The Atheist Who Couldn't Escape God's People

In 1927, American journalist and committed atheist H.L. Mencken traveled to Dayton, Tennessee, to cover the Scopes Trial. He arrived with pen dipped in acid, ready to mock what he called the ignorant believers of the Bible Belt. His dispatches dripped with contempt. He called the townspeople "yokels" and "primates" and declared that faith was the refuge of fools who refused to think.

But something unsettled Mencken that summer. The people he ridiculed kept feeding him. They offered him sweet tea on their porches. They prayed for him openly, without malice. A local pastor invited him to dinner three times, and three times Mencken accepted. Years later, Mencken admitted in private correspondence that those Tennessee Christians had shown him a dignity he struggled to explain within his own philosophy.

Psalm 14 opens with a devastating line: "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.'" But the psalm's deeper concern is not intellectual atheism — it is the moral corruption that follows when people live as though the Almighty is absent. "They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good." The fool's error is not merely philosophical. It is the conviction that no one is watching, that kindness is weakness, that the poor can be devoured without consequence.

Yet God looks down from heaven, searching. And He still finds His people — imperfect, faithful, stubbornly generous — refusing to let the fool have the last word.