There is something incongruously amusing about listening in on several hundred
atheists who have gathered to wallow in the exaggerated sense of grievance and
persecution that is the hallmark of identity politics. Atheists, after all,
think of themselves as superior beings, as rationalists who have succeeded in
rising above the superstition and prejudice that so blight the lives of their
fellow citizens. Shouldn't such virtue be its own reward?
Apparently not. Take, for example, Ellen Johnson, the president of American
Atheists, speaking to her fellow members at the opening of the recent national
convention in Boston. Johnson -- described in the organization's literature as
"a second-generation Atheist" and "soccer mom" -- spoke of the rage atheists
felt after the September 11 attacks. From George W. Bush to the lowliest local
official, she charged, government's response was drenched in religion.
"Atheists felt marginalized and angered," Johnson said, standing in front of a
banner that announced AMERICAN ATHEISTS: LEADING THE WAY FOR ATHEISTS' CIVIL
RIGHTS. "It's religion that caused the attack on our country," she added, "and
it's religion that divides America."
Johnson seethed as she denounced such post-September 11 idiocies as the Ten
Commandments Defense Act, which would give states the right to decide whether
to display the Ten Commandments on public property, and a decision by school
officials in Palestine, Texas, to allow a minister to lead students in
prayer.
"We are also grieving Americans, and we won't shut up and be quiet while others
break the law," she thundered -- that is, if thundered is the right word for
someone who comes across more as a carefully groomed, well-spoken K Street
lobbyist than as the fire-breathing heir of that most infamous atheist of them
all, the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair.
To the untrained ear -- to someone unaccustomed to hearing of "atheist rights"
in the same context as gay-and-lesbian rights or racial equality -- Johnson's
remarks at times seemed to border on parody. "If you are not being thrown in
jail today for not praying, thank an atheist," she said at one point. She also
announced the formation of an atheists' political-action committee. (Don't
laugh -- according to Johnson, a Libertarian gubernatorial candidate
from Colorado has already made inquiries.) And she told the crowd about a
"March on Washington for Godless America" being planned for next September 21.
The message: "We are free, proud, godless, and on the move."
As I said, incongruously amusing.
Photos by Michael Manning
 |
But once you get past the rhetoric, there remains the content of what Johnson
and others at the convention were saying. If it sounds crazy, maybe it's
because we've been so browbeaten into accepting, even embracing, religiosity in
the public sphere that it's shocking to hear anyone depart from orthodoxy. That
hasn't always been the case.
As the social critic Wendy Kaminer, herself an atheist, observed in the New
Republic some years back, Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken railed against
religion, with Mencken calling it "so absurd that it comes close to
imbecility." People don't write or talk that way anymore, Kaminer said, noting,
"Atheists generate about as much sympathy as pedophiles."
The atheistic impulse is not alien to me. Years ago, I was a staunchly secular
agnostic. These days I'm what I guess you could call a religious liberal -- a
member of a Unitarian Universalist church and someone who has no particular
beliefs beyond the vague notion that spirituality is good. So when I found out
that the atheists were coming to town, I wanted to learn more. For me, as for
many liberals, poking fun at fundamentalist Christians, fanatical Islamists,
and the like is easy -- too easy. The atheists, I suspected, posed a more
formidable intellectual challenge.
I WAS TALKING with a desk clerk at the Hyatt Harborside Hotel, at Logan
Airport, trying to figure out how I could leave and come back without incurring
another parking fee, when she smiled and asked, "Are you with the atheists?"
"No!" I replied immediately. "I'm a reporter." I paused before mumbling, "I'm
just covering them."
I felt a little guilty about my disavowal. I may have more in common with Ellen
Johnson than I do with Pat Robertson, but that didn't mean I was eager to
identify myself with the godless. Wendy Kaminer was right.
So maybe what surprised me more than anything about the atheists I met during
the weekend was not that they don't believe in God (well, duh), but that they
are so upfront and in-your-face about it. After all, what percentage is there
in giving offense to the righteous? During the convention, I heard
atheists complain not just about prayer in the schools and public invocations
of the Ten Commandments, but about crèches on government property, about
prayers at public gatherings, even about the inscription IN GOD WE TRUST on
money.
My attitude tends to be: "Who cares?" I know my views are not mainstream, and I
don't expect to see them reflected in the majority culture; all I ask is that
the majority's views not be imposed on me. The idea that nearly 300 people
would travel across the country to spend a weekend complaining about
such trivial insults -- if, indeed, they can even be considered insults --
struck me as weird.
At lunch, Lydia Rice tried to set me straight. A manufacturing engineer from
Silicon Valley (and the proprietor of a Web site called godlessgeeks.com), Rice
described herself as a refugee from a conservative religious childhood in which
women were treated as "slaves." Having overcome such an upbringing, she said,
the impulse to activism comes naturally. She was the prime mover behind a
non-religious memorial to the victims of September 11 at Golden Gate State
Park, in San Francisco. And she is quick to point out what she sees as the
damaging effects of religion on everyday life.
