Atheism is never going to become the big player people say it will
Recently, I spent a week on the beautiful island of Lesbos with a team (funded mostly by the Norwegian government money), studying Atheism and what makes people atheist. My conclusion: Religion is here to stay and Atheism is not a threat to it.* There are two reasons behind my conclusion: 1) atheists can be as unopen to facts as religious people when they don’t hear what they want and 2) there is nothing special about atheism. Now, before I get into this let me make a quick caveat, by atheism I don’t mean “secularism” and those who want non-religious explanations. A push toward scientific thought in the world is clear, and a trend I do believe will continue in conjunction with religious beliefs. I do not believe that it threatens religions. Now, I’ll be trying to outline it, but also keep things pretty light in what could otherwise be a hefty discussion.
At the end of my week with some of the leaders of the study of atheism and atheist movement, I’m left with the conclusion that if points are raised about how cohesive groups from (both religious and secular) they often reject the science behind it. Now, for me, I was taken aback by the science denialism that I was seeing. These groups are the ones that should be trumpeting scientific breakthroughs. And yet, when presented with findings that they don’t like, they turn — as all fundamentalists do — into denialists. This denialism isn’t rooted in the “scepticism” that Atheists like to herald.
In my academic research, I focus on what causes religious movements to take root and how they can sustain themselves over time. There are a few clear suggestions and requirements. For example, fostering a cohesive identity with which you can bind a group is required. You cannot have a religion without a group. As they say, one man who receives messages from a supernatural being is crazy, but if 10 people believe him, it’s a religion. There is a massive literature on how to foster an identity in the psychological literature and how different experiences can foster different identities. For example, in a study I helped design investigating bonding and cohesion, we found that reflection on an intense emotional experience had a positive effect on a key measure of social cohesion (known as fusion). Also, I have found in my research that frequently participating with a social group and learning the beliefs and tenants of that group can foster social identification with that group.
When I discussed these ideas with some of the people I spent my week with (including leaders at some of the top Atheist and Free Thought organizations in the world), I was fascinated by how quickly they rejected the ideas. When I presented brief synopses of the papers and literature that suggest this, they only pushed back harder. The reason for their push-back, I learned, was because they don’t believe that Atheists want to do things in order to be part of a cohesive group, particularly if the things they’d have to do look religious (such as weekly gatherings).
This fascinated me. When presented with reasonable evidence that they could grow their groups quite simply by mimicking the well attested to social structures of so many other successful organizations, they rejected the research because of a predisposed bias against religion. Well, I have news for the Atheists who do this: religiosity is still the dominant identity of most humans. Not most Americans, not most “developed” nations, the vast majority of our species.
I also found that many of the leaders are extremely aware of literature supporting their view that secularism is growing, but were totally unaware of any critiques to the contrary, such as the critique that the survey questions that are being used are biased toward a Judaeo-Christian view of religion and are not actually capturing changes in religions toward more “new age” or “spiritual” dimensions that lack the sort of structured social dogmatism that has come to define Western World Religions. Now for my first interlude into hyperbolic comedy to poke fun at the way that so many people approach religion and spirituality.
When those critiques were presented and explained, responses ranged from “well I don’t think that’s right from my experience” to “I’ll have to read that and see”. On the one hand, the “I’ll have to read that”, crowd does seem to represent the healthy scepticism that the atheist community wants to put forward. However, in my experience, they are not reading this new material to understand it, they’re reading it to find a nit-picked hole that they can exploit to justify holding on to their previous beliefs. Cognitive dissonance is not a unique quality of the religious.
Lastly, and most interesting to myself, so many people in the study of atheism and secularity are not even attempting, or appear to have really considered, that there could be explanatory, scientific, approaches to the study of atheism. They have — to date — been happy to simply describe atheism and attempt to extrapolate from this description in trends, that the future holds similarly. This is the equivalent of saying in 2007 “well, my investments in sketchy mortgages have been great so far, they’ll continue to be great in the future”, then in 2008 wondering why you were wrong. Hint: its because you couldn’t fully explain the mechanisms of why those bonds were valuable and thus predict the conditions under which they would no longer be valuable.
