Saving An Atheist Soul

In my last article for Chowk (“Talking Politics with Friends: A Step-by-step Guide”, 11 December 2024), I mentioned we can and should have conversations about difficult subjects. I then laid out how to discuss politics and stay best friends. Today I want to look at the other subject, religion, and how, for me anyway, it looks a lot like the immigrant experience.

First, we need to go back in time. The early 2000s were a godsend for a new band of atheist writers warning of religion’s hateful, malignant ways. In the fearful days and months after 9/11, the “New Atheists” urged everyone not to be fooled by the comforting exterior, religion “poisons everything.” These writers were and still are some of my heroes: Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richards Dawkins and Dan Dennet, the ironically named “Four Horsemen” (after the biblical sign of the coming apocalypse). There were many others too who published at the time about their trouble with one or all of the gods.

As a previously devout Christian who had begun to doubt, I was convinced by their infallible arguments and shrewd debating skills and fell in with this wave of rationality. It was unstoppable and everywhere all at once. You could find a humanist, skeptic or atheist group in any city in North America by the start of the 2010s and feel very much part of the congregation.

All this forms the backdrop to a more recent trend. One I feel myself; one playing out everywhere all at once. So, from here on I will do my best to talk about that trend through my own experience and you can take from it what you will.

For all the promises of being better off for knowing the truth of science, I didn’t feel satisfied. When I met other humanists (or atheists or skeptics, because we really liked our labels), we ended up speaking about religious people and how ignorant they all were. Religiously-based holidays like Christmas were to be actively avoided as commercial and superstitious. Religious schooling was designed to brainwash; prayers before a meal to manipulate. Besides all this, my experience studying and living around Baptists in Oklahoma, some of the most religious people you will ever meet, had been warm and inviting.

There was no “aha!” moment but there started in me a creeping feeling of being part of something I didn’t particularly like and I sensed that these sentiments needed to be kept to myself. The “new” atheism was becoming a religious movement.

By 2016, let’s just say there was room for a few new heroes. One of the first was Alain de Botton, the founder of the School of Life videos you might have seen on YouTube. His philosophy was enchanting to me because he didn’t throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. He looked on religion as necessary to humans, unavoidable even, and suggested we keep its best parts. He did this by admiring stately church buildings, religious art, ancient rituals and the creation of sacredness by integrating all these parts into a whole.

It was a hard message to ignore having grown up with occasional attendance at Sunday schools and watching family members say grace before meals. Maybe this was not a malignant tumour after all, just part of me that needed acknowledgement?

Alain stirred a new fascination with religion in me that was quickly fueled by the rise of Jordan Peterson. Peterson came to public light by first creating YouTube videos and then testifying before Canadian parliament on trans rights in Canada. His treatment more than his views catapulted him to fame. In late 2016, on his home campus at the University of Toronto, he was shouted down and screamed at for expressing his opinion on a new piece of legislation in Canada that could mean criminal charges for misgendering (calling someone by the wrong pronoun). We had entered the “cancel culture” era that lasted from 2016 and has hopefully breathed its last.

Peterson opened my eyes again to the Judeo-Christian bible. Not the verses criticized as incoherent or farcical by Hitchens, Dawkins and co, but the timeless stories like Cain and Abel. You should know that their story is only about 400 words, or about 8 tweets, long. In that scarcity is encoded the eternal threat of jealousy, sibling rivalry, fortune, revenge and the call to sacrifice. This was another way of understanding the Bible: as the distillation of knowledge through generations and generations of writers applying its lessons over and over again to better refine the prescription for the good life. It’s one I had to put away the measuring tape and calculator to understand; it remains a work in progress.

I have been back to church, but I do not call myself a Christian, other than in a cultural sense. I am not the only one, it turns out. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim turned Atheist, has now converted to Christianity. Talk of coming full circle! She is so convinced that her new faith is a necessary force for good in the world that she recently took on her former co-non-believer, Richard Dawkins, in a debate.

This immigration of belief is not really much different than moving across land borders. First, you’re confronted by a new and frightening reality against which you put up your best defenses. Over time, you integrate and even adapt, possibly relinquishing old and cherished ideas. Later, though, you see those old ideas with new eyes; you’re capable of seeing beyond right and wrong to their core message. This has certainly been my story: from Christianity, to Atheism and now back to something in between … but not really.