Printed in the Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Huff, Peter A. "The Current State of Unbelief" Quest 110:2, pg 20-24
By Peter A. Huff
Unbelief has no president, pope, or CEO. Many people speak as unbelievers, but no one speaks for unbelief as a whole. To understand the phenomenon today, we have to investigate a broad spectrum of interrelated dimensions of life.
The evidence, from shifting demographics and moral sensibilities to the latest publications and trends in social media, suggests that unbelief in its many forms is a cardinal feature of our time. From all accounts, the current state of unbelief is vibrant, increasingly visible, rapidly evolving, and complex.
Atheism and agnosticism, to name two familiar types of unbelief, are essential ingredients of contemporary experience. Without them, everything we call modern (and postmodern) would be different, perhaps unrecognizable. The entire modern project, springing from the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, revolves around freedom: freedom to question authority, reject oppressive institutions, and invent new ways of constructing selfhood, organizing community, and pursuing happiness. Atheism, agnosticism, and all the variants of unbelief express these defining freedoms of the modern age: inquiry, revolution, invention. They permeate every sector of modernity—from politics, economics, and science to literature, education, entertainment, art, and even religion.
Recognizing the importance of atheism and agnosticism and cognate forms of doubt and dissent is one thing. Understanding what they are is another. Many discussions of atheism and agnosticism suffer from simplistic assumptions about the meaning of the terms and the phenomena to which they point. Atheism and agnosticism are routinely reduced to questions of belief. According to conventional wisdom, atheism is belief in the nonexistence of God or disbelief in the existence of God. Agnosticism, caricatured as timid or tepid atheism, is seen as the inability or unwillingness to believe in God’s existence or nonexistence.
These approaches tell only a fraction of the story. As intellectual shorthand, they get a conversation started. For people who identify as atheist or agnostic, they may get the conversation started in the wrong way or aimed in the wrong direction. Just as there are varieties of religious experience, there are varieties of atheist and agnostic experience. The meaning of unbelief is neither obvious nor simple.
Concentrating on belief or unbelief, in fact, contributes to distorted portraits of atheism and agnosticism. A brief review of atheist and agnostic literature reveals a number of factors shaping these distinctive outlooks and orientations: critique, defiance, disenchantment, discovery, liberation, and exhilaration, just to name a few. These themes offer not only a sense of atheist and agnostic beliefs or ideas but also a glimpse of the lived experiences that make atheism and agnosticism so multifaceted. Acknowledging that beliefs about God may not necessarily constitute the main characteristics of atheism and agnosticism is an important step toward allowing these realities to speak for themselves. Unbelief is not just about unbelief.
Language itself is a challenge when it comes to understanding atheism and agnosticism. Too often, atheism and agnosticism and their adherents have been pictured exclusively in terms of negation or lack: not believing something, not having something, not being something. A long train of synonyms with negative prefixes or suffixes reinforces this trend: unbelievers, nonbelievers, irreligious, antireligious, nonreligious, antitheist, nontheist, infidel, godless, and misotheist (“hater” of God). Even twenty-first-century nicknames such as None (as in “none of the above”) and Done (as in “done with religion”) fit the pattern. This trend goes back to the Greek basis for each word: átheos (a + theós = “without god”) and ágnostos (a + gnosis = “without knowledge”).
In ancient Mediterranean cultures, people labeled as átheos, including Socrates, promoted not a worldview antagonistic to divine beings but a critical approach to society’s unquestioned assumptions. In the first century CE, Roman pundits called Jews and Christians atheists. The allegiance to only one deity challenged the folk religions of the empire, threatened the cult of the emperor, and stumped the Roman imagination.
Once the church gained worldly power, it turned the tables and called practitioners of the older religions atheists, saying pagan gods were not gods. Three centuries later, Muslim authorities issued similar declarations. By the early modern period, Western writers and their Arab, Turkish, and Persian counterparts used words derived from átheos as all-purpose terms of abuse, not precise references to a specific point of view.
Today, any number of atheists and agnostics may capitalize on the negative charge of the root terms, defying what they take to be the oppressive nature of religion and the God idea. Some people who find religion meaningless and God a useless hypothesis, however, avoid atheist and agnostic precisely because of the negative stigmas associated with the labels. Many gravitate toward freethinker, humanist, and secularist, or the twenty-first-century neologism Bright. Some suggest that godfree may be the best way to state what appears to be a negative in a positive way.
