The Evolution of Atheism by Stephen LeDrew;

Author:Stephen LeDrew; [Stephen LeDrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2015-09-08T11:11:00+00:00

Good Without God

To this point, I have examined two elements of the latency phase of social movement emergence: the development of ideology and validation of a worldview (covered in Chapter 4) and community building (the corollary of mobilization in political process theories). Closely related to the latter is the defining characteristic of the latency period: collective identity construction.25 This involves basic identity-related self-examination, addressing the questions “Who are we?” and “How do we define ourselves?” In the political identity framework that I am employing, however, we must understand these questions and the way they are addressed in terms of their relationship to more instrumental questions like “What are our goals?” and “How do we achieve them?” The Out Campaign is both an exercise in community building and a project of collective identity construction. It is modeled after that of the gay and lesbian movement, which proved successful at bringing LGBT people “out of the closet” and into visible groups where they could feel not only like members of a community but also empowered rather than isolated and vulnerable.26

The efforts toward community building and constructing a positive image of atheists that we see in the bus campaign and the Out Campaign reflect the importance of morality in movement recruitment. Pinel and Swann argue that social movement participation is a kind of “self-verification,”27 a confirmation of a particular conception of self through a collective identity that affirms and verifies it, a process that Snow and McAdam refer to as “identity seeking.”28 Jesse Smith’s research on atheist groups in Colorado found that morality is an essential component of individual atheist identity.29 More specifically, confirmation of the idea that belief in God is not necessary to be a moral person is important to atheists because a common charge against atheism is that it is morally bankrupt and leads to nihilism.30 Smith also found that morality was central to these atheists’ rejection of theism and that emerging atheists

began to construct a cognitive and symbolic boundary between morality and religion, and asserted themselves as moral individuals against what they increasingly viewed as a false connection between being religious and being moral. They each in some way observed—and criticized the idea—that people need religion to be moral and good.31

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