Liberal Atheists are really christians

Oliver

They mock the Bible. They roll their eyes at prayer. They pronounce the death of God with the theatrical finality of a Nietzschean opera. And yet, their hearts remain devout. Their ethics, Christian. Their instincts, baptized. Their politics? Sermons. Their protests? Liturgies. Their outrage? Old Testament.Modern liberal atheists like to think of themselves as rational, enlightened, and radically free from the chains of religious delusion. They are not. They are, in truth, the most fervent believers of all. Not in dogma—but in the moral residue of Christianity. They have sawn off the branch of the tree they were sitting on, and now float midair, held aloft only by memory, momentum, and denial.This is not new. Nietzsche diagnosed it with surgical precision. “God is dead,” he wrote, “but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.” What was he warning us about? That the West had killed its God, but not its conscience. That we had destroyed the source of our values while continuing to worship the values themselves.

Oliver Bennett

Like orphaned children who spit on their father’s grave, even as they live in his house and spend his inheritance.Liberal morality today is a house haunted by the ghost of Christ. The belief in universal human rights, the sacredness of each individual, the care for the poor, the demand for compassion, the reflex to defend the marginalized—none of this emerges naturally from reason, evolution, or history. These are Christian mutations. Strange, radical ideas birthed in the fever dream of the Gospels.Look to the pre-Christian world. Look to the Greeks, the Romans, the pagans. Their gods didn’t weep for the poor. They didn’t lift up the meek. They admired strength, glory, dominance. Pity was weakness. Mercy was suspect. Justice was hierarchy.Look beyond the West. To Hindu cosmologies of caste. To Confucian orders of filial duty and status. To the Aztecs, who tore hearts from chests in ecstatic rituals of cosmic balance. Even the Buddhists—so peaceful, so gentle—had no missionary impulse to alleviate suffering outside their village, let alone on the other side of the planet. The bleeding heart is not a dharma wheel. It is the sacred heart of Christ.It was Christianity that insisted the last would be first. That the beggar was beloved of God. That the child had divine worth. That every soul—not just the king’s, not just the warrior’s—was made in the image of the Creator. This was a scandal to the ancient world.

Oliver Bennett

And it remains a scandal, even now, in the subconscious of the secular mind.Take a liberal atheist. Strip away his belief in God. He may scoff at the Virgin Birth, laugh at the Resurrection, rage against the Church—but he still believes in feeding the hungry. He still believes in the dignity of the prisoner. He still believes in the Good Samaritan. He just doesn’t know why anymore.Because he no longer has the theology, but he cannot let go of the ethic. He cannot explain why all people are equal. Or why life is sacred. Or why justice matters. He only feels that it is so. Deeply. Urgently. With conviction that borders on... faith.This is why the language of liberal politics sounds like a secular gospel. We speak of being . Of being . Of , , , , and . We divide the world into the righteous and the wicked. We cast out heretics. We offer no forgiveness, only excommunication. The spirit of the Puritan lives on—not in Salem, but in San Francisco.And what irony: these crusaders against religion are the most Christian of all. Richard Dawkins may not kneel before a cross, but he wages holy war against heresy. Sam Harris meditates like a monk, but cannot stop preaching. Greta Thunberg stands like a young saint at the gates of the temple, demanding we repent for the sins of the world.

Oliver Bennett

Bill Maher, perhaps the most ridiculous of them all, mocks Jesus weekly while preaching a gospel of liberal ethics that make no sense without the Nazarene. He condemns religion as fairy tale nonsense, but expects people to believe in the moral dignity of every human being, in universal compassion, in the brotherhood of man. Where did those ideas come from, Bill? You didn’t get them from Darwin.This is the tragicomic genius of Christianity: even its enemies are its children. The atheist teenager slams the door on his heavenly father, swears he’s never coming back, then weeps with rage when the world is unfair. He demands justice. He demands meaning. He demands love. He cannot stop praying.The philosopher Charles Taylor called it “the immanent frame.” A world in which transcendence is denied, but the longing for transcendence remains. A world full of people who live as though God were real, while insisting He is not.Even the Enlightenment, that great secular triumph, was built atop Christian assumptions. The dignity of the individual? Christian. The idea of moral progress? Christian. The belief in universal reason? The inheritance of a rational Creator God.

Oliver Bennett

Even the word “secular” only has meaning within a religious society—it’s a Christian invention to describe the part of life that is the Church.Compare this to Islam, where law and religion are fused. Or Buddhism, where detachment and inward enlightenment are paramount. Or Shinto, where ancestry and ritual are supreme. None of them developed a doctrine of universal human rights. None of them produced the Red Cross. Or Amnesty International. Or the idea that we should care about suffering , even when it doesn’t touch us directly.Christianity did that. Christianity invented the bleeding heart. And now the bleeding heart marches in protests, writes op-eds, edits Wikipedia pages, and tweets moral outrage—all while denying the man on the cross.To be clear, Christianity has its own hypocrisies. Many conservatives cling to Christ’s name while rejecting His spirit. They moralize about sex and family while deporting refugees and slashing aid to the poor. They quote scripture but forget the Sermon on the Mount. They wave the Bible like a flag while living like Pharisees. But at least they know whose house they’re in.

Oliver Bennett

Liberal atheists, on the other hand, have inherited the house, the furniture, the manners, and the meal—but insist it was all built from scratch. They forget the river they’re drinking from. They believe the stream began with them.But morality is not a stream. It is a mighty river. And its source matters.So let us call it what it is. Liberal secularism is not the opposite of Christianity. It is its ghost. A haunted, brilliant, beautiful ghost. It fights for justice with the fire of the prophets. It weeps for the oppressed with the tears of Christ. It sacrifices, protests, and forgives like a religion—because it a religion. The last, perhaps, that the West will know.And maybe that’s not so bad. Maybe we need the ghost. Maybe the world is kinder, more just, more beautiful because the Nazarene still haunts our dreams.But we should at least be honest. The atheist is not free from religion. He is soaked in it. He is a branch from the tree of Christ—cut, but still green.And no matter how far he wanders…He cannot escape the river.