Conversation on Atheism, Part 3

(Originally published in The Pile On on May 17, 2020)

Today we continue a conversation about atheism. Atheism is burdened by being an idea focused on negation — it doesn’t state what exists but rather what doesn’t. It is an unlikely foundation for community, ideology, or political activism to grow from, yet it seems to have become just that. While freethought has a deep tradition in philosophy, the direct connection between the personal rejection of the divine and social and political change are rarely investigated. In this series Todd and Nathan discuss how they found atheism, what they found when they began to connect with other atheists, and what they think the role of atheism ought to be in the future.

Dr. Nathan Alexander received his Ph.D. in history from the University of St Andrews (UK) where his research focused on the intersection of freethought and the construction of race. His latest book is Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914.

Previously we discussed our religious backgrounds and previous experience in the atheist community. Below we return to the conversation discussing the desired outcomes of atheist organizations.

Todd: You and I both seem to agree that atheist organizations — whatever form they take — should, at the very least, provide positive support to a burgeoning community. This certainly requires members to organize themselves, information and resources. You added other elements, like anti-religious information and becoming politically active to preserve and strengthen the division between church and state. These strike me as very defensive, and almost reactionary, in the sense that they are a check on the expansion of religious power rather than an attempt to expand atheism. Do you recommend atheists militate against faith-based organizations or agitate for anti-religious actions?

There is a certain conundrum to supporting a concerted campaign to abolish religious belief in the world. One the one hand, I believe religion does very active harm in the world. The fact that religion is also used to confer legitimacy on war, violence and injustice helps convince me that it is an obstacle to be overcome. It is inherently sectarian, requires a deeply irrational obedience and preys on ignorance. I want to avoid just listing examples but a couple might help to illustrate this really well. In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush claimed God told him to invade. Maybe he believed he did, maybe it was just a cynical ploy to win approval but the way it functioned was to use the belief in God to get people to side with him in the face of evidence that he was wrong about the real world conditions and likely consequences. We see a lot of religious attempts to make people gullible enough to get played by bad-faith actors. A recent precedent setting case in the US about businesses being able to opt out of state mandated healthcare coverage for their employees was rooted in religious arguments . This is a clear threat of completely illegitimate power over personal autonomy and health. Efforts to keep creationism in schools effectively attempt to maintain theological doctrine through social ignorance. Religious beliefs are both wrong and have harmful effects.

On the other hand, religion still creates positive goods that the secular community cannot or does not offer, whether it be social provision or individual motivation. Churches are a huge part of the distribution of social goods to people who need them in terms of substance recovery, soup kitchens, child care or end of life counselling. Although the state or society might provide this in the absence of the church, these would be lost in the absence of faith-based organizations were they to blink out tomorrow. Although prayer doesn’t work, religious belief can provide hope or motivation. Cutting off the spiritual support that hospice workers, nurses or charity works find in a church couldn’t just be replaced. It is also true that churches represent a major counterweight to the state in terms of pushing back on policy. If we look at the recent sanctuary movement we can see lots of ordinary people organizing to fight against government arrests and removals of immigrants. Yet the most effective organization that I have seen came from religious coalitions, and churches have also been able to shelter immigrants far better than citizens.

At the heart of this contradiction we see things like the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. organizing the nonviolent Civil Rights movement in opposition to the southern clergy who rejected direct action. It is a dilemma and I wonder if you see a way out of it. What do you feel is the appropriate position for atheists? As an historian, how do you see the process of secularization playing out in the past and into the future?

Nathan: I do think that anti-religious agitation could and should be a part of atheist organizations’ agendas, but how this is done will be dependent on the particular context. In other words, this will look differently in places that are already quite secular versus ones that are not.

I definitely don’t think this kind of agitation should be coercive. In other words, I don’t think atheists should use the power of the state, for example, to attempt to suppress religious beliefs, like the Soviet Union attempted. I’m also somewhat hesitant about direct confrontations. For example, I definitely don’t think atheists should harass people coming out of church or something like that.

But I do think disseminating information or arguments about atheism, science, and reason is important. I think it’s important to get the information out to people and to let them make up their own minds. So there have been campaigns by atheist groups putting up billboards or ads on buses, for example, and I think those make sense.

