Farewell, Fedora
New Atheism felt righteous. What did it achieve?
With Joe Barden
In late 2010, I made a pretty awful facebook post. (Several, probably, but I’m thinking of one in particular.) At the time, I was a diehard Militant Atheist, and a large part of my online energies were spent to that end. The post I’m thinking of involved a far-right christian who intended to burn a pile of Qurans in a symbolic rejection of Islam. I shared the story, and without endorsing the burning, commented that anyone concerned about the burning should consider what I saw as the Quran’s historical and ongoing antifeminism. I’m pretty sure that post lost me several friends, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and it took years for me to understand how and why what I said was wrong. The following is an attempt to trace that journey.
A Different Kind of Atheism
Not every atheist is the militant kind. You probably know dozens of atheists. Atheism is a [non]belief — that gods do not exist, and that’s it. Centered around the works of famous atheists like Richard Dawkins, a movement arose in the 2000s, calling itself Militant or “New” Atheism. Militant Atheism generally extends into antitheism: the idea that religion is inherently bad and should be wiped out as soon as possible.
There’s a couple main ways people find themselves militantly atheist. For myself, then a liberal who saw liberalism as too ‘soft’ on religion, Militant Atheism was an attractive idea. The fact Militant Atheists don’t care about the “political correctness” of not criticizing religion made it distinct from liberalism in an exciting way. The idea that you can’t, for example, ‘point out’ that “The Terrorists Are Muslim!”, was somehow a way that liberals were lying to the public; that their bleeding-heart love for all people was a risk. Militant atheists were telling hard truths to people who didn’t want to hear it, and I was excited to be one of them. People needed to hear the hard truths, and the negative response to my awful post simply confirmed my beliefs. The fact people were riled up was somehow proof that it was working.
For that reason, the movement also attracts people with anti-liberal sentiments from across the political spectrum. Under the Militant Atheist umbrella, you can be otherwise progressive and be cozy with fascists as long as you all share contempt for liberals’ inability to “tell it like it is.” In their search for something to fill the holes in liberalism, many of those on the left end up moving to the right, even if they don’t admit it.
Did we expect to change minds? Our core mentality was that shaming believers was actually helping.
Take the late Christopher Hitchens and his support for the Iraq War. Hitch had been a socialist, but found himself sitting at the neoconservative lunch table when it came to taking out Saddam. Leftist views, like opposition to American imperialism, were easily overwhelmed by his focus that the Iraqi people needed rescuing. In that way, New Atheism provides secular cover for imperialism. You don’t need to be a Crusader to support bombing the hell out of brown people; the scourge of religion is so bad in Muslim countries that we need to save them from themselves. And even Salon can see how “telling the truth” about Islam often becomes outright hatred towards Muslims:
At this point, Harris and Maher have become war trolls and fellow travelers of Dick Cheney, without even realizing it. It’s a sad fate for Maher, who was an acrid voice of resistance under the Bush administration. As for Harris, he has played an elaborate intellectual game of bait-and-switch since at least 9/11: He makes inflammatory comments about how we must wage war against Islam, or about the need to consider a nuclear first strike against a Muslim nation, and then backs away, protesting that he’s been taken out of context and actually thinks those things would be dreadful. He and Maher have provided covert aid and comfort to bigots who firebomb mosques or beat up “Muslim-looking” people at the mall, while officially being horrified by such hateful actions. They’re analogous to polite Southern whites of 1955, who did not personally use the N-word and found the Klan distasteful, but who never questioned the fundamental rightness of white supremacy.
Maher is another Militant Atheist whose politics became dominated by antitheism, and twisted by a need to show religion as the great evil in prety much any political context. Liberal sentiment, like that against violence against the Middle East, is simply swallowed by his Islamic exceptionalism. The Muslims are simply too dangerous to be left alone.
But I’m RIGHT!
