Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious

By Chris Stedman

The story of a former Evangelical Christian turned openly gay atheist who now works to bridge the divide between atheists and the religious

The stunning popularity of the “New Atheist” movement—whose most famous spokesmen include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens—speaks to both the growing ranks of atheists and the widespread, vehement disdain for religion among many of them. In Faitheist, Chris Stedman tells his own story to challenge the orthodoxies of this movement and make a passionate argument that atheists should engage religious diversity respectfully.
 
Becoming aware of injustice, and craving community, Stedman became a “born-again” Christian in late childhood. The idea of a community bound by God’s love—a love that was undeserved, unending, and guaranteed—captivated him. It was, he writes, a place to belong and a framework for making sense of suffering.
 
But Stedman’s religious community did not embody this idea of God’s love: they were staunchly homophobic at a time when he was slowly coming to realize that he was gay. The great suffering this caused him might have turned Stedman into a life-long New Atheist. But over time he came to know more open-minded Christians, and his interest in service work brought him into contact with people from a wide variety of religious backgrounds. His own religious beliefs might have fallen away, but his desire to change the world for the better remained. Disdain and hostility toward religion was holding him back from engaging in meaningful work with people of faith. And it was keeping him from full relationships with them—the kinds of relationships that break down intolerance and improve the world.
 
In Faitheist, Stedman draws on his work organizing interfaith and secular communities, his academic study of religion, and his own experiences to argue for the necessity of bridging the growing chasm between atheists and the religious. As someone who has stood on both sides of the divide, Stedman is uniquely positioned to present a way for atheists and the religious to find common ground and work together to make this world—the one world we can all agree on—a better place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9780807014400

Reviews for Faitheist

[dimlightarchive · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I struggled rating this book. I think it's written with skill, and the subject matter is important. I even found parts of it compelling.

And yet, I think this might just not have been the right book for me right now. As someone interested in interfaith, I learned a great deal, but finished this book feeling like I'd wanted something just a bit chewier about that work, and less of a religious/Humanist memoir.

Not a bad book. Not by a long shot. I just didn't fall entirely in love with it.

[auntieknickers · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

From my progressive Christian viewpoint, this is an excellent book. Chris Stedman, without abandoning or compromising his atheist principles, makes a good case for atheists to join in interfaith work for social justice. So much of the widely-publicized discourse in recent years has been focused on the supposed intellectual superiority of atheism and the obsessively-catalogued sins of religion (conveniently forgetting that Stalin, for one, was an atheist). It's refreshing to read of Stedman's journey of unbelieving and his dawning understanding that his Humanist beliefs can find common ground with other faiths in the work of feeding the hungry, healing the sick, clothing the naked and all the other tasks that churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples do every day. It doesn't surprise me that Stedman is from Minnesota and an alumnus of Augsburg College (a small, progressive Lutheran school in inner-city Minneapolis.) I hope a lot of atheists and agnostics will read this book, but I may be too hopeful. It's hard to give up that feeling of being smarter than everyone else, hard to give up the ease of dismissing out of hand anyone who believes in a God. For atheists who care about the other people on this planet, working with people of faith can help to form a critical mass of people who can change the world for the better. Highly recommended.

