About this time two years ago, as the residents of my dorm were beginning to pack up for the summer, one was preparing for a much longer break. My friend Matthew, who was a sophomore like me, had decided not to return to school in the fall. I have never been as happy anywhere in my life as I have at Harvard, so I couldn’t understand why anybody would voluntarily go anywhere else. He kept saying he needed time to study some things on his own, and he promised all of us that he was going to do something big before he came back. Sure you are, I thought. This was one of the first instances of what has now become something of a pattern: Matthew makes a big claim, I am skeptical, and then he follows through and blows me away.

Matthew recently delivered a speech called “The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality” at a church in Wichita, Kansas. (Here is a transcript if you are short on time, though I recommend the video if you happen to have one hour, seven minutes, and nineteen seconds free, since Matthew is a very persuasive speaker.) In this speech – which is the result of the extensive independent research he has performed over the last two years – Matthew analyzes six key Bible verses and turns their traditional anti-LGBTQ interpretations on their heads. Again, I went into the video skeptical, expecting it to be another instance of people twisting words to mean what they want them to mean. But by the end, I was sold. I’m no theologian, but as a person with an interest in the Bible and a general academic background, I found it extremely compelling.

To be clear, I obviously disagree with Matthew on some key premises here. Most importantly, I don’t think the Bible is the word of God, so I don’t think its contents should actually have any bearing at all on how we evaluate the moral status of different types of human relationships. Matthew, as a Christian, clearly feels differently. But I think what he has to say is important for even non-Christians to hear, for a variety of reasons. First of all, Matthew’s main purpose here is combating anti-LGBTQ bigotry among Christians, which is a goal pretty much anybody reading this blog is probably on board with. If Christianity is here to stay – which I’m pretty sure it is, at least for the foreseeable future – then we might as well do our best to make it as harmless as possible, and ending or reducing Bible-based homophobia would be a huge victory. People of all beliefs can use the arguments Matthew presents to help have productive conversations about this topic with their Christian friends. We can also help by sharing the video widely in order to get it into the hands of as many Christians as possible, so it can help LGBTQ Christians feel less alone, arm them with talking points for difficult conversations with family and friends, give similar tools to LGBTQ allies within the Christian community, and maybe even change the minds of some of the more conservative Christians who watch it.

Since I was so intrigued and excited by Matthew’s project, I was delighted when he took the time to answer a few of my questions about it. I had been planning on editing my questions and his answers into a more synthetic form, but he is so thorough and eloquent in his responses that I thought it would be a shame to mangle them. So, in its raw majesty, I give you a conversation with Matthew Vines, Christian Gay Rights Activist Extraordinaire.

Chelsea Link: Can you tell me more about the path that led you from college to giving this speech?

Matthew Vines: Long story short: I was raised in a conservative evangelical church in Kansas, so I suppressed awareness of my sexual orientation growing up. But Harvard was a very different atmosphere, and by my sophomore fall, I’d come to terms with being gay. And though I might’ve liked simply to have come out and moved on, I couldn’t do that without losing or fracturing many relationships, so I took a leave of absence to study—among other things—the Bible and homosexuality. The traditional interpretation of these six verses in the Bible is the main sticking point on this subject for a lot of Christians, and the grounds on which gay Christians can expect to be rejected by straight Christians if and when that happens. And unfortunately, that still happens far too frequently, so gay Christians really have to take the time to learn their theology if they want to be well-prepared.

But obviously, I didn’t just want to learn the theology in a personally satisfying way, but also in a way that would equip me for substantive dialogue and engagement with Christians who disagree. There’s a real wealth of literature out there on this subject by now, as it’s been a hot topic in the Christian world for a good three decades, but it can seem quite unwieldy and intimidating at first. There are almost too many books and too many resources, so that it isn’t at all clear where one should start. And most of the best scholarship is written at a pretty high level, which makes it difficult for your average lay Christian to access and absorb easily. Consequently, gay Christians in conservative communities remain without the resources that they need to stand up for themselves and challenge the prejudices within their own communities. That was my driving motivation in doing this research: to produce a clear, comprehensive, and cogent argument that gay Christians in unfriendly places will find directly instructive and helpful.

