In the Spirit of Russell: Why I Am Not a Christian

Critically Examining the Claims of History's Most Popular Religion

For about a decade (roughly 1971 to 1981), I was an evangelical, fundamentalist “born again” Protestant Christian. All of my primary and most of my secondary education was accomplished at the behest of Independent Fundamental Baptists with strong Christian Zionist leanings. My familial church affiliation was that of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which follows the teachings of the Calvinist theologians J. Gresham Machen and Cornelius Van Til (whom I personally met circa 1977). The famous televangelist Jerry Falwell was a family friend. My own local church eventually became affiliated with the “reconstructionist” or “theonomist” movement of R. J. Rushdooney.

By the early 1980s, my growing disdain for the evangelical subculture and growing awareness of cult psychology, comparative religion, biblical scholarship, and church history led me to reconsider the Christian theological framework I had been previously immersed in. I became increasingly skeptical of theological or doctrinal concepts like scriptural inerrancy, creationism, biblical historicity, Trinitarianism, penal substitutionary atonement, Augustinian soteriology, “End Times” eschatology. and practices such as the Communion ritual. For a number of years afterward, I explored a range of alternative Christian, Eastern, New Age, and occult religions before eventually becoming an atheist in the vein of Bertrand Russell in the late 1980s.

I am generally more concerned about what people do rather than what they believe. I very much admire the venerable American tradition of church/state separation and freedom of worship. It’s one of the things we Americans get right, regardless of our flaws and failures. I would rather live next door to someone who is a good community member but who believes an ancient Palestinian superman walked on water and traveled through space as a resurrected corpse, or who believes a medieval Arabian warlord flew from city to city on a winged horse and split the moon, or that an ancient Indian sage had the ability to self-levitate and move through solid walls than I would a non-believer who throws his garbage in my yard or steals my mail. As a philosophical anarchist, I consider the “religious” or “spiritual” varieties of anarchism to be just as legitimate as the atheistic, anti-clerical varieties.

However, I do consider much of American evangelicalism to be problematic, largely because of its alliance with Zionism and the right-wing of the US capitalist class, its Roman Mithraist-like worship of nationalism, imperialism and the military, and, on the periphery, its more overtly theocratic leanings at times. Therefore, I have to consider the growth of the “nones” (people with no religious affiliation) and movements like the “ex-vangelicals” or “deconstruction” (former fundamentalists who are rethinking their religious or spiritual orientation) to be a welcome occurrence. No other religion in the United States has the size, power, or intensity necessary to influence the nation’s internal politics. Conservative Catholics and the Mormons mostly piggyback on the evangelical Protestants, and Jewish Zionists are mostly secular or hold only to very watered-down “reform” versions of Judaism.

The following video presentation was created by a Philadelphia-based anthropologist, himself a former evangelical fundamentalist. If I were inclined to write or produce an extensive critique of Christianity, I would say more or less what this man says, though I also lean away from mainstream critical scholarship, which continues to be heavily influenced by at least the residual impact of liberal Protestantism and Reform Judaism, and toward radical critical scholars who interpret Christianity and Judaism within a mythicist, astrological, numerological, astrotheological, allegorical, and syncretist framework (for example, the Dutch Radical School).