Resisting the eraser
At the risk of making a second analogy to the struggle for racial equality: Sixty years ago this week, Jackie Robinson became the first black player in major league baseball.
But imagine someone suggesting that he didn’t really integrate baseball because he wasn’t really black — he was just very, very, uh…dark white.
My editor at Amacom (a very good folk, by the way) continues to wring her hands over a statement of mine on the website, in the study guide, and in the book itself, that the majority of Unitarian Universalists are nonbelievers, noting that the UU website puts the number at 19%.
I visited the UUA site. Here are the numbers from the most recent survey in which UUs were asked to choose just ONE label (something UUs hate to do, God bless ’em):
Humanist: 46%
Atheist: 19%
Earth/nature-centered: 19%
Theist: 13%
Christian: 9.5%
Buddhist: 4%
Jewish: 1.3%
Hindu: tiny %
Muslim: tiny %
…etc etc. Only a tiny fraction of people who choose “humanist” or even “religious humanist” as their primary label believe in a god. Even if we leave the mostly non-god-believing pagans and Buddhists behind, these numbers indicate that about two-thirds of UUs are nonbelievers.
Those of you who are not new to this kind of discourse might know what my editor did next: she began redefining words. From her message:
“The term ‘believers’ refers to whether you believe in a religion, not whether you believe in God. Therefore, by definition, all religious humanists are believers…so you can’t call them non-believers.”
Now let me point out that her intentions are entirely good. She does not want the book to draw unnecessary criticism that would divert attention from substantive things. Still, this reasoning frustrates me. I’m pretty confident that “nonbeliever” in a religious context reliably means “does not believe in a god.” This kind of thing is why my head feels like it’s splitting apart at the midline whenever I get into religious discourse. Just as you put their king in check, they simply bump the table and scatter the pieces, then claim that’s how they were to begin with.
And this is the way disbelief gets gradually erased from the culture: We ignore it, or deny it, or redefine it out of existence. Everybody’s a believer, even those who don’t believe.
Even more troubling is the frantic impression I get from her messages (her subject line was YIKES!) — as if we had called these fine people a terribly dirty thing. If she believed I had mistakenly called the majority of UUs lefthanded, I doubt it would have been a problem. And even implying that all of those humanists are actually God-believing humanists strikes her as erring in the “right” direction. But nonbeliever — why, them’s fightin’ words!
Most of the UU humanists I know would be just as offended by the attempt to call them “believers” as Robinson would have been by the suggestion that he was essentially white.
One of the central purposes of this book is to normalize disbelief, and one of the central tasks in that game is taking the eraser away from those who feel the need to mask the presence of disbelief.