The Chris Moeller Archives

A day at the American Atheists National Convention

About midway through Saturday's proceedings at a national gathering of atheists in Des Moines' Embassy Suites Hotel, the emcee announced that a tornado had struck the St. Louis Airport. All inbound and outbound flights out of this nearby "hub" city were postponed indefinitely and so many of the out-of-town conventioneers were going to likely be affected on their way home. It's probably fair to say that none of the 700 people in the convention hall were thinking of the word "miracle" at any point in the day, but that's the one the St. Louis County emergency management director used when he announced that the tornado had caused extensive property damage, but no fatalities, in the disaster that coincided with Easter weekend. (The St. Louis Post-Dispatch hopped on the bandwagon of superstition and show business by reprinting the word "miracle" in their banner headline this morning without bothering to put quotes around the word.)

And there it is. You can stop staring hard at the colorations of your morning toast and call up the Vatican on your cell phone. We have our Easter miracle for 2011! The person invested with the responsibility for the human mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery for natural disasters in a municipality of almost a million people is crediting a merciful deity for the physical and biological outcomes of the storm. And people wonder why atheists have to gather together and draw public attention to themselves.

Many of you would probably never go to an atheist convention, but many nevertheless would probably be curious as to what goes on there. The event this weekend stretched from Thursday night until today, but I can only tell you about yesterday, the (full) day I was there. Disclaimer: I missed the ritual sacrifices and the bacchanalia from Friday.

The day started with a panel discussion involving representatives from area atheist groups-- those from the state organization "Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers," from Iowa State University, and from the Sioux City area. The most interesting speaker of the day followed them-- Jamila Bey. She is a freelance journalist formerly of NPR, and at times, a stand-up comedian. She spoke in great detail about the myth of uniform religious belief in the African-American community, and of the very real corrupting influences of the church. The Christian congregations, specifically, are rapidly aging now, fortunately, as young African-Americans are recognizing the hypocrisies.

As Bey explained in her presentation, and then as part of a diversity panel that followed her hour-long speech, our black communities are largely matriarchal. In fact, only 13 percent of African-American children are raised in two-parent households. Yet these young people see that their mothers and grandmothers, who govern their own lives and their children's lives with such great strength and fearlessness, are cast into a position of complete subservience when they're in the church pews on Sunday. It's a group of men only that stand at the front of the church-- the minister, the deacon, the junior minister, the junior deacon, and on down the line. Man after man.

Statistically, black women between the ages of 20 and 60 are the segment of the American population most likely to tithe, that is, give 10% of their income to their church. That same group has a membership, according to Bey, that has an average net worth per person (assets and debts) of-- no joke-- five dollars. In one American city after another, we see one or more of these enormous churches standing in the middle of predominantly-black neighborhoods, with almost as many ministers driving cars that cost more than the homes of their congregants. It's unconscionable. The church provides a family-safe environment that make it attractive for single mothers, but the mothers are forced to accept cultural and financial subordination as part of the package deal.

Too often, these mega-churches (such as Eddie Long's 25,000-member New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta) stand in stark contrast to the crumbling city schools in the neighborhoods, and many children of African-American households grow up without ever stepping foot inside a library or a museum. As it is often for whites and Hispanics too, women that would otherwise think about leaving their church would also be leaving behind your entire support network if they depart. When they do, they become ostracized in much the same way that gay men and women have been ostracized by the church because of the bigotry of the scriptures.

The churches aren't doing wonders for black men either, unless that man happens to be in the hierarchy of the church. The church can't get you a job, as Bey pointed out, and young black men are, statistically, the most unemployed segment of the American population. God's temple is a dead-end resource for men that want something better than the promise for happiness in "the next life," and that's why young black men have abandoned the church in droves. The man at the front of the church is "the shepherd of the flock" and that leaves only one role left to play for anybody else-- a sheep, and who the fuck wants to be a sheep?

The atheist tradition in African-American life is long and deep, but it's been suppressed because of the entrenched influence of the church. Bayard Rustin, a noted pacifist and the lead organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, was an atheist (as well as a gay man, incidentally). Julius Hobson was a writer well-known in Washington D.C., an early leader of the D.C. statehood movement, and the one-time head of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality). The celebrated essayist and poet James Baldwin was an atheist also. With Bey as our instructor, we know that nearly the entirety of the Harlem Renaissance was made up of atheists, including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson.

We should recognize Charles Darwin's contributions to the cause of racial equality also, and I'm glad that Bey took the time to reference his contribution. Despite later distortions of his work by religious groups trying to combat the teaching of evolutionary biology in schools (that is, the invention of the once-popular and racist concept of "Social Darwinism"), Darwin opposed slavery while it was still the law of the land in America and the conclusions of his research confirmed that there was actually no biological difference in the races, as had long been argued. (It is the pigmentation of the skin only that differs.)

