If you’ve been paying attention remotely, you probably know that Richard Dawkins is the most prominent vocal atheist out there, by a long shot. As I write this, his book The God Delusion is at, in various forms, places 1, 3, 5, and 10 in the “atheist” section of Amazon’s bestsellers list (which changes frequently, of course — but he tends to stay in the top ten), even though the book was written seven years ago. Everything he says seems to polarize people; bloggers seem to pay attention to his Twitter feed like meteorologists do wind speeds. So, it seems, people have looked at him as a major representative of atheist views.
But I don’t think it would be right to say that he is the face of atheism. Because I’ve yet to find a monolithic definition of who atheists are, besides the fact that they don’t believe in God or gods. Every time I’ve remotely touched on the subject, I keep bumping up against the fact that there are several differences in the way my atheism impacts my life, compared to the way atheism affects other people’s lives. I’ve come to relate to other atheists, yes — but I’ve also come to see that calling my atheism, “my atheism” is a necessary clarification, oftentimes, when I’m talking about my lack of belief in God or gods — it’s not easily applicable to anyone else. So I feel a little out of place when someone says “Richard Dawkins is the face of atheism,” because atheism’s impact on his life does not automatically seem to necessarily apply to the affect an atheistic stance has had on my life. Even though I’m an atheist, I’m not Richard Dawkins and thus can’t, in many ways, relate to his specific position.
I mean, In spite of the media trying to say, occasionally, that he somehow is the face of my atheism, we don’t have a ton in common. I mean, to start with, we actually look totally different. I swear; here, look:
I know it might be hard to tell us apart, but it’s true. We’re two different people. In case you didn’t notice, I’m not a white male who is a major figure in evolutionary biology, has written several bestselling books, and has lived in the ivory tower of privilege his whole life. I’m in my thirties, not my seventies. I’m black. You can’t hear us now, but I don’t have anything even closely resembling a British Accent. And I know relatively little about the evolutionary process – my deconversion was due more to philosophical problems with the biblical text, in addition to the unreliability of the Bible’s accounts and the fact that a lot of it didn’t mesh with practical experience. Learning in biology had almost nothing to do with it.
In some ways — sure, I have a bit of respect for Richard Dawkins. For one, I like his straightforward stance against religion. But at the same time, I do think that when he discusses social issues and other elements within the realm of the humanities, he is, to put it mildly, at times a bit crude. And, like other atheists, I hate being associated with that crudeness.
It’s not like I’m trying to get rid of Dawkins — like I said, I think he has some valuable things to say, as other people do. But I don’t want to have that one perfect leader I follow or am thoroughly associated with, 24/7…when I was religious, I did that, and I don’t want to go back.
I guess I just want to be my own person. I want things set up so that when people see me they see ME instead of automatically associating me with the New Atheists (or, for that matter, with anti-new-atheists like Greta Christina). Yeah, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris had something to do with my deconversion – just seeing them out there, speaking out against religion strongly, with occasional wit and brilliant rhetoric, was pretty helpful for me. But beyond that, they they weren’t all that important to me. I mean, if I wanted information on the reliability of scripture, I turned more to the likes of Bart Ehrman. If I wanted information on philosophy, I turned to the likes of Jean Paul Sartre and Nietzsche. If I wanted information on feminism, I found that Judith Butler and bell hooks had awesome things to say. If I wanted to relate to a voice that reacted to the hypocrisy of white Christianity’s treatment of blacks in America, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. DuBois are examples of people who had my ear. If I was struggling with figuring out dynamics of power in how religion worked, Michel Foucault seemed helpful. If I want a feminist perspective on an atheist issue I’ll check out Greta Christina, Rebecca Watson, or Sikivu Hutchinson. If I’m looking for a trans atheist perspective on an issue, I may take a look at Zinnia Jones or Dori Mooneyham. And so on.
Your list may be different than my list, and that’s fine, because that’s not the point — the point is that neither Richard Dawkins, nor any of the four horsemen, has to define one’s break from Christianity or a continued irreligiousity — I got information, filtered it through my own calculus, and eventually found that the evidence seemed to point away from religion; so I left. And to this day, I have yet to find any atheist I agree with on everything; I see myself as an individual with a unique set of social forces and interests working in me that have given me a unique perspective.
