Explaining Nativity Scenes to Kids

A nativity scene or creche.

Every Christmas season here in the States, Christians set up traditional nativity scenes featuring Baby Jesus. These scenes are a good opportunity for non-Christian kids to learn a little bit about the historical Jesus and about Christianity. Here’s a simple guideline to follow, to help kids (and maybe you) understand the nativity scene better. The text is written at a simple level to help you convey this information to children or to let you share it with them directly.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

The Christmas story is made up, but Jesus was a real person. He was a Jewish preacher and faith healer, and after his death his followers said he had been the divine king (“Messiah”, “Anointed”, “Christos”). Many people followed him, and that group turned into Christianity. Christianity has became the biggest religion in the world. Jesus’ mother, Mary, was also probably a real person, although maybe she didn’t like her son being a wandering preacher. Joseph’s name might be made up, and in real life Mary might have been a single mother.  

“Nativity” means a person’s birth

You’re a native of the place where you were born. That's where you “had your nativity”. The Christmas story was invented to show that Jesus had his nativity in Bethlehem. People expected the divine king to be from Bethlehem because that was King David’s city. Jesus was actually from a little town in a poor country, Galilee.

Stable, manger, and animals

The historical Jesus was a poor man who preached mostly to other poor people. In the end, rich and powerful men had him killed. The Christmas story is made up, but it does remind us that Jesus was poor. To show how poor Jesus was, the story says his crib was a food trough for animals, called a manger. He and his parents are in a stable with animals instead of in an inn or a house, which also shows how poor they were. 

Angels and shepherds

Angel means “messenger”, and in the Christmas story, angels bring the message that Jesus has been born. But instead of telling kings or wise men, they tell poor shepherds. When Christianity started, the people who liked it were mostly poor, and rich people usually didn’t join. In the story, the shepherds remind us that Jesus’ message went mostly to poor people. 

Three kings and the star

The star and the three kings are from a different Bible story and don’t belong here in the Christmas story. In the other story, Jesus is more like a little prince than a poor child, so the other story is like the opposite of the Christmas story. In this story, magicians follow a magic star to Jesus’ house in Bethlehem, and they bring him expensive gifts. The second story also has little boys being killed by soldiers, so it’s a bad story for Christmas. Even though the magicians and star are from a different story, Christians traditionally add them to the nativity scene. They also changed the magicians to three kings, to show that Jesus was more powerful than kings even when he was a child.

Where does the story come from? 

After Jesus was killed, his followers made up more and more stories about him to make him seem more important. The Christmas story says that Jesus’ father was God instead of Joseph, and that's how important Jesus was, even though he was poor. After all these years, Christians still love the Christmas story because it shows Jesus as a helpless, little baby. Everybody loves babies. Most religious leaders in history have been powerful men, but Jesus was different. The humble scene around the manger reminds us that Christianity has always held a special appeal for the poor. 

Note on historicity

The Christmas story comes from the prologue of the third gospel, Luke. The first gospel written, Mark, starts with Jesus as a man being baptized under John the Baptist. Baptism was a token of repentance in the face of an upcoming apocalypse. We don’t know anything about Jesus before that. The next two gospels followed Mark’s outline but added extra material. Among other things, each gospel added stories of Jesus’ birth. Matthew, written for Jews, portrayed Jesus as like Moses. Luke, written for poor gentiles living in crowded cities of strangers, portrayed Jesus as like those poor gentiles themselves. Luke includes some stories of Jesus’ life and teachings that scholars believe to be authentic, but the prologue is considered mythical.

Plenty of atheists will tell you that there’s no evidence that Jesus existed, but that’s a fringe idea from outside mainstream, secular scholarship. The idea that Jesus was a myth has been around for over a hundred years, and it has gone nowhere. The top scholars on the topic of Jesus agree that he was a historical person. See, for example, E. P. Sanders, Geza Vermes, Bart Ehrman, and John Dominic Crossan.

2021: Parents can decide for themselves whether to bring up the issue of human sacrifice. The helpless little baby is destined to die a miserable death on a cross. Valerie Tarico discusses this angle of the story, in case you want to know more. 

2014

I donated a draft copy to the "children's
library" at Sunday Assembly Seattle.

Friendly Atheism 

Today I was the guest speaker at Sunday Assembly Seattle. Sunday Assembly is a secular “church,” a celebration of life with singing and community. They asked me to talk on the topic of why atheists can act like jerks sometimes, based on my September 28th blog post. Today I’m addressing the topic in a less confrontational way and suggesting that atheists ought to achieve greater degrees of self-awareness, niceness, and humility. Here’s the vision of atheism that I talked about. 

Atheists ought to be self-aware. 

We don’t have any holy books or priests to tell us that our thoughts and feelings are right and true. If we’re proud or offended, we have no choice but to own those feelings. We can’t imagine that God is proud of us or that we are offended on his behalf. We don’t understand human reason to be a gift from God, nor can we expect reason to function objectively. We see ourselves as evolved animals with biased, self-serving minds.

Atheists ought to be nice. 

We know that this is our only life. We can’t look at starving people and tell ourselves that they deserve their lot because of sins they committed before they were born. We can’t overlook suffering in this life by looking forward to an afterlife. We can’t look at differences between races or genders and say that God wants it that way. We don’t have a holy book that glorifies killing infidels, apostates, gays or anyone else. We ought to be especially nice to the people who disagree with us. If people disagree with us, we never think that they’re being controlled by Satan, that they are committing blasphemy, or that they deserve to be tortured forever in hell. When we feel antipathy toward someone in an "enemy camp," we should be self-aware enough to be skeptical of our own negativity.  

And atheists ought to be humble. 

We know we’re not God’s chosen people, and we know our truths aren’t God’s truths. We understand ourselves to be biased and fallible just like everyone else. We know that humans are varied, both in their genes and in their experiences. We don’t think that the King of the Universe wants everyone to think the same way we do. We ought to be self-aware enough to recognize our feelings of self-righteousness as bias rather than rationality.

Where we’re at

Maybe one day evangelicals will say, “Those atheists are going to hell, but they sure are self-aware, nice, and humble.” My sense is that we’re a long way off. Honestly, we’re already behind. In a nation that has defined itself as religious, atheists are a distrusted, misunderstood minority. Meanwhile, atheist authors make big bucks by attacking religion with one-sided criticisms. This “anti-theist” contingent reinforces hostility and arrogance among atheists, and it reinforces the idea among believers that we’re a bunch of haters.

What next?

A number of different things are going on that seem to point to the rise of a more humane atheism. Authors such as Alain de Botton and Chris Stedman are showing a nicer side to atheism, while others, such as Robert Wright, Ara Norenzayan, and David S. Wilson are showing us the good that religion has accomplished historically. Christians don't talk about the good that atheism has done in the world, but we atheists are open-minded enough to talk about the good that religion has done. Our ability to see “them” more objectively is a big step forward. Sunday Assembly is a step forward of a different sort, giving secular people a way to gather and form community. Here in Seattle I’m working on setting up moderated dialogs that might help atheists address sensitive topics with greater sensitivity. The theory of evolution also offers us an opportunity to share a natural vision of the world and our place in it. In particular, natural selection explains why we are born into this world ready to form ourselves into “moral tribes,” as psychologist Joshua Greene calls them. Some people think these changes are big enough that we should leave the “atheist” label behind, associated as it is with us-versus-them thinking. All of these developments don’t add up to a movement, but maybe they are evidence of a shift in atheist culture. Or maybe the beginning of a shift. 

