I recently stumbled upon an article from 2012 about a man who grew up in the church, became a prominent pastor, and now leads an atheist organization that encourages Christians to leave the faith.
As with many people who have gone through so called reverse-conversion, his transition was largely facilitated by the writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
At one time, I assumed that the members of the four horsemen of atheism, Dawkins, and Hitchens, along with Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, were very well versed in Christian exegesis.
Just a little research showed how wrong I was.
The arguments of these obviously educated men who are seemingly well prepared are so simplistic that atheists philosopher Michael Ruse said that they are so bad that it makes him embarrassed to be an atheist.
A quick look at Dawkins' very well known The God Delusion immediately shows that his arguments are poorly analyzed and rely on followers who are willing to put logic aside, which is something he claims to value.
Agnostic sociologist Rodney Stark described Dawkins and Dennett’s expertise in theology by saying “to expect to learn anything about theological problems from Richards Dawkins or Daniel Dennett is like expecting to learn about medieval history from someone who had only read Robin Hood.”
With such weak arguments coming from the leading atheist apologists it makes me wonder how a man who once led a church could be swayed. All he needed to do was know a little about scripture to counter most of their arguments, and shouldn’t he know a great deal more than a little considering he had been a pastor?
Digging deeper into the article made me feel that he never had a relationship with Jesus at all. He likely never was a believer, regardless of how difficult he claims his reverse-conversion was.
I got the feeling from the article that he missed the people and the ceremony more than anything, which tells me he never knew God.
Was it just part of the culture for him?
Matt Chandler, pastor of the Village Church in a suburb of Dallas, Texas once said that “the hard part of being a pastor in the South is figuring out who the Christians are.”
In the South, a big part of the culture is focused on the church and church activities. I can’t decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
It is good in the fact that it makes it easier to be a Christian.
It is bad because it makes it easy to be a Christian.
Is it supposed to be easy to be a Christian?
Jesus didn’t think so, in fact, He told us it wouldn’t be easy in Matthew 5:11.
So, is it actually damaging our ability to be closer to God by having a culture that is friendly to Christianity and does it create a situation where it is easy to leave Christianity because in so many cases people are just trying to fit the mold of what society says is acceptable?
The thing that stood out to me in the article is the fact that after he was “outed” as an atheist by an elderly aunt, nearly everyone he knew stopped talking to him, he lost his job in just a few hours, and his wife left him.
In the small town where he grew up being told to love, he was suddenly under attack by “Christians” saying all kinds of nasty things about him and to him. Rather than praying for him or trying to speak to him and figure out how he got to that point they ran him out of the society that had so openly embraced him.
I wonder how authentic their Christianity is.