Christians often associate atheism with the kind of contemptuous dismissal of the divine that Richard Dawkins and others like him used to demonstrate. Political scientist professor Eric Kaufmann represents a different kind of atheist—one who respects the rationality of religion. Christians should interact with atheists like Kaufmann. They have good insight into the gospel’s downstream benefits for individuals and society. They rightly critique the philosophical problems inherent to many popular ideas, and therefore help us understand why these ideas have proven to be socially destructive instead of constructive. We also need to appreciate how atheists like Kaufmann can potentially subvert Christian faith better than Dawkins’ bombast, because they represent a less obnoxious, more seemingly wholesome form of atheism.
Predicting the Recent Religious Resurgence
Kaufmann’s 2010 book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? predicted, completely against the direction of Western societies at that time, that secularity would eventually decline and religion would re-emerge as the dominant global social force. He based that prediction on his understandings of religion’s non-rational emotional and traditional effectiveness, and the effect of religiously grounded sense of meaning and purpose on relative fertility rates. Basically, he held that contra Dawkins’ and Humanist UK’s bus ad, even if “there’s probably no God”, people can’t “enjoy life” without some sense of the divine.
In 2019 he defended his thesis in ways that now seem remarkably prescient. He recognised that since secularity had become fashionable, “the actively religious will shrink to a core of true believers rather than those who belong without believing.” He expected this clarification of religious commitments to make the psychological and sociological benefits of religious loyalty more obvious and attractive, and to thereby eventually slow down or even reverse the process of secularisation. Now, as Western society experiences a post-Covid ‘vibe shift’ including a renewed openness to religion and spirituality among young people, Kaufmann’s only mistake seems to have been his optimism about secularity’s longevity.
Critiquing Contemporary Intolerant Relativism
As an atheist rationalist, Kaufmann has faith: faith in the ability of the human intellect, disciplined through the universal laws of logic, to discern final reality. The most withering critiques in his writing are therefore not directed at religion, but at the aggressive and intolerant social engineering which has recently emerged under, ironically, the guide of postmodern relativism.[1] He doesn’t spend much time demonstrating the internal incoherence of the radical relativist claim that there is no final truth beyond the truth of the absence of final truth. Instead, he demonstrates how those making such claims have imposed themselves as the final authority on more and more segments of society, with no final authority beyond their confidence in their own righteousness. They are intolerant relativists, whose arrogance blinds them to the nonsense at the heart of their position.
Kaufmann exposes and critiques the three steps these new social engineers make as they seek to refashion society according to their utopian views. First, drawing on sociologist Jonathan Haidt, he shows how they use very specific and historically novel categories of minority groups. These minority groups are defined by novel characteristics of radical individuality and performative self-expression, and by new views of the fluidity and therefore malleability of sex and gender. This hyper-individualistic, hyper-autonomous view of the self is not normal. It does not represent what people have believed throughout history, nor the current views of the majority, non-Western world. It only appeared in the West in the wake of the sexual revolution, which normalised sexual hedonism by detaching sexual activity from responsibility to offspring. Western wealth permitted development of birth control technology, which made it culturally normal to impose human preferences upon our natural bodily operations. This is why evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich was right to describe Western society as not ‘progressive’ but WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.[2] Pastor and author Andrew Wilson thinks it has since become even weirdER: Ex-Christian and Romantic.[3]
The second step which Kaufmann exposes and critiques is how intolerant relativists invoke allegedly “universal moral intuitions of equalizing outcomes and protecting groups from emotional harm” (page 149). Tom Holland and Glen Scrivener have shown how these supposedly universal expectations of equality and care are not actually universal but spring from the Judaeo-Christian ethic.[4] Anti-racist multicultural hospitality is one way whereby Western society has secularised Christianity. It recognises the validity of diverse ethnicities and their cultures in a way akin to the biblical idea, grounded in both the image of God and the multiethnic reach of divine blessing in Abraham (Gen 12:3b), that Jews, Greeks, male and female are not homogeneous but are united and therefore equal in Christ (Gal 3:28; Eph 2:11–22). But these new social engineers both ignore the Christian basis of this generosity towards minorities and redefine it to apply not to ethnic groups but sexual minorities (as defined in step one).
