Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God: How to give love, create beauty and find peace

by Frank Schaeffer

Now there was no longer anyone ahead of me to obscure the view of the cliff I was staggering toward one year at a time.

My brain is not evolved enough to reconcile the collision of my genetic imperative with transcendent experience. My brain recognizes but can’t explain how love and beauty intersect with the prime directive of evolution: survive. Nor can I reconcile these ideas: “I know that the only thing that exists is this material universe,” and “I know that my redeemer liveth.” Depending on the day you ask me, both statements seem true.

Certainty made things simple, gave me an answer to every question and paid the bills.

Embracing paradox helped me discover that religion is a neurological disorder for which faith is the only cure.

The perceptions and understandings of the religious practitioner are more like the outpourings of a poet than they are like theoretical pronouncements… Poetry, at its most profound, need not observe consistency…

You will always be more than one person. You will always embody contradiction. You—like some sort of quantum mechanicals physics experiment—will always be in two places at once.

Dad and Mom had a lesbian couple living in our chalet for several years in the early 1970s. One was Dad’s secretary, the other Mom’s helper. They shared a room. Fortunately, my parents were hypocritical and acted as if, no matter their official religious absolutes, the higher call was to ignore what the Bible said in favor of what they hoped it meant. Thus, without ever saying it, it seems to me my parents were affirming that the Bible should be read as if Jesus was the only lens through which to see God. The result was that Francis and Edith Schaeffer were nicer than their official theology.

Enlightenment thinkers jettisoned the ugly, exclusionary and magical parts of the religion that grew up bearing Christ’s name. Their goal was what Ellul called on the Church to do in Jesus and Marx: “On all levels and in every aspect of our society, the poor are rejected, mistreated, and forced more deeply into their poverty. Christianity should have taken up the cause of the poor; better yet, it should have identified with the poor. Instead, during almost the entire course of its history, the Church has served as a prop of the powerful and has been on the side of exploiters and states” (emphasis in original).

Similarly, his essay on religion contrasts institutional religion with the lived religion of the greatest commandment as Voltaire engages with Jesus (“a man of gentle, simple countenance”) in a dream-like fantasy: I saw a man of gentle, simple countenance, who seemed to me to be about thirty-five years old… I was astonished to find his feet swollen and bleeding, his hands likewise, his side pierced, and his ribs flayed with whip cuts… I said to him, “is it possible for a just man, a sage, to be in this state?… Is it by priests and judges that you have been so cruelly assassinated?” He answered with much courtesy—“Yes.” “And who were these monsters?” “They were hypocrites.” “Ah! That says everything. I understand by this single word that they must have condemned you to death… You wanted to teach them a new religion, then?” “Not at all; I said to them simply—’Love God with all your heart and your fellow-creature as yourself, for that is man’s whole duty.

Struensee was thus shaped by his religious family’s outsider status in Germany. Through a fluky series of circumstances, Struensee got to try out his Enlightenment ideas on a large scale. As physician to King Christian VII of Denmark, he became regent of Denmark when the king’s life-long mental illness grew extreme enough to create a power vacuum. Struensee’s dramatic social reforms included universal health care, limits on the totalitarian power of the Church, abolishing torture, removing censorship of the press, revoking privileges for nobles, introducing luxury taxes to fund the care of orphans, banning the slave trade and abolishing capital punishment.

In God-fearing America the poor are now the “takers,” no longer the “least of these,” and many conservative evangelicals side with today’s Pharisees, attacking the poor in Jesus’ name.

Who then are Jesus’ followers: the secular, godless Danes caring for the poor or the don’t-tread-on-me Ayn Rand-inspired libertarians and their church-going enablers?

We have Jesus and his Enlightenment prophets to thank for the humanistic ideas on which America was founded. If you’re one of the people Jesus is said to have favored—a child, a woman, someone ill, a sex worker, someone regarded as untouchable, old, ugly, abandoned or “the other” in some other way—and you are being cared for by unbelievers, is Jesus’ example being followed? Or does Jesus only live in correct theology regardless of how little a Christian may care about your wellbeing?

I also choose to try my best to be honest about problems in the church of my choice. Jesus did that too. He criticized everything religious around him yet still participated in the traditional liturgical formal worship of his day even though it was led by hypocrites he denounced.

That said, my presence in our lovely local church could be construed as a kind of condoning of my not-so-lovely denomination’s overall problems. We’re sexist, we’re nationalistic and there are fundamentalist manipulators in our midst! And I go to a local church that belongs to a denomination like that! Shame on me!

We are all recovering from what we’ve experienced in captivity to ourselves.

There is only one defense against the rising, worldwide, fear-filled fundamentalist tide engulfing all religions (including the intolerant religion of the New Atheists) which once engulfed me: the embrace of paradox and uncertainty as the virtuoso expression of love.

Brilliant, humane and accessible artists like Thiebaud, Banksy, Ellington, Davis, Chihuly, Arbus and Penn, not to mention generations of other great artists, musicians and conductors, had their work cut out for them during and after the twentieth century. They labored during a period of art history when serious artists had to struggle to survive a concentrated toxic dose of willful meaninglessness.

Those of us raised in the Christian tradition need to choose to either see God in Jesus or to continue to let the Bible define God. Our tradition says that Jesus is God. Maybe we should act as if we think he is instead of worshipping a book. Maybe we should be brave enough to admit that we are compelled to either become blinded ideologues or we need to forthrightly pick and choose what we follow in the Bible. Most Christians do that anyway, many just don’t admit it.

we need to see God in Jesus ...