While it is hard for me to imagine the appeal of an organized movement devoted to godlessness and secularist ideology, I suppose it is worthy of our attention that non-religious groups around the US are banding together to “evangelize” those put off by the church and religious dogma. Undoubtedly encouraged by recent best-selling books on the dangers of organized religion by avowed atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, a group called The Freedom from Religion Foundation has kicked off an ad campaign hoping to boost membership and create greater community among fellow non-believers around the country. The Wall Street Journal reported on this development in the following article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122696699813835335.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Fighting off mere bemusement, I wonder what we Christians can learn from this development? What does it tell us about our culture and our witness that dogma has such a bad name? Why do so many find us church-types so intolerant? And why do so many fail to discern the intolerance of those who claim tolerance for anything except the others of us who maintain the independent existence of absolute truth? By the way, I agree with Alister McGrath who has written in his history of atheism: “The 20th century gave rise to the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence” (The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World, Oxford University Press, 2004).
Certainly this movement cited in the Wall Street Journal does not strike me as a threat to our religious liberties, much less to peace and safety. Rather I sense a sincere desire among the leaders quoted in the WSJ article to be more organized so as to have better representation in political circles and better branding among the public. I cannot fault them for that goal.
What is most worthy of contemplation is our cultural aversion to dogma. To be sure, in today’s culture religious dogma is quickly associated with the pejorative “dogmatic,” conjuring images of confidently doctrinaire, unctuous and narrow-minded preachers using God’s name to condemn whole classes of people. However, the word dogma simply means a settled opinion or belief that has authority for us (as opposed to our defining beliefs based on our own experience or feelings). Aaahhh. Perhaps our real issue is with authority. Think so?
Tim Keller in his excellent book, The Reason for God, notes that in his nearly two decades of ministry in New York City, the biggest problem many people have with Christianity is summed up in one word: “exclusivity.” But what about secularist dogma? Why is it not an exclusivist and dogmatic assertion to say that there can be no exclusive claims to truth while it is dogmatic to assert one can reasonably make such claims?
Since Adam and Eve we have been trying to resist dogma in order to be free. It is the witness of our faith tradition that the more we clamor to be freed from the constraints of God’s authority and the unrelenting (if often unseen) reality of revealed truth, tragically the less free we become.