Globa l
S ce pt ica l
P u blics
F RO M NO N - R E L IGIO US P R I N T M E D I A
TO ‘ DIGITA L AT H E I S M ’

Ed i t e d by Jacob Copem an
a nd M as cha Schul zGlobal Sceptical Publics

Global Sceptical
Publics
From non-religious print media
to ‘digital atheism’

Edited by Jacob Copeman and Mascha Schulz

First published in 2022 by
UCL Press
University College London
Gower Street
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Contents

List of figures

vii

Notes on contributors

ix

Acknowledgements

xiii

Foreword: the frustrating and wonderful ambiguityof sceptical publics
Joseph Blankholm

xv

Introduction: non-religion, atheism and sceptical publicity
Jacob Copeman and Mascha Schulz

1Part I Aesthetics and visual culture of non-religion
1

Rationalist camera: non-religious techniques of vision in India
Jacob Copeman and John Hagström

2

Performing the secular: street theatre and songs as ‘secular
media’ in Bangladesh and West Bengal
James Bradbury and Mascha Schulz

71‘There is no god, Summer’: a critical evaluation of Rick andMorty’s approach to atheism and nihilismFrank Bosman

97

3

39

4

Aesthetics of the secular
Stefan Binder

127

5

Gender, affect and atheism in Arabic media
Natalie Khazaal

144

CONTENTSv

Part II Mediated scepticism: historical and contemporary trajectories
6‘Apostates’: a new secularising public in the United KingdomJohn Hagström

7

Satan, sex and an Islamist zombie apocalypse:
religion‑sceptical publicity and blasphemy in Turkish
cartoons and comic books
Pierre Hecker

8

From campaign and dispute to ‘public service broad/narrowcasting’: secularist and atheist media strategies in
Britain and America – a contextual historyDavid Nash

173

193

219

Part III Atheism and scepticism in a digital age
9Intimate deconversions: digital atheist counterpublics
on Reddit
Eric Chalfant

244

10 Pumpkins at the centre of Mars and circlejerks: do atheists
find community online?
Evelina Lundmark

269

11 From ‘talking among’ to ‘talking back’? Online voices of young
Moroccan non-believers
Lena Richter289

12 Ungodly visuals: confrontations, religion and affect in theeveryday lives of atheists in India
Neelabh Gupta

309

Afterword: paradox laxity and unwordy indifference:non‑religious figurations beyond emancipatory narratives
and declamatory genres
Johannes Quack
Indexvi

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339
353

List of figures

3.1

3.2

3.3

12.1
12.2
12.3
12.4
12.5

Jerry plays the role of Moses, splitting the sea and allowing
his clay people to get across, not to escape Egypt, but toconquer it by force. From ‘Childrick of Mort’ (S4E9). Rickand Morty (2020). The Cartoon Network, Inc.
103
Summer (girl with balloon in hand) is all too eager to send
her parents Beth and Jerry skywards to her newly adopted
godheads, the ‘giant heads in the sky’. Beside her, we see(left to right) Morty’s and Summer’s school principal andmaths teacher. From ‘Get Schwifty’ (S2E3). Rick and Morty(2015). The Cartoon Network, Inc.
108
After their prayer, Rick and Morty are greeted by a numberof cartoonish characters, all connected to the Christian
fundamentalist subculture. From left to right, we see ananthropomorphised sheep with a Hitler moustache, a Care
Bear with a cross on his sweater, Psalty the Singing
Songbook, a goofy kid with a T-shirt reading ‘I love Jesus’, infront of him three of the VeggieTales characters, then ananthropomorphised cross-with-thorny-crown, Rick, Morty
and Denver the skating dinosaur. From ‘Never Ricking
Morty’ (S4E6). Rick and Morty (2020). The Cartoon
Network, Inc.
120
Excerpt of chat with an interlocutor, translated from Hindi.
Created using fakechatapp.com.
314‘Silenced dog’ meme. Image taken from a closed Facebook
group.
316
Ram Mandir donation-drive bike rally, Delhi, January 2021. 320
Screenshot of meme shared in a secret Facebook group,with text caption.
321
Screenshot of viral Instagram story (Sushmita Sinha), with‘religious’ book placed above a toilet roll.
325

LIST OF FIGURES

vii

12.6
12.7
12.8

viii

Screenshot of the ‘Sexy Kali’ image as tweeted by Armin
Navabi, 3 September 2020.
A warning about blasphemy laws shared in a secret
Facebook group affiliated to Atheist Republic.
Meme shared in Indian atheist online spaces in support ofArmin.

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328
330
331

Notes on contributors

Stefan Binder is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in the Department
of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich.
He has published on secular activism and lived atheism in South India andon the aesthetic production of multiple temporalities in the context of Shi’imourning rituals and media practices in Hyderabad. He is currently
developing a research project on ethics and generational change in queer
and trans communities in South Asia and Europe.
Joseph Blankholm is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of The Secular
Paradox: On the religiosity of the not religious (New York University Press,2022). His research focuses on secularism, atheism and religious change.
Frank Bosman is Senior Researcher at the Tilburg School of Catholic
Theology, Tilburg University. He is currently involved in multiple research
projects concerning cultural theology and video games. He has publishedvarious articles on theology and gaming in journals such as Games andCulture, Gamevironments and Online: Heidelberg Journal of Religions on
the Internet, and the series Studies in Theology and Religion. Further key
publications include Gaming and the Divine: A new systematic theology ofvideo games (Routledge, 2019) and, as editor, The Sacred & the Digital:
Critical depictions of religions in video games (Multidisciplinary Digital
Publishing Institute, 2019).
James Bradbury completed his PhD in Social Anthropology at the
University of Manchester in 2019. His doctoral dissertation, entitled‘Hinduism and the Left: Searching for the secular in post-communist
Kolkata’, was based on fieldwork in parts of the city that were settled byHindu refugees from what is now Bangladesh, and which became bastionsof the regional communist movement. Through these neighbourhoods,
the thesis explored the city’s distinct formulations of secularism, as well

Notes on contributorsixas how they have begun to transform in the post-communist period. He is
now the editor for Synaps, a research and training organisation based in
Beirut, Lebanon. (ORCID: 0000-0002-7501-244X.)
Eric Chalfant is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Film &Media at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He received his PhD in
Religion and Modernity from Duke University in 2016. He also has an MA
in Religious Studies from Wake Forest University, NC (2011) and a BA in
Religious Studies from Whitman College, WA (2008). He has previously
taught at Portland Community College, OR and Elon University, NC. His
current research unearths the affective elements underlying the historyof atheist uses of media in the United States from the nineteenth to thetwenty-first centuries.
Jacob Copeman is Research Professor, University of Santiago deCompostela, and Distinguished Researcher (Oportunius). His most recent
monograph, co-authored with Dwaipayan Banerjee, is Hematologies: The
political life of blood in India (Cornell University Press, 2019). His mostrecent edited collection, co-edited with Giovanni da Col, is Fake:
Anthropological keywords (HAU Books, 2018). He is principal investigatorof the ERC-funded project ‘Religion and its others in South Asia and theworld: Communities, debates, freedoms’.
Neelabh Gupta is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the Centre forSouth Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh. His work focuses on digital
media and atheism in North India, exploring various ways in which thelives of non-religious individuals are joined together by digital media. His
primary research interests are media, non-religion and visual cultures.
John Hagström is a PhD student in Social Anthropology at the Universityof Edinburgh. His research is on apostate refugees – atheist, humanist,
rationalist and other non-religious asylum seekers in England andScotland – with a concomitant focus on the various organisations andnetworks that support them. More broadly, his research interests include
secularisation, ethics and morality, wonder, and non-religious movements
worldwide. He is co-author of ‘The absence of the divine’ (HAU: Journalof Ethnographic Theory, 2018). (ORCID: 0000-0002-6902-8197.)
Pierre Hecker is Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Centre for Nearand Middle Eastern Studies at the Philipps University of Marburg. He
holds a PhD from Leipzig University and is the author of the book Turkish
Metal: Music, meaning, and morality in a Muslim society (Ashgate, 2012).
Recent publications include ‘Islam: The meaning of style’ (Sociology ofx

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Islam, 2018) and ‘The “Arab Spring” and the end of Turkish democracy’,in E. Mohamed and D. Fahmy (eds) Arab Spring: Critical political theory
and radical practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He heads the researchgroup ‘Atheism and the politics of culture in contemporary Turkey’ fundedby Stiftung Mercator, and co-edited the volume The Politics of Culture inContemporary Turkey (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
Natalie Khazaal (PhD, UCLA) is Associate Professor at the Georgia
Institute of Technology and an American Council of Learned Societies(ACLS) fellow for her work on Arab atheists. She has contributed to the
topic of atheism with publications on the use of pseudonyms by Arabatheists and the embedded atheism in Mohamed Choukri’s literary
oeuvre. Her latest books, Pretty Liar: Television, language, and gender inwartime Lebanon (Syracuse University Press, 2018), which studies how
audiences affect media legitimacy during violent crises, and herco-edited volume on borders and the displacement of human refugees
and non-human animals, ‘Like an Animal’: Critical animal studies
approaches to borders, displacement, and othering (Brill, 2020), explore
different forms of disenfranchisement.
Evelina Lundmark holds a postdoctoral position at Agder University in
Norway, where she studies the intersection of Christian nominalism,
Scandinavian secularism and national identity in relation to publicbroadcasting and children’s television. She holds a PhD from the Facultyof Theology at Uppsala University, where she looked at how atheist
women and gender-queer people speak about their unbelief in a US
context on YouTube. Her research interests lie in the areas of non-religion
and secular studies, digital religion, gender studies and critical theory.
She has previously researched how religion is negotiated in discussions
on reddit.com/r/atheism, worked within the Understanding Unbelief
programme based at the University of Kent, and collaborated on projects
that explored the modern graveyard in Sweden and examined how theSwedish Christian magazine Vår Lösen impacted on the daily press during
Anne-Marie Thunberg’s tenure as editor-in-chief.
David Nash is Professor of History at Oxford Brookes University. He has
published monographs in the areas of blasphemy, secularism andsecularisation and on British criminal history, and is an internationallyrenowned specialist in the history of blasphemy in Europe and theEnglish-speaking world. He has also published Cultures of Shame:
Exploring crime and morality in Britain 1600–1900 (with Anne-Marie
Kilday) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Notes on contributorsxiJohannes Quack is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of
Zurich. He is the author of Disenchanting India: Organized rationalism andcriticism of religion in India (Oxford University Pres, 2012). He co-authoredthe book The Diversity of Nonreligion: Normativities and contested relations(Routledge, 2020), and co-edited the volumes The Problem of Ritual
Efficacy (OUP, 2010), Religion und Kritik in der Moderne (LIT, 2012),
Asymmetrical Conversations: Contestations, circumventions and theblurring of therapeutic boundaries (Berghahn, 2014) and Religious
indifference (Springer, 2017), and he co-edits the book series Religion and
Its Others: Studies in religion, nonreligion, and secularity (De Gruyter).
Lena Richter is a PhD researcher at Radboud University, Nijmegen. She
has a background in anthropology and migration studies, with a regional
specialisation in the Maghreb. As part of the Mediating Islam in the
Digital Age (MIDA) project, she conducts qualitative research about theexperiences of non-believers in Morocco and the Moroccan diaspora. Her
research explores how the less religious urban youth normalise this taboo
topic, by using humour, embracing a ‘liberal’ lifestyle and narrating theirexperiences online.
Mascha Schulz is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC project‘Religion and its others in South Asia and the world (ROSA)’ and is basedin the Department of Anthropology of Politics and Governance, at the
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. She is a political
anthropologist currently working at the intersection of politics, economics
and non-religion. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in urban
Sylhet (Bangladesh), she is working on a book titled Cultivating Secularity:
Politics, embodiment and criticism of religion in Bangladesh. She has also
published on the state, political parties and student politics in South Asia.
(ORCID: 0000-0002-9053-5134.)

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Acknowledgements

This volume was made possible through the support of the European
Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 817959) andthe Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2018-145). It grows out of a workshop
funded by the same grants held (virtually) at the University of Santiago
de Compostela in May 2021. We would like to thank the participants inthat workshop for their feedback. Particular thanks are due to Stefan
Binder, Amelie Blom, Koonal Duggal, Meera Gopakumar and Arkotong
Longkumer. We would also like to thank Joseph Blankholm and Johannes
Quack for generously taking up our invitations to reflect on the chapters,
Lindsay Graham for her help in preparing the final manuscript and Chris
Penfold at UCL Press for his support for this project.

Acknowle dgements

xiiiForeword: the frustrating
and wonderful ambiguityof sceptical publics

Joseph Blankholm

This volume explores important questions. As a scholar of American
secularism and secular people, I give lectures about non-believers topublic audiences several times a year, both in person and broadcast via
media. I receive certain questions often. Does more access to information
make people less religious? Has the internet led more people to becomeatheists? Has a medium like the internet helped non-believers find others
like them and feel less alone? These questions are surprisingly loaded,
which makes them tougher to answer than they appear. Who counts as a
non-believer? Why do they want to talk about what they don’t believe?
Why do they form communities – publics – online and in person? The
persistence of these questions belies their simplicity, which is why I don’t
always have great answers, and why I’m grateful for this volume’s
perspicacity and breadth.
As an ethnographer of very secular people, including secular
activists, I also hear questions non-believers ask in conversations, inperson, but also in print and online. I ask these questions in my voice, but

FOREWORD

xv

they capture the gist. Are atheists simply people who don’t believe in
God? Or people who don’t believe in the supernatural? Is atheism
anything more? (Maybe now we’re talking about humanism!) Did ancientphilosophers know the truth about the gods? Was that truth lost in thedark ages and rediscovered in the Renaissance? Was it the Enlightenmentthat revealed it fully? Is it enough to make this truth known? Or should agood atheist try to convince people there is no God? Would the world bea better place without religion? Questions like these are pressing forpeople trying to understand atheism, secularism and secularisation. They
are even more important for the secular people trying to create a moresecular world. Their answers provide the basic assumptions that constitutesecularism and animate secular life.
Scepticism, media and publics are great starting points for finding
answers. This volume begins a subfield; it does not summarise one. Its
essays enter into an emerging terrain for which there is, as yet, no map.
The paths they blaze are several and fantastically ambiguous; they leadone way, turn suddenly, then turn again; they dead-end. These paths’
progress is circuitous, even as it remains important to follow where theylead. As the authors in this volume attempt to map the secular terrain,
they are mired in a special set of challenges that it would be helpful forreaders to recognise. Why are sceptical publics, of all things, so difficult
to understand?
Publics, sceptics, non-religious and media are all ambiguous, evenparadoxical, concepts. They warrant a little examination before weembark with them as our guide.
Public and publics depend on privacy for their meaning, just as
secrets depend on disclosure. As scholar Michael Warner has made clear,public is distinguished from private more easily in theory than in practice.
Secrets can be told in public just as private life can be aired publicly.
Particular publics can be open to outsiders and still insular. As the authors
in this volume repeatedly observe, publics are not necessarily public, inthe sense of available to everyone. This is all the more true in the case ofcounterpublics, which are defined by their relationship to more dominantpublics because they are spaces where people who feel marginalisedinteract with one another. A public can be open, but closed, and in any
public, discourse usually has its limits.
Sceptics are no less ambiguous, and likewise in more than one sense.
If sceptics are doubters then on what grounds? Anyone can doubt, asmany faithful Christians will attest. Ancient sceptics like Pyrrho and
Sextus Empiricus doubted as much as they could and urged a state ofindecision, ataraxia, which questions even the conditions of their

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doubting. Modern sceptics are different because they are decidedly
empirical. They doubt the veracity of claims that are not falsifiable byscience, but they do not question that science provides the best way ofknowing and that claims about reality should be subjected to its methods
first and foremost. In other words, modern sceptics are sceptical of someepistemological sources and not others. Divine revelation, inspired
scripture and mystical experiences cannot be trusted because they cannot
be verified by microscopes, telescopes or the Large Hadron Collider.
Sceptical faith lies in the empirical testing of reality even as social reality
tends to confound science at nearly every turn. Here I should admit that
I share sceptics’ secular faith in the empirical even as I find ancient
sceptical critiques both compelling and maddening. My ambiguity
remains unresolved.
Non-religious is at its core paradoxical, as are ‘non-belief’, ‘atheism’,‘secularism’, and any other term we use to describe religion’s absence. Yes,
any negative identity bears within it that which it is not, but where doesthat observation really get us? The ‘non-religious’ are so strange because
they might share something more than what they lack. Negative epithetsare often mere slander; they are more uncanny when they become selfappellations. After all, early Christians called the Romans atheists, andthe Romans did the same to the early Christians. That they called eachother heretics doesn’t tell us much about who they actually were. But
what happens when people begin to call themselves heretics, to callthemselves atheists?
In the negative, those who do not believe are only unified by what
they oppose, and defining their opposition broadly can too easily swelltheir ranks. The rise of the religiously unaffiliated, or so-called ‘nones’,
has been described by some secularists as a growth in secularism, thougha lack of religious affiliation can only tell us about how people don’t
belong. What about their beliefs and behaviours? And what about atheists
who consider themselves religious, like many members of the Satanic
Temple? More complicated still is atheism’s presence as a worldview of its
own. Is atheism merely the rejection of the ‘God hypothesis’, or does it
name the consequences of a worldview, such as materialism or
physicalism, which is atheistic only incidentally? Atheism is of course
both a name for heresy and a name for a way of seeing the world andbeing in it. We must have it both ways if we’re to see it rightly.
Media is a filter and a conduit. Or are media filters and conduits? I
labour the point, which is of course media’s overwhelming ambiguity as
it simultaneously enables and constrains communication. Twitter’s 280
characters, broadcast television’s inability to receive and ancient texts’

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lacunae are at once methods of delivery and message-shaping constraints.
Interpretations reflect these limits, too. In the media of sceptical publics,
there are implications between the lines and allusions perceived only by
those in the know. For historians of atheism, the constraints of persecution
loom large. Did he really believe in God, or did he hold back the truth of
his atheism? Philosopher Leo Strauss is right to argue there’s an art towriting when certain sentences are punishable by death, though paranoia
might be getting the better of us if we believe that any contradictions in asystematic thinker’s oeuvre hold the keys to their hidden truth. Even in
the absence of media’s mediation, wondering whether a speaker is sincere
can make a labyrinth of understanding. As this volume shows, the risks ofnon-belief are not the same everywhere, and those risks condition how,where and to whom atheists speak their minds. Media enables theirspeech even as the publics it reaches, sometimes via surveillance, impose
their own restrictions.
The ambiguity of these four concepts is confusing, but it should
motivate us to look at them more closely, as this volume does, rather thanturn away. Ambiguities are the best starting points because they show theseams of social reality and reveal how it’s stitched together. They dare us
with loose threads we might pull, which fill us with the thrilling but false
hope of taking everything apart to understand it more clearly. Alas, we’restitched in, too, and this is why our words so often betray us.
The challenge of ambiguity is basic and unavoidable for those who
study people, and all the more for scholars using secular, empiricalmethods to study the secular people who are most empirical. In actual
life, we have to contend with what the authors in this book face head-on.
A certain type of philosopher might indulge in the luxury of settling thesedisputes by stipulating a definition and placing sceptics or non-believers
in one category or another: yes, they are religious because they have faithin an epistemology; no, they are not because they claim they are notreligious. Those of us who want to make sense of living people must do
our best to understand them as we find them, in all their contradictions,even as our own ideas and language betray us by failing to capture what
we find. To make matters worse, those we study are always entangling
our terms with theirs in an ouroboros of emic and etic.
That social life so often resists description in language tells us asmuch about the latter as it does the former. The language and concepts
we bring to bear on an object we seek to understand have a material
history just as rich as that of the people and things we study. Vibrations
like those that emanate from the mouth of someone reading these words
aloud are aural shapes that resonate in our ears as comprehension. Theyxviii

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have been learned through repetition, and what they mean or signify has
not only changed over time but is also the product of accretion. Meanings
linger, mixing old and new into remarkably dense signs.
Publics, sceptics, non-religious and media are overladen concepts,
which makes them as useful as it makes them confusing. They help us
understand the world better even if they also refuse us the satisfaction of
fixity. The authors of this volume do the important work of stitching theseconcepts to a social world that exceeds containment but nonethelessdemands explanation, at least for anyone reading these words. Its essays
are timely, which of course means they will one day be less relevant thanthey are now. All the more reason to read them soon.

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Introduction: non-religion, atheism
and sceptical publicity
Jacob Copeman and Mascha Schulz

On 15 January 2013, Asif Mohiuddin, a secular activist, was stabbed in
Dhaka, Bangladesh, allegedly because of his blogging activism,
particularly his critical writings on religion, and for being an atheist.
Having, luckily, survived, he now lives in exile in Germany. The incident,
however, marked the beginning of a wave of attacks between 2013 and2015 on activists who engaged critically with the Islamist party Jamaate-Islami and Islamic fundamentalism, promoted secularism or lobbied for
LGBTQ rights, which subsequently became known as the killings of the‘atheist bloggers’. Several of the nearly 20 victims were self-declared
atheists, who wrote on blogs such as Mukto-Mona (‘freethinking’), whileothers were not necessarily known as atheists but rather as progressive
activists in a broader sense. In the national media coverage, these people
were sometimes referred to simply as ‘the bloggers’; blogging thus became
increasingly associated with being an apostate or an atheist. As a reportin the Bangladeshi newspaper The Daily Star stated, ‘Islamist groups havebranded them [bloggers] “atheists” …. They have launched a propaganda
campaign against the bloggers, utilising the lack of understanding of theconcepts – blog, blogging and blogger’. The report contextualised theintensification of sentiments around ‘blogging’ and ‘atheism’ as part ofwider power struggles concerning the war crimes tribunals that weretaking place at the time, which put on trial prominent leaders of the
Jamaat-e-Islami.1 The trials were accompanied by popular mobilisations

INTRODUCTION

1around issues of secularism, non-religion and Islam staged by the
Shahbag movement and the Hefajat-e-Islam (see for example Chowdhury2019). But of particular interest for us here is that the article points out
how a certain medium, namely blogging, became in this context
associated, and even partially synonymous, with ‘atheism’. This is further
specified in the article (Haque 2013):
If you introduce yourself as a blogger, social media illiterate people
take you to be an atheist! Because of this, all bloggers are now facingsuch kind of trouble though they (Muslims bloggers) have full faith
in the Almighty Allah and Islam. Blogging is not a sin. … Before [the]introduction of blog[s], there were some self-proclaimed atheists but
they did not have any open sources for writing. But now they havesuch open sources. So, blogging is not a practice of atheism and every
blogger is not an atheist. It depends on what type of content is posted
at a blog and whether it is hurting Islam or other religions.
Bangladesh is not the only country in which digital media has provided
new spaces for religion-sceptical publicity, which has subsequently led
to controversies. The social media activism that accompanied the ArabSpring in 2011, for instance, seems to have resulted in a marked increasein online exchanges about religion and secularism (see for example Al
Hariri, Magdy and Wolters 2019; Schielke 2015), which resulted inintensified visibility and, similar to what happened in Bangladesh,increasing contestation regarding atheism in countries like Tunisia,
Egypt and Morocco. Moreover, Ayala Fader has vividly documented
how, since the mid-2000s, the Jewish blogosphere has created newopportunities for sceptical ultra-Orthodox Jews to cultivate andcommunicate doubt, and crucially to find like-minded community. This
led the rabbinic authorities to campaign against the internet as such,fearing that what they perceived as an ‘anonymous heretical public’
could bring about a general crisis of faith (Fader 2020). Striking abalance between increasing visibility and providing the possibility ofremaining anonymous, blogs and social media like Facebook, Twitter,YouTube, Quora forums and Reddit have formed crucial spaces forcommunication and activism among agnostics, freethinkers, sceptics
and atheists in a wide range of places, including those where such media
have not provoked the same degree of controversy, such as Indonesia(Schäfer 2016; Duile 2020), Egypt (van Nieuwkerk 2018), Morocco(Richter 2021), Kyrgyzstan (Louw 2019), the US (e.g., Cimino andSmith 2014; Laughlin 2016; Lundmark and LeDrew 2019), the2

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Middle East (Al Zidjaly 2019; Khazaal 2017) and the Philippines(Blechschmidt 2018).
It is thus not surprising that there has been a surge in research on‘digital atheism’ in recent years (e.g., Bosman 2019; Fader 2017, 2020;
Richter 2021; Rashid and Mohamad 2019). So far, however, there has been
little attempt to engage at a more systematic level with questions of therelation between different forms of media and non-religiosity, and how
they may produce what we call sceptical publics. While there has been
extensive scholarly engagement with and theorisation of how certain
media affordances affect religious community formation and shapereligious subjectivities (e.g., Engelke 2011; Houtman and Meyer 2012;
Meyer and Moors 2006), we know little about the significance of different
media for the (re)production of non-religious publics and publicity.
The above-quoted newspaper article helps us see what is novel about
dynamics provoked by the increase in formats and use of digital and social
media. Though they did not promote the emergence of atheism as such,they did equip atheists, agnostics, rationalists and religious sceptics withpotentially novel forms of publicity, in particular with regard to scale,interactivity and accessibility. As a result of the often semi-anonymous
affordances of these media, different forms of non-religious activism andcommunity became more visible and, hence, more easily accessible forreligious sceptics – as well as researchers – especially in contexts in which
non-religious positions tend to be marginalised and silenced. Yet, incontrast with the view put forward in the newspaper article quoted above,
digital media is only the latest means of expressing non-religiosity. Sceptical
publicity has, of course, a very long history and utilised a wide range ofdifferent media, such as discussion circles, print media such as books,
pamphlets and other textual forms (see Nash 1995; Minois 2012;
Whitmarsh 2016), atheist archives and cartoon strips (Luehrmann 2011,2015; Schmidt 2016), advertisements on buses (Tomlins and Bullivant
2016), billboards (Blankholm 2018), and films and TV shows, to name justa few. Even in Bangladesh the violent campaign targeting ‘atheist bloggers’
can be understood as being in continuity with similar, earlier campaigns
against writers such as Taslima Nasrin, Shamsur Rahman and Humayun
Azad (a point we will return to below), and the blogging we have discussed
is contemporary with other forms of non-religious expression less prone to
provoking controversies or violent attacks by Islamists (see for example
Bradbury and Schulz in this volume).
This book seeks to further understanding of the remarkably diverse
ways in which a variety of religious sceptics, doubters and atheists engage
with different forms of media as means both of communication and of

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3

forming non-religious publics. Some varieties, such as books in English
ranging from early scepticism (for example, those of Bertrand Russell) to
the New Atheism2 literature, had a far-reaching influence, informing
debates and subjectivities in diverse places. Other forms, such as the useof Bengali theatre for secularist projects, have remained highly
idiosyncratic to specific contexts. The volume brings together scholars
from different disciplines in order to initiate debates on media, materiality
and non-religion. It thus contributes to the recently growing social science
literature on humanism, atheism and other varieties of non-religion, but
expands its thematic reach and theoretical concerns by extending
prevailing insights from studies of non-religion to media contexts. How
do changes in media forms affect modes of anti-atheist activism andvigilantism? How does non-religious publicity differ according to medium
and locale? What can geographically dispersed non-religious literatureand visual art, from theatre to video production, tell us about nonreligious subjectivities, communities and activisms, past and present?
Any attempt to engage with these questions must take account of
the diversity and heterogeneity of the various forms of mediatedscepticism and non-religious publicity that make a single, uniform reply
to these questions unrealistic. In doing so, the book makes three key
conceptual interventions.
First, if most previous studies typically treated media (mostly
texts) ‘as transparent vehicles for ideas’ (Chalfant 2020, 4), simply
transporting rationalist and religion-sceptical ideologies into new orexisting domains, several programmatic works have emphasised theneed to attend to the role of materiality and media in the study of nonreligion (e.g., Lee 2012; Copeman and Quack 2015; Nash 2019; Binder
2020; Chalfant 2020). Building on these works, and extending them, we
explore how various media produce different ways of circulating andmediating discourses for specific audiences, and also how these
mediated discourses are closely interlinked with the properties andmateriality of different media, and also to embodiment and emotional
encounters. This book shows that the mediated formation of sceptical,
atheist or secularist subjectivities cannot be analysed merely at a
cognitive level; rather, affective and material (technological) dimensions
must also be taken into account. Which forms and materials are used tosustain and promote sceptical publicity? How have different media
forms facilitated the travel and exchange of non-religious ideas acrosscontexts, and how does this facilitation relate to the specific propertiesof certain media? When are issues of non-religion addressed directly
and when are more indirect forms such as humour used?

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Examining diverse media, but with a focus on digital technologies,
the book aims, secondly, to make a conceptual contribution to contentious
debates on religion, secularism and ‘the public sphere’ by highlighting
how media – including those considered ‘public’ and ‘liberal’, such as print
media and the internet – tend to facilitate engagement with criticism of
religion and communications among highly specific and limited ‘publics’,
rather than by contributing to intellectual debates in a more generalised
public sphere. By paying close attention to the material and technologicalproperties of different forms of media, not only their role in circulatingideas and ideologies but also their affective potentials, the book seeks torethink the relation between the ‘secular’ and ‘public(s)’ in diverse
contexts. Acknowledging the centrality of the role of script and print
media in the formation of non-religious thought and community, but also
moving beyond these media forms, it asks the following questions. Whatother means do non-religious people employ to publicise their scepticism?
What kinds of publics are created thereby? Are such publics directedprimarily at educating ‘the public’ or do they serve as a means of seeking
like-minded individuals for community creation? How do the dynamics
of mediated non-religious publics and publicity vary, depending on thelocation and time? How does consideration of these dynamics allow us torethink the relationship between ‘the secular’ and ‘the public sphere’?
Thirdly, given that digital and social media is receiving a growing
amount of attention – both popular and scholarly – because of how itapparently assists the formation of sceptical publics, this book makes aparticular effort to bring different studies of ‘digital atheism’ into
conversation. It does so by attending to questions such as the following.
Might the internet, in markedly religious countries, have a communitybuilding function in allowing formerly isolated individual atheists to locate
and interact with like-minded persons, without necessarily meeting them
face to face, becoming, thereby, a key atheist technology for the imagining
and construction of non-religious communities in sometimes hostile
locales? How do such digital dynamics differ from other forms of‘underground press’ that have published periodicals critiquing religious
orthodoxy and fundamentalism? How and when do digital or offline media
become means of socio-political mobilisation, building up advocacy
networks within and across national borders? Taken together, thecontributions show that despite this transnational and supposedly nonlocal, ‘liberal’, open and democratic form of communication, the role thatthe internet plays for atheist and religious sceptics varies considerably
depending not only on specific communities, which display a surprisingly
strong sense of geographical belonging and often engage with specific

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5

forms of religious tradition, but also on the kinds of digital space used(closed Facebook groups, openly accessible activist statements and so on).
In this introduction we first explain our use of the term ‘sceptical
publics’ in reference to still prevalent understandings of the secular publicsphere, arguing that configurations of sceptical publicity always appear
as a public rather than the public. We suggest that although a number ofthe sceptical publics we discuss are not outward-facing (the ambivalentrelation of sceptical publics to visibility is a marked theme across thebook), pursue only indirect forms of publicity, and do not resemble formal
communities, this does not mean that they are a- or anti-political. We
then address discourses of newness (New Atheism, new media, newopportunities for sceptical publicity), questioning the novelty that isfrequently imputed to both medium and message in such contexts. Media
innovations tend to renew or rework rather than transform extant modesof sceptical publicity. A historically informed approach allows us to seethat spreadable media and virtual networking are far from being confinedto the digital world.
We then turn our focus to materiality. Rather than taking nonreligion as negation or absence of religion or as a neutral ground, we
argue for a focus on non-religious fabrications as a means of allowing us
to ask pertinent questions about how non-religiosity is produced andmade tangible and socially significant in different contexts.
Our final section, on digital atheism, shows that though the digitalcan be vital for apparently offering socially and politically isolated atheists
a safe place for finding like-minded fellowship, digital privacy breaches
can make such communities vulnerable to discovery. Further, engaging
with Daniel Miller et al.’s (2016) theory of attainment, we present
evidence showing that digital affordances can go beyond enabling the
fruition of latent non-religious attitudes or desires to actively produce
varieties of non-religion.

Public(s) and publicity
It can seem that whenever the word ‘public’ appears in scholarly writing, it
evokes an association with, and impulse to position oneself towards,
Habermas’s influential work on the public sphere, as well as debates on
public(s) that emerged in its wake (e.g. Fraser 1992; Warner 2002; Cody2011). According to Habermas, the emergence of the public sphere ineighteenth-century Europe was strongly connected with bourgeois coffee
house culture and the rapid development of mass media. The argument

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that it provided a space for ‘rational’ debate on society and politics has ofcourse been widely criticised, not only for its Eurocentrism and for ignoring
existing power inequalities and exclusions, but also because its normative
presumptions of a ‘secular’ and ‘rational’ space discount the significance ofaffect and local discursive traditions and positionality, including religious
belonging (see Calhoun 1992; Meyer and Moors 2006; Salvatore andEickelman 2004). As already indicated, the concept of ‘sceptical publics’seeks to move beyond this debate to take inspiration from recent criticalworks on publics, publicity and media in order to ‘examine how [sceptical]
publics are brought about into being through historically specific media
practices’ (Hirschkind, de Abreu and Caduff 2017, S3).
This book’s focus on non-religion, media and ‘sceptical publics’ forces
us to question notions of the public sphere that associate it closely with ‘thesecular’ and which posit the emergence of publics as an integral part ofmodernisation and secularisation. While Habermasian notions assume,and normatively posit, that the public sphere is in principle ‘secular’, several
studies have shown how public(s) might be created through religiously
informed media. One of the most renowned works here is Charles
Hirschkind’s The Ethical Soundscape (2006), in which he explored how
cassette sermons reinforce Islamic traditions of both ethical discipline anddeliberation, resulting in what he conceptualised as an ‘Islamic
counterpublic’ in Egypt, thereby questioning not only the association with‘the secular’ but also ‘the hierarchy of senses underpinning post-Kantian
visions of the public sphere’ (Cody 2011, 42). Similarly, Arvind Rajagopal(2001) argues that media, most notably the telecast serial version of the
Hindu epic Ramayana, was crucial for fashioning a Hindu public thatenabled the rise of Hindu nationalism in India in the 1990s (see also Rao
2011; Lewis 2016). Moreover, numerous recent studies explore how
certain religious groups or authorities publicly reposition themselves
through the use of media technology, such as televangelism in the Americas(Birman 2006), audiovisual media in Ghana (Meyer 2006) and Islamic
televangelism in India (Eisenlohr 2017). These studies often seek, like
Tania Lewis in her research on religious and spiritual television, explicitly
to enhance a ‘non-secular or more correctly a post-secular conception ofcontemporary publics’ (2016, 284) and to ‘challenge such narrowassociations between the public and the liberal-secular’ (Lewis 2016, 295).
Thus, much scholarly effort has gone into empirically disproving any direct
association between publics and secularity by highlighting intersections
between emergent forms of religion, media and publics.
We aim to extend this debate, albeit through approaching it from aslightly different angle, suggesting that problematic assumptions about

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close links between ‘the secular’ and the public sphere can fruitfully berethought through a focus on non-religious or sceptical publics, as
witnessed by the contributions to this book. In view of the different
modalities of ‘sceptical publics’ explored here, one necessarily has to leavebehind the idea of the public sphere as ‘secular’ qua default. Instead, thefocus on non-religious media, materiality, publics and publicity allows us
to explore how secularist, atheist or religion-sceptical stances aresubstantive, and in fact contested, ethical-political positions whichthemselves are mediated – and actively produced or fabricated – indiverse forms by actors who seek recognition, legitimacy or visibility todifferent degrees. Moreover, the different ‘sceptical publics’ assembled inthis book more often than not reflect specific religious contexts that aremarked by Christianate, Islamicate or Hindu influence. The degree of
legitimacy these stances are able to claim varies considerably dependingon the context – temporal, spatial and social – as does, interrelatedly, theextent to which actors seek or avoid publicity.
The term ‘sceptical publics’, therefore, is not a descriptive term that
attempts to capture a clearly delimited phenomenon or necessarily similar
forms of community. Instead, it is used here as a heuristic for exploring
the diverse ways in which publicity and creating publics matter for nonreligious and secularist actors and configurations – or not. The question,
assuredly, is not just how certain media are used to further criticism of
religion and advance atheists stances in society, but under whatcircumstances people choose to use them for this purpose.

Mediated publics, community formation andidentity politics
In contrast to notions of a secular public sphere, all non-religious publics orconfigurations of sceptical publicity in this book appear as a public rather
than the public. This does not mean, however, that people do not seek toposition themselves in diverse ways towards an imagined dominant opinion,or what they perceive as the public. But if we accept the now relatively
established notion of publics as multiple, unstable, fragmentary,interconnected and diverse in their formation, what are the main
characteristics that mark a ‘public’? There are of course many answers to thisin the vast literature on the subject. In his essay on ‘the various, seemingly
contradictory, uses of the public as a concept’ (Gilmartin 2015, 371) inhistorical and contemporary South Asia, David Gilmartin has argued that,
despite such a plurality, ‘the paradoxical tension of the public – as an arena

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for open debate and displays of difference and for the production of animage of imagined community unity – is central to its modern meanings’(Gilmartin 2015, 386). Similarly, David Marshall emphasises in his
discussion of ‘the plurality of publics’ that ‘most (if not all) iterations of“public” have contained this overriding communicative relationship of theindividual to unity’ (2016, 2). Imagined communities and communication
figure also in the chapters in this book. Yet the precise relationship between
them differs substantially in each case.
Certain chapters (for example Gupta’s) explicitly address how
particular media, more often than not digital media, provide a space inwhich to talk about non-religious convictions, and to share affective
communications like memes or jokes, and thereby create a form of(imagined) community for religion-sceptics, rationalists and atheists
despite the lack of face-to-face contact. These digital spaces thereby
provide such atheists with a sense of community despite their anonymity
and internal heterogeneity. Participants are provided with online spacefor debate and recognition of their scepticism, precisely because they areclosed and limited and their privacy settings carefully guarded by mostmembers in order, ironically, ‘to limit its public reach’.
Tellingly, a sense on the part of atheists of marginality and exclusionfrom what is commonly understood as ‘the public’ is present in many of
the chapters. In the light of this, several of the chapters (see also Dick2015) characterise mediated atheist communities as forms ofcounterpublic, drawing on the influential work of Nancy Fraser (1992)
and Michael Warner (2002).3 This is done most explicitly in Eric Chalfant’s
chapter, which focuses on several subreddit atheist communities, thecombination of which can be considered a mode of counterpublic not only
because it ‘marks itself off unmistakably from the dominant public’ while
voicing a sense of being subordinated, but also because the relation it
embodies between stranger communication and identification results inthe provision of ‘an alternative space for the performance of (non)religious
identity as neither fully public nor fully private’.
In interesting tension with Chalfant’s analysis is Evelina Lundmark’s
chapter, which also focuses on US atheist Reddit users as well as animateddiscussions beneath the line of YouTube videos. Focusing on one discussion
following a video in which the public commentator Ana Kasparian rejected
identification as an atheist, Lundmark shows how such a closed digitalpublic allows users to distinguish themselves from, and imagine themselves
as rational through opposition to, supposedly irrational Others (bothatheist and religious), while not necessarily imagining themselves asforming part of a community in the sense of evoking a sense of shared

INTRODUCTION

9identity. Indeed, the point for such users is precisely to resist shared
identity, even as they congregate virtually to do so.
Lundmark’s chapter also prompts reflection about the supposedly‘political’ nature of publics. It has been argued that in ‘conjunction with
communities, publics emerged as political entities related to visible
cultural movements’ (Marshall 2016, 6). Yet in the cases outlined so far wehave seen how non-religious actors’ principal aim is communication
within the group rather than ‘going public’ beyond such spaces: ‘coming
in’ rather than ‘coming out’, as Chalfant puts it. At the same time, the lackof ‘publicness’ of these publics should not be equated with an absence ofthe political. As Warner (2002, 63) has argued, even if it is possible only
for limited or ‘damaged forms of publicness’ to develop since‘[c]ounterpublics are, by definition, formed in conflict with the norms andcontexts of their cultural environment’, they can nevertheless transform
non-religious subjectivities since they offer a space where ‘private life canbe made publicly relevant’ (Warner 2002, 62). For Warner, it is precisely
such processes of ‘world making’ that allow us to determine whether
collections or assemblies of people are ‘just “communities”’ or ‘mediatedpublics’ (ibid., 61). Indeed, for Rosalind C. Morris such a form of speaking,which ‘is no longer to be understood in the terms of communicative action’(2013, 95) – that is, it does not address strangers with a (political) message– is a property of the contemporary moment beyond counterpublics. Its
emergence is connected with the opportunities presented by new mass
media, which require us to rethink ‘publicness beyond the public sphere,
in the nonspaces of a networked world’ (Morris 2013, 100).
Richter’s chapter complicates further the question about power
relations and communication between a sceptical public and the public bypaying attention to diverse, partially contradictory forms ofcommunication, and, crucially, different audiences. While Richter points
out that the internet provides a space for many of her Moroccan
interlocutors to connect with like-minded religious sceptics and to gain
visibility, she also explores their ambivalence towards such visibility. She
shows that non-religious people might have good reason for remaining
silent or for not going public beyond the boundaries of the sceptical
public. While some of her interlocutors avoid such publicity, having in
mind the sensibilities of family members or threats from third parties,
such a decision might also be based on political considerations, such as
the wish of diasporic Moroccan ex-Muslims to avoid inflaming antiIslamic sentiment in Belgium. Thus, an increased sense of community
emerging in online and offline spaces does not necessarily result in an
activist stance that attempts to challenge its marginal position. Rather,

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these spaces are marked by diverse forms of communicative register,among them ‘talking among’ more or less like-minded persons and‘talking with’ other marginalised groups, for instance when non-religious
groups speak up for gender or LGBTQ rights.4
The question of community formation via such publics is of course
vital for many non-religious interlocutors because of a lack of establishedformal organisations. While religious communities, and especiallyreligious reform movements, create community and thus limited publics
through their religious activities (for example in churches or mosques, or
through listening to sermons transmitted through loudspeakers; Stille2020), this is not true to the same degree of non-believers, agnostics,
atheists or religious sceptics. Recent years have seen the publication ofnumerous studies on organised non-religion across the globe (e.g., Quack
2012; Engelke 2012, 2015; Kind 2020; Blechschmidt 2020). At the sametime it is widely acknowledged that the majority of non-religious people
globally have engaged in more diffuse ways of cultivating doubt and nonreligious community. However, in seeking to conduct research on lessvisible or less formally organised non-religious subjectivity formation,scholars face challenges, as we have discussed elsewhere (Schulz and
Binder 2023; Copeman and Quack 2019). Digital spaces, such as closed
forums like the Atheist Republic and those on Reddit, might be one wayof engaging productively with these more diffuse non-religious publics(see also Lundmark and LeDrew 2019), especially since most digitalspaces are entangled with offline sociality, as the chapters in this volume
by Gupta and Richter demonstrate (see also Duile 2020; Blechschmidt2020).5 In Gupta’s chapter on WhatsApp discussion groups and Instagram
meme sharing among young Indian atheists, it is striking how little
engagement exists between them and the modes of organised atheism
discussed in the chapters by Binder and by Copeman and Hagström.
Though the organised variants have attempted to form online presences(Quack 2012, 97, 165; Binder 2020, 239), the situation appears to reflect
Daniel Loxton’s general assessment that while ‘digital outreach may bringnew grassroots support to traditional skeptical organizations, … realizingthat potential requires facing up to a more fundamental shift: traditional
skeptical organizations are no longer the default leaders of the popular
movement. Indeed, new skeptics may not even realize the traditional
skeptical groups exist’ (2009, 24; see also Smith and Cimino 2012, 27).
We should not, then, limit our approach to forms of sceptical publics
that resemble more or less formal communities. Instead, a wide range ofdifferent genres is involved in the production of sceptical publics. Rather
than dialogue-centric interaction, often associated with public spheres, it

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has been suggested that ‘genre-specific communication might beproducing specific forms of consensus and truth that aim to persuade noteveryone, but those involved in this particular communication’ (Stille2020, 15). David Nash in this volume surveys how media and genre
innovations and the historical prominence of different media have shaped‘sceptical publics’ in the UK and the US over time. He reminds us thatbesides the most obvious form of publicity, that is, ‘reading publics’
fostered via publication of pamphlets and other print media, imaginedcommunities have also been created through oral formats, though it canbe challenging to find historical sources for this. Nash shows that court
records of blasphemy or similar cases can be a particularly productive
genre for reconstructing difficult-to-trace sceptical histories.
Several other chapter authors highlight the significance of particulargenres for sceptical publicity. Frank Bosman’s chapter offers an in-depth
discussion of the serial Rick and Morty as an example of American popular
entertainment that prominently engages in criticism of religion. James
Bradbury and Mascha Schulz explore why their secularist interlocutors in
Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, often choose theatre and Bengali
cultural activism rather than communist politics, in which they are also
engaged, in order to promote a secular society. Direct criticism of religion
can result in threats or unpopularity; hence such statements and actions
are discouraged in formal politics. Theatre allows activists to addressthese issues more indirectly. A ‘secular public’ is not only created throughperformances in front of different audiences, but also, in another sense,by providing a space for cultural activists to cultivate secular sentiments
and to come together as ‘seculars’. Further, argue Bradbury and Schulz,
the degree of publicity associated with performances is strongly regulated
depending on its content and the expected audience. The supposedly‘public’ medium of street theatre is therefore marked by what Martin
Zillinger (2017) has called a ‘graduated publicness’.
The chapter by Copeman and Hagström focuses on how Indian
rationalists see an opportunity in TV and film formats, including talkshows and video slow motion, to renew attempts to expose religion as‘fake’ and superstitious. While the rationalists have scored some notablesuccesses, the chapter also highlights significant audience-related
ambivalences concerning these highly visual modes of sceptical publicity;
the spectacle of broadcast exposure of spiritual gurus on popular TV does
not always lead to the intended result: audiences might ask questions
about the particular guru under scrutiny, but not about guru-ship in
general; or, even worse, they may assume that rationalists themselves
hold some kind of special power. Recalling the case of a

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mid-nineteenth-century US sceptic withdrawing from a project of publicly
exposing spiritualism after realising his efforts were helping to create new
spiritualists (Walker 2013, 31), such unintended side effects of increased
publicity can result in ambivalence towards mass mediation among
rationalists, despite their inherent activist desire for publicity.
Hecker’s chapter discusses another case of unwarranted publicity,or publicity of the wrong sort. The Turkish cartoons and satirical comic
books on which his chapter focuses form part of a long tradition ofproviding critical engagement with and humorous reflections on religion
dating back to the late Ottoman era. Indeed, they have played a central
role in the formation in the country of sceptical publics, which, as Hecker
argues, in contemporary Turkey constitute a mode of counterpublic
because of the increasing hegemony of political Islam and pious
conservatism. Reflecting this hegemony, popular Turkish cartoonists are
increasingly under threat of legal action for denigrating religious values‘in public’. Hecker’s historical discussion illuminates not only considerable
ambivalences concerning publicity but also important shifts over time inwhat it is deemed acceptable to say about religion, or Islam, ‘in public’.
The focus on sceptical publicity in these chapters, rather thansceptical publics in respect of mediated community formation, raises
questions of reception, diversity of audience and ‘regimes of circulation’(Cody 2009). Though it might be true that publicity is integral tosecularisation (Lebner 2018), this does not mean that sceptical publics seek
publicity necessarily or in an unqualified way. As several chapters in thisvolume show, there can be good reasons for avoiding ‘going public’. In
particular, dangers can arise if digital communications move beyond theirintended audiences: consequences range from their appropriation in
support of right-wing anti-Islamic agendas (Richter), to the unintended
provocation of outrage. Therefore publicity is often sought indirectly, forinstance through humour or entertainment media (Bosman), via media
that specialise in implicit messaging (Bradbury and Schulz), or by targeting
publicity at certain segments of society. Indeed, focusing on non-religiously
inflected indirection, silences and ‘public secrets’ (Taussig 1999) is likely tobe productive in the further study of global sceptical publics.
At the same time, many non-religious people do of course actively
and explicitly seek publicity in order to advance an activist stance, despite
running the risk of provoking harsh reactions; we see this in Gupta’s
chapter in relation to meme sharing, and also in cases where the agenda
of sceptical communities is explicitly to make rationalism, secularism or
atheism more acceptable to what they understand to be the public, which
despite being fictitious exerts powerful effects on these dynamics. The

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chapter by Natalie Khazaal is concerned with such individuals, whoengage in media strategies to promote acceptance of apostasy and atheism
in Lebanon. Her chapter provides insight into the implicit rules of how one
can speak in public in order to make legitimate claims to be an atheist andnevertheless a moral person, reminding us that the strategies employed,
be they calculated or habituated practices in the form of gendereddispositions, matter for how an atheist testimony might be evaluated.
Sceptical publicity designed to emphasise the ‘nevertheless moral’
character of atheists in the face of the tenacious argument that ‘atheists areunable to be moral because they lack belief in the religious faiths thatdefine morality for many in society’ (Linneman and Clendenen 2010, 101)
has long been a key public-facing concern for atheists, sceptics andhumanists. The notable nineteenth-century British sceptic George Holyoake
rejected the term ‘atheism’ precisely because it might lend credence to thewidely held assumption that abandonment of religion is synonymous withabandonment of morality (Zuckerman and Shook 2017, 4). Media
employed for ‘good without god’ publicity have included print (e.g. Epstein2009), billboards (Blessing 2013), the body (Copeman and Quack 2015),
charities (as in the establishment of organisations like Aid Without
Religion), and miracle demonstration (to show that atheists conduct such
exercises to foster scientific literacy whereas others do so to exploit (Binder2020)). Yet, in dramatic contrast to projects that seek to promote acceptanceof atheism among the public via ‘good without god’ publicity, Bosman’schapter demonstrates how the Rick and Morty TV show has no interest insuch a project at all, instead foregrounding its atheist protagonists’ ethicalnihilism: precisely the perception atheists are usually so keen publicly tocounter. With Rick ‘generally portrayed as an amoral atheistic genius’(Hummel 2019), the programme comes to look like a kind of sceptical antipublicity, actively lending credence to stereotypes of the morally unmooredatheist without meaning and purpose.
Yet non-religious modes of ‘going public’ need not be primarily
directed towards ‘the public’. John Hagström’s chapter highlights thesignificant emergence and prominence in UK humanist circles of adiscourse, stimulated by a recent increase in non-religious asylum
seekers in the country, centring on the global plight of apostates. While
such an ‘apostate politics of visibility’ is directed towards a secularisingpublic in which the suffering of individuals leaving religion has become
far less visible, such apostates have sought publicity particularly among
their more privileged non-religious peers, which reminds us of theimportance of taking into account the internal heterogeneity of any
given ‘sceptical public’.

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New atheism, new publics?
Scholarly interest in relations between publicity, media and nonreligiosity has grown in parallel with increased research on non-religion
in more diverse geographic locations. It is no coincidence, we suggest,that this research has emerged alongside, or subsequent to, two significant
interrelated popular developments at the beginning of the twenty-first
century: first, the appearance of a public debate concerning ‘New Atheism’after the publication of high-profile works by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett,
Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (2004–7) that provoked
substantial controversies, especially in the US and the UK, but which havenevertheless, or possibly for that reason, been highly influential aroundthe globe (for example in the Philippines (Blechschmidt 2018)); secondly,
the emergence of what is called ‘new media’ and interrelated debates on
how this has shaped our possibilities of forming communities, and ourrelation to space and the dynamics of political participation (Hirschkind,de Abreau and Caduff 2017; Kelty 2017; Morris 2013).
The word ‘new’ figures in both these popular developments and also
prominently in academic discourses that discuss different (digital) media
and their role in allowing atheists and other non-religious people to raise
their voices or seek community. This is also true of contributions in thisbook: Richter, for instance, concludes that ‘the internet has set in place
the basic conditions for a new counterpublic of non-believers’. Copeman
and Hagström discuss how film and TV ‘offer rationalists new techniquesof vision’ and Chalfant discusses how a specific form of digital media(Reddit) has enabled ‘users to develop new forms and formations of
intimacy’. Most prominently, digital media has been associated with‘newness’ and with cutting-edge technology that brings about change. For
now, we bracket the question of whether (or not) and to what extent
digital atheism creates new forms of sceptical public and publicity, as we
attend to it in detail below. Instead, we would like to draw attention to thediscourse of ‘newness’ that accompanies such writings.
Of course, the word ‘new’ immediately invites caution. As theauthors of the introduction to a journal special issue on ‘New media, newpublics?’ say of ongoing innovation in digital technology and interactive
formats, ‘scholars increasingly wonder what is “new” in new media’(Hirschkind, de Abreu and Caduff 2017, S4). The ‘novelty’ of New
Atheism has also been subject to debate (Flynn 2010; see also Pigliucci2014). Most prominently, Tom Flynn questioned the novelty of thearguments made by so-called New Atheists, arguing that there are

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substantial continuities between present-day atheist arguments and thosemade within a long tradition of freethinking, which includes figures suchas Robert Ingersoll and Bertrand Russell. He contended that ‘there’s
nothing new about the new atheism’ besides its key texts being massively
accessible because of their publication by mainstream presses and theirprominence as bestsellers (Flynn 2010). One could argue whether eventhis is innovative or novel given its continuity with the earlier media
strategy of rationalist ‘cheap editions’ in operation since the latenineteenth century (see Nash, this volume). Our aim here is not to takeup a position in this debate. Instead, we dwell on it in order to highlightthe significance within it of media circulation, and its consequences for
non-religious visibility and publicity. While Flynn downplays the role ofmedia as insignificant compared to the main arguments of New Atheism,
it strikes us as a central characteristic of the phenomenon and one of themain reasons for its controversial influence. A key aim of this book is toattend to the different affordances and characteristics of media without
overemphasising the cutting-edge technology of digital formats, whichhave figured prominently in research on atheism in the last decade.
Instead, we attempt to bring into conversation different media genres aswell as contemporary and historical research.
In fact, New Atheists have employed a number of media beyond
renowned book publications such as The God Delusion (2006) to facilitate
publicity and promote radical atheist politics, ranging from Twitter toYouTube videos and Richard Dawkins’s large personal investment in bus
advertisements (see Tomlins and Bullivant 2016). It was the combination ofthis large-scale publicity, supported by the considerable financial means of afew of its members, the appearance in a post-9/11 era of increased concern
about the public role of religion, and surging anti-Muslim sentiment in the
US and the UK (see also Kettell 2013) that made it such a visible andcontroversial movement. While the ‘new’ publicity of ‘New Atheism’ has
resulted in increased academic interest (Bullivant 2020), studies of nonreligion have largely covered countries in Europe and North America, and thevariants of non-religion explored have often been comparatively hard-line,
organised, or both. This book has a larger geographical purview, withchapters including but not limited to contemporary Euro-American contexts,
and also considers more diverse modes of non-religiosity, though we
acknowledge that the contributions remain, despite their ‘global reach’,limited to certain regions, reflecting the asymmetries of existing scholarship.
In locations hitherto barely considered by scholarship on nonreligion, such as Bangladesh or Morocco, the visibility of non-religious
publics and publicity has often been considered a novel development or,

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at least, as reaching ‘a new stage of atheist and irreligious publicity’, as
Khazaal argues for the Arabic-speaking world, and this is frequently put
down to the prevalence of new media formats. Yet we would not wish toreiterate this popular diagnosis without reservation. It is an obvious but
still important point that media forms in practice often nest within one
another rather being isolable, with no obvious boundary between‘traditional’ and more recent forms such as social media, and, certainly,
different media forms do not emerge successively in any simple sense as
substitutions for one another (Hirschkind, de Abreu and Caduff 2017). A
particularly prominent mode of this is the reposting on YouTube of TV
clips which thereby become subject to different dynamics of circulationand publicity (see Khazaal in this volume). Recognising this, Daniel Miller
et al. (2016, x) propose the term ‘polymedia’ as a means of emphasising‘our inability to understand any one platform or media in isolation’.
Thus, while we need to acknowledge the ‘new’ dynamics that attend
what Francis Cody calls the ‘networked publicity of satellite television and“spreadable media”’ (2020, 394), these dynamics neither fully replace
extant media forms nor necessarily fundamentally transform sceptical
publicity. Instead, sceptical publics tend to have diverse histories andmultiple geographic origins liable to be renewed, reworked orreconfigured in the light of media innovations. We thus agree with Kajri
Jain that we need ‘to disentangle the idea of newness in “new media”
from the much-critiqued modernist narratives of linear progress andevolutionary succession in whose terms it is still too often unwittingly
framed – or rather to provincialize this as just one of the temporalities atwork when thinking about what enables newness to emerge’ (2017, S13).
We illustrate this by returning to the Bangladeshi case of theso-called atheist bloggers. Despite the novelty of blogging as a form of
Bengali sceptical publicity, this development was not exclusively new
but ‘layered itself over existing infrastructures’, to employ Cody’s phrase(2020, 394). The newspaper article we cited earlier suggested, in
accordance with popular sentiment at the time, that the figure of the
blogging atheist was a new phenomenon, since the blog form, for the
first time, provided an ‘open source of writing’ for religious sceptics. Yet
such a ‘new’ development has a long intellectual history in Bengal, as
has writing more broadly. One of the main targets of Islamist
condemnation was the Mukto-Mona (‘freethinking’) blog, which,according to its self-description, ‘is an Internet congregation of
freethinkers, rationalists, skeptics, atheists & humanists of mainly
Bengali and South Asian descent6 who are scattered across the globe’.7
As a moderated blog, it gave religious sceptics and secularists an

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opportunity to exchange views and share thoughts mostly throughlonger-form writing, with a strong intellectualist leaning. While theweblog genre certainly offered ‘new’ affordances, such as the relatively
short period between writing and publication, it should be seen incontinuity with older traditions of freethinking and writing in Bengali
such as the freethinker ‘Young Bengal’ movement in Calcutta, and theradical humanist movement Buddhir Mukti Andolon (‘Freedom ofIntellect Movement’) in Dhaka in the 1920s, which began under Kazi
Abdul Wadud’s leadership (see Khan 2001; Murshid 1997), and otherforms of publication such as the journal Sikha (‘education’). Moreover,such blogs were not particularly ‘new’ when they became a nationallycontroversial issue in 2013 in the context of the polarisation following
the Shahbag movement: Mukto-Mona, for instance, had been foundedin 2001.8 The outrage focused on ‘the bloggers’ in 2013 thus needs to beunderstood in the light of the socio-political context of the time (seealso Hasan and Ruud 2021; Chowdhury 2019). While the ‘new’
technology of blogging certainly had its own effects in Bangladesh, it
did so in continuity with older patterns to create a media of ‘layered
temporalities’ (Jain 2017, 2021).
Following this, the book includes chapters that bring historicaltrajectories to the fore. Nash’s chapter on the changing nature of nonreligious media engagements in the US and the UK illustrates how many
patterns and challenges continue, albeit with modifications, despite
innovations in technology. Other chapters explore how certain genres
have historically been linked with ‘sceptical publics’. Copeman and
Hagström, for instance, demonstrate how the advent of TV was mobilised
by Indian rationalists, while Bradbury and Schulz examine how
understandings of Bengali street theatre as a form of ‘secular media’result from its significant historical legacy and the role it played in anticommunal and resistance movements. Hecker’s chapter, too, is sensitive
to the long history of critical engagement with religion in Turkey and how
the social evaluation and acceptability of this engagement have changed
over time.
While the chapters by Hecker and Nash are focused on printed texts
and their circulation, the existence of reading (and writing) publics is alsoa precondition for the forms of mediated non-religion explored in digitalcontexts by Chalfant, Gupta, Richter and Lundmark. Jack Goody (Goodyand Watt 1963; Goody 1996) famously made the case for literacy andwriting as pivotal for the development of sceptical thinking. For instance,
he connected a rise in reflexivity and criticism of religion in sixth-century
India with the introduction of an alphabetic script (1996, 674).

