MLK's Institution

Reminding atheists that sometimes

Christianity is good.

tl;dr We atheists should be able to acknowledge that churches empowered King’s campaigns even if we don’t believe in King’s God.

Here in the States, the third Monday of January is Martin Luther King Day. He’s the only individual to get his own federal holiday. Since King was a great man and a Christian, his day seems like a good opportunity for us atheists to appreciate the good that religion can do in the secular world. Some atheists are quick to point out that King’s values aren’t exclusive to Christianity, and that’s true. The implication, however, is that in an alternate reality there may be a secular King who was just as successful in promoting civil rights as our Christian King was. That scenario seems unlikely. Since even atheists admire King, his career is a useful opportunity for us to see what’s good about Christianity and about religion in general. In particular, King’s career demonstrates the value of religious institutions. Atheists often define religion as a belief or maybe a belief system, but first and foremost religion is a social institution. Maybe it’s our individualism or our rationalism, but we atheists commonly underestimate the value and power of institutions. King’s life can help us see the good that institutions can do, even when they’re religious.

The Black Church

On a number of levels, King couldn’t have done what he did if he hadn’t been a minister. As a black man, his opportunities for leadership were limited. The black church, however, allowed him to pursue a career of learning, communication, inspiration and leadership. In some theoretical world, perhaps a gifted black man could have led an equivalent career as part of a secular institution, one devoted to community and justice. But in our actual world, the black church offered this opportunity to King and no other institution did.

The black church connected King to black leaders across the country. It gave him churches to speak at, congregations to speak to, and an organization through which to spread ideas and recruit allies. His status as a minister gave him clout that helped him lead his campaign. Churches aren’t beliefs. They imply buildings, meeting rooms, newsletters, organizational structures, connections to people in the community, and congregations that are willing to gather and hear someone inspire them to action. Apart from any sort of belief, churches are social institutions that bring people together, and those institutions made King’s career possible.

The Christian Church

As a Christian minister, King had a connection to Christian clergy and laypeople across the world. For the most part, this connection was theoretical, but King made it practical. As a minister, he called on clergy from across the country to join him in Selma. After “Bloody Sunday,” hundreds of white clergy answered his call and joined him on short notice. It’s true that people of any belief could have joined him and did, but the institution of the Christian church provided an impressive, rapid influx of white allies, each of whom was connected to a congregation back home. When a white congregation saw its minister fly to Selma, that must have had a big emotional impact. Emotional impacts are irrational, so atheists are sometimes uncomfortable with them, but emotions are usually how things get done in this world. 

Maybe if there were an international secular institution that went back 2000 years, and if it had a cadre of educated, professional community leaders on hand to join a civil rights campaign, then maybe a secular version of King could have called on the leaders of that institution. In real life, that institution was the Christian church. 

Perhaps the most famous white minister to answer King’s call was James Reeb. He’s famous because he was beaten to death. It’s sad to say, but the death of a white minister from Boston shocked the nation the way that deaths of black activists had not. Reeb’s martyrdom was not in vain. It advanced the cause of civil rights. Reeb didn’t just happen to be a minister. He was there in Selma because he was a minister and because King was one.

On a less dramatic level, King’s identity as a Christian minister allowed him to reach the hearts of many white Christian laypeople. His civil disobedience was predicated on God’s justice trumping human law. When people called him an extremist, he called out Jesus as an example of an “extremist.” White clergy and lay people across the country picked up his call for racial justice and campaigned for civil rights in their hometowns. Like King, they used the infrastructure supplied by the church to gather crowds, inspire congregations, and spread the word. 

Christian Faith

Atheists assure me that if King had been an atheist, he still could have lived a life with just as much courage, determination, hope, and love. Maybe they are right. King believed that no matter what his enemies did to his body, his soul was safe with Christ, but maybe that didn’t make any real difference to him. He believed that his campaign emulated the life of Christ, but I suppose even an atheist can aspire to emulate a hero like Jesus. King led a heroic career, explicitly in the name of Jesus, but I sure can’t prove for certain that a godless King couldn’t have braved everything the actual King braved and more. Still, if an atheist is certain that King’s faith didn’t contribute to his heroism, the point of this post is that it's institutions that get work done, not ideas. 

