Guess who’s coming to visit us on Capitol Hill, folks? Mars Hill Church.

This week, Mars Hill’s Joel Fariss—a deacon at MH’s downtown church—wrote a blog post entitled “Mission in Capitol Hill.”

Capitol Hill is majestic in its standing among Seattle culture shapers, with its long Broadway avenue freckled with dirty Thai restaurants and hipster clothing stores, as well as a statuesque presence in the coffee world. Among these elite caverns of caffeine lies Bauhaus Coffee and Books. Bauhaus has long been a Capitol Hill landmark and is seen by locals as a comfortable place to hang out… literally. Just the other week I looked towards the door as I saw legs of black lace wrapped in a tight and short leather skirt which met the fur shawl that fell from the shoulders of a beautiful… man.

A MAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A guy I know has been creating some really cool relationships with some of the staff there over the last year. The fruit of his ministry is amazing considering the hostility that most hold towards Christianity on the hill. Farris goes on to quote a bunch of scripture relating to Mars Hill’s mission to spread the word of God, fix the sinners, etc.

Then, Fariss writes:

This is what Mars Hill is doing on Capitol Hill: Living life intentionally. We are loving our neighbors, eating with them, serving the city with them. We have a vision to serve and love Capitol Hill to see the hill transformed to love and serve Jesus.Are You In?

I would love to talk with you more about the gospel of Jesus and the implications thereof, you can find me every Monday at Grey Gallery and Lounge on 11th between Pike and Pine on Capitol Hill: 5:30pm.

Yes, the same misogynistic, hipster church — which compared homosexuality to cancer — wants to come here and save you from yourself.

Grey’s management says they weren’t contacted Fariss or Mars Hill and aren’t sure what to expect, come Monday. “If it’s just [Fariss] and a couple people having a beer and talking about god, I don’t have a problem, but if it’s a mission thing then it’s not something we would tolerate,” says Grey Gallery and Lounge owner Erik Guttridge. “If it were to be a sort of mission at Grey, we’ve asked people to leave [for similar things] before.”

When contacted about his “mission” Fariss seemed a bit rattled. He danced around Mars Hill’s stance on homosexuality, saying that he disagreed with Pastor Mark Driscoll’s gay-cancer analogy, but still believes all you gays are sinners.

His best-but-totally-incomprehensible explanation:

“I believe that if there have been negative things said about homosexuality, where those statements are coming from, they are coming from the same place on a biblical or Christian perspective on abusive fathers or other injustice in the world. Maybe the same place we would say victims find themselves in. People are victimized in certain ways.”

The last anti-gay church that tried to get a foothold in Capitol Hill didn’t last long. This time, all the queers, punks, militant atheists and lovable godless weirdoes should head over to Grey next Monday, pack the place and make Mars Hill feel as welcome as possible.

Paid “friendship missionaries” on the University of Arizona campus scan for lonely foreign students, who get invitations to dinner with a side dish of salvation. Are the missionaries and their sponsors generous, predatory, or both?

Several studies (e.g. here and here) show that religious people give more dollars and volunteer hours to charity than do nonbelievers. Evangelical Christians have been trumpeting these findings: No matter what you may think about our exclusive offer of salvation, our religion is a social good.

As a former Evangelical I tend toward skepticism, especially when it comes to data that have been assembled and promoted by ideologues. And yet I’m inclined to suspect that these results tap something real. Sociologists have found that tribal identity increases altruism toward other members of the tribe (though at the expense of outsiders). In many ways, a religion functions as a tribe. Besides ordinary in-group/out-group effects, religions explicitly teach that we are made to serve something larger than ourselves. They encourage members to give of themselves to gods, co-religionists and others — in part by promising deferred compensation. But perhaps even more importantly, they provide a community and structure for doing so.

Let’s assume that religious people are more generous or altruistic. An interesting follow-up question is this:

Where is this generosity directed? Does it serve the cause of goodness? By a scientific definition of altruism, suicide bombing is an altruistic act supported by religious attendance. It is the individual sacrificing his life (and reproductive potential) in the service of another individual or the greater collective — in this case Allah, Islam, the Muslim brotherhood. But is it as a social good?

