Religion

Just Say You’re An Atheist, It’s Fine

You shouldn’t have to feel shame in talking to a priest you used to know just because your lifestyle no longer matches his religious convictions.

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I ran into my old parish priest at a minor league baseball game the other night (along with like a dozen other priests wearing the collars and everything — I guess it was priests’ night out or something). Anyway, I went up to say hello, and the conversation went something like this:

“Hi Father Mark! I’m Jon Wolf. You probably don’t recognize me, [same recycled joke about looking like the fifth Beatle after a year-and-a-half of COVID-19 lockdowns that I’d used like five times already that night], but I used to be an altar boy for you when you said Mass.”

“[Nervous laughter] Oh, I don’t really remember you, but that last name Wolf, was your mom a dental hygienist in town?”

“Of course, that’s why I have such good teeth [weird smile]! See? You have really good teeth too, probably my mams had something to do with that.”

“Thanks. So, are you married now, and do you have a family or what?”

“Oh yes! Well, I’m not married exactly, I do have a long-term girlfriend though, and we have a kid, not my kid biologically, but she’s more or less my daughter, and that look on your face makes clear that you’re now processing my obvious embrace of premarital sex and procreation outside of the bonds of matrimony and so in turn I’m only now realizing that I did not come into this sentence with an exit strategy …”

“You know, I’m going to pray for you tonight.”

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Ugh. So often in life it’s just easier to pretend you’ve entirely forgotten someone.

My point in writing about this though is that it would have been perfectly acceptable for me to just say, you know, I appreciated all the sermons and everything when I was a kid, and I think your heart was in the right place, but I’m an atheist now, and everyone is fine with that, and I don’t have any problem with how I now choose to live my life. I shouldn’t have had to feel shame in talking to a guy I used to know just because my lifestyle no longer matches his religious convictions, but I did.

I’m not alone in that. The religiously unaffiliated proportion of the U.S. population continues to grow, and it stood at 26 percent as of 2019, according to the Pew Research Center. Yet, being nonreligious in a country full of religious wackos is a complicated endeavor, and relatively few people are willing to self-identify as atheist even if the definition of “atheist” functionally matches their actual belief structure. Just 4 percent of Americans actually say they are atheists when asked to state their religious identity (although that number is on the rise, too).

I was raised pretty hardcore Catholic, and actually believed a lot of that shit for years. But having read about 30 science books, and about 30 true crime books detailing the misdeeds of falsely religious hucksters bilking believers out of money and power and sex, and seeing a couple of my friends have their whole families randomly murdered, and watching my daughter go through cancer treatments, and having other friends die randomly in their 20s for no goddamn reason at all, and watching a lot of anti-gay bigotry and women-shaming and clergy molestation scandals and a bunch of other things take place, I mean, come on. The evidence is overwhelming. There’s just not some all-powerful altruistic being watching out for all of us. The world is random and indifferent, and if you want a path through life that’s better than that, it’s up to you to create it.

Magic and mental wishes (aka prayer) don’t control everything. We’re all skinsacks holding in five or six liters of blood around a bone framework, and that’s OK. There is no broader plan beyond whatever human beings come up with. It’s only us here, and it’s up to us whether we turn this world into a heaven or a hell. Really that’s not such a bad thing. It gives us all a lot of responsibility.

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But most atheists still can’t just say that. There are zero members of Congress who will admit to being atheists, and only one who will even acknowledge being religiously unaffiliated. Atheists shouldn’t have to feel bad about their lack of belief though. We don’t (well, most of us don’t) go around directly insulting the God-fearing for the beliefs that apparently give them some form of comfort through this admittedly rough existence. So maybe the pious could return the favor.

If you’re an atheist, just say it, and try not to feel bad. And if you’re not, perhaps try to make us feel OK with who we are rather than pushing beliefs on us that we’ve already rejected for some pretty good reasons.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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