Every group likes to play the victim. Religions are quite adept at playing the victim. Atheists, however, are not. Even when atheists are persecuted, they are often unconvincing in their role as the victim. Consider the faces of the “new atheism”: Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett. They’re all privileged white males!

And too often when atheists do cry foul, they are over relatively petty things like “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. I think the phrase’s 1954 inclusion into the Pledge was brazenly unconstitutional, but that issue still ranks near the bottom of my concerns.

But yesterday, I was reminded that atheists in America do have legitimate grievances. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC reported that atheists are banned from public office in seven state constitutions:

During Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, there was much discussion about political prejudice against Mormons. One Gallup poll found that nearly a quarter of Americans refused to vote for Romney because of his religion. What received less attention, however, is that this same poll also found that over half wouldn’t vote for an otherwise qualified atheist candidate. Another recent survey reported that atheists are America’s “most distrusted minority”–behind Muslims, gays, recent immigrants, and other minority groups. These anti-atheist sentiments are particularly disconcerting to me, as someone considering a career in government.

So how do we reverse these negative sentiments? I argued earlier that atheists are bad at playing the victim card. For that card to even be effective, people must first be sympathetic to your plight. And frankly, Americans aren’t.

What atheism needs is positive representation. And for good or ill, we are that representation–for our campus, and (individually) for our friends and family. What we do and how we comport ourselves matters.

Professor Kleiner, who frequents our SHAFT meetings and this blog, has challenged us to put greater emphasis on our humanist values–to articulate a secular ethic and act accordingly. I want to meet that challenge next semester. As important as our presentations and events have been, we have thus far neglected things like service.  We floated several service opportunities, but never developed and executed them. That’s largely my fault.

So let’s commit to doing a couple service projects next semester. A visible service project would go far in dispelling misconceptions about atheists as angry and immoral.

Don’t wait until next semester to do service, though. There’s no better time to give than this holiday season.

*Sorry for the disjointed nature of this post. This was more a stream of consciousness–just a jumble of thoughts I had today that I wanted to (but failed to) synthesize into a coherent whole.

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