Despite atheism and secularism often being conflated there’s no reason a religious person can’t be a secularist. However there seems to be the assumption that being an atheist automatically makes one a secularist. But is this always true? Just as being non-male does not automatically make one a feminist, it seems that many atheists can be non-secular and even anti-secular

Atheism is defined as the lack of belief in gods.

Secularism in the sense that I use if is the rejection of religious privilege or the imposition of religious authority in the public sphere

Secularism like feminism (the rejection of gender privilege) is a subset of egalitarianism. Side note: this is why men’s rights activists sound particularly stupid when they say “I’m not a feminist, I’m an egalitarian.”

I could write a whole blog on why secularism and atheism are conflated but for now I want to briefly address three main reasons. Anti-atheist prejudice in the United States has led to many non-religious organisations calling themselves secular in an attempt to seem less threatening and associate themselves with a very American value. Anti-atheist prejudice can also explain why some religious people want to link secularism to a word they perceive as a pejorative, while in the Islamic world secularism is often conflated with atheism/apostasy.

Often members of a privileged group find it hard to imagine anyone else in the privileged group rejecting that privilege voluntarily. I find something similar whenever I comment on feminist issues online. Because my screenames have always been gender neutral, anti-feminist men tend to assume I’m female and respond with (in)appropriately gendered insults.

Finally many secular atheists tend to assume that other secularists are atheists as well. At a recent secular conference the assumption of a shared atheistic worldview from many of the speakers and audience members was particularly problematic given that a large theme of the conference was the stories of secularists of all backgrounds. Around the world religious individuals rejecting the imposition of religious authorities in their lives are some of the bravest secularists.

Atheist may not generally suffer the worst from the effects of religious privilege but they don’t generally benefit from its effects either. By comparison many members of religious minorities may suffer deeply from the effects of religious privilege but also experience some positives – at least for their own elites. As atheists would find their very existence at risk under almost any theocratic regime, most atheists have a practical reason to support at least some degree of secularism.

An earlier draft of this blog looked at some of the ways in which atheists may be anti-religious in a non-secular way. I decided to cut a lot of this as it is in any case an overly hyped problem and could distract by endorsing some of the ridiculous strawman secularists some religious leaders use to justify their own privilege.

Of course it is possible to be anti-religious and a secularist; just as it would be entirely consistent with feminism to wish either to a) end the social construct of gender as a means of ending gender privilege and promoting equality or wish to b) end gender privilege and inequality while preserving some form of gender as a social construct. It may be a secondary effect of secular policies (e.g. equality laws or good quality education) that certain religious views decline (e.g. homophobia or creationism). But if the intended purpose of a policy was to promote atheism then it would be hard to justify in a secular way.

I’ve cut out a longer exploration of this issue (although hope to explore it in a later blog on Humanism) to move on to a more interesting (and real) problem and one that is on the surface harder to explain. Why do many atheist seem to actively support at least some form of religious privilege. In trying to understand why this is we can draw on other examples which look at why members of an outgroup or marginalised group may support the privileges of an ingroup or privileged group.

First the most obvious is that atheists are not an automatically visible outgroup. We can confidently say there are atheists in the congregations, laity and priesthood of every single religion. Someone can be an atheist but still present themselves as a member of an ingroup in order to draw on the privileges of the ingroup. This is not always a deceitful tactic, as when a politician or priest feigns religious belief in order to have more influence and in so doing actively promotes religious privilege. In many places and times atheists have had to feign religious belief in order to enjoy the religious privilege of not being murdered or ostracised as an apostate and in so doing they passively support religious privilege. Of course there are many positions in between, just as a homosexual may conceal their sexuality in order to avoid discrimination an atheist could conceal their atheism to better fit in. Given that challenging religious privilege (secularism) is so conflated with atheism, many atheist passively or actively support religious privilege in order to avoid being labeled as part of the outgroup.

Secondly many atheist may simply not see religious privilege as that big of a problem for them. They could be very privileged in other ways (Bill Gates can probably insulate himself from the effects of religious privilege reasonably well) or they could be very marginalised in other ways that they are focused on dealing with more immediate forms of privilege, or someone may not realise how one form of privilege that is harming them is related to religious privilege.

Thirdly atheists may earn favour with (or appear less threatening to) religious people by supporting religious privilege. Turn on Fox News and you can find a person of color telling the audience how the black community is at least partly to blame for America’s race problems. Open the Daily Mail and you can find female writers railing against feminism. Openly atheist politicians in the UK go out of their way to praise the work of religious organisations and to support faith schools. E.g. the Deputy Prime Minister and theist Nick Clegg sends his children to a state funded highly socially selective faith school. Exercising this religious privilege is seen as acceptable whereas exercising his economic privilege by sending them to a private school would not be seen as acceptable.

This brings up a fourth reason. Different forms of privilege can act as a proxy for each other or be intertwined (intersectionality). Recently I spoke to a member of staff at a Church of England primary school. They wished to make their school less religiously selective. However parents at the school (at least some of whom had to have been atheist) were vehemently opposed. The reason? A less religiously discriminatory admissions criteria would make it easy for children from the newly constructed council estate to attend. The overwhelming evidence is that religiously selective schools in the UK are socially selective, they take (proportional to how many they would take in an equal admissions system) less poor children, less children who speak English as a second language, less children with complex needs.

Many middle class atheists support faith schools because by supporting this form of religious privilege they support their privilege of being able to get their children into a better more middle class school than their poorer neighbors.

There is another darker form of religious privilege acting as a proxy and that is in the identity politics of the British far-right. In these politics Christian is a proxy for White and many on the far right support Christian religious privilege as a way to support white privilege or anti-Muslim bigotry. For example Tommy Robinson the former leader of the EDL has said in interviews that he is not personally religious but he supports ‘Christian Nation’ identity politics. Atheists who support religious privilege by arguing against marriage equality would be another tiny example.