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

by Dan Barker

“This book profoundly affected me. It’s funny, and poignant, and most importantly, true! You must read this book.” —JULIA SWEENEY

Foreword

My mistake has been naively to think I can remove their delusion simply by talking to them in a quiet, sensible voice and laying out the evidence, clear for all to see.

What is it really like to be so indoctrinated that you can honestly and sincerely believe obvious nonsense—believe it with every fiber of your being?

Dan was not just a preacher, he was the kind of preacher that “you would not want to sit next to on a bus.”

Dan knows deeply what it is like to be a wingnut, a faith-head, a fully paid-up nutjob, an all singing, all glossolaling religious fruit bat.

Introduction

“Joining me now,” said Oprah, “is a former ordained minister of 17 years who gave up his religion: Dan Barker. So, tell me your story, Dan, the ex-reverend.”

“You went for 17 years as a minister to not believing in God! What does that say about you?” “That I was wrong,” I replied.

Part 1 of Godless, Rejecting God, tells the story of how I moved from devout preacher to atheist and beyond.

Part 2, Why I Am an Atheist, presents my philosophical reasons for unbelief.

Part 3, What’s Wrong With Christianity, critiques the bible (its reliability as well as its morality) and the historical evidence for Jesus.

Part 4, Life is Good!, comes back to my personal story, taking a case to the United States Supreme Court, dealing with personal trauma and experiencing the excitement of Adventures in Atheism.

—Dan Barker Freedom From Religion Foundation ffrf.org

A NOTE ON WORD USAGE

PART 1

Rejecting God

Chapter One

The Call

I had already been “saved.” My parents were Christian, but belonging to a Christian family does not make you a Christian any more than having a baker for a father makes you a loaf of bread. Each person has to make his or her own decision.

God was not just an idea, He was a reality. I had a personal relationship with Jesus, and he had something to say to me as one of his close friends and servants.

Millions of people still needed to be saved, and the time was short. I knew God was talking directly to me, and I knew right then how to live the rest of my life. I accepted the call. I would spend my life bringing lost people into the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus was coming soon! I didn’t think the world would last long enough for me to go to college or get married or raise a family.

As I look back on it now, I can see that most of the “miracles” were pretty boring. The excitement was in our minds.

I saw people walk up to the side of the stage in search of a healing, before being told by an usher to sit in a wheelchair to be rolled up to Kathryn. When Kathryn quietly told the person to “stand up and walk the rest of the way,” the crowd went wild, assuming that the person couldn’t walk in the first place.

I never witnessed any organic healings, restored body parts or levitations. A few crutches and medicine bottles littered the aisles, bu...

The bulk of the “cures” were older women with cancer, arthritis, heart problems, diabetes, “unspoken problems,” etc. There was an occasional exorcism (mental illness?), too. We had come to be blessed and we were not to be cheated, taking the slightest cue to yell, sing and praise God. I think, in retrospect, the organist was the re...

I didn’t think I was “crazy”—I was quite functional and could snap out of it at any moment, like taking off headphones—but I did feel that what I had was special, above the world.

I simply knew from direct personal experience that God was real, and no one at the time would have been able to convince me that I was delusional. I would simply say, “You don’t know.” I had seen miracles. I had talked with God. I knew the truth and the world did not.

I eventually spent a total of about two years as a missionary in Mexico, trying to convert Catholics into Christians. (Looking back on it, I am embarrassed at the arrogance and ignorance of American Protestant evangelists, thinking we should convert an entire “lost dark country” to Jesus.)

During those years, I was the kind of guy you would not want to sit next to on a bus.

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.

From 1968 to 1972, I attended Azusa Pacific College, an interdenominational state-accredited Christian school in California, and majored in religion. Looking back, I can see that most of the religion courses (with a couple of notable exceptions) were simply glorified Sunday School classes and I don’t remember that we delved very deeply into the evidences or arguments for or against Christianity. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since I wanted to be out in the streets preaching the gospel, not stuck in a classroom chewing over pointless history and philosophy. After all, the world was ending soon.

We listened to end-time author Hal Lindsey (The Late, Great Planet Earth) assure us that the second coming of Jesus would be no later than the mid 1980s. That late?

