The Atheist Pastor

The Atheist Pastor

He is quite an intelligent guy — my atheist friend.
When he sent me an email overflowing with quotes and sagacious anecdotes about faith, I knew he was up to something deeper.

There’s something in every atheist itching to believe, and something in every believer itching to doubt. That’s what my friend — let’s call him Patrick — once told me.

When I first confessed my faith in Christianity, I told him that although I wasn’t a regular churchgoer, I was still a staunch believer. He looked at me, puzzled, and asked how that was possible.
“How do you become a sailor without ever going to sea?” he asked, his tone laced with ridicule. He called it my philosophy of telekinetic Christianity.

I had no better response than to smile awkwardly and look upward, as though heaven itself might provide the answer.

Aside from his “heathen” side that set us slightly apart, Patrick wasn’t a bad person — whatever that means. He didn’t steal maize or uproot any country’s railway line. He was the quintessential modern bachelor — only that he lacked both faith and facial hair.

Patrick grew up in a home where church was encouraged but never forced. As a child, Sunday school was simply a way to escape the dull routine of regular school. He didn’t care much for the baby rescued from the Nile, even though he swore Migingo Island would never belong to Uganda as long as he lived. Nor did he care for Jonah the escapist, Saul the part-time believer, or any of the other lesson-filled figures in the Good Book.

His idea of church was always rooted in escapism. As a boy, it freed him from chalk-wielding teachers; as an adult, it freed him from work — and sometimes led him to potential girlfriends or helped him evade taxes.

When Patrick set out to find faith, he didn’t actually believe it existed — or that it could be found. He wanted only to prove me wrong. And for a moment, he almost did.

Though my non–church-going self was hardly qualified to speak for the church, I waxed philosophical. I told him that it takes just as much faith to be godless as it does to believe. As I spoke, I felt wise — even inspired — as though my words might finally exorcise the ghost of atheism that had haunted him for years.

I attacked that ghost with holy verses, jabbed at it with pugnacious prayers, and struck at it with pithy debates. Eventually, Patrick looked at me with dead eyes and a faint, unyielding smile. Then he waved his hand dismissively and said, “Shut up — I’ve heard it all before.”

And I faithfully obliged.

That was the beginning of his journey — the faithless man seeking faith. Yet he continued to insist that believers were no better than deluded fools, “a bunch of ignorant idiots,” as he put it.

To my self-righteous self, Patrick’s quest seemed absurd — an imbecilic attempt to find what he had already decided didn’t exist. He followed the atheist’s rainbow, hoping to strike gold. What he found instead was a goose — a goose that has been laying golden eggs for him ever since.

Six years have passed since Patrick became a corporate pastor in Nairobi. When I asked how it all began, he told me stories of the clergymen he met along the way — men of the cloth whose clothes alone could feed him for a decade; generous priests whose charity masked greed; flamboyant pastors who preyed on his doubts, threatening him with fire and brimstone.

He played the confessional sinner, wept, wailed, and gasped theatrically. And when his performance was complete, he was baptized — not into faith, but into business.

Today, he owns a church. Not for the faithful, and not by faith — but for profit.
He dresses like the rainbow he once chased: in colorful suits and shiny cars. His world is a royal blend of the soft and the shiny, the illicit and the legal, faith and doubt.

He remains, at heart, the same old atheist — a believer only in the weaknesses of humanity. His congregation, however, worships him. They follow him like hungry sheep would follow a grassy wolf.

“They want what I have,” he tells me with a smirk.

“How do you live with all this — the lies, the treachery?” I once asked.
He smiled, looked straight at me, and in his fake pastoral accent said,
“My calling isn’t any worse than a teacher who doesn’t believe in what she teaches, or a builder who doubts his cornerstone, or a doctor who prescribes a drug while counting the hours till the patient dies.”

I stared at him, nodded sardonically, and let him continue.

“It’s the same twisted thing, my friend,” he said, rising to leave for his evening sermon — and his evening drink.
“You believe but don’t act. I don’t believe but I act.”

There’s a thin line between truth and fiction.
This is that line.