Athiesm: AMERICA’S MOST REVILED MINORITY

March 18th, 2007
Rev. Edward Searl

America's Most Reviled Minority

I want to talk to you about two lists—recent polls taken by the Pew Research Center.

First, the most unpopular religious or ethnic groups. Here’s a minority group and the percentage of respondents who had either a "mostly" or a "very unfavorable opinion" of said group. From the bottom up: Blacks 8%; Jews 10%; Asians 12%; Hispanics 13%; Catholics 14%; Evangelical Christians 17%; Muslims 31 %; and at the top of the list—Atheists 50%.

Second, the percentage polled "unwilling" to vote for "well-qualified" candidate of their party who belongs to a certain minority group. Again from the bottom of the list up: Catholic 5%; Black 6 %; Jewish 10%; Woman 12 %; Evangelical Christian 15%; Homosexual 37%; Muslim 38%; Atheist 50%.

These telling lists that might be read in a variety of ways: 1) My, how far we've come; for example, only 8% of Blacks are the object of deep prejudice and only 5 % would not vote for a highly qualified Catholic candidate of their own party. 2) Oh, my, there's as lot of prejudice out there… still. 3) Of course, Muslims are disliked and not trusted considering 9/11 and the War Against Terror we've been engaged in since 2001. 4) Evangelical Christians really are discriminated against; they’re not just making it up ot thin skinned.. And 5) Wow and double wow! Atheists are the most reviled—by a large margin—group in America.

Apparently hostility toward Atheists is universal that is it cuts across all other groups. Surveys show that 43% of Republicans and 36% of the Democrats maintain that Atheists "do not at all" represent American values. And here’s an irony: 25% who rarely, if ever go to church, also believe that Atheists "do not to at all" share American values.

So where does this broad prejudice against Atheists come from? It seems that a majority of Americans firmly maintain that to have decent morals and values, a person must believe in God. Some 87% of the population says that they never doubt the existence of God. Americans are preponderantly God-believers. The underlying supposition is to the effect that, in order to have the right values and to act morally; a person must find a code of behavior outside her or his own experience, that is, from a Higher Power. The person must be accountable to that God, even under the fear of punishment, not necessarily here and now, but in an after life.

Religious types, of course, attack Atheists directly. Google the World Wide Web for ample evidence. (In the Jungian sense is their any other clearer Shadow than Atheists are for Theists?) The reason for this animosity is obvious. Atheists’ denial of God confronts the core of Theistic belief. The religious community has relatively well formulated discourse against Atheism. But I suspect that for most Americans animosity is more of a gut reaction, not well reasoned, as in the following question and answer between a reporter representing the American Atheist Press and then Governor George H. W. Bush from 1987:

AP "What will you do to win the votes of Americans who are atheists?"

GHWB "I guess I’m pretty weak in the atheist community. Faith is God is important to me."

AP "Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?"

GHWB "No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

AP "Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?"

GHWB "Yes, I support the separation of church and state, I’m just not very high on atheists."

In fact, other than a vague, yet palpable, social stigma, Atheists don’t have to deal with much systemic discrimination. This is in part a factor of their relative affluence and their relative high level of education. Yet many Atheists, because of the social stigma of their non-belief prefer to stay "closeted."

Nevertheless, sometimes in the case of child custody, particularly in the states of Mississippi and Louisiana judges have decided in favor of a so-called religious parent over one who is not, saying that the former is more fit to raise a child or more likely to provide the child a religious education. (Similar decisions have been rendered in more unlikely states such as Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.)

Atheists do suffer de facto exclusion from public office, especially when compared with other unpopular groups. For example there are several openly homosexual persons in Congress. As of 2006 there were 26 Jewish congressmen and 11 Jewish Senators. Yet not one member of Congress is openly Atheistic, though Atheists make up some 3% of the population, about the same percentage as gays and more than the Jewish percentage of the population. Never has there been an Atheistic president, vice-president, and member of the cabinet, Supreme Court justice, or state governor.

And Atheists suffer exclusion from certain social organizations. The Boy Scouts won a Supreme Court decision in 2000 to exclude openly homosexual employees; and the boy Scouts reject all avowed Atheists. On the positive side the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in 2004, rescinded their exclusion of Atheists. (So, perhaps there were Atheists in foxholes after all.)

It came as a surprise to me, that Atheists, more than any other majority, suffer the most prejudice among American minorities. In this instance the numbers tell the tale.

Until the past few years, public atheists belonged to the general category of cranks and malcontents known for fighting crèches on public property at the Holidays, railing against prayer in schools or facsimile stone Ten Commandment tablets in courtrooms, or resisting the Boy Scouts' oath to God. Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founder of the American Atheists, was a 20th century Atheist activist, who rankled the traditionalists every chance she had was the prominent Atheist.. Her bizarre death only added to her notoriety, gained through her activism and idiosyncractic personal life. Throughout the last half of the 20th century she was the face of Atheism.

But in the past few years more respectable, well-credentialed credible Atheists have claimed the public’s attention through best selling books: Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist wrote, "The God Delusion." Sam Harris, a philosopher and student of religion, wrote "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation." And Carl Sagan, popularizer of cosmology a couple of decades ago, and dead since 1996, has the posthumous publication of his Gifford Lectures of 1985: "The Varieties of Scientific Experiences: A Personal View of the Search for God."

In these lecture Sagan said: "As science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. Evolving before has been the God of the Gaps, that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then, after a while, we explain it, and so that’s no longer God’s realm."

In a time of continuing and extreme prejudice, Atheism has more presentable, persuasive voices than ever before. In fact, in the face of prejudice Atheism is more public and arguably persuasive than ever before. (If you know your cultural history, the last great hey day of free thinking was during the late 19th century when the British scientist Thomas Huxley coined the word agnostic and Robert Ingersoll, the Great Infidel, spread that doctrine in the U.S.)