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Objectifying and codifying myths and other religious narratives via writing
enhances one’s ability to critically scrutinise and discern incongruities inthem. The approach has been criticised for its division of oral and literate
cultures according to relative levels of credulity (Barber 2007, 68–9), withorality and literacy in any case frequently hybrid practices (Binder 2020,
129). In his later work, Goody clarified that literacy merely ‘seizes’ uponkernels of doubt that already existed in oral cultures (1996, 678). Literacy
does not invent scepticism, but it can extend it.
Focusing (as did Goody and Watt) on ancient Greece and Rome,
Tim Whitmarsh (2016) similarly connects growth in criticism of the epics
with the emergence of a sophisticated literate culture that sought out‘naturalistic plausibility’. Moreover, literacy allowed a form of ‘virtual
network’ to form, comprising the ‘scattered dots’ of individual Hellenic
and Roman atheists across time and space. These ancient atheists initiatedno large-scale movement, community or public face, but writing andliteracy did allow a form of ‘detached fellowship’ or linking together ofscattered dots at particular times, especially in the pre-Christian Roman
Empire. That is to say, literate culture allowed atheists of this era tosustain ‘a fantasy of connection’ to the great classical atheists (Diagoras,
Protagoras, Socrates, Critias). Returning in the light of this to our earlier
discussion of media novelty and layering, the chapters by Nash andHecker, which explore licit and illicit circulations of printed documents(including pictorial representations) among literate publics, remind us
that spreadable media and virtual networking are far from being confinedto the digital world. Moreover, if ancient ‘disbelievers were not concernedto leave physical traces of their absence of belief, [with] no shrines,
statues, inscriptions, coins, or graffiti indicating their presence’(Whitmarsh 2016, 142), these circulations perhaps indicate that thematerial culture of atheism should be considered more in terms of ‘books,
pamphlets, books and more books’ (Nash 2019, 7). The physicalcirculation of books and pamphlets among clandestine and othernetworks of literate publics is certainly a central part of the material
culture of many non-religious communities across time and space (see forexample Minois 2012). However, if there still lingers an association
between the phenomenon of written language and ‘peculiarly abstract
and autonomous qualities of cognition’ (Mertz 2007, 23), analyticallycoupling written language too tightly with non-religion runs the risk of
reducing non-religion to the status of an abstract intellectual position. In
contrast, the next section seeks to highlight just how multifaceted nonreligious material engagements can be.

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Non-religious fabrication: media, aesthetics andthe material
Contributions to this book highlight the diversity of non-religious aesthetic
and affective encounters, ranging from the aesthetics of propagation via
speech, film and street theatre (Binder; Copeman and Hagström, Bradbury
and Schulz) to the strategies employed by Lebanese atheists on social
media and their affective implications (Khazaal), and the role of humour
and ridicule in the criticism of religion in a US TV series (Bosman) and‘ungodly visuals’ in the form of memes (Gupta). Thus, Global Sceptical
Publics reflects and extends emerging approaches to non-religion that nolonger treat it as a domain divorced from aesthetics and the sensory.9 Thisis important for any analysis of ‘sceptical publics’ because, although it is
widely agreed that debate and dialogue are critical features of publics,
equally important is how publics constitute themselves through aesthetic
styles and material signs (Prince 2019, 136). Here we address these styles
and signs with reference to chapters in the book and recent key works inaesthetic theory, in particular those by anthropologist Birgit Meyer.
A widely noted problem confronted by scholars of non-religion
working in the area of non-religious sensoria and aesthetics has been theconventional assessment of secular humanism as a hyper-intellectual
exercise (Lee 2012; Engelke 2012) that is antithetical to aesthetics (Binder2020) and so unconcerned with, indeed divorced from, matter, affect andthe senses. This is ironic given the normative commitment of secular
humanists to materialism (Copeman and Quack 2015). On the one hand,such understandings of secular disembodiment and dispassion were only
possible because so many scholars already assumed they knew how secular
humanists think and operate, with no further investigation required(Luehrmann 2015, 101). It is no accident that the aforementioned
stereotypes began to be challenged almost as soon as ethnographic studies
of non-religion began in earnest in the 2010s. On the other hand, there
does indeed exist ‘a kind of “Enlightenment story”, in which bodies, affects
and emotions are supposed to play minor roles’ (Engelke 2019, 200). Thisis a story that should be taken seriously as informing some atheists’ selfunderstandings and that indeed is reflected in certain self-ascribed labels
such as ‘freethought’, ‘scepticism’ and ‘rationalism’ (Lee 2012, 142), but it
is a story that should not be treated uncritically or taken for granted, andits bias in terms of European intellectual history should be recognised.
A number of studies question positions that assume the very idea ofsecular aesthetics is a contradiction (Binder 2020, 10) and that nonreligion is ‘all in the mind’. Lois Lee (2012) argued early on that studies of

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non-religion should not fail to address the rich material culture of nonreligion. Taking inspiration from the concept of ‘banal nationalism’ andapproaches to religion that emphasise its lived dimensions, she
persuasively challenged the assumption that ‘nonreligious forms areprimarily intellectual rather than social, practical, symbolic, aesthetic
and/or material’ (2012, 136). This was an important shift. To focus on
lived non-religion rather than abstract formal doctrine – on atheists rather
than on atheism (Chalfant 2020, 6; see also Copeman and Hagström, thisvolume) – is to be more likely to avoid the unilluminating stereotypes wepointed out above. Leigh Eric Schmidt’s (2016) emphasis, in his work on
nineteenth-century atheists and freethinkers in the US, on the earthinessor ‘mundane materiality’ (p. 18) that marked these atheists’ alienationfrom religion, is exemplary here. Other key works – such as those by
Engelke (2015), Copeman and Quack (2015), Chalfant (2020), Binder(2020) and Schulz (2021) – that have sought to take forward Lee’s
agenda or propose adjacent ones often cite in passing the work of Birgit
Meyer, who is well known for her substantial body of work on religious
media, aesthetics and materiality. We think, however, that it is worth
explicating more fully the conceptual possibilities for studies of nonreligion generated by her work.
With an ethnographic focus on Christianity in West Africa, Meyer
has been key to the scholarly endeavour to foreground the mediated,material and affective basis of religion as a counter to dematerialised
belief-centred approaches that define it in terms of internalised mental
representations and propositional assents (Engelke 2005; Morgan 2009;
Chidester 2018). Valuable though it is, such work on ‘material religion’runs the risk of perpetuating unhelpful perceptions of the immaterialityof non-religion (Binder 2020, 10). We suggest that the most productive
response to this risk is to creatively apply concepts developed by material
religion scholars to the field of non-religion. The first step is to recognise
the shared concern of scholars of religion and non-religion to counter
overemphasis on mentalistic representations of their objects of study; toacknowledge that ‘atheists, like religionists, are more than what they door do not believe’ (Chalfant 2020, 3). There is thus, at the outset, a quite
evident symmetry or overlap between Meyer’s agenda and that of scholars
seeking to engage material non-religion.
Proceeding from this, we suggest that Meyer’s (2014, 209) emphasison the significance of ‘form’ – ‘not as a vehicle but as a generator ofmeaning and experience’ – is as apt for non-religion as it is for religion.
Related to this is Meyer’s interest in processes of fabrication (via texts,
sounds, pictures, objects, etc.) as means of generating a sense of the

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sublime or transcendent. If this might appear unhelpful for describing
those ‘who neither affirm nor long for the transcendent’ (Blankholm2017), we suggest that a sense of the immanent, of the non-religious,
should not be considered the neutral ground from which such religious
fabrications begin, but that it is a sense that itself must be fabricated. This,
too, can often take the form of a beyond in respect of a (from theperspective of the active non-believer) problematically de-secularised, orincompletely secular, here and now. To paraphrase Meyer (2014, 213),
foregrounding fabrication prompts very concrete empirical questions
about the specific practices, materials and forms employed in generating
a sense of the non-religious. Which materials are used and how are theyauthorised as suitable? What steps are involved in procedures ofde-sacralisation? How does a non-religious fabrication inspire or help
sustain non-belief? Posing such questions allows us to study attempts
both to dispose of extraordinary (religious) presences and to create
immanent ones. In such processes we are often able to register a kind of
non-religious ‘moving beyond’: what, to repurpose a concept proposed by
Stef Aupers, Dick Houtman and Peter Pels (2008, 702), we call theengineering of immanent, ‘this-worldly other worlds’.
Consider how secular humanists across time and space have sought
to fabricate selves, spaces and events free from – beyond – religious
iconography. In present-day England, for instance, ‘the first thing that a[humanist] celebrant does, when he or she arrives at the chapel [toconduct a funeral], is take away or have covered any religious symbols
that may be present’ (Engelke 2015, 39). An Indian example of nonreligious fabrication consists of atheist activists attempting ‘to overcome[caste and religious] communalism by mobilising a social imaginary or an“aesthetic formation” (Meyer 2009) of atheist humanism’ (Binder 2016,205) that centres on sharing food among communities for which
restrictions on food sharing are a key means of maintaining community
distinctions. Activists thereby attempt to materially engineer animmanent, this-worldly other world that both represents and hopes toeventuate a condition of achieving freedom from – going beyond –normative religious identities.
The chapters by Gupta, Binder and Khazaal each depict non-religion
as an embodied practice of the human senses which, to paraphrase Binder(this volume), aesthetically produces varied affects: group-binding
humour, offence and silencing in the case of memes (Gupta), ridicule andarrogance in the case of speeches propagating non-religion by Indian
activists (Binder), and affective responses to religious discrimination as aspur to emotive non-religious messaging in the case of Lebanon (Khazaal).

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Bradbury and Schulz, in their chapter, coin the term ‘secular media’ tostress the point where secular humanism and media merge through‘performative embodiments of secularity’ in Bengali street theatre. A
genre and material practice that criticises religion, opposes divisivecommunalism and, critically, simultaneously advocates and arouses anatmosphere of autonomy from religion, it is fabricated out of Bengali
aesthetic genres old and new – demonstrating again how non-religious
fabrication can seek to bring forth a richer, more palpable immanence or‘phenomenal secularity’ (Lee 2019, 44), however temporarily or
imperfectly, to form immanent, this-worldly other worlds.
Meyer (2014, 216) approvingly cites Robert Orsi’s (2012, 147)
definition of religion as ‘the practice of making the invisible visible, ofconcretizing the order of the universe, the nature of human life and its
destiny, … in order to render them visible and tangible, present to thesenses in the circumstances of everyday life’. Yet tackling invisibility andmaking it available to the senses can be just as much a concern fordisbelievers as for the faithful. For example, some atheists are keen tohave their dead bodies publicly donated to medical science – thereby
circumventing death rituals and contributing to science – because it canmake atheist commitments tangible. With scurrilous rumours often
circulating about deathbed recantations, successfully enacted body
donations palpably objectify the reality of the deceased atheist’s
unwavering irreligiosity, making it available for inspection (Copeman andQuack 2015). Precisely because non-religion is so often interpreted interms of mental attitudes and interiority, it is often essential for claims of
non-religion to be given material form.
Following this, it is important to explore the different media throughwhich these claims are made tangible, whether oral, material, documentary
or affective, and how these change over time and space, an endeavour thisbook contributes to. For instance, in Binder’s chapter on atheist verbal
propagation in India the principal aesthetic forms at stake are sonality,
oratorical mastery (involving, for example, memorisation and fluency) anda ‘hyperliteral’ attitude towards religious texts in order to expose absurdities
therein. The resultant speeches are intended not only to persuade via logical
exposition but to be means of fabricating – making perceptible – seculardifference, that is, secularity as a figuration of perceptible difference. We
find literal visualisations of non-religion in the chapter by Hecker, which
describes the materialisation in popular comic books of a comic aesthetics
of resistance to the increasing de-secularisation of the Turkish state. These
centre on vulgar bodily images and transgressive retellings of Muslim andreligious myths. Consider too the illustrations of the American secularist

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Watson Heston, whose provocative drawings featured in the American
freethinker publication Truth Seeker in the late nineteenth century: ‘His
lifework had been the visualization of a secular republic, the bountiful
provision of emblems – of enlightened rationality, anti-Catholicism,
women’s emancipation, anti-evangelicalism, scientific progress, intellectual
freedom, and strict church-state separation – designed to render freethinking
liberalism tangible’ (Schmidt 2016, 84). The evidence of the senses and therequirement to make the invisible visible also lie at the heart of Copeman
and Hagström’s chapter, which describes how Indian rationalists employ
video slow motion and replay to make visible their otherwise immaterial(and therefore unconvincing) claims of religious malfeasance. In addition toseeing, audience involvement in miracle-debunking performances entails
use of the so-called lower senses of taste, smell and touch as important
ingredients in rationalist projects of exposé. If the ‘process of acquiringconviction through the senses’ is frequently discussed in terms of religion(Stolow 2008, 684; van de Port 2011; Meyer 2014, 212), it is also patently
a central component of non-religious sensoria.
While the resignification and redeployment of religious aesthetic
forms (myths, imagery) for secular purposes described by Hecker are notnovel secular techniques, they warrant our consideration as a key mode ofmaterial fabrication of senses and spaces of the non-religious (here throughdrawing, printing, pictures and viewing). Indeed, secular redescription, or
non-religious aesthetic appraisal, can be a significant component of nonreligious aesthetics, with secular actors seeking to clarify which aspects ofculture – though they may ‘present’ as religious – possess an essentiallyhuman and therefore valuable basis independent of religious premises.10
Such cultural forms are made ‘visible and tangible, present to the senses’(Orsi) in a manner that authorises their de-sacralisation. But this is not a
hard and fast rule: Bradbury and Schulz’s chapter shows how clarification
between ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’ need not be significant for secularprotagonists: reference to, and appreciation of, certain aesthetic traditions
on their own might be considered sufficient to demarcate oneself as secularand to further one’s secularity.

Digital atheism
From anthropology (Oosterbaan 2011), to sociology (Slater 2007),
religious studies (Caputo 2001) and media theory (Mitchell 2015), muchrecent scholarship has emphasised the potential of digital technologies
for evangelical outreach and visions of a globally connected religiosity.

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Yet digital technologies are just as capable of fostering atheist visions ofglobality and future successful outreach as they are religious ones. As one
influential US atheist blogger put it: ‘[The Internet’s] a religion destroyer
as much as anything else we’ve ever seen – open access to information,
the ability to prove your pastors wrong, the overwhelming number ofatheists who make their case online’ (cited in Laughlin 2016, 320). A
further exemplary expression of this kind of liberatory digital atheism isIranian-born activist and commentator Maryam Namazie’s statementthat ‘Social media and the internet are doing to Islam what the printingpress did to Christianity’ (Jacobsen 2017). Such claims form part of anarrative that some atheists tell about the internet and its ability to provethe validity of their claims and promote their message, forming part of alarger long-standing propensity to view the internet as a kind of‘transparency machine’ (Mazzarella 2006, 489), and digital and social
media as promising a ‘universal political enfranchisement in the form of“access”’ (Hirschkind, de Abreu and Caduff 2017, S4). At the same time,
existing studies in the field of digital atheism, both those in this volume
and others, demonstrate ambivalence and heterogeneity with regard to
the modes of engagement of religious sceptics with the internet
concerning questions of visibility, identity formation and community
building. But noting such diversity is not to say there are no patterns
within these engagements, as we shall see. Discussing such patterns, butalso variations that depend on particular platforms or geographic regions,this book aims to advance comparative discussions of non-religious
engagements with and experiences of digital media.
As we have already noted, digital technologies have played an
important community-building function in allowing formerly socially
isolated individual atheists in markedly religious countries to locate andinteract with like-minded persons without necessarily meeting them face
to face, thereby further decoupling geographical and moral proximity. This
dynamic, considered by Simmel more than a century ago in his reflections
on modern urban societies (1908; O’Hara et al. 2014, 2), has sinceaccelerated because of many factors, including, especially, the rise of digitalcommunication technologies. In places where public expressions of atheism
may be treated as blasphemous and so pose physical and social dangers,
digital technologies have seemed to offer a safe place for atheists toanonymously ‘gather’ and engage in dialogue, or to find moral closenessapart from their immediate geographic locales, or indeed simply to assuage
loneliness, as reported for Kyrgyzstan (Louw 2019). Digital technologies
can thus be a key tool for the imagining and construction of non-religious
communities in sometimes uncongenial or even hostile locales.

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The anonymity characteristic of many digital interactions can becentral to non-religious digital experiences, with many users engaging
anonymously because of the social costs of publicly being known to be an
atheist, though certainly not all of them do this. Where online anonymity
is preserved a critical doubleness may result, the atheist’s online presencereflecting their non-religious attitudes while their visible bodies andpublic practices remain religious. Chalfant’s chapter in this book provides
a striking example of this doubleness, with US-based Reddit contributors
deliberating over whether or not to ‘come out’ to their devout families asatheists, while Gupta’s chapter, too, explores the sometimes parallel livesof young Indian atheists who, though active participants in digital atheist
spaces, may refrain from expressing themselves on these matterselsewhere (for example in domestic contexts).
In such instances, use of online pseudonyms can be crucial for enablinga degree of security, for example when used among Arab ex-Muslims as atechnology of destigmatisation (Khazaal 2017) or by US Reddit users as anecessary condition for the creation of ‘atheist intimacies’ (Chalfant, thisvolume). Euro-American governments are currently engaged in policy
debates that raise the prospect of removing rights of anonymity on social
media as a means of reducing trolling and ensuring accountability.11 If suchmeasures are adopted, it is not hard to imagine the deleterious effects they
will have on numerous kinds of non-religious social media user.
The differentiated nature of covert engagements has been teasedout by Al Zidjaly (2019, 10) for the case of Arab Twitter. If the main action
takes the form of tweeted interactions between well-known ex-Muslims
and current Muslims, lurkers who silently observe such debates also readalong. Fear of prosecution in a region in which criticism of religion ispunishable by law leads to ‘followers withholding response’; this extends
even to refraining from ‘light practices’ (Blommaert 2018) such as liking
or sharing. This refraining further complicates the distribution of silence
we have contemplated in previous sections, with silenced doubt associatedprincipally with face-to-face lives (e.g., Fader), as opposed to the ability
to find voice (and community, moral propinquity, etc.) in digital
environments. Here we see how offline silences are not necessarily
countered but replicated online (see also Richter’s chapter). Voice,community and moral proximity are disaggregated: we find a kind of‘silenced community’ marked by moral propinquity but not by the ability
to have a voice or engage in dialogue.
Regarding the central question of digitally enabled doubleness andcovert identities, it is precisely because digital technologies have assisted
atheists by affording moral proximity and visions of community that some26

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religious groups have identified these technologies as a generalised
threatening ‘blasphemous space’. Consider a 2017 newspaper report on
atheism-related moral panics concerning social media in Pakistan: ‘An
Islamabad High Court (IHC) judge has called for a ban on social media
sites in Pakistan, due to the spread of “blasphemous” images online. …
[The Justice] appealed for the support of Pakistan’s Interior Minister …,
asking him to “take some steps in his own supervision to eliminate theevil, even at the cost of blocking the entirety [of] social media’”(Sulleyman 2017). In this way, the internet paradoxically can makeatheists more visible to non-atheists even as it seems to afford themanonymity and a safe place for discussion. Thus, as we have already seen,in Bangladesh atheist bloggers have become the target of violence, inPakistan atheist bloggers have been arrested and associated Facebook
groups taken down, and in Pakistan and India internet users have publicly
sought to uncover the identities of participants in atheist online forums.
Another important case is that of Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi, whoin 2022 was released from prison after completing a ten-year sentencethat included 1,000 lashes (though he received ‘only’ 50 after global
condemnation).12 Nevertheless, access to digital communication
technologies has been particularly important for those whose voices
traditionally have been constrained, as van Nieuwkerk (2018) has also
argued in the case of atheist digital engagements in Egypt. Indeed, theway atheists have found refuge in private groups online but also come tobe newly vulnerable to discovery through participation in them strongly
reflects the significant wider argument that has been made about digital
media, that it both affords greater capacities of privacy to users and has
the strong potential to threaten such privacy (Miller et al. 2016, 212).
Yet, if digital technologies have undoubtedly enabled dialogues
between differently located non-religious people, that is not to say they
always find common ground. The ability of digital technologies to grantatheist users instant access to ‘other’ atheists can force acknowledgementof separateness and aversion just as much as it facilitates productive
exchange. For instance, Richter (this volume) finds that many Moroccan
atheists come to be ‘critical of French secularism and cannot identify withthe most vocal non-believers, who are overwhelmingly middle-aged
Western men’, while the Kyrgyz atheists discussed by Louw (2019) are as
likely to be disillusioned by the divisive atheist rhetoric in global online
spaces as inspired by thinkers such as Richard Dawkins. This shows once
again that, despite the supposedly ‘global’ reach and de-territorialisingpotential of digital media, social and geographic location continues tomatter substantially for digital atheism.

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Further, while Chalfant shows how digital atheist community canseem to coalesce around discursive exaltation of the atheist individual
and that individual’s agency, notably in celebrating the individual
atheist’s heroic resolve in overcoming conformity to come out as an
atheist, he also points out that users are not unaware of the role ofReddit’s algorithms in manipulating their online preferences andbehaviour, undermining their agentive free will even as they continue toexalt it as the pivot of their hard-won atheist subjectivities. Committed tofree will versus determinism, they employ quasi-automated sociotechnical structures to express and form that commitment. The point is
not simply to contrast algorithms and individual human judgement(Gillespie 2016) but to recognise how embedding the latter within
systems highly structured by the former can provoke novel challenges to
non-religious values. With a different ‘higher power’ in play than the one
atheists are usually concerned with, the danger faced by users is that ‘thenotion of the individual atheist making a rational choice to disbelieve
based on available information is replaced with that of the atheist
hivemind conditioned by algorithmic feedback loops and echo chambers’(Chalfant 2016, 22).
Despite perceptions of digital media as a space for disembodied
forms of communication, various scholars have noted the gendereddimensions of non-religious digital engagements. Al Zidjaly (2019, 21)
has examined the gendered dimension of the harbouring of covert digital
identities, with Arab male atheists struggling under the burden of having
to publicly perform daily acts of prayer they no longer believe in. On theother hand, social media is reportedly facilitating a challenge to
traditional male dominance within atheist communities, disrupting its‘boys’ club’ culture ‘in part because it is now easier for like-minded women
to realise they are not alone in their inclinations’ (McAnulla, Kettell and
Schulzke 2019, 97).13 This is reminiscent of Fader’s analysis of genderedlanguage in the Jewish blogosphere, even though it leads in that case, bycontrast, to a sceptical counterpublic which ‘remained almost exclusively
for men, reproducing women’s exclusion from the ultra-Orthodox
religious public sphere’ (2017, 729). Khazaal also focuses on genderdifferences in her chapter on expressions of atheism on Arabic YouTube,
Twitter, TV shows and literature, finding that male and female atheists
quite consistently account for their rejection of religion in different ways.
Men tend to present their journey as one of a gradual increase in logicalthinking and curiosity, with critical appraisal of religious contradictions
leading to intellectual growth. This approach often fails to provoke public
sympathy. By contrast, female tellings that dwell on religion-related

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restrictions to freedom and the consequent suffering they have endured
gain far more resonance and traction, so modelling a successful form of
atheist public engagement in the region.
Contrasting with the previously outlined discourse of newness, Miller
et al. (2016, 205) approach digital technologies via a ‘theory of attainment’,
which highlights how digital technology expands users’ capacities without
necessarily changing their pre-existing wants and desires: ‘Typically new
media are first used conservatively, to attain something already desired but
more easily achieved with the help of this new media.’ With regard todigital atheism this raises the question: do these media provide new waysof representing atheism and accentuating already existing atheist identities,
as the theory would suggest, or do they assist in actively producing these
phenomena? It is a question atheists themselves have posed: ‘Would you be
an atheist without the internet?’, asked one noted atheist blogger. Laughlin(2016, 320) summarises Smith and Cimino’s analysis of the responses
received (2012, 27), namely, that ‘the Internet is not so much responsible
for making atheists as it is for the intensification of this identification’, afinding that supports the theory of attainment.
Yet we also want to suggest – without denying its value in manycases – that a theory of attainment cannot always account for thegenerativity of non-religious digital engagements. To return to Fader’s(2017, 745) work on the heretical Jewish blogosphere: she argues
persuasively that doubt is not simply an unpersuasive discourse or stateinternal to the individual, but is ‘rather produced intersubjectively ininteraction’ in these digital spaces, that is, through digital mediation.
Further, in her work on Arabic Twitter, Al Zidjaly (2019, 10) compellingly
argues that expressions of atheism are not just extensions of alreadyexisting offline attitudes, but emerge from new identities and attitudes
formed from within those very spaces. Responses to the hashtag#WhyILeftIslam explicitly reference particular memes and otherdiscrediting actions native to Twitter as key catalysts of their apostasy. Al
Zidjaly suggests that ‘online forbidden actions taking place on Twitter are,in a clandestine and slow, yet steady manner, taking roots and shifting thevery fabric of Islamic societies in yet unforeseen ways’. Cases such as theseshow how digital affordances can go beyond enabling the fruition oflatent attitudes or desires to actively produce varieties of non-religion.
So far we have shown how the digital can be good to think with foratheists (not just for practitioners of religion; cf. Slater 2007), deliver ameans of communication to atheists whose voices have hitherto been
constrained, foster global visions of non-religious connection, offer avariety of meaningful modes of non-religious association, and in certain

INTRODUCTION

29

circumstances go further than actualising already existing atheist latency
to generate atheist attitudes, understandings and affects ‘from within’. Yet
we have also sought to highlight problems and limitations concerningsilencing, threats to privacy, and algorithmic disruption of non-religious
values and global frictions, and we finish by proposing a further
qualification concerning the potentially constraining nature of discussion
forums and their prescription of identity.
Scholars have, with good reason, emphasised a connection between
global intensification of engagements with digital media and a burgeoningof non-religious identity politics (e.g. Smith and Cimino 2012; Addington
2017; Bullivant 2020). Yet we want to caution against the presumption ofsuch a relation and to note how, even where such a relation unquestionably
exists, it may be shot through with ambiguity and ambivalence, as we saw
earlier in our discussion of Lundmark’s chapter in this volume. Consider
also the UK-based closeted ex-Muslims studied by Simon Cottee, forwhom anonymous online discussion forums are important forameliorating loneliness, offering support and providing an appropriate
language for defining their journey away from Islam. At the same time,
online discussion can trigger difficult emotions in users, and even lead todepression, while for others the usefulness of such forums is strictly timebound, in part because it is too definitional in terms of identity: notwanting to be defined by their atheism only, apostates may leave theforums to re-engage with ‘real life’. As Cottee was told by one of his
interlocutors: ‘There’s more to me than being someone who used to be a
Muslim’ (2015, 207). This does not gainsay the pivotal role of theseforums in apostates’ journeys, but rather suggests they can play a roleakin to the proverbial ladder that can be kicked away after the ascent, andthat non-religious identity can be something to be resisted via digital
engagements as well as fostered by them.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank John Hagström, Michael Vine and Jakub Zahora
for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this chapter.

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Notes1 The War Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh was set up in 2009 to prosecute crimes committed
during the Independence War in Bangladesh. It was criticised by the opposition as being
politically motivated and resulted in a considerable polarisation around issues of secularism,
atheism and Islam.
2 ‘New Atheism’ denotes the impact of ostensibly novel arguments against religion that saw
widespread popular diffusion in the first decade of the twenty-first century as a result of the
publishing successes of predominantly US- and UK-based atheist and humanist thinkers suchas Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, who are often
collectively referred to as the ‘New Atheists’.
3 See Chalfant (2016) and Laughlin (2016) for earlier applications of the concept. Laughlin’s isdistinctive for arguing that US digital atheism ‘is far less a counterpublic, in Warner’s sense,than it imagines itself to be’ (p. 334).
4 Richter is drawing on bell hooks’s concepts here.
5 Founded by Iranian Canadian ex-Muslim Armin Navabi in 2012, Atheist Republic hasdeveloped into a prominent and influential multiplatform digital community with manynational branches. Growing out of the Orkut-hosted ‘Iranian Atheists’ group, its name wascoined to contrast with that of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
6 Notably, Bangladeshis with residence in the US took a leading role in initiating and promoting
this digital platform. The significance of expatriate citizens for digital platforms such as MuktoMona has parallels in many other regions, such as Morocco (Richter) and India (Gupta).
7 https://mm-gold.azureedge.net/new_site/mukto-mona/muk-aboutus.html, accessed 19 May
2022.
8 It was a Yahoo group for a short time before being transformed into a website.
9 Aesthetics is understood here as ‘a methodological framework for integrating the analysis ofsensory, embodied, mediated, and cognitive aspects of religious practices within specifichistorical and political contexts’ (Binder 2019, 285 fn.3).
10 See Engelke (2014) for a related argument. The corollary of discerning which modes of religiosity
are to be considered legitimate cultural or human artefacts is the marking for disposal of those
aspects of culture which cannot thus be determined (that is, superstitious and potentially harmful
mystical practices and understandings); see Hagström and Copeman (2023).
11 Other states have trialled or adopted such laws, e.g. Egypt and South Korea. The Geek Feminism
Wiki has compiled a list of groups likely to be harmed by the introduction of ‘Real Names’
mandates. It includes ‘those whose religious beliefs, lack thereof, or experiences place them atrisk’ and ‘people who are questioning their religious beliefs’: https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/
wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F (accessed 20 August 2022).
12 ‘Saudi blogger Raif Badawi released from prison’, Al Jazeera, 11 March 2022. https://www.
aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/11/saudi-blogger-raif-badawi-released-from-prison (accessed
20 May 2022).
13 The relationship between non-religion and progressive politics is of course multifaceted andcontested. Studies by Laughlin (2016), Quack (2012) and Bradley and Tate (2010) provide
starkly different perspectives on this question.

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Slater, Don. 2007. ‘Glimpsing God in the Internet’, in Cultural Politics in a Global Age: Uncertainty,
solidarity and innovation, David Held and Henrietta Moore, eds, 88–97. Oxford: Oneworld.
Smith, Christopher and Richard Cimino. 2012. ‘Atheisms unbound: The role of the new media
in the formation of a secularist identity.’ Secularism and Nonreligion 1: 17–31. http://doi.
org/10.5334/snr.ab.
Stille, Max. 2020. Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh: The poetics of popular preaching.
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Stolow, Jeremy. 2008. ‘Salvation by electricity’, in Religion: Beyond a concept, Hent de Vries, ed.,668–86. New York: Fordham University Press.
Sulleyman, Aatif, ‘Pakistan considers social media ban due to blasphemous content online’, The
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Taussig, Michael. 1999. Defacement: Public secrecy and the labor of the negative. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Tomlins, Steven and Spencer Culham Bullivant. 2016. ‘Introduction’, in The Atheist Bus Campaign:
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University Press.

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I
Aesthetics and visual cultureof non‑religion

1
Rationalist camera: non-religious
techniques of vision in India
Jacob Copeman and John Hagström

There now exist many scholarly accounts that demonstrate how adept
religious practitioners have been at employing the latest forms of media
for their own purposes (e.g., de Vries and Weber 2001; Pinney 2004;
Dwyer 2006; Meyer 2009; Eisenlohr 2011). In the case of India, writes
Kajri Jain, ‘most new media and technologies made their initial
appearances with religious or mythological themes – indeed, one mightargue that in India, religion has been the most responsive arena for new
technologies of all kinds’ (2012, 188). In this chapter, we provide examplesof Indian rationalist visual media interventions that contrast Jain’s
diagnosis. They range from locally specific uses of video slow motion,
replay and hidden cameras to successful mass-mediatised campaigns of
exposé that demonstrate both the growth and the ambivalent nature of
the rationalist movement’s influence on Indian public culture. These
examples of how rationalist activists have used technological media (film)
to unmask superstitious phenomena rub up against well-establishedtrends in occult anthropology and largely Western-centric histories ofcommunication. In these two areas of enquiry, ethnographic and historical
data have been used to argue that technology – especially photography,
film and telegraphy/telephony – has inexorably spectral dimensions (e.g.
Leathem 2019). Meanwhile, considerable scholarly effort has been
expended on demonstrating how the emergence and expansion of various
technological forms has inhibited the proliferation of secular sensibilities

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and impaired secularisation (in Ashley Lebner’s (2018) sense, as projects
and processes that create domains and practices that are distinct fromreligious, mystical and superstitious premises). To be sure, anthropology
has accumulated a rich bank of insights that rightly undermine secularmodern triumphalism and, in particular, have radically unsettled the ideathat a specifically technological modernity allows for critical secularaffordances. In this chapter, we raise a provocation against these
disciplinary habits of mind and suggest that they risk saddling analysts
with a blinkered approach to contexts in which it is necessary to criticallyexamine yet also recognise the secular achievements and effects thattechnological forms can engender.
While secularism and detachment from religious forces and premises
are long-standing concerns in the sociology and anthropology of SouthAsia, existing scholarship on this region, as on others, frequently invokes
secularism as an abstract intellectual doctrine or in terms of its legalconstitutional status. If anthropology is philosophy with the people left in(Ingold 1992), secularism has mostly been analysed with the people leftout. This tendency has, however, begun to change, with an increasing
number of studies seeking to move beyond intellectualised debates toaccess the lived, practical dimensions of secularism. These studies form
part of a growing discussion of non-religion globally that seeks to take its
manifestations seriously in ethnographic terms (see for example Blanes
and Oustinova-Stjepanovic 2015; Schulz and Binder 2023). Research on
the topic in India has focused on the organised criticism of religion,delineating the particularities of Indian rationalism and non-religion as
ways of life.1 This work has entailed a kind of balancing act: acknowledging
the pervasiveness of religion and the prevailing importance of caste
without corroborating the frequently unchallenged assumption that all
Indians are ‘notoriously religious’ and only to be understood as homines
hierarchici. Studies of Indian rationalism have not omitted discussion ofmedia, matter, aesthetics and publicity: for example, its often mediatised
anti-superstition and miracle exposure campaigns (Quack 2012; Binder2019), its promotion of body donation as a means of enacting materialism
and social reform (Copeman and Quack 2015), and the aesthetics ofnaming (Copeman 2015) and speech (Binder, this volume), have all been
explored. However, the modalities of publicity it pursues have not formed
the primary subject matter of these studies.
While studies of non-religion have much to learn from recent
generative works on affinities and dependencies between religion andvarious forms of media (see Copeman and Schulz, this volume), it is also
the case that richly entangled histories of non-religion, media and matter

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have constituted a blind spot in this proliferation of works (Copeman andQuack 2015, 55). Moreover, we question the emphasis of this research on
the deeply (even essentially) woven-together nature of media and religion(e.g. Mitchell 2015, 116), an emphasis that militates against any
suggestion that media can be deployed to produce secular(ising) effects.
Helpful here is Ashley Lebner’s (2018) argument concerning the
inextricability of publicity and secularity. Lebner defines secularity as ‘thecondition of living with secularization’, with secularisation understood
not in conventional (yet now long discredited) terms of a putative growthin atheistic attitudes but instead as the enlargement of spaces of action
and reflection distinguishable from religion (p. 127). These seculardomains and sensibilities are marked by a ‘will to publicity’ because of
their attitudes to ‘reality’. The demarcations of secularisation, albeit
roughly drawn and subject to dispute, make reality subject to publicargument and contestation (pp. 129–30). Secularisation, by necessity,
involves ‘encounters with other views of reality and politics – and withother publics – and thus makes reality and politics themselves publicly
contestable’ (p. 142). Hence ‘the will to publicity, the desire to go public,arise under conditions of secularity’ (p. 129).
The Indian rationalist, humanist, and atheist activists we areconcerned with here seek to contest and remedy the non-naturalistic
understanding of reality they see as predominating in the country.2
Secularising publics do not necessarily see themselves as such (Lebner
2018, 129); however, in this case the mode of secular publicity at stake is
explicitly and reflectively so. The will to publicity is instantiated in theways activists have sought simultaneously to define their own reality andto mould others’ conceptions of it. Such a reality, roughly speaking, is one
that is ‘exhausted by nature [and] contain[s] nothing “supernatural”’. Its
proponents argue that ‘the scientific method should be used to investigate
all areas of reality, including the “human spirit”’ (Papineau 2007, para. 1).
Oratory and writing have traditionally been central to invoking this reality(Quack 2012; Binder, this volume). The movement’s use of written media,
earlier in the form of printed periodicals and pamphlets and more recently
as blogs and articles on dedicated websites, has been prolific and wideranging.3 To contest realities fraught with supernatural premises, a key
approach has been to launch public challenges; in this chapter, we refer tothese as ‘tournaments of reality’. Celebrated anti-superstition campaigner
Abraham Kovoor (1898–1978) was pivotal in developing this mode of
publicity, with ‘purveyors of superstition’ such as astrologers and palmists
challenged to prove their dubious claims under scientific conditions(Yongjia 2008, 9; Quack 2012). Such challenges would be advertised in

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newspapers and the results subsequently reported.4 Another prominentmeans of overtly contesting supernatural claims on reality, as noted, hasbeen the public performance of miracle demonstrations, the aim being
to set up a kind of ‘theatre of proof’ (Ecks 2010) in which to expose thetrickery of holy men who gain followers and funds through theperformance of miracles. Activists demonstrate the ‘science behind
miracles’ before audiences – most often schoolchildren – who are shownhow to perform them and encouraged to replicate the work of exposé
themselves.
Eric Chalfant (this volume) notes that atheist publics in the modernWest, since their inception as self-identified communities roughly 300
years ago, have been preoccupied with a politics of visibility centring on
how to make themselves, and atheism more broadly, visible to a wider
religious public. Meanwhile, James Bradbury and Mascha Schulz (thisvolume) propose the notion of secular media as that which simultaneously
expresses, and has the potential transformatively to embody (instantiate),secular convictions. These insights, taken together with Lebner’s on the
inextricability of secularity and publicity, set the stage for the central
focus of this chapter: the possibilities and perils afforded to activist reality
contestation by new developments in visual media. What happens when
the staple techniques of exposure we have outlined are filmed andsubjected to mass mediatisation?
Chalfant’s chapter explores questions of the visibility of atheist
identity through discussion of the public appearances of Madalyn Murray
O’Hair in the US in the twentieth century – her priority being to challenge
prevalent negative understandings of atheism, to re-present it indestigmatised form, and to claim certain rights for atheists – and also of
Reddit’s atheist community, in which questions of visibility are discussed
more equivocally, because ‘coming out’ as an atheist can entail profoundfamily tensions. This kind of atheist visibility is something to be thought
through carefully and even discouraged. Building on Chalfant’s analysis,
this chapter identifies further dimensions of an atheist politics of visibility
in India. Similar to members of the atheist Reddit community’s
ambivalence concerning visibility5 (see also Gupta, this volume), there
are drawbacks for Indian rationalists in becoming visible via mass media.
It can place a target on their backs; they become exposed even as, orprecisely because, they seek to expose superstitions. Further, the fact thatprivate TV is driven in part by a commercial profit motive can jeopardise
and actively undermine the messages that rationalists seek to convey. Yet
film and TV offer rationalists new ‘techniques of vision’ (Hirsch 2004),
techniques that are less about causing atheism to be seen than about

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prompting mass audiences to see better the nature of reality. Adapting
Hirsch (pp. 19–20), we highlight how film and TV – in the form of video
slow motion, the hidden camera, replay and massification of exposé –offer rationalists new techniques of vision conducive to the public
disclosure of naturalistic reality. By using the term ‘techniques of vision’,
we draw attention to the capacity of film and TV to ‘bring forth’ vision: theword ‘technique’ derives from ‘techne’ – ‘a form of poiesis, something thatbrings forth’ (Weiner 2001, 87).6 Rationalists view such techniques asforms of secular media in the sense discussed by Bradbury and Schulz(this volume): inherently disposed to both mediating and producing
secular sentiments. We refer here to the possibilities and hoped-for effectsof these media – their potential as secular media to provide new ways ofrendering revelations of reality.

Rationalist camera
In discussing what he calls registers of incontestability – modes andmeans of authentication, of communicating the unarguability of a given
claim – Mattijs van de Port (2004) emphasises the power of the how over
the what of communication; indeed, the latter’s relationship to the former
is depicted as being one of complete dependency. For the rationalists, thehow of filmic techniques of vision has the potential to bring forth the‘unarguable truthfulness’ (p. 20) of their claims concerning reality – akind of felicity condition underscoring the veracity of the naturalist
message transmitted. While many rationalists today harbour a sense of
having been left behind as religious figures such as spiritual gurus haveproceeded with notable entrepreneurial prowess to seize the expansive
possibilities of television and film, rationalists of the 1980s and 1990s
were in some ways ahead of the game in exploring the possibilities of film
to realise their agendas, in particular, film’s apparent ability to uncover
the truth because of the indexical relationship (direct connection, fidelity)
it affords between image and object.
Use of hidden cameras to forcefully demonstrate religious
wrongdoing has been common practice among rationalist groups since atleast the 1990s. Activists carried out early variants of the ‘sting’ journalismthat the Indian media would embrace in the 2000s (with incriminating
footage uploaded onto online news sites) as a means of collecting visualevidence of crime (Mazzarella 2006). They, too, contributed to the‘optical turn’ (Roy 2015, 5) taken by contemporary Indian democracy,
and more generally a strong case could be made for treating their work

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together with, or at least adjacent to, studies of the anti-corruption
movement (Khandekar and Reddy 2015) and transparency activism suchas the influential Jan Sanwais, village-based public hearings, centring on‘informational transparency’, that resulted in the Right to Information Act(Sen 2016). Indeed, India’s rationalists can be viewed as an idiosyncratic
segment of the consumer protection movement: both seek to counter misselling and to promote transparency and disclosure (Schwarcz 2014;
Gold 2016). Rationalists specialise, of course, in the mis-selling of
religion. It is no accident that probably the leading figure in present-day
Indian rationalism, Narendra Nayak, was prominent in the consumer
movement in the 1980s that resulted in the landmark Consumer
Protection Act, 1986 (‘Consumer protection is also about scientificthinking’, Nayak told us). Following from this, a proposed anti-superstition
law in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana employs the framework of
consumer protection in seeking to criminalise disprovable claims made byreligious practitioners as false advertising and fraud (Binder 2020, 135).
Activists seek to bring wrongdoing to light. ‘Consumer champion’ activists
seek to employ the techniques of vision offered by contemporary media
to provide visual evidence of religious crimes.
In addition to handing to the police any footage they obtain of
criminal wrongdoing committed by religious figures so that they can takeaction, rationalists frequently rely on TV to expose their findings to abroad audience: their footage is nested within another form of media – atelevisual ecosystem – whose priorities sometimes accord with therationalists’ and sometimes do not, which causes activists to have aconflicted view of TV. An account from 2007 provides an example of what
was, from the rationalists’ point of view, a successful collaboration with
TV producers. Rationalists from the Maharashtra Andhashraddha
Nirmoolan Samiti (Blind Faith Eradication Committee; ANS) used ahidden camera to expose the falsity of claims by a guru, Shivanand, that
he was enacting a penance of standing on nails for 82 days whilerefraining from speaking or taking food and water. With the assistance ofTV executives ‘who took [an] interest in [ANS] activities’, the footage wasultimately aired on a popular TV channel. The account, published in the
ANS in-house journal Thought and Action, concludes: ‘ANS activists
thanked Sahara TV for their cooperation in exposing Shivanand. If media
joins hands with ANS activists a lot can be done!’ (Mandape 2007, 3).
This optimism about the possibilities of TV is reflected in some rationalists’enthusiasm for what we earlier called the massification of exposé afforded
by TV: ‘TV is more convenient and more effective, I have found’, one
rationalist told us. He was probably referring to how activist mass

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communication via TV – and its perpetual storage and replayability in akind of ‘archive of reason’ on YouTube – can seem to promise liberationfrom ‘the constraints of material form’ (Hirschkind, de Abreu and Caduff
2017, 10), that is, the everyday labour of secular publicity involving
repetition of miracle demonstration and science education before
teachers and schoolchildren across the land. Rationalist media activism
certainly does possess the contemporary indicator of value that is‘citability’ – ‘the capacity to circulate’ – which we see in the hundreds andsometimes thousands of comments below the line of clips of rationalist
media appearances.
Some activists, however, have been left demoralised by theirencounters with TV. A female activist from Patna describes TV
appearances by rationalists as producers’ ‘alibi’: ‘Every day you havesomething: a tree secreting holy water, or some other bullshit. They
report all this. But the broadcast code says you can’t propagate
superstition, so they invite us. They describe some bullshit for the whole
programme, and then give us 30 seconds at the end. What’s the point?’
Another said: ‘TV uses us as puppets.’ They fear they are being used by TV
channels precisely as a means of screening more superstitious
programming. They could decline to participate, but then the ‘bullshit’
would go completely unchallenged. They are damned if they do anddamned if they don’t.
A technique of vision that held out particular promise, forrationalists, of publicly contesting the version of reality claimed bymiracle-enacting holy men was that of video slow motion: indeed, it was
integral to their investment of hope in film as a potentially secular
medium. Michael Wesch (2009, 25) cites Marshall McLuhan (Fallon
2008) on the replay of sound and video recordings as offering a means of
re-cog – recognition – of an event. He compares this to Catholic ritual, therepetition, or replay, of which is intended to elicit ‘a deepening for the
devotee’. Rationalists envision a different kind of deepening for devotees,
to be brought about through enrolling replay into a project of reality
contestation. Devotees must be made to re-cognise their guru’s miracles
as fraudulent by way of second-order observations of them via slowmotion replay.
At the turn of the twentieth century, slow motion was used inscientific cinematography for Pathe (Sobchack 2006, 350); similarly, workon early film culture and dance has explored its educational potential(Guido 2006, 144). The ‘detailed reproduction of specific phases oftechnical gestures’ afforded by slow motion can ‘give an exact idea of thedifferent phases in movement, phases that escape even the most trained

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eye’, and so ‘allow “progress to those in training”’ (p. 143). It was also used
as a kind of military technology by the British during the First World War
for observing the flight of artillery shells in minute detail. Early filmmakers, likewise, employed the technology ‘as a major mode of detailingand inspecting violence (a major civil concern at the time)’ (Sobchack
2006, 350 n. 20). The use of slow motion by rationalists to enact ‘truthevents’ (Banks and Harris 2004, 10) echoes these earlier uses, with motion
slowed to allow scientific observation of the technical skill required forenacting sleight-of-hand miracles and inspection of a kind of doublepronged violence: the violence of exploiting people who make offerings to
those who demonstrate such (false) powers, and the violence done tonaturalist reality. However, if slow motion apparently holds the capacity tomake the reality of this violence incontestable, the problem remains of thenesting of this secular medium within another (TV) that is more
ambiguous, mercurial, and less amenable to control by rationalists.
Video slow motion featured prominently in the attempts ofrationalist Basava Premanand (1930–2009) to discredit the eminentSouth Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba (d. 2011).7 One of the most celebrated
Indian rationalists of the latter half of the twentieth century, Premanandfounded the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA) in 1997,
and the monthly magazine The Indian Sceptic, and was a key figure in
institutionalising rationalist activism in India in the tradition of Abraham
Kovoor. Sathya Sai Baba famously designated his ability miraculously tomaterialise sacred ash (vibhuti) as his ‘calling card’, while a CNN journalist
described it as the guru’s ‘signature illusion’ (Marshall 2004). Given the
guru’s popularity and the extraordinary fetishisation of this substanceamong his devotees (Srinivas 2015), vibhuti has taken on the status, foractivists, as the number one superstitious substance and therefore figures
prominently in their programmes. If vibhuti is a fetish in the classic sense– the objectivised form of devotees’ desire – for activists it forms a kind ofreverse or ‘rationalist fetish’ as the objectification of devotees’ superstitionand so a primary object of desire for rationalists in terms of its debunking.
Such a reverse fetish is layered, with slow motion itself a kind of fetishistic
technology: ‘the desire to be able to view the same images again andagain points to the fetishist dimension in the act of watching in acontinuous loop’ (Guido 2006, 144), which is exactly what Premanand
does in order to access the secrets of the vibhuti fetish, a procedure that,in turn, is encompassed within a rationalist process of ‘fetishistic inversion’(Žižek 1991, 30) as the concept applies to interpersonal relationships: if
rationalists assume they focus on this powerful guru because he is alreadyin himself a powerful guru, in reality this person is a powerful guru at

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least in part because they treat him as one in their continual preoccupation
with debunking him.
In interviews with us, Premanand explained how he obtained asmuch film footage of the guru as he could find, particularly footage inwhich he is shown performing miracles. Meticulously and repeatedly
playing the footage and slowing it down to observe and learn how theguru performed his craft, Premanand confirmed what, as a rationalist, healready knew, namely that the guru’s miracles were merely magic tricks:‘I took all of his films and proved it [vibhuti] is taken from his fingers fromhis left hand – with slow motion it was very easy.’ But it also, crucially,
allowed him to learn the skills himself and to teach them to others, who,
it was supposed, would no longer be taken in by the guru; furthermore,they would be capable of demonstrating the sleight of hand to others. In
the documentary film Mystery Hunters, Premanand explains how what helearned from slow motion gave a new impetus to efforts to expose Sathya
Sai Baba ‘in real time’: ‘I wrote an article, “You too can be a godman”, andI trained lots of girls and boys. I said to them, “You go to [the guru’s
residence in] Puttarparthi, and say, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ and fall at his feet andhe will think you are bhaktas [devotees], and when he gives you vibhuti
you knock his hand.” One girl from Hyderabad University did it.’This ethnographic material is notable in part because it contrasts
with prevailing scholarship that links the proliferation of technologicalforms with the continuity, modification and entrenchment of religious
and superstitious premises. The myriad global entanglements of theoccult and the modern have been standard anthropological fare for quite
some time (e.g., Geschiere 1997); these entanglements are exemplified
by the rate at which ‘such long-standing practices as reading oracular
designs’ are given an ‘electronic update’ by embracing the television, forexample, as a technology of mystical mediation (Comaroff and Comaroff
1999, 287). In Gabon, Bonhomme has shown how the communicative
ambiguities of mobile phones have suffused such devices with occult risk
and he describes them as ‘witchcraft technology by design’ (2012, 223).
Bubandt’s inquiry into the ‘witchcraft nature of technology’ is also telling(2014, 241). In Buli, the gua is a cannibal witch capable of assuming ‘theshape of an animal or a plant, and it can become any object, mechanicalor inanimate. The gua in that sense can become technology: a motorbike
or a boat, for instance’ (pp. 222–3). In these contexts, researchers havesought to unsettle the ostensibly secularising telos of technologicalmodernity. Rather than advancing disenchantment, technology – even
when, as we have seen, it is recruited into the service of scientificdemonstration – is not the ‘causal engine dragging the gods [and the

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gurus] into retirement’ (Stark 1999, 251). It is the spectral and occult
potentialities of early and recent communications technology that havetended to occupy the forefront of analysis. As John Durham Peters put it
in his study of the history of communication – a work filled to the brimwith contemplation of the ghosts invariably conjured by phonographic
and filmic media – ‘Every new medium is a machine for the production of
ghosts’ (1999, 139).
The combined weight of ethnographic findings, critical studies in
the history of thought, and common contemporary critiques of anythingthat resembles outmoded modernisation theory, has instilled – as Lebnersuggests – an unproductive ‘trepidation, sometimes even confusion,around “secularization” as a theme for anthropological investigation’(2018, 129). From a different historical location, however, the criticalinterrogative and unmasking work pursued by rationalist activists looks
distinctly anthropological. Richard Baxstrom’s depiction of the ‘masteryof nonsense’ undertaken by early anthropologists in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries is relevant here: a ‘privileged space wasclaimed by early anthropology … through the discipline’s purported
ability to understand the seeming “nonsense” of “the native”. The
empirical mastery of domains consigned to the illogical [andsuperstitious?] realm of human social life’ was at the ‘foundation of anempirical method … that would allow field-workers to “see” [andexpose?] unknown or irrational forces’ (2014, 4, our emphasis). Central
to Baxstrom’s argument is that early anthropologists, like present-day
rationalist activists, seized on the irrational, superstitious and fake as
legitimising spaces for rationalist activity.
In their miracle demonstrations before schoolchildren, activists
often screen a film called Sai Baba Seduced Me. The children are told thefilm is ‘very serious’. Sai Baba is shown before a crowd that includes thePrime Minister of Thailand. His signature miracle – the materialisation ofsacred ash – is shown in slow motion so that one can see him perform,
quite clearly, the sleight of hand. Close-ups are shown of an ash pill in the
guru’s hands (compressed cow dung, according to activists) and a graphic
encircles it on the screen. There can be no doubt of the guru’s trickery. ‘Is
it a miracle?’ asks the sceptical narrator. We are then shown another trick
in which Sai Baba materialises a gold chain before offering it as a gift toan awestruck dignitary. The activist keeps stopping and replaying thefootage to make sure the audience has had every opportunity to see, inslow motion, how the guru has taken the chain out from under a‘memento’ (a large cup standing on a square wooden base) – somethingthat is easy to see in slow motion, and next to impossible without it.

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In fact this footage was shot not by rationalists but by the statebroadcaster Doordarshan. As was the case with ANS and Sahara TV,
Premanand availed himself of contacts at the channel who were rationalist
sympathisers. Having advance warning of the event at which Sai Baba
would produce the chain, Premanand contacted the producers, who were
careful to secure footage of the sleight of hand which, slowed down on
film, is clearly visible. The guru was ‘caught’ by a secular medium. Yet thenext part – the planned exposé on national television by Doordarshan of
the guru – did not go to plan. Doordarshan was inaugurated in 1976 but
only became a widely accessible mass medium in the mid-1980s (Ganti
2009, 119). Despite its state ownership and formal pedagogical mission,
it was not completely non-commercial and did not regard ‘the popular’ as
off limits. It screened content that was often ‘lustily corporeal’ (Mazzarella
and Kaur 2009, 17), and though the channel was under central control,much of its programming was produced in the private sector. Despite its
imperfections, however, the Doordarshan of these years is rememberedby activists as being characterised by an ethos of restraint and anticommercialism of which, generally, they approved.
What transpired in this case, however, is recalled by rationalists as
a promising moment for the movement thwarted. According toPremanand, ‘because VVIPs were involved, the [Doordarshan] Director
said he had to go higher [for permission to screen the materialisation inslow motion and so discredit the guru]. They called the Prime Minister[Narasimha Rao] and the concept was removed.’ The former Prime
Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao is regarded by rationalists as a politician
notorious for his indulgence of holy men, astrology and other superstitions(Yongjia 2008), but he is far from alone: at least one other Prime Ministerand a President of India have been Sathya Sai Baba devotees, and Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi famously consulted holy men (Jaffrelot 2012).
The case foregrounds, then, both the hopes that were invested in film andTV and how the nesting of the former within the latter leaves ample spacefor sabotage. This dynamic of filmic hope coupled with recognition of an
all-too-real potential for televisual spoliation is captured in the words ofan activist from Uttar Pradesh who was speaking about the episode before
a cohort of trainee science teachers in the state: ‘On Doordarshan [SaiBaba] materialised a gold chain on air, but TV cameras have no faith and[in slow motion] the footage showed him handling the chain and taking
it out. But Doordarshan edited the trick out [of the telecast footage]. They
are all in cahoots.’
If cameras ‘have no faith’ – the secular medium perfectly rendering
the incontestability of the guru’s deceit – the reality they so compellingly

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convey is sabotaged (in the eyes of rationalists) by the imperatives of asecond-order medium (TV). In consequence, the imperfect secularism of
the secular state is once again foregrounded. Thomas Hansen understands‘perceptions of the state as always/already split into a “profane” and a“sublime” dimension, one imperfect and corrupt, the other a more
durable ideal form relatively impervious to real-life imperfections ofsarkari practice’ (Hansen 2019, 10). The state’s handling of the footage
was, from rationalists’ point of view, the state at its most profane.
Conversely, the Constitution of India, which mandates that citizens foster‘scientific temper’, is the state at its most sublime, and it is by no means
the case that the state is consistent in obstructing rationalists’ activities.8
Rationalists must work with and through both of its dimensions as
outlined by Hansen.
Yet all was not lost. A sympathetic cameraman sent the slow-motion
footage to Premanand, who, afraid that state authorities might confiscate
it, had 12 copies made and sent to different locations outside the country.
‘One copy went to the BBC. The BBC immediately came and made theGuru Busters documentary which made me famous’,9 and the rationalists,
as we have seen, make suitable use of the footage in their education
programmes outside of any necessity to nest it within the televisual
domain. Notably, the footage features in Video CDs (VCDs) distributed by
Mumbai-based activists as part of a strategy of ‘deception to expose
deception’. The aim is to distribute, to devotees who might not otherwise
be willing to accept them, revelatory VCDs featuring slow-motion
unveilings of their spiritual masters’ sleights of hand. But to highlightgurus’ sleights of hand activists engage in some of their own. As one
activist told us, ‘I will talk piously about that baba [guru] to [devotees] on
the train, and ask them, “Have you seen the baba’s new VCD?” And theysay “No! You have it?” And I say, “Please take it!” I hand it over very
religiously.’ The footage lives on, then, in other ways, including now on
YouTube, where Sathya Sai Baba’s miracles can in theory be infinitely
re-cognised, and the reality of which they are symptoms contested.
In his account of the denigration of listening within modernist
narratives, Charles Hirschkind (2006) discusses the historical affinity
between rationality and vision. The other senses, such as hearing, wereconsidered too immersive and risked engulfing the individual in a mannerthat might compromise their independence and detachment. As a fidelity
requirement for the visual discernment of the real, a distance was
required between ‘the eye and its objects of perception’, thereby grounding‘the masculine spectatorial consciousness’ (13). The flesh-and-blood
rationalists we are discussing – as opposed to narratives concerning the50

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purported claims of reason – both reflect and depart from such acharacterisation. On the one hand, this chapter endorses the centrality ofvision to the rationalist project as it manifests in India. Watching is
integral to the process of debunking; new media provide new rationalist
techniques of vision. On the other hand, audience involvement in miracle
demonstrations entails use of the so-called lower senses of taste, smell
and touch as important ingredients in rationalist projects of exposé(Copeman and Quack 2015, 42). More significantly, the very means ofachieving objectively seeable, knowable reality requires the immersion– even engulfment – that in Hirschkind’s account is anathema to thatreality. Recall Premanand’s repeated rewatching of the guru’s sleight ofhand in slow motion and the replay of similar film before schoolchildren.
Scholars of South Asia – where seeing can be intimately tactile, a kind oftouching or even drinking of the seen object (Vidal 2006) – are perhaps
more aware than most that seeing need not always maintain a distance
between the eye and its objects of perception. In other words, Hirschkind
recalls the requirement of distance or detachment as a guarantor ofvision’s fidelity, but it is the untrained eye’s insensitivity to registers ofvelocity – requiring slow motion – that matters more.
The remainder of this chapter presents more recent case studies ofrationalist engagements with TV, and considers how the rationalist
politics of visibility has adapted to a context in which deregulation led tothe introduction of at least 300 satellite TV networks between 1995 and2007 (Udupa and McDowell 2017, 2). It is important to note that market
imperatives have stimulated both ‘profitable provocation’ – composed notjust of heightened representations of sex but also ‘irrational’ religious
appeals – and forces opposed to it (Mazzarella and Kaur 2009, 4). The
Cable Television Network Rules, issued in 1994, which forbid thebroadcast of content that encourages superstition, theoretically continue
to apply. Indian rationalists, however, are convinced that the state is nolonger interested in promoting the scientific temper that such codes
nevertheless ritually invoke. How, then, have they responded?10

The great tantra challenge
On 3 March 2008, on the set of a live show on India TV, one of the country’s
major Hindi-language news channels, celebrity rationalist Sanal
Edamaruku and a tantric priest named Pandit Surinder Sharma, whoclaims to advise leading politicians and is well known from his TV shows,
faced off in a show named The Great Tantra Challenge (the GTC henceforth).

