The Ordinary Extraordinary blog
The Ordinary Extraordinary blog
Atheism...and polyamory, and Christmas
In the October 29, 2018 issue of The New Yorker, Casey Cep authors an article entitled “Without a Prayer.” The well-reported piece asks, “Why are Americans still uncomfortable with atheism?” It’s a thoughtful look at the history not of unbelief but of others’ perceptions of the unbelieving. At the end of our look at the article, we offer a few other observations.
The article opens by exploring objection to military service, something that first required filling out the United States Selective Service System’s Form 150, the first question on which was “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?” One man, Daniel Seeger, was unsatisfied with the two available options: “Yes” and “No.” Ms. Cep points out, “those who belonged to pacifist religious, such as Mennonites and Quakers, were sent to war as noncombatants or to work as farmers or firefighters on the home front through the Civilian Public Service…”—but there existed no such dispensation for the nonbeliever. Seeger’s fight against this disparity went all the way to the Supreme Court, “where, in 1965, the Justices found unanimously that a draftee did not need to believe in God in order to have a conscience that could object.”
Seeger’s victory helped mark a turning point for a minority that had once been denied so much as the right to testify in court, even in their own defense. Atheists, long discriminated against by civil authorities and derided by their fellow-citizens, were suddenly eligible for some of the exemptions and protections that had previously been restricted to believers. But, in the decades since U.S. v. Seeger, despite an increase in the the number of people who identify as nonbelievers, their standing before the courts and in the public sphere has been slow to improve. Americans, in large numbers, still do not want atheists teaching their children, or marrying them. They would, according to surveys, prefer a female, gay, Mormon, or Muslim President to having an atheist in the White House, and some of them do not object to attempts to keep nonbelievers from holding other offices, even when the office is that of notary public. Atheists are not welcome in the Masonic Lodge, and while the Boy Scouts of America has opened its organization to gays and to girls, it continues to bar any participant who will not pledge “to do my duty to God.”
Cep writes, “Lack of belief in God is still too often taken to mean the absence of any other meaningful moral beliefs, and that has made atheists an easy minority to revile. … Yet the national prejudice against [atheists] long predates Daniel Seeger and his draft board. It has its roots both in the intellectual history of the country and in a persistent anti-intellectual impulse: the widespread failure to consider what it is that unbelievers actually believe.”
Ms. Cep then takes a good look at the founding of America, and observes that “the men who gathered for the Constitutional Convention banned religious tests for office holders, in Article VI. There would be no government church, no state religion, and, except for being signed in the Year of our Lord 1787, no mention of God in America’s founding text.” The next major skirmishes in the tug-of-war of America’s relationship with religion came much later. “Two centuries after the Founders wrote a godless constitution, the federal government got religion: between 1953 and 1957, a prayer breakfast appeared on the White House calendar, a prayer room opened in the Capitol, ‘In God We Trust’ was added to all currency, and ‘under God’ was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance.”
So what exactly constitutes an atheist? A longer extract from the article:
Unlike racial minorities, their condition is not immutable, but, like many religious minorities, they are subject to hostility and prejudice. Atheism, however, is not a single identity, ideology, or set of practices, and to speak of it that way is as reductive as speaking of “religion” rather than of Judaism, Buddhism, or Christianity—or, even more usefully, of Reform Judaism, Mahayana Buddhism, or Pentecostalism. “Atheisms” is a more precise concept, as the philosopher John Gray demonstrates in his new book, “Seven Types of Atheism” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and one that could help Americans move beyond their intractable fight over the existence of God.
Gray, who taught at Oxford, Harvard, Yale, and the London School of Economics before turning full time to writing, starts by offering a highly provisional and idiosyncratic definition of “atheist”: “anyone with no use for a divine mind that has fashioned the world.” As he concedes, that makes the category so capacious that it includes some of the world’s major religions: neither Buddhism nor Taoism features a creator god. Yet that capaciousness is appropriate, because it suggests, correctly, that there is no single atheistic world view. Much of the animosity and opprobrium directed at nonbelievers in America comes from the suspicion that those who do not believe in God could not possibly believe in anything else, moral or otherwise. The reason that atheists were not allowed to testify in court for so long was the certainty that witnesses who were unwilling to swear an oath to God had no reason to be truthful, since they did not fear divine judgment. Gray’s survey, while not comprehensive, is a welcome corrective to that ungenerous view.
It is also a refreshing look beyond the so-called “new atheists” who have lately dominated the conversation surrounding unbelief. Gray does not brook what he describes as their “tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion… New atheists have directed their campaign against a narrow segment of religion while failing to understand even that small part,” he writes. By Gray’s account, they ignore polytheism and animism almost entirely, while insisting on reading verses of Genesis or lines of the Nicene Creed as if they were primitive scientific theories. Not all monotheists are literalists, and, for many of us, both now and throughout history, the Garden of Eden is not a faulty hypothesis about evolution but a rich symbolic story about good and evil.
A bit further on, Cep quotes Gray as arguing that “saying that God does not exist is not so different from saying that we cannot comprehend God's existence. In both cases, the material world may be characterized by limited understanding and limitless wonder. That is the charity so seldom extended to atheists in America: the notion that they, too, may be awed by and struggling to make sense of the human and the cosmic. ‘A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think,’ Gray writes.”