If you’ve ever seen an internet argument about religion, you know that Militant Atheism has always placed an emphasis on being right. The goal is to win the ‘debate’ against the religious. That emphasis prevents the movement from having any sort of real-world relevance. What are you gonna do, scream at people until they… stop being religious? You’ve disproved the existence of god… now what? Did that save a life? You’ve made people feel silly or stupid for their beliefs. Have you improved their situation at all? Have you changed the material conditions that drove their choices?
Did we expect to change minds? Our core mentality was that shaming believers was actually helping. My facebook post was somehow telling a hard truth — as if there were no other way to tackle the oppressive elements of religion without alienating a billion human beings.
The anti-liberal mask on New Atheism provides room for social conservatism underneath.
Our gut instincts failed us in other ways. The no-fucks-given attitude of Militant Atheism certainly made it feel like we were making a break from our old politics, but the movement is squarely [neo]liberal. The emphasis on deconverting individuals, ‘ending’ religion one person at a time, reflects a bigger assumption the world is just the sum of our individual choices. Sure, there are attacks on the institutions of religion itself, but by and large the New Atheism movement focuses on individual rejection of irrationalism, shaming or pressuring individuals into changing. The causes of the ‘problem’ are beyond the scope of the assessment.
This liberal individualism is the same problem that plagues American politics. Instead of national or international action on climate change, we’re asked to change the way we each consume; instead of community-based prevention of violence, we emphasize punishment of those individuals who don’t follow the rules; instead of asking why poverty exists, we encourage individuals to stop being poor. In the same way, many Militant Atheists tell individuals not to be religious without considering why they are religious in the first place. And to the extent that investigation does happen, the conclusions don’t often lead to a change in perspective.
To be sure, some atheists do make some genuine, thoughtful attempts to explain why people are religious, and consider treating those causes instead of blaming people for choosing religion in response. But hose efforts are few and far between, and mostly carried out by those who don’t identify with the Militants.
The anti-liberal mask on New Atheism provides room for social conservatism underneath. (Again, the movement’s incomprehensible politics makes for weird mixes of ideology.) Sam Harris still hasn’t walked back his 2009 claim that “If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.” (There’s a perverse compulsion among New Atheists to ‘compare’ abstract ideas in terms of their ultimate evil; e.g. Islam is worse than Christianity, religion is worse than rape. It tells us nothing.) And the misogyny lives in the movement as well as its politics. Look at the multiple sexual harassment allegations against David Silverman or this disturbing essay by skeptic Rebecca Watson:
Richard Dawkins’ seal of approval only encouraged the haters. My YouTube page and many of my videos were flooded with rape “jokes,” threats, objectifying insults, and slurs. A few individuals sent me hundreds of messages, promising to never leave me alone. My Wikipedia page was vandalized. Graphic photos of dead bodies were posted to my Facebook page.
Twitter accounts were made in my name and used to tweet horrible things to celebrities and my friends. (The worst accounts were deleted by Twitter, but some, such as this one, are allowed to remain so long as they remove my name.) Entire blogs were created about me, obsessively cataloging everything I’ve ever said and (quite pathetically) attempting to dig up dirt in my past.
This brings us to Dawkins, perhaps the biggest name attached to the movement. His long history of misogyny and racism would require several more articles. Suffice it to say the evidence is readily available.
Humanist Atheism
There is a better lens through which to see things. The admission that religion is not the cause of all evil requires an appropriately revised atheism. Scientific atheism is rejected in favor of humanist atheism. From this beautiful look at neoliberalism and New Atheism:
“Nonbelievers tended to fall into one of two rather distinct camps that have regularly reappeared in new incarnations ever since, namely “Scientific atheism,” and “Humanistic atheism.” The former, epitomized by, among others, Victorian evolutionists, Comteans, Social Darwinists, and now the so-called skeptics and New Atheists, is a cognitive critique that sees religion as a thoroughly backward impediment to progress and focuses on promoting its eradication. The latter, whose “major pioneers” include Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and, in their own unique ways, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, and which is nowadays manifest most notably in the secular humanist movement, is a political and moral critique that “rejects the structure of a world that gives rise to religion,” and “posits that minimizing suffering and maximizing well-being and fulfillment in life are the only things likely to make religion vanish.”
