Cheap Atheism: The Implications of the Rejection of God

M. Todd Hall

"Meaning" in a world without God

Some years ago, I read an article about a monument erected on a public space in Florida, countering a Ten Commandments monument, celebrating “atheism.” It was billed as an expression of free speech, and I suppose it was. But thinking about it further stirred a question within me. Beyond the pettiness of it (framed within the context of “protecting atheist rights”), why would an atheist erect such a monument? If one truly rejects the existence of a god of any kind, and thus rejects any sort of telos to the universe (and one’s own life), why would one choose to celebrate this reality? And if one lives out what one believes, what possible “moral” justification would there be for being concerned about resisting those who do believe? I don’t mean to suggest, as has often been the case, that atheists cannot be moral and have no motivation to be so. I merely wonder what justification there would be for anything in light of the meaninglessness of it all.

Over 60 years ago Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a book calling the bourgeois German church to Discipleship. In this masterful work, Bonhoeffer excoriated a church that had been lulled into a stupor by “cheap grace”—grace that allowed Christians to find forgiveness apart from understanding and embracing the depths of transformation this grace required. The implications of what God had done in Christ, for Bonhoeffer, required (and motivated/empowered) real transformation. To understand the person and work of Christ was to understand that life is forever different and must be lived under the horizon of God’s future. And this grace, this costly grace, demanded of the church a radical holiness.

More recently, Dallas Willard wrote,

One of our greatest needs today is for people to really see and really believe the things they already profess to see and believe. Knowing about things — knowing what they are, being able to identify them and say them — does not mean we actually believe them. When we truly believe what we profess, we are set to act as if it were true. Acting as if things are true means, in turn, that we live as if they were so.

The church in America should hear the call to costly grace and live as if they believe it were so. We have often made the gospel of Jesus Christ into a commodity to be bought and sold, an entertainment piece, a self-help, affirming gospel that requires no transformation. Indeed, “Jesus is Lord” is often another slogan set alongside “your way, right away.” Gone, often, is the transformative action that reveals an actual belief, which Willard pointed out. Indeed, we have perhaps embraced cheap grace with a deeper fervor than any before us.

But we are not alone in this. For “atheists,” such as they are, have also embraced the “cheap grace” of trendy atheism. A world with no telos, a life without a Creator, would look very different than that lived by so many self-proclaimed atheists today. What are the implications of a steel-eyed, set-jaw atheism? And where are those who really grasp and accept this today? Has anyone ever, really, lived the life of an atheist and expounded the lifestyle (if there is one) which it would imply?

Certainly not the “New Atheists” of years ago—Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett—who portrayed religion as a “poison,” a force for violence and backwardness and slavery. Though these outspoken critics of religion spoke of the dangers of “faith,” they also desperately tried to hold on to the ethos of a society formed by Christianity—human dignity, universal rights, the classical liberal ethic that developed through the millennia of Christendom. The question, of course, is “why”? Why do all human beings deserve to be treated with dignity? If there is no Creator, no telos, no inherent meaning, why maintain the moral framework of the West? Indeed, can such a moral framework exist apart from the teachings of the church? For Dawkins (author of The God Delusion), it appears that it cannot: he recently confessed himself a “cultural Christian,” wanting to maintain the trappings of Christianity—hymns, Christmas carols, culture, and ethic—while denying its reality. This, too, is an expression of a mind formed by the Christian ethos. As Tom Holland (himself not a believer, and author of the great book Dominion: How the Christian Revelation Remade the World) said in response to Dawkins' confession:

[S]ecularism & Dawkins’ own brand of evangelical atheism are both expressions of a specifically Christian culture—as Dawkins himself, sitting on the branch he’s been sawing through and gazing nervously at the ground far below, seems to have begun to realise.

These “atheists” are not willing to delve deeply into the actual implications of a rejection of a Creator. Is anyone?

The closest confessed atheist to actually understand (and even embrace) these implications, I think, would be Friedrich Nietzsche. Here was an atheist who understood the meaning of staring into the black abyss that is the meaninglessness of a life without God, without telos.

Nietzsche understood that the atheist “story” is a story, ultimately, of meaninglessness. From the moment that we crawled out of the cosmic sludge humans have been living lives without any transcendent meaning, waiting for the day the meteorite or super-eruption or other cosmic event brings a terrifying end to it all. The end of the story is the end of the line, and it offers no particular judgment or motivation for any particular morality, at all. It matters not a bit how you treat your neighbor. It matters not at all how we as a society treat the poor, the widow, the orphan.

Actually, for Nietzsche that’s not true. Christianity, to Nietzsche, is a “slave religion,” a religion that reversed the natural working out of life: the strong dominating the weak. No, Christianity, the most insidious (to Nietzsche) religion of all, was a weapon used by those who—by nature—were meant to be subjugated. It flipped the ethics of the natural world on its head. There’s a reason why the National Socialists in Germany used Nietzsche’s texts to create the super-race and subjugate (and annihilate) the Untermensch.  The widow, the orphan, the outsider, the weak and powerless, ought to be crushed by the strong and the powerful.

Oh, sure, Western atheists spend a lot of time extolling the virtues of caring for the poor, the weak, the powerless—these virtues make for a better society, they are compassionate, even human. But, ultimately, the true atheist story, as Nietzsche understands, says, “So what?” The very idea of morality is a scream into the black hole of the cosmic abyss.

The Christian story, though, is the story of the God who created and redeemed, who even now works toward that day when he will set all things right. He is a God who relentlessly pursues, to the cross, a humanity determined on rejecting him. And thus he has imbued existence with immeasurable meaning. Every action of peace, of compassion, of neighbor love, of care for others—every action echoes into the eternity of this God.

It is a terrible tragedy that more Christians do not live their lives in keeping with this story. But, thanks be to God that more atheists don’t live in keeping with theirs.

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