Some thoughts about in-your-face atheism

by Massimo Pigliucci

The recent American Atheist ad campaign, the one that says that religions are scams, is a bad idea, on all fronts. Before explaining why, I have to remind readers that I’ve had a close connection to AA for years. Former AA President Ellen Johnson made me an honorary life member of the organization; the President who succeeded her, Ed Buckner, is a close friend of mine; and I have appeared several times on their TV show, next to current President Dave Silverman. So, I hope I will not get excommunicated as a result of what follows, it would be a shame (though not something unheard of either).

The new ad says: “You KNOW they’re all SCAMS,” and it’s signed “American Atheists — Telling the truth since 1963.” “They” are at least five of the major religious traditions, as is made clear by a set of symbols accompanying the poster. In an interview, Blair Scott, communications director for American Atheists (another person whom I know and respect), explained that the “target is not the Christians, but all the atheists and agnostics still in the closet who are still pretending, still playing the game, still putting up a facade.”

There are three reasons why this is a bad idea. First, the ad is simply making a preposterous claim that cannot possibly be backed up by factual evidence, which means that, technically, it is lying (but see below for another interpretation). Not a good virtue for self-righteous critical thinkers. Second, it is a really bad PR move, even if the target audience is in fact limited to closet atheists and agnostics. Third, it is an even worse PR move when it comes to the public perception of atheists considered more broadly.

Beginning from the top of the list, a scam is defined as a dishonest scheme, an intentional fraud. Now, it is certainly the case that some religious leaders have made knowingly fraudulent claims to their followers in order to either make money or otherwise unethically gain access to power or sexual favors. But to imply that all or even most religious leaders (and communities) knowingly do this is an extraordinary claim which simply does not even begin to be backed up by the necessary extraordinary evidence. And when one makes a claim that is not substantiated by facts one is either lying (if the statement is made while being aware of the lack of necessary evidence) or is deluded. Either way, AA ought to know better.

Then again, in my dealings with the skeptic, humanist and atheists communities over the years I have noticed a peculiar lack of critical thinking among some atheists. Atheists are not necessarily skeptics (and vice versa), though they typically pride themselves in being smarter and more honest than religious people. The statistics may back up the honesty claim to some extent (proportionately far more Christians than atheists inhabit American prisons), but sometimes I wonder about superior smarts or critical thinking abilities. Yes, we atheists know that there is no god (not as an absolute epistemic certainty, of course, but in the same way in which we know that there are no unicorns — lack of evidence and reason in favor of the positive claim). We can even recite the basic reasons why we don’t think there are gods, which according to philosophers since Plato, means we really have knowledge of this (knowledge being justified true belief).

Yet, several atheists I have encountered have no problem endorsing all sorts of woo-woo stuff, from quasi-new age creeds to “alternative” medicine, to fantapolitics. This is partly because many of them seem to be ignorant of the epistemic limits of science (in which they have almost unbounded faith) and reason (ditto). At the very least it seems that we ought to treat factual evidence with due respect, and claiming that religions are scams flies in the face of the available factual evidence. Hence, it is a bad idea that damages our reputation as an evidence-oriented community.

The second reason why the AA ad is not likely to do much good is because it probably fails at its own core mission, reaching out to “closeted” agnostics and atheists. I wager that most reasonable people who do not believe in gods will look at that sort of ad and react just like Groucho Marx famously did: “I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.” I certainly wouldn’t want to join that club, except for the fact that I’m already a life member of it. The reason most closeted atheists might not like the ad is twofold, of course: on the one hand, it is factually wrong (see above), and therefore does not inspire trust in the organization that sponsored it. On the other hand, it is unnecessarily rude, which brings me to another important sore point within the atheist community: anger.

I get it, a lot of atheists are recovering from religious indoctrination, often of the harshest fundamentalist kind, and they are therefore angry about all the time they have wasted and all the emotional suffering they have endured. I went through my own short anger phase in atheism after I moved to Tennessee (where religion was as in your face as it could possibly get, the place priding itself in being the buckle of the Bible Belt). Anger is good as a transitory psychological state, because it gives us the energy to reexamine broad aspects of our lives, laying the ground for a more thoughtful future self. But if it stays in our system it quickly becomes both corrosive at the personal level and undermines our overall goals as a community.

American Atheists has a history in this respect, going back to the controversial figure of its founder, Madalyn Murray O’Hare. She brought us the landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision that made unconstitutional the practice of forcing our children to recite a prayer in public school, and the nation should always be grateful to her for that. But she was also, by all accounts (I never met her) a pretty abrasive woman who instilled something of a personality cult at AA.

It doesn’t have to be that way. My friend Herb Silverman (no relation to Dave, as far as I know), president of the Secular Coalition for America, prides himself in organizing regular breakfast meetings with religious people in his community in Charleston, NC, and while I assure you that Herb doesn’t mince words when it comes to explaining to people what he thinks, he often wears a “Your Friendly Atheist Neighbor” t-shirt, which manages to shock and endear at the same time. Our own Reasonable New York coalition, in its previous incarnation, sponsored a very successful ad campaign in the Big Apple, featuring the motto “A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?” The ad was both friendly and factually correct (we got the number from national figures on the percentage of non religious people in the US, and if anything we probably underestimated the number for New York, notoriously ripe with infidels). We were not saying that one is an awful person if one believes in gods, we were simply pointing out that plenty of good people don’t believe, thus indirectly undermining the most recurrent argument for why religion is a positive force in society (the alleged link with morality).

Lastly, Blair Scott said that the targets of the AA campaign did not include religious people. But why not? How is the secular community going to grow if we do not strive to make secularism a mainstream position? And how are we going to do that if we keep talking just to ourselves? Granted, no ad is going to change the mind of the religious fundamentalist, but there are plenty of somewhat religious people out there who might be interested in a positive message, and are sure as hell going to be turned off by a (factually inaccurate) negative one.

Sometimes it seems like atheists could benefit from learning a bit of elementary psychology, or ask a professional ad agency to help them “brand” themselves to the general public. Yes, the AA ad did generate publicity, including an appearance by David Silverman on the O’Reilly show. But did you watch it? It was hard not to cringe a few seconds into it, and you know you are in trouble when even Stephen Colbert points out that it is not good PR strategy for the atheist in the room to look uncannily like the Devil. Of course Colbert also mercilessly made fun of O’Reilly’s idiotic “arguments” for the existence of God — but that’s my point: Colbert elicited laughs and possibly some serious thinking, neither of which will be forthcoming as a result of the AA ad.

By the way, before anyone misunderstands me, I’m not advocating any sort of wishy-washy position about the existence of god. Let’s not throw around silly accusations of “intellectual dishonesty” or “accommodationism.” All I’m saying is that both the accuracy of the message and the way it is presented matter, at least if you wish to build a better society, which I assume is what we are all trying to do. If the goal is simply to feel superior by pissing people off, I’m not interested.

[Dave Silverman, the President of American Atheists, has graciously accepted my invitation to write a guest commentary in response to this post, it will appear soon.]