2014

See ReThink Prize webpage here. 

Ten Secular Commandments

The ReThink Prize is offering $1,000 each for the ten best secular commandments, as determined by a panel of judges. The prize is promoting a new book, Atheist Mind Humanist Heart, which promotes a vision of atheism as positive and ethical rather than negative and reactive. Here are the ten “commandments” I submitted, each with a note on why I submitted it. 

Know yourself to be the gloriously evolved animal that you are. 

Our evolutionary history tells us two important truths: that we are connected in flesh and blood to all living things on earth, and that we are something new and wonderful. 

Connect yourself to a caring community. 

Secular people generally don’t connect to communities the way believers often do, so here’s your reminder. It’s natural and healthy to be part of a group that cares about you. 

Thou shalt not get sucked into the wasteful vices that corporations keep pushing on us. 

Some corporations run entirely on their ability to get you to consume their unhealthy products. They are devoted full time to distracting you from a better life. Enjoy what you like, but don’t get sucked in.

Focus on the things that you control and that make the most difference. In particular, focus on how you respond to things.

You can’t do everything, but you can do something. 

Be good to your “us” and be good to your “them.”

Invest in your community and the people you think of as “us.” Check your natural instinct to think ill of the people that you think of as “them.”

Expect exceptions as part of the natural order.

The world isn’t as simple as it looks. The mind expects bright lines and clear definitions, but nature is variable. In a world of exceptions, humans in particular are exceptional.

Pay your way and then some. 

Help humanity move forward faster rather than making it advance more slowly. 

Sing together. 

People find lots of occasions to do sing together. Find more. Coming together is the reason we evolved singing in the first place. 

Check your bias. 

Your intuitions are generally accurate but bound to be biased in predictable directions. Just because you feel like something is true doesn’t mean it’s true. 

Contend with each other over actions and policies, but don’t fight over thoughts and words. 

Creeds and labels separate us into opposed camps. There are plenty of practical issues to disagree over, but don’t argue about beliefs or identities. 

Historical Note: The historical Ten Commandments are well known, but many secular people don’t recognize what was special about them. The first ancient laws were commonly lists of punishments for crimes, and most of the Hebrew law was like this, specifying punishments for transgressions. The Ten Commandments, however, issue absolute imperatives, such as “Thou shalt not kill.” This apodictic form of law was unique to the Israelites. In ancient law, murder was usually a crime that you should avoid because you’d be punished for it. In the Ten Commandments, Yahweh just tells you “Don’t murder.” Why were the Israelites unique in this? Maybe standard laws were created by rulers and promulgated to their subjects, so it made sense to specify the punishments that the rulers will mete out to transgressors. But the Ten Commandments come from a time when the Israelites had only recently given up nomadic life for permanent settlements, and their tribal egalitarianism was still strong. Maybe the Ten Commandments represent not a lord’s threat to his subjects but rather a community’s voice, declaring that they are, among other things, a people who don’t murder each other (or at least really really shouldn't).

Agreeing How to Disagree

Daniel Dennett offers four rules for
more intelligent disagreement.

What if atheists were the best at disagreeing? What if we were the ones that could be counted on not to attack straw men or exaggerate someone else’s viewpoint? In theory, we atheists should be the best at deliberation because we have no holy books or dogmas to bias us. Furthermore, we don’t consider believers to be worthy of hell, and we don’t consider ourselves to be God’s favorites, so we ought to be the nicest, most respectful disagreers out there. That’s my dream, but we’re not exactly there yet. Daniel Dennett advocates high standards for critical commentary and I think we can do more along those lines. Here’s a concrete suggestion: replace the debate format with an intentional, moderated dialog. The debate format is outdated, and we could use a new way to disagree, one that better anticipates the human tendency to deceive oneself.

Debating is Outdated…

In October, Bill Maher and Ben Affleck got into a heated exchange about Islam. They talked over each other for a while, and the next day everyone was saying that their guy had won. Online, the Maher and Affleck partisans would link to the same video clip, and each would claim the score was 1-0 in their favor. Arguing over each other doesn’t work, and the problem is that it looks like it works. Each side thought that reason had prevailed, which shows that it hadn’t. If anyone, Maher is the one who prevailed because he got a heated exchange on tape and got a lot of free publicity. But did the conversation get anywhere? People on both sides seem to say that there’s nothing more to be said. Each thinks that their side has been proven right, and that people on the other side are just being pig-headed. Audiences like to watch smart people talk about important issues, but the antagonistic emotions of the debate trump rationality. Could a better format for a discussion reduce how much the participants talk past each other? After all, the debate format hails from a time when faithful people thought God-given Reason could deduce the Truth. Now we know that humans are political side-takers, and that reason is primarily our tool for making ourselves look good. 

…Because Reason Doesn’t Rule.

It’s traditional in Western culture to give reason pride of place among human faculties. The thinking part of you thinks that the thinking part of you should be in charge. We tell others that we believe what we believe because we’ve reasoned it out. We atheists in particular love to assert that we came by our faithlessness through rigorous cognitive effort. With the premise that reason rules, it’s logical to deduce that you can bring people’s opinions closer together by giving them more information and a better understanding of a topic. The more information that people have in common, the more their opinions should converge. In fact, the opposite is true. After an even-handed debate on a controversial issue, the audience finds itself further apart rather than closer together. It turns out that we’re biased little social apes, not detached intellects. When we hear an argument that agrees with us, our intuition responds positively before our reason has had time to analyze the argument. My side’s arguments sure sound rock-solid! But the other side’s reasons? We intuitively react to them as threats, and we spot their flaws effortlessly. That’s how an even-handed debate polarizes people rather than helping each side understand the other side better. 

Your Instincts Know a Fight When They See One

It turns out that instead of detached intellects, we’re flesh-and-blood creatures connected emotionally to each other, and especially to our respectve groups. The thinking part of your brain might think it’s watching a rational debate about, say, abortion, but your unconscious mind recognizes the event as a battle between your tribe and the enemy. You listen to the enemy debater tell horrible lies, and your blood boils. Conflict between groups can trigger the fight-or-flight response, which channels blood away from the part of your brain that makes you reasonable. You sit quietly, but you’d like to throw something or yell. The Internet, with its anonymity and lack of social cues, is even worse. Forums are littered with endless threads of people arguing back and forth across political and religious divides. Each side presents logical arguments the way a rational person is expected to do, but the energy driving the flame war is good old us-versus-them. These threads can get abusive pretty fast. An attempt at rational argument quickly turns into mere arguing.

The human mind comes with several self-serving biases. Our ancestors evolved to get ahead in life, not to evaluate life objectively. Some positive biases aren’t too bad, such as thinking you’re better than you really are, but a host of other biases evolved to help us unite against the hated enemy. These instinctive biases get us to judge people by what group they belong to and to see one’s own group as more virtuous, reasonable, worthy and varied than out-groups. When intellectual disagreements turn vicious, they typically concern questions of identity: religion, gender, race, nationality, politics, and evolution. People who are on the opposite side from you on these sorts of issues are generally “them,” the enemy. Truth is the first casualty of war, and objectivity is the first casualty of us-versus-them thinking. 

