Hello and welcome back! Recently, I got a little book with a title Id consider clickbait in a blog post:Atheist Overreach.Its author, Christian Smith, says he wrote it to help normies achieve greater insight and perhaps, dare I say, enlightenment. Oof. I wanted to show it to you because its a relatively new book that rehashes a lot of the same old bad arguments we see in apologetics most especiallythe Law of Conservation of Worship. Today, lets review this law and see how Christian Smith falls afoul of it.

(Interestingly, this book doesnt seem to push Christianity as a divinely-fueled supernatural-driven faith system. It seems to deal more with coercive religion as a means of social control of a communitys citizens and about how he thinks thats a good thing.)

Christian Smith wroteAtheist Overreach. According to his Amazon biography, he teaches sociology at Notre Dame. According to this link from the school, hes the former director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society.

Interestingly, Smith is one of the co-authors ofDivided by Faith, a book that we actually like around here.

I suspect hes a fervent Catholic, because hes also written books arguing against biblical literalism and offering instructions for how evangelicals can convert to Catholicism. Theres this reportabout former young Catholics, too, which he co-authored.

I also dont think he likes atheists or atheism itself all that much. (Source.)

Atheist Overreachcame out just last year (2019). Thus, Smith wrote this book well after Christianitys decline had begunandwell after the vast majority of Christian leaders had recognized and accepted the fact that they were, in fact, in decline. That understanding of decline permeates the books pages like the scent of cigarette smoke. You can really perceive a difference between it and, say, that silly Lee Strobel puffery we reviewed just a bit ago. The difference starts looking even more dramatic when we compareOverreachto that soulwinning book from 1959.

So thats the author of the book.

We first discussed this idea back in 2016. Clint came up with it.A while ago, he smacked down a Christian over onGodless in Dixie with it, and it immediately got stuck in my head forever.

Here is the Law of Conservation of Worship in full form:

For every action and belief Christians hold, their enemies and sales targets have an equal and opposite reactionary action and belief. Spiritual practices are neither created nor destroyed; as beliefs change, they simply transfer to another method of expression.

And here is how it works:

Christians often assume that people of other faiths do and believe all the exact same things they do and believe, practice the same devotions, talk the same ways, and suffer the same dysfunctions in their relationships and groups. Those non-Christians just utilize different jargon for their stuff.

Since this book deals with atheism, heres how thatd look for atheists:

Obviously, atheists dont go to church; they go to science lectures. Atheists dont have priests and popes; instead, they answer to Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Atheists dont evangelize for Jesus; they evangelize for science. Atheists dont revere the Bible as a holy book; they revere Charles Darwins bookOn the Origin of Species. Atheists dont use apologetics to PROVE YES PROVE that Jesus really exists; they use science to PROVE YES PROVE that he totally doesnt (COUGH: except they fail all the time, poor little dears, unlike Christians using apologetics). They dont trust in the teachings of their faith, but rather in the Scientific Method.

Most of all: atheists dont worship Jesus; they worship themselves.

The projection this Law inspires just goes on and on and on.

As the saying goes, every accusation they make is really a confession.

In this re-imagining, atheists seek to enshrine the persecution of Christians into the public sphere and from there, punish their enemies (Christians). Atheists seek to indoctrinate children in atheism instead of Christianity. They accept without even questioning all the things their scientists tell them. And oh, one fine day atheists hope to dance over the corpse of Christianity with delight and then make atheism Americas new official religion.

See what I mean? No wonder so many Christians imagine atheists as toddlers angry about not getting candy for dinner. Their entire conceptualization of atheism is justwrong in every single direction. They seriously see it as a sort of childish warping of their own religion!

And if atheism actually worked like they think, well, they wouldnt be wrong.

It doesnt. However, a huge number of Christian leaders are deeply invested in making the flocks think thats what it looks like. And it seems like Christian Smith is one of them.

Now then. With all that in mind, lets examine the cover ofAtheist Overreach. Seriously. Thats how far I got before head-desking.

You see, we immediately encounter a false accusation and the Law of Conservation of Worship on the cover. Heres the books full title:

Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Cant Deliver

And anybody who actually is an atheist or knows what it actually involves immediately knows that this book is not going to be helpful to anybody seeking real answers.

First of all, atheists do not commit overreach.

Instead, atheist activists fight Christian overreach. But theyre not the only ones fighting against that tyranny. Christians, too, fight the overreach of their more power-lusting peers.

And Smith oughta know this! Remember, he helped writeDivided by Faith.

