“There is no atheist movement.” “Atheism isn’t a movement.” “Look at the definition — all ‘atheist’ means is ‘person who doesn’t believe in any gods’! We don’t have anything else in common! How can you build a movement around that?”
When I write about organized atheism, I get this response a fair amount. I saw it most recently on Twitter, where @davidgaliel wrote, “I think ‘atheist movement’ is about as meaningful as ‘non-chess-player movement’ — but I’m mentioning that particular instance just to give an example, not to single it out. I see this idea a lot. I used to argue with it. I am done arguing with it. Whenever I see it in the future, I’m just going to link to this piece.
Let’s make an analogy. Let’s talk about the gay rights movement.*
No, not every one of these issue concerns every single one of us. But enough of them affect enough of us that we’ve been able to organize. No, we don’t all agree on the best way to reach our goals, or even what our goals should be. Having a movement doesn’t mean marching in lockstep. It doesn’t mean every single one of us agrees on every single thing, or indeed on anything at all (other than “people of the same gender sure are hot!”). It means enough of us agree about enough things, enough of us share enough of the same goals, enough of us share enough common experiences — so we’ve been able to organize.
Technically, the only thing gay men and lesbians and bisexuals all have in common is that we’re attracted to people of the same gender. And if we’d decided that we couldn’t build a movement around that, we’d be in the crapper. Forget about same-sex marriage and employment non-discrimination — we’d still be getting put in mental hospitals, getting our bars shut down by the police, getting arrested for just looking too gay. We haven’t just built a movement — we’ve built an extremely powerful movement, one that radically improved our lives and has had a significant impact on society at large.
Now. Translate, please, to atheists.
Is there any reason LGB people can organize, but atheists can’t? Is there some reason that “same-gender attraction” can be an effective locus for community and political organizing — but “not believing in gods” can’t be?
If you want to see a much longer but by no means comprehensive list, with links and everything, take a look at the Resource Guide from my book Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why (I’ve posted it online). Plus there are national conferences, international conferences, regional conferences, backchannel discussion groups, informal networks of colleagues and friends — all so that the people in these organizations and networks and groups can talk together: to strategize, to share information and experience, to commiserate, to celebrate, to offer and give support, to just enjoy each others’ company.
What the heck is all that if not an atheist movement?
Now, if you want to argue that there shouldn’t be an atheist movement? Knock yourself out. I probably won’t be able to listen to your argument for very long without laughing myself sick, but sure, make that argument. (Not here, though — I’m really not interested in hosting it.) And if you want to quibble about semantics? If you want to insist that atheists who want to organize should do it under the banner of humanism or freethought or anything other than atheism? If you want to insist that we should never ever use the word “atheism” as a linguistic shorthand for “organized atheism” or “movement atheism”? Well, I urge you to consider the issue of self-determination and the importance and power of marginalized people naming ourselves — and to question whether we should be trying to take that power away from each other. (I would also urge you to pay some attention to the history of the changing language: just a generation ago, my own non-believing parents called themselves agnostics and not atheists, because according to self-identified non-believers at that time, “atheism” meant “100% certainty that there are no gods” — a definition most self-identified atheists today fiercely resist.) But if you really want to make that argument — knock yourself out. Just don’t do it here. Take the Atheist Semantic Quibbling Society elsewhere, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
As Bad Willow said on Buffy: Bored now. I am done arguing about whether an atheist movement exists. I’m just going to get on with the business of fostering it.
*Note: In this particular analogy, I’m talking about the LGB movement rather than the LGBT movement, since I’m talking about the one thing we have in common, and that’s harder to pinpoint in a few words for the LGBT movement.
Yet another cogent argument I will have to steal (with proper credit, of course.)
I remember when I became a gay activist in the mid 80s. Almost 20 years after Stonewall, and 30 years after the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis started the modern gay rights push, there was still discussion going on over whether men and women could even be part of the same movement. I saw the same argument being made about bisexuals, and I hear the same arguments being made about trans* rights. So yeah, I think the LGB analogy is apt.
Excellent throwdown.
Myself, I notice that most of the time when atheist dudebros (and it’s almost always men) say “There is no atheist movement” or pull out the Dictionary Atheism card, it’s in the context of trying to deny any responsibility for fixing behavior problems in the movement, particularly with regards to treatment of women and minorities.