New Ways to Disagree

So if we’re hopeless partisans doomed to see things from a biased perspective, can we ever communicate across a tribal divide? Yes, but it takes work. Daniel Dennett has long popularized four rules for criticizing constructively. The best one, I think, is that before you can criticize someone you have to summarize their viewpoint so generously that they agree with your summary. This approach has been called "kind," but as Dennett points out the real benefit is that it's effective. By acting non-antagonistically, we set aside our us-versus-them instincts. By following Dennett’s four rules, you communicate to your own unconscious mind that the exchange isn’t a fight, and with any luck your opponent's unconscious gets the same message. I’ve used these rules in correspondence and have achieved mixed results, which is to say that they work miracles. Typically, a reason-oriented, antagonistic debate feels compelling but leads nowhere. To get mixed results means enjoying an unprecedented amount of success communicating across a tribal divide. These rules work well enough that I’d like to see them incorporated into a moderated dialog, in place of a debate. Another of Dennett’s rules is that one should describe areas of agreement with the person that you’re criticizing. This step confounds the us-versus-them instincts, too. In fact, in a dialog, I’d like to see the moderator working with the participants to find more common ground between them. Debates highlight differences but systematically exclude commonalities. 

It seems like rational debate should be effective in reaching agreement, but instead it’s usually divisive. Now that we understand our own evolved tendencies to lie to ourselves, it’s obvious why debates don’t work the way we thought they should. With this improved self-understanding, we could use a better way to frame disagreements. So my friends and I are working on something along these lines.

Update, February 2017: The Seattle Atheists nonprofit has now hosted three moderated dialogs, one on Islam and Islamophobia, one on historical Jesus, and the last on Christianity. They have been well received, and the last one in particular seemed successful. Here’s a link to the Christianity video.

Christianity: Good and Bad. An honest debate among atheists. 

Further Reading

This post is based on insight gained from a number of different sources. Here are the major ones. 

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel C. Dennett. For the complete treatment of his four rules for criticizing.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. Kerry Patterson and Joseph Grenny. Focusing on the context of the conversation rather than content, avoiding impasses, managing emotions during verbal disagreements. Probably worth paging through at a bookstore even if you don’t buy it. 

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Kelly McGonigal. The flight-or-fight response versus the pause-and-plan response. 

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Jonathan Haidt. Emotional foundations of morality, including tribalism.

Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Joshua Greene. Emotional foundation of tribalism.

Thinking, Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman. Quick, effortless intuition versus slow, difficult deliberation. 

How We Decide. Jonah Lehrer. Emotional basis of decision-making. 

Other Evolution-Themed Posts

Crow Scientist is Live, 2020

[Review] Human Swarm, by Mark Moffett, 2019

Not “Race” but Ancestry, 2019

Testosterone for Amateurs, 2019

Evolution Unites Us All, 2018

March for Science, Seattle, my speech, 2017

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day, 2017

Mother Love and Human Nature, 2017

Kids and Grandmother Fish, 2017

Reading about Religion, 2014

Creatures of Love, 2011

Grief and the Human Animal, 2011

2014

Suffering Versus Faith

Last Monday in Seattle, Teresa MacBain, an ex-minister, gave a talk about building secular community. Incidentally, she strongly recommended singing together as an exercise in group bonding, which suggests that the Sunday Assembly may be on the right track. MacBain is the second ex-minister I’ve met who would like to see the secular community have more to offer in terms of community. The first was Richard Haynes, who hosts Atheist Nexus, the most active online atheist site I’ve found. For sure there are others like MacBain and Haynes. For myself, the only reason I know anything about community is my years of experience in a Unitarian congregation. As an introduction to her topic, MacBain recounted her personal story of losing her faith. For a minister, that basically means losing your job and your community. What would drive a minister to abandon her faith? For MacBain, it was the failure of theodicy. Theodicy is an answer to the philosophical puzzle of why the world that God controls is full of pain. Why do bad things happen to good people? Theologians and apologists have come up with plenty of explanations of why this makes sense, and most of the arguments are strong enough to convince those same theologians and apologists. But for MacBain, it wasn’t an abstract, philosophical issue. It was personal. Hurting people from her congregation came to her, and she had to tell them something. For centuries, elite men have been generating wordy explanations for what all this suffering is about, but those words don’t do much for flesh-and-blood humans who are actually suffering. MacBain tried to figure it all out so that she would know what to say when a congregant came to her and needed comfort. Instead, she came face-to-face with the realization that Christianity doesn’t really do much good for you here. The Christian tradition hails from a more brutal era when personal suffering was a given, and it is not in synch with modern sensibilities about individual justice. 

In the ancient world, everything around you demonstrated that you were not worth much. Human life was cheap. Famine, plague, war, wild animals and personal violence were all eager to do you in. If you survived, life didn’t have that much to offer the average person. You put in your time laboring in the fields, and maybe you didn’t starve. There were no police, social workers or other third parties looking out for you. In this context, God was great, and that meant he was too far beyond us to worry about our individual lives. That was true of both Zeus and Yahweh. Think of the little babies that Yahweh drowned without a tear in the Flood, not to mention the puppies, hedgehogs and other adorable critters. Think of Lot’s family, which Yahweh would have incinerated along with the evildoers of Sodom and Gomorrah. If it hadn’t been for Abraham intervening, Yahweh would have killed that family of innocents and not batted an eye. The story of Adam and Eve explains where death and suffering came from, but tellingly it doesn’t explain why we deserve death and suffering. What an individual deserves was not at issue. Likewise, when you died, you were just plain dead. God didn’t even bother to punish evildoers in a hell. The tribe mattered, but individuals didn’t.

It speaks highly of our civilization that the suffering of everyday people is felt so strongly that it becomes evidence that God doesn’t exist. Three thousand years ago, suffering was taken as evidence for God instead of against him. Your suffering showed that Yahweh was a total badass, and he had cursed you before you were born. All the pain that he inflicted on humans, what did it matter to El Shaddai, the Lord of the Holy Mountain? But today God gets called to account. Why, God, did you let this child die? This everyday child? We live in a culture where everything tells you that you do matter. You have police, firefighters and paramedics standing ready to help you when you need them. If you’re suicidal, people you don’t know are waiting for your phone call so they can talk you out of it. You elect your leaders. If someone in your family is beating you, society takes that as its business, not a private affair. These days, humans look out for each, and God doesn’t live up to our example. 

Maybe the Catholics are onto something with not letting women be priests. Men are, on average, more easily satisfied with abstract ideas, and you have to think pretty abstractly to be OK with a God who watches the Holocaust without lifting a finger. When a woman asks her minister why God let her daughter die, a female minister probably has a harder time saying it’s all part of God’s mysterious plan. If the minister is a mother herself, that line will be even harder for her to say. 