When it comes specifically to atheism, the vast literature on the subject by atheists themselves reveals more nuanced understandings of unbelief. Some writers recognize that the God denied by atheists does not always correspond to the God affirmed by believers. Aware of the complexities within theism, they share Martin Buber’s conviction that God is the “most loaded of all words.” Others, especially since Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God in the nineteenth century, have endeavored to move the discussion of atheism beyond the categories of belief and reason. They portray atheism as a life orientation or the default position of the human mind, not simply a set of ideas. Atheist novelists, playwrights, artists, composers, and poets express atheism as a cluster of moods, intuitions, and sentiments. Criticism of religion and religious institutions, especially accompanied by disappointment or outrage in light of religion’s intellectual incoherence or moral failure, can be a mode of atheism. Anger at God can be a kind of atheism.
The twenty-first century has witnessed the appearance of a new class of confident advocates for secularity and nonreligion, eager to present atheism and agnosticism in a positive light. For them, these stances are far more than a nay-saying to a question of belief or a refutation of somebody else’s worldview. Phil Zuckerman, founder of the first academic secular studies degree program in the U.S., exemplifies this approach in Living the Secular Life. He maintains that atheism is not a reversal of something or a rejection of a competing viewpoint. It is a constructive, affirmative way of being in the world, based on courage and awe and yielding authenticity and contentment. Likewise, Lesley Hazleton, in Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, argues that cultivated not-knowing can be the effective basis for a life marked by intellectual adventure and generous empathy for other human beings. Questioning and questing, she claims, lead to richer ends than rigid avowal or denial can provide.
Such forthright recommendations of atheism and agnosticism have been rare in history. They are stark reminders of how new open, organized, socially active, and legally protected atheism and agnosticism truly are. Our premodern ancestors could not have imagined organizations such as Humanists International or public relations initiatives such as the Atheist Bus Campaign in Britain, with its ads proclaiming “There’s Probably No God.”
The track record of atheophobia is as long as the history of atheism itself. In some countries, blasphemy and apostasy laws still inflict severe punishment on the individual who will not conform to fixed standards of belief and behavior. Even in societies with constitutional protections for free speech and conscience, outspoken atheism can wreck a career, a reputation, or a relationship.
The academic study of the history of atheism and agnosticism is in its early stages. Until the late twentieth century, it was little more than a footnote to the history of philosophy and theology. Too often it was blurred with accounts of religious heresies and other deviations from reigning orthodoxies. Greater acceptance of intellectual diversity in present-day society has fueled growing interest in unbelief’s past. Unfortunately, undisciplined quests for atheist and agnostic forebears, portrayed as pioneers or heroes, have been largely exercises in wishful thinking and anachronism.
At least three significant challenges face the historian of atheism and agnosticism. One is the convention of the periodization of history. Carving history into preconceived chapters, such as ancient, medieval, Renaissance, modern, and the like, is still standard practice in the academy and the popular media. These titles are frequently woven into the stories of atheism and agnosticism. Freighted with assumptions that may distort more than they describe, the labels should be employed with caution and self-awareness. Referring to the intellectual innovation of highly literate male European thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the “Enlightenment” highlights that era’s revolutionary new ways of studying nature and imagining society. At the same time, “Enlightenment” grants dangerous cover for the cultivation of notions of race and progress that subsidized enterprises such as the international slave trade, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and Western imperialism and colonialism.
Another challenge to the historical study of atheism and agnosticism is, again, terminology itself. Atheism first appeared in English during the mid-1500s, initially as a term of derision, not self-description. Cambridge theologian Henry More’s Antidote against Atheisme, published in 1653, was as much about witchcraft and religious fanaticism as what people today call atheism. The word agnosticism, by contrast originally a matter of self-identification, was coined only in 1869, during the initial controversy over Darwin’s theory of evolution. These terms, while remarkably flexible, have come to be seen as relatively reliable indicators of recognizable positions or mindsets in various phases of modern history. It is a matter of debate, though, whether the terms effectively correspond to states of mind harbored by some people in earlier phases of history. If no language existed to describe the state of affairs, and especially if the danger to person and freedom was so grave that admission of atheism or agnosticism would have meant possible prison, exile, or death, how can anyone point to individuals in the premodern past, individuals lacking words or safety to speak up, and confidently identify those figures as atheists or agnostics? Could there be something peculiarly modern about unbelief itself? Is modernity the age of atheism and agnosticism? Or is the modern period one chapter in the story of these worldviews?
