosperity gospel. Their view of atonement is likely to be penal substitution. Again, there are many qualifications here. I count six or seven again, on the grounds that that description is tautological regarding their view of sacred texts. They are of course also theistic and trinitarian, their view of the Book of Revelation is likely to be historicist or futurist, they may believe in the Rapture and they are also young Earth creationists. A few of them are even flat earthers nowadays. It almost goes without saying that they’re homophobic and sexist, and they’re also likely to be against abortion and transphobic. Again, remember this is a caricature. They’re both caricatures, projected onto the other side of the argument.
Paul the letter-writer once said:
And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
1 Corinthians 12:7-9
And in Greek:
καὶ τῇ ὑπερβολῇ τῶν ἀποκαλύψεων. διό, ἵνα µὴ ὑπεραίρωµαι,
ἐδόθη µοι σκόλοψ τῇ σαρκί, ἄγγελος Σατανᾶ, ἵνα µε κολαφίζῃ, ἵνα
µὴ ὑπεραίρωµαι. 8 ὑπὲρ τούτου τρὶς τὸν κύριον παρεκάλεσα ἵνα
ἀποστῇ ἀπí ἐµοῦ· 9 καὶ εἴρηκέν µοι, Ἀρκεῖ σοι ἡ χάρις µου· ἡ γὰρ
δύναµις ἐν ἀσθενείᾳ τελεῖται.
(I’ve finally got round to copy-pasting from an actual copy of the Greek New Testament, hence all the diacritics).
As a Christian, I’ve found this very helpful. Pre-transition, I considered my gender dysphoria to be my “thorn in the flesh”, and it’s non-specific nature is advantageous for many of us who need comfort. If I’d been epileptic, and it’s been suggested that this was in fact Paul’s specific thorn, it might’ve helped, although of course there’s the issue of the social model of disability here. For a less ableist set of circumstances, “these things are sent to try us” is another way Abrahamic religious theists might look at it, since it externalises the issue, and of course a thorn is a foreign body so it could be structural ableism which is the problem rather than the disability itself in a more medicalised way. Nonetheless, there is another way in which we can be a thorn in the flesh of soi-disant Christians with that list of baggage above.
There seems to be a theme in the views of certain Christians of this ilk that they know your own mind better than you know it yourself. This is patronising and doomed to failure, because one of the restricted areas where it is actually possible to know things is in the realm of mental states and dispositions. There are a number of similar claims here: that homosexuality is a choice, that atheists refuse to admit there’s a God and that if you lose your faith, you never had it in the first place. It seems sometimes that the reasons Christians make these claims is more for their own sake, to deal with their own doubts, than to reach out to others, but as I say, it seems – methinks. I can’t make this claim without being a hypocrite, so don’t set too much store in it. The aspect of this I’d like to look at today is the doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints, and before I go into it, I should probably talk about the word “saint”.
The popular understanding of the word “saint” is more Orthodox and Roman Catholic than Protestant. For a non-reformed church, a saint is a particularly holy person who is better than `οι πολλοι, that is they sin less than average if at all and have performed at least one miracle. They are a different class of people than the rest of us and tend to get prayed to directly. Protestants don’t hold with any of this because, as Paul says in Romans 3:23, “πάντες γὰρ ἥµαρτον καὶ ὑστεροῦνται τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ” – “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” having just said “no-one is righteous, not even one”. There’s Jesus Christ and everyone else. In the Protestant view, a saint is just someone who has repented and committed to Christ as her lord and saviour. Anyone at all. Every single Christian, in other words.
Then there’s the perseverance bit. The doctrine of the perseverance of the saints is that salvation cannot be lost. Due to the confusion brought by the nomenclature, it’s also referred to as “held by God”, “preservation of the saints” or “eternal security”. The website GotQuestions.org, though scarily fundamentalist, is nonetheless an excellent resource regarding what this strand of Christianity is “supposed” to believe, written by faithful Christians and quite authoritative. It’s also, of course, horribly bigoted but that goes with the territory – it doesn’t stop it being useful. Those who are born again will continue to trust in Christ forever, is how it puts it. A slightly different formulation would be that once you are saved, you’re always saved. This means that if you’ve ever been Christian, you never stop being Christian. It’s a permanent change and there’s plenty of Biblical backup for this view, such as Romans 8, and John 5, 6 and 10. And if you want a conversion story from me, here it is: when I was first at university at the age of eighteen, I was theist but not Christian. I became convinced that Jesus was the uniquely fully divine and fully human son of God who died for my sins on the Cross and that by repenting and committing myself to him I would be saved. I therefore prayed sincerely that this happen, and happen it did, according to standard Protestant Christian doctrine. I went to church twice each Sunday and to Bible study groups during the week. I had long conversations about my faith with other Christian friends. I was sincere, and this is an honest account of what happens. Nor is my memory unreliable, as this is what I wrote in my diary at the time. There is no sense in which I was not Christian, outwardly or inwardly. However, after a few months there were problems. I was assured that I shouldn’t stop asking questions because there were answers, and rapidly found that I was supposed to reject anyone who followed a different spiritual path as not saved, required to be homophobic and sexist and that vegetarianism and veganism were not considered priorities. So I thought, sod this for a game of soldiers and left. My fellow Christians were utterly recalcitrant in persisting in being bigoted in a whole load of ways. Nor was there any trade off with anti-materialism. One couple was saving up to buy a Porche! You would think, maybe, that a little bit of bigotry would be somewhat excusable if the Christians concerned were also not interested in material possessions for their own sake and, say, volunteered to help the homeless or donated money to good causes, or at least as they were perceived at the time, such as Live Aid. This did not happen. So to me, these people had no redeeming features and I came to the conclusion that Christianity was the worst thing to happen to this planet since the extinction of the dinosaurs, and that’s a realistic comparison because their attitudes were probably instrumental in causing more damage to the biosphere than the Chicxulub Impactor. I would revise this view today. I’d now say “non-avian dinosaurs”.
