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I was reading on Rethinking Youth about the The Blasphemy Challenge, “Basically, this is a group of atheists, led by a thirty-year-old…, that challenges individuals, specifically youth, to deny, on camera, God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit…” The young people then post these on YouTube.

I went to the The Blasphemy Challenge website and watched a news interview from Fox News that they had posted. The interviewer on Fox (who irritated me a lot more then the atheist), was quite concerned that young people were being corrupted and brainwashed by the Blasphemy Challenge, he seemed to me to be more concerned in trying to defend Christendom values then necessarily defending Christ or his message.

I think that this is what people are afraid of, people want nice ‘Christian’ young people who will uphold societies Christendom statues-que, not swear, not do drugs and be ‘nice’ and fit neatly into ‘the system’. Atheism threatens the ‘nice’ statues-que. Yet Christendom is not the radical good news of liberation and wholeness that Christ spoke of. Christendom is political (Constantine), empire building and oppressive. I see The Blasphemy Challenge as another expression of young post moderns attacking or deconstructing Christendom, which in the US is on its way out (The Blasphemy Challenge is one of many signs of this) and in Europe is almost dead and buried, and good riddance, the sooner the last nail is hammered into Christendom’s coffin the sooner the Good News of Christ can break through from the distortions of Christendom. Christendom has done 10 fold more damage for the Good News of Christ then atheism could ever have done, just look at the church in China under a atheistic oppressive regime compared to the church in Europe under Christendom.

The Blasphemy Challenge, are targeting teenagers just like youth work/ministers can often do, we know that we can easily manipulate teenagers, and we so often do, thinking that we are doing it for their own good. In fact spiritual abuse is often a category in denominational child protection policies. Maybe we just see youth work/ministry techniques mirrored in the techniques The Blasphemy Challenge and we don’t like what we see.

Neo-atheism is on the increase. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins was number 5 in the top 10 selling books of 2006, Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials Boxed set was number 5 on the 2007 top 10 Selling Books from Amazon UK, alongside other atheist material such as the film, The God Who Wasn’t There, and the The Blasphemy Challenge. I believe that a lot of these neo-atheists are not necessarily attacking Christ, but Christendom and maybe they are the new post-Christendom prophets, heralding the shape of things to come.

The church needs to enter into some thought-out intelligent rational dialogue, we need to listen and listen some more, accepting that maybe God can speak to the church through the concerns of atheists. This is a belief structure that Christian youth workers are going to have to approach from a sensitive missional prospective just as we should any other belief system. We need to seek to understand their ‘theology’, and their practise. Seeking ways to communicate with and learn from what atheist young people have to say.

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Technorati Christendom, Emerging Church, Evangelism, Missiology, Theology, Theory, Youth Work/Ministry