Emboldened Atheists Are Finding Purpose
In Coming Out Of The Closet
Charles Lewis, National Post
Published: Saturday, July 21, 2007
The Centre for Inquiry Ontario office is on the main floor of an old row house in downtown Toronto, but has the look of a spacious church basement. It has a piano, folding chairs in neat rows, and shelves of books, many with God in the title. But because it is a drop-in centre for atheists, humanists and secularists, the books are entitled, The God Delusion, Can We Be Good Without God? and Road to Reason; the magazines include the Canadian Free Thinker and Skeptical Inquirer; and there are T-shirts for sale emblazoned with “Darwin” and “Heretic.” There is a kitchen in the back to cook the occasional mass spaghetti dinner.
“The church basement was the place where people came on a Saturday night — it wasn’t necessarily religion-related,” says Peter Aruja, a 23-year-old political science student at nearby University of Toronto who volunteers at the centre. “And that’s what we’re trying to build here: the atheist church basement.”
The centre has been open for a year; it has 70 active members, an anonymous donor who pays the rent, and on almost any day, there is a meeting or someone who drops by for advice on how to tell their family they have given up on God.
- Big questions have been monopolized by religious institutions,” says Justin Trottier, 24, who has a degree in engineering, comes from a secular Jewish background and is the centre’s executive director. “Atheists are just as interested in questions of meaning, purpose and beginning. Why shouldn’t we have a place where we can chat?”
He says the recent spate of books about atheism, from Christopher Hitchens and others, have helped to attract interest, but he is convinced the movement is built on more than best-sellers. He and others see a confluence of events that have drawn atheists out of the shadows: the rise of fundamentalism, the evangelical politicking of George W. Bush, including his interference in a tragic right-to-life battle, and the anti-religious fallout from 9/11.
“People who are not religious are finding themselves marginalized, and they think it’s time they spoke up and fought back,” says Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. “There is a sense that the pendulum has swung too far.”
A City University of New York survey found the number of non-religious adults grew from 8% to 14.3% between 1990 and 2001, to more than 29 million Americans. The current issue of The Atlantic magazine cites a study that showed 14% of Americans “were distancing themselves from organized religion as a symbolic gesture against the religious right.” A 2006 Pew study found that 20% of today’s 18-to 25-year-olds have no religious affiliation or are atheist or agnostic, up from 11% in the late 1980s.
In Canada, the number of people who categorize themselves as atheists, agnostics, humanists or no-religion rose to 16.2% in the 2001 census, up from 12.3% in 1991, and 7.4% a decade earlier.
There are now dozens of atheist groups in the United States and Canada, under such banners as the Atheist Alliance International, the Secular Coalition for America and the Humanist Association of Canada. Membership in these groups is still relatively small, usually in the several thousands. Most report a leap in interest since the books came out.
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