Bad Christian Institutions

Some atheists get uncomfortable when they hear religion being praised, and they want to jump in and point out its flaws. That’s natural. It is true that religious institutions were operating on the opposite side of the civil rights movement. Southern Baptists had church buildings to meet in and copy machines for their racist fliers, too. That’s all true. The point here is not that religion is always good but that religion is powerful, and that its power stems from its institutions. We are well aware that these institutions can be used for evil purposes, and in all fairness we atheists ought to acknowledge that they can also be used for good purposes. King’s holiday is a fine time for us to reflect on that.

Secular Assessment

If religious people are going to get over the tribal thinking that sets them against each other and against us, maybe we secular people need to show them the way. It’s natural for us atheists to downplay the degree to which Christianity contributed to King’s accomplishments, but maybe we would do well to rise above our tribal nature. Reflecting on King’s life is a good opportunity for us atheists to do just that. 

2015

Chris Stedman advocates working 
with liberal believers. 

Who Cares If You Believe in God?

Atheists should stand up to the religious right to protect equality, liberty, and justice. The religious right is dangerous, the struggle is one that we can win, and opposing the religious right makes us look good. The same cannot be said, for example, for historical Jesus. Promoting the idea that Jesus never existed puts us on the wrong side of scholarship and makes us look biased. I’d like the atheist community to get past its affection for believing that Jesus didn’t found Christianity. I’ll go further. My dream is that atheists will become known as people who don’t care whether you believe in God. Why should we care? Modern culture is about letting people do their thing. But it’s obvious that we do care, and plenty of atheists disparage believers in just the same terms that believers use for atheists. What if atheists stopped caring? If that happened, young people would see that the believers judge people by their beliefs about God, but the atheists don’t. We’d look broad-minded, which is a win in modern culture. If my dream came true, it might also help believers hate us a little tiny bit less. But mainly it’s my dream because we atheists would actually have to become more broad-minded. Specifically, we’d have to tame our tribal instincts and stop gunning for the sacred symbols that the outsiders revere. In other words, we’d have to become more enlightened, and it’s an enlightened community that I want to be part of. 

The conflict is tribal. 

If you listen to atheists and believers describe each other online, you’ll learn that one side is populated by delusional fools who are lying to themselves, a menace to all that is good and true. Luckily for humanity, the other side is populated, with some admitted exceptions, by well-meaning, reasonable people who aren’t blind and can see what’s really going on in this universe. In fact, this second groups has a privileged, enlightened understanding, free of the illusions that most people throughout history have lived their lives under. The only disagreement between the two sides is which side is which. Is is the atheists who are the fools, or the believers? That’s the debate. The first thing to know about the heated conflicts between atheists and believers is that they’re tribal. Humans are naturally tribal, and we instinctively see things “our” way, to the detriment of “them” in the out-group. Believers have dogmatic reasons to believe that their religion-versus-religion conflicts represent cosmic truth, but we atheists can see these conflicts for what they are: political struggles among social apes.  

Humans excel at binary thinking, pattern matching, and taking sides in interpersonal conflicts. These traits lead believers to dislike atheists. Binary thinking says that if “we” believers are good then “they,” the atheists, must be bad. Pattern matching means that if one atheist hates religion then all atheists must hate religion. The human propensity to take sides means that believers intuitively develop negative judgments of us. Of course, the same process works in the other direction, with atheists automatically developing negative judgments of believers. The tribal nature of this conflict explains why it is so resistant to resolution. People get emotional and talk past each other, and debate leads nowhere. Since we atheists don’t have traditions, prophets, or scripture to limit our perspective, we ought to be the first to embrace the modern view of human cognition and to recognize our own tribalism.

Belief in God is the wrong target.

