The Varieties of Nonreligious Experience

Atheism in American Culture

Jerome P. Baggett

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781479884520
• eBook ISBN: 9781479867226
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Atheism

A fascinating exploration of the breadth of social, emotional, and spiritual experiences of atheists in America

Self-identified atheists make up roughly 5 percent of the American religious landscape, comprising a larger population than Jehovah's Witnesses, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus combined. In spite of their relatively significant presence in society, atheists are one of the most stigmatized groups in the United States, frequently portrayed as immoral, unhappy, or even outright angry. Yet we know very little about what their lives are actually like as they live among their largely religious, and sometimes hostile, fellow citizens.

In this book, Jerome P. Baggett listens to what atheists have to say about their own lives and viewpoints. Drawing on questionnaires and interviews with more than five hundred American atheists scattered across the country, The Varieties of Nonreligious Experience uncovers what they think about morality, what gives meaning to their lives, how they feel about religious people, and what they think and know about religion itself.

Though the wider public routinely understands atheists in negative terms, as people who do not believe in God, Baggett pushes readers to view them in a different light. Rather than simply rejecting God and religion, atheists actually embrace something much more substantive—lives marked by greater integrity, open-mindedness, and progress.

Beyond just talking about or to American atheists, the time is overdue to let them speak for themselves. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in joining the conversation.

Part I

Getting the Lay of the Land

Identifying as Atheist

1

Well, I’ll Be Damned!

Considering Atheism beyond the “Popular View”

In the absence of any serious investigations, what has been believed about irreligion is whatever constitutes the “popular view,” and on a subject such as this the opinions of the general public are notoriously unreliable. In general, opinions about irreligion were forged in the white-hot furnace of emotion surrounding the great religious debates of the late nineteenth century. At the time both sides were capable of believing almost anything to the disadvantage of the other, and although now the furnace has burnt very low, underlying attitudes linger on.

—Colin Campbell, Toward a Sociology of Irreligion (1972)

Considering American Atheism in the Twenty-First Century

It has been nearly half a century since the distinguished British sociologist Colin Campbell first directed his colleagues toward atheism and other species of irreligion as topics worthy of serious consideration. Relatively few, however, especially those living and working in the United States, have followed his lead.1 Both “push” and “pull” factors have likely swayed them from doing so. American sociologists’ frequent lack of interest in matters pertaining to religion has been the primary push factor. Considerably more secular than the public at large, they also score lower on most measures of religiosity than their scholarly peers from other academic disciplines.2 Many have also subscribed to a particularly strong version of the secularization thesis—prominent among the highly influential founding generation of social scientists—that tends to equate increasing modernization with decreasing levels of piety and, in many colleagues’ estimation, renders the empirical exploration of religion- or irreligion-related topics scarcely worth the effort. Plenty of researchers, including those advocating subtler versions of this thesis, have disagreed with this assessment, certainly.3 After all, the zero-sum model that equates more modernity with less religion and vice versa, while alluringly simple, does not correlate especially well with the more complicated reality of religion’s persistence in contemporary society.4

Yet, the lion’s share of those who have acknowledged this reality and have been indeed interested in such topics have long found themselves pulled in other directions. At about the time Professor Campbell was writing his ground-breaking book, many sociologists were being drawn to such “new religious movements” as Scientology, Hare Krishna, and the Unification Church (the “Moonies”) as fascinating venues for research. Shortly thereafter, the equally unexpected emergence of traditionalist piety, especially the politically active “Religious Right,” commanded scholars’ attention. Next came what was dubbed “New Age” religion as well as the newfound visibility of those who, bristling at denominational labels and other group-based religious identifiers, took to calling themselves “spiritual but not religious.” Then the focus turned to the new institutional “carriers” of people’s religious commitments that included small groups, community organizations, social movements, and the like. And so it went. With each passing decade, Americans’ ever-churning religious marketplace supplied observers with more than enough new products to draw their attention away from the nation’s minority of religious nonconsumers.