Part of this sense of authority I have over my perspective was nurtured in leaving religion, because when I left church I was kinda making a point out of leaving groupthink. I had no desire to unthinkingly accept or seek affiliation with another incarnation of church. And, I’ve gathered, many other atheists are really insistent on this point – we didn’t, for the most part, leave to become devotees of a certain person. Most of us atheists who were formerly religious left because our own circumstances, goals, desires, and standards of rationality – our own minds, our own sociological positions, and our own psychologies — ran directly counter to some aspect or another of religion’s groupthink. Or at least, that’s what I hear.
I mean, let’s face it: When you have something as outrageous as the miracles in the Bible, for instance, or as preposterously cruel as the doctrine of hell, or as jaw-droppingly misogynistic as the Law of Moses or the Letters of Paul, or as slavery-supporting as Philemon – when you have something with a history of many dead and tortured bodies rubber-stamped by church-defining theologians like Aquinas and Augustine and Martin Luther and John Calvin who Christians revere to this day that could use the Bible as a rubber-stamp for the deeds – when you have as many incredible lies and failed promises made from pulpits week after week, and when you are so thoroughly and extremely wrong as most religions obviously are today – when you have all that, it should be no surprise when millions of people, from a wide spectrum of former religious beliefs and ideologies, a wide spectrum of experiences in the very different groups they identify with, and an stupefying variety of temperances and tendencies and preferences, come to the conclusion that your religion just isn’t working out for them and decide to unceremoniously break up.
We are different. We aren’t all followers of one person. We are our own people, and many of us don’t want to be trapped behind Dawkins Masks. Or that of any other “atheist leader.”
So, someone might ask — if you have such a problem with being so thoroughly associated with Dawkins, why the hell are you talking about him? Why not just ignore him? Great question. Basically, looking at the media and hearing how women and minorities are afraid to say they are atheists, I think the thought that we ARE associated with the likes of Richard Dawkins and company — inside and outside what’s commonly called the “atheist movement” — is what’s holding back people more people from leaving their religion. Because, let’s face it – the demographics of atheism and agnosticism, in the United States at least (and probably other places as well), is mainly made up of white males. No, I’m not saying that just because I’m black. Look at the atheist/agnostic category below:
I’m NOT saying that white male atheists should quit being atheists; hopefully that’s obvious. What I’m saying is that that’s not the face of atheism. Richard Dawkins — and other white males — doesn’t represent the only reason someone might become an atheist, although the connotation that they do seems to have skewed atheist demographics tremendously. Sam Harris (joking — as he later claimed to be — or not) was wrong when he said, “The atheist variable just has this—it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.” You don’t have to look like a white male or be in their position to be an atheist who is pissed off about religion — which is good news for people like Katha Politt, who said recently in The Nation after a tirade over the indiscreetly sexist remarks made by the likes of Dawkins and Harris, “Why would women join a movement led by sexists and populated by trolls? If this is atheism, I’m becoming a Catholic.”
Here’s the deal: If we want to make it more socially acceptable for people who aren’t white and male to become atheists, it is becoming increasingly clear that we are going to have to break out of the media’s monolithic image of what an atheist looks like, and perhaps the way to start is to stop listening to the media talking about people who are “the face of atheism” or “atheism’s leaders” as much, and try to listen to ourselves, even though it’s hard in a geographical locations in which we are saturated with stereotypes. We have the freedom to effect change simply by enjoying the uniqueness and concerns of our own stories, and the reason why we, specifically, are not in favor of religion if we happen to be anti-theist — without feeling any obligation for our stories to smoothly mesh with anyone else’s.
