Confessions Of An Atheist In America

With more and more Americans identifying as non-religious, why is there still a stigma hanging over atheism?

Close-up image of a dictionary entry for the word "atheist". The word itself is encircled with red ink.

In 1990, Americans who self-identified as religiously unaffiliated made up just 7% of the population. By 2021, according to Pew Research Center’s National Public Opinion Reference Surveys, that number had risen to 29%.

In the period since Pew began polling Americans’ religious affiliations in 2007, while the religiously unaffiliated, or “nones,” grew from 16% to 29%, the percentage of those who identify as Christian fell from 78% to 63%. 

Yes, self-identified Christians still remain a majority of the U.S. population, but the “nones” have eaten into that dominance in a dramatic way. In just 14 years, the Christian to unaffiliated ratio went from approximately 5 to 1 down to just over 2 to 1. 

But even as the nation becomes more secular, with thousands of churches closing each year, and with Millenials and Gen Z leading the movement away from religion, self-described atheists make up just 4% of the U.S. population, and agnostics make up just 5%, both up from just 2% in 2007. The remaining 20%: “nothing in particular.”

What do these terms mean? 

According to The Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Theist is a person who believes in the existence of a god or gods

Atheist is a person who does not believe in the existence of a god or any gods. (Similarly, a nontheist is a person who does not believe that there is a god or gods)

Agnostic is a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (such as God) is unknown and probably unknowable

Despite this seemingly innocuous definition of “atheist,” if you look at polling of “non-traditional” categories people would support for president, atheists still fall toward the bottom. In 2020, Gallup found that just 60% of Americans would elect an atheist for president, sandwiched between 45% that would elect a Socialist and 66% who would elect a Muslim. By contrast, Evangelical Christians come in at 80%, Jewish at 93% and Catholic at 95%.

In the pantheon of Americans elected to Congress, there appear to have been only two who have identified as nontheist while in office. Pete Stark of California became the first openly atheist member of Congress when he publicly “came out” in 2007. More recently, Jared Huffman of California declared himself a nontheist humanist in 2017. 

In the case of Huffman, while he stops short of self-identifying as an atheist, he is quoted as saying that he is a “nonbeliever, a skeptic,” and “I suppose you could say I don’t believe in God.” Which is literally the definition of an atheist.

The reason he gives for not self-identifying as such, according to The Washington Post:

the tag “atheist” offers a level of certainty he doesn’t feel — and perhaps arrogance.

Rep. Kyrsten Sinema reportedly became the first member of Congress to list her religion as “unaffiliated” in 2013 but felt the need to release a statement confirming that she was in fact NOT an atheist.

Why did I become an atheist?

My own journey to atheism was long but in the end, fairly straightforward, free of this anti-atheist sentiment so many seem to have. I apparently never got that memo. 

I was not raised in a terribly religious household. My family went to a congregational church, which I generally found to be inoffensive, even thought-provoking.  

And while we did not make a big deal out of our religion, it was clear that going to church was just something you did. A societal obligation. And so was believing in God.

But then the questioning began.

When it came time for high school, for a number of reasons not having to do with religion, I attended a Jesuit high school. Suddenly the Bible was a required textbook. We were taught both Eastern and Western religions, remarkably free of indoctrination. 

In class, I was now doing critical thinking about religious texts, particularly the Old and New Testaments. I learned about the doctrine of transubstantiation from an incredulous lay teacher. It was eye-opening to say the least. 

Meanwhile, at church, I recall enjoying a sermon that made the case that Christ had asked us to play a “game”—to pretend the wine was his blood and pretend the bread was his body. Acknowledging the symbolism and metaphor of the Eucharist made much more sense to me. But so did a sermon that taught us that a relationship with God took work. It was healthy to challenge the relationship, to question it constantly, work at it as you would any relationship.

Then came a fateful and pivotal moment. Two decades after graduating high school, in 2009, I found myself at the hospital with an infection in my leg as a result of an infected poison ivy rash. The same hospital my father had died in just months prior. 

After plying me with IV antibiotics in the ER, the doctor informed me they would need to admit me, the infection was just too advanced. 

As the IV antibiotics continued to flow through me that day and evening without any discernible improvement, my mind went to very dark places. I considered the possibility that my leg would have to be amputated. So, that night I prayed. I prayed a lot. To God, whom I still sort of nominally believed in. And to my father. I prayed to save my leg. 

The next morning, as the doctor came around to check on me, he declared the antibiotics a success. My leg would recover fine, I’d be discharged in a few days, although a regimen of at-home antibiotics would be required for some time after.

