The Scourge of Atheist Pastors!

I got an email from our local NPR affiliate to talk about a recent survey by famed atheist author (and Tufts University professor) Daniel Dennett about pastors who, secretly, have lost their faith.  They can't be open about what's happened to them because (a) they need the job and have no other job skills or (b) one pastor hasn't told his wife, a fervent believer or (c) some other reason.  Dennett's belief is that this closet atheism among pastors is widespread, something he's going to try to prove in his next study, an anonymous survey sent broadly among pastors.  His hope is that, if he can prove this is widespread, he'll be doing a service both to congregations (who surely deserve to know if they're being led by a closet atheist) and to these unfortunate pastors, who perhaps can take hope that they're not alone when they see his massive numbers.  At present, this will have to remain speculative, because to date he's only found five such pastors.

What caused them to lose their faith?  Well, writings by Dennett's friend Richard Dawkins accomplished this for one of the pastors, who'd read Dawkin's book "for reasearch."  Others found they could no longer believe in biblical stories that now struck them as unlikely or contradictory.  He paints a lonely picture of their lives.

The initial question from the NPR reporter was whether I knew of a lot of pastors like this.  (I don't know of any who fit Dennett's profile.)  I responded that one reason I might not know (or know that I know--maybe they just haven't come clean to me) could be that even the terms of "losing faith" have changed in recent decades.   This ties back to our post yesterday.  It seems to me that the pastors I know didn't start pastoring because of any intellectual conviction that, if it were successfully challenged, would ruin everything.  They started pastoring because of an experienced connection with God that they were eager to help others experience as well.

Now, certainly, one can "lose faith" on those terms too.  And I certainly know many a pastor who's gotten discouraged that God "isn't coming through" for them in ways that they wish God would.  But that strikes me as a different process than losing faith because one no longer believes there was an actual Jonah who survived being swallowed by an actual big fish. 

And this makes me rethink the whole atheist-debunker approach.  I know many people of faith who've really enjoyed Christopher Hitchens' or Richard Dawkins' books.  (I'm not included in that number, but that's an aside.)  But they like them not because they debunk faith or God (the books, to the naked eye of the observer, seem to have had no impact on my friends on that front), but because they debunk stage 2 Christianity, and so Dawkins and Hitchens have partnered with my friends to take down a common enemy. 

Do you know stories of closeted atheist pastors?  For you, would atheism look like an intellectual debunking of something you've previously thought to be true (the Hitchens' picture) or would it look more like a loss of confidence that God is going to come though in one's life?  And, if you read Hitchens' article, what's your response to it?

Comments

[paul]

Isn't it amazing...Atheists, secularists, Christians, et al working together to reveal ourselves to us...and all seem to be seeking 'truth?' I actually haven't read any of these guys...only know what you tell me, Dave ;-)

But it seems Jesus did the same...held a mirror up to the people of his day. Of course, these three may have a message that isn't as hopeful as Jesus, but seems they are doing their part. Interesting.

[Dana]

I find Dennet's article embarrassing - like when I watched sitcoms like Family Ties as a kid or Seinfeld as an adult (sorry fans, I don't find most of it at all funny, just uncomfortable). I find myself embarrassed for Tufts too. I'm sure Dennet isn't like my characterization, but a crazy uncle who tells off-color jokes at family holiday gatherings comes to mind. Is anyone at Tufts checking his work for intellectual honesty?

Now that that's off my chest...
I agree that he's chasing after stage-2 Christians (or that their the vulnerable ones), but it seems a little unsporting to pick on people who don't believe what their job purports them to believe when many people have a crisis of faith at one time or another. (How about support groups?)
Better, though much harder, to go after a God-believing but hypocritical group who exploit others with their position and power.
I discover that I don't really care if he uncovers more (even 80%) pastors who don't believe in God.
I prefer a little nuance anyway. And an experiential God.

[Jai]

It sounds like bait for one those trash "reality shows" I catch glimpses of on the treadmill at the gym. "If you are an atheist pastoring a Christian church and want to be on the show call us at 555-. Somehow I see a book deal in the works with an abundance of embellished information and statistics forth comimg from the see through Dennett.

[Account Deleted]

Unlike the other respondents here so far, I find this issue to be quite serious, and real, and an interesting opportunity to think about what it takes (on a psychological level) to live the life of an "atheist pastor." There may be far more such individuals than many of us would care to admit, though perhaps not the thousands that Dennett et al. would hope for.

