Defining ourselves

When Jack Killen asked atheists, agnostics, freethinkers and other secularists to go underground and drop our titles, I think he passed over an essential fact of our situation. Aside from “humanist,” most of our titles are bestowed upon us by a normatively religious society.

On our own, we can’t stop being nonbelievers any more than a non-stamp-collector can stop being a non-stamp-collector. We will always be atheists to the Christian majority of this country in the same way that they were once atheists in the view of the Hellenist majority who coined the term.

I’m even inclined to argue that maintaining these titles allows us some control over their use in the same way that “gay” and “queer” have been claimed by the LGBT community.

It’s a powerful thing to point out that Joe the Monotheist’s understanding of atheism bears little or no resemblance to what atheists actually believe or practice. Such normalization and humanization of labels is how the gay-rights movement progressed to the point where gay marriage is on the table at all.

When Killen writes that “we must act as champions of reason, science and empirical reality,” I find myself agreeing but wondering whom he might be addressing. The problem seems not to be with us but that reason, science and empirical reality aren’t sexy.

They’re incredibly hard concepts to sell to people above the age of 12 who are not already interested. Worse, we have stiff competition with a wider demographic. For every legitimate science show or book, there are a host of pseudoscientific or paranormal rivals masquerading as science and doing just as well – or much better – in the ratings department.

The fact is that the real science hardly ever gains attention from non-specialized media unless it’s related to medicine or technology. The same goes for micro-level arguments against specific religious claims: They exist in great numbers, but repeating them will rarely land you an appearance on television.

Legitimate Levant archeology is concerned with details of pottery and burial styles far too obscure to be compressed into sound bites like “Jesus tomb discovered” or “Noah’s ark found again.”

I don’t mean to suggest that every atheist is another Adam Savage, co-host of the Discovery Channel television series MythBusters or Neil DeGrasse Tyson, host of PBS’s Nova, waiting to be discovered. But to a large degree, the difficulty in directing attention to more nuanced messages lies within an American media that relies on shock and controversy for ratings and believes equal time is the standard of fairness.

So long as that remains the case, a volatile Christopher Hitchens will always outsell more scholarly work.

In the meantime, I find it difficult to believe even the most anti-religious of prominent atheists are doing us a disservice considering the number of people continuously coming out as nonbelievers.

If we want to make a difference, we need to start directing people away from traditional asocial media and toward the blogs, podcasts and other new media where community is of primary importance and where the micro-level debates are already happening. It also doesn’t hurt to join local atheist organizations, like the Secular Alliance of IU, to find out what is happening and what others have to say about conversations like this.

For more information, see saiu.org.