The problem was probably more that the Christians around me weren’t doing a particularly good job of witnessing to me or others, because they were stuck in a particular mindset which was unhelpful. And it has to be said that because “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”, this can to some extent be expected. I’m also aware that I’m being quite judgemental here, and I’m not supposed to do that. However, the point is not so much that these people were persisting in their sin and that made them bad people. It didn’t at all. It did, however, illustrate that they didn’t seem to be getting any help to avoid sin, and if Christianity doesn’t help you make the world a better place, what’s the point of it? I can, incidentally, filter out much of this and assert that the likes of the Porsche people are by practically any standard materialistic, and given that the prosperity gospel was less prevalent back then I would hope that they would consider this a problem for them as Christians. I dunno, maybe it supports the economy. Let’s be Keynesian, shall we?
For whatever reason, my sincere commitment to the Christian faith rapidly decayed in my first year at university. You can say it was Satan, or my own sinfulness. That’s all fine. Maybe it was. What you can’t do, given the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints, is claim correctly that I was never Christian. That doctrine means that the definition of a Christian is, in their terms, something like “A person who has repented of their sin, asked Christ to forgive them and honestly committed their life to Christ, the uniquely sinless fully human and fully divine Son of God who died on the cross for the forgiveness of sins, as lord and saviour”. That’s what a Christian is, you cannot lose your salvation and it’s that simple. Many people describing themselves as ex-Christians have had faithful Christians go over their beliefs and the process in their lives in great detail, perhaps hoping that they would be able to find some feature that allows them to say, “Gotcha! You were never a real Christian anyway!”, thereby preserving their own faith. This is a little legalistic for a Christian attitude. Well, yes I was, absolutely, Christian, by your understanding of what a Christian is, and in fact whereas I have lost my faith, I’m still aware that there is a loving God who responds to prayer. I don’t have all the answers. But in a way, I hardly care that it’s a fact that God exists in comparison with the problem posed by conservative evangelical Christianity, and therefore I believe I have more in common with many atheists than I do with some Christians, and that we are allies in this.
I could, of course, have completely lost my faith and in fact there was a short period during which I was atheist between then and now, but currently I am by no means atheist. Let’s leave that aside though. I don’t wish to alienate atheists, whom I have no interest in converting, particularly left wing politically active ones.
By making the claim that someone was never Christian when it is incontrovertibly the case that they were, people are basically making the claim that they’re telepathic: that there could not possibly be anyone who used to be Christian. They must’ve had their doubts from the start, or they just went along with what others were saying or something. This is in spite of the fact that many generally upright, honest people with a great deal of integrity say otherwise: that they definitely were Christian and no longer believe. One reason they are able to make this claim is that there are many people who see themselves as ex-Christian. Now there is a sense in which I am ex-Christian, in that I don’t currently believe in the power of the Holy Spirit and also have some concerns that Christianity culturally appropriates Judaism. On the other hand, I am definitely someone who made a commitment to Christ, and that’s supposed to be all that matters. If I therefore continue to claim to be Christian, and if atheists with a similar history also do so, it makes it much harder for fundamentalists to claim convincingly that we are not. Because we know better than they do that we were, and therefore by their definition we still are, even if we have no religious faith or belief in God at all nowadays. We can be a thorn in their flesh.
Therefore, if you are atheist and opposed to religious bigotry, and you have a history of having been Christian in that sense (it doesn’t work as well in non-reformed denominations but even so), I implore you, please don’t let them get away with the claim that you never were. Don’t let them have anything their own way. You are still Christian even though you don’t believe.
I could go through the rest of those qualifications (metaphysical naturalism and the like) but right now, I’ll leave it there. I don’t want to widen any of the cracks between us any more than they are already. Progressives need to be united against conservatism and to work together, don’t you agree?
A Box Of Chocolates 