Even though unreason of various forms can be a dangerous thing, there are few of us who don\u2019t occasionally take comfort in some sort of convenient fiction (or potential fiction) \u2013 whether it be that our sports team is the best, or that that the look we received was innocent, rather than evidence that the people across the room were saying nasty things about us.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a range of significance to fictions, of course. If you don\u2019t much care about what people think of you, you might simply note that look, and think little more on it. You might engage in some casual banter with a supporter of another football team, but not be the sort to have heated arguments about something as inconsequential as sports are.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s clearly a different level of importance by comparison to a fiction that allows you to sweep child molestation under the rug, to justify misogyny, or causes you to pray over a child while she dies, instead of rushing her to hospital. And beneath all of this, I consider it indisputable that whether something is true or not matters. It matters profoundly, because the more false things we believe, the more likely it is that we\u2019ll make mistakes of various kinds, ranging from the trivial to the profound.<\/p>\n
Despite the fact that organised religion is premised on mistakes of various sorts, sometimes involving social and political ones related to power and authority, and often metaphysical ones to do with what is or should be considered significant, it would be an error to ignore the value it brings to those who do participate. It would also be an error to ignore all the things that we (as nonreligious folk) might have in common with them, regardless of those core disagreements.<\/p>\n
But when any common ground is obscured by antagonism, stereotypes and caricatures, it\u2019s easy to forget that we most likely have more in common than not. The average religious person lives a similar life to the non-religious person \u2013 caring about their family and friends, trying to be competent or excellent at what they do, whether it\u2019s a job or a hobby.<\/p>\n
Much of the time, we\u2019d be aiming for similar outcomes \u2013 less poverty, more justice, less sexism and racism, more happiness. Of course there are exceptions, and some are notable \u2013 the institutionalised \u201cwar on women\u2019s bodies\u201d is one, where holding life to be sacred results in opposition to abortion for many Christians. The widespread prohibition on assisted dying is another, and in both these cases the religious view can conflict with the nonreligious one. The point remains that the average religious person is less like the extremist Mullah, or the child-molester-enabling Cardinal, than she is like you and me.<\/p>\n
So why is it, then, that the public perception of atheists is that of them being overwhelmingly anti-religious? Well, I suppose because atheism \u2013 in and of itself \u2013 does not need to concern itself with any of these other goals. It\u2019s precisely (and only) about a lack of belief in gods. So it\u2019s perhaps unsurprising that what people associate with atheism\u00a0is merely (and repeatedly) making the point that gods don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n
And, it\u2019s often not possible to make that point without causing offence. Which means that whether they intend to come across as offensive, antagonistic, strident and so forth or not, that\u2019s the way that atheists will often be perceived.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s limited value in simply making the point that gods don\u2019t exist, though. Or rather, there are only so many ways of saying it, and saying it is only one way of changing the world for the better. And this is why most of us are more than simply atheists \u2013 some of us are also campaigners for secularism, or for science education, or for humanism.<\/p>\n
And again, campaigning for all those things rarely involves a necessary conflict of interest with the religious. But we can \u2013 and perhaps sometimes do \u2013 assume that a necessary conflict exists, especially in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of social media and the Internet, where mass-communication in real-time seems to encourage people to be the first to say something, rather than being the first to say something considered.<\/p>\n
We pick fights, and occasionally also pick examples to justify those fights, ignoring the possibility that the examples might be unrepresentative. The careful work of constructing a science of the sacred \u2013 what religion means to the religious, and how best to engage with it \u2013 is by and large left to the academic endeavours of a Scott Atran or Pascal Boyer, while the blogosphere happily continues picking fights with their favourite straw men.<\/p>\n
I generalise, of course. But those of you who follow the seemingly-endless squabbles in the secular, sceptical, or atheist community will know that fighting with each other is as much a part of the game as combating religious dogma is. And this isn\u2019t only because there can be dogmatism and unreason on the non-religious side too \u2013 which there certainly can be \u2013 but also because everyone is sometimes guilty of being more interested in being right than in making progress.<\/p>\n
