In the early 2010s, when I was still working at Trinity College’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC), the question of why the nones -then 15% of the adult population- weren’t better represented in politics was often asked in conversations I had. As I have explored in earlier articles, the situation has improved in the past decade, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

At the time, about one-in-six adults in the U.S. were nonreligious and growing. Theoretically, the secular movement could transform the political landscape with a well-executed outreach strategy. But in the era of New Atheism, much of the leadership was more interested in gatekeeping and would prefer not to engage with the “spiritual but not religious” crowd. Instead of building a movement that capitalized on the growing distrust of religious institutions, outreach campaigns of the era doubled down on godlessness with vague and counterproductive billboards.

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It was weird to double down on atheism because most people have no issues with God because it does not exist. Many “nones,” as the nonreligious are usually called, believe in what I call “fuzzy theism.” They may believe in some higher power, though it is not clear that it also means that the higher power can influence events on Earth. This higher power is likely neutral or good in some vague way or maybe a force or energy that binds us. As I said in part one of this post, they are “practical atheists.” Even when they believe in the supernatural, that supernatural is not likely to be the cranky and fearful Yahweh.

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Millions of people realized they did not identify with or care about religion. Many were people raised in interfaith households that rarely discussed religion as a means to keep the peace. Others were raised nominally religious, maybe baptized, but rarely, if ever, practiced it. And others left religion, either because it was useless (they realized there’s no God) or the experience harmed them.

In the previous decades, the Christian Right had wedged itself to power by taking over the Republican Party. The raw dominionist ideology we now label Christian Nationalism was boiling in there. The height of the Catholic Church abuse scandals was a recent memory. September 11 was still in the minds of many people. In other words, religion, whether it was different strands of Christianity or Islam, was facing a crisis of trust. The people leaving religion were not rushing to join more liberal or inclusive congregations. Many were taught that “God is good” but saw that God’s representatives weren’t as much. People didn’t have an issue with God; they had an issue with religion.

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Unfortunately, the era’s strategy was to focus on, ironically, “religious atheists.” The group that answers that their religion is “atheist” in surveys. Even when the era’s main source of religious data (Pew’s 2014 Landscape Survey) showed that the “nothing in particulars” included many nonbelievers and even more skeptical of religious practice, furthermore, the “religious atheist” contingent was, and still is, mostly comprised of white men. Thus, doubling down on atheism hindered the diversity of the communities. Even when the language of diversity was spoken, the programming based on discussions about the existence of God and making fun of religion wasn’t going to attract faces much different from the ones already in attendance. The movement is changing; some organizations like American Atheists, Atheists United, and the Center for Freethought Equality are doing excellent work in broadening the networks the secular movement relates with. But we essentially wasted a decade pandering to an audience there already without seriously understanding the sectors where growth was most likely to come from.

Other news

• Excellent piece by Jasmine Banks in OnlySky about the real things our movement should be fighting against (hint: not God, since there’s none). My favorite sentence: “The old tactics and narratives of meeting for book clubs to chat about philosophy, publicly mocking and shunning religious people, and refusing to heal from religious trauma are not reaching the audiences you need the most.”
• Hemant writes about a new Pew poll about Americans’ attitudes toward religious groups with a guest appearance from yours truly and my good friends Drs. Phil Zuckerman and Melanie Brewster.