Church & The New Atheism
There's Nothing to Fear
Much is said and written these days about the threat that Radical Islamism and other forms of religious extremism may pose to Europe's traditional culture and its Christian heritage.
The former head of the British Army, General Sir Richard Bennett reminded us of not long ago that whenever there is a spiritual vacuum in a nation, something else will flood in to fill the gap.
Recently, with the announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden, a bevy of military and political experts have been quick to point out that while the demise of Al Qaeda's symbolic leader is important, it by no means removes the threat posed by highly motivated and well resourced ideologues.
Yet, for all the talk about radical religious ideologies, as far as the Church is concerned, a far bigger threat may be posed by secularism, which tends to place all religious faiths together in one box and label them "irrelevant anachronisms".
Secularism drives much of the most dramatic social change we've seen over the past decade, in areas of law (particularly Human Rights law), medical and technological ethics, education reform and the redefinition of family and marriage.
At the heart of much of this change lies a worldview which, while denying the veracity of all religions, is in itself a belief system, taken largely on faith. It is founded in an absolute conviction, that given the absence of any Personal Divinity in the universe, there absolutely are no absolutes.
There is probably nothing particularly new about the so-called New Atheism. Except that it is represented and preached with a more fiercely evangelical fervour and even arrogance than we've seen before.
Why are these New Atheists so aggressive? There are many possible explanations.
One very plausible one, to my mind, is that in the age of science, atheists were expecting religious faith to shrivel and die. In fact, all of the world's major faiths - most notably Christianity - are experiencing rapid rates of expansion.
This, for some that atheists, is too much to handle. Their frustration is given vent in ever louder attacks on faith.
You may ask, if Christianity is growing anyway, why talk bother talking about atheism and secularism at all?
The church is growing but, the biggest part of that growth is taking place in the 3rd world, the developing world and among oppressed people groups. In terms of church growth, Europe hardly registers on any scale - in fact, in many ways it has been going backwards for decades.
I passionately believe that this can change - and have devoted much of my life to helping to see that happen.
But the influence of atheism and the secularism it promotes are actively working against the change we want to see.
Why is it sometimes easier to see people come to Christ in southern Africa, or in South America than in the developed, Westernised world? It's partly because their cultures are more aligned with Christian values - or at least, they're not so deliberately set against those values.
Not all enemies of the church are spiritual in nature. Often, the 'principalities and powers' of which Paul speaks are intellectual systems, which he also labels as 'vain imaginations'. They set themselves up in opposition to the rule of Christ. We are commanded to bring down these vain imaginations, to challenge every thought system to become 'obedient to Christ'.
The Bible has much to say about the power of human intellect and imagination. In fact, we might say that the tragedy of the human fall began not with human action but with human imagination. Eve saw "the tree that it was good". She had seen the tree before, but suddenly her perception of it, her image of it changed under the influence of temptation.
To change the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, we must first understand it.
The section of society that turns to New Atheism for answers does so because it thinks that Christianity has none to offer.
We must show them otherwise; both by modelling Christ-like living and by proactively and strategically moving our culture's thinking away from the claims of the New Atheists and toward the values and truth of God's Kingdom.
This article is adapted from Mal Fletcher's introduction to the SLC2011: ZEITGEIST European leadership summit in Spain. For a report on the summit, click here.
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