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Headlined ‘India TV exposé of guru’s stunt’ on India TV’s YouTube channel,
the description reads: ‘Holy man Pandit Surender Sharma had claimed hecould murder a man using simply his mind. So, after hearing his boasts of
the lethal talent, sceptic Sanal Edamaruku challenged him to kill him there
and then. Mr Edamaruku – head of the Indian Rationalist Association –said calmly: “Go on then – kill me.” The mystic was at first unwilling but
finally relented and agreed to prove his powers’.11
The India TV presenter begins by announcing the contest between
the two: ‘Aur aaj TV pe ho raha hai tantra aur tark ke beech bohot badaghamasan’ (‘Today is the biggest battle between magic and reason onTV’). The set background represents the different sides through a displayof competing symbols: ‘scientific’ images connoting atomic energy andthe sun on one side, and images of a human figure in a classic yogic
posture and of a human skull crosscut with bones (resembling signage
warning of danger) connoting black magic and psychedelic effects on theother. The headline, in massive text, calls attention to the event as the
final day of reckoning between the two sides – ‘Aaj faisla ho kar rahega’(‘Today the final decision will be made’) – and to its sensational unfolding
live in front of a TV audience. Drama and suspense are prompted byheadlines – ‘Jyotish bada ya vigyan?’ (‘What’s greater – astrology or
science?’); ‘TV par tark aur tantra amnay-samnay’ (‘TV faceoff between
tantra and reason’); ‘Studio mein tantra aur tark ki ladai’ (‘In the studio– battle between reason and tantra’); ‘Tantra jeetega ya tark?’ (‘Will tantraor reason win?’) – flashing and replacing one another in a cycle, as if they
conveyed breaking news, with a background score akin to that of a horror
film or thriller. Indeed, the programme was originally to have ended withdiscussion of a controversy centring on the politician and Hindu ascetic
Uma Bharti, ‘but the “breaking news” of the ongoing great tantra
challenge was overrunning all program schedules.’12
Inside the studio, the battle lines were drawn. With Uma Bharti’s
face in the background, Edamaruku and Sharma are shown standing on
two opposing sides, with the news presenter, between them, acting as akind of referee; indeed, the presenter struggled to protect the boundary
between them from foul play, with Sharma constantly attempting toviolate it. The comportments of the contestants are starkly contrastive.
While Edamaruku, pillar-like, stands firm and still, Sharma appears
restless and desperate as he vigorously chants the mantra Om Aim Hreem
Kleem Chamundaye Viche while ritualistically sprinkling water on his
opponent for all of 15 minutes in the first bout. If Edamaruku repeatedly
smiles and mocks the tantric’s actions, explaining how their ineffectivenessdemonstrates or reconfirms the truth of reason – ‘Yeh sab andhvishwas

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GLOB AL SCEPTICAL PUBLICShai, is tantra-mantra mein koi shakti nahi hai’ (‘There is no power in themagic, all this is superstition’) – Sharma, in his defence, declares ‘Jo aapke
marg par chalega woh depression ka shikar hoga’ (‘Whoever would follow
your path will get into depression’).
Television rating points (TRPs) measure audience numbers in realtime, and maximising them is crucial for a channel’s advertising revenue.
With India TV’s TRP ratings soaring, the channel allowed the GTC to
overrun and roll on and on in ‘breaking news’ mode. With the constructionof suspense and unfolding drama drawing in millions of viewers all overIndia, the channel was moved to announce another round of ‘our epic
battle’ for the night show. The contest eventually shifted location from theinside of the studio to an open-air setting in which the tantric had
prepared a havan kund (sacred fire). The struggle between the rationalist
and the tantric continued for several more hours, with Edamaruku
emerging each time as the fearless victor and Sharma the fearful loser
anxiously trying to manipulate the situation in his favour. More and more
desperate to save face, the tantric shifts from seeking to kill Edamaruku
to causing him merely to faint or become ill. Finally, with the attempt at
harming Edamaruku through the invisible power of mantra clearlyfailing, the tantric tries to apply physical force to injure him in a less‘supernatural’ way. Still very much alive at the end of the evening,
Edamaruku was proclaimed the victor, and the guru a fake.

‘We love rational investigations!’
Thus was the activist challenge pioneered by Kovoor in the 1970s adjusted
to fit a tabloid TV format, and because it was enacted in real time as a kindof duel, it had a certain gripping quality that was reflected in the viewing
figures. With the two sides resembling dogs fighting over the same bone,
namely truth (Quack 2012, 307), the rationalist tournament of reality
came of age as a mass-mediated spectacle.
The GTC case begs the question, is it simply that the rationalist
theatre of proof is now larger, or does the shift in scale cause a qualitative
reshaping of its politics of visibility? We have already mentioned that the
GTC retained the form of the public challenge. This was not premeditatedand setting it up required some quick thinking on the part of Edamaruku.
Referring to a TV show on which the subject of ‘Tantric power versus
science’ was debated, he said:

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Both of us were invited to comment on the claims of Uma Bharti,
former chief minister of Indian state Madhya Pradesh, that her
political opponents were using tantrik powers to damage her. It wasa staged controversy. After screening a video clip about the troublesof the superstitious politician, my counterpart elaborated with thestandard routine of a tantrik specialist; he demonstrated various
techniques for causing harm to any person, such as burning theirphoto or torturing a little doll made from wheat flour that is named
after the intended victim. Suddenly half of the 30-minute show wasover without me having an opportunity to say a single word tocounter these absurdities. While I was watching Sharma ‘strangling’his sticky clot of dough with a thin red thread, I suddenly knew what
I had to do. My casually expressed doubts provoked him to boast
about his personal tantrik powers: he could, he claimed proudly, killanyone with mantras in just three minutes. That was where I caught
him. I challenged him to demonstrate his powers there and then, on
me. At first, he tried to ignore my proposal, but I insisted, and after
repeating ‘I challenge you!’ five times it could not be ignored. Still,
the anchor and I took the whole of the commercial break to pin
Sharma down. Finally, the trap clicked.
(Edamaruku 2008)
As with the use of hidden cameras and video slow motion that we havediscussed, film remains here the medium for rendering incontestable theillegitimacy of supernatural reality, Edamaruku’s filmed aliveness at theend of the evening apparently proving black magic’s inefficacy. But there
are key differences. Ever since Kovoor, it has been a requirement for all but
the most intellectualised variants of Indian rationalism to generateaudiences by making their programmes entertaining. Here, however, thetelevisual setting of ‘rationalist entertainment’ is much less within thecontrol of rationalists and might draw proceedings in a direction dangerous
to the cause, while the massification of televised exposé on a tabloid
channel draws rationalism into the attractive but dangerous orbit of
popular culture, with attendant fandom and heightened vulnerability to
attack and vilification. The trustworthiness of tabloid channels is generally
understood to be questionable. If they are the setting for rationalist
techniques of disclosure, does this corrupt the ability of those techniques
to bring forth the proper understanding of reality rationalists seek?
The Indian Journalism Review described the event as ‘anunprecedented experiment in rationalism – and television’, claiming that
it offered a win–win combination of enlightenment and entertainment:

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GLOB AL SCEPTICAL PUBLICS‘Over a couple of hours, a dangerous and widespread Indian superstition
had been slayed in the studios, while the channel laughed all the way tothe top of the ratings’ chart.’13 If, after liberalisation and deregulation, thecitizen-subject must be seduced into consuming enlightening information(Mazzarella 2003; Rao 2010), Edamaruku seemed to have hit upon awinning formula for rationalist communication.14 Though almost
certainly tongue in cheek, YouTube comments such as ‘We love rational
investigations!’ and ‘Temple of Doom live on television! Awesome’ point
to the enjoyable nature of the episode.15 Meanwhile, commenters both
Indian and non-Indian post triumphalist comments on Edamaruku’s GTC
feat: ‘This video wants to say FUCK OFF to all the religious fanatics andidiots. … Great Job Sanal’, ‘A victory for rationalists everywhere’, ‘Kya
bakwaas hai. Photo jalaa kar, mantar bol kar, aur loongi pehan kar aadmi
nehi marta. Bandook ki goli se baat kar, pandit :P’ (‘What a load ofnonsense. After burning a photo, after chanting mantras, and after
wearing a lungi a man doesn’t die. Talk with bullets from a gun, pandit’),‘Take a time machine back to the 14th century where you belong, you[tantric] LUNATIC’, ‘Only good thing India TV’s ever done … normallythey show “naag naagin ka pyaar” [lit. love of shape-shifting serpents, aphrase used here to refer to trashy superstitious TV].’ The comedic impactof the programme is also registered in comments such as: ‘He should have
faked a heart attack, that would have been hilarious’, and the reply: ‘And
then rise as a super zombie sceptic. lol’.
Edamaruku’s calls from media companies increased and India TV
began a regular series on debunking holy-man tricks that ran for over a
year. It might have seemed that the ‘experiment in rationalism – andtelevision’ had succeeded and that a new template for mass-mediatedrationalism had been established. However, we turn now from thetriumphalism that marked the immediate aftermath of the GTC to ourearlier discussion of the ambivalence at the heart of the rationalist politics
of visibility. A number of different registers of scepticism emerged in
response that were markedly distinct from the kind of scepticism
Edamaraku’s ‘victory’ was meant to encourage: the ‘wrong’ kind of
sceptical public(s) were formed, so to speak.
When we spoke about the programme with the residents of apredominantly Sikh and Hindu mixed-income neighbourhood of West
Delhi a few months later, it still seemed fresh in their minds. They had
found it amusing and entertaining; some even watched the whole thing,which lasted for several hours, gripped. However, to return to the Indian
Journalism Review write-up, they were not at all convinced that ‘adangerous and widespread Indian superstition had been slayed’. SomeNON-RELIGIOUS TECHNIQUES OF VISION

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residents, distrustful of India TV, regarded it as ‘a put-up show’ thatproved nothing (we return below to the allegation that the tantric was anactor). However, for those who took the programme at face value, adifferent problem (from rationalists’ point of view) emerged, which issimply that Edamaruku’s demonstration of invulnerability revealed nobroader truth beyond itself, but proved only his own adeptness atwithstanding tantric assaults. Edamaruku, as one of them put it, simply‘had the stronger magic’. Perhaps they took seriously the defeated tantric’s
claim that his inability to kill the rationalist was due to the latter’s own
tantric defensive abilities.
Such responses reflect a problem of efficacy faced by all forms ofrationalist challenge and miracle demonstration, mass-mediated or not:a problem of (lack of) exemplarity. Everyone knows there are fake gurus,
many of whom make false claims to possess supernatural powers.
Rationalists who debunk a given holy man’s claims require spectators totreat the debunking as exemplary, a synecdoche standing for any and allsuch claims. But the hope or assumption is frequently misplaced.
Audiences already know particular holy men are charlatans, but why
extrapolate beyond such cases? The very work of exposé that successfully
designates someone a fake guru can seem to rest on the assumption (andreconfirm as fact) that real or true gurus do exist; debunkers’ very successmay be their failure. What audiences learned from the GTC, then, was notthat tantra is false but that this particular tantric is, or at least that he is
not a very good one.
If such a problem of efficacy linked to refusal to extrapolate is notunique to the GTC or TV,16 it might have been made worse by the massmediated setting. Here we encounter a critique from Edamaruku’s fellow
rationalists, who explain that debunking works best in person throughaudience participation. Rationalists from Bihar and Karnataka we spokewith were dismissive of miracle demonstration on TV because ‘Talking
isn’t enough – it only works when you do and show’, and ‘Demonstration
only on ourselves has no value – the audience has to come and demonstrateit’. This is important for circumventing a key problem faced by rationalists(as we have seen in response to the GTC), namely the possibility thatrationalists will themselves be taken to be supernaturally powerful on
account of their ability to perform miracles in the very act of exposing
them. As one activist emphatically stated to us: ‘When I burn myself they
think I’m magical, but when they do it – that is the proof.’ Indeed, where
Kovoor gave lectures about the science behind miracles, and was able todemonstrate several of them, the novelty and reported effectiveness ofPremanand’s approach were to combine this approach with getting the56

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audience to demonstrate them, too. This is now a key activist principle,
borne out at least in part by viewer responses that consider Edamaruku
to have emerged victorious because of his better magic. If the audience istaken away or is in front of a TV screen, the key participatory element isfoiled and the reality contestation less effective.
Tom Boland (2019) notes that in public debates about New Atheism,
science and climate change, promotion of critical attitudes by New
Atheists ironically provides tools for climate change deniers to critiquethe claims of mainstream science regarding the reality of climate change.
Those whom the New Atheists or scientists would term climate change
deniers or conspiracy theorists see themselves as the sceptics as they
adopt and deploy the supposedly universal elements of logic and scienceto produce doubt about mainstream scientific claims (p. 97): sceptical
publicity is directed at the sceptics. Similarly, Indian rationalists, in a timeand country in which everything seems ripe for debunking, are notexempt. ‘Was it genuine?’ asked many of those we spoke with about the
GTC; indeed, there are grounds for at least broaching the subject. Tantricacts in general are strongly associated with secrecy (White 2000; Urban
2003). A tantric openly operating in front of TV cameras – and witheverything to lose – raises questions. To take just one comment beneaththe YouTube video: ‘A true black magician will never cast spells openly onothers. Black magic is the most secretive. Even entire villages become sickand die when a true black magician passes by.’Further, a website associated with Sathya Sai Baba – a prominent
rationalist target, as we have seen – claimed that nobody had ever heardof this supposedly very famous tantric guru and that the Sanskrit mantras
he chanted were in fact life-giving rather than life-taking.17 Rationalists,
moreover, are well known for dressing up and acting out the parts of
those they seek to expose.18 For these reasons, the website asserts, theGTC proved nothing about the efficacy of tantra: ‘Surprising how so many
people and so many websites blindly jumped on this bandwagon. … It is
ironic how those who ask the general public to embrace rationalism,
logic, skepticism, the scientific process and free thinking do not subject
stories that advance their beliefs to the same standards they apply tostories that advance spiritual people’s beliefs.’ In seeking to debunk the
televisual debunking the website enacted a kind of negative reciprocity,
thereby adding a further dimension to a tournament of reality in which
sceptical subject positions are by no means restricted to avowed sceptics.19
This partly reflects Boland’s (2019, 2) observations concerning critiqueof critique, or the unmasking of unmasking, as a self-undermining
exercise. But that is not quite right. The authors on the Sathya Sai Baba

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website are not critiquing critique per se but rather bad critique; it is
Edamaruku’s critique, as they see it, that is self-undermining in its beingat least as fraudulent as the tantric he seeks to expose.
Even if the GTC was not a hoax, rationalists, too, worried that India
TV’s wish to make the most of its popularity might result in fraudulence.
For the ratings success of the GTC meant it was now not only rationalists
but also media companies and others who had an interest in the
spectacular debunking of holy men, and in ways that might have thepotential to reflect badly on the movement whose methods of exposé itborrowed from. As we noted earlier, India TV sought to capitalise on the
success of the GTC by screening almost nightly exposés of fraudulent holymen, often via the use of hidden cameras. If at first glance the strategy
seemed to mimic (albeit crassly), while provoking a strange kind of
nostalgia for, an age of broadcasting in which it was imperative to impart
information that could further national growth and development (Sen
2016, 133), the debunking of course had very little to do with thecultivation of ‘scientific temper’ and everything to do with entertainment.
Well aware of this, far from gaining the approval of the movement, many
rationalists suspect that the holy men subjected to televisual exposé wereactors; that is, India TV was debunking fake fake holy men. Here is where
the critiques of Edamaruku’s fellow rationalists and those found on
saisathyasai.com find common ground. While rationalists were notdirectly involved in the serial exposés screened by India TV in theaftermath of the GTC, they nonetheless feel compromised by the (alleged)
duplicity of the TV producers. The attempt to unmask fraudulent spiritual
practices as entertainment on commercial TV comes to seem less of awin–win. Rationalists’ entrance into a domain in which it is apparently
expected that no one plays by the rules potentially compromises theirreputation and brings the movement into disrepute.

Reality TV and the meta-politics of atheist visibility
To borrow from the Indian Journalism Review article quoted above, 2018
witnessed a still more radical experiment in rationalism and television,
with the famous Hyderabad-based rationalist Babu Gogineni appearing
as a contestant on the Telugu version of Bigg Boss, the Indian adaptationof a globalised format known in the UK as Celebrity Big Brother, in which
well-known contestants are confined to a house fully equipped withsurveillance cameras to become 24/7 objects of the voyeuristic viewing
public.20 Viewers interact with the show by voting to eliminate a contestant

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each week; the last person remaining wins. ‘Staging a TV show as if it was
not a TV show’, in the form of a ‘dream of immediacy’ (van de Port 2011,76), reality TV defines a form of subjectivity ‘which equates submission tocomprehensive surveillance with self-expression and self-knowledge’(Andrejevic 2002, 253). Meanwhile differences between individual
participants are key to selection criteria and exaggerated by producers togenerate controversy and resultant ‘eyeballs’ (Sen 2016, 147). Bigg Bossis renowned for the extraordinary level of social media coverage it
generates, with contestants often viciously trolled by fans organised into
campaign ‘armies’ (senas) who owe allegiance to their rivals.
Gogineni was an apt choice by the show’s producers. Comparatively
youthful, outspoken, active on social media, a campaigner within the
broader movement to up its media game, and with experience ofpresenting his own TV show, he was probably better equipped than any
other public-facing rationalist to engage a youthful audience. He was also
more likely than other rationalists to view the invitation as an opportunity
rather than as something that would further ‘subordinat[e] the priorities
of a movement for mental revolution to the agendas of profit-oriented,
privately owned media networks’ (Binder 2020, 240); reality TV has,
after all, been described as the single biggest phenomenon of Indian TVof the past two decades (Sen 2016, 134).21 We have discussed Indian
rationalism’s predilection for contests and challenges as central planks of
its sceptical publicity. It intersects here with the ‘series of contests andconfrontations’ (Sen 2016, 147) that is the standard fare of reality shows.
What would come of this novel intersection? Could supernatural reality
be contested on reality TV?
If Gogineni was already a well-known figure, since his appearance
on Bigg Boss he has been subject to elements of the fan bhakti (devotion)
for which South India is famous (Prasad 2009; S. V. Srinivas 2009).
YouTube comments beneath his videos proclaim: ‘Babu Gogineni
Zindabad’ (‘Long live Babu Gogineni’), ‘I am a big fan of babu gogineni’, ‘Ilove you babu Thank you sir’, ‘Babu rocks’, ‘Babu garu … first things first,
mee new look bagundi [very nice]. Now, we all rationalists owe you big
time sir. Your courage, unrelenting fight against these cheaters is aparallel [unparalleled?] in Telugu world Sir. Thank you and we all oweyou.’22 Gogineni and his fans have certainly made rationalism more visible
in Telugu public spaces and, to refer back to Chalfant’s argument about
an atheist politics of visibility, that is at least part of the point. If Bigg Bossitself is dominated by the notion of popularity, the result of his
participation is ambiguous. On the one hand reportage drew attention tohis popularity among youthful viewers: ‘It’s now increasingly becoming

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clear that many had underestimated Babu Gogineni’s popularity before“Bigg Boss-2” … In India, large sections of youngsters are atheists … In
Babu Gogineni, atheists in the Telugu States see one of their own. Since
the media usually don’t give rationalists much of a voice, only a few very
sophisticated rationalist speakers have made a name in the country.
Gogineni is one of them.’23 On the other hand, while he did last for 63
days in the house, he did not come close to winning.
In press interviews after his elimination, Gogineni spoke of how ‘itgave me a huge platform to air my views’. Recalling the initial invitation,
he said: ‘I chose to go only because they said I could be myself. In fact, I
told them, “I can’t sing, dance or perform. ... I can’t even comb my hair. So
what will you do with me 24 hours a day?” That’s when they said they areinviting because I am a humanist and a rationalist. I liked that.’ Heconsidered his stay in the house a success, noting that hebroke many stereotypes, questioned many conventions andsuperstitions in the Bigg Boss house. I stepped my left leg into theshow first,24 opposed the pumpkin-breaking custom25 in the moviemaking task, gave equal wages to the hero and heroine and offereda share to the labours from the producer’s profit too.26 I believethese are victories for a humanist in the house. This is indeed amessage to the film industry as well.27
Recalling his interactions on the show with the legendary film actor
Kamal Haasan, who had entered the house to promote his latest film,
Gogineni records the thrill of having Haasan discuss ‘humanism in frontof tens of millions of viewers with me’. Flattered that Hassan knew his
name ‘even though we have had no prior contact’, he recalls how Haasan
singled him out as a kindred spirit: ‘We are both connected by ourrationalist mind.’ Star-struck, but also sensing an opportunity to makemore visible a true icon’s sympathy for rationalism, Gogineni presented
Haasan with his T-shirt, which even before the interaction with Haasan
had formed a small part of Gogineni’s atheist visibility strategy. For the
text on the T-shirt read ‘REASONOTRELIGION’. Accepting the gift,
Haasan ‘said that he would cherish it’.28
As we have noted, however, the show demands controversy and seeks
to establish the conditions for achieving it. The principal controversy
featuring Gogineni concerned an earlier criticism he had made of acclaimed
Telugu film director and avowed atheist S. S. Rajamouli. The year before, in
2017, Rajamouli had visited a temple in Mantralayam where he prayed withhis family before the village deity Manchalamma and Raghavendra Swamy

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GLOB AL SCEPTICAL PUBLICSto give thanks for the success of his films. On a talk show at the time, Gogineni
had ‘criticised Rajamouli for maintaining dual standards. He added that [he]has no objection if Rajamouli visits [a] temple but on one side he is claiming[to be] an atheist but on the other side he is visiting temples[,] which isquestionable.’ It was on account of this criticism that he was nominated foreviction by another of the contestants who claimed – apparently without
irony – that for him Rajamouli ‘is like god’.29 Gogineni had committed, then,what counts as a kind of blasphemy in the Telugu world of fan bhakti. If thematter was raised quite cynically by his fellow contestant as a means ofeliminating a rival, the fact that Gogineni was voted off by viewers
nevertheless seemed to demonstrate their dislike of Gogineni’s criticisms.
The host, Nani, also weighed in, revealing that his own grandmother was ‘aconverted Christian and [that] he used to go to Church every Sunday withher even though he himself is not a Christian because he respects her belief
and he loves her. Then Nani used this analogy to defend Rajamouli’s visit totemples[, because], even though Rajamouli is an atheist, he might havevisited temple on the request of his family members as he loves them and herespects their beliefs.’30 While any kind of criticism of a Telugu hero such as
Rajamouli was unlikely to be well received, viewers apparently also foundunappealing the glimpse it afforded of ‘internal’ rationalist policing (seeHagström and Copeman 2023) with its militant demand for self-consistency
in a domain they intuit and may know from their own experience – especiallyin sensitive domestic contexts that may require delicate manoeuvring
between one’s own private disbelief and the religiosity of one’s family
members – to be marked by the kinds of compromise, accommodation andambivalence that are rarely reducible to the religion versus atheism binarythat Gogineni apparently seeks to police and maintain.31
What resulted, then, was a kind of meta-politics of atheist visibility,with Gogineni’s prior criticism of atheist (in)visibility in the case ofRajamouli’s temple visit the principal form that atheist visibility took in
the Bigg Boss house. As Gogineni himself put it, ‘You can’t claim you don’t
believe and yet be seen praying at temples’ (our emphasis).32 If Gogineni
is concerned that atheists should not be seen to be hypocritical, this very
concern with (and attempted enforcement of) how things should appear
is strategically made visible by another contestant in such a way that thedesignated spokesperson for rationalism on the programme – andrationalism itself? – is made to appear unappealing. While we must recall
that an atheist politics of visibility is not concerned solely with popularity
or even acceptance, Gogineni’s experience highlights an obvious peril of
this kind of rationalist visibility, namely that viewers might be put off by
what they see. Indian rationalists have long been accused by their critics

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of arrogance and condescension (see Binder, this volume, on atheist
arrogance as an aesthetically produced affect), and Gogineni was
criticised, too, along precisely these lines. One article drew attention to
Gogineni’s haughtiness in telling another contestant that ‘Living in thesame house and talking Telugu doesn’t make us equal. I am aninternational figure’,33 and rival contestants’ social media armies madesimilar complaints via Twitter:
I used to have some respect on #BabuGogineni before#BiggBossTelugu2 show but i completely lost it because he doesn’t
looks a humanist and looks like egoist for me with his behaviour inthe house and in the news channels
Hi big boss team … babu Gogineni is the wrong contestant in
the house … From first day he is not at all participating any tasks …
unnecessarily he is analysing the things … making every one
mentally disturbed.
Babu gogineni shd be evicted from Big boss and sent to
Ramana Maharshi Ashram where he will learn the very purpose of
our life.
Any sane and rational person know Babu Gogineni got the Big
Boss 2 opportunity on his stance ‘reason not religion’ and eliminatedbecause of his arrogant and irrational behavior.34
If such comments enact quite typical critical moves in respect of atheism,
such as denying the reality of the avowed humanists’ humanism, claiming
the irrationality of their rationalism, and underscoring their arroganceand egoism, it is difficult to gauge how representative they are of
Gogineni’s overall reception: he was never going to receive a sympathetic
hearing from members of rival contestants’ social media armies. However,such comments are worth noting here to give a sense of how the perceived
arrogance of the ‘aloof’ atheist is apt to be reproduced even as (andperhaps because) rationalists seek to make themselves more accessible
and approachable in pop culture contexts, a perceptual reproduction that
adds a further stratum of ambivalence to the politics of atheist visibility.
Mass-media visibility strategies can also make public-facing
rationalists more vulnerable to legal action and even violence. A keyelement of the Bigg Boss formula is the creation of a kind of hothousebubble, with contestants cut off from the publicity the show generates.
Therefore, Gogineni was not aware until his elimination that during his
confinement he had been charged with a range of offences by the
Madhapur police that included sedition, outraging religious feelings,

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cheating, and intent to provoke a breach of the peace.35 Though the
charges did not directly relate to comments he made during the
programme, it appears that its raising of his public profile led the private
petitioner to search online for his speeches, on the basis of which thepetition was filed. Though the charges – condemned by local andinternational humanist groups as spurious and malicious – were quickly
dismissed by the Hyderabad High Court, for International Humanist andEthical Union President Andrew Copson they were nevertheless‘dangerous’ for potentially ‘painting a target’ on his back for religious
extremists.36 Edamaruku, too, is in exile in Finland because of both thelegal cases he faces and death threats; once again, it seems that rather
than the content of the GTC (it is a Christian group that has charged him
with blasphemy) it is the way it enhanced his visibility that made him
vulnerable.37 More broadly, while Indian rationalists have for several
decades been reviled by Hindu nationalist groups for being ‘anti-Hindu’(that is, for their alleged concentration on Hindu practices rather thanthose of other religions), the recent advance of South Asian outrage
politics – in which the ‘emotional subject’ (Blom 2008, 21) enacts politics
on the basis of an ‘experience of indignation’ (Blom and Jaoul 2008, 2),and ‘hurt religious sentiments’ are strategised and distributed as a meansof cultural regulation (Zecchini 2020, 243) – can cause atheist visibility
projects to become particularly fraught with danger. Maharashtrian
rationalist leader Dr Dabholkar was killed in 2013. Edamaruku, as noted,
has had threats made on his life (not just by the tantric). Rationalists in
Karnataka were killed in 2015 and 2017. Others employ bodyguards. If
the era of private TV has offered new opportunities to rationalists to makerationalism visible, the recent exceptional level of violence directed
towards them is perhaps a perverse measure of their success. It is not farfetched to suggest that there is a relation between this violence and theincreased media visibility of rationalists; that is, the violence is an extralegal form of ‘vigilante censorship’ (Pohjonen and Udupa 2017, 1178).

Conclusion
For some time, there has existed a considerable scholarly impetus to ‘radicallyrevise the purported status of media as secularizing machines’ (Udupa andMcDowell 2017, 9), when media has in fact been completely normalised as
the reverse.38 Whatever the unwelcome outcomes and compromises of
televised and mediatised rationalist exposés, their sometimes widely
publicised successes should invite recognition of the power and – dare we say,NON-RELIGIOUS TECHNIQUES OF VISION63

at least from the point of view of rationalist activists and their supporting
publics in India and elsewhere – the emancipatory secular potential oftechnological media, an ethnographic as well as analytical thematic that has
generally been pushed aside in favour of counter-examples that drive home
media’s imbrication with the radically non-secular.
Building on works by Lebner, Chalfant, and Bradbury and Schulz, we
have shown how the rationalist will to publicity has employed various
visual media both to contest supernatural reality and to make rationalism
visible to a wider public. Adapting Kovoor’s model of the public challenge
to new media formats, spectacles of reason are enacted as massified‘ideological events’ (Nash 1995) with explicit instructional value. Film andTV have offered rationalists new techniques of vision for bringing forthnaturalistic reality, with the indexicality of film, in particular, marking it
out as having ‘no faith’ and therefore being potentially a secular medium:video slow motion, replay and hidden cameras have all been key filmic
techniques of vision to enact truth-events, inspiring viewers to re-cognise
reality. We have also seen, however, that the requirement to nest faithlessfootage within potentially ‘less’ secular media can subvert its hoped-for
communicative efficacy. In spite of their ambivalent interactions with TV
before liberalisation, rationalists have sought to adapt their politics ofvisibility to the imperatives of private TV, with high-profile coups such as
the GTC and Bigg Boss, on channels, too, that rationalists recognise havelittle or no interest in promoting ‘scientific temper’.
In the case of the GTC, rationalism seemed to triumph not justagainst tantra but against its own and others’ expectations of its ability toretain relevance and visibility in the age of commercial TV: the rationalist
tournament of reality as a mass-mediated spectacle was a huge ratings
success. However, once more the matter of media within media, ormediatic nesting, raised questions of efficacy. If India TV is entertaining
but not trustworthy, the GTC in the opinion of many viewers could not be
distanced from the agreed-upon characteristics of the channel on which
it was broadcast; a kind of unmasking of unmasking ensued. The Bigg
Boss experiment also embedded rationalism in a pop culture format inwhich its penchant for controversy and contest could find new expression.
Certainly successful in making rationalism highly visible in Telugu public
space, Gogineni’s appearance also occasioned the revival of hoaryaccusations of atheist arrogance, saw controversy turned against public
perceptions of rationalism, and underscored how a new mass-mediatedvisibility for rationalism is likely to be accompanied by new vulnerabilities
in an era of ‘religious outrage as spectacle’ and ‘blurred distinctions
between the emotional and the orchestrated’ (Ruud 2019, 107).

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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Stefan Binder, Johannes Quack, Mascha Schulz
and the audience at the Centro de Investigación Interuniversitario en
Paisaxes Atlánticas Culturais (CISPAC), Santiago de Compostela, for theirhelpful feedback. We are particularly indebted to Koonal Duggal for his
insights and help with this chapter.

Notes
1 See in particular works by Quack (2012), Binder (2020) and Copeman (2015). Renny Thomas(2017) has conducted related work on atheism and unbelief among Indian scientists.
2 While we use the term atheist activists here to describe these figures, the reticence with whichmost rationalists use the term ‘atheism’, or its closest Hindi equivalent nastika, in public must
be noted. The public use of these terms is discouraged since they have the potential to prevent
activists from getting a sympathetic public hearing. As in rationalist organisations globally,
there is an unequal representation of the sexes in the Indian movement. Roughly, active womenconstitute less than a quarter of the group’s membership. The caste make-up of activists is quite
diverse, but leaders tend to hail from upper-caste and -class backgrounds.
3 The London-based Rationalist Press Association (RPA), founded in 1899, made available cheap
copies of classic Western humanist texts in the mid-twentieth century, and ‘One of the mostinfluential successes of Indian atheist publishers was to translate much of the Thinker’s Library,
and many other classics of humanism, into local languages like Malayalam’ (Melville 2007).
Periyar, himself an extremely influential and prolific anti-Brahminical and atheist pamphleteer,
had translated into Tamil important critical works on religion (Manoharan 2020: 4). The
tradition continues apace.
4 Kovoor was originally from Kerala, but much of his work was in Sri Lanka. See Wijeyewardene’s(1979) account of Kovoor and Sri Lankan rationalist challenges to supernatural understandingsof fire walking. Such challenges are a point of connection between the Indian movement andrationalists elsewhere (Quack 2012).
5 This ambivalence is strongly reminiscent of the dynamic of disclosure (‘coming out’) andconcealment (‘staying in’), which is found in many studies of apostasy (e.g., Brooks 2018).
6 Paraphrasing Hirsch (2004, 20).
7 See T. Srinivas (2015) for a full account of the Indian rationalist encounter with Sathya Sai Baba.
8 Most notably, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Emergency suspension of democracy in the 1970s
is remembered by many rationalists as a time of productive cooperation with the state.
9 IMDb summary of Guru Busters (dir. Robert Eagle, 1995): ‘On the road with India’s antisuperstition campaigners confronting fraudulent gurus and quacks. The film reveals thetrickery behind pseudo-magical phenomena such as levitation, materialization and walking onfire and questions the credibility of leading “god men” such as Satya Sai Baba.’ https://www.
imdb.com/title/tt0472100/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl (accessed 23 May 2022).
10 We can compare this with comparable fears elsewhere among rationalists concerning aperceived takeover of the media by adept religious entrepreneurs; for example, ‘as one
prominent British freethinker has confided, the proliferation of Christian computer andInternet resources has been seen within secularist circles as a perceived “threat that must be
countered”’ (Nash 2002, 280).
11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfJPYzxHM4g (accessed 23 May 2022). Our thanks to
Koonal Duggal for this and other references on and insight into the GTC.
12 ‘The great tantra challenge’, Rationalist International, 18 March 2008. https://web.archive.org/
web/20080318045751/http://www.rationalistinternational.net/article/2008/20080310/
en_1.html (accessed 23 May 2022).
13 Indian Journalism Review, 18 March 2008. https://indianjournalismreview.com/2008/03/18/
how-indian-tv-slayed-a-dangerous-superstition/ (accessed 23 May 2022).

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14 Here we paraphrase Ursula Rao’s (2010, 189) discussion of political information and infotainment.
15 A reference to one of the Indiana Jones Hollywood blockbusters.
16 There are many comparable instances from the ethnographic record. See, for example, Shipley(2009, 524) and Evans-Pritchard (1976, 107).
17 Sathya Sai Baba, ‘“Great tantra challenge” hoax? Rationalist International, India TV &Sanal Edamaruku’, 2 August 2008. https://sathyasaibaba.wordpress.com/2008/08/02/greattantra-challenge-hoax-rationalist-international-india-tv-sanal-edamaruku/ (accessed 21
August 2022).
18 See Copeman and Ikegame (2012, 295–7).
19 See Copeman (2018) on debunking and cycles of negative reciprocity.
20 The ‘hugely popular format … originated in the Netherlands and has since been implemented inover 50 countries’ (Sen 2016, 156). It is to be distinguished from the ‘civilian’ version of Big Brother.
21 See Binder (2020) on Gogineni’s show The Big Question with Babu Gogineni, which ‘has been
airing successfully from 2014 to 2015 on 10TV, a private news channel with close ties to theCommunist movement’ (p. 241).
22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4_mH_sbPX8 (accessed 1 July 2022).
23 https://www.ntvtelugu.com/en/post/thats-what-strikes-for-babu-gogineni (accessed August2021).
24 Stepping into a house left foot first is a well-known bad omen in India.
25 Ritual performed at house-warming ceremonies.
26 See Quack’s (2012) important reflection on the centrality of social justice efforts within Indian
manifestations of rationalism.
27 Times of India, 31 August 2018.
28 Times of India, 31 August 2018.
29 Telugu360, 29 July 2018, ‘Bigg Boss tidbits: Rajamouli’s atheism was central topic in show thisweek’. https://www.telugu360.com/bigg-boss-tidbits-rajamoulis-atheism-was-central-topicin-show-this-week/ (accessed 24 May 2022).
30 Telugu360, 29 July 2018, ‘Bigg Boss tidbits: Rajamouli’s atheism was central topic in show thisweek’. https://www.telugu360.com/bigg-boss-tidbits-rajamoulis-atheism-was-central-topicin-show-this-week/ (accessed 24 May 2022).
31 On such familial compromises and ambivalences, see Quack 2017.
32 ‘Rajamouli, who is also an atheist like me, went to a temple and prayed after his movie becamea success. So, I said that either you say you belong to a religion or admit that you’re an atheist
and stick to it. You can’t claim you don’t believe and yet be seen praying at temples’ (Gogineni
cited in Suhas Yellapantula, ‘Inside Bigg Boss’ house, it felt like I was in North Korea on a
starvation diet: Babu Gogineni’, Times of India, 31 August 2018. https://timesofindia.
indiatimes.com/tv/news/telugu/inside-bigg-boss-house-it-felt-like-i-was-in-north-korea-ona-starvation-diet-babu-gogineni/articleshow/65621383.cms (accessed 24 May 2022).)33 ManuaTeluguMovies, 24 July 2018, ‘Babu Gogineni’s true colors exposed’. http://
manatelugumovies.cc/babu-goginenis-true-colors-exposed/ (accessed 24 May 2022).
34 Sakshi Post, ‘Kaushal army slams Babu Gogineni over paid fans comment’, 3 September 2018.
https://english.sakshi.com/entertainment/2018/09/03/kaushal-army-slams-babu-gogineniover-paid-fans-comment (accessed 24 May 2022).
35 The News Minute, 14 August 2018, ‘“Kamal Haasan said we share a rational mind”: Bigg Bosscontestant Babu Gogineni’: https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/kamal-haasan-said-weshare-rational-mind-bigg-boss-contestant-babu-gogineni-86559 (accessed 24 May 2022).
36 Hemant Mehta, ‘Two notable South Asian atheists face blasphemy charges in their countries’,
Friendly Atheist, 22 July 2018. https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2018/07/22/two-notablesouth-asian-atheists-face-blasphemy-charges-in-their-countries/ (accessed 24 May 2022).
37 See P. Thomas (2020) for further details of Edamaruku’s plight.
38 Not only in anthropology. See, for instance, art historian W. J. T. Mitchell’s (2015, 116)
suggestion that contemporary media ‘is simply the latest version of that image of the divinity
in which “we live and move”. Perhaps that is why the rhetoric of religion is so deeply woven into
the discourse on media, why concepts like media and mediation so easily turn into god-terms
even in secular, technical contexts, why the concrete materiality of a medium is so easily
abstracted and spiritualized by the terminology of media and mediation.’66

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Srinivas, Tulasi. 2015. ‘Doubtful illusions: Magic, wonder and the politics of virtue in the
Sathya Sai movement.’ Journal of Asian and African Studies 52 (4): 381–411. https://doi.
org/10.1177/0021909615595987.
Stark, Rodney. 1999. ‘Secularization, R.I.P.’ Sociology of Religion 60 (3): 249–73. https://doi.
org/10.2307/3711936.
Thomas, Pradip. 2020. ‘Journalism and the rise of Hindu extremism: Reporting religion in a posttruth era’, in The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Journalism, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler
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Thomas, Renny. 2017. ‘Atheism and unbelief among Indian scientists: Towards ananthropology of atheism(s).’ Society and Culture in South Asia 3 (1): 45–67. https://doi.
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2
Performing the secular: street theatre
and songs as ‘secular media’ inBangladesh and West Bengal
James Bradbury and Mascha Schulz

Shomapti Debi:1 My father was passionate about left politics.
Because he was a socialist and engaged with Marxism and Leninism.
For this reason, he told us from our childhood onwards that before
getting directly involved with politics, you have to go via culture[cultural activism] … You get closer to the people [through culture]than would be possible via engagement with formal politics. You
can reach them [via party politics] but not at first. It is for this reason
that he encouraged us to practise music and songs [gān-bājnā].
Shomapti Debi, a Hindu woman in her late thirties, is staunchly politicaland works towards a more equal and ‘secular’ society in Bangladesh. She
ascribes a central, even predominant role to cultural activism in the
promotion of her political viewpoints among the broadest possible public,
alongside party politics. For Shomapti, as for many of our interlocutors in
Bangladesh and West Bengal, leftist or communist ‘formal politics’ andcultural activism seem inherently interlinked. Following her parents’
example she is engaged in communist party politics, cultural organisations
and other forms of activism, such as women’s rights advocacy. Shomapti
stood as her party’s candidate in recent local elections, is an elected
member of the coordination committee of the United Theatre Council

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(sammilita nāṭya pariṣad) in Sylhet, Bangladesh, and has engaged invarious other cultural activities for many years. However, Shomapti
attributes different potential and moral qualities to each activity.
Following her father’s advice, she emphasises ‘culture’ or cultural activism
as a medium for effectively protesting against inequalities and promoting
a progressive and secular society, free from communal divisions andconflict. Cultural activism allows her to advocate these political values
and secular vision in relative freedom from the compromises andcorrupting tendencies that seem to come with party politics. As Shomapti
explained, ‘Change will occur through culture, through politicalawareness. This does not mean that everybody will be an active memberof a political party, and this is not necessary.’
The notion that culture could be used to advance secularism or‘dharmanirapekṣatā’ (lit., neutrality towards religion(s)),2 and to promote
progressiveness and political awareness, is widespread in both Bangladesh
and West Bengal, which share vibrant secular political cultures despite
many differences between the two regions. West Bengal, an Indian statewith a Hindu majority and a sizeable Muslim population (roughly 30 percent), has harboured diverse institutional and ideological commitments
to secularism, reinforced through the dominance of the Left Front
coalition that governed from 1977 to 2011 (Bradbury 2019). The
coalition’s leading partner, the Communist Party of India (Marxist)(CPI(M)), brands itself as the ‘secular alternative’ in contemporary India’s
political landscape.3 More broadly, various socialist parties, associatedcultural groups and rationalist associations have fostered non-religious
cultural activities. Despite this historical commitment to secularism, theincreasing significance of Hindu nationalism cannot be ignored, andyounger generations of activists in West Bengal now strive to counter the
Hindu right’s promotion of religiously divisive narratives.
In Bangladesh, by contrast, secularism is most strongly associatedwith the struggle to gain independence from Pakistan in 1971, which
entailed a rejection of a shared Islamic identity as the basis for statehood(in part because of Bangladesh’s substantial Hindu minority population)in favour of Bengali nationalism.4 Communist parties and ideologies
played a major role in the mobilisation for the country’s independence,and during the first years after it, but are now comparatively marginal
and embraced mostly by a tiny cultural-intellectual elite. Instead, theruling Awami League party draws on the significant role that it played
during the Independence War to portray itself as a liberal, left-leaningand secularist party, and is commonly perceived as such, despite common
complaints about its policy decisions among some self-identified

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secularists (see also Schulz 2020). Being thus intertwined with party
politics, secularism and criticism of (certain forms of) religion have long
been significant yet contentious issues in Bangladesh, as revealed throughseveral constitutional changes that have installed, eliminated andreinstated secularism as a constitutional principle.5 At the same time,
secularism continues to constitute a strong point of identification andsocial imagination that is supported and shared by different segments ofsociety, especially by an educated and culture-oriented middle class.
Despite the divergent trajectories on either side of the Bengal
border, so-called left-leaning and progressive interlocutors in bothBangladesh and West Bengal advocate secularism most strongly throughculture, which they see as a potent medium for fighting communalism
and religious extremism. Although the umbrella term ‘culture’ or its
Bengali equivalent sanskr̥ti is often used in this context, it mostly refers tospecific performative art genres such as gaṇasaṅgīt (folk songs),
rabīndrasaṅgīt (songs in the tradition of Rabindranath Tagore), Baulsongs6 and theatre, especially street theatre (pather nāṭak). These specificgenres, rather than, for instance, Bengali rock music or Islamic song
forms (e.g., gajal, murśidī gān, kāoẏāli), are associated with a sense ofbeing secular, with a secular Bengali cultural identity (or ‘Bengaliness’),
and with an inherent potential to transform self and society. Like
Shomapti, many secular-minded interlocutors have engaged in thesekinds of performative arts in order to advance their fight for a secularsociety. For them, culture is not only a form of political engagement
complementary to party politics, but also often more effective, ‘purer’ ormore honest, and thus morally superior.
In this chapter, we explore how cultural forms – specifically theatre
performances, but also related performative genres – function as
articulations of the secular for our interlocutors. We analyse the specifickinds of secular imaginations that are produced through cultural work, aswell as the ways in which such activism contributes to the fostering of
secular and non-religious publics in the region. In our analysis, culturalactivism is not only, nor necessarily, a vehicle for explicit secularist
messages, nor is it a monolithic project that aims to produce a singularsecularised public sphere. Instead, culture provides a medium throughwhich secular conversations, self-cultivation and identification among acertain group of secularly oriented interlocutors can take place.
Ultimately, we argue that cultural secularism should be understood interms of the subjectivities, communities, genres and publics that become
constituted, and recognised as secular per se, through such performances.

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Secular culturalism: the preferred means of promoting asecular society
The notion that culture is closely interlinked with politics in Bengal is notcoincidental. The region has a long history of using performative arts asa tool for political movements and protests. Among its diverse and longstanding performative traditions (kabi gān; paṭuẏā; bāul; pālā gāmbhīrā,etc.) is jatra theatre (yātrā), which before the nineteenth century mostly
portrayed different episodes of the life of the Hindu god Krishna, but later
also engaged with more ‘secular’ socio-political themes. Playhouses
emerged in the colonial period; the first one was built in Kolkata in 1753
(Kunz 2006, 284), with colonial officers making up most of the theatregoing audience. During the nineteenth century, the bhadralok eliteincreasingly appropriated this theatre culture, while simultaneously
incorporating many elements of jatra, especially its emphasis on musicalelements (Kunz 2014), which resulted in the distinctive aesthetics of a
‘Bengali theatre’.
The first dedicated Bengali-language theatre venue opened in
Kolkata under the name ‘National Theatre’ in 1872, amid rising anticolonialism. Starting as a temporary stage in a courtyard, it aimed to beaccessible to urban middle- and lower-middle-class audiences. Its first
performance, Nīl Darpaṇ (‘The indigo mirror’, written in 1858–9 by
Dinabandhu Mitra and published in Dhaka), drew attention to theoppression of indigo cultivators and their revolt against colonial rule, andthus inaugurated a powerful new medium for changing politicalconsciousness. This new public role of the theatre was, according toPartha Chatterjee (2012, 232), one of the most important tools forcultivating political consciousness at a time when ‘formal politics’ was off
limits to most:Denied equal participation in a racially divided civil society, thenationalist elite proceeded to carve out a separate public cultural
sphere for itself. But in doing so, it also hoped to reach out to a wider
urban public, educate it in its new and sophisticated tastes, andpersuade it to listen to the new doctrines of social reform andnationalism. Of all the means employed by the Indian nationalist
elite to create a base of mass support in the cities, the theater was
one of the most effective.

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The British government brought in the Dramatic Performances Act of1876, granting authorities the power to censor performances thatchallenged, criticised or mocked colonial rule. However, less institutional
theatre continued to foster nationalism and create new kinds of public
cultures. Jatra, street theatre and other performative art genres played acrucial part in the popular mobilisation of the Swadeshi movement(1906–11), a forerunner of the independence movement that mobilised
against the partition of Bengal in 1905 along religious lines (that is, intoa Hindu-majority West Bengal and a Muslim-majority East Bengal) (Kunz2014). Bengali nationalism and non-communalism were promoted atthat time through political protest songs (gaṇasaṅgīt, lit. people’s songs)
by writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Rajanikanta
Sen and Atulprasad Sen, many of which are still used by secularist culturalactivists today.
Throughout the twentieth century, stage theatre (mañca nāṭak) andstreet theatre (pather nāṭak) continued to inform each other, both forms
being committed to exploring contemporary socio-political issues, albeit
in different ways. The former is associated with ‘progressiveness’ and has
incorporated diverse influences, including those of Bengali writers,
Rabindranath Tagore being one of the most renowned, but also European
traditions such as Shakespeare, French political theatre (especially Sartre,
Molière) and German theatre, most explicitly the Brechtian Lehrstücke.
Although undoubtedly political in its content and the intentions of its
performers, stage theatre remained a largely urban and middle-classculture, as it took place mostly in playhouses, community halls andauditoria attached to educational institutions. The street theatre tradition,by contrast, explicitly seeks to address diverse audiences by performing
short plays in open spaces, often (though not exclusively) without a stageor props. These plays are more experimental, draw on aesthetic traditions
from different Bengali music, dance and theatre genres, and are explicitly
didactic and politicised in nature. Some contemporary forms have also
adopted elements of the Theatre of the Oppressed of Augusto Boal (seealso Mohan 2004).
The street theatre approach was central to anti-colonial nationalist
mobilisations in the mid-twentieth century. This is particularly true of the
Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), which emerged in the late
1940s out of the independence struggle and as part of a growing Marxist
cultural movement that sought to promote ‘cultural awakening’ in rural
areas of the subcontinent (Kunz 2014; Bharucha 1983). Being directly
linked to the Communist Party of India, it laid the groundwork for thestrong association between theatre and progressive, left-wing politics

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that is today observable throughout South Asia (e.g., Arora 2019;
Bharucha 1983; Eldhose 2014; on Nepal, see Mottin 2017; on Pakistan,see Rashid 2015). Even as the IPTA became beset with internal tensions
around the party’s interference in cultural productions, it gave rise to
many independent left-leaning theatre groups, including the renowned
Jana Natya Manch in Delhi, associated with Safdar Hashmi. Street theatre
likewise played a role in fostering the Bengali language movement in East
Bengal, and, later, the struggle for Bangladesh’s independence. The
diverse array of cultural groups that used theatre in such ways
consolidated the association of certain cultural genres with Bengali
nationalism, secularism and non-communalism.
In contemporary Bengal, this history of political theatre, which
continues to be widely perceived as liberal and left-leaning, inspires adiverse range of theatre groups that share in broadly left-wing, secularpolitical aspirations. These can be large organisations with branch
structures, such as Bangladesh’s Udichi Shilpigosthi, which is now
international in scope, but also small groups in which young middle-classpeople gather in their neighbourhoods to rehearse and stage amateur
plays. Given their relative autonomy from party politics, neighbourhood
theatre groups sustain a left-leaning culture of performance while largely
circumventing partisan dynamics, such as the violence surrounding
elections. Theatre has also been taken up by NGOs in order to promote
human rights and campaign against practices such as dowry, childmarriage and religious fundamentalism. These ‘forum theatre’ groups,
along with independent, politically inclined street theatre performers,
have moved through Bengal in recent decades, bringing plays that focus
on diverse social and political issues to villages and to less affluent andeducated urban populations.
There is therefore a long tradition of political theatre in Bengal, and yet
the contemporary entanglements between ‘culture’, (left) politics in a
broad sense, political parties and secularism require further attention.
Shomapti, like many other activists, sees cultural activism and partypolitical engagement as two different but complementary means ofbringing about a change in society and fighting for a non-communal
society. Yet many of our interlocutors saw a tension between these two
approaches, often considering cultural activism less ‘dirty’ (see Ruud2001), corrupt and compromising than party politics. At the same time,they distanced themselves from supposedly apolitical forms of art.
Souvik Bose, a member of the CPI(M) in his mid-thirties in Howrah,
West Bengal, emphasised that he was not a cultural person per se. He was

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not like some in his neighbourhood who wrote, acted in and produced
plays for some of Kolkata’s premier venues. However, cultural work
became a way of expressing his politics at a time when he was not fully
accepted by the party, as someone deemed too radical. For several years,
he ran a small, informal theatre group for young people in his
neighbourhood, for which he wrote the plays himself. He thus saw himself
as a facilitator who organised performances, but also provided mentorshipto the group members in ways that served his political cause. He was also
an active member of his local branch of IPTA, the party’s cultural wing.
Even after gaining party membership, he continued to invest energy in his
theatre activities, because he felt that he could express his politicalconvictions more effectively through this medium. His plays explicitly
critiqued religion, often to a degree that is unusual even for secularist
cultural activists. Souvik’s idea of performance was not concerned withprofessional standards and settings, but was a more self-consciously
amateur, agitprop medium that would impart messages to his audience.
Although Souvik would have preferred to disregard religion entirely,
his domestic life was indelibly marked by Hindu symbols and practices.
He lived in a small house with his mother, a pious woman who did herrituals (pūjā) every morning, and the walls were covered with framed
prints of Hindu gods, goddesses and guru figures. Souvik recalled that, in
his youth, political figures came to consult his grandfather, who was awell-known astrologer (jyotiṣ). However, his life was also shaped by the
influence of communism: his father, family members and manyneighbours were supporters of the CPI(M). Many of these people saw nocontradiction between support for the secularist party and their religious
commitments. But, for Souvik, religious practices went against hismaterialist convictions. He refused to conduct the Hindu last rites when
his father died, even though the local party comrades had urged him to
do so for the sake of his mother. He felt that the party delayed his
membership because of such ‘radicalism’, which could harm their image
among the electorate. Later, in 2018, he married a non-practising Muslim
woman from rural northern West Bengal whom he had met at a statelevel party rally. Souvik was frustrated that many comrades saw her firstand foremost through her religious identity, especially given that she wasalso a party member. For him, and indeed many in the CPI(M), party
belonging should override any sense of religious affiliation. However, inpractice, some CPI(M) members talked and behaved in ways that reflected
the wider polarisation of society along religious lines, and interreligious(and inter-caste) marriages within the party’s ranks were always rare.

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Many in Souvik’s neighbourhood were frustrated by the constraintsof party politics, and preferred to express their politics through culture.
Besides the local branch of the IPTA, which is directly linked to the
CPI(M) and participates in their campaigns through songs and street
theatre (see Ghosh 2005), Souvik’s friends and neighbours alsofrequented a local social club which had vibrant cultural events, andcounted several prominent communist theatre personalities among its
members. Some of these activists had had relationships with the IPTA in
the past, but resented the party’s control over creative work, and left towork ‘without any party flag’. These tensions, in which left-wing culture
coexisted in complicated and even antagonistic relationships with thelocal party institutions, are very familiar to Kolkata’s cultural activists.
Nevertheless, the latter’s historical links to left-wing political parties havereinforced in West Bengal a strong association between secularism andcultural activism. The political and the cultural are thus seen as
co-constitutive and distinct at the same time.
Likewise, theatre activists in Sylhet frequently sought distance from
Bangladesh’s party politics and guarded against any interference from thetwo largest parties, the Awami League and the BNP. They distinguishedthemselves from cultural organisations that are formally or informallyconsidered the cultural wing of a political party, such as JASAS(Jatiyatabadi Samajik Sangskritik Sangstha), the cultural wing of the
BNP, whose committees are directly approved by the party’s leaders andwho tend to be active only when their party is in power. For the most part,secular theatre groups in Sylhet do not maintain direct affiliations withmainstream political parties but have generally taken an oppositional
stance towards the Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami. Although culturalactivism is widely associated with left-wing politics, few groups are
explicitly committed to communism or any particular left-wing party. The
United Theatre Council, in which Shomapti is a committee member, is anumbrella organisation for 21 lay theatre groups in Sylhet, and takes
tremendous pride in not being affiliated to any single party, maintaining
links to politicians of various parties in an effort to avoid partisanship.
According to its constitution, the Council aims to advance the theatre
culture in Sylhet and to ‘improve the cultural consciousness of general
people for the sake of progressive development of society’, to ‘always keep
up the value of our independence’, and to ‘be active against all kind of
backwardness like bigotry, communalism, regionalism through practising
theatre and enforcing the dynamic development of society’. Shomapti’sother main engagement, Udichi Shilpigosthi, is one of the largest andmost active cultural organisations in Bangladesh. Founded in 1968 by the78

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renowned writers and Marxist-influenced activists Satyen Sen and Ranch
Das Gupta, the organisation is committed to a left-leaning or ‘communist’
stance but is not directly affiliated to any party.
Shomapti regards her engagement with a communist party andcultural activism as two complementary means of political commitment.
Both forms of engagement matter to her but fulfil different roles in her
vision of advancing a more equal, secular and just society. However, sheremains concerned about party interference in cultural activism,
contending that ‘if anyone in the leadership of cultural activities has apolitical [i.e., partisan] bias, then it will not be pure (śuddha) culture’.
She shares the common view that this ‘contamination’ of culture throughparty politics occurs because of the pragmatics of political manoeuvring:‘The main aim of the Awami League is to remain in power, voter politics.
They always need to calculate. … And this is why, in my view, the Awami
League can never take a clear stance towards secularism.’ According toher, anyone affiliated directly to a party needs to consider how theiractions as a cultural activist will reflect on the party, and consequently
affect their public reputation. Any open criticism of religion, she contends,
is thus very unlikely to occur. In her view, partisan ‘bias’ dissuades culturalactivists from clearly and openly articulating their political perspective,
including their secularism, something that she believes is at the core ofactual or pure (śuddha) culture. She thus keeps both activities explicitly
and intentionally separate, even though her party comrades and fellow
performers broadly share the same cause and convictions.7
Culture is therefore deeply enmeshed with political activities in the
Bengal region. The historic associations of specific performative genreswith national independence and left-wing movements, both of whichhave strong secularist components, carry into the present. Moreover, they
have provided relatively free spaces in which to express secular values,
which would otherwise pose a problem for party activists who have muchto lose when it comes to votes, in societies where religion remains
politically salient. However, how and why are theatre and certain othergenres of Bengali culture actually considered ‘secular’? What does it
entail to publicly promote secularism through cultural performance
rather than party politics? These are questions we explore more explicitly
in the next section.