Believers like to say that they have an advantage over us because they can take comfort in God’s love even in the face of personal tragedy. Certainly some believers facing loss find support in their faith. In my experience, however, assurances that everything is in God’s hands are more assuring to the person speaking than to the one suffering. Telling a suffering person that God will make things all right often seems motivated more by a desire to protect one’s own feelings than to actually comfort the person who’s suffering. When my wife was dying, she was lucky to have a Unitarian minister tending to her. Our minister helped my wife face her mortal end without recourse to any supernatural palliatives, such as the promise of going to heaven or everything having a purpose. She helped my dying wife face her reality, not duck it. Maybe those of us who face loss straight can sometimes be more help than those who minimize a suffering person’s profound experience of loss. 

- - -

Macbain shared this link to a blog post with me. It’s by Rachel Held Evans and covers similar territory: http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/fail-abraham-test

2014

More Talk About Talking

Last weeks’ post about men talking over women generated a lot of commentary, so please allow me to clarify and elaborate. The universal relegation of women to second-class status is obviously a huge issue around the world, but here I’m focusing on one particular issue. The phenomenon of men talking over women deserves special attention, I suggest, because it’s ubiquitous and overlooked. That makes it a big opportunity for men to have their consciousnesses raised, and maybe even to make a real difference in how people communicate. What I recommend is that people spend some time observing conversations. There are plenty of gender-related dynamics to look for, but a good place to start is to watch who talks over whom. It can be eye-opening.

As with any social or political movement, feminism includes an us-versus-them element. Our social instincts provide use with adaptations such as pigheadedness and selective hearing so that we can successfully engage in identity-based, us-versus-them struggles. Feminists who try to prove male privilege have limited success because opponents can pigheadedly derail the conversation with straw man arguments, contentious demands for definitions, and other handy devices. If you cite the wage gap, an opponent can question all the details of how you compare one employee’s career to another’s. Any statistic is easy to question and possibly ignore. But what if someone observes a conversation and sees for himself how often men talk over women? Maybe seeing it happen will be like a Zen koan, an experience that circumvents logic to offer enlightenment. It’s hard to argue with something that one has seen oneself.

There are plenty of communication dynamics that one could look for, but the dynamic of men talking over women is easy to see and requires little interpretation. You could look for which participants in a conversation are one-upping each other and which are connecting with each other, but that can be subtle. You could see how much “air time” each participant takes up, but it’s generally OK for some people to talk more and others less. But when you see someone talk over someone else, that’s not a matter degree. No amount of shutting others down is good.

Self-awareness is a hallmark of post-modern society. More than any people before us, post-modern Westerners understand their perspectives as their own personal perspectives. Even so, we’re subject to blind spots and biases. Here’s an opportunity for some men in particular to learn a little more self-awareness. The subtext of this lesson is that the everyday interactions that you take for granted might reveal an underlying bias, if you just know how to look. That’s a big lesson.

Talking Over Women

In 1990, this book got people talking
about male and female conversation styles.

In social gatherings, it’s common to see men talking over women. I don’t think the Y-chromosome has a gene for interrupting women, but there’s no mistaking that males interrupt and talk over females more often than the reverse. In the geek population, it seems to be worse than average, and it’s probably also worse among people don’t know each other well, such as at a convention. The gamer and atheist communities can be uninviting or even hostile to women, and when women get talked over that doesn’t help. Geek conventions have taken to adopting explicit anti-harassment policies to help women be safer, and that’s great. I’d like to go further and implement an anti-interrupting policy. Women commonly have their voices silenced metaphorically, such as when their opinions are dismissed as hysterics. When a man talks over a woman in person, her voice is being silenced literally. How do we get that to stop?

In an open conversation with lots of people and no ground rules, a few people tend to dominate. They’re typically men, and I’ve often been one of them. To make the conversation more even, it helps to have some structure. The Burning Man discussions I lead are “walk and talks,” where everyone in the discussion answers yes/no questions by walking one direction or another. We also discuss the questions, and a few people tend to dominate the verbal discussion, but everyone gets to “speak up” by walking either left or right. When I’m moderating a panel at a game convention, during Q&A I give each member of the audience an opportunity to ask one question. We start at the front of the audience and work our way back one row at a time. Quiet fans get their chances to ask questions before we open the floor. Once the floor is open, a few people dominate the rest of the Q&A. The formats for Burning Man discussions and panel Q&As are gender neutral, but they have the net effect of reducing men’s dominance of the conversations. When I’m out with a group somewhere, I often notice women being talked over. There’s no moderator in these discussions, but sometimes I break in to ask the woman what she was going to say. 

It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that geeks, gamers, atheists, and similar populations see more talking over than average. First, the populations are skewed in the male direction, so a woman’s odds of getting talked over go up. Second, these populations include a lot of educated, analytical people who don’t always have the best social instincts. In tabletop roleplaying, several people are gathered around the table and only one talks at a time. That setup invites more aggressive talkers to shut out the less aggressive ones.  

An explicit rule against talking over people should be phrased as gender-neutral, the way anti-harassment policies are. Loud people talking over quiet people is bad regardless of the genders involved. But making people aware of previously unconscious conversation habits is a teaching opportunity. The beauty of having a norm about men not talking over women is that anyone who doubts the feminist perspective can simply observe people talking and see for themselves what happens. You don’t have to hate men to say that they interrupt too much. You just have to watch us. And it’s hard to argue with the idea that people should be allowed to participate in a conversation. That’s why I bring up the gender issue, because men are the ones who need the most practice checking their privilege. A rule against talking over people would not only make our conversations more equitable, it would give men a good opportunity to see unthinking sexism in action. Maybe even in their own actions.

Presuming that anyone agrees with me on this point, how do we spread the norm of not talking over people? It’s a tricky question with different answers for different groups. In any event, it probably starts with some discussions on the Internet. Let’s see if that leads anywhere.


Walk-and-Talk Discussions: A post on this structure for “free-range” conversations.

Why Atheists Are Jerks: A closer look at certain interpersonal styles that are common among us atheists.

Land of Nice Atheists

Society without God
by Phil Zuckerman

Here in the States, people willing to call themselves “atheists” are a rare breed. When we gather for a convention or other social function, we find that we have certain traits in common, much like gamers do. Even more than gamers, atheists are brought closer together by the general population’s distaste for us. The same would not be true in Denmark. There, atheism is so common that there’s little to distinguish atheists from the general population. They are the general population. We atheists like to point at Nordic countries as models of modern society. There, we say, atheism is normal and life is good. Why can’t it be like that everywhere? Phil Zuckerman’s book Society Without God takes a close look at Denmark, with an eye toward what atheism, belief, and Christianity are all about there. The Danish atheists, it turns out, are not New Atheists reproduced on a national scale. Surprisingly, these atheists say they’re Christian. They support “Christian” values, pay taxes to support the state church, and even have their atheist kids baptized and confirmed. Can you imagine American atheists happily watching their adolescent children affirm a Christian creed during confirmation ceremonies? Here in the US we take our religion too seriously for that, and our atheism too.   

