We had been talking about how angry some Catholics are and my friend, a Jewish academic, wrote, “It has always struck me as odd that a Christian could feel alienated and angry. Didn’t Christ conquer death? Isn’t the Gospel good news?”
He describes himself as a nonbeliever, and he had an answer to his own question. “I attribute the absence of joy to the functional atheism I see everywhere in the religious world,” he wrote. Even Christians can live as atheists.
Pope Leo XIV has raised the same concern. He said in his homily during a Mass celebrated just after his election that in some places, “Jesus, although appreciated as a man, is reduced to a kind of charismatic leader or superman.” Many Christians do this and “thus end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism.”
Benedict XVI also warned of this — many times. Speaking at a general audience in 2012, he explained that in practical atheism, “the truths of faith or religious rites are not denied but are merely deemed irrelevant to daily life, detached from life, pointless. So it is that people often believe in God in a superficial manner, and live ‘as though God did not exist.'”
Both popes stressed that practical atheism hurts human beings. Leo said it can bring “the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society.”
Benedict said that it reduces man “to a single dimension, the horizontal,” costing him his “rightful place” in the world in relation to the creation and to other human beings. We can’t be fully human on our own.
A loss of joy
My friend agrees. He saw, as a nonbeliever, that what he called “functional atheism” costs people the joy their faith should bring them and leaves them much less protected from feeling alienated and angry.
In fact, it might be better to be a convinced atheist than a practical one. The conscious atheist, at least, knows he doesn’t believe. But because the practical atheist thinks he believes, he doesn’t see that often he really doesn’t — especially when and where it matters. He doesn’t see that sometimes he takes God’s place.
As Pope Benedict XVI put it: “Many people today have a limited idea of the Christian faith, because they identify it with a mere system of beliefs and values rather than with the truth of a God who revealed himself in history, anxious to communicate with human beings in a tête-à-tête, in a relationship of love with them. In fact, at the root of every doctrine or value is the event of the encounter between man and God in Jesus Christ. Christianity, before being a moral or an ethic, is the event of love, it is the acceptance of the Person of Jesus. For this reason the Christian and Christian communities must first look and make others look to Christ, the true Way that leads to God.”
A default position
Leo spoke of Christians with a defective understanding of Jesus living as practical atheists. I think most Christians, including those who deeply believe in Jesus as the Church understands him, live as practical atheists some, much, or even most of the time. It’s the typical believer’s default position, the belief we slip or drop into when we’re not paying attention, when we take our eyes off the prize.
I told my friend that Catholicism assumes the majority of religious believers are functional atheists much of the time. To actually believe that Jesus conquered death and to live most of the time in the way that reality requires is an achievement.
Sometimes we’d rather be angry, for example. We like being angry and, at least for the time we’re enjoying ourselves being angry, we’re living without God. Even, ironically, when we think we’re being angry on his behalf.
We frequently want to do what we want to do, which means living as if God did not exist. That is, until we decide — sometimes out of self-interest, when life makes us remember we need God — to go back to living as if he does.
When we sin, we become practical atheists. In the second volume of “Jesus of Nazareth,” Benedict describes sin as “the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives.”
Reminders to look and listen
The idea of practical atheism adds a wrinkle to the simple and misleading distinction of theist and atheist. Being aware of it helps us better understand ourselves and the danger we’re in.
It works this way for me and, I think, for others: I go through life as a Catholic assuming I’m always a Catholic, always a believer, always a theist — not the best one, but still, I’m always onside. I’m OK.
But practically, in the way I function, I’m not always onside, and I’m not always OK. I can actually go over to the other side without realizing it, to fight for the other army while still wearing the uniform of my own.
I say Catholicism assumes most of us will often live as practicing atheists partly because the Catholic life is set up to make us look and listen to God. Sundays being holy days of obligation, for example. Once a week, we will encounter our creator and redeemer whether we like it or not.
And we encounter him in pretty much every other act of the Christian life as well: confession and the act of contrition, praying the Divine Office, adoring Jesus in the tabernacle, spiritual and theological reading, crossing yourself when an ambulance drives by, talking to your guardian angel or a favorite saint — even acts like giving alms and saying a grace before meals.
All these tell us: Remember that God is God, and you’re not. Don’t be an atheist, even by accident.
