We were out to amuse ourselves, and because we were amusing ourselves, we amused others, too. People like laughing. At the beginning, we weren’t part of any national movement, so if we were impolitic, no one cared. We were only out for ourselves. When groups form in college, they tend to immediately affiliate with the SSA or CFI, organizations that have prescribed ways to run groups. But since we didn’t know about the national secular organizations, we were flying by the seat of our pants. What we did differently than most other groups is that we had a philosopher king setup, with one person who made all the decisions. It worked really, really well. There was no bickering amongst the officers. If something needed to get done, we just did it.
One of my major goals in becoming an activist was to change people’s minds. I know what it feels like to be religious, but I also know that religious people can change. I was as closed off as anybody at the height of my religiosity, so I’m familiar with what happens in the brain of someone who is meeting atheistic arguments for the first time and doesn’t want to accept them. Some people try to close their brains. I’ve been in that position, and even though I tried to do so, I couldn’t. Once the worms got inside, there was nothing I could do, which is the way the mind works. We don’t choose our beliefs. Our beliefs are formed by the information that is in our brain. One can climb up to the top of a building and try to convince oneself by force of will that gravity doesn’t work, but you’ll never be able to do so. Our minds are reality-producing engines, so once ideas get into someone’s head that destroy their belief in God, even if they say, “No, no, no, I’m not listening,” the ideas are in there. There’s nothing they can do about it. I was the same way. Once they got in there, I was done. It was just a matter of time.
In a way, this is why I believe atheists can be successful in the long run. I bump into a lot of atheists who express awe that we can make it look easy to beat all of the illogical arguments that religions and religious leaders make in debates. People think that theologians really do have good arguments, that it must take some towering intellect to beat them. I think most atheists also felt that way until they started watching other atheists win religious debates online. Atheists began to think, “That argument was easy. I never thought about that argument, but it’s so simple. These religious ideas are dumb, and I just never saw it.” Human beings have a herd mentality. If we see a bunch of people running away from something, we also run, even though we may not necessarily know why. People who act boldly and speak with confidence, like the world’s most revered religious leaders, assure people that there’s no chance that they’re wrong about their beliefs, and people tend to believe them.
I personally think that the best way to change someone’s mind about religion is through confrontation, by telling people unashamedly and without apology that what they believe is wrong. I think this way for a couple reasons. The first is that when we appear strong, that influences people. We have every right to appear strong, which is what separates us from the religious. We have all of the evidence, all of the reason, all of the logic on our side. More people are beginning to understand that fact. As more young people come out of the closet, secular organizations like the SSA and CFI are providing warm environments for people to know that they’ll still be loved and supported. As more people are coming out, more people are realizing that not only do they know atheists, but that they like atheists, too. That has a powerful effect. It’s easy to say that atheists are the cause of all things evil when people are not faced with them. But when your child or your parents or your friend or your lover comes out and says, “I don’t believe in God,” all of a sudden there’s a human face on that identity. That is happening right now.
I’ve been incredibly interested in helping the secular movement continue to grow, and I was fortunate to be hired by the SSA after I graduated from college. It was quite interesting for me to hold my job organizing high school secular groups at this point in time. In my experience, many high schools do not want freethought or atheist student clubs and therefore try to stonewall them. Usually it’s juniors or seniors who are trying to start these clubs. The most popular tactic is that administrations will ignore the students, delay and drag their feet and wait for the student to either lose interest or graduate. If the students don’t lose interest or graduate, the administration will generally say that they require all clubs to have a willing faculty advisor. They then ask the student to find one. I’ve had plenty of teachers admit to me in confidence that they were going to be the faculty advisor for such a club but were told that it would be a bad career move by higher authorities in their district. We have solutions to these problems: even if a teacher can’t or won’t come forward as a faculty advisor, legally the school can’t require the groups to have one.
As an organizer, I had access to an army of pro bono legal advisers. Every time something went wrong in high schools, I could message them and ask, “What is your take on this?” They’d advise me, and I’d tell the student what to do. Countless times the law has come down on the side of secularism in government institutions like high schools. Sometimes high school administrators would cave. Other times, they were dying to be sued. And anytime administrators would try to drag their feet, the students could call me, and I would contact that administrator and put the fear of God into them.
Overall, the secular movement is growing at a rapid rate. A couple years ago, the SSA had 60 to 80 groups. Now, they’re up to 350. All reliable polling indicates that religion is on the decline in America, particularly in the 18-29 age bracket. The 18-29 age bracket makes up roughly 22% of the overall population, but has roughly 30 to 31% of all atheists. This group is the future.
The SSA’s conferences and large gatherings help to replicate the community that churches have used to their advantage for centuries. I attended several conferences as a member of the SSA, and when students left them, they did so with a fire lit for activism. They’d want to go out and change everything because they’d met so many like-minded people and felt support, like they had an army at their back.
While I have my personal approach to confrontation, I do think that, on occasion, even super nice atheists who never want to criticize anybody, who just want to show people that atheists can be kind, every now and then they are effective too. I think they’re much less effective than the people who are creating a harsh environment for religion, though. Right now, I think that one of the reasons that a lot of people are religious is because it’s comfortable. One thing that we can do to change the status quo is to try to take that religious comfort away. Today, a religious person, a Christian, for example, can go into the public square and spout ludicrous religious ideas. There really is a part of the social rubric that prohibits public criticism of those ideas. I want to live in a world in which religious people check themselves and think, “If I open my mouth and say things that I can’t defend, is somebody going to call me on this? Is someone going to socially punish for me doing that, am I going to look like an idiot?” That’s something that the confrontationalists are doing that is making a huge difference. I think they’re really effective.
To me, I don’t think that Richard Dawkins is any more valuable to our movement than a car mechanic who comes out to his family. There are a lot of people who would disagree with me on that. Dawkins’s role is certainly more prominent, but we’re all a part of the movement with different roles. I’ve accepted that public speaking is part of my role, so I do it. Even though I’m a shy person, and public speaking exhausts me, it needs to be done. Frankly, I think I have one of the easier roles in the movement as a debater.