Though I don't know any atheist pastors, I do know several people who are possibly the next closest thing (?) in my world, viz., atheist biblical scholars who think the Bible is worthless (or unhelpful) as a spiritual document. They perhaps began as people of faith, but lost that somewhere, and now soldier on for a variety of reasons similar to those of atheist pastors.
This has given me, throughout the years, many chances to reflect on Dave's exact question regarding whether atheism in this context is "an intellectual debunking" or a personal, experiential perception of failure with God.

I don't have an answer to this latter problem in terms of the five or so people I know personally in this position. For me, I can't imagine having a meaningful, current experience with God and then some "intellectual issue" would just obliterate it. Of course, one would do well to question the boundaries between an "intellectual" and experiential problem. This tired old dichotomy operates much like the "head vs. heart" debate, which never made sense to me; most normal people cannot actually distinguish what their "head" is telling them versus their "heart" except as a convention of speaking. I suppose the fact that it is a convention means that it does have some value, I admit that; and I understand, most of the time, what I think others mean when they oppose these kinds of terms, as Dave has, mutatis mutandis, above. But still. What is your "heart" as opposed to your "head," exactly? Is your intellectual world not an ongoing "experience"?!

Having said all this: I would leave open the possibility that someone could engage with a real "intellectual" issue that could drive them to abandon faith (and vice versa). But there is always, I think, a deep experiential/emotional background to the question of why one would allow an "intellectual" problem to derail a longstanding faith commitment.

[Otto]

You know, I am the opposite of a closet atheist, I feel that I'm a closet believer! For the most part... I mean I will tell people what I believe if they want to know, but I find for the most part people are not interested. What most people are only interested in "do you agree with me?" and that's a question I find unsatisfying.

And the reason I keep it to myself is that secular people don't take me seriously if I say I believe in God (they are not even mildly interested in hearing about faith). And church people don't take me seriously either, if I say that I believe in God but I'm not willing to take a stand on questions like: is the Bible factual? Are non-believers saved? Is there an eternal hell? Is Jesus God? etc.

(And at the heart of it, I feel I'm more of a universalist than anything else, in that I firmly believe everyone has a connection to God, even if in many cases the connection is dormant or unconscious.)

So regardless of who I'm talking to, virtually nobody takes me seriously, so I figure what's the point in talking about it. I know that may sound cynical, and that's not really the case. But really, what's the point.. do you know what I mean?

Being a closet believer also has been a lonely place to be in!

[DJ Sybear]

I can think of two sources on this subject off the top of my head.

The first is the story of my friend Ken's former mentor, who was a pastor in a mainline church. Ken knew him for at least a few years and was attending his church. Ken was surprised when his friend admitted to him, in confidence towards the end of his life, that he no longer believed that the Bible was much more than some stories that maybe helped people along, and that whether God was really out there was pretty much a mystery. So maybe not strict atheism, but full-fledged agnosticism at least.

Sadly, the story ended in tragedy: the pastor committed suicide, and in the wake of his death the news surfaced that he had maintained a secret relationship with another man, never free to have that relationship affirmed given his status. His funeral was shunned by most of the congregation as news spread, and Ken was one of the few that attended. Ken, understandably shell-shocked, dropped the seminary program he was in at the time for a master's program in philosophy, and turned his back on the Church, and God, who to his mind had abandoned his former mentor.

The second source comes from a program I was involved in ministering to pastors in crisis. On the bright side, this is good news: the prevalence of confessed atheism or agnosticism in this program was very low. By virtue of the format, pastors were secure knowing that their confessions would not travel to unintended ears; no one would know what they said or admitted in that context, and the geography of the situation put them miles away from their churches. That said, I think we ran into a couple pastors who didn't really believe God was out there. So that would be less than 5% of the pastors we worked with. And since that's self-selecting based on crisis, I'd put the odds at less than 1% prevalence across the United States. Not that that's particularly scientific, mind you.

So is there a there there? Does Dennett have a credible theory? Probably. Is it earth-shattering? Probably not. The opportunity here is to stop thinking of pastors as superhuman. They just aren't, and whether pastors believe or not from one day to the next isn't indicative of anything, except that ministers of the gospel are just as fallible as the rest of us.

[PB]

I'd be interested to hear from any church leaders out there (Dave? Jeff?) how you've handled any "crises of faith". Or if there hasn't been a crisis, would a more moderate term be "ebb and flow"? Times when it seems like God hasn't been there?

[Dave Schmelzer]

Perhaps I'll edit this when I'm next at my computer, but I had a brain aneuryism at the end of the post when I swapped in "Hitchens" several times when I, of course, meant Dennett.

[amy]

Tell me about it!!

[Brent]

Well, I'm late to the conversation, but as usual I have a brilliant analysis. Seriously, its great.

