I’m intrigued by Jesus’ question: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8). What is faith? What does it mean to be a person of faith? Faithful? This is more than an intellectual exercise for me. Some of my family members identify as atheists/secularists and have left religion, while others, including me, identify as religious people and Jesus-followers.
There are differences, of course, between Christian believers and secularists. But both groups have much in common. For example, Christians believe nature points to a Creator. Secularists also regard the cosmos with awe, without invoking God. Both groups believe the cosmos is more than chaos and has order. But then we part: Christians trust that purpose is built into the universe, secularists believe humans create purpose themselves.
Psalm 19:1 declares, “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” Early scientific thinkers such as Isaac Newton sought to follow the “thoughts of God” through the study of nature. Later thinkers concluded that God may have created the cosmos but then withdrew, leaving the stewardship of sky, earth, and seas to humanity. This so-called “Deism” assigned God no continuing role in our journey and helped prepare the ground for the secular vision of life we experience all around us today.
Needing some help, I turned to the book Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society, published in 2023 and written by the sociologists Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, and Ryan T. Cragun, for definitions which distinguish “believers” from “secularists.”
- Believers accept supernatural claims as true, act according to established religious beliefs, and identify with a congregation, denomination, or tradition.
- Secularists transfer property, power, and activities from institutions with a supernatural framework to those guided by empirical, rational, and pragmatic criteria.
- Secularization is the social process by which fewer people accept supernatural claims, practice religion, or identify with a religious tradition over time. This group includes the “nones,” many of whom were raised religiously but no longer claim that identity.
Secular humanists and Christian believers both seek a good life, but they describe its source and purpose differently. Secular humanists seek what’s been called a “science of well-being,” while believers seek God’s will for the flourishing of the earth. What do these pursuits share, and where do they diverge?
My working thesis is that faith need not erase the differences between Christian belief and secular humanism. “Faith” can be broadly understood as a disciplined trust expressed through humility, responsibility, and fidelity to others. The question is whether this shared ethical posture can become a genuine bridge without reducing either worldview to the other.
Psalm 42 captures the contrast: God-fearers thirst for God even when God feels distant, while the secularist asks, “Where is your God?” and makes sense of the world without God as a reference point.
But how much of this difference is semantic?
Psalm 14 calls God-denial foolish, and says those who shun religion are “corrupt, doing abominable deeds.” This assertion may be true some of the time, but it is not always true. Secularists do admirable deeds, even rightly labeling certain aspects of religious faith as corrupt.
Both God-fearers and God-deniers have killed people in the name of their theology or philosophy. God-fearers carried on the Inquisition from the 12th century, executing unbelievers for hundreds of years. Stalin’s God-denying communism killed millions of peasants primarily between 1929 and 1933.
On the whole, though, both groups seek well-being, flourishing, and harmony in relationships and communities, even when they ground the ultimate source of the common good differently.
This leads to a possible connecting point between believers and secularists: the pursuit of goodness. Believers ground goodness in God, while secularists ground it in the quest for human flourishing. How far apart are they? A deeper question I’ve been wrestling with is whether faith names persistence in that pursuit or requires commitment to a particular creed.
The central question is whether believers and secularists can share a quest for fruitful living despite their different accounts of reality. More specifically, can attention to nature temper a believer’s emphasis on the supernatural? Can attention to mystery temper a secularist’s strict naturalism? These questions lead toward a practical test: whether both groups can pursue goodness together without denying their real disagreements.
Modern science shows that matter can be described as both particle and energy, deepening secular awe before the cosmos. Believers, meanwhile, understand Spirit as incarnate within earthly life, including us. Both therefore grapple with mystery, present challenges, unfolding processes, and future possibilities.
This world holds goodness and evil in tension. Believers may hope for life beyond death, while secularists may not; both nevertheless seek direction, purpose, and goodness in this life.
Are there any indications of possible bridges that can connect believers and secularists?
In my view, both groups need a Job moment: Where were you at creation, 14.3 billion years ago, when the boundaries were set? Job learned awe and humility yet continued his quest. He was humbled yet made it through to a better future.
