There Is No God and Mary Is His Mother: Rediscovering Religionless Christianity

By Thomas Cathcart

Is the Western world really post-Christian, or does Christianity simply need a reinterpretation? What did Dietrich Bonhoeffer mean by "religionless Christianity"? Is it passé? Or was it perhaps ahead of its time? In an era of dramatically increased religious pluralism and the emergence of large numbers of people identifying as "spiritual but not religious," so-called "religionless Christianity" can speak to those who find both biblicism and "belief-based" religion irrelevant. In this personal, witty, and timely book, New York Times bestselling author Thomas Cathcart takes readers on a journey into belief and unbelief and leads them through to the other side. Drawing from deep philosophical and theological wells, There Is No God and Mary Is His Mother demonstrates the meaningfulness of being a Christian in a secular age. Cathcart shows that, even absent traditional theological formulas and doctrines, Christianity can be a credible, meaningful, and practical means of negotiating worldly existence and experience. For Christians, There Is No God and Mary Is His Mother offers encouragement. For ex-Christians, it presents a different way of being a Christian than the one they've rejected. For atheists, it shows how Christianity can be an ally in affirming the here and now. Religionless Christianity is possible and desirable wherever and whenever it awakens personal and social transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781506474175

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Praise for There Is No God and Mary Is His Mother

Warning! Handle this timely exploration of ‘religionless Christianity’ with care. Its potent medicine provides a wise and witty—yet deadly serious—antidote to mindless dogmatism, heartless moralism, and other forms of toxic religiosity. Follow the recommended daily dose of living in, with, and for Mystery, and be well on your way to spiritual recovery and relief.

—Marvin Ellison, author of Making Love Just: Sexual Ethics for Perplexing Times

"Cathcart has written just the kind of book I have been trying to write for many years, but have only rarely succeeded. He has an impressive ability to convey demanding theological ideas in an accessible idiom without watering down the substance. I appreciate his skill in weaving in his own experiences, giving the book a personal voice and making his ideas more available.

Since I am a disciple (in a way) of both my predecessor at Harvard, George Santayana, and of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and since I believe both have something vital to say to us today, I was worried at first to see how Cathcart draws on them. But he does it with verve and acuity, and here and there with genuine humor. He understands them both. But he also knows what is happening in the postmodern soul, somewhere between faith and skepticism. This honest and spirited book will speak to a varied lot of readers. I know that I will recommend it."

—Harvey Cox, Hollis Professor of Divinity, emeritus, Harvard University, and author of The Secular City, The Future of Faith, and The Market as God

In a world swirling in supremacy culture, we don’t need more religion; we need an ethics of engagement. This book helps us navigate how to embody an ethics of engagement from a place of care of self and other. A religionless world will be an okay world—if we embody an ethics of engagement.

—Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, PhD, founder and activist, Theology Project; author of Activist Theology; transqueer actixist; Latinx scholar; and public theologian

There Is No God and Mary Is His Mother

There Is No God and Mary Is His Mother

Rediscovering Religionless Christianity

Thomas Cathcart

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

THERE IS NO GOD AND MARY IS HIS MOTHER

Rediscovering Religionless Christianity

Copyright © 2021 Thomas Cathcart. Printed by Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are from the King James Version.

Cover image: sedmak/iStock

Cover design: Brice Hemmer

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-7416-8

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-7417-5

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To my favorite atheist,

Danny Klein:

oldest and dearest friend for over sixty years,

collaborator on several books,

mentor on this one,

raised a secular Jew,

but a man to whom I often say,

You’re a better Christian than I am, my friend.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1: So What?

2: How Did We Screw This Up So Badly?

3: What’s Wrong with You? (If Anything)

4: Some Terminology and Some Loose Ends

5: God Is Good?

6: Envisioning a Kingdom of God

7: How Holy Is the Holy Spirit?

8: The Gift

9: Christ in Me?

10: Bringing It All Back Home

Further Reading

Notes

Acknowledgments

I want to reiterate my gratitude to Danny Klein, dearest friend since 1957, for his constant guidance in the writing of this book. His unflagging encouragement and his close reading of several drafts were both crucial to its completion. The fact that he is himself the author of dozens of books didn’t hurt.

