Generation Atheist

by Dan Riley

  Eventually, I became more comfortable with my atheism. I came out to my mom, which I had been scared to do. I sat down with her and simply said, “I don’t believe in God.” She asked, “You don’t believe in anything?” I replied, “The whole Jesus, God, heaven, and hell thing, no, I don’t really believe in it.” I had thought that my mom was incredibly Catholic when I was growing up. I expected hellfire and brimstone to rain down upon me when I told her that I was an atheist. To my surprise, she turned to me and she said, “You know, I don’t really buy half of that stuff either.”

  I had known her, at that point, for 27 years, my entire life, and in reality, I didn’t really know how she actually felt about religion. She told me, “When your father died, I didn’t think he went to heaven or hell. I think his body is in a hole in the ground.” While she is spiritual and wouldn’t consider herself an atheist, she’s not into organized religion. After coming out to my mom, I started to become even more vocal about the subject with my friends and my family.

  It’s interesting how my new worldview has influenced the way that I think about history. Because of evolution, I know that my ancestors got through this world alone without any divine help. I know that I have descended from people who made it, the survivors, the winners. In fact, we all come from survivors; we all come from winners. That truth strikes me as a much more powerful idea than the idea that a benevolent God has allowed our ancestors to survive, keeping us on life support. If anyone doesn’t think of the thousands of generations of human beings who have survived against incredible odds as an inspiring fact, then I don’t know where their heart is. That idea puts a smile on my face when I wake up in the morning. I have the bravery and will of my ancestors to thank for putting me here, not a God. I have gratitude for my true heroes: the people who developed asthma medication so that I can breathe and the people who have built reliable shelter so that I’m not freezing on cold nights.

  Being an atheist has had its challenges, though. I have had relationships that were completely sidetracked simply because I am not religious. A few times, when I’ve been talking to a girl, and we’d both become quite interested in each other, eventually she would ask me, “Do you want to come to church with me and praise the Lord?” I would reply, “I’m not really into the ‘praise the Lord’ thing.” Her response is usually the same: “Well, okay, that’s great. Nice talking to you.”

  It’s tough. It’s difficult to find a nonreligious black woman. It has taken its toll on me. I get lonely. The stigma of being an atheist is one of the worst parts about living in a predominantly Christian country in a predominantly Christian region in a predominantly Christian culture. I don’t feel that I would date only nonbelievers. In my recent experience, though, dating nonreligious girls has been what’s worked best for me.

  In fact, my current girlfriend is as nonreligious as I am. I look at nonreligious couples, and I see a level of connection, of love, of cherishing life that I don’t generally see with couples who are supposedly joined under God. Many religious couples get married because they want to have sex. They believe that their union is something that needs to be preserved because it is ordained by a third-party. I believe people lose a lot of freedom in those relationships. My girlfriend and I, for example, know that we can get married. But if, over time, we don’t like each other, we shouldn’t be with each other. We shouldn’t feel any pressure to get married because we want to have a healthy physical relationship. We shouldn’t be following anybody else’s rules except for the ones that we create for ourselves. A lot of the nonreligious relationships that I see are absolutely beautiful because they get to follow their own path, set their own goals. It makes their relationships, I think, a lot more fulfilling.

  In the black community, I’m Bigfoot. I’m the unicorn. I’m the Loch Ness monster. People like me are not supposed to exist. Atheism isn’t discussed in the black community. I’m in graduate school now, and I helped to start the Secular Students at Howard University. One of the reasons why I wanted to start the group was because when I got to Howard, I looked on the event bulletin and only saw Christian groups. Every group discussing religion viewed the subject from a faith-affirming point of view. There was no outlet to discuss religion from a secular angle. I wanted to bring that conversation to my university.

  Because of my involvement in the secular group, there are people at my school who won’t talk to me anymore. They think that the devil is trying to get them to fall away from the Lord, that the devil is speaking through me, that the devil is trying his best to convince the world that he doesn’t exist. I don’t want to demonize black people in general, but the vast majority of blacks are not responsive to my perspective, and they generally don’t want to be involved with me.

  To a degree, I understand their point of view. As blacks came up in America and developed their own culture, religion was a central component of African American life. Black people don’t have babysitters. They don’t do Kaplan programs for their kids. They don’t do psychologists. They do the church. They do Bible study and tutoring in math and science. When they’re having marriage problems, they go to the pastor and ask him how to fix the problem. Everything comes out of the church, everything.

  Even with some feelings of isolation, I feel much happier with how I now approach the planet, people, my issues, my problems, and my education. The world makes so much more sense to me. I value the relationships that I have in the secular community through my secular friends, through secular organizations, perhaps more than I did through churches and pastors and deacons and bishops. I feel as though my new community appreciates the love that we have for each other much more than did the people who thought that love was coming from up-on-high as opposed to coming from you, from me.