"There are so many religious images that are really ugly," Rice told me. As an
example, she cited the crucifix. "It's a picture of a guy being tortured to
death," she said. "Do you really want your kids looking at that? It's an ugly,
ugly vision." Again, it's a matter of perspective. If you're a believing
Christian, no doubt you'll find Rice's words sacrilegious. Personally, I hadn't
given it much thought. But yeah, she's got a point.
Rice's friend Mark Thomas, a software engineer also from Silicon Valley, called
religion a form of "mind control," adding that coming out publicly as an
atheist can be an important step in getting over that control. Religion, he
said, erects an "electric fence to keep people from leaving" -- to "keep them
from thinking thoughts that they don't want to be thought." To which Rice
followed up, "Maybe there isn't a God -- oh! I can't think that; I'm going to
hell!"
If being an atheist in Silicon Valley is hard, imagine what it must be like in
the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia. James Ramsey, the American Atheists'
state director for Virginia, lives near a small city called Harrisonburg. He
looks like the sort of person you might run into at a science-fiction
convention: young, bearded, bespectacled, and with a long ponytail, offset by a
well-tailored suit and an unusually sober demeanor.
Ramsey, whose family finds his atheism so upsetting that his brother is able to
refer to it only as "the A-word," says becoming an active, outspoken atheist
was part of his "leaving the closet -- gays and atheists both have closets."
His license plate reads ATHEISM. He recalls the time that his supervisor at the
warehouse where he works as a clerk saw him on television, protesting at City
Hall against the National Day of Prayer. He counts himself lucky that he wasn't
fired.
Occasionally, Ramsey says, he'll encounter someone who is put off by his
outspokenness and who tells him something like, "You need to remember what kind
of community you're in." Ramsey's response: "Listen, this is my community,
too."
IF THE SORT of atheism I encountered at the Hyatt was distinctly mainstream,
the path was paved by someone who was not mainstream at all -- Madalyn Murray
O'Hair, the founder of American Atheists and the victorious plaintiff in the
1963 Supreme Court decision that declared prayer in public schools to be
unconstitutional.
O'Hair was flamboyant and outspoken -- sometimes called "the most hated woman
in America" -- and she came to a nasty end. In 1995, she, her son Jon Garth
Murray, and her daughter Robin Murray O'Hair were kidnapped from her home in
North Austin, Texas, apparently as part of an extortion plot. Their bodies were
discovered in South Texas in 2001. The murders were carried out at the behest
of a former employee, who had stolen more than $600,000 from O'Hair's
organization.
One of the biggest critics of the American Atheists today is William Murray, a
son of Madalyn O'Hair who left the movement in 1980 and became a born-again
Christian. Several atheists I spoke with were surprised that Murray didn't show
up last weekend, something they say he usually does when the organization has
its convention. But Murray did take out an ad in the Boston Globe. And
he has a Web site (www.wjmurray.com) devoted to explicating the so-called
errors of his mother's ways.
"I was taught that because there was not God there was no such thing as right
or wrong," Murray says on his Web site. "My mother told me it was better to be
a homosexual than a Christian. She taught me that the most important things in
life were the physical pleasures of drink, food, and sex."
Well, if there was any serious debauchery going on at the Hyatt last weekend,
it eluded me. (Then again, it usually does.) But the convention was not without
its light moments -- not by any means.
There was, for instance, the bookstore -- a veritable laugh riot of bumper
stickers (WWJD -- WHO WANTS JELLY DONUTS?), T-shirts (PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN
ATHEIST, complete with American flag -- trying wearing that to the
7-Eleven), and books (Martin Luther: Hitler's Spiritual Ancestor --
apparently serious, but a great title nevertheless).
There was a presentation by Arlo Pignotti called "Holy Paraphernalia Mania," a
show of religious artifacts ranging from a Scientology E-
meter
to a little bronze statuette of Jesus and his dog ("I don't remember that in
the Gospels," he quipped) to something called "rumpology" -- or "ass-crack
reading," as Pignotti accurately described it -- whereby Jacqueline Stallone
(Sylvester's mom) promises to predict your future if you will merely send her a
photocopy of your butt, along with (naturally) $100. (Try Googling "rumpology"
and "Stallone." You'll be amazed.)
And there was the highlight of the weekend, the showing of a video called
Godstuff, by Joe Bob Briggs (the stage name for the writer and
tongue-in-cheek movie critic John Bloom), a hilarious compilation of clips from
religious television shows. The biggest star: Robert Tilton, a televangelist
not well-known in this part of the country, but whose rather astounding on-air
greed makes Jim Bakker look like someone who's taken a vow of poverty.
"This could be like Religious Talk Soup," quipped Briggs, who was on
hand to introduce his film and sign autographs.
