Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists

by Dan Barker

If you want to be a preacher, then “just do it.” Do it with confidence and style. It works. (Just like anyone in sales will tell you.) But with religion, most people are uncritical. Never once in 19 years of preaching did anyone ever come up to me after a service and ask, “Rev. Barker, what were the sources for your sermon?” I was accorded an immense amount of unearned respect, simply for being a minister. Where were the skeptics, atheists, agnostics and humanists? (Well, why should I expect them to be in church?) Why did anyone rarely challenge my asserted “authority” to speak for God? I do remember a few slammed doors. I recall only two or three times during all those years when someone on the street would reject what I was saying, and it was a huge surprise to me when they simply walked away. Now, I don’t blame them; but at the time, I was perplexed at how someone could be so lost that they would run from God.