There is a pretty clear trend of religious decline across the western world, but I don’t think secularization just magically happens. I think social/economic/political factors (development of the welfare state, rising living standards, etc.) are important in explaining secularization, but we shouldn’t underestimate the value of putting out arguments against religion. Callum Brown, a historian from Glasgow University, makes the point that at the heart of secularization is people. In other words, there is a temptation to think about secularization as just a bunch of points on a graph changing over time, but for every point there is an individual story there.

You do a good job of setting out the obvious harms of religion, but also the benefits, particularly providing foundations for activism, community-organizing, charitable work, etc. I don’t, however, see any reason why these things can’t be replicated by secular organizations, although it’s probably true they have not yet filled the void. Is there a secular equivalent of sheltering migrants in churches to prevent deportations? I’m not sure.

This goes into a point I wanted to raise, namely, what should the scope of atheist organizations’ political activism be? In other words, should they focus narrowly on things directly relevant to atheism, like ensuring boundaries between church and state are respected, or should they focus more broadly? And how should one go about defining the scope?

Todd: There is a lot to unpack here so I hope you don’t mind if I go back a little bit. I find in your answer a clear desire for secularism, and one that builds from argumentation and individual conversion. Callum Brown’s point, which I really like and hadn’t thought about before, is that secularization is an aggregation of personal choices to reject the divine. It is a wonderful reminder of how atheism has grown, but I think that is too narrow a view of secularization. If we look at secularization only as the number of irreligious people, then we don’t see too much success. Take a place like Ireland — a place we think of as traditionally very religious and strongly Catholic — where the number of people who report having no religion jumped from about 5% to about 10% since 2006. That is a sign of secularization for sure, but it is a small change, and I don’t think it is enough of a marker for secularization overall.

Ireland during that time had major changes to its laws and culture that should be seen as an aspect of secularization as well. Major changes occured in the laws that were derived from religious authorities, namely divorce, abortion and even the removal of a law against blasphemy. As you suggested, secularism is related to numerous other socio-economic changes so it is probably not a coincidence that this came after a prolonged period of capitalist growth, state development and international integration. I don’t think we can easily separate the individual rejection of religious belief and social/economic/political structures, but I do think it is important to point out that what allows them to occur, put as succinctly as possible, is the waning of religious power.

So, to get back to your point about the scope of atheist action: In the context of secularization (so much of this is context) your point seems to be one of mitigation — allow the good, eliminate the bad. This strikes me as something that is highly pragmatic and gradualist while being wholly appropriate. Considering the political goals for atheists in this regard — meaning the ideal goals at a macro level — I would call for removing power from religion. As social scientists we both know how multi-faceted the elements of social power and the process of social change are. Any atheist movement, to consider a multitude of organizations collectively, would have to successfully operate in many different spheres challenging religious power in different ways. We have already seen some of this, and there has been some success. I am fond of the cultural and legal jamming The Satanic Temple (which is predicated on rational materialism and scientific inquiry so I am going to count them) has done to promote the separation of church and to combat proselytization in schools. They created a giant statue of Baphomet to compete with public displays of the Ten Commandments and produced a coloring book to compete with religious handouts when they are allowed in public schools. Most often the results of their activism are local governments ending or restricting religious symbolism and outreach rather than allowing competing faiths, like Satanists, the same privilege.

While such actions are mostly cultural, American Atheists is more specifically focused on litigation and politics. Lawsuits aren’t nearly as fun as Satanic statues, but they are part of a dynamic power structure of a country. American Atheists has also attempted to engage with the political right in the US by renting booths at the Conservative Political Action Conference. I am not a conservative, and in the US “conservative” is nearly synonymous with “religious”, but I think that sort of political outreach and information is critical to atheist legal and political goals.

Of course this leads to the point that state power doesn’t just coerce, it can also confer privilege. And this is when the state as an agent of secularization probably gets really messy if we are concerned about government coercion. For instance, some US states allow pharmacists to refuse to sell emergency contraception on religious grounds, other states mandate that they must stock and sell it despite objections on religious grounds. Certainly, ending religious discrimination against medicine is part of secularization, but I find the line between ending privlilege and using coercion muddy in this case. Likewise, in the US we have a tax rule that prohibits tax exempt groups from endorsing political candidates. This rule specifically mentions churches and imposes a punishment of removing their tax exempt status for such political activity. The goal was to create a firewall between church and state by restricting actions on both sides — political speech from churches and taxation from the federal government. However, not a single church has lost tax exempt status despite the fact that more than 2,000 clergy have intentionally defied the rule since 2008.

