The Vanguard Fallacy and the Embattled Purview
I really enjoy having friends who are in the academic study of religion because you can learn so much and question a lot of the assumptions that often seem taken for granted. Today, we have a guest post by Marcus Mann, a Masters student in Religion at Duke, exploring how some sociology research can help assess and improve the atheist movement.
In 2007, sociologists Richard Cimino and Christopher Smith published a paper in the journal Sociology of Religion titled “Secular Humanism and Atheism beyond Progressive Secularism.” In the paper, Cimino and Smith noted a significant change occurring within organized atheism and secular humanism, as organizations shied away from acting as the vanguard of progressing secularism in wider western culture and instead began to emphasize atheism as a part of minority discourse and identity politics.
This first frame, which I’ll be calling the “secular vanguard frame,” is deeply rooted in the famous “secularization thesis” which dominated the sociology of religion in the 20th Century. The idea was that the West was on a steady march toward complete secularization, with religion becoming functionally extinct in the not too distant future. Organized atheism enthusiastically bought in, and they billed themselves as the force instituting this change.
The advent of the Moral Majority, however, and the rise of Christian Evangelicalism in the late 20th Century, not to mention the resiliency of American religiosity in general, effectively delegitimized many conceptions of the secularization thesis and left sociologists scrambling to make sense of a religious landscape they didn’t anticipate. Cimino and Smith document organized atheism’s response to these revelations, and it was largely manifested in the adoption of what I’ll call the “embattled minority frame.” That is, the movement began to frame atheists as a disenfranchised minority under attack by oppressive forces.
But it seems that the worst of the secular vanguard and embattled minority frames are being employed in a way that is both inconsistent with current sociological realities and alienating to both outsiders and members of atheist organizations and communities.
First, the secular vanguard frame has experienced resurgence in atheist circles due to the rise of religious “nones.” Sociologists and other scholars of religion, meanwhile, remain hesitant to associate this trend with broader secularization. For some atheist leaders, though, the rise of religious disaffiliation in the US seems perfectly timed to validate as successful the New Atheism phenomenon and other recent aggressive approaches.
David Silverman of American Atheists, for example, conflated “Nones” with atheists completely after the Boston Marathon bombings. He says, “These tragedies affect all citizens, including atheists—the fastest growing religious demographic in New England,” but this is not true. Nones are the fastest growing religious demographic, but nearly 70% of them believe in God. Considered alongside his claim (that he supports using nothing but Google trends) that “firebrand atheism” is solely responsible for increased interest in atheism, this mistake in demographic categories has the effect of suggesting that militant atheism itself is responsible for the rise of religious disaffiliation in the United States—a claim that no sociologist or religious scholar has made or would ever support.
The more serious, and perhaps more insidious, trend in organized atheism, though, resides in the troubling implications of embattled minority framing. This is not to say that atheists aren’t often marginalized or discriminated against, because they are. But this embattled purview can mask problems within the movement itself, especially while culture war rhetoric often lends the movement the aesthetic of a group actually at war.
A lot has been written lately on sexual assault and Islamophobia within organized atheism, and I’ll leave it to those better educated, well-versed and with more personal experience regarding those issues to comment on them. My point is more general and perhaps more obvious: a group that perpetuates the idea that they are being cornered, or that they are at war, or that disunity of voice portrays weakness which means death, will almost always create a culture that demonizes out-groups for the sake of in-group morale, elevating its leaders beyond the reach of legitimate critique in the process.
How then should atheist organizations think of themselves and frame their mission? I don’t have a definitive answer to such a large question but I do think that internalizing a few sociological truths will help steer them in a better direction.
First, there is no evidence that atheist or secular humanist organizations are acting as the vanguard of an advancing secularism. Nor can they claim to represent the thoughts, wishes, or sentiments of the “Nones,” who are a much more diverse and religious demographic than organized secularists. Rather, they need to feel comfortable catering to their membership and their own organizational goals while seeking spaces of engagement with other religious groups that share their values. The secular vanguard frame is toxic to religious pluralism and interfaith relationships for obvious reasons, and discarding it will improve outreach and engagement with the wider community.
This point has profound implications for the embattled minority frame, as well. Seeking relationships with other religious minorities will temper bias against out-groups, provide the foundation for a broader coalition of marginalized belief systems, and bring more accountability to leadership as they struggle to serve a greater diversity of interests rather than dictate to only a few.
Some of the reactions to accusations of Islamophobia and sexual misconduct in the atheist movement have been predictable, with various voices doubling down on in-group exceptionalism and unity, respectively. But this is counterproductive in addressing the problems within the atheist movement and impedes our ability to become more accountable to each other and accessible to those that might consider our message. That’s a fiction I don’t care to take part in, and one that organized atheism and secular humanism can’t afford to perpetuate.
Marcus Mann lives with his wife and two cats in Carrboro, NC and is a Masters student in Religion at Duke University. He has been focusing on the sociology of irreligion, and is currently working on his thesis, which is an ethnography of atheist culture in the Triangle region of North Carolina. You can follow him on Twitter.
