La referencia y la deíxis

The Atheist Movement(s): An Analytical Framework

The New Atheists defend a particular vision of modernity, the enemies of which are ‘pre-modern’ superstition and ‘post-modern’ relativism. The unexpected appearance of these enemies has in their view derailed the process of secularization, and they set out to combat each with the rhetorical tools of science and reason. Their aggressive and uncompromising approach, a product ultimately of frustration at a failed vision of modernity and secularization and reaction to perceived challenges to scientific hegemony, has brought the secularist movement unprecedented attention. It has also created a rift within the movement, which had heretofore been constituted by atheism and secular humanism, which have historically been considered roughly interchangeable positions and collections of individuals under the banner of “freethinkers” (Jacoby 2004).

That is, humanists could generally be considered to be atheists and vice versa, though these two groups might choose to emphasize different things (non-belief in God for the latter, humanistic ethics for the former).

Today new tensions are emerging between these groups, with those scientific atheists represented and influenced by the New Atheists continuing on the path of the dialectical development of atheism (discussed in the first chapter), and many secular humanists ready to move beyond the religion/science dichotomy and focus on basic underlying values and social issues that their movement should strive to represent and fight for (for example, science-driven policy decisions and social justice). This chapter analyzes the emergence of the New Atheism as a sub-group within an already existing freethought movement, which I take to be comprised of organizations defined by any one or more of atheism, secularism, rationalism, and humanism (I will sometimes refer to this movement simply as the “atheist movement”, which I use as inclusive of these terms). It examines the New Atheism’s goals and strategies in relation to the ideology that

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underwrites it, as well some recent and ongoing tensions between atheists and secular humanists that arise from the engagement in identity politics. Specifically, the former group emphasizes difference and their minority status, while the latter seeks assimilation and cooperation with groups – possibly including religious groups – that share their concerns regarding science education and social issues.

It should be noted at the outset that calling atheism a “movement” is somewhat controversial. In his analysis of the New Atheism phenomenon, William Stahl puts it bluntly: “Atheism is not a social movement” (2010: 97). In general, scholars studying atheism have made scant reference to the notion of social movements, with the singular exception of Richard Cimino and Christopher Smith (2007, 2010), and even they argue that it is better understood as a subculture than a social movement. I argue that recent events indicate that the associations of people Cimino and Smith (2007) refer to collectively as “freethinkers” – i.e. atheists, rationalists, secularists, and humanists – must be treated as a social movement, but we must be specific about what type of movement it is. We must also be specific about which group we are referring to, because I will argue that within this group of freethinkers there are sub-groups with fairly distinct goals, ideological groundings, and strategic orientations. The analysis is complicated by the fact that there is considerable overlap between these groups. Doubtless many individuals would identify with all three. I believe that it is possible, however, to identify various distinctions regarding goals, strategies, and ideology that compel us to recognize at least three sub-groups as relatively distinct elements within the freethought movement. These include secular humanists, new (scientific) atheists, and libertarian rationalists. My primary task is to understand the phenomenon of the New Atheism. I will therefore emphasize this ideological subset of the movement in my analysis, but this phenomenon can only be understood in relation to and in distinction from the other groups that oppose each other in some important ways.

While atheist and secularist organizations have been around for some time, the New Atheist movement is new, even though it has emerged within the structure of existing social movement organizations, such as the Council for Secular Humanism and

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its parent organization the Center for Inquiry (CFI), and Atheist Alliance International (AAI). While I will refer to other organizations in this analysis (Table 1 lists these according to their major focus), I focus on CFI and AAI because they are the organizations the New Atheists have been most active in. The Four Horsemen famously all delivered presentations at the 2007 convention of the Atheist Alliance International.

The 2009 edition of the AAI convention was co-organized by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (RDFRS). In this instance Dawkins was not just an influential figure and celebrity speaker, but actively involved as an organizer and movement leader. AAI and particularly CFI are the organizations where the presence of these four has been felt most strongly (aside from RDFRS, of course). Because of their strong presence and influence within CFI and AAI, these are the organizations I have chosen as the focus of my research.