These selfsame “movementless atheists” will, of course, rally behind “thought leaders” like Dawkins, Harris, Shermer, and the like, to defend them from criticism, thus demonstrating that they know full well that they’re part of a movement, or at least a community; but ask them to take on responsibility for making the movement better, and suddenly, oh no, I’m not part of a movement, what movement?
It’s kind of like the dichotomy between the sexist belief that men are more rational and logical than women, on the one hand, and that men are ravening sexual beasts who can’t be expected to control themselves around women on the other hand; or the similar one that men are more capable and able to learn things, but at the same time are incompetent with things like household chores. Contradictory, of course, but the men who hold such beliefs will pick and choose whichever one suits them for the moment, and spin on a dime to adopt the other one if it doesn’t work; the contradiction is a feature, not a bug.
OK, so there’s a movement. But there are no leaders. I’m OK with that.
Hit the nail on the head. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told by other atheists that they didn’t become an atheist just to join some new “group,” this often makes me wonder if those who emphasis the correct “dictionary definition” of atheism aren’t the ones who really have trouble understanding how to define it. That is, they treat atheism as some sort of radical individualism. Of course, in most cases their radical individualism, ironically enough, involves a lot of groupthink.
YES, a million times, yes. So true about the dudebro atheists, Flewellyn! I would also add the hipster-misogynists.
@Skeptimus Prime – Exactly! It’s not the group aspect of church that led me to leave; in fact, the group aspect is what I miss the most about church. It is having to profess beliefs without evidence and contrary to reality that led me to leave.
If some atheists want to be loners, hey, more power to them. But that’s not a good reason for becoming an atheist in the first place.
Movement atheism moves beyond a simple definition. It’s moves toward a world built on a foundation of atheism.
It is based upon atheistic thoughts, values and assertions.
No. It is not “atheism”. It is the application of atheism. Why any atheist would not want to be a part of that is beyond me.
Hmm. LGB (&T) movement seems to have dodged the bullet of overlapping ideologies. As atheists, we are forced into association with *technically* ‘atheist’ groups that may actually oppose almost everything we stand for.
Bluntly, I mean Red Diaper Stalinists, and Randroids/Libertarians. The former may be more of a local phenomenon (here in the Bay Area) but the latter seem like a ball and chain hitched to any secularist organization.
And the blazing MRA/PUA misogynist edge seems to be HEAVILY based within the same group.
There are certainly legitimate anti-theist organisations, closet opening support groups, and first amendment enforcement groups, so sure, whatever, as long as you don’t try to equate ‘our’ movement with a religion.
“*Note: In this particular analogy, I’m talking about the LGB movement rather than the LGBT movement, since I’m talking about the one thing we have in common, and that’s harder to pinpoint…”
It’s funny you should say that, since it is in the “T” that this particular analogy really runs deep.
Today, certain trans activists (especially on twitter) are to the LBG movement what people like Phil Mason or T J Kincaid are to ateism; tearing the movement apart from the inside and alienating would-be allies by over-agressively pushing their most personal agendas under an appropriated banner.
Cousin Ricky @6
Being an atheist and being a loner have zip point shit to do with each other. Some of us atheists are introverted and shy and don’t do well with large groups of people we don’t know. If you want to join groups, have a nice time time. You have my blessing. Just because I don’t want to join groups because I am so uncomfortable around strangers that I’m almost paralyzed is no reason to be snooty about me being a loner.
[…] The latest example of an approving response to the term is from Greta Christina, who is officially done with Dictionary Atheism. And aren’t we […]
[…] The latest example of an approving response to the term is from Greta Christina, who is officially done with Dictionary Atheism. And aren’t we […]
@3
But there sure is a select group of “seculartastic, globalistic, thought leadery coalitionaries” who seem to think they have a monopoly on being the defacto leadership of at least a large portion of the atheist movement. I’m an outsider to the LGBT movement and the first thing I thought of when reading Greta’s analogy was “Wow, they did great things without a Dawkins trying to ownership-pee on everything.” I’m not saying there weren’t internal issues in the LGBT movement, but it seems like there is a significant portion of movement atheism that is very heavily invested into hero worship in a way that there isn’t/hasn’t been in the LGBT movement. Maybe my perception of this is ignorant. Obviously, celebrities that have come out as LGBT are considered heros for the cause, but that’s not the same kind of “hero” as we see emerging within the atheist movement. Thoughts?
