Does atheism imply liberalism?

To me, it has never seemed logically inconsistent to be both an atheist and a libertarian (I wouldn't be both of those things if it did). As a matter of fact, I've always thought it was quite natural--each philosophy is, in its own way, a rejection of the necessity and/or legitimacy of an authority higher than oneself. Of the few serious libertarians I know, a fairly large proportion of them, while they may not necessarily classify themselves as atheists, tend to be sharply critical of organized religion. When, as a teenager, I realized* I was an atheist, one of the things that appealed to me about the atheist community was that it was an open-minded bunch of people, who, I hoped, would not belittle or denigrate my political beliefs, as is all too common.

*A brief digression: reminiscing on it now, I don't think I ever really "became" an atheist so much as I was born one (as are all people). As far back as I can remember, I was always uncomfortable with the idea of gods; since my family is Christian, I have many vivid memories of sitting in church on Christmas Eve or, especially, Easter, trying with all my might to accept the stories I was being told but never having much success. (A Christian would probably criticize me for never listening to those stories in "the spirit of the Holy Ghost;" my response to that is that if your cherished parables seem outlandish even to a child--a child of no great intellect and substantial credulity, mind you, but also one in the habit of thinking unceasingly about things--that's not the child's fault.) My early teenage years were spent not shedding a belief in God but admitting to myself, and to the world, that I'd never had one.

In the years since I became open about my atheism, that hope has been, for the most part and to my very great dismay, entirely misplaced.

The vast majority of vocal atheists, and in particular of well-known Internet atheists, are adherents--in most cases, astonishingly devoted adherents--to a brand of politics we would have once called liberal but which is now often referred to as "progressive" (a loaded and suggestive label if ever one existed). In and of itself, there's nothing wrong with that; there are, of course, a great many issues on which I disagree with mainstream American liberalism, but I don't begrudge anyone their beliefs if they can back them up. The problem comes from the fact that, for a group of people who pride themselves on having no dogma and no orthodoxy, their particular strain of liberal politics seems an awful lot like something one must accept dogmatically in order to be an orthodox member of the club. Politics, it seems, is the one subject on which the contemporary and otherwise commendably open-minded American atheist will not countenance your telling him you disagree.

Atheists have experienced incredible success in carving themselves a sizable niche in the realm of Internet opinion; people like Adam Lee, Jen McCreight, P.Z. Myers, Phil Plait, and hundreds of others are doing an amazing and heroic thing by providing a voice for what was once one of America's biggest voiceless minorities. Unfortunately, a huge number of these bloggers and critics have, at least implicitly, adopted the view that liberal politics is a prerequisite for being a conscientious or "good" atheist. P.Z. Myers maintains sole control over what is almost certainly the highest-profile atheist blog on the Internet (how many other bloggers have had a turn as a guest on Mr. Deity?), and he devotes what I consider an inordinate amount of time and bandwidth not on free and open discussions with theists, or on marshaling cogent logical defenses of atheism, or even on carefully explaining the evolutionary history of life on Earth (Myers is a biologist) to a country inclined to believe in divine creation, but on angry screeds against Republicans and, yes, libertarians. Adam Lee--who I admire, to the point of being his Facebook friend, for being able to express huge and profound ideas with an economy of carefully chosen, lucid, and often brilliant words--does the same (although usually with much less shrillness than Dr. Myers); in fact, it was this post to his blog Daylight Atheism, in which he refers quite pointedly to wind farms, high-speed rail, and the remediation of the "greed and shortsightedness" that led to calamitous global warming as components of an ideal atheist future, which inspired me to write on this topic. Pharyngula and Daylight Atheism, and in particular the echo chambers that masquerade as their comment sections, have fallen from sites which occupy places of honor in my blogroll to sites that I can barely stand to read any longer, given the regularity with which people like me are savaged as "fascists;" barely a week goes by, it seems, that one mainstream American Republican or another doesn't get unfavorably compared to Mussolini in a Pharyngula comment.

This is a fundamental problem, not just for P.Z. Myers or Adam Lee but for the atheist movement as a whole--we are sometimes so strident that we drive away people with whom we have a common cause. If I no longer read Pharyngula because I don't want to get tarred as a right-wing lunatic, how many others like me are there? How many atheist sites are driving away readers, atheist and otherwise, by conflating atheism with liberal politics? And just how is it that so many atheists seem to take a liberal brand of politics as a given? Adam Lee himself, in an essay he wrote for one of his other sites (Ebon Musings), says of atheists "Some are liberal, some are conservative"--and yet his own later writings seem to overlook the existence of conservative atheists.

I'm not really surprised that so many atheists are liberals. It is probably part of human nature to be at least a little reactionary, and fundamentalist Christianity has bred a particularly noxious type of conservatism in this country; in addition, many atheists see liberalism (and particularly welfare and the social safety net) as an extension of their secular humanist focus on the well-being of humans in this, the only observable realm of existence. What does surprise me is the vitriolic dismissal with which atheist intellectuals frequently treat conservative ideas, which might make some small amount of sense if restricted to socially conservative ideas (whose justifications are, in many cases, religious in nature) but seems a bit incongruous when it comes to fiscal conservatism. As this post is already too long, I won't lay out my moral justification for fiscal conservatism and will save that for this blog's future.

Atheists in the United States need all the friends and sympathizers we can get; if we want our ideas heard, we can't be particularly choosy about the kind of person who is willing to advance our cause. It is my belief that there are substantial numbers of people--good, honest, upstanding people--who would become active atheists, or would at least be supportive of our few true causes, but are turned off by the politics that many atheists deem a prerequisite. We make such people feel unwelcome at our own risk.