Not Your Parents’ Atheism

After the recent Mockingbird Conference in New York City, I joined two friends for two weeks of trekking in the U.K., one week in the Lake District and another in the Yorkshire Dales. On the last four or five miles of our day’s walk from Ambleside to Coniston, we were joined by Luke, a red-haired and bearded 32-year-old from New Hampshire. Luke was on a three-month ramble, which had already taken him to New Zealand and Southeast Asia. His wife had stayed home with the cat.

“It’s an experiment in independence for us,” said Luke, “to see how we do with the challenge.” I said that I’d always found the challenge in marriage to be the “living together” part. He smiled. While on his journey Luke was working. He had his computer in his small backpack. At night he would work as a programmer, or take a day off from walking for work, if needed.

Luke joined our threesome for dinner in Coniston, where we had the “special.” Fish and chips with peas. “Garden or mashed?” the server asked. What is it with Brits and peas?

The talk turned to religion. In some groups, I feel as I imagine a black person does when white people want him to, in effect, explain how all black people think or feel; except I am thought to have such knowledge of all religious people and to speak for them.

My two companions, both roughly my age, had been brought up with religion — Catholic for one, Judaism for the other. Both had what they regarded as bad experiences and walked away as teenagers, never to return. I’ve talked with and written for such folks for a long time, the “Nones” and the “Dones.” Some are polite, fair-minded atheists and agnostics. Others, and I used to hear from a lot of these in the years I wrote a newspaper column on faith, were eager to inform me that religion is not just stupid, but wicked.

So sometimes in these conversations I find myself in a bit of a defensive crouch, as I hear the usual objections to religion from another “Serious Modern Person Who Doesn’t Believe in Magical Nonsense” (Ross Douthat).

But that night in Coniston it was different. Luke, who was clearly a very bright young man with considerable skills (and maybe money too), came at the topic from a totally different place. “I was raised,” Luke said, “by two atheists. I grew up reading Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris” (two of the “New Atheists” who were popular in the first decade of this century).

Unlike my age cohort of friends, Luke had no bad experience of religion that had turned him off. He had had no experience of religion at all. But he had become curious. More than curious. When I spoke of the limits of the worldview of “secular materialism,” he latched onto that. He said he felt he was searching for something. More: he was relying on God to direct his current journey.

I note this as a sign of an important but insufficiently acknowledged shift. Many, if not most, who are my age have some experience of religion and its institutions. Mine was largely positive. For many the experience was negative. They come to discussions of religion with stuff, stuff which may be 40 0r 50 years old, but which has come to represent and define all religion for them.

Luke is of a new generation. He fits the description of people his age and experience, of whom Ross Douthat writes in his new book Believe: “Rife with disillusioned agnosticism and reluctant nostalgia for belief.” Luke was definitely weary of the disenchanted world in which he worked as a programmer in a crypto-currency business.

So, one, I’m simply noting the shift. A lot of people my age had some church/religion experience but walked away, often disillusioned or angry, often with good reason. They certainly have opinions about religion. A new generation, Luke being the current case-in-point, is quite different, with little to no baggage. More likely turned off by pompous atheists, like Dawkins, than believers, who seem odd and interesting. Feeling that there is something about the world they have been brought into, that it is a spiritual wasteland.

I was already starting to see this twenty years ago while still leading a church. We were getting more and more young adults who had no church background or experience. I thought this a wonderful opportunity, which is my second point — for all the talk about the secular society we live in, it is also a wonderful opportunity, with more interest, less baggage, and different questions.

So many in the mainline Protestant world are, like the New (now old) Atheists fighting the last war: where religion is seen largely as a force of repression or anti-modern superstition, with the exception of a few “progressive” options that have largely stripped away the supernatural elements and replaced them with moralism. For Luke, and I’m guessing for a growing number of people, that approach doesn’t offer much. It is, to use Jonathan Rauch’s term, too “thin.” They long for transcendence, for enchantment, for … well, God.

I might be whistling in the wind, but the way forward isn’t to continue fighting the old modernist battles, but to pay more attention to those, in Douthat’s words, “rife with disillusioned agnosticism and reluctant nostalgia for belief.”