Within conservative Christianity, a tremendous amount of donated time and money is solicited for conversion activities: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Is religious recruiting a social good? On this, most evangelists and I would have opposite opinions, at least about Christian recruiting. (We might be more in agreement about the proselytizing done by Hare Krishnas or Scientologists.)  It is only fair to give evangelical missionaries credit for their intentions. If you truly believe the unsaved are going to be tortured eternally, then there is no greater good than to spend your life saving their souls. By comparison, nothing else matters. A missionary, operating on this premise, may experience herself as highly generous, because she is.

She also might protest that independent of afterlife benefits, accepting Jesus makes people happy in this life, here and now. This is true.  Sometimes. Jesus worship can fill people with deep joy. It can get alcoholics to stop drinking and abusers to stop abusing. It can save marriages.  But sometimes the opposite happens. (See thousands of testimonials at exChristian.net). Pentecostals point to happy African church-going children singing and dancing. A former Pentecostal might point to the African children who have been kicked out of their communities or killed because new converts to Pentecostalism saw them as witches and took their took their Bibles literally. The net here and now benefits of proselytizing are arguable.

A darker way to look at Christian “outreach” is as an example of how viral beliefs, sometimes called meme complexes, can exploit the human tendency toward altruism. What I mean is that a belief set can redirect altruistic do-gooder impulses away from activities that actually serve human well-being and onto activities that serve to replicate the belief set itself. When the Asian tsunami hit, a highly successful Seattle mega-church directed members to do three things: pray for people who were affected, give to Mars Hill Church, and give to the Mars Hill church-building work in India. Why not reverse this — pray for Mars Hill church, pray for our missionary work, and give money to the people who were affected? Churches that make suggestions like these are, on average shrinking. Churches that follow the Mars Hill model are growing.

Daniel Dennett in the first three pages of his book, Breaking the Spell, beautifully narrates how a similar redirection occurs in nature. An ant climbs to the top of a stem of grass and lingers there. Why? Not because it is adaptive for the ant. Rather, another organism has take charge of the ant’s brain and to reproduce it needs the ant to be eaten by a cow. When a person’s altruistic impulses are directed toward winning converts, it is valid to ask whether they are actually serving human well-being or simply serving a mind virus.

If we don’t count their recruiting activities, do Evangelical Christians actually give more than non-religious? Do they give more to things that we humans pretty much agree are social goods? Sorry, all you fellow secularists, thought the gap narrows the answer still appears to be yes. Think first about money given to churches. Besides outreach, church moneys fund what economists call “club goods“. Churches often do a wonderful job of providing and organizing members services: warm meals for kids with a sick parent, adventures for teenagers, housing for young adults, support during bereavement, even free counseling or legal services. And with regard to outsiders, even if food, medical care, or friendship is offered primarily as bait to set a fish hook, the food and medical care are real.

But even beyond the money given to churches, religious people appear to give more to ordinary charities than secular folks do. At least based on self report data, religious participation and religious giving are positively correlated with giving to nonreligious charities like educational institutions, social services, even blood banks. Although the gap gets smaller the harder you look at it, this appears to hold true for the 40ish percent of Americans who self-describe as Evangelical or born again as well as their more theologically open counterparts.

If this makes those of us who are freethinkers squirm a bit, perhaps it should.

You might protest that that charity should be only a way station on the road to justice, and that your energies are better spent working for structural change. Many secular folks and liberal people of faith believe this is true. I know I do. As a non-theist, I once sat on the nonprofit board of an organization called the Washington Association of Churches because their mission was my mission: Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. Like me, they sought solutions that went beyond charity.

But even if justice is the destination, those way stations are still needed. Most of us agree that both generosity and justice are virtues. We prefer to live in a world where both are in rich supply. Maybe, now that freethinkers are coming out of the closet it is time for us to begin thinking about how to create our own communities and structures that empower personal generosity. Since we don’t have to be a sales force with a promise of treasure laid up in Heaven, we are free to give without expecting something back except maybe a bit of good will.

Recently Seattle Atheists organized a blood drive for members. Now, that’s what I’m talking about.

[Ed. note: Not only do both Seattle Atheists and Tacoma Atheists have an ongoing food-drive in place, but Seattle Atheists has a bi-monthly blood drive, Christmas wrapping (of which 100% of the proceeds go directly to the Seattle Childrens Hospital), and a Day of Reason blood drive.]