Foreword: My decades of atheism played out in phases. At first, I was a nonbeliever out of sheer apathy toward religious questions. Then I became part of the atheist movement, though I often didn’t realize it. During this phase, I was convinced of my righteousness. Toward the end, I was more thoughtful and recognized many benefits to faith. I didn’t generally have a problem with religion or religious people.

This article is not about the apathetic or thoughtful atheists, who I know (both from my own experience and from my friendships today) to be generally decent people. Instead, it is about people in that middle phase, who I will call “movement atheists.” After my conversion to Christianity, I have had time to reflect on that community from the outside, and it looks a lot more tribal, irrational, and angry than I realized when I was in it. This article is an attempt to explain why movement atheists are like this.

We like to think we choose our beliefs because we reasoned our way to them1. We are wrong. In recent decades, social and cognitive science has shown that rational arguments barely move us. We are actually motivated by a desire for conformity and building an identity.

For example, in my hardcore atheist days, I assumed I was a nonbeliever because reason led me there. Most atheists say the same thing in polls2, and the movement’s popular authors argue this as well3. I saw these people as my fellow travelers who looked at the evidence and landed where I did.

This creates a problem for atheists. How people actually become nonbelievers is so far from the story atheists tell themselves that this story falls apart under any scrutiny. Let me explain in simple terms.

Movement atheists build their self-image around their idea of reason. To them, reason usually means one of two things. The first is that they are simply better thinkers. This comes from an Ancient Greek picture of the mind, which argued that humans have a superior rational mind and an inferior emotional one4. This Ancient Greek picture was so influential, it stuck for thousands of years. By the 20th century, psychologists were building entire therapies on it5. Enlightenment philosophers added a twist by associating religion with the emotional mind6. From there followed the modern atheist view that rejecting religion is a victory for the superior rational mind.

The New Atheists took this picture of the emotional believer and the rational nonbeliever very seriously. Richard Dawkins described his own atheism as reason answering quietly while emotion screamed7. The movement's leaders wrote bestselling books containing this theme8. Ten thousand nonbelievers celebrated this idea at Washington DC’s Reason Rally9.

The science of the mind shows that this model is wrong. We do have something like an emotional mind and a rational one, but they do not do what the traditional picture claims10. The emotional mind thinks and processes; in fact, it is the main engine of thought11. When it comes to moral and political questions, the rational mind is not doing the deliberating and deciding people assume it does. Instead, it kicks in late to justify what the emotional mind already concluded12. This is true of everyone, atheists included. Atheists are not superior reason-brained thinkers because there is no such thing.

Some atheists are more sophisticated on this point. Steven Pinker, for example, acknowledges that the emotional and rational minds work together13. However, he still prizes the second notion of reason, which is a method for finding a conclusion14. The idea is that you reach a conclusion only after evidence and logic support it, even if there are emotional detours along the way. Atheism, in this view, is for people who take this method seriously15.

The trouble with this position is that social and cognitive science cuts the other way. Strongly held beliefs get adopted through group identity and belonging, not through reasoning, and atheists are no exception16. Lois Lee, a University of Kent scholar who studies atheism as a social phenomenon, finds that atheists build their worldviews the way everyone else does, from upbringing, groupthink, and a susceptibility to charismatic individuals17. To quote her directly, “the science increasingly shows that atheists are no more rational than theists.”

In summary, people don’t join movements by being rationally convinced first. This is true of atheism just as it is of religion. They join for social reasons, and sincere belief follows when they become part of the communities. Any reasons they give for joining these movements should be understood as mostly post-hoc explanations for choices they made emotionally.

Concluding that atheists are like everyone else might sound underwhelming. It isn’t, because the movement atheist’s self-image rests on being a superior thinker. They feel that they used science and logic to reason their way to atheism while the rest of us went along with the crowd18. Science shows that’s wrong. Their self-image is so contradictory that it collapses once you poke at it.

This sense of superiority is a bigger problem than it seems. Social science finds that movements which tell members they are superior produce more hostility toward group outsiders19. That goes a long way toward explaining the contempt atheists so often show believers20. It’s still tough being on the receiving end of this, even though I could dish it pretty hard in my atheist days. I admit my past hostility toward theists came from thinking that my atheism made me superior to them. I am not proud of this, but it is true.

By now it should be clear that atheists ought to take social psychology and cognitive science more seriously. So should theists. That is because much of this research is quite friendly to religion. It finds real and lasting benefits for people in faith communities21, and those benefits are hard to get outside of religion22. Meanwhile, renowned social scientists have spent years arguing that the loss of religion will make society worse23, not better as atheists have long promised.

Some Christian traditions worked this out millennia before the research existed. When I was first inquiring at my Orthodox parish, I asked the priest about some of the harder doctrines. Rather than justify them, he gave me an old Orthodox answer24, which is that if I participate enough in parish life, I will come to believe them too.

It worked.

For centuries, Christians have argued that God’s hand can be seen in beauty, morality, the laws of nature, the existence of the universe, and more1. Yet when it came to looking for evidence of God in nature, nothing captivated Christians quite like the complex order of the universe. The intricate workings and remarkable details of nature seemed to demand a divine explanation2. Christians pictured God as an assembler, one who manually configured matter into the complex arrangements we observe.

During the 17th century, one form of complexity started to get a lot of attention: the intricate biology of living things. Books documenting the complexity of life as evidence for God had become popular3. This line of thinking peaked in 1802 with the famous watchmaker argument4. Essentially, this argument makes the case that only an all-powerful God can explain complex living organisms. The idea is that if you had never seen a watch before and found one on the ground, you would know someone assembled it. It’s so complicated and purposeful that it couldn’t have come together by random chance. Similarly, the complex and purposeful anatomy of living creatures means there must be an assembler God. It quickly became one of the most influential arguments for the existence of God in the English-speaking world.

Books making this argument were required reading at Cambridge by 1828, the year Charles Darwin arrived there to study for the Anglican clergy. Darwin later wrote that he was sold on the watchmaker argument, and he credited it for drawing him to biology5.

In the following decades, Darwin had several crises of faith, in part due to his theory of natural selection6. Evolution was a process that could produce biological complexity without an assembler God. He agonized over this his whole life. Before long, the entire Christian West was as unsettled as Darwin. They had staked a lot on the idea of an assembler God, and now it faced an existential threat.

Some Christians coped by simply denying evolution. Others took shelter in the hope that it was unproved or incomplete. Many argued evolution explained some complexity but not all. The assembler God was wounded but not finished. What finished it, in my view, was a computer game that came ninety years later. I want to show you how this game works because the argument only lands if you feel its force.

Evolution is a tangled, messy phenomenon. For nearly a century, scientists struggled to draw clear conclusions about evolution because they studied it with fossil records and comparative biology, which are riddled with gaps and background effects7. In science, when a question gets messy like this, we often build a simple model. This is a controlled situation where the variables are simple and clear, and we study it to see if the effect shows up. If it appears in this simple environment, we can understand it. Back in my atheist days, I thought Conway's Game of Life was the model that settled how complexity could emerge without an assembler God.

Devised by British mathematician John Conway in 1970, it is a dead simple computer game. It’s based on a 2D grid, and each square in the grid is called a “cell.” Cells are either alive or dead.

Players choose an initial arrangement of living cells, and the game runs on four rules:

1. Underpopulation: A live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies.

2. Overpopulation: A live cell with more than three live neighbors dies.

3. Reproduction: A dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes alive.

4. Survival: A live cell with two or three live neighbors survives.

That is all. The initial arrangement then evolves by these rules alone. Despite the simplicity of this game, the results are startling. Order emerges, moves across the grid, and sometimes creates more order. The results are far more complex than the simple rules seem to suggest.

