The great advantage of an organized church is that it can develop and maintain a reliable income stream. Listen to any evangelical radio station or read the novels of Anthony Trollope and you quickly realize that money is the chief preoccupation of the church leaders. Finance gets a lot of time and attention in churches, managing it and to making sure it continues to flow in. Atheism has no such institutional advantages. The problem with atheism is that there is no money in it.
Several organizations exist for the propagation of atheism, but since the obvious advantage of atheism is that you can stay in bed on a Sunday morning, there is no clear mechanism for raising funds. Atheists don’t gather where they can be exhorted. For the cynical who believe that evangelical organizations are established at least in part because of the power and influence that accrue to the founder, it might seem that the same motivation should inspire a guru of non-belief to start a non-church. This might be a little too obvious and blatant. Even if it were successful in generating cash flow, what would an atheist organization do with the money? All you need is to support a few web developers.
I suggest this is actually a problem for society. Atheists are invisible. There is no organization that a TV station can call upon to defend the interests of atheists when someone like former President Bush says that atheism is incompatible with being an American – something that he would not have considered saying about any other minority. Since nine percent of Americans describe themselves as atheists, this would appear to be a large amount of people to antagonize. Another problem with this invisibility is that the average person can be lead to believe that an atheist is some kind of crazed neo-Marxist hiding in the woods, probably making pipe-bombs.
All this has shown some signs of changing in recent months with the publication of several books by atheists that have received a lot of publicity. Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great is the most recent one, hotly following The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. Sam Harris is notable for having been catapulted if not into fame at least notoriety by his book.
Suddenly there are some spokesmen for atheism who come across as being reasonable beings, somewhat passionate about their non-beliefs, but otherwise quite normal. In Hitchens, the cause has a formidable, polished and assertive debater, who reduced Sean Hannity to incoherence in a recent discussion.
Society now effectively enriches people solely for their adoption of atheism as a personal creed, which has not happened before, at least not to this extent. Atheists may regret that two of these authors appear to be definitely non-American (which might be viewed in some quarters as bolstering Mr. Bush’s opinion), although Christopher Hitchens has recently become a US citizen.
What happens next? If non-believers are really as much as nine percent of the population, then it would seem that politicians cannot ignore them indefinitely. Historically a minority is ignored as long as there is an unspoken agreement between the two parties to do so. Typically, a politician will break ranks when he or she reckons the advantage to be gained is worth the potential dismay among existing supporters. Eventually the cause of the minority goes mainstream and both parties battle for their vote, with the advantage usually going to the original champion.
There is no sign that atheism will get the nod from anyone, judging by the tone of the presidential nomination debates. But that could change, especially of someone emerges as an articulate spokesman for non-believers at large.
The biggest problem for politicians who might want to court the atheist vote is how to address it. After all, on Sunday morning atheists are all in bed.
