An Agnostic Advocacy

This particular article (available at http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/the-atheist-bus-drove-in-on-the-web/?scp=6&sq=Secular%20Humanism&st=cse) details an agnostic bus campaign brewing in the UK. Fed up with vocal Christians condemning her to hell for her atheism, Ariane Sharine posted a blog message calling for donations to help fund an agnostic ad-campaign. Like-minded individuals were quick to answer her call: Donations poured in, totaling up to £135,000 altogether, more than twenty times Ms. Sharine’s initial estimates. The money has been used to fund advertisements on 800, each banner brashly declaring, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” High profile atheists Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee have come on board to support the campaign, and similar movements have cropped up in Spain, Italy, and even Washington DC.

Such an overt advocacy for agnosticism led my thoughts to Rice University Sociologist William Martin’s With God on Our Side, an examination of America’s Christian Right. I’d just finished a passage on the notion of the “traditional” family and the rise of the Moral Majority. Throughout these chapters, Martin focuses on the Christian Right’s paranoid loathing of the “secular humanists.” As explained by Martin, many on the right considered the secular humanists to be some sort of underground shadow network (akin to the dreaded Communism) surreptitiously working to undermine American greatness and values. The secular humanists were blamed for everything “wrong” with America, from the rising divorce rate, to doubt in God, to the theory of evolution, to the existence of homosexuals. When the Christian Right coalesced in the late seventies and early eighties, it was partly to stand against this spectral, monolithic threat to American values.

The idea of a secular humanist “conspiracy” explicitly formed to destroy America sounds a bit paranoid. However, a vocal advertising campaign decrying God certainly adds fuel to that fire. Martin seems to view the “vast conspiracy” as a partially imagined threat, a front to unite conservative Christians. However, Ms. Sharine gives that imagined threat a voice and a face. Rather than “raise awareness,” I expect this bus campaign can only stoke further antagonism.

The comments below the blog carry on the hostile spirit. Enthusiastic calls for “the second Enlightenment” and a scrapheap for “old superstitions” abound. However, one particular dissenting comment also caught my eye: “Are these the same people who are offended by religious folks who proselytize?”