What is an Atheist? Strictly or scrupulously speaking, an Atheist is one who asserts there is no God. More practically speaking an Atheist is one who, when presented with belief in a God, looks at the evidence and concludes, for a variety of reasons, that the evidence isn’t sufficient. The former position is often called strong atheism: God does not/cannot exist. The latter is often called weak atheism: disbelief in God, as God is presented by others to believe. Weak atheism is akin to skepticism. Strong atheism is a sort of belief system itself.

Atheism’s sibling is Agnosticism. Agnosticism claims that knowledge of God’s existence is not knowable. Agnosticism is a halfway covenant, an unsatisfying and disingenuous position, for many Atheists.

Atheism and Religious Experience

I searched for a representative statement regarding a practical, non-strident, and positive Atheism and have settled on the following by a respected contemporary nature essayist, Chet Raymo, for many years a columnist for the Boston Globe:

I grew up in the Bible-tumping South where every other telephone pole along the two-lane blacktops had a sign that said "Jesus is Coming Soon" or "Prepare To Meet Thy Maker."

My family was Roman Catholic, a relative rarity in Tennessee. But I was raised to be Prepared. Armageddon might not be just around the corner, but an eternity of happinesss or torment was riding on my state of grace. I lived in fear that I might accidentally die with a mortal sin on my soul, some teenage peccadillo perhaps. Sheep on the right, goats on the left. Fire and brimstone for the goats.

But I had parents who read books and loved ideas. A few exceptional high school teachers, Dominican nuns, taugh me to value the life of the mind. By a stroke of luck I went off to the University of Notre Dame just as a new young president, Father Theodore Hesburgh, decided a Catholic university could also be a great institution of learning. By the time I left that place, after eight years of undergraduate and graduate education, I had lost my faith.

For that, I give Notre Dame credit. My teachers taught me to think for myself, and gave me an excellent education in science that made no reference to religion. Notre Dame science was exactly the same as UCLA science (where I also spent a few years). Or University of Tokyo science, for that matter. I had discovered a way of knowing that transcends accidents of birth.

With a fresh Ph.D. in physics, I came with my growing family to the New England of Emerson and Thoreau. My transformation was complete; I had become an Only Live Oncer, and I was determined to live my one life as well as I could. I didn't want to be good because I feared hellfire, but because it is good to be good -- good for oneself, good for one's family, good for one's fellow men and women. I no longer believed in the God of my forebears. I had become, in short, an atheist.

But I still felt religious. The more I learned about the natural world the more I stood in awe of its mystery. I longed to sing praise and thanksgiving. And to pray. "I don't know exactly what a prayer is," says Mary Oliver in a poem, "I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed." I knelt in the grass.

The biologist Richard Dawkins, whom I much admire, thinks it's a fraud for someone of atheistic temperament to use the language of traditional religion. The word "God," for example. Or "prayer." These words have meanings defined by usage, he says. "God" is a transcendent personal being who hears and answers prayers and intervenes miraculously in the world. By that definition I am an atheist.

But why must words like "God" or "prayer" be stuck in their ancient usages? Why must I concede an age-old language of praise to the Born Agains? I read the Book of Nature; I have no qualms using the G-word for the mystery that I find there, no embarrassment using the word "prayer" for attending with reverence to what I see.

I am an Only Live Oncer, but I try to live in a state of grace. Not supernatural grace, to be sure, but the myriad natural graces that bless and hallow the everyday http://www.sciencemusings.com/musingsarchive/2004_09_19_musings.html (Sunday, September 19, 2004 THE PATH TO HEAVEN DOESN'T LIE DOWN IN FLAT MILES...)

Are You an Atheist, Too?

Chet Raymo gives witness to a natural religious spirit that is not alien to Atheists. He demonstrates that an Atheist need not be cranky, but might assume a reverent posture toward Self and Nature, a posture he--and I as well--see as more religious. There are surely cranky atheists, aggressive in their ways. Yet I suspect that many Atheists, who comprise perhaps 3% of the larger culture, are more of the Chet Raymo type who left an untenable Theism behind them and moved into a natural spirituality. They struggle for a suitable vocubulary to express their own religious expeirnece; and some may be loathe to even consider their expeirenece as religious. At lest that’s my experience in Unitarian Universalism, where atheists are always welcome and sometimes abound..

Many of you belong to the "weak atheist" group. Your simple skepticism has led you to forego the unexamined God of the larger culture. You resonate to the timeless Unitarian motto: "Prove all things, hold fast to that which is good." You’re not militant. You probably have a soft sadness for what you’ve given up; because it has been part of your early years. It’s not always to leave your childhood beliefs and "tribe." Yet you would never go back; in your heart of hearts and mind of minds you acknowledge, "you can't go home again."

Like me, you don't self-define as an Atheist. It's the larger culture that judges you so. I prefer to call my self by several names a humanist, a transcendentalist in the Emersonian tradition, a practioner of natural religion.

My religion is of Nature and Human Nature. My values are ethics are strong, even though I ultimately reject supernaturalism of any ilk. As a religious naturalist, though, I must also acknowledge being, in a cultural, as well as in the literal sense, an Atheist.

As I close, I remember Martin Luther King's famous hope regarding the content of character over the color of the skin. I hope for a day when we judge one another not by the pigeonholes of beliefs, rather by the goodness of our values and the ethical quality by which those values are lived, shaping Self and our common world.

I find it ironic, at the very least in my experience, that many Atheists I have known have better values and are more ethical/moral human beings than many Theists I have known.