Because belief in God is a symbol of identity, its importance is exaggerated in the minds of both believers and atheists. In conflicts between groups, tribal symbols loom large: national flags, sacred images, distinctive clothing, holidays, God in various forms, and so on. But it’s costly for atheists to oppose belief in God, and the benefits of doing so are uncertain.  

Costs are high.

Opposing belief in God means we atheists come across as intolerant, as the Christmas billboards from American Atheists do. Even if more people become atheists as a result, the status of atheists goes down in the eyes of observers. Today in the States, there are plenty of people who don’t believe in God but won’t call themselves atheists. Some of that is due to the lies believers tell about us, but I bet our critical habits also contribute to that reluctance. Opposing belief in God also supports the idea that people can be evaluated based on whether they believe in God. The public’s opinion of atheists would get better if people stopped assessing others by their beliefs. Finally, opposing belief means not working with liberal believers who are at work resisting the religious right.

Benefits are iffy.

Anti-theists like to say that religious beliefs lead to bad behaviors, and they’re right. But it’s easy to exaggerate how powerful beliefs are. Christians and atheists go about their lives pretty much the same way, and they even face death with the same feelings of fear and sadness. Why don’t religious beliefs make a bigger practical difference? Because human lives run on feelings more than on ideas. People know they should exercise, but how many do? Of all the people who believe in astrology, few of them head to Las Vegas when the stars say they are lucky with money. If someone believes that President Obama is the Muslim Anti-Christ, they probably go about their lives pretty much like other people. Of all the people who believe that climate change is killing the planet, how many of us are really changing our lifestyles? Beliefs are not good motivators for behavior. A much better motivator is social proof. Seeing other people doing something is a great motivator for doing that behavior yourself. Even if belief in God should in theory lead to all sorts of bad behavior, most people can be counted on to not lead their lives in accord with their own ideals. 

Besides, even when belief does motivate people, is that always bad? Sometimes faith inspires people to do good things, as with Florence Nightingale or Martin Luther King. Belief in God, per se, doesn’t seem to be the problem. Problems are things the religious right wants to do, such as cut evolution from school curricula. Let’s fight those things directly.

Some atheists are likely to say that the world would be a better place if tomorrow everybody stopped believing in God. Suppose that were true. So what? That’s a magical hypothetical. The real question is which would serve humanity better, atheists opposing belief in God or atheists not caring about belief in God?   

Enlightenment is good for us.

The religious right, especially in Christianity and Islam, has created a secular backlash. To most people, secularism looks good compared to the religious right. One part of secularism is an enlightened view of personal liberty, including freedom of belief. Saying that we don’t care whether people believe in God means we are in line with secular ideals, as opposed to the extremists who want to limit what people can believe. 

My fellow atheists should see that it would be good for us if people cared less about belief in God. That idea lets us atheists off the hook. If you want to lay it on thicker, say “I don’t judge people by whether they believe in God.” No one wants to be judgmental. To my compatriots I might go so far as to say it’s un-American to judge people by whether they believe in God. Doing so is also against the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As long as people judge others by their beliefs about God, atheists are going to have a PR problem. So let’s stop. 

The best thing about not caring about theism is that it’s a powerful mental exercise for us. It’s natural for an atheist to oppose theism on some level, but if we can rise above our natural, us-versus-them instincts, then we are better people with a clearer view of the world. Atheists don’t have any supernatural beliefs to limit our view of the world. We know we’re not God’s chosen people, and we know that our truth is not guaranteed by any deity, scripture, or prophet. By rights, we ought to be the first people to embrace the new science of human identity and to check our own biases. Maybe one day believers will say, “Atheists are going to hell for sure, but you gotta admit that they’re broad-minded.” I suppose it’s biased of me to expect that my in-group should be above average in terms of self-awareness and tolerance. I can live with that.

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See also Reading about religion: Books for atheists on the topic of religion, as well as tribalism in general.

2015

Unlike Jesus, Moses wasn’t even close to historical.