Here’s an example arrangement:

It’s a simple one I selected at random. After several steps of the game, it turned into this:

You can see gliders, which are patterns that travel outward. Oscillators switch between two patterns forever. Stable patterns retain their shapes without changing. And transients are explosions of activity where groups of cells grow and change rapidly. It looks a lot like human civilizations at high speed. I encourage you to play yourself (https://playgameoflife.com).

There it was. Complexity emerging from simple, mindless rules with no assembler needed. This killed the watchmaker argument: an all-powerful assembler God was not required for a complex universe. I wasn’t the only one who found this compelling. Philosopher Daniel Dennett, one of the most prominent atheist thinkers of the past fifty years, used Conway’s game to argue for a universe without God. Discussing both Darwin and Conway, Dennett wrote “Give me order and time, and I will give you design.”8 The assembler God was dead.

But does this disprove God entirely? An assembler is just one picture of God. It’s illogical to say that if a preconception about something is wrong, that something does not exist. Just as scientists use observation to revise their models of nature, theists can use observations to refine their models of God. Such a refinement may unsettle some Christians, but it shouldn’t. After all, for centuries Christians were at the forefront of science9, and they used it to better understand how God works. Sometimes a better understanding means discarding a picture that turns out to be wrong. Darwin and Conway exposed a false notion of God. However, their work points to a new picture of God that is more elegant: not a God that assembles the pieces, but a God that writes the rules.

Like Conway’s game, modern evolutionary theory shows that rules produce complexity. Evolution is based on thermodynamics, information storage in DNA, and the mathematics of natural selection. In light of this, it makes sense why Daniel Dennett could not find evidence of God in complexity. Complexity seems mundane if you take order for granted, as Dennett did, without sorting out where it comes from10. The laws of nature that produce that order are mathematical, elegant, eternal, and true everywhere without exception. Something eternal cannot come from something temporary. Something mathematical cannot come from something mindless. Something that applies everywhere cannot come from something limited to one place or time. What could be the source of all that?

Conway's game contains the answer: the programmer. Whereas the game’s complexity comes from the underlying rules, the rules themselves come from the programmer, a mind outside the system with absolute power over the game. In fact, any model system with its own rules (not just the Game of Life) has them because a mind wrote them. It’s not even a coherent idea for such a system not to have a law author. Like Conway’s game, our universe is governed by universal natural laws. Schrödinger’s equation, Einstein’s field equations, Maxwell’s equations, and all other equations of physics imply a law author with extraordinary mathematical knowledge, capable of writing the rules of reality itself. If that’s not a God, what is?

It’s worth appreciating how magnificent a law author God is compared to an assembler. The assembler creates life piece by piece like a sculptor. Meanwhile science tells us that the law author God created humanity by starting with a tiny speck containing all of space and time. He infused it with elaborate mathematical rules and designed it to explosively expand in the Big Bang. He tailored the rules so precisely that after the universe evolved across 14 billion years and a staggering number of variables, we emerged. The power and precision of it all gives me the chills. This is the God that science is pointing toward.

When I was in college studying physics, the New Atheist movement reached its peak, and I was caught up in it. Every bit the stereotypical academic atheist, I firmly believed in materialism, the philosophy that the universe is fundamentally a physical process. No God, no souls, just matter, forces, energy, and so on. I delighted in talking about how irrational religion was. I took for granted that most other scientists had to agree with me because atheism equals intelligence, and physicists are intelligent. I knew quite a few scientists who were religious, and while I respected and liked them, I privately regarded their faith as a remnant of their childhood that they were too weak to discard.

I found kindred spirits among prominent atheist academics. For example, Richard Dawkins argued in a 2002 TED talk that the atheist worldview “is held by the vast majority of top American scientists, and probably the majority of the intelligentsia generally.” He backed this up with the statistic that 85% of members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), America’s most elite scientific body, reject the notion of a supernatural God. Neil deGrasse Tyson publicly complained about the remaining 15% of believers within the NAS. Oxford chemist Peter Atkins was quoted as saying it’s not possible to believe in God and be a “true scientist.” Physicist Lawrence Krauss insisted that all scientists should be “militant atheists.”

As the New Atheist movement ebbed, so did the intensity of my atheism. I found myself unsettled that my materialist worldview, which originally seemed so assured, appeared to change with popular opinion. If my atheism was rooted in reason, as I had assumed, then why was it so affected by social forces? Was I just playing out a role expected of academic scientists? I was embarrassed by how performative my aggressive atheism felt in hindsight.

My assumption that intelligence begat atheism also fell apart under scrutiny. After all, my religious colleagues were bright and talented. Furthermore, it wasn’t clear they were anomalies. Scientists don’t talk about their religious views in the lab. I only learned that some of my colleagues were religious through workplace gossip. There easily could have been others.

Social science reveals a more complicated story about religion in academia. A majority (52%) of American professors believe in God, and less than a quarter of them (23%) are agnostic or atheist1. The percentage of agnostics and atheists rises to 37% in elite universities, a fact I’ll return to later. Among elite academic scientists specifically, the number of believers was similar to the number of atheists and agnostics (27% vs 30%), and only a handful actively opposed religion2. This is a larger percentage of atheists and agnostics than the general population, but it is not consistent with the Dawkins picture of an atheist majority among the intelligentsia. Furthermore, atheist scientists tended to come from irreligious or non-observant family backgrounds, suggesting their views emerged from their upbringing rather than intellectual inquiry. Social forces, it seemed, drove their religious opinions rather than reasoned arguments.

The picture shifts dramatically outside the post-Christian West. The tension between science and religion is largely a Western invention, for Eastern academic science and religion coexist harmoniously3. Indian scientists in particular were found to struggle with survey questions that put religion and science in separate categories.

One New Atheist criticism of religion notes that people tend to follow the religion of their birthplace and upbringing. The implication being that faith isn’t chosen based on independent inquiry, so it must have little to do with truth. As explained above, the same criticism applies to academic atheism. To understand why, it helps to consider how people actually form opinions about God and morality. Contemporary social psychology argues that humans arrive at these convictions through gut feelings and a desire for belonging. Reason serves mainly to justify conclusions people have already reached. The false assumption that our ethics and religious views are driven by reason is sometimes called “the rationalist delusion.”4

Some academic atheists seem to believe this intuitive, emotional approach to adopting morals doesn’t apply to them, and that they are cut out of more rational cloth5. Yale professor Dan Kahan’s research shows otherwise. When it comes to questions touching on identity and values, educated people tend to use their knowledge to defend their preconceptions rather than to identify the truth. In one study, Kahan found more scientific education increased polarization on climate change concerns. If higher education were making people more rational, the opposite would occur. Furthermore, participants used their scientific knowledge to build more sophisticated cases for whatever view their political identity demanded.

Since academics tend to use their knowledge to bolster rather than correct their preconceptions, it’s important to understand where those preconceptions come from. In an earlier piece, I wrote about how atheist culture became embedded in the Western intellectual class. Yet this doesn’t fully explain the overrepresentation of atheism among professors. After all, there’s no believer background check to get an academic job. If academia selected purely for intelligence and relevant talent, we would expect far more diversity in upbringing than we actually see6. Faculty come disproportionately from high socioeconomic status backgrounds, highly educated households, elite pre-collegiate institutions, and secular families. Something beyond merit is doing the sorting.

