Sunday Sermonette: What Causes Atheism?
Religion is in decline in America. The White Christian voting bloc has collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy, with some still supporting the candidacy of a vulgar narcissist who has even less commitment to Christianity than he does to marital fidelity. More clear-eyed Christians have backed away from the Republican nominee, leading to much confusion in the ranks. The Christian Post provides a good example of the turmoil. They published an editorial decrying Trump as long ago as last February, saying “Trump, an admirer of Vladimir Putin and other dictatorial leaders, may claim to be your friend and protector now, but as his history indicates, without your full support he will turn on you, and use whatever power is within his means to punish you.” Then they published a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t op-ed in August. The most recent op-ed from October 3 is a guarded endorsement of Clinton.
Church attendance is shrinking, especially in Catholic and mainline Protestant denominations. Just a glance at Sunday attendance shows mostly people my age or older. While churches have long been accustomed to young people falling away in their late teens, they always came back when they had children. This is no longer the case. The fastest growing segment of the religious landscape are the Nones, those who profess no religion and don’t seem to care. What could possibly have caused so many people to no longer believe in the creeds and confessions of older generations?
Some pastors believe it’s all because of arch-atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair and the Supreme Court. In 1962, the Court ruled against school prayer in Engel v. Vitale. In 1963, this was followed by a declaration that public school-sponsored Bible reading was unconstitutional in Abington School District v. Schempp (which consolidated Murray v. Curlett, since Schempp was a Unitarian Universalist which outnumbered declared atheists at the time). These decades-old decisions cast God out of the public square, cry the pastors. World Nut, er, Net Daily quoted Christian author Jonathan Cahn: “It is the continuation of what took place in the 1960s when America began consciously and officially removing God from its public square - and particularly from the lives its children. You cannot do that without reaping a mass harvest of consequences. And it is the absence of God that allows for the presence of darkness. … If a nation’s high court should pass judgment on the Almighty, should you then be surprised God will pass judgment on the court and that nation? We are doing that which Israel did on the altars of Baal,” he cried.
Marshall Connolly of the Catholic Say website massaged data from a recent PRRI study on the growth of Nones and blamed divorce. “Divorce rates reached about 50 percent in the 1980s. Since then, children from those divorces have grown up. At the same time, the number of people who are religiously unaffiliated has risen from 5 percent in 1972 to 25 percent today.” Connolly does not link to the study, which can be found here. Here’s an interesting tidbit: Catholics are more likely to have left the Church over its treatment of LGBT people (39%) and the clergy sexual abuse scandal (32%). I’m not sure how Connolly fits that into his divorce theory.
My very favorite comes from fundamentalist Catholic blogger Michael Voris, who blamed Martin Luther: “Protestantism eventually gives way to atheism, because philosophically, it is atheism. What, after all, is atheism? It is a-theism, no God. What does Protestantism, with its me-centered theology, produce? That you become your own God. You determine your morality. You determine the meaning of Scripture. You determine your own theology. There is no longer room for God, because the individual assumes the throne - kind of the working definition of atheism.” I don’t know which is worse, his understanding of Protestant belief or his understanding of atheist non-belief.
There is one theory none of the Christian publications or bloggers have considered. The reason that Christianity is in decline and the Nones are increasing just might be because there isn’t the slightest shred of evidence that any such being as the Christian God exists. There hasn’t been a single new discovery or argument made for the case in hundreds of years. Those that exist are rationally impoverished and logically incoherent. Heck, even I figured that out eventually, and my parents are still happily married and sent me to a parochial grammar school where we prayed every day.
The so-called Four Horsemen, Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens, did not discover atheism, they just wrote about it at a time when a lot of people were already questioning. It turns out that there are more atheists than Unitarian Universalists (some of whom are also atheists, by the way), and still more people who just don’t think the question of whether gods exist is important or is at best purely personal.
I call it progress.
Church attendance is shrinking, especially in Catholic and mainline Protestant denominations. Just a glance at Sunday attendance shows mostly people my age or older. While churches have long been accustomed to young people falling away in their late teens, they always came back when they had children. This is no longer the case. The fastest growing segment of the religious landscape are the Nones, those who profess no religion and don’t seem to care. What could possibly have caused so many people to no longer believe in the creeds and confessions of older generations?
Some pastors believe it’s all because of arch-atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair and the Supreme Court. In 1962, the Court ruled against school prayer in Engel v. Vitale. In 1963, this was followed by a declaration that public school-sponsored Bible reading was unconstitutional in Abington School District v. Schempp (which consolidated Murray v. Curlett, since Schempp was a Unitarian Universalist which outnumbered declared atheists at the time). These decades-old decisions cast God out of the public square, cry the pastors. World Nut, er, Net Daily quoted Christian author Jonathan Cahn: “It is the continuation of what took place in the 1960s when America began consciously and officially removing God from its public square - and particularly from the lives its children. You cannot do that without reaping a mass harvest of consequences. And it is the absence of God that allows for the presence of darkness. … If a nation’s high court should pass judgment on the Almighty, should you then be surprised God will pass judgment on the court and that nation? We are doing that which Israel did on the altars of Baal,” he cried.
Marshall Connolly of the Catholic Say website massaged data from a recent PRRI study on the growth of Nones and blamed divorce. “Divorce rates reached about 50 percent in the 1980s. Since then, children from those divorces have grown up. At the same time, the number of people who are religiously unaffiliated has risen from 5 percent in 1972 to 25 percent today.” Connolly does not link to the study, which can be found here. Here’s an interesting tidbit: Catholics are more likely to have left the Church over its treatment of LGBT people (39%) and the clergy sexual abuse scandal (32%). I’m not sure how Connolly fits that into his divorce theory.
My very favorite comes from fundamentalist Catholic blogger Michael Voris, who blamed Martin Luther: “Protestantism eventually gives way to atheism, because philosophically, it is atheism. What, after all, is atheism? It is a-theism, no God. What does Protestantism, with its me-centered theology, produce? That you become your own God. You determine your morality. You determine the meaning of Scripture. You determine your own theology. There is no longer room for God, because the individual assumes the throne - kind of the working definition of atheism.” I don’t know which is worse, his understanding of Protestant belief or his understanding of atheist non-belief.
There is one theory none of the Christian publications or bloggers have considered. The reason that Christianity is in decline and the Nones are increasing just might be because there isn’t the slightest shred of evidence that any such being as the Christian God exists. There hasn’t been a single new discovery or argument made for the case in hundreds of years. Those that exist are rationally impoverished and logically incoherent. Heck, even I figured that out eventually, and my parents are still happily married and sent me to a parochial grammar school where we prayed every day.
The so-called Four Horsemen, Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens, did not discover atheism, they just wrote about it at a time when a lot of people were already questioning. It turns out that there are more atheists than Unitarian Universalists (some of whom are also atheists, by the way), and still more people who just don’t think the question of whether gods exist is important or is at best purely personal.
I call it progress.