To that end, I bought dozens of books on the subject from all viewpoints and tried to delve as deeply as possible into every nook and cranny of the theological debate as I could. That meant finding the best articles and essays on every aspect of the debate, and then finding the best rejoinders to those articles—on and on until I felt like I had seen all of the best material from both sides on every point and could then make an informed judgment. And there are many more levels to this debate than just these six verses; there are a plethora of ways of framing the issue biblically, historically, and theologically, and those must be carefully considered as well. All the while that I was doing this solitary study, I was also meeting and dialoguing with other Christians about the subject on a regular basis—mainly those who disagreed with me, so that they could challenge my thinking and force me to reconsider any questionable arguments I was making. In total, I probably spent somewhere in the vicinity of three to four thousand hours studying this since 2010, and of course, I could easily invest another three to four thousand and learn even more. But after having read at least fifty books on the subject (and probably even more journal articles), watched or listened to countless debates and interviews, and had many dozens of drawn-out conversations about it with other Christians, I felt ready and prepared to make a formal presentation about it.

CL: What do you hope to accomplish with this work, short-term and long-term?

MV: My short-term goal is to continue to build traffic for the video, with the hope of reaching LGBT people in conservative Christian communities in particular. That way, even if they aren’t ready to come out yet, they could still share the video with friends and family and start a dialogue about the subject in a less personal way. Hopefully, that could get at least some of their friends to start thinking about the issue more critically while also allowing LGBT people to find out who their allies are. Another core group to reach in the short-term are straight Christians in conservative communities who may already quietly support LGBT people but need better resources to nudge others in a similar direction.

In the long term, my goal is to help to permanently reform Christianity so that homophobia is a thing of the past. Homophobia meets all of the biblical criteria for sin in a way that homosexuality never could, and I and many others will not let up until that is recognized across the board in church teaching.

CL: How has it been received so far by your fellow Christians?

MV: So far, the responses from other Christians have been quite positive. Most people who’ve contacted me have expressed agreement and appreciation. One woman who came to my presentation let me know a few days later that she found it sufficiently compelling that she was changing her position because of it. And she hasn’t been alone among the more traditional Christians who’ve watched the video. That’s not to say that everyone agrees, because they don’t, but of the negative responses I’ve received so far, few of them have offered well thought-out counterarguments to the arguments that I put forward. I am hopeful that that will change, and that those who disagree will begin to engage more deeply with my scriptural arguments, but many of those who hold negative views about this have never had their views challenged before biblically, so they may not be prepared to engage in this dialogue yet.

CL: Part of your argument rests on the fact that certain rules in Leviticus only applied to Jews, and should not constrain the behavior of Christians today. But what were gay Jews supposed to do? Do you think God did want them to be alone in life? Or that God wouldn’t make any Jews gay? Or is there an alternative explanation?

MV: First of all, no one is identified as a gay Jew in the Old Testament. Our entire discussion about sexual orientation is very recent and doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bible. So it’s fairly speculative to be talking about God’s will for a group of people that are never even mentioned in the text.

That said, however, there are indeed alternative explanations of the Levitical prohibitions of male same-sex intercourse. I didn’t discuss these in my talk because my basic point—that the prohibitions are inapplicable to Christians—is the most important one for a Christian audience. But the precise meaning of the verses remains very important for Orthodox Jews today, so they are worth studying more carefully. Modern scholarship (cf. Daniel Boyarin, Saul Olyan, et al.) has convincingly demonstrated philologically that Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 specifically prohibit male anal sex, but only that act. And it’s on those grounds that some in Orthodox Judaism are moving toward accepting sexual relationships for gay Jews so long as that particular act is avoided. But even beyond that, it’s important to consider the meaning of the word “abomination” (toevah in the Hebrew). This word is almost always tied to issues of idolatry and cultic ritual in the Old Testament, not intrinsic wrong (although those categories can overlap as well). And Leviticus 18 and 20 specifically state that the reason that these various behaviors are prohibited is because they were practiced by the Egyptians and the Canaanites, who were in the land before the Israelites. So there is an argument to be made that male anal sex was specifically prohibited because of its associations with idolatrous pagan practices rather than due to the act itself, and therefore, that the Torah’s prohibition even on male anal sex should not be understood as binding on Orthodox Jews in loving, monogamous relationships today.