Traditionally the atheist/secularist movement has addressed one element of the secularization thesis, while the New Atheism addresses the other. These two sub-theses posit that secularization is a process characterized by (1) the differentiation of religious and secular spheres and the concomitant distinction between private and public dimensions of life, and (2) a general decline in religious belief and practice (Asad, 2003;

Bruce, 2002; Casanova, 1994; Taylor, 2007). In its emphasis on church-state separation (in recent years manifest most conspicuously in legal battles regarding creationism vs.

evolution in public education), civil liberties, and protection for atheists from discrimination, the freethought movement has traditionally addressed the first sub-thesis through instrumental political action that can take the form of lobbying government, organized protests and demonstrations, and lawsuits (Cimino and Smith 2007).

American Atheists, for instance, was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair in 1963 in the wake of her constitutional challenge to religious instruction in public schools, and thus was born of a particular instance of instrumental legal-political action (LeBeau, 2003). Today its mandate is “Supporting civil rights for atheists and the separation of church and state” (American Atheists 2013), a conspicuously political goal. The Secular Coalition for America website explains that the group’s purpose is to “formalize a

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cooperative structure for visible, unified activism to improve the civic situation of citizens with a naturalistic worldview”, and that it is located in Washington, D.C. “for ready access to government” in their lobbying efforts to represent the views of atheists (Secular Coalition 2013). The Freedom From Religion Foundation, an American secularist group founded in 1976, is guided by the primary goal of “protecting the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state” (Freedom from Religion 2013), a political goal that involves lobbying efforts and lawsuits against government agencies and public institutions. Examining the mandates and activities of these organizations, we see that the freethought movement as a whole has traditionally had clear political goals and has essentially acted as a movement for secularism as differentiation (i.e. the first sub-thesis) or at best to promote the civil rights of atheists, who in their view constitute a marginalized and even oppressed segment of American

The New Atheists’ effort to change people’s beliefs and to convince them of the superiority of their particular ethico-epistemic system places attention on the second

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secularization sub-thesis (encouraging the abandonment of religious belief) and exhibits greater concern with cultural beliefs and values than politics (the first secularization sub-thesis, differentiation of public/secular and private/religious spheres, is more clearly a political process). They therefore eschew instrumental legal and public political pursuits, and focus attention on the second secularization sub-thesis. Toward this end, they pursue a goal of broad cultural transformation, arguing that religion cannot be simply pushed to the private sphere, but rather, religious beliefs must be destroyed and replaced with scientific rationality in the name of progress. We can thus distinguish the New Atheist movement within the previously existing freethought movement on the basis of this distinction: the former is primarily a cultural movement while the latter is a political movement.

In taking this view I am drawing primarily on Alberto Melucci’s (1989; 1996) pioneering work on contemporary movements that direct action outside the formal political system, and adopt “cultural” goals like collectively constructing identity, transforming representations of cultural groups and minorities, and challenging dominant values. Melucci’s work was part of the “new social movements” paradigm that emerged mostly outside of the American context in the 1990’s. It sought to develop a new framework for research on identity-based movements that resisted explanation within the framework of the existing structure-based approaches of resource mobilization (Tilly 1978) and political process (McAdam 1982). These understood social movements as collective action directed at the state on the part of actors sharing a common structural location, and thus a common disenfranchisement. These approaches focused on class as the condition giving rise to collective action, while tending to neglect the key problems of identity and ideology, resulting in a “structural bias” (McAdam 1994) and the presumption of “an already-existing collective actor able to recognize the opening of political opportunities and to mobilize indigenous resources for political purposes”

(Polletta and Jasper 2001: 286). The “new” social movements in question – primarily identity-based ones such as the women’s movement and the gay rights movement – involved actors sharing a common identity but no common structural location (Johnston

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et. al., 1994). Hence, a new paradigm emerged that offered something more than the existing “utilitarian economic models” (W. Gamson, 1992: 53) that tended to neglect the subjective dimensions of identity and meaning.

