Am I the only person in the United States who believes that a dialog between nonbelievers and evangelical Christians might help both sides identify some mutual concerns and even the occasional area of agreement? In order for such a meeting to take place participants would have to submit to a few ground rules. The atheists, agnostics and anti-theists must promise to refrain from excessive smirking, snarky asides about an “imaginary friend,” and the use of profanities (whether expressed verbally or via manual gestures). The evangelicals, for their part, would have to swear upon a Bible that they would not ask the nonbelievers if they experienced any traumas in childhood. Nor could they make any efforts at soul salvation (even perfunctory ones) or request that all join hands in prayer by meeting’s end. As long as the leaders and polemicists of evangelical and secular America can agree to these simple and discourse-inducing protocols the possibilities of an enriching dialog -- OK. Bad idea. Forget it.
Then again, outside of the best known and loudest representatives of both camps, there are thousands of evangelicals, atheists and agnostics toiling in the obscurity of universities and theological seminaries. By training and by temperament nearly all scholars are perfectly capable of following the guidelines mentioned above. Would the media show any interest in their conversation? And would the professors bore the screws off of every chair in America if they did?
In any case, many nonbelievers, though not necessarily all, are committed liberals. One of the pregnant stories of 2008 concerns the expected emergence (or defection) of non-traditionalist evangelicals. These kinder, gentler, centrists and progressives are deeply concerned about poverty, the environment, solving the AIDS crisis, exploring the possibilities of human embryonic stem cell research (which some can disassociate from abortion), among other issues. That’s something to talk about, is it not?
Not everything is politics, of course. The professors might point out that some strains of nonbelief -- especially the more aggressive, less touchy-feely, French varieties -- share a rather jaundiced view of human nature. The idea that mortals are not repositories of virtue surfaces in works as early (and as central to the syllabus of secularism) as Voltaire’s Candide and as recent (and spectacular) as Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles.
With their constant emphasis on the depravity, sinfulness, and corruption of humanity evangelical Christians can, at the very least, engage these themes. Of course, there will be utter, total disagreement on the root causes of the human "fallenness" (and the cures). But the theology of Evangelicalism and the bibliography of nonbelief are capacious enough to generate this and many other studies in compare and contrast. Without such a dialog we are left only with the rants and caricatures of the unlettered.
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