Christianity is different in the US because we have never had an official church to suppress demagogues and to force religion to stay boring. The Founding Fathers supposed that people would use their freedom from state control to reasonably throw off the superstitions of the priests. Jefferson predicted that the nation would turn Unitarian. Instead, Americans used their freedom from state control to make religion more thrilling. Given free rein in the US, religious visionaries and hucksters have delighted the masses with apocalyptic visions, Doomsday predictions, faith healing, speaking in tongues, new revelations, and the “prosperity gospel,” according to which giving money to a televangelist will make the giver rich. In Europe, by contrast, the official churches kept religion reasonable, respectable and dull. The official church was your religion by default, so all it had to do to retain members was not drive anyone away. The resulting religion is so innocuous that atheists don’t bother to quit. If Danes don’t feel much need to go to church, neither do they see much need to leave it.  

Atheist Danes don’t just go to Christmas services; they get their kids baptized and confirmed, too. Unlike weddings and funerals, baptisms and confirmations are about religious identity and faith. Baptism makes an infant part of the Church, and in confirmation a young person declares faith in Christianity’s tenets. So why do atheist Danes baptize their kids and get them confirmed? When Zuckerman would ask them, they often said that it’s just what they do. A big part of religion has always been “what we do,” the customs and traditions of a people. Practically speaking, getting confirmed means a party and presents, so a youngster has little incentive to bow out. I went through confirmation in the Lutheran church I grew up in. Yes, there was a party, but there was also a year of preparatory education so we could know what beliefs we were confirming. The minister’s wife made clear that, if one didn’t believe the doctrines, one was supposed to back out of the process. Family pressure kept me in the program, and I went through the confirmation rite, but it was onerous to be pressured into publicly avowing things I didn’t believe. Atheist kids in Denmark don’t face any such inner conflict when they go through confirmation. The kids aren’t actually devoting their souls to the service of Christ. Confirmation is just what they do.

In the States, atheists complain about how much tax money is being lost by our not taxing churches. Many would like to take away religion’s special tax status, and many would like to see religion torn down altogether. Personally, I’m more concerned that we enforce the laws we already have against political campaigning from the pulpit and against inordinate salaries for clergy. But atheists in Denmark don’t begrudge a special status to the official Lutheran church. In fact, most of them pay a regular tax whose revenue supports the church. This arrangement, where the government collects revenue on behalf of official churches, is common in Europe but strikes Americans as bizarre. Most Danish atheists are happy to support the Lutheran Church as part of their cultural heritage. 

While most Danes are atheists, they often think of themselves as Christians who support Christian values. What do they mean by Christian values? Opposing gay marriage and abortion? Far from it. They mean being a decent person, helping the poor, caring for the sick, and the general welfare-state apparatus. As Zuckerman observes, the Nordic welfare state is the best realization yet of Jesus’ message that we are to care most for the people who have the least. US atheists are likely to claim that such concerns are merely natural elements of human morality, but this drive to help people who can’t help us in return only feels natural in a culture that’s been steeped in Christian idealism, as ours has. Nietzsche hated Christianity for the way it promoted concern for the lowly and equal rights for all. He saw and despised unspoken Christian ideals motivating the supposedly logical schemes of the utilitarians. Will atheists in the US ever speak admirably of these “Christian” values that they uphold and honor? Not any time soon, I’d reckon.

The atheistic Christianity of Denmark makes neither side in the US happy. Believers don’t want faith to be stripped from their sacred rites, reducing them to mere cultural traditions. Atheists don’t want to pay taxes to support churches, and we don’t want to send our kids to be baptized and confirmed in a church. Both sides take religion too seriously for going through the motions. But if Denmark’s example is too accommodating on both sides to work in the States, can we still learn something from it? If nothing else, Denmark shows us that the bitter animosity in the States between atheists and believers is not the only way.    

The Atheist Alliance of America Convention

Me and Steven Pinker

Last August I attended the annual conference of the Atheist Alliance of America, which conveniently took place just south of Seattle. It was my first exposure to the atheist community, and it was an eye opener. When I say that I wish atheists would dial back the negativity and dial up the empathy, my experiences at this conference contribute to that opinion. I’ve been to dozens of gamer and science fiction conventions, but this was different. It was an annual convention, like most are, but it moves from city to city. That means the people at the AAA running the convention were not familiar with the local secular community, and the locals had never been to the convention before, or to any atheist convention for most of us. The locals demonstrated a desire to be part of something, but the AAA offered programming that leaned toward being against something. For a few hours on Saturday, I staffed the welcome table in the hotel, with a big “Atheist Alliance of America” banner high on the wall behind me. Most of the people walking by were not with the convention, and I’m sure some believers looked at me and figured that we atheists were gathered there to make fun of them. It was a little embarrassing to sit at that table because to some degree they were right. The negativity was bad enough to even turn off some of the atheists. Opponents of friendly atheism accuse me of wanting to accommodate believers better. Beliebers? How about we accommodate our fellow atheists better?

How negative was the convention? Not all that negative. There were talks about secular volunteer work, news about a first-responder organization that’s in the works, a reading of quotes by and about the famous agnostic orator Robert Ingersoll, and some comedy aimed at atheists. But the anti-Christian and anti-religion slant was evident. One headline event was a documentary about how terrible the black church is. The film presumes that churchgoers are dupes, getting nothing from the church experience. We got Steven Pinker to speak to us. What luck, Steven Pinker! As atheists, we know our minds come from our evolved brains instead of from our souls. Did Pinker explain to us how the evolved brain works? No, his lecture was about how religion has no evolutionary value. As if we atheists hold religion in too high esteem, and we need to have its down side spelled out to us. A debate over whether Jesus existed got big billing, too. Richard Carrier was there promoting the idea that Jesus never existed. This fringe idea is naturally popular among atheists. Carrier wisely chose not to debate against someone holding the mainstream, Encyclopedia Britannica answer to the historical question of Jesus. Instead, he found a Bible-thumping Christian. Compared to the Christian view, the Jesus-myth idea looks pretty good. Presumably that’s why the consensus view was excluded from the debate and they didn’t invite me to take on Carrier. In addition to Carrier, there were two other Jesus-myth authors in attendance, and none of the three offer a plausible explanation for where the stories in the New Testament came from. Like creationism, the idea that Jesus is a myth has gone nowhere in mainstream scholarship but survives among die-hard fans. We atheists like to style ourselves as evidence-driven skeptics, but we’re human and we’re prone to tribal biases just like anyone else.

Could this negativity have been what people wanted? Yes, there must have been plenty of people there who ate up all the anti-religious rhetoric. Politicians and talk radio hosts know that us-versus-them talk is golden. We’re born ready to adopt tribalism as our way of life, and talking about the enemy gets our attention. I’d like to think that the Pacific Northwest is home to soft, nice atheists, but that’s a suspiciously self-serving opinion. Still, judging from the people I talked to there was more interest in community than you would infer based on the official programming. At first, I didn’t talk about being a Unitarian Sunday school teacher because I didn’t want to draw a hostile reaction. When I did talk about it, one con-goer accused me of indoctrinating children, but then I met two other Unitarians, including one who also loves teaching Sunday school. Maybe I should do a panel about Unitarians at my next atheist convention. In atheist community-building, the latest news worldwide is the Sunday Assembly. Several locals expressed a real interest in the project, but there was no official mention of it anywhere at the con. The guy who was running AV for the con is a secular humanist celebrant, and he recently gave an historic humanist invocation at a local city council meeting, but there was no information about the celebrant program. Nor was I the only atheist to be put off by the negativity. One attendee told me she walked out of some of the talks. Another said it was her first atheist event ever, and she wanted to know why there was so much attention being paid to Christianity. Her young son was along, and the event was billed as family friendly, but there were hardly any kids and not much for them to do. 

