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

by Dan Barker

I discovered that I could live with a small amount of gray. Not that I liked it, but I could do it.

Those initial and timid movements away from fundamentalism were psychologically more traumatic than the intellectual flying leaps that came later.

I was about 30 years old when I started to have these early questions about Christianity. Not doubts, just questions.

I didn’t have any problems at that time with Christianity. I loved my Christian life, I believed in what I was doing, and it felt right. However, my mind must have been restless to move beyond the simplicities of fundamentalism.

I had been reading the Christian writers (Francis Schaeffer, Josh McDowell, C. S. Lewis, etc.) and really had not read much of anything else besides the bible for years.

I read some science magazines, some philosophy, psychology and daily newspapers (!), and began to catch up on the true liberal arts education I would have had years before if I had gone to a real college.

This triggered what later became a ravenous appetite to learn, and produced a slow but steady migration across the theological spectr...

I had no sudden, eye-opening experience. When you are raised like I was, you don’t just wake up one morning, snap your fingers and say, “Oh, silly me! There’s no God.”

There are many hundreds of denominations and sects, and each one of them can open the bible and prove that theirs is the correct interpretation and the others are all off in some way, either slightly aberrant or grossly wrong. They can all do that.

Jesus still had not returned, obviously, and I began to realize that it was not going to happen.

Gradually, I began to swing across the theological continuum, becoming less and less fundamentalist and more of a moderate evangelical.

I couldn’t really articulate the questions properly, but a voice in my mind kept saying, “Something is wrong. Admit it.” I think that was the voice of honesty—I knew it was not the voice of God.

I think it was at this point that I made the leap, not to atheism, but to the commitment to follow reason and evidence wherever they might lead, even if it meant taking me away from my cherished beliefs.

I read some liberal and neo-conservative theologians, such as Tillich and Bultmann. These authors, though perhaps flawed in this or that area, appeared to be intelligent and caring human beings who were using their minds and doing their best to come to an understanding of truth. They were not evil servants of Satan attempting to distract believers from the literal truth of the bible. I came to respect these thinkers and even to admire some of their views, without necessarily embracing the whole package.

I was not an atheist yet, but since I was doubting everything else, I began to wonder if I should question my own inner experience.

Maybe I should put myself under the microscope. If everyone else could be wrong, then so could I.

At that time in my migration, with my theology trying to keep pace with my intellectual and rational maturing, I still believed in a god but had no idea how to define it.

Where did we get the idea that words on a page speak truth? Shouldn’t truth be the result of investigation and analysis?

If the Prodigal Son is a parable and Adam and Eve are a metaphor, then why is God himself not one huge figure of speech?

Like the lonely heart who keeps waiting for the phone to ring, I kept trusting that God would someday come through. He never did.

I finally realized that faith is a cop-out, a defeat—an admission that the truths of religion are unknowable through evidence and reason. It is only indemonstrable assertions that require the suspension of reason, and weak ideas that require faith.

Finally, at the far end of my theological migration, I was forced to admit that there is no basis for believing that a god exists, except faith, and faith was not satisfactory to me.

I did not lose my faith—I gave it up purposely.

I was forced to admit that the bible is not a reliable source of truth: it is unscientific, irrational, contradictory, absurd, unhistorical, uninspiring and morally unsatisfying.

I threw out all the bath water and discovered there was no baby there!

I could finally see clearly that there was no evidence for a god, no coherent definition of a god, no good argument for the existence of a god, no agreement among believers as to the nature or moral principles of “God,” and no good answers to the positive arguments against the existence of a god, such as the problem of evil. And beyond all that, there is no need for a god. Millions of good people live happy, productive, moral lives without believing in a god.

It was during the summer of 1983 when I told myself that I was an atheist.

I did not become an atheist because I wanted to join a club. I was not converted by the “atheist movement.” I saw no atheist evangelist on TV who persuaded me to change my views. I came to it all on my own, and that’s how it should be.

Between the summer and Christmas of 1983 I went through an awful period of hypocrisy.

I knew I should have just cut it off cleanly, but I didn’t have the courage or clear-sighted vision to know how to do that.

