The day had started too early. Through bleary eyes I could just barely make out the clock on my computer screen. It said five-something. It was too early to get anything but spam on my email so, although I grimaced a bit at the prospect, I brought up the news on the New York Times website. What first caught my eye wasn't war news or the latest natural disaster, but a request for readers to submit quotes from recent literature, which were to be collected and published. I reached over, grabbed the book I was reading, and copied out a sentence that had got my attention when I read it the day before. I submitted the quote and waited for email confirmation that it had been received; but nothing came. Finally, feeling a bit frustrated, I started going through the online list of quotes that had come in. I didn't get very far before I found "my quote" already submitted by another reader. Here's what it said: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." This quote has gotten quite a bit of media play so you may recognize it as coming from Richard Dawkins's recent book, The God Delusion.
Dawkins's description of the God Yahweh captures something of the tone of his book, which is a take-no-prisoners, in-your-face presentation of the case for atheism. It's a bit remarkable that in religious America, Christian America if you want, The God Delusion had a long run on the New York Times best seller list. And Dawkins's book is not alone. Sam Harris's two books, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, and Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great have also had good runs on the best seller lists. Hitchens' book, as a matter of fact, is still on the best seller list. There have been other recent, less popular books by Susan Jacoby, Daniel Dennett, and Jennifer Michael Hecht, among others, on the same themes.
And it's not just books. There have been conferences, op-ed pieces by the score, blogs, news articles, and letters to the editor about atheism. It seems as if the hottest single religious topic in America today is atheism. Things have reached such a fever pitch that the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a prominent Christian evangelical school in California, speaking about these recent developments said, "I don't believe in conspiracy theories, but it's almost like they all had a meeting and said, 'Let's counterattack.'"
And there's some hard evidence that the interest in atheism goes deeper than a mere media phenomenon fomented by liberal elites as some religious conservatives have tried to claim. In 2006, The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press did a rather extensive study of Generation Next, young adults then between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. The Pew findings about the religious attitudes of Generation Next show some remarkable shifts in attitude when compared with other age groups and with past studies. A full twenty percent, one in five, of Nexters say that they are atheist, agnostic, or have no religion, while in 1987-1988 only eleven percent of this age group were in this category. Nearly two-thirds of Generation Next accepts human evolution, a higher proportion than any other contemporary age group. The lowest proportion of acceptance is forty-two percent in those sixty-one and older.
So there we have generational changes with time. How about changes in place? If you're looking for where "it's happenin'" in our nation, where would you look? California, of course, and you'd be right. In the San Francisco Bay Area atheists have been "coming out of the closet" in significant numbers and organizing groups such as the Santa Clara Brights, the Atheists of Silicon Valley, Atheists and Freethinkers of Contra Costa County, and the South Bay Ethical Culture Society. These groups provide a safe haven where members can express their beliefs without fear of rejection or reprisal. A member of the Santa Clara Brights said, "I joined this group so I can meet people of like minds, so I can commiserate. There's very little we can't say to each other." A member of another group described their meetings as church without the deity. Members of these groups have diversified into subgroups such as humanists, secularists, rationalists, freethinkers, skeptics, nontheists, brights, and plain garden variety atheists and agnostics. California is also home to the highest ranking government official to announce publicly his atheism. U.S. Representative Pete Stark, a Unitarian Universalist, who represents the 13th Congressional District in the Bay Area announced in March of this year that he didn't believe in God. After Stark's announcement members of various Bay Area atheist groups made it a point to show up at the Congressman's next community meeting to show their support. It wasn't necessary, everything went smoothly. Stark apparently still holds broad support in his district despite public revelation of his disbelief. So things are happenin' in California. Perhaps coming out of the atheist closet is one of those California trends that will spread its way eastward across the nation in coming years.
So far I've dwelt almost exclusively on atheism, but I usually think of nontheists as atheists and agnostics. So perhaps I should say a few words about agnosticism. There seems to be an inherent human dislike for answering maybe to a question: a firm yes or no seems so much more satisfying. Both atheists and theists seem to take a dim view of agnostics. In his book The God Delusion Dawkins has a chapter section entitled, "The Poverty of Agnosticism." In this section Dawkins accepts with some qualifications a preacher's description of agnostics as: "namby-pamby, mushy pap, weak-tea, weedy, pallid fence-sitters." Agnostics fare no better with theists. In our story today we heard Yann Martel describe agnosticism as "akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation." A nearly fifty year career in scientific research has taught me that there is often more wisdom than is commonly thought in suspending judgment on questions.
My favorite story about agnostics involves the great British philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell. In the World War I era Russell was arrested for protesting the war and was taken to jail to be booked for his crimes. The jail clerk, following the normal booking routine, asked Russell to state his religion. Russell replied that he was an agnostic. The jailer, looked a bit confused, then brightened and said, "I guess it's all right. We all worship the same God, don't we?"