  If I could give advice to a young me, I would tell myself to question authority. One of my biggest problems with 14-year-old Mark is that 14-year-old Mark was a bright kid, a nice kid, but he believed what people told him. He was happy to be the worker bee. He was happy to be the chess pawn. In a lot of families, black families, children are not allowed to question their elders. I would tell him to question everybody. Do it respectfully, but question everything, and you’ll be okay.

  XIV.

  ______________

  Harrison Hopkins: South Carolina Secularist

  “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

  — Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to the Danbury Baptists”

  Harrison Hopkins has never been particularly religious. In his junior year at Laurens District 55 High in Laurens, SC, a public school, he learned that the graduating class was required to vote at an annual senior class meeting on whether a prayer should be read at graduation. After doing some research, he contacted the South Carolina ACLU and the Freedom From Religion Foundation to inform them about the vote. Laurens High responded, after receiving a letter from the FFRF, stating that the prayer would not take place.

  Once the prayer issue hit the local news, attention grew. He was told that Jesus loved him by some and that he would be jumped by others. On graduation night, the student body president, one of the speakers at the ceremony, stated that the controversy had strengthened his faith. He decided to read a prayer, which was greeted with a round of applause. Harrison isn’t particularly surprised that his desire to remove the school prayer has been treated with such hostility, as he understands that many within his South Carolina community have never had their religious faith challenged. He says he wants basic fairness and for religious people to understand that their religion is one of many, that no religion deserves special privilege within a public school or government.

  I was born and raised in the South. When my parents divorced when I was in first grade, I lived with my dad. I went to church on Wednesdays with my neighbors
up the road from first to fifth grade, mostly for social reasons. I moved in with my mom, in Southport, NC, a coastal city, in sixth grade. I miss that place. During my eighth grade year, we moved inland to Deep Run, NC, which is in the middle of nowhere. My mom and I never went to church. Later, I moved back in with my dad in Waterloo, SC.

  I can’t remember a time when I truly believed in God or religion. Like everyone else, I was born an atheist. Unlike most everyone else, I was never forced into attending church when I was young. I didn’t know the word “atheist” until I was in seventh or eighth grade. I was on the computer, and I came across it. I looked it up, and I thought, “That’s what I am!”

  My old home in Deep Run was in a rural area where everyone is really religious. When I told people that I was an atheist, they had no idea what that was. They thought it meant that I was a devil worshipper. I had the fun job of explaining to them that I was not. I enrolled at Laurens District 55 High at the start of my junior year. Here in Laurens, I have been the only outspoken atheist. Until recently, though, there hadn’t been any problems.

  During my junior year, I learned about my public high school’s graduation ceremony. I found out that the school puts the choice of whether or not to hold a prayer at the graduation ceremony to a vote by the graduating senior class. When I learned this, I was in my AP U.S. History class. My teacher stressed that this procedure was in place as a way for the school to legally put prayer into the graduation ceremony. That didn’t sound quite right to me. I started doing research on my own and found the case of Eric Workman, who had been the valedictorian at Greenwood High School in Greenwood, SC. His school did the exact same thing that mine was attempting to do, and he filed a complaint with the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The dispute ended up going to court, and the court ruled in Eric’s favor, stating that the school could not leave the decision of whether to have a prayer at a public school’s graduation ceremony up to a vote. I was hopeful that I might be able to do something to stop my school from holding such a vote, too.

  In January of my senior year, I started looking up information on the subject again because my graduation was only a few months away. I stumbled across a Facebook group for Jessica Ahlquist, who, I found, had been fighting the display of a prayer banner in her public high school in Cranston, Rhode Island. I joined the group. In one of the group chats on the page, I mentioned that my school had historically held a prayer at graduation following the results of a vote by the senior class. I was interested in doing something about it.

  In April, I learned that a senior class meeting was to be held. I decided to ask around and find out what was supposed to happen there. I discovered that, as I expected, the purpose of the meeting was to vote to determine whether or not we would have a prayer at graduation. I came home and began investigating who I would need to contact. While doing that, I got a Facebook message from Jessica Ahlquist asking if I was going to do anything about the vote. I decided to act.

  I filed a complaint with the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the South Carolina ACLU. The next day I received a response from the FFRF stating that they had sent a letter to my school explaining why the vote was illegal, stressing that prayer at public high school graduation ceremonies had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and that the school needed to immediately stop the holding the vote. This happened a week before the meeting was to be held. At the meeting, there was no mention of the possibility of a prayer. There was no vote. I thought, “That was easy.” In the packet that they handed out, however, there was a document that said that the graduation ceremony would not be over until a prayer had been read.