I’ve been flailing my arms at people saying this for seven years. I’ve met people at atheist student groups who told me there’s no atheist movement or community. Where the hell do you think you are right now? Are religious movements seriously your only basis of comparison for what a movement is?
Of course, back then it was only a pet peeve. I didn’t expect a whole group to pop up and make it their slogan.
changerofbits@#12 Maybe my perception of this is ignorant. Obviously, celebrities that have come out as LGBT are considered heros for the cause, but that’s not the same kind of “hero” as we see emerging within the atheist movement. Thoughts?
I think the problem is we’ve mis-identified self-promoters as leaders. But, really, we don’t need leaders – a “movement” can quite effectively consist of a lot of people all pushing in approximately the same direction. If there is enough movement in the same direction, progress in that direction will happen.
We don’t need leaders but organizers are useful – organizing and clarifying that push in the same general direction. The beauty of that model is that we aren’t beholden or held back by flaws in those organizers like we are if we put laurels on a leader, or a horseman, or whatever, and they turn out to be a narcissistic ass. Also: leaders become targets. If you’re dealing with an inclusive groundswell, there’s no particular individual you can single out and demonize as we’ve seen happening with certain jackass prominent atheists.
@ DogHouse Riley#10:
I don’t know what any of that means, and I am a little afraid to ask, but I’m going to anyway. In what way are trans people on twitter like certain unapologetic misogynists, and how exactly have they appropriated the queer rights movement? I am trying to imagine what someone appropriating a movement they helped start that’s regularly thrown them under the bus in the interim would look like.
I’m comfortable calling myself a dictionary atheist. I’ll support (morally, at least) atheist civil rights campaigns and organizations, because as an atheist I benefit from that work. And my approach to social justice comes from the direction of atheism. And if I’m interested in X, an explicitly atheist X group may be more my speed than a general X group or an explicitly secular X group. But I’m not interested in an “atheist movement” in the sense of “here we are, not believing in gods together.”
Re #10: Doghouse Reilly has been blocked. I do not tolerate anti-trans hatred and bigotry in my blog.
Marcus Ranum @ #3: Actually, I think we do have leaders. I think we have thousands. Every head of an organization, every head of a local group, every staffer or committee member in an organization or a local group, everyone in an organization or local group who’s asked other to do something and kept on eye on whether they did it — all are leaders. And while I don’t care for the term “thought leader,” I’d also include writers and videobloggers and podcasters and so on, who are widely listened to and who influence people’s ideas and actions.
johnthedrunkard @ #6: Are you familiar with the Log Cabin Club, the organization of LGBT Republicans? Or for that matter, the Human Rights Campaign — formerly known as the Human Rights Campaign Fund, derisively known as the Human Rights Champagne Fund — bravely championing the rights of wealthy gay white men, and tossing trans people under the bus at every opportunity? There is plenty of non-overlapping ideology in the LGBT movement.
Atheism isn’t a movement, no. An atheist movement is.
In other words: silly semantics.
@Al Dente #11
That was exactly my point. I’m not being snooty.
Didn’t Greta make it clear in this very piece you are commenting on that religious movements aren’t the only type of moevement? What do LGB peiple sit around saying “here we are, being attracted to people of the same sex together”?
1: One can not be attracted to a gender, as classes of pronouns are not biologically viable.
2: ‘Lesbian’ is always capitalized, just as ‘Sumatran’ and ‘Venezuelan’ are.
3: Lesbian people may be said to be attracted to the same sex only to the extent that people from any other locale can.
4: That a person is bisexual says nothing abot which sex it is attracted to, only that the person is of two sexes, hence the name.
5: Series of capitalized letters are not acronyms. Series of capitalized letters separated by periods are.
@Brian McInnis
You forgot:
6. It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!
7. If man came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?
8. How come you park on the driveway and drive on the parkway?
@22 Brian McInnis
?? Are you just being pedantic for the fun of it?
1. “Gender” refers not only to classes of pronouns but classes of people as well.
