MORTAL REMAINS by S. M. Hutchens
God's Shadow
1In a January 4, 2014 CNN Religion Blog from London, Katie Engelhart writes,
The world's most voguish—though not its only—atheist church opened last year in London, to global attention and abundant acclaim. So popular was the premise, so bright the promise, that soon the Sunday Assembly was ready to franchise, branching out into cities such as New York, Dublin and Melbourne.
"It's a way to scale goodness," declared Sanderson Jones, a standup comic and co-founder of the Sunday Assembly, which calls itself a "godless congregation." But nearly as quickly as the Assembly spread, it split, with New York City emerging as organized atheism's Avignon. [Now this is remarkable—a writer on religion who actually knows the significance of Avignon! —S.M.H.] In October, three former members of Sunday Assembly NYC announced the formation of a breakaway group called Godless Revival. "The Sunday Assembly," wrote Godless Revival founder Lee Moore in a scathing blog post, "has a problem with atheism."
Moore alleges that, among other things, Jones advised the NYC group to "boycott the word atheism" and "not to have speakers from the atheist community." It also wanted the New York branch to host Assembly services in a churchlike setting, instead of the Manhattan dive bar where it was launched. . . .
Pity the atheists. They can't escape God because he is the necessary reference point of atheism. The more they bother to bother about him, the more they must propose an un-God who at every moment threatens to cross the line into Godness, and the more the forms of deconstruction must place themselves in apposition to, and therefore build up the image of, what they oppose.
This is something Mr. Jones seems to know intuitively, thus his warning against advertising atheism too energetically. He is a practical man who knows profitable atheism to be a perilous game, for in order to attract the greatest number, he cannot be too atheistic, any more than a Christian pastor can encourage congregational growth by excesses of Christianity. Icarus, whether theist or atheist, mustn't fly too near the sun. In this sport it is likely the more durable kind of leadership may be found in stand-up performers rather than serious believers.
A Caution to Theists
Theists, however, should be cautious about boasting, for while no-God provides, in the shadow it casts, an image of God and a way of escape into theism, so theism with its affirmation of God provides a broad and well-traveled path out of itself through the constructs of idolatry—of making a no-God God, refashioned to taste. Much that passes for the worship of God has not-God as its actual reference point, so that a man not only has to be saved from atheism, but from theism as well, to lay hold of the Lord whom to have seen is to see the Father. We begin and end in a cry for mercy and a giving of thanks.
It is hard not to laugh at atheists of the sillier variety, although we know we shouldn't, for there we are but for the grace of God, and there we may be yet if our foundations are shaken. One reads in this article, however, of critics, themselves unbelievers, who have attended atheist assemblies and heard nothing more than disjointed tantrums delivered by shabby crackpots—laughable even to them.
But this form of atheism is the bailiwick of the little devils. The greater ones, as Screwtape noted in his Toast, can do more with conventional piety than they can with unreligion. This is why it is probable that the general run of atheism is at its strongest when it is weak enough to look humorous to both serious belief and unbelief, for the more substantive and better-reasoned it becomes, the more it looks like what it hates, and the more it has the potential to be overcome in those for whom the Lord has kept reason and sweet desire alive.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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