It’s all a matter of ideas, and God is just one idea I don’t accept. It’s not important. I am not going out and be immoral or commit crimes because I don’t believe in God. I don’t even think about it. It’s just that I get tired of Him getting credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort. There simply is no blasted God—there is only man and it is he who makes miracles!
— Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), A Raisin in the Sun
A diary that’s currently high on the rec list smears open dissent from religious ideas and demands that we who are moved to express such things instead voluntarily silence ourselves:
I don’t care if you are an atheist (my communist dad was one) or have specific beefs with the idea of religion in general, or one particular doctrine specifically …. I don’t give a flying f**k what you believe or don’t believe. It’s your right. What I do believe is you should keep it to yourself and not spread your snide or snarkey disdain around on social media, or in comments on blogs like Daily Kos.
(Emphasis added.)
Demanding the silence of an entire massive (ir)religious demographic because an partisan opponent (the diarist identifies herself as “a priest in [her] chosen African diasporic faith”) has decided that our critical ideas consist of “snide or snarkey disdain” is outrageous and deeply reactionary. The diarist’s attacks are grounded in millennia-old bigotry against nonbelievers—and they slime a group of tens of millions of Americans who are overwhelmingly progressive and Democratic, who vote and advocate for progressive policies and Democratic candidates at rates that put every single religious demographic of anything approaching comparable size to shame.
The diarist purports to be concerned with people who “are contributing to the general nastiness” and declares that “we need to bring people together to mount a battle against the unholy cabal of fascists running and ruining our nation”—and yet, with the same breath, she demands that a historically marginalized minority forfeit our right to be open and proud about who we are and what we believe. To the contrary, it is her attacks on nonbelievers, and not our insistence on living outside of the closet she would shove us into, that “contribute to the general nastiness” and block attempts to “bring [progressive] people together.” Debasing and dehumanizing nonbelievers does nothing good; it merely commands us all to genuflect to the power of our religious superiors. It has no place in progressive communities—and it won’t work.
Nonbelievers’ Silence is the Standard, Bigoted Demand of Religious Privilege in America.
A “disturbing message” on a Des Moines bus
The diarist, of course, is far from the first person to argue that the only acceptable nonbeliever is a silent nonbeliever. Americans have held deep and widespread bigotry against atheists for centuries, as University of Minnesota sociologist Penny Edgell explained in a companion piece to her 2016 study regarding a particular kind of prejudice:
Atheists offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years. .... It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as everyone shares a common ‘core’ of values that make them trustworthy—and in America, that ‘core’ has historically been religious. .... Our findings seem to rest on a view of atheists as self-interested individuals who are not concerned with the common good.
This antipathy has serious consequences—as the author of a mid-aughts UCLA Law Review article found when he studied the role of religious skepticism in child custody disputes. The author found more than seventy published cases over the course of the prior thirty years in which an atheist, agnostic, or religiously apathetic parent was denied custody in favor of a more religious parent. In each of the seventy-plus cases, the court cited as one basis for its decision that the skeptical parent could not be trusted to provide a proper religious upbringing for her or his children.
A few years later, an atheist and agnostic organization called Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers (IAF) raised money to post an advertisement on city buses operated by the Des Moines area public transit system (DART). The central content of the ad was the words “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone” set against a blue sky.
The backlash to the advertisements was immediate. Complaints flowed into DART demanding that the ads be removed. One DART driver refused to get in and drive his bus with the ad posted on it. After three days of being inundated with hate mail, DART openly breached its contract with the atheist organization and removed the ads.
Asked to comment on the controversy, Iowa Governor Chet Culver—a DEMOCRAT—told the press that he “was disturbed personally ... by the advertisement. I can understand why other Iowans were also disturbed by the message that it sent.” Asked whether he believed that IAF had a free-speech right to buy ad space on city buses, Culver responded that that was a question “for the attorney general and for legal scholars. … But I do again understand that people were actually not wanting to get on the bus, they were so disturbed by the message that was being sent.”
That message, again, was: “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.”
That is the bigotry—the expectation that nonbelievers be neither seen nor heard—that the diarist is wielding in her demand that each of us nonbelievers “keep” our identities and ideals “to yourself and not spread your snide or snarkey disdain around on social media, or in comments on blogs like Daily Kos.”
Just like (1) Governor Culver, (2) the objecting bus driver, and (3) untold numbers of riders outraged by a bus sign announcing the offensive fact that there are atheists (!!!) living in the Des Moines area, yesterday’s diarist contends that religious people—who enjoy extraordinary privilege and power by virtue of their membership in the religious majority—have the right to demand the elimination of nonbelievers and our critical ideas from the public square. Though believers happily exercise their right to announce, praise, and proselytize their own religious ideas at will, shouting them from the proverbial rooftops (and Daily Kos comments!), Culver and the diarist argue that any open dissent from those same ideas is a violation of the believers’ right to be free from distressing remarks they unilaterally deem “disturbing” or “snide or snarkey disdain.”
