there are no atheists in foxholes

One of the biggest casualty of last month’s attacks was people’s security in their ability to control their own lives and create a world after their ideal. Last month we all watched as church attendance nation-wide tripled and several thousand people showed up at one of the most secular universities in America to pray. As my father said, “There are no atheists in foxholes, and all of America’s a foxhole now.”

Religious skeptics bring up the “problem of evil” in academic discussions, but when real evil strikes the core of our national conscience, it drives people to their knees, and not their biology books, to seek understanding.

The real loss we feel at senseless death and suffering cannot be explained or understood without a God to endow value to we peculiar arrangements of molecules. Nor can our moral outrage gain any traction without a judge and executor to give justification to our preference to live rather than die.

The problem of evil is not solved by taking God out of the equation. Rather, it is made unsolvable. In the aftermath of situations like September 11th, people don’t turn away from God, they cry out to Him in grief, confusion, and anger. Even those that reject God can only do so because they know there’s a God to turn their back on. Every atheist can describe the kind of God they don’t believe in.

Deep in our souls, we know the world is twisted. In the absence of a creator God who knows how the world is supposed to be, we cannot explain why we know the world shouldn’t be as it is. And without a God who chose to imbue the vision of perfection in humans, alone among all creation, how would we even think to want to straighten our now deeply wrenched Eden?

We feel something is desperately missing in our lives despite all our degrees, credentials, careers, money, friendships, wit and humor we throw into the deep emptiness inside us. But what is lacking cannot even be counted without a God to give those things value and purpose.

Only the wealthy and the eccentric can afford the kind of opiate that produces illusions of a Godless universe. You must either have enough money or power to create your own personal universe and sustain notions of your personal sovereignty within it, or be so out of touch with the world as to believe you really are an existential island. It took an event like September 11th to break through our illusions of control and get us realize that this crazy world is in control, just not our own. When we get knocked off our vaulted thrones of security, God remains on His.

Perhaps elite universities and richer countries tend to be more secular only because they can entertain illusions of total security and complacency that the rest of the world knows are delusional. Smart people aren’t being more rational or intelligent by adhering to atheism. They’ve just chosen one leap of faith over another. And yet many of us have not enough perspective on our own life nor objectivity in our thinking to acknowledge that, however you live, it makes more sense to work off of a tried model than make everything up for the first time as you go along. And whether you’re an atheist, a Christian, or just spiritually ambivalent, the pertinent question is whether there’s a good reason, or any reason at all why you live the way you do.

The natural response to an article like this is to say that I’m just another religious person exploiting people’s emotional vulnerability after a national tragedy for my sectarian goals. I am a follower of Jesus. But let me explain why I think our emotional vulnerability is a healthy crossroads for all of us—under the cloak of crowd behavior, we can feel safe finally unveiling the deep loneliness and insecurity that saturates our souls under the surface of confident competence.

There are so many lonely people at Harvard. And for all our accomplishments, most of us are also deeply insecure about whether we’re good enough, whether we’re the world-changers everyone tells us we’re supposed to be, and whether we will be valuable if we’re just normal people in 30 years.

I wish more people experienced the real community, the honesty, and the genuine love a relationship with God offers. Who doesn’t know what it feels like to be complimented only to think, “They wouldn’t say that about me if they knew…”? Ever wonder would it be like to be totally known and still completely loved? Beneath the façade of achievement and self-confidence that we put up, so many of us are just hoping that no one will notice the reality of self-doubt and emptiness we feel each day.

As a Muslim friend said to me last year as we talked about this phenomenon at Harvard, “We’re on the same team here. God will sort out whether Jesus was a prophet or God, but we’ve got people at this school who don’t know God loves them. There are people that don’t even think God exists, that God doesn’t have a plan for the world, and that don’t know they can enter into relationship with God.”

I know I have a relationship with God—I’ve experienced it as clearly as that with my parents. No academic discussion could convince me that either relationship is illusory—“What do you mean I don’t have a relationship with God? I spoke with Him just this morning after I got off the phone with my parents.”

At times like these, I wish more people could experience the peace, the security and the assurance that come from knowing a God whose love for them was so great that He came to earth to live, suffer and die so that they’d know how valuable they are, so they wouldn’t have to remain separated from Him by the guilt of a lifetime of mistakes and pain.

My own knowledge of these things doesn’t make the aftershocks of September 11th any less painful, heartbreaking or draining. But it does give me solace to know that someone else really does know what I’m going through, cares more about each person who died that day than even their own families, and remains in control even when my world feels like it’s coming down around me.

We all know deep down inside that most of our situation in life is out of our control, and that acquiring whatever it is you’re working toward right now will not satisfy you any more than the last thing did. Don’t let yourself slide back into that illusory world where you’ve got it all under control without first considering what it will cost you.

Benjamin D. Grizzle ’03 is a History and Literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House.