CL: You mention yourself that, although the Bible does not seem to actually condemn same-sex relationships, there are no positive representations of same-sex relationships in the Bible as there are of opposite-sex relationships. Why do you think that is?

MV: Well, had I had more time to discuss this, I would’ve said that there is not absolutely conclusive proof of any same-sex relationships in the Bible. However, there may be three positive examples of gay relationships in Scripture, but because our understanding of them hinges largely on speculation, I didn’t include them in my argument. The first and most famous potentially gay relationship in the Bible is that between David and Jonathan in the Old Testament. The second is Ruth and Naomi, and the third is the account of the Roman centurion and his slave in Matthew 8. (The Greek term used for slave or servant in that passage—pais—was also used to denote a same-sex romantic partner at the time, and the centurion does express unusually strong, personal interest in healing his slave.)

The problem with these cases, as I said, is that they rely on speculation, and it’s possible that that speculation is mistaken. So the more conservative argument is that the Bible is silent on the subject of loving gay relationships and that it does not condemn them, the latter point of which is undoubtedly true regardless of what people believe about the aforementioned relationships. And in general, when operating on the premise that the Bible doesn’t contain explicit positive statements about same-sex relationships, we need to pay more attention to the historical context before casting a judgment about what that might or might not mean. Specifically, the most well-known and widely discussed model of same-sex behavior in the biblical world was pederasty, a very disturbing practice involving an adult man and an adolescent boy. (We would simply call this pedophilia and/or child abuse.) That’s not to say that loving same-sex unions between adults didn’t also exist, but they were far less visible than pederastic relationships. So in some ways, it’s somewhat surprising that there is not greater condemnation of same-sex relationships in the Bible – with the focus specifically being on pederasty.

CL: You make a pretty convincing case, in my opinion at least, for why the Bible might actually support homosexuality and same-sex relationships. But I’m curious what you think the Bible can tell us about other types of alternative sexualities and gender identities. What, if anything, can the Bible tells us about bisexuality? And what, if anything, can it tell us about intersex and transgendered people? I’m curious about these topics because your argument seems to rest largely on the idea that God created people with certain desires and orientations on purpose, and that everybody should be true to their natural orientation – whether a man is attracted to men or to women, he should find a partner of his preferred gender. Can somebody be naturally oriented toward both genders? And what if somebody feels that they have been born with the wrong gender in the first place? Are they meant to stick with the body they were given because God gave them that body on purpose, or are they meant to switch to the gender they feel like they are because God gave them that impulse on purpose?

MV: First, the Bible tells us nothing directly about sexual orientation and gender identity. Our modern discourse about these subjects is worlds apart from the biblical canon. So my view that sexual orientation is created is something gleaned from general revelation; it’s of a piece with Christians’ views now about things like the solar system and the universe. The Bible doesn’t teach the specifics of our modern astronomical understandings, but those of us who believe in a creator also believe that the creator designed the universe in that way, even if Scripture doesn’t spell it out precisely. It’s the same with sexual orientation and gender identity. We can’t know for sure that God created people with different sexualities on purpose, but the Bible offers no reason to think otherwise, and so that would be the natural conclusion to reach.

As for your specific questions: Of course people can be naturally oriented toward both genders; that’s what it means to be bisexual. Now, from a Christian standpoint, we would expect bisexual people who pursue relationships to enter into a monogamous marriage just like everyone else; they simply have a wider pool of potential partners for that marriage. There exists an ongoing misperception that being bi means being disposed toward promiscuity or polyamory in a way that gay/straight people are not. But this isn’t true, so really, bisexual orientation raises no issues theologically that gay orientation doesn’t already.

