Here’s something that really, really annoys me: clueless idiots who blame atheism for creationism.
I don’t have stats but I strongly suspect that the strenghtening of creationism with the simultaneous rise of public atheism is not a coincidence.
That isn’t just ahistorical ignorance: it requires such short-sightedness that they aren’t able to look back even a decade.
The major events in creationism that led to their expansion were the publications of the Scofield Reference Bible and The Fundamentals in the early years of the 20th century, and the publication of The Genesis Flood in 1961. Neither periods were associated with a rise in atheism. The first actually coincides with the third Great Awakening; I don’t want to diminish the importance of Robert Ingersoll and the Golden Age of Freethought, but lets not pretend that these were serious challenges to the ubiquitous association of the church with morality and political power. They were promises of secularism that didn’t threaten the status quo all that much, yet. If you wanted something that was scaring many conservatives of that time, look to the Suffrage Movement. I don’t see many people arguing that women’s rights were responsible for creationism, but I expect they are out there.
The second major event in creationism came after the entrenchment of Christianity in the 1950s as part of the Cold War. Our money was splattered with “in God we trust” and “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance in the 1950s; where, pray tell, were the loud aggressive atheists who prompted those religious actions in that period? Is anyone seriously going to argue that the era of the gray flannel suit and Ward Cleaver and the Red Menace was a time of high atheist activity?
Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s lawsuit to end the reading of the Bible in public schools was settled by the Supreme Court in 1963. It was not a trigger for widespread public piety, but was a response to that association of patriotism and civil life and religiosity that had been brewing in this country since the end of World War II. American Atheists was founded after “in God we trust”. Finding a causal relationship that pins the blame on atheism has a few temporal difficulties.
The Institute for Creation Research was founded in 1972. Answers in Genesis was founded in 1980. The NCSE was established in 1983, in response to the rising influence of creationism in the schools (and it is explicitly NOT an atheist organization). No one was trying to insert atheism into the schools in the 1960s. No one is trying to do that even now, but we’ve been dealing with efforts to push Genesis crap and faith-based bullshit in the schools for at least 60 years.
The Moral Majority was big news in the early 1980s, and was founded in 1979. I was wide awake and politically aware in the 1980s; there were no big atheist role models making a noise in the public sphere, they were still little more than a despised minority at the time, and most people were surprised to learn that atheists even existed in America.
The recent rise of public atheism can be traced to a number of influential books. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, by Susan Jacoby, published in 2004. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
in 2004 and Letter to a Christian Nation
in 2006, by Sam Harris. The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins in 2006.
It’s been less than ten goddamned years.
And we’ve still got idiots claiming they see a correlation between creationism/public religiosity and outspoken atheists.
Listen, whenever you see someone making that claim, you know you’ve found an idiot talking out of their ass. Give them a look of contempt and walk away.