Things seem to be changing, though. Scholarship in this area has been growing as, within only the last decade or so, public expressions of atheism have become ever more visible. Comic performances such as Bill Maher’s film Religulous and Julia Sweeney’s one-woman show exploring her Letting Go of God have found large audiences and stirred much media interest. The same goes for a number of documentaries, the most notable being The God Who Wasn’t There, The Atheism Tapes, and The Unbelievers. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (also known as Pastafarianism), a spoofing of religion prompted by the Intelligent Design movement’s influence within public schools, has become an Internet sensation. The number of atheism-related online support networks, forums, podcasts, blogs, and videoblogs is dizzying, and seems to grow daily. And this groundswell of discourse is increasingly complemented by important voices from on high. In his 2009 inaugural address, President Barack Obama spoke to what he hailed as “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.”5 Even Pope Francis, in a lengthy editorial printed on the front page of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, responded to questions about atheism by telling readers that “God’s mercy has no limits” and, he continued, “the question for those who do not believe in God is to abide by their own conscience.”6

Adding to this enhanced visibility are local atheist organizations that, due mostly to the cultural contretemps that often ensue when publicizing themselves, are also finding their way onto people’s “radar screens.” In one instance we hear about the Los Angeles United Atheists adopting a local strip of highway and then complaining publicly when vandals, theists presumably, etched out the A on their sign.7 In another, the Colorado Coalition of Reason created a brouhaha when, during the Christmas season, they sponsored eleven billboards bearing such messages as “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone” and “Why believe in God? Just be good for goodness sake.”8 In yet another, we read in the New York Times that a Habitat for Humanity affiliate would not allow volunteers from a South Carolina secular humanist group to build houses while wearing their “Non-Prophet Organization” T-shirts.9

Despite the pushback they can receive, local initiatives like these are proliferating, often in conjunction with nationally organized ones doing the same. For decades the American Atheists, founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair in 1963, was virtually the only national-level atheist advocacy organization known to the public. Now many others, almost all founded within the past decade or two, are coming onto the scene and expanding. For example, Camp Quest—a network of secular-themed summer camps for children—is currently in over a dozen locations across the country. The Secular Student Alliance, the national umbrella organization for campus-based atheist and humanist groups, had fewer than fifty affiliates in 2007; now it has nearly four hundred established at colleges and universities from coast to coast. Held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the 2012 Reason Rally, the so-called Woodstock for atheists, was able to attract an estimated twenty thousand people and also publicize the event to many more, mainly because of the coordinated effort of nearly twenty distinct national organizations. Running the gamut from the United Coalition of Reason to the Freedom from Religion Foundation, from the American Humanist Association to the Skeptics Society, from the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations to the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, and everywhere in between, a full description of such organizations could fill the remaining pages of this book. Suffice it to say that they, along with the events they sponsor, the magazines they publish, and the websites they maintain, have all helped American atheism go public.

Maybe the best indicator that atheism is finding a place within the wider culture is the unexpected popularity of four books—all best sellers at some point—that take aim at religion: Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (2005); Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006); Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006); and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007). These books are generally regarded as comprising the vanguard of what has come to be known as the New Atheism. This term is misleading in that neither atheism in general nor these books’ arguments in particular are without precedent. What is new for the American context, in addition to their appealing to a large readership as well as augmenting (sometimes inspiring) additional works by both lesser-known atheists and theistic critics alike,10 is their offensively defensive quality. In other words, rather than trying to understand religion (presumed to be almost wholly nefarious) or religious people (presumed to be almost uniformly fundamentalist)—or even bother to engage religion scholars who do—they take the offensive and seek to explicitly eradicate religion. This posture is compounded by a kind of defensiveness that would be unfamiliar to an earlier, more secularly triumphant generation of atheists that includes such familiar figures as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Unlike these and other “old” atheists, their present-day counterparts express a call-to-arms urgency and conviction that, rather than being on the ascendancy, secular ways of thinking and living are in fact being assailed by religious publics from seemingly all sides.