[jdhomrighausen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Stedman first heard the title for this book as an insult thrown at him. He was at a party for an atheist organization, listening to an angry man rant about how religion should be destroyed entirely. Stedman questioned him, wondering if that was the same absolutist mindset he had heard as an evangelical Christian. The angry atheist sneered at him, spouting, "Oh, you're a faitheist!"Stedman does not believe that the angry atheist is a true stereotype. He does, however, believe that the small and angry subset have taken too much airtime. Stedman seeks to reclaim this space. This book chronicles his journey from religious none to gay-closeted evangelical Christian to out-gay liberal Lutheran back to religious none. He describes where he hopes to lead the secular humanist movement in his work at the humanist chaplaincy at Harvard: away from facile religion-bashing and into deep engagement with the religious.Part of Stedman's story is painful. He spent most of eighth and ninth grade trying to earn God's love by denying himself any joy. At one point he curls up in the bathtub, holding a knife over his left wrist, afraid to dig it in. Why? He believed that his gayness was a sign of God's indifference. Had God loved him, he would have been cured of his affliction as his prayer group had told him. Stuck in this catch-22, his mom discovered his journal and immediately took him to an inclusive congregation.Stedman does not speak with regret of his time in the Lutheran Church. In fact, he loved it. He went to a Lutheran college and majored in religion. While there he examined arguments for God and found they did not measure up. Back to square one - no religion.Along the way Stedman learned something important. One night he and his friends were approached outside a gay bar by some Christians calling them to repent. Stedman stayed to listen to them while his friends laughed and went inside. After the street preachers had finished evangelizing, he asked if he could share his story. After hearing about the pain and agony he went through trying to reconcile his sexuality and his faith, they left with a new respect. their minds opened by the encounter. I love this story.Having read all four of the New Atheists, I was ready for a change of pace in atheist writing. After the painful task of leaving religion, religion-bashing can only be the center of one's being for so long. Stedman does not pretend to be the only atheist who respects the religious and understands that religion is a broad spectrum rather than a singular entity. But it took him a while to meet another. I used to work with an angry atheist, a guy who had grown up evangelical and left it. If anyone brought up anything having to do with religion, he would make a snide joke and sneer. Worse, if anyone tried to engage him critically on the issue, he made it clear that the only true Christianity was a crude biblical literalism; if you did not believe that, you were only fudging the issues. People like him are the reason Stedman reports meeting so many atheists who fear identifying so publicly.Still, there is a place for conversion. Stedman doesn't emphasize this enough. It's great that humanists like him are doing interfaith work (interbeing work?). But if he truly believes theism is false, then why not convince others? Stedman seems to have found that debates are possible when relationship has been formed. But he doesn't emphasize this enough. I was left curious to know if he had ever turned someone else to atheism.Last, I wonder what kind of virtues and narratives humanists can draw on for negotiating pluralism. As Alasdair MacIntyre points out, the narrative we see ourselves in - socially, personally, cosmically - conditions the virtues we practice. Extremists who see the universe in cosmic warfare will live out virtues of destruction to achieve the end of good, regardless of the means. Open-minded Christians who see God as self-sacrificing love will employ caritas as their chief virtue. What chief virtue will the atheist/secular humanist movement employ, particularly in encounters with pluralism? Is it even possible to bring the coherence of a moral narrative to a subgroup that is exploring what it means to reject all the conventional moral stories?Stedman's book provokes many thoughts in me. It's amazing to think he is only a few years older than me. I await his next book eagerly.

