How should we respond to this phenomenon that many call “the new atheism”? In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins suggests that religious education for children may be a form of child abuse. In God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens picks up Dawkins’s line of thinking and takes it at least a step further, offering ominously that the time has come to get to know the religious “enemy” and “to prepare to fight it.” One would like to dismiss such a statement as a mere rhetorical flourish, but it should be noted that Hitchens was one of the most eloquent advocates for George W. Bush’s all too real war in Iraq. Sam Harris has written that “Science Must Destroy Religion,” and that perhaps even religious moderates—mere “failed extremists,” he says in The End of Faith—should not be spared this destruction. Most recently the popular comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher has, if such a thing is possible, escalated the war of words even further by preaching in his film Religulous that “for humanity to live, religion must die.”
Most Nonreligious People Are Not Antireligious!
It cannot be said often enough: Humanism stands for more than these incendiary statements. Let me also reiterate, regarding my previous chapter on Humanist ethics, that I am not claiming that every person who refers to him or herself as a Humanist always behaves ethically. And I’m not saying that religious people are always unethical. My point is merely that we Humanists have our ways and goals, and they’re at least every bit as good as anyone else’s. If you’re prepared to say or think anything nice about anyone who disagrees with you, by this point you ought to have plenty of nice things to say about Humanism. If you’re not prepared to say or believe anything positive about those who disagree with your theology, then we may indeed have to defeat you, but we will have many religious allies in doing so, as we saw in the 1800 and again in the 2008 American presidential elections.
There is no question that religious people have killed too many in the name of their God. But secular people have at times killed for their beliefs as well. Granted, almost all secular people (including the new atheists and their most passionate supporters) go about their beliefs peacefully today, and it would be immoral for me to try to make religious people feel better by making an equivalence, implying that we Humanists were out there killing just like the Taliban even today, when we are clearly not. Still, even if our percentages are better, there are still an enormous number of people who call themselves religious who are peaceful, open-minded, and not worthy of hate. Should we go to war with these people? Destroy them? Are they poison? Are they deluded?
We do not need to go to war with religion—not physically and not rhetorically either. But if not war, then what should the relationship between religious and nonreligious people be? There is a one-word answer: pluralism. This doesn’t mean the end of all differences between us, or even competition among us. It means that competition should be, as in the Qur’anic turn of phrase, to “compete with one another in good works.” (Qur’an 5:48)
I’ve been thinking about pluralism since I was too young to remember, because I grew up in Flushing, New York, “the most diverse neighborhood in the most diverse borough in the most diverse city on the planet,” according to a recent New York Times op-ed.1 Flushing was the site of one of the very first victories for interreligious acceptance in the New World. In 1662, the farmer John Bowne was banished from New Amsterdam for harboring Quaker meetings. He was not a Quaker himself but believed they deserved refuge from Peter Stuyvesant’s intolerant regime. So Bowne set off to (old) Amsterdam immediately—not to defend himself, but to defend the Quakers. He won his case, and so did tolerance. As another citizen of the colony wrote even earlier in the century in a petition defending the Quakers, “We desire therefore in this case not to judge least we be judged, neither to condemn least we be condemned, but rather let every man stand and fall to his own master.”2 And more than three centuries later, the neighborhood was so teeming with religious, ethnic, and other diversity that when my friend Tari and I were assigned to go in front of our second-grade class and talk about our similarities and differences (as the teacher informed my parents later), we remembered to mention our blond hair and black hair, big ears (mine, of course) and small ears, his talent for sports and mine for art, but we completely forgot to mention that one of us was black and the other was white.
But it’s not just that I’m from Flushing, and it’s not just tolerance that I’m highlighting here. Pluralism is the heritage of my country, from its earliest days. President George Washington’s single greatest act may have been his statement to the Touro Synagogue that “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” Jews and all religious minorities were not only to be tolerated in America, but fully equal.
Still, neither the Qur’an nor John Bowne nor George Washington were in a position to answer the precise question that is before us today, which is, how should religious and nonreligious people relate to one another? But perhaps on this issue the New Testament and Martin Luther King Jr. have something to contribute when they suggest we should love our enemies.