For example, lets check out the website of Americans United (AU). There, we see a tab called Our Issues. These are the issues they actively fight:

In every single one of the listed items, we discover that the problem being fought is Christian overreach in that area.

Under Schools, as just one example, we discover that AUs concern centers around Christians trying to get taxpayer dollars to cover religious education at religious schools, a system which tends to be really substandard if not harmful to children.

If Christians werent constantly trying to insert their beliefs into the public sphere and force their cruel and impossible religious rules on everybody else, this organization would not even be a thing. I could say much the same thing regarding any other atheist group out there. Atheists organize to stop Christians from turning America into a theocracy.

Secondly, Smiths subtitle tells us that atheism doesnt deliver.

I saw that and thought, Of course it doesnt. What a ridiculous thing to say.

Atheism never promises to deliver anything to anybody in the first place. Its non-belief, not belief; the absence of a package of claims, not a package of claims.

But thats the Law of Conservation of Worship for ya.

Christians expect Christianity to deliver all kinds of results to them. Of course, it delivers precisely none of them outside of purely earthly stuffsometimes, like social interaction. If any Christians yowl too loudly about not getting oft-promised results, they get yelled at and gaslit into silence. If they deconvert when they realize nothing in the religion is what it says it is, they get insulted by Christians cuz they wanted a pony and didnt get it.

(Indeed, when Christians of all stripes talk about praying for stuff, many of them invoke this exact phrase to illustrate how silly it is to be upset over not getting what they pray for. Usually, they describe their own small children praying for the ponies in question. The metaphor of a silly little child praying for a pony has become very popular among Christians as a means of insulting ex-Christians for taking Christian marketing and indeed the Bible itself at their word.)

So Christians often assume thatother religions and philosophies and ideologies and mindsetsalso make similar promises to their adherents. Since Christianity promises all kinds of stuff, obviously atheism must promise all the same stuff!

I really dont know what these Christians think atheism actually promises. I could find not one example of even one of these supposed promises. Maybe the book will tell us. But whatever atheism promises to atheists, Christian Smiths subtitle asserts, it does not deliver.

Unlike Christianity. Which always delivers. Unless it doesnt. Which totally still counts as a delivery. Because shut up, thats why.

Gosh, itd really just super-suck for Christian Smith if the entire operating premise for his book turned out to be based on a really flawed misunderstanding of exactly what atheism is and what it really promises (or rather, doesnt promise at all, ever, to anybody).

But that seems to be exactly whats going on here.

Starting with the initial claim that atheists commit any kind of overreach and then continuing with a subtitled claim that atheism somehow doesnt deliver something it promises to atheists, hes already set himself up for absolute failure.

I know why hes set up this unnecessary showdown, of course.

He needs to make atheism look really unappealing. And he does so by warping atheism into a strawman that will be familiar to Christian readers.

That is the entire purpose of the Law of Conservation of Worship. Christians invoke it when they want to make other religions and mindsets look like pale imitations of their own religion, which will then be offered up as the onlyreal dealin the world.

As we saw above in his biography, Christian Smith feels deeply concerned about how quickly his religion is bleeding young adults. Catholicism in particular facesan even more rapid decline than other flavors of Christianity do. A 2015 Pew survey found that about half of young Catholics end up leaving the church, with only about 11% returning to church at some later date. Its 2018 survey gave Catholic leaders no reason for optimism either.

Absolutely, positivelynothingCatholic leaders are doing is changing anything there, either. Consequently, I imagine their ongoing panic attack over retention is entering its fourteenth-ish straight year at this point. They can demonize atheism all they want: its still growing, while Catholicism is shrinking. Even just Nones (adults who are unaffiliated with any religion) are growing rapidly.

In addition to making atheism look unappealing, then, Smith needs to make his own religion look like the Last Ideology Standing. He wants Christianity to look like the literal only option on the shelf if someone wants to lead a good, moral, decent life.

So from the very beginning,Atheist Overreachmakes two assertions that I know already are flat-out incorrect. Thats unfortunately completely expected from Christian authors, but its especially disappointing from this one.

And thats our review of thecoverofAtheist Overreach, yall!

NEXT UP: The introduction ofAtheist Overreachproves that your fourth-gradeteacher and Carl Sagan were both wrong aboutdumb questions. Get your desks nicely-padded for this one. See you soon!

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(Dont worry. Its a really short book. This wont be aThis Present Darkness situation type deal. I just got frosted over the title of the book and had some things to say.)

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'Atheist Overreach' and the Law of Conservation of Worship - Patheos