[lancasterways · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Near the end of Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious (Beacon Press, 2012), Chris Stedman wonders if he's too young (24) to write a memoir. Stedman concludes that he isn't. Turns out he's wrong. Faitheist is full of good ideas, but it's an article (or two) posing as a book. For those of you keeping count, the book's metadata--that is, its bibliographic information--indicate that Faitheist is approximately 200 pages. If that's accurate, 20 pages must be blank, and another 10-15 consist of front matter and notes. In other words, contrary to the advertised length, Faitheist is about 170 pages long, and, even then, it's puzzling in its lack of specificity when it comes to Stedman's life.Stedman is a native Minnesotan, and his sunny, Midwestern disposition shines through here. He cheerfully recounts his childhood, as well as his adolescent and adult difficulties, always concluding on a triumphant note, with success achieved or a lesson learned. Stedman's optimism might be annoying if it weren't so obviously sincere. It's just hard to stay mad at that Chris, even when he's kicking in church signs, or, in the case of the book, glossing over large chunks of his life.Faitheist is clearly the work of a young man. This is not to say that young men aren't capable of great things; they clearly are. But Stedman doesn't seem to be aware--or willfully chooses not to acknowledge--that, as a twentysomething, his story has only just begun. Stedman presents as complete, or near complete, a story that, by rights, is just getting underway. He wants us to think he's in chapter 15, when he's really only in chapter 2.Consider, for instance, the beginning of the book, in which Stedman goes into poignant detail regarding his grandmother and mother, his love for them, and their influence on his life. These women were independent, strong, and encouraged those qualities in Stedman. Of course, there is a glaring absence: Stedman's father, who is not discussed. Stedman's parents divorced, and it's clear from the Acknowledgments that Stedman and his father are working on their relationship. Stedman clearly was uncomfortable with discussing in his memoir his relationship with his father. But that omission is obvious, and, in itself, speaks volumes about where Stedman is in his life. Given another 10 years, perhaps Stedman would be able to reach more meaningful conclusions about his relationship with his family. (His siblings are given short shrift.)Of course, the draw of Faitheist is not Stedman himself, although he is charismatic, but his role in American religious life. Stedman is a "faitheist," an atheist who is comfortable engaging in interfaith work and dialog with the religious. (The term is pejorative when one atheist applies it to another; Stedman's intent is to reclaim it, as the LGBT community did with "queer.") Stedman has had a remarkable spiritual trajectory, from a nonreligious childhood, to an adolescent infatuation with evangelical Christianity, to angry and alienated atheism, and, finally, to his interfaith work on behalf of atheism and Humanism, movements (or philosophies, or ways of life, what have you) that he goes to pains to point out are not religions.Even here, in what should be the meatiest part of his memoir, Stedman is inconsistent. His struggle with his sexuality (he is gay) as an evangelical Christian is excruciatingly drawn. It's after the chapters devoted to that period of his life, though, that Stedman's narrative loses its momentum. Stedman discovers liberal Christians who welcome gays, and throws himself into the social justice work in which his community engages. Then, relieved to be welcomed into a new community, to have his very identity validated, he goes to college and, almost immediately, kinda, sorta gives up on religion for no reason other than that was his intellectual path. The angst of his adolescence and the joy of acceptance would seem to be at odds with Stedman's almost apathetic abandonment of his faith. But wait: Stedman was angry. He carried a grudge against religion because of the box it had put him in, because it couldn't live up to his expectations, because, try as he might, he couldn't intellectually convince himself of the existence of God. But he's okay with it, really. But he's not. Stedman's vacillations are understandable, especially in someone who is still relatively young, but, in the presentation of his narrative, he appears unaware of its internal inconsistencies. Stedman might have been advised to engage in more introspection as he considered his story.Stedman's philosophy is better thought out and will be of interest to the average reader. Put simply, Stedman encourages atheist engagement with the religious. He advances several reasons for this, for instance, education. Stedman argues that atheist-religious dialog serves atheists because it works both ways, allowing believers to discover that atheists are not the bogeymen they're perceived to be (if popular polls are to be believed). In short, Stedman believes that "atheism" is a negative philosophy, defined as it is by what it does not stand for, and advocates for "Humanism" as a positive, active promoter of secular values.Stedman is a social justice warrior (and I say that as a compliment) and advocate for his beliefs and those who share them. He is a promoter of understanding and dialog. He is a leader. But Faitheist is a poor reflection of Stedman's ideas. It is not the book his movement needs. Faitheist is, like its author, sincere, well-intentioned, but callow. Give Stedman another 10 to 15 years. Perhaps then he'll produce a memoir worthy of his goals.

[bibleblaster · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A great affirmation of interfaith (including non-religious) communication and cooperation, along with a compelling personal story. Goes a long way toward explaining why I do what I do (Unitarian Universalist ministry).