Research by sociologist Lauren Rivera illuminates what that something is. Studying elite professional hiring, she found that evaluators are biased toward job candidates who remind them of themselves7. People in hiring committees don’t seem to consciously recognize this, believing they are assessing only merit; however, cultural fit is the variable that matters. In academia there are six or seven major career stages, each involving gatekeepers making judgments about who belongs. Typical academics tend to have different personality profiles than religious people8, and even a modest bias toward the academic profile accumulates across career stages. By the time you reach peer-elected bodies like the NAS9, you are looking at the product of a cultural filter applied many times—by an increasingly homogeneous group. The atheist tilt Dawkins portrayed as a rational consensus is actually elite monoculture.

Academics form their religious views the same way everyone else does, through upbringing, geography, social circles, and professional culture. There is nothing wrong with this. What makes this worth examining is that academics don’t just hold these views privately. They are society’s intellectual standard-bearers. According to group psychology research, people tend to align their views with the highest status members of their group rather than the average member10. Intelligent non-academics (like podcast listeners or nonfiction readers) tend to get their sense of what is intellectually credible from academic culture, whether they admit it or not. I’m often struck by how much intelligent content, even content hostile to academia, uses academic language and academic authority to make arguments. If academic atheism is driven more by messy social forces than careful reasoning, and ordinary people are following along, that has consequences. Religious participation is among the strongest predictors of longevity, happiness, mental health, and closer social bonds (stronger than being married or having close friends)11. People who might benefit enormously from faith are being nudged away from it by academic sociology. Therefore, academia ought to make more space for religion, even if that simply means encouraging religious academics to be more open about who they are.

Preface: This is part three of my series Lies Secular Culture Told Me. Each part stands alone.

Some of the most cherished moral values in the modern West are Christian in character. For example, universal human dignity regardless of status or origin, a moral obligation to the downtrodden and strangers, and compassion toward one’s enemies. Some prominent thinkers, many of them nonbelievers, have credited Christianity for creating these morals. German philosopher and atheist Jürgen Habermas, winner of the Kluge Prize (AKA the “Nobel prize of the humanities”), acknowledged Christianity as the source of universal rights and compassion. Cornell historian Brian Tierney, regarded as one of the finest medieval scholars of his generation, argued that the idea of universal human rights originated in medieval Christianity.

In recent years, however, the name most associated with the connection between Christianity and Western morals is historian Tom Holland. In his landmark book Dominion, he traces the history of Christianity from the death of Christ to the present, focusing on moments of genuine moral innovation throughout Christian history. He ultimately argues that the secular moral framework of Western civilization is Christian in origin.

This conflicts with a widespread view among atheists and secularizers. Joseph Campbell, professor and scholar of religion and mythology, argued that universalist morals were a general feature of all religions and that Christianity deserved no special credit for them. His 1988 PBS series The Power of Myth, one of the most watched programs in the channel’s history, brought this argument to millions of viewers. Philosopher and novelist Aldous Huxley argued in his 1945 book The Perennial Philosophy that Christianity is just one expression of a universal moral and spiritual inheritance found across faiths (many of which predated Christianity) rather than anything distinctively Christian.

More recent examples include Fish Stark, executive director of the American Humanist Association, who has called Holland’s arguments both wrong and dangerous. He claims that universalist morals were found before Christianity, in other faith traditions and even as a biological impulse. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, in his popular nonfiction book Enlightenment Now, argued that religion is broadly the enemy of humanist ideas.

In my other articles in this series, I documented how several myths about Christianity originated from deliberate anti-Christian activism. This myth of unoriginal morals is no different, and in this case the campaign emerged during the Enlightenment. At the time of the Enlightenment, Christians had been regarded by other societies as morally unique and often morally bizarre for over a millennium. Throughout that time, this unusualness left opponents of Christianity with a challenging problem: they wanted to weaken Christianity but keep many of its morals1. Their approach was to separate Christian morals from the broader religion, often by attributing them to another tradition (such as Greco-Roman values or Asian religions). These efforts frequently failed. Yet within Christendom, a civilization that had been consistently Christian for over a thousand years by the time of the Enlightenment, Christian morals had come to feel normal and obvious. In this environment, Enlightenment activists were able to decouple Christianity from its morals by claiming that these values were so universal as to be found in numerous traditions, including those that predated Christianity. For people who had lived in societies that normalized Christian values for generations, this claim probably felt plausible.

One of the strongest Enlightenment figures associated with this disinformation campaign was Voltaire. It pains me to say this because in my atheist days, I adored his clever, funny, and insightful writing. But I cannot deny that he was an influential anti-Christian activist who was at times dishonest, either deliberately or because he simply didn’t care about the truth.

In public, he presented himself as a reformer who simply opposed religious fanaticism and argued for religious tolerance. In private, however, he had a thoroughly anti-Christian agenda. He wrote to Frederick the Great that “Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.” He ended every letter to friends with “Écrasez l’infâme,” which meant “crush the infamy” (referring to the Christian religion). Historian David Wootten wrote in 2024 that “Voltaire was happy to conceal his true beliefs” and “rarely spoke directly in his own voice.” Some of Voltaire’s more aggressive works were published anonymously so that he could maintain his public persona. In part, his double identity was motivated by elitism. It is well documented2 that he believed commoners to be in need of religion due to their incompetence, whereas different rules applied for intellectual elites such as himself.

In Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary of 1764, which he published anonymously, he argued that Christian morality was already present in other traditions. He wrote “[The values] of Confucius, of Zoroaster, of Pythagoras, of Aristotle, of Epictetus, of Antoninus, are absolutely the same. God has placed in every breast the knowledge of good.” These claims have been challenged by historians. WSU professor of history Paul Brians asserted in the 2010s that Voltaire’s claims about Asian religions “bears slight relation to real Asian thought” and were frequently “a vehicle for the expression of some of his more daring criticisms of Christian theology.” Historian August Ludwig Schlözer, a contemporary of Voltaire’s, argued that Voltaire was “less concerned with historical facts and rigorous scholarship than he was with narrative and readability.” There’s no direct evidence that Voltaire was deliberately dishonest when he falsely attributed Christian morals to other traditions, but at best he was unconcerned with the truth. He was at least aware of how to do good historical scholarship given that he once wrote “one demands of modern historians more details, better ascertained facts, precise dates, more attention to customs, laws, mores.” The fact that he knew how to arrive at historical truths makes it clear that honesty wasn’t his goal.

Though Voltaire wasn’t the only person to attribute Christian morals to other traditions, he was one of the more influential ones. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that his legacy “cemented the alleged linkage that joined positivist science on the one hand with secularizing disenchantment and dechristianization on the other” and describes him as “the initiator of a philosophical tradition that runs from him to Auguste Comte and Charles Darwin, and then on to Karl Popper and Richard Dawkins in the twentieth century.”

The balance of evidence, acknowledged by many non-believing scholars, is that ideas like universal moral consideration and the elevation of the downtrodden were distinctively Christian innovations. A powerful case for this is that the pre-Christian traditions Voltaire, Campbell, Huxley, and others credited as moral equivalents simply did not share these innovations.

Ancient Greek ethics were broadly aristocratic, giving greater moral consideration to powerful elites. Aristotle argued that some people were naturally suited to slavery and that the powerful had more value. The Stoics, often cited as the closest Greek parallel to Christian ethics, believed that elite status should not dictate moral consideration. Instead, they valued traits like wisdom and courage and were, at best, indifferent to the poor and weak. Historian Kyle Harper noted that “the Stoics used to be credited for having humane attitudes toward slavery and for ameliorating the condition of slaves in law and practice in the Roman Empire. As a matter of plain fact, this story was always false.” Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, argued that freedom was the exclusive prerogative of the wise, while the majority of people were “not only fools but also slaves.”