Why these authors, commonly known as the “four horsemen” of the New Atheism, have become such well-known intellectuals and why their books have sold so briskly are enquiries that beg the larger, more encompassing question of why a cultural space for public expressions of atheism opened up when it did. No doubt a confluence of factors was at play here. Two of these—the emergence of Islamic terrorism and the political traction the Intelligent Design movement has gained within America’s public schools—have been highlighted by each of the New Atheist authors. The fact that Sam Harris began writing The End of Faith the day after 9/11 provides some grounds for speculating that this event may have had a comparable anti-religion effect among the broader populace. And while Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are distinctive for each having written important books on Darwinian theory, many Americans have no doubt shared their fed-up-with-faith reaction to the imposition of a religious agenda that Creationism (among other political initiatives advanced by religious conservatives) represents.11 A third factor facilitating atheism’s greater visibility is the emergence of what one scholar calls a widespread “societal cynicism concerning organized religion.”12 One wonders, for example, if Christopher Hitchens’s subtitle, “How Religion Poisons Everything”—not just some or even many things—would seem so plausible to Americans were it not for their all-too-vivid awareness of certain televangelists’ financial misdealings; former National Association of Evangelicals president Ted Haggard’s troubles concerning drugs and male prostitutes; the Catholic Church’s pedophile scandal; religious organizations’ opposition to stem-cell research and same-sex marriage; and so on. Fourth, even if it were the case that a proportion of Americans have perennially deemed the influence of religion to be unvaryingly poisonous, the end of the Cold War seems to have made it easier to actually voice this opinion. With the fall of “Godless Communism,” expressions of irreligion, while still often stigmatized, no longer smack as alarmingly unpatriotic as they once did. Finally, these expressions are being heard and corroborated to a previously unimaginable degree with the emergence of the Internet. Given that atheists have long been a scant, often “closeted” segment of the population, it would be difficult to overemphasize this as a factor in helping people to connect with intellectually compatible others, consolidate their identities as atheists, and then “come out” in ways that feel appropriate to them. Thanks to the Internet, observed David Silverman, the current president of American Atheists, “there is no way that a person who is an atheist can think they’re alone anymore.”13

They can, however, rightly think of themselves as being misunderstood by the majority of their fellow citizens. Filling the void left by sociologists’ (and others’) chronic inattention to contemporary atheism has come what Professor Campbell called the “popular view,” which, as when he first reflected upon it, remains “notoriously unreliable.” This viewpoint is unreliable because it is largely reductionist. In the course of their everyday thinking, in other words, people tend to reduce the complicated and multifaceted reality of atheism to something they cursorily presume to be simple and clear-cut.

Before exploring this tendency in greater detail, it is worth noting that reductionist thinking is a two-way street, and it has been well travelled by both cursory and critical observers of religion. On the most basic level, discussion about, critiques of, or dismissiveness toward this thing called “religion” all neglect the reality that no such thing truly exists. There are actually many religious traditions throughout the world, and these all have complex histories and hand on quite disparate teachings and practices that influence adherents’ lives in equally disparate ways. This might be obvious to most readers. Nevertheless, even more analytically minded treatments of religion can fall prey to this reductionist tendency. A classic sociological example is Karl Marx’s eminently disdainful harrumph that religion functions primarily as the “opium of the people,” an ideological bromide that lulls the exploited masses into a listless state of political quiescence when, in his view, they ought to mobilize themselves and surmount the forces oppressing them.14 Neglected here is the reality that, while some manifestations of religion function in the very manner Marx described and surely witnessed throughout much of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, this is hardly true of all. Just as often, as innumerable studies of the long-standing connection between religion and political engagement have shown, religiously derived ideas and networks can function as a kind of “amphetamine of the people,” stirring them toward collective action of all kinds. This too may be obvious to readers, especially in light of the role that American religious institutions and publics have played in sustaining broad-based political initiatives that range from the civil rights movement decades ago to the pro-life movement today.

Still, reductionism has not necessarily gone out of style. All four of the aforementioned New Atheist writers, for example, depict religious faith as belief without evidence and, in doing so, reduce religion to intellectually vapid propositions about the natural world. To Richard Dawkins, religious faith, which he describes as a “persistently false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence,” is really nothing more than shoddy science.15 “Thanks to the telescope and the microscope,” exults Christopher Hitchens in agreement, “[religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important.”16 Approaching religion this way, though, is tantamount to a confusion of genres. It is something akin to disparaging Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis for being an extremely poor entomology textbook or to carping about certain astronomical inaccuracies charted in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. The fact is that most religious people in the United States see little overlap or conflict between religious and scientific claims, and since they think of faith as being about connecting them to something supernatural, they often find dis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I. Getting the Lay of the Land: Identifying as Atheist
• Part II. Digging a Bit Deeper: Cultivating Atheist Sensibilities
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A. The Varieties of Nonreligious Experience: Interview Schedule (E-mail Version)
• Appendix B. The Varieties of Nonreligious Experience: A Demographic Snapshot
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author