I’m not talking about sitting and holding hands and singing “Kum Ba Yah,” though that has, as Gustav Niebuhr eloquently points out in Beyond Tolerance, rather oddly become the put-down of choice when you want to make fun of people for trying to come together. After all, in the 1960s, he writes, people probably did hold hands while they sang it under intense pressure from southern police forces and Klansmen, and from there the song spilled over not to interfaith circles but to largely Christian youth groups and summer camps.3
A Meditation on Love and Pluralism
What I do mean is that we atheists and agnostics might offer nonviolent resistance to imposed religion in our lives—while loving our religious neighbors, offering them friendship and steadfastness even when they offer us spite. We might recognize that our humanity, in its fullest expression, can make some theists feel that their humanity—tethered as it is to belief that they are God’s children—is called into question. We might say, “We will not hate you, no matter what. But we will not be anything other than ourselves, loud and proud.” We might choose pluralism because, as Martin Luther King Jr. said in his 1967 Christmas Sermon on Peace, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Of course, there are real provocations. In most places in this world you are free to look a man in the eye and tell him you do not believe in his God, or in the platform of his party, or even in his right to marry the partner he holds dearest, and you may be considered disagreeable but you will still be seen as decent. But say that you do not believe in God at all, and despite whatever else you might add about the good things you do value, there are many who will consider you indecent and unfit. Nevertheless, there were real provocations for Martin Luther King and Gandhi too.
It’s not that we should lie to ourselves and say we’re their equals when we know that no one could measure up to their stature and their importance—perhaps not even them. But on the other hand, they were on to something, and we should be on to that something too. At a time, as Sarah Vowell writes, “when no one’s typed the word ‘nonviolence’ since the typewriter,”4 we should give serious thought to going into the most vehemently antiatheist, anti-Humanist parts of the world—parts of the Deep South of the United States, or the Arab Muslim world, for example—and starting a conversation (not to mention organizing community service projects) by just being ourselves, loudly and proudly, but in a loving, nonviolent way. Might it be dangerous if we happened to run into the one or two individuals in some town somewhere who can’t physically countenance the presence of a proud Humanist or atheist? Yes, it could be. But if we’re not willing to face even the slightest possibility of violence in order to spread our message, how can we expect change? I believe we have more than enough courage for the challenge.
In Dr. King’s same Christmas Sermon on Peace, he went on to say that there are three words for love in the Greek New Testament. He did not mean we are obligated—or able—to love our enemies in the sense of having warm affection for them, but rather that we should cultivate agape: “understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all men,” and that by this kind of love, “We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.” But as beautiful as I find this language, I fear I’m going to get myself into trouble for using it. I sense that I’m putting myself in a no-win situation here, because fellow atheists may not be able to help but see this sentiment as excessively Christian, while most Christians will not think that by loving them as an enemy I do them any favors.
It is hard to like those who don’t like Humanism, who don’t like atheism, who would discriminate against me, who would be prejudiced. It’s hard to like someone who wouldn’t vote for me based on what I believe about the nature of the universe, and hard to like someone who would attempt to subvert the Constitution to proselytize to hundreds of thousands of soldiers on tax dollars. It’s hard to like people who would not only violate my rights but would violate the rights of others I consider my friends and colleagues or just my fellow citizens and human beings, simply because they are gay or non-Christian or nontraditional in whatever way. But I don’t want to hate the people who do this. And I don’t want to turn my back on them and simply disengage from them, pretending they do not exist, that they are dead to me. I do not want to have to look at myself in the mirror and see a man who has inculcated that in himself which would see such people as entirely other, as entirely wrong and worthless and frightening, as enemies. I do not want to do to others that which I find hateful when done to me.
I know that I have only so much room for emotion in my heart and my mind on each day, in each year, in this life. If the emotion I choose to cultivate is hate, or indifference, or bitterness, then that’s what I will become, and it doesn’t matter if my so-called enemies have earned the scorn, because now I have given over to it too. So I want to feel another emotion toward them. It’s not that I want to like them. It’s not that I want to submit to their will. It’s not that I want to be persuaded by them, that I want to be their best friend, or that I want any favors from them. But there is an emotion that I want to feel toward them. I don’t simply want to enter into some sort of political negotiation with them. Political negotiations, when they are that and that alone, don’t work.
For example, we all know what the right solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be. That’s why I’m proud to be pro-Israel and pro-Palestine; it’s why the most Zionistic thing anyone can do is work for a just resolution through the peace process in which two nations will live side by side, sharing Jerusalem as their capital. Because we all know it’s either that or oblivion. The final status of each of those countries is already known, but nobody can move forward, because the emotions on the sides opposed to negotiations with their enemies are hotter than the emotions of those who want to negotiate. And the reason is that we are most fully ourselves when we admit that we are emotional beings, that we are defined by the ways we find though our behavior to express all these myriad emotions constantly bubbling beneath the surface of us as we try our fragile best to reason our way through the world.
