Why I Am Not a Christian
She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
Born and raised in the Bible Belt, I have almost six decades of experience with the social anxiety associated with confessing that I am not a Christian.
The paradox of this anxiety, I suppose, is that the particular type of Christianity I have lived among in South Carolina is strongly grounded in witnessing and being very cheerfully public about one’s faith. “Let us pray” not as invitation but as directive.
As a public school teacher for 18 years, I was under the added weight of fearing that I would be outed in ways that threatened me socially andprofessionally. But when I moved to higher education, I really felt no more comfort in expressing my lack of faith — even as I was often directly asked by students, even though it was a professionally safe place to be honest.
In fact, it has always been far easier to share with students my communist/socialist/Marxist leanings than to say simply, “I am an atheist.”
The personal recognition wasn’t an easy journey, but during college, including reading and re-reading Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not a Christian” and a significant amount of existential philosophy, I came to terms with ethical and moral groundings as well as being entirely comfortable with those ideals being in no way connected to God or organized religion.
Since my college years overlapped with the rise of the Moral Majority and Religious Right, that disconnect wasn’t even complicated. The most passionately Christian people of my community growing up and then the most vocal Christians in the public and political spheres of the Reagan era confirmed for me that I had zero interest in such anger, hatred, and most of all, hypocrisy.
I have taken comfort instead throughout my adult life in literature — works such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, which directly interrogate all the ways I find religion, and Christianity, more apt to be a bludgeoning device than a balm.
Religious text as a tool for authority, religion as the opiate of the masses — as Emily Dickson wrote as a contemporary of Karl Marx:
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit –
Strong Hallelujahs roll –
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul –
In 2018, with Donald Trump courting and maintaining the passionate support of the religious right, specifically evangelicals across the South, and with the South Carolina summer primaries in which Republicans run aggressive TV ads shouting “100% pro-life” and images of candidates in front of NRA rallies and holding (even shooting) guns, I have never been more confident in why I am not a Christian.
During this time of Trumplandia, as well, one of the most devout and moral people I know happens to be a Muslim — whose faith is routinely and grossly demonized by Trump and his Christian base.
Christianity is rarely about love and charity, but often about tribalism and the calculated use of higher authority to maintain or gain power.
The narrator in Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night argues:
“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.
“It’s that part of an imbecile,” I said, “that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”
As I grow older, it becomes more and more imperative that I seek a moral and ethical life — something I equally recognize as incredibly hard to achieve as a mere human among humanity, as we are all so flawed, so fragile, so unwilling to sacrifice and risk in the name of the hypothetical Other, the faceless and nameless human we choose either to treat as our brother/sister or to leave mostly ignored in the basement closet.
Christianity, I fear, too often allows the worst in us to thrive instead of inspiring us to be the loving community we are capable of being.
Love, community, and holding sacred all humans’ dignity — these are what matter to me, and why I am not a Christian.