And in being different, in telling your own stories, you may be surprised when the specificity of the story will allow other people who may not relate to Richard Dawkins to relate to where you’re coming from. For me, at times, I’ve even found comrades, in some instances, with religious people on fairly important issues. For example, I despise religion, for the most part – but when Ferguson and Eric Garner was in the news and I saw that the predominantly white male population didn’t see the sense of being concerned about it, I was a fan of Cornel West, and of how he could inspire people – religious and non-religious alike – to fight to make the streets safer for myself and others to walk. I can be an anti-theist when it comes to the contents of the Bible and the history of its use and the way con artist preachers line their pockets by preaching falsehoods and psychologically crippling the masses under their charge – and at the same time applaud Cornel West when he gets escorted to Jail for demanding justice for Eric Garner. Because this is ultimately my story, and it has many facets; I can identify with each of them. I don’t have to be one-dimensional or follow according to the beat of a certain drummer. I can march to my own tune, and so can you.
Sometimes, though, you need to know that you’re not alone in who you are and how you want to help the world change. And it’s entirely possible that you’ll find yourself in a demographic that, because of the current definition of what is commonly known as the “atheist community,” you may have difficulty finding it, even among your atheist peers. Although my own experience of white atheists who are personal friends indicates that there are several white individuals who make a special effort to be socially conscious, I’ve been in enough online conversations to know that this is not the norm; many think I take my stance too far. It can be discouraging – and not just for me; I’ve talked to several friends, of several races (yes, including white), who experience a similar frustration, a similar aloneness.
But the truth is that the world is that you can connect to people. You can find camaraderie by cautiously joining group – finding ones that are near your area, on meetup, or that meet virtually. There’s no law saying that you can’t occasionally cross ideological lines on one issue to help the world on another issue you feel passionately about. And commentary on your views that are written by knowledgeable writers can provide you with ways to grant yourself a dignified, well articulated understanding in ways that weren’t available to you before the read..
Also, it seems very important to not be so distracted by what the supposed celebrity “leaders” are doing that we miss out on the people right in front of our face who can bring joy to our lives, who have the capacity to make the experience of life richer and fuller. Just think — Christians in some denominations believe that people who don’t believe as they do deserve to spend eternity in hell. We just think people who disagree with us are wrong – there is no need to push things to that extreme. We have the freedom to see the beauty in every human being if we want to.
For me, atheism has also provided a tremendous opportunity to accept myself and who I am instead of measuring myself up to the Bible’s God – and as I accepted myself, I was surprised to find that I was an empathetic person without God, and that many of my goals, as far as my basic desire to positively impact the lives of other people and better know myself, had not disappeared but, in many ways, were powerfully enriched.
What I mean is that being religion-free has allowed me to explore who I am. And in that journey of self-discovery, I constantly find ways in which I am connected to others around me. Those connections have allowed me to discover love for people in places within my heart I didn’t know I had. That’s my experience; it may not be yours, but I’ve found that owning and sharing my experience connects me to the experience of others, deepening the love I feel in my heart for myself and for them.
So…I may be repeating myself, and I’ve said just about all I want to say, but I feel it may not get across if I don’t say it one more time…you are yourself. Atheism gives you freedom, should you choose it, to appreciate the locality of your social position, preferences, and tendencies in ways that can allow you to understand and connect to the world around you with less restriction from creeds written or voiced by men. Within that freedom, I’ve found a love-based right to be angry when unbased restrictions are placed on myself and others. And I don’t have to hang my head in shame every time Richard Dawkins or another atheist says something that doesn’t line up with the values and the love in my heart that I have for the world. And I think the same for you — you do you; you are not responsible for Richard Dawkins. You may appreciate some of the things he says, but there is no obligation on anyone’s part to stand with or even to strongly stand against what he says. He ain’t you, and if the media tells you different — fuck ’em.
If you’re religious…you should know that most of us don’t have just one book we all follow, or a prophet, or a leader. We’re individuals. We’re your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, your acquaintances. We’re just…us. We’re tired of being painted with a broad brush. We come from a wide range of races and former creeds, a wide range of concerns, and a wide spectrum of attitudes and orientations that are attached to each of these concerns. We’re our own people, defining “atheist” with our own experiences and through the handshakes of your friendship, even if — and largely BECAUSE — we desire a relationship with you as opposed to with an imaginary being.
And finally, a word to other atheists…if someone asks you who the face or leader of atheism is…maybe the best thing to do, in my opinion, is freely say you own your atheism and provide them with a selfie.