[dubiousdisciple · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh, man, do I relate. Here is an atheist that feels more at home in religious surroundings than with a secular community. While I’ve never considered myself an atheist (I’m happy with the phrase “agnostic Christian”), even if I were, I would hesitate to take the title. I don’t want to be known as someone who tears down rather than builds up. I have more in common with nonbelievers than fundamentalists, but I have never been able to swim in the waters of an online atheist forum without feeling queasy … like I just plain don’t belong. I’m not alone: so uncomfortable are many people with atheists that polls show them to be the least electable group in America.Why? Why are atheists so distrusted? Enter Chris Stedman, a believer-turned-atheist who misses the goodness of Christianity, and feels happiest when he is joining the Church in the soup kitchen.Yet, the “regular Joe” atheist is as misunderstood as anyone of any contrary belief system, insists Stedman. The problem is, when there is little familiarity, extremists become the face of a religious movement, and this is just as true of non-religion (atheism). The New Atheists have managed to monopolize the public discourse on atheism. They have succeeded in making atheism more publicly known, but at what cost?The goal of the New Atheist movement is the total eradication of religion. Confront the religious, expose the idiocy of believing, and sneer it under the table. The antireligious rhetoric spewed by aggressive atheists is not a critique of theology, says Stedman. That, he could deal with on an intellectual level. Rather, such attacks are “based in a willful ignorance of what it actually means to be religious and of the way religious lives are lived, and turn religious people into a cheaply mocked caricature.” Chris tells of trying to fit in at an American Atheists gathering in New Jersey, which was “packed full of blasphemy sessions and speeches comparing religion to sexually transmitted diseases.” He recalls how “Witnessing the sheer vitriol some expressed toward the religious, I actually cried—hot, angry tears. I called friends of mine back home—atheists, no less—and recalled what I’d seen … One friend said to me: ‘You see, this is why I don’t want to call myself an atheist.’”Today, says Stedman, he cannot recount the number of fellow atheists and agnostics who do not want to be associated with the movement. What has gone wrong? How did atheism sink to the level of polarized fundamentalism it claims to despise, and can the image be fixed?Chris is trying. He suggests that the atheist movement should be more about what it does stand for than what it doesn’t. Energy spent disparaging what others believe (the New Atheism) is worse than wasteful; it’s toxic. There is no benefit in dehumanizing those with different metaphysical beliefs. Far more effective would be for atheists to promote constructive dialogue with the religious, treating them as intellectual equals. Atheism’s reputation can be rescued by reaching out, attempting to understand and empathize rather than bulldoze and mock. So, Stedman decided to walk the walk. He became the Assistant Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, working in interfaith relations.An atheist chaplain! Hee, hee! I doubt the New Atheists are amused, but I am in awe. This is a captivating, inspiring, must-read book, whether you are a believer or an atheist. Get it now.

[hjvanderklis_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Where New Atheist movement (what’s new in this?) famous spokesmen include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens may impress some like-minded people, their pedantic attitude towards fellow humans that do adhere a faith or consider themselves religious, caused lots of animosity with others. In Faitheist (mind the words: fag, faith, atheist; kidding, it’s a previously coined term), a twentysomething named Chris Stedman challenges both sides and pleas for a respectful treatment. Quite shocking to learn to many Americans even don’t know one Muslim personally, but have strong opinions on Islam. I bet that’s the same for Hindus, Buddhists, Mormons, Jews and Christians. If you’re willing to reach out to other people and build relationships outside your comfort zone or natural / religious / cultural habitat, respect is good starter.Stedman tells his own story, from one Seder meal on Friday night to literally taste some of the Jewish religion to his entry into and exit from American Evangelical type of Christianity. VeggieTales songs, the performance of a worship team, Left Behind series, that stuff. Yes, free pizza and a community for social care are valued. The need to belong to a community is a main theme throughout the book. Raised in a broken family, Stedman struggled with his homosexuality, didn’t get accepted by the local Christian church folks and going through the motions while upholding a “trendy” Christian image doesn’t work out well.Stedman put of Christianity as a whole, his story has some pedantic elements as well, as if one teenager oversees a faith family that holds more than a billion people worldwide and whose American brothers and sisters aren’t the only flavour around. Exit Christian-era, exit True Love Waits certificate, coming out and live out a queer life. But there’s more to life: reaching out, learning at seminary and work in communities, such as the Interfaith Youth Core, founded by Eboo Patel who delivered a foreword to this book. The life and work of fellow Dutch man Henri Nouwen came to my mind.The author found added value in raising interfaith communities, bringing together people regardless of their religious or other belief system. Humanism is the common ground Stedman builds on. What exactly interfaith means to both writer and reader is left unsorted. Next, I missed the philosophical standpoints in the humanism paradigms around, as well as explaining to a less involved reader what all the “isms” and abbreviations like TEC, LGBT and LGBTQ mean. Nevertheless: Faitheist is a book that makes you (re)think through your own beliefs and convictions.