Which is to say that Culver’s comments on the “disturbing” nature of “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone” and the diarist’s savaging of “snide or snarkey” atheist “disdain” are the same attack: they both declare that we nonbelievers only possess the right to live openly to the extent that we are willing to genuflect to religiously privileged believers’ comfort. Meanwhile, that comfort not infrequently requires us to simply disappear. Our ads are removed from buses; our ideas are censored; we are muzzled and erased from community life.
The demand for the silencing of this minority is blatantly incompatible with the reality that atheists, agnostics, and others who openly challenge and criticize religion(s) are fully human beings with every bit as much right to critique some of the most powerful and consequential ideas in the world as believers have to advocate those same ideas. To demand silence—“keep it to yourself”—from someone for merely disagreeing with your views is a denial of their basic humanity.
It won’t work. We won’t accept it. We will not be silent just because our ideas (if not indeed our very existence) make the members, fans, and defenders of the religious hegemon uncomfortable.
Don’t believe in God? You are not alone, and there is no just reason for you to be quiet about it.
The History of American Religious Doubt and Critique is Studded With BLACK Heroes.
Hubert H. Harrison (1883-1927)
Show me a population that is deeply religious, and I will show you a servile population, content with whips and chains, contumely and the gibbet, content to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the waters of affliction.
— Hubert H. Harrison (1883-1927)
Perhaps sensing that the longstanding American societal prejudice against atheists and the broad public support for shutting us up (see, e.g., the Des Moines bus controversy, above) is an insufficient foundation for her program, yesterday’s diarist introduces a second premise: that open critiques of religion should be eliminated from the public square because they allegedly make Black folks in particular unhappy. After noting that “clearly Black Americans are the voting block who overwhelmingly votes for Democrats,” she declares:
Trashing the death of Pope Francis, and religion in general shows me you have no clue about Black Catholics, Black religious voters, our history and our present day Democratic electoral demographics.
This argument is bizarre on multiple levels.
First, the notion that one of the most powerful political figures in the world and overwhelmingly powerful belief systems (i.e., “religion in general”) should be exempted from criticism because, it is claimed, Black Catholics and Black religious voters are offended by such critiques is an extraordinary attack on the notion of free inquiry. Political figures are necessarily fair game for criticism. Ideas cannot be sealed off from challenge and critique just because their proponents prefer it. Demanding that an irreligious minority be muzzled because its ideas offend the privileged sensibilities of the religious majority is blatantly tyrannical and untenable on any principles that deserve to be called progressive or liberal.
From pewresearch.org (link in text)
Second, if it is purely “voting block[s] who overwhelmingly vote[ ] for Democrats” who matter here, one wonders why the diarist has no interest whatsoever in the political behavior of American atheists and agnostics. In point of fact, that group—which numbers approximately thirty million people, almost exactly equal to the population of Texas, the second-largest state in the Union—is also by far the most Democratic and the most liberal (ir)religious demographic of anywhere near that size in the country. Atheists are fifteen points more Democratic-leaning (+67 to +52), for example, than Black Protestants are. And oh, by the way, “Atheists are the Most Politically Active Group in the United States.” There is no thirty-million-strong group of Americans who votes, volunteers, and advocates for progressive policies more consistently and actively than atheists and agnostics do. (Moreover, a disproportionately large number of us are LGBTQ, and a million and a half of us are Black.)
So if Democratic political orientation and activity really is what it takes to have one’s ideas about religion treated respectfully in progressive circles, then atheists and agnostics ought to be among the most honored and listened-to people on the entire American political left. Oddly, though, yesterday’s diarist completely ignores this—showing no concern whatsoever about alienating or offending nonbelievers when she demands we keep everything we believe about religion to ourselves. What happened to the urgent concern for “present day Democratic electoral demographics”?
Finally, the diarist’s attempt to conscript Black Americans writ large (that is, “the voting block who overwhelmingly votes for Democrats”) into her attempt to silence irreligious critique constitutes an outrageous erasure of major strains of both Black and nonreligious history. Specifically, Black activists, writers, and intellectuals are among the greatest heroes in the history (and present!) of American atheism and criticism of religion. And Black folks have authored some of the most incisive, and not infrequently cutting, critiques of religious ideas that the nation has ever seen.