In my second point, I’m not claiming that there is anything “special” about religion in particular. Religion appears to be a “default” for most of human history. Only recently have there been claims that the world is getting more secular. However, these claims are extremely problematic. They’re often based on studies that boil down to tracking traditional Judeo-Christian religion, and anything that falls outside of this narrow and presentist definition of religion is thrown to the wayside. So, what the studies have shown is that religions are moving away from the traditional paradigm of belief in a “god” and toward other things, such as new age spiritualities. Now for our second funny laugh break a guy who totally nails some of the pop-culture fads surrounding spirituality:
This, on the whole, might not be so problematic for atheism, if atheism is just defined as a rejection of the belief in god. But this definitional problem illuminates a greater issue with atheism. If religious groups are religious, then aren’t non-religious groups everything else? Unless your football team is a “Christian football” team or your hockey team is explicitly a religious hockey team, you’re on a secular sports team. Your chess club is a secular chess club. Everything that is not religious can be contrived as secular.
This is a problem because it means that the only definition of atheism where there is something “special” (or defining) of atheism is that it is explicitly opposed to religion. So, if atheist groups want something to “be”, that is to say, if they want something to set them apart, they basically are the inverse of a religious group.
This last idea almost brings me full circle to my first. Religions, like it or not, have worked. They have (in some cases) created world-wide communities that have lasted thousands of years. They’ve done this because they have specific beliefs and practices that they use to define the group. Atheist groups lack this insofar as they are either a) anything but a religious group or b) the opposite of a religious group. One could argue that option B actually is possible. Writers such as Richard Dawkins (and the other “horsemen of atheism” Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett) have become famous for their vehement attacks on “religion” (and here I deliberately use scare quotes because their attacks often only apply to small fractions of extremists in a specific religion that they then extrapolate to all of Religion as a category — a known logical fallacy they’ve perpetuated for decades). So, it is possible that their more fervent anti-religious rhetoric could be used to define the group. However, there are two problems with this. 1) it sets up atheism to be attacked by religious groups that can demonstrate that they do not believe the extremist caricatures that are presented of them — thus undermining the Atheist argument and recruitment. 2) it pidgin holes atheism into a specific set of beliefs that — if they are applicable — are only relevant to the present socio-political climate.
Religions are dynamic, one of the reasons they can be so dynamic is because their key beliefs are about the supernatural, things we can’t observe or falsify or measure. Because of that, religious beliefs can be shaped to apply to almost any aspect of our world at almost any time (past present and future). Atheism is unlikely to ever be able to mimic this sort of cohesion because if it were to juxtapose itself against religion, it would always be one step behind the ball.
So, what does this mean? Well, for me, it means we can make a clear prediction about atheism: By 2040, the world’s share of atheists will be less than it is today (a prediction that somewhat aligns with Pew’s results-as flawed as their model may be). That is to say, atheism will be on the decline. Given the social and economic and global trends we see today, taking into account their likely fluctuation in the future, it is hard to imagine a world where atheism prospers into the middle and end of the next century.
Global population growth, coupled with our impending issues with finding the resources to support that population, and the fact that countries that have the highest rates of atheism have the lowest rates of reproduction and the countries with fast growing populations (such as in the “global south”) are also embracing charismatic Christianity and Islam at an astonishing rate, suggests that atheism will be on the decline in coming decades.
*Just as a personal note to get out ahead of the inevitable ad hominem arguments that come from this sort of discussion: I do not believe in the idea that God is a bearded white guy in the sky. I also do not accept the atheist argument that science has disproven god. I write this piece as a reflection on my interactions with Atheists over the past week in particular, informed by over 10 years of study and work with religious groups.