Eastern traditions were also poorly matched to Christian morals. Confucianism was deeply hierarchical, with moral consideration flowing downward from rulers and fathers rather than upward from the least. Zoroastrianism had genuine moral seriousness but directed it primarily toward cosmic struggles between good and evil rather than toward the worth of individual human beings. Buddhism had real compassion, but it was fundamentally oriented toward helping people detach from earthly concerns rather than toward elevating the downtrodden.

More importantly, none of these traditions produced a universalist moral culture. Stoics complained about Roman gladiatorial games and then attended them. Asian religions coexisted with societies that broadly disregarded the impoverished and sick. Ancient Greece and Rome were deeply hierarchical places where the powerful had tremendous license over the powerless. Slaves could be worked to death, the weak could be killed for entertainment, and unwanted infants were abandoned to die.

Christians, however, lived universalist morals. They built and staffed the first public hospitals3, caring for lepers at the cost of their own lives. They collected abandoned infants and raised them4. They brought slaves into their churches and allowed them to advance to senior roles5. They founded the first institutionalized charities to feed the hungry. They ended the Roman gladiatorial games by putting their bodies between gladiators and their audiences6, even though they surely knew they would be killed for it. They established a culture of forgiveness in an era when mistakes followed people for life. They created a novel model of marriage based on voluntary partner choice, mutual love and respect, and monogamy7. Ancient writers remarked with bewilderment that Christians lived their morals in a way that philosophers never did8. Both the movement to abolish human slavery9 and the one to end apartheid10 were Christian efforts animated by Christian convictions about human dignity

What’s frustrating about the persistence of this myth is that it is now entirely unnecessary. One can at least understand why Voltaire promoted it to serve his objective of weakening Christianity in an era of strong Christian political power. However, today it costs secular culture nothing to be intellectually honest and say “Yes, these values were originally Christian, but now we practice them in a secular way.” The myth of unoriginal Christian morals is now just a story that people thoughtlessly and unquestioningly repeat. I was guilty of this for years. But society should at least be honest about where these morals came from.

Afterword

This series “Lies that Secular Culture Told Me” focuses on myths about Christianity started as disinformation campaigns by skeptics and secularizers. In many cases the people behind these campaigns were scholars (e.g. historians, philosophers) who leveraged their positions as experts to dishonestly advance agendas.

However, it is important to note how heavily my articles in this series relied on contemporary scholarship written by nonbelievers. Whereas the historians from centuries past who perpetuated these myths were sometimes more interested in agendas than truth, it is apparent that contemporary secular historians have developed an admirable culture of honesty. Ironically, many of the errors and lies initiated by non-believing scholars centuries ago have been debunked primarily by non-believing scholars of the 21st century. I want to express my gratitude to these people, who have helped exonerate Christianity from many of the false accusations against it.

Preface: This is part two of my series Lies Secular Culture Told Me. Each part stands alone.

This piece might seem short given how much could be said about this topic. I decided to make this article friendly to both the casual reader and the more academic one with extensive footnotes. You can ignore the footnotes and get the entire point, but if you want interesting details, citations, or quotes, please have a look at them.

The myth I am focusing on today is one you have surely heard before: that Christianity has a long history of using its power to suppress, delay, and at times punish science that challenges it. This view has permeated intellectual and popular culture. It can be found in movies, plays, TV shows, bestselling books, and even Family Guy1.

The conflict thesis

Historians call this Christian war on science narrative the “conflict thesis.” The mainstream scholarly consensus, among historians who are largely secular, is that it is deeply inaccurate2.

The two most influential contributors to the conflict thesis were John William Draper3 and Andrew Dickson White4. Both writing in the late 1800s, they argued that as soon as Christianity gained political power, it had consistently antagonized science. They gave several shocking examples of this, such as

1. Galileo was oppressed by the church for promoting heliocentric astronomy.

2. Astronomer Giordano Bruno was executed for promoting heliocentrism.

3. Copernicus hid his heliocentric theory from the church out of fear.

4. The church was hostile toward Charles Darwin and tried to suppress his work.

5. The church aggressively enforced a young Earth model.

6. The church taught a flat Earth doctrine.

7. The church banned dissection and anesthesia.

Mainstream historians have thoroughly debunked these examples, and they have also criticized the work of Draper and White as clear propaganda motivated by personal animus. Draper was a Protestant who was hostile to Roman Catholics5, and White was a liberal Protestant who hated denominational Christianity6.

Despite that both men merely wanted to reform their faith rather than kill it, their work became part of a more destructive campaign that was already underway. One of the most influential figures7 behind that campaign was 19th century biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley was an agnostic and anti-Christian agitator who used his clout among Britain’s scientific elites to pit science against the church8. Huxley’s campaign overlapped with the publication of Draper and White’s books, and together they created a perfect storm. By the end of the 19th century the conflict thesis was embedded in Western culture as settled fact, complete with a roster of specific historical cases offered as proof.

Here’s what mainstream historical scholarship says about the conflict thesis examples.

Examples of the Christian war on science, debunked

Galileo was imprisoned for promoting heliocentrism

Galileo is now understood by historians to have been a 17th century provocateur. He was eager for fame and willing to stir up controversy to get it. He was popular and even had Pope Urban VIII as a friend and strong supporter. He received permission from the church to write about heliocentrism, under one condition: that he present this theory as a hypothesis (which it was at the time) rather than established fact9.

Ever the provocateur, Galileo not only violated this condition when he wrote about heliocentrism, but his infamous work deliberately humiliated his friend the Pope. Although he was formally charged with writing about heliocentrism as fact rather than hypothesis, historians have been clear that he would have emerged relatively unscathed if not for his attack on authority10. Furthermore, his sentence was a relatively comfortable house arrest11. This is not an insignificant punishment, but in an era when humiliating powerful people could result in a painful death, it was remarkably lenient.

Giordano Bruno was executed for promoting heliocentrism

This longstanding myth has shown up in many conflict thesis media pieces, and an entire episode of the 2014 Cosmos reboot was dedicated to it12. Bruno’s trial records show that heliocentrism was not part of his charges. He was charged for his open opposition to the basic tenets of Christianity and interest in occultism1314. Over a long seven-year trial, he was given several opportunities to publicly recant his positions and save his life, but he refused every one. While I am grateful to live in an era when executing people over theological disagreements is considered barbaric, this was not an example of Christianity opposing science.

Copernicus hid heliocentrism from the church out of fear

Copernicus worked openly and with Church support. When he presented his heliocentric theory, Church officials received it with interest rather than hostility. He corresponded openly with Church officials about his work and even dedicated his book to Pope Paul III.

The church was hostile to Charles Darwin and tried to suppress his work

Christianity’s response to Charles Darwin was largely accommodating. He had mentors who were clergymen, and he was even given a full state funeral by the Church of England in honor of his scientific contributions15. The Catholic Church and mainstream Protestant denominations accommodated natural selection without much resistance16.

Christianity had tensions with evolutionary theory17, but this came later, and largely in the form of open disagreement rather than institutional suppression (with one counterexample explained below).

The church enforced a young Earth model

Young Earth models have always existed within Christianity, but the church never punished or suppressed old Earth theories. In fact old Earth models have been broadly accepted among Christians for as long as these models have existed18.

Christianity taught that the Earth was flat, as doctrine

Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian writers, scholars, and professors taught that the Earth was round1920.

