Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor

Sunday, October 28, 2018 ~ All Saints Sunday

 Sermon: “The Unfriendly Atheist”

© 2018, Dr. Tamilio

This has been a very interesting week.  After my recent article appeared in The Canton Citizen, an organization called The Friendly Atheist wrote an article bashing me and what I wrote.  These “Friendly” Atheists really aren’t that friendly.  As a result of their article, which appears on their online blog, I received several messages: some on Facebook, some via email.

Some of the messages were very respectful, their authors saying that even though they disagreed with me, they had respect for what I wrote and how I wrote it.  They stated and defended their opinion as an act of civil discourse, which I encourage.  I don’t expect all my readers to agree with me.  I welcome intellectual argumentation.  However, there was another brand of messages I received last week — vicious attacks on me and the Christian faith.  Let me share a couple of them.  (Some of the language has been censored.)

• “Hey Dr. John. Why are you so stupid?”  By the way, this person’s Facebook profile picture is a painting of Jesus giving the middle finger.
• “The ‘new’ Testes [you heard that right: ‘Testes’] is…hearsay.”
• “F-you and your zombie god you filthy Christian fascist. Your disgusting, mass mudering [he meant murdering] cult will be banished as an unfortunate stupidity of history.”
• My favorite response came from an atheist who said I was dead wrong, but that he would pray for me. That makes as much sense as the Freedom from Religion Foundation saying that they understood that I was to offer a “secular prayer” at last June’s high school graduation.  (Can someone please explain what a secular prayer is?  Seriously, I have no clue.  Do I pray to the wall or to the grass?)

I find it interesting that some of these people claim that I am wrong in claiming that the Freedom of Religion Foundation does not think belief in God is dangerous, but then turn around and say that we are a cult that should be banished!

I never thought I’d say this, my friends, but we are at war — not with atheists per se.  To some extent, I do not care what people believe.  I respect atheists and their right not to believe in God.  I have no qualms with that, nor do I want to see the United States become a theocracy.  My issue is with those who think religion is dangerous and should be eliminated.  This is what I wrote about in my most-recent article.  I was told that this isn’t anyone’s objective and, in the next breath, was told that people who believe in God are unintelligent rubes.  One person threatened to call Boston University to have them rescind my doctorate.  (I gave him the phone number to the Dean’s office.)

We are at war.  Our world is filled with people who have such hatred towards those who believe in God, that they feel religion should be a private affair at best — and eliminated altogether at worst.  There are all kinds of benign beliefs and practices that I do not agree with, but I do not go out of my way to attack the devotees of such beliefs and practices.  Imagine going on a crusade against those who believe in Santa Claus.  Why would you?  Something that doesn’t exist isn’t really worth fighting against.  I draw your attention to a letter to the editor of The Canton Citizen this past week by Sue Harrington.  Although she and her family are “proud American atheists,” she wrote, “I have no interest in dislodging anyone’s faith.”  This is a perfectly reasonable response to what is going on.

But not all responses have been as respectful as Ms. Harrington’s.  The Freedom from Religion Foundation and their followers do not think that belief in God is benign.  They think it is detrimental to society.  In turn, they have become hostile to any manifestation of religion in the public square.  They say that this is not what they are doing.  They say that they are very tolerant of religion; they just don’t want prayers and religious ceremonies of any kind to be offered in public settings.  But then, when you get the vile hate mail that I received from people affiliated with this group, it makes their agenda quite clear: demonize clergy and paint religious people as a bunch of ignorant fools.

In a Time magazine article from two years ago entitled “Regular Christians Are No Longer Welcome in American Culture,” Mary Eberstadt writes, “This new vigorous secularism has catapulted mockery of Christianity and other forms of religious traditionalism into the mainstream and set a new low for what counts as civil criticism of people’s most-cherished beliefs.”[1]

There’s no doubt that we live in what many theorists call a post-Christian society.  That doesn’t mean that Christianity no longer exists, of course.  It does mean, however, that the Church no longer has the same influence that it used to.  It is no longer the center of society, no longer one of the pillars of community.  One way of explaining post-Christian is that it “is the loss of the primacy of the Christian worldview in political affairs, especially in the Western world where Christianity had previously flourished, in favor of alternative worldviews such as secularism or nationalism.”[2]

 This is why the Mainline Church is in a state of decline.  People no longer attend churches the way the used to because either: a) they feel the church is irrelevant, that it doesn’t address contemporary needs, or that b) people are fulfilling those needs elsewhere, finding their answers in post-Christian institutions.

We can also see that civility and respect have gone out the window, as Eberstadt touched upon.  It used to be that if people disagreed with you, they would just leave you alone.  Think about how the world has changed.  If you hold a different political opinion than your neighbor, he thinks you’re an extremist.  If you hold a different religious belief than your co-worker, especially if she is an atheist, she thinks that you are unenlightened.

We, in part, are to blame.  We’ve let ourselves become irrelevant.  When people stop coming to church, we just keep “doing things the way we’ve always done them,” hoping that people will eventually come around.  Isn’t that Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again expecting different result?

I am not suggesting that we compromise our message.  That is the last thing we should do.  We do need to find innovative ways to share it and to connect it to people’s lives.  People need to see that the Gospel matters.  Otherwise, they’ll ignore us at best.  At worst, they’ll try to root us out of society.  Believe me: there are a lot of people who would love to throw us to the lions!

 I am not going the way of the dinosaur — and neither is this church.  We are at war against both rabid atheists who want to see the church die and against the sense of irrelevance that we helped create.  It’s hard to fight a war on two fronts, but I am prepared to do so.  First, I will become deeply engaged in apologetics: no, that doesn’t mean saying “I’m sorry.”  Apologetics is a field within theology that defends the faith.  Second, I will continue to work with the leadership of this congregation to show the wider Canton community that we have something quite unique here: a faith that nurtures people’s souls as well as their brains; a community that is inclusive of all people; a home where people feel a love unlike any they have ever known.  This is our treasure.  We should not hide it under a bushel basket.  I will not let us.  Amen.

[1] Published June 29, 2016.  Taken online from time.com.

[2] Taken from Wikipedia.