And so yes, I want to love my enemies. Not in the strict sense of agape, of doing charity for them, and not even in Dr. King’s sense of Christian love for them. Love has been around, I believe, longer than Christianity. And although I am the first to admit that Christianity is not going anywhere, love will be around longer than Christianity. I’m talking about love in the sense of caring. Caring: I think it’s as good a definition as any for love. And that’s what I want to offer to those who would be prejudiced and discriminate against me, that I care about you and indeed even love you anyway, and I too would rather die than hate you, though thank goodness many religious and secular martyrs alike have already come along and lived and worked and died so that I can hope not to have to chose between hatred and death. I want to find loving respect for you and live to tell the tale—and see, as Dr. King proclaimed, that you too will be transformed and we will have a double victory.
But now that I’ve talked about my feelings on this issue, let’s look at some much more concrete matters, starting with that definition I promised above of the religious pluralism that I’m calling for.
According to Dr. Eboo Patel, director of the Interfaith Youth Core,
Religious pluralism is neither mere coexistence nor forced consensus. It is not a watered-down set of common beliefs that affirms the bland and obvious, nor a sparse tolerance that leaves in place ignorance and bias of the other. Instead, religious pluralism is “energetic engagement” that affirms the unique identity of each particular religious tradition and community, while recognizing that the well-being of each depends on the health of the whole. Religious pluralism celebrates diversity and welcomes religious voices into the public square, even as it recognizes the challenges of competing claims. Also, it recognizes that in a pluralistic democracy, competing claims must be translated into moral language that is understood by fellow citizens—believers and nonbelievers alike—who must be convinced of the benefits of what is proposed.5
This is a definition and a concept I want to affirm. But it needs to be understood that we have equal rights in all that pluralism entails, because this has not been immediately clear up to now, as we saw earlier in the quotes on secularism as the common enemy of religion. Would some atheists reject this concept of pluralism? Of course. But plenty of Christians reject it as well, and you’d hardly think of holding an interfaith meeting without Christians because of it.
There are three specific issues related to religious pluralism that need to be addressed in order for us to be good together, with or without God: religious literacy, interfaith cooperation, and the inclusiveness of religious pluralism.
Religious Literacy
We have a major civic problem on our hands,” says Boston University religion scholar Stephen Prothero. In his best-selling book, Religious Literacy, Prothero argues that religion must be taught in American public schools because our national illiteracy on the subject endangers our ability to address important social problems like terrorism and the need for greater investment in science research. Prothero’s point is well taken, and he even takes on the profound misunderstanding that secularists are responsible for removing religion from public discussion. “In one of the great ironies of American religious history,” Prothero writes, “it was the nation’s most fervent people of faith who steered us down the road to religious illiteracy.”6
I would like to support Prothero’s message heartily, but his otherwise good book (along with many books like it) is in need of a revision when it comes to atheism and Humanism. Prothero devotes only a few short paragraphs to each of these subjects, presenting nontheism as a kind of footnote to a bigger, more important conversation about the various religious traditions in the United States. For example, he gets it right that Humanism is a belief that “human beings can get along just fine without God” but dismisses it as “more an epithet of the Religious Right than a self-designation.”7 This approach is common, but no longer adequate. The reason people do not designate themselves as Humanists is that Humanism, secularism, and atheism have been unstudied, underresearched, and otherwise ignored by everyone from scholars of religion to the popular media. Remember, one in five young people in America now considers him-or herself nonreligious. There are half a billion to a billion people around the world to reckon with. The many courses on comparative religion that Prothero’s work is inspiring need full-fledged units on Humanism and atheism in their curriculum, not a mention of nonbelievers that you could miss if you coughed. Daniel Dennett gets at this same idea in his Breaking the Spell, providing an example of a supposedly hard-line, fire-breathing new atheist (actually, when you get to know Dennett in person his manner is just as much that of a scholarly Santa Claus as his looks) pushing to get “more education about religion into our schools, not less. We should teach our children creeds and customs, prohibitions and rituals, texts and music, and when we cover the history of religion, we should include both the positive…and the negative.”8
And lest we think that religious people won’t extend us the courtesy of teaching about Humanism and atheism, consider the case of Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, an American-born Muslim leader who, in a captivating keynote address at the 2007 national conference of the Interfaith Youth Core, told a room full of five hundred religious young people that they should all consider reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion—that it was a worthwhile book and one should always challenge oneself to understand all perspectives on religion. Only when I went up to Yusuf afterward to thank him for the magnanimous gesture did he privately and with a humble smile relate the story that Dawkins once publicly called him “palpably stupid.” In fact, Hamza is palpably smart, and not only can we learn from his approach to religion, we atheists should learn to be religiously literate.