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Performative arts as a secular medium
Some ‘secular’ cultural performances in Bengal address religion directly
and critically, with an educational and political purpose. Suchperformances tackle issues of interreligious conflict, corrupt godmen or
dangerous superstitions head-on, in fictional but very accessible formats.
This is part of a long tradition of scepticism and critical engagement withreligion in mainstream Bengali culture. Examples include: plays, such as
Rabindranath Tagore’s Bisarjan (1890), in which animal sacrifice to a
Hindu goddess brings down a kingdom; novels like Syed Waliullah’s
Lālsālu (1948, film 2001), which critically engages with superstition andthe authority of Islamic leadership through the story of a man who takes
advantage of people with his fabricated religious teachings; and Satyajit
Ray’s film Devī (1960), in which a father worships his daughter as anincarnation of the goddess Kali. In recent years many novels, poems, plays
and films continue to tackle superstition, religious authority,
fundamentalism, communalism and terrorism, with some, like the filmsof Tareque Masud, becoming internationally renowned.
As noted above, Souvik engaged in cultural performances as a wayof disseminating his secularist, Marxist values among broader publics.
When the Bengal Platform of Mass Organisations, an umbrella body ofoutfits that supported the Left Front, organised a major rallying marchthrough rural West Bengal in 2016, Souvik’s group decided to perform aplay on roadsides along their itinerary through Howrah district. Souvik
was not only the play’s author but also played one of the central characters,
a corrupt godman associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha(RSS), the paramilitary arm of India’s Hindu nationalist party, the BJP.
The plot, according to Souvik, saw this religious figure (sādhu-bābā) goto ‘a specific area where the majority were backward classes, devoted toślōkas, sūtrās, things like that [i.e., passages from Hindu religious texts]’.
The godman made a deal with the local political leader, and they told theresidents of the village to go around collecting something that he called‘the elixir of life’. The villagers misunderstood, and went around collecting
waste from the roadsides. When they realised that they had been sent on
a fool’s errand, they threw the collected sewage over the godman.
It was a comic play, but the message was: those sādhus, the whole
Indian structure of religion, will put people in that state. The people
don’t understand anything, they are just following [their religious

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leaders]. And if you do that for one or two thousand years, you’ll
just gather shit.
Through the medium of satire, Souvik was able to express what otherwise
would certainly be seen as offensive, and even dangerous. For an Indian
audience, he taps into everyday grumbles about the exploitative activities
of some renunciants, who go round asking for food and monetary
donations (sevā, lit. ‘service’). He associates such behaviour with the BJP,
the Hindu nationalist party, which counts several prominent renunciants
among its leaders, as well as its support base. The very language that heuses suggests his dismissal of religion: sādhu-bābā is a colloquial turn ofphrase for a religious figure, devoid of any reverence; the phrase ‘ślokas,sūtrās, things like that’ undermines any sense of the sacred in these Hindu
texts. Most explicitly, the supposedly god-given elixir is revealed to be a
deeply polluting substance; even calling it ‘shit’ is an affront to the cultural
tastes of many respectable Hindus. The image of people from ‘backward
classes’ pouring sewage over a corrupt godman is a sort of communist
wish fulfilment which could be gleefully performed, with none of therepercussions that could be expected if it happened in real life.
There is perhaps no more visceral demonstration of a secular
positionality than embodying a religious figure who is punished for his
own moral failings. Souvik was proud of a photo that showed him dressed
up in the white dhuti (lower-body garment) and sacred thread, the attireof a religiously conservative, upper-caste Hindu man, during theperformance described above. Being born into a family with strong
religious convictions but also an atheist himself, Souvik’s choice to not
only write such a play but also act in the role of a religious villain was arebellious act for him personally. When asked how his performance wasreceived in Muslim areas of Howrah, he seemed to feel vindicated: ‘Over
there, the people really stood and clapped. There was loud laughter, they
were really happy that Hindu people like me were playing the role of asādhu and criticising.’ However, Souvik’s desire to frontally criticise
religion was not always given free rein. He recalled that the local CPI(M)secretary had reluctantly approved his play for the rally, asking Souvik totone down the slang and obscenities. This reflected the uneasiness amongmuch of the party rank and file with upfront criticism concerning suchsensitive issues, which could have negative reputational consequences forthe party and ultimately cost them popular support.
While there are certainly more examples of plays that explicitly
confront hegemonic forms of religion, they are comparatively rare andoften criticised, as we can see by the secretary’s reaction, for being too

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provocative. Notably, these plays tend not to oppose religion as such, but
certain forms of religiosity or what is considered a ‘misuse’ of religion.
Furthermore, the plays tend to target forms of religiosity that are
dominant in their part of the Bengal region, or that are considered by
critics to be potentially dangerous. Therefore, while the problem ofsuperstition and Hindu guru figures is commonly addressed in West
Bengal, plays in Bangladesh tend to focus on Islamic fundamentalism or
the role of Bengali Islamic leaders in opposing the independence
movement in 1971 and encouraging violence against Hindus. The kindsof religiosity that are targeted through theatre thus reflect contemporary
debates and the political climate.
More often than not, performances articulate a secularist critique ina much more indirect way. Furthermore, many plays reflect notions ofsecularism that are quite different from the one articulated by Souvik. For
instance, the notion of secularism as non-communalism is arguably morewidespread – and, socially, far more acceptable, even respectable – thanovert criticism of religion. Such a notion is linked to the Bengali term
dharmanirapekṣatā, which may be glossed as neutrality or impartiality
towards religion or different religious groups as well as ethnic minorities.
It implies a commitment to the equal treatment of all religions in the
public sphere, and opposition to religious division and exclusivism.
Despite the different meanings and connotations that secularism acquires
in colloquial usage, this idea of equal treatment of religions is very
prominent and feeds into the English-language term. In this form,‘secularism comes to be defined as a form of pluralism with metaphysicalfoundations and not, in any sense, as the replacement of religious values
by irreligious ones’ (Cannell 2010, 93).
A typical example of promoting this distinct form of secularism
through theatre is the play Blood Test, which was performed by a theatregroup in Sylhet. The main storyline of the play sees a person arrive in aparticular place to take blood tests from the whole population. The person
claims that through blood tests they will be able to determine the religion(dharma) of an individual and thus check whether the person ‘belongs tothis country’. They will subsequently divide people according to religion,
thereby preventing any supposedly undesirable mixing. Moreover, theblood tester, it is revealed, aspires through this endeavour to attain highpolitical office in the country. Ultimately, he fails to determine whether aperson is Muslim, Hindu, Christian or Buddhist, and in his rage accusessome of the test subjects of being atheists (nāstik), a term with negative
connotations in Bengal. The simple moral of the play is voiced by thosecharacters who contest the blood tester’s authority, namely that religion

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cannot be determined by blood because ‘all humans are one [kind]’, ‘weare all equal’, and that the harmony between different religious groups
will be destroyed by persons like him. While the play promotes, in anutshell, universal humanity and a form of humanism that invokes
familiar secularist slogans in Bangladesh, it also touches on a couple ofmore tangible political issues. For instance, the play indirectly accuses
politicians of dividing the country along communal lines, and addresses
how citizenship has become entangled with religious belonging
throughout South Asia.8 Though only a side note, the sudden, andapparently arbitrary, accusation that a test subject is ‘atheist’ seems tocomment on how a person who criticises powerful leaders or hegemonicideas can easily be defamed as such. The audience would immediately
associate this kind of accusation with a number of killings of so-calledatheist bloggers in the years preceding the play’s writing.
However, a substantial proportion of plays staged by culturalactivists do not touch upon the issue of religion at all. If ‘secular’
performances in Bengal are indeed often about staking out a different
identity, they do not necessarily or always refer to the supposedly
constitutive Other, namely religion. Indeed, cultural activists tend toaddress a wide range of issues related to contemporary political discourse,from environmental pollution, corruption and gender politics to specificpolicy debates, such as expressing opposition to the building of a nuclear
power plant in Rampal. Theatre and other forms of ‘culture’ favoured by
activists are nevertheless seen as inherently ‘secular’ by activists
themselves, as well as by other people in Bengal. This understanding islinked to how certain genres index ‘Bengali culture’ and the (secular)
history that has become associated with particular aesthetic practices,traditions and references.
On World Drama Day 2017, one of the theatre groups in Sylhet
staged a martial dance known as a bratacārī nr̥tya (Bratachari dance), in
which the performers (male in this case, but not always) wore white andred dhutis. This performance stood out in a programme that wasotherwise made up of street theatre plays with a clear didactic approach.
It was distinct in its aesthetics and its impressive rhythmic choreography
inspired by martial arts, but also for the absence of any narrative or
explicit message. It is not unusual for theatre performances to beaccompanied by more artistic-leaning dance or music performances,
especially at cultural events that take place on national days. However, in
this case the dance was performed by a theatre group that is well known
for its radical progressive agenda, for its political street theatre and fordrawing on different aesthetic registers.

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When asked by the researcher, one of the leaders of the groupexplained that they had chosen this performance because it was a Bengali
rural ‘folk dance’, and that it was important for them to cultivate a cultural
tradition that might otherwise be forgotten. For him, this performance
was both highly political and part of a secular cultural repertoire. Throughengagement with this physically demanding choreography one could
become a whole human, he suggested, irrespective of class and caste. The
link that he makes between engaging with an aesthetic and cultural
genre, supposedly indexing ‘Bengaliness’, and the cultivation of a certain
universalist humanism is related to the fact that the dance emerged in the
Bratachari movement, which was initiated by Gurusaday Dutt (1882–
1941) in the 1930s in undivided Bengal. The Bratacharis sought aspiritual and social renewal of the Bengali ‘nation’ irrespective of sex,
religion or caste through engagement with folk traditions and physicalexercise. Dutt, like many cultural activists, saw folk culture as contributing‘significantly to the development of a national culture by providing
indigenous models of secularism’ (R. Chatterji 2016, 101).
Following Talal Asad (2003), many studies of the secular have exploredhow ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ emerge in relation to each other and how
such taxonomies and imaginaries of a secularising modernity haveshaped power dynamics in different social contexts. Despite widespread
criticism of such a dichotomy (e.g., Bangstad 2009; Dressler and Mandair
2011; Schielke 2010), scholarly approaches nevertheless struggle toaccount for a mode of being secular that might not fit into this binary or
relate to religion in any direct way. One promising solution to this problem
has emerged in recent scholarship that attends to the aesthetic, embodied
and performative dimensions of the secular (see Binder, this volume;
Chalfant 2020; Gholami 2015; Schulz 2021). Stefan Binder (2020) has
identified scholarly attention to material religion as one factor thatreinforces an immaterial, ideological understanding of secularism that
ignores its material, embodied and performative dimensions. He alsosuggests that the seeming defeat of the secularisation thesis has further
weakened our ability to identify an autonomous secularist position.
According to Binder (2020, 10),The critical impetus to deconstruct the intellectualist anddisembodied bias of secular ideology has been immensely
productive for ‘rescuing’ the aesthetics of lived religion but, in sodoing, it has been unable to address the materiality and embodied
nature of lived secularity as anything other than a contradiction or

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shadow of secularity’s own normative insistence on its autonomy
from the realms of the material, the corporeal, the social, thetraditional, and so on. (Italics in original.)
Binder attends to the material dimensions of atheist lives, accounting forhow difference from religion is expressed in ways which deal with thenegativity of the secular. He describes ‘secular difference as an aesthetic
quality and the outcome of a performative positionality, both being more
complex than a conceptual dependence or relationality vis-à-vis thecategory of religion’ (p. 13, italics in original). Such an approach, whichallows us to account for secularism ethnographically through culturalexpression without relegating it to an epiphenomenon of religion, andwithout having to see secularist culture in reference to religion, alsoenables us to conceive of performative cultural forms here as secular
media, regardless of whether religious critique forms the content of theperformance per se. This is true of the above-mentioned Bratacharidance, but similar cases could be made for a wide range of other genres(Baul music, gaṇasaṅgīt, etc.) used by cultural activists, along withaesthetic styles that are commonly associated with street theatre, such as
specific kinds of clothing (e.g., dhutis) and musical instruments (theektārā and the harmonium).
This aesthetic repertoire is often seen as secular insofar as it
manifests as a tradition that is perceived as distinct from, thoughsometimes in competition with, and at other times complementary to, thereligious. The kind of secularism that is articulated through ‘culture’ – orrather the specific forms evoked by cultural activists – is entwined withthe aesthetic affordances of these genres or media, as well as the specifichistories, traditions and understandings of cultural secularism in theregion that are linked to the historical legacy described above. Attention
to aesthetics suggests that the ‘how’ may be as important as, or more
important than, the ‘what’ for a performative secular positionality. As
Charles Hirschkind explains in relation to Islamic cassette sermons, these
performances ‘create the sensory conditions of an emergent ethical andpolitical lifeworld, with its specific patterns of behavior, sensibility, andpractical reasoning’ (2006, 8). We therefore suggest that specific culturalrepertoires allow activists to ‘perform the secular’ not only through overt
messages but also as instantiated by the media themselves and thesecularity that they enact. In both Bengals, ‘culture’ has thus become thepreferred medium for expressing and advocating for secularist politics.
Furthermore, the aesthetic and affective dimensions of these
performances accrue secular meaning from their ongoing associations

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with recent ‘secularist’ and non-communal causes. In the case of West
Bengal, for instance, communist parties effectively ‘secularised’ thesignificant five-day-long annual Hindu festival Durga Puja, by focusing on
its aesthetic and artistic dimensions (Guha-Thakurta 2015). The poetry
recitations, art exhibitions and theatre performances that take placearound Durga Puja allowed the CPI(M), and indeed the wider public, tothink of the festival as a predominantly ‘cultural’ event, and therefore
secular, in a mutually reinforcing loop. In Bangladesh, cultural
performances are often used as a tool to counter Islamist leaders andmovements. This has been observable in incidents ranging from protests
against attacks on Hindus to the opposition to the demands of Islamic
leaders that sculptures be removed from public places (see Schulz 2021),
and most prominently in the significant role that cultural activists playedin the 2013 Gonojagoron Moncho (‘platform for people’s awakening’) or
Shahbag movement,9 which was widely celebrated as ‘secular’ and drewheavily on the particular cultural genres and aesthetics of these activists.10
As an aesthetic tradition, certain supposedly secular cultural genres
coexist with other traditions, notably religious ones, each drawing uponestablished aesthetic norms and affective relations. Thus, while many
performances may say little about religion per se, they are understood as
secular because of the role that they fulfil in the public sphere, gathering
around them audiences on the basis of non-religious affective experiences.
While an openly secularist or even atheist position is often problematic
because of the socio-political role of religious belonging and symbols,
cultural activism creates a space in which to articulate, identify with andmake perceptible secularist convictions and practices through distinct
genres and aesthetics. This space becomes the basis of a ‘secular public’,to which we now turn.

Secular publics as mediated through culture
Cultural activism, by its very nature, seeks to impart a political message
to a public. As noted above, Souvik and Shomapti took pride in the factthat their groups did not confine themselves to the theatre halls andbhadralok audiences; they both aspired to reach new audiences topromote a secularist standpoint that emphasised common interests overreligious divisions and superstitions. This was precisely because they saw
these audiences as being both in need of such messages and capable ofeffecting changes in people’s opinions, as Souvik explains:

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What is the point of performing this RSS sādhu in [a middle-class
Hindu area]? It will serve nothing. I can get some applause, but thatapplause will come from the so-called rich people, the middle or
upper-middle class. They will always find a comfortable corner intheir life. If I claim myself as left or progressive, I should take mytheatre to those people who are the agents of revolution.
Such comments were very common among our interlocutors and mostcultural activists aimed at distinguishing themselves from ‘fine arts’ thattarget mostly an educated middle class. Theatre workers in both Bengals
often emphasised the need to reach the sādhāraṇ mānuṣ (ordinary
people) or janagaṇ (crowds, people, public) to bring about change. Suchstatements might be read as a reminder of the apparently obvious andintended publicness of theatre and an indicator that politically engaged
plays seek to address a general public to inspire critical debates,
reminiscent of what Habermas conceptualised as a ‘public sphere’. Sucha reading would resonate with the Indian literature scholar
Adakkaravayalil Yoyakky Eldhose’s conception of street theatre in Kerala
as a ‘space for democratic discourse in order to create an active publicsphere’ and as an ‘agent of political conscientisation’ (2014, 340).11 The
fact that many activists emphasised the importance of being neutral, withregard to both political and religious affiliations, evokes such an idealised
notion of a public sphere.
Yet this Habermasian understanding of the relation between theatreor cultural activism and ‘the public’ is misleading for various reasons, notleast given the various criticisms of his concept as Eurocentric and for its
normative presumption of self-reflective critical subjects engaging inrational debates, apparently on equal terms, irrespective of existing
inequalities and power structures (e.g., Cody 2011; Fraser 1992; Warner2002). Despite their rhetorical references to the masses, our interlocutors
were certainly aware of different audiences, as we can see in Souvik’s
statement. He was enthusiastic about addressing Muslim audiences,rather than ‘the public’ as such. This is in part because Muslims as a socioeconomic group are underprivileged in contemporary India and thetarget of Hindu-nationalist rhetoric and violence, which he criticises
through his performance, making them a receptive audience for his
message. However, it also points to the fact that religious traditions havediverging relationships to different Bengali art genres for historicalreasons, such as the close association of jatra with Hindu traditions, orthe banning of Tagore songs by what was then the East Pakistan

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government for being ‘un-Islamic’. Indeed, different Islamic theologicalstandpoints have diverging attitudes to music; while the kinds of music
genres used by activists closely resemble the aesthetics and religious
practices of certain Sufi sects, they are opposed by other Islamic religious
authorities. As a result, Muslims are on average less likely to engage insuch forms of culture. Consequently, theatre performances have been not
only oriented towards the middle class but also considerably Hindudominated, even in Bangladesh, where Hindus constitute a minority.
Venturing into working-class and Muslim-populated neighbourhoods wasfor Souvik thus a practical way of enacting secularism, not only throughhis play’s message but also as a performative act of outreach in itself.
Furthermore, his statement partakes of a long-standing discourse inwhich he distinguishes himself from those performers who, in his view,
only seek artistic validation. The frequency with which we encounteredsuch normative and moralising statements among cultural activists
suggests that their ideal of ‘reaching the masses’ was an ambition morethan a reality, and one that they did not always expect to fulfil. Ourinterlocutors did make efforts to move beyond the typical audiences of theeducated secular-leaning elite and often explicitly sought to perform infront of unprivileged strata of society. Examples of this include
performances in Muslim neighbourhoods of Kolkata, cultural activists’collaborations with tea workers in Sylhet and the organisation of
performances in rural areas and at urban spots visible to rickshaw drivers
and passers-by. Nevertheless, more often than not ‘street theatre’ did nottake place at street corners as much as at established venues for culturaland other ‘secular’ activities – such as the Shaheed Minar in Sylhet, or on
the campuses of College Street and Jadavpur University in Kolkata – andin front of sympathetic, mostly left-leaning, audiences. In fact, the Kobi
Nazrul auditorium in Sylhet, which was the main venue for stage theatre,
dances, musical and other artistic performances targeting a bhadralok
middle class, had an outdoor space that was frequently used for street
theatre performances, which were mostly attended by other culturalactivists and what may be called a ‘theatre-going public’ (Shimko andFreeman 2012, 6). This space was crucial, one of the Udichi activists
explained, because even though it was outside, it offered a secure andprotected environment for cultural performances, just like otherestablished secular-cultural venues.
Indeed, despite the supposed publicness of street theatre, certain
plays were deemed too radical and provocative to be performed in frontof a ‘general’ audience of passers-by, and were reserved for events at more
explicitly secular spaces. The cultural activists were aware that their88

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powerful tool for political education and awareness raising was notuniversally approved and at times even violently opposed, as in infamousincidents such as the killing of Safdar Hashmi by a political party cadre
during a Jana Natya Manch performance on the outskirts of New Delhi in
1989 or the Islamist bomb attack on the Udichi office in Jessore,
Bangladesh, in 1999; many much smaller incidents did not make it into
the headlines (van Erven 1989). Consequently, theatre activists tend to
anticipate their audiences and take into account which plays and speechacts might be appropriate. They are, thus, very much aware that they are
not addressing any singular, abstract ‘public sphere’ but rather several
distinct, and in this case physically embodied, publics. For instance,
several years ago one theatre group in Sylhet split into two after acontroversy over whether or not to perform a script written by therationalist Ananta Bijoy Das, a so-called atheist blogger who was later
killed by an Islamist, in 2015. Das’s play was a biography of Giordano
Bruno, the sixteenth-century polymath who was persecuted as a heretic
because of his promotion of scientific knowledge and freethinking. Hasan
Islam, one of the leading members of the Sylhet group, who had strongly
opposed the proposal, explained his perspective on the controversy:
This character [Giordano Bruno], he does not practise [religion].
He is against religion. … That’s fine. But what is the issue here? If
this is written for intellectuals, that is fine. But if you think about thegeneral audience [sādhāraṇ darśak], then there is a problem. If theplay was only for specific people and intellectuals, it would work.
But will ordinary people understand it in the same way that you
understand it? … An uneducated or moderately educated audience
will assume that I have insulted their religion. Even if he [Bruno]
does not protest for the sake of politeness … he and his family [i.e.,
members of a general audience] might decide to never see any
theatre again.
As we can see, Hasan Islam did not oppose the script in principle but
rather considered it inappropriate for a ‘general audience’. He reflects on
the possible reception of the play by the audience and unintended
consequences, being concerned especially that the message might bedistorted in this process. Even though this highly controversial play was aparticular case, considerations concerning audiences and the particularlocations of performances were common among theatre activists. They
often maintained what Martin Zillinger has called a ‘graduated publicness’by being concerned about the ‘constantly changing mediation practices

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that constitute, negotiate, and shape the Öffentlichkeit [publicity]’ (2017,
S43) of their performances and regulate the degree of publicness not onlywith regard to the specific play at hand but also the political moment andthe socio-political climate.
In anthropology and related disciplines, debates about ‘publicness’
have long moved beyond criticisms of Habermas’s idea of a public sphereand have instead focused on how different mediating practices and‘regimes of circulation’ (Cody 2009) serve to constitute diverse, fluid,competing and often overlapping publics. Such publics are often
structured along lines of class, gender, ethnicity, religion, educational
background, language group and, as Robert Shimko and Sara Freeman
suggest, ‘by shared interests in cultural matters’ (2012, 6). In our case, wewould also emphasise aesthetic preferences, political visions andcommitment to socio-political projects. Ethnographic exploration of suchmediating and media practices have resulted in a reconceptualisation of
the role of ‘media’ in such processes as well as a renewed interest in theirmaterial and technological preconditions (e.g., Abu-Lughod 2004;
Eickelman and Anderson 1999; Meyer and Moors 2006; Rajagopal 2001).
For instance, Charles Hirschkind’s (2006) emphasis on the medium ofdissemination (in his case, cassette sermons), their affective affordancesand significance for emergent forms of political community in Egypt
provides a profound ‘challenge to the hierarchy of the senses underpinning
post-Kantian versions of the public sphere’ (Cody 2011, 42). This isparticularly important when we analyse the relationship between media
and non-religious publics, considering the ‘cognitivist bias’ and tendency
to ‘treat media as a transparent vehicle for ideas’ that have thus far typified
scholarly approaches (Chalfant 2020, 1, 4; see also Binder in this volume).
Our interlocutors certainly envision street theatre and other Bengali
cultural genres as tools for transmitting a message to ‘masses’, as theyclearly explain. Yet if we take the insights from the anthropology ofreligions and publics seriously, it becomes apparent that such aspirations
to publicity and, arguably, the creation of a ‘secular’ public sphere are notthe only way we can understand the role of performance. If publics emerge
through mediating practices, as has been widely argued (see Meyer andMoors 2006), the very engagements with certain Bengali cultural genresproduce a specific and limited public, constituted through the medium oftheatre among its activists, in which the cultivation and articulation ofradical secularist or other non-religious stances are possible and at thesame time inextricably linked with their aesthetic preferences and what isunderstood by them as ‘Bengali culture’. It is for this reason that street
theatre and genres like gaṇasaṅgīt or bratacārī nr̥tya are often considered90

GLOB AL SCEPTICAL PUBLICSto be tools to promote secularism, even though such performances do notaddress, at least in any direct way, issues related to religious traditions,rationalism or superstition.
Habermas’s concept of the ‘public sphere’ is inherently linked tonarratives of secularisation. It stipulates a normative expectation that the
public is inevitably and necessarily a secular space from which individuals,
who may or may not be religious in their ‘private’ lives, separate any
religious convictions in order to participate in supposedly impartial andrational debates. The widespread criticism of this prescriptive model for
its lack of empirical significance was taken up in Habermas’s later
proposal of the ‘post-secular’, which, however, fails to fully transcend thenormative and liberal binaries inherent in his theory (see Casanova 2013;
Cooke 2010). For South Asia, even more than elsewhere, it has beenargued that many publics are structured both religiously and, more
specifically, communally, for a number of historical and structural
reasons, many of which are rooted in colonial policy (Embree 2002; Scottand Ingram 2015). They range from the partial intersection of languageor print communities with religious affiliation12 to legal pluralism and thesignificance of contested religious nationalisms that are partially a legacyof the divide-and-rule policy, including the two-state solution of the
British colonial government. In contemporary India and Bangladesh,religious traditions play a significant role, with the majority religions,Hinduism and Islam respectively, often exerting substantial normative
power over people’s lives. Cultural activists like Shomapti and Souvik are
critical of such influence and the importance attributed to publicly
performed piety. They thus conceptualise their own activities as part ofwhat might be called a ‘counterpublic’. Ironically, the common utopian
vision of cultural activists, namely the establishment of a society in which
all members are equal irrespective of religious convictions and belonging,seems to resemble Habermas’s notion of a ‘secular’ public sphere innotable ways. Yet the activists are very aware that this secular space is a
utopian aspiration, while their activities suggest secular publics of alimited, but more immediately tangible, nature.
We should therefore conceptualise cultural activism not as anintervention in a singular public sphere, but rather as a secular mediumthat allows conversations, self-cultivation and identification among acertain group of secularly oriented interlocutors to take place. And it isarguably for this reason that cultural activism creates spaces in whichpeople feel they can actually raise their voices, openly articulate ‘secular
attitudes’, and translate such aspirations into action, without being
constrained by partisan interests and considerations of propriety.

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However, this is the case because performative arts, rather than being
mere media through which secularist ‘messages’ are transmitted to an
audience, are in themselves cultural forms that are capable of mediating
secular sentiments. Such performances thereby create – through a
combination of the activists’ intentional actions and the affordance of themedium itself as well as the regional history inscribed into it – local,
limited but identifiably ‘secular’ publics for our interlocutors in Bangladesh
and West Bengal.

Conclusion
This chapter has argued that cultural performances – specifically, several
genres that carry with them historical resonances of struggle – are
privileged media for activists to cultivate secularism among themselves
and in order to disseminate their values to a wider public. For activists, it
is important to keep this cultural secularism separate from the efforts ofsecularist political parties, with which they share broad aims and values.
This is because cultural activists (even if they are party members
themselves) are sceptical of the level of commitment that can be fosteredthrough groups and organisations that must seek public support and are
therefore prone to compromises with dominant opinions and norms.
Conversely, performative genres lend themselves more readily to
expressions of secularism that are relatively free of compromises, while
performance itself shapes the formulations of secularism that are possible.
The kind of secularism that emerges is thus tied to the specificmedium that activists deploy, in this case Bengali theatre. We haveidentified three possible secular cultural modalities, of which (1) the
overt critique of religion and (2) the humanist opposition to communalism
are most readily perceptible. The third kind of secular performance is nottransmitted as a message of iterated ‘content’ but is rather a product of theact of performing itself: (3) the community and performance of being
apart from religion, understood in relation to the historical inheritancesof political theatre, as well as performers’ and audiences’ contemporary
contexts. This secularism as autonomy from the religious involves
manifesting a kind of public that brings people together as ‘seculars’
through the social act of performance, drawing upon the historicalassociations of performative media with secularist ideas and positions.
The specific configuration of cultural politics in Bengal, in which
certain genres have themselves historically taken on secularist resonances,draws attention to the fact that performances need not reference religion

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GLOB AL SCEPTICAL PUBLICSto constitute a ‘secular performance’. This recognition expands our fieldof attention to consider the secularity of various kinds of embodiment,
through acting, dialogue, costume and genre aesthetics, as well as thegroups, audiences and publics that coalesce around performances. It also
highlights the fact that the ‘secular public’ produced through culturalactivism need not aspire to totality, but may constitute a space in which
activists can perform, socially reinforce and disseminate their secularcommitments in ways they deem safe. Thus performative embodimentsof secularity – unlike more cognitive or ideological considerations ofsecularism, and especially when secular performance does not reference
religion – reveal how tangible secular publics cohere with a much broadersocial milieu, in ways that exhibit rebellion and radicalism, but also
threats of censorship and violence. The importance of accounting forsecular publics in this manner, paying attention to the limits of theirperformances as much as their explicit demonstrations of secularism,
cannot be overestimated in contexts in which exclusivist religious politics
continue to assert themselves violently.

Notes
1 All interlocutors’ names and identifiable information have been anonymised.
2 Like the English term, the Bengali concept takes on multiple meanings, which may include theideal of equal treatment of all religions (by the state and in everyday interactions), the rejection ofreligion-based politics and political parties, and the opposition of certain forms of religiosity suchas fundamentalist forms of Islam or Hinduism. Thus, being ‘secular’ often has the connotation of
being less religious. These issues are highly contested in both Bengals, though differently in
relation to their histories and the dominant religions, Hinduism and Islam. In this chapter, we
focus on secularism as it is variously defined by secularist cultural activists through performances.
3 According to the CPI(M) programme, ‘the Party should fight against all forms of intrusion ofreligion in the economic, political and administrative life of the nation and uphold secular anddemocratic values in culture, education and society.’ It criticises other secularist parties that
describe themselves as secular for a supposedly bourgeois pseudo-secularism, in which all
religions can ‘equally interfere’ in political life (Communist Party of India (Marxist) 2001: 24–5).
4 The notion that Bengali nationalism (conceptualised as distinct from Bangladeshi nationalism)is ‘secular’, especially in the sense of being non-communal, has its roots in earlier anti-colonial
movements, especially the Swadeshi movement against the division in 1905 along communal
lines of Bengal by the British colonial administration (see Chatterjee 1999).
5 The 1972 constitution of Bangladesh mentioned secularism as one of the four core principles.
However, the fifth amendment to the constitution in April 1979 during the BNP (Bangladesh
Nationalist Party) rule removed secularism from the constitution, and the Arabic phrase‘bi-smi-llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm’ (in the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful) was
added. In 1988, under the Ershad regime, Islam became the state religion. In 2010, theSupreme Court declared that the fifth amendment was unconstitutional. Subsequently, theprinciple of secularism was reinstated in the constitution, but ‘bi-smi-llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm’and Islam as a state religion were retained.
6 Bauls (Bāul) are members of a devotional musical tradition in the Bengal region, drawing
adherents from both Islam and Hinduism. They often intentionally and explicitly aim attranscending religious divisions and are associated with secularism in Bengal. See Openshaw
1997; Knight 2010; Schulz 2021.

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7 This sense of shared political values prevails even though very few groups in the United
Theatre Council have explicit communist leanings. For Shomapti, commitment to ‘the spiritof the Independence War’, non-communalism and secularism form the common groundbetween all the cultural activists in the council.
8 Such contested entanglement between citizenship and religious belonging should be seen in
the context of the divide-and-rule policies of the British colonial government and the many
partitions of Bengal, as well as the two-state theory in which the British Raj was divided into a
Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan (see Chatterjee 1999; J. Chatterji 1994).
Contemporary ramifications can be found in religion-based and secular nationalisms, but also
in contestations about who may hold legal citizenship, an issue that has been recurrently
debated with regard to the Urdu-speaking minority Biharis in Bangladesh, and has regained
urgency in recent years in India as changing citizenship legislation increasingly discriminates
against Muslims, reinforcing a notion that they are disloyal to the nation, second-class citizens
or ‘infiltrators’ from outside.
9 This movement was formed mostly by cultural activists, intellectuals and digital activists in
February 2013 to demand harsher punishment of the war crimes committed in the 1971
Independence War and in opposition to the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami. While it wasdenounced as an ‘atheist’ platform by some of its opponents, it was widely perceived asprogressive and secular by those who supported it.
10 Examples of such secular aesthetics include not only performance and songs but also visualarts such as ālpanā (colourful floor paintings), as well as protests in the form of candlelit
vigils, which the Islamist groups explicitly opposed in reaction to the Shahbag movement.
Such opposition illustrates the contentious and political nature of some aesthetic practices
that may be considered ‘Bengali’, ‘secular’ or ‘Hindu’, depending on one’s point of view.
11 Eldhose discusses the interrelation between street theatre and the rationalist movement in
Kerala, another Indian state that has been governed intermittently by a CPI(M)-led coalition.
For another example of rationalist and anti-superstition performances, see Quack 2012.
12 The division between Urdu and Hindi is one of the most obvious examples. For a fantastic
introduction to the historically changing relationship between language, script traditions andreligious identity in Bengal, see Uddin 2006.

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Chatterjee, Partha. 1999. ‘On religious and linguistic nationalisms: The second partition of
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Chatterji, Roma. 2016. ‘Repetition, improvisation, tradition: Deleuzean themes in the folk art ofBengal.’ Cultural Analysis 15 (1): 99–127.
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Eldhose, Adakkaravayalil Yoyakky. 2014. ‘Political conscientisation through street theatre: A
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Kunz, Hans-Martin. 2006. ‘Schauspiele, Schaubühnen, Schauplätze: “Jatra” und Populäres
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3‘There is no god, Summer’: a criticalevaluation of Rick and Morty’s
approach to atheism and nihilism
Frank Bosman

As early as the third minute of the first episode of the first season, Rick
Sanchez, Rick and Morty’s anti-hero, throws his calling card on the tablefor everyone to see: ‘There is no god, Summer. You gotta rip that Band-Aid
off now. You’ll thank me later.’ It is an adage that runs through the core of
the adult animated sitcom Rick and Morty, already running for four
seasons at the time of writing: God is dead and the universe is a cold andlonely place without any meaning or comfort.
The series combines pubescent dick jokes with philosophical themes
primarily connected to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (Abesamis
and Wayne 2019). The show (2013–present), created by Justin Roiland(Gravity Falls, 2012–16) and Dan Harmon (Community, 2009–15), hasbeen nominated for numerous awards, winning – among others – the IGN
Awards of 2015 and 2016 for Best Animated Series, the Annie Awards of2018 for Best General Audience Animated Television/Broadcast
Production and Outstanding Achievement for Writing in an AnimatedTelevision/Broadcast Production, and the Primetime Emmy Awards of2018 and 2020 for Outstanding Animated Program. The series has beenpraised by the public as well as by critics, applauding its dark overtones,
mature themes and philosophical sharpness (Bisset 2020; Chandler
2019; Di Placido 2020; Philips 2015).

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The show focuses on the adventures of the members of the Smithhousehold, consisting of parents Jerry and Beth, children Summer andMorty, and Beth’s father Rick Sanchez. Rick, indisputably the ‘hero’ of theseries, is a super-brilliant, nihilistic, alcoholic scientist, who drags his
reluctant and fearful sidekick and grandson Morty with him on countless,often highly dangerous adventures, taking place in one of the infinite
realities of the multiverse (Carr 2007). Beth may be the more assertive
force in the household, but is emotionally torn by her dissatisfying
marriage to Jerry, a simple-minded and insecure person, and her urge to
be validated by her absent father. Summer, in her turn, is crushed under
the general uncertainties of high school and under the specific knowledge
that her mother’s (unwanted) pregnancy with her is the only reason forher parents’ strained marriage.
The philosophy of Rick and Morty has been described as ‘a neverending fart joke wrapped around a studied look into nihilism’ (Cobb2017). An instructive example of this nihilism can be found in the firstseason of the series, identified by Dan Harmon as ‘the meaning of life in
Rick and Morty’ (Marnell 2017). When Rick, quite unintentionally, has
genetically altered the DNA of the whole of humankind, turning them into
monsters, he and Morty ‘bail out’ from their original universe to take theplace of their counterparts in another dimension, just seconds after thelatter are killed by a failed scientific experiment (S1E6 ‘Rick Potion #9’).
Rick and Morty bury their counterparts in the backyard, a factwhich leaves Rick quite unaffected, but leads to considerable mental
trauma for Morty. Two episodes later (S1E8 ‘Rixty Minutes’), Summer
learns that her mother’s pregnancy with her was not planned, that her
parents considered an abortion, and that her parents would have beenmuch better off without her. When she plans to run away from home,
Morty confronts her in her room, referencing his earlier ‘death’:I kinda know how you feel, Summer. … That out there? That’s mygrave. … And every morning, Summer, I eat breakfast 20 yards awayfrom my own rotting corpse. … Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody
belongs anywhere. Everybody’s going to die. Come watch TV.
This ethical and teleological nihilism also has a religious dimension, or,better formulated, has a specific influence on the show’s depiction anddiscussion of (institutionalised) religion. Rick and Morty is a self-identified
atheist show, as readily expressed by Rick to his granddaughter in thethird minute of the first episode ever (quoted above). In the series as awhole, atheism – in this chapter defined as the explicit denial of and98

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critique of any belief in any metaphysical entity or reality (Nielsen 2021)– is ubiquitous, usually expressed by and through Rick himself, as a kindof realisation of Nietzsche’s idea of the self-realising Übermensch(Magnus 1983).
In this chapter, I want to explore and critically evaluate Rick andMorty’s atheism-based religion criticism. To do so, I will present anddiscuss the series’ criticism under five different themes (and in the same
number of sections): (1) the series’ deconstructive intertextual
relationship with the Christian Bible and its reductionist view of religion;(2) the series’ depiction of religion as a kind of coping mechanism; (3) the
absence of divinity in the face of the existence of evil; (4) Rick as the
Nietzschean Übermensch and its evident impossibility; and (5) the series’
specific criticism of religious people ‘selling’ their story particularly badly.
In the conclusion, I will formulate some final thoughts concerning
Rick and Morty’s handling of religion and nihilism, which will prove to berather unexpected, at least for some readers. To foreshadow these final
thoughts, it is enough to indicate that while the series appears to
propagate a nihilistic and atheist worldview, in the end – as I hope to show
convincingly through the course of this chapter – Rick and Morty judges
quite critically the possibility of attaining and maintaining a ‘hard’Nietzschean (in terms of both atheism and nihilism) position in life on a
personal and practical level.
Some preliminary remarks are in order here. Of course, Rick andMorty is not the only adult animated sitcom – as the genre has beenlabelled – that targets (institutionalised) religion in a critical manner. The
Simpsons (Groening, 1989–present), for example, while not overtly
religion critical, gave rise to what is called the ‘Ned Flanders effect’,
named after the Simpsons’ extremely religious neighbour, namely theidea that the more religious a person appears to be, the more likely a nonbeliever is to assume they are not open to new ideas and (thus) find themless attractive (Bingham 2015).
Futurama got its Robot Devil (Groening, 1999–2013) and Solar
Opposites (Roiland and McMahan, 2020) its pseudo-religion from ‘The
Wall’, a self-contained world where shrunken people are kept as house petsby alien children, but it is probably South Park (Parker and Stone, 1997–
present) that is best known for its blatant and forceful attack uponeverything related to religion (even though the targets of the series’
criticism are certainly not limited to that). Episodes that include strong
religion criticism are: ‘Christian hard rock’ (on the economics of praisemusic), ‘A boy and a priest’ (about child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic
Church) and ‘The passion of the Jew’ (on Christian anti-Semitism).

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As a methodology, I opt for a communication-oriented analysis(COA) of the series’ content (Wieringen 2020). COA makes a strong
differentiation between text-external communication (between theso-called ‘real author’ and ‘real reader’), and text-immanentcommunication (between the so-called ‘text-immanent author’ and ‘textimmanent reader’). In my analysis of the series’ content, I focus on textimmanent communication, thus methodologically excluding the positionof the series’ creators (real authors) and their intentions andinterpretations of their work, as well as the position of the series’ actual
viewers (real readers) in the United States and elsewhere in the world,
and their reaction towards and opinions concerning the series’ content.
Last but not least, I discuss only the first four seasons of the series(2013–20), since the fifth season is still airing while I am writing thischapter.

‘Our cup runneth over’: biblical references and religious
reductionism
Rick and Morty is a series that cannot be accused of biblical or religious
illiteracy (Dinham and Francis 2015). More than once the series quotes– implicitly or explicitly – the Christian Bible. Over four seasons, a kind of(chronologically ordered) anthology can be compiled.
The first instance is found in the pilot (S1E1). When a drunken Rickdrags Morty from his bed into his spaceship, he explains to his grandsonthat he will nuke the world, apparently to ‘get a whole fresh start’ for theearth. Morty objects, understandably, to which Rick answers he will pickup Jessica first, Morty’s long-lasting (but one-sided) love interest. Ricksays: ‘I’m gonna make it like a new Adam and Eve and you’re gonna be
Adam. … And Jessica’s gonna be Eve.’ It is a clear reference to a section of
the creation story found in Genesis 2:5–25, where Adam and Eve are
portrayed as living in the primordial paradise.
The invocation of the biblical first couple, however, refers not only
to a paradise now presumably lost, as Milton called it, but also to theChristian concept of ‘original sin’ (Jacobs 2008, i–xv). There is a kind ofhereditary ‘sin’ running through the Smith-Sanchez family. Beth, and toa lesser degree Summer and Morty, are constantly wrestling with the
combination of an intrinsic brilliant intellect and a chronic lack of ultimate
purpose in life, traits clearly inherited from Beth’s father. This inheritanceis jeopardising not only her own happiness, but also that of her husband
and two children.

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In ‘Rick Potion #9’ (S1E6), Morty and Summer’s school principal
announces the annual flu-season dance. To explain this somewhat odd
concept, he adds: ‘I don’t know how many times I have to say this but if
you have the flu, stay home. The flu-season dance is about awareness, notcelebration. You don’t bring dead babies to Passover.’ The principal’sannouncement invokes, quite ironically, the Passover story from Exodus
12: the Israelites were instructed to smear the blood of a lamb on their
doorpost in order to avoid being targeted by the angel of death, killing
every firstborn in Egypt.
Another example of intertextuality between Rick and Morty and theBible is found in ‘The Wedding Squanchers’ (S2E10). The Smith family
has to flee an alien wedding and eventually Earth because of the Galactic
Federation’s hunt for Rick, whom they deem to be one of the mostdangerous criminals in the galaxy. Rick directs the Smiths to an Earth-likeplanet to start again, an episode reminiscent of the Adam and Eve scenefrom the pilot episode mentioned above, including the difficult suggestionthat Adam and Eve’s children would have to have sex with their parents
to produce the next generation (Stiebert 2016).
When Rick has found the perfect planet, he smiles and quotes Psalm
23:5 from the Authorised Version (King James translation) almost
verbatim: ‘See? Our cup runneth over. Now, who wants to go shopping fora brand-new motherfuckin’ world?! All right!’ Of course, in a true Rickand Morty way, all three planets that appear to be an ideal replacement
have some sort of terrible fault. The biblical quote boomerangs: insteadof a divine blessing, the family is ‘welcomed’ with trials and tribulations.
In one instance, the biblical quotation is directly tied to Rick seeing
himself as a kind of godlike creature (see below). When Jerry fails to put
the Christmas decorations on top of the Smiths’ house (S4E5 ‘Rattlestar
Ricklactica’), Rick makes his body float through the air and argues:
I made your atomic matrix slightly lighter than air, and now yourshoes are heavier than air, which makes you neutrally buoyant,which I find personally more impressive conceptually than walking
on water, but what do I know? I wasn’t born into the god business.
I fucking earned it.
Rick refers to the famous story from the New Testament in which Jesus
walks on the Sea of Galilee (Mark 6:45–54, Matthew 14:22–34, John
6:15–21), claiming he himself is more powerful than the son of God.
The most extensive intertextual discussion with the Bible (with thepossible exception of S4E6 ‘Never Ricking Morty’, see below), however, is‘THERE IS NO GOD, SUMMER’: RICK AND MORTY

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found in ‘Childrick of Mort’ (S4E9). In this episode, Rick seems to have
had sex with a whole planet, conveniently called Gaia, bringing forth awhole nation of clay-people, resembling him in appearance. Because ofher own experience of abandonment, Beth forces her father to take up his
responsibility towards his offspring. Together they massively speed up thenatural evolution of the clay-people in order to bring their civilisation up
to the level of spacefaring, apparently the collective galactic equivalent ofa person coming of age.
The clay-people themselves refer to a combination between Genesis
2:7, in which God creates humankind out of ‘the dust of the ground’, andGenesis 1:26–7, where God declares that ‘they’ (the Bible uses a pluralform here) will create humankind after their own image. It isn’t hard to
see the parallel here: the episode suggests that – as the God of the Old
Testament created humankind – Rick is doing the same with the claypeople, created after his own image, making him – again – a godlike
being. The clay-people may also be a reference to the concept of the golemfrom Jewish mystical lore: a human-made clay figure imprinted with asecret incantation and coming to life in order to protect the people (Idel
1990; Sherwin 1985).
However, some of the clay-people are not ‘well’ and are deemed‘unproductive’ by Rick: ‘DJs, foodies and influencers’. They are tossed
outside the quickly developing city, where they accept the categoricallyunemployed Jerry, by implication the most unproductive creature of all,as their leader. Jerry leads them in what is turning out to be a fightbetween Rick and his city-dwellers versus Jerry and his outsiders,
supported by a giant Zeus-like figure who claims to be the real father ofGaia’s children. Eventually, Rick defeats this Zeus, whose fallen bodydestroys almost all the clay-people.
The whole episode is one very difficult intertextual reference to thebooks of Genesis and Exodus. The clay-people are a reference to the creation
story in which God creates the first human out of clay (Genesis 2:7),
portraying God as a divine potter (as for example in Jeremiah 18:1–6). Jerry
is clearly portrayed as a kind of modern Moses: he is taken away by a river(Exodus 2:3; see figure 3.1), assembles his ‘chosen people’, as both Rick andJerry express it (Deuteronomy 14:2), splits the river separating ‘the wild’
from Rick’s city (Exodus 14:15–31), unleashes ‘plagues’ on Rick’s people(Exodus 10:4–20), in this case locusts, and self-identifies as Moses, who is‘ready to burn some bush’ (Exodus 3:2).
The interpretation is, as said before, very complex. Rick and Morty
seems to identify Rick with the Egyptian pharaoh, the traditional
antagonist of the Exodus narrative, and Jerry with the hero Moses.

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3.1 Jerry plays the role of Moses, splitting the sea and allowing his clay
people to get across, not to escape Egypt, but to conquer it by force. From
‘Childrick of Mort’ (S4E9). Rick and Morty (2020). The Cartoon Network, Inc.
However, the deity fighting on Jerry/Moses’s side is not that of biblical
Israel, but that of Greek mythology, identified by Rick as ‘the off-brandYahweh’. This Zeus gives Jerry’s clay-people superhuman, magical powers
to fight Rick’s city folk, a clash between magic and religion on the one
hand, and science and rationality on the other. Rick’s killing of Jerry’s
Zeus/God is the image of science triumphing over religion andsuperstition, the first leading to a spacefaring civilisation, the second to aprimitive life in the untamed wilderness.
This last ‘biblical’ episode indicates very clearly the standpoint of
the show with regard to the relationship between religion and science,
opting quite frankly for the second over the first. In Ian Barbour’s famous
typology of religion–science interrelationships (1990, 4–10), Rick andMorty clearly falls into the category of conflict, the first category Barbour
describes. Religion and science are principally and irreversibly
incompatible with one another, to the point at which only one can beadhered to, leaving the other void and meaningless.
Another episode focusing on this conflict is ‘Something Ricked ThisWay Comes’ (S1E9), notably in both sub-narratives of the story. First,
Rick quarrels with Lucius Needful, the self-identifying as devilish (‘I am
the devil’) owner of an antique shop, freely handing out odd objects thatimbue their new owners with magical boons, but curse them at the sametime (a not so veiled reference to Stephen King’s famous 1991 horror
novel Needful Things). Rick invents a machine that identifies and removes‘THERE IS NO GOD, SUMMER’: RICK AND MORTY

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the curse without sacrificing its benefits. Rick is triumphant over magicand superstition because of his scientific mastermind. We will discuss this
episode later on in more detail.
In the same episode, Jerry and Morty have their own father–son
adventure, revolving around the discussion concerning the classificationof Pluto as a planet, a reference to the real-life 2006 discussion by theInternational Astronomical Union of whether to classify it as a dwarf
planet (Weintraub 2008). Jerry is convinced Pluto is still a planet andgoes to great lengths to maintain that claim, up to the point where he isinvited by the leading class of Plutonians to visit their ‘planet’. They mine
the interior of their own world for raw materials, constantly diminishingits size.
The Plutonians have cross-shaped irises, probably as a reference totheir religious-fundamentalist zeal, with which they cling to their belief
despite scientific evidence pointing elsewhere. The ruling class of
Plutonians is well aware of the situation, but keeps it a secret from theordinary citizens out of corporate greed, a probable reference by theseries to the famous, but usually not well-interpreted, quotation from KarlMarx about religion being the opium of the people. Jerry, in his turn, hassome very particular views on the nature of science. On the status of Pluto
as a planet, he comments: ‘Yeah, I heard about that, Morty. And I disagree.
… It is possible to disagree in science. Pluto was a planet, some committeeof fancy assholes disagree, I disagree back.’
When the Plutonian king compliments Jerry, whom he constantly
identifies as an ‘(earth) scientist’, he comments: ‘You know, sometimes
science is about conviction.’ Both expressions seem to reposition theoutcome of scientific inquiry from the realm of empirical knowledge tothat of subjective opinion, a tendency we know all too well from notions
such as ‘post-truth’ or ‘alternative facts’ (Stenmark 2018). (On a quickside note, in ‘Rick Potion #9’, Rick himself explains to Morty that science
is sometimes ‘more art than science’, right after he has compromised
human DNA beyond repair.)Back to Barbour’s typology and Rick and Morty’s highly critical viewof religion. It is interesting to note that Barbour defines two mutually
exclusive positions in this conflict, both, just as the series seems to argue.
On the one hand, we have scientific materialism, on the other biblicalliteralism. As Barbour (1990, 4) explains:
Both seek knowledge with a sure foundation – that of logic andsense data, in the one case, that of infallible scripture, in the other.
They both claim that science and theology make rival literal104

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statements about the same domain, the history of nature, so that
one must choose between them.
Barbour makes the accusation that those who argue in favour of the
exclusivism of science as the only epistemological means by which true
knowledge can be attained have, in fact, a reductionist perception of theconcept of religion and a philosophical and untenable trust in (empirical)
science. As Barbour suggests, religion and science are not intrinsically
opposed or mutually exclusive (giving three other possibilities for the tworealms to interact: independence, dialogue and integration); neither can(empirical) science prove its own epistemological premises.
The other position Barbour describes under the notion of ‘conflict’is biblical literalism, the idea – indeed upheld by several (fundamentalist)
religious communities all around the world – that only the Bible, theQur’an or some other Divine Revelation written down can give trustworthy
information on the nature of things, and when science and the Bible arein conflict, the second should always prevail. Within the context of Rickand Morty, two things are noteworthy. First, this adherence to biblicalliteralism is by no means the only or even the most common attitude ofChristian believers towards their sacred scripture. Secondly, Rick andMorty seems to frame all religion as biblical literalism in order to exclude
its possible value in an uncomplicated way. The use of biblical quotes
indicates – quite paradoxically – this framework.
Rick and Morty’s complex intertextual relationship with theChristian Bible is both a conduit for the show’s religion criticism, and an
expression of the show’s reductionist view of religious phenomena.

‘Headism is a hit!’: cults and religion as a
coping mechanism
Rick and Morty also expresses its religion criticism by means of the
exploration of the concept of ‘cult’, partly because of the notion’s negative
undertones in popular culture (Richardson 1993; Urban 2015). Over thefour seasons of Rick and Morty, this concept is explicitly dealt with in two
episodes: as a minor plot device in ‘Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind’(S1E10), and as a full-blown narrative in ‘Get Schwifty’ (S2E3).
In ‘Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind’, Rick and Morty are held
prisoner by some evil counterparts from another dimension. The ‘evil
Rick’ hoards Mortys from different dimensions, since their specificbrainwaves prevent him being found by the authorities. When this evil

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Rick throws ‘our’ Morty into a cell, he meets dozens of other ones there.
Most of the Mortys are trembling in fear of evil Rick’s terror, but somehave found another way to cope with their desperate situation.
These Mortys wear brown, monk-like habits and red paint on theirfaces. One of them says to ‘our’ Morty: ‘There is no escape, my son. We
will find our peace in the next world. … We are giving in. To the power ofthe one true Morty. One day he will return.’ All the Mortys pray in unison:‘Praise the one true Morty!’ When Morty gives a passionate speech about
Mortys’ self-awareness, one of them says: ‘This sounds like something theone true Morty might say. … He is the one true Morty.’
The cult member offers Morty a booklet, depicting his face with ahalo around his head, accompanied by the words ‘The Good Morty’. On
the back the words ‘Only one way to Morty salvation’ are printed. When
Morty looks inside, it depicts a little cartoon, in which two Mortys arelooking at a computer screen. The first says: ‘Morty, take a look at thiswebsite’, to which the second replies: ‘Hmmm, I don’t think we should be
on a site like this.’
The whole scene is an ironic commentary on Christian pretensions
concerning the way salvation is to be attained: only through faith in the
one true God. The cartoon of the website is a joke about Christian sexual
ethics, which is commonly associated with prudishness, modesty andcontained sexuality (Ranke-Heinemann 1990).
The second, and longest, discussion of religion as cult is found in theepisode ‘Get Schwifty’, in which the planet Earth is visited and abductedby the Cromulons, an alien race addicted to music-competition televisionseries like The Voice. They appear as enormous heads in the sky, whose
voices can be heard everywhere on the planet. The Cromulons force Earthinto a galactic music competition in which the winning planet will bespared, while the rest are obliterated by a giant space laser beam. While
Rick and Morty try to win the competition by performing their newly
written hit ‘Get Schwifty’, the rest of humankind yields to a new religion
called ‘Headism’.
The episode revolves around the idea of a disconnection between
cause and effect. On the one hand we have the Cromulons reacting to Rickand Morty’s performances, while on the other hand the new devotees try
to communicate with their new deities. When the Cromulons react to theperformances, the devotees believe it is because of what they did, since
they have no clue what is really happening. Only at the end of the episodeis the true identity of the heads-in-the-sky revealed to all, stimulating
Jerry to summarise: ‘Yeah, it’s possible that we may have been correlatingsome things that weren’t actually related at all.’106

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For example, when the Cromulons appear for the first time, theycause major storms all over the world. People, gathered in the local
church, try to reason what the true nature of the new phenomenon is.
Morty’s school principal rails against Father Bob, who sees the wholesituation as an opportunity to get some donations for his church:
I’m just gonna come out and make this pitch. The old gods are dead.
Fuck all previous existing religions. All hail the one true god, thegiant head in the sky. … I’m going out on the sidewalk and dropping
to my knees and pledging my eternal soul to the thing that literally
controls the fucking weather!
Then, the principal goes outside the church to pray to the heads in the sky:
Giant head in the sky, please forgive all that we’ve done. We’re sorry
for increased levels of emissions and our racism. And of course, theamber alerts I keep ignoring on my phone. … Please be kind to us
for we are but tiny things with entire bodies stuck to your ground.
At exactly the same time, Rick and Morty end their first performance in
Area 51; the Cromulons are very pleased with it and they stop the badweather instantly. This causes the principal and the other churchgoers,
who have followed him outside, to reason that the heads have improved
the weather because of their devotion and loyalty to their new gods.
Within days, Headism develops into a full-blown cult, with its own creed
and rituals like Ascension Day, its own priests pretending to interpret thewill of the gods exclusively, and its own punishment in the form of sending
heretics skywards tied to a massive quantity of balloons. The devotees
believe that these ‘unwantables’ will be absorbed by the gods and sneezed
out some time later in the form of newborn babies.
When Beth and Jerry decide to leave the new church, they are
deemed unwantables too (see figure 3.2), and are to be sent skywards by
a very enthusiastic Summer. At Area 51, Rick and Morty perform again,
at first displeasing, but later humouring, the giant heads in the sky. The
followers of Headism interpret these divine mood swings as caused bytheir actions, and a violent row starts between two factions within thecult, both claiming to know the true meaning of the divine signs in thesky. It is only after the heads reveal themselves to be the creators of acosmic music competition in which Earth had to perform that they
re-evaluate their reasonings, understanding that they saw cause andeffect where there was actually none.

