Writing Theism As an Atheist

The novel I’m working on has two protagonists. Each has qualities and sides to her identity that I share, and each has some for which I have to use my empathy and imagination.

For example, one’s gender presentation is masculine-of-centre, and so is mine. One is Jewish, and so am I. One is an academic, like me, and one is white, like me. Both are queer women, like me.

One is femme, and I’m not. One is Black, and I’m not. Neither one is in a heterosexual relationship, and I am. The Jewish one is observant, and I’m not particularly so. The other grew up with Christian traditions, and I didn’t. One doesn’t feel emotionally supported by her family of origin, and I–very fortunately–always have.

These are big differences between my protagonists and me, and I’ve learned to be especially mindful of them. I can illustrate why with a little difference that often trips me up: I wear glasses, and none of the protagonists I’ve been writing recently do. If I’m not careful, I’ll carelessly have a character push her glasses up her nose or polish the lenses or squint at something the way I do when I’ve taken my glasses off for the night but am too lazy to go find them again.

I send my character down the well-trod paths of my first thoughts because it’s easy to automatically follow the mental routes I walk every day of my life. And just as I don’t want to write characters with mysterious spectacles that pop into existence every few chapters because I forgot to pay attention and ask myself how life is for this character and not for me, I don’t want to write characters of other races or genders or religions who accidentally think or behave or get treated like a white, gender non-conforming, cisgender secular Jewish woman.*

So I thought I was working hard to give the major differences between my characters and me the care and respect that they (and the real-life people who share those differences) deserve. And for the most part, I am. But this Yom Kippur, I realized I’d overlooked one key difference that really should change one character’s voice and viewpoint.

That character believes in God. And I don’t.

I thought it wouldn’t be that big a deal because I have believed in God in the past. As a child, I went to religious day-school, and I took for granted that what we were taught about God was true.

However, I didn’t consider that my belief was a child’s belief, rooted in acceptance of adult authority rather than in core convictions.

I should have–I remember noticing at age 10 or 11 that two years before, I’d prayed with kavanah in prayer class, but last year, the prayers had become more rote than meaning. This year, in my new class, I found myself moved again. Even at that age, I quickly understood the reason: my current grade’s Hebrew teacher had also been my Hebrew teacher two years ago, and her devout kavanah inspired mine. But my Hebrew teacher in the intervening grade didn’t profess the same religious faith, and so I’d reverted back to my baseline.

My viewpoint character–and the many real-life believers I know and respect–aren’t children, and their belief in God doesn’t stem from that childlike trust in teachers and parents. I know that not every believer has faith in God for the same reasons, and that some adults of all opinions regarding theism root their beliefs in appeals from human authority, but overall, I’d say that portraying an adult of faith as a child, but bigger, is not only unfair to most believers but also the least interesting approach to take.

I’m not going to pretend I understand all the different reasons that folks believe in God, or even all the different things that people mean when they say they believe in God. All I can do is pick the ones that make sense for my character, avoiding cliché, and consider how they affect her perspective and actions.

To do that, I first need to understand what I believe as an agnostic atheist and how that belief affects my actions. Celebrating Jewish holidays and practicing some Jewish traditions are important to me, but how does my lack of belief change my experience? Occasionally, I pray, but how is prayer different when/if you believe that God really is listening? (Does it have to be different?) How does my lack of belief in an afterlife affect my actions in the here and now? Does it change the balance of my ethical equations? How does considering myself to be my own moral authority affect my beliefs and behaviour?

My character’s belief in God is shaping up to be similar to my lack of belief: she, too, is agnostic, in that she believes one can’t ever really know whether there is a Deity. But, unlike me, she believes in one nevertheless. Her God is, in some ways, the type that would be easier for me to believe in. She believes in a God who values free will, who doesn’t intervene directly in human life, who is embedded in the universe itself and imperfectly embodied in every person, no matter how annoying or nasty or cruel they might be.

But there are challenges too. I can’t reconcile the actions of God as described in parts of the Torah with what I understand goodness and godliness to mean–how does she? (Or does she? One can be a person of faith and still struggle with parts of that faith.) Does belief in an afterlife change how she views death? Does belief in inevitable Divine judgment change how she views her own sins (she knowingly commits a lot of them)?

One of the main ways I’m exploring her theism in her personality and viewpoint voice is through her humility. If you know me, you probably know that my worse self can be pretty conceited and aloof. I care about other people, but I don’t always want to engage with them. And it can be easy to fall into the trap of acting like I know everything about topics that I’ve studied a lot or practiced a lot. But my character’s understanding of God comes with, for her, a constant sense of her own human imperfection that can’t be overcome and can’t be accurately assessed by any mortal being.

To me, figuring out what that means for her, someone who’s unafraid to take drastic action on what she thinks is right but also struggles to figure out exactly what “right” means in a messy world, helps to make her more interesting. It also nicely contrasts with her co-protagonist, who’s developed a kind of performative arrogance in reaction to a family and dominant society that constantly tell her she has no good qualities to be humble about.

I’ve still got a lot of thinking to do about all the things that make my characters different from me, and I know I’ll never get them perfect. (And I accept that it’s impossible to represent any group “perfectly,” because there’s so much diversity within groups as well as between groups.) But being able to identify the ways in which their experience and thinking differs from my own is an essential first step.

So identifying and examining my own atheism and cultivating respectful curiosity about others’ theism is crucial.

* This obligation is magnified by real-life power imbalances that mean some folks who differ from me find that people like me are amplified when writing about people like them while their own writing about their own identities is marginalized. That gives me a stronger moral obligation not to impose my own life experience on my characters without careful critical examination. It also means acknowledging that my examination will never be perfect, but that doesn’t absolve me of doing my thoughtful and meticulous best.