The Church enacted an institutional ban on dissection and anesthesia

Literally never happened.

An example that holds up

Counterpoint: The Scopes Trial

This happened after Draper and White’s books, but it often gets pointed out in more recent conflict thesis media. It’s also probably the best example of institutional Christian opposition to science.

In response to a handful of US states banning evolution in public schools in the 20th Century, the Scopes Trial of 1925 challenged the prohibition in Tennessee. This trial is largely famous due to the influential 1960 film Inherit the Wind21, which portrayed religious authorities as simple-minded maniacs22 and science teachers as martyrs for truth23. This film has been debunked as propaganda by mainstream writers and pundits24.

Importantly, evolution bans did not find support in a thoroughly Christian America25. The overwhelming majority of US states rejected evolution bans26. These bans were real Christian institutional opposition to science and should be acknowledged, but they bear little resemblance to the systematic war on science the conflict thesis describes.

Science within Christianity

Perhaps the most striking challenge to the conflict thesis is that Christianity was not an enemy of science. It was the parent of science.

Many societies helped develop the cultural practice we call science. Ancient Greek thinkers showed that some natural phenomena could be understood mathematically, and some Greek philosophers believed in a logical order to the universe27. But they never broadly moved beyond their view of an unintelligible, chaotic world28. Their philosophers directed people toward contemplation rather than observation of the universe. These factors limited the Greek contribution to the foundations of science. Scientists in the Islamic Golden Age and Medieval China also contributed, but their dominant view of science being a largely practical activity (to improve things like calendars, medicine, and navigation) limited their contribution as well29.

The foundational scientific worldview came from Christendom, and for deeply Christian reasons. Christians believed their God to be a rational designer who wrote mathematical order into every facet of existence30, and that he created humans in His image. Therefore, nature must obey mathematical laws that humans could understand. They also believed their loving God’s creation was fundamentally good, so attempting to understand it was a joyful act of reverence. These features gave rise to a culture of empirical science31, used to deduce God’s mathematical laws of the universe, and done for its own sake rather than for application32. This is what we understand today as science.

In this environment, it is not unsurprising that many founders of modern science were not just nominal Christians, they were devout, reverent believers. Roger Bacon33, Blaise Pascal, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, and more were scientist theologians who viewed science as an act of piety. Despite that Christianity’s contributions to science were downplayed in favor of conflict narratives by scholars of the past, thankfully more recent work by non-believing scientists34 and historians35 acknowledged Christianity’s unique and critical role in developing the foundations of science.

Christianity didn’t destroy science. It gave us science.

Preface: This is part one of my series Lies Secular Culture Told Me. Each part stands alone.

Part of the reason I was an atheist for so long was that secular culture taught me several myths about Christianity. These myths led me to believe that religion is irrational and destructive, so I never looked honestly at Christian history or positive cases for faith. One such myth was that Christianity caused Rome to collapse, destroying enlightened classical knowledge and civilization. The result of this was a dark age of religious madness that delayed our transition into the prosperous modern culture we have today. Another was that Christianity hated science and persecuted brave scientific truth tellers. Also, that Christians had little to do with modern values of charity and universal morality, which were actually the common inheritance of ancient cultures.

These ideas are false. And not in a “they lack nuance” sort of way. I mean that they are lies. Some were created by activists who were deliberately dishonest, and the evidence for this is damning. Others were so shaped by anti-Christian agendas that it is hard to draw a line between bias and deception. Either way, these activists were successful in embedding a corrupted narrative in Western culture, and much of it is still taught to this day. Furthermore, this dishonesty is now well understood and acknowledged by mainstream secular historians and other scholars.

This article begins a three-part series challenging these three myths. I will go over what they are, where they came from, and why mainstream scholarship has now dismantled them.

You may have heard this story. Once upon a time there was a great, intelligent society called Ancient Greece. They developed logic, philosophy, mathematics, and proto-science. Greek knowledge and philosophy was perpetuated by the Roman Empire, which developed its own philosophy, engineering, and advances in statecraft. But unfortunately, the great Roman Empire became infected with a religious superstition known as Christianity. This was a major contributor to the downfall of Rome in the 5th century. With Greco-Roman reason replaced by the Christian mind virus, Europe became a wasteland. People lived in filth and darkness until reason triumphed again during the Enlightenment. Finally, with superstition beaten back and rational thinking in the driver’s seat, humanity could be liberated to develop science and disease cures and great art and music.

This story is pervasive in internet culture, popular nonfiction books, and academic texts. A well-traveled atheist meme summarizes it:

A version of this chart appeared in the celebrated 1980 TV show Cosmos by Carl Sagan, who promoted elements of the “Christian Dark Ages” narrative to millions of viewers. New Atheist Christopher Hitchens repeated key elements in his bestselling 2007 book God Is Not Great, and British writer Catherine Nixey built her entire 2017 bestseller The Darkening Age around the premise that Christianity plunged the classical world into darkness. The notion of Rome’s tragic 5th century downfall is so widespread that a 2021 Time magazine article noted that “everyone from schoolchildren to scholars” accepts it as fact. All of this was downstream of centuries of mainstream academic history that taught this narrative largely without questioning it.

But this story is a lie. One major contributor to it was the Enlightenment historian and philosopher Montesquieu. He had written extensively about what he termed the “Byzantine Empire,” a Christian civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean that he portrayed as small-minded, petty, and wholly un-Roman. His works were enormously influential. He was the same thinker whose writings on the separation of powers helped shape the United States Constitution. His framework for understanding Byzantium shaped Western historical scholarship for over a century.

There is, however, a fundamental problem with Montesquieu’s portrayal: the Byzantine Empire was Rome. The Roman Empire had been divided into Western and Eastern regions starting in the 3rd century, at times governed by separate emperors. It was only the Western region that collapsed in the 5th century. The Eastern region continued as the Roman Empire without interruption. Its citizens called themselves Romans, their lands the Roman Empire, and their ruler the Roman Emperor. This was understood by the Byzantines themselves and by every neighboring civilization at the time. Furthermore, the deeply Christian Byzantine Empire was by all reasonable accounts a thriving civilization for much of its 1000-year history. It was surely the best place in the world one could have been born during much of the Middle Ages, with the possible exception of Medieval China. It had military might, elaborate art, strong commercial networks, public hospitals, a public education system, social support for the poor, and more.

There is no hard evidence that Montesquieu manipulated facts to serve an agenda. However, the circumstantial case is compelling. His animosity toward Christianity is well documented. For someone who was in other respects a careful and thorough scholar, it is telling that he refused to grant the Byzantines their Roman identity. According to Montesquieu, Greco-Roman culture was one of history’s great achievements. The idea that Rome could become Christian and thrive for a thousand years challenged this worldview. If someone wanted to venerate classical Rome yet maintain the freedom to attack Christianity, the obvious move would be to treat classical Rome and Christian Rome as wholly separate societies, so that the former could be celebrated while the latter could be undermined. Whether by design or by the blinders of his own prejudices, that is precisely what Montesquieu did.

Montesquieu’s contributions to this myth were substantial, but they were surpassed by his fellow Enlightenment scholar Edward Gibbon. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was the definitive work on how the Roman Empire met its end. This roughly 4000-page tome, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, portrayed Christianity as irreparably damaging to Rome. Unlike Montesquieu, there is hard evidence that Gibbon was intentionally dishonest. As revealed by his letters, private journals, and unfinished memoirs, he falsified evidence to disparage Christianity and idolize Greco-Roman culture. One particularly egregious move, which would be considered grave academic dishonesty among contemporary historians, was his partial use of Zosimus, a historical source he considered unreliable. Since the source was problematic, he largely avoided it throughout his work, yet selectively deployed it in passages where it would damage Christianity.

