Have Atheists Set the Standard for Morality?
As the hypocrisies of Christianity demolish our moral fabric, atheists have questions
Fundamentalist Christians led the way in helping a serial liar, hate merchant, accused serial sexual predator, and a man who is barely coherent become President of the U.S. again. Many fundamentalist preachers actively used sermons to lobby their congregants to vote for him.
Many of these fundamentalists believe he’ll help spread a Christian jihad. He, of course, has no idea what they’re talking about when they bring up the coming Trump-led rapture in their various chat and Facebook groups.
The only church he’s interested in promoting is the one devoted to his daily musings and rants.
There is a growing movement of leftist Christians, but they remain largely quiet on the sidelines, mostly wishing this would all just go away. Centrist Christians are nowhere to be found, unwilling to admit their role in this American tragedy through their silence.
The real leaders in this fight are atheists and agnostics.
When it comes to morality, atheism is the new black. It is the standard many modern Christians should consider seeking.
Christians could learn if they listened a little more to what atheists had to say — if only to gain some empathy.
If you’re a Christian, before you get too worked up about my proclamations, ask yourself why atheists are atheists in the first place. Many of them, of course, simply don’t buy what they consider to be a myth. Most of those folks simply move on to the regular chores of life and pay little attention to what is happening in the Christian world.
So I’m not thinking about them when I talk about the moral principles of atheists. Some of them have high morals, some don’t. It’s a melange. I don’t think you can put them into one bucket and say they are either moralistic or otherwise.
What I’m more interested in is the angry atheist. The one who is offended every time he/she sees a cross or a man in a priestly collar.
Sidebar: A typical atheist won’t see many women in priestly collars because women were banished from pastoral roles centuries ago. Even in our modern world, only a few denominations allow them to wear clerical robes. Traditional denominations that have begun to include them typically did so after centuries of refusal.
Some angry atheists are direct victims of Christian oppression. Their anger can take them to dark places.
When you’re treated terribly, you may not be railing against your oppressors because what they are doing is wrong, but because it hurts. However, if your response is to hurt others or lash out, the moral high ground has been ceded to the same dark forces you have fallen victim to.
For these folks, we need to offer empathy, though, not another copy of the Bible.
Let them have their rage. If you believe strongly in a Christian God, you’ll know that he’ll lead them to salvation: If not now, then in some future life.
Christians claim that only those who accept Jesus as their savior will go to heaven. I doubt that very much, but if it’s true, I envision Jesus standing at the pearly gates asking, “Do you believe in me now?” If, as in the movie “The Rapture,” you still say no, I suspect he will still say, “Come on in, anyway. You will soon enough.”
I’m mostly interested in the angry atheists who are disgusted by what they see, whether it’s the Christian church’s treatment of the LGBTQ+ community, its treatment of women, its sex scandals, its participation in slavery and ethnic cleansing in America and other countries, its support of America’s frequent wars, or its culture of rigid heterosexual monogamy. And, of course, Christianity’s serial hypocrisy.
Atheist screeds against Christianity are all over the place in the leftist ecosphere. Not one day goes by that I don’t see a headline in a Substack or Medium feed that says something like, “Christianity sucks.” Look at things from their perspective, and I don’t understand how anyone can say anything other than, “Who can blame them?”
I call these folks moral atheists.
Moral atheists are busier than you might think looking for answers as they rightly fume at the moral offenses they see in modern Christianity.
And here’s the thing. If you’re a practicing Christian, you should fume, too. Jesus sure would.
Countless stories about Christian hypocrisy abound—no need to rehash it all here. Instead, let’s take a peek at a Twitter-X thread I found not so long ago that stuck with me enough that I bookmarked it. (Just because some rich guy with an always-on chubby bought Twitter and calls it X doesn’t mean I have to. It’s Twitter for me until he finally kills it or the banks seize it from him.)
The Twitter thread I have in mind has nearly 28 million views. The thread’s original tweet asked a simple question:
“What made you stop going to church? 🎤”
I included the microphone from the original tweet because I thought it was cute enough to use in this article. Did I mention that this tweet has 28 million views? That’s a lot of angst. That’s a lot of people seeking answers and wanting a voice.