Legendary Moses

A new Moses movie is out, and, since I’m a great big fan of the historical Jesus, a friend of mine asked about “the historical Moses.” Some of my fellow atheists get upset at me because I say that Jesus was a historical person. Today they might be happy to hear me “get with the program” and say that Moses is a legendary figure. He didn’t exist, nor did anyone like him. The same goes for the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob/Israel, and Joseph. Even King David’s existence is in doubt. When looking at the Bible, it’s important to sort out the history from the legend, the way historians do. It doesn’t make sense to treat the whole thing as the same, either all literally true or all made up. That approach is too simple to be useful. Thanks to archeology, we now have a better idea of Hebrew history, and Moses isn’t there. Neither is the Hebrews’ bondage in Egypt or their conquest of Canaan. That’s good news, since it means that the ethnic cleansing of the Bible is fantasy rather than history.

Modern history of ancient Palestine

The Hebrews were not slaves in Egypt, and Yahweh did not show off by killing Egyptians. Hebrew armies did not ethnically cleanse the Promise Land. Instead, the Hebrews were nomadic pastoralists driving their herds across the hills of Palestine. They looked down on their neighbors, the farmers. In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain, the farmer, sees his offering rejected by Yahweh, while Abel, the shepherd, sees his offering honored.

The nomadic Hebrews presumably traded with the civilized people of the coastal regions, whose economy was based on farming. Suddenly, about 3000 years ago, the Hebrew settlements switched from temporary to permanent, and the shepherds took up farming. This switch was probably the result of the collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the area. No one is sure why civilization fell, but it fell hard in the eastern Mediterranean. For the Hebrews, taking up the plow meant adopting a more laborious lifestyle, and they commemorate the  hated switch in the story of the Garden in Eden. Yahweh curses men to earn their bread by the sweat of their faces. If you want bread. someone's got to farm.

Genocide

Some of the most horrific stories of the Bible come from the conquest of the Promised Land. The mighty Hebrew armies, acting on Yahweh’s orders, massacre men, women, children, and even livestock. None of that ever happened. Nor the wandering for 40 years in the wilderness, nor bondage in Egypt. Those stories were invented because they were a more satisfying history than the truth: “The civilized cities collapsed, so we couldn’t trade with civilized people any more, and if we wanted the products of settled life, we had to become settled ourselves.” Of course, today these ancient stories of plagues, bloodshed, and triumph come across as genocidal, with Yahweh a fearsome megalomaniac. 

In the story of Moses, Yahweh is vindictive in a personal way. His vicious plagues afflict the everyday Egyptians, punishing them for their king’s hard-heartedness. In the olden days, it was considered only natural that people suffered for their king’s misdeeds. What’s worse, however, is that the everyday Egyptians wind up suffering not because their king is hard-hearted but because Yahweh wants to show off. Pharaoh would relent, but Yahweh hardens his heart to prevent him from freeing the Hebrews. With Pharaoh’s heart hardened, Yahweh gets to demonstrate increasingly terrible plagues until finally he kills off all the first-born in the land. The Jewish celebration of Passover commemorates the night when Yahweh slaughtered children in order to show off how bad-ass he was. It’s no wonder that in the 2nd century CE a major Christian reformer, Marcion, advocated ditching the Jewish scriptures altogether. Who could believe that Yahweh was a good guy?  

Moses and Jesus

The differences between Moses and Jesus are instructive. Traditional believers say that Moses and Jesus are equally historical, and Jesus mythicists agree with them. Historians, however, distinguish between these two figures, and here are some reasons why. 

Timing

The story of Moses was written long after he was said to have lived (Deut 34:6), whereas Paul started writing about Jesus while Jesus’ brother, James, and his lead disciple, Peter, were still alive. 

Precedence

Exodus is evidently based on earlier, simpler stories embodied in ceremonial creeds (Deut 26:6-10, Josh 24:2-13), while the stories about Jesus’ life have no clear precedent. Jesus was the historical figure to teach mainly in parables. The earliest written gospel is an innovative literary form, an amateur account pieced together from stories from the oral tradition. Later on Christians copied all sorts of magical elements from other religions, but many mundane details of Jesus’ biography are original and look genuine.

