Here’s a great way to make a movement: have your most famous and powerful public figures obsess over Henry Higgins’s famous question, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Why aren’t they more into critical thinking, argument, logic? more rational? Why do they accuse a man of sexual harassment when he’s just trying to chat them up in an elevator at 4 in the morning? Why do they get drunk and then accuse men of rape? Then, having alienated a huge number of actual and potential members, to whom you sound arrogant, vain, sexist and clueless, look around and wonder, Gee, where are the women? They must be even less rational than we thought!
Atheism is having a moment. Rigid, reactionary Christianity may have captured the Republican Party, but it’s turned off millions. According to Pew, some 20 percent of Americans have no religious affiliation, including 32 percent of those 18 to 29—there are more “nones” than there are white evangelicals. True, only 2.4 percent describe themselves as atheists (up from 1.6 in 2007), but that still means there are more self-identified atheists than there are Jews, Muslims or Mormons. It’s the perfect time to put our best godless foot forward—to connect with other progressive movements, and to put out the welcome mat for all those millions of new-made unbelievers. And that means looking in the mirror in order to broaden a movement that has historically been white, male, middle-class and culturally rather narrow.
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