Melucci (1996) argued precisely that the locus of social conflict has shifted from class to questions of meaning and identity, and that state-centred approaches could not sufficiently account for the distinctly non-political goals and targets of emerging forms of collective action. These new movements did not express themselves through political action, but rather, “raised cultural challenges to the dominant language” (Melucci 1995:

41). Melucci defines the political (in relation to social movements) narrowly as interaction between actors within the formal political system of governance and state authority. Much action in new social movements is not ‘political’ in this sense, even if it clearly has political implications in a more expansive understanding of the concept, and the social and cultural problems addressed by this action cannot be resolved at the level of the state.

In the new social movements paradigm, groups with no clear political goals (i.e.

influencing government authorities) can be considered social movement actors on the basis of strictly cultural goals, such as promoting a particular idea or worldview (Staggenborg, 2008). Perhaps most significantly, movements can transform cultural representations and social norms in terms of how groups see themselves are how they are seen by others (Polletta and Jasper, 2001: 284). This can be an enormous achievement for a social movement, with a signature example being the gay rights movement, which succeeded in bringing about cultural transformation by constructing and promoting identity and challenging conventional assumptions and biases outside of the formal political system. That is, the movement was not directed at the state, but rather, addressed homophobia in society. Indeed, for new social movements, ideology and collective identity construction are the most important elements of collective action (Melucci 1989; McAdam 1994). In this view, successful movement outcomes are not limited to legislative and policy changes achieved through direct interaction with the state, but rather, cultural impacts on their own can be considered successful outcomes,

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regardless of whether they result in state action, and identity may be a worthwhile goal in itself (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008; W. Gamson 1998).

Many have pointed out that identity construction is not exclusive to new social movements, but an important element of movements historically, including the labour movement (Calhoun, 1993; W. Gamson, 1992; Tilly, 1988), and that any self-defining group by definition makes a collective identity claim (Hunt et. al., 1994). I therefore choose not to use the term “new” social movements, but rather, I will refer to these identity- and ideology-based movements as “cultural” movements, in contrast with the

“political” movements that direct action toward the state, as in the instrumental, rational-actor models (i.e. political process and resource mobilization theory). Here I do not mean to make a rigid distinction between cultural and political spheres of social life and action, but rather, these terms distinguish different types of social movement goals and activity for analytical purposes. I thus offer the following definitions: Political movements involve instrumental action aimed at the state with the goal of legislative and policy change. Cultural movements involve constructing and defending shared identities, as well as ideological action aimed at society with the goal of transforming beliefs and values.

The distinction between these two types of movements is summarized in Table 2.

It is formulated in relation to Melucci’s model of the three dimensions of movement activity that together comprise its “action system”, with collective identity emerging from the process of negotiating tensions regarding orientation to the action system:

Individuals or subgroups contribute to the formation of a ‘we’ (more or less stable and integrated according to the type of action) by rendering common and laboriously adjusting three orders of orientations: those relating to the ends of the actions (the sense the action has for the actor); those relating to the means (the possibilities and the limits of the action); and finally those relating to relationships with the environment (the field in which the action takes place). The action system of a collective actor is thus organized along a number of polarities in a state of mutual tension. The collective actor seeks to give an acceptable and

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lasting unity to such a system, which is continuously subject to tensions because action has to meet multiple and contrasting requirements in terms of ends, means, and environment. Collective mobilization can occur and can even continue because the actor has succeeded in realizing, and in the course of the action continues to realize, a certain integration between those contrasting requirements. This ‘social construction’ of the ‘collective’ through negotiation and renegotiation is continually at work when a form of collective action occurs. A failure or a break in this constructive process makes the action impossible (Melucci 1995: 43-44).

