March 24-30, 2005

city beat

Losing Your Religion

Enough with the deity worship, say the Convention of American Atheists in town this Easter weekend.

by Doron Taussig

Sitting at a corner table in Lombardi's Pizza at 18th and Walnut streets, three patrons who met over the Internet quietly share their coming-out stories. "I came out when I was 16," says Diane Kinney, a library employee with a nose ring. Her Catholic mother accepted her, but "doesn't understand how I get out of the bed in the morning." Nina Rulon-Miller came out after a book by Bertrand Russell helped her realize she wasn't alone. "I remember lying in my bed, thinking, "I'm so glad I'm not the only one!'" she says. Geoff Odhner was studying to be a minister when he realized he could never meet the job's requirements. "I had to give myself permission to let go," he recalls. He was 28 when he realized what he was. But it wasn't until he was 32 that he gathered the courage to tell the world: I'm here. I don't believe in the existence of a supernatural deity. Get used to it.

These members of Philadelphia Atheist Meetup are not alone in borrowing terminology from the LGBT lexicon. Many nonbelievers consider the experience of being an atheist closely akin to being gay or lesbian. They feel marginalized, discriminated against and sometimes shunned. Tomorrow (Good Friday) and for the rest of this weekend (including Easter Sunday), several hundred atheists from across the country will gather at the Hyatt Regency at Penn's Landing in Philadelphia for the 31st Annual Convention of American Atheists. There's no unifying theme, but organized atheism has a few central goals: the separation of church and state, the need to get atheists organized and — the subtext of the movement — the need for atheists to be recognized as a minority group that suffers discrimination.

The convention is being hosted by American Atheists, an organization founded by the notorious Madalyn Murray O'Hair in 1963. Murray is often credited with putting atheism on the map — she was a major figure in the fight over prayer in public schools — but she's also blamed for personifying a negative stereotype. Murray was a veritable leftist caricature: vulgar, litigious, conceited and shrill. (After falling out with a son who became an evangelical, Murray said, "I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times. One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess.")

In part because of Murray's legacy, several rival atheist organizations have sprouted up over the years. But while there are 1 million professed atheists in the U.S. (and an estimated 30 million nonreligious people, according to the American Religious Identification Survey), none of the groups has more than several thousand members.

Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists, thinks it's difficult to organize atheists because the only thing they necessarily share is a conviction that there is no God. Johnson has also found that "atheists are not joiners." But, she says, atheists must organize in order to secure their "freedom from religion. Most politicians pander to the religious. I don't expect them to do otherwise," she says. "Atheists have bought the idea that they are "less than.' Blacks have had their black pride movement, because blacks had been made to feel "less than.' We should shout it from the rooftops: We're not going to remain second-class citizens."

How have atheists been made to feel "less than"?

In 1987, on the campaign trail, George H. W. Bush expressed his opinion on atheists: "I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." Atheists haven't forgotten this attack and say it's indicative of a general bias that manifests itself in both institutional discrimination (the Pledge of Allegiance) and individual discrimination (atheists losing jobs, being shunned by neighbors, being intimidated into silence about their beliefs). These instances happen haphazardly, and often in places where organized atheism has no toehold (like Mississippi), so they're hard to track.

But a Chester County woman tied to a different atheist organization is beginning to collect them. Margaret Downey is president of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, a member group of the national Atheist Alliance. Downey is an anti-Madalyn Murray: amiable, diplomatic, exaggeratedly patriotic. She has an adult-sized bronze Statue of Liberty in her backyard, her own little graven image. But she is also a zealous atheist. She has drawn attention for filing a lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America after they denied membership to her atheist son (her lawsuit was dismissed, and she received a lot of hate mail) and for her fight to have a Ten Commandments plaque removed from the Chester County Courthouse (also unsuccessful). She goes so far as to purchase special, pre-1954 currency that doesn't say "In God We Trust" and, failing that, to black out the phrase on legal tender.

