Reaction Formation and the Fear of Fire
what I hear when Christians spew venom about atheists
When I was a kid, a man in my neighborhood used the word “queer” a lot — as a slur, not in its modern, political context.
He told boastful stories about having spent his youth putting the “queers” in their place by beating them up — he called it “Playing Smear the Queer.”
His name was Lester.
Lester married his boyfriend about two years ago.
I have a point to make about Lester, but first: it’s very important to me that I not let financial considerations — like how many people will cancel their subscriptions if I say what I really think — keep me from saying what I really think.
So here it is.
I don’t read Notes much anymore. I find it pointless.
Angry anti-Woke types nutpicking and dunking on Woke types.
Angry Woke types nutpicking and dunking on anti-Woke types.
People who are unhappy with the growth of their Substack asserting, always without evidence, that Substack is suppressing them.
No, they’re not.
And it’s not even that you’re not that special; it’s that they’re not that competent. They tweak their algorithm all the time, but no human is consciously making decisions about the results.
They’re using the same ridiculous AI bot that they’ve outsourced their support (even their alleged priority support for bestsellers) to.
Know how I know?
Their algorithm now regularly suggests to me one thing — explicit, quiet-part-out-loud, no-euphemisms-at-all, Holocaust denial.
The Substack founders want desperately to go public and get filthy rich.
Only an AI bot could make choices as fucking dumb as their current algorithmic ones.
So I don’t read it much — usually just a minute here or there while eating at my desk.
Which means that when I see the same thing repeatedly, the pattern stands out more.
Lately the pattern is Christians attacking atheists.
I bend over backwards to stress that I know not all Christians are like my parents — effort that was apparently wasted.
Lately, I’ve read things about atheists that make what my parents said to me seem moderate and kind.
Christian theology is deranged on its face, in my case — you Christians will spend eternity with the father who mangled my shoulder, the pedophile who put the scar tissue between my legs, and the mother who enabled them both.
Perhaps you can have a chat with them about how fair and just and even merciful it is that they’re all in heaven with you while
and I roast on a spit in hell.So no, none of what I’ve read is remotely surprising, not even the personal stuff — I’ve also been told that my openness to prayer and other forms of support makes it especially heinous that I still openly “refuse” to believe in God.1
Having said all that, I have a hypothesis for what’s going on.
Here’s where I can expect my income to go down: where I explain what I think is happening.
What I think is happening is a psychological phenomenon known as reaction formation. The loudest Christian attacks on atheists read to me like the shrieks of people trying to drown out their own doubt.
It’s the same psychological trick you see in closeted gay men, like Lester, who become fire-breathing homophobes.
The forbidden feeling is there. The stakes of admitting it are terrifying.
So the mind scrambles to build a wall by performing the opposite of what it secretly fears: “I don’t just not doubt — I hate the doubters, I’m against them, I’ll destroy them.”
Lester did it for decades. Then he married his boyfriend.
But if the faith were really secure, if the ground underfoot were steady, why the desperate need to prove it with venom?
Why the obsession with atheists in the first place?
The energy isn’t coming from confidence; it’s coming from fragility.
And the cruelty—the mockery, the threats of hell—isn’t an overflow of strength.
It’s the cover story of someone who’s terrified they’ll look over the edge and see what they already suspect: there’s nothing there.
And I get it. Believe me, I do. Someone I care a lot about had a heart attack recently, and it made me cry harder than I have since Adam died.
Death and near-death rip through all the armor you think you’ve built. They strip you down to raw fear.
Without the comfort of an invisible Father waiting on the other side to make it all better, death is stark. It’s final. It’s terrifying.
I understand why people cling to the hope that it isn’t.
But that’s exactly why the attacks feel so desperate to me. If you’re already hanging by a thread, the last thing you want is someone reminding you that maybe there is no safety net. Maybe there isn’t a reunion waiting. Maybe the coffin is really the end.
So you don’t argue calmly. You lash out, because the alternative is letting the fear in—and once it’s in, it can eat you alive.
So I don’t think the Christians who froth at atheists are doing it from a place of spiritual confidence. I think they’re doing it from terror.
Terror that their belief is a placebo.
Terror that the eternity they’ve been promised is no more real than Zeus or Krishna.
Terror that if they stopped fighting atheists for even one second, they’d hear their own doubt echo back at them.
And once you see it that way, the cruelty makes more sense.
It isn’t confidence. It isn’t certainty. It’s camouflage for fragility.
When your faith is steady, you don’t need to mock people who lack it.
You don’t need to call them arrogant or broken or damned.
You can just live in it, and let the love and goodness in you, the natural result of being transformed into a new creature by a deity, be enough.
But when your faith feels like a house of cards, every atheist is a gust of wind.
You shore it up by shouting louder, swinging harder, convincing yourself that volume equals strength.
It doesn’t. It just betrays the panic underneath.
Which is why I don’t take it as strength when Christians write about atheists like they’re monsters.
I take it as proof of how much they secretly fear becoming one of us.
And an admission that many of them already are.
Lester spent half a lifetime insisting he wasn’t what he was, and he made other people pay for it.
In the end, all the shouting didn’t change the truth.
It never does.
I really don’t experience it as a choice. If you do, send me an email and explain why you chose Yahweh over Allah, Krishna, Zeus, or the other choices. I am completely serious. I am genuinely and with sincere curiosity interested in understanding the moment of choice. Once you became aware you had the choice — atheist or theist — did you just kneejerk to the Christian god because you grew up with familiarity? Or did you investigate the other possibilities?