A third challenge to the construction of atheist and agnostic lineages is the built-in Eurocentrism of most inquiries into their backgrounds. The majority of histories of atheism and agnosticism have been written by Western writers, for Western readers, about a certain set of Western people. The standard narrative, tracing skepticism from ancient Greek suspicion about the gods to twenty-first-century North Atlantic New Atheism, tends to confirm this conclusion.
Haunting every study of atheism and agnosticism, past and present, is the question of the relationship between atheism and agnosticism and the specific styles and assumptions of Western intellectual life. Are atheism and agnosticism primarily Western phenomena? If they are, then they would appear to be among not only the most important products of the Western world’s cultural economy but also some of its chief exports. If they are not, then what are the signs of atheism and agnosticism in cultures that have not been substantially influenced by Abrahamic traditions—in cultures, that is, without a history of obsession with the concept signified by the term God? Are there compelling reasons to describe certain forms of philosophical outlook in African or Australian or American indigenous cultures, or in south or east Asian cultures, as varieties of atheism and agnosticism?
Despite the challenges, a number of historians have attempted to construct a chronicle of atheism and agnosticism stretching from ancient to modern times and around the globe. Most begin their narratives in the first millennium BCE. Few examine the full time of Homo sapiens on earth. Almost none consider the lives and strivings of other Homo species, which would extend the story of the human mind to at least 2,500,000 BCE. Archaeological evidence suggests that magic and religion have shaped human experience for millennia. God and gods have been relatively recent additions to human cultural life.
Depending exclusively on written evidence, many historians see possible first signs of atheism and agnosticism in India’s nontheist Samkhya philosophy or the traditions of Jainism and Buddhism, dating from around 500 BCE. Some point to folk traditions in ancient China that evolved into Daoism and Confucianism, some to systems of thought that planted the seeds for Africa’s ubuntu ethic—the humanist philosophy, often translated from Zulu and Xhosa languages as humanity toward others, which has flourished in postapartheid South Africa and many other sites of the global African Renaissance. Many scholars, writing from a Western perspective, claim to find atheist and agnostic ancestors in ancient Mediterranean nonconformists: Greeks such as Protagoras of Abdera, Theodorus of Cyrene, and Diagoras of Melos, author of On the Gods; and Romans such as Cicero, author of On the Nature of the Gods, and Lucretius, author of On the Nature of Things. The difficulty with these efforts is the problem of demonstrating the connection between ancient people who thought gods irrelevant and modern people who see gods as imaginary. The quest for the world’s first atheist or first agnostic, while tantalizing, is fraught with trouble. Some critics say it is wrongheaded from the start. Atheism and agnosticism have no origins, they contend. They are names for the natural state of the human mind, as old as human existence.
The student of atheism and agnosticism is on firmer ground investigating these phenomena today. One of the most striking features of these ways of life and thought is their variety. A diversity of types of atheism and agnosticism confronts the open-minded researcher. Often the types can be grouped into pairs of contrasting forms: rational versus emotional, organic versus organized, active versus passive, naive versus sophisticated. Some unbelievers are raised in nonreligion. Some have transformations of mind along the lines of a religious conversion. Some are in the closet, some are out. Some have no argument with religion. Others wrestle with gods for a lifetime. Some insist that atheism and agnosticism have intellectual content. Others say they represent independence from all creeds, even anticreeds. Some worship science as a substitute deity. Others are suspicious of scientism. Some seek social change. Others are aloof, content with the status quo. Some are happy. Some depressed. Still others nostalgic, reluctant unbelievers mourning a lost faith. Some could not believe if they wanted to. Others, spiritually homeless, find themselves somewhere between belief and unbelief, half conscious, as Martin Heidegger put it, of the “trace of the fugitive gods.” André Comte-Sponville’s Little Book of Atheist Spirituality evokes an unbelief bordering on mysticism.