And as for transgender people, of course they are part of creation as well. It’s hardly my or anyone else’s place to tell trans people that their gender identity is broken simply because it is different from my own experience and identity. Being trans can be an incredibly rich and rewarding experience, and non-trans people need to learn and preach acceptance more than anything—and certainly not think that we should be in the position of pronouncing other people’s gender identities inferior to our own just because they’re different. God’s design is beautifully diverse and multifaceted, and basic Christian humility and compassion should compel us to accept all LGBT people (including the B and the T) and to learn from them rather than pretend we already understand everything there is to know about them.

CL: Any closing thoughts?

The fundamental purpose of the video is to empower LGBT Christians who are being mistreated because of who they are and who they love, so anything people can do to share it would be helpful. There is nothing Christian about the status quo on this issue. Homophobia is un-Christian—and yes, it’s unbiblical, too.

***

So there you have it. If you think Matthew is onto something potentially good for the world, like I do, then you can help him spread his message! Read his HuffPo article! Share the video! Follow him on Twitter! And keep your eye on him. Whatever he does next, I’m sure it’s going to be big.

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine. She is documenting her attempt to read the Bible in a year at Blogging Biblically. She is the former Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, the former President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council, and a Volunteer Ambassador for the Be the Match bone marrow donor registry. She likes to cook while pretending she’s on Top Chef (hasty breakfast? more like Quickfire Challenge!), adores word games of all kinds (and was once the President of the illustrious Harvard College Crossword Society), and tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare. Last summer, she interned at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. You can ask her what she’s doing after graduation, but she’ll give you a different answer every time.

Left: Christian protester. Right: Man dressed as Jesus riding a dinosaur. This is what most college students do on the weekend, right?

After two trains, a bus, a quick breakfast with my fellow NPS panelist Walker Bristol and our Unelectables co-blogger Chelsey Faloona, and two more trains, I stumbled up the Metro stairs and onto the National Mall in the midst of the Reason Rally. All my exhaustion and scrunched-bus-napping-induced aches were replaced with the excitement of finally being there. This was the largest gathering of atheists, agnostics, Humanists, and other assorted non-religious folks in history. Around 20,000 of us flocked to the capital for a day of speeches, music, comedy, and celebration.

I have so far refrained from looking at any of the (from what I hear, extensive) news coverage of the event, because I would like to share my own impressions before they are colored by others. I think that media and popular responses to the event, from the religious and non-religious alike, will be crucial to determining whether it accomplished its goals – which were, according to the Reason Rally website, to dispel stereotypes about atheists, to encourage people to come out of the closet as non-believers or supporters thereof, and to achieve (or at least move toward) legislative equality. I will probably do another post in a few weeks, once the dust has had time to settle, on how well this seems to have worked. For now, here are my own impressions.

First of all, I am so proud that this event happened, and so glad that I was able to go (thanks to the generous funding of a donor from the Secular Massachusetts Meetup). I firmly believe that the non-religious do need to organize if we want to get anything done – and we have so much to do. I had a fantastic time last weekend, and I’m extremely grateful to everybody who put the rally together. It was a huge step for our movement.

But we still have a long way to go.

As I emerged from the Metro, yellow-shirted volunteers were ready to direct me to the rally. One of these volunteers was calling out to passersby as he directed them: “Atheists! Agnostics! This way! Step right up! Reason Rally, over here! Skeptics! Non-believers!” I smiled at him and thanked him for pointing me in the right direction (although I would like to think that I could have found my own way to the giant stage in the middle of the park). He kept on calling out: “Freethinkers! People with brains! This way!” My smile drooped as I walked away, thinking, oh, good, here we go again.

A lot of the day was focused on positive rhetoric, inspiring the crowds to work towards the three goals mentioned earlier. Don’t be ashamed of who you are! Tell people what you believe! Be proud! Demand equal treatment! Defend your rights! Let’s unite and work together towards our common goals! Build supportive communities! Show people that we can be good for goodness’s sake!

