One of the pleasures of teaching is when old students contact you and catch you up on their lives.  A few years ago, we had a wonderful English major--I'll call her Bethany (this is the first time I've ever changed someone's name, but for some reason I don't feel comfortable using her real name)--who was one of those students who make teaching especially rewarding, the kind whose papers you put at the bottom of the stack so that when you think you can't face grading another paper, you know there's a good essay waiting for you.  She was not just smart, but unpretentious and good-humored.  Bethany was also extremely religious, a very devout Protestant, and obviously troubled by my atheism.  I would have expected her to go to graduate school, but after graduation she married and has had two children.  I may be misinterpreting her motives, but I think that her choice was determined in part by her belief that it is the man's place to be the breadwinner and the woman's to be submissive.  In the last couple of years, I've gotten several nice, flattering e-mails from her.  The first I found rather off-putting, since she said that the only hope for me was to put myself in the hands of the Great Healer, the only true physician.  But since then she has generally avoided religion--until this week.  Pondering my coming out stories, she wondered how an atheist . . .

Normally, what follows is how an atheist can be good, can make moral decisions.  I think most atheists are tired of this question, which implies that we can't figure out simple moral principles (and those those of Christianity are unique) or can't follow them if we somehow manage to arrive at a sense of morality.  We arrive at moral decisions in the same way that most people do--and we do so sometimes successfully, sometimes not so.  I really doubt that most Christians, faced with a moral dilemma, actually make their decision by contemplating WWJD.  And given the history of religious wars, I'm equally doubtful that Christians (or members of other religions) arrive at solutions any more successfully than atheists do.  It always seems especially ironic that what Christians really imply is that without the promise of heaven or the threat of hell, they would be incapable of acting morally.  At least atheists don't need bribes and threats.

But Bethany's question was somewhat different: how do atheists deal with guilt?  For her, she said, the only satisfactory answer was the Protestant one: "Christ Jesus took upon himself all sin, for once and all."  And that's that.  I've always found that answer, even metaphorically, one of the most repellent aspects of Protestantism.  It's just way too easy and rather than answering anything seems a gross evasion.  At least in Catholicism, you have to work to get rid of guilt.  But for Protestants, all you have to do is profess your faith, and guilt magically vanishes.  Christ took care of all that for us.  (Martin Luther was particularly irritated by the book of James, which he wanted expunged from the Bible, calling it "an epistle of straw" because James says that "faith without works is dead.)  The parable of the Prodigal Son has always seemed to me one of the most pernicious in the Bible.  But it's a favorite of American Protestants.  Is there any story they like better than the sinner come home?  (Of course, as Jimmy Swaggart found out, you can only work it so many times.)  Mark Twain parodies it in the con men's scam at the revival meeting in Huck Finn.  And the lesser known George Washington Harris has an even funnier version in his Sut Lovingood tales.  One can sin and sin and sin, but a few tears and a profession of repentance, and the faithful rejoice. 

Atheists deal with guilt the same as most non-Protestants do: we can deny it or ignore it; more successfully, we can make amends and resolve to do better.  But however we deal with it, the responsibility and accountability are ours.  Like all human decisions, our reactions are tentative and ad hoc.  That may not be as comforting as letting Christ take all the burden, but it's what we have to work with and the best we can do.  And it seems much more honest than just wiping it all away with a profession of faith.

What also seems too easy about Bethany's answer is that it does away with shame.  Guilt becomes purely private, as does forgiveness.  Protestant Christianity used to have a firm sense of shame.  Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter is a classic exploration of the differing roles of guilt and shame.  But somewhere over the last two or three centuries, Protestantism has banished shame.  (A few hours in front of a television set should be more than enough evidence that many Americans no longer have any sense of shame.)  But actions that entail guilt are usually not only private in their consequences.  Why should they be only private in their expiation? 

A student in one of my classes once wrote that Hester Prynne "suffered from low self-esteem."  My marginal comment was LMAO.