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3.2 Summer (girl with balloon in hand) is all too eager to send herparents Beth and Jerry skywards to her newly adopted godheads, the‘giant heads in the sky’. Beside her, we see (left to right) Morty’s andSummer’s school principal and maths teacher. From ‘Get Schwifty’(S2E3). Rick and Morty (2015). The Cartoon Network, Inc.
Even though Rick and Morty’s ‘cultic’ understanding of religion has many
elements, I want to focus on two of them: religion as proto-science(Quadrio 2017, 101–2; Smith 2017, 211–12) and religion as coping
mechanism (Hood et al. 2009, 435–76; Pargament 2001). Jerry, Beth andSummer are depicted as ‘awed and terrified “primitives”’ who tremble in
the face of the ‘opacities of nature and society’ (Orsi 2016, 38), that is, intheir case, the true meaning of the giant heads’ appearance in the sky, andthe influence, or rather the non-influence, that the Headists have on theunfolding of events. It is only at the end of the episode that the cultists
understand the true, immanent meaning of the Cromulons’ appearance,
through which they ‘switch’ from a religious to a scientific perspective on
the matter at hand, a transition that is looked upon favourably by theseries.
The second qualification of religion Rick and Morty presents is oneof providing a psychological mechanism by which people can cope in ameaningful way with experiences such as pain, suffering or loss of control.
As Riesebrodt (2010, 172, 173) puts it,
religious institutions … uphold the ability to act in situations where
people feel powerless and incapable of action. … In this existential
sense, religion is a way of coping with contingency. … [It] maintains

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people’s ability to act in situations in which they run up against theirown limits. … [R]eligion allows humans to continue to act evenwhen overtaxed. Religious practices offer humans a structure insituations in which they might otherwise oscillate between panicand despair.
This is exactly what we see happening in both the episodes discussed
above. The Cult of the One True Morty helps the imprisoned Mortys tocope with their captivity specifically, but even more with their own
existence. All the captured Mortys are without their own Ricks, whichleaves them not only without protection from the dangers of the universe,
but also void of their primary and self-explanatory place in the universe,that is, beside a Rick as his sidekick. The Cult of the One True Morty tries
to give the prisoners a new goal to live and to hope for, easing theirsuffering to tolerable levels.
Coping is also at the heart of the Cult of Headism in the second
episode. When people are confronted by a literally awesome alien force,
which (empirically) controls the weather on the whole planet, and towhose mercy all of humankind is abandoned, they have to choose
between surrendering to the utter meaninglessness and uncontrollabilityof human life in the face of the uncaring universe, symbolised by the
Cromulons, who sacrifice whole planets for their own petty entertainment,
and reframing the fabric of their reality into a paradigm that fits the newsituation in such a way that it gives (at least the impression of) control
and purposefulness.
Rick and Morty’s depiction of religion as a cult incorporates not only
the traditional criticisms like inherent violence and blind obedience to thecult’s leaders, but also the ideas of religion as a coping mechanism and aform of proto-science. Both qualities of religion are criticised throughout
the series, because the lack of scientific insight into the ‘true’ nature ofthings pacifies the individual into a state of acceptance of the status quo,preventing him or her from rising to the occasion, taking matters into
their own hands and trying to change the situation for the better.
If ‘our’ Morty hadn’t risen to the occasion, to rebel against the ‘evil’
Rick’s keeping the Mortys prisoner, and had been content with his new
religiously interpreted status quo, the Mortys would never have escaped.
And if Rick and Morty hadn’t grasped the true nature of the Cromulons
and acted accordingly, all the devotees of Headism would have been
destroyed by the displeased heads in the sky all the same.

‘THERE IS NO GOD, SUMMER’: RICK AND MORTY109‘There is no such a thing as hell’: atheism and theexistence of evil
Rick and Morty’s religion criticism is perhaps most visible in its principal
and consequently professed atheism. Even though Rick is identified byvarious characters, and frequently self-identifies, as a kind of ‘living god’(S3E10 ‘The Rickchurian Mortydate’; see also the next section of thischapter), the series’ universe appears to be void of any transcendent
reality or divine entity. Beth may appear to be a goddess, and may evenbe identified as one by Jerry, but she is not a god in the traditional sense(S2E7 ‘Big Trouble in Little Sanchez’). And the Zeus-like figure who
claims to be the father of Gaia’s children (S4E9 ‘Childrick of Mort’) is nota transcendent being either. Rick identifies and dismisses his competition
as an ‘off-brand Yahweh’ and ‘just a Zeus’.
Over the whole series, Rick’s adage, formulated in the pilot episode– ‘There is no God!’ – echoes continuously. In two specific episodes, thistheme of the denial of any transcendent being is discussed in more depth
and quite explicitly: ‘Rickmancing the Stone’ (S3E2) and ‘The Ricks Must
Be’ (S2E6). In the first of these, when Rick, Morty and Summer are
visiting a post-apocalyptic version of Earth in another dimension in searchof a very valuable but at the same time very imaginary kind of rock,identified as ‘isotope 322’, the violent raiders they meet appear to worshipthe substance as a kind of divine object.
The raiders’ leader, Hemorrhage, explains its paradoxical meaning:‘That is our glowing rock. We carry it with us for desecration, to remind
us there are no gods.’ It is a reversal of the original meaning of a sacredobject (relics, totems, idols and the like), which is typically revered
because of its connection to the divine realm or because it symbolises oreven manifests the divine itself (Hahn 2017, 18–47). Isotope 322 is,however, not a symbol of the divine–human connection, or of a connection
between mortals and their gods, or a magic tool to manipulate thephysical or the divine realm, but a symbol of the opposite, that there is no
divine reality or deity to begin with.
Another possibility is the interpretation of the glowing rock as a formof ‘material irreligion’ (Chalfant 2020). Atheism has been regarded as anintellectual endeavour first and foremost; in contrast, scholars such as
Matthew Engelke (2015) and Jacob Copeman and Johannes Quack(2015) argue that material culture is just as important for the non-religious
as it is for traditional religions. The glowing rock of Hemorrhage could beconsidered to be such an object: significant, but in a non-religious way.

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Hemorrhage’s statement that they ‘have no gods’ is especiallyinteresting if we take into account the apocalyptic context of his raiderclan, because it invokes the theological theme of theodicy and the series’
constant criticism of this. The theodicy lies at the heart of threemonotheistic religions and focuses on the ancient question about theexistence of an omnipotent and good God vis-à-vis the existence of evil
within this world (Bosman 2019, 127–30). A theodicy is an attempt tofind a solution to the principal problem: how can one believe in a God
who is both omnipotent and righteous, in the face of all the evil andsuffering in the world? According to John Hick’s famous typology (1966),
the majority of these ‘defences’ either excuse evil and suffering itself –suggesting it serves a higher, yet undiscovered good – or excuse God byreframing the existence of (moral) evil as a necessary condition of theabsolute freedom of the human will.
Isotope 322 symbolises both the question being asked – why did
God not prevent the apocalypse in the afterdays of which Hemorrhage
and his clan have to live? – and the ultimate, atheistic answer to thatquestion – because there is no God in the first place. It is a reversed
causality: because the suffering of the apocalypse happened, that is, was
not prevented by a divine entity, the existence of that entity is nullified, orat least one’s faith in such a divinity. It is a signpost of the series’ atheist
religion criticism: if God exists, why all the suffering?
Examples of the critical discussion of the theodicy in Rick and Morty
can be found in at least three other instances. (1) In the pilot (S1E1),
when Summer is confronted with her boy-crush being frozen by Rick andshattered to pieces, she cries out: ‘What kind of God lets this happen?’(2) In ‘Rick Potion #9’ (S1E6), when Jerry fights off the human monsters
created by Rick’s failed manipulations and rescues Beth, she cries: ‘Jerry!
Thank God!’ But Jerry disagrees: ‘God? God is turning people into insect
monsters, Beth! I am the one beating them to death. Thank me.’ (3) In‘The Vat of Acid Episode’ (S4E8), Rick confronts Morty with theconsequences of his behaviour, which is killing thousands of Mortys fromother dimensions, and his grandson cries in despair. Rick comments: ‘It’sover, Morty. Feel this. Take this in. This is God.’ All these examples echo
the same criticism of any religion: why the suffering?
Yet another train of thought, intended to underline the idea of the
non-existence of any godhead whatsoever, is found in ‘The Ricks Must Be’(S2E6). Inside the battery of Rick’s spaceship, he had created a‘microverse’ that includes intelligent life. Rick has visited this microverse
earlier and introduced to it Goobleboxes, devices that generate electricity,which is partly rerouted to power Rick’s battery. Inside the microverse,‘THERE IS NO GOD, SUMMER’: RICK AND MORTY

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the scientist Zeep has created his own miniverse in which people operatea Flooble Crank to create electricity. Within the miniverse, anotherscientist, Kyle, is busy creating his own teenyverse, which includes
another electricity-making device, called the Blooble Yank. In this
episode, Rick and Morty evokes the idea of (earthly) life as the result of
extraterrestrial interference (Feder 2002), leaving their memory distorted
in the world’s religions and mythologies, popularised by Erich von
Däniken’s bestseller Chariots of the Gods? (1969).
When Kyle realises his ontological status, he despairs: ‘So he madea universe, and that guy is from that universe, and that guy made auniverse, and that’s the universe where I was born? Where my father
died, and where I couldn’t make time for his funeral because I wasworking on my universe.’ Kyle smashes his spaceship into the rocks,
killing himself in the process and blocking Rick, Morty and Zeep fromreturning to their respective universes. Zeep and Rick engage in a monthlong conflict in which verbal cursing takes an important part, usually ofan existential kind. For example, Rick says to Zeep: ‘I made the stars that
became the carbon in your mother’s ovaries.’ To which Zeep replies: ‘Ididn’t ask to be born!’ They even mock each other theologically. Zeepsays: ‘I hope your god is as big a dick as you.’ To which Rick replies, true
to his atheist inclinations: ‘My god’s the biggest dick that’s never existed.’
The denial of any transcendent reality or divine being also hasconsequences for the existence of an afterlife, be it a good one (heaven), ora bad one (hell). Rick denounces both explicitly. In ‘The Rickchurian
Mortydate’ (S3E10), Rick warns a security officer of the US president not
to touch him: ‘Son, you have a right to refuse his order, and I guarantee
you’re going to die if you touch me, and there’s no afterlife. Everything justgoes black.’ And in ‘Rest and Ricklaxation’ (S3E6), a very evil version of
Rick says the same: ‘There is no such thing as hell.’ The same applies to theafterlife the alien Tony arrives at in ‘The Old Man and the Seat’ (S4E2). It isonly after he meets his deceased wife that Tony understands he is in a fakeversion of heaven, created by Rick, based on ‘what he wants’ and ‘what hehas’. The morality of this fake heaven is that every conception of the afterlife
is not based on reality, but on the hopes and dreams of individuals (as a partof religion’s quality of being a coping mechanism; see above).
It is, however, interesting to see that the series explicitly denies theexistence of divine entities and an afterlife in some episodes, while at thesame time it has no problem with depicting a very real hell, several
demons and the devil in other ones. I will give three examples. In the first,
in an extraterrestrial commercial, a leprechaun with an Irish accent,Tophat Jones, is slain by two children who empty the contents of his

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stomach in order to eat the cereal (called Smiggles) the creature has justdevoured. When the apparently Roman Catholic (what else?) leprechaundies, he weeps: ‘Jesus Christ! It hurts! … Ah, Jesus Christ. Lord. Savior.
And Spirit. Save me! Take me to the light. Oh, my God! I see demons. I see
demons are coming.’
Of course, this is not the same as depicting an actual afterlife, since
we have only Tophat’s dying words to testify to it, and he is – after all – ina commercial. But we have other examples. In the second, in the earlier
discussed parody of King’s novel Needful Things (S1E9, see above), Lucius
Needful, the self-identified devil, and Rick have a quarrel over the cursed
objects in the store. Rick discovers a way to remove the curses, about
which he comments: ‘Does evil exist, and if so, can one detect and measure
it? … The answer is yes, you just have to be a genius.’
The third example is from the anthology episode ‘Morty’s Mind
Blowers’ (S3E8), in which Rick and Morty revisit former adventures too
painful for either of them to remember. In one of those memories, a Floop
Floopian warlord, Zick Zack, asks Rick to kill him, since his people believethat such an honourable death will bring them everlasting happiness inthe afterlife. When Rick goes to the bathroom, Morty and Zick Zack havea conversation on the afterlife.
Morty: You know, I’m a little envious. Your species has an actual
afterlife. That’s gotta be nice.
Zick Zack: What do you mean?
Morty: Well, you know, here on Earth, we don’t know what’s goingon. It must be nice for you guys to, you know, have that proof’s
in the pudding, you know, evidence.
Zick Zack: Evidence? There’s supposed to be evidence?
Morty: Um, yeah, uh … otherwise, how do you know if it’s true?
Zick Zack runs outside, very unsure about his former request, but is killed
instantly by a passing car. Upon his death, dark figures, chanting in eerie
voices, drag Zick Zack’s soul downwards.
Zick Zack: Oh, God, it’s all real! Oh, it hurts! Oh, I shouldn’t havedoubted it! I shouldn’t have let you make me doubt it! Aah! I
blame you, I blame you!
Morty: But he said there wasn’t any evidence! That was a ton ofevidence!
Rick: Well, silver lining. Now I know their religion’s real. They havea hell, and it does not look good.

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From these examples, we see the interesting fact that, while there is an‘official’ denial of any transcendent reality, deity or afterlife, hell seems to
be a pretty real deal in Rick and Morty’s universe. In combination with thesubtle hints about the theodicy issue I touched upon earlier, the series
gives evidence of the struggle of postmodernity with the existence ofsuffering and evil in the world, exactly because there is no transcendent
reality or entity that could be connected to these experiences (Bosman
and Wieringen 2020).
The death of God extinguished the self-explanatory nature of God,an afterlife and the accompanying judgement between good and bad. It
did not, however, extinguish the (experiences of) pain and suffering, nor
the experienced need for a (final) judgement to reward what is good andpunish what is evil. This results in the strange phenomenon whereby
depicting hell is far more popular than depicting heaven, a tendency
stretching from Dante’s Inferno to animated sitcoms like South Park and
The Simpsons (Zocalo Public Square 2012; Baird 2007). The reality of ourworld not being a very heavenly place ‘produces’ the need to ‘expel’ theevils from this world to another realm, at least in a collective culturalsense. This is why hell is very real in Rick and Morty, while every trace ofheaven is eradicated.

‘I am a goddamn god now!’: Rick as a NietzscheanÜbermensch
Connected to the concept of the death of god and the disappearance of anafterlife is the idea of the Übermensch. Nietzsche’s superman has to workout, in the face of the vanishing of an external value-creating instance orentity, his own new goals, ideals and values (Loeb 2006; Fitzsimons 2007,
149–65). Rick answers to the description of the Nietzschean superhuman:(1) he is his own god, in the sense that he accepts no higher authority
than his own, (2) he is constantly working towards self-realisation,
sublimation and creativity, and (3) he fights a constant battle against
ethical and teleological nihilism that is so intricately connected to
Nietzsche’s ideal (Abesamis 2019).
During most of the series, Rick seems perfectly able to operate (andincarnate) this Nietzschean philosophy to the fullest, including theaccompanying nihilism:

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To live is to risk it all. Otherwise you are just an inert chunk ofrandomly assembled molecules drifting wherever the universe
blows you.
(S3E2 ‘Rickmancing the Stone’)I don’t respect therapy, because I’m a scientist. Because I invent,transform, create and destroy for a living, and when I don’t likesomething about the world, I change it.
(S3E3 ‘Pickle Rick’)
Worse, you’re smart. When you know nothing matters, the universe
is yours. … The universe is basically an animal. It grazes on theordinary. It creates infinite idiots just to eat them.
(S3E9 ‘The ABCs of Beth’)
Many times, indeed, Rick is identified as some kind of god; elsewhere, heclaims to be a god himself. For example: ‘the smartest thing in every
conceivable universe, the Infinite Rick, a god’, ‘a demon’ and ‘a superfucked-up god’ (S3E1 ‘The Rickshank Rickdemption’), ‘if God exists, it’s
fucking me’ (S3E6 ‘Rest and Ricklaxation’), ‘a living God’ (S3E10 ‘The
Rickchurian Mortydate’), ‘a goddamn god’ (S4E1 ‘Edge of Tomorty’), a‘god of death’ (S4E7 ‘Promortyus’) and bigger than ‘a Zeus’ (S4E9‘Childrick of Mort’).
The interesting part of Rick’s portrayal as a Nietzschean Übermensch
is not when he is successful, but rather when he fails and his superhumanproperties are unveiled as masking an ultimately unsure, bitter and (mostof all) lonely figure. Several moments spring directly to the mind of any fanof the series. The first example of the dissolving of Rick’s self-proclaimed
semi-divinity can be found in the episode ‘Auto Erotic Assimilation’ (S2E3).
Rick reconnects with his former girlfriend Unity, a relatively small ‘hivemind’, a collective of individuals whose interconnected consciousnesses
form one giant new entity. Rick and Unity plunge themselves into a planetwide orgy, sprinkled with booze and drugs.
Eventually, Unity breaks up with Rick, not because she has stopped
loving him, but because she realises that she will lose herself – even as ahive mind which has absorbed millions of individuals – because of her
relation with the intellectually and psychologically stronger Rick. She
writes: ‘I lose who I am and become part of you. As in a strange way you’rebetter at what I do without even trying.’ When Rick returns home to his
garage, he puts together a strange contraption. After having defrozen andgently caressed a strange, squeaking alien, he puts it in the machine,‘THERE IS NO GOD, SUMMER’: RICK AND MORTY

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which – after a few seconds – kills the creature instantly. Rick, heavily
drunk, also puts his own head in the death-ray contraption, but passes out
before the machine can kill him.
Rick’s depression is evidently due to lovesickness – he apparently
really loved Unity – but also to the hive mind’s comments on their breaking
up. Unity seems to think Rick is already ‘evolved’ and ‘whole’ on a level
she will never attain even if she unifies uncountable species. Rick,however, is of another and much more negative opinion concerning
himself. His consciously chosen Nietzschean worldview, including his
own self-realisation, prevents him from loving and being loved as a‘normal’ person could. In ‘Rick Potion #9’ (S1E6), Rick has already listed
his opinion on love, sex and marriage:
Listen, I hate to break it to you, but what people call ‘love’ is just achemical reaction that compels animals to breed. It is hard, Morty,
then it slowly fades, leaving you stranded in a failing marriage. I did
it. Your parents are gonna do it. Break the cycle. Rise above it. Focus
on science.
This ‘focus on science’ has brought Rick two opposed things: the capability
to live the life of a Nietzschean demigod and the incapability to connect toUntermenschen, who cannot follow in his footsteps. The same happens in
the episode ‘The Old Man and the Seat’ (S4E2); Rick – shy pooper that heis – has built himself an artificial world for the sole purpose of taking a shit
in private, but discovers that his royally positioned toilet is also used byanother creature. After some investigation, Rick identifies the alien Tony– also a shy pooper – as the culprit. Instead of killing him right away, Rickgoes to great lengths to prevent him from intruding ever again. Tony keeps
coming, however, and eventually explains the situation to a furious Rick:You need the same thing I needed, Rick. You need someone to give
you permission to live. … You know what shy pooping is, Rick? It’sa pointless bid for control. You want to take the one part of life thatyou truly think is yours, and you want to protect it from a universethat takes whatever it wants. … We can spend our lives fighting
that, or we can choose to be free.
When Tony eventually dies – which is unrelated to Rick’s efforts – thescientist returns to his artificial world in order to grieve the death of his‘friend’, silently being humiliated by the devices he had installed for Tony.
As Unity was the symbol of Rick’s incapability to connect to loved ones,

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Tony is the symbol of his incapability to control the world around him inevery detail, even with his superhuman intellect. Rick knows he isultimately limited, but refuses to acknowledge this fact to himself, which
results in the controlled environment and his shy pooping.
A third time, Rick fails to live up to his own Nietzschean standards.
During the four seasons of the series, it becomes more than clear that Rickleft Beth’s mother early in his daughter’s life, which led to great
abandonment issues during her adulthood. When Beth struggles with herlife choices, going back and forth between her bourgeois life with herfamily and a wild life on her own in the spirit of her father, Rick offers tocreate a perfect clone for her, giving her every opportunity to takedecisions in life (S3E9 ‘The ABCs of Beth’).
The viewer is left in the dark as to which path Beth chooses, until
the fourth season’s finale, ‘Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri’ (S4E10). ‘Wild’
Beth returns home to find ‘sensible’ Beth running her household. Bothdaughters try to squeeze out of their father who is the clone and who is
the real Beth. Eventually, Rick is forced to explain he doesn’t know either,since he let a computer mix up the two at random. Both daughters walkaway disgusted, leaving Rick to himself. Rick is visibly shocked by his own
behaviour. He sighs and says: ‘Holy shit. I’m a terrible father.’
Just as Unity exposed Rick’s inability to connect to a loved one, andTony showed Rick’s incapacity to cope with his own contingency, the two
Beths are incarnations of Rick’s inability to take any form of long-term
responsibility. The question the series poses towards the Nietzschean ideaof the Übermensch, at least as it is popularly understood, is a tough one:is Rick insufficient to be a real superhuman or is the superhumaninsufficient as a model for one’s individual life?
Intriguingly enough, the series does not answer that question veryclearly: Rick and Morty leaves the unanswered question ‘hanging’ above
the series’ arch. Rick is continually swung back and forth between
succeeding and failing his Übermensch calling. In this respect, the seriesis criticising not only the ‘old-fashioned’ bourgeois and ‘religious’worldview, as Nietzsche did himself by introducing his concept of thesuperhuman, but also the concept itself by illustrating the practicalproblems of maintaining such a status in one’s life.

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‘My best friend and personal savior’: religion as abad story
Now, after having established Rick as a not unproblematic but still strong
incarnation of the Nietzschean Übermensch, whose place is within auniverse void of meaning and without any transcendent reality or
supernatural deity, the series – again – makes a final U-turn. And it
collides, precisely, with its own religion criticism.
In ‘A Rickle in Time’ (S2E1), Rick, Summer and Morty have managed
to split time into multiple fractions of itself. Rick manages to produce adevice which should restore order, but the device of one of the many
Mortys involved across the different timelines is malfunctioning. The
accompanying Rick gives Morty his own device, saving the grandchild but
condemning the grandfather to certain death by the collapsing of thefractured time. When Rick accidentally finds the broken one, floating
through space, he immediately navigates to it, trying desperately to fix it
before it is too late.
During this short period, Rick fervently and feverishly prays to God:
‘Oh, sweet Jesus, please let me live. Oh my God, I have to, I gotta fix thisthing, please, God in heaven. Please, God, oh Lord, hear my prayers.’
When he succeeds, as he inevitably does, he denounces his faithinstantaneously: ‘Yes, fuck you, God. Not today, bitch!’ In the meantime,
another Rick is on his knees praying too, hands folded, eyes closed:‘Please God, if there is a hell, please be merciful to me.’ When he is saved(by the other Rick), he also renounces his faith immediately: ‘Yes! I did it!
There is no God! In your face!’
This episode is remarkable for containing the only moment in theseries in which Rick seems to genuinely testify to his faith in a personalGod, something that is in stark and blatant contrast to his usual denial ofany deity or transcendental reality. Of course, one could dismiss thisscene as a kind of temporary regression into a state of proto-scientific
behaviour: in the face of immanent and seemingly unavoidable mortal
danger, even a Nietzschean Übermensch like Rick is not immune to the
comfort and hope faith can bring. But as soon as the emergency isovercome, Rick shows his true colours again.
This could indeed be so, but I want to suggest that the series runs
deeper than this. In the already much-discussed and -quoted episode‘Childrick of Mort’ (S4E9), Rick reassures Beth when he is confronting hiscompetitor Zeus: ‘Relax, it’s just a Zeus. If this was the real God, it’d be acompletely different story.’ Again, this is a remarkable moment in the series,

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since it is one of the very few in which Rick seems to testify to his belief inthe possibility of the existence of a ‘real’, that is transcendent, God.
The clue, so to speak, lies in the word ‘story’. Of course, ‘x is so andso, but y is another story’ is a standard expression in the English language,
but I want to argue in favour of a different interpretation. To do soconvincingly, I have to discuss a scene from what is probably the mostdifficult and most discussed episode so far (Joest 2020; Di Placido 2020).
‘Never Ricking Morty’ (S4E6) is very ‘meta’ and self-referential, even by
Rick and Morty standards, and declares itself to be ‘non-canonical’. It
revolves around the idea that Rick and Morty are aboard a literal ‘story
train’, a materialisation of the series’ creator’s literary device which hecalls ‘story circle’ (Walsh 2020).
This physical train is operated by a character called Story Lord, who
actively wants to harness the narrative power of Rick and Morty tomaximise narrative success. It is a reference to the series’ publisher Adult
Swim, which urges the series’ creators to maximise the output of the Rickand Morty franchise in order to earn as much money as possible. The factthat the Story Train Rick and Morty are aboard appears to be a physicaltoy Morty bought for Rick increases the urgency of the capitalist criticism
even more.
In the middle of this very complicated episode, Story Lord positions
Rick and Morty against an overwhelming number of enemies (most ofthem have appeared in earlier episodes). Morty seems to have lost all
hope, but Rick has one last trick up his sleeve. He bursts into a very outof-character prayer in a style parodying that of evangelical or Pentecostal
traditions, pledging his faith in the risen Lord Jesus Christ:
You’re right, Morty. Sometimes it does seem like there’s no way out.
Like it’s hopeless. But remember, there’s always someone there forus. Who? My best friend and personal savior, Jesus Christ. What?!
You don’t believe in God. But he believes in us, Morty. You know, I
thought I was the inventor, but the greatest invention of all is thefree gift of eternal life. … Oh, trust me, Morty. I’ve done plenty ofeffed-up stuff in my life. But it’s never too late to accept Christ. Jesus
is always knocking at the door. All we have to do is open it and let
him into our hearts. How? I’m so glad you asked, Morty. Just close
your eyes and go to him in prayer. Like this. Heavenly father.
Heavenly father. Thank you for sending your only begotten son.
Jesus, I accept you into my heart. Fill me with your spirit. Make mea shining city on a hill for you. Make me born again. In Jesus’ name,
we pray. Amen. Amen. Amen!

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After this prayer, Rick and Morty are greeted by a number of cartoonish
characters, all connected to (more fundamentalist forms of) Christianity(see figure 3.3): an anthropomorphised cross-with-thorny-crown, Psalty
the Singing Songbook (an actual character from a series of Christianchildren’s music albums), Denver the skating dinosaur (from the Christian
cartoon series Denver, the Last Dinosaur), some of the talking vegetables(from the Christian cartoon series VeggieTales), a Care Bear wearing asweater with a cross on it, and a goofy kid with a T-shirt reading ‘I love
Jesus’. Rick identifies what is happening as ‘the greatest story ever told’, areference to the biblical film of that name (George Stevens, 1965). Then
Jesus descends from the heavens, uncovering his ripped abs, and all kneel
down to him. One character utters: ‘My Lord and my God!’, a reference tothe words spoken by Thomas (the ‘doubting’ apostle) in John 20:28.
This religious turn in the story makes Story Lord very angry, since
the narrative (and therefore commercial) quality of ‘his’ Rick and Morty
story plummets very fast. But when Story Lord enters his own story, Ricktraps him inside it and takes control of the Story Train. Morty asks what
will happen to Story Lord, to which Rick replies: ‘He gets to spend eternity

3.3 After their prayer, Rick and Morty are greeted by a number ofcartoonish characters, all connected to the Christian fundamentalist
subculture. From left to right, we see an anthropomorphised sheep with a
Hitler moustache, a Care Bear with a cross on his sweater, Psalty the Singing
Songbook, a goofy kid with a T-shirt reading ‘I love Jesus’, in front of him
three of the VeggieTales characters, then an anthropomorphised cross-withthorny-crown, Rick, Morty and Denver the skating dinosaur. From ‘Never
Ricking Morty’ (S4E6). Rick and Morty (2020). The Cartoon Network, Inc.

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in every writer’s hell: the Bible.’ Morty seems concerned – also a first in
the series – that they might have offended religious viewers of the show:‘I don’t know. Some people actually like that stuff. Seems kind of cynical.
I just don’t like taking cheap shots, you know?’ Rick replies, offended:‘Cheap shots? Morty, we were literally saved by Jesus Christ. Tell me inany way how that’s offensive.’
It is at this moment that Rick finds out that the Story Train he tries
to operate is actually a child’s toy, making up the story they were (andare) part of. The scene switches to another location, a beach. Story Lord
and Jesus are having a theological discussion:
Jesus: So you’re saying my father and his kingdom …
Story Lord: Well, yes … it’s based on the fusion of a Sumerian God
named ‘ya’ and a Mesopotamian God named ‘way’.
Jesus: And we’re in a toy train?
Story Lord: Yes. It’s enough to really make you question all of
existence, isn’t it?
The intertextuality is overwhelming in this scene, which seems to be
aimed at blatantly criticising evangelical America (New 2012), including
its prayer practices, its ‘merchandise’ (Schultze and Woods 2009, 312–36), its supposed disqualification of historical exegesis, and its adherence
to the biblical fundamentalism Barbour (1990) criticised earlier. So it
would not be difficult to interpret this scene as yet another example of theseries’ religion criticism, adding an explicit punch in the face of those who
could (and probably would) be offended by the series’ depiction ofreligion. Yes, Rick prayed to Jesus, who saved him and his grandson from
Story Lord, but no Christian will recognise this as a genuine expression oforthodox faith.
Yet I argue that the series does something more complex andinteresting. It criticises religion not so much for its beliefs or practices – as
it did abundantly elsewhere – but for ‘being a bad story’. This criticism
could be interpreted in two distinctly different ways: either religion in
general and Christianity specifically are a ‘bad story’ in themselves – as
the atheist will argue and the series has argued – or the faithful of thenumerous (world) religions fail miserably at ‘selling’ their belief, bothnarratively and commercially.
Even though the Bible still inspires some film-makers to produce
Hollywood blockbusters like Exodus: Gods and Kings (Ridley Scott, 2014),
Noah (Darren Aronofsky, 2014) and the older, animated Prince of Egypt(1998), the golden age of cinematographic biblical epics, when films like

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The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille,
1956) were at the forefront of the medium’s popularity, is definitely gone.
And authentic ‘Christian’ films, series and games, produced by and fordevout believers, are usually of a very low quality (Ambrosino 2016; S.
Brown 2007). Examples of such below-par productions are Super 3D
Noah’s Ark (Wisdom Tree, 1994), Left Behind: Eternal Forces (Inspired
Media Entertainment, 2006), and the aforementioned Psalty show
(1980) and VeggieTales (Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki, 1993).
Rick and Morty do stimulate the faithful, whom they attack sofiercely over the series in general and in this episode specifically, toimprove their own storytelling, in order to make it appeal to a broader
public and make it less vulnerable to atheist criticism like that of theseries itself. Rick and Morty does more than criticise the content of theChristian meta-narrative, it criticises the way Christians have told and are
telling that story.

Final thoughts
Yes, Rick and Morty’s religion criticism is blatantly present in the series,
but what does it mean? On the one hand, the series has its place among
the other popular adult animated sitcoms and their religion criticism,
like The Simpsons, South Park, Futurama and Solar Opposites, eventhough none of them formulate their criticism as sharply and as
significantly as Rick and Morty does; on the other hand the series’
stipulated connectedness between atheist religion criticism andteleological and ethical nihilism is surprising.
One of the most common forms of criticism of atheism, usuallyformulated from an apologetic point of view, is that this worldview
inevitably leads to an existence without any cause or reason, and without
any moral point of reference (Tartaglia and Llanera 2021, 13–24). Withouta god or an afterlife, people would find it very hard, if not impossible, theargument goes, to find purpose in their life or a need to conform to any
moral value other than egocentric self-interest. Of course, philosophers,
whether atheist or not, have argued against this supposedly necessaryconnection between believing in a transcendent deity and living a full,
happy and ethical life (Nielson 1990; Kurtz and Craig 2009, 25–48).
Nevertheless, Rick and Morty seems to suggest exactly that: faith ina supreme being, morality and purposefulness seem to coincide, just as
their opposites, atheism, immorality and purposelessness, seem to. The
causality between the two is ambiguous in the series: either the idea that

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no God exists causes the teleological and ethical nihilism, or theexperience of an uncaring and seemingly purposeless universe, including
pain and suffering, causes the denial of any transcendent reality.
If the second option is the case, the theme of theodicy re-emerges,
but more profoundly. Rick and Morty may suggest that the experience ofthe conflict between the existence of an all-good and all-powerful being
on the one hand, and the horrors and suffering so firmly attached to thehuman condition on the other, combine to form an important ‘moment’for the adoption of an atheist worldview, at least in our time. And truly,
this may be the most fundamental religion criticism the series offers its
viewers. Rick and Morty is not doing the atheists a favour by linking themso readily to nihilism. It evokes the old apologetic paradigm in which
religious positivists argued against atheism as a nihilist worldview.
Rick and Morty seems to be – in the end – a kind of philosophicalthought experiment. The idea of a ‘thought experiment’ itself is very wellknown, and is described and used in philosophy from ancient Greece topostmodernity (Brown 1986). A good definition is the following (Gooding1998): ‘A thought experiment is an idealization which transcends theparticularity and the accidents of worldly human activities in order toachieve the generality and rigour of a demonstrative procedure.’
The thought experiment of Rick and Morty is – in short – on thepractical viability of Nietzsche-based atheism and nihilism, when – at thesame time – a return to the old religious ‘naivety’ is in itself not viable any
more. The series portrays (institutionalised) religion as having become
obsolete, that is, untenable for the postmodern, Western individual,
because of its (supposed) inherent (negative) qualities, which the seriesso adeptly features. The atheism and nihilism, that – according to theseries – are mutually dependent and co-constructive feature as a kind ofreaction to the experience of a godless universe.
However, the attaining and maintaining of the self-realised
Nietzschean Übermensch, the series argues, is not viable either, especiallyin terms of practicality. Notwithstanding the whole corpus of nonreligious efforts to disconnect atheism from nihilism and immorality (asquoted and discussed above), the series shows that even the god-man
Rick, at the zenith of his atheist and nihilist realisation, falls prey to theintellectual and – even more pregnant – practical heaviness of his selfgiven task. Rick ‘floats’ somewhere – as the postmodern human – between
a definite goodbye to traditional (institutionalised) religion or to religion
altogether, and an emotional nostalgia for a universe that was intrinsicallypurposeful and meaningful, in the face of a new and irreversible
realisation that such things have to be produced by humans now.

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Rick and Morty does not want to ‘go back’ to the old days of selfexplanatory religion, but neither does it close its eyes to what it believes
is the inevitable consequence of this farewell: that every human being is
personally responsible for finding and producing their own meaning andpurpose, or to how difficult, and lonely, such a task may be.

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4
Aesthetics of the secular
Stefan Binder

Introduction: the aesthetic production of being‘other‑than-religious’
This chapter explores how an aesthetic approach developed in religious
studies offers a way to examine hitherto neglected aspects of ‘lived
secularity’ in the specific sense of claims to and practices of being ‘otherthan-religious.’ As a first step, this chapter briefly reviews why a focus on
aesthetics is crucial to enlarging the methodological setup of scholarshipon the secular beyond normative accounts of secularity as based on
disembodied reason. After engaging with existing literature on theaesthetics of non-religion, the final section demonstrates the potential ofthis approach in a case study of organised atheism in South India. It
engages lived secularity as an aesthetic phenomenon by exploring a
specific historical imaginary of ‘Indian Atheism’ in relation to material
culture, rhetorical practices, emotional habitus and representational
economies.
Since the 2000s, questions related to the secular have become amajor theme across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. A
variety of academic disciplines with divergent research agendas andmethodologies have been involved in this project of reappraising therelationship between the religious and the secular. As a result, the research
field is highly diversified, and no consensus exists about definitions of evenits most central categories. While several authors have attempted to
produce taxonomical clarity for terms like secularism, secularity,

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secularisation or the post-secular (Casanova 1994; Taylor 2007; Gorski etal. 2012; Lee 2015), the disciplinary perspectives and actual themes ofexisting scholarship seem too diverse to allow for a single, authoritative
vocabulary. This chapter limits itself to the secular as it appears in an
emerging field in religious studies, sociology and anthropology that deals
with people, discourses and practices that are marked or consider
themselves as different from and often opposed to religion: atheism,
secular humanism, rationalism, disbelief, religious indifference, etc.
(Bullivant and Lee 2012; Quack 2014; Blanes and Oustinova-Stjepanovic2015). In approaching the secular as other-than-religion, the intention is
not to postulate an essential difference between the religious and thesecular; rather, the aim is to explore how certain groups of people use
aesthetic or sensorially perceptible means to constitute themselves andtheir ways of living as different from or not religious.

Researching the secular: from secular ideology to an
aesthetics of lived secularity
It is not coincidental that the turn toward aesthetic approaches tostudying religion is contemporaneous with a renewed interest in the
secular after deconstructions of the modernist secularisation paradigm.
A common theme in both developments has been the critique of atendency to construe religions primarily as disembodied, intellectual andtextual phenomena concerned above all with questions of meaning andbelief. The aesthetic and material turns in religious studies have retraced
the origins of this truncated understanding of religion to a specificallymodern episteme and semiotic ideology of ‘disembedding’ (Giddens
1991, 21–9). Within this framework, the secular has been identified asthe ‘ontology’ (Asad 2003, 21) and conceptual grammar that undergirdsa ‘moral narrative of modernity’ (Keane 2013, 159) telling of theliberation and purification of human reason and agency from supposedly
premodern entanglements with material, bodily, affective or social
constrictions (see also Latour 1993; Connolly 1999).
While critical scholarship on the secular-modern remaking of
religion has been immensely productive in uncovering the hitherto
neglected aesthetic dimensions of lived religions, it has tended to equate
the secular with its normative accounts of disembodied reason. As aresult, scholarship on the secular has dealt with aesthetics predominantly
as a question of how secular-modern epistemologies, legal structures andforms of governance have misconstrued, ignored or regulated the128

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aesthetic dimensions of religion (Mahmood 2006; 2009; Keane 2007;
Asad 2011). While there are important exceptions, to which I return
below, the growing body of research on the secular has been largely
unable to address the materiality and embodied nature of secularity as
anything other than a contradiction of the secular’s own normative
insistence on disembeddedness, universality and autonomy frommaterial, bodily or socio-cultural domains. Within this methodologicalsetup, to describe the embodied and material dimensions of the secular isto describe what it is not – or what it claims not to be. However, even
explicit disavowals of aesthetics or projects of anaesthetics (Verrips 2006;
Yelle 2019) within certain secular and/or modern discourses do notforeclose the analysis of the aesthetic forms and strategies through whichsuch disavowals are put forth and made sensible.
This replicates a problem well known from the study of religions,where the concept of religion was based to a large extent on the discoursesof religious professionals while so-called ‘popular’ or ‘lived’ forms of
religiosity were measured by the extent to which they conformed totheological normativity. This is more than a mere analogy, since
theology – especially in its Protestant variant – has been identified as amajor driving force of (secular) modernity (Keane 2007; Meyer 2010;
Bate 2010; Yelle 2013). By equating the secular with its normative selfrepresentation, the study of secularity has been circumscribed by aconceptual grid reconstructed almost entirely on the basis of earlymodern European intellectual history. This Eurocentric bias presents a
serious methodological problem for studying secularity outside the ambitof European languages or narratives of European diffusion. It has
prevented existing research on religious critique, doubt, scepticism orwithdrawal in area studies from being integrated into a systematiccomparative and postcolonial perspective on the secular (cf. Engelke
2015c). In this chapter, I seek to demonstrate how a focus on aesthetics
can offer a way forward beyond normative accounts and European
conceptual history (for an extended discussion of this argument, see
Binder 2020a).

Aesthetics of science and politics
Precisely because the secular has been closely linked to discourses aroundrationality, the intellect and science, the aesthetic approach as developedin the study of religions is a particularly suitable epistemological andmethodological framework. The ‘aesthetics of religion’ (Grieser andJohnston 2017) as an emerging field of research focuses centrally on how

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the body, the senses, figuration and material media are intrinsic toprocesses of intellectual reasoning and knowledge. From this perspective,
an aesthetics of the secular overlaps with an aesthetics of science, whichanalyses how scientific claims to objectivity and rationality are not only
represented but also constructed through rhetorical strategies, sensorial
engagements, material assemblages, assumptions about the body and thesenses, as well as aesthetic judgments inherent to culturally shaped andhistorically changing epistemologies (Harris 1997; Weibel and Latour
2002; Pauwels 2006; Grieser and Borrelli 2017). It is important to note,however, that the science/religion binary is historically related to but
cannot be collapsed into the secular/religious binary, as aesthetic forms
associated with religious traditions may very well be employed inscientific practices and vice versa (Grieser 2017).
Besides science, another core area of secular boundary work
concerns the relationship between the state and religion, a major theme
in debates on political secularism (Cannell 2010; Calhoun, Juergensmeyer
and van Antwerpen 2011; Scherer 2011) and the post-secular (Vries and
Sullivan 2006; Braidotti et al. 2014; Gorski et al. 2012; Mapril et al.
2017). While recent debates have tended to focus on how secular statescondition or suppress aesthetic dimensions of religions, an earlier streamof scholarship in the tradition of the Frankfurt School examined theaesthetics of political regimes themselves. Critical theory has focused
especially on how the confluence of changing technological and media
environments in a capitalist ‘culture industry’ is linked with projects of
totalitarian politics (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 94). Beyond
descriptive collections of tropes and themes associated with specifichistorical regimes, this research has approached political and social
formations of fascism and socialism as fundamentally aesthetic projects,
grounded in what Walter Benjamin called the ‘aestheticizing of politics’(2008, 42). While this implied a critical perspective on the reduction ofpolitics to aesthetics – as opposed to democratic or parliamentarian
process – more recent perspectives stress the inherently aesthetic
character of politics (Rancière 2004).
A phenomenon like ‘socialist realism,’ for example, is of particularinterest for an aesthetics of the secular, as it was understood less as aclassificatory category of style or genre than an artistic-political programand aesthetic method meant to construct and usher in the communist
future of Real Socialism – rather than merely representing it (Gutkin1999; Cai Xiang 2016; for more general discussions of secularism in postSoviet contexts, see McBrien and Pelkmans 2008; Luehrmann 2011). It
is, however, precisely on the basis of such aspects of ‘applied aesthetics’

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that fascism and socialism have been interpreted as pseudo, political,
civil or secular religions, thus raising again the question of what exactly
is secular about their aesthetics other than the rejection of historicalreligions. Anja Kirsch (2017) shows that such interpretations are
grounded in normative distinctions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion. In
describing the difference of secular and religious aesthetics, she proposes
instead to focus on formal aesthetic criteria, in her case narratologicalstructures, which may occur in both secular and religious contexts ofworld making without being themselves either religious or secular.
Aesthetic dimensions of socialism, and other phenomena perceived as
secular, can thus be analysed in comparison to religion and further ouranalytical understanding of the aesthetic efficacy of the secular/religious
binary itself. Thus, potentially normative concepts like political or civil
religion can be reappraised for their analytical value with regard to thelarger project of an aesthetics of religion and the secular (Koch 2017).

Is there a secular body?
One of the first attempts to explicitly tackle the task of bringing together
the aesthetic turn and the secular turn within scholarship on religion isCharles Hirschkind’s essay on the ‘secular body,’ which he proposed toapproach as ‘a particular configuration of the human sensorium – ofsensibilities, affects, embodied dispositions – specific to secular subjects’(Hirschkind 2011, 633). Hirschkind addresses the problem that the mere
absence of religion would inflate the category of the secular to such an
extent that it loses its analytical specificity. His solution is a turn toward
genealogy and narrative, as he proposes to conceptualise a secularsensorium as those bodily and sensorial dispositions that contribute to
instituting and legitimising ‘the secularist narrative of the progressive
replacement of religious error by secular reason’ (p. 641). Following Talal
Asad, he calls this the ‘triumphalist narrative of secularism’ (ibid.). An
important area of research takes this line of inquiry as a starting point to
explore secular sensibilities with regard to bodily practices like veiling(Amir-Moazami 2016), gender and sexuality (Cady and Fessenden 2013;
Wiering 2017) or affects and emotions (Scheer, Fadil and Johansen2019). While this solution is elegant, Hirschkind’s secular remains
fundamentally marked by traces of absence, inasmuch as ‘every secular
practice is accompanied by a religious shadow, as it were’ and, therefore,‘will always be subject to a certain indeterminacy or instability’(Hirschkind 2011, 643; see also Asad 2011; Engelke 2015b).

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Based on his ethnographic work on North American immortalism,
i.e., techno-scientific attempts at prolonging human life through cryonics,
biogerontology and artificial intelligence, anthropologist Abou Farman(2020) emphasises the historicity of the secular and thus argues that thesecular can emancipate itself from a relational dependence on thereligious. Farman shows that materialist or rationalist worldviews, theirinitially oppositional stance toward religion notwithstanding, have by
now established their own ‘traditions’ (2013, 738), which generate
identifiably secular bodies and notions of personhood at the nexus of
institutional, legal and technological discourses. Similarly, sociologists
and anthropologists have described how self-declared non-religious
people in contemporary Britain engage with ethical questions of pleasure(Engelke 2015a), the troubling presence of material objects (Engelke
2015d) or everyday practices of dress and food (Lee 2015, 70–105).
Materialist, humanist or rationalist worldviews emerge here asframeworks for secular ways of living that refuse to be defined solely innegative relation to religion. In simplified terms, these studies do not ask
how the secular/religious binary has been created or enforced throughvarious modern institutions or state apparatuses but what happens once it
has been put in place and is actively appropriated by people in theireveryday lives. As the following case study illustrates, such a pragmatic
approach makes room for collecting empirical narratives and aesthetics
beyond those of triumphalism, pseudo-religion or anaesthetics – and hence
room for more complex and plural genealogies of the secular as well.

Case study: organised atheism in South India
In this case study, based on my ethnographic research on an atheist
movement in the two mainly Telugu-speaking states of Andhra Pradesh
and Telangana (Binder 2020a), I explore a specific narrative of Indianatheism prevalent in South India. I mainly focus on how this narrativeand its social imaginary relate to practices of materialisation and verbal
articulation in order to illustrate an aesthetic approach to what it ‘feels
like’ to be secular in a given place and time. Despite some doctrinal
differences and the absence of an overarching institutional structure, themembers of this movement recognise a shared goal of their secular
activism: the reconstruction of a moral, just and rational society throughthe eradication of what they call ‘mental slavery’ (bhavadasyam), a
condition manifesting itself most directly – though not exclusively – inreligious beliefs and practices. While some members of the movement

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prefer to label themselves as humanists or rationalists, I refer to this larger
movement as capitalised Atheism due to the centrality of the term‘atheism’ and its Telugu equivalent ‘nastikatvam’ for its history.
Due to Orientalist and anti-colonial ideas about the supposedly
religious nature of Indian civilisation (Inden 1990; King 1999), Atheists
today are regularly confronted with allegations that their worldview is a
product of European colonialism and therefore ‘Westernised’ or foreign
to Indian culture and history (cf. Quack 2012a, 286–93). While thecolonial history of Indian Atheism and the influence of European
rationalist and imperial discourses is well documented (Quack 2012b),
its pre-colonial roots are highly contested and difficult to historicallyreconstruct (Quack and Binder 2018). However, precisely the ancient andpre-historical roots of Indian Atheism are of crucial significance tocontemporary Atheists, who primarily try to establish their ‘indigeneity’and cultural belonging in India in two ways: first, by harking back tomaterialist, empiricist and sceptical schools within classical Indianphilosophy (Chattopadhyaya 1959; Bhattacharya 2009; Gokhale 2015);
and second, through recourse to the so-called Aryan migration theory(Bergunder 2004; Bryant and Patton 2005).
Based on linguistic evidence gathered by European Orientalists incollaboration with South Indian pundits (Trautmann 2006), the Aryan
migration theory posits the origin of Hindu civilisation around the second
millennium bce, when so-called Aryan migrants from Central Asia
brought Vedic culture and religion to India and encountered there an
indigenous Dravidian civilisation. Many contemporary Atheists, especiallythose speaking Dravidian languages of Southern India, link themselves
and their worldview genealogically to this presumed indigenous
Dravidian culture, which they tend to describe as atheist, materialist,
rationalist or proto-communist (Pandian 2007). In Atheist iterations of
this theory, Aryans do not figure as migrants but as violent invaders, who
wilfully and strategically destroyed the original Atheist culture of thesubcontinent by importing not only Vedic religion but religion as
such – what Atheists call ‘mental slavery.’
It is crucial to stress that for many Atheists in India, the ‘triumphalist’
narrative of secular dominance mentioned above is spliced with, at times
superseded by, a narrative of decadence, destruction and corruption.
There are moreover concrete historical agents, namely Aryan invaders,
who make this narrative of secular decadence tellable as an intentional,
strategic and political process rather than a merely ‘natural’ historical
process of devolution. From the perspective of an aesthetics of the secular,
what is at stake are the sensorial, material and affective1 aspects that

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transform this spliced narrative from a mere ‘story’ into a potent‘imaginary’ and thereby condition what it feels like to be an Atheist inSouth India (cf. Johannsen and Kirsch 2019).

From narrative to material culture
To refer to Atheist retellings of the Aryan migration theory as an ‘imaginary’is not a comment on its historical facticity but stresses the role ofimagination in structuring the perceptions of those who seek to practicallyrealise that theory by living Atheist lives in the present (Traut and Wilke
2015). Since one of the core features of this imaginary is the wilful
destruction of Atheist culture and its material remains, it conditions how
contemporary Atheists can experience the absence of ‘traditional’ forms ofAtheist material culture, rituals or social institutions. It allows them toreconfigure ‘absence’ not as lack but as the source for Atheist acts ofheroism and resilience, which consist in either reinventing Atheist
traditions or bravely facing their absence by developing the strength to dowithout them; after all, most Atheists claim that it is precisely the inability
to let go of ‘tradition’ that leads to mental slavery. A substantial part ofAtheist activism therefore consists of re-materialising Atheism by, first ofall, writing down and narrating its history of destruction, secondly, by
reinterpreting and thus reappropriating certain parts of Indian cultural
history – like folklore, art forms, moral principles or philosophicalinsights – as purloined achievements of original Atheism (for a famous
example, see Ramasami 1972) and, finally, by reinventing Atheist culturein the form of songs, plays or commemorative festivals. Atheists have also
constructed physical structures, ranging from educational institutions, tovenues for Atheist gatherings, to commemorative sculptures of past andpresent Atheist luminaries (cf. Binder 2020b). Such material structures
scaffold concrete ‘spaces of imagination’ (Hermann, Laack and Schüler2015) that function as both ‘messengers’ and ‘traces’ for making thehistory of Atheism’s absence present in and for a contemporary Atheist
community (Binder 2020b, 239–40). By inquiring into the concrete historyof the visual and narrative figurations at play in such attempts at cultural
reconstruction, an aesthetics of the secular can carve out an ‘aesthetic
ideology’ (Grieser 2017, 261–5) specific to Indian Atheism.
Another common form of Atheist activism consists in the re-enactmentof alleged supernatural miracles performed by religious practitioners, likethe spontaneous materialisation of objects or certain forms of bodily
mortification, and their subsequent exposure as ‘mere’ conjuring tricks.
Jacob Copeman and Johannes Quack have described such performances as

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an instance of secular material culture based on a semiotic ‘retooling of
sacred objects for non-religious purposes’ (2015, 42; see also Binder 2019).
In a similar way, Atheist practices and discourses around body and organ
donation become sites for pedagogic realisations of public materialism,
where the utilitarian ‘gift’ of one’s own (dead) body for the sake of medical
science becomes not only the authenticating climax of an Atheist biography
but also a heroic act of civic virtue and enlightenment (Copeman andReddy 2012). Besides actual material culture and concrete ‘things,’ theimaginary of Atheist destruction and heroic resilience may also be enacted
in and through the aesthetics of speech.
A crucial site for this enactment is the ongoing controversy aroundthe name of the movement as well as individual professions of Atheism.
As mentioned above, there is no commonly agreed-upon label for the
movement, with atheism (nastikatvam), rationalism (hetuvadam) andhumanism (manavavadam) being the most widely discussed alternatives.
Beyond the diversity of arguments for one or the other option, theircommon thread is a concern with the public efficacy of labels. The boneof contention is the term atheism and its standard Telugu translation:
nastikatvam. While atheism/nastikatvam is considered a taken-forgranted philosophical foundation, it is not necessarily consideredappropriate as a public label. Both terms have historically been used asexonyms and invectives for ideological adversaries and have therefore
accumulated a powerful negative affective charge – to the point where
they may evoke suspicion, contempt or even fear.
Some within the Atheist movement argue that this negative affective
charge will prove detrimental to the overall aim of the movement, because
it alienates ‘ordinary people’ and thus prevents the movement from widely
spreading its socially transformative message. Others, however, contend
that the power of those negative affects even among Atheists testifies to thecontinuing legacy of Aryan invasion, whose prime strategy of cultural
warfare was to slander their opponents as atheists/nastikulu. Hence, toreappropriate and revalue that name is tantamount to heroically liberating
oneself and others from ‘mental slavery.’ Some of my interlocutors havereported intense anxiety and severe social or familial repercussions after
their open self-identification as atheists/nastikulu, yet they have also
described feelings of pride and heroism as well as forms of recognition andpraise by peers once they had taken that step (Binder 2020a, 50–67).
The debate around labels also extends to the realm of personalnames, where especially committed Atheist activists change their or theirchildren’s names by including surnames with references to Atheism or byremoving all elements that may evoke caste or religion. Jacob Copeman

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has analysed such ‘secular onomastic experimentation’ (Copeman 2015,
para. 6) as speech acts ‘designed to iteratively produce a particular kindof intersubjective sensibility’ (para. 34). Thus, what is at stake here are
not merely issues of terminology, definition or individuals’ (dis)beliefs
but the way in which names, or rather sociocultural categories, are able
to encode and evoke an ‘emotional habitus’ (Trawick 1990, 154).
Margaret Trawick coined this term to describe how the literal andfigurative use of kinship categories can mobilise and manipulate arepertoire of emotions as well as their appropriate expression or
suppression. Such repertoires are acquired through processes ofsocialisation and manifested, rehearsed and negotiated through cultural
imaginaries transmitted in folklore, pop culture or formal and informal
educational systems. Furthermore, the question of who can mobilise orappropriate a given imaginary in contemporary India – and for which
effects – is conditioned by its colonial and postcolonial political history.
An important task for an aesthetics of the secular is thus to describe andanalyse the production, reproduction and transformation of suchemotional habitus as well as their sensorial deployment and manipulation.
Though a crucial aspect of Atheist activism appears to consist of toppling
the affective implications of historically and culturally entrenched social
categories, that activism must work on and with existing emotional
habitus to get its message across and make its ‘secular mark’.

Atheist propagation as an aesthetics of persuasion
Insofar as onomastic experimentations or practices of naming are speechacts intending an individual or social transformation, they are part of themain modus of Atheist activism: written and oratorical propagation.
Atheists in India are known for giving speeches, to the point where somecritics complain that they do nothing but talk. They are moreover
frequently accused of being arrogant, haughty or condescending, as they
relish in ridiculing religious scriptures and beliefs. Critics sometimes
attribute this simply to a psychological personality trait of arrogance that
Atheists are supposed to share. I propose instead to analyse it as anaesthetically produced affect and a counterpart to the affect of heroism
involved in naming oneself an Atheist in the face of the absence of Atheist
culture. I focus here on how this affect is produced in oratorical speechand how it is historically conditioned by concrete aesthetic criteria andrhetorical devices like fluency, hyperliteralism or decorum.
A common way to praise gifted and influential orators among
Atheists is to say that their oratory is ‘like a stream’ (pravahamlaga).

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Speakers are lauded if they are capable of spontaneously commandingknowledge about as vast an array of topics as possible. They should be
able to speak continuously without having to search for words orarguments and, if possible, with a substantial number of verbatim
citations from various sources – preferably in a classical language such as
Sanskrit. Success or failure of Atheist speech acts is thus intimately
connected to an aesthetic criterion of fluency, which can override
questions of content or message: orators may be considered right, evenbright, but nonetheless judged incapable of persuading others due tolacking skills of rhetorical delivery.
The art of memorisation is fundamental to this form of fluent, streamlike speech and has a long history in South Asian pedagogy. Most famousin this regard are traditions of Vedic recitation (Knipe 2015), which linkforms of contemporary Atheist speech to a larger aesthetic dimension of
sonality in South Asian and especially Hindu culture (Wilke and Moebus2011). Atheist propagation has an ambivalent relationship to this sonal
tradition, as Atheists commonly reject it as stale rote learning and mindlessproduction of sound. It is important to note, however, that the fluent
rejection of religious fluency is not just an argument about denotational
content (or the lack thereof) but has itself an aesthetic form. Despite thegreat value placed on oratorical mastery in Indian culture and especiallypolitics, scholarship of South Asian rhetoric beyond ritual speech inreligious contexts is scarce (for an important exception, see Bate 2009).
Even in its most informal settings, Atheist oratory usually involves
some sort of stage or dais which produces a frontal visual relationshipbetween orator and audience and tends to corporeally immobilise thelatter into seated positions. This can be physically demanding sinceoratorical events may stretch over a few days with individual speeches
lasting up to several hours. Propagational events may occur indoors aswell as outdoors, which further modulates the focus on the stage throughdifferent degrees of perceptual distraction or ‘noise’ (e.g., the largely
unconscious humming of fans or air-conditioning in closed rooms versus
the visual, olfactory and aural environment of an urban outdoor setting).
Speeches tend to be amplified, often irrespective of the actual acoustic
requirements for audibility in a given venue; in fact, excessive volume,
overmodulation or audio feedback frequently impede audibility. A
comprehensive analysis of Atheist oratory thus requires not only ahistorically sensitive and comparative contextualisation of aesthetic
properties such as gestural repertoires, forms of staging, practices ofrhetoric pedagogy or ‘hearing cultures’ (Erlmann 2004) but also an
investigation into the cognitive, perceptual and physiological affordances

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and effects of material environments and technological infrastructures(architecture, seating arrangements, ambient sound, amplification,lighting, etc.).
In the following discussion, I focus on a specific rhetorical strategyof ‘hyperliteralism’ (Richman 1993, 190), where religious scriptures areinterpreted in an extremely literal fashion so as to expose – or create –inconsistencies and absurd conclusions. This rhetorical-cum-hermeneuticstrategy has historical antecedents in inter-religious polemics (Hudson
1995; Yelle 2013) and is inseparable from a larger shift from scribal toprint culture in colonial India. Hyperliteral rhetoric has been enabled byprinted texts, as an increasingly literate public could access scriptural
material that had hitherto been restricted to and at times jealously
guarded by circles of specialised readers/reciters trained in particularhermeneutic and exegetical technologies (Narayana Rao 2001). Hence,
Atheist ‘arrogance’ is not merely a presumed psychological trait based ona conceit of intellectual superiority, but an affect that is aesthetically
produced as Atheists literally ‘arrogate’ the social power that comes withthe right to rhetorically appropriate, manipulate and reproduce(religious) knowledge as printed and thus publicly accessible ‘text’ (cf.
Bauman and Briggs 1990 on politics of ‘entextualization’).
As Bernard Bate (2009) has shown for the case of Tamil oratory,
modern technologies like print and language ideologies based ondenotation have therefore not simply replaced existing notions of poetic
efficacy. One example is the Sanskrit poetological concept of ‘decorum’(aucitya), which grounds the efficacy of literary and ethical discourse ina careful balancing of content and form as well as performative social
context (Prasad 2012, 168–77). Despite an emphatic commitment to thedenotational dimensions of language, it is within the confines ofhistorically entrenched and often implicit aesthetic criteria like decorumthat Atheist orators deploy strategies such as fluency or hyperliteralism inorder to produce secular difference within changing media environments.
As Atheist rhetoric is firmly grounded in print culture and the physicalco-presence of audiences, the expansion of satellite television and digital
media since the early 2000s present entirely new challenges for bothsecular and non-secular oratorical aesthetics. In other words, the efficacy
of Atheist verbal propagation is not exhausted by the intellectual or
logical persuasiveness of arguments but also depends on the historicallyconditioned ways in which Atheists manage to produce secular difference
by aesthetic means.