I felt such profound relief, but also foolishness. Not only that I had convinced myself that such a worst-case scenario would even happen, when that was never actually a possibility. But also that I had resorted to praying to God as a sort of escape hatch, a get-out-of-jail-free card. What a cliché. But also, what a hollow relationship with God that was.

The fact that I turned to God in my moment of crisis when I never acknowledged God at any other time, the fact that I only turned to him when I needed something, didn’t actually give me comfort at all. It did the opposite. 

It made me realize not just that I didn’t believe that praying that night had saved my leg, but that I didn’t believe God was real, and hadn’t for a while.

That day wasn’t the moment I became an atheist, it was the moment I realized I already was, and finally allowed myself to admit it.

And it was a moment of profound clarity for me.

Why still such antipathy toward the term “atheist”?

For me, identifying as an atheist was not a difficult decision once I realized I didn’t believe anymore. Because as far as I am concerned, belief in a god or gods is a binary: either you do (which makes you a theist) or you don’t (which makes you an atheist.) I didn’t. Therefore I was an atheist, simply by definition.

What I didn’t anticipate was the pushback I would receive at simply identifying with that label, even among some who are not religious.

My theory for why culturally in this country there is such a kneejerk reaction against the notion of atheism, or nonbelief in a god generally, falls into two categories:

1. Godlessness = Wickedness

While technically the United States does not have a national religion, the existence of the Abrahamic monotheistic God is just baked into our culture. It’s on our money. It’s in our “Pledge of Allegiance.” And despite a nominal separation of church and state, governmental meetings—most notably sessions of the U.S. Congress— are regularly convened with some religious prayer, usually Christian in nature.

You simply can’t escape religion, and this has led to a silent indoctrination in all of us, one from which I have had to deprogram myself: the notion that belief in a god was virtuous while nonbelief, or “godlessness,” was in some way [insert preferable word here.] Evil? Wicked? Sinful?

Stephen Colbert once interviewed Rep. Jared Huffman back in 2014 and called him out for listing his religious affiliation as “unspecified.”

As described by The Washington Post the exchange went as follows:

“Unspecified? Come on, grow a pair. What is it? Are you an atheist?” Colbert cracked.

“I don’t know,” Huffman replied.

“Agnostic then?”

“Perhaps.”

Colbert’s journalist character picked up his pen.

“I’ll just put you down for ‘heathen-slash-hell-bound.’ ”

Colbert’s character, of course, was a parody of a conservative, but this over-the-top reaction to someone who has no religious belief, or is “godless,” rang quite true.

Merriam-Webster puts it a slightly different way with its “archaic” definition of atheism:

godlessness especially in conduct : UNGODLINESS, WICKEDNESS

Maybe not so “archaic” after all.

But clearly, from Jared Huffman’s refusal to identify as an atheist even as he does identify as a “nontheist” who “doesn’t believe in God,” the discomfort people have with the term is not wrapped up solely in the notion of nonbelief. There is something about that label: “atheist.”

As Huffman himself stated, he somehow associates the word with a sort of arrogant certainty, which leads to the second issue I think people have with self-identifying as an atheist.

2. Atheism = Arrogance

Why is nonbelief arrogant but belief isn’t? Is there something inherent in the lack of belief that conveys more certainty than a believer’s actual belief does?

Isn’t believing that one’s god—out of all the gods that have ever been believed—is the one true god the very definition of arrogance?

Ironically, people love to criticize atheism itself as a belief system, claiming it requires more faith to disbelieve in a god’s existence than it does to believe that one does exist.

This, too, is a head-scratcher. Atheism is literally the lack of belief. No belief. Zero, zip, nada.

But it’s clear that this notion of disbelief in a god or gods is difficult for some to grasp, even though every monotheist in the world by definition disbelieves in every other god. So why is disbelief demonized among atheists but not among theists? 

As I like to tell anyone who questions my atheism, out of all the gods that have ever been believed, theists and atheists disbelieve all the same gods except for one.

But while atheists’ nonbelief is seen as arrogant, that of believers is somehow seen as virtuous, inoculated it would seem by having at least some modicum of belief. 

As backup for their insistence that atheism is indeed a “belief,” they claim atheism is the “belief that no god exists” rather than the absence of belief. Except it’s not. 

Religious belief is the faith in something despite not having proof. So, how would belief that something doesn’t exist work? The lack of evidence for the existence of a god is for me a reason not to believe. But this “atheism is belief” argument by some believers has always struck me as a convenient way for them to cut atheists off at the knees by claiming the ultimate hypocrisy: that nonbelievers have more “belief” than anyone. 

