The Atheist at the Breakfast Table

Nonbelievers are growing in number. So why are they still sitting in the next pew with their kids?

By Bruce Grierson,  

Ross Harvey wedged himself into the back pew of the North Shore Unitarian Church in North Vancouver, British Columbia, as a visiting gospel choir filled the vaulted nave with soaring harmonies. Harvey, whose white T-shirt beneath a black dress shirt made him mistakable for a padre at a distance, was among the first to stand and clap and groove at the chord changes and the shared emotion. The only thing that came between him and full-on abandon was the part of himself that was irked by the words. "You know why the Baptists are so much better singers than we are?" he later joked. "It's because Unitarian Universalists are always reading ahead to make sure that what we're about to say we actually believe in. That slows us down."
Unitarian Universalists are full of questions, not answers; heavily into social justice and community service; and strong on dogma-free religious education for kids. And that suits Harvey just fine. He's an atheist. Just three years earlier he had confided to his wife that he wished there were "a church you could go to where you sang and heard inspirational talks and you didn't have to get into all that other nonsense." Then he found the UUs. No sooner did they join than they were asked to be in the Christmas pageant. Ross laughed, then said yes. He and Gabi were Joseph and Mary; their infant son, Jackson, was the baby Jesus

There are two kinds of atheists: the kind you hear about, and the rest, the kind you don't.

The kind you hear about have been making headlines pretty consistently since 9/11. They aggressively confront religious arguments at every turn, in order to expose the perceived perniciousness of organized religion. Whenever religious bigotry raises its head, they step up their campaign, galloping through the chapel with the guns-ablaze fervor of a persecuted minority.
That strategy has raised the profile of atheists—witness the saw off between Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great and Todd Burpo'sHeaven Is for Real on best-seller lists. But it hasn't exactly endeared atheists to the majority of Americans. Indeed, polls tell an unrelenting story: In America, dislike and distrust of atheists is more widespread than for any other identifiable group.
The large cohort of nonbelievers that you don't hear about refrains from actively evangelizing atheism to theists. For them, religion isn't a militant stance; it's just, well, not that big a factor in their lives. And they compose the first generation to think like this. That a in atheism simply means without, not against, belief in God. Not an adversarial position, just a position. There, in the vast middle of the religious spectrum, a space not occupied by fundamentalists of any sort, live tens of millions of atheists and agnostics, more or less quietly, mostly with their families. And their numbers are growing