Gibbon’s main contribution to the Christian Dark Ages narrative was to argue that Christianity weakened the Roman Empire militarily and economically. He portrayed the Middle Ages as a miserable era for Western Europe due to Christian prominence and influence. He claimed that 4th Century Christians embarked on a widespread, coordinated campaign to destroy countless pagan temples and classical Greco-Roman books, including the Library of Alexandria. His work also covered the Byzantine Empire, casting it as weak, badly governed, and in slow, continuous, pathetic decay. According to the famed 20th century historian John Julius Norwich, Gibbon’s contemptuous treatment of the Byzantine Empire led directly to a lack of scholarly interest in that civilization, which allowed misconceptions to fester unchallenged for generations.

Eventually, scholarship caught up with Gibbon. By the 21st century, mainstream historians had largely absolved Christianity of responsibility for Rome’s fall. The deterioration of Western Rome was lengthy and caused by Roman mismanagement that predated Christianity entirely. Historian Will Durant, no friend of religion, argued that Christianity’s growth was more an effect of Rome’s decay than a cause. People turned to the Church precisely because Roman institutions had already failed them. It is true that the Early Middle Ages in Western Europe were a painful time. Trade networks, literacy rates, and urban populations all dropped, but this resulted from the chaos of barbarian invasion and centuries of Roman mismanagement, not from the Church.

As for Gibbon’s claim that 4th century Christians conducted a widespread, coordinated campaign of cultural destruction, this too has been rejected by contemporary historians, such as Philip Jenkins and the renowned Dame Averil Cameron. There were isolated attacks on classical culture by fringe groups, but this was limited mob violence rather than a coordinated institutional campaign. Furthermore, the role of these fringe groups in the destruction of classical culture has been vastly overstated. The world of Ovid and Horace was in terminal decline centuries before Christian political power, owing largely to the neglect of books and infrastructure. Gibbon’s most dramatic example of Christian cultural destruction was the Library of Alexandria, but this was largely destroyed by Julius Caesar in 48 BC, as historian David Bentley Hart has documented. Outside of radical fringe groups, mainstream Christian culture actively worked to preserve classical literature, and there would be less of it available today without their efforts.

Furthermore, Christianity played a leading role in arresting the decline of Western Europe and rebuilding it. By the High Middle Ages, Europe had built the first universities, Gothic cathedrals, sophisticated theology, astronomy, and doctrines of universal human rights, and it was all deeply Christian in character.

After Gibbon’s work was published, the first scholarly departure from his narrative only appeared in 1953. It still remained the standard for decades and influenced history textbooks into the 21st century. The first thorough treatment of Gibbon and his agenda in a single volume, by historian Hugh Liebert, was only released in 2022. Today’s young Americans may finally be the first generation in this country’s history to learn the correct history of the fall of Rome in high school.

This is not to say that Montesquieu and Gibbon were one-dimensional cartoon bad guys. They were complex people who contributed important things to Western civilization. But there is no mistaking that when it came to Christianity and Rome, both men served their prejudices over the truth.

I struggled to get this piece right. My faith journey began in Protestant communities, where I met wonderful, generous, caring people. They helped me develop spiritually and gave me friendship. I’m worried this article will read like animosity toward them. It isn’t. It’s a complaint about the Protestant framework that my friends inherited. And it partially explains a widely reported trend in American faith.

Ancient Christian traditions have recently seen a surge in converts drawn largely from Protestant backgrounds. The Eastern Orthodox Church has reported rapid growth, with conversions significantly outpacing immigration for the first time, according to an internal church survey. Religion journalist Terry Mattingly reported that many parishes now have initiation programs so large they rival the existing congregation in size. Father Barnabas Powell of Georgia reports that three quarters of his parish are converts, including Powell himself. The Catholic Church tells a similar story. Adult conversions have roughly doubled in recent years, with internal reports describing the typical convert as an educated young adult entering out of theological conviction rather than family tradition.

A less-discussed part of this story, and the part that is most relevant to my own experience, is that nearly 40% of these Catholic converts come from nonreligious backgrounds (according to The Catholic Perspective). This is a remarkable number by the standards of recent history, and it hasn’t been well explained in popular media. To that end, as a lifelong atheist turned Christian, I want to explain why ancient traditions are better matched to people like me than Protestant churches are.

Why are Protestants often so keen to tell people how many years they’ve been Christian? Maybe because without a formal initiation process, seniority is the only credential that confers the respect of a mature Christian. This lack of structured initiation from the church is a problem for people arriving without faith backgrounds. They are full of questions and confusion that would have been answered by a religious upbringing, and Protestantism’s solution is for them to fumble through it on their own. Meanwhile, Catholic and Orthodox churches offer structured formation, which is an elaborate process of initiation into the practices, community and moral life of the church. There are classes, daily prayer routines, theological study, and regular guidance from clergy. It’s a clear process with a clear endpoint. Which approach do you think works better for someone who arrives without faith?

Also consider the demands the church places on its congregation. Protestant churches basically just ask you to show up on Sunday. At nondenominational churches it’s more like a weekly rock concert. They have stripped away the demands they place on the congregations, but many people from secular backgrounds need demands. Choosing faith after a secular life has a real social cost. You are going against the grain of the culture you were raised in. When a church makes genuine demands on its members (fasting, prescribed prayer, regular confession, liturgical obligation) it makes the social cost feel worth it. A faith with no cost can feel like a faith with little value. Catholic and Orthodox churches are more demanding, especially of their initiates.

Grandeur matters too. Adopting faith for the first time in adulthood feels enormous. The church you go into needs to be enormous too. Ancient traditions give that vibe. Their spaces are ornate and their rituals are complex. Many of their chants have not changed for centuries. Protestant churches have often gone in the opposite direction, aiming for simplicity and an everyman feel. That approach might work for a community of lifelong believers, but for an atheist upending his life for something greater, it’s the wrong register.

Protestantism is also a profoundly individualist faith. Bible study and a personal relationship with Jesus are its beating heart. Why would someone trying to escape the loneliness of secular life choose a faith where so much of the journey is undertaken alone? Ancient churches insist that faith must be lived out in community.

They also understand something that aligns with contemporary psychology: ritual is frequently the vehicle of faith, not merely the expression of faith. When you first perform a complex liturgy it can feel awkward and then later stir something in you. The stripped-down Protestant approach was surely a more natural fit in past generations, who were born into Christian culture. Elaborate formation is redundant if the culture already does this work. Also, relatively undemanding Protestant churches were probably a nice complement to America’s more regimented past. However in the disorganized modern world, in which arguments against faith are louder than those for it, a stripped-down religion feels like it doesn’t have enough to hold onto.

Protestantism was developed partly to anchor Christianity in scripture, which was viewed as more concrete and reliable than papal authority. In hindsight the failure mode was obvious, for a text can be interpreted countless ways. The result is countless Protestant denominations1, each with a scriptural argument for their theology. For someone molded by secular culture, where every niche of society is debated by fields and subfields of experts, Protestantism provides no refuge from this noise. But a two thousand year old tradition with an unbroken liturgical life is like a rock holding steady against crashing waves.

History is worth consulting on this. Ancient Christianity was forged under conditions of extreme adversity. It was a minority faith operating in a world dominated by Roman paganism, Greek philosophy, and Jewish tradition, and the adherents of these views were hostile and violent toward the early Christians. Yet Christianity grew. It developed its formation process, its communal life, and its demands precisely because it needed to form people who weren’t Christian into something new. By the time the New Testament canon was compiled in the late 4th century, Christianity had already conquered the Roman empire. It did that on tradition alone.

