Addressing the National Conference of the American Humanist Association
They gathered at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown Chicago, some 500 delegates strong. They came from all across the United States and abroad with the Netherlands, in particular, being well represented. By and large they were a well-educated group made up largely of professional people: doctors, lawyers, business leaders and academics. Their single most identifying mark, however, was that they were overtly non-religious – perhaps anti-religious. Their publicity material featured a quotation from Kurt Vonnegut, the late novelist, extolling the virtues of living without God. I had been invited by this organization to receive an award and to address this conference. I shared both of these privileges with one other person. His name was Dr. Jared Diamond, a renowned scientist and former professor at UCLA, who is the author of numerous books. I was to receive the Humanist Association’s annual “Religious Liberty Award.” Dr. Diamond would be honored as “The Humanist of the Year.” Previous winners of this award, I learned, were Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts and novelist Joyce Carol Oates. It was an impressive list.
I found it a fascinating experience to enter this conference, as I did, as a representative of organized religion. Clad in the purple shirt and clerical collar of my profession, my wife and I presented ourselves at the registration desk to receive orientation materials, a schedule of activities, meal tickets and name tags. Above this registration desk was a banner that proclaimed “Good without a God.” I felt very much like a Mexican immigrant might feel at a Trump rally!
I thought about that banner’s message and I did not disagree with it. I have known and respected atheists whose lives were not only good, but noble. The quality of goodness does not depend on a belief in God. Perhaps what I understand better than that is that the opposite of their slogan can also true. One can be “evil with God!” I thought of the anti-Semitism that has been the great “contribution” of the Christian Church over the centuries. I recalled that the Crusades were organized by the Vatican to kill “infidels,” which was the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries’ word for Muslims. I thought of Christianity’s complicity with slavery, the “Bible Belt’s” support of segregation, the church’s denigration of women over the centuries and the abuse of the LGBT community of people by organized religion. Yes, one can be good without a God and one can be evil with one. It is also true that people can be evil without a God and good with one. Having a God or not having a God seems to me to be no guarantee or even an indicator of goodness.
Everyone that I met on a personal level at this conference was incredibly warm and gracious. I saw one person, who had attended lectures I had delivered in a church in Western North Carolina over a number of years. She had always wrestled with what she called the unbelievable aspects of the various religious explanations with which she had grown up. She was absolutely glowing when she greeted me. “I have finally found the community in which I belong,” she stated. I was delighted for her. Religion sometimes does strange things to people.
Another delegate greeted me with a lovely smile, then shared with me the fact that the last book she read before deciding that she was no longer “a believer” was my book: Why Christianity Must Change or Die. That book, she said, “pushed me right out of the door of organized religion.” An author never knows quite what effect his or her writing will have on his or her reader. It was interesting to me that this woman seemed to say this as a compliment!
I discovered that the reason I had been chosen to receive their “Religious Liberty” award was related to two things. One was the role I had played over the last fifty years in the various battles for justice, as people of color, women and the LGBT community struggled for full acceptance in the life of our church and country. The other was what they perceived to be my attacks on the kind of religious literalism with which most of them grew up and were today in vigorous rebellion against. I found it fascinating how familiar they were with my writing. I have discovered many times that those, who are themselves most overtly anti-religious, are also deeply, sometimes even emotionally interested in the religion they claim to reject. Carl Sagan, who was what I call a “God-intoxicated atheist,” fitted that category.
At the banquet during which the awards were given, the two honorees spoke. During my presentation, I walked them through just a bit of contemporary biblical scholarship. The Bible is a human document, written between two and three thousand years ago and it makes assumptions that no one today can still make with any intellectual credibility. The earth is not the center of a three-tiered universe, God does not live above the sky. Human beings were not created perfect, only to fall into “original sin.” Stories of a virgin birth are not about history. Miracles, people need to recognize, do not enter the story of Jesus until the 8th decade of the Common Era. Thus for anyone in the church to speak of the Bible as the “Word of God” becomes irrational. One surely does not want to blame God for all of the things in the Bible. For me, these statements are so mundane, so commonplace in the field of academic biblical studies that they are not even debatable. The fact is, however, that to my audience that night, they had never heard a representative of the Christian Church say these things. My talk received a standing ovation and elicited a number of questions to which I was given the privilege of responding. After that address, there was a lively sale of my books.
I am sure that Professor Diamond’s address was far more tailored to this group’s expectations than was mine. I, nonetheless, found his address absolutely fascinating. He spoke on the two reasons that, in his mind, belief in God no longer made sense. The first of his reasons came from the field of evolutionary biology. Human beings are “developed animals,” he said, not a special creation. He illustrated that with the discoveries of genetics and with the fact that all of us today carry some of the genes of Neanderthal people in our makeup. The idea that there is something unique, godlike or eternal about human life has, he suggested, no basis in science. The second reason, which in his mind destroyed the possibility of one being able to believe in God, came from the field of astrophysics. In the vastness of the universe, inhabited by perhaps as many as a trillion galaxies, the evolutionary probability is that intelligent life exists in many more places than just on planet Earth. This means, Dr. Diamond suggested, that life is a product of nature and that God is little more than a human myth.
I am not unfamiliar with either the field of evolutionary biology or astrophysics. I have read extensively in both areas. He told me nothing about which I was not already familiar. What did surprise me about Dr. Diamond’s address, however, was that the God he believed to have been destroyed by these two areas of exploding human knowledge is a deity in whom I too have not believed in for decades. This brilliant man was still operating out of a concept of God that represented what I would call a 4th grade Sunday school mentality. How could he be so learned in one field, and so limited in another? The answer to me is quite clear. The Christian Church, in its institutional form, makes little or no effort to educate its people theologically. Adult education in most churches is naive, juvenile and easily forgettable. It does not address the great issues of our day for fear of being controversial. It does not reflect the knowledge available in the Christian academies, keeping that knowledge secret from most congregations. It does not free the Christian faith to engage the knowledge revolution that is rampant in our generation. How can one in a post-Darwinian world, for example, still talk about human life being created perfect only to fall into original sin? The Christian Church in almost all of its forms continues to protect from challenge, the childish fantasies of most churchgoers. We would rather have our members quiet and placid rather than stirred up and questioning.
Recently I had a conversation with an Episcopal priest of my church, who decided that for the Trinity Sunday liturgy he should revert to the traditional language of the late 19th century. Why did you make that decision, I wondered? This priest responded that the language of the Trinity seemed to fit better inside the more ancient forms of liturgy. Then, as if to justify his decision, this priest went on to say how many people in his church that day had expressed their delight in hearing the ancient liturgical words being used again in worship.
It was an interesting argument put forth by a gifted priest, but one who has yet to embrace the meaninglessness of yesterday’s theological words for today’s people. I did not press the issue, but the facts are that those who expressed delight in this traditional, liturgical language of another world will all be dead within twenty years, while the use of this language among younger and educated people produces exactly the effect that I met at the American Humanist Association convention and in their speaker, Dr. Jared Diamond.
Because some of today’s Christians have a sentimental attachment to the liturgical patterns of the past, which portray God in pre-Copernican terms, as an external being, living above the sky, possessing supernatural power, who enjoys being flattered (we call it praise in church) and who is moved when we human beings grovel like slaves before this deity on our knees, begging for mercy, does not shield us from the fact that this God is no longer believable. That God will never be resuscitated. Our only choice is to accept this deicide or to transform, in a radical way, what the word God means. My presence at the gathering of the American Humanist Association made the choice quite clear. Christianity needs to have churches and clergy, who understand the issues and who are prepared to address them.
John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here