People are struggling to connect with something. Christianity just ain’t it for them.
The answers to the question posed by the tweet reveal why.
Judgmentalism
For example (the cute microphone is a link to the original replies in each quote) :
“My single mother pastor was telling women they shouldn’t have babies out of wedlock bc they’re going to hell.” 🎤
The single-mother pastor not only went all in on hypocrisy, but she then lied when she said that single mothers would go to hell. This is one of the fundamental problems with modern Christianity. As practiced by many Christians, it is a judgment-based creed that violates a key tenet of Jesus, this one in John 8:4–7. In it, he mocks a bunch of fundamentalists who are up in arms over an adulteress:
Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”
Whether or not Jesus actually said these words isn’t important. Love and forgiveness were his most common themes in all of the Bible’s translations.
This is missing from most modern Christian teaching and, especially, fundamentalist discourse.
Vindictiveness
Some tweeters responded with stories of vindictiveness from church leaders:
“When the pastor had a misunderstanding with my mom and he made the congregation pray against her.” 🎤
I call this going Old Testament on someone. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, and all that.
The Old Testament is full of blood, lust, and violence, which tend to obfuscate its core teaching moments centered around forgiveness and empathy. When Jesus arrived on the scene and started to yell at the Pharisees, part of his mission was to correct fatal flaws in existing tradition.
One of those traditions was the concept of revenge. He repeatedly insisted that revenge was a big, “no,” and that forgiveness and love were to be the unifying force of everyone and everything.
He even distilled the Ten Commandments down to two: Loving God and loving your neighbors. The first one does not mean bending over with your pants down and waiting for your heavenly spanking. It simply means listening for daily guidance.
Sexual assault by clergy
Many answers to the tweet’s question are visceral reactions to awful things that have happened. When stuff like this happens, it’s little wonder people become atheists:
“i went to my pastor about being molested and he told me God allows things like that to happen to us so we can be a living testimony for others.” 🎤
In reply to that one, another wrote:
“I was molested and raped for 7 years of my life by my stepfather. I got pregnant from it. I was 16 when I gave birth. My father is a preacher and he told me ‘God wanted me and your stepmom to have a baby and this is how he made that happen’ yes I understand how you feel 😢 🎤
What we are witnessing here is one reply to the original question that describes an obvious falsehood on the part of a pastor in response to a crime. The reply to that tweet describes yet another crime committed by a preacher. A crime that is too common, as the allegations that have swept the Roman Catholic and Baptist religious communities have revealed.
It’s fair to say at this point, “That’s not a demonstration of morality. That’s a victim crying out.” I mentioned this at the beginning of this article.
It’s true that such obvious manifestations of immorality are easy to identify and flag. Not just by its victims, but by any reasonable person. But I get the sense from these responses that the victims in these cases moved on enough to become moral atheists. People we should all listen to.
These extreme examples, where priests and pastors and preachers are directly involved in grotesquely harmful acts, provide powerful ammunition for those who want to discredit Christianity. But they also provide clarity and meaning to disaffected lives.
Fundamentalists would throw a Bible in their faces anyway, even though these people will probably be forever lost to any kind of formal Christian practice.
Instead of screaming at them with a Bible in our hands, Christians should listen to them. They offer important lessons as survivors, and their stories need to be broadcast so we can eradicate the scourge that Christianity has become.
Hypocrisy
There are other, less harrowing examples of people rejecting Christianity. These can be quite simple:
“the christians not christianing 🎤”
This is the essence of the problem. Of course, the sexual assaults are awful, but this one tweet establishes the festering sore that moral atheists frequently take note of.
When I think about Christians not Christianing, I’m not only thinking of those kinds of moments where fundamentalist preachers like Jerry Fallwell Jr. get caught with their pants down:
That’s obviously not a good look for the supposedly pious Christian, and it’s hypocritical, but if people want to walk around with their flies open, who am I to judge?