2. Only when referring to people from Lesbos.
3. “Lesbian” is a long-accepted term for “female homosexual.”
4. Yes, well spotted. If a person is attracted to at least two genders, one of them won’t be the accepted heteronormative option. Hence the inclusion in the Gay Rights movement.
5. I too am frequently annoyed by the conflation of the words “acronym” and “initialism” (which Firefox’s spell check doesn’t even recognize!) but since I’m not a pedantic jackass I keep it to myself. Unless someone asks, or I’m currently teaching English, which I do professionally! But when people are having casual conversations, I don’t bust through the wall like an annoying grammarian kool-aid man with “ACTUALLY YOU’RE USING THAT WORD WRONG,” especially when the usage in question is a common casual one.
@22 Brian McInnis:
Ohh, look, someone thinks he’s very clever.
The long list of movement organizations you linked betrays your point. These are fragmented, somewhat casually-crafted groups that rarely interact or share common cause on a meta level. If there’s ever going to be an atheist movement, it’s going to take a lot of cat-herding to make it a reality. Atheists as a subset are more politically diverse than LGBT individuals and I don’t think the comparison is apt.
@Pat Doyle #26, you seem to be under the misapprehension that a large mass of people moving in roughly the same direction is only a movement if they all group together under a single banner. The LGBT movement has an equally long list of organizations with different specific missions, but they are a movement nonetheless because all those specific missions in some way improve the lives of LGBT people. The multiplicity of organizations in the secular/freethinker/atheist arena is actually a sign of the strength of the concept and not of the weakness of any single organization. We don’t need one huge organization trying to be all things to all atheists.
The difference between non-god-believers and non-stamp-collectors isn’t that hard to explain.
Why would you atheists gather and organize around something you don’t believe?
Why would doctors and cancer survivors spend so much time thinking about a disease that they don’t want to have?
Some religion is not helpful, not uplifting, and not comforting; quite often religion is damaging, dangerous, hateful. Usually it’s the most harmful versions of religion which fight the hardest to prevent people from leaving religion, or from disagreeing with the religion’s decrees.
There is a need for an atheist movement.
I’m not convinced that atheist on its own is a good basis of identity. For myself, I want to be a humanist; I want to be a rational thinker and a skeptic. But atheism is also an important part of that list because without it, I’d have no way of escaping the damaging, mind-numbing evangelical faith I was brought up in.
kellyw. posting here
OK. *Deep breath* Hopefully this won’t be too long.
I am a dictionary atheist. And I care very much about social justice.
I only came to the conclusion of atheism because of skepticism, because of critical thinking, because I became no longer afraid to ask questions and to challenge my beliefs. Atheism isn’t responsible for my caring about social justice–skepticism, again, plus personal experience and listening to people from marginalized groups made me give a shit about other people. I wasn’t completely terrible before, but my skepticism in the status quo made me a more caring person. Atheism? I was excited when I became a non-believer. I thought I had found “my people”. I erroneously thought that other atheists would come to the same conclusions that I had, that social justice is good and important. And the facade cracked…..and shattered. Elevator Gate was my reality check. And it’s gotten worse. There are so many atheists who do not share my values, who consider me as less than, that I only use the word atheist as a description of my lack of belief, not as a description of my political and social views. Who’s atheism should I follow? Dawkins? Shermer? Hitchens? Harris? *vomit* And what of Freethought Blogs? For example, two bloggers I respect and who should know better, PZ and Brayton, use ableist words, such as “stupid”, “idiot” and “moron” to describe assholes. Many commenting have no problem saying the same. It’s disheartening because they get so much right EXCEPT for this. People with disabilities and neurodiverse people can just fuck off, amiright? That’s not the kind of atheism I can get behind. The closest I’ve found is Atheism +, and while I haven’t participated on the forums much at all in the past year, despite fuck ups there was an attempt to recognize biases when called out. That I can get behind. A+ never really took off, though, and I find myself wondering if it’s worth it to stick with the atheist version of social justice….and I just can’t. I’d rather find secular groups that include religious people who care about recognizing all marginalized groups. There are lots of atheists who left the movement. I’m on the edges, still waiting for atheists to get it. Eventually I’ll give up.