Making progress \u2013 whether it be finding a political solution to a seemingly intractable problem, or persuading the rank-and-file Catholic to join you in publicly denouncing a child-abuse-enabling Cardinal \u2013 sometimes requires collaboration rather than antagonism. And, the former is more often appropriate than the latter is, as far as I\u2019m concerned.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t get me wrong \u2013 there is room for anger, and there is room for the sharpest criticism. Not only because the sharp criticism can inspire others to break with a tradition or belief, or serve as a lightning rod for debate, but also because it\u2019s sometimes deserved. So nothing that I say here should be understood to mean that harsh criticism is always out of order. I\u2019m just not so sure that it should be the default strategy for so many of us, so much of the time.<\/p>\n
In any area of contestation, caricatures often win out over trying to find common ground. On the pro-science and secular side (and note the false dichotomy there \u2013 as if the religious can\u2019t be pro-science, just like pro-life invites the caricature of \u201canti-life\u201d), what community there is is partly premised on a caricature of the \u201cother\u201d, just like religious folk can easily point to some obnoxious atheist they know and use that person as their baseline for understanding non-believers.<\/p>\n
What I worry about in these cartoonish versions of reality is firstly the possibility that we\u2019re forsaking opportunities to learn things \u2013 about each other, about difference, about persuasion; and second that we\u2019re impeding progress towards what could in many instances be common goals.<\/p>\n
A significant proportion of secular activism \u2013 at least on the web \u2013 currently consists of people mindlessly (or so it appears) sharing photographs of a Hitchens or Sagan looking thoughtful, and accompanied by an inspirational (or blasphemous) quote. Often, these images will come from Facebook groups such as \u201cI fu**ing love science\u201d \u2013 as if saying so makes it true.<\/p>\n
But many (is it perhaps most?) of the folk doing the recycling of these images don\u2019t have a much clearer grasp on the science than the average religious person. Sure, religious folk can have some gaping holes in their understanding of some aspects of science, such as evolution \u2013 but in most areas that actually impact on day-to-day existence, they are not quantifiable less well-equipped than atheists like myself are.<\/p>\n
What sharing photographs of Sagan does, though, is to create a (false) impression of community through imagining that \u201cthe other\u201d is an unscientific, Bronze Age-mythology believing monotheist. That \u201cother\u201d in turn is encouraged to construct a shibboleth of the dogmatic, immoral and cruel New Atheist. And we\u2019re all sometimes looking through the eyes of our respective prejudices, rather than engaging with the typical believer or nonbeliever.<\/p>\n
The reinforcing and recycling of prejudices strikes me as quite an anti-humanist activity. And for every Hitchens, who was able to marshal a hundred quotes for every occasion in the service of cutting some religious windbag down to size, there are dozens of ordinary atheists who don\u2019t have Hitch\u2019s intellect or breadth of knowledge. But they are nevertheless inspired towards a similar strategy, and the problem is that in less competent hands, that sort of strategy amounts to simply being maximally offensive, and trying to bully your opponent into submission.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been working with skeptics and atheists in South Africa for the last 15 or so years, and given that I teach at a university, many of the people who seek me out to talk about these issues are relatively young. And it\u2019s fairly consistently the case that what attracts them to the atheist movement is a fair amount of anger, and a desire to express it. They feel lied to or betrayed, and feel like they have wasted much time in service of a lie.<\/p>\n
To be honest, they sometimes even put me off, because pomposity and arrogance \u2013 especially in your average 20 year-old \u2013 is rarely pretty. But because there is a ready-made community of people out there who will validate the anger, and encourage the blasphemy, that arrogance is planted in some very fertile soil, and some atheists seem to never get past it. Which means that they can never realise that as comforting as it might be to belong to the community of those who are right, it also isn\u2019t changing as many minds as possible, and it\u2019s also not contributing much to changing the world.<\/p>\n