Protestantism was born into a completely different world. It emerged from within Christendom, which was a civilization that had been Christian for a thousand years. Everyone was baptized at birth, and Christian culture was like the air people breathed. In that world the church didn’t need to form people from scratch. The questions Protestantism was designed to answer were about reform and corruption and theological clarity, not about how you take a nonbeliever and make them Christian.

Where Protestantism did spread into non-Christian territory, it rarely did so on the religion’s merits alone. It traveled with the colonial power of the Dutch East India Company and the British Empire. Protestant missionaries had the economic and political weight of the colonizing culture behind them. The early church had no such advantages. It spread through the sheer force of its communal life and the strange attractiveness of its rituals.

Now the West is full of nonbelievers again, and people are no longer formed by the culture. I certainly wasn’t. The conditions that exist today look far more like the world ancient Christianity was built for than the world Protestantism was built for. Which might explain why the tradition forged in adversity is proving more fit for purpose now.

None of this is a eulogy for Protestantism. It has much going for it, like a genuine passion for the faith, a democratic instinct that has served many people well, and communities of real warmth and generosity. I’ve experienced that warmth firsthand. But another article by an alarmed pastor about why high-profile Protestants are headed for ancient traditions isn’t going to stop the trend. What might is simpler and harder: learning to give people what they need right now. Stop holding the door open and hoping they find their way in. Ancient traditions are offering something more attractive. It wouldn’t hurt to borrow some of it.

In my last article, I described my reasons and plan for trying faith. As a lifelong atheist, I would live as a Christian in the fullest sense I could manage, calling myself one, practicing sincerely, and seeing if it took. That article was a flashback. I wrote it to explain how this experiment began, but the experiment has been underway for the better part of a year.

When it started, my mind was resistant to my lifestyle change. Prayer felt performative, Bible study felt purely intellectual, and I even felt awkward saying the word “Christ” aloud. I had made lifestyle changes in the past, such as learning to eat better or exercise more. Those changes took a lot of time to settle into, so surely adopting a different entire worldview would take longer. Yet it … didn’t.

In a short time, my faith became sincere. And it was truly joyful. The idea of an existence created by a loving God was a jolt of grandeur to my view of a universe as a giant random fluctuation. The notion that my mind was downstream from my soul, which would be waiting to welcome my children after death, was a glorious upgrade from a view of humans as meat robots. In so many big and small ways, life felt more special with faith.

What puzzled me was how easy it was. Other attempts at changing myself had been a grind. Why was this radical change so different? Christians would say it was by God's design. But I also discovered that science has an interesting answer that complements the Christian one rather well. This science is relatively new, and it cuts against everything I had been taught about religion.

Like many people in the 21st Century, I grew up absorbing the Western intellectual view that religion was a primitive attempt to explain existence. This outlook argues that our ancestors, lacking our scientific understanding, could only comprehend the chaos and complexity of the universe in terms of deities. One early figure to promote this idea was 19th Century philosopher Auguste Comte. He hypothesized that societies would begin in a primitive religious phase and eventually transition into an enlightened scientific one. By the early 20th Century, these ideas were part of the popular intellectual background as Sigmund Freud was developing his theories of the mind. Freud described religion as a collective neurosis that a mature civilization would outgrow, in the same way children outgrow a fear of the dark. It’s hard to overstate the influence Freud had on intellectual culture generally, including his take on religion. By the mid-20th century, some sociologists were treating the Comte-like view of religious decline less like philosophy and more as observable fact.

The recent figure most famous for promoting the idea that religion is a pernicious problem to be discarded is of course Richard Dawkins. Drawing on his background of the evolution of human culture, he identified religion as a sort of cultural virus that needed to be stamped out. Unlike Comte and Freud, Dawkins was a culture warrior. At a rally in 2012, he encouraged his followers to mock and ridicule religious people in public. This hostile attitude caught fire and spread across the West. Whether this movement caused the rapid decline in Christian culture in recent years is hard to say, but statistically there was a substantial drop in religious identification during the New Atheist peak.

However, in the early 2000s, the elite intellectual culture that portrayed the removal of religion as an unalloyed good was finding itself at odds with science itself. Biologists and psychologists like David Sloan Wilson, Robin Dunbar, Richard Sosis, and later Jonathan Haidt came to believe that religion is an evolved trait with deep benefits to human societies. They understood religion as a social technology that made communities more cohesive and resilient, binding citizens together in deep and lasting ways. This work was curiously dismissed by the New Atheists. It was a convenient position, given that seriously engaging with this research might have harmed their surging book sales.

Researchers have identified several ways that religion makes societies function better. One problem inherent in human societies is that they provide a strong incentive to cheat. If everyone else is doing the work to make sure society is fed and secure, an individual could benefit simply by enjoying the fruits of that labor and shirking their own responsibilities. People can’t monitor each other all of the time, but if they believed in a God that watches over them and expects them to uphold their obligations, they are less likely to try and game the system. That religion helps societies deal with this so-called “free rider problem” is central to much of the science on religion’s social benefits.

Religion also provides a framework that makes suffering meaningful, giving communities a way to absorb hardship without falling apart. Societies that can grieve their dead and endure natural disasters within a shared religious framework are often more psychologically resilient. Religion teaches people that devastating loss is not the end of their story.

Shared moral codes are another contribution. Religion forces communities to broadly agree on right and wrong, with a moral system backed by divine command. In this environment, behavioral norms are uniform and cooperation comes more naturally. As we are learning in our secular society, which has a shared legal system but not a shared moral one, we frequently have to negotiate basic ethical questions from scratch in our individual relationships. The religion-backed shared moral codes of the past made communities more stable and capable of sustained cooperation.

Finally, there are religious rituals. These mark important events like birth, marriage, and death in ways that bind people together. They create a sense of collective identity that transcends individual differences. A group that prays together, fasts together, celebrates together, and mourns together develops a cohesion that is very difficult to manufacture any other way. Ritual makes a collection of individuals feel like a people. Although secular rituals exist, research suggests that religious ones tend to be more binding. This is because they are part of larger, cohesive religious communities rather than events for individual families, like today’s secular funerals and weddings.

A remarkable illustration of social bonding through religion comes from the island of Bali. Since the 9th century, Balinese farmers have managed a sophisticated irrigation system that networks rice fields, canals, and water temples covering terrain about three times the size of Manhattan. The system, called Subak, succeeded in distributing water fairly and efficiently across Bali, among thousands of farmers with competing interests, and without central administration. The overarching force coordinating this effort was not bureaucrats but religion.

Local communities had temples that managed water distribution among small groups of farmers. Collective decisions about planting schedules and water allocation were made through religious rituals. Hindu priests in the temples taught that managing water was a spiritual obligation. Regional and island-wide temples oversaw the local ones, but importantly these superordinate temples did not administer local water decisions; rather, they governed the religious framework, such as the religious calendar and spiritual obligations, not the water.

After more than 1000 years of success, secular experts in the 1970s tried to improve upon the Subak with modern agricultural methods. High-yield rice varieties, chemical fertilizers, and centralized irrigation management were installed to maximize farming output. Although crop yields initially rose, pest populations eventually exploded and crops failed. In response, the Indonesian government brought back the Subak, which still stands today.

