A belief is a claim, and claims by themselves are weightless. The test of any position (faith or the lack of it) is what it empowers the holder to do.
When I was a student at Jackson State, I was part of an arts collective called Outspoken, and several of the members were queer. I enjoyed being a poet with them. We spent hours on the third floor of the library writing, refining, rehearsing, and critiquing each other's work. I had a few poems torn to shreds by that group, but the space was creative, and the community mattered to me.
But the people outside that room, the folks I shared a broader campus community with, weren't so neutral about how the group was seen. Homophobia was vocalized freely and directly to me by people I considered to be peers. They would say things like, "KD, I rock with y'all poetry, for real. Y'all are really dope, but I couldn't imagine having to be around them f*gg*ts."
They felt entirely comfortable using that language around me because I was a straight Black man in Mississippi, a place where your Christianity is almost implied. I was part of their in-group, and they assumed my loyalties lay with our shared demographic, not with the people I shared a stage with.
In that environment, even the suspicion of being gay was enough to strip a straight man of his standing. It was a patriarchal reflex.
It is easy to try and tell myself now that my silence was solely about self-preservation, but it wasn't. Calling it cowardice would let me off easy. It was that, but it was also that I thought the silence was the right response, because it was underwritten by my theology.
I didn't like the slurs, but neither did I feel like I had the theological ground to defend my friends. According to the text I had built my life around, they were wrong. The Bible was clear, right? And in the back of my mind, if I believed they were going to hell, a slur was nothing compared to what God was going to do to them.
Defending them carried a double cost: it meant risking my social standing to the suspicion of being gay, and it required me to challenge my own religious framework. I enjoyed being in community with those poets, rappers, singers, and I also liked sharing the stage with them. I trusted them with work I wasn't sure about, but I wasn't willing to defend them when the jokes were made, because defending them would have cost me my standing both socially and spiritually.
That is what cheap belief looks like. My Christianity empowered my belonging in the broader culture, provided holy cover for my silence, but it didn't empower my defense of the people my in-group was actively harming.
They couldn't see my complicity, because in that room, I never treated them differently, but the betrayal wasn't in what I did to them. It was in what I didn't say to everyone else.
the cost of certainty
The comedian KevOnStage recently showed the only honest way to look back at this kind of complicity. After he expressed shifting views on the LGBTQ community, the backlash from the conservative Black church was immediate, as accusations of heresy and threats to unfollow for his refusal to condemn.
In a follow-up video responding to the clip, he said: "I don't be so sure about stuff that I used to be so sure about." By publicly revoking his certainty, Kev crossed the line I was too afraid to cross in college, looking at the collateral damage of his tradition and acknowledging that the certainty itself was the weapon.
Belief without action is cheap because it costs the believer absolutely nothing, but the weight of the load is always carried by someone else. They paid the tab for my cheap belief, and when you finally stop letting them pay it, the bill eventually comes to you.
the new clothes
I have no problem, now, applying that same test to atheism.
What does my unbelief empower? If the answer is that it gives me a new label, a new in-group, a new sense of intellectual superiority online, then it is imitating the cheap work my Christianity once did.
I can feel the pull of it sometimes: the in-group satisfaction, the relief of being right out loud. That is why this test needs to run on me now, not later, because it is a new identity running on the similar machinery.
Unbelief that doesn't empower action is just as hollow as belief that doesn't empower action, because the label isn't the work; it's only a marker. The work is whatever the marker is supposed to be referencing.
If atheism becomes nothing more than a badge that signals my new boundary lines, if it exists only to prove what I don't believe anymore, it does what every dead identity does. It signals and defends, but refuses to build.
So the question isn't what I claim. The question is what my claim produces, whether or not I would speak up now, in that same room.
If atheism has a generative power, it's the recognition that this life is all we got. There is no afterlife where the scales get balanced, nor is there a cosmic parent keeping score.
The people I love, I have no choice but to love now. And the harm I see, I have to name and call out now. If someone is being denied their full humanity, they only have one shot at this existence, and I cannot wait for divine intervention to make it right.
That is what unbelief can produce, if it is more than a badge.
after the asterisk
Where I landed after leaving Christianity wasn't always about the metaphysics for me. It made me look closer to what the old position was doing to me, and more importantly, what my silence was doing to others. Leaving Christianity meant walking away from an identity that ran up a tab other people had to pay.
The atheism that replaces it has to do something the old belief didn't, otherwise, I've just traded one cheap label for another. The refusal of the old claim was supposed to free me to do the things the old position wouldn't let me do.
The artists I worked with on the third floor of H.T. Sampson Library are no longer available to me in those specific moments, and I cannot go back to Jackson State and undo my silence.
But what I can do is refuse to repeat the pattern in new clothes, which means saying, out loud and in public, what I wouldn't say then: that the people my tradition taught me to fear were my friends, and my friends were not the problem.
Belief was a claim, unbelief is a posture, but neither one is the work. What I do with the cleared space is the actual question, because that is what the refusal was for.