I gather that most visitors to this website are American. So they may not know that Liverpool, the part of England I grew up in during the early-1980’s, was, in many ways, a pretty edgy place.
I recall at the age of fourteen one day attending school, only to be handed a reading list referring to various math textbooks. The list itself was over thirty pages in length. Little wonder: it was to cover us for the following fifteen months when the school was expected to be closed down along with various other public institutions. After all, the local council had brought the city to the verge of bankruptcy. The same council managed to arrange a city-wide eruption of strikes which lit their way across its streets provoking fear of violence in anyone unfortunate enough to be passing by one of the many bonfires which signaled the presence of a nearby picket line.
The council, you see, had been infiltrated by the political faction, Militant Labour. When many British people over the age of forty now think of Militant, they conjure up images of the broken-Liverpool of yesteryear.
Fast forward nearly thirty years to February 2012. Two stories spanning the secular-religious divide hit the British headlines. In one, the National Secular Society took a stand against an almost unheard-of council at Bideford, and succeeded in persuading the High Court to force prayers off its agenda. A week later, a survey organized by the Richard Dawkins Foundation made clear the rather minimal extent to which British Christians are, in any meaningful sense, Christian.
Yet rather than debate the issues raised in any coherent way, the media and the politicians have queued up to dust down their age-worn lines about the shrill rhetoric of Militant Atheism. “I’m not religious myself,” so many have announced, “but I can’t abide these Militant Atheists.”
But what is it about even the most extreme atheists that can justifiably be labeled “militant”? It must be one of two things: either the content of what they say or the way they communicate it.
So what do today’s most extreme atheists say that can properly be described as militant? The answer is surely nothing. To state that you are an atheist is simply to say that you do not consider that believers have discharged the burden upon them of proving that a supernatural god of some sort exists. It might even involve going a step further and predicting that no such evidence will ever come to light.
What is militant about that? To refrain from believing in God is no more militant than to believe in him in the first place.
Or perhaps it is the practices of today’s atheists that supposedly justifies the use of the label “Militant”. But hold on a moment. The likes of Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett and AC Grayling are hardly in the same league as the Labour lefties of the 1980’s who drove home their absolutist message with a combination of character assassination and the knuckle. Today’s atheists communicate their opinions by writing books, penning newspaper articles or – as recently – organizing a questionnaire. Even the most extreme example – that of asking the high court to decide a point of law about the practices of Bideford Council – is hardly in the same league as throwing missiles at teachers passing through a picket line on their way to school.
So why have so many people started singing from the same frayed hymn sheet? Surely, the answer is obvious. Today’s politicians are incapable of defeating the arguments raised by the skeptics who find no currency in arguments based on faith. In fact, many of the politicians and newspapers editors have no desire to debate these issues and, in many cases, will wholeheartedly agree with the skeptics’ line. But it would be political suicide to admit it. So they must find something – anything – with which they can disagree and so retain the respect of their religious constituents.
And what can be better than a nice piece of ephemera? Let’s call them militant: a label so vague that it is bizarrely difficult to shake off. Quite frankly, today’s leading skeptics should take it as a compliment.
