Devin Kelley, the Sutherland Church shooter, was an atheist. The evidence for that is quite clear, even if you haven’t seen it in the mainstream media. People who knew him said he was an atheist, he featured a favorite atheist quote on his Facebook page (possibly attributable to Richard Dawkins), and he “liked” four atheist Facebook pages. The information for this is all nicely compiled at the Shadow to Light blog. So was his atheism responsible for his rampage?

When Christians commit crimes, unbelievers frequently blame it on their religion. Try to tell an atheist, though, that three of the great murderers of the 20th century, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, were motivated by their atheism. More often than not they’ll answer, “Atheism isn’t a belief. There’s nothing in it that would motivate a person to do anything like that.” Richard Dawkins once wrote,

What I do think is that there is some logical connection between believing in God and doing some, sometimes, evil things, but there’s no logical connection between them [Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot] being atheists and doing evil things. It’s just incidentally true that, say, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin happened to be atheists, but that wasn’t what drove them. What drove them was a political ideology. It had nothing to do with atheism.

Which led me to wonder whether atheists’ actions have anything at all to do with what they believe. Still the question arises, did Kelley’s atheism have anything to do with his motives. Discussion on atheist sites, including one that Kelley “liked,” the “Friendly Atheist,” is running really defensive.

Atheism Doesn’t Cause People To Do Wrong

So let’s look at this. Does atheism cause people to do bad things? 

I’d say no. I’d say no even though many of history’s deadliest mass murderers  were atheists.

Atheism doesn’t cause people to do bad things. It doesn’t have to. Christian doctrine teaches that we’re born with propensity to do wrong. We don’t need to be atheists to be that way.

Every parent knows they don’t have to teach their children to be selfish. Kids who aren’t taught not to lie or to steal grow up lying and stealing. Kids who grow up with some measure of physical or social power, who aren’t taught not to use that power to hurt others, often grow up abusing their power their whole lives long. 

But Atheism Doesn’t Give Any Reason To Do Right

Devin Kelley didn’t need atheism to be the kind of person he was. Here’s what he did need, though, and didn’t have: He needed a good reason not to kill. He needed strength of character to overcome his murderous urges. He needed to know that humans have more than just an eyeblink’s existence (as a quote on his web page said), that we all matter eternally. He needed to know life is for loving and serving others, not for harming and using them.

Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot needed the same things. Like Devin Kelley, they didn’t get it. Especially from their atheism. Especially if atheism “isn’t a belief,” as its proponents are fond of saying. Of course that’s not true, but it’s at least true that atheism is empty of any morality-producing content. That much isn’t there, at any rate. 

So atheism doesn’t cause self-centeredness, abuse of power, and murderousness. It merely allows it. To the one who wants to do wrong, it says, “Hey, do what you want; I’m not stopping you.”

True Christian religion doesn’t permit any of that. Because it’s based on the loving, self-sacrificing character of God revealed in Jesus Christ, and on the truth that each person is created in God’s image, Christianity teaches us to love and to serve others for their good.

The Moral Guidance Kelley Couldn’t Find

Atheism has no such moral compass built in. Atheists may have good moral beliefs, but those beliefs don’t come from a belief that the life and the universe are a purposeless accident.

The so-called “Friendly Atheist” likes to list the sins of Christians on his blog. He probably thinks they show that what I’m saying here is wrong. No, what it shows is more of what goes wrong when people direct their lives by some principle other than Christian morality, some motivation other than that which God wants us to order our lives by. 

Atheism doesn’t cause murderousness. We can come up with that well enough on our own. What we need is something to keep us from going there; something to teach us there’s a better way to live than seeking our own way.

The great majority of atheists know what’s right and wrong, but they didn’t get it from their morally empty atheism. They got it from somewhere else — the law of God stamped in their hearts (Romans 2:14-15), for one thing. 

I can’t get into the late Devin Kelley’s head. I don’t know how much his atheism contributed to his outrageous actions. I do know this much: When he most needed help to find moral guidance, his atheism gave him nothing.