Going, going, gone

There are any number of stumbling blocks for Christians looking to bring new members into the faith: unengaging clergy, unengaged parishioners, lukewarm services. Those looking for new ideas will find a most unlikely savior in 24-year-old Hemant Mehta, the self-styled Friendly Atheist.

In his debut book, I Sold My Soul on eBay (Waterbrook Press, $13.99), the Orland Park denizen details his experiences attending 15 Christian churches of various denominations around the country, visiting everything from tiny, ragtag living-room services to projection TV–filled megachurches. There is, of course, nothing unusual about a person trying on different religions to see what fits, but Mehta’s path was a bit less orthodox.

As a 22-year-old DePaul grad student in mathematics, and an active volunteer in two national, secular organizations, Mehta realized he had never been exposed to any religion outside of the Jainism he was born into in Schaumburg. An atheist from the age of 14, he felt compelled to try out new religious services as a test of his beliefs, but wanted the freedom to ask questions about the religions and get feedback about his experiences from other atheists and Christians alike. “I knew religion is a very private thing for people,” he says. “I felt like if I just showed up to a church, temple or mosque and asked the person next to me, ‘Hey, do you really believe this?,’ it definitely would’ve been rude.”

In January 2006, he devised an experiment using the online auction site eBay: For every $10 pledged,  Mehta would attend a religious service of the winning bidder’s choice. Mehta’s project landed him on the cover of several major newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times and the Wall Street Journal, whose above-the-fold headline read: an atheist puts his own soul on the auction block.

After attending nine Christian churches, he blogged about his experiences on author and former minister Jim Henderson’s evangelist website off-the-map.org. On the blog and in the book, Mehta directs levelheaded critiques and praise at everything from church music to decor, posing incisive questions—Why pray if God’s will is going to win out regardless?—and offering advice to churches about how to more effectively communicate the gospel to nonbelievers. “Christians do a lot of things in church they feel are going to help unchurched people,” Mehta says, “but oftentimes they’re not doing it correctly.”

Rather than alienating himself, he found he was opening lines of communication between churchgoers and atheists.

“Christians were like, ‘You don’t like that? We don’t like that, either. You’re right about a lot of these things,’” he says, adding that he saw penning a book as a way to continue to stoke the fire of dialogue between the two camps.

As an author, Mehta—a soon-to-be math teacher at Naperville’s Neuqua Valley High School—inflicts I Sold My Soul on eBay with a sort of mathematical sheen, and his plain prose tends to make his procedural accounts of rote church services a slog to get through, too. But where he really lights up is in his offbeat observations of absurd, head-scratching rituals like the “Christian mosh pit” at New Life Church in Colorado; the 24-hour prayer hotline that asks him to leave a message; or the Christian business directories that cause him to wonder, Do Christians think non-Christians are not good to do business with? The vitriolic us-versus-them stance of many churches doesn’t stop Mehta from marveling at their ability to unite people and wield power in society—qualities he believes the atheist community could better embody if both sides could set aside the dogma and get friendly.

“Atheists should know that churches have something to offer,” Mehta says. “It doesn’t mean they’re right when it comes to theological arguments, but our first priority as atheists shouldn’t be to tell everyone, ‘You’re wrong and we’re right.’”

I Sold My Soul on eBay is up for sale now. Mehta speaks as part of the Kriti Festival Sunday 29 at 10am.