Going “godless”: An Extended Book Analysis of Dan Barker’s “godless” (Part 1)

One of the most illuminating, albeit frustrating, intellectual exercises one can do is to read something by someone with whom you completely disagree, and then write about what they claim and why you disagree with them. It sharpens the intellect to force yourself to not only articulate an opposing view, but to then articulate precisely why you think that opposing view is wrong.

I’ve done this sort of thing in the past, in my three previous book analysis series on Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great, and Sam Harris’ The End of Faith. I read all three books when I was still teaching Worldview at a small Christian high school, and I wanted to be able to intelligently talk about the New Atheist Movement with my students. I remember thinking, “I know I’m going to disagree with these writers, but surely they are going to give some challenging insights and arguments.” Needless to say, I came away thoroughly unimpressed. Not only were their arguments not challenging, they weren’t even well-informed or good.

This was my first real encounter with the current New Atheist Movement. You can read each of my three series on Dawkins (21-part series), Hitchens (7-part series), and Harris (12-part series) in the provided links. To get to the next in each series, just hit “next post” at the bottom of the post.

It has been awhile since I’ve written about any atheist author, so I thought I’d take up this intellectual exercise once again with Dan Barker’s book, godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists. As the subtitle says, Barker is somewhat of an interesting case because he was once was not only a Christian, but an actual minister and Christian musician. He is currently the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and he spends his time debating Christians (he has debated the likes of William Lane Craig, Dinesh D’Souza, Greg Boyd, Norman Geisler, and Richard Swinburne) and, in his own words, “fighting for the separation of church and state”—in other words, suing people and organizations to try to get Christian-related monuments off of government property.

Now, not to steal my own thunder for the upcoming posts, but let me say up front that I found godless to be quite bad. In fact, as I read the book, I couldn’t help but think how similar in tactics Barker’s book was to the famous (infamous?) YECist apologist Duane Gish in his debates. Basically, his debate tactic was to throw out so many half-truths and falsehoods in such a short time that his opponent couldn’t possibly (or adequately) respond to and refute each one. And as soon as his opponent would address one half-truth Gish put forth, Gish would then pivot and simply fire off a dozen different claims. The end result was that he made his opponent the equivalent of a cat chasing the red laser pointer he was moving all over the place.

Barker pretty much employs the same tactic in his books. If I was to refute every single one of his misleading claims, I’d end up writing an entire encyclopedia set. Still, since this is my blog, I can just choose to focus on whatever in his book I want to focus on, and not worry about any moving laser pointer.

A Brief Overview of the Book

Barker’s book is laid out in four sections. Part 1 is entitled “Rejecting God,” and in it he writes about his deconversion from Christianity and being a Christian minister to becoming an atheist. What I found interesting in this section is that, as Barker says on the very first page of his book, his background was a combination of Christian fundamentalism and the charismatic movement. He felt called to be a preacher when he was fifteen and didn’t feel the need to go to seminary or get ordained. He just wanted to preach, as he states, “I had the bible, the word of God, to speak for itself. What else did I need?” By his own admission, he was the kind of zealous missionary Christian that you wouldn’t want to sit next to on a bus.

In any case, he did end up attending Azusa Pacific College (now University). And, as he states in the book, the religion courses he took were “simply glorified Sunday School classes.” Nevertheless, he then set out as a Christian minister, but by the early 80’s he had come to walk away from the faith. He makes it a point that he didn’t abandoned the faith because he despised God or hated the Christian life. He loved what he was doing. He just came to the realize he did not believe any of it was true, pure and simple. The rest of Part 1 is about the conflicts he had with people when he did, in fact, leave the ministry and walk away from the faith, as well as his “new call” as (what I would call) an Evangelical atheist, where he debates various Christians and is now co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, along with his new wife.

Part 2 is entitled, “Why I Am an Atheist,” and (as the title suggests) is about his reasons as to why he is now an atheist. In Part 3, “What’s Wrong With Christianity,” Barker gets into the specifics of both the Bible and Christianity in general, and attempts to show how most of it is either not true or absolutely immoral. Finally, in Part 4, “Life is Good,” Barker describes his life now and what his Freedom From Religion Foundation does.