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Conclusion: toward a comparative and postcolonialapproach to secular difference
In this chapter, I proposed to approach the aesthetics of the secular byexamining phenomena that are understood or declare themselves to bedifferent from and possibly antagonistic toward religion. This is indeed
meant as a starting point and an alternative to outright dismissals of sucha project on the basis of an ideological self-representation of the secular
as disembodied reason. The chapter’s aim was to demonstrate that a focus
on aesthetic themes may function as a heuristic that enables us to expand
scholarship on the secular beyond the immediate ambit of the conceptual
grid and genealogy of the secular/religious binary. The example of IndianAtheism sketched how a civilisational imaginary of Indian Atheism
conditions the ways in which forms of and attitudes about material
culture and rhetorically produced affects are constructed, enacted andcontested within a larger, historically shaped ‘representational economy’(Keane 2003, 410). Instead of circumscribing a priori what secularityrefers to, for instance by postulating a singular secularist narrative oftriumphal antagonism toward religion, an aesthetic approach attends tothe historical and cultural plasticity of secularity as an aesthetic
phenomenon, i.e., as a form of producing aesthetically mediated seculardifference in specific social settings. The surplus of this approach consistsof conceptualising secular difference also as a question of aesthetic
efficacies rather than primarily a question of conceptual classification or
semiotic ideology. Such an aesthetically grounded comparative approachto the secular can feed back into the analytical apparatus of the larger
project of an aesthetics of religion, not by juxtaposing substantialist
notions of secular and religious aesthetics but by making our analyticalcategories and conceptualisations of aesthetic strategies sensitive to a
specific dimension of differentiation: secular difference.

Acknowledgement
This chapter is a slightly updated version of: Binder, Stefan. 2019.
‘Aesthetics of the secular’, in Bloomsbury Handbook of the Cultural andCognitive Aesthetics of Religion, Anne Koch and Katharina Wilkens, eds,
263–72. London: Bloomsbury Academic. It is reprinted here with thepermission of the previous publisher.

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Notes1 Although there is no commonly accepted definition of affect, an important theme in ‘affecttheory’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010) concerns the ways in which affects circulate between
bodies and things and stimulate certain responses. I am using the term affect to stress thisintersubjective and stimulating aspect.

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Kirsch, Anja. 2017. ‘Religious in form, socialist in content: Socialist narratives and the questionof civil religion.’ Journal of Religion in Europe 10 (1–2): 147–71.
Knipe, David M. 2015. Vedic Voices: Intimate narratives of a living Andhra tradition. Oxford:
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Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge,
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Lee, Lois. 2015. Recognizing the Non-Religious: Reimagining the secular. Oxford: Oxford
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Mahmood, Saba. 2009. ‘Religious reason and secular affect: An incommensurable divide?’, in
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5
Gender, affect and atheism in
Arabic media
Natalie Khazaal

Introduction
The beginning of the 2011 uprisings was a watershed moment for the
public appearance of atheists in the Arabic-speaking world. Since then, abold generation of atheists has begun to announce their apostasy (leaving
religion) publicly through various media like Facebook, Twitter andYouTube, managing to create a like-minded community. Their use ofsocial and other media kicked off a new stage of atheist and irreligious
publicity in the Arabic-speaking world, a stage intimately related to themedia and the public sphere it affords contemporary societies. In thischapter, I explore how the new public atheists interact with the media
and what role gender plays in their engagement with the media. This
chapter contributes to the book’s project – to conceptualise the relations
between media and non-religion – by exploring the nexus of atheism,
media and gender in Lebanon. Ultimately, the Lebanese case of what
Jacob Copeman and Mascha Schulz call ‘sceptical publics’ helps
reconceptualise the link between the secular and public spheres.
An explicit goal of this loose movement has been to normaliseatheism. Normalisation for the movement means creating a safe space fora presently unknown but considerable number of secret atheists to comeout in public and live their truth. It also means not being punished fortheir convictions, by forced veiling, being disowned by their family or

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fired from their job, for instance. Yet, many Lebanese and other Arabatheists remain anonymous or pseudonymous because creating a more
hospitable environment has been difficult (Khazaal 2017). Legal systems
often forebode danger for them. For example, the Lebanese constitution
does not directly penalise apostasy or atheism, because it explicitly
endorses freedom of conviction (§ 9). However, §§ 473–5 of the Penal
Code criminalise blaspheming the name of god and insulting religious
practices and punish the accused with up to three years of imprisonment.1
This law has been used selectively to accuse musicians, journalists andactivists of blasphemy (16 cases between 2018 and 2021), and then tosilence the accused from social media under the pretence of preserving
public safety, thus violating the Lebanese constitution and the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. In addition, personal status law on suchmatters as marriage, inheritance and custody is exclusively delegated toreligious sectarian courts, which do not recognise apostasy or atheism.
Many Lebanese, then, feel that they are religious subjects, not citizens,
because the freedom of conviction guaranteed by the constitution ismeaningless without actual freedom of expression.2
Despite Lebanon’s status as a more liberal Arabic-speaking country,
revealing that one is an atheist attracts stigmatisation even in moreprivate, family settings there, and often carries serious consequences.
According to a 2021 study about forms of abuse perpetrated against
atheists in Lebanon, all 40 interviewees said that they had sufferedserious abuse because they were atheists, such as forced veiling,
psychological violence, threats of death or violence, physical violence,illegal detention, discrimination in employment, restricted access to
education and social services, and restrictions on expressing personal
beliefs (Harakeh, Ayat and Abdallah 2021). Of all the abuse, the mostcommon was forced veiling. Of the 25 female interviewees, 22 were
‘forced to wear the veil at some point during their lives, are currently
forced to wear it, or are facing the consequences of refusing to wear it,from physical to emotional abuse’ (Harakeh, Ayat and Abdallah 2021). Asa socially imposed punishment for their atheism, two of the participants
were arrested and charged with apostasy, two were fired from their jobs,
two were abducted by a religious party and two took their lives: a 25-yearold woman who lost her custody battle and whose family disowned her(by Muslim personal status law, as practised in Lebanon, children belong
to the father) and a 24-year-old man who was covertly held and tortured
for months.
Why has there been relatively little progress, after a decade, towards
normalising one’s non-religious convictions in Lebanon and the

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Arabic-speaking world, despite the opportunities for self-expression andcommunity building offered by certain media? Why have atheists’ stories
not resonated with the general public? And, most importantly here, does
the way women explain publicly (via the media) why they left religiondiffer from the way men frame their exit? If so, what can we learn fromthis? Finally, can region-specific insights about Arabic-speaking contexts
shed light on broader global contexts?
The media strategies employed by Lebanese atheists who for activist
reasons explicitly seek publicity take particular forms. Prominent among
them are closed social media groups such as Facebook groups, as well as
public spaces that are open to everyone, like YouTube channels andtelevision talk shows reposted on the internet. Whereas closed Facebook
groups involve conversations between self-proclaimed atheists oragnostics, YouTube channels address a broad audience rather than justother atheists, while television shows target mostly religious audiences.
Entertainment and emotions seem to be prominent in the latter, incontrast to other media like intellectual-argumentative books on atheism
as well as closed atheist Facebook groups.
To address the above questions, this chapter focuses on publicatheists on YouTube and traditional Lebanese media. Since the total
number of public Lebanese atheist–activists is perhaps only about 10–15,3
by necessity my sample is also small: I selected four individuals, whom I
divided into two groups. The first group consists of two women: journalist,
writer, poet and rights activist Joumana Haddad, a well-known andrespected Lebanese media personality with a long history in journalism
and her own television show, and Pamela Ghanem, a Twitter activist anda YouTuber for ‘Jumhuriyyat al-Ilhad’ (‘Atheist Republic’; see also
Neelabh’s chapter in this volume, which analyses Atheist Republic in
India). The second group consists of two men: activist and Freethought
Lebanon co-founder Mazen Abou Hamdan, and geology professor Ali
Haydar. Although my sample is small, in the Conclusion I present four
more cases from the Arab world, which confirm my analysis and suggestthat when more Arab atheists come out publicly a statistically significant
sample will be an option.
In the second section I describe the meanings which believers andnon-believers attribute to faith and atheism and how such meanings aretheorised in academic discourse; in the third, I examine the differences
between the two groups of public Lebanese atheists. My textual analysisof their statements about their reasons for leaving religion contributes toour understanding of public atheism and its ties to the media byhighlighting how affect, embodiment and aesthetic sentiments are central

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offers one of the first, and therefore provisional, deep dives into genderedsceptical publics in the Arabic-speaking world and beyond, as I point out
later, it also aims to provide insights that transcend gender. The conclusion
poses the question: what do these differences tell us about atheists’progress towards normalising apostasy in the Arabic-speaking world andthe directions that may speed up normalisation? The answer helps explain
how Lebanese sceptical publics engage with the media to address nonreligion and non-religious identity.

Ideology versus affect as a vehicle for shared meaning
Lebanese atheists’ appearances in the media shed light on theirunderstanding of atheism and religion. Their concept of faith is at odds
with that of Lebanese theists (believers), just as believers’ concept ofatheism is at odds with that of atheists. (Of course, I look at thisdisagreement in general terms, as individuals within the two groups
disagree among themselves on the definition and utility of these terms.)
But it is the difference in the meanings with which atheists and believers
imbue non-religion and religion that sits at the core of current challenges
to atheists’ inclusion in the broader community.
New Atheism has influenced the ways in which many atheists
around the world, including in Lebanese communities, see atheism andfaith (Zenk 2012). New-wave atheists depict themselves as proponents ofan evolutionary approach to scepticism, science, faith and religion(Kettell 2013; Taira 2012; LeDrew 2012). Assuming that religious claims
should be subject to the same rules of argumentation and refutation as
scientific claims, new-wave atheists juxtapose science with religion,
doubt with belief and the modern with the pre-modern. This juxtaposition
portrays atheism as the outcome of free inquiry, critical thinking andrigorous scrutiny, while religion is seen as a product of dogma, fallacious
and irrational thinking and shallow analysis, and as stemming from fear
or insecurity.
Some critics argue that the new movement does not have a concept
of atheism beyond dismantling faith (Beha 2012). Others argue that it
reduces religion to cognitive acts, leaving out substantive, functional andpolythetic ways to define religion. For instance, Paul-François Tremlett
and Fang-Long Shih show how belief and doubt could be used strategicallyas a form of practice rather than being simply delusional concepts about
reality. According to them, in the Philippines belief and doubt are

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‘fundamentally about practice’ rather than beliefs (2017, 88). When agroup of believers asked a local goddess for a prediction on an importantmatter and got unfavourable results, they kept rephrasing their question
until they got the answer they needed to back up their political claims.
Belief and doubt, then, could be products of self-interest and experiential
efficacy, rather than simply mental acts.
On the other hand, in a 2016 episode of ‘Al-‘Ayn bi-l-‘Ayn’ (‘An eye
for an eye’) aired on the Lebanese television channel Jadeed, Lebanese
Catholic priest Edgar al-Haybi (director of the Institute for Religious
Studies at Saint Joseph University) frames faith as a personal experiencefor Lebanese believers, rather than as an idea that could be logicallyrefuted (emphasis added):No matter how much we want to find in our mind logical arguments
to say yes or no – there’s a creator or there is not, the universe has abeginning and an end or it does not – I do not think that faith is amatter of physical, tangible evidence, of scientifically demonstrable
proof. Faith is inside the mind, it’s an act of the mind and not beyond
the mind. However, it’s an act that we experience, that we live but
cannot argue or demonstrate with tangible evidence, with logic.4
Despite the variety of views on the nature of religion among Lebanesebelievers, al-Haybi’s frame captures the common understanding of it aspersonal, emotional experience. The Maronite Christian show host Tony
Khalife also emphasised the greater importance of the heart in comparison
to the mind in his opening to this episode: ‘[Atheists say:] I’m an atheist
because I use my brain, not my heart. … This group’s numbers are notsmall at all, and they say that their mind told them that there’s no God.’5
As for atheism, conservative and many non-conservative Lebanesebelievers see atheism as a mental disease rather than an intellectual
position, as we can see from a viewer poll on a 2019 episode of Tawasul(‘Communication’) aired on the Shi‘ite-owned Manar television channel.6
Furthermore, Lebanese religious communities see atheism as a rebellion
against the rise of religious extremism (ISIS, al-Qa‘eda), or as a desire totransgress religious prohibitions against alcohol, sex, etc.7 In all these cases,
atheism amounts to a deviation from religio-normativity: ‘Every child isborn with the innate knowledge that God Almighty is his creator. What
drives people to deviate from this instinct and turn towards atheism?’8
Believers too are occasionally accused of failing to engage
productively with atheists, especially as a type of religious minority(Eyadat 2013). Criticisms of the nature of atheist and theist publicity

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largely focus on the ideological aspects of non-religion and religion. I
would like to assess here an additional aspect of that publicity: the role ofaffect and disposition. I will focus on affect in gendered visions of atheist
publicity on the media. I chose affect because it was apparent to me thatit played a major role in gendered atheist publicity and because of its
shared significance for atheists and believers alike.
According to Samuli Schielke, non-believers in Egypt, including
atheists, share with believers similar structures of affect brought about by
similar ‘underlying tensions and conflicts over the ways Egyptians
experience their lives and the powers to which they are subjected’ (2012,304). As Raymond Williams explains, structures of affect or feelings aretypes of affective social experiences that cannot be boiled down toideologies or convictions. This helps Schielke point out that questioning
the minimal requirements of Muslim faith (belief in Allah andMuhammad) is an affective, rather than epistemic, issue. In other words,
both atheism and religiosity carry a core affective aspect, even though theterm religion is imbued with various aspects of morality, metaphysics,
subjectivity, ritual, politics, etc. This core aspect is not negated by thedifferent motivations for engagement with religion or the multiple
reasons for disengagement from it. According to Schielke, this core is theaffect of ‘lifeworldly certainty’, while each side has divergent ways ofachieving it, the religious side through textual knowledge and renewed
divine presence, and the non-religious side through turning ‘the loss of
divine presence into an accomplishment with the help of a trust in humanagency and judgment’ (2012, 317).
Moreover, doubt has social dimensions and is not exclusively acognitive mechanism, as Ruy Llera Blanes and Galina OustinovaStjepanovic (2017) have argued (we can see this in cases when people
distrust corrupt religious practitioners, for instance). Given these insights,
I explore the role played by the appeals to affect made by atheists versus
the role played by intellectual arguments and how they impact audiences.
If affect is a major aspect of experience shared by atheists and believers,
are Lebanese atheists who make their public admission of atheism on
traditional and social media using affect strategically? Are there genderdifferences in their use of affect? And do their strategies resonate with thelarger audiences of believers?

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Gender and atheist publicity
Although academic interest in atheism and non-religion is growing fast,
research projects on non-religion and the media are still few; someexamples are studies of the secularist press in Victorian England (Nash1995), the coverage of atheism and atheists in American and British
newspapers (van der Veen and Bleich 2021), atheist publicity campaigns(Lee 2017; Knott, Poole and Taira 2013), atheist cartoon strips(Luehrmann 2011, 2015), the material culture of Indian atheism(Copeman and Quack 2015), secularist cyber-activism (Smith and Cimino2012), atheism and Reddit (Lundmark and LeDrew 2019), gaming(Bosman 2019), apostate blogs (Rashid and Mohamad 2019) and onlinesocial groups in Indonesia (Duile 2021). There have been even fewerstudies on non-religion and the media in the context of Arabic-speaking
communities, such as on digital periodicals like the Arab Atheist Magazine(Khazaal 2017), on Arab Twitter (Al Hariri, Magdy and Wolters 2019)and on YouTube (Elsässer 2021).
Few scholars have explicitly engaged with gendered dynamics
surrounding atheism. This is concerning, because gender is an importantfactor when it comes to professing atheism in public. Most public atheistsin Lebanon and the Arabic-speaking world have been male. While exact
statistics are hard to generate, the proportion of men versus women on
the Facebook page ‘Lebanese Atheists’, for instance, is 71.5 per cent maleand 28 female. Without claiming that there are ‘female accounts’ per se,
this chapter nevertheless infers from the juxtaposition of the two female
and two male cases that men and women articulate atheism differently.
The chapter does not argue that ‘female’ accounts are structured aroundan ‘affective defence’ because women are emotional; on the contrary, itshows that female accounts incorporate both affective and intellectual
defences but connect to audiences better by the strategic use of theaffective defence. In this section, I draw on gender literature to situate mystudy in the wider literature on atheism beyond the Arabic-speaking
world and reference other works that have highlighted the gendereddimensions of humanist, rationalist and atheist projects and publicity.
Thus, I engage explicitly with how questions of the constructions offemininity and masculinity tend to be interlinked with notions of ‘womenas emotional’ and ‘men as intellectual/rational’, which might result in
gendered forms of atheist publicity.
For example, in her study exploring whether empathy is gendered,Claudia Strauss (2004) argues that women typically exhibit more

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GLOB AL SCEPTICAL PUBLICSempathy, but that gender difference varies across cultures. According to
Yoshihisa Kashima et al. (1995), US women demonstrate noticeably
greater emotional connectedness than US men, but the difference
between Korean women and men is negligible. Various reasons have been
postulated to explain differences in empathy, among them: higher
expectations on women to behave empathetically because empathy ismore important to women’s identity (Davis 1996); the fact that women
are typically the primary caregivers forces them to learn to control
aggressiveness and mimic same-gender behaviour by the caregiver(Chodorow 1999); cultural devaluation of the affect of caregiving(Benjamin 1988); the impact of larger, rougher play groups for boys andsmaller, more intimate ones for girls (Maccoby 1998); and typicaleconomic and power differences between women and men (Miller 1986),
which mean that those in subordinate positions need to be more skilled
in decoding the thoughts and feelings of their superiors than vice versa.
Readers will notice that, while gender is a significant dimension,other factors also shape Lebanese atheists’ dynamics of self-representation.
This fact shows how important it is to apply an intersectional perspective infuture analyses. The selected cases demonstrate, for instance, that class,social milieu, urbanity, established social status and, arguably, transnational
interactions are very significant for a person’s relative scope to engage
effectively with atheist publicity, and for how the latter is perceived.

Female accounts: an affective defence of atheism
Joumana Haddad
Joumana Haddad is the single most influential open Lebanese atheist andthe single most influential open female atheist in the twenty-first-century
Arabic-speaking world. Her integrated identity as a writer, journalist andrights activist defines the horizons of her impact. Raised in a conservative
family with a huge library and an avid interest in reading, Haddad beganwriting when she was ten. After a two-year affair with medical school toappease her parents, she embarked on an extraordinary career injournalism and literature. As a writer, she is famous for five poetry
collections, a play, a novel and a trilogy of essays about women in the
Arab world. During this time, she has also been a well-known journalist,
the first woman to serve as the cultural editor of the most prestigious
Lebanese daily, Nahar. In 2018, she began hosting the political-social
show Kalimat Haqq (‘Word of truth’) on the US-operated Arabic-language

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television channel Hurra, in which she focuses on critical thinking andfree speech regarding cases of human rights abuse, censorship anddiscrimination against disenfranchised groups in Arab countries. She haslong been an activist for women’s, LGBTQ+ and atheist rights, and in
2019 she founded the youth-centred, secular, independent human rights
organisation the Joumana Haddad Freedoms Center.9
In the early days of her atheism, she used to debate with believers,
pointing to the irrefutable evidence of contradictions in religious scripture
and appealing to believers’ quest for truth through logic. But after
multiple failed attempts, she discovered that believers always find a way
to explain away even the most hard-to-justify contradiction. This kind ofactivism has long ceased to attract her because she understood that every
person has the right to believe in different things even if they were wrong.
Now she favours a different type of atheist activism, what I call ‘anaffective defence of atheism’. I argue that her ‘affective defence of atheism’has two main steps: disarming believers’ fears and appealing to theirsense of compassion.
On 23 March 2013, Haddad published a brave article in Nahar
called ‘Limadha Ana Mulhida’ (‘Why I’m an atheist’, later (2014)
republished as the preface to the Arabic edition of her popular book on
patriarchy, Superman Is an Arab: Why I’m an atheist).10 The title is in
homage to Egyptian writer, critic and mathematician Dr Ismail Adham’s
famous 1937 manifesto of the same name. Adham has achieved a revered
status in the Arabic-speaking atheist community for his bravery in openly
revealing his atheism at the time. Notice how even Haddad’s title marks
step 1: breaking the atheist taboo and disarming the audience’s fear of
atheists (since she is a journalist whom readers have known and respected
for a long time). In the body, she unambiguously affirms that she is anatheist, thwarting any attempts to explain her atheism as a metaphor ora phase: ‘I do not feel that this essence [god] is part of me or of the essenceof my existence. I now live without god inside me’; ‘That is the reason I’m
no longer a believer. That is why I’m an atheist.’
By 2012, Haddad had been in the public eye for long enough tobecome a beloved cultural and feminist icon. She had enemies too, which
made her announcement of atheism risky, but not reckless because of thecultural cachet she had amassed and the connections with colleagues,
supporters and friends she had made over the years. Her atheism was not
the first thing to be known about her publicly. Her prior popularity as an
iconoclast helped Lebanese audiences reappraise her atheism andconsequently took away some of their fear. It also challenged a stereotype
that there are no Arab women atheists in the Arabic-speaking world. Some152

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bloggers commented how shocked they were to discover not only that there
are Arab women atheists but also that Haddad was a worthy opponent withmany positive qualities. Single-handedly, Haddad forced many to deal withatheism as a legitimate part of the Arabic-speaking socioscape.
In what I call step 2 – evoking believers’ sense of compassion andjustice – Haddad’s article describes her atheism as simultaneously a resultof an intellectual position in which god has become an unconvincing idea,
and a feeling or lived experience: in other words, it is an ‘intellectual andexistential position’:
The issue is one of life that I live; and I do not feel that this life needs
the essence (or ‘crutch’) I had been brought up believing in. I do not
feel that this essence is part of me, or of the essence of my existence.
I now live without god inside me. This is, in short, my intellectualand existential position on the question of faith. That is the reason
I’m no longer a believer. That is why I’m an atheist. … I believe inscience, in its current breakthroughs (many of which decisively
refute the idea of a god, or at least the ‘need’ for one to explain theexistence of this universe) and in its future breakthroughs.
(Haddad 2014, 12–13)
While Haddad acknowledges the intellectual roots of her atheism, she
focuses her attention on its existential/affective roots. This focus closely
parallels the signposts in al-Haybi’s definition of faith; as she presents her
convictions as ‘an act that we experience, that we live’, she reaches
believers who might respond negatively to definitions focused on‘physical, tangible evidence, of scientifically demonstrable proof’. (Shealso communicates successfully with anyone interested in logicalreasoning and intellectual positions by describing her atheism as anintellectual position.) By talking the language of believers Haddadconditions them to listen to her message and be more open to her ideas.
Their listening allows (but does not compel) them to feel compassion for
Haddad, the narrator, when she explains her atheism as an outcome ofthe deep schism between her morality and that of Abrahamic religions, asa consequence of the ways in which religions offend and oppress women:‘they are racist, misogynistic, homophobic, unforgiving, blood-stained,
intolerant of difference, biased in their actions against humanity,
freedoms and human rights’ (Haddad 2014, 15). Or, in greater detail:Monotheistic religions offend me, in the first place as a woman. A
woman with dignity. A woman who believes unequivocally that she

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is equal to men and that she should enjoy the same rights andprivileges that they do. How can I not reject religions that are
inherently misogynistic and against gender equality, that competewith each other to apply patriarchal standards, from humiliating
women to describing them as a kind of property owned by men, tooppressing them, to treating them as inferior? … And then,monotheistic religions offend me, in the second place, because I
believe my body is my property, yet religious hypocrisy about sex
has no limit.
(Haddad 2014, 16–19)
Haddad’s article stirred much public debate on the topics of her atheism
and atheism in general when it was first published. One outcome was thatin 2015 Nahar’s sister outlet, Nahar TV, enthusiastically accepted
Haddad’s proposal to make a series of short shows on controversial topics,
including atheism. The purpose of each episode was to raise awareness inyounger generations through an intellectual conversation between
Haddad and an opponent chosen from her students at the LebaneseAmerican University (LAU). Haddad created the series (especially theepisodes on atheism and removing the veil, which provoked the mostviewer interest) having in mind that religious faith is a tool which
communities use to create a sense of belonging.11 Haddad wanted todislodge the links between religion and the sense of belonging and toshow viewers that they have the freedom to choose the community they
belong to. To achieve this, she wanted to leave them with ‘earworms’, orthoughts that challenge them to question their convictions. She conveyed
this idea directly in the signature statement that ended each episode: ‘My
goal is not to persuade you or anyone else. My goal is that we respect eachother and start thinking.’
In line with her strategy of atheist activism, the atheism episodefocuses on morality, rather than on contradictions and logical fallacies inreligious scripture. This is how Haddad described the reason why she
chose morality as the episode’s focus:
NK: Why did you choose to focus on morality in the episodes onatheism and the veil above anything else, for example
contradictions in religious scripture?
JH: You know, there has been a lot of focus on contradictions inreligious scripture. But if someone is a believer, they’ll always
find a justification and an excuse to explain away thesecontradictions. On the other hand, the question of morality

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has been an important one for me because believers see
atheists as immoral people, as if religious belief were whatdefines human morality. For me it is extremely important todemonstrate that morality and humane values precede
religion; and that a believer who prays to god could be either
moral or immoral, and an atheist could also be either moral or
immoral. That is why I chose this topic instead of dealing with
‘Byzantine polemics’, which has been done. I wanted to offer aview of atheists as moral people who are not deficient incomparison with believers, because morality is the standard
by which we judge anyone.12
The discussion of the origins of morality could be framed by a discussion
about how defining religious communities as the only moral communities
contradicts historical evidence, and how the sense of belonging is abiologically hard-wired component of decision making and the moods ofhappiness in social animals (including humans). The debate format of theepisode could also fit with a kind of atheist activism that focuses on
exposing contradictions in religious scripture and discussing morality
from an intellectual, philosophical point of view. Yet Haddad’s
implementation fuses this approach with her affective defence of atheism,
which appeals to believers’ sense of compassion and justice. If atheists canbe moral persons, as the episode suggests, then is it moral for a religious
community to rob them of some of their rights? Do not they deserve thesame freedoms of expression and belonging as their religious counterparts?

Pamela Ghanem
Pamela Ghanem also uses an affective defence of atheism, but targets
primarily atheists or believers with doubts. These considerations and her
own experience have been key to the crystallisation of her message as anactivist: if you are an atheist, you are not alone and you do not need toembrace society’s traditions in order to belong.
Ghanem was born to a Roman Catholic family from Tripoli,
Lebanon’s second largest city, with a Muslim-majority population. She
used to go to church every Sunday when she was younger, although herfamily was not strict and her father often criticised clerics. This relaxedatmosphere fostered her doubts about the possibility of a virgin birth andthat eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood during Communion
implies cannibalism. But she was truly frustrated with male priests’harassment of boys, nuns and others over whom they exerted power. She

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also deplored women’s secondary position in the Church and in
Christianity. Ghanem started using Twitter when she left for the US, andsoon came across Twitter users like George Carlin, Ricky Gervais, Richard
Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Sam Harris who talked openly about
evolution, a subject she was never taught at school. At the same time, she
encountered on Twitter Joumana Haddad, who impressed her with thefrankness and boldness with which she talked in Arabic about liberated
female sexuality, atheism and women’s rights. Haddad’s model of activism
inspired Ghanem to open up about her own doubts about religion andbecome a more passionate defender of women’s rights. She befriended
Haddad on Twitter and the two started talking. By 2012, Ghanem had left
religion but still held on to some of its imagery; over the next year, shetransitioned to scientific deism, then to agnosticism and finally toatheism.13 Soon after, she contacted Armin Navabi, founder of the popularAtheist Republic online community, proposing that she should create an
Arabic-language version of it on YouTube. Navabi accepted the proposal,
and promoted the community before it launched in January 2019.
Ghanem’s own experience of trying to find a new community tobelong to – one that did not incur high costs such as forcing one to accept
mythology or condone misogyny – created the framework from which she
speaks about her own atheism in episode 2 of her series, titled ‘Limadhaana mulhida’ (‘Why I’m an atheist’). The main message to viewers is thatthey are not alone. This is important to Ghanem because, by her own
admission, she was unable to shake off her religious identity on her own,
despite her scepticism, while she was in a deeply religious environment,that is, without a new community to embrace her. A major aspect of her
affective defence of atheism, then, is to look beyond the transitional stage
between faith and atheism, during which the discussion of contradictions
in religion is essential. Instead, her focus is on the stage at which theatheist builds connections with a new community better aligned with
their own identity. Achieving this goal has been difficult for many atheistsin the Arabic-speaking world because of the enormous obstacles religious
communities place in the way of members who are likely to defect. In
other words, Ghanem places more weight on the harm done by religious
rhetoric and the policing of likely defectors than on the contradictions inreligious scripture. After all, an encounter with a more accepting
environment with less communal policing has been paramount in her
own defection.

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Impact
The gender-based discrimination and abuse that many women in Arabicspeaking communities experience or witness lead women atheists there
to talk about atheism from a more affective place. Even though Haddad
and Ghanem have never been abused in the way some other women have,their commitment to four fundamental ways to fight discrimination andabuse – gender equality, secularism (including the rights of non-believers
it guarantees), LGBTQ+ rights, and personal freedoms (sexual freedom,
freedom of expression, etc.) – is undeniable.14 In her first episode (January2019), Ghanem announced that she would touch on the following
important subjects on her channel: 1) women’s rights, 2) LGBTQ+ rights,
3) religious freedoms and 4) freedoms outside of religion. Even if we
ignore the ranking of these topics suggested by her mention of women’s
rights before those of atheists, we can still see how important women’s
rights are to the content and direction of Ghanem’s tenure. Many of theepisodes Ghanem posted on the channel focus on religious and patriarchal
oppression of women and other minorities: ‘Women in Saudi Arabia andatheist movements’ (to which Ghanem invited the Saudi atheist Danah),‘Atheist women’, ‘God is a man’, ‘Homosexuality is not an illness,
homophobia is’, ‘Political and religious repression during the COVID-19
pandemic’, ‘Shutting down the Pamela ‘alayha al-Salam account’,‘Brainwashing kids’, ‘Seeds of harassment’, etc. In comparison, there isjust one episode dedicated to science: ‘I trust science’.
While the strategic effects of the affective defence of atheism arecomplex, and difficult to establish definitively, there is much evidence
that it is worth considering seriously. For instance, Haddad’s cumulative
life efforts in atheist activism have led to some remarkable achievements.
Her open admission of atheism has on the whole enhanced her successand broadened her influence rather than curtailing them. A case in pointis the 2020 episode of her show Word of Truth, which focused on atheism
and where Haddad featured Hamed Abd al-Samad – a famous Egyptianatheist activist residing in Germany – as a guest. As a joint study of theportrayal of atheists on Lebanese television demonstrates, atheists are
depicted negatively and as second-rate guests, even though Lebanon
boasts of being the most liberal Arabic-speaking country (Khazaal, Itani
and Abdallah 2022). While their portrayal on Hurra, which hosts theshow, is remarkably more positive than on other channels, this episode ishistoric because it is the first ever Arabic-language show to feature only
open atheists – the show host and the guest. Furthermore, Haddad’s open
admission of atheism probably encouraged her wide recognition in and

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as part of the Arabic-speaking world, and certainly has not discouraged
it. She made it into Arabian Business magazine’s 100 most influential Arab
women, as well as into Apolitical’s 100 most influential people in gender
politics (2021). Her recognition in Lebanon is just as impressive. After alengthy discussion of her atheism on the popular talk show Ana Heyk(‘This is how I am’) on Jadeed TV (aired in 2019), 23 out of 25 people in
the audience voted that they would like to see Haddad as a member ofparliament in the show’s audience polling segment.15 Indeed, on the nightof the 2018 elections, Haddad went to bed an elected member of the
Lebanese parliament after the media announced her victory, but she woke
up having lost the election. The voting commission allegedly rigged thevotes, but Haddad’s lawsuit to force a recount was dismissed by the higher
courts. Still, an enormous crowd marched in her support, proving her
unwaning popularity.
As for Ghanem, although she does not have the public visibility andsuccessful career of Haddad, her Twitter account had 30,000 followers before
it was shut down.16 Another indicator of the acceptance of her message
is the number of closeted atheists – famous Lebanese journalists, singers,
actors and regular citizens – who frequently contact her on social media toshare that they agree with her but do not feel comfortable coming out in thecurrent environment. According to her own testimony, these followers arethankful for the community she and others like her have created, where they
can feel a sense of belonging and counter social isolation.

Male accounts: an intellectual defence of atheism
The two male accounts below present a different approach to explaining
one’s atheism, which I call an intellectual defence of atheism. The core ofthis defence is the idea that religious scripture and tenets are createdaround logical contradictions and fallacies, whose implications lead toatheism, or the denial of the existence of supernatural entities like gods.

Mazen Abou Hamdan
Mazen Abou Hamdan comes from a Druze family. In 2016, he co-founded
Freethought Lebanon as a Facebook group and, after it reached 10,000
subscribers, created a website with the same name.17 These platforms
provide space to build a community of Lebanese and other atheists, butalso target recent apostates going through an ‘angry’ phase. According toAbou Hamdan, anger is an unproductive response to the religious

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delusions one espoused before becoming atheist. The platforms help
young atheists grow out of this phase by organising different events, suchas debates and a showing of the documentary ‘Dawkins on Darwin’ in
Masrah al-Madina, Beirut in 2012, by posting atheism-related articles, byparticipating in conferences such as the International Humanist
Conference, and by appearing on a BBC show about Arab atheists. His
goal is not to claim separate rights for atheists, but to build alliances withother rights movements to advance secular causes, like legitimising civil
marriage in Lebanon. Out of three possible ways – submission, aggression
and assertion – of advancing atheists’ visibility and guaranteeing thatthey have the same rights as everyone else, he chooses the third.18
However, Abou Hamdan was not always as polished in the way hepresents his ideas. In 2011, a news story on Qadiyat al-yawm (‘The issueof the day’, Jadeed TV) featured him in a segment titled ‘Al-Mulhidin fi
Lubnan’ (‘Atheists in Lebanon’).19 When I interviewed him, he shared thatthe audience did not respond warmly to this first television appearance of
his. In the segment, Abou Hamdan explained the reasons for his atheism
this way:
I studied philosophical books for a long time; I read, dug deep into
and thought about big existential questions. In the end, I discoveredthat the logical arguments against the existence of god were for mea lot more convincing than the arguments for god’s existence. … I
wish that you all would accept us and not kill us.
His explanation is an encapsulation of the intellectual defence strategy:
it captures the intellectual growth of a critical thinker who takes the time
to review and thoroughly analyse important sources on the given topic,
and only then comes to reasoned conclusions. This process guarantees
him complete freedom of inquiry, analysis and conclusion, and thenopinion. It allows him to consider several opposing viewpoints andindependently select one of them as the correct option. His time is wellspent because the topic is germane to human life, signifying his ability torank issues in terms of importance. His devotion to logic helps him
identify and remove affective conclusions, and positions emotions outsideof the mechanism of validation or refutation of any truth.
What is interesting is the brief appeal to the audience at the very
end of Abou Hamdan’s account. It is clearly the wish that he and mostatheists hold most dear – that the religious community would accept
them as legitimate community members and not harm them (or killthem). Notice that this plea is entirely based in feeling. It suggests a desire

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to be seen as one’s true self without having to hide one’s atheist thoughts
and identity. It also suggests a desire to be considered equal to the rest of
the members of the community, that is, the nation-state, despite how
ineffective the state is in enforcing the equal rights laws on the books
when it comes to atheists. Again, there is nothing fundamentally wrong
with such a plea. The question is whether it resonates with the audience
for whom it is meant: would this audience be convinced they need tochange their feelings about atheists and consequently their behaviour?
Why are their current feelings misguided? The entire rationale for theplea is missing, as the intellectual defence cannot provide one. Perhaps it
was cut out during production and the editing team decided to substituteit with a brief statement by an attorney explaining how Lebanese law
penalises those who blaspheme against god. In any case, Abou Hamdan’s
logic is not made explicit. It does not move the audience – not yet.

Ali Haydar
Ali Haydar also uses the intellectual defence strategy, speaking to asimilar audience. His position as a geology professor at the American
University of Beirut (AUB) endows him with the status of an expert inscience. As a result, his main message is that scientific discoveries reveal
the true nature of humans, life, death and the universe.
Haydar was born into a Shi‘ite family and became an atheist in his
teenage years. In 1991 he graduated from the University of Parma in Italy
with a master’s degree in science, and in 1997 he finished his doctorate at
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, specialising in
nanofossil recognition and geochemistry. He taught at the University ofParma before joining AUB, where he continues to do research inpalaeontology and geoscience.
In 2018, Jadeed TV featured Haydar as the second guest on theshow Ana Heyk under the title ‘The atheist in confrontation with therepentant debauchee’. When the host asked him how he became an
atheist, Haydar answered:
I’m always in a process of searching, even today that is still going on.
When I grew up and was able to read whole books by myself – Imean, we are talking about when I was about 16 – I began reading
the exegesis of the Qur’an by al-Tabarsi and finished all the volumesof Khalafi in one summer. I mean because my goal was not to decide
if I was an atheist, my goal was to discover the truth. … Science
opened avenues of thought outside the religious ones.

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Using the intellectual defence strategy like Abou Hamdan, Haydar
carefully presented himself as an open-minded thinker who always
re-evaluates his ideas, suggesting that ideas should not be set in stone,
because new scientific discoveries constantly improve our knowledge of
the world. He appeared as an independent thinker, who could not only
read books by himself at age 16, as he literally said, but also, he implied,evaluate their claims independently. Critical, independent thinking, then,gave him strength, and confidence that he could understand the world
around him. According to his account, he diligently and thoroughly
reviewed multiple primary and secondary sources (al-Tabarsi’s exegesisof the Qur’an, all Khalafi’s volumes), so that he could evaluate some of thebest existing religious evidence. The implication was that if he had beenbiased he would not have consulted theological sources, and therefore hecould be trusted. The viewer could also infer his dedication to discovering
the truth, since not many 16-year-old boys would rather spend thesummer vacation reading twelfth-century religious exegeses thanswimming with their friends at a beach on the Mediterranean, or chasing
after some heartthrob (what parent would not delight in seeing theirchild spend a summer reading books!). His implied message to theaudience was that his convictions, and his conclusion, are trustworthy.
Only after he had established that did Haydar present his conclusion:science is a better route to truth than religion.
Before asking this question, the host, Nishan Derharoutyounian,
had introduced Haydar as a guest who represented a ‘secular’ viewpoint
based on secular sources ‘incompatible with Abrahamic scripture’. It isclear from Haydar’s answer that he made an effort to counter Nishan’sframe. To appeal to the religious audience in the studio and at home,
Haydar implied that his atheism should not be discredited, because it isan outcome of his engagement with famous religious exegeses, the very
sources they deem most credible. Despite this effort, his intellectual
defence appeared out of sync with the celebration of the power of faiththat took place during the first part of the show.
The story of the first guest, Tony Frangieh, was dramaticallydifferent from Haydar’s peaceful pursuits. Frangieh, a born-again
Christian who had engaged in drug and alcohol abuse, gambling, theft
and infidelity, had spent the better part of an hour relating in detail all thevice and debauchery from which he claimed his newfound faith in Christ
had saved him. Again and again, Nishan came back to how alone,
confused and weak Frangieh had been without god and how the world
turned from a cold, heartless place to a source of strength and wisdom
once he accepted Christ into his heart. The pain and shame of his previous

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life were still visible in his facial expressions, body language and tone. It
might have appeared cruel for Nishan to probe relentlessly into Frangieh’s
earlier sins, but the more uncomfortable the guest appeared, the more it
enabled him to play the role of the ‘living proof’ of the existence of god,
who was called upon to move the audience to tears of joy. Nishan ended
the segment by saying:
ND: Religions are hospitals for the soul. Hallelujah.
TF: Amen.
Frangieh called himself a ‘haykal for the Holy Ghost’ (temple, skeleton),whose infectious faith had saved from atheism and 11 suicide attempts ayoung woman he had brought with him into the studio. During Haydar’s
portion of the interview, Frangieh addressed the studio audience directly:‘Christianity is a strategy for salvation. I bring to you the good news of joy,
the message of jubilation’, and the host followed with, ‘What science or
philosophy can make you a new person [like] the divine power, just by abrief encounter with it?’Compared to this direct message in simple Arabic, Haydar’s response
in English – which described Frangieh’s experience as ‘SICPT, or spiritually
integrated cognitive processing therapy’ – seemed esoteric. After the‘living proof’ presented to the audience (Frangieh and the young woman),
Haydar’s foray into ‘dead’ proof – ‘the fossil record’, ‘sediments’ and skeletal‘remains’ – to demonstrate that god did not exist seemed ineffective. So did
his mention of Australopithecus afarensis – a recent prehuman ancestor – asa proof of evolution that ‘we see with our eyes’ and ‘touch with our hand’.
After all, the record was not in the studio. The audience could not see ortouch A. afarensis, but they could see and touch Frangieh and the young
woman. We cannot directly observe evolutionary changes that occur overmillions of years. Understanding evolution requires abstract and logicalthinking and at least nominal familiarity with the evidence. At one point,even Haydar became aware how esoteric his measured scientificexplanations and references seemed to the other, religious, participants.
This made him smile at his own answer as if to signal: ‘Yes, I know how
unbelievable it sounds.’ It happened when host Nishan asked an affective
question and seemed lost for words (emphasis added):
ND: When somebody dies, you go to the funeral, to the mourning
ceremony and you see a sheikh who is praying or a Christian
priest. How do you approach this topic, the topic of burial andthe greatest tragedy, the tragedy of separation, bidding another162

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person a farewell, burying him under the ground, covering him
with dirt and tears, this huge pain that a person feels when theylose someone?
AH: We are not saying that the secular person’s gotten rid of
emotions. Tragedy is still tragedy, regardless if you are abeliever or secular. Human relationships gain a deeper
dimension if you are secular, that is what is expected in myopinion, because the secular person has no extra – spiritual –credible resources. That is why the human dimension deepens
rather than shrinking for the secular person.
ND: Death gives Muslims the right to see the face of their merciful
lord; for Christians, death is resurrection. What is death for you?
AH: The bacteria show up and eat us, that is all. [Smiles]
ND: That’s it? Worms show up and eat us? We get disintegrated?
That is the end?
Haydar’s initial answer – that atheists have the normal range of feelings
like other humans – answered the question. But the host did not let go until
Haydar framed his perspective as a heartless, cold reality devoid of humanfeeling or memory. The audience could compare the two mediated frames– Frangieh’s who had filled his heart with Christ and presented to them aworld of love and strong bonds with the religious audiences and Haydar’s– with the appalling image of bacteria and worms eating one’s heart.

Impact
The male atheists in my sample present themselves as serious thinkers who
carefully evaluate the evidence, letting it take them to the truth without any
bias or preconceived expectations. All are careful not to offend believers.
For instance, Haydar presented his atheism as born out of ‘the questions ofdiscussion between science and religion’; he clearly meant contradictions,but changed that word to ‘questions’ in the middle of his statement. He also
declined to answer a provocative question about Christianity on the
grounds that the Lebanese penal code does not allow him to answer such aquestion. What is the impact of this measured, rational and respectful wayof presenting one’s atheism in the Lebanese media?
Similarly to the women’s case, the effectiveness of this common malestrategy is difficult to establish. Yet some trends emerge. Joumana Haddadand Ali Haydar were guests on the same show, ‘This is how I am’, with host
Nishan. Overall, Lebanese channels, like other channels in Arab countries,
are biased against atheists. Yet there was a noticeable difference in the

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host’s attitude towards the guests. While he introduced Haddad at the
beginning of the show, Haydar appeared 63 minutes into the 87-minuteshow, or after 72 per cent of the duration of the episode had lapsed. The
host’s tone was almost favourable towards Haddad, but noticeably
unfavourable towards Haydar, just as was the host’s introduction of
Haydar and his atheism. In the joint study (Khazaal, Itani and Abdallah2022) of political bias against atheists on Lebanese talk shows, we foundthat the Haydar episode was strongly biased against atheists, scoring
17/18 on the overall bias scale, where 18 is the most biased. Most
importantly, while 23 out of the 25 studio audience members voted infavour of Haddad becoming a member of parliament, not a single studioaudience member voted in favour of Haydar, an unprecedented event in
the history of the show, as the host commented. It is possible that Haddad’s
popularity as a writer and journalist versus Haydar’s much less visible
position as a university professor made a difference, or that the ethnicallyArmenian host felt an affinity with Haddad, whose grandmother was also
Armenian, or that the polling question’s wording biased the audience in
opposite ways: ‘Would you like to see Joumana Haddad as a member ofparliament?’ versus ‘Are you like Tony Frangieh or like Ali Haydar?’Yet I believe there is more to this, and it has to do with messaging.
Why did the audience overwhelmingly vote against Haydar’s main
message, that science establishes what truth is and religious dogma
contradicts science? Why did the born-again Frangieh’s message of
eternal joy find such support while Haydar’s was stillborn? Why did Abou
Hamdan’s feedback suggest his message needed more work?

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have argued that the messaging male Lebanese atheists
have used in traditional media like television reflects the tenor of the
global wave of atheism in the twenty-first century that renders their
atheism as an intellectual pursuit, implicitly framing religion as anirrational assumption. By contrast, female Lebanese atheists incorporate
an additional affective defence of atheism that finds a more positive
reception among the general public. The previously unexploredintersection of gender with the media and the public sphere that thisinvestigation of atheism revealed helps reconceptualise the link between
the secular and the public sphere. In particular, I have shown thatdifferent media like television and YouTube have a meaningful affective
potential, not just an active role in circulating ideas and ideologies.

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world, not just to a society like the Lebanese, typically seen as more liberalthan the rest of the Arab world. Consider the following four examples
described in the media. When the family of Moroccan student Siham, now
an atheist, forced the veil on her at the age of ten, she asked why men did
not have to hide their charms as well.20 The traditional answer that womenshould not provoke male lust did not satisfy her. Trying to figure out whichpart of the female body was responsible, she explored her naked body inthe mirror. But her family caught her and forced her to swear on the Qur’anthat she would never do it again. This set her off on a quest to discover themeaning of life and religion. Years later, Siham’s eyes fill with tears when
she remembers how she silently gave in to wearing the veil, all the whilecrying on the inside. Religious TV channels like an-Nas played an
important role in the life of another Moroccan woman, Rabab, who also
later became an atheist. She was devoted to prayer and other Muslim
rituals, owing her religious zeal to popular Islamic televangelist
Muhammad Hassan, whom she greatly admired. But one day she heard
about something called ‘rada‘ al-kabir’ (breastfeeding grown men) andironically it was Hassan who confirmed that Islam condones it without a
trace of embarrassment. ‘That started my research into Islam, whereupon
I was shocked by its fallacies and glaring contradictions.’21
Compare the above two accounts with two male accounts, also fromthe media. For Jabir – a Saudi man – the road to atheism started with hisasking why music is haram (forbidden),22 while for another man – Syrian
YouTuber Kosay Betar – leaving religion began with his asking if nonMuslims can go to heaven. When Kosay was a child, people around him
warned him that asking insistently who god was and where he came fromwas blaspheming. Kosay was intent on understanding his religion, but
after years of study in a children’s Qur’anic circle and in his religion classin regular school, his faith in Islam was shattered by the answer that evengood non-Muslims go to hell:
After years of reading and thinking, of asking and searching, I foundmyself forced to reject this silly story. The same story that was once
the ultimate truth for me. At age 20, I reached the conclusion that,based on the sources we have today, Muhammad was not a prophet
of god, the Qur’an was not written by the creator of the universe andIslam is no doubt a man-made religion.23
Siham’s and Rabab’s stories are common when women in the Arabicspeaking world talk about leaving religion. Logical contradictions in

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religion certainly stunned Siham and Rabab: however, a painful personal
experience of misogyny and an encounter with an idea that demeans
women were the keys to their apostasy. Girls often get their first taste of
sex-based discrimination inside their own family when religious traditions
allow their brothers freedoms prohibited to them and force on them
duties their brothers are excused from. Many Muslim girls are powerless
to resist their first experience of oppression or injustice, since it is typicalthat their freedom to choose the clothes they wear or to move aroundfreely is taken from them at the age of 10 or younger. Siham’s and Rabab’s
testimonies above show that even if religion was not based on myth andrife with contradictions, they would probably have left religion because
their experience of it violated their rights and freedoms as women. In
Rabab’s words, ‘How can a sane woman believe in a religion that buries
her, kills her humanity and makes her men’s slave?’24
In contrast, Jabir and Kosay frame their departure from religion as
an outcome of an intellectual struggle sparked by contradictions in thereligious texts, questions religion fails to answer or moral problems not
related to them personally. Between March 2020 and April 2021, Kosay
posted on his YouTube channel a 20-episode series titled ‘Why I left
Islam’.25 Each episode exposes a contradiction or failure: for example,
episode 1 is subtitled ‘The failure of the story of the Creation’, episode 3‘Fallacies and logical contradictions in the Qur’an’, episode 4 ‘The scientificmistakes in the Qur’an’, and episode 17 ‘Islamic superstitions’. Kosay’s
videos present him as a critical thinker with extraordinary curiosity about
truth and the world: ‘In this episode, I’ll focus just on the problems I
discovered in the Creation myth after I began using critical thinking.’ Incomparison, he paints religion as a set of irrational beliefs, accepted byuncritical thinkers who fail to apply reasonable standards for verification:
The first step for me to leave Islam was recognising that this Creation
myth, which I once thought was the ultimate truth, is just a joke …
it is not good enough even to be a story. And I was not surprised thatmy family, those around them and the whole country still believed
in it, because it turns out that, just like me, they were born into thisstory and believed it without any thinking whatsoever. They did
nothing but copy and paste. It sounds like … a story written byignorant people that lived 1,500 years ago with no real
understanding of reality or the world around them, who were raisedon myths by people even more ignorant than them albeit with avivid imagination.26

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So, can region-specific insights into Arabic-speaking contexts shed light onbroader global contexts as well? I believe they can. How does the
miscommunication between the typical male atheist story and the generalreligious audience affect the demands of atheist communities for equal
rights, protection and positive visibility? According to one of the foundersof cognitive science, George Lakoff (2010), proper messaging is of crucial
importance for the success of any social movement or issue. He has
demonstrated that we think through frames, that is, in terms of roles andthe relationships between those who play these roles. Frames workthrough the circuitry of the brain, which is connected to the affective
regions of the brain. As Lakoff (2010, 72) puts it, ‘Without emotion, you
would not know what to want, since like and not-like would be meaninglessto you. When there is neither like or not-like, nor any judgment of theemotional reactions of others, you cannot make rational decisions.’
Religious communities have spent centuries building systems offrames, and other systems to communicate these frames quickly andparsimoniously. Atheists have not done so yet. Moreover, many in theaudiences they address when they appear in the media have strong
frames that contradict those of the atheists, or lead audiences to ignore
the facts that matter. Just presenting new facts is unlikely to erase oldframes. One needs to build background frames, so that audiences canunderstand the issue and what to do about it. This is a long game andatheists are not coming to a level playing field.
The consequences of the misalignment, then, are serious. That is
why I argue that presenting atheism as an intellectual position isappropriate to targeting atheists or atheist-curious individuals, but unlessatheists in Arabic-speaking communities and globally incorporate anaffective defence of atheism, like the women in my sample, they will finda much steeper road ahead.

Notes
1 Freethought Lebanon, n.d. ‘Legal report: Discrimination against atheists in Lebanon.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28FCwXQnT2A (accessed 29 May 2022).
2 Freethought Lebanon, n.d. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28FCwXQnT2A (accessed 5
July 2022).
3 Many members of Facebook groups are not publicly visible as atheists or agnostics outside the group.
4 Al Jadeed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9tS5ZEaaGA (accessed 29 May 2022).
5 Al Jadeed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9tS5ZEaaGA (accessed 29 May 2022).
6 Tawasul, Manar, 2019. https://program.almanar.com.lb/episode/63241 (accessed 29 May2022).
7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLOIO8rbwx8 (accessed 29 May 2022).
8 Tawasul, Manar, 2019. https://program.almanar.com.lb/episode/63241. See also David Eller’s(2004) opposite view, arguing that every child is born an atheist.

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9 Joumana Haddad Freedoms Center, ‘We are the Lebanon of the future’. https://joumanahaddadfreedoms.org/ (accessed 29 May 2022).
10 The full text can be found at https://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=351886(accessed 29 May 2022).
11 ‘W intou? with Joumana Haddad – Episode 8 – Faith and Atheism’: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=sJPNLZLFF8o (accessed 7 June 2022); ‘W intou? with Joumana Haddad – Episode4 – The veil’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUoBTm6s4aA (accessed 7 June 2022).
12 Interview with author, Beirut, April 2021.
13 Interview with author, Beirut, May 2021.
14 ‘W intou? with Joumana Haddad – Episode 8 – Faith and Atheism.’
15 ‘Ana heyk ma’ Nishan – al-katiba Joumana Haddad’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPAKMrl8Mk (accessed 7 June 2022).
16 For shutting down social media accounts of Arabic-speaking atheists, see Khazaal 2017.
17 https://www.freethoughtlebanon.net/ (accessed 7 June 2022).
18 Interview with author, Beirut, 2019.
19 ‘Al-mulhidin fi lubnan – Ramiz al-Qadi’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQTqCrV3vZs(accessed 7 June 2022).
20 ‘Al-ilhad aw hikaya maghribiyya rafadna quyud al-mujtama’ w-al-din’. https://tinyurl.com/
svunzfu3 (from https://www.hespress.com) (accessed 7 June 2022).
21 ‘Al-ilhad aw hikaya maghribiyya rafadna quyud al-mujtama’ w-al-din’. https://tinyurl.com/
svunzfu3 (from https://www.hespress.com) (accessed 4 July 2022).
22 William Bauer, ‘Interview with a Saudi atheist’, Your Middle East, 12 November 2012.
23 ‘Limadha taraktu al-islam – al-halqat 1 - fashl qissat al-khalq’: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=fZMFZvKPjX4&t=2s (accessed 7 June 2022).
24 ‘Al-ilhad aw hikaya maghribiyya rafadna quyud al-mujtama’ w-al-din.’25 ‘Limadha taraktu al-islam – al-halqat 1 - fashl qissat al-khalq.’
26 ‘Limadha taraktu al-islam – al-halqat 1 - fashl qissat al-khalq.’.

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II
Mediated scepticism: historical andcontemporary trajectories

6‘Apostates’: a new secularising publicin the United Kingdom
John Hagström

In this chapter, I argue that self-described ‘apostates’ have become an
influential public whose impact has led to broad shifts in the sensibilities andpractices of non-religious individuals and organisations in the United
Kingdom. As national rates of disbelief and non-religiosity have increased,
the need for a legitimising atheist politics of visibility has decreased. The
relative ease with which many people can arrive at explicit and public nonreligious identities and labels is substantiated by both social survey reports
and anthropological studies. As a result of the gradual absence of obstacles
to disbelief, however, the need for an apostate politics of visibility has
increased, since the experiences of those for whom leaving religion is atumultuous process marred by hardships and upheavals (‘apostates’) havebeen obscured. This chapter is informed by ethnographic research on atheist
and humanist refugees, apostate spokespersons and awareness organisations,and their impact on non-religious groups. I also describe and analyse relevant
portable media forms and content on a digital education platform.

