The Atheism Diet

Amusing story this morning on MSNBC:

It might be the potlucks, it might be those long hours sitting in pews, but whatever the cause, a new study presented this week shows a link between religious activity and weight gain.

The study, conducted by researchers at Northwestern University, found that young adults who frequently attended religious activities were far more likely to become obese than those who didn’t.

“Our main finding was that people with a high frequency of religious participation in young adulthood were 50 percent more likely to become obese by middle age than those with no religious participation in young adulthood,” says Matthew Feinstein, the study’s lead investigator and a fourth-year medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“And that is true even after we adjusted for variables like age, race, gender, education, income, and baseline body mass index," he added.

Mockingbird should totally blog about this. I'll bet it is the potlucks. Or maybe it's that religious people don't smoke as much.

Does the good news hinge on bad news?

Is Christianity a guilt-driven religion?

The answer of what I like to call "pop-evangelicalism" is, "No man, it's all about grace."

Grace. Sure. But don't you mean grace in response to...guilt?

The narrative which the evangelical has in mind is still the narrative of Martin Luther--burdened by guilt under the wrath of an angry God, finally liberated by the good news of justification by faith alone. We don't have to keep trying to appease God under the weight of heavy burdens imposed upon us by the Catholic Church. That's good news, right?

Here's the thing: that's still a guilt-driven religion. It's just that you've proposed a different solution to that guilt. Instead of trying to pay of the debt you owe, you are driven to accept the fact that you cannot pay it, confess your guilt, and accept God's forgiveness and cleansing. This proposal would not make sense outside of some shared assumptions about God's wrath and our accountability to him.

Evangelicals often run into the problem that many people aren't starting with those assumptions. Their solution to this problem goes like this: before you tell the good news, you have to tell the bad news. This takes on a couple of forms. One is the fundamentalist bible-thumping technique, where you tell people all the things that they're doing that God hates and will send them to hell. Another is the pop-evangelical method of psychoanalyzing the world around them and convincing us that deep down we're all screwed up. (I read a couple of perfect examples of this here and here.) Whatever may differ in outward appearance, the fundamental principle is the same: make people feel their guilt, so that they may be driven by that guilt to God's forgiveness in Christ. It is the gospel of guilt.