Sources

The story of Moses comes from one source, while we have four independent first-century sources for Jesus: the Q gospel of Jesus’ saying, the gospel attributed to Mark, the gospel attributed to Thomas, and Josephus’ history. 

Embarrassing details

Moses was said to be slow of tongue, needing his brother Aaron to speak for him. Is this the sort of embarrassing detail that authors wouldn't invent about their hero? On the contrary, it's an addition by the Aaronite priests, their way of shoehorning their man Aaron into the story. It's bad storytelling, and so this detail is generally dropped from modern retellings. Jesus' life, on the other hand, is marked by details that were embarrassing to his early followers, so embarrassing that they took pains to paper them over. Prominent among these details are his repentance and baptism under John the Baptist and his shameful, miserable death on the cross. 

Oral style

Moses speaks in long lectures, like Jesus does In “John’s” gospel. In both cases, historians take these lectures to be fictions, possibly pious fictions. Many of Jesus’ sayings, on the other hand, are pithy, memorable phrases. “Turn the other cheek” is the sort of formula that oral histories are able to preserve. The words that Christians falsely attributed to Jesus are noticeably second-rate. Thomas Jefferson said that picking the genuine sayings out of the text was like spotting “diamonds in a dunghill”.  Historians think these memorable phrases were passed down for 20 years or so before being recorded in the Q source and other works. 

Orthodoxy and originality

The laws attributed to Moses look like an expression of orthodox Hebrew patriarchy. They could have been assembled by a committee. Jesus’ teachings, on the other hand, are puzzling and paradoxical. The Kingdom of Heaven is like dirty leaven? Like a tiny seed? We’re supposed to turn the other cheek and go the extra mile? These are original, memorable sayings. The work of the committees was to tame these sayings for general consumption. When Jesus said, for example, that a man had to hate his father to follow him, the editors of “Matthew’s” gospel changed the line to say that one had to love Jesus more than one’s father. 

Legends and history

Christians put Moses and Jesus in the same category (historical), and so do Jesus mythicists (legendary). Mainstream historians, on the other hand, see them as very different. Treating Moses and Jesus as the same is an error, whether it’s literalists who do it or atheists.

PS: More about historical Jesus

I know that some people can't read about Jesus being historical without wanting to raise a heated objection. If that sounds like you, please read what an atheist historian has to say on the matter:

http://bit.ly/atheistjesus1

http://bit.ly/atheistjesus2

Bonus Moses Comment

Follow-up comment on my post about Moses being legendary. 

Q. Why isn’t it reasonable to think that there could have been a historical leader of the Hebrews like Moses, someone on whom the stories are based, however vaguely? 

A. It’s more plausible that the Hebrews never had a ruler like Moses because the Hebrews were nomads, and nomads don’t have rulers. People hate to be told what to do, and we’ll walk away rather than put up with bosses. Bosses arise in places where people can’t leave, such as fertile river valleys or islands. Once people settle into agriculture, it’s easier to get them to submit to rule because they can’t just walk away like nomads can. But having a boss is not natural, and people generally don’t like it. Nomads can unite for war in great masses, and they sometimes acclaim ultimate leaders to serve as commanders-in-chief, but the union of tribes dissipates once the war is over. While nomads don’t have rulers, what they have instead is forefathers. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob/Israel and Joseph are forefathers. Moses is a spiritual forefather for the Hebrews, a heroic authority to put some weight behind the law. 

We are used to seeing nations led by charismatic rulers, and the Moses story sounds like something that could be based on a historical ruler and lawgiver. In fact, what could have gotten a nation of nomads to follow a man like Moses? It would take the sort of miracles described in Exodus. Maybe if someone really could call down the wrath of Yahweh on enemies, then the Hebrews would have followed him. But as for history, the existence of such a ruler is very much in doubt. 

For more about tribal culture, see Francis Fukuyama’s Origin of Political Order. The book is tremendous, summarizing the rise and decay of political order around the world from prehistory to the French Revolution. After reading it, I feel like I understand history for the first time.