Sam Harris says that the critical posture that’s prevalent in atheism is driving away women. He’s half right. It’s driving away people who are more interested in connecting with each other as people than in tearing down outsiders. It’s not gender per se that’s at issue, but the net effect is to drive away more women than men. As a professional game designer, I know about communities that are full of brainy guys, and it can be a weird place, especially on the Internet. Let’s grow beyond that. Let’s get working on a secular community that’s more about what we can do together and less about identity politics, something that’s welcoming to a broader range of people. The AAA convention tells me that there are secular people looking for something. Let’s build something.

Atheist Alliance of America: This national organization is distinct from the one that erects confrontational billboards at Christmas, the American Atheists. 

Atheists Mostly Aren't Jerks

Grief Without Belief, part of a
warmer, friendlier atheism.

Last Sunday, I angered some of my fellow atheists with my provocative title (“Why Atheists Are Jerks”) and my unflattering portrayal of the atheist population (too critical). Today’s post is for the people I offended. I know that it’s nearly impossible to use reason to convince someone of something they don’t want to believe, but these atheists raised a lot of points, and it’s only fair that I address them. First, though, let me rephrase the two elements of my core statement from last Sunday.

1. People in the atheist community are more argumentative than average. 

2. Let’s make the atheist community less argumentative overall. 

Now here are a couple common responses, which are opportunities for me to clarify my position.

“I’m an atheist but not in the atheist community”

My post is primarily about the atheist community in the US, which basically means people here who interact with each other and with others as atheists. There are plenty of atheists who aren’t in the community, and plenty of people who don’t believe in God but who don’t identify as atheists. My concern is with the community because it’s my community and because the people in this community give others the impression of what atheists are like. 

“Believers just think we’re jerks because their beliefs don’t hold up to our logic” 

It’s not just believers who think atheists act jerky too often. Famous atheists cause controversies with their hurtful or tone-deaf blog posts and Tweets. The people who are provoked by these atheists mostly aren’t believers. Often it’s fans of these atheists who wish that they would keep quiet. On atheist message boards, atheists go after each other in ALL CAPS over hot-button issues, such as race or Islamophobia. This year’s Atheist Alliance of America convention had such negative, anti-Christian programming that it put off some of the attendees. This negativity is real; it’s not in the imaginations of the believers. 

“There is jerky behavior in every population” 

It’s true that there’s jerky behavior in every group, but some groups have more jerky behavior than others. Consider our opposites in the New Age movement. If atheists are people who don’t intuit a mind behind the universe, then our opposites are the New Age types, who infer meaning and cosmic intentionality in every coincidence. New Age leaders aren’t known for saying inflammatory things about rape or sexual harassment on the Internet. I’m on a forum for people who get all mystical about evolution and the history of the universe, and these people fall all over each other saying nice things about each others’ work. On atheist forums, I come across as comparatively civil, but on these New Age-y forums I’m a rebel and an iconoclast. It’s true that stereotypes are false. Not every atheist acts jerky all the time. But generalizations can still be true, and on a per-capita basis the atheist community generates a lot of jerkiness. Enough jerkiness, for example, to make the community less appealing to women, on average, than to men.

“It’s important to be angry”

I can agree with that sentiment this far, that it sure feels right to be angry. It feels right down to the very bones. If you stopped being angry, that would feel like backing down or giving in. That’s what anger is for. Anger evolved to help us get up the gumption to go hurt someone, or at least to help us stare enemies down because they can see that we’re really willing to hurt them. Anger did not evolve to help us think clearly, and certainly not to help us think clearly about our enemies. People, it turns out, make their moral, political and religious decisions emotionally and then justify them rationally. So if you’re angry, the anger is influencing your perspective, a perspective whose “factory settings” already bias it in one’s own favor. Martin Luther King got a lot done. Was he angry? If you want to define him as angry, then so be it. Be angry like King was. Would King have indulged in sharing derogatory memes on the Internet? We each have a built-in bias, distorting everything we notice and remember in our own favor. In particular, we tend to exaggerate the virtues of our own “tribe” and to denigrate the virtues of other “tribes.” You’re never getting past that bias while you’re angry. You’ll never be able to objectively assess the impact of religion on world history or the historicity of Jesus if you’re driven by faith or by anger.

Anger is unpleasant. People who are less empathic presumably don’t mind anger that much, but even so none of the people locked in online forum debates are really having fun. These text-based duels are more like a compulsion than a joy. “Someone is wrong on the Internet!” Look at the angry exchanges with believers over evolution or religion, and you’ll see that nothing productive is being generated from these virtual fights. Perhaps less empathic people get stuck in online debates because they don’t mind the arguing enough to drive them completely away. You may claim a right to be angry, and you have that right, but you’re exercising that right at the expense of other atheists.

Anger also moves product. People with books to sell love to stir up the base with messages that get people angry. Talk radio knows how to do that. Politicians know how to do that. Atheist leaders are making money by churning up more anger among atheists. What if people were making money by helping us achieve focus or tranquility instead of trying to raise our bile? Here Sam Harris’s new book, Waking Up, is an interesting case, where he’s selling insight and equanimity. Can we please see more of that sort of thing?

Friendlier Atheism?

One commenter asked how to express one’s atheism without being confrontational. For general guidelines, I recommend using conversation to build connections with people rather than to one-up them. From a young age, girls learn to use conversation to create connections, and boys learn to use language to compete. We should take a page from the girls’ playbook. For example, how do you respond when someone says “God bless you”? If I said to someone “Good luck,” and their reply was to sharply inform me that they don’t believe in luck because the universe is unfolding as it should (or something), that rejoinder would not endear me to the other person. When someone says “good luck” or “God bless you,” they’re just trying to be nice, and it’s best to respond in kind. Here’s a hypothetical exchange with four different atheist responses. My advice is to use the response that will make little old ladies think that we atheists are sweet and funny.

Nice old lady: “God bless you, young man!”

Atheist: [mad face, angry voice] “How dare you assume that I subscribe to your ancient, genocidal myth?!”

Atheist: [mock solemn] “And may the Force be with you.”

Atheist: [sincere] “I don’t actually believe that invoking God will do me any good, but thanks anyway.”

Atheist: [smile] “Thanks. I’m an atheist, but I need all the help I can get!”

How do we develop a friendlier atheist community? We can try to reduce the negativity by calling out the worst behavior. Vitriol is taken for granted, and by questioning vitriol maybe we can get people to reflect on it and see it for what it is. Tribalism is bad juju for a community that sees itself as enlightened. And we can increase the positivity, finding ways to improve connections among us, both online and face-to-face. Efforts such as the Sunday Assembly (http://sundayassembly.com/) and Grief Without Belief (http://www.griefbeyondbelief.org/) are good examples of recent developments along these lines. In general we might not be the warmest, most empathic population on the planet, but we can sure do better than we’ve been doing.

Why Atheists Are Jerks

The chapter on atheism is revealing.

