Atheists: The New Evangelicals (Part 1: My experience with WASH)

As you may or may not know (or care), I'm an atheist. It's not something that I advertise or wear on my sleeve or even disclose without asking. It's just the way I see the universe; my moral compass is derived from many sources, mostly from personal experience, but I also include religious texts as sources of guidance. I mean, hey, if it works for so many, there must be something to them, right?

For the past couple of years, I'd been looking for a group of people to socialize with apart from my theatre friends and/or drinking buddies. I figured that getting to know other local atheists would be right up my alley. Boy, was I wrong.

The first experience I had was with the Washington Area Secular Humanists. I suspect that they labeled themselves as such because Washington Area Atheists has a worse acronym. The chapter closest to me meets the first Saturday of every month for discussions and refreshment at the Montgomery County Public Library in Chevy Chase, Maryland. When I arrived, I was instantly apprehensive about fitting in: everyone in the group was old, unkempt, and had no sense of style. I was also the youngest one in there by about 10 years. Looking at these folks, I couldn't see anyone there who I could strike up a fun conversation about the latest episode of Heroes or the travesty that was Spider-Man 3 or even marriage and babies. As the afternoon progressed, I discovered my apprehension was apt.

The meeting started with summary and reflections on the latest Atheist Alliance International Convention, where noted atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Ayan Hirsi Ali told their stories and publicized their books. (These are the world's leading voices in atheism today, and I know that at least 3 out of these 4 have appeared on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report at one time or another.) The WASH representatives who attended the convention gave the speakers almost unanimous raves and praise. Then something interesting happened and it gave me an unfortunate sense of disappointment.

One WASH representative reported on his experience listening to Sam Harris. Harris' philosophy on discussing atheism with religious people boils down to this: remain calm and don't get frustrated, no matter how frustrating or unreasonable a person may seem. The message seems simple enough, except that it assumes that all religious people are unreasonable. Worse yet, the representative giving the report explained this philosophy as if having calm and reasonable discussions was a novel idea! It was at this point that I came to the clear yet unfortunate realization that no group is immune to ignorance.

Refreshment soon followed, and I trolled around and eavesdropped on conversations, seeing if there were any that I found interesting. None were. All were basically the same thing: religious people are fanatics, look at 9/11, Republicans suck, Hitchens and Dawkins are fantastic. This was Bible study, but without the Bible or even the happiness and joy that can be found in Bible studies.

The discussion period then began, and the question posed for the day was "Is having moderate or light religious faith as bad as being an extremist?" For the most part, people said that not all religious people are extremists, but they are still suffering from a delusion. I found that the tone of the answers smacked of an overwhelming sense of derisiveness, as if these people didn't truly understand how non-atheists led their lives. I said as much when I went up to speak.

The meeting broke up shortly after, and there were continuing conversations in the parking lot. Using my history background, I explained to one gentleman that Abraham Lincoln, while not a member of any specific church, was a deeply religious man, and not (as the gentleman I was chatting with believed) a man who used the word "God" as just that -- a word. Great men and women in our history and today believe in a higher power, and I didn't think it was wise for atheists to consign those men and women to the category of deluded individuals.

The WASH meeting was a bust for me. The members carried with them a sense of superiority that I found disturbing. I realized then that I had just gone to a place that I was hoping to avoid: I had just been to a church.

Next, Part 2: The Beltway Atheists.