That all sounds great. But I was shocked at the apparent lack of cognitive dissonance that many of the speakers (and attendees) experienced when these lovely sentiments were blatantly contradicted, often in the next breath.

I particularly remember Dave Silverman, the president of American Atheists, delivering a rousing fire-people-up kind of speech in which he instituted a “no more bigotry” rule. I love that rule. Within a matter of seconds, however, he was insulting religious people. No, not presenting a thoughtful critique of their beliefs. Flat-out insulting people. It was…oh, what’s the word…bigotry. What happened to the “no more bigotry” rule? I asked this out loud, and several people around me immediately set me straight, telling me (most of them in a tone implying that this distinction should have been obvious to me) that the rule applied to anti-atheist bigotry only.

Oh.

…So, I know we all become flushed with passion at the thought of logic and reason and so on, but I’m having trouble following the argument for why we should demand respectful treatment from people who believe we are mistaken, but we feel no need to treat the people we believe are mistaken with equal respect. Wouldn’t it be simpler to extend the “no more bigotry” rule to everybody?

Fortunately, Greta Christina was on hand to remind me why atheists are angry. This is a speech she has given many times before; you can see the video from Skepticon here. I actually kind of love this speech – mostly. I’m completely on board with about 95% of it. Religion has been responsible for some pretty fucked up stuff. (Just to be clear, I’m not claiming that religion is responsible for every bad thing, or even most of the bad things many atheists like to blame on it – for a great article on this bad habit, check out the Rogue Priest. But I’m comfortable attributing some pretty lousy things to religion.) I’ve said this before, but I would love for religion to go away. So don’t tag me with that “belief in belief” crap.

Here’s the difference between me and Christina. She wraps up her list of grievances with a defense of aggression. After all, we have reasons to be angry, so why should we hold back? But I think there is a small but crucial distinction between being angry and lashing out. Christina claimed at the rally that “nobody ever accomplished social change by being nice” (I might not have that quote exactly right, but that’s as close as I can remember, and it definitely captures the sense of what she said). Again, I couldn’t help responding out loud, to the indignation of those around me. “Um…Martin Luther King. And Mahatma Gandhi. And Harvey Milk.” I didn’t go on because I was getting dirty looks again. I’m not sure if people were glaring at me because they disagreed or because they didn’t want to be reminded of pesky facts that didn’t fit with their worldview. Which is one of the things people at the rally repeatedly mocked religious people for doing.

Sigh.

Christina’s questionable claim about the ineffectuality of niceness was just part of an ongoing debate over tactics. According to most atheists, it would seem – or at least the loudest ones – this is the million-dollar question: Will we deconvert more religious people by being nice to them, or by teasing them and yelling at them?

I don’t know the answer, although I do have my suspicions. But here’s another question I think has been overlooked, and one which was stuck in my head throughout the rally and never answered: If we really are committed to being good for goodness’s sake (which we love to brag that we are), then why do we spend so much time calculating whether it’s strategic to treat people respectfully? Shouldn’t we be respectful because that’s the right thing to do, and we (supposedly) do the right thing simply because it’s right?

I know we love tracing our non-believing heritage to famous dead guys, so let’s take a leaf from David Hume’s book: “Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.”

Personally, the moments of the rally when I was most moved, inspired, and proud were those which focused more on our shared humanity and less on our theological disputes with our neighbors. The top three showings, for me, were by Jesse Galef, who gave an uplifting and rousing speech on the importance of community, particularly for young people; Senator Tom Harkin, who isn’t even an atheist but beautifully explained why he, as a religious person, fully supports the secular movement and the rally; and of course the inimitable Eddie Izzard, who always manages to use humor in exactly the right way, brilliantly critiquing religion without punishing the people who cherish it. He doesn’t hold back from poking holes right and left in theology, but he does it in such a way that religious people can laugh at it, too. And maybe it’s just me, but I think showing people how to laugh at themselves might cause people to see their own worldview from a different perspective, whereas trying to tear it violently out of their hands will only make them clutch it more tightly. But even if it doesn’t, I still think respect is worthwhile as more than just a strategy.