You want to walk around with your fly open with some party girl? Cool. Have at it. Just don’t tell other people they can’t do it. That’s just slimy.
It’s a case of Judgment Syndrome. There are millions upon millions of cases of fundamentalists acting out on their sex drives who then raise a fist at you when you do it.
Christians not Christaning goes far beyond a few wayward televangelists. Hypocrisy becomes has become institutionalized in the Christian world. For example: Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.1
Liberty University is a Christian university that has scandal baked into its campus to such a degree that it is now a permanent feature.
Atheists wouldn’t notice these things if they had a broken moral compass. They often become enraged at the deep level of hypocrisy they find in Christian churches, writing, and teaching. They look at it all and wonder where the moral code is.
They look at the insanity of book bans and wonder, “Umm, hello? The Bible? Why isn’t that banned?” The Bible is full of sex and violence. There are parts of it that kids shouldn’t read, if you’re thinking that there are books kids shouldn’t read.
Naturally, there are those who reject Christianity as just another myth, to be given no more credence than the Greek gods or any other fictional deity, as illustrated by this response from another Twitter user:
The support and encouragement of pedophilia by the church. The grooming of children.
And god is fake. Jesus is made up.
The Bible is horrific and immoral babble.
And as a whole Christianity ideology is abhorrent. 🎤
That’s how I felt until a few years ago. I can tell you from personal experience that there is no amount of evangelism that will change that kind of thinking.
Human Sacrifice
This is one of the more challenging questions for Christians, so I’ll conclude with this final reply to the tweet’s question:
What type of father puts his own son on the cross to die? And not only that made him die for people who he knew were never gonna believe in him anyway. 🎤2
This is certainly a valid question that wouldn’t come from an amoral individual.
Some of this, I suspect, centers around the idea that most of us at one point feel utterly helpless in the face of God. The question even sometimes becomes: Is God moral? One of my favorite visual illustrations of this question comes from Neill Blomkamp, the director of the film “District 9,” in his three-minute film: “God:Serengeti:”
There aren’t many worse feelings than helplessness. And besides, nobody likes a bully (with the apparent exception of 78 million American voters).
Preaching “Jesus saves” has probably killed more people than it has saved. For me, Jesus saves me on a daily basis. But it’s really no one else’s business. Sometimes he even speaks to me in those quiet recesses of the mind where no other voices roam. But I came into Christianity kicking and screaming. I rejected its essence until I didn’t, until I was pulled into it by what I consider miraculous means that I can’t describe in a short post.
I’m not here to evangelize that. Hell, my own faith is shaky enough. No atheist is likely to benefit much from my version of it, anyway. Instead, I am here to praise the moral atheist. They know more than many of us who claim to know God.
Besides, who am I to tell the moral atheist how to live? After all, if God came to me with a faith offering, there was probably a good reason for it. As Mark 2:17 says:
And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”
This means that I’m probably the one who should be listening to the moral atheist, not the other way around.
The world needs more listeners, don’t you think? The next time an atheist raises a red flag, check it out. You’ll probably discover a serious problem that needs to be talked about.
Thanks for reading!
NOTES
Read the full Twitter thread here.
French, David. 2023. “Opinion | the Worst Scandal in American Higher Education Isn’t in the Ivy League.” Nytimes.com. The New York Times. October 22, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/22/opinion/liberty-university-scandal-education.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5Ew.1fe3.mImnWf_6H8ZW&smid=url-share. (non paywall link)
The answer that works for me is that he didn’t put his son on the cross, but put himself on the cross as a part of experiencing the full range of human emotion and injustice. The mistake evangelists make is expecting other people to believe this. We all must come to our own conclusions about questions of God. Some of us will find my conclusion ridiculous. Others will not, but both sets of opinions will form independently of anything I say.
Well written. What you will find online is many atheists will follow Christian leaders who are spreading a message of compassion and love. I follow Rev. Ed Trevors, even though I've been an atheist for 40 years.
I consider myself a zen/methodist.