At Azusa Pacific I met a singer (again paralleling my dad’s life). The world had not ended yet, so Carol and I were married in 1970, when I was barely 21. We have four children: Becky (1973), Kristi (1975), Andrea (1977), and Danny (1979).

For the next eight years my wife and I lived “by faith” as touring musical evangelists, still expecting Jesus to return at any moment, “like a thief in the night.”

The expression “living by faith” is more than a profession of belief. It is an adventure and a risk, putting your life in the hands of God. Neither of us had a job. We had no regular income, no health insurance, and of course no retirement plan since we would never need it in the short time remaining before the rapture. All our belongings were in storage for the first year and we lived on the road, accepting housing from church members, friends and relatives. When Carol was pregnant with our second child, we booked a national evangelistic itinerary, hopped in our yellow Chevy Nova with about $100 cash, and bounced around the country from church to church, not charging for the ministry but accepting freewill “love offerings,” trusting that we would get enough money from each service to allow us to make it to the next.

In retrospect, I now realize that if I hadn’t been such a blinkered believer, if I hadn’t been convinced that Jesus was coming back “any day now,” I might have had a decent career as a music producer, doing something I was good at and loved. I now know it was negligent, as a parent of young children, to sell myself so cheaply, allowing the clients to reap the profits while my family very often struggled to eat.

I used to think that everything that happened to me had a spiritual significance. If I was looking for a parking space and a car pulled out of a space right near where I wanted to be, then I would say, “Thank you, Jesus, for giving me a place to park.” If I had to park six blocks away, I would say, “Thank you, Jesus, for teaching me patience.” The bible says “All things work together for good to them that love God.” I viewed all income as an undeserved gift from heaven. I tried to interpret every news event as fitting into God’s plan for the world. If something bad happened then I would say, “There is the price for evil.” If something good happened then I would say, “There is a sign of God’s blessing.” Any news from the Middle East was a sign that God was focusing attention on the site of the arena for the last days, which was just around the corner. Nothing in my life was accidental. Every occurrence was a lesson to be learned, or a part of divine purpose, or a temptation from the Devil. Behind the visible world was a very real spiritual world inhabited by angels, demons, spirits and saints, all fighting to win my soul and demolish the other side. As you might imagine, this made my life very interesting.

Since I have become an atheist I often hear from believers who tell me that I could not possibly have been a true Christian or I would never have left Christianity. If I had truly known Jesus personally, like they do, then I would never have denied him. I must have been merely pretending to convince myself that God was real, they insist. Well, yes, I know exactly what they are saying. I used to preach that sermon. I preached it, believed it, knew it and felt it. If I did not have an authentic relationship with God, then why not? Why would God reveal himself to them, and not to me? I read the same bible, prayed with an open, humble spirit, and received inner confirmation of a “presence” witnessing to the truth of what I believed. If what I felt was phony, why would a good God allow me to be so deceived? (And how does anyone else know they are not being deceived as well?)

Jesus said, “Ye shall know them by their fruits” and my life exhibited the “fruits of the spirit.” Paul wrote that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.” I was not perfect—nobody is—but judging by the bible, no one else can make a stronger claim to being a Christian.

The reason I rejected Christianity was not because I did not understand or experience it. It wasn’t because I despised God or hated the Christian life. I loved what I was doing and never imagined throwing it away.

If I was not a true Christian, then nobody is.

Chapter Two

The Fall

It was 1979 and Jesus had no...

If Jesus can make up stories, why can’t other biblical writers? Some people think the story of Adam and Eve was a Hebrew parable created by the ancient Israelites to explain the origin of the sinful human race, and the moral lesson is what is important, not the physical existence of two protohumans, with or without navels.

The fundamentalist mindset does not allow this latitude. To the fundamentalist there is no gray area. Everything is black or white, true or false, right or wrong.

As a fundamentalist, I used to dislike liberals more than atheists, because with atheists, you at least knew where they stood. (This was a principle only: I didn’t actually know any atheists—well, I probably did, but I didn’t know that I knew any atheists. That ought to tell us something right there.)

What I did was say, “Okay, I believe Adam and Eve were historical, of course, because the bible does not indicate Genesis is a parable or metaphor, but that should not stop me from fellowshipping with believers who might feel differently about it.”