Young atheists are to my mind given a false choice between a hard, antagonistic approach and being some sort of a sell-out or traitor if you decline opportunities to mock people of faith. Those of us who have been in the game for a while can perhaps forget what it\u2019s like to discover this community for the first time, especially at a time of life when many of us were insecure, and therefore quite happy to find an outlet for frustrations and disappointments.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s the politics, or the messaging, that I\u2019m most concerned with here. Calling someone an accommodationist or faitheist is also a way of mocking, and serves to disincentivise that behaviour (or to make sure that people who have those views shut up about them). Yet a middle ground does exist, because of the fact that we have so many shared interests despite our disagreements on religion.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a worthwhile question to ask, as Chris Stedman does in \u201cFaitheist\u201d, \u201cDo we simply want to eradicate religion, or do we want to change the world?\u201d These goals are of course not mutually exclusive, but in our eagerness to caricature each other, I worry that we lose sight of the possibility that focusing on the latter could contribute to achieving the former. More to the point, it could do so at a lower cost than entertaining caricatures of each other does, because those caricatures prevent working together towards those goals we do have in common.<\/p>\n
That Stedman indulges in some caricaturing of his own is one of the criticisms that has been levelled at the book. From details regarding parties attended, community activism, to the tone and messages of \u201cnew atheism\u201d, critics have protested that Stedman gets them wrong, and wilfully so. I can\u2019t judge much of this, but nor do I think it matters as much as some reviews would have me believe.<\/p>\n
An uncharitable reader could even assume that Stedman is lying about a significant part of the biographical detail if they chose to. This would undermine his authority, but it wouldn\u2019t speak for or against the book\u2019s call for more co-operation between the religious and the nonreligious, nor his claim that atheism has become more publicly known at the cost of public goodwill.<\/p>\n
Those two propositions are the heart of chapters 7 and 8. Much of the chapters before these are biographical, and serve to provide the reader with an understanding of why Stedman turned to, then away from religion, before finding a middle ground that allowed for cooperation with the religious even while disagreeing with some of their core beliefs.<\/p>\n
Stedman clearly doesn\u2019t approve of how some atheists engage with religion. While he himself only mentions PZ Myers disapprovingly, he seems to endorse the Reza Aslan quote criticising the \u201cfour horsemen\u201d, Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. Another strong attack on the horsemen can be found in the introduction, where Eboo Patel finds it unlikely that they would perform an act of compassion Stedman later describes himself engaging in, where he reads a prayer to a friend. But that was Patel speaking, rather than Stedman.<\/p>\n
And what Patel says there is simplistic, misleading and to my mind somewhat offensive. Having met all three surviving horsemen, and having spent many hours in the company of one of them, I\u2019m fairly confident that if in that situation they would either do just as Stedman did, or find some compassionate way of achieving the same result without having to read a prayer. Patel reinforces the stereotype of new atheists being nasty and uncompassionate, and seeing as Stedman never disagrees with his friend Patel, perhaps we\u2019re entitled to assume that he agrees with this caricature.<\/p>\n
So I think Stedman is wrong to help prop this particular stereotype up \u2013 first because it\u2019s false, and second because it\u2019s one of the items of anti-atheist propaganda used by some religious folk. And as I\u2019ve said above, there is room for anger and antagonism in any case. But where I\u2019m sympathetic to Stedman\u2019s thesis is with respect to the example that is set for young atheists, where the relative loudness of the angry voices can sometimes seem to drown out the more subdued tones of something like an interfaith movement.<\/p>\n
But just as Stedman wrongly buys in to a certain caricature of new atheism, I\u2019d suggest that some dismissals of the position sketched by Stedman are also based on somewhat ad hominem caricatures of the author, rather than his position. There is room for various strategies, but there shouldn\u2019t be room \u2013 in a sceptical community \u2013 for caricaturing the proponents of any of these strategies. Regardless of whether we think Stedman disingenuous, or PZ Myers obnoxious, we can independently of that make the case for shifting our engagement with the religious more towards compassion and understanding, and less towards ridicule and mockery.<\/p>\n