Other enjoyable speakers on the stage Saturday included comedian, actor, and filmmaker Paul Provenza. I've been a fan of Provenza since his regular television roles on "Empty Nest" and "Northern Exposure" in the 1990s. As a film director, he partnered with Penn Jillette to create the hilarious and wildly-inventive comedy/documentary movie "The Aristocrats" in 2005. (Provenza credits the comic magician Jillette with introducing him to the organized atheist/skeptic community.) On Saturday, Provenza read passages from his new book, "Satiristas," a collection of interviews he conducted in recent years with dozens of famous "subversive" and "contrarian" comics, and to whom he referred as our most fearless and enlightened social critics.

The audience heard passages from the book that mostly equated to religion and religious culture, from the likes of Dave Attell, Lizz Winstead, Jillette, Eddie Ifft, Doug Stanhope, Rick Shapiro, Terry Jones, Lily Tomlin, Marc Maron, Dana Gould, Janeane Garafalo, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone. His book is dedicated to the great George Carlin, who is profiled as well. (I would venture the guess that you hear a more liberal use of Carlin's 7 dirty words on stage at an atheist convention than you do at any other that has religion as one of its themes.)

After Provenza came Dr. Hector Avalos. Dr. Avalos is a professor of religion at Iowa State, where I attended as an undergrad. He's an academic of course, and an author, as well as a former Pentecostal preacher, and an atheist. I didn't take any of his classes in school, but he was a willing and friendly contributor to a spirited campus television show that I hosted for a time in the late '90s called "Wake Up ISU." His topic of discussion at the convention was the religious theory of Intelligent Design, and he used part of his allotted hour to describe the 2007 controversy at Iowa State during which a proponent of ID was denied tenure by the university. Avalos had led the authorship of a written statement against Intelligent Design in 2005 that was signed by 130 members of the institution's faculty. The school had become the target of a neo-creationist think tank called the Discovery Institute dedicated to landing creationists in the science departments of the country's colleges and high schools. From this standpoint, Avalos is responsible, in large part, for nothing less than the preservation of the prestigious scientific reputation of my alma mater, and so for that, I'm eternally grateful to him.

After a comedian (Troy Conrad) dressed as White Jesus came out and gave a computer-aided presentation about the quest to save this particular planet, Heavenly Father deflected some spontaneous and equally-hilarious questions from the audience, ranging from the more-nuanced "Could you still walk on water after you had holes in your feet?" to the very-simple "Why me, Lord?" (The answer to the second question, incidentally, was "Because you asked.") My favorite exchange, paraphrased here and ideal for Easter Sunday, was this: "Did you find it difficult to roll the stone away after being dead for three days?" Jesus: "Your arms and legs start to atrophy after that amount of time of inactivity." (one beat) "That's just science."

We heard from a biologist in Minnesota named P.Z. Myers, whom Conservapedia describes as having "excess weight in his abdominal area" and suggesting the partial impairment of his brain function as a result (he seemed otherwise coherent); and following him on stage were a pair of experts in the area of psychology, Dr. Elizabeth Cornwell and J. Anderson Thompson, talking about their clinical research into why women, in particular, are drawn to religion.

The highlight of my day personally, though-- and remember, this is a day that included all of these marvelous speakers and getting to tell Paul Provenza how much I liked his "Dr. Phil Capra" character on "Northern Exposure," was meeting the couple that sat down next to me during our lunch break. They were probably in their 60s, or late 50s, and visiting from a small town in northern Iowa. They were attending the conference, like me, for just the one day only. I'll keep their identities private, except to tell you that his surname is a common one of German origin in the area that I grew up, Benton County, Iowa, but that his clan pronounces the name differently than the ours. He had grown up in a town close to my home in which my uncle had once been the pastor of the Lutheran Church. They said that they prefer small-town life, but that it can be stifling also. They must own a small business of some kind now because she suggested that they weren't sure they would come to this event until she finally got annoyed of her customers reflexively and presumptuously wishing her a happy Easter all week long. (For me, the last straw was seeing the ridiculous bunny rabbit image attached to Sunday on the 7-day weather forecast on television.)

There we were, sitting in a hotel dining area-- them on a day trip, me only several blocks from home-- certain blood relatives from not so long ago at all, at least in evolutionary terms, and relating virtually identical stories involving closeted identity, discovery, enlightenment, and the complexity of our extended family social dynamics. For all we know, he and I share a grandparent from only five or six generations ago in Germany, yet in a larger, even more dynamic sense, we know that we share a grandparent from millions of years ago, who lived in a tree on all fours, a tail swinging her from branch to branch. If I didn't know better, I would be tempted to take that FACT of our existence and call it a "miracle."

posted by CM @ 9:09 AM