The night after a service in an adobe mission in the Mexicali Valley south of town, I went to bed on a burlap cot in a Sunday School room that doubled as a guest room for visiting preachers. I didn’t sleep much that night. I could see some stars out the window, and I remember staring up at the ceiling as if I were gazing right up into outer space, contemplating my place in the universe. It was at that moment that I experienced the startling reality that I was alone. Completely and utterly alone. There was no supernatural realm, no God, no Devil, no demons, no angels helping me from the other side. No big eyeball judging my thoughts and actions. I am a biological organism in a natural environment, and that is all there is. The stars ingest and recycle matter and energy, and I saw myself as a little, low-wattage star, glowing faintly in the dark universe, destined to burn out like a sun after it has spent its fuel. It was simultaneously a frightening and liberating experience.

I had at last graduated from the childish need to look outside myself to decide who I was as a person.

The last time I stood before a congregation as a minister was the following month, during the Christmas week of 1983.

It was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do in my life. It took a tremendous effort just to get the words out, words that I no longer believed. It can still make me cry to think back on that moment.

At one point near the end of the concert I almost lost it. I was singing some of my particularly dumb lyrics and almost stopped right in the middle of the song to say, “This is crap.” I wanted to turn to the audience and say, “Harry! You are right. I’m sorry. There is no God, and this is mumbojumbo nonsense.”

I was so ashamed of myself, so embarrassed at how we were treating this man, singling him out like he had a social disease.

Sometime during the little party the pastor spoke up and said something about how nice it was for all of us to get together to celebrate the birth of the Savior, and Harry in a loud voice immediately said, “Not all of us.” He was fearless. He seemed proud to be identified as an atheist, and happy to be an independent thinker. The sermons and songs of the thousands of dedicated Christians I had ever known did not measure up to that one simple and brave comment spoken by an unbeliever.

I never preached another sermon. I never accepted another invitation to perform a religious concert. To be fair to myself and to everyone else, I knew that I had to cut it off quickly and cleanly. In January 1984 I wrote a letter to everyone I could think of—ministers, friends, relatives, publishing companies, Christian recording artists, fellow missionaries—breaking it off for good, telling them that I was no longer a Christian, that I was an atheist or agnostic (I didn’t have the distinction clear in my mind then), that I would no longer accept invitations to preach or perform Christian music, and that I hoped we could keep a dialogue open.

Dropping those letters into the slot was a million times more satisfying than any religious experience. It was real.

Chapter Three

The Fallout

You can’t believe if you don’t have the freedom not to believe.

I had actually lost faith, not just someone else’s faith, but the very concept of faith as a valid tool of knowledge. Well, no, I had not lost faith: I had discarded it, thrown it away, rejected its value.

The letters I received and the conversations that followed my “coming out” displayed love, hatred, and everything in between. Many friendships were lost, others transformed, and still others strengthened. Of all of the attempts to get me back in the fold, not a single one had any intellectual impact.

If you are a lifelong Republican, announce that you have switched parties. How many of your “friends” would stay your friends? Some undoubtedly would, because your friendship is a true horizontal peer relationship of unconditional admiration and enjoyment of each other’s person. But some of them would not, because you (and they) would learn that the arrangement was contingent on something external to the relationship, such as belonging to the same club, faction, philosophy or religion. As soon as that external link disappears, so does the artificial bond that brings you together. That’s when the friendship loses its point. But this is good, because then you know who your friends are. If they were true friends, they would have gladly accommodated your freedom of choice even if it made them uncomfortable. You can’t lose something that was not there in the first place.

Oh, gosh, now I see it! I should stop questioning and just be afraid.

Why doesn’t God simply reveal himself to everyone? And even faking it, as they must have imagined I was doing (or could do), why did God not respond? Their challenge actually backfired: “Thanks. I tried it and it failed. There is no God.”

None acknowledged that my change of mind might be an indictment of Christianity itself.

She was a wonderful mother. Within weeks Mom concluded that religion was “just a bunch of baloney,” as she told the reporter. She felt a “tremendously great disappointment in God.” She began to do some reading and thinking of her own, and eventually started calling herself an atheist. “I don’t have to hate anymore,” she said happily.

At first Dad, the bible school alumnus, tried to argue with me in a friendly and fatherly way, and mailed me many pages of correspondence on the issues, which I answered promptly.