The problem is of course that we have no counterfactuals allowing for the assessment of different strategies. I was, like Stedman, mortified by David Silverman<\/a> and American Atheists protestations regarding the World Trade Center \u201ccross\u201d. But my delicate sensibilities in this regard don\u2019t mean that the consciousness-raising effect of those campaigns is eliminated. They might, on balance, do more good than harm. I don\u2019t know \u2013 but I do know that they don\u2019t speak to some atheists, and therefore that other sorts of (more moderate) messages will certainly have an audience too.<\/p>\n I\u2019m sympathetic to the substance of Stedman\u2019s argument, which depends on the idea that community and a shared narrative of some sort can be helpful for combating inequality, and fighting various social justice causes. I do think that many religious people would welcome certain kinds of support from the nonreligious, and that support starts with understanding. But understanding Stedman\u2019s book as making some novel claim, or telling us something we didn\u2019t know, is a mistake \u2013 and I think that criticism or praise premised on that understanding is mistaken also.<\/p>\n Many atheists already work with religious folk in various social justice fields, and the topic of religion seldom comes up. When it does, some of us will be hostile to religious ideas, some of us not \u2013 and what I see Faitheist doing is simply offering a corrective to the fact that the hostile sort of response seems to get more attention (inside the atheist movement) than the more accommodating one does.<\/p>\n Of course, the role I see Faitheist playing is not necessarily the same as the role Chris Stedman sees it playing. He seems to genuinely disapprove of some atheist bloggers, and seems to genuinely want us to all engage in interfaith collaboration far more than is currently the case. And I think he over-reaches in some respects, and that he contributes to caricatures \u2013 even as the book is an extended appeal to not engage in caricaturing the religious.<\/p>\n Stedman himself raises the issue, in chapter 8, as to whether 24 year-olds should write memoirs. While I don\u2019t see that as a problem in principle, I think it becomes a problem when a memoir written by a 24 year-old risks telling others that they are doing it wrong, and that they should learn from the author how to do it right.<\/p>\n This precociousness is part of what has resulted in some of the negative reaction, I think, but some of that reaction has gone too far in choosing to attack Stedman\u2019s sincerity rather than try to understand that the book can be read as an inspirational call to reflection and action (of a different sort than many atheists are used to).<\/p>\n It is important to understand each other, so that our dialogue can be more meaningful and productive. Of course, it\u2019s important to allow room for that dialogue itself. As atheists, we are outnumbered \u2013 and not working across \u201cparty lines\u201d, as it were, can perhaps mean that we don\u2019t see the opportunities to collaborate as environmentalists, feminists, or whatever-ists \u2013 regardless of our religious views.<\/p>\n More generally, though, Faitheist reminds us that we perhaps have more shared values than differences. And for me, it\u2019s also a reminder that persuasion is more difficult when people don\u2019t want to listen to you, and therefore that there is some merit in combating a negative reputation, whether it\u2019s a deserved one or not.<\/p>\n None of this means we should stop asking whether beliefs are true, nor that we should stop asking people to discard untrue beliefs where possible, even if they are comforting. But no matter how often we ask those questions, they will have no effect unless someone is listening. And why should anyone listen, when it\u2019s clear that the person asking you to listen is far more interesting in telling you you\u2019re wrong than in conversation?<\/p>\n Chris Stedman\u2019s Faitheist is imperfect, as all books are. It\u2019s imperfect in a quite regrettable way, though, in that it seems to have antagonised exactly some of the people Stedman was presumably trying to persuade. The argument for faitheism could have been made without propping up stereotypes around new atheism, and the title does Stedman no favours either.<\/p>\n Despite these and other flaws, though, I think it worth reading. It\u2019s provocative, and it\u2019s a call to action \u2013 and even if you don\u2019t think interfaith work is the sort of action required, I\u2019m in agreement with Stedman that there\u2019s plenty of common ground between the faithful and the atheists that we\u2019re not yet fully exploiting. And, even though this isn\u2019t quite his claim, Faitheist reminds me that for all the good that can come of making people uncomfortable with their rituals and beliefs, much good can perhaps also come from us becoming better at understanding our similarities, as well as our differences.<\/p>\n ___________________________________________<\/p>\n I’d bookmarked a whole bunch of posts on this – mostly reactions from when an excerpt from Faitheist was published at Salon – but when sitting down to write this, I realised that there was far too much there to re-read. So, if you want to get a sense of the negative reaction to date, some of these posts are good examples – but I couldn’t tell you which, or why.<\/em><\/p>\n Just a shy kid with holes in his socks<\/a> – Butterflies and Wheels<\/p>\n Stedman being Stedman<\/a> – Pharyngula<\/p>\n Chris Stedman defends accommodationism<\/a> – Sandwalk<\/p>\n How is religion like delicious yummy corn?<\/a> – Crommunist Manifesto<\/p>\n Chris Stedman’s toxic atheism<\/a> – Temple of the Future<\/p>\n Why atheists don\u2019t respect faitheists<\/a> \u2013 and you shouldn\u2019t either – Butterflies and Wheels<\/p>\n