Table 2. Characteristics of political and cultural movements

Political Movements Cultural Movements General orientation formal and restrictive informal and expansive

Goals (ends) legal and policy change changing norms, values, beliefs

Strategy (means) instrumental action ideological action

Target (field) state civil society

A collective actor, then, is defined in terms of a common orientation to an action system, which includes three elements: the desired goals of the action (ends), the strategies by which they might be realized (means), and the environment or field within which the action is carried out, and where and to whom it is directed (that is, the target of the action). Table 2 outlines a distinction between general orientations to the action system in political and cultural movements. Political movements are more formal and restrictive in their approach: their goals involve specific legal and policy changes, they take an instrumental approach to realizing these goals, and the target of action is the state, with action aimed within the formal political system. Negotiation of the action system within a political movement will involve different approaches to these specific dimensions of the

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actions system – that is, differences in terms of what specific laws of policies should be instituted or challenged, what type of instrumental action is required (e.g. a protest, a lawsuit, and so on), and what specific state authorities should be targeted – but they will concur in terms of the general political orientation. Cultural movements, meanwhile, are more informal and expansive: their goals involve changing norms, values, and beliefs in society in general, and their means of doing so involve ideological action through public advocacy and promotion (e.g. protests, books, videos, websites, and so on). Again, while there will be debate on specifics, a cultural movement will agree on the general orientation to the action system.

This perspective involves a more expansive definition of social movements than those of the political process and mobilization school. David Snow (2004: 11) provides a suitably expansive definition, writing that social movements are “collectivities acting with some degree of organization and continuity outside of institutional or organizational channels for the purpose of challenging or defending extant authority, whether it is institutionally or culturally based, in the group, organization, society, culture, or world order of which they are a part”. The key concept here is authority – both cultural and political movements involve challenges to authority, whether institionalized (for example, in the state) or based in dominant cultural norms, beliefs, and values.

Armstrong and Bernstein (2008) argue that we need such an expansive definition because domination is not organized around one source of power (i.e. the state), but rather, there are multiple sources of power in society, both material and symbolic. In this view, collective actors need not challenge the state to be considered a social movement, but rather, sustained challenges to “cultural systems of oppression and authority” can be understood as movement activity (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008: 79). These authors propose a “multi-institutional politics” approach that recognizes both political and cultural dimensions of social movements that challenge power and authority from multiple sources. They thus support Melucci’s critique of state-centred models and his expanded framework for analyzing movements with non-political goals and targets.

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I want to argue that the atheist movement, and more specifically the New Atheism, can be understood within this framework. As I suggested above, the New Atheism was a novel development within the atheist movement, which had focused on the political goals of secularism and civil rights for atheists before the Four Horsemen came forward with a radical program of public attacks on religion and a substitute worldview defined by scientism. The New Atheism challenges the moral authority of religion by attacking its intellectual authority, arguing for the epistemic superiority of science over ‘religious’ forms of knowledge. The conflict between groups advocating for scientific rationality as a form of authority on the one hand, and those advocating for religious and traditional authority on the other, is a political conflict that is being played out in the cultural arena as a dispute over ‘true’ knowledge and values. The New Atheism positions itself and its ideology of scientism as an alternative to religion, which is represented as a cultural system of oppression and authority (the New Atheism’s challenge to religious authority, and desire to replace it with scientific authority, was the theme of the previous chapter). It might therefore be considered a social movement, following the definitions of Melucci (1989, 1996), Snow (2004), and Armstrong and Bernstein (2008) discussed above. More precisely, it is a cultural movement that targets civil society, with the goal of changing beliefs and values, and uses a strategy of ideological action that takes the form of public advocacy and science education. It is thus an example of the type of movement that challenges dominant cultural “codes” rather than state authorities, institutions, or policies (Melucci 1996).

As I argued above, the New Atheism was a novel development within the atheist movement that shifted the focus from instrumental legal-political action to broad cultural transformation. This process can be understood in terms of Melucci’s (1989) notion of a

“latency” period that characterizes the emergence of some new social movements. This is the period before a movement becomes visible or highly organized and politically

“latency” period that characterizes the emergence of some new social movements. This is the period before a movement becomes visible or highly organized and politically