By Sikivu Hutchinson
Kim Davis.
Ben Carson. Donald Trump. The GOP clown car. The Planned Parenthood attacks. The Pope’s misogynistic
anti-abortion “forgiveness” gesture. After
a brief holding pattern, the resurgence of aggressive Christian fascist dogma
and moral policing of women’s bodies is back on the rise. The GOP’s full-throated embrace of its
reactionary standard bearers—God, gays, guns and gynecology—are the heart and
soul of a nativist revival that’s in overdrive. Historically, when white Middle America felt most
under siege “God” always comes out swinging.
It was true in the 18th century with the first Great
Awakening and it was true in 2011 when Harold Camping pimped
out the Rapture. And it’s true now as white
population growth declines and a so-called minority-majority society looms.
Thus, reports of secular America’s meteoric rise are
greatly exaggerated. Although the Pew
Research Center trumpets
a significant increase
in non-religious Americans (many of whom simply identify as “spiritual”) the
impact of this shift on public policy—aside from same sex marriage laws—is
debatable. When it comes to women’s
bodies, science education and climate change, Christian Americana’s God is
still in the big house, still a flat earther and still a raging sexist.
Which brings me to atheism. Yes, the historic Black Church played an
important role in civil rights organizing and social justice, much of it
powered by black women.
However, despite being among
the most religious/churched groups in the nation, there are compelling reasons
for black women to be attracted to atheism.
The stigma of public morality, fueled by white supremacy and patriarchy,
has always come down more heavily on black women. Religious right policies gutting
reproductive health care disproportionately affect poor and working class black
women. Christian fundamentalist
propaganda demonizing abortion as “black genocide” vilifies black women’s
choices and right to self-determination.
The HIV-AIDS epidemic in African American communities has been enabled
by hyper-religious stigmas on black women’s bodies and homophobic, heterosexist
views of gay sexuality. In some of the
poorest communities in the U.S., robber baron multimillion dollar mega
churches all but use black women as ATMs. And generations after 19th century
religious orator and abolitionist Maria Stewart became the first black woman to
preach on social justice and women’s liberation Black Church leadership is
still overwhelmingly male
dominated.
Yet, the most visible
version of public atheism is that of superstar heretic Richard Dawkins and his acolytes—white
dudebros who rage
that Islam is the fount
of all evil. Every now and then they
cheep in outrage about the anti-abortion American Taliban but conveniently turn
a blind eye to their complicity in the way white Christians and atheists
co-sign racist, nativist and white supremacist policies. Comfortably segregated in their white
enclaves they dismiss
atheists of color who advocate
for social justice, atheism and humanism.
Despite the organizing and writing of progressive
atheists of color, these rugged individualists continue to be the atheist “tribe’s”
official representatives. They speak for
the tribe in mainstream media; scoring big publishing contracts and tenured
university jobs while reaping the benefits of white privilege in an ivory tower
universe where tenured black professors remain a small minority.
The association of atheism with whiteness and white
cultural traditions is one of the reasons black feminist atheism is an
anomaly. There is virtually no space for
it in black culture, much less academia.
In her 1928 novel Quicksand Nella
Larsen depicted one of the few black female non-believers in African American
literature. Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 Raisin in the Sun also portrays a black
female freethinker in the character Beneatha Younger. Not surprisingly, given the gender conventions
of the era, both women are rebuked and punished for their views.
Aside from my books
and that of writer Candace
Gorham, there has been little published on black women and non-belief. Atheist/humanist scholarship is still
dominated by white males who naturally have far more institutional acceptance
than the few people of color in the field.
As an educator who incorporates humanist critique of religion and gender
inequity into my work with high school students I’ve been slammed and excluded by
narrow-minded religionists. Recently, a
colleague informed me that the real reason a gender justice pilot I’d developed
for black girls was shut down last year by a fellow black woman administrator was
because I was an atheist. Evidently this
person would rather have black girls go without culturally responsive programs than
see them administered by an amoral devil worshiper.
Atheism doesn’t require constant jockeying to justify
the inaction of a particular god or gods on questions of morality and ethics. Believers’ endless gyrations in defense of
the righteousness and omnipotence of their preferred supernatural representative(s)
are sidestepped. Human beings have the
ultimate agency and responsibility for defining morality, ethics and social
justice. In a nation in which black women have historically had little
institutional control over their personhood, atheism—eschewing gods/goddesses/spirits
and other human inventions—is liberating.
As the white atheist feminist and women’s rights activist Ernestine Rose
once said, “Do you tell me that the Bible is against our
rights? Then I say our claims do not rest upon a book…Books and opinions, no
matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights are
nothing but dead letters.” Centuries
later, in a “secular” country where the white nationalist backlash is in the ascendant,
the Bible’s dead letters are still Middle America’s fascist literary weapon of
choice.
