Fischer - Faith in the Shadows

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BRIAN ZAHND

A few years ago, a pastor of an evangelical-fundamentalist church with whom Im acquainted announced on the Sunday after Easter that he had become an atheist. He told his stunned congregation that he had been an atheist for a year and a half and that all attempts to revive his faith had failed. So on the Sunday after Easter he publicly left Christianity and moved on with his lifea life with no more Easters.

A few days after his bombshell resignation I met with this now erstwhile pastor. As I listened to his story, it quickly became apparent that he had not so much lost his faith in Christianity as he had lost his credulity for fundamentalism. Sadly, he had been formed in a tradition where Christianity and fundamentalism were so tightly bound together that he could not make a distinction between them.

For this fundamentalist pastor, if the Bible wasnt literally, historically, and scientifically factual in a biblicist-empiricist sense, then Christianity was a falsity he had to reject. When his fundamentalist house of cards collapsed, it took his Christian faith down with it. In one remarkable leap of faith, a fundamentalist became a newly minted atheist. I did my best to explain to him that he had made the modern mistake of confusing historical Christian faith with early twentieth-century fundamentalism, but by then the damage was done, and it appears his faith has suffered a fatal blow.

This story Ive briefly related is true, but its also a postmodern parable. By misinterpreting the Enlightenment and the corresponding rise of empiricism as an existential threat to Christian faith, many frightened Christians sequestered themselves in panic rooms of certitude. Unfortunately, this kind of darkness breeds monsters. Most doubtslike most monstersare not that scary in the daylight. Most Christians can deal with inevitable doubts as long as there is room for doubt. But when a system is enforced that leaves no room for doubt, benign uncertainties can mutate into faith-destroying monsters. When doubts are locked away in a closet of secrecy they can grow into formidable ogres.

As a pastor Ive seen it happen. Ive seen fear-based Christian parents place their children in fundamentalist Christian schools for the sole purpose of shielding little Johnny from the lies of secular science, only to see Johnny become an atheist before hes out of high school. When you force Johnny to choose between fundamentalist certitude and peer-reviewed science, Johnny may not always be persuaded by pseudo-apologetics from fundamentalist answer men like Ken Ham. Ive seen it happen.

Ive seen too many Christians lose battles they never needed to fight. Like Don Quixote they imagine harmless windmills as threatening giants and fight a needless battle, only to have the windmill-imagined-as-giant win. The culture wars have created these kinds of quixotic crusadesand sometimes the tragic outcome is pastors announcing their atheism on the Sunday after Easter.