Forms of everyday unbelief include the methodological atheism that reigns in the natural sciences (evident every time researchers assume that no supernatural force will influence their experiments) and the pragmatic atheism displayed in religious communities (when, as the saying goes, people pray as if everything depends on God and act as if everything depends on them). Religion also houses more profound strains of atheism. Atheists can be found in foxholes, of course, but they can also be found in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, and covens. Jewish atheists are relatively uncontroversial, especially since the Holocaust. Christian atheists less so, even after the rise of “death of God” theologies in the 1960s. Harvard philosopher George Santayana communicated his unique brand of Catholic atheism with the memorable line “There is no God, and Mary is his mother.” Islam, still coming to terms with the Enlightenment legacy, has yet to reckon fully with what Walter Lippmann dubbed the acids of modernity.
One issue that illustrates the diversity within contemporary unbelief is morality. Critics wonder how unbelievers can be responsible without religion. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil fueled such suspicions, as did the widely quoted comment by a character in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” Some atheists embrace hedonism, rejecting all values except the pursuit of pleasure. Others believe in moral relativism, understanding morality as an invention of society, constantly evolving. A significant number of atheists believe that reason and science can lead to universal ethical principles that religious and nonreligious people can share. Good without God by Harvard’s humanist chaplain Greg Epstein represents the current state of this conversation within atheist circles. A body of self-help literature, by atheists for atheists, focuses on issues such as life-cycle ceremonies and parenting. Today, atheists are active in campaigns for racial justice, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, freedom of conscience, science education, and environmental justice.
A notable feature of contemporary unbelief is the growing prominence of women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and people of color. Independent LGBTQ+ voices include Camille Beredjick, author of Queer Disbelief, and Greta Christina, author of Coming Out Atheist. Eminent figures associated with what Candace Gorham has called the “Ebony Exodus” from religion include Mandisa Thomas, founder of Black Nonbelievers Inc., and Sikivu Hutchinson, author of Humanists in the Hood. African American atheists, agnostics, and Nones of all genders represent a visible and vocal dimension of twenty-first-century nonreligion.
As it turns out, counting these diverse individuals around the world is becoming less daunting. More social scientists are specializing in the study of nonreligion. More atheists and agnostics are feeling safe enough to speak up. Nomenclature, however, remains a challenge, distinguishing between atheist and agnostic, humanist, secularist, and freethinker—terms often used interchangeably by the same person.
Self-declared atheists are easiest to quantify. Some estimates place the worldwide atheist population at 500–700 million. Others set it closer to one billion, making unbelief the third or fourth largest “faith” in the world. Factoring in covert atheists would raise the number significantly. Nations reporting the highest percentages of people who identify as atheists, all in double digits, include China, Japan, the Czech Republic, France, Australia, Iceland, Belgium, and Denmark.
In the United States, the many forms of nonreligion are rapidly growing. According to the Pew Research Center, from 2009 to 2019, the percentage of adults who identify as atheists doubled, from 2 percent to 4 percent. Agnostics increased from 3 percent to 5 percent. People with no religious affiliation, the so-called Nones, grew from 12 percent to 17 percent. By 2019, over one quarter of the U.S. adult population claimed no religion—an unprecedented moment in the history of a country still described by some as Christian. All studies indicate that the highest rates of unbelief and nonaffiliation are among young adults. Even the most sober analysts are forced to imagine a soon-to-be majority American population for whom the national motto “In God We Trust” is not only a relic of the past but a bewildering and insulting one at that.
All of which confirms that unbelief has enormous social, political, and cultural consequences, especially, as Michel Onfray, author of Atheist Manifesto, has said, “when private belief becomes a public matter.” The growing visibility and normality of unbelief, broadly defined, affect everything we do—from the way we raise children and configure our calendars to the way we relate to our planet and respond to someone who sneezes. Especially at stake is the definition of the good life, not to mention the all-consuming question of truth. Perhaps options for all humans throughout the storied past of the species, atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of unbelief have intimate ties to modernity and the yearning for freedom at the heart of the conflicted Enlightenment project. The current state of unbelief is vast, multivalent, and unprecedented.
Peter A. Huff teaches religious studies and directs the Center for Benedictine Values at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois. The author or editor of seven books, he is active in interfaith and intercultural dialogue. This essay draws from his recently released book, Atheism and Agnosticism: Exploring the Issues (ABC-CLIO, 2021).