The third step is for intolerant relativists to impose their new, hypersexualised concepts of the self and society (step one) upon the rest of the world, and use their redefinition of vulnerable minorities (step two) to aggressively shame, censure, and even seek to criminalise those who oppose them (overly broad conversion therapy legislation, anyone?). In the process they deny and destroy the religiously based social processes which have contributed to the formation of healthy, prosperous societies throughout human history, and also advance a new kind of racism in place of that which prior generations sought to expose and expunge.
Kaufmann is right to critique this kind of social engineering as irrational therefore immoral and anti-social. And his critique rightly uses laws of logic that are available to all people. But he is wrong to claim that that human rationality is the final authority whereby we can build a tolerant society. He needs to think deeper, and recognise how human rationality is one way we image our creator God. That means we can’t achieve social stability through human reasoning alone.
Religion Stabilises Society
Societies, cultures, and civilisations throughout history have been created and sustained by moral systems based on religion. Christian morality underpinned Europe. By population, the world’s biggest democratic republic today is not the USA but India,[5] which has been Hindu for millennia.[6] Islam unerpinned the Ottoman Empire, which stretched from Vienna to the Middle East and North Africa, lasted from the fourteenth to the mid-twentieth century, preserved the intellectual heritage of Aristotelian philosophy,[7] and often respected Christians as fellow ‘People of the Book’. Religious morality shows individuals how to find fulfilment not in themselves but as members of community, and reminds communities that they are responsible to their God/s. Religion thereby provides the rational basis and emotional motivation for individuals to engage in prosocial behaviour, including voluntary restraint of desires—sexual and all others. This rational love for and loyalty towards family, community, nation, and God provided the social capital which builds, sustains, and prospers families, communities, nations, and empires.
Christians favour this kind of social stability. We don’t want individual or social anarchy; an ordered self and world is a good, godly goal. We believe that one God made this world; imbued it with ordered patterns that sustain life (Gen 8:22; Ps 104; Acts 14:17); and made humans in his image with the ability to discern these patterns and live well according to them. Even sinful, unregenerate humans can still, through attention to these patterns, do much good. The sinful line of Lamech is credited with making the culturally useful innovations of animal husbandry, musicology, and metallurgy (Gen 4:20–22). Humanity’s innate rationality means we cannot survive for long in a meaningless post-truth world where we retreat into ever-diminishing echo chambers that constantly affirm our prejudices; validate our right to do whatever we want and/or whatever makes us feel good; and revile those who disagree with us. Our divinely inscribed rational constitution propels us to discover deeper truths about reality that bind us together in our shared humanity.
Where does this compassionate, socially beneficial rationality come from? Does truth possess an objective reality beyond the human truth-seeker, beyond even the truth-seeking community? If not, why is truth-seeking demonstrably a universal social good? And why do Kaufmann and philosophers like him care so much about rationality as to defend it at length with such passion and erudition? Religion (broadly defined, not just Christianity) is rational, because it recognises how final truth is a gift from the supernatural being/s at the centre of reality who know all reality, and how it all coheres, better than we do.
Religion Can Harden Us Against the Gospel
Everything we’ve said so far has been about the social benefits of religion. Christian love of neighbour compels us to want them to live a wholesome, stable life. But the good life now is not the gospel! We cannot achieve perfect justice in this world—we cannot ‘justify’ ourselves by completely cleansing ourselves of our sins. We need to be justified by faith in Christ’s atoning death on our behalf. And we cannot build heaven on earth. Every attempt to do so inevitably becomes a Babel-like rebellion against God and will be similarly dismissed by his almighty power. The best we can do in this created order is minimise the effects of sin. In this world, “the wise die”, just like “foolish and the senseless” (Ps 49:10). Only God can, through union with the risen Christ through faith, redeem us from the dead take to eternal life with himself (Ps 49:15, Jn 14:19; Eph 2:6).
In light of these evangelical realities, we can see how Kaufmann’s kind of atheism can be more dangerous than the arrogant atheism of Dawkins and others like him.[8] Precisely because Kaufmann is religion-positive, his brand of atheism can ally with morally upright non-Christian religions to convince people that they can be good enough for life in this world and perhaps even the next!
