Rumors of my Recovery have been Greatly Exaggerated

God might not be dead, but His vital statistics aren't trending in a good direction as of late:

Now, once again, nonbelievers have a fresh sense of mission. The fastest-growing faith in the country is no faith at all. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the results of its “Religious Landscape” survey in February and found that 16 percent of Americans have no religious affiliation. The number is even greater among young people: 25 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds now identify with no religion, up from 11 percent in a similar survey in 1986. For most of its modern history, atheism has existed as a kind of civil-rights movement. Groups like American Atheists have functioned primarily as litigants in the fight for church-state separation, not as atheist social clubs. “Atheists are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don’t feel like they need an organization,” says Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists for the past thirteen years. “They’re so independent that if they want to get involved, they usually don’t join an organization—they start their own.”

The quartet of best-selling authors who have emerged to write the gospel of New Atheism—Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Dawkins (the Four Horsemen, as they are now known)—has succeeded in mainstreaming atheism in a nation that is still overwhelmingly religious and, in the process, catalyzed a reexamination of atheistic raison d’être. But for some atheist foot soldiers, this current groundswell is just a consciousness-raising stop on the evolutionary train, the atheist equivalent of the Stonewall riots. For these people, the Four Horsemen have only started the journey. Atheism’s great awakening is in need of a doctrine. “People perceive us as only rejecting things,” says Ken Bronstein, the president of a local group called New York City Atheists. “Everybody wants to know, ‘Okay, you’re an atheist, now what?’ ”

So some atheists are taking seriously the idea that atheism needs to stand for things, like evolution and ethics, not just against things, like God. The most successful movements in history, after all—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.—all have creeds, cathedrals, schools, hierarchies, rituals, money, clerics, and some version of a heavenly afterlife. Churches fill needs, goes the argument—they inculcate ethics, give meaning, build communities. “Science and reason are important,” says Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain of Harvard University. “But science and reason won’t visit you in the hospital.”

The last sentence is just silly. You don't need a religion to tell you to visit people in the hospital, and atheists don't need an organization of their own to do so either. In my mid twenties, after I had left the Catholic Church I felt like I still needed to participate in, or find a replacement for the habits I had ingrained in me from a lifetime in the Church. I felt like I needed somewhere to go on Sunday mornings. But in time I got over it. Now sitting in a coffee shop reading the Sunday paper fills my need for ritual.

Likewise this felt need by some atheists to form the atheist equivalent of a church is just a cultural reflex, in my view. Non-religious people, whether atheists, agnostics or dunnoists, have had an identity forced on them by American society just for going against the cultural grain. But since it is a negative identity in the sense of being defined for what we are not, rather than a positive identity, it doesn't make for a natural, cohesive subculture. Just as a group of non-Japanese foreigners living in Japan would have the experience of being treated as a foreigner in common, it isn't enough to bind a Swede, an American and a Chinese into a natural affinity group. Without a sense of feeling beseiged, which will become harder to justify as the non-religious population grows, there won't be a felt need for a secular pro-military conservative to feel a special kinship with a secular anti-military socialist.

As the non-religious segment of the population grows, political parties will take notice and begin to compete for them. The collapse of the Reagan Coalition and the Democrat party's rise to dominance is signalling the decline of the strident anti-secularism of the Religious Right as a dominant political force. If Republicans wish to remain competitive in the future, they will have to find ways to appeal to secular voters.