Re Brian McInnis @ #22: Tedious, off-topic derailing is tedious. And off-topic. I am entirely uninterested in this sort of pedantic ignorance of how language actually works — and I’m especially uninterested in it when it’s entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. Brian McInnis has been put into comment moderation. If he ever says anything here that contributes to the conversation, it’ll appear — but it’ll have to be approved by me first.
Pat Doyle @ #26: What do you think is the meta-level on which the LGBT movement is interacting and the atheist movement isn’t? What organizational structures or communication methods does the former have which the latter lacks?
Because as a participant in both, I’m not aware of any. Atheist groups and organizations do, in fact, interact quite a bit: at conferences, in bars after conferences, in backchannel discussions, etc. I do think the LGBT movement is better at it, largely as a result of having been at it for longer — more coherent, more effective, and better at working together — but that’s a difference of degree, not of kind.
According to the Secular Census, that’s not true. Self-identified atheists skew liberal/ progressive, very very strongly.
Re overlapping ideologies and the misogyny of some groups, I’ve long seen more similarities across religious beliefs and cultures between like-minded groups than between different religions/non-religions. For example, atheist MRAs are more like their Christian conservative Westboro-esque cousins than they are moderate atheists or religious folks of any sort. Their common bond is a strong fear of femininity, and their similarities are many – mostly stemming from poor, young, white conservative men who are rightly angry about their lack of power, but wrongly attribute it to feminism or abortion or homosexuality (again, all equating to a fear of femininity). They should be angry at the incredibly wealthy untouchable few (white men) at the top who profit from propagating fear and polarizing our culture into two impotent political parties – while keeping our eyes off of them and keeping us poor, afraid, and overworked.
OK, so there’s a movement. But there are no leaders. I’m OK with that.
I’m not. A movement without leaders — preferably smart and savvy ones, of course — is a movement that is set up to fail. Anyone who says “The [X] movement doesn’t need leaders” is most likely someone who opposes [X] and wants the [X] movement to fail.
Atheists are under attack (mostly verbally here, much more violently elsewhere) by enemies who are well organized and have leaders. Does anyone here really think atheists don’t need decent leadership to mount any sort of effective defense against such attacks? I certainly don’t hear anyone saying (for example) that Greta’s attempt to lead in an organized effort to help Taslima stay safe in the USA is unnecessary.
But the people applying for the position aren’t OK with it. Problem with movements is that there is always someone who wants to lead the damn thing and the first people to put themselves forward are usually the absolute worst people to do that.
There are lots of people whose method of climbing the slippery pole and keeping themselves at the top is to kick other folk trying to climb it. That is what Dawkins was doing to Rebecca Watson when he refused to be on a platform with her and years earlier, Catherine Mackinnon did the same to Erica Jong.
Phillip Hallam-Baker @ #34: Is that really true? I know a lot of leaders in this movement, and most of them do not fit that description. The leaders of support organizations, the leaders of local groups — they’re not exactly power-hungry megalomaniacs clawing their way to the top. They’re mostly dedicated, passionate, and decent.
Reading this post was painful for me. Not because of the final message, which I am totally on board with, but because you used “gay rights movement” and included bisexuals in that.
I really struggle reading about the “gay rights movement” when that phrase is supposed to include bisexuals. To me, “gay rights movement” explicitly excludes bisexuals, because bisexuals aren’t gay, and if you’re writing about the “gay rights movement” and talking about bisexuals, then that doesn’t make any sense to me – it can’t. I much prefer “queer rights movement” so that a) we’re not privileging gay people over bisexuals, and b) it’s more inclusive.
I know you’re bisexual Greta, and I’m sure you’re across the constant erasure of bisexuals by L&G orgs, and I understand that you’re writing so that the majority of your readers would understand your analogy. However, this was a painful read for me.
If there were no atheist movement, I would never have found folks like you (Greta), Matt Dillahunty, Christopher Hitchens, Seth Andrews, and countless others who convinced me it was normal to question Christianity. I’d probably still be a nominal Christian, giving money to a church while deep-down wondering how true any of the dogma was. I’d still be sitting silently, wishing I had the courage to say what I really thought but fearing the repercussions.
May the atheist movement continue to grow larger and stronger with every passing day!
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