Apatheism and Secularism

By Kyle Beshears

In his massive tome A Secular Age, Charles Taylor asked. . . . “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” His answer, as the title of his book suggests, is secularism, but not in the way we might initially think.

We typically associate secularism with skepticism, that the idea of God is arguable and disputed. Secularism is synonymous with a-religious beliefs. It’s an emphasis on the temporal rather than eternal; it means not pertaining to religion. And we assume that skepticism leads to indifference about God. This is true sometimes, but it’s not always the case.

In fact, ironically, sometimes the opposite is true. Think about the hostility of the New Atheists, like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. In his most recent popular-level book, Outgrowing God, Dawkins talks about God and religion quite a bit. He assures his readers that there’s no need to believe in the former or practice the latter because science has propelled us beyond them both. In fact, he feels it’s a sign of maturity if you don’t believe, even though it might be difficult to let go. He ends his book imploring his readers to “take our courage in both hands, grow up and give up on all gods.” Elsewhere, Harris gave us a fundamental reason why: belief in God elicits “ignorance and fanaticism,” which, in turn, oppresses people into fear. So, belief in God ought to be dismissed. New Atheism, it turns out, cares quite a bit about God. It just cares about him in the opposite direction from believers. After all, authors like Dawkins and Harris have made a great deal of money debating theism and ridiculing religion. If every skeptic were apathetic toward the idea of God, who would buy their books?

Skepticism doesn’t represent the totality of secularism. Instead, imagine secularism as a state in which it’s okay either to disbelieve in God or believe differently than your neighbor, whether that belief has to do with God, gods, or nothing at all.

It wasn’t always like this, of course; as Taylor explained, a change in the way we think occurred some five hundred years ago. After that, Western society shifted from the position where “belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” Once, orthodoxy was default, although there were certainly some in the margins who believed differently. Now, in our secular age, orthodoxy itself is marginalized. Society allows for both unbelievers and believers, and all different kinds of believers at that.

For the purpose of our question, then, secularism leads to apatheism [complete apathy toward theism] for two reasons: (1) secularism offers us an alternative explanation for the origin of the universe and meaning of life without appealing to the supernatural, thus permitting some people to lack a reason to care about God; and (2) secularism provides the fertile ground for pluralism (diversity of beliefs), thus robbing some people of a reason to care about God in a crowded field of competing “truths.”

In both instances, skepticism and pluralism, a person can lose any reason to care about God, either because he’s not needed to answer life’s biggest questions or there are just too many answers to those questions, so it’s better to relax and let the religious thinkers and philosophers sort out that mess.

Let’s consider the first reason, that belief in God is contestable. This is easy to understand because we’re very familiar with the story of how secularism supposedly liberated us from the tyranny of ignorance and myths. It goes something like this: A few hundred years ago, we were blinded by religion. It hindered our ability to think, live, and organize society according to our conscience and reason. Our rational minds were imprisoned by superstition, and our lives were shackled to myth. Society submitted to the authority of some deity in the heavens and his representatives on earth.

We were trapped, like a damsel in distress, locked away in the castle of ignorance. But something changed. A knight named Enlightenment stormed the keep to rescue us. Science taught us that the supernatural isn’t real (naturalism) because physical matter is the only thing that exists (materialism). Rationalism taught us how to organize our lives and society without appealing to some transcendent authority.

The Enlightenment brought a time of “withouts”: the universe without God, philosophy without God, government without God. Science and reason cast an unflattering light on enchanted beliefs. Before, the existence of God was unquestionable. Afterward, belief seemed silly and childish. The world matured as it was disenchanted. We stopped believing in God and devils once we started believing in science and reason. For some people, like Denis Diderot (1713–84), God became irrelevant altogether. As perhaps one of the first Enlightenment philosophers to exhibit apatheism, Diderot quipped, “It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.”

Nevertheless, some people still cared and believed. There was a disconnect between Enlightenment thinkers in ivory towers and the common folk on farms. Unlike the elites, the peasants still believed, haunted by a sense that there was something more beyond the natural order of things.

That is, until ideas like Darwinism developed and saturated the public imagination, and, as philosopher Daniel Dennett argued, acting like a “universal acid,” ate through every traditional concept until only a “revolutionized world-view” remained.

So, we’re told, the secularization of Western society is a story about subtraction. Once we removed God from the equation, we were left with human reason and desires to guide us into a new era of modernity. Armed with the power of criticism, we’ve come to understand that religion was merely an evolutionary tool that lost its value in the face of reason. Religion was the “sigh of the oppressed creature [and] opium of the people,” according to Karl Marx, but rationalism liberated and sobered us to see religion for what it truly is—the illusion of an imaginary world. The open-minded rely on empirical evidence, not superstition, to form beliefs, and have therefore freed themselves to “think, act, and fashion [their] own reality,” claimed Marx.

Today, for many people, God has become irrelevant because science and skepticism did away with needing him to explain the hows and whys of life. So God is irrelevant to how we imagine fullness. We know where we came from—a universal common ancestor from long ago. And we know our purpose. The narrative of Darwinism has set us on a trajectory of evolution and advancement.

The meaning of life, then, isn’t found in some religion or god; it’s found in us. We ought to strive toward advancing and improving the human condition, to find our own fulfillment. That’s where we find our joy, through altruistic living. We’re only here for a short while. One day, we’ll become nothing but dust as our consciousness ends and everything goes black forever. In the meantime, it’s best to make the most of every moment by bringing goodness to the world, however you want to define “goodness.”

Besides, religion can be a very contentious issue, so why should we let ourselves get worked up over imaginary superstition? This was the argument made by journalist Jonathan Rauch, who popularized the concept of apatheism in his Atlantic Monthly article, “Let it Be.” In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Rauch denounced ideological fundamentalisms, whether religious (e.g., Salafi jihadism) or a-religious (e.g., Stalinism), as harmful to the progression and safety of a society. The solution, he claimed, was apatheism, which has a calming effect on all belief, regardless of its content. An ideologically dispassionate society is one undisturbed by radicalization. Rauch’s prescription may now be reality. Sociologist Steve Bruce observed that in a secular society religion is generally seen as a positive force that teaches morals and offers comfort to believers, but fervent belief, especially in public spaces, is frowned upon.

In sum, if secularism means that belief in God is contestable, then some apatheists lack the reason to care about God because ideas like naturalism and materialism explain him away. So why care at all?

— Kyle Beshears is a teaching pastor at Mars Hill Church in Mobile, Alabama, and a PhD candidate at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

This article is excerpted from Kyle Beshears, Apatheism: How We Share When They Don’t Care (B&H Academic, 2021).

Note: For more on apatheism, see Paul Copan’s series “Apatheism and the Unexamined Life” Part 1 and Part 2.

Image by Mustafa shehadeh from Pixabay

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