  I scanned that page and sent it to the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the ACLU. They both sent letters to the school asking for assurance that there would not be a prayer at graduation. The school finally responded and said that while the vote had been cancelled, they still believed there had been no court with jurisdiction over South Carolina that had ruled that prayer was unconstitutional at public high school graduation ceremonies in all circumstances. They contended that by following a law in South Carolina, the South Carolina Student-Led Messages Act, they were still allowed to give speakers time to deliver an opening and closing message that the school could not review. Despite the ambiguity, I still won a partial victory: the possibility of an official, school-sponsored prayer no longer existed.

  My desire to remove the prayer from the ceremony stems from a desire for basic fairness. Prayer at a public high school graduation ceremony excludes people who aren’t of the Christian faith, not to mention that it violates the First Amendment of the Constitution. There is no telling how many other atheists, Jews, Muslims, or people of different faiths have gone through my school’s ceremony and felt as though the graduation ceremony wasn’t as much theirs as it was any Christian’s. I thought that it was time for somebody to stand up and tell the school that what they were doing was not right. We’re supposed to have a secular government, and the schools are part of the government.

  Initially, once word leaked that the possibility of a school-sponsored prayer had been removed, only a few people knew about it. I heard from my friend that in her journalism class, people were talking about it, that students were calling me a jerk, an asshole. Eventually, a parent heard about the cancellation of the vote and contacted the local news. I had no idea about this until a friend of mine saw a news van at school and found that the local news was interviewing a student who was in support of having prayer at graduation. My friend put me on the phone with the news anchor, and I ended up driving to school to be interviewed.

  Once the interview aired that night, everything blew up. Facebook went crazy. People were posting things such as the following: “For those who got our annual prayer taken out of my graduation, I’ll pray for you.” Another: “Harrison Hopkins, I do not know you personally, but tonight you need lots of prayer for being the one wanting to take prayer out of graduation. How can the district let one student’s feelings overpower all of the others? If this happens, I’ll be seriously disappointed with my alma mater.” Another: “There will be a prayer June 2nd. You’re not taking that away from us. Enjoy burning in hell.” Another: “I think it’s ridiculous that a prayer can’t be said at graduation because somebody doesn’t feel included. When have you ever been?” Another: “Congratulations to Laurens County School District for caving to one person’s demands. If my school would have caved to me, I would have been a straight-A student and not learned a darn thing. And now, a message to the student body with one exception: I am not a fan of senseless violence, but this kid needs to be taken out back and had his ass kicked to beat some sense into him.”

  When I went to school the next day, everyone seemed to know who I was. People stared at me in the halls. Nobody actually came up to me and said anything to my face, but sometimes when I’d have my back turned, students would yell things like “Jesus loves you!” My lunch table was interesting. I sat with a rather diverse group of people. There was me, the atheist; my best friend, who was spiritual but nonreligious; a lesbian; her girlfriend, who was a rather hardcore Christian; and a bunch of other people who varied from extremely religious to not religious at all. We got into some intense arguments that day. It evolved into a shouting match. Somebody called me close-minded because I was trying to force a secular graduation ceremony. Some of the people I argued with during lunch removed me as their friend on Facebook. I heard rumors that people were planning to jump me. One day not long after that, I was driving my best friend home, and we passed two young men in camouflage on four wheelers driving the opposite way on the street. We passed them and ended up at a stop sign about a mile down the road. I looked in my rear-view mirror; they were behind us, flipping us off.

  On graduation night itself, I decided that I wasn’t going to be afraid of anybody. The student body president ended up saying a prayer during his speech. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but he opened the prayer along these lines: “I’d like to
thank our teachers, our principal, and our administration, but there’s one other person I’d like to thank, and that person is God. Would you please join me in prayer?” He read a prayer that ended with “in Jesus’s name we pray, amen.”

  The prayer was greeted by applause and cheering from the crowd. The valedictorian mentioned the controversy in his speech. He said that while we had this division, we should still realize that we were all graduating together. He went on to say that his faith had been strengthened by the prayer fiasco and that, while he understood my opposition, he was glad that there was a prayer at his graduation. Later, a friend told me that while he was sitting in the audience, he overheard people behind him talking about wanting to find me to beat me up after the ceremony. None of that happened, perhaps because of the police that were walking through the crowd. Walking to my car after the ceremony, somebody yelled, “God loves you!”

  During graduation, I wasn’t really scared because if somebody had decided to beat me up, that would have further proved my point. I suppose I was just indifferent to the people who were against me because I knew that I was right, and the threats weren’t going to impact me. If I lost any friends because of it, they obviously weren’t that good of friends anyways.