Unlike other belief systems, apatheism is not a formal worldview. Rather, it is a posture or attitude of indifference toward belief in God. It is an outlook that Christian apologetics must engage with because it is a common obstacle to considering Christian belief.
The author and journalist Jonathan Rauch, in a widely referenced article in The Atlantic, “Let It Be,” identifies himself as an apatheist. He defines the term apatheism as “a disinclination to care all that much about one’s own religion, and an even stronger disinclination to care about other people’s.” Rather than being “lazy recumbency,” Rauch believes apatheism is a sociological achievement. Writing after the events of Sept.11, 2001, he explains that for much of history, religious zeal has driven division and violence, and sees the taming of religious passion not as a lapse, but as an achievement.
Philosophers Trevor Hedberg and Jordan Huzarevich echo Rauch’s sentiment: “[Apatheism] is distinct from theism, atheism, and agnosticism. A theist believes that God exists; an atheist believes that God does not exist; an agnostic believes that we cannot know whether God exists; an apatheist believes that we should not care whether God exists (emphasis added).” Hedberg and Huzarevich consider six common reasons for valuing “existence questions” (EQs). With the exception of how belief or disbelief in God could impact one’s afterlife, they find the normal motivation for considering such questions unconvincing, and so insufficient reason for focusing on this question. According to Hedberg and Huzarevich,
Each of these objections posits a different reason for thinking that belief in God is practically significant. Five of these objections prove unsuccessful. The sixth, which appeals to the practical significance of belief in God with respect to our fates in the afterlife, is more promising but nonetheless encounters significant obstacles. Since the success of this objection is controversial, whether we have good grounds to reject practical apatheism should be similarly controversial, and the view should be given further examination.
Hedberg and Huzarevich thus conclude, “If our answers to [existence questions] lack practical significance, then perhaps they warrant less philosophical attention, and perhaps debates concerning them should be more carefree because the stakes are not as high as most believe.” They conclude that we should not care whether God exists.
What are the needs and barriers in apologetics to apatheists?
Kyle Beshears, a pastor and scholar who has written about apatheism, maintains that our present cultural milieu supports the flourishing of this attitude to faith. He identifies four related barriers to Christian belief: 1. contested belief and globalization, 2. existential security without God, 3. distraction, and 4. autonomy.
First, following thinkers such as Charles Taylor, James K. A. Smith, and Alan Noble, Beshears points to the way belief in the contemporary world is contested due to increased globalization and the regular intersection of religious belief and cultural diversity. This is reminiscent of the pressures that Peter Berger terms a plausibility structure. Because we regularly encounter many different people with wildly different beliefs, it makes it harder to believe in Christianity as the one true faith.
Second, the advances of science, the prevalence of secularism, as well as increased affluence and technology have created a sense of existential security that did not exist in earlier times in history, times when the irrelevance of God was unthinkable. As Charles Taylor explains, in the last five hundred years, there was a significant shift of focus to the “immanent frame” away from belief and dependence on what he calls the “enchanted world,” where God was believed to be involved and intervening in the world. Beshears continues, “The more a society feels safe and taken care of, the less important it finds God to be. And the less motivated people are to turn to God, the less likely they will find his existence relevant.” Apatheists share one commonality, according to Beshears: “A sense of existential security absent God.”
Third, as well as self-sufficient, our world is also increasingly distracted. Drawing on Alan Noble’s work, Beshears maintains that the “persistent distraction of our culture prevents us from asking the deepest, most important questions about existence and truth. The things that prick our souls for the sake of the Gospel (e.g., death, beauty, anxiety, etc.) can be numbed quickly by an eight-hour dose of binge-watching.” Beshears continues, “We effortlessly avoid asking the biggest, most difficult questions of life because we are so busy.” It is in this soil of “contestability, diversity, comfort, and distraction — that apatheism not only grows but flourishes.”
Finally, Beshears argues that the primacy of personal autonomy is the ultimate cause of apatheism. He writes, “The core reason why apatheism exists” is that “we do not want to care about God. We’ve developed an antipathy toward spiritual contemplation because we don’t want what inevitably follows, a fundamental change in who we are and how we live. To sacrifice autonomy is too high a cost, so we protect it through apathy.” It recalls what Francis Schaeffer termed “idols of personal peace and affluence” some years ago. People want to be left alone and to live untroubled by others’ needs, whether close by or across the world. “Personal peace,” Schaeffer explains, “means wanting to have my personal life pattern undisturbed in my lifetime … Affluence means an overwhelming and ever-increasing prosperity — a life made up of things, things, and more things.” Lived without measure, both are at odds with the lordship of Christ.