Interfaith Cooperation on the Big Issues
The major political and social challenges of the twenty-first century cannot be addressed by any one group alone. Dream if you wish about a time when religion will be no more. No one can stop you. But in the meantime, reason requires us to acknowledge that religion is here to stay, and we human beings may not be if we do not find the collective moral motivation to beat back climate change, rein in terrorism before it realizes its most destructive hopes, and prevent the erosion of our democracies as economies shift and hopes are dashed. My hope is that, on some of the issues listed below, Humanists can play a mediating role in the decades to come. We may not be the biggest or certainly the richest group, but if we keep in mind Margaret Mead’s insight that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens is the only thing that has ever changed the world, we may just become the most influential group in getting the world’s religious communities to sit down together and work out successful plans and policies where they are most desperately needed.
CLIMATE CHANGE: BECAUSE GLOBAL WARMING DOESN’T CARE WHAT WE BELIEVE ABOUT GOD
E. O. Wilson, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning sociobiologist and committed Humanist, often called the “new Darwin,” has been working tirelessly to assemble coalitions of Humanist scientists and conservative Christians to save “The Creation,” regardless of their differing views on what created this world. At our 2007 New Humanism conference, I had the opportunity to address, via satellite, several thousand Evangelicals and others gathered to hear Wilson’s plea for the natural world at Samford University (the “Ivy League of the Southern Baptist Convention”) in Birmingham, Alabama. They seemed eager to hear from a conference of a thousand Humanists and atheists at Harvard, and to find common ground where possible. What struck me about the experience was that for every stop Wilson can make on that sort of tour, there are dozens of communities that need to be reached where he will not be able to go. We all need to be ambassadors for our community, and for the earth. I’ve told Ed only half-jokingly that if I could somehow be one of several Robins to his Batman in this cause, it would be an incredible honor.
CHURCH-STATE SEPARATION: MAINTAINING IT SUCCESSFULLY REQUIRES COMPROMISE AND COALITION
This is not the place for a long description of church-state separation, except to emphasize that Humanists and the vast majority of nonreligious people affirm the value and importance of secular law. Separation of church and state must be absolute; as we saw in Thomas Jefferson’s vision, this benefits all people, religious or not. In a secular government, Humanists might have a unique perspective on any given moral or ethical issue. For example, given our belief that science is a much better method than revelation for determining the nature of reality, we are, if I might attempt a bit of an understatement, highly likely to support the teaching of evolution in public school science courses, and reject the teaching of “intelligent design” (as nonscientific) in those same courses.
But we Humanists do not seek to impose our view on the secular moral and legal systems. Rather, we see our views as no better and no worse than anyone else’s when it comes to whether they should become secular law. We need to build consensus with other groups in order to find solutions that work for all people. And this is precisely what we’ve done in the past. To continue with the example of evolution, what most people on either side of the religious fence rarely stop to consider is that most religious people agree with the Humanist position, for their own reasons. The Catholic Church, the world’s single largest religious denomination, has officially affirmed that evolution is real. So have all the mainline Protestant church denominations, most organized Jewish groups, and many more. Even a goodly number of Evangelicals have no problem with evolutionary theory and no patience for their brethren who clog the airwaves and the printing presses with their diatribes against Darwin. So, yes, we have plenty of allies on this issue. For more information on it, just look up the Reverend Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, who is an ordained Christian minister.
Arms reduction, poverty, and torture are among the many other issues on which most Humanists are progressive and thus will find countless millions of religious progressive allies with whom they can and must work. In fact I was very proud to join the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and I recommend that atheists, agnostics, and the nonreligious support the NRCAT and its efforts to define torture as a moral issue and as an evil for which we must not stand. But I know that the NRCAT has been reluctant to publicly acknowledge that theists and atheists can share equally in denouncing torture. We must all work together in the promotion of such true moral causes.