My disbelief in any god does not require belief on my part, it is simply a function of what I would consider objective observation. The lack of evidence for the existence of any god leads me to a lack of belief in its existence. If a god were to come down to Earth and show itself to us all tomorrow, I would acknowledge its existence, just as we all should reevaluate the world when we get new evidence. That’s how science works. But then, of course, that god would go from the realm of belief to the realm of scientific fact.  

Another related criticism I’ve heard is something to the effect of, “Oh, you think you know better than all these brilliant people throughout history who believed in God?” Which again feels like a weird flex.

All I can speak to is my own personal lack of belief, which is the result of a lot of thought and self-reflection. The fact that many people in the U.S. are coming to a similar conclusion at this moment in time is a function of having more information at our fingertips. There’s a reason thousands of gods of old are now widely accepted as myths, as scientific knowledge replaced superstitions and mythologies at the heart of the creation of those gods. 

I suspect the faith traditions popular today will ultimately have similar fates, although I fully expect some form of religion will always exist as long as humans are on the Earth. 

Why not just be an “agnostic”?

While the difference between the 5% who self-identify as agnostic and the 4% who self-identify as atheist in Pew’s poll may not look like much, the fact that it is 25% higher may say something about the comfort level Americans have self-identifying as “agnostic” relative to “atheist.”

Many people consider being an agnostic as a sort of “atheist-lite,” free of that pesky arrogance or certainty people associate with atheism.

Or as Colbert put it in his interview with Rep. Jared Huffman:

“What is an agnostic but an atheist without any balls?”

But in fact, being an atheist and being an agnostic are not mutually exclusive. While theism and atheism are about belief or non-belief in a god or gods, gnosticism and agnosticism are about whether the existence of a god or gods can be known.

As Merriam-Webster puts it:

atheist refers to someone who does not believe in the existence of a god or any gods, and agnostic refers to someone who doesn’t know whether there is a god, or even if such a thing is knowable

According to PEDIAA, a “gnostic theist” would be someone who believes in god and thinks the existence of god can be known, while an agnostic theist is someone who believes in god but doesn’t know whether the existence of god is actually knowable.

Similarly, you can be a gnostic atheist, one who doesn’t believe in god but thinks the existence of a god can be known. And an agnostic atheist, one who doesn’t believe in god and does not know whether we can know any god exists.

Perhaps gnostic atheist is the description that fits me best. In my mind, if an all-powerful divine god did exist, certainly it would show itself. Why wouldn’t its existence be knowable? The fact that no god has done so, to end the disagreement and uncertainty about its existence, is part of what led me to atheism in the first place. If two different people can have two completely different notions of who or what their god is, and believe equally strongly, doesn’t that mean it only exists within believers’ minds and not as an objective reality in the world?

For me, a divine god is a fictional mythological figure invented by humans to tell a story about our existence. But for agnostics, they tend to say “we can’t really know” whether any god exists or not.

But one either believes a divine god exists or one doesn’t. It’s not entirely clear to me why the question of whether that god exists gets the added “oh, we can’t really know” allowance not afforded other things whose existence is considered in the realm of belief.

But for many, the fact that one can be both an agnostic and an atheist is irrelevant. The “agnostic” label is simply less toxic than “atheist,” carrying with it less baggage.

It’s my hope that we can erode that toxicity over time, but in the meantime, if “agnostic” is where nonbelievers are most comfortable, so be it.

Normalizing atheism

There are many questions that come up about atheism that I haven’t touched on here, but I think it’s valuable to be open about my nonbelief, if only to chip away at the stigma that still pervades atheism, and do my little part to normalize it in our culture.

I am heartened by younger generations’ seeming immunity to the persistent built-in anti-atheist sentiment that seems to be inherent in so many of us. The more people openly discuss atheism, the less fraught the subject will be, and perhaps we can become an even greater percentage of the “nones” as our numbers continue to grow.

One uphill battle we still have is the lack of goodwill toward many of the better-known atheist thinkers and authors out there. We also would benefit from more atheist community groups, both online and in real life. 

When my father died, I recall the outpouring of support and love that my family received from the church I grew up in. I’ve been aware of the community aspect of religion ever since I was a kid, but the kindness we were shown made that real for me, even if it meant simply a lasagna delivered on our doorstep so we wouldn’t have to think about cooking in our time of grief. It was something I will not forget.

If atheism, or the “nones” more broadly, ever figure out how to build the kind of community that religion offers, I have no doubt that nonbelief could make even greater headway, even in a culture as infused with religion as ours.