These are cases where I think the state is a necessary agent of secularization through the reduction of church privilege, but I am not sure how this can be accomplished separate from even just the appearance of coercion. I am curious as to where you draw the line on coercion and what state actions, past and present, you would reject. Or is this idea of secularization too ambitious? Should atheists just focus on making more atheists?

Nathan: I agree with you that secularization is more than just the number of people who are no longer religious, but is something that permeates the whole society, even those religious people within it. So you’re right that we can still see the effects of secularization even if the raw numbers of nonreligious people do not change dramatically.

Your point about coercion and state power is a good one. Clearly we would both object to governments closing down churches or criminalizing religious belief. But you’re right that government can subtly privilege religious power in certain ways, tax exemptions for example, or challenge it. For example, prohibiting the teaching of creationism in schools could, from one angle, be seen as privileging a secular worldview. But I think the key is to distinguish between a secular state and a state that promotes atheism. I don’t want to see the state promoting atheism, but I do want to see the state promoting secularism, namely, freedom of (and from) religion and not promoting any religion (or lack of religion). Of course, there is a lot of grey area here, but I think there are enough clear examples of the state supporting religion, for example in the US, that we shouldn’t get bogged down with this. Or at least, from a political activism perspective perhaps it’s not worth getting bogged down; philosophers can explore those grey areas!!

Having said all this, I think a topic for the next conversation could be to what extent reducing religious power is the most pressing political goal to work on. Sometimes I see atheists and atheist organizations spending considerable time and resources on what are in principle admirable goals, but which are comparatively trivial. For example, devoting time and resources to get approval to have a license plate that says “IM GOD,” or to prevent some town in the middle of nowhere from putting up a nativity scene. Yes, I agree in principle with these goals. But our time and resources are finite, and I do think there are more pressing issues that might be better addressed.

So, should atheist groups be focused on, say, addressing something like racial inequality? This is a complaint I’ve seen from some atheists of colour, that atheists should be working to address broader social problems rather than just, for example, the aforementioned nativity scene. I’m definitely sympathetic to this perspective. But then, if we go down this road, does it even make sense to fight for those goals within the framework of atheism?

Todd: We have definitely gotten ourselves caught in the deontology vs consequentialism debate. We both accept a materialist view of the universe best understood through the scientific method and desire this to guide all people and our ruling institutions. We both reject domination by religious authorities in worldly matters, but may support the actions of religious people and institutions based on the intended outcome or practical consequence. I think where we diverge in what we see to be the forces that drive history. When I look at secularization I conceptualize lots of organized social interests struggling for state power and enacting rules that favor their interests. (I do have a background in political science after all.) I think that when state governments decide that their schools will teach that evolution is real and that the Earth is more than four billion years old they are teaching and promoting atheism, that the material world was shaped without any god or gods, and I am fine with that.

Your perspective of secularization seems to be more bottom up. Would it be wrong to say that you see an aggregation of individual actions as the engine of history? I ask this because while I have been focusing on these macro changes and collective agents those sorts of individual interactions would be overlooked. Do you think individuals change history or that a small group of atheists could make large changes in society?

Nathan: I think that’s probably the key question all historians face. One of Karl Marx’s quotes came to mind: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” So I think it’s true that “men” (that is, people) make history, they also do so in a given social, economic, political, historical (etc.) context. They can shape that context but they are in turn shaped by it as well. So I see a dynamic interaction here between individual action and the wider context. Perhaps that answer is a cop out, but there it is!

Having said that, I do think it’s very difficult to create religious change by brute force from above. My understanding of the Soviet case is that they really struggled to impose atheism on the people who wanted to hold onto their Christian beliefs. Even with the whole weight of the state on their side, it still took decades and decades, and even then, the imposed atheism has not appeared to completely stick in Russia and other ex-communist states in the decades since the Soviet Union ended.

Just one final note before we move on to the next part. I want to push back slightly on the idea that teaching about evolution and that the earth is billions of years old is to promote atheism. Belief in evolution and an old earth are both still compatible within Christianity, although perhaps not a literalist/fundamentalist variety!

Todd: This leaves us with a lot more to discuss. I am looking forward to it.