Full Inclusion in Interfaith
Before we can understand why Humanists and atheists must be invited, and must choose to participate, in interfaith activities around the world, we need to ask what interfaith means. Gustav Niebuhr, in his book Beyond Tolerance, writes: “At its heart, it’s a grassroots educational process in which the goal is to gain knowledge about individuals and their beliefs in a way that lessens fear. It is a new activity in the world, an entirely new phenomenon in our history. It is a social good, a basis for hope, and a tendency that ought to be nurtured and cultivated.”9
We know that interfaith is the model, if for no other reason than that one side destroying the other is not. And fortunately, the way to promote interfaith work is not by promoting belief in what Allen Ginsberg called “Allee Samee,” the lowest common denominator bringing people together to spout platitudes back and forth. “Humanists and Muslims are really the same because…” is never a good sentence, no matter how you choose to end it, no matter how decent and noble your intentions. Let’s allow people, as Jonathan Sacks titles his book, the Dignity of Difference.
Eboo Patel and his very talented staff at the Interfaith Youth Core are living out their belief in pluralism in an impressive way. The IFYC has gone out of its way to include Humanists and atheists in recent years, though he admits he did not start the organization with that intention. Mainly, Patel—a progressive, religious Muslim—wanted to bring together young leaders from many backgrounds, to be an alternative to the corps of leaders being trained by Al Qaeda and other extremist religious organizations. These young people, now by the tens of thousands each year, do community service and educational projects together, and if you just watch some of the IFYC’s videos or get involved with them locally, you may agree it’s remarkable work. But Eboo originally assumed it would just be for religious people, and to his credit he’s been willing to learn: “In the great American pragmatist tradition, it just happened,” he told me, that atheists and Humanists became one of his core constituencies. But as my mom used to say, “Nothing just happens.” The IFYC became truly pluralistic because consistently, over the course of several years, one in five young people attending their events was nonreligious, and they were open enough to recognize this and honor it.
FULL INCLUSION OF HUMANISTS AND ATHEISTS IN PUBLIC INTERFAITH CEREMONIES
In a historic step, the Democratic Party unveiled its 2008 convention with an “Interfaith Gathering of Clergy.” It had learned well from leaders of the religious left: innovative thinkers like the Evangelical Jim Wallis and the rabbi Michael Lerner, who preach that poverty, the environment, and education are deeply moral and spiritual issues and that Democrats must not abandon religious voters to those who reveal a narrow, puritanical, and too often hypocritical obsession with sex. Raise your hand if you would have predicted just seven years earlier, on 9/11—not to mention seventy years ago—that a major American party would begin a convention honoring a black man by honoring a Muslim woman cleric standing alongside an Orthodox rabbi and many other representatives of America’s diverse communities. I don’t care how much of a secularist you are—if you couldn’t find something heartwarming about this event signaling our nation’s expanded horizons, consider having your ticker checked.
However, historic moments like these will ultimately become still more examples of prejudice if we open our doors and our podiums to new religious groups without acknowledging the equality of Humanists and their values as well. Will “faith” end up as nothing more than a reason for division between religious and secular Americans—a cheap euphemism for belief in God, miracles, and the supernatural, as opposed to reason, empirical evidence, and this-worldly ethics? We can do better.
This is how I think we can make inclusion work:
Don’t ask, “Can you be good without God?”
Do ask why we are motivated to be good, or to work with you.
Don’t proselytize to atheists in an interfaith context.
Do reach out specifically to atheist, secular, and Humanist groups and solicit their participation.
Don’t advertise interfaith events as for the religious only or as a way for everyone to unite, despite theological differences, around belief in God.
Do advertise as religiously pluralistic, including all religions as well as atheists, agnostics, Humanists, and the nonreligious. You don’t have to mention all those words if you don’t have time or space in a very short advertisement—pick whichever one or two you like. But if you have the space to mention several religions by name, consider lengthening your description of us as well. You might also say you welcome “all religious and ethical perspectives,” or as it is often phrased in Europe, “all religions and lifestances.”10
Here are my three suggestions (as opposed to commandments) to help recruit stronger participation from Humanists and atheists for an interfaith group:
Good With and Without God: Humanists in an Interfaith Nation
When Lori Lipman Brown, former director of the Secular Coalition for America (the congressional lobbying office for Humanists, atheists, and the nonreligious) was running for reelection to the Nevada State Senate in 1994, she was attacked by her opponent, Kathy Augustine, for not participating in some explicitly Christian prayers held in the Nevada State Senate chambers. Augustine and some of the Republican leaders of the Nevada Senate put together a public relations campaign to smear Brown as not only non-Christian but unpatriotic, going to reporters with the false accusation that Brown “actively opposed prayer and refused to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance in legislative sessions.”11 Ads were taken out in local newspapers contrasting the supposedly unpatriotic Brown with Augustine as a self-professed “active church member and proud to salute our nation’s flag.” The accusations stuck and Brown lost. But years later, Augustine was forced to admit to willfully violating state ethics laws. She and the former state senate majority and assistant majority leader eventually sent Brown signed retractions of their accusations, acknowledging that they had misled the public. As Augustine put it, Brown “had never actually done anything to my knowledge which showed anything but the utmost respect for our flag and for the veterans of our nation.” But the damage had already been done.