The Reason Rally was a hugely important event, and we should be proud of all that we’ve accomplished. But if we really want to show our religious neighbors that we can be good without god – or if we want to be able to look at ourselves without shame – we can’t let the “without god” bit overshadow the (much more important, I think) part about just being good.

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine. She recently founded and currently writes for two other blogs, The Unelectables (following religious minority candidates in the 2012 election) and Blogging Biblically (documenting her attempt to read the Bible in a year). She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, the former President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council, and a Volunteer Ambassador for the Be the Match bone marrow donor registry. She likes to cook while pretending she’s on Top Chef (hasty breakfast? more like Quickfire Challenge!), adores word games of all kinds (and was once the President of the illustrious Harvard College Crossword Society), and tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare. Last summer, she interned at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. You can ask her what she’s doing after graduation, but she’ll give you a different answer every time.

About sixteen months ago, the Pew Research Center announced the results of their study of religious literacy in the United States. This study caused such a buzz that the Pew website crashed from all the traffic. Atheists and agnostics  were – perhaps unsurprisingly? – found to be the most religiously literate belief group, and we’ve hardly stopped bragging since. Hemant Mehta wrote a good Friendly Atheist post assembling some choice excerpts from the flurry of atheist commentary attempting to explain the results, including his own very compelling Chicago Tribune piece on the topic (in which he suggests that we’re atheists precisely because we’re so religiously literate).

Before you break out the confetti all over again, I’d like to point out that the study results might not be as impressive as we non-religious apologists have all made it out to be. Yes, we scored the highest, but barely: on the 32-question quiz used in the study, atheists/agnostics answered an average of 20.9 questions correctly, but the Jews and Mormons were breathing down our necks at 20.5 and 20.3, respectively.

But, even more importantly, it’s time to acknowledge that 21 out of 32 is an embarrassingly low score on such an appallingly simple test. Sure, we did better than the rest of America, but I think a more accurate characterization of the results is, “holy shit, everyone else is even more ignorant than we are.”

Seriously, this was not a hard quiz. We are not talking about theological minutiae or obscure sects here. We’re talking about very basic, fundamental ideas in the world’s most prominent belief systems, and major, world-changing events in the history of religion. This Huffington Post article and this Vancouver Sun piece provide some horrifying examples of America’s rampant ignorance. For a taste, here are just a few of the things that over half of Americans don’t know:

- that Judaism is a religion

- that the Qur’an is the sacred text of Muslims

- that Martin Luther was a leader of the Protestant Reformation

Again, this is not complex stuff. Forget about the tenets of Judaism; a majority of people don’t even know what Judaism is.

And it gets worse: not only do people have no idea what everyone else believes, they’re also totally ignorant of the basic ideas that make up their own beliefs.

- Almost half of Catholics don’t know that their church officially teaches that, during communion, the bread and wine literally turn into Jesus. Keep in mind that this exact belief was a huge source of violence and general chaos in the sixteenth century, and is a major reason for the split between Catholicism and Protestantism.

- Speaking of which, more than half of Protestants don’t know that Martin Luther was a major player in that whole debacle.

- Over a third of Jews don’t know that Maimonides – who, as Rachel Zoll notes in the HuffPo piece, was “one of the greatest rabbis and intellectuals in history” – was Jewish.

I think you probably get the idea. The fact that atheists are, on average, very slightly more religiously literate than everybody else isn’t very impressive when you realize just how low the bar is.

So, while 2012 is still young and there is still time to make belated resolutions, I’d like to issue a challenge to my fellow atheists (and everyone else): this year, try to learn a little more and suck a little less.

