These
activities and more are organized by the Illini Secular Student
Alliance (ISSA), one of 394 student groups that are affiliated with the
national Secular Student Alliance (SSA). “We brand ourselves as a safe
place and community for students who are not religious,” says Derek
Miller, a junior at Illini and president of the ISSA.
Oddly
enough, in the geography of on-campus student groups, atheist
organizations fit within the category of faith-based groups like the
Campus Crusade For Christ, which recently (and controversially)
changed its name to Cru. At
Stanford University, the Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics (AHA!)
register with the Office For Religious Life, just like Cru, and are a
member of Stanford Associated Religions.
“There are a lot of parallels with religious groups on campus,” says Ron Sanders, Cru’s missional team leader at Stanford.
“They
have weekly meetings similar to ours, and give one another support, and
they do social justice projects on campus and in the communities… I
don’t know that they aren’t a faith group. They don’t have a faith in
God, or in revelation or something like that, but they have faith in
reason and in science, as I understand it, as a guide for human
flourishing.”
“I
don’t think it’s unfair to say that groups like Cru are our cultural
opponents,” says Galef at SSA. “It comes down to which values we’re
promoting. We are promoting values of critical thinking and acceptance.”
Conflicting
values on campus have led to unsavory events. Last year at Salisbury
University in Maryland, the Atheist Society took offense when Cru
students chalked a verse from the Bible: “The fool says in his heart,
‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, and their ways are vile; there is
not one who does good.” This led to a
chalking counter-offensive,
which escalated but ended peacefully. In 2010, secular student groups
at the University of Illinois and other Midwestern schools drew
controversy when they chalked images of Muhammad. After the fallout,
this event led to interfaith conversations, followed by friendship and
cooperation with the Muslim Student Association. They have since hosted
events together and convened for pizza and board games.
“We really encourage interfaith activities,” says Sarah Kaiser, field organizer at the
Center For Inquiry,
an international organization that promotes “science, reason, freedom
of inquiry, and humanist values.” As a student, Kaiser was member of the
Secular Alliance at the University of Indiana. Her group raised money
for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society through a “Send An Atheist To
Church” tabling event. The atheists put out cups for each of the campus’
religious groups, and whichever cup raised the most money determined
which church the atheists would attend as an interfaith educational
activity.
The Muslim Student Union’s cup received the most donations, so the atheists attended mosque.
The Unstoppable Secular Students
The
Secular Student Alliance is essentially a support network for the
autonomous atheist, agnostic, and humanist student groups that choose to
be its affiliates. The rapid growth of the SSA is analogue to the
general growth of the American secular movement. Atheist groups were
once fringe organizations that didn’t get along. That began to change
around 2007, on the heels of bestselling books from atheist authors like
Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Suddenly, the movement had
leaders, a sense of direction and a common purpose. Today, the
Secular Coalition For America is
an umbrella lobbyist group for a number of once-competing groups,
including American Atheists, the Council for Secular Humanism, and the
American Humanist Association.
These
“adult” organizations support the growth of campus groups. American
Atheists offers scholarships to student activists, noting that “special
attention is given to those students who show activism specifically in
their schools.” The American Humanist Association provides support to
campus groups, as does the Richard Dawkins Foundation and the Freedom
From Religion Foundation. Increasingly, students who are active in SSA
groups continue with the movement after college. “The dynamic of being
in a [secular] college student group translates so well into national
advocacy and lobbying,” says Kelly Damerow, research and advocacy
manager at the Secular Coalition For America.
The
Center For Inquiry, like the Secular Student Alliance, has college
campus group affiliates. “Groups can co-affiliate, and most affiliate
with both of us,” says Kaiser. Cody Hashman, also a field organizer at
the Center For Inquiry, says many campus activities focus on activism
training. “We give them advice on how to implement activism campaigns,
resources on service projects, and help with putting on book tours for
non-religious authors,” Hashman says. “Every summer we have a leadership
conference where we train students on how to organize their group,
manage volunteers, how to talk to the media, how to send a press
release, how to make posters.”
National
organizations, particularly the Secular Coalition For America, are
primarily concerned with lobbying in Washington over First Amendment
church/state and freedom of religion (and of non-religion) issues. But
the anti-religious (or “antitheist”) thread within the secular movement
is difficult to ignore and implicit in the names of some of the
organizations, such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the
Foundation Beyond Belief, and, of course, the Pastafarians, an atheist
group worshipping under the parody Church of the Flying Spaghetti
Monster. The Skeptics and Atheists Network at East Tennessee State
University rather pointedly calls itself S.A.N.E.
“We
do a lot of interfaith activities if they align with our humanist
values, but the one thing we never compromise on is our right and
responsibility to criticize bad ideas,” says Miller at ISSA. “When you
assume a supernatural world, that is a train of thought that does not
have a basis. When you start from that, you will automatically lead
yourself to a bad idea.”
A recent SSA presentation entitled “
The Unstoppable Secular Students”
compared SSA to Cru. Cru takes in $500 million a year, while SSA takes
in $998,000; Cru has three paid staff members per 1 campus group, while
SSA has 78 campus groups per 1 adult organizer. And yet Cru is growing
at a rate of 16 per cent while SSA is growing at a rate of 116 per cent.
The presentation concludes:
“Cru
has a massively larger budget, the majority of the U.S. population to
draw from (76% Christian), an organized political voting bloc to give
them politicians and laws and supreme court justices in their favor. But they are losing in the cultural war. The secular students are winning, and they are unstoppable!”
This
hawkish stance is understandable in light of Cru’s rather unilateral
mission statement: “Win, build, and send Christ-centered multiplying
disciples who launch spiritual movements.” No doubt many student secular
groups hope to find those freshman questioning their faith and prevent
them from becoming multiplying disciples. “As the secular students clear
up misconceptions about what it means to be secular, I feel that more
students will leave their faith,” says Galef.
Most
campus groups are more concerned with strengthening the community,
visibility, and tolerance of secularists than engaging in the cultural
war. Hashman at the Center For Inquiry says that some students come from
homes and communities where they have to hide their secular identity,
and secular student groups become an important community for them. “It
has now become more acceptable for people to state that they are
questioning or no longer religious” says Hashman. “We are dedicated to
free inquiry and freedom of expression, and that can come off as
abrasive, but we believe it necessary for a free and democratic
society.”
(Credit: Tyler Olson via Shutterstock)
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