Atheists aren’t really jerks, but we sure can come across as jerks sometimes. I know I’ve been guilty of that. On the Internet in particular, we have a habit of being insulting, snarky, and offensive. You can review the #atheism hashtag on Twitter or Google+ for examples. Around Christmas, the American Atheists organization likes to put up mean-spirited billboards. New Atheist authors sell millions of one-sided, negative books denouncing religion. As a result of all this negativity, lots of people who don’t believe in God refuse to label themselves atheists. I’ve advised my college-age daughter to consider telling people she’s agnostic just so people don’t lump her in with the most vocal and negative atheists. Honestly, this harsh side of the community is something I’d like to see mellow out. It would be good for us in a lot of ways. This negative, combative side of atheism seems to arise from three sources. First, people are mean to us, and we often respond in kind. Second, humans are tribal, and atheists are no exception. Third, the community expresses a certain testosterone-friendly combativeness. Male atheists are the worst offenders, and the whole community is weighted toward males in its demographics and its personality.  Can we achieve a less male-dominated, less tribal, more likable secular community? Let’s hope so.

Mistrust: The US populace holds a low opinion of us atheists, and online we like to swap links to the latest poll or psychological study that shows how despised we are. We’re mistrusted more than just about anyone else, infamously on par with rapists according to one study. Here in my social circle in Seattle, where politically correct tolerance for every other kind of diversity is mandatory (hurray), someone occasionally says something derogatory about us atheists. Even Oprah doesn’t like us. One famous D&D fantasy world singled out atheists for supreme punishment in its imaginary afterlife. It’s no surprise that some atheists are angry. Occasionally, an atheist comes “out of the closet” in a hail of angry Facebook posts, horrifying their extended family. The anger, of course, feeds into the mistrust in a vicious cycle. It’s the angry atheists that stand out.

Tribal Conflict: The mistrust and the revenge hate are both sustained by primeval tribal instincts. To the believers, we atheists have rejected God and in doing so we have rejected the decent society that reveres Him. Since we don’t fear divine judgment, many believers suppose we’re free to be immoral. To atheists, the atheist community is their new tribe. Like any normal in-group, we unfairly smear the opposition, considering religious people to be more homogeneous and less praiseworthy than they actually are. A subtype of atheist, the anti-theist, goes after religion with zeal that feels a bit religious itself. Again, this minority of anti-theists makes the most noise, puts up mean billboards at Christmas, and makes us atheists look like haters. So we’re back to people not liking us.

Verbal Combat: As if mistrust and tribalism weren’t enough, the jerk factor gets kicked up a notch because atheists are more analytical and less empathic than average (see Big Gods by Ara Norenzayan). The less empathic one is, that is the less one intuits the mental states of others, the less likely one is to intuit a personality running the universe. The more analytical one is, the more one sees impersonal forces at work in the world. Since men, for various reasons, tend to be more analytical and less empathic than woman, atheism is more attractive, on average, to men. But really atheism is more attractive to the sort of person who doesn’t notice when their spouse is upset, and most of those people happen to be men. This personality profile also fits people on the autism spectrum, a predominantly male population that is over-represented among atheists. Of course, all these correlations are statistical averages over large populations, not definitive in any particular case. Whatever gender they may be, people who are more analytical and less empathic are the sorts of people who say mean things on the Internet more often than average. In fact, the Internet is perfect for just these people, the ones who want to operate in the realm of abstract ideas (text) rather than the world of living, feeling people. Worse, without live human interaction to moderate Internet debates, they easily spin out into escalating insults and flame wars. On atheist forums, you can even see atheists insulting each other over hot-button issues such a drone strikes or circumcision. As sociologist Deborah Tannen has documented, women tend to use conversation to form connections more than men, and men speak to compete for status. On the Internet, it’s easy to hear virtual antlers locking in combat as anonymous “bucks” clash over ideas. Sam Harris says that the combative, testosterone-friendly vibe in the atheist community drives away more women than men (link), and I think he’s right (regardless of why this difference exists). And the more men there are in a community, the higher the chance that a woman will run into a sexist pig, a harasser, or some other hazard. The male majority sustains itself by creating an atmosphere that’s less inviting to women than to men. 

New New Atheism?: Can there be a friendlier, gentler atheism? I hope so. First, we need to acknowledge our own biases. We’re tribal like anyone else. When we feel the urge to defend our tribe’s honor with insults, we should think twice. Lots of us are extra-analytical and under-empathic. When we feel the urge to use our smarts to try to make others look stupid, we should think twice. When we feel the urge to lock horns over our differences, we should question that urge. If we want to develop into a well-rounded, more likable community, then we need to intentionally work against our biases. With any luck, we’ll create a feedback loop in which friendlier atheism attracts friendlier atheists, creating an even friendlier community, and so on. A couple prominent atheists are already leading the way, including Alain de Botton (author of Religion for Atheists), Chris Stedman (author of Faitheist), and Hemant Mehta (“The Friendly Atheist”). They don’t make as much noise as the combative atheists, but I trust they’re making a difference. 

Notes

“Empathy”: In Big Gods, Norenzayan uses the term “mentalizing” for what I’ve been calling empathy. It’s also called theory of mind or the intentional stance. The spouse who doesn’t notice when you’re angry is under-mentalizing. The spouse who is always reading something into your innocuous remarks is over-mentalizing. 

Gender differences: One can use the idea of gender differences to resist change (“nothing we can do”) or we can use the idea of gender differences to help men in a male-dominated field question their own assumptions of how people in the field should relate to each other. I favor the latter approach. 

Anti-theists: You can read about this particularly dogmatic and angry type of atheist, and five other types, in this article. According to this formula. I'm an RAA.

Is Christianity for Losers?

Saint Francis worked to restore
Jesus’ identity as a poor man.

Around AD 177, the philosopher Celsus wrote True Word, the earliest recorded major treatise against Christianity. Among other criticisms, he mocked Christianity for being popular among workers, slaves, peasants and women. It would we better, he said, if these foolish people would obey their masters. Christianity, Celsus seemed to be saying, was for losers. And he was right, all the way back to Jesus, a fatherless laborer from the sticks. What Celsus didn’t know was that Roman culture would one day absorb Christianity, turning it into a religion for bishops, emperors, and other winners. Even so, Christianity has had a lot to offer the downtrodden down through the centuries and still does today. 

Jesus was something of a loser himself, a hillbilly with an accent marking him as from the hinterlands of Galilee. He was evidently illiterate and possibly a bastard. His ministry appealed especially to the sick, to the poor, to the crazy, to women, and to children. The gospel stories feature common people, not just the kings and heroes that were standard characters in other literature of the day. Early Christianity, as Celsus noted, appealed to people of lowly status. Especially in Paul’s churches, women could be prophetesses and apostles. The communities he founded were havens of egalitarianism. Only later would editors amend Paul’s letters to tell women to be silent in church and to make other concessions to mainstream culture. In the Christian sect, slaves and women could achieve heroic status by facing lions in the arena. These spectacles demonstrated their devotion and led to the faster spread of Christianity. Christian numbers also grew because they valued some of the least valuable people in the Roman Empire: newborn girls. Among gentiles, girls were commonly exposed at birth rather than raised, but Christians let their girls live. Christians also tended to the sick through plagues, establishing an enduring Christian tradition of care for the ill and injured.