These four obstacles — contested belief and globalization, existential security without God, distraction, and autonomy — are essential targets for apologetics among apatheists.
Apatheism: A preliminary assessment
There are a number of important observations and issues for apatheism that we should note. First, although apatheism is not a developed belief system, it is a belief. As Beshears argues, “Ask an apatheist why they are uninterested in God, and their response will likely be that they don’t believe God is relevant to their life.” The problem is that they also do not believe questions about God are worth asking to know whether or not this is true, despite much of the world having been positively impacted by Christian theism, and particularly being crucial in shaping Western culture and society.
Second, rather than being virtuous, there are good reasons to see apatheism as intellectually and morally harmful. Tawa Anderson argues, “Apatheism leads to the vices of acedia (failure to care sufficiently about things that deserve close consideration) and misology (hatred of reasoned argumentation).” Paul Copan is similarly critical: “From a spiritual, rational, and moral perspective it’s like not caring about having cancer. Or it’s like a child who doesn’t see the point of a good education.” Lewis’s words are fitting: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
Third, apatheism’s sense of “progress” is what Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” As Lewis defines it, chronological snobbery is the uncritical belief in the superiority of one’s own time and culture, and the viewing of the past as discredited. Lewis felt he had blindly embraced chronological snobbery until Owen Barfield challenged him, and it had been an obstacle to him becoming a Christian. Lewis argues that you have to be aware of your own cultural context with its fashions and look at the arguments around particular beliefs: “Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.”
This can be applied to Hedberg and Huzarevich’s article. It is doubtful that the article has “conclusively refuted” or displaced the theistic worldview’s explanatory power for objective ethical systems or the grounding of the objective meaning of life with secular models. Other points under consideration seem trivial from a Christian perspective (e.g., believing to have answered prayer) or misapplied (e.g., being ethically motivated without theism).
The issue for nontheistic ethics is not whether one can be motivated ethically without belief in God — Christians believe that nontheists can be moral without theism. The question is whether naturalism as a worldview makes better sense of moral values and duties than theism, or whether Christianity gives a better grounding and justification for objective standards of morality.
Fourth, the possibility of God as the Greatest Conceivable Being demands the attention of the morally and intellectually sensitive mind. An unwillingness to entertain such questions may suggest that the perceiver’s faculties are not appropriately sensitive or ordered as they should be. For example, a person may have little regard, or even complete disregard, for human life, but this does not diminish the actual value of a human being. In such cases, the person’s emotions or intellect are in some sense morally deficient. Apatheism’s indifference to God and questions about him recalls Lewis’s surprising admission in The Abolition of Man that he did not enjoy the presence of children. But Lewis recognized this as a defect in himself when judged against the Tao (the doctrine of objective value), which is the belief that certain attitudes are really true and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.
Emotions, on this view, are recognitions of objective value. When rightly ordered, virtuous emotions like what ought to be approved. Adam Pelser notes that this view is increasingly supported in the fields of philosophy and psychology. Pelser explains, “Emotions are perception-like experiences of objective values. On perceptual accounts, emotions, like sense perceptions, can get things right or wrong and the wise and virtuous person will not only make the appropriate moral and aesthetic judgments, she will also ‘see’ the value in the world accurately through her emotions.”
Lewis and ancient thinkers across cultural and religious contexts believed that sentiments could and should be cultivated through exemplars. Pelser explains,
By “irrigating” our students’ arid hearts … we can make them free … to experience or “see” the injustice of apartheid, the inhumanity of genocide, the beauty of a Beethoven symphony, the elegance of the physical laws of the universe, the dignity of human persons, our own sinfulness, and even the grace and goodness of God through well-formed emotional perceptions — through, in particular, indignation, moral horror, aesthetic awe, wonder, love, contrition, and gratitude, respectively.
Unlike Lewis, who recognized that his lack of affection was a moral deficiency, apatheists are content, and in some cases proud, of their indifference to the one whom Anselm fittingly adored as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.”
Originally published at The Worldview Bulletin Newsletter.
Jonathan M. Parker is Adjunct Professor of Christianity and Culture at Washington University of Virginia and an adjunct professor at Columbia International University. He is senior pastor of Jerusalem Baptist Church, a multi-ethnic church in Northern Virginia. He has also had the privilege of living abroad in Colombia and Costa Rica as well as traveling to over twenty countries in Central and South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Connect with Jonathan on Facebook or at otherwatchfuldragons@gmail.com.
