A Meaning Crisis and Atheists

Why we need a disruptive witness

Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash

Ryan Burge’s recent post at Graphs about Religion on the frequency at which people think about meaning and purpose is fascinating and well worth your time. In it he notes a massive gap between atheists and evangelicals in their contemplation of life. Only 26% of atheists and 36% of agnostics reported thinking about meaning or purpose weekly compared to 58% of evangelicals (and 65% of Black Protestants!). As Ryan goes on to note, the determining factor seems to be church attendance. When you are regularly attending church, you are more likely to think about the big, important issues in life on a regular basis. It is good that Christians are thinking about these issues, and I think we could do a lot more contemplation of our purpose (especially our telos) and life’s meaning. But this brings me to a problem. If only 23% of atheists and agnostics report thinking about meaning and purpose yearly, how are they going to become aware of their need for redemption? Or aware that their life has a purpose and meaning? Where is the space for wrestling with their soul and their state in Creation that might lead them to Christ? Pascal famously wrote that “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” It doesn’t sound like there’s much sitting quietly going on here.

Of course, it’s possible that some of these atheists and agnostics have determined their purpose and meaning in life and are now just living it out with resolute confidence. But it strikes me as much more likely that they just live as if such questions are irrelevant. They, like many of the rest of us, distract themselves in the flow of life such that they no longer stop and ponder their state in the world. If that is the case, then part of our duty, evangelistically, is to offer a disruptive witness, to invite people to be alone with themselves, to consider the state of their soul, to think deep thoughts, to ponder their meaning and purpose, to provoke, not an existential crisis, but a yearning for answers.

As I argue in my first book, the flow of contemporary life tends to suck us away from contemplation of the state of our souls and the need for a Redeemer. Disruptive Witness was published in 2018, and things have not gotten less distracting. More technologies of distraction have cropped up. People are more addicted. We have found new ways (sports gambling?) to avoid being alone with our thoughts. I framed this conversation around atheists and agnostics, which Ryan found to be the most likely to avoid thinking about meaning and purpose, but I do want to suggest that we all struggle with this problem. My suspicion, building off of Ryan’s work, is that at least with weekly church attendance there is some time during the week when we are devoted to thinking about the state of our souls (if we don’t distract ourselves there, too!).

But there is thinking and then there is contemplation. It’s worth asking ourselves whether we are really, meaningfully contemplating our need for a Redeemer, our purpose in God, and the meaning we have in Christ during the week, or if we are superficially going through the motions during the church service. In other words, are we really able to sit alone with ourselves, as Pascal says, or not?

As far as evangelism goes, we should begin by asking ourselves these questions before we branch out and ask atheists and agnostics to examine themselves. Then, we should take relationships we have with unbelievers and invite them into a deeper world of contemplation. This is what I mean in my book and this article by a disruptive witness—a witness that upsets, that challenges, that stirs up the ground so that it can be fertile.

This could be as simple as inviting them to watch Tree of Life with you and then discussing it with them. Or inviting them to a book club and reading The Road and discussing it with them. The point here is not to argue them into Christianity, but to invite them to investigate their God-given longing for a Savior, for a moral order that is not liquid, for hope grounded in something beyond this material world, for transcendence, for resurrection. Too often we suppress our God-given longings or we cope with them with maladaptive coping mechanisms like addictions of various kinds instead of recognizing that they are true and good.

I just finished reading The Sun Also Rises with my honors students, and in that great novel there are many characters who cope with their longing for divine love, meaning, and purpose with maladaptive coping mechanisms: sex, drunkenness, drama, racism, pride, sarcasm, and so on. I’ve known many people in my own life who have done the same thing. And one of the most interesting parts of the novel is how little the characters discuss life’s big questions. They avoid contemplating meaning and purpose because it’s too heavy. They drink instead. Well, the contemporary person scrolls instead. Maybe they drink and scroll, which is a terrible combination.

My point in all this is that if 23% of atheists and agnostics are only thinking about meaning and purpose yearly, and we know that meaning and purpose is part of the crux of our faith, then we should be seeking to invite atheists and agnostics to break out of that habit. That needs to be part of our evangelism, shattering that bubble. Of course, the ideal would be to invite them to church and allow them to experience what Christians experience weekly, but many of them might not be ready for that. In that case, what are some ways we can invite them to contemplate their existence? We want them to contemplate their own existence because, as John Calvin argued, knowledge of yourself is part of how we come to know God:

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone. In the second place, those blessings which unceasingly distil to us from heaven, are like streams conducting us to the fountain. Here, again, the infinitude of good which resides in God becomes more apparent from our poverty. In particular, the miserable ruin into which the revolt of the first man has plunged us, compels us to turn our eyes upwards; not only that while hungry and famishing we may thence ask what we want, but being aroused by fear may learn humility. . .Every person, therefore, on coming to the knowledge of himself, is not only urged to seek God, but is also led as by the hand to find him.

Calvin does go on to say in the next section of this first chapter of the Institutes that “it is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God.” But if people do not “survey” themselves and ask questions about meaning and purpose, they won’t have that experience of seeing that all good gifts come from God and that they need a Redeemer!

All of which means, that our task as bears of the Good News to our neighbors should involve an invitation that disrupts the dulling distractions of life and draws them into investigating the good gifts God has blessed them with and their own sin nature, the meaning of their life and the purpose God has created them for. And we pray that the Holy Spirit would show them the face of God and that we might even reflect God’s presence in their life with our actions, so that they might see and hear and believe.

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On a different note:

Here’s a write-up of To Live Well, my new book, at Christianity Today. Please read and consider pre-ordering. Pre-orders help authors tremendously.