The God of Atheists and Evangelicals
“Why do atheists and fundamentalists believe in the same God?”
“Why do atheists and fundamentalists believe in the same God?” Some variation of this question tends to come up repeatedly if you often discus theology and philosophy, and while it’s obviously reductionist it does have some basis in reality. Us Millennials and older Zoomers often cut our discourse teeth watching and participating in online “debate” led by so-called “New Atheists”, and their favourite foils were always the likes of young earth creationists, evangelical Christians, and Salafi jihadists. That information environment has long since dissipated, but among those still holding the irreligious line there remains a strong sense that fundamentalism is a more legitimate expression of religion, and that non-literalist, non-fundamentalist religious people—progressive or otherwise—are somehow dishonest, wanting to have their intellectual cake and eat their God too.
I think the reasons for this are myriad, and it bears noting that this critique does not extend to all atheists, only the loudest subset. To answer the original question though, religious fundamentalism offers an attractive straightforwardness and “solidity” that makes it easy to argue for and against, and that once you depart from it, religious positions become more more idiosyncratic and more in a realm of the personal and mystical. This realm is less “debatable” than the one in which fundamentalism operates, and it’s resistant to “scientific” evidentiary standards.
At the outset, fundamentalism is often the most straightforward version of a textual religion. If you give the average uncatechised person a Bible, convince them it’s the inspired word of God, and leave them to their own devices, then what they come up with is likely going to look a lot more like fundamentalism than progressive mainline Protestantism or even Roman Catholicism. There’s also a good chance that it will look far more gnostic and dualistic than Nicene Christianity (and a small one that they’ll go on to start a civil war that kills 10s of millions of people).1
So fundamentalism is very clean-cut in this way. You have a book, you have the truth claim that everything in it is literally true and literally God’s word, you have whatever truth claims are in the book. It’s straightforward. Once you depart from there it gets very ragged. How do you know which parts are meant to be literal and which are metaphor? Which are some secret third thing? How do you know what deeper meanings are supposed to be gleaned from the books of poetry? Oh, you’re supposed to use your God-given faculties of reason? Okay, my reason leads me to think one thing and you another and the Bishop of Rome a third.2 You can appeal to history and the church fathers, but not everyone will accept that appeal to authority. Luther didn’t; the Anabaptists really didn’t.
I think it’s for this reason—this sense of firmness and ability to quickly appeal to a textual authority—that both “New Atheism” and fundamentalism can be traps for people who exist on the edge of intellectual life. In my experience, they both appeal to people who crave mental stimulation and something like an intellectual pursuit, but have an underdeveloped sense of curiosity, lack exposure to academia and particularly philosophy, and are uncomfortable sitting with doubts. So you end up with fundamentalists at Bible study reading scripture with no church history or literary analysis, and you have atheists watching youtubers with a list of logical fallacies and a high schooler’s conception of the scientific method, both of them thinking they’re doing what Smart People™ do.
It doesn’t help matters that once you depart from fundamentalism, or at least something like it—say, the more conservative branches of Roman Catholic theology—you often wind up loosing some of the argument for Christianity specifically. If this is all just flawed humans (albeit particularly luminous/enlightened ones) who are encountering the divine in their lives and interpreting that as best they can within the context of their cultures and biases, well, that’s all well and good, but the Biblical prophets and the apostles are hardly the only people to have done that and written it down. You can say that these stories carry a spark of divine inspiration and we can use them as a lens to sacralize and interpret our lives, and I agree, there’s tremendous value there, but that’s not an argument for these stories exclusively. If my Jewish friends want to draw their religious inspiration from the Old Testament and nothing else, that makes sense—it’s their mythic history, but it’s not mine. My mythic history is in the Eddas and the Táin Bó Cúailnge. You can tell me that those are reactionary and that Christianity is historically progressive and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but it hardly is now (gestures vaguely at the world) and besides, if I’m going to believe in a God I’d like it to be for a better reason than the same belief having made the lives of 3rd Century women marginally less miserable.
Progressive Christianity especially runs into this problem in my experience, where in giving up many of its hard-and-fast truth claims it looses the ground on which to stand up for its own existence. I know many people for whom that faith and community is very important, very few of them are “evangelizing” though. Unfortunately, fundamentalism seems memetically fit in contrast. Look at the state of religion today. The Roman Church gains followers where it’s most reactionary—Sub-Saharan Africa and among newly religious young men in the occident—and looses them to pentecostals elsewhere. American Protestantism may be collapsing in general, but the pockets of vitality seem to center on a evangelical-derived milieu, and a huge segment of Americans that retain little or no formal religious practice and membership seem to still be guided by a sort of half-remembered reactionary fundamentalism mixed with the superstition of medieval peasants. Outside of Christianity, Conservative Judaism is shrinking while various orthodox branches grow, and Salafism has a great deal of vital energy in Southeast Asia and among diasporic muslim communities in Europe.
Many atheists rightly see a major threat to secular liberal society as coming from fundamentalist quarters, and there’s a degree of misplaced anger at progressive religious people who in their eyes might be fifth columnists. There is also, I think, an appealing fantasy of a “knock-out” blow in which fundamentalism can be “disproven” once and for all, if not for everyone then at least for the current interlocutor. To argue with someone whose faith rests less on a few axiomatic truth claims and more on personal, mystical experience is to enter the realm of, well, faith, and that’s a place that many atheists and fundamentalists are equally uncomfortable.
The Roman Catholic Church is able to sidestep many of these issues by having a single source of legitimate interpretations, but—setting aside for a moment the truth of the claims about papal authority—even this is not a perfect solution. Beyond the existence of protestantism generally, the increasing relevance of Sedevacantism and similar groups demonstrate that this settlement breaks down under multiple sets of conditions. The Roman Church has also built up an amount of institutional scar tissue around what does and does not count as the Bishop of Rome actually speaking authoritatively as the heir to St. Peter. This has largely allowed them to sidestep the Mormons’ problem with direct contradictions as well as the personal flaws of many popes, and to tolerate a degree of dissent within their church, but on the flip side makes things less clean cut than the initial solution would suggest.