Should the church apologise to atheists?

NATIONAL APOLOGIES have become a feature of political life around the world. Believing that they have a positive therapeutic effect on those who have been wronged, and claiming that the national conscience (if one can be said to exist) will be cleansed only when the sins of the past are confessed and contrition expressed, an array of apologies have been offered. On behalf of the United States, President Bill Clinton said sorry to the Afro-American community for the slave trade. Speaking for the English people, Prime Minister Tony Blair said sorry to the Irish for failing to relieve the nineteenth-century Irish potato famine. More recently, France and Turkey have been engaged in a bitter feud over the unwillingness of Paris to concede that French forces committed crimes against humanity in its former colony of Algeria in the 1950s while Turkey has been condemned for failing to acknowledge the Armenian genocide of 1915 when as many as a million people were killed.

With the Australian government's formal apology to the so-called "Stolen Generations" in February this year there will no doubt continue to be calls for collective apologies for past wrongdoings. One group that has yet to seek an apology is atheists. This is a little surprising. After all, those rejecting the sacred texts of Christianity and the temporal discipline of the church have been subjected in the past to physical torture and mental cruelty, they have been refused state employment, debarred from certain professions, suffered deprivation of their property and even denied a dignified burial.

In living memory atheists claim to have been the subject of personal discrimination in daring to promote unbelief and in resisting religion's domination of the public square. Prominent atheists claim their sincerity is doubted and their honesty questioned because Christians think atheists lack an ethical code and are devoid of a moral conscience.

FROM OPPRESSION TO OPPRESSORS

THE FIRST FOLLOWERS of Jesus were personally acquainted with persecution and oppression. Not only were Jewish Christians dislocated from their social and familial networks after the complete break between the church and the synagogue in the fifth decade CE, the Christians were deemed by the imperial authorities in Rome to constitute a dangerous sect entirely lacking in earthly loyalty. There is evidence in the New Testament that the church sought to avoid a clash with the empire by endorsing the authority of its appointed officials and promoting exemplary civil behaviour. This would deny the emperor any pretext for their violent suppression.

The early Christians were thoroughly opposed to the use of any form of coercive force either in the preservation of doctrinal orthodoxy or in the maintenance of religious order. They declined to accept responsibility for the health of the civil order as well. In the writings of Origen (c. 185-254 CE), an Egyptian-born Christian thinker, the underlying theme is the belief that Christians are set apart for a divine purpose: "[Therefore] it is not for the purpose of escaping public duties that Christians decline public offices, but that they may reserve themselves for a diviner and more necessary service in the Church of God--for the salvation of men." Although Christians had been the subject of systematic oppression and institutionalised prejudice, they did not retaliate and refused to contemplate securing religious liberty for themselves by resort to force. While adherence to these principles brought suffering and hardship, they were clearly and consistently applied because they reflected Christianity's core convictions about human conscience and personal integrity. It also made the Christians a distinct political and social community within the Roman empire.

This mindset changed dramatically when Flavius Valerius Constantinus became emperor in 306. "Constantine" was conscious of the acute dangers confronting the empire by incursions and invasion from without and by division and social decadence from within. With the Christian church practically constituting an "imperium in imperio" and Christianity having appeal as a potentially revitalising force, Constantine sought to strengthen and invigorate the empire with the active participation of the church. After his "conversion" in 312, he declared Christianity to be a permitted faith and persecution formally ended. But this radically reversed status happened so quickly that the church was not in a position to accept any responsibility for the social and political order of the empire, quite apart from the new challenges this posed for its own internal organisation. Put simply, the church was without a thorough critique or a positive program in discharging these responsibilities in the light of Christian principles. The church was hardly even ready to move from the margins to the mainstream of Roman society. Nevertheless, Emperor Theodosius I declared Christianity to be the empire's official religion in 380.