Apostasy and asylum
Conway Hall, a renowned centre of ethical culture, freethought andhumanism, is located a convenient 15-minute walk from King’s Cross
railway station in London. As members or patrons, anthropologists‘APOSTATES’: A NEW SECULARISING PUBLIC IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

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frequented Conway Hall throughout the discipline’s history in the twentiethcentury. For instance, A. C. Haddon gave the Conway Memorial Lecture in
1921 and Edmund Leach in 1972 (during his presidency of the British
Humanist Association; the organisation was renamed Humanists UK in2017), followed by Ernest Gellner in 1974. Since at least the early 2010s,
however, anthropologists have been turning up in growing numbers, notnecessarily as supporters or contributors but as researchers who study
atheism, humanism and other varieties of non-religion. For the expanding
range of students as well as junior and senior anthropologists with suchresearch aims in the United Kingdom – not to mention those working inclosely related social sciences – Conway Hall is something of an obligatory
port of call even if one’s research is not situated in London, given its bustlingschedule of relevant talks, discussions and socials. A significant number ofhumanist interlocutors whom I first met in cities like Liverpool, Manchesterand Edinburgh had visited Conway Hall to attend this or that notable event.
The spokespersons and officers of Humanists UK1 – as distinct from thedozen or so affiliated but ‘local’ humanist groups in the Greater London
area – hold the majority of their events at Conway Hall, attracting visitors
not just from humanist groups in London and beyond but also from thewider bricolage of the city’s atheist, sceptic and freethought scene.
A few months into my fieldwork in early 2019, I attended an evening
panel discussion at Conway Hall titled ‘Apostasy and asylum’. It wasorganised by Faith to Faithless, an apostasy awareness and support
organisation founded by two ex-Muslim atheists in 2015 and incorporated
into Humanists UK in 2017. In keeping with the norm for this type of
event, the panel was hosted in the Brockway Room. In a conference spacelarge enough to seat nearly 80 people, less than half the chairs were fullthat evening. Humanists International’s red retractable cassette banner
contrasted with the uniformly white walls of the room.2 A slanted skylight– one of the Brockway Room’s selling points as a venue for hire – spanned
the perimeter of the ceiling. I knew the invited speakers, having met themon previous occasions. As the result of a thorough networking effort, I also
knew most of the three dozen audience members in attendance. I had
long since, and on numerous occasions, obtained permission to place adigital voice recorder on the front table during events like this one, but asa matter of courtesy – and for a bit of small talk, since I arrived early – I
repeated the process, before taking a seat with the rest of the audience.
The panel comprised four invited speakers. The first to be introduced
was Hamza bin Walayat, a humanist from Pakistan who was infamously
denied asylum in 2017 on the basis of his inability to identify Plato andAristotle as signal contributors to ‘humanist’ thought. In response,

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non-religious and secularist organisations mobilised to recriminate
against the Home Office, the ministerial department responsible for
immigration. A published letter of support signed by 120 philosophersand academics declared, ‘There is no scholarly basis to think that Platoand Aristotle were humanist thinkers’ (Sherwood 2018). This debacle, in
conjunction with media attention to related cases unfolding elsewhere at
the time, contributed to the establishment of the topic of apostasy and thepredicaments of apostate refugees as novel concerns for atheist, humanistand other non-religious groups and movements in the United Kingdom.
Hamza has become a singularly well-known humanist refugee cause
célèbre, and the legal implications of his case were already the subject ofacademic inquiry by the time I started my own fieldwork (e.g., Nixon
2018). Also on the panel was Rasel,3 a Bangladeshi atheist, LGBTIQ+
activist and writer who was in the process of applying for asylum, andMaria, an immigration solicitor with over a decade’s worth of experienceof assisting non-religious asylum seekers. The fourth invited panellist, aHome Office agent involved in the training of asylum assessors, wasunexpectedly absent. Amelia, one of Humanists UK’s campaigns officers,
started the discussion with an introductory talk, striking a confident tone
despite the somewhat sparse attendance:
We set ourselves three big campaigning aims as part of our ‘Save
Hamza’ campaign. The first of those was to overturn his refusal
decision. The second was to ensure new training is introduced for
all asylum assessors so that they are fully conversant with nonreligious beliefs – what humanism or atheism means and how you
interview claimants on those grounds. And thirdly, it needed to bemade crystal-clear in all training that non-religious claimants
should be given equal treatment to religious claimants and religious
converts, since there seems to be a huge disparity of treatment. …
The non-religious were just not included in the Home Office’s
thinking at all. It was as if a whole group of people did not exist andtheir beliefs didn’t count. Those were our three main aims that we
set ourselves in January of 2018 and as of last week we have now
achieved all three of them.
Humanists UK’s monthly newsletter had been issued the week before the
Conway Hall panel and its headline read: ‘Our members helped save
Hamza’s life!’ Andrew Copson, chief executive of the organisation andone of its most prolific spokespersons, shared an additional – and every
bit as celebratory – e-mail, largely restating the newsletter’s message:‘APOSTATES’: A NEW SECULARISING PUBLIC IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

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Last year, we brought national attention to the plight of humanist
asylum seeker Hamza bin Walayat, who was told by the Home Officethat he would be deported to Pakistan, where humanists can be
executed, on the grounds that he couldn’t identify Plato and Aristotle.
It was an absurd and barbaric decision. Thousands of you agreed.
Over 12,000 people like you signed a petition to the Home Secretary.
… Hamza’s fresh claim for asylum has just been granted. … It is all
thanks to supporters like you. This shows the power of our work
together – changing Home Office policies on asylum. Saving lives.
Ever since Humanists UK began providing Hamza with support in 2017,
there had been regular updates on his case in the monthly newsletter.
But, significantly, since early 2018 the newsletter has featured at least one
article on the subject of apostasy – unrelated to Hamza’s case – nearly
every month. The specific topics have included an update on Humanists
UK’s efforts to contribute to proposed changes to the Domestic Abuse Billin mid-2019 in order to call attention to ‘domestic abuse against apostates’.
The headline of that issue read: ‘Humanists UK and Faith to Faithless tocall for stronger laws to protect apostates’. Another newsletter featured aninterview with Ste Richardsson, an ex-Jehovah’s Witness and vice chairof Faith to Faithless. He described the organisation’s ongoing work to‘support apostates on a personal and emotional basis’, and he alsomentioned the need to ‘identify and tackle the systemic societal issues
that lead to apostates slipping through the cracks’ (Richardsson 2019).
By calling attention to ‘seemingly mundane media products such as… monthly newsletters’, I take a cue from Omri Elisha’s emphasis on how
their ‘material and social functionality is a big part of the story they tell’(2016, 1064, my emphasis); in the case of her research, the stories areabout persecuted Christians in non-Western contexts. But, more specifically,
I describe these newsletters here in order to attend, following Ashley
Lebner, to ‘published/public texts (scholarly, political, etc.), because secularconcepts … have most clearly developed therein’ (2019, 129, my emphasis).
And rather than stories, it is precisely the concept of ‘apostasy’ and its
related forms (e.g., ‘apostate,’ ‘apostatise’) that these newsletters popularise
and promote. Connectedly, all the speakers on the Conway Hall panel used
the words ‘apostasy’ and ‘apostate’ – and they did so unhesitatingly, withoutpausing to expound on definitions or meanings. This might seem like atrivial observation, but my aim is to underscore the regularity of theseconcepts, that is, to highlight the significant extent to which they are
discursively well established. Amelia described an ongoing effort to ‘builda network of stakeholders – lawyers, academics and supporters – who are

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able to provide the assistance we need, equivalent to what – if you were a
Christian convert – you could expect from your church. … We are raisingawareness and building a network to rally round apostates.’ As mentioned,by the time of this 2019 discussion, two years had passed since the debacle
surrounding Hamza’s case, and in that time these concepts and terms hadentered the mainstream. Below, I include examples of contexts where they
still find explicit definition and elaboration.
At the discussion, Rasel described social and political hardships
facing secular, liberal and LGBTIQ+ minorities in Bangladesh. In key
respects, he fitted the mould of the ‘Bangladeshi atheist blogger’, an iconic
figure known to humanist and other non-religious audiences throughout
the West in part because of intensive media coverage of the murders ofactivists, writers and publishers, such as Ahmed Rajib Haider, Avijit Roy,
Ananta Bijoy Das, Niloy Chatterjee and Faisal Arefin Dipan, between 2013
and 2016 (see Schulz 2021 for a critical assessment of Euro-Americanpress coverage of these killings and related attacks). In the course of myfieldwork, I met scores of humanist interlocutors who were familiar withthe ‘atheist bloggers’ in Bangladesh, a metonym regularly used in lieu of
the names of specific individuals. In contrast, while Hamza spoke briefly
about laws, religion and conservative social mores in Pakistan, he spent
more time giving a personal account of his gradual – and often traumatic– route to disbelief and humanism. Critically, the substance of what Raseland Hamza had to say about their countries of origin resonated quite
strongly with the content of reports by the United Nations Human Rights
Council (e.g., United Nations 2017, 2014) and Humanists International’s
own Freedom of Thought Report (e.g., 2018, 2017a). These are reportsthat international humanist organisations have either publicised or called
attention to for nearly a decade. In 2017, Dr Ahmed Shaheed, the UN
Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief – speaking at a
Humanists International conference – restated what nearly all of his
predecessors had said when he claimed, ‘in my observations, humanists– when they are attacked – they are attacked far more viciously andbrutally than I think in other cases’ (Humanists International 2017b;
McAdam 2018). What distinguished the Conway Hall panel discussion –and other events like it in 2019, and more recent occasions, for instance
Humanists UK’s first Apostasy Conference in 2021 – is that persecuted
non-religious people are now present and visible, speaking directly toallied and sympathetic audiences. It is this presence that partly accounts
for the considerable extent to which – from 2017 – the plight of maltreatedatheists and humanists both abroad and in the United Kingdom has
become a central organisational concern of Humanists UK. Two months‘APOSTATES’: A NEW SECULARISING PUBLIC IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

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after the panel discussion at Conway Hall, Hamza spoke on a different
stage: the 2019 Humanists UK Conference, held in Leicester. There he
was elected to the organisation’s board of trustees.

A different kind of secularising public
In this chapter, I argue that apostates constitute a novel secularisingpublic that has been a key driver behind several widely felt shifts in the
campaigns, practices and sensibilities of non-religious individuals andgroups in the United Kingdom. My analysis here is primarily fixed onorganised humanism in urban contexts throughout England; however, I
also allude to the more far-reaching ramifications of these shifts. Lebnerhas argued that ‘secularisation’ is an undeservedly neglected concept in
the anthropology of secularism (2019, 127), and to resolve this impasse
she recommends that analysts depart from the concept’s prevailing
connotations, such as state secularism, structural differentiation and thegovernment regulation of politics and religion: ‘I contend that, historically,
new conceptual-practical distinctions from religion – secularizing
practices – were first developed and engaged with prior to and beyond thestate’ (p. 126). In other words, Lebner suggests that researchers
foreground the multiple and chequered attempts of individuals, groups,
movements and publics to establish ‘conceptual-cum-practical domain[s]distinguished from religion’. She gives two examples of secularisingpublics. The first is historical: in nineteenth-century Brazil, ‘Enlightenment
ideas gained influence with the Brazilian elite, especially the positivist
writings of Auguste Comte. [...] This call for science, order, and progress
motivated Brazilian elites to agitate against the church’s claim on power
and knowledge as they vied for a Republic’ (p. 132). The second example,
set in the present day, is the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), a
Marxist agrarian movement and a focus of Lebner’s fieldwork in Brazil.
In order to delineate my argument, I want to underscore that Lebnerplaces descriptive emphasis on how these two publics target religion. In
other words, they are depicted as outward-oriented: the nineteenthcentury positivists agitated ‘for an autonomous political domain distinct
from religion’, while the Marxists claim the ability to ‘know and transform
reality, a reality not reliant on God’, and promote a pedagogy that ‘focuseson the development of autonomous human consciousness, distinct fromthe divine’ (pp. 132, 139, my emphases). The activities of these two
publics exemplify the tenuous establishment of contestable ‘difference[s]between religion and the secular’ (p. 142). I take Lebner’s approach in a

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different direction here by shifting attention to a public that is primarily
inward-oriented, less concerned with distinctions between religion andthe secular than with the betterment of an existing secular domain.4 In
their capacity as a secularising public, apostates direct their efforts mainly
at audiences that are already atheist, humanist or non-religious, and at awider society that is understood to be secular, yet which exhibits ‘systemicsocietal issues that lead to apostates slipping through the cracks’, as thevice chair of Faith to Faithless put it (Richardsson 2019).
The 2019 British Social Attitudes Survey, published by the National
Centre for Social Research, estimated that 52 per cent of adults in Britain
have ‘no religion’, a number that is expected to increase since, on average,‘[t]wo non-religious parents successfully transmit their lack of religion.
Two religious parents have a 50/50 chance of passing on the faith. … To
borrow the terminology of radioactive decay, institutional religion in
Britain now has a half-life of one generation’ (Voas and Bruce 2019, 21).
Unsurprisingly, Humanists UK capitalised on this report and produced
shareable graphics that amplify key points from the survey (e.g.,
Humanists UK 2019). There is one significant fact that the organisation
did not call attention to, however, and it concerns the nature of the 52 per
cent: ‘[M]ost were simply not brought up with a religion, with a smaller
minority having lost a childhood faith’ (Voas and Bruce 2019, 18). In
other words, large numbers of non-religious people in Britain have paid
no cost – or a relatively low social cost – for leaving their former religion.
For such individuals, the type of atheist politics of visibility that Eric
Chalfant describes in the first part of his contribution to this volume is not
required, although there exist several historical parallels in the United
Kingdom. My research indicates that, in part because of this generalabsence of obstacles to disbelief, a specifically apostate politics of visibility
has become necessary. In their capacity as a secularising public, apostatescall attention to and publicise the kinds of experiences, ambiguities andhardships that ‘closeted’ atheists, including ex-Jews (e.g., Fader 2017,2020), ex-Muslims (e.g., Cottee 2015) and ex-Mormons (e.g., Brooks2018), discuss in anonymous digital spaces (as Chalfant describes in thesecond part of his chapter). At stake here is not a call for such individuals
to ‘come out’ en masse. The efforts of this public are intended to educatecomparatively fortunate non-religious peers, so that they can understandthe upheavals and costs attached to the disclosure of disbelief, with theaim of building capabilities for solidarity and support, both within nonreligious movements and in society at large.
If apostate spokespersons and awareness organisations comprise an
inward-oriented secularising public that is more concerned with the‘APOSTATES’: A NEW SECULARISING PUBLIC IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

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ameliorative improvement of secular knowledges than with the targetingof religious premises, there is still a key sense in which they are definedby a ‘negative relation’ to religion, to echo Matthew Engelke’s remarks on
a common analytical approach to secular and non-religious phenomena:‘when we highlight the quality of secularity, what we are highlighting isanother kind of negation: a not-religiousness. So often … to be secular is
to be not religious’ (2019, 203).5 While it is not possible to theorise
apostasy without recognising it as a kind of ‘not-religiousness’, in thischapter I emphasise the ways in which apostates shed light on the matterof forming positive relations to non-religion, which for many of them is a
protracted and traumatic process. In other words, apostates – as asecularising public – not only aim to disseminate sympathetic
understandings of the difficulties involved in leaving religion behind, theyalso call attention to the problem of non-existent or inadequate secularcommunities of support.

The normalisation and ‘realisation’ of apostasy
In mid-2019, Humanists UK launched a Massive Open Online Course(MOOC) on the digital education platform FutureLearn. The course,
titled ‘Humanist lives’, is designed to run for six consecutive weeks, eachweek featuring between five and seven thematic segments comprisingshort videos and texts, and accompanied by question prompts forattendees to discuss. The introductory course overview states: ‘On thiscourse you’ll meet individual humanists from around the world. Fromtheir stories, you’ll learn what motivates them, and how they express
their humanism. You’ll learn about the questions, choices, challenges,
and joys found in a humanist approach to life’ (FutureLearn 2021). Thisis perhaps an optimistic summary for a course that deals with a numberof arguably difficult topics, as expressed by some of the thematic headings,
such as ‘Leaving religion, losing community’ and ‘Humanists in danger’,the first of which I give particular attention here. ‘Leaving religion, losing
community’ contains an introduction to Faith to Faithless, which is
described as ‘a programme of Humanists UK working to reduce the stigma
faced by people leaving religion (apostates)’. Aliyah Saleem and Imtiaz
Shams, the two co-founders, are featured in a short video in which theyinterweave personal accounts of apostatising from Islam with descriptionsof the organisation’s activities: ‘It raises awareness about the prejudice
and discrimination that they [apostates] face. It offers training and it also
creates social groups or social events that people can go to so they can

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meet like-minded individuals who are going through very similar
experiences to them’, Aliyah says, before she relates these activities to her
own background:I grew up in a traditional Muslim family and I went to religious
schools, so I had a thorough religious education – an Islamic one.
And then as I reached towards my twenties, I started to have doubts.
At first, I was, I would suppose – I felt very anxious about my doubt.
I felt like I was doing something very wrong, so I felt very guilty andashamed to speak to other people about it, so, I thought, I mademyself quite isolated. … And then when people around me did findout – so, when friends found out, I lost a lot of my Muslim friends,
which was very difficult for me. And my family found out as well.
And, you know, it didn’t go down well. So, it was difficult and it’s
taken a lot of time, a lot of support from people around me, a lot of
healing to get to a place where I’m quite comfortable and happy
with myself and my beliefs.
Aliyah’s experiences are not uncommon, as studies of ex-Muslims attest(e.g., Cottee 2015), while research on disaffiliates from other religious
groups (e.g. ex-Mormons, Brooks 2020) likewise demonstrates that there
exist significant experiential overlaps. Indeed, towards the end of an
autobiographical text not featured in the MOOC, Aliyah reflects on her
work with Faith to Faithless and calls attention to shared experiences ofhardship, upheaval and loneliness:
We work with apostates, people who have left religions and cults,
from all backgrounds, not only people who have left Islam. This
experience has taught me that the discrimination which affects
ex-Muslims also affects people from other groups such as in the caseof former Jehovah’s Witnesses who can face excommunication andshunning. Last year I visited Plymouth Humanists and a woman
cried during my talk. I spoke to her later and she had left a Christiandenomination and had lost her family and friends because of it. She
spoke about how lonely she has felt and that she was glad to havemet someone who understood what she was dealing with.
(Saleem 2018, 59)
This excerpt is telling, since it is implied that the ex-Christian she met wasa member of the humanist group in Plymouth, which suggests, even if it
is not Aliyah’s intention to make this point, a lack of understanding of‘APOSTATES’: A NEW SECULARISING PUBLIC IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

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apostasy by non-religious peers. In a different part of the MOOC video,
Shams describes the organisation’s apostasy-awareness efforts directed atsocial institutions: ‘We will train the police, we’ll train the NHS [National
Health Service], in how to properly recognise apostasy, how to help
apostates better, and how to make sure that we are taken care of properly,
like anyone else going through their institutions.’ This training does not
only target institutions, however. The other main target audience ismembers of non-religious groups and movements, as I demonstrate in thenext section. Shams concludes the video by describing his hopes for theorganisation’s work: ‘I really think, and I really believe, that in the next
couple of years, apostasy will become much more understood as anormalised form of discrimination, rather than, right now, where no oneeven knows what we go through.’ In the discussion section below Aliyah
and Shams’s video, an attendee named David R. Freke6 expressed a kindof recognition – or realisation – that bore a strong resemblance tostatements made by my humanist interlocutors, some of whom had taken
the course during my fieldwork: ‘I feel fortunate in that I don’t have to
face the issues faced by leavers of full-on sects/faith, and am sympathetic
to their situations.’
In Engelke’s research on British humanists – based on fieldwork hecarried out in 2010–11, several years before apostasy became a major
concern for Humanists UK – he labels some of his interlocutors ‘realization
humanists’ (e.g., 2014, 297). The label refers to individuals who, througha variety of trajectories, came to understand – to ‘realise’ – that there exists
a label (‘humanist’) for ideas and values that they held before ever hearing
the word: ‘[they] only recognize[d] themselves as humanists after reading
about it or talking to someone else who is’ (p. 296). It is important to notethat the realisation narratives described by Engelke are sometimes
lackadaisical, occasionally enthusiastic, and always light-hearted innature: ‘It’s nice to have found a label’, as one humanist put it, while
another recalled the day on which a friend suggested that she might in fact
be a humanist (p. 296). He adds that ‘this particular framing is not the only
one in play’ and becoming a humanist can of course involve a great deal
more than this. But it is this type of ‘realisation’ that underscores the needfor an apostate politics of visibility. To ‘stumble’ across a label and recognisethat one holds the values attached to it is an experience that is strikingly
different from the stories recounted in studies of apostasy; Aliyah’s own
story, while brief, is a case in point. For many apostates, the gradual andtumultuous process of becoming aware that it is even possible to be ‘notreligious’ – an awareness or recognition that is still worlds away from an
explicit self-identification as ‘atheist’ or ‘humanist’ – is marred by social,

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moral and cosmological upheavals. As a secularising public, apostate
spokespersons have aimed to compel their non-religious peers to have a
different kind of ‘realisation’ from the type Engelke identified: a realisationof one’s comparative ease of access to non-religious affordances and publiclabels, and the concomitant realisation that capabilities for understanding,solidarity and support are required.

Awareness, education and the ‘apostate’ label
I first visited Liverpool to attend a roving training course given by Faith toFaithless, titled ‘Apostasy awareness and safeguarding training’. I had
already attended one of these sessions in Sheffield some weeks before.
The local Liverpool humanist group and the University of Liverpool
humanist society co-hosted the meeting, enabling the use of a spacious
conference room on the second floor of the university’s Guild of Students
complex. The iconic circular Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, locatednot quite directly across the street, was visible through the windows. In
contrast to the digital newsletters and the MOOC I described above,
where the frequent use of apostasy and related terms was rarely unpacked
in any comprehensive manner, the training sessions provided by Faith toFaithless are sites of more in-depth conceptual explication. ‘It’s an oldfashioned word, one that we’re sort of trying to reclaim,’ said Asma Salehi,
the course instructor. Asma was an ex-Muslim atheist and humanist in her
mid-thirties, born in London into a devout Sunni Muslim immigrantfamily from Pakistan. She apostatised from Islam in her late teens and had
been a key member of Faith to Faithless since the organisation was
founded in 2015. We were given course trainee handbooks, the first pageof which read: ‘The term apostasy is derived from the ancient Greek word
(apostátis), meaning rebellious.’ Asma did not read at length from thehandbook, however. She knew that the course participants in Liverpool
were humanists and that the group included two apostate refugees (onefrom Afghanistan and one from Iran, both men). It was also her first timeteaching the course, as she would later tell me. In contrast, the Sheffieldsession was attended by a mixed group that included teachers and charity
workers, and a smaller number of humanists. In Sheffield, the instructor
read directly from the definition given in the handbook:
Apostasy is the disaffiliation from, or renunciation of, a religion orcult. This applies to someone who leaves a religion to join anotherreligion (or who leaves one sect to join another), or someone who has‘APOSTATES’: A NEW SECULARISING PUBLIC IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

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gone from following a religion to expressing a lack of belief in any
religious tenet. The term ‘apostate’ may be used by religious groups
as a derogatory label to identify someone perceived as no longer
following the traditions of that religion or cult to their expected
standard. The term may also be used as an insult or admonishment,even if the individual does not self-identify with the label.
The course participants at the two different sessions I attended – one inLiverpool and the other in Sheffield – exemplify two main audiences that
Faith to Faithless is trying to influence. As the organisation’s website puts
it, echoing the description given by Shams in the MOOC video, theapostasy awareness course is intended to benefit ‘[l]ocal authorities,[p]olice, social services, NHS workers, homeless shelters, teachers,
university staff and charities’ (Faith to Faithless 2021). Printed and digitaladvertisements for the course almost always include the following review:‘The Faith to Faithless training event was some of the best training I haveever received, in 29 years of service’, attributed to an anonymous‘Constable Detective, London Metropolitan Police’ (Faith to Faithless2021). But the impact that Faith to Faithless has on, for example, legal
and medical domains has been beyond the scope of my research. Although
I briefly reference the Sheffield session here for the purpose of contrastive
description, my concentrated research focus has been on the other –smaller and more manageable from a research standpoint – target groupthat Faith to Faithless is attempting to impact: non-religious people andgroups in the United Kingdom. The course participants at the Liverpool
session were part of that landscape.
Asma did not have to ‘start from scratch’, as the instructor in
Sheffield did. There existed an undeclared background of common
knowledge. As I mentioned, the humanist group in Liverpool included
two apostate refugees who were at different stages of applying for asylum.
But, to restate one of my earlier points, apostates had become increasingly
visible and the topic of apostasy had been receiving concentrated
attention for several years at this point. Throughout the course of myfieldwork, it was rare for me to meet anyone in a humanist context who
was unfamiliar with at least one key problem or topic, even if this only
extended to a cursory familiarity with a cause célèbre like Hamza – or ineven vaguer terms: the ‘humanist from Pakistan who was denied asylum’.
For local humanist groups like the one in Liverpool – or the group in
Manchester, where Hamza was based – Faith to Faithless provide
experienced and authoritative guides who can educate the wider
membership of a group or help it expand its accumulated knowledge.

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The definition of apostasy provided in the course handbook, partsof which were read aloud by the instructor in Sheffield, does notcomprehensively represent the use of the apostate label in my researchcontext. For instance, it does not express what Asma meant when she
spoke of ‘reclaiming’ the label. Her view – a widespread view, as I
discovered in the course of my fieldwork – is that the label is used, orought to be used, in the service of subversion and normalisation, and toraise awareness. This view maps closely onto the terminological approachthat Simon Cottee selected for his study of ex-Muslims in Britain:
It does not use insipid or opaque sociological terms like ‘exiter’,‘disaffiliate’ or ‘leave-taker’, opting instead for the term ‘apostate’.
This is primarily because ‘apostate’ is the more readily
understandable term and conveys not merely loss of faith, but its
active rejection. I recognize of course that the term may carry anegative connotation, but this depends entirely on how it is used.
Indeed many ex-Muslims I have met and interviewed referred tothemselves as ‘apostates’. Their objection wasn’t to the term itself,
but to the moral condemnation of their apostasy by others,
especially loved ones.
(2015, 9–10)
This use of the apostate label coheres with Marshall Brooks’s study of
ex-Mormons in the United States, and is evocative of the sensibilities hefound among his interlocutors:
Normalizing, and even embracing the term apostate, has thus
become among some newly nonreligious people an effective
strategy for combatting and overturning the negative stigmas
attached to it. Invoking the literal definition of apostate as someone
who rejects religion yet otherwise stays ‘normal’ has enabled theterm to be appropriated as a ‘badge of honor’ to be worn proudly bymany ex-Mormons aiming to make their rejection of religious
dogma an identity to rally under.
(2018, 179–80)
Brooks writes that the apostate label is ‘harnessed as a basis of struggle,
effectively creating a foundation of temporary solidarity on which social
action can occur’ (p. 181), an assessment that is portable enough toapply quite well to the use of the label in my own research context. But
there are also a number of striking differences that, when properly‘APOSTATES’: A NEW SECULARISING PUBLIC IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

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highlighted, shed additional expository light on the distinctiveness of
apostates as a secularising public in the United Kingdom. Cottee’s study
contains thorough descriptions of how ex-Muslims engage anonymouslywith online self-help communities, sites on which descriptors like‘ex-Muslim’ and ‘apostate’ are popularised. Likewise, Brooks examinesat greater length those forms of organised sociality, both digital andphysical, that ex-Mormon apostates engage in for self-help andcommunity. Faith to Faithless and its allies are similarly engaged in theprovision of such forms of support, guidance and sociality for apostates,
but their efforts extend in equal measure to the education of secularothers: atheists, humanists and other non-religious people who haveexperienced fewer difficulties, or no difficulties at all, in embracingthese labels and self-understandings.
It is conceivable, and perhaps even likely, that apostate
spokespersons like ex-Muslim Aliyah Saleem, ex-Jehovah’s Witness Ste
Richardsson, ex-Christian Audrey Simmons and ex-Jew Izzy Posen havecontributed to advancing existing critiques of the multiple religious
traditions and groups that they indirectly target by publicising theirexperiences and by calling attention to apostasy.7 Although such a
research focus would not be unmerited, I argue that it would obscuretheir more significant impact. As an inward-oriented secularising public,
apostates have been more consequential in their educational outreachefforts and in building capabilities for support. In other words, one would
be ill advised to focus on what apostates bring to the table in terms ofenabling new kinds of criticisms of religion. It is ‘apostasy’ itself, for itself,that is their primary focus, as a concept that ought to be entered into an
existing secular vocabulary. I expand on this point by recourse to a brief
example before moving on to the conclusion of this chapter.
The word ‘cult’ is mentioned in the trainee course handbook, Shams
used it in the MOOC video, and Aliyah used it in her writing, but it was
not otherwise a common term in my research context. ‘High-control
religion’, however, was a ubiquitous concept. As I understand it, on thebasis of my encounters with its use, it is a catch-all term intended to evoke
the high degree of social encapsulation associated with a ‘cult’ while
including mainstream religious traditions to which that label is not
typically appended, such as Islam. Rather than a definition of this term,
however, the handbook presented 15 examples of experiences that fallunder the intended use of the concept. In Liverpool, Asma asked us tobreak into groups of three and consider the list:

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From a young age, my sister and I were made to wear very modest
clothing whenever we went out in public. My mother insulted meand hit me when I said I didn’t like the clothes.
I was not allowed to touch any men other than close family members– not even a handshake.
I wanted to go to college and university, but my parents forbade it
because they wanted me to focus on my religious studies.
I only had close friends from within my religious community andwasn’t allowed to socialise with any non-believers.
In religious education lessons we were taught that contraception
was morally wrong and a sin, and that we would go to hell if weused it.
When I broke a church rule, my parents locked me in my bedroom
for a whole weekend and told me to pray for forgiveness.
I wasn’t allowed to play with any of the children from my school
because my parents didn’t want me to mix with people outside ourreligion.
When I came out as gay, my family took me to gay conversion
therapy.
We were constantly told not to trust people from outside our faith,as their thoughts were guided by Satan and they didn’t know thetruth.
When I was a little girl my family arranged for me to undergo ‘female
circumcision’. My genitals were mutilated and it was only later that
I found out that I won’t be able to enjoy sex when I’m older.
My parents didn’t allow us to use the internet or go to the local
library, because they were worried about what we would learn.
As a teenager I was forced to take part in fasts, even when I didn’t
want to.
When I was on my period, I wasn’t allowed to touch any men,
including my husband. They said I was impure at those times.
When my brother left the religion, we were required to treat him as
if he had died. We carried out the formal mourning ritual for him.

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At eighteen I ran away from home in the middle of the night. I am
fourth-generation British, but I didn’t speak any English or have any
meaningful education to speak of outside of my religious community.
Two main elements characterise the majority of these examples: they
implicitly refer to practices belonging to specific religious traditions orgroups but do not explicitly name any, and they foreground experiencesof suffering. I want to underscore the emphasis at stake in theseexamples: the hardships of apostates. At none of the training sessions I
attended was the focus of attendees ever directed to a more distinctly
critical register evocative of common objections to specific religions. To
be sure, there are attendees who might use their newfound knowledgeof apostasy to entrench and fortify their existing qualms about ‘religion’at large, or a specific religious tradition in particular. But efforts by Faith
to Faithless course instructors and other apostate spokespersons to
educate atheists, humanists and other non-religious people about thekinds of experiences that apostates go through should not be written off
as a veiled conduit for critique. Strikingly, the educational aim at stake
here recurs in studies of apostasy. For instance, Brooks, a medical
anthropologist, has leveraged the findings of his research on ex-Mormonsin the United States to call for ‘greater competency in matters of religious
disenchantment’, since existing guidelines risk rendering clinicians‘grossly unprepared to … treat former believers seeking help, thus
contributing to new forms of misdiagnosis and perpetuating the lack ofsupport for those leaving such all-encompassing faith traditions’ (2020,
208). Although his academic background probably helped him reachthese conclusions, they are also assessments he arrived at as a result of
acquiring fieldwork-based insights about a prevailing lack ofunderstanding of the forms of distress and disintegration that arecharacteristic of detachment from a religious group. In the epilogue tohis study of ex-Muslims, Cottee writes that a crucial policy issue is ‘how
to provide better support for wavering and ex-Muslims in moral
jeopardy’, and he specifically mentions the need to properly train ‘social
workers and mental health care professionals not only about the
intricacies of the Islamic faith but also the difficulties and dilemmas
involved in leaving it’ (2015, 212). He advances these suggestions
precisely because several of his ex-Muslim interlocutors expresseddisappointment at a lack of understanding of apostasy (pp. 164–5).

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Conclusion
A number of the contributions to this volume contain descriptions andanalyses of how atheist strategies and technologies are enlisted in theservice of a politics of visibility. But in Lena Richter’s and Natalie Khazaal’s
chapters, such efforts unfold in national and regional contexts that aremarked by a high prevalence of religious sensibilities, institutions andauthorities. In the United Kingdom, however, a range of explicit andpublic non-religious positions and labels – including ‘atheist’ and‘humanist’ – have reached unprecedented levels of social normalisation.
As a consequence of how this normalisation has occurred – as a gradual,
generational ‘decay’ of religious identities rather than their abrupt
rejection – the experiences of those who leave tightly knit religious
communities or religious contexts characterised by high degrees of social
encapsulation and pietistic devotion (‘apostates’) have faded from view,
becoming invisible or misunderstood by a secular society and the nonreligious movements in it. As a result, since 2017 apostate spokespersons
and their organisations have embarked on campaigns that seek to realisea specifically apostate politics of visibility. As a secularising public, suchapostates have not only worked to develop and provide forms ofcommunity, solidarity and self-help to those who need it, but also aimed
to educate non-religious peers: those atheists and humanists who havearrived at their non-religious self-understandings without great difficulty.
Ruy Blanes and Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic have remarked that‘not every context creates enabling conditions for an unequivocal breakaway from one’s religious tradition’ (2015, 3), an observation thatapostate self-help groups would probably affirm. I have shown that thepresence of highly visible non-religious movements in a society that isreportedly secular can impair rather than provide the enabling conditions
required for apostasy. Indeed, non-religious organisations may generateenabling conditions only for those forms of religious detachment that are
already familiar, such as the ‘realisation’ humanist. I should note thatapostate spokespersons and awareness groups do not claim to haveresolved the situation that Cottee identified: there is still no reliable ‘postapostasy script’, no definitive guide for ‘knowing what to do in the face ofthe myriad dilemmas and difficulties which befall the person who
renounces’ (2015, 173). The difference made by the years separating
Cottee’s fieldwork and my own is that this observation is now more widely
recognised. While Faith to Faithless does not offer a ready-made‘APOSTATES’: A NEW SECULARISING PUBLIC IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

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post-apostasy therapeutics, it does offer space and support for those whoshare that lack of guides and scripts.
I close this chapter with a few brief remarks on the relationshipbetween an anthropology of non-religion that is no longer ‘hypothetical’8
and a fledgling anthropology of apostasy. The two are no doubt related,
and while the latter could be viewed as a specialisation that falls underthe broader thematic jurisdiction of the former, I wonder if this emphasison complementarity risks devaluing the antagonistic potential of ananthropology of apostasy to correct as well as complement its parent
field. This corrective potential, and a critical recursion of emic and etic
dimensions, can be gleaned from my chapter. I noted how, in Engelke’s
work, the ‘realisation’ humanist takes centre stage, shaping ourunderstanding of how people in certain places arrive at or adopt a‘humanist’ label. As my research indicates and as studies of apostasyrichly demonstrate, however, ‘realisation’ is a distinctly privileged
narrative. This is the same essential problem that apostate spokespersons
and awareness organisations are dealing with on the emic level. In otherwords, one of the reasons apostates are relevant and interesting – to us,
as analysts, and as a secularising public – is not their capacity to upset or
expand what an ‘atheist’ or ‘humanist’ label signifies, but their provocative
potential to enrich understanding of the variegated routes and hazardous
trajectories that can precede the adoption of such labels.

Notes
1 Humanists UK is the largest charity working on behalf of non-religious people in the United
Kingdom: ‘We’re committed to putting humanism into practice. Through our ceremonies,
pastoral support, education services, and campaigning work, we advance free thinking andfreedom of choice so everyone can live in a fair and equal society’ (Humanists UK 2021).
2 In London, the staff of Humanists UK and Humanists International overlap to a degree, so it
was not uncommon to see banners and other promotional materials from the latter at events
hosted by the former. Humanists International, formerly the International Humanist andEthical Union (IHEU), was founded in 1952: ‘We are the global representative body of thehumanist movement, uniting a diversity of non-religious organisations and individuals. … We
work to build, support and represent the global humanist movement, defending human rights,
particularly those of non-religious people, and promoting humanist values world-wide’(Humanists International n.d.).
3 The names in this chapter are pseudonyms, with the exception of well-known and high-profile
individuals.
4 Copeman and Hagström (this volume) similarly emphasise the outward-oriented campaigns ofIndian rationalist activists: as a secularising public, they target superstitious/supernatural beliefs
and practices. I am not suggesting that the MST, or the Indian rationalists – as secularising publics– do not exhibit what I refer to here as ‘inward-oriented’ dimensions. As a consequence of thespecific examples that Lebner uses to dust off the concept of secularisation, however, the religionfacing or ‘outward-oriented’ aspects of such publics take centre stage. My argument should beconsidered a complementary expansion of her approach, rather than a critique.

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5 Importantly, Engelke goes on to express scepticism about a scholarly insistence on ‘theimpossibility of the secular as a substantially independent entity’ (Scheer, Johansen and Fadil
2019, 3) and he argues – drawing on Abou Farman’s work (e.g., 2013, 2020) – that ‘we do see
secular ontologies and epistemologies emerging on their own terms, putting forward specificcombinations of values, emotional sensibilities and affective registers’ (2019, 205). I am broadly
sympathetic to this approach, and, in a different text, I have sought to contribute to a movebeyond a relational view of secularity and non-religion (Hagström and Copeman, forthcoming).
6 FutureLearn allows course attendees to be as anonymous as they wish, but a majority of those
who participated in the discussions in this specific course appeared to be using real names,
profile pictures and personal biographies.
7 As mentioned in this chapter, Aliyah Saleem is a co-founder of Faith to Faithless and Ste
Richardsson is vice chair. Izzy Posen and Audrey Simmons are affiliated with the organisationand have spoken at several events.
8 As Blanes and Oustinova-Stjepanovic put it (2015, 2).

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Schulz, Mascha. 2021. ‘Convoluted convictions, partial positionings: Non-religion, secularism,
and party politics in Sylhet, Bangladesh.’ PhD thesis, University of Zurich.
Sherwood, Harriet. 2018. ‘Philosophers urge rethink of Pakistani humanist’s asylum.’ The
Guardian, 26 January. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/26/philosophersurge-rethink-of-pakistani-humanist-hamza-bin-walayat-asylum (accessed 8 June 2022).
United Nations. 2014. A/HRC/28/66. ‘Report of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion
or belief, Heiner Bielefeldt.’ https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/793599?ln=en (accessed
8 June 2022).
United Nations. 2017. A/HRC/34/50. ‘Report of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or
belief.’ https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G17/008/79/PDF/G1700879.
pdf?OpenElement (accessed 29 August 3022).
Voas, David and Steve Bruce. 2019. ‘Religion: Identity, behaviour and belief over two decades’, in
British Social Attitudes 36, John Curtice, Elizabeth Clery, Jane Perry, Miranda Phillips andNilufer Rahmin, eds, 17–44. London: National Centre for Social Research.

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7
Satan, sex and an Islamist zombie
apocalypse: religion-sceptical
publicity and blasphemy in Turkish
cartoons and comic books
Pierre Hecker

Turkey has a long and richly diverse history of cartoons and comic books
that traces its roots to the late Ottoman and the early Republican era(Küper-Büsch and Rona 2008; Cantek 2014; Demirkol 2016). Cartoonsand comic art have always provided a popular space for humour, satireand entertainment, but also for religion-sceptical publicity. The history of
cartoons and comic books in Turkey has been closely linked to theascendancy of Turkish secularist modernity and is thus situated within amuch broader, contentious debate on religion and secularism that
dominates Turkish politics to the present day. This chapter provides acontextual, though incomplete, history of religious scepticism andblasphemy in Turkish comic books and cartoons. It investigates how
Turkish comic artists challenge religious norms and narratives, bymocking and criticising, and appropriating and rewriting them.
Comic books and cartoons have been prominent vehicles for religious
scepticism in Turkey. They have helped to establish a non-religious,
sceptical counterpublic and defend it against the encroachments ofpolitical Islam. Turkey’s comic artists have been vehement critics of theincumbent President of the Republic Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his
government’s attempt to educate a new pious generation (dindar nesil)

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and de-secularise the state and society.1 The discourse about religionsceptical publicity in Turkish cartoons and comic books also relates tomore recent debates on the representation of atheism, deism and nonreligion in the public sphere (Hecker 2021, 2022; Tayfur 2022). Against
this backdrop, this study examines the potentially blasphemous
representations and metaphoric implications of religious concepts (Satan,
Adam and Eve, female rebellion and sexuality, etc.) in the works of the
comic artists Bahadır Baruter, Ramize Erer, Kenan Yarar and Suat Gönülay.
The chapter begins with a few remarks on the troubled relationshipbetween contemporary art and political Islam in Turkey. It thereby also
touches briefly upon the phenomenon of ‘lynching culture’ and the angerof the provoked public. In doing so, this study seeks to contribute to awider debate on the popular mobilisation of outraged communities in
predominantly Muslim societies (see Blom and Jaoul 2008). The
investigation subsequently delves into the intricacies of the legal
discussion of Article 216/3 of the Turkish Penal Code (‘the denigration ofreligious values’) and the right to freedom of (artistic) expression. The
legal discussion provides the background for an analysis of the works ofthese comic book artists that forms the main body of the present
investigation. The chapter ends with a reflection on the role Turkey’s
comic book subculture has played in the formation, expansion andpreservation of a non-religious, sceptical counterpublic in Turkey.

Contemporary art and political Islam: a troubled
relationship
Turkey’s secularism from above has never gone uncontested and, in recent
years, has come under increased pressure from Turkish political Islam, asrepresented by President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party(Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). Turkish secularist modernity is rooted
in the reform efforts of the early Turkish Republic founded on 29 October
1923. Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), Turkey’s newstate elite initiated a cultural revolution from above that sought toestablish a modern secularist nation state.2 The republican state also
promoted European-style forms of artistic expression that were meant tosignify and consolidate the advent of secularist modernity in Turkey. The
foundation of state-run cultural institutions (museums, theatres,
conservatoires, opera houses, etc.) sought to establish a Turkish national
culture that was based on modern forms of music, dance, literature,theatre and painting.

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The advent of modern and contemporary art in Turkey therefore
also represented a rupture with religious traditions. The Republic nolonger supported the condemnation of figure representation and,
consequently, paved the way for the emergence of contemporary art and,
subsequently, the rise of satirical magazines and comic books. Figuralrepresentations in painting and other arts are, usually, no longer seen as
religiously offensive. However, contemporary art is still often accused ofdenigrating religious values and thus being a source of blasphemy.
The issue of blasphemy in Turkey is a rather complex one. Turkish
law does not operate on religious concepts and therefore does notrecognise blasphemy as a legal concept. This, however, does not meanthat Turkish citizens have been given carte blanche to blaspheme, as
explained later in this chapter. Public scepticism towards ‘religious truths’
has been a characteristic phenomenon of Turkish secularist modernity
but has never become the norm in society. The concept of blasphemy (andapostasy) continues to play a vital role in significant parts of society.
Blasphemy, as David Nash so aptly summarised it in the introduction
to his book Blasphemy in the Christian World, is ‘the attacking, wounding,and damaging of religious belief’ (2007, 1). Nash’s clear and simple
definition should not, of course, obscure the fact that blasphemy is by nomeans a universal and homogeneous concept. The English term blasphemy,
derived from the Greek blasphēmía (‘abusive speech’, ‘personal mockery’)(Kittel and Friedrich 1985, 107), only partially resonates with an Islamic
tradition. What comes closest to the concept of blasphemy in a Muslim
religious context is the Arabic term sabb (‘abuse’, ‘insult’, ‘slander’).3
Medieval Muslim jurists developed the related concepts of sabb al-allāh(insulting God), sabb al-rasūl (insulting the Messenger) and sabb al-ṣaḥāba
(insulting the Companions of the Prophet) (Wiederholt 1997, 40–7; Saeed
and Saeed 2004, 37–9; Saeed 2021), according to which the mocking,ridiculing or criticising of God, his Messengers or the Companions of theProphet Muhammad not only constitutes an act of blasphemy but, if
committed by a Muslim, also apostasy (Saeed 2021, 18–19). This is also
why the Islamic idea of blasphemy (sabb) has been linked to a much wider
theological debate on ridda or irtidād (‘renunciation’, ‘apostasy’), kufr(‘denial’, ‘unbelief’), nifāq (‘hypocrisy’), zandaqa (‘heresy’) and shirk(‘idolatry’) (see, for instance, Saeed and Saeed 2004, 35–50). Contemporary
Muslim jurists predominantly view blasphemy as an attack on the religious
concepts and symbols of Islam (Saeed 2021, 18–19). This very broad
understanding of blasphemy makes it a dangerously volatile concept.
Basically, every act of criticising religious concepts or personalities
venerated by Muslim believers might be included in this category.

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Turkish public opinion still appears to be dominated by the viewthat it is incumbent upon Muslim believers to protect and defend Islam
against any form of critique, ridicule or mocking. This accompanies anational identity politics that supports the myth of the Muslim nature of
the Turkish nation. Non-religion, apostasy and blasphemy, therefore,
have the potential to represent not only a grave sin to the believer but also
an act of treason against the state and nation. What is deemed
blasphemous is not so much a matter of religious doctrine and theologicaldebate but the present government’s politics of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and thelogic of public outrage.
The outrage of the provoked public represents a constant threat to
sceptical artists and intellectuals. Criticism of religion and, moreover, theruling bloc’s political agenda can easily draw the anger of ordinary people
who have been incited by public hate speech. Turkey’s pious conservative
government has more than once drawn on the support of the provoked
public in recent years. Encouraging ordinary citizens to act on behalf ofthe nation and punish those who deviate from societal norms has
somehow become popular in Turkish politics. Tanıl Bora comprehensively
describes these politics of public outrage in his book Türkiye’nin Linç
Rejimi (‘Turkey’s lynching regime’, 2014). The term ‘lynching culture’(linç kültürü) denotes a state of public outrage and mobilisation thatseeks to restore the dignity of the nation and cleanse society from national
shame and disgrace. In particular, right-wing politicians like Nihal Atsız,
the father of Turkish fascism, and Devlet Bahçeli, at the time of writingErdoğan’s ultra-nationalist junior partner in Turkey’s coalition
government, have publicly acknowledged lynching as an appropriate
means of defending the nation (Bora 2014, 12, 34). On several occasions,even President Erdoğan himself has threatened to call upon his supporters
and unleash the ‘will of the people’ (milli irade) upon those who will notcomply with his political agenda. More than once this ‘national anger’(milli öfkesi) has targeted Turkey’s non-religious, sceptical public.
Probably the best-known example of public lynching in Turkey is theso-called Sivas Massacre (Madımak Katliamı) on 2 July 1993 (see Çavdar
2020). During the event, which pre-dates Erdoğan’s rule, an agitated
Islamist mob set fire to a hotel and burned 37, mostly Alevi, artists andintellectuals alive (see Çavdar 2020). Video footage of the event showssome of the perpetrators calling the members of the Alevi religious
community ‘atheists’ and ‘unbelievers’.4 The attack was directed not onlyat the members of the Alevi community who had gathered to celebrate
the annual Pir Sultan Abdal Festival, but also at Aziz Nesin, a well-known
atheist intellectual who had translated parts of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic

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Verses into Turkish. While the Islamist mob prevented the trapped
intellectuals from escaping the burning building, the police, the military
and the fire brigade stood idly by and watched. A more recent incident
involved the Turkish fashion designer Barbaros Şansal, who barely
escaped a lynching attempt upon his arrival at Istanbul Airport in early
January 2017. Şansal, a professed atheist and homosexual, had dared to
openly criticise the government and the Turkish nation (Şansal 2017).

Wine and virgins: a legal debate
The Turkish Constitution acknowledges secularism as a permanent andunalterable principle of the state (Article 4) and guarantees the right tofreedom of and from religion (Article 24). Religious scepticism is thus notdirectly punishable under Turkish law; neither are apostasy, atheism andblasphemy. This does not mean, however, that a person who publicly
criticises or pokes fun at religion, religious groups or religious values
necessarily goes unpunished. Article 216/3 of the Turkish Penal Codestipulates that ‘any person who publicly denigrates the religious values
embraced by a part of the population’, and, through this, commits an ‘act
liable to disturb public peace’5 shall be punished with imprisonment fromsix months to one year (Artuk and Alşahin 2014, 993). Essentially, thisprovision aims to protect the right to freedom of religion and to combat
hate speech and racism directed towards individuals and groups for theirreligious beliefs (Yıldırım 2012; Şirin 2014, 76). Recently, however, it has
also been applied to prosecute criticism of religion and religious values,
and thus create a legal battlefield where the complementary humanrights of freedom of expression and freedom of religion collide. It is herethat the current shift in the judicial interpretation of statutory law under
AKP rule becomes most obvious, especially when particular verdicts andpublications of Turkish jurists are considered.
Mehmet Emin Artuk and Mehmet Emin Alşahin, for instance,reassessed the legal applicability of Article 216/3 after examining
previous court verdicts. Against the backdrop of these verdicts, they
sought to clarify the legal meaning of the terms ‘denigration’ (aşağılama),‘in public’ (alenen) and ‘religious values’ (dini değerleri). According totheir findings, ‘denigration’ does not even require a direct insult towards
religious values. An act of denigration can already be constituted by a lackof respect or simply any act that publicly undermines people’s feelings ofrespect and trust in religious values (Artuk and Alşahin 2014, 994–6).
The act of denigration itself needs to be witnessed by a large number of

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people (that is, it must be ‘in public’) to be considered a crime under
Article 216/3. In practical terms, this means it must be in a public spacesuch as ‘the street’, ‘a coffee house’, ‘a mosque’ or ‘a police station’(pp. 995–6). Artuk and Alşahin further suggest that this also applies tothe realm of social media, given that the potential insult can be perceived
by a wider public (for example through a public post on Twitter).
However, the denigration of religious values cannot be punished if posted
confidentially within a circle of friends or, for instance, in a closed groupon Facebook (p. 1002).
Artuk and Alşahin also address the question of how to define‘religious values’ in legal terms: ‘Religious values should be understood asanything that represents [a particular] faith or is of religious value for the
believers, such as a belief system, senior religious figures or places andforms of worship’(p. 997). For Islam, these values include religious
practices such as fasting during Ramadan, the ritual sacrifice of animals
during the annual Eid al-Adha celebrations or the pilgrimage to Islam’s
holy sites in Mecca (p. 997). Any public mockery of these practices falls
within the scope of Article 216/3. To summarise Artuk’s and Alşahin’s
legal conception of Article 216/3, the ‘crime of denigrating religious
values’ can be literally anything that a particular group of believers
considers an act of denigration of whatever ‘thing’ they consider sacredor representative of their religion. The vagueness of these concepts
entitles Turkish courts to utilise a broad scope of interpretation andimplementation, thereby increasing the potential threat of judicial
arbitrariness and political abuse. Artuk and Alşahin further promote theview that Article 216/3 does not apply to insults directed against the
beliefs and ideas of non-religious individuals (p. 998). Against thisbackdrop, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Article 216/3
functions as a legal instrument to curb religious scepticism and protect
dominant religious belief systems.
Tolga Şirin, a human rights expert from Marmara University,
suggested that in recent years ‘the limits of tolerance for critiques towards
Islam (not to other religions) have been enormously narrowed’ (2014,76). This becomes evident when considering the increasing number ofcases opened by public prosecutors against individuals who express
scepticism towards religious truths and teachings or advocate atheist
positions in public. The most prominent case of this kind was theindictment of the classical composer and jazz pianist Fazıl Say over
several Twitter posts in 2012. Say had not only publicly proclaimed
himself an atheist, but also shared a poem by the medieval mathematician
and philosopher Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) which reads as follows:

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You say rivers of wine flow in heaven,
Is heaven a tavern to you?
You say two beautiful virgins [houris] await each believer there,
Is heaven a brothel to you?
In another Tweet cited in the indictment, Say had jokingly commented ona muezzin’s all too hasty delivery of the call to prayers, implying that hemust have been in a rush either to meet his sweetheart or have a drinkwith friends (‘Man, the muezzin read the evening call to prayer in only 22
seconds. Prestissimo con fuoco!! Why the haste? A girlfriend? A rakı
table?’ Yeni Şafak 2012). The public prosecutor at a local criminal court
in Istanbul argued that Say’s joke about the muezzin’s alleged lack ofpersonal religious conviction did not fall within the scope of the right tofreedom of expression, but instead constituted a threat to public peace,‘considering the reaction and complaints from a huge number ofindividuals and non-governmental organisations from various parts ofsociety’ (Bianet 2015). The pianist was eventually found guilty of
purposely mocking and insulting religious concepts (‘paradise’) andpractices (‘prayer’) considered sacred in Islam, Christianity and Judaism
and, as a result, sentenced to 10 months in prison (Altıparmak 2013;
Bianet 2015). Following an appeal by his lawyers, Turkey’s Supreme
Court of Appeals finally overturned the initial verdict, stating that Say’s
Tweets do indeed fall within the scope of the right to freedom of thought
and expression.
Notwithstanding Say’s acquittal, the initial verdict delivered by alocal criminal court in Istanbul can be interpreted as an attempt toprioritise religious principles (and not freedom of religion) over basic
human rights, namely the right to freedom of expression, and, moreover,to let the outraged public decide who is to be indicted under Article
216/3. In his analysis of the initial verdict, Kerem Altıparmak of theAnkara-based School of Human Rights (İnsan Hakları Okulu) pointed out
an important detail. While human rights law only approves restrictions
on freedom of expression if the individual rights and freedoms of others
are at stake, it does not accept any restrictions for the sake of protecting
religion or religious values (Altıparmak 2013). This, however, is exactly
what the initial verdict in the Say trial came down to.
What also needs to be mentioned about the Fazıl Say case is the factthat the pianist was not the only person, nor even the first, to share Omar
Khayyam’s poem via Twitter. Arne Lichtenberg (2012), a correspondent
for the Deutsche Welle, reported that Say was one of 166 Twitter users who
circulated the quote but the only one to be prosecuted. This underlines

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the volatility and unpredictability of the situation Turkish artists andintellectuals are confronted with. It has become unclear on what grounds
and at what point public prosecutors will take action against such artists.
Looking at the various cases opened against Turkish citizens under Article
216/3 in recent years, it would seem that legal action is linked topopularity: the better known the work, the higher the chance ofprosecution (for example, the case against the Turkish publisher ofRichard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and the case against the TurkishArmenian writer Sevan Nişanyan). This pattern of legal action points
towards a strategy of intimidation that has the potential to pressure
people into self-censorship. Legal action against popular artists andintellectuals serves as a warning that criticism of religion or religious
concepts can (and will) be prosecuted.

Şevket Kazan, Lord of the Jungle
It was the controversy over the sculpture of a naked woman that, in
1974, plunged Turkey’s newly formed coalition government into serious
crisis. National elections had failed to produce a clear parliamentary
majority, and, after months of political negotiation, a fragile, and in theend short-lived, alliance between two improbable partners was formed:
Bülent Ecevit’s (1925–2006) centre-left Republican People’s Party(Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) and Necmettin Erbakan’s (1926–2011)
National Salvation Party (Milli Selamet Partisi, MSP), an openly Islamist
movement and the political predecessor of today’s AKP. The sculpture,with the title ‘Beautiful Istanbul’, had been commissioned by the Istanbul
Metropolitan Municipality in 1973 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of
the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. Its creator, Gürdal Duyar(1935–2004), a graduate of the State Fine Arts Academy in Istanbul andstudent of the expressionist sculptor Rudolf Edwin Belling,6 explainedthat the naked female body is meant to represent the natural beauty ofIstanbul (Antmen 2009, 367). The deputy prime minister, Erbakan,
certainly did not share the artist’s views: he described Duyar’s artwork
as obscene and a ‘statue of shame’ that was an insult to the ‘Turkish
mother’ (Antmen 2009, 369–70). His demand to have the sculpture
removed resulted in an open political confrontation with his coalition
partners from the CHP.
Nudity in art is where ideologies collide, especially in connection
with religion and the female body. Public nudity has always been apolitical statement in Turkey, whether intended or not. This is closely

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related to the fact that the female body has been credited withconsiderable symbolic significance in Turkish national culture. Kemalism
has always sought to represent the modern Turkish nation in the image ofthe unveiled, enlightened woman, while political Islam contrasted thisimage with its own conception of the female. The practice of Islamic
veiling is central to the identity of Turkish political Islam, which, as apolitical movement, has put the veiled, and therefore pious, woman at theforefront of resistance to secularist modernity in the public sphere. The
exposure of the naked female body in modern and contemporary art canthus only be considered un-Islamic and contrary to religious values andmorality. Nudity therefore still constitutes an object of moral outrage, as
it is perceived as a challenge to Islam itself. In 1974, the conflict between
the CHP and MSP coalition partners was (temporarily) settled byrelocating the ‘Beautiful Istanbul’ sculpture from the busy Karaköy Squareto the more remote Yıldız Park in Istanbul’s Beşiktaş neighbourhood.
However, in 2017, the sculpture caused new controversy when the AKP
authorities ordered that the sculpture’s nudity be concealed by planting
a fence of saplings around it. Following a protest from local residents, the‘fence’ was removed (Diken 2017).
The ‘Beautiful Istanbul’ incident is related to Turkish comic art
because erotic cartoons and comic strips had become quite popular at thetime. Turkish satirical magazines had been able to enhance circulation byincreasingly depicting sexualised nudity. The eroticisation of the female
body has been a common feature of Turkish comic books and magazines
since the early 1970s. Şevket Kazan (1933–2020), minister of justice for
the Islamist MSP, consequently took up the fight against these ‘obscene
publications’ (müstehcen neşriyat), which he blamed for the decline ofmoral values in Turkish society. As a result, he ordered several newspapers
and magazines to be confiscated (Demirkol 2018, 66–71). However,
Turkish caricaturists did not back down and resisted by depicting andmocking the minister himself.
The satirical magazine Gırgır’s Mehmet Polat (1929–81), forinstance, portrayed Kazan as ‘Ormanlar Hakimi’ (‘The Lord of the Jungle’)in reference to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan novels. In Polat’s comic
strip, Kazan discovers that obscenity – in the form of nudity – has come tothe jungle. He forces all the animals to get dressed. Satisfied with his
work, he leaves the scene, saying: ‘Now, you look like animals!’ (Demirkol
2018, 67–8).7 Swinging on a liana through the trees, Kazan lets out ajungle call similar to Tarzan’s famous trademark yell. In Kazan’s case,however, the yell resembles the Islamic Basmala: ‘Ya bismillaaa … AAA …
aaa’ (‘In the name of God …’). The artist apparently intended to make fun

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of a political figure who had attempted to restrict freedom of artistic
expression. From today’s perspective, the religious reference in the
cartoon – even though obviously used for the purpose of ridiculing politics– might be considered an act of denigration of religious values according
to Article 216/3. However, when the cartoon was published in 1974, theartist went unpunished. Today, the situation seems different.