The diarist offers the umpteenth citation of the religious leaders of the Civil Rights movement, ignoring the fact that this is among the least surprising historical developments imaginable in light of the overwhelming power religion has always possessed (along with the concomitant bigotry against atheists—see that Des Moines bus, above) in this country. Religion holds overwhelming social and political power, and open atheism is deeply stigmatized, not least for Black Americans. That dominance, and the persecution of dissenters from it, shapes who can viably lead any kind of mass movement—and it did so only more powerfully decades and centuries ago.
But the diarist’s, er, “snide or snarkey disdain” toward nonbelievers notwithstanding, atheists and agnostics (most of them Black) were in fact vital to the Civil Rights movement, in the same way that nonbelievers were and are vital to every other social justice movement in American history:
Asa Philip Randolph, known as the "grandfather of the civil right movement", founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the man who conceived of the March on Washington and was its director and one of its founding chairmen, where MLK gave his famous "I have a dream" speech, was an overt atheist.
So was Bayard Rustin, the strategist and organizer of the March on Washington and its deputy director. Rustin, an openly gay atheist, was MLK's closest advisor and mentor.
So was James Farmer, founder of C.O.R.E. and a founding chairman of the March.
So was Walter Reuther, leader of the United Auto Workers and a founding chairman of the March.
And Eugene Carson Blake, a founding chairman of the March.
As was James Foreman, founder of SNCC, the Student non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
[….]
Civil rights was never presented by the actual activists (including my father), as a "Protestant" movement, and the African American intellectual movement of the time included many freethinkers and atheists such as W.E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes and Freeman Douglass - and other leaders of the Harlem Renaissance such as Hubert H. Harrison, George Schuyler, and Chandler Owen. who cofounded The Messenger with Asa Philip Randolph.
— longtime Kossack RandomActsOfReason
More to the diary’s central point of allegedly impermissible expression, the long and distinguished line of outspoken Black nonbelievers are responsible for well over a century's worth of severe critiques of religious belief that make an ordinary impious Daily Kos comment look like chicken feed. In addition to the Hansberry and Harrison passages I’ve quoted above, there are countless more in the historical record—for example:
On the horizon loom a growing number of iconoclasts and Atheists, young black men and women who can read, think and ask questions; and who impertinently demand to know why Negroes should revere a god that permits them to be lynched, Jim-Crowed, and disenfranchised.
— George Schuyler (1895-1977)
As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion. I’m an atheist, and Christianity appears to me to be the most absurd imposture of all the religions, and I’m puzzled that so many people can’t see through a religion that encourages irresponsibility and bigotry.
— Butterfly McQueen (1911-1995)
God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958-)
The key figure in the Christian faith involves a story of suffering so that others do well. You're only going to get so much liberation, you're only going to get so much transformation, from a system that is based on suffering.
— Anthony B. Pinn (1964-)
The quotations I’ve shared above (which are far from an exhaustive list) represent the full-throated, historically grounded voices of Black intellectuals, scientists, artists, and activists who did not and do not mince words in their critique of religion. Their rhetoric, like that of countless other nonbelievers both present and past, is not “snarkey”—it is incisive, defiant, and utterly unapologetic. Their critiques merit respect and—if one is interested in the topic—substantive engagement, not religiously privileged fury that anyone dares to express such ideas.
In any case: before she even demands that religious believers’ fragile sensibilities be assiduously protected from every impiety that resembles the ones quoted above—again, the central command is “keep it to yourself”—yesterday’s diarist smears those same ideas, right in the title of her diary, as “white-privileged.” That is, again, an objectionable erasure of vital strains of both Black and freethinking history, and it should not go without opprobrium in this community.
I’ll give the last word in this diary to present-day Black queer secular activist Bria Crutchfield:
Bria Crutchfield
I am a black woman, lesbian and atheist. I fight for the underdog because no one fought for me. My being an atheist is an integral part of my being and it'll be a cold day in hell before I sweep myself under the rug in order to assuage the masses.
--
Edited to Add:
(Whoops—sorry, Bria. I’m stepping on your mic drop. It was inspiring nonetheless.)
I’m heartened to see, from the comments below, that my objections resonated with a large number of Daily Kos community members who also found yesterday’s diary offensive and inappropriate for reasons similar to mine. (That diary—or perhaps more pointedly, the diarist—clearly has passionate defenders as well. At least a few are even more dismissive of the idea that critical commentary on religion has any legitimate place in public discourse, here or elsewhere.)
But setting aside the substantive points made above, I think the number of commenters who responded to this diary by saying it reflected their own experiences and perspectives suggests something broader: that many Kossacks—most of us atheists or agnostics—read yesterday’s post as a serious and unjustified attack on our right to voice how we see the world. That suggests a real community problem in how religion, and dissent from religion, are treated in our discourse.
Whatever else you may think of those of us whose perspective on religion is predominantly critical, we’re not going away. Telling us to shut up has never been constructive—and it never will be.