By the end of the first century, the first bishops had appeared among Christian churches, replacing the informal leadership of elders. Within a hundred years, bishops had taken control over the whole church. They established a patriarchal hierarchy modeled after Roman rule, a hierarchy that grew in wealth and power through the classical period and into the Middle Ages. Even so, a distinctive counterculture survived within Christianity. Commoners and women could claim direct inspiration by the Holy Spirit for their visions and revelations. The labor-friendly traditions of the Jews, of Jesus and his followers, and of Paul the tent-maker lent a certain honor to honest labor, standing in contrast to the labor-despising culture of elites everywhere else. Charity has always been part of Christian practice, and a bishop’s income was traditionally equal to his territory’s charity. Bishops could take in more for themselves only if their churches also gave out more to the poor. Monasteries and convents provided security and organization for the people who joined them, especially after Benedict established work as the rule for monastic life rather than just contemplation. Saint Francis one-upped Jesus himself by calling for compassion to an overlooked population of vulnerable individuals: animals. Later, Franciscan monks opened to door for today’s modern credit economy when they broke the age-old taboo against lending at interest, deemed “usury”. In a campaign to provide working capital to the poor, they applied for and received a special dispensation to lend money at interest. That special dispensation spread until the old crime of usury became business as usual. Now common people can get loans, not just the rich.

Even as Europeans secularized, they put into practice the Christian concern for the most vulnerable. Nursing reforms, for example, created the modern, professional role of nurse, where previously “nurses” had been menial servant girls. Florence Nightingale spearheaded this effort, with Jesus as her inspiration. Nietzsche blamed Christianity for spreading democracy and egalitarianism. When the English utilitarians presumed that each person’s utility is equally valuable, Nietzsche identified Christianity as the source for this assumption. Quakers and other nonconformist Christians called for the abolition of slavery and eventually got their way. In the States, the black church served as incubator for community leaders. In the 20th century, this community gave rise to Martin Luther King, who called on other Christian ministers to join him in campaigning for the dignity of blacks and of the poor.

At the start of the 20th century, the hot new expression of Christianity was Pentecostalism. It’s probably the closest thing today to a 1st-century Christian church. It appeals to the poor and has been spreading especially in South America and Africa. They have no bishops. Believers speak in tongues as early Christians did, a miracle that’s too spontaneous and unpredictable for any standard church hierarchy to condone. As for mainline denominations, you might find them out there supporting today’s “losers”. They run various programs to help the homeless, refugees, illegal immigrants, prisoners, the elderly and other vulnerable populations. In North Carolina, Christians are suing the state, demanding the freedom to marry gay couples.  

Christianity began as a counterculture movement, but almost immediately editors and other serious men went to work to bring the movement into line with mainstream, patriarchal expectations. In some ways, Christianity developed into its opposite. Instead of being a sect that pious Jews voluntarily joined, it became the default religion of an empire of gentiles, complete with Roman-style monarchs ruling as bishops. But Christianity still reflects humble beginnings as a home-grown, rural movement for peasants and outsiders.

Spiritual Identity and Mental Disability: A post about a “loser” who's welcome at church.

2014

Sunday Assembly in Seattle

In Seattle on September 28th, the Sunday Assembly is bringing together nonbelievers to sing, listen to a speaker, and presumably mingle. I’m going to be there to check it out, and if you’re in Seattle, you’re invited to come along. The Sunday Assembly has me curious because it’s the latest big news in efforts to redefine “church” for agnostics. It started as a single location in London, and now it’s spreading across the world. The 28th is the first session in Seattle. It’s common for atheists to assume that believers go to church and sing together because they think God wants them to. Since atheists don’t believe in God, most of us see no reason to gather and sing. But what if gathering and singing is something that originates not from doctrine but from our own primeval history? From the human spirit, one might say. What if there’s something to the experience that’s separate from any supernatural beliefs? That’s what I figure, and that’s why I’ve been following the Sunday Assembly. 

The Seattle chapter of the Sunday Assembly describes itself as “the best bits of church but with no religion and with awesome pop songs!” The Sunday Assembly’s motto seems to be “Live Better. Help Often. Wonder More.” It’s hard to argue with “live, help and wonder.” On the issue of supernatural belief, they finesse the issue. Probably they’ll never describe themselves as an atheist association, and that’s a prudent decision. And they don’t want you to stay away just because you believe in an afterlife. Their mission is to celebrate not “the one life we have,” which would exclude believers, but is instead to celebrate “the one life we know we have.”  

The Sunday Assembly has been in the news, but it’s not the first attempt to create a “church” without belief. Jerk Church has already spread from Oakland to other cities, including Seattle. Members, who call each other “jerks,” are mostly from the Burning Man community, and their “services” are casual, fun-loving potluck suppers, with plenty of booze, weed, and singing. They meet in homes without an authority figure running the show, sort of like first-century Christians. It’s an extremely personal version of church, a private event very different from the public church service that’s typical of mainline churches. The Unitarian Universalist Association provides a cradle-to-grave church community without a creed, and I’m happy to be in a congregation. The Atheist Alliance of America convention had a number of us Unitarians in attendance, but overall I think that UU is probably too churchy for most atheists. It was too churchy for me, at least until my late wife made me attend for several years. The Ethical Culture movement includes congregations with Sunday services, coming-of-age ceremonies, and other church-like elements. The movement started without the ritual elements, but they were added to the the repertoire by popular demand. Ethical Culture’s emphasis on rationality might appeal to atheists, but it doesn’t have a prominent public profile. The Sunday Assembly is expanding, which gives it an appealing story, positioning it as the most approachable “non-church” yet. 

It’s no accident that the Sunday Assembly, Jerk Church, and Unitarian Universalism all feature group singing. In Faith Instinct, Nicholas Wade makes the case that singing and dancing together is a primeval ritual for group bonding. Jonathan Haidt says it activates the “hive switch,” generating group spirit. Once you see a biological reason that singing and moving together helps you feel connected to other people, the song “Kum Bah Yah” makes a lot of sense. The hokey pokey makes sense, and so do the Macarena, Zumba, and country line dancing. In addition to dancing, people sometimes gather to sing songs. Before radio, singing around a piano with friends was a common pastime. Perhaps those were simpler, happier times. Singing, however, is a real watershed moment, where the participant can go one way or another. Singing in a group is so awkward that some people can’t stand it. My Unitarian church has a contemplative service as an alternative to the regular one, and presumably that’s better for people who don’t like singing in a group. For many other people, however, singing together is elevating. They seek it out in choirs, churches or other outlets. Sunday Assembly is banking on providing a powerful human experience that secular people aren’t getting enough of as it is. That’s smart. 

While I’m curious about the Sunday Assembly, I can’t  say that I actually endorse it. It’s a promising concept, but social engineering is tricky and full of ways to go wrong. I’ve heard some great things about the Sunday Assembly and some discouraging things. Time will tell, and I’m hoping for the best.

PS: Since this post, I've been to a few services, spoke at a couple, and gotten to know the local leadership. I'm cautiously optimistic. —JT, April 2015

PPS: The Seattle chapter has closed in 2017. —JT, 2017