To this end, my New Year’s resolution is to read the Bible in its entirety before 2013 rolls around. It’s the most influential piece of literature in the Western canon – and, arguably, in history – and I’m embarrassed to have lived 22 years and change in the most Christian country in the world without reading it cover-to-cover. I’m documenting my journey from Genesis to Revelation at Blogging Biblically; each post includes a [snarky and unorthodox] summary of that day’s reading, so if you prefer your scriptures partly digested, I invite you to subscribe and follow along. And I’m very interested in other people’s thoughts on the Bible and reactions to my ideas about it, so please feel free to join in the conversation in the comments. </shameless plug>

Whether or not you give a rat’s ass about my Bible blog, I hope you’ll take seriously my challenge to boost your religious literacy this year. Richard Dawkins’s disgruntled complaints about fairyology aside, there are clear benefits to understanding what other people – billions of them – believe about life, death, morality, fate, and the universe. Indeed, in a country where sharia law and fetal ensoulment are hot political issues, and in a world where centuries-old beliefs inspire bloodshed in theocracies and democracies alike, you can hardly afford not to.

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine. She recently founded and currently writes for two other blogs, The Unelectables (following religious minority candidates in the 2012 election) and Blogging Biblically (documenting her attempt to read the Bible in a year). She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, the former President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council, and a Volunteer Ambassador for the Be the Match bone marrow donor registry. She likes to cook while pretending she’s on Top Chef (hasty breakfast? more like Quickfire Challenge!), adores word games of all kinds (and was once the President of the illustrious Harvard College Crossword Society), and tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare. Last summer, she interned at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. You can ask her what she’s doing after graduation, but she’ll give you a different answer every time.

Last week, I had the privilege of writing a guest post for the Social Action Massachusetts blog. They often have people of different faiths blog about what, from their tradition, motivates them to work towards social justice. But Caitlin from SAM realized they’d never had a nonreligious perspective on that topic, so she asked me to contribute. This is what I wrote.

This summer, a Christian student at my school told me that if he found out God didn’t exist, he would kill himself.

I was horrified, of course, but also simply confused. If this student stopped believing in God, would his world really look that bad? Would it suddenly look that different? Would it cease to be worth living in?

That world is my world. I live every day of my life assuming that God doesn’t exist, and I’m having a grand old time.

But I was even more confused when the same student went on to say that, if he didn’t kill himself, he would at the very least become a heartless monster; he would stop doing community service, stop caring about the wellbeing of others, and devote the rest of his life to selfish and radical hedonism.

As somebody who has lived through exactly the process he is hypothesizing about – the transition from a theistic worldview to an atheistic one – I can testify that my commitment to serving others only became stronger when I stopped believing in God.

I’ve always believed in the importance of community service. But, for most of my life, it didn’t seem particularly urgent. It will all be evened out eventually, I figured. It’s nice to do what you can, but no matter what we do in this life, God will sort it out in the next. Justice will be served regardless of my participation in it.

When I became an atheist, I suddenly lost recourse to this comforting thought. I became painfully aware of the very real possibility that justice might never be served. With that awareness came the unshakable conviction that I must do everything in my power to ensure that people do, as nearly as possible, get justice in this life. If I don’t do it, I can’t assume that it will get done.

Rabbi Hillel famously asked, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” I ask, if we are not for ourselves, who will be for us? And if I am not for my fellow humans, who will be for them?

Thus, the idea that atheism dissolves responsibility is baffling to me. On the contrary, the way I see it, responsibility is a constant; the question isn’t whether it exists, but who bears it. You can only abdicate responsibility if you have somebody to foist it off on – somebody like God. When God is removed from the picture, the weight of the world falls squarely and irrevocably on our own shoulders.

That’s why I, as an atheist, am committed to working as hard as I can for social justice.

I believe in the religion of reason – the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.

– Robert Ingersoll

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine, and minoring in Mind/Brain/Behavior. She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. She also writes for the Harvard Brain and volunteers with the Be the Match bone marrow donor registry. She likes to cook while pretending she’s on Top Chef (Hasty breakfast? More like Quickfire Challenge!), adores word games of all kinds (and was once the President of the illustrious Harvard College Crossword Society), and tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare. This summer she interned at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. You can ask her what she’s doing after graduation, but she’ll give you a different answer every time.

Today, this article popped up in my twitter feed, courtesy of the lovely Amber Hacker of the Interfaith Youth Core. The gist of the article is that some Notre Dame students applied for official university recognition of a club called Atheist, Agnostic and Questioning Students (AAQS); the application was denied.

