Why churches sometimes cause atheism

George Gilmore

ReligionAndSpirituality.com

January 31, 2007

One of the challenges issued by "Gaudium et Spes" (Joy and Hope), the "charter-document" of the Second Vatican Council, is the issue of atheism. Why do the formerly believing countries of Western culture find themselves more and more atheist?

The Council affirms: "[B]elievers themselves frequently bear some responsibility for this situation. For, taken as a whole, atheism is not a spontaneous development but stems from a variety of causes, including a critical reaction against religious beliefs, and in some places against the Christian religion in particular. Hence believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion."

The Council does not investigate what might be the institutional responsibility, the Catholic and other Christian churches' responsibility, for such a sea-change. How are the institutional Christian churches responsible for atheist reaction?

Let's look at a few possible causes.

We might start with the reactionary conduct of religious institutions, such as the rise of clericalism, the substitution of ministerial service by authoritarian power, the emphasis on fear, and self-protection.

Like other large institutions, there can be an instinct for self-preservation, "circling the wagons," and an urgency to justify the institution's continued existence.

Historically, in the face of such an implication of irrelevance, the Christian churches have responded, "Yes, we are relevant, and you better take us seriously, or you will make God mad, bring disastrous calamities upon yourselves and your countries, and you may go to hell." No longer adult challenge, but infantile threat.

Given such a reactionary fear, some institutional churches find themselves petrified in several senses: They are terrified of their visible unimportance, and they can become fixated, petrified, turned to stone, as they fall back on conservative and traditional appeals to fear.

It's always the most fateful of strategic decisions to use the tactics of the last war to meet the present challenge.

It is a pity that religious institutions do not have to undergo aggressive "sunset legislation." Religious institutions, if they are truly, in the biblical image, "worth their salt," could with evangelical humility and "metanoia" re-establish themselves every century.

According to Father Theodore Steeman, O.F.M. (in "The Study of Atheism: A Sociological Approach"), "[A] high degree of institutionalization of religious systems gives them a functional autonomy which makes them continue their existence even though out of touch with the real core orientation of operative culture." To my knowledge, this photocopied paper has never been published, and deserves being cited extensively.

"The practice of religion can in such a structure become a pure Sunday-affair, the homage to God a verbal recognition of established formulae; the real life-informing force of religion, at any rate, is far gone. Or, perhaps, we should say that the real religion, the real experience of the Sacred is elsewhere, not in the churches, not in the official religious institutions, not in the solemn proclamation of God, but in the deeper dynamics of Western culture ... the religious institutions do not function as religious institutions."

Religion can then become both over-intellectualized and trivialized. "Every form of objectification and expression is, although necessary for communication, essentially inadequate." "[E]very interpretation is really a eulogy." "Nowhere in the world, apparently, has religion been so thoroughly intellectualized as in Western society."

The great German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel eloquently described philosophy (and by extension, theology) through the metaphor of the "owl of Minerva." Minerva/Athena was the Greco-Roman goddess of wisdom, and the owl was her symbol. It appeared only as darkness arrived. Namely, real life had to take place before subsequent explanations could occur.

The issue is nicely summarized by Howard Thurman, onetime dean of the chapel at Boston University in a "Long Search" video: "Religious experience is dynamic, it's fluid, it's effervescent, it's yeasty, all these words. But the mind can't handle that, so it has to imprison the religious experience in some way, get it bottled up. Then, when it gets quiet enough, it meaning the religious experience, then the mind draws a bead on it and extracts out of this ferment concepts, notions, dogmas, so that the religious experience will make sense to the mind. But meanwhile, the religious experience goes on experiencing. Therefore, whatever creed there is, whatever theology there is, it's always a little out of date."

This is compounded by a concern among many busy, or insecure, people, that religion should not in any way be a challenging pilgrimage. A Methodist minister also in the film series "The Long Search" recognizes how plaintively many ordinary believers shy away from challenge and religious pilgrimage. There can be an idolatry caused by excessive security: "But can't we reduce it all to something that I can wrap up and put on the mantel or put here or here and know that I've got it?"

Steeman remarks, "It is precisely because the religious system is removed so far from the immediate problematic of life and is a 'solved problem,' that life can go on without being greatly hampered by religious considerations." There is "an honest incapability to square the traditional religious doctrine with man's self-understanding and life-experience." "Religious consciousness has been objectified to a measure in which it has lost contact with the direct experience of life as a mystery. A clearly defined God is a domesticated God."

"The affirmation of God's existence is more a purely intellectual ascent to a conceptual truth than a deeply sensed presence of the Sacred Reality in the life of man, ... resting in itself, formulated mainly in terms of an objective reality and a set of distinct practices, ... in its abstractness, in its limiting the freedom of man's creative search, in the lack of creativity and concern among its adherents."

Religious scandals further undercut the credibility of religious institutions.

There have been times in the history of the churches when everything was for sale, which reveals the stark necessity for ongoing Reformation. The contemporary sex-abuse scandal reveals believers not only betrayed by neurotic priests, but betrayed by self-protecting and institution-protecting bishops and cardinals who often have victimized victims to allow the churches to save face.

Security needs have been replaced by "the rationalization process of the West." With the rise of science, people do not run to God or to religious leadership to cope with perceived danger. Western culture has moved away from needing the churches to supply security, to a need for challenge.

The central, even revolutionary, Christian faith of commitment is not met by a security-oriented faith of trust. Overemphasis on security from "object-defining" castes of mind can only render hostile the ever-growing percentage of educated Western humanity.

Since science in its many forms has been able to satisfy many, many of humankind's needs for security, any religious overemphasis on paranoia has met indifference from most educated people.

"Thus religion is implanted at the fringes of life, as a safety valve in utter emergency; the real dynamic of life lies elsewhere. ... [M]odern man is a man who has learned to rely on his own power; for him the magical use of the Sacred has lost all meaning, and the aspect of need in his existence does not so much make him cry out to a supernatural resource of life but is understood as a challenge to his own creativity. By rationally understanding the world he lives in, this world has lost much of its mystery to man. Thus the Sacred is not found in this world, but the emphasis is on the transcendence of God, and it is found rather in the inner drive of man to realize himself in a responsible action in the world."

"These are the atheists for whom the whole of the religious tradition has become meaningless, because in full honesty and against the background of their life experience and of their understanding of man's task and possibilities in this world, the tradition has nothing to say whatsoever. ... Religion is too far removed from what really moves these men and women: a medical practice, a serious dedication to science as a human task, a humanitarian enterprise, a deep devotion to the well-being of mankind. For many of these, religious concerns are of no help to their work. ... "

Contradicting this entire negative train of thought, there are stunning positive examples of laity, priestly, episcopal, and papal faith of commitment and adult challenge, across the planet and throughout the last century. But the weaknesses of humankind, as dramatized in much of today's column, also continue to afflict the churches.

Truly Christ is risen, but truly also his church falls on its face, as He did, under the weight of the Cross.

Pity that much of the cross' weight is of the church's own making.> - - -

Dr. George Gilmore, Ph.D., is professor of humanities at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala. http://www.religionandspirituality.com/christianity/view.php?StoryID070131-093357-8818r