All religions except biblical Christianity require us to make ourselves right with God (or the gods) by purging ourselves of our sins in various ways. Hinduism has various ways to build up positive merit (‘good karma’) and work off our demerits (‘bad karma’). Islam tells us to perform its Five Pillars. Buddhism has its Noble Eightfold Path. And traditional Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy reject the completeness of Christ’s death and resurrection and require us to add to it our faithful obedience to the Church. All these could work together with a Kaufmann-style religion-positive morally conservative atheism (through cultural alignment of worldview assumptions) to harden people against the gospel. They may not feel the need to helplessly depend on an external saviour, because they feel entitled to God’s commendation, because, by all the religious and moral standards of this world, they really are good, religious, morally upright people—just like the Pharisees (Lk 18:9–14)!
Holland and Scrivener are right. Two millennia of cultural influence have deeply woven Christian values, especially kindness to minorities and ‘sinners’, into the Western psyche. That makes us forget how counter-culturally ‘irreligious’ and ‘immoral’ Jesus seemed to the people around him. He rebuked a Pharisee while praising a much-forgiven sinful woman (Lk 7:36–50) and was mocked for being a “friend of sinners” (Lk 7:34). Paul had to write Romans 6 after Romans 5 because to morally upright religious people, the completeness of salvific grace sounds like a license to sin—“let us do evil that good may result” (Rom 3:8). The same religiously based social forces which inculcate harmony through moral responsibility can vilify and condemn those who contradict that harmony through real or perceived immorality. In the West, the social pendulum has swung so far towards anti-religious libertinism it may rebound towards a strict, possibly religiously based morality. Might the day arrive when Christians are vilified, not for being morally conservative in Christ’s name, but for treating sinners kindly and offering them forgiveness and fellowship with us in the name of that same Christ?
Misdirected and Redirected Rationality
Kaufmann’s love for rationality is a misdirected love for God. He has permitted a divine gift—his impressive intellectual capacity—to substitute for the Giver. God graciously impresses upon each one of us an image, an impression, of his own rationality. Being a divine gift, we should find the exercise of our cognitive powers to be intellectually, emotionally and relationally delightful. We should use them to think hard about how to live well as individuals, families and societies together. And we should use them to think hard about God, his goodness, and how to best worship him. Sin twists and dulls this capacity so that we tend to use it against God. But God uses that same intellectual aspect of being human, to redeem us to himself. Christians have good reasons to believe that God not only exists but has revealed himself in his Son Jesus Christ. This one true God bids us to speak truth to each other (Eph 4:15, 25)—truth about everything, especially as summed up in his Son (Eph 1:10), who is truth incarnate (Jn 14:6).
It takes considerable prayerful effort to rightly understand what it means for Christ crucified to be the power and wisdom of God that renders the wisdom of this world foolish and therefore useless (1 Cor 1:18–25). A significant aspect of that prayerful effort is the systematic humbling of our intellect by renouncing all human ways of knowing, so that we know nothing—not Christ, ourselves, each other or the world—from a “worldly point of view” (2 Cor 5:16), but as revealed to us by God through his inspired therefore finally authoritative Scriptures. That kind of humility is not normal. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
Kaufmann, and thoughtful atheist rationalists like him, are no threat to Christians, because we know the deeper supernatural rationality which underpins his secular natural rationality. We know God the Word incarnate (Jn 1:14). We can commend them for using their unacknowledged God-given intellect to discern reality. And as we do so, we can, indeed must, urge them to humble themselves—beginning, perhaps, with their impressive intellects—to know the one who bestows the ultimate knowledge worth knowing.
[1] The linked open-access article summarises his recent book Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution.
[2] Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Penguin 2020.
[3] Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, Crossway 2023.
[4] See T. Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Basic Books 2019, reviewed by Tim Keller on TGC; and G. Scrivener, The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality, Good Book Co 2022, reviewed on TGCA by Rory Shiner.
[5] The USA remains the world’s largest economy.
[6] A more finely-grained analysis of India would acknowledge the complexities of what it means to be Hindu historically and in contemporary India, and the associated issues with resurgent ‘Hindu’ nationalism and potential decline of proper representative democracy in favour of what is functionally a populist autocracy. But we cannot discuss these things in detail now.
[7] They preserved it by interpreting and adapting it through the lens of Islamic theology: Makram Abbès, ‘The Influence of Aristotle’s Thought on Arab Political-Philosophical Ideas,’ Chapter 9 in A Critical Companion to the ‘Mirrors for Princes’ Literature, Brill 2022; Kiki Kennedy-Day, ‘Aristotelianism in Islamic philosophy,’ Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1998.
[8] Even Dawkins recently toned down his contempt towards Christianity and expressed appreciation for its values.