Looking Forward

I am going to focus on critiquing primarily Parts 2-3, but I do want to state one observation I had regarding Part 1. In many ways, I was not surprised at all that Barker had brought up in an extreme Fundamentalist home and had spent much his time in the ministry in the charismatic movement. Although I didn’t grow up in a Fundamentalist home, my family did attend an Assemblies of God church as I was growing up. For that matter, while in junior college, I had actually applied to and gotten accepted to Azusa Pacific University. I ended up not going there, but my point is that I am somewhat familiar with the kind of Christian environment Barker had actually grown up in.

To get to the point, the Fundamentalist and charismatic subcultures aren’t all that intellectually challenging. Whether it be high school classes, college classes, or church sermons, Barker is right: much of it is the equivalent of a 5^th grade Sunday School class. Fortunately for me, my parents were life-long learners, and I remember a whole range of books on my parents’ bookshelves, from the standard Evangelical books by Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis to books on Kierkegaard, Greek philosophy, and many others. Perhaps that is why I never truly felt “at home” in the Evangelical world I had grown up in. I distinctly remember after reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis after my junior year in high school—that explanation of Christianity made sense; but then I looked around at the Evangelical world I was in and, well, I didn’t see much of what Lewis talked about in it. It wasn’t bad, or necessarily wrong, but much of is just seemed shallow and thin.

As it turned out, I ended up teaching both English and the Bible/Worldview in three different Evangelical high schools, and in each one I felt the challenge to somehow get those Evangelical kids to break out from that easy, Sunday School version of the faith that (unfortunately) is all too common in Evangelicalism and the charismatic movement, to critically think through and to really ask questions and explore the Christian faith. In many ways, it really isn’t hard to do. It has been my experience that most students do have real questions and really do want to learn.

Still, there is that peculiar trend in so many Evangelical (and certainly Fundamentalist) circles that fears honest questioning. Even in the current “Worldview classes” of many Evangelical schools, although the mantra is, “We want to encourage critical thinking and have the students ask the hard questions and think through their faith,” in reality there is a second part that often goes, “…and here are the answers.”

Sadly, and I’ve seen this firsthand, the consequences of this mentality in Evangelical circles is that not only have many people not developed the ability to critically think, but shockingly too many self-professed Christians have little or no understanding of the Bible itself. I’m not talking people don’t have a “PhD level understanding.” I’m talking most people simply don’t have much a clue about some of the most basic things about the Bible and the actual historical Christian faith.

Consequently, and I don’t mean to sound snobbish, but hardly anyone—both Christians and atheists alike—knows what they’re talking about when it comes to the Bible and Christianity. That is what this series on Barker’s godless really will attempt to show. In a nutshell, Barker is right to criticize many of the standard Evangelical/Fundamentalist answers and explanations for Christianity and the Bible—they often are faulty and problematic. But when Barker then tries to explain his understanding of Christianity and the Bible, he demonstrates that, even though he walked away from Christian Fundamentalism over 30 years ago, he still works from the exact same mindset and assumptions as the very thing he rejected. I’ve seen this in so many instances when someone who grew up in an extreme Fundamentalist or Evangelical culture ends up rejecting all of Christianity and running to the extreme opposite end of the spectrum—either extreme atheism or far Left progressivism. The politics and views of religion have radically changed, but the Fundamentalist mindset is the same. And in that sense, they are still, at heart, Fundamentalists—albeit of a different stripe: wholly hostile to “the other,” full of an ardent zeal to convert everyone to be like them, and all too willing to completely butcher the biblical text to suit their own agenda, all the while not even realizing they are butchering the biblical text—they sincerely think what they’re saying is true.

Barker admits being this way when he was a Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christian minister. As I will show in the upcoming posts, he still is this way, just substitute “Atheist” for “Christian.” He still is a Fundamentalist, and he certainly still is Evangelical in the “good news” he longs to share—that of his atheism.

In any case, I think you will find this series is going to be quite interesting.