Several months ago, I encountered an interesting newspaper column entitled “America doesn’t need more God. It needs more atheists” (Washington Post, 10-3-23). The author, Kate Cohen, said that Americans needed more atheists since atheists “demand that truth claims be tethered to fact.”
It is unfortunate, Cohen notes, that atheists are not popular in our public culture. A recent Pew Research Center poll listed the number of self-proclaimed atheists at 4 percent. Several psychologists, using a different polling technique, were able to raise that to 26 percent of people who refused to say they believed in God.
Americans seem to have a built-in distrust of atheists. We don’t want to vote for them or want our children to marry them, and we even associate lack of belief in God with criminal behavior. We refer to God in our pledge of allegiance and stamp it on our currency—this, for many of us, is part of the notion that we are “a Christian nation,” something that is not true legally, sociologically, or even behaviorally.
And this brings us back to Cohen’s claim that we need more publicly professed atheists in order to raise the level of honesty in our public life.
Cohen cites a recent Washington Post/ABC News Poll in which 29 percent of Americans said they believed that President Biden was not legitimately elected. 22 percent of those polled “think there is solid evidence of fraud” while 7 percent said there wasn’t such evidence but still said Biden was not a legitimately elected president.
Eighty-one percent claimed to be Christian in a 2022 Gallup poll. How many of them, I wonder, might also be among those who deny Biden’s victory in 2020? I suspect it was more than a few.
Being affiliated with an organized religious group, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist or other, does not make you immune to political falsehoods. Of course, neither does being an atheist. Cohen argues, however, that atheists are more “tethered to facts” because they do not accept religious stories or “myths,” as she calls them.
Cohen also claims that atheists are more likely to be active in and donate to political campaigns and are 30 percent more likely to vote than religious people. She believes atheists “understand that, without [belief in] a higher power, we need human power to change the world,” but also admits that there are are social and political activists are who are religious. “You don’t have to be an atheist, she notes; you just have to act like one” she says.
Having said that, she is still critical of religious believers for not “pushing back against the outsized cultural and political power of religion itself.” By this she means all the religious exemptions that have been given by recent court decisions. These include rulings that the state of Maine must “pay for a parochial school. . . and that a website designer can reject same-sex clients.”
Cohen’s article raises some interesting and legitimate points. Religious groups now have more legal, social, and political power than appropriate in a nation which has long valued separation between church and state.
The second major point this author makes (beyond claiming that it is easier for atheists to be more honest and that there are more of them in hiding in religious communities than you might think) is that America would be stronger if more atheists “came out of the closet.” If this happened, she says, would reduce some of the pain which evangelical Christians inflict on our country by supporting people like Donald Trump.
“So ask yourself: Do I think there is a supernatural being in charge of the universe? If you answer ‘no’ you’re an atheist. . . .But if you go further, you’ll be doing something good for your county.”
Now this is where I get off the train that Ms. Cohen is driving, even though I am willing to ride with her criticisms of the damage done to America by the type of “Christians” she deplores. While I believe in God, I do not accept Cohen’s definition of God as a “supernatural being” running the universe.