So far, one of the greatest challenges of my semester has been waking up on time for Sunday morning church. When my absence doesn’t affect my grade, my laziness becomes apparent. However, a few weeks ago, my motivating factor was the book study series of my local church. We were going over one of my favorites: Romans.
The series has been delivered exegetically, with the pastor making his way through small sections of each chapter per sermon. That morning he preached on the role of sin in Romans 1:24-32, as much of the chosen section listed various offenses against God and other consequences following their debasement. However, the sermon started with verses 24-25: “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (NRSV). Naturally, the pastor transitioned into a dismissal of materialist atheism. To my best memory, he asserted that atheism is irrational because it declares humans as merely masses of chemicals with no explanation of love or heroism, likening this train of thought with the idea that “humans are simply animated pieces of meat.” Unlike my brothers and sisters in Christ in the pews surrounding me, I was taken aback.
Before I delve into my perspective, I want to clarify that I am a woman of faith. I adhere to Scripture and Christian doctrine, and I affirm that atheist thought is irrational. However, what I deny — and what caught me off guard in the moment — is the casual simplification of atheism and of the minds that both contribute to and maintain that belief. Yes, atheism is illogical, but this hardly insinuates that Christians are free to write off these human beings also created in the image of God as a bunch of idiots who don’t believe in love, justice or morals.
This is not to say that there are not atheists who forgo love, justice and morals. Famous among atheist philosophers is Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued for the death of the Christian God and the reign of nihilism in His place. Nietzsche’s nihilistic ideas advocated the destruction of traditional moral values, equating them to slavery, and the replacement of morality with the will to power. In the field of philosophy, Nietzsche has been named “the father of atheist existentialism” due to his passionate hatred for Christianity. Likely, this title and the general extremity of Nietzsche’s views associates Nietzschean thought with atheism. Christians have used Nietzsche to generalize atheism, combatting the belief system in a triumphant sermon like a strawman—easy to knock down with a Bible verse or two.
Although Nietzsche remains prevalent in the school of atheism, not every atheist subscribes to his thought. In fact, many atheist philosophers throughout the past and present have made fantastic contributions both to society and humanity. These include John Dewey, the educational reformer responsible for the Dewey Decimal Classification, Simone de Beauvoir, a famous feminist and activist, B. F. Skinner, an advocate of behaviorism and the father of operant conditioning, and Auguste Comte, the father of positivism and the first philosopher of science.
Simply put, not all atheists refute the existence of love, justice or morality. Christians have merely utilized the traditional American attack of simplifying either an argument or people group they dislike into a compressed set of outlandish ideas to ridicule and then use as justification for cruelty. As an intercultural studies major, that is what is the most off-putting for me about this approach to atheism. It contains ghastly similarities with the justification of racism within Western imperialism. By reducing the inhabitants of colonized territories to simple-minded savages, the colonization and subsequent Westernization of these people groups was beneficial. They needed civilization, after all. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this comparison is that Christianity partook in this worldview, causing its fair share of irreversible damage. For generations, missionaries worked side by side with colonizers, filing within their ranks. Imperialism coincided perfectly with the expanse of Christendom. The “culture,” the “civilization,” brought to the global East and South included Christianity as well.
Why must Christianity pompously descend upon those untouched by its light? Did Christ Himself not walk on earth in the poor, dirty form of those He loves?