I feel like the kneejerk reaction of many atheists to stories like this is to decry the intolerant administration’s thickheaded discrimination against brave, nonconformist students. But I’m going to play devil’s advocate – erm, savior’s advocate? – and say that this was a perfectly fair decision by the university.

Notre Dame is, of course, a Catholic school. Everybody knows this. But it seems to me that most people expect religiously affiliated schools to make equal accommodations for both the students who do not belong to the affiliated denomination and those who do. This isn’t a totally unreasonable expectation based merely on precedent; for example, Georgetown University, another Catholic school, was the first university in the country to hire a full-time Muslim chaplain.

But I have to ask: what, if anything, do people think it means for a university to be religiously affiliated? We can’t claim to be down with religious affiliation while simultaneously looking askance at any religious university that doesn’t behave exactly like a secular university. People seem to expect religiously affiliated universities to be such in name only. That surely can’t be fair. It is the people who take that attitude, not the universities like Notre Dame who act according to their overtly stated religious values, who are being unreasonable.

Although there are clearly a variety of constraints on students’ college choices, it is enough of a free choice to fairly say that students decide whether to attend a religious or a secular school. Notre Dame isn’t exactly subtle about its Catholicism:

So the students who choose to attend certainly know what they are getting themselves into, and any non-Catholic who matriculates essentially forfeits, while on campus, any religious accommodations beyond those required by law.

Of course, there is always the possibility that a student who begins college as a Catholic may end it as an atheist – my boyfriend is proof of that – or as a Muslim or a Lutheran or anything else. But surely Catholic high school seniors, along with their parents and advisers, are as aware of that possibility as anybody else. The risk of inconvenient apostasy – and of all the struggles that doubt entails when it occurs within a religious institution – is one that all who choose to enter such an institution must be willing to take.

In the case of the Notre Dame incident, the rejection letter stated that “A club’s purpose must be consistent with the University’s mission….No organization, or member of any organization on behalf of the organization, may encourage or participate in any activity which contravenes the mission of the University or the moral teaching of the Catholic Church.” So if your club idea doesn’t mesh with the administration’s interpretation of Catholic doctrine, you’re out of luck – and you should have known that to begin with.

There is perhaps a discrimination claim to be made on the basis of hypocritical inconsistency. If an atheist group is not “consistent with the University’s mission” and goes against “the moral teaching of the Catholic Church,” then surely so is any student group devoted to any religion besides Catholicism. Right? Wrong: Notre Dame has a Jewish club and a Muslim club. So what’s that about?

Then again, that’s still within the rights of the school. If they want to interpret “the moral teaching of the Catholic Church” to mean that Jews are A-OK and atheists are verboten, that’s their prerogative. If Notre Dame decides homosexual activity is grounds for expulsion, that’s fair game. If they decide that gay is okay, that’s fair game. If they decide everybody has to wear a purple hat on Thursdays, that’s fair game.

The way I see it, the students at religious colleges are constantly at the mercy of the administration’s interpretive whims. (Which is just one of the many reasons why I would never attend such an institution.) For this reason, the question of whether religious affiliation is conducive to the environment of questioning and discovery one generally expects as the foundation of a college-level liberal arts education is an open one – but a fairly irrelevant one for the current discussion. The important point here is that the student (more or less) chooses the school, so they don’t have grounds to complain when they end up getting exactly what it said on the tin.

Besides, Notre Dame’s incipient atheist community has, according to one of its would-be founders, “been meeting underground this whole time,” which is way cooler anyway.

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine, and minoring in Mind/Brain/Behavior. She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. She also writes for the Harvard Brain and volunteers with the Be the Match bone marrow donor registry. She likes to cook while pretending she’s on Top Chef (Hasty breakfast? More like Quickfire Challenge!), adores word games of all kinds (and was once the President of the illustrious Harvard College Crossword Society), and tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare. This summer she interned at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. You can ask her what she’s doing after graduation, but she’ll give you a different answer every time.