None of us is self-derived: we enter life through relationships and remain dependent on intricate webs of mutual flourishing. Believers may receive this dependence as a sign of creation, while secularists may understand it through biology, ecology, and social life. Their explanations differ, but both recognize that life is relational and that offenses require forgiveness, repair, or reconciliation.
Each recognizes our own contingency and dependence. We are not self-derived; we belong to one another. As John Donne reminds us, “No one is an island,” cut off from the shore.
Life is relational. Each of us is poor and needy in some way. We seek both individual identity and healthy relationships—people and places where we belong.
We face reality and seek resources within ourselves and among trusted others— “beggars telling other beggars where we found bread,” to paraphrase D. T. Niles. This is true of secularists and believers alike.
The world is as it is, say the secularists. There are clear, sunny days and cloudy, stormy days. There are water and sunlight to make the crops grow. As with Job, there can be horrendous winds that sweep away all that we love. There are no answers to these mysteries. We only move forward in humble awe at our smallness, finitude, and dependence in the overall scheme of things.
Yet we rail against injustice when innocent children who cruelly die. Where does this sense of justice come from? Are we to conclude, like Christopher Hitches, “If that is God’s doing, I want nothing to do with God.”
Back to our original question: “What is the meaning of faith?” Reality is a mystery, something (or Someone) we encounter each moment of our lives.
Britt Hartley’s journey from fundamentalism through nihilism to “no nonsense spirituality” illustrates a search for meaning apart from religion. At a West Michigan session, I asked Hartley whether believers and secularists might bridge their differences. She replied that both groups need like-minded communities to reinforce identity; even when people want connection, they may fear surrendering a hard-won sense of belonging.
Her family experience makes the question tangible. Despite the gulf between her beliefs and those of her “religious” brother—and the pain of being “kicked out of the home” at sixteen—she still wants a relationship with him. Can we remain faithful to people with whom we profoundly disagree?
This squares with experiences in our nuclear family. Earlier conversations about our deeply differing world-and-life views (sometimes contentious) have given way to deep-sharing of the vast amount of love we share with one another. We don’t let our deep differences divide us. We use language that enhances instead of erodes wholesome relationships.
When each of us lives out of the primacy of love and refuses to let close relationships rupture, there may be hope for our shared future.
In the early days of the church, Romans sometimes considered early Christians atheists because they rejected traditional gods. Paul likewise dismissed “so-called gods” (1 Corinthians 8:4–5), yet in Athens proclaimed a Creator who gives life and breath whom people might seek– quoting Aratus, one of their own secular poets (Acts 17:22–31). He sought inroads into “pagan” culture.
Perhaps today secular humanists/atheists are renouncing modern false gods, such as Christian nationalism, while believers are seeking truer ways of following the crucified and risen One. Can we affirm both quests?
James, the brother of Jesus, in his New Testament letter, insists that faith without works is dead. Secularists and believers therefore each have responsibility for the flourishing of the cosmos: receiving and giving back belong together. Each has the grace of the given; each has the gravity to “give back.”
Faith, then, is trust expressed as fidelity: receiving life as a gift, responding through meaningful work, and keeping faith with others even when agreement is impossible. Believers and secularists alike grow weary in doing good, yet they can affirm one another, work together, and entrust unresolved questions to a larger reality. Such humble cooperation will not erase our differences, but it may help restore humanity’s fortunes and set the poor and oppressed free. At this point, such is at least a part of my faith.
There is so much generativity in the cosmos. We are to be co-creators for the benefit of all.
When I shared this essay with my nuclear family, they all agreed on one thing: It’s not a simple either/or situation. Non-theists can bleed into a “religious” modality. Even Britt Hartley admits to community building that has religious overtones (but avoids God-talk). One of our adult children identifies as a “non-theist” yet as a “follower in the way of Jesus and as religious.” Another adult child is glad we “share our love across the divide” (which isn’t that stark/harsh as I imply in this essay). Maybe that’s because we’ve found a way in our family. In other families, not so much. Is it a goal to shoot for or will it be either/or?
I look forward to your comments in the chat below. Thank you for engaging.
