This week in DC I attended the Pub Theology gathering hosted by pastor, writer and pub theologian Brian Berghoef. It’s a regular event bringing people with and without various faiths into common reflection on engaging life and spiritually related questions. We often generalize the “faithless" into the cousin camps of atheists and agnostics. I’d suggest a third category: apathists.
In contrast to the atheist’s insistence on a godless universe and the agnostic’s insistence on uncertainty, apathists don’t care. They do not lack passion for life, just for questions of theology. They deem these questions irrelevant to the meaning of their life better defined by other questions of cosmology, ontology and epistemology.
Apathists might not help advance the theological questions but will aid in the advancement of the alternatives.