During the Enlightenment and before modernism was fully in swing, Descartes saw the threat that Modernism might bring to God as people put more faith in reasoning and science. So, he sought to secure a place for God and gave some now-famous arguments for why, on philosophical grounds, God must exist. Good intentions, to be sure, but what he really succeeded in doing was turning God into philosophical/ intellectual argument, and one that has been pretty easy to defeat over the past three hundred years. It now widely recognized that this God, the intellectual-argument, philosophical-construct God, is dead.
All Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, Hitchens, etc., are doing is continuously hitting over the head with this foregone conclusion.

So what's the problem? The problem, I think, in the couple of hundred years that this Cartesian God held sway, we Christians largely bought into it. We adopted the vocabulary of philosophical reasoning and affirmed God's existence on those grounds.

But its only through ignorance that this position can be maintained since that God really is dead (as Dennet knows very well). So when a pastor (or, more commonly in my experience, a freshman student taking an intro philosophy class) encounters the arguments that show this God to be dead, it becomes a faith-shattering event. Dennet and his ilk count on this. They are not bad guys, necessarily. They simply make the (not unwarranted) assumption that we agree with them that God reduces to an intellectual argument, and therefore if they could simply better educate us on the matter, we'd come to see God need not exist.

The solution, I think, is one we dance around a lot here - namely reclaiming experiential knowledge of God as central. We don't follow Descartes' God, but that of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Jesus. God's existence is proved through his faithfulness to us. It is therefore only his unfaithfulness that should shake our faith (like maybe in DJ's story above about his friend Ken).

so we should maybe read Dennet and Dawkins (and, more importantly, Descartes, Heidegger, and Neitsche), but we shouldn't let those arguments that God is dead, convincing as they may be, worry us too much. We don't worship that God.

[Jeff]

yup. I read the first few chapters of hitchens "God is not great" and concluded, yup, your God isn't great. but he's not my God.

[Brent]

Right, me too. But the other thing we should realize from that Hitchens book is that the God he condemsn HAS been the God of millions of Christ-proclaimers through the centuries. We should not blame Hitchens for condemning the God that he does, because that is the God we have so often proclaimed.

[Doug]

I'm inclined to agree, but have we now simply reduced the problem to a matter of changing orthodoxy?

[Dan L]

Otto's comment posted twice so I deleted one of them.

Thanks for sharing Otto!

[Mark J]

First off, I am glad I found this website. It's very engaging.

I find it difficult to be so black and white about such a topic. People fluctuate in their state of belief through out the day, not to mention weekly or monthly. As CS Lewis once said somewhere that your faith could even be affected by your digestion or change of environment. This I have found to be true at times.

A loss of belief is serious. I myself have gone through years of doubt only to come out the other side deeper in what I knew about Christ, but I worked through it (or God worked it out in me). But if you were to ask me in the thick of it what I believed I would have been agnostic. Now I believe in Christ.

I am writing from Canada, and I am not sure if there is a big difference in the secular culture up here then in many US states, but when my brother was in seminary, in the '80's, with a mainline church he told us that one of the seminary students at that time was an Atheist, who went on to lead a church. The reason he was becoming a Minister was because "it was a stable job for the rest of his life".

Now, at first I thought this was unusual and also that he was being allowed through the system was strange, but since then I have met pastors in this denomination who's view of God was weak (deist), or just not Christian at all (Unitarian-ish), and I stopped being surprised.

I even met one pastor who was a youth leader who openly denounced Christ. And I could go on. Needless to say this is my root denomination, and one that I love, but it is fading rapidly in this country, these churches are often empty or few attend.

If one was to take a survey of Christian belief here in Canada and limit it to a set time period or to just the mainline churches, one would find that it seems to be going away, but if one was to broaden the survey then one would find that there are a rapidly growing number of 'new churches' that are popping up everywhere (like the Meeting House, Harvest bible Chapel, Calvary chapel, and so on). It looks as if belief is dying up here, but it is just changing and adapting.

So my questions are: How does one determine doubt?

and What frame work is there to determine 'non believing' pastors? Because one can believe in a god, but not Christ, but would that person still be deemed a Christian believer or an agnostic? but the answer would be neither.

And beyond that, If one finds a denomination with many 'non believing' pastors in the system, then one needs to look at that denominations system too. Not just the pastors, plus the psychology behind it all.

And finally, its been my experience that a good pastor is hard to find. And usually they work hard and alone with little or no support, so they go through burnout. I have seen that many times, and it looks like they lost their faith, but they just need Christian community and support.

And the last note I would like to end on is that if you read the letters of Paul, he was often dealing with teachers who were going in different directions. Teachers have been loosing their faith since day one, but people have been finding faith since then too.

Once again, I find that one can't be black and white with all of this, There are too many loose threads here.