In 1999, Downey began keeping a database of "discrimination events." She now has more than 200 cases, ranging from the seemingly petty to the evidently serious. They include a university president in Syosset, N.Y., ending meetings with prayer; a woman in Greenville, Tenn., being fired after co-workers discovered she was an atheist; a principal in Madison, Wis., collecting the names of students who declined to recite the Pledge of Allegiance; and an 11-year-old girl in Abilene, Texas, being told by a substitute teacher that she had "no right to live in America because she refused to say the "under God' [in the] Pledge of Allegiance."

Downey collects these anecdotes as proof that "atheists should be a class of protected people." Bobbie Kirkhart, president of Atheist Alliance, explains that it's important for such discrimination to be recognized. "We would like to see it acknowledged. People who are against every other kind of discrimination think it's OK to discriminate against us. Obviously, we'd like to eliminate discrimination against atheists, but the recognition of discrimination is a necessary step."

The American Atheists' Johnson isn't even sure if discrimination against atheists is illegal. The federal Civil Rights Act bans discrimination on the basis of religion, and though the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights says this covers atheists, Johnson says, "I want to be protected as an atheist. I don't want to say that I'm religious in order to have my rights protected. Technically, a court could say, "You're not included.'"

Larry Frankel, legislative director for the Pennsylvania ACLU, says he believes atheists are protected by the Civil Rights Act but applauds Downey's efforts to collect data. "There needs to be further education for them to understand that this discrimination occurs." One can already hear the conservative laments: Not only is another minority group claiming it needs protections, but atheists.

The "atheist agenda" is sometimes referred to as a nefarious plot to drive religion from the public square, to eliminate belief, to kill God. It's true that atheists can seem to have, shall we say, a lack of respect for religion. Some convention programs seem aimed at tweaking religion; consider, for example, the presentation "Holy Paraphernalia Mania," a "show-and-tell" of religious relics such as Mecca Cola, Savior Sneakers and inflatable churches.

When asked what the role of religion in society should be, Johnson says, "What's the role of medieval superstition? It belongs in a classroom where we can study it and examine the past." And in response to the common suggestion that society draws its moral bearings from religious foundations, she argues, "The God they imagine they're drawing from is a petty, vindictive criminal." Johnson believes humans get by "by cooperating."

Not all nonbelievers are equally combative. Many are unaffiliated or apathetic; others belong to groups like the Ethical Society, which considers itself a religion without a deity. (John Hall of the Philadelphia Ethical Society laments that some atheists' "version of certainty is that they're smarter than you.") Regardless of their differences, however, most nonbelievers say they'd like to encourage the acceptance of the scientific method and foster the separation of church and state. Many point to the diametrical opposition of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion and the First Commandment — "You shall have no other Gods before me" — as evidence that the two are irreconcilable. And yet they fear that society is headed in the opposite direction. "Obviously, George W. Bush is bad for the separation of church and state," Johnson says curtly.

Beyond this, most atheists say they are not particularly evangelical. For one thing, they know they can't compete with the promise of eternal life or the threat of a fiery lake; for another, they aren't plagued by the concern that their neighbors are going to burn in hell. They just don't like being alienated.

At Lombardi's, Odhner is handing out orange "Get Out of Hell Free" cards, replete with an illustration of Rich Uncle Pennybags leaping out of a fiery pit, and the discussion has moved on to the subject of alienation. Kinney finds "In God We Trust" disturbing and took umbrage after 9/11 when she was told that it "wasn't the time" for her to mention her atheism. Rulon-Miller is piqued by Christmastime ("I hate walking around, seeing all the Jesus stuff"). Odhner is bothered by the swearing of oaths in court. Kinney says the suggestion that society needs a God in order to establish a moral order is "insulting to humanity in general."

Finally, Rulon-Miller sums up what all three atheists seem to be feeling. "For me, being an atheist is very lonely. Everybody is so damn religious today."