Heartfelt thanks as well to my wife, Eloise, an excellent writer and editor in her own right, for her clear-eyed critique of an early draft and for her unfailing love for the last twenty-five years. Both Eloise and Danny come out of religious traditions different from mine, and their perspectives were invaluable.

Thank you to my wonderful daughter, Esther, for her permission to use a very personal story. Living within a short drive of each other, as we now do, has been a huge gift.

Bob Lohbauer, actor extraordinaire, thank you as well for the use of a poignant, personal anecdote.

Julia Lord, you have been Danny’s and my talented (and sometimes relentless) agent for the past fifteen years. Even more importantly, you’ve been a dear friend. Thank you.

Many editors are good at improving their authors’ prose style, and Ryan Hemmer at Fortress is one of the best of them. Never have I had an editor, though, who also knows the subject matter better than I do! That has been a huge boon, and I thank you, Ryan. Needless to mention, any remaining errors are mine.

Introduction

We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. . . . If religion is only a garment of Christianity—and even this garment has looked very different at different times—then what is a religionless Christianity?

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

It’s no secret that a growing number of people have stopped believing in the God they learned about in Sunday school. A recent study by a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University found that 23 percent of Americans now claim no religion, putting this group (the so-called Nones) in a three-way tie for first place with those who identify as Catholic or evangelical. Meanwhile, the mainline Protestant population—once the plurality of Americans—has fallen from 28 percent to 11 percent.

It’s a puzzling time, not only for some Nones, but also for some related groups: the Nearly Nones, the Sometime Nones, the Borderline Nones—those with one religious foot inside the church and one skeptical foot outside. Their puzzlement, in turn, makes it a challenging time for church leaders, teachers, clergy, and college and seminary instructors, who, in addition to the obvious leadership challenges, are often wrestling with their own skepticism, questioning both their personal commitment to the faith and their vocation.

As a one-time teacher, sometime church leader, sometime dropout, and current church member, my journey may be of interest. Although I am not a None, my story does intersect in many ways with those in the no religion group. I grew up in the mainline Protestant tradition, was active in Sunday school, was president of my youth group, and was accepting of what might be called the suburban-American-Protestant standard model of beliefs and practice in the 1950s. My plan was to become a Christian minister, the pastor of a church.

Like countless other adolescents, I found my faith challenged in college. In my freshman year at Harvard, I took a course called Ideas of Man and the World in Western Thought, in which we read the Greek tragedies, the Bible, and some Shakespeare, but mainly we read some of the highlights from the history of Western philosophy: samples from the works of Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Sartre, and others.

It was David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion that sent me into a tailspin. There, Hume systematically destroys all the traditional arguments for the existence of God. The one that I found most devastating was his attack on the argument from design. That argument goes roughly like this: the intricacy of the universe is analogous to the intricacy of objects of human invention, which would therefore lead us to assume an analogous designer. This is the core of the current argument for intelligent design that leads some evangelical Christians to argue that our public schools should teach intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution.

Hume levels several objections. How can anything be said to be analogous to a one-off entity like the universe? Aren’t there equally compelling analogies (e.g., the universe resembles an animal at least as closely as it does an object of human design) that would lead us to different conclusions about its origin? Even if we established the existence of a human-like designer god, what would make one think that this designer is the traditional Judeo-Christian God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?

My head swam. I was fascinated by philosophy and went on to major in it.

Insofar as I had thought about it at all, I guess I had more or less relied on the argument from design to underlie my faith. One would think that, scrambled as my head was by Hume, I would have rethought my plan to go to divinity school. But I didn’t. Probably because one evening I sat up all night and read Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be from start to finish. Tillich describes faith as something more like concern and courage than belief in unbelievable statements. Along with my Jewish/atheist BFF, Danny Klein, I signed up for Tillich’s course on the philosophies and religions of the Hellenistic period. (Danny’s scientist father exclaimed, I’m paying all this money for you to take a theology course! Harvard tuition at the time was $1,250 a year.) The next year I went on to the University of Chicago Divinity School, where, shortly afterward, Tillich came to fill out the remainder of his career. (I like to say Tillich followed me to the University of Chicago.) Needless to say, I took every course of his I could.

(At the end of my second year, I dropped out after it became clear that I was not being called to