So what does the recent stir over nontheism mean? I'd like to answer this question on two levels: historic and communal. But first I'd like to say what I think this new focus on nontheism doesn't mean. I don't think that we are about to be inundated with a wave of new atheists and agnostics. If we are actually headed to an era in which nontheism is more socially acceptable, then we may statistically see the proportion of nontheists rise simply because individuals will feel more comfortable with coming out of the atheist closet. I expect America in the future to be largely Christian theists, as it is now. Before I launch into my speculations about the meaning of our current focus on nontheism in our society, let me remind you of a little wisdom from the physicist, Neils Bohr. Bohr once said, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
Susan Jacoby, the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, has said that in interviews she is nearly always "asked whether I am an atheist or an agnostic." She goes on to say that, "This question reflects the 25-year ascendancy of right-wing religiosity, which has fostered a general ignorance about and lack of respect for the Enlightenment rationalist side of the nation's heritage." In our readings today we heard Gordon Wood's description of religion in America in the post-revolutionary period. Wood described a clear dichotomy between the rationalist religion of the founding elites and the democratic, emotional religion that became common in most of the population. Wood doesn't use the term, but some of the more emotional religious practices he describes arose during the years 1800 - 1830, a period that many historians call "The Second Great Awakening."
While popular evangelical religion was spreading rapidly throughout the country in the post-revolutionary period, "many of the enlightened leaders and liberal deists scarcely understood what was happening," according to Gordon Wood. It was also during this period that American Unitarianism came into full flower. At least in part Unitarianism was a reaction to the popular religion of the day. Alexis de Tocqueville, that great chronicler of early American democracy, writes in his essay, On American Government and Religion:
On the confines of Protestantism is a sect which is Christian only in name, the Unitarians. Among the Unitarians, that is to say among those who deny the Trinity and recognize only one God, there are some who see in Jesus Christ only an angel, others a prophet, others, lastly, a philosopher like Socrates. They are pure Deists. They speak of the Bible because they do not wish to shock public opinion, still entirely Christian, too deeply. They have a service Sundays; I was there. There they read verses of Dryden or other English poets on the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. A discourse is made on some point of morality, and it's done. This sect gains proselytes in about the same proportion as Catholicism, but it converts in the high ranks of society. So in some measure, according to de Tocqueville, Unitarianism was a conservative religious movement seeking to preserve the Deism and rationalism of the Enlightenment against the onslaught of popular evangelical religion. And that's the important point for us in our search for meaning in the current popularity of nontheism. Some have referred to what Susan Jacoby called "a 25-year ascendancy of right wing religiosity" as a modern period of Great Awakening. I think the modern interest in nontheism in America is a sign that after twenty-five years the modern Great Awakening is in decline, and that people are beginning to turn to more rational modes of religious thought. Modern nontheist books generally express quite different approaches to their subject, but one common theme that runs through these books is a call to reason. Is it too much to think that this might be part of their appeal to the reading public, that at least some readers see the havoc that putting aside reason for a faith-based approach has wreaked in their lives, that they want to change to a more reasoned approach, and that they want to feel the social approval for the religious freedom to make such a change?
That's end of my historical argument. Now, I'd like to say a few words about how this relates to our Unitarian Universalist community. I would not be as bold as Thomas Jefferson was in 1822 and predict that everyone in America will become Unitarian. However, I believe that if there is a shift to more reasoned approaches to religion, Unitarian Universalism will experience new opportunities to increase our membership. Our own community is already growing. Perhaps this growth is just the leading edge of what we shall experience as our nation's infatuation with right wing religiosity wanes. Just remember: "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
Our Unitarian Universalist communities house a vital and precious treasure: the uniting in common cause of individuals who freely choose their religious approach, anywhere in the spectrum from theism to atheism. The glue that holds this diversity together was best expressed four hundred years ago, it seems to me, by Unitarian Francis David with the simple declaration, "We don't have to think alike to love alike." This unity in diversity is a treasure to be shared with the larger community, and we need to do a better job in explaining this to others. Yes, we have our differences and divisions, but they are rarely theological. In a world rent by religious sectarianism and violence, our community could stand as a vision of hope and possibility. Somehow this all reminds me of that old chestnut of a question: What do you get if you cross a Unitarian Universalist with a Jehovah's Witness? The answer is: Someone who keeps knocking on doors, but has nothing to say. I'm not advocating knocking on doors. But we do have something to say, and I think we should find effective ways to say it.
That's my view from the nontheist corner on this Sunday morning. No doubt theists and nontheists will continue to debate, but I can't help thinking that our world would be much better off if it heeded the words of religious scholar Karen Armstrong: ". . .[T]he religious quest is not about discovering 'the truth' or 'the meaning of life,' but about living as intensely as possible here and now. The idea is not to latch on to some superhuman personality or 'to get to heaven' but to discover how to be fully human." Perhaps in our effort to become fully human we might grasp the true meaning of our religious quest. I think it's worth our best effort now and in the future, no matter how unpredictable that future may be. May we make it so.
Copyright © Merrill E. Milham. All Rights Reserved.