By Armchair Mayor

ROTHENBURGER: Does Christianity need more atheist church ministers?

Nov 17, 2018 | 4:00 AM

WHAT’S ORGANIZED RELIGION coming to? When a minister in the United Church not only is an atheist, but is supported in her atheism by her church, you know times they are changing on the God front.

Rev. Gretta Vosper is the minister of West Hill United Church in Toronto. She doesn’t believe in God. Or the Bible.

One would have thought believing in God was pretty much a pre-requisite for anybody who works for a Christian church. Not anymore. “It is a new day in the Christian world,” Vosper posted on Facebook after the church released a statement last week saying she could keep her job. Then the church thought it better clarify with a second statement that (unlike Vosper) it still believes in God.

This, after three years of legal action that began with the General Council of the United Church of Canada initiating proceedings to have her fired, and ended with what amounts to an out-of-court settlement.

A new day indeed. After the church’s decision, Vosper’s congregation celebrated with cake and dancing at last Sunday’s service.

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There were a lot of congratulatory comments on Vosper’s Facebook page, many agreeing that one doesn’t have to believe in a supreme being to belong to a Christian church.

A lot of the comments distinguished between a “theistic/supernatural God” and a “post/non-theistic god.”

It was like a declaration of independence. The church itself calls it “being inclusive.”

Being that I was raised in a non-religious household, maybe I don’t understand all the nuances of belief and non-belief. Maybe there’s a middle ground I haven’t heard of.

If so, could someone please explain to me a non-theistic god, since the definition of theism is belief in God as the creator. Isn’t “non-theist” just a polite way of saying “atheist”? Anyway, Vosper self-identifies as an atheist.

Letting a minister who doesn’t believe in God keep her employment with the church surely is taking inclusivity to new heights.

While all this has been going on, attendance at Vosper’s church has gone up. And she has estimated in an interview on CBC’s The National in 2016 that upwards of half the clergy in the United Church don’t believe in a God of the “theistic, supernatural” type. She says it’s time for unity on the issue of God. In her book, With or Without God, Vosper writes, “It is time for humanists and atheists, skeptics and agnostics to see they share a common future with the many who are still comforted by their religious beliefs.”

She refers to God as “it,” not “he” or “she.” Later in the book, she says. “…God isn’t as big as it was before.” God has become diminished by unanswered questions about human suffering and evil, she says. The “big God” that used to protect us is no longer around, leading us into self-destructive habits. Toronto Star columnist Rosie DeManno referred to “the cult of Gretta Vosper” in a column this week, writing that “to go God-less (or godless) is intrinsically, profanely sacrilegious and anti-spiritual. It is what Vosper exalts: Apostasy.”

(Vosper fired back on Facebook that “it was great to see she joined us yesterday even though she mistook last week’s decision as a sign of irrelevance. It wasn’t.”)

DeManno pointed out that Christian religion is losing ground rapidly; membership continues to drop. The United Church itself now has only 1.5 per cent of the Canadian population as members, compared to 6.25 per cent when it was founded in 1925 with the merger of Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists.

So, does the hope for a revival of organized religion come down to joining forces with doubters?

The Unitarian Universalist Church seems to have already answered that question. The website for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Vancouver states, “UUs have a diversity of beliefs, and may consider themselves humanists, atheists, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, pagan, mystics, or spiritual.”

The UU church sounds almost like a political party when it talks of supporting environmental protection, racial justice, social justice, civil rights, LGTQ equality, immigration reform, and so on — all stuff we hear so much about on the hustings.

We don’t have to go to Vancouver, though — Kamloops has its own Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, which also welcomes non-believers.

The bottom line seems to be that it’s possible to follow Christ without believing in a supreme being, hence Christian atheism. That’s a pretty big step for Christianity. Some Christian atheists even believe God once lived, but is literally now dead.

The more I read up on this, the more it becomes obvious that Vosper’s situation isn’t as unique as it seems.

As organized worship declines (unfortunately, religious extremism has not), atheism grows. An Angus Reid poll found that more Canadians view “religion” negatively than positively. Non-believers now account for roughly 20 per cent of the population, while another 30 per cent are uncertain. Thompson Rivers University professor Tina Block, in her book The Secular Northwest, has concluded that the Pacific Northwest including B.C. has a history of secularism surpassing the rest of Canada.

Will there be a great convergence of religion and non-religion? Will the Kamloops Centre for Rational Thought march arm in arm — figuratively, if not literally — with Protestants, Catholics, Uniteds and Anglicans?

All this is very timely as we enter the Christmas frenzy and go through the annual angst of revisiting the true meaning of Christmas.

Some days, there are advantages to being an agnostic.