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On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, he interviewed Pastor Rick Warren. You can read the whole interview here, but they did talk about my “Losing My Religion” book and I pasted the exchange below.

HH: Now I’m looking at another book here by my closest friend, and a friend of yours, Bill Lobdell…

RW: Yeah.

HH: …Losing My Religion. You know Bill, he covered you a lot.

RW: Yeah, right.

HH: He’s one of the new atheists now.

RW: Yeah.

HH: Lost him, and we’ll get him back. But Hitchens was here in town at Biola University.

RW: Yeah.

HH: What do you make of the new atheism, whether it’s Lobdell or Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, and all the attention they’re getting?

RW: Well, first place, they’re making a ton of money, okay?

HH: Well, Bill’s not, but Hitchens is.

RW: Hitchens…and I’ve debated two of the three of those guys. I’ve debated Hitchens and I debated Sam Harris, and I told Sam, I said Sam, to be honest with you, I have never known an atheist who wasn’t mad, who wasn’t angry. And he got angry about it. But the truth is, every one of them have a thorn. I’m not worried about atheists. I’m more worried about the apatheists. The apatheists are the harder ones to reach. The atheists, the reason they are so dogmatic about it is they’ve got a burr under their saddle where they’ve been hurt. I was, two years ago, speaking at Davos at the World Economic Forum, and we were sitting around a room, and the guy, we were at tables, and the guy knew who I was, knew I was a pastor, and so he got up and made some long statement like the worst thing in the world right now is organized religion, and if we could just get rid of all of that, well then we wouldn’t have any wars, blah, blah, blah. And I knew he was just bating me, and I could have, if I had wanted to, I didn’t want to, I could have gone up, stood up and said the fact of life, and for instance, far more people were killed in the 20th Century by atheist regimes than all of the people ever killed in religious regimes put together in history. When you take Mao, Stalin and Hitler, there’s no comparison the genocides that have been caused by atheists. Christian campaigns are miniscule in comparison. But I didn’t. I wasn’t just going to take the bite. And after it was over, he came over and kind of chagrined, he said my father was a rector. And I’m going well, you expected me to be surprised at that? Paul Vitz, who is an author with New York University, wrote a very fascinating book called Faith Of The Fathers, in which he went and studied the 72 most well-known atheists in history, the Bertrand Russells, the Voltaires, the Freuds, and the only thing he could find in common with every one of them is they all hated their dads. Every one of them. They had distant dad, demeaning dad, a dead dad, they had no relationships with their fathers.

HH: But what about, now Lobdell’s book, for example, talks about the impact of the scandals.

RW: Yeah.

HH: He covered the Church scandal, he’s covered the TBN scandals.

RW: Yeah.

HH: You have stayed above scandal. Thank you for that, because so many Christian pastors, you know what happens when this happens, and we could name 30 of them, the damage they do.

RW: Yeah, I keep a list.

HH: You keep a list?

RW: Actually, I have what, Hugh, I’ve had it for almost 40 years. I call it a warnings file. And every time I watch somebody, and Satan has no temptations that are new. It’s either money, sex or power. It’s lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, the pride of life, and you have to know the antidotes, and you have to set up the parameters that keep you from even being tempted in those areas, which means for instance, I’m never alone, ever, ever alone with a woman, or even my myself when I’m traveling. And so there’s certain things Billy Graham did, and I just copied him. He taught me how to do that. And that’s an important thing.

HH: So what do you say to people like this who say, like Lobdell, they list all the scandals? What do you say to them?

RW: Bill, I’m not quite…I read Bill’s book, he asked me to endorse it, and I’m not convinced that the reason he dropped the ball was the real reason he dropped the ball. There’s got to be something more, because he knew enough genuine believers, like you, like me, like others, who he knew these guys are not rip-off artists, they’re not fakes, they’re not double-minded, they’re not double-dealing. Yes, there are bad apples in any bunch, okay? But the presence of counterfeit always implies there must be a real thing. Nobody counterfeits a counterfeit. If there’s a counterfeit out there, it implies, nobody does a counterfeit $4 dollar bill.

I’ve always liked Rick Warren, and I wrote about him with appreciation in my book. But he’s off here a bit.

First, none of the New Atheists took their position because it was a get-rich-quick scheme. In fact, just a few years ago, no one would have dreamed a book about atheism could be a best seller. It’s also interesting to note that no one who accused the atheists of trying to make a buck by going against theism complains about Christian authors who’ve become millionaires off of God.

Second, I guess from Rick’s perspective, I “dropped the ball.” But that’s wrong on two counts. One, my faith vanished, and I spent four years trying to get it back (I believe I couldn’t get it back because I realized it wasn’t real). It would be more accurate to say the ball was stripped from me. Two, the scandals within the Body of Christ merely caused me to start doubting the underpinnings of my faith. My subsequent investigation and soul-searching led to my reluctant atheism/deism.

Finally, atheists can be an angry bunch. So can people of faith. I try to be a happy atheist, but it’s tough sometimes when you are a 2% minority in America, and you have Christians and other theists constantly hammering on you — intentionally or not. I’ve learned not to get worked up over the small things — like attending a city council meeting and hearing a pastor pray in the name of Jesus Christ — a de facto government endorsement of a specific religion, but what are you going to do?

What would Rick Warren and other Christian pastors think if a Muslim leader said a prayer at the next presidential inauguration in the name of Allah? They would go nuts, but Rick did the same thing when he spoke of Jesus during his prayer.  I think that’s where much of the anger comes, though I do agree with Rick that some atheists have some unresolved issues from which the anger flows.