DESPITE THE OUTPOURING of religiosity that followed September 11, there are
signs that we may be on the verge of a reinvigorated secularism. The Catholic
Church is in the midst of an institution-threatening crisis of its own making,
having covered up the crimes of thousands of pedophile priests over the course
of many decades. Anti-Western terrorism is being perpetrated in the name of
Islam. In the United States, two of the religious right's aging icons,
the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, have lost face and credibility
by blaming terrorism on homosexuality and the women's movement. Even the
Reverend Billy Graham, who brought President Bush to Jesus and who has long
been thought to represent evangelical Christianity's more-benign side, has been
exposed on the latest reel of Nixon tapes as a vicious anti-Semite. Ellen
Johnson herself touted a recent City University of New York survey showing that
the proportion of Americans who do not adhere to any religion grew from eight
percent to 14.1 percent during the past decade. (However, Johnson did
not share another finding with the delegates -- that just 0.4 percent of
Americans consider themselves atheists.)
So even if atheism may never be fashionable, the American Atheists' message
last weekend was certainly timely. In fact, I was hard-pressed to find any
issue of substance on which I disagreed with them, be it abortion-rights
pioneer Bill Baird's denunciation of Bernard Cardinal Law ("this cowardly man")
and the Catholic Church ("the most dangerous place for children in America") or
Why I Am Not a Muslim author Ibn Warraq's suggestion -- while noting
that recent scholarship suggests that the Koran promises holy warriors "white
raisins of crystal clarity" rather than 72 virgins -- that terrorists "abandon
their culture of death and concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this
world."
The most earnest speaker I heard was Eddie Tabash, an unsuccessful candidate
for the California legislature who talked about the need to elect atheists to
political office -- even if it involves using "stealth" measures, such as not
telling potential voters about their atheism unless they're specifically asked.
"The prejudice that voters have against us is illegitimate and doesn't deserve
to be accommodated," he said. As a comparison, he cited Congressman Barney
Frank, who didn't come out as gay until he had been safely ensconced in office
for several terms.
At the end of his presentation, Tabash half-seriously said he'd like nothing
more than to see Ellen Johnson elected governor of New Jersey someday.
"Governor Ellen!" someone shouted.
That night, as folks were filing in to watch Godstuff, I had a chance to
speak with Johnson for a few moments. I asked if she would ever consider taking
such a step. "No, because I can't leave this position," she told me. "Who's
going to do this job?" Her goals: boosting her organization's membership well
above its current total of about 2200 and opening an office in Washington.
I asked her how she made the leap from nonbeliever to atheist activist. After
all, as a "second-generation" atheist, she's presumably not trying to exorcise
any demons from her past. "When I was growing up, people didn't talk about
being an atheist," she said, comparing it -- as had James Ramsey and Eddie
Tabash -- to being gay and closeted. The euphemism she recalls being used, she
added, was that "we were just not interested in religion." She saw Madalyn
O'Hair on television for the first time in 1979 and experienced a moment of
self-recognition: "Oh, that's what we are: she's just like us." She went to her
first American Atheists' convention in 1980, became New Jersey state director,
and took over the presidency after O'Hair's disappearance.
By why? Why the urge to proclaim her atheism from every rooftop rather than
just live her life? It was hard to pin her down; she was distracted, making
preparations for Joe Bob Briggs, and she interpreted my question as being about
her members rather than herself. "If I knew that, I would have the biggest
organization -- I don't know," she said. "It's very individual. What makes a
gay person an activist?"
As I was driving to one of the sessions on Saturday, listening to NPR, I heard
Scott Simon chatting with a couple of biblical scholars about the significance
of Abraham. The discussion morphed into a consideration of Abraham's
almost-sacrifice of Isaac. How, Simon asked, could Abraham be revered for
hearing a voice telling him to kill his son while Andrea Yates is sentenced to
life in prison for essentially the same thing?
The scholars were secular, and their answers had to do with tradition and
culture and the existence of ancient sects in which child sacrifice was
commonplace. Yet I knew that in many places, on many parts of the radio dial
where NPR is not heard, the very discussion would be seen as sacrilege.
God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son," and if you've got a problem with that,
pal, you must be one of them godless atheists.
"Sometimes I shake my head," Ellen Johnson said during her keynote address. "I
am actually the president of an organization that lobbies on behalf of
reality."
Wendy Kaminer put it this way: "Faith is not a function of stupidity but a
frequent cause of it."
Identity politics can be dreary and smug and self-satisfied in its embrace of
victimhood, but it has its uses. I'm unconvinced that the atheists are as
persecuted as they think they are. Nor have they succeeded in making reality
their exclusive franchise.
But it's not a bad thing that they're here to blow away the hypocrisy and the
icky piety of what passes all too often for religious discourse in this
country.
For more information on American Atheists, visit their Web site at
www.atheists.org. Dan Kennedy can be reached at dan@dankennedy.net.
Issue Date: April 12 - 18, 2002