By acknowledging that religion is not the cause of all the world’s suffering, we’re forced to ask what the cause actually IS. Moreover, is there just one cause? That journey requires more space than we have here, but capitalism, not religion, is the great evil.
Fighting religion is only good insofar as religion encompasses reactionary practices and institutions. If religion was at heart a right-wing phenomenon with right-wing values, leftists everywhere would remain opposed. But the history of leftist Christianity begs to differ. Look at the Diggers and the Levellers, or the Ranters. The Hussite rebellions have been described as early attempts at anarcho-communism. The German Peasants’ War of the 16th century was largely political but had strong support from Anabaptist clergy. Religion, clearly, is not incompatible with leftism.
As Murray Bookchin put it in The Third Revolution, Vol 1:
From the largely medieval peasant wars of the sixteenth-century Reformation to the modern uprisings of industrial workers and peasants, oppressed peoples have created their own popular forms of community association — potentially — the popular infrastructure of a new society — to replace the oppressive states that rule over them. Generally these popular associations shared the same goal: the de facto political empowerment of the people. In time, during the course of the revolutions, these associations took the institutional form of local assemblies, much like town meetings, or representative councils of mandated recallable deputies.
A history of people organizing themselves — i.e. a history of leftism — is incomplete without the inclusion of religiously-influenced revolts.
Humanist, leftist atheism must avoid condescension, mockery, or blame. It must reject the savior-complex of liberal/scientific atheism. Its values cannot be spread by drone strikes. It cannot fight the religious; it must grapple with the causes of religion. It has to provide people with the material conditions to grasp their own freedom from the limits religion places on us.
On the other hand, dismantling capitalism will fight the negative effects of religion.
By no means is this an abandonment of the fight against reactionary elements associated with belief. Evangelical Christianity, especially, has associated itself with the worst elements of chauvinism, plutocracy, misogyny, and racism. These must be called out. But this time, instead of assailing religion head-on, those elements of oppression will be addressed independently — and not as fundamentally religious. A focused critique, instead of a blanket attack on all religious people, prevents collateral damage to those who might otherwise be friendly to organizing. Truly, one of Militant Atheism’s greatest pitfalls is its lack of efficacy; offending people is simply a bad way to change minds. For humanist atheists, this means considering the fact that oppression like antifeminism are by no means exclusive to Islam, and understanding that no religion exists without relating to social and economic forces. For me back in 2010, this would have meant acknowledging that the antifeminist practice I blamed on Islam actually lives in the patricentric cultures that dominate most of the world.
With that said, critical thought, skepticism, and humanism are still invaluable to leftists, and these ideas are fundamental within libertarian socialism. But there, they coexist with material politics in a way that creates constructive social progress instead of just tearing people down.
In the end, the goal has changed. The total war on religion is replaced by a determined drive to push humans beyond capitalism. Why? Because the removal of every bit of religious irrationalism will not save the earth from its greatest threats. Inequality will remain at historic levels. Fascism will continue to swell. Racism (you can’t have capitalism without it) will still exist. The United States will still run concentration camps. We’ll still have plastic rain. Our worst-case climate scenarios will still arrive decades before we feared.
On the other hand, dismantling capitalism will fight the negative effects of religion. Eliminating inequality will prevent the church from using their assets to silence abuse survivors. Ending the multigenerational bombardment of Muslim countries will stanch the flow of religious terrorism. Providing social welfare will make people less dependent on unaccountable private charities. Giving people the basic necessities makes them less likely to turn to magical thinking to deal with the stresses of reality. In other words, we ‘fight’ religion not by fighting religion, but by alleviating its causes. I know now that Quran-fires only burn the bridges we desperately need; a reformed planet will need cooperation from all people, not just atheists.
There’s a popular quote from a moderate religious point of view that says “God prefers kind atheists over hateful Christians.” I truly echo this sentiment, if in reverse. As a humanist atheist, I’ll take religious activists like Martin Gugino over reactionaries like Dawkins in a heartbeat.
