Godless Atheists as Scapegoats: Atheists are Scapegoats for the Christian Right

Attacks on minorities are frequently not about minorities themselves, but something else: they are scapegoats for something larger, usually something perceived to be a conspiracy against all that is right and proper. Jews and gays, for example, have been scapegoats for reactionary hatred of modernity. Atheists can be scapegoats for fear of modernity as well, but more specifically for a fear of the loss of religious traditions and religious privilege.
One of the most important changes in the modern world is the erosion of unjustified privileges — male, white, heterosexual, and Christian. America’s Christian Right can’t stand the fact that they are no longer treated as politically, socially, or culturally special and they usually blame atheists for this. They ignore the overall growth of religious pluralism in America and complain about atheists who are simply standing up to demand basic equality.
The Christian Right hates the separation of church and state; one of their tactics against it is to associate it as closely as possible with atheism, something which they consistently demonize as much as possible. It’s normal for critics of this or that decision on church/state separation to act as though only atheists file the lawsuits against government establishment of religion. They ignore or lie about the fact that most cases are brought by religious theists — often Christians.
A popular accusation against godless atheists is that they are communists, or at least responsible for communist totalitarianism and all the people killed under communist regimes. Christians making this accusation aren’t able or willing to make a distinction between mere atheism and communist ideology, much less the ideology specific to communist governments. Atheists are just made scapegoats for acts that were not committed in the name of or for the benefit of atheism. Read More...
Christians often like to accuse atheists as being responsible for Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. Supposedly the Nazis were an anti-religious and anti-Christian party; in fact, while some Nazis were anti-Christian pagans, most were not and the official Nazi Party platform was explicitly Christian. Hitler often said that he was doing God’s will and the Holocaust wouldn’t have been possible without the long history of Christian anti-Semitism.
Perhaps the most basic target of Christian Right attacks is anything they perceive as “moral relativism.” For the Christian Right, the only secure anchor for society is moral absolutism, where of course they get to decide what the moral absolutes will be. Godless atheists, in their worldview, are responsible for the spread of relativism because they themselves cannot recognize the absolute morality handed down by God.
In the minds of Christian conservatives, the relationship between evolution and atheism is complex: teaching evolution encourages atheism while godless atheists are responsible for pushing evolution on unsuspecting Christians. The Christian Right attributes all manner of social ills to evolution; as a consequence, atheists are also blamed for these ills — declining moral standards, declining respect for Christianity, and so forth.
Although it might sound like a new form of insanity, some have actually tried to blame godless atheists for religious terrorism. Christians in America say that Muslim terrorists wouldn’t attack America if godless atheists weren’t destroying its religious culture; Muslim “moderates” claim that suicide bombers are really just atheists, not Muslims. Thus atheists get it from all sides with everyone ignoring the role of religious faith and theism in the violence.
As part of their doctrine “hate the sin but love the sinner,” Christians think that they are demonstrating love and respect for atheists by saying “nice” things about how they deserve to be “saved,” but also that their atheism and atheistic philosophies are all hateful. They then hypocritically take criticism of Christianity as personal criticism and an indication that atheists are uncivil and mean-spirited. This sort of Christian “love” is something we can all do with less of.
Atheists are not the first or only minority to be demonized by Christians looking for a scapegoat for all the problems they perceive in the world. In the past, Jews were the primary recipients of this Christian “love”; in more recent times, humanists and gays have been popular targets. All of these groups have more in common than they realize, given their similar treatment at the hands of Christians who think nothing of promoting their oppression for the sake a religious agenda.

What Eric Bronner writes in A Rumor About the Jews about the ‘Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’ is remarkably appropriate to what other groups demonized by Christians have endured:

The Protocols solidifies the connection between the true believers in Christianity, those nineteenth-century reactionaries intent on combating the Enlightenment, and the fanatics of a seemingly antireligious and revolutionary Nazi movement desirous of establishing the primacy of a single race. Christian institutions and the first genuinely reactionary movements, no less than the Nazis, overwhelmingly aligned themselves against the modern ideas and values generated in the age of democratic revolution: secularism and science, rationalism and materialism, tolerance and equality, capitalism and socialism, liberalism and marxism. Antisemitism was never simply an independent impulse. It was always part of a broader project directed against the civilizing impulse of reason and the dominant forces of modernity.

Ultimately, that’s what Jews, gays, humanists, and atheists have all been scapegoats for: changes in society and culture which have occurred in modernity as a consequence of the “civilizing impulse of reason.” The Christian demonization of these groups has been the voice of unreason, barbarism, and intolerance. It reached a zenith under the Nazis and the Holocaust. Hopefully we’ll never have the misfortune to see the illiberal, anti-modern ideology of Christian hatred achieve such extremes again.