July 19, 2009
A kinder, gentler American atheism
by Byron R. McCane
The State
Has something gone wrong with the new atheism? For awhile, it was really on a roll. Several best-selling books aggressively attacked religion, calling it a "delusion" (Richard Dawkins), and a "spell" (Daniel Dennett) that "poisons everything" (Christopher Hitchens). Bill Maher's movie "Religulous" warned that humankind must get rid of religion or die. New atheism looked like the wave of the future. But not anymore. "Religulous" got mixed reviews and disappeared quickly. Rebuttals to Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens have appeared, culminating with Karen Armstrong's new book, The Case for God. Sales of atheist books have fallen off the charts, literally. Months have gone by since one appeared on the best-seller list.
Why did the new atheists falter so quickly? Because they ignored important facts about religion in America today.
First, they dramatically overestimated the number of unbelievers. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, 15 percent of Americans are not currently members of any religious organization. This finding led to the claim that one in six Americans is now an unbeliever. But the data actually show that three quarters of the people in that 15 percent are "in between" religious commitments.
Previous studies by Robert Wuthnow of Princeton University have shown that America today is a nation of "religious migrants." Most of us go through a series of religious commitments over the course of our lives, drawing upon various religious institutions as "resource centers" along the way. We are, Wuthnow concluded, a country of "spiritual seekers." At any given moment, 15 percent of us may be unaffiliated, but most of those are believers. In a recent Pew Forum survey, in fact, only 1.6 percent of respondents identified themselves as atheists.
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