Brown thought back to that time with deep satisfaction in 2007, when on behalf of the Secular Coalition for America she accepted membership into the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights—the largest civil rights lobbying organization in the nation. The LCCR—founded by African American labor and civil rights leader—and Humanist—A. Phillip Randolph, lobbied for and won the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and also helped to organize one of the defining events of the twentieth century—the 1963 March on Washington. Today it fights not only for African Americans but for all “persons of color, women, children, labor unions, individuals with disabilities, older Americans, major religious groups, gays and lesbians,” and more. And with the addition of the SCA, from now on it will also defend the right of Humanist candidates to stand on an equal footing with Christians, certifying that discrimination against the nonreligious can indeed be considered a civil rights issue.12 Perhaps thanks to Brown and many others like her, a number of talented, civic-minded young people reading this book today will one day successfully seek political office as open and proud Humanists, carried to victory based on merit and determination and supported by religious and nonreligious voters alike.
As with other civil rights struggles, sometimes we can make progress toward our ultimate goals in unexpected ways. This was certainly the case in Philadelphia in the summer of 2008, when a clash of roadside billboards gave way to a moment of interfaith understanding and cooperation.
Earlier that year, a group called the Philadelphia Coalition of Reason (PhillyCoR) had come together for the purpose of uniting the city’s numerous Humanist, secular, and atheist groups toward the common goal of raising the profile of the nonreligious in the area. To that end, the group rented a billboard along a busy section of I-95 to display the message “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.” But it happened that just up the Interstate, a large local church, the Light Houses of Oxford Valley, had taken out a billboard to display a similar sign—both had a bright blue sky with floating clouds in the background—to encourage drivers to “Experience God.” When members of the ostensibly rival groups became aware of each other’s efforts, they braced for a long (and potentially very expensive, if not bloody) advertising war. But then they came up with a better idea.
In a story for the Philadelphia City Paper entitled “Religious Smack-down!! (Not Really),” local reporter Boyce Upholt playfully described how the church members discovered their competition and realized that their God might need to “up his game.”13 On the church’s Web site, Pastor Bob Jones offered this challenge: “I am not asking you to believe, but simply open your eyes and minds and see if there is something more.” Reading the blog was my friend and fellow Humanist activist Martha Knox, coordinator of the PhillyCoR group. Martha reached out to Light Houses and offered, instead of more slogans, for PhillyCoR to join them in a day of joint community service. “We want those who disagree with us to understand that we share the same secular values,” Martha said. “Charity is a secular, human value, not [only] a religious one.”
As Upholt described it,
And so, on Saturday I joined a crowd of Christians and atheists, 20-odd of each and all wearing T-shirts to mark their allegiance, at the Philabundance warehouse in North Philadelphia.
Things began quietly. The groups mingled in the parking lot, waiting for someone to take charge. When I was discovered as a neutral party, I was assigned to take a group photo. Atheists and Christians clustered around a picnic table, patterned together awkwardly like boys and girls in an elementary class picture. It was hard to tell them apart: Both sides consisted of nice families with children and polite young adults. Even their T-shirts looked the same, white with subtle blue logos across the chest. Only the details gave a few away: a “Spirit in the Sky” ringtone on one side; Knox’s edgily short hair on the other.
In the end the groups got along very well as they worked together to pack personal and medical supplies for homeless shelters. No one was rude, and in particular the teens on both sides found they had a lot in common. The reporter, clearly sensing he had a great story on his hands, seemed to Knox to be waiting for someone to break into a debate about theology, but it was not to be. “What’s right in your heart is right in your heart,” said one atheist mother. And “People are in different places in life,” said Pastor Heidi Butterworth. “Hey, you guys are other people in the community. We love you and God loves you. It’s simple.”
Humanists and atheists have learned from the experience to focus on deeds, and PhillyCoR has continued to get together for a community service outing every month since. Occasionally we all need to remember that we can get beyond arguing over whether we can be good with or without a God, and simply be good, together.