Christianity’s faith-based freakout: Why atheism makes believers so uncomfortable
Rather than respecting the right of atheists to disbelieve, christians are constantly forcing them to fake it
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Why do so many religious believers want atheists to lie about our atheism?
It seems backward. Believers are always telling atheists that we need religion for morality; that we have to believe because without religion, people would have no reason not to murder and steal and lie. And yet, all too often, they ask us to lie. When atheists come out of the closet and tell the people in our lives that we don’t believe in God, all too often the reaction is to try to shove us back in.
In some cases, they simply want us to keep our mouths shut: when the topic of religion comes up, they want us to tell the lie of omission. But much of the time, they actually ask us to lie outright. They ask us to lie to other family members. They ask us to attend church or other religious services. They sometimes even ask us to perform important religious rituals, like funerals or confirmations, where we’re not just lying to the people around us, but to the god they supposedly believe in.
Why would they do this?
When I was doing research for my new guidebook, “ Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why,” I was shocked at how often this happens. I read over 400 “coming out atheist” stories to write this book, and in the stories I read, this theme came up again and again and again.
You see it a lot with parents and children. When kids and teenagers tell their parents that they’re atheists, parents often respond by insisting that their kids keep up a religious charade. Alexander came out as atheist to his family in fourth grade, and was met with hostility and confusion — and quickly went back into the closet. “True to form,” he says on his Scribbles and Rants blog, “my parents dropped the matter as long as I went through the motions and didn’t bring it up myself.”
Parents don’t just pressure their atheist kids to keep up the facade, either. They often force them into it. On the Coming Out Godless Project website, Emmanuel Donate says when he was a teenager and came out as atheist to his family, a Latino family who took their Catholicism seriously, they forced him to go to church with them. And Lexie tells of the enormous fight she had with her mother over whether she would go to church. “I did go to church that next morning,” she says, “albeit yelling, screaming and basically being dragged out of the door (picture a teenager and mother behaving basically like a young mum and tantruming toddler).”
This doesn’t just mean making kids sit through church, either. Stories of kids and teenagers being forced to go through confirmations and other important religious rituals are ridiculously common. Helena says she was pressured to be confirmed into her Lutheran church — even though she knew she was an atheist and had tried to make that as clear as she could. And she isn’t alone. Lauren, who came out as atheist to her Lutheran family and church at age 12, told both her mother and her pastor that she didn’t want to be confirmed. When she told her pastor, “I can’t get up there and say stuff I don’t believe,” he replied, “Please stop disrupting class with your questions. This is a special time in everyone’s life — don’t ruin it.”
The upshot was that she was forced to go through with the ceremony, and to lie, in public, about her atheism. Now, here’s the thing: Confirmation is one of the most serious rituals in religion. It’s the ritual in which children accept adult responsibility for their purported soul, and declare their adult commitment to their religion. The whole point is that they’re finally making a free choice about participating in religion, instead of just going along with their family. Yet parents and clergy still pressure kids into this ritual, or even force them into it. Even when they know it’s a lie.
But this isn’t just a parent/kid dynamic. It happens with adults as well. It happens between spouses; in the workplace; in adult families and communities; between parents and adult children. When Rosie and her husband first started dating, she made sure he was aware of her atheism — and yet, she says, “When our first child was baptized, I felt suckered into participating.” When Judy Komorita’s mother died, her Christian evangelical boss “gathered me up with the bookkeeper into a prayer circle. I knew it was stupid (and wrong), and I was shaking with grief. But with his and her arms around me, he said something like ‘Lord, even though Judy doesn’t believe in you, I know you will take care of her and help her.”
When LD’s father died, “[the] priest requested we all do readings and I was open to it, if I could read something poetic from Psalms, maybe.” Instead, she says, “I was handed John 3:16. [‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’]” This happened even though her family and friends knew about her atheism. And in her famous performance piece Letting Go of God, actor and comedian Julia Sweeney says that her mom’s response to her atheism was, “This doesn’t mean that you’ve stopped going to church, does it?”
And pressure to pray in the U.S. military abounds. Including official orders to pray. On the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers website, you’ll see these stories again and again. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Francy Legault says, “In boot camp, we were learning commands — right face, march, all that and one command is ‘let us pray’ and we were told it didn’t matter what we believed, when we heard that command, we had to bow our heads. So prayer is a command.”
Army Sergeant John Gill says, “My first glimpse of Army belief pushing came when I was standing on a parade field as a brand new private, refusing to bow my head for the chaplain’s prayer. My platoon sergeant told me afterward that even if I didn’t believe in God, I should bow my head out of respect for those around me.”
Air Force Staff Sergeant Johnathan Napier says, “I also remember going through basic training and being given the option of ‘going to church’ or ‘cleaning.’ That’s not a real option.” And Army Master Sergeant Michael Hammond says, “Being ‘strongly encouraged’ as a leader to attend yet another prayer breakfast has pushed me past the point of tolerance.” In fact, it’s common for atheists in the U.S. Military to be pressured to not list “atheist” on their dog tags — or even have their explicit requests about this refused.