Later research showed that the Subak performed sophisticated ecological management. Over centuries the temple schedule slowly adapted until it synchronized land plowing in a way that effectively managed pest populations. It was a revealing lesson in one of modernity's great blind spots: technological thinking is so focused on disruptive change that it struggles to build anything meant to last. Modern pest control worked until resistant populations emerged. However, the Subak was a system based in religion, which resists change by design, favoring stability and continuity over disruption and novelty. This system was therefore able to play the long game, empirically adjusting over centuries to work beautifully with the farmland. It illustrates how religion quietly encodes hard-won knowledge and transmits it across generations, long after anyone remembers where it came from.

In 2018, the accomplished water engineer and atheist Peter Prevos blogged that his years studying the Subak convinced him that religion and modern problem solving can work together in ways that neither accomplishes alone. History bears this out. Some of the most durable civilizations (e.g. Medieval China, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire) succeeded in part because religious and secular authority reinforced rather than undermined each other. After all, contemporary science argues that human religiosity is an evolved trait woven into our nature for millennia. Societies that work with that tendency generally fare better than those that work against it.

When I spoke of these topics with other Christians, they responded that we were designed to be worshippers, so of course faith comes naturally. Whether religion is a random mutation that led to a beneficial group-level adaptation or written on our hearts by a divine creator, both suggest that faith is our natural state. The first time I walked into church not as a curious visitor but as someone genuinely trying to participate, maybe I wasn’t forcing my mind to do something alien. Maybe I was releasing it from decades of working against its own nature.

This raises a practical question. If religion comes naturally to human minds, if it demonstrably improves wellbeing and mental health, and if it binds people to communities at a time when so many are desperately isolated, then what exactly is the case against it? That academic scientists have not confirmed God’s existence? That strikes me as a thin reason to opt out of something with this much going for it. Even if religion is nothing more than a genetic mutation that stuck around because it worked, the case for practicing it seems stronger than the case against.

I spent decades demanding proof for faith. I now realize I need to demand proof for my absence from it.

In late 2013, the Seventh-Day Adventist pastor Ryan Bell made headlines with an unusual project for a religious leader: he was going to spend an entire year living as an atheist. It was billed as a curious pastor’s effort to understand a worldview alien to him, after realizing his identity was so wrapped up in his faith that he couldn’t truly see the other side. The only solution, he decided, was to cast off his old identity and inhabit the one he was curious about.

As an atheist, I celebrated his experiment. At the time, online atheist communities were full of videos of Christians critiquing atheism, and the content was curated to make the faithful look as foolish as possible. In this environment, it seemed like Christians didn’t have the capacity to understand us, so I appreciated that Ryan Bell was giving it a sincere shot. When his experiment ended a year later and he announced he would remain an atheist, the online faithless (myself included) celebrated.

My own life had played out almost as a mirror image of his. Religion was nearly absent from my childhood. My family didn’t go to church and barely even talked about religion. Entire years would go by without a word about God or the afterlife. By middle school I had stopped thinking about religious questions altogether. By high school I was calling myself an atheist. In college, the New Atheist movement was in full swing, and I got behind it. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris seemed like prophets of reason, promising that society would become rational and wise once it finally cast off religion and superstition. I knew little about religion or arguments for faith, but I was confident it had to be mindless drivel.

After the New Atheist fervor died down, I remained a nonbeliever through graduate school, marriage, my postdoctoral position, a faculty appointment, and becoming a father. But somewhere in that stretch of life, I had also come to read about some of the benefits of being religious. Religious people tend to have a greater sense of purpose, healthier marriages, more friendships, and stronger community networks. Their children are less likely to get into serious trouble and more likely to form stable marriages of their own. I found this information interesting, but as an atheist, what was I supposed to do with it?

I had also, by this point, reflected on how New Atheism actually played out at the level of ordinary participants, not just the thought leaders. Emboldened by the aggressive behavior of guys like Dawkins, who once scolded high school teachers for not criticizing the faiths of their students, many of the movement’s foot soldiers were needlessly cruel to religious people. On social media, I saw people insult their religious friends and family. In one case I saw someone tell his relatives they were child abusers for raising their kids with faith. Rarely were the religious people starting these fights, and oftentimes they were measured and kind in response to someone being gratuitously mean. This kind of bad atheist behavior was so widespread at the time that The Economist ran a piece on how hostile atheists had become online.

Upon these reflections, I began growing out of my animosity toward religion. Nevertheless, I remained comfortably settled into my atheist worldview. Then came three shocks to my comfortable position.

The first was a consequence of bedtime reading. As a fan of Jonathan Haidt’s work, I picked up The Righteous Mind and discovered that religious belief has deep evolutionary benefits for social cohesion. It is not the backward superstition the New Atheists portrayed it to be, and casting it out wouldn’t produce a more rational civilization. In fact, Haidt predicted discarding religion would produce a host of problems that are becoming more visible with each passing year.

After Haidt's book, I finally got around to reading Sapiens, which gave historical weight to Haidt’s arguments. I decided to go further down the rabbit hole with Tom Holland's Dominion. I had always assumed that values like universal human rights, care for the vulnerable, and separation of church and state were products of the Enlightenment. Holland made a compelling case that they were gifts of Christianity. None of these books changed my religious beliefs, but together they thoroughly dismantled my caricature of Christianity as primitive superstition and left me with a sense of it as a rich and important tradition.

The second shock came from After, a book about Bruce Greyson’s career studying near-death experiences. I had doubts about the validity of such experiences, but I had to admit the research at least leaves open the possibility of something beyond the material world. That admission was more uncomfortable than I expected.

The third hit hardest. It came from a conversation with my father. He told me about a woman he knew, a committed atheist who had raised her son the same way. Her boy developed terminal cancer as a child. In his final years, she told my father, her son spent much of his remaining time screaming. Sometimes it was from physical pain. But much of it was existential terror at the prospect of oblivion.

As a dad myself, this was a gut punch. And it forced me to realize something important: religion prepares people for death. It’s easy to forget that dying is something we need to prepare for in the 21st Century, when fewer people pass away young and death happens quietly, out of public view. It’s especially easy to forget that death is something we need to prepare our children for. I could hear in the way my kids talked that they were growing up as I had, atheists by default, not by choice, simply because no one offered them anything else. We can’t be certain our children won’t face a terminal illness or a devastating accident. If mine did, would they find comfort in the belief that death isn't the end, or would they spend their final moments in existential terror? Shouldn’t I make sure they have something to hold onto, just in case?

I wanted to act on this, but my atheist mindset kept getting in the way. The atheist worldview takes for granted a pure materialist universe unless there is airtight proof to the contrary. Since no faith claim can meet such a standard, how could I adopt a religious life without first being convinced that God is real? It felt like a dead end.

But this kind of problem wasn’t a dead end to Ryan Bell. He hadn’t waited until he was convinced of atheism before trying it. He just lived it, sincerely and fully, and let the experience speak for itself. I had been approaching this completely backwards. The way to find out whether a Christian life was something I could inhabit wasn’t to resolve the God question first from the outside. It was to actually go inside. Not just read about faith, or visit a church as a curious skeptic, but to live as a Christian. Call myself one. Practice it as though it were true, and see what happened.

I’m doing one thing differently than Ryan though. I’m not giving myself a fixed year. Given how little experience I have with religious life, I’m going to take as long as I need to feel like I’ve given it a genuine try. I am treating baptism into a church as the working endpoint of this experiment. I may never get there, but if I do, it will only be as someone making a deep and lasting commitment to Christianity. However if I walk away from faith, it won’t be without feeling like I did everything I could to make it work. And if that’s how it ends, if I can’t pass spiritual comfort to my children, at least I’ll know I tried.