The Road to Damascus and the Angry, Bitter Atheist

Why does the Angry, Bitter Atheist myth persist? I think it’s because it’s a specialized form of another persistent myth in our culture:  the Road to Damascus.

Let’s consider that Angry, Bitter Atheist myth. Call it the House Effect:  in popular fiction, an atheist will inevitably be portrayed as being bitter against God and Man and the Universe, most likely because a beloved spouse/grandparent/parent/child (especially child, they just eat that one up) died of cancer/was mangled in a thresher/was run over by a drunk. An atheist can’t merely be someone who intellectually has come to the conclusion that there is no god, and has subsequently gotten on with their life. They have to be actively in rebellion.

I suspect that few myths are more comforting to the believer. It lets them feel good as they sympathize with the person in pain. It reaffirms their provincial view that everyone must really believe in their special god. It also makes the believer feel comfortably superior — after all, they have seen tragedy, too, but they, in their Spiritual Maturity, know that God acts in Mysterious Ways, and always with Love and Wisdom. They accept the cup that the Lord has given them.

We are storytelling creatures, and the urge to fit the details of our lives into Story is irresistible. The story appeals to the Christian mind because the Christian path is largely seen in those terms — Road to Damascus, Amazing Grace, the moment of salvation in the Dark Wood. Atheists must be the same way, right? Only it must be bitter and hurtful, because only that could explain walking away from God’s Love. It’s the Road to Damascus, Fun House Mirror style, everything twisted and upside down. Tragedy fills the heart with bitterness, lets in the Devil, and bam! You have your atheist.

In both cases, note, the story not only simplifies things and makes them easy to convey — the stories serve to reinforce Christian belief.

Our journeys, of course, are never that simple. I doubt anyone ever became a nonbeliever merely because of tragedy. Sure, tragedies can have a way of focusing your attention on some of the contradictory aspects of faith, but the journey to publicly proclaimed atheism is usually a long one, made up of many small epiphanies, rather than one large one. It’s emotional and intellectual. It’s complex and messy and looking back it’s impossible to point to any one thing as “the thing that made me an atheist.” That’s true even in my case, growing up as I did with only the vaguest notion of “God.” How much more so for believers who lose their faith!

A case in point: Darwin and his agnosticism. There is a story that goes like this:  Darwin left Christianity because of the death of his beloved daughter Annie in 1851. The Rough Guide to Evolution has put together an, er, rough outline of the idea in print and online, in preparation for a full-blown attempt to refute it. What’s interesting here is that it isn’t just some creationist attack at work — it’s an idea that’s been pushed by people like Carl Zimmer. The storytelling urge is hard at work, searching for the angle to make his agnosticism a rippin’ good yarn. I can’t help but wonder if the Angry, Bitter Atheist myth is so strong that, almost unconsciously, many of these writers, even if not Christian themselves, naturally gravitated towards the death of Annie. The long intellectual journey that Darwin underwent in his lifetime is simplified into an event — Annie’s death drove him away from his faith.

We are all storytelling creatures, and the urge can get the best of all of us. In the case of Darwin, the emphasis on Annie is a bit odd. It no doubt had an effect on him. It no doubt helped crystallize some of his thinking. But Darwin had been on a long and complex intellectual journey for years. His faith had never been particularly strong, and his scientific research had served to challenge it again and again. Annie’s death was, at best, one small piece in a very large puzzle. And so it is with all lives.

The Road to Damascus myth is, a I think, a dangerously seductive one, in any of its forms. It simplifies the complexities of life into a cartoonish form. We’d do well, I think, to cast it aside, and find a different way to tell rippin’ good yarns about ourselves.