By the time Seeger submitted his form, in the late nineteen-fifties, thousands of conscientious objectors in the U.S. had refused to fight in the two World Wars. Those who belonged to pacifist religious traditions, such as Mennonites and Quakers, were sent to war as noncombatants or to work as farmers or firefighters on the home front through the Civilian Public Service; eventually, so were those who could prove their own independent, religiously motivated pacifism. Those who could not were sent to prison or to labor camps. But while Selective Service laws had been revised again and again to clarify the criteria for conscientious objection, they still did not account for young men who, like Seeger, refused to say that their opposition to war came from belief in a Supreme Being.[...]
Seeger’s victory helped mark a turning point for a minority that had once been denied so much as the right to testify in court, even in their own defense. Atheists, long discriminated against by civil authorities and derided by their fellow-citizens, were suddenly eligible for some of the exemptions and protections that had previously been restricted to believers. But, in the decades since U.S. v. Seeger, despite an increase in the number of people who identify as nonbelievers, their standing before the courts and in the public sphere has been slow to improve. Americans, in large numbers, still do not want atheists teaching their children, or marrying them. They would, according to surveys, prefer a female, gay, Mormon, or Muslim President to having an atheist in the White House, and some of them do not object to attempts to keep nonbelievers from holding other offices, even when the office is that of notary public. Atheists are not welcome in the Masonic Lodge, and while the Boy Scouts of America has opened its organization to gays and to girls, it continues to bar any participant who will not pledge “to do my duty to God.” [...]
With nonbelievers starting to assert themselves, believers began more aggressively protecting their faith from offense or scrutiny. Blasphemy laws were enforced against those who insulted God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, or the Bible. A former Baptist minister turned freethinker named Abner Kneeland was arrested in Massachusetts for an article that he wrote explaining why he no longer believed in a monotheistic God; not even the prominent Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing or the former Unitarian pastor Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom rose to Kneeland’s defense, could spare him jail time. In New York, a man named John Ruggles was sentenced to three months for insulting Jesus; in Pennsylvania, another man, Abner Updegraph, was fined for calling the Bible “a mere fable” that contained “a great many lies.” (Laws against blasphemy, though rarely enforced, still exist in Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wyoming.) All but three states passed Sabbatarian laws, which were imposed on everyone, including religious observers whose Sabbath did not fall on Sunday. (Such prohibitions linger in blue laws, which now mostly restrict the sale of alcohol on Sunday.) One Jewish merchant took his case all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, only to be denied an exemption because, in the words of the court, “Whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government.”[...]
Gray is especially interested in those atheists who, in addition to having no faith in the divine, have none in humanity. (Given his own intellectual bent, one suspects him of delighting equally in their pessimism and their unpopularity.) These aren’t misotheists—those who hate God, like the Marquis de Sade, many new atheists, and the literary critic William Empson, whose “Seven Types of Ambiguity” Gray cites as an influence. They are thinkers like George Santayana, a thoroughgoing materialist who scoffed at human progress to the point of indifference to human suffering yet loved Catholic traditions so much that he chose to live out the end of his days in the care of nuns. Similarly, the novelist Joseph Conrad had no faith in God, and lost his faith in progress after witnessing the colonization of Congo, but he wrote beautifully about those who faced their empty fate head on: sailors surviving the indifference of the sea. Such men—and almost all the atheists in Gray’s book are men—would not recognize the hopeful atheism that is all the rage today. (Gray does make space for Ayn Rand, who briefly steals the show, as her followers raise their cigarette holders in tandem with hers, marry mates chosen by “the Collective,” and tap-dance at their weddings because Rand deemed it the only truly rational form of dance.)
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