The article also takes note of something that lies foremost in the minds of many atheists, that “contemporary American atheists may be inclined to wage war on religion because religion has been waging war on them for so long. A brief truce was reached at the end of the Obama Administration, when Congress passed, and the President signed, a new version of the International Religious Freedom Act that officially included nonbelievers. ‘The freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is understood to protect theistic and non-theistic beliefs and the right not to profess or practice any religion,’ the law was revised to read.”
The last line of Cep’s article is perhaps its finest: “In the end, the most interesting thing about a conscience is how it answers, not whom it answers to.”
A lovely article, and one well worth reading. But, to our minds, there’s a little more to observe here. And it starts with the plain fact that an overwhelming number of polyamorous people are atheists. A polyamorous atheist, like any atheist, might very well bristle at any suggestion of a creator god, regardless of the source or context. Or they can, as we do, embrace rhetoric such as that of Abraham Lincoln’s finer exhortations, many of which involve a heavenly Lord, and not necessarily take offense but, indeed, exult in the words of a wise man. The reason an atheist might accept such concepts coming from Lincoln is that they understand his heart, and know where his efforts led. In the same spirit, one hopes an atheist wouldn’t vote for a craven atheist when an honorable, civic-minded Christian was offered as an alternate.
If we poly people want to be seen as more than a horde of single-focus hedonists (a vastly incorrect view), and if we atheists want to be seen as more than knee-jerk humanists (ditto), we need to allow for some of the religious among us to be palatable. Typically, and historically, this occurs plenty often—and probably more than we receive in return. But if we’re looking to be further absorbed into the culture, and to have our polyamorous and atheist views seen as available, mainstream options, then we must always endeavor to meet situations halfway—even when denied it from the other party.
Gay rights were more quickly attained when people had gays and lesbians among them, out of the closet and ready to talk. Their daughter, their friend, their coworker—the imagined LGBT menace gained a face and became impossible to dismiss as Other. The polyamory community is making some strides in this direction but remain largely Other. The atheist community is more and more accepted (especially in Blue states) but individuals are sometimes seen as annoyingly one-track and held at arm’s distance. If you feel you must loudly proclaim your veganism at the mere mention of meat, you become a thoroughly negative example of veganism to those around you. You will have become a jukebox of which everyone knows which response will come with a given prompt.
Why are so many polyamorous people atheists? We believe much of the answer comes from what polyamory is based in: a willingness to see that traditional structures need not be hewed to. In the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment, polyamory is an option. And as long as you’re not taking it as your mission to convert the monogamous to polyamory, you see all avenues as viable: in love, and in religion. There is no need to automatically take up the faith of your parents or your community, and perhaps not even a speck of dread accompanies the decision. You’re free to see all options, and to see that you need not be chained to ideas simply because they’re tenacious.
If the eagle-eared reader noticed something echoing in the latter portion of the previous sentence, it’s because we’ve quoted from something we’re going to end this entry with. We’re unbelievers through and through—but we love Christmas. We love the traditions, the warm fuzzies, and much of the aesthetic. And the wonderful song “White Wine in Sun,” by the wonderful Australian comedian and musician Tim Minchin, is about how he’s an atheist who loves Christmas. We’re going to include the lyrics to the song below. We hope you all enjoy, the religiously devout and the godlessly devout alike.
When we wish you Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, know that we mean it with the entirety of our atheistic hearts. As Linus van Pelt once said, “And on earth peace, good will toward men.”
(Note: Minchin has varied the lyrics slightly over the years.
These are from our favorite version, performed live on
The Late Late Show with James Corden, December 2017.)
Tim Minchin’s “White Wine in the Sun”
I really like Christmas — it’s sentimental, I know, but I just really like it
I am hardly religious — I’d rather dance with the devil than Desmond Tutu, to be honest
And yes, I have all of the usual objections to consumerism,
To the commercialization of an ancient religion, to the westernization of a dead Palestinian
Press-ganged into selling PlayStations and beer
But I still really like it
I'm looking forward to Christmas — though I'm not expecting a visit from Jesus
I'll be seeing my dad — my brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They'll be drinking white wine in the sun
I don't go in for ancient wisdom
I don't believe just ’cause ideas are tenacious, it means they’re worthy
I get freaked out by churches
Some of the hymns that they sing have nice chords but the lyrics are dodgy
And yes, I have all of the usual objections to the miseducation of children who, in tax-exempt institutions, are taught to externalize blame
And to feel ashamed, and to judge things as plain right or wrong
But I quite like the songs
I'm not expecting big presents
The old combination of socks, jocks and chocolates is just fine by me
’Cause I'll be seeing my dad — my brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They'll be drinking white wine in the sun
And you, my baby girl, my jet-lagged infant daughter
You'll be handed ’round the room like a puppy at a primary school
And you won't understand — but you will learn someday
That wherever you are, and whatever you face, these are the people who'll make you feel safe in this world
My sweet blue-eyed girl
And if my baby girl, when you're twenty-one or thirty-one
And Christmas comes around, and you find yourself nine thousand miles from home
You’ll know whatever comes …
Your brothers and sisters, and me and your mum will be waiting for you in the sun
Drinking white wine in the sun
Darling, when Christmas comes, we'll be waiting for you in the sun
Waiting …
I really like Christmas — it’s sentimental, I know…
Sunday, December 2, 2018