A telephone conversation with God
Article 216/3 has also been used against Turkish cartoonists. Following acomplaint by the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri
Başkanlıgı)8 and several concerned individuals, the Chief Public
Prosecutor’s Office in Istanbul opened a case against Bahadır Baruter(b. 1963) over a cartoon published in Penguen on 10 February 2011.
Baruter is a cartoonist, painter and sculptor well known for his biting
criticism of society and politics. Since the mid-1990s, he has worked formany of Turkey’s most prestigious satirical magazines, such as Pişmiş
Kelle, Penguen, Kemik, Lombak and L-Manyak.
The cartoon illustration under investigation depicts the interior of amosque, signified by a minbar (pulpit), chandeliers hanging from theceiling, carpets on the floor, and a line of middle-aged men with skullcaps(namaz takkesi) kneeling in prayer. In front of the praying men is an imam
who can be easily recognised by his white turban-like headgear, the sarık.
Directly behind them, another man – also kneeling, also wearing a skullcap– discreetly speaks into his mobile phone. The man, who is depicted sideon, averts his eyes from the rest of the group as he apparently seeks toconceal his inappropriate behaviour. However, his telephone conversation
does not go unnoticed and, with an expression of shock, the other men
turn towards him. The shocked expression on their faces does not derivefrom his supposedly impious behaviour of talking on the phone during
prayer but from the fact that he is apparently speaking to the Almighty
himself: ‘Dear God, do you mind if I skip the last part of the prayer? I havework to attend to.’ After a pause (indicated by ‘…’ in a speech bubble), he
continues: ‘Thank you very much, God! Have a nice day.’
Baruter’s God at the other end of the line appears to be gracious andkind. He seems neither to take himself (and the need to be worshipped)
too seriously, nor to want to keep the worshipper from pursuing moreurgent business. However, from a believer’s perspective, the cartoon
might also signify a denigration of religious values. The act of prayer isindeed one of the Five Pillars of Islam (arkān al-Islām), that is, the five202

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obligatory acts of worship in Islam, and is thus a fundamental
manifestation of the Muslim faith. Baruter’s humorous depiction of theprayer scene at the mosque might therefore be interpreted as an
expression of contempt for the commands of God. A small detail in the
background of the cartoon certainly strengthens this impression. Almost
hidden from the viewer, an inscription on the wall of the fictional mosque
reads: ‘Allah yok din yalan’ (‘There is no God. Religion is a lie’).
The artist’s outright denial of God’s existence triggered outrage
among Muslim believers, especially on social media (Internet Haber
2011). Penguen and Baruter were accused of advocating atheist ideas andsowing hatred against Muslims. Amid growing criticism, Penguen felt
compelled to respond and released a public apology stating that themagazine did not mean to be disrespectful to the faithful. They said thatthe cartoon only represented the personal opinion of the artist. However,Penguen’s editors emphasised their conviction that the right to freedom of
expression needs to be protected from the outraged public.
Baruter explained to Radikal newspaper that he felt as if a lynching
campaign had been unleashed upon him on social media (Radikal 2011).
Despite widespread opposition to his cartoon and obvious attempts at
intimidation, reactions to the cartoon were not entirely negative. Many
readers of Penguen expressed their support for the cartoonist. The wellknown columnist and writer Ayşe Arman interviewed Baruter for
Hürriyet and asked whether he was afraid of the public threats andinsults. Baruter said that he felt more disgusted than afraid, disgusted by
the many insults of ordinary people towards his alleged family (mother,sister, wife): ‘I shuddered only once, when they said: “Don’t send yourkids to school. Be careful, they might not return!” This kind of threat.
Luckily, I don’t have children. If I did, I would have left the country a longtime ago’ (Arman 2015).

‘Fun’ and taboos
The heyday of satirical magazines is indelibly linked to one name: Gırgır
(‘fun’, ‘josh’). Formed in August 1972 under the leadership of the famous
cartoonist Oğuz Aral (1936–2004), Gırgır soon became one of thebestselling satirical magazines in the world (Tunç 2001; Cantek 2014,
211–21; Demirkol 2018). Starting with a modest circulation of 40,000
copies weekly, Gırgır ended up selling as many as half a million copies per
week in the late 1980s (Demirkol 2018, 105).9 For a whole generation ofyoungsters who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, Gırgır became an

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integral part of collective memory and nostalgia (Marcella 2021). Gırgır’ssuccess was certainly linked to the fact that the Turkish state had not
given up its national broadcasting monopoly, which happened in the early
1990s.10 Radio and TV were state-controlled, the days of satellite TV andthe internet were still to come, and the sources of entertainment andcritical inspiration were seriously limited. In the end, the magazine’s
popularity resulted from a combination of factors, but mostly from its
transgressive character and ability to entertain. Gırgır provided both awelcome source of light-hearted fun and laughter, and a rare outlet foraddressing societal and political taboos.
One of these taboos was sexuality. The depiction of sexualised nudity
and the eroticisation of the female body attracted a wide (male) readership.
Demirkol argues that it would be wrong to claim that Gırgır used sexuality
solely for the purpose of boosting sales (2018, 71–2). Even so, the editorial
board was predominantly male, and the cartoons were dominated by amale gaze. It is certainly questionable whether the use of sexist depictionsof the female body is a suitable means for challenging society’s conservative
moral values. However, Gırgır always insisted that the depiction of sex andnudity also represented an attempt to promote liberal worldviews andcriticise sexism and misogyny in Turkish society. Many of the cartoons
published in Gırgır did indeed reflect critically on heteronormative genderroles and went beyond stereotypical depictions of sexuality (for example,Oğuz Aral’s well-known cartoon classic Avanak Avni).
Demirkol (2018, 7, 46–9) stresses the close relationship between
cartoons and everyday life. Not only did the artists use everyday languageand depict scenes from ordinary life in their cartoons, they also drew
inspiration from real-life encounters. Abdülkadir Elçioğlu, the author of
the once very popular cartoon series Grup Perişan,11 for instance, claims
that his cartoon narratives were often directly influenced by his and his
friends’ personal experiences (such as being harassed in the streets fortheir long hair, earrings and supposedly non-Turkish behaviour), which
he depicted in an exaggerated, ironic way in Grup Perişan.12 That being
said, many of the societal conflicts portrayed in Gırgır were not purely
fictional but representative of the Zeitgeist of a particular period in Turkish
modern history.
Gırgır also actively brought in talented young cartoonists fromamong its readership (Tunç 2001, 247; Marcella 2021). Readers wereencouraged to send in their own drawings, on which they would receive
personal feedback from the editors. The best cartoons would be publishedin the magazine. Some of the ‘apprentice cartoonists’ eventually became
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recruit aspiring young cartoonists early on and become Turkey’s unofficial‘school of cartoon’. Over the years, Gırgır produced numerous successful
artists who would either establish their own satirical magazines (e.g.
Limon, Hıbır) or turn into professional comic book authors and graphic
designers. Even today, Turkey’s (cartoon) art scene still benefits from
Gırgır’s early efforts in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the most prominent
representatives of Gırgır’s ‘school of cartoon’ is Ramize Erer, who is often
described as Turkey’s first feminist cartoonist.

‘Bad Girl’
Ramize Erer invented the cartoon character Kötü Kız (Bad Girl). She rose
to fame as a cartoonist only when she depicted a young girl masturbatingin front of her parents. Following the publication of the cartoon, Erer was
heavily criticised for the supposedly pornographic nature of her work.
The girl in her cartoon, somewhat confused or delirious, declares that her
hymen has been broken, but also claims that she has protected her hymenfrom being broken. Turning to her father, she tells him that, with hervirginity intact, so are his reputation and his bank account. The girl’s
obviously shocked mother, seated on a sofa next to her husband, whispers
to her husband: ‘Pssst … we shouldn’t have put so much pressure on her.
Our little girl has lost her mind!’ The cartoon clearly represents a critiqueof patriarchal society, a traditionalist society that expects its members topreserve the sexual integrity of the female body (namus) as a preconditionof the father’s as well as the girl’s social reputation (şeref).
Erer’s cartoon also contains several visual references to religion.
While the girl’s mother wears a rural-style Islamic headscarf, her father
feeds a string of prayer beads (tesbih) through his fingers. On the wallbehind the girl’s parents, a painting (or maybe a carpet) depicts Islam’sholiest site, the Kaaba in Mecca. The combination of these three signifiers
marks the family as most likely poor and uneducated pious believers.
Through this correlation of religious and patriarchal references, Ererappears to suggest a causal relationship between religion and patriarchy.
Similar meaningful connections appear in many of Erer’s cartoons.
In a more recent drawing for the feminist magazine Bayan Yanı, forinstance, she portrays a young couple on a park bench. The male characterhas put his arm around the woman’s shoulders. In a partly flirtatious,
partly condescending, mansplaining way, he seeks to persuade his
girlfriend (or wife) to start wearing the (Islamic) headscarf, suggestingthat if she does not the wind will ruffle her hair in a ‘very seductive way’.

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In another, more drastic, cartoon, Erer depicts a young woman vomitingon the floor, while shouting ‘Enough. Oooh, enoughhh’ (‘Yeter yaaa
yeterrr’). Her vomit contains several dwarfish men complaining about
women’s supposedly immoral behaviour. By their attire (prayer beads,
beards, skullcaps, etc.) they can be recognised as pious conservatives orrepresentatives of political Islam.
Erer’s cartoons advocate for female emancipation and sexual
freedom. Her critique of patriarchal society certainly establishes aconnection between patriarchy and religion. But it does not seem torepresent an attack on religion itself. The target of her criticism isprimarily men, traditionalist men who make use of religion and religious
values to sustain their dominant position in society. Erer’s ‘Bad Girl’represents the prototype of the rebel girl who criticises religious tradition
as a source of patriarchy in Turkey’s society.13 Yet it was not until the mid1990s that a colleague of Ramize Erer, Kenan Yarar, invented an evenmore terrifying bad girl: Hilal.

‘And God created Hilal’
Hilal first appeared in a serialised short story with the title ‘The mostbeautiful girl in the class’ (‘Sınıfın en güzel kızı’), whose first episode waspublished in H.B.R. Maymun on 14 September 1995.14 The character of
Hilal had been inspired by one of Kenan Yarar’s former classmates, who
was of the same name.15 The artist initially conceptualised Hilal only as asupporting character that the main protagonist of the story, a shy andugly nerd with an enormous nose and glasses, had a crush on. But it was
Hilal who stood out from the rest of the story, not so much for being
young and sexy but for possessing genuinely devilish traits that made hermurder the school’s headmistress when she slaps Hilal in the face forwearing too short a skirt. The reader does not see the actual murder andonly learns from a sequence of content panels that the headmistress has
died from falling down a stairwell. But it is this insidious, secretive smileon Hilal’s face that conveys a sense of cheerfulness and thus implies to thereader that she has taken deadly revenge on the choleric schoolteacher.
However, at the very end of the story, it is Hilal herself who dies in agruesome traffic accident. Driven by jealousy and unrequited love, theschool nerd manipulates the brakes on the motorcycle of Hilal’s lover andthus accidentally kills the girl he adores.
The story of Hilal could have been that brief and simple if it hadn’t
been for Ergün Gündüz, H.B.R. Maymun’s editor-in-chief, who also fell in

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love with the uncompromising heroine.16 According to Kenan Yarar, it was
Gündüz who talked him into developing a cartoon based on theadventures of his short-lived devilish blonde. Eventually, Hilal came backfrom the dead with her own cartoon series, this time entitled ‘The devil inschool’ (Okuldaki Şeytan). A few years later, this evolved into the ‘Hilal’
comic strips that were eventually published in the form of three comic
books in 2016, 2017 and 2018. The narrative structure of this cartoon
revolves around Hilal’s relationship with the Devil, whom she meets inher sleep or when she is caught up in a daydream. The line between dreamand reality is frequently blurred, especially when Hilal wakes up to areality that is worse than any nightmare. Yarar creates a dark, dystopian
atmosphere full of human ugliness, violent perversion and repulsive
characters. He does not stint on sex, faeces, decay and violence. In the
midst of this apocalyptic chaos he places Hilal, the young, lean and sexyblonde with a lust for life and a sharp mind. The beautiful young woman
stands in sharp contrast to the ugliness and dreariness that surround her.
But the beauty and purity of Hilal’s features only obscure the fact that sheshows no mercy to those who do her harm, killing and rampaging her way
through the story. The author skilfully plays with the psychotic
atmosphere he creates, and sometimes it is no longer clear if Lucifer is justan appearance in Hilal’s dreams or if Hilal is herself the Devil.
Yarar’s Hilal is part of a whole genre of dystopian comic books fromTurkey. Galip Tekin’s Tuhaf Öyküleri (‘Weird stories’), Suat Gönülay’s
Vakur Barut, Ersin Karabulut’s Yeraltı Öyküleri (‘Underground stories’)
and the various works of Nuri Kurtcebe all appear to represent a surrealist
intervention into Turkish modernity, embodying the dark, psychotic
fantasies of their authors. The fictional worlds depicted in these comic
books are transgressive in that they contest dominant norms in Turkishsociety. Hilal, for instance, is replete with depictions of sex, nudity andviolence, redefinitions of gender roles and explicit language (similar to
many works of the aforementioned comic artists). On top of that, Hilal
contains various recurring references to religious mythologies. These
become adapted and modified within the surrealist, fictional world
created by Yarar. Hilal’s personal relationship to religion remains rather
obscure and open to interpretation. Yarar himself describes it in thefollowing way:
I can’t tell if Hilal has a religious belief or not. I can’t say she is anatheist. But I also can’t say that she is outright religious either. Is she
a deist? I am also not sure about that. First and foremost, she is avery young girl at the beginning of her life [who] explores herself,

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the world and her body. … In some scenes, Hilal angrily shouts at
an invisible entity because of the personal, inner rage she
experiences. In return, she is punished in various ways, for instanceby being struck on the head by lightning. Sometimes, she enters into
an inner dialogue with this invisible creator and quarrels and fights[with him]. … It is obvious that Hilal does not live in accordancewith common religious rules. [But] none of this makes her either anon-religious atheist or a pious believer.17
The metaphorical implications of the various religious references in the
Hilal comic books are certainly a matter of interpretation and cannot
necessarily be read as religious scepticism or, as related to the legal
discussion above, as an act of blasphemy. For this reason, the analysis
below must be seen as what it is: the present author’s interpretation andnot the artist’s intention.
In the opening chapter of the second comic book in the series, ‘And
God created Hilal …’ (‘Ve Tanrı Hilal’i Yarattı…’), Yarar appears to reverse
the Islamic (and Judaeo-Christian) creation myth. His way of storytelling
adheres to a form that is common to many comic books. Visual images
combined with text (speech bubbles, captions) are arranged in separate
panels of varying size and divided by gutters (white spaces between thepanels). The caption of the first panel of the story of Hilal’s creation tells
the reader the location (‘heaven’) and date (‘minus zero’ – before thebeginning of time) of the depicted setting. The author begins his story by
picturing an almost idyllic scene. A young, naked woman, who is in thecentre of the picture, is skipping. She is surrounded by exotic plants andfantastic animals that, at first glance, appear to coexist in peace andharmony. What gives the scene a somehow dystopian, demonic touch are
the dot-like greenish eyes of the animals, which stand out on the blacknessof their demon-like empty eye sockets. It almost seems as if the author istrying to warn the reader of the darkness and evils in heaven.
The following panel zooms in on the skipping Hilal who sings a song
and whose private parts are covered only by a single leaf. Still, the settingof the story looks pure and innocent. But then Adam appears on thescene. As announced in one of the captions, he had been created by God
only after Hilal (‘ve ardından de Adem’i …’). Adam, as depicted by Yarar,
looks nothing like Hilal. He is fat and hairy, a middle-aged man with ahuge moustache, wrinkled skin and eyes that resemble those of the otherheavenly creatures (bluish dots on blackened eye sockets). When he sees
Hilal, he utters a dirty laugh and twists the ends of his moustache. In his
left hand, he holds a toffee apple on a stick, with which he approaches

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Hilal from behind. He offers it to her by addressing her in an awkward,
clumsy, inarticulate way: ‘Yoo-hoo … Excuse me, little lady. Would you
like to eat a toffee apple? Would you? Very nice … very sweet … do you
want it? Eh?’ (Yarar 2017, 3). When Hilal reaches out for the apple, Adam
stops her (from touching the forbidden fruit) and wags an admonishingfinger at her. He will only give her the apple if she agrees to come with
him to the nearby bushes. As he explains this to her, he calls her ‘my little
bird’. From Adam’s demeanour and the angry look on Hilal’s face, it isobvious that he intends to lure her into the bushes to sexually abuse andrape her. Nevertheless, Hilal follows him towards a huge tree. When theimaginary camera zooms out again, the reader can only see the tree, fromunder which a loud sound of something breaking and a muffled voice canbe heard. Animals can be seen fleeing in panic. In the next panel, it is Hilal
who can be spotted running away from the tree. In her right hand, she istriumphantly holding the apple. With a broad smile on her face, she islooking back at the tree, laughing, while Adam is hanging, dead, from abranch of the tree.
This is the moment an alarm clock rudely rouses Hilal from sleep.
Angry, she smashes the device with her fist and falls back into a slumber,masturbating. Back in her dream, she begins excitedly licking the toffee
apple she stole from Adam, and then, all of a sudden, as if summoned byher desire, Satan appears in front of her. With his massive horns, goat
face, hooves and beard, glowing eyes and long tail, Yarar’s depiction of
the Devil embodies all the clichés. The two characters enter into a
discussion, during which the Devil seeks to persuade Hilal to accompany
him to hell and give her virginity to him. Hilal is very annoyed, and withan obscene gesture (‘fuck you!’) she sends the Devil back to hell. Only
later in the story will she have sex with the Devil, driven by her own lust.
The metaphorical implications of this narrative are numerous, as
this reversal of the Islamic creation myth encompasses various layers.
According to Islamic tradition, Adam is the father of mankind, created by
God from soil and clay. He may not be identified as such in the Qur’an but
de facto he holds the status of a prophet in Islam and is therefore
considered impeccable (Bolay 1988, 358–9; Tottoli 2008). The Islamic
creation myth shows many similarities to Jewish and Christian traditions,despite some differences. Eve, for instance, is not given a name in the
Qur’an but only referred to as Adam’s wife, created by God to be hiscompanion. Only in other Islamic sources is she mentioned as Eve. Islamicexegetical tradition (tafsīr) also seizes on the Judaeo-Christian narrative,
according to which Eve was created from one of Adam’s ribs while he wasasleep (Tottoli 2017). The narrative of the expulsion of Adam and Eve

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from Paradise, which in the Christian tradition is commonly referred toas the Fall, is also broadly similar to the Judaeo-Christian narrative. Adamand Eve were allowed by God to dwell in the Garden of Paradise ‘and eat
thereof as freely as [they] please’ (Qur’an 2:35); only one particular tree
in Paradise was taboo, and they were not allowed to approach it (Qur’an
2:35–6, 7:20–4; see also Bolay 1988, 361–2). This tree, which in JudaeoChristian tradition is known as the ‘tree of knowledge’ or the ‘tree ofknowledge of good and evil’, has no name in the Qur’an. However, inIslamic theology, it is referred to against the backdrop of God’s previous
revelations (the Torah, the Psalms and the Gospels), in which theexpression ‘tree of knowledge’ (bilgi ağacı) is not uncommon (see Bolay
1988, 361). When Adam and Eve succumb to the temptation of Satan andeat from the tree, they are expelled from the Garden of Paradise and sent
to earth to live in strife with each other. Roberto Tottoli (2017) points outthat post-Qur’anic traditions tend to downplay Adam’s responsibility andput the blame for sin on Eve instead.
In Yarar’s portrayal of events, the connotative meanings of religious
signifiers are renegotiated and reversed. Hilal appears to represent Eve.
So when Yarar places Hilal’s creation before that of Adam, he challenges
not only the alleged truth of a particular religious narrative but also thehierarchical order between the sexes that it implies. In Islamic tradition,
Adam is not only considered impeccable but also depicted as a tall andformidable man (Bolay 1988; Tottoli 2008). Yarar’s Adam is a fat and ugly
rapist. The way he looks, talks and behaves signifies that he is the
prototype of the maganda. The invention of this term is often attributed
to Nuri Kurtcebe, one of Gırgır’s earliest cartoonists. The character of themaganda represents the stereotype of the rude and brutal, uneducatedguy from rural Anatolia whose only outlet is to sexually harass young
women. He is depicted in the cartoons and comics of countless artists,such as the works of Ramize Erer and Abdülkadir Elçioğlu. Depicting an
alleged Islamic prophet as a maganda certainly holds potential for conflict.
If Hilal represents Eve in this story, then the toffee apple represents
the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Paradise and the tree from which
Adam has been hanged the tree of knowledge. Likewise, it is Adam whoseeks to seduce Hilal into sin (that is, to eat the apple and have sex with
him under the tree of knowledge), not the other way round. This
represents another reversal of gender roles, similar to Yarar’s reinventionof the creation myth (Hilal first, Adam second). What the series of events
comes down to is this: Hilal hangs Adam from the tree of knowledge after
he tries to rape her, and runs away with the apple, which functions as asymbol of her own sexual fantasies when her desire for the forbidden fruit

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appears to conjure up the Devil, who tries to seduce her. Can this be seen
as an act of female revenge on patriarchy or an act of female selfempowerment narrated by a male author? Or should the story of Hilalrather be seen as an act of blasphemy that intends to make fun of religious
mythologies and, consequently, the people who believe them to be true?
Yarar himself denies having any intention of blasphemy in his works:
As for the religious references in Hilal, although these references
seem to represent Islam … these themes were not written anddrawn to target, praise or vilify Islam directly. It might seem obvious
but I have no such intention. … Personally, I respect all kinds ofreligious belief or irreligion. It’s not my place to interfere withpeople’s beliefs or disbelief or to express my opinion and to praiseor criticise [them]. I only react to issues such as bigotry, emotional
abuse, suppressing people’s free will or targeting their thoughts, as
any democratic individual should do; and I convey this with my art
and stories in my own way. … After all, I produce adult comics. I
cannot write these kinds of underground stories and fully abide bymoral, religious and societal rules. There has to be some anomaly,tantrum and contradiction so that the work is entertaining andinteresting to read.18
Yarar denies any intention to blaspheme or denigrate Islam. Instead hepoints towards the artist’s legitimate right to address social issues ofmoral corruption (‘bigotry, emotional abuse, suppressing people’s freewill’) and, on a different note, to entertain his readers. The artist has no
obligation to abide by moral, religious and societal norms but does havethe right to freedom of expression and creative activity. Freedom ofartistic expression is an integral part of the right to freedom of expression
more broadly, and thus a fundamental human right as covered by theEuropean Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, to both of which the Republic of Turkey isa signatory. So even if Yarar’s comic books pose a challenge to a normative
order shaped by religious narratives they can hardly be classified as adeliberate act of denigrating religious values. Still, Yarar admits that his
artistic creativity is ‘always’ affected by ‘a self-censoring mechanism’ atthe back of his mind:
There are very few countries and people in this world that tolerate
artists whose works criticise religion or satirically engage with religious
themes. Considering that many of my international colleagues have

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been ruthlessly murdered for fanatic reasons … I am concerned about
the misinterpretation of my works. It breaks my heart that today
veteran artists are lynched and their works torn down when [forinstance] a word in a song has an anti-religious meaning.19

An Islamist zombie apocalypse
Adam and Eve, the tree of knowledge, the Garden of Paradise, Satan andthe serpent, the forbidden fruit and the reversal of good and evil arerecurring themes in the Hilal comic books. In a different story Hilal
imagines Adam as a young and sexy lover. She angrily tells the serpent toshove the offered apple up its arse, as it is interrupting her flirtatious
encounter with Adam. In the end, it is the sexy, young Adam who turns
into a fat and shapeless mass of man and finally explodes after eating all
the apples on the tree of knowledge (Yarar 2017, 65–6). In anotherchapter of the story, Hilal is expelled from heaven and dragged into hell
after complaining about how boring heaven is (Yarar 2016, 18). Other
religious references are rare. In the second chapter of the first volume(Yarar 2016, 6) the reader finds Hilal sitting at the centre of a prison-likestructure. Apparently, she is in a state of repentance. This is signified by
the word tövbe (‘repentance’), which echoes through the first couple ofpictures of the story. Dressed in a black chador (a full-length garment thatcovers the head and the whole body), which only reveals her eyes, Hilal
reads from the Qur’an, only to be distracted by a butterfly. It is thebutterfly and the sound of music that finally guide her towards a hole in
the wall, through which she escapes and enters into a beautiful garden,
where she throws off all her clothes.
The theme of Adam and Eve appears in various other Turkish cartoonsand comic books, such as Suat Gönülay’s Halkım İstesin Hemen (‘My people
want it now’). Gönülay’s story is also situated in a dystopian urban
environment. In contrast to Yarar’s Hilal, Gönülay’s story is designed toconvey a political message to its readers. The comic book is dedicated to‘the Republic’ (‘Cumhuriyet’e’), which identifies the author as arepresentative of what has been described earlier as Turkish secularist
modernity. Adam and Eve are represented by the story’s main characters,
Tonguç and Tomris, a young, intellectual couple who share a flat in a
nameless, faceless city. Their attire (denim jeans, glasses, unkempt hair)and several references to the Turkish socialist movement (such as DEV-YOL,
the Marxist-Leninist ‘revolutionary path’) mark them out as sympathisers

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of a Turkish socialist revolution. Another marker that functions as anindicator of the author’s political orientation is the names Tonguç andTomris. They hold a connotative meaning in that they do not derive fromthe Qur’an, or other religious sources, but date back to pre-Islamic times.
The narrative of the comic begins with a monologue by Tonguç. His
eyes wide open, he romanticises about the Turkish people: ‘Oh, mypeople, my love. … One day, I will tell them to come and stand up. …
Come, my people. Come. Shoulder to shoulder. Back to back. … May thetime come soon, when I gather my people behind me. Come on, march
on. Close your ranks. … Hey! Hey! … Oh, I would give my life for thesepeople, Tomris ….’ (Gönülay 2013, unpaginated). Tomris listens
attentively and tries to calm him down (‘Alright, sweetheart. Your people
are my people too’), when suddenly a massive crowd appears in thestreets in front of their house and calls out Tonguç’s name. When Tonguç
looks out of the window, excitement grips him again: ‘Ah … This is myworker, my peasant, my civil servant …. Oh, look at my people. … They
have come for me. HELLO, HELLO! HEY, HEEEEY … HELLOO!’ (Gönülay
2013, unpaginated). However, the crowd responds by shouting ‘Get outof here’, and starts to throw stones through the windows of the couple’s
flat. Eventually, the crowd breaks through their door and attacks them.
Gönülay depicts the attackers as almost completely dehumanised
creatures: naked males with long arms and erect penises. Shocked,
Tonguç identifies them as ‘randy maganda’. When the creatures begin totear off Tonguç’s trousers with the apparent intent of raping him, Tomris
takes out a gun that lies hidden on a bookshelf and shoots them. After themaganda, several more waves of attackers hit the building, each of them
representative of a section of Turkish society: the workers, the police and,
finally, the Islamists, in Tonguç’s words, those who are ‘inclined to radical
religion’. The story repeats itself when the zombie-like mass of turbaned,
bearded men scale the walls of the apartment building, and Tomris holds
them off by firing her gun at them at close range. Only at the last moment
do the couple escape to the rooftop of the building.
To make a long and confusing story short, Tonguç and Tomris end
up naked under the tree of knowledge where the Devil forces Tomris tofeed the forbidden fruit, again in the form of an apple, to Tonguç. At thispoint, Tonguç is still unable to process what has happened and lamentsthat his people have forsaken him. He seems panic-stricken and confused,unable to digest what has happened to him. It is Tomris who keeps a clear
head and saves them from being killed.
The metaphorical implications of Gönülay’s comic book can beinterpreted in a number of ways. For instance, it could be seen as an

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anti-religious polemic, but it could also be seen as the ultimate disillusion
with the dream of a socialist revolution in Turkey. Within the frameworkof this chapter, it constitutes a final example of how religious narratives
are being adapted and reversed by Turkish artists, and how these
depictions pose a challenge to dominant religious norms in Turkey’s
society. What Gönülay’s story has in common with that of Yarar is thecharacter of the strong, sexualised, smart and violent heroine whochallenges the moral boundaries set up for her by society. Both comic
books might furthermore be seen as an expression of feminist revenge on
the stereotyped Islamist male and religious concepts that legitimate
societal patriarchy. Within Turkey’s political context, these comics andcartoons constitute a popular medium for the proliferation of religious
scepticism, and might even be interpreted as an act of resistance towards
the de-secularisation of state and society by the encroaching forces of
pious conservatism.

Conclusion
This chapter has sought to provide a contextual, though incomplete,
history of religious scepticism and blasphemy in Turkish comic books andcartoons. It has also intended to investigate how Turkish comic artists
challenge religious norms and narratives, by mocking and criticising, andappropriating and rewriting them. The investigation will conclude with abrief discussion on comic books as a means of cultural resistance and away of promoting alternative narratives within the narrow frames of an
authoritarian political system. The history of cartoons and comic books issituated within a contentious debate on religion and secularism thatpolarises Turkish society to the present day. President Erdoğan’s Justiceand Development Party (AKP), which has been in power since November
2002, has been following an agenda of authoritarian populism that puts
religion at the centre of national identity politics. The idea of the Muslim
nature of the Turkish nation provides the basis for a politics of ‘us’ versus‘them’ that has been the main source of the growing marginalisation of
the secularist, and therefore allegedly non-religious, other in society (see,for instance, Özyürek 2006; Toprak et al. 2009). The transformation ofTurkey’s political system from a parliamentary democracy to an
authoritarian presidential system that has ceased to operate on afunctional separation of powers has furthermore contributed to asystematic dismantling of the rule of law and a successive loss of
democratic rights and freedoms (Tahiroğlu 2020). The earlier discussion

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of Article 216/3 of the Turkish Penal Code points towards an ideologyinduced change in legal interpretation that also marks the impending
decline of Turkish secularist modernity. Article 216/3 has de facto been
turned into a powerful tool to protect and maintain the supremacy ofIslam in Turkish society. Public blasphemy or, more precisely, thedenigration of religious values in public is now seen as transgressive
behaviour that needs to be criminalised for the sake of protecting religion
and religious belief itself. Public prosecutors increasingly appear to follow
a logic of dominance and subordination in which religious belief enjoys
supremacy over non-religion, and the individual right to freedom of(artistic) expression is not sufficiently protected.
The potentially blasphemous representations of religious concepts
in the works of the artists discussed here appear to make cartoon andcomic art the natural adversary of political Islam. Cartoons and comic
books do indeed provide space for religious scepticism, and one mightargue that Turkey’s cartoonists and comic artists have helped to reinforce
Turkish secularist modernity. Today, however, cartoons and comic books
address only a very limited public. In recent years, Turkey’s conservative
government has systematically taken legal action against political
cartoonists and satirical magazines. As Valentina Marcella (2022) andothers have pointed out, most satirical magazines have ceased publication,
because of political pressure and falling sales. Consequently, mostcartoonists have lost their public platform and their economic livelihood.
Comic books are still available from local comic book shops and theinternet, and they certainly have a cult following among younger readers,
but their outreach appears to be increasingly limited. It is therefore
difficult to assess what cultural impact Turkey’s comic book subculture
has on the wider public. Public hate speech and the potential outrage ofthe provoked public create a volatile situation and probably contribute to
the fact that many religion-sceptical artists and intellectuals prefer tokeep a low profile. Nonetheless, cartoons and comic books continue tofacilitate the existence of a religion-sceptical counterpublic that offers achallenge to the power of religion in Turkey’s society.

Notes
1 Erdoğan’s announcement that his government would prioritise the education of a new pious
generation amplified the fear of a forced Islamisation of Turkish society from above. Indeed,
several studies, such as Iren Özgür’s Islamic Schools in Modern Turkey (2012), Ceren Lord’s
Religious Politics in Turkey (2018) and Elif Gençkal Eroler’s Dindar Nesil Yetiştirmek (‘Raising a
religious generation’; 2019), provide detailed insight into the ruling elite’s comprehensive
efforts to strengthen religious discourse in the field of education.

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2 In the course of building a modern, Europe-oriented nation-state, Turkish reformers under theleadership of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) enacted a bundle of wide-ranging reforms. In addition
to abolishing the Sultanate (1 November 1922) and the Caliphate (3 March 1924), removing
the constitutional provision designating Islam as the state religion (9 April 1928), replacing the
Arabic alphabet with the Latin one (1 November 1928), and granting equal civil rights to maleand female citizens (17 February 1926), the reformers adopted a secular legal system based on
the Swiss Civil Code (17 February 1926) and the Italian Criminal Code (1 March 1926).
3 Lutz Wiederhold (1997, 40) mentions several other terms that are used to denote acts of
blasphemy in Arabic (e.g. shatm, la‘n, ta‘n and īdhā). In Sunni legal literature, the debate on
blasphemy does, however, centre on the term sabb.
4 Markus Dressler (2013, xii) wrote that ‘Alevism constitutes an intrinsic part of Anatolian andTurkish culture’. The Alevis of Turkey represent approximately 10–15 per cent of the population.
Alevism can be described as a religious community at the margins of the Islamic tradition. It
differs from Sunni Islam in its heterodoxy and syncretism and exhibits a certain closeness to
Shia Islam. Turkish Sunni supremacists commonly characterise Alevis as heretics andunbelievers (Akyıldız 2022), and even some Alevi diaspora organisations insist that Alevism is
an autonomous religion distinct from Islam.
5 All quotes, unless stated otherwise, have been translated by the author from Turkish into English.
6 Rudolf Edwin Belling (1886–1972) was a German expressionist sculptor who spent almost 30
years in exile in Turkey after his works had been classified as ‘degenerate art’ (entartete Kunst)
in Nazi Germany.
7 The cartoon was originally published in Gırgır magazine on 23 June 1974 (see Demirkol 2018, 67).
8 The Directorate of Religious Affairs is a state institution responsible for administering religious
affairs in Turkey. It was established under article 136 of the Turkish Constitution and is thestate’s key instrument for placing religious affairs under state control.
9 Aslı Tunç puts the numbers even higher and mentions a weekly circulation of 750,000 copies(Tunç 2001, 243). Demirkol’s figures are far more detailed; therefore they appear to be morereliable (2018, 61, 88, 105).
10 The first private TV channels began operating in 1990, followed by private radio broadcasters
in 1992.
11 Grup Perişan (‘Group of losers’) was published in the satirical magazine Hıbır from 1989 to
1995. It depicted the lives of three young men in Istanbul, one of them an uncompromisingrocker and metalhead. Grup Perişan played a huge part in the dissemination of rock and metal
culture among Turkey’s youth.
12 Personal interview with Abdülkadir Elçioğlu conducted in Istanbul on 24 December 2003.
13 Ramize Erer’s equally famous cartoon characters Eşi Nadide and Bir Bıyıksız follow the same lines.
14 H.B.R. Maymun (originally Hıbır) was founded by a group of cartoonists who broke away from
Gırgır in the late 1980s. The early Hilal comic strips were published weekly in autumn 1995
(issues 67 to 73, 14 September 1995 to 26 October 1995).
15 The name Hilal means ‘crescent moon’ in Turkish. The crescent moon is historically known tosymbolise Islam. It can be found on coins, flags and stamps, on top of domes and minarets and,more recently, on religious lifestyle products (clothes, food, etc.). Yarar stresses that he did notchoose the name Hilal for its religious meaning but in tribute to his classmate of the same namefrom middle school. He thus does not intend to poke fun at Islam (Kenan Yarar, e-mail toauthor, 11 April 2022).
16 According to Kenan Yarar in an interview with Meltem Şahbaz for Habertürk (Şahbaz 2018).
17 Kenan Yarar, e-mail to author, 11 April 2022 (translated by the author from Turkish to English).
18 Kenan Yarar, e-mail to author, 11 April 2022 (translated by the author from Turkish to English).
19 Kenan Yarar, e-mail to author, 11 April 2022 (translated by the author from Turkish to English).

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8
From campaign and dispute to‘public service broad/narrowcasting’:
secularist and atheist media
strategies in Britain and America –a contextual history
David Nash

This chapter investigates the long and varied history of atheists andfreethinkers in Britain and America and their attempts to communicate
amongst themselves and to a wider world. This history is traced throughthe development of this phenomenon within the British and American
contexts, stretching roughly from the French Revolution to the present.
In doing so it focuses upon atheist and secularist forms of resistance toorganised Christianity and uses exclusively English-language sources.
Commencing with the philosophies developed as a result of
Enlightenment ideals – which cultivated freedom of speech andexpression – the chapter investigates how these ideas were put into
practice, from the first few generations of nineteenth-century campaigners
right through to contemporary atheist/freethinking use of media. It
analyses their adoption of new media technologies (from pamphlets and,
subsequently, newspapers and books, to multiple and various online
presences) and of changing styles and narratives. Many of thesetechnologies have been related to specific tactics as well as to theconfrontation of perceived evils and ills, whilst some have been replies tothe specific ‘provocation’ of opponents and authority. These narratives

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have also been determined to showcase the exposure of error and‘gullibility’, creating and disseminating alternative viewpoints. Whatemerges from this study is that the various analyses which see digitalcommunication as a sea change in both approach and opportunity foratheist/freethinkers/secularists significantly overstate the case. In
elaborating a long-term history of one particular context for atheism andcommunications strategies it is hoped to provide opportunities forcomparison with different contexts, histories and possibilities.
The chapter assesses the relative successes and failures of different
media strategies by emphasising the tensions that came with them foratheists and freethinkers. How did atheists resolve the tensions between
the private quietism of some unbelievers and the urge to proselytise andcreate public controversy, alongside the personalities who inspired both
approaches? When was it appropriate to convert and when was it
appropriate to speak to the converted? How did media aid or hinder theseobjectives? How were media utilised in the different strategies of work on
single issues and, alternatively, the broad front of undermining religion’scontrol of state, cultural and social institutions? Lastly, how did the use of
media alter around discussions about whether atheism would overturnreligion, or widen its constituency to colonise a ‘market share’ of belief/
unbelief? Fundamentally, resolving such tensions often came down toless than obvious choices about whether atheists should be broadcastingor narrowcasting. Whilst these strategies were always in debate, thewider assertion of rights and identities resembles the ‘talking back topower’ described by Richter in this volume.
Such a contextual history is necessary because too many writers oncontemporary atheism and its strategies view the problems andpossibilities created by new media as a novelty that possesses no prehistory.
Too often they fail to look beyond the arrival of the modern cyber age andits technological breakthroughs and forms. This outlook has a tendency tocite the contemporary world as having foisted a sudden and unwillingengagement with communications technology for the first time uponatheist and secularist groups. Cimino and Smith, for example, described
contemporary atheists in America as ‘creating an alternative ethos anddiscourse, using social media to “talk back” to society whilst “speaking
with” one another’ (Cimino and Smith 2014, 2). The medium’s tools andmechanisms have even, by these same analysts, been seen as moulding
and shaping the nature of unbelief itself (Smith and Cimino 2012).
Tracing the very existence of what we would now call atheists,
agnostics and freethinkers becomes more fraught with difficulty forhistorians the further back they go. Their visibility scarcely breaks the220

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surface for a host of reasons. Such a gap and silence meant that Lucien
Febvre was persuaded that religious culture was so all-encompassing andpervasive that medieval and early modern atheism was actually
impossible (Febvre 1985).
Such a conclusion seems scarcely credible, and it is not the purposeof this chapter to probe this particular historical conundrum any further.
However, the current existence of this absence of visibility is pertinent to
our investigation of atheist communications strategies. Historians are still
uncovering hidden religious congregations that function under the radar
when the prevailing religious regime is unfavourable to their cause, such as
the previously unknown continuation of the émigré ‘Stranger’ Church in
Marian London (MacCulloch 1999, 182). Even religious congregations that
surface when the situation is favourable are often found to have had an‘illegal’ prehistory. With atheists and freethinkers such a situation is
impossible to replicate. Congregations, groups, families and even perhaps
the concept of ‘like-minded individuals’ do not exist for atheists until
modernity. The evidence we have is of what we might call ‘opinion’. This isportrayed as something at least semi-private, and conspicuous to theindividual consciousness only of those who hold such opinions (Royle
1974, 12–16). We might here think about how this privacy is replicatedelsewhere in this volume, where there are some very different examples of
how dissident opinions are deliberately hidden from scrutiny as a protective
measure. This can be simple self-defence, or the careful protection andpossible nurturing of dissident opinion still at an early stage of development.
The solitariness of those individuals is reinforced partly by thehistory and historiography of unorthodox belief and unbelief. Carlo
Ginzburg’s investigation of an early modern Friulian miller emphasised
his sustained learning and outlook, the creation of a strange heterodox
universe deduced from the collision of reading, observation and sustained
thinking (Ginzburg 2013). Yet this individual stepped out of the darkness
into the historical record when made to speak through court records.
Such appearances before the law are probably our most important
evidence of religious dissent. For the medieval and early modern period
this has been crucial for detecting such opinions, ranging from heresy towhat later becomes nonconformity. It is also significant because it
highlights the importance of blasphemy and blasphemy cases,
demonstrating places where the orthodox objected to the behaviour andspeech acts of others (Bradlaugh Bonner 1934). Although blasphemy wasfor much of the time unwitting, it sometimes emerges from these episodes,
especially from the seventeenth century onwards, as a deliberate methodof communication.

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What, for obvious reasons, is left hanging is the question of how
representative Ginzburg’s miller and his desire to build his own
intellectual universe may have been in practice. Were there others out
there whose self-imposed sceptical quietism left no trace in the historical
record? Similarly, the episodic appearance of a work of biblical criticism,or critique of organised religion, might break the surface much later, inthe later seventeenth or early eighteenth century. But our history tells usof the author whose prosecution or pariah status further emphasised
their isolation, both to contemporaries and to subsequent historians.
Such individuals are plucked from their time, recorded and returned toit as individualistic milestones in the history of unbelief (BradlaughBonner 1934, 33–8).
It is not the purpose of this chapter to investigate this lacuna/darkfigure, but this prehistory of unbelief makes a fundamentally important
point about the vitality of communications for unbelievers themselves,and for historians trying to uncover their history. Unbelievers only leavesignificant traces of themselves when they interact throughcommunication that often bridges significant distances. Until thenineteenth century there was almost no interactive communal life that
could remotely have resembled the congregations of their Christiancounterparts. All communication between atheists was via the spoken
word and through written communication, often constructed as material
to reach an unknown or imagined audience, something Lundmark andKhazaal have both noted in this volume in relation to atheism’scontemporary history. Thus communication has historically been central
to the identity of unbelievers since 1800, and we must be aware of how,for historians, this creates a slightly lopsided story. Such a narrative
probably tells us too readily about places where the vocal and articulate
predominate at the expense of the silent and the silences. The latteremphatically may not represent assent to any belief system, religious orotherwise, and certainly do not represent an empty space. However, thisvisibility of ‘speaking out’ within unbelieving circles has itself influenced
an ongoing desire to reach out to the ‘imagined audience’. This ‘imagined
audience’ for atheist, freethinking and humanist ideas has been a driving
force behind many initiatives and activities. It has also been defined andredefined at significant moments in unbelief’s past. This driving force has
also, at times, created a tension between outward-looking proselytising,informing and campaigning and the desire to fortify existing unbelievers
against a world often ranged against them.

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Forging the imagined audience
The Deism- and Enlightenment-inspired critiques of religion were quite
often shaped to appeal to an ‘imagined audience’. Thomas Paine’s own
prose style was testament to his desire to popularise critiques of
established religion, which became eminently quotable to his immediate
contemporaries. His writings also became accessibly readable andmemorable through the republication of his central text (The Age of
Reason); subsequent editions made conversions to unbelief even after theSecond World War. In the 1820s a generation led by Richard Carlile wasprosecuted for blasphemy and sedition for republishing Paine’s works,
amongst other texts (Carlile 1821). The principle at stake for Carlile, andfor other defendants such as Susannah Wright, was the power of freespeech to transform society. In court they saw the attempts to censor andsilence their opinions as an affront and an assault upon reason and the
Enlightenment ideal of free and unfettered discussion (Carlile 1825). This
combination fused the unbelievers’ enduring link with arguments for freespeech. Carlile and his acolytes believed that publishing their writings onmonarchy, the clergy and biblical criticism was self-evidently a social
good. Hence preventing the publication was harmfully repressive. In
many courtroom defences they stated that if the government and its
supporters could clearly demonstrate that their writings and opinions
were causing widespread harm they would immediately desist frompublishing them (Carlile 1822, 11–12). This was not a rhetorical question,
since it was an appeal to their imagined audience, which would encountersuch opinions, defendants believed, simply because they had been madeavailable.
Such beliefs were also put into action in the behaviour of these
defendants in the courtroom, with the elaborately stage-managed readingof defences that involved lengthy extracts, and attempts to read wholetexts that were central to accusations against them. These disseminatedsuch opinions to the court’s public gallery, and those present wereentertained by rebukes aimed at prosecuting counsel and the presiding
judge. Such verbal ‘republication’ of these opinions and arguments fromtexts reached beyond the courtroom, since they fished for further‘republication’ in court reports that found their way into some newspapers.
This determination to communicate was further enhanced by Carlile’s
own publishing venture, which republished the reports of court cases inpamphlet form (Carlile 1821, 1822, 1825; Nash 1999, 84–8). These cases
were sometimes published together, whilst others were singled out for

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individual publication when an especially important rhetorical point had
to be made. Although these publications reached out to the ‘imagined
audience’, the number of individuals prepared to face prosecution for
publishing and selling Carlile’s numerous works indicated that there wasa significant community of the like-minded.
These like-minded, as we have discovered, initially appeared, in theeighteenth century, to be scattered and dispersed. Although the isolated
atheist was an archetype that would continue into the early twentiethcentury, in the nineteenth century some different common characteristics
began to emerge. Unbelievers, not surprisingly, consumed print culture
avidly, and sometimes it is possible to believe that some unbelievers weredrawn into this cultural world specifically through their consumption of
texts. This perhaps explains why we encounter, in equal measure, sudden
conversion from Christianity and a more long-term ‘falling away’. Many
working-class unbelievers were thus part of an autodidact world in which
the possession and consumption of texts became a central aspect ofunbelieving culture. Ensuring the ready availability and distribution ofsuch texts became something of an enduring preoccupation within thewider movement (Royle 1980, 131–2).
By the third quarter of the nineteenth century unbelief had fused
into more sophisticated ideological positions, notably the ideology ofsecularism, which offered degrees of protection to its adherents bycreating an ideology which appeared to outside observers to be likemodern agnosticism (Rectenwald 2018). This ideology was able to createa movement culture that craved lectures and expositions of new
ideological developments. These could be in such areas as biblicalcriticism, biology, politics and the emerging social sciences. In
counterpoint to this was a more metropolitan and visible campaigningculture centred on the person of Charles Bradlaugh and his various
crusades to gain citizenship rights for unbelievers (Royle 1980, 12–18,
23–8, 263–71). For this branch of the movement communications focusedupon the speeches and on their republication in various forms. Where thepamphlet form was used this genre owed a great deal to the lecturingformat, with a plethora of rhetorical questions and assured assertivenessabout the arguments and their presentation. Both sides of this divide
would frequently come together in both the capital and provincial
contexts to involve themselves in disputing the truth of the Bible with
Christian debaters (Royle 1980, 150–5). These events were immensely
popular; they could straddle several nights of speech and counter-speech,
and attract considerable attention and surprisingly large crowds. Throughthe medium of questions from the floor, and audience engagement with224

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the speeches, individuals were invited to ‘use’ the fruits of atheist culturecommunicated to them as a method of repelling attacks upon theiridentity. Such events could be contests of moral superiority in which
speakers like Bradlaugh were forced to defend individuals like Carlile andPaine from accusations of immorality, and from accusations that theirdoctrines were the clear source of crime within society (BradlaughBonner 1894, 158–60).
This period also saw the growth of a mature secularist press that
had titles to reflect the philosophical and thoughtful end of the movement,such as The Secular Review and the Agnostic, as well as the more politically
hard-edged campaigning periodicals such as the National Reformer. Each
could be counted on to display a range of sensibilities in asking andseeking to answer religion’s central questions. For example, discussionsof the historical Jesus and his resurrection could range from outrightdenial of these events to a more moderate discussion of their precise
importance. Beyond such philosophical discussions, a niche market inlampoon and scurrility would also, episodically, serve the individual
purposes of the movement and the agenda of specific editors. This presspresence was a further appeal to the ‘imagined audience’ throughcommunication to the isolated, living, perhaps covertly, in an otherwise
Christian and believing landscape. Such newspapers would contain newsof the national movement as well as records of poorly behaved clergy, or
instances where it detected that Christianity was found wanting in its
stewardship of everyday life. Letters pages carried echoes back from thataudience, often with similar stories. Many communications displayed
isolated atheists reaching out to a national movement when sickness
drove them to create final statements of their enduring unbelief. Thesestatements were portrayed as courageous attempts to thwart spurious
deathbed conversion stories (Nash 1995).
Occasionally, papers like the Freethinker, the Jerusalem Star and in
the Edwardian period the Truthseeker, adopted genres of writing andillustration that were designed to push free speech onto a collision coursewith prosecution in the form of blasphemy (discussed below). These
episodes saw communication as a means of creating offence in thosebelievers who experienced a casual encounter with such material. Thereis evidence that comic lampoons of Christianity and its beliefs were
fleetingly amusing to some unbelievers whilst creating discomfort inothers. In genres like this the Freethought movement confronted thedilemma of whether communications media should be used to enrich thelives of adherents, or whether to submerge this aspect in favour of theirpotentially campaigning impact (Nash 1999, 107–17).

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Publishing why and how? The world of the cheap edition
By the end of the nineteenth century the metropolitan secular organisations
had become especially keen to promote published editions of importantworks. This keenness was a tacit admission that the days of the lecture
platform were largely over, and that very cheap consumption of theprinted word and its messages was a real alternative. By this time lecture
audiences had fused into the committed unfaithful, meaning that casualengagement with others and the possibility of conversion had becomeless likely. Again, this development seems to reflect the passing of
attractive and strident personalities with high-profile campaigns andvisible agendas. This campaigning competed (again) with a more quietist
agenda that sought dissent and criticism which was more considered,whilst providing content and comfort to the stable membership. To a large
extent such publishing had to replace the aspirations of the lecture
platform, which always entertained the idea of reaching a wider audience,
whether in oral or printed form. The quest for sustained cheap publishingseemed a logical next step which might yet offer the desirable possibilityof pleasing both constituencies.
In Britain one outcome of this quest was the Rationalist Press
Association (RPA), which ambitiously hoped to be an important means ofprojecting secular and rational ideas into the wider community. Whilst
this was an innovation, it sought to shape reading habits by focusing on
the human sciences, echoing the message that Paine and Carlile hadadvanced in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. In the latter partof the same century, a concentration on these subjects appeared valid.
This was because they had seemingly been in the forefront of the erosionof Christianity’s authority as an objective truth, alongside critiques of its
authority over the governance of behaviour. The time also felt rightbecause such a concentration could capitalise on the impact ofChristianity’s own ‘fifth column’, those who had produced English
translations of David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus, Essays and Reviews
and Lux Mundi. The RPA’s publishing initiatives actively wanted not justto inform but also to create a predisposition to distrust beliefs andembrace reason (Whyte 1949, vii). The human sciences offered thechance to benefit the whole of society, both on their own terms and as themost potent weapon against religion’s claims. These strategic goals
assisted the movement’s desire to move from ‘guerrilla warfare to a fullscale campaign’ (Whyte 1949, 2).

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The RPA readily utilised the publishing experience and skills of
those who remained from the heyday of secularist newspaper
publishing, chiefly Charles A. Watts (1858–1946), the former editor ofCharles Bradlaugh’s National Reformer. Watts was also responsible forthe creation of a highbrow newspaper, Watts’ Literary Guide, which was
designed to reach the opinion-forming classes, and eventually morphed
into the modern magazine New Humanist. A changed emphasis on new
subjects also vied with repolishing and republishing elements of thepast, almost in an attempt to create an alternative history and canon. So
human sciences competed for attention, to an extent, with biographiesof past great thinkers in a secular and humanist tradition. These latter
publications would be leavened with the occasional individual
publishing success story, such as John Mackinnon Robertson’s
Christianity and Mythology, which (trading on his wider reputation)
went through several editions.
The RPA, at least for a while, relied on word of mouth, unofficial
forms of promotion, and casual encounter with its contents for its success.
To all intents and purposes the organisation had become a ‘book club’,financed by modest sales and Association subscriptions. The aspiration toreach the wider world came when the RPA was able to publish jointly with
Macmillan when they released a reprint of T. H. Huxley’s Essays andLectures. It quickly became a success story, selling out a first edition and a
hasty second reprint (over 40,000 copies). To some extent this desire to
publish popular works became a wider trend in 1928 when the RPA
embarked upon the ambitious venture of producing the particularly eyecatching concept of the ‘Thinker’s Library’. It showcased what the RPA
considered to be ‘classics of rationalism’ from such writers as J. S. Mill,
Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells, Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley. These
editions carefully trod the line between being distinctively stylish andbeing cheap, and were sold from an attractive, bespoke display cabinet
which could be purchased by enterprising booksellers. The series offereda renewed opportunity to revisit the autodidact complete education ofSecularism’s forebears, and allowed for pick-and-mix reading habits or
chance discovery. Eventually the effort put into these initiatives meantthat Christianity itself, in the interwar period, often bemoaned the fact
that, for the layperson seeking to educate themselves, the best
introductions to many of the sciences were penned by atheists. This left
the Church lagging behind in its potential explanatory power over themodern world. For this reason atheist publication strategies in the first
third of the twentieth century had some degree of ideological success.

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Nonetheless, as a business proposition the RPA was occasionally a
liability and to many seemed stuck in a time warp, repeating the
publication of Victorian and Edwardian material that was unable to speak
to the modern generation in their twenties, an audience which the secularand later humanist movement sorely needed.

The Open Society unfolded
The interwar period saw humanism in Britain interact with the ideas ofKarl Popper and his concept of the ‘Open Society’. The BHA later expressed
this fundamental principle in the following terms:
The Open Society is the name given to a society which respects all
viewpoints and traditions present in it and in which the ideas of
democracy are extended to include a much expanded participationof individuals in decision making and the conduct of affairs. It is theantithesis of the authoritarian society.
(British Humanist Association 1972)
This ideology was ostensibly formed in response to the episodic successof tyrannical regimes in the 1930 and 1940s, and appeared to be a tacit
admission that societies ‘closed’ to debate and progressive ideas had
fallen into totalitarianism. Popper’s ‘Open Society’ was thus an attempt toenrich debate and actively encourage the spread of the participatory
element within politics and other decision-making processes. Moral
education was to be an important tool and would be shaped to create an
expectation that institutions would be ‘shared’ by all, rather thandominated by specific interests. The secular humanist movement in
Britain only fully adopted the ‘Open Society’ manifesto meaningfully inthe 1960s. For those who embraced these ideas communications media
seemed to have a crucial role in furthering this cause. Moreover, the‘Open Society’s’ belief in what had been surrendered to tyranny madecommunications media almost into a commodity, something to bepossessed, or at least not surrendered so readily to malevolent forces.
The ‘Open Society’ concept did create a belief that access to themedia would enable a sharing of this common good, whilst also
safeguarding its appropriate use. This belief became a de facto
commitment to a strategy of seeking the right to ‘broadcast’ alongsideother denominations and religious positions. Judged on these terms thesecular and humanist movements were always likely to come away228

GLOB AL SCEPTICAL PUBLICSdisappointed. In the immediate post-war period humanists who did
manage to enter the media (such as Jacob Bronowski, Bernard Williams
and Bertrand Russell) did so largely on the strength of their reputationsin other spheres. When in the media spotlight they were closelychaperoned and were refused the right to speak openly on secularist or
humanist matters. The summing up in such programmes also had asupervised and invariably Christian bias. In 1959 a Humanist Broadcasting
Council was formed to discuss permitting secular and humanist issues tobe debated on public service broadcasting. Debate was all that ensued
except for isolated programming victories. To this day humanist
viewpoints are absent from BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day. Likewise,
equality would not come from elbowing aside the practitioners of
religious broadcasting in the hope of ‘sharing’ this important institution.
Instead the collapse of enthusiasm for sabbatarian restrictions on Sunday
broadcasting and the waning interest in religious broadcasting would
turn it into a niche interest, one to be catered for alongside others as
though it were a minority rather than a priority. Whilst the power andinfluence within public service broadcasting was narrowly held in a few
hands, and the audience for its products was significantly captive, thequest for equality appeared to make clear and obvious sense. When
eventually this situation became democratised by technological change,
and its falling cost, new strategies and priorities would emerge.

Cyber scepticism: embracing the communityand campaigning
Investigating atheist online presence in the late 1990s, I could see thegradual adoption of the new technology and its possibilities in the UnitedStates (Nash 2002). What was striking about this situation was its
mirroring of the situation and problems of the nineteenth-century atheist
movement in Britain. The Secular Web acted as a repository of many
classic and standard atheistical texts which could be downloaded andprinted, providing the possible apotheosis of the ‘cheap edition’ concept
which the Rationalist Press Association struggled for so long to get right.
The campaigning impetus was catered for with web links to the main
freethought periodicals. Whereas in the nineteenth century the decision
to purchase a newspaper may have had both monetary and ideologicalopportunity cost for some, the web links approach of the internet
encouraged diversity of potential contact with related issues. This contact
could occur through the simple inclusion of extra links as places the

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freethinker might wish to roam intellectually. Such roaming could be
eclectic but not without controversy, or indeed inherent humour. One
debate surrounding the apparent desirability of affiliation concerned who
to ‘include’. This could reach into unknown territory, as potential fellow
travellers in unbelief asked whether links to groups involved in satanism
were desirable. One side of the argument saw satanists as legitimate
individuals circumscribed unjustly by Christianity and its cultural
attitudes. Therefore they should be treated as potential allies because of
their polar opposition to the Christian narrative. The dissenters from thisview, which eventually won the argument, strenuously suggested that
this was unacceptable because satanists were theists! Nonetheless, thisoutward desire to be ‘inclusive’ has been noted by some commentators as
indicating a potential splintering of effort and ideological will, which
essentially means that atheist groups are not competing with Christianity
or other religions but rather with themselves (Laughlin 2016, 317–19).
What does emerge from this period is that many who eventually
arrived at secularism did so through varieties of ‘seeking’ which saw them,
however briefly, embrace forms of Buddhism and Wicca. This perhaps
further raises a question about the precise active role of the internet itself
in the creation of atheists. ‘Seeking’ around secularism and freethought isscarcely new; however, the ability and ease with which some could tap
into a previously unknown subculture was suggestive even in the 1990s(Nash 2002). Many of the formative experiences of 1990s American
secularists mirrored those of their nineteenth-century British counterparts
and, in a vastly different religious context, the modern Moroccan nonbelievers described by Richter in this volume. Observing the moral
hypocrisy of Christian neighbours, and undergoing the enforced nature of
1990s American religious culture within the social and political spheres,
were formative experiences that had British nineteenth-century echoes.
Feelings of isolation would also surface, in some cases alongside a strategy
that avoided conflict with the wider community – a strategy observed by
Gupta in this volume in surveying contemporary India.
Thus, as was the case in the 1990s, new media of communications
were lauded as doing something different in creating a safe haven or
space in which secularists could contemplate their ideological world and,for a time, escape theism-laden culture. The impetus to create such ahaven has been noticed by Lundmark (this volume) in a description of
atheism as seeking to ‘think rationally’ rather than pursue the idea of
forming a wider movement. From the safety of physical distance (andanonymity, which has echoes in Gupta’s chapter in this volume) secularists
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Muslims. This recalled the set-piece discussion nights of their mid- to latenineteenth-century British counterparts, albeit with significant
advantages. Individuals expressed hope that this form of debate would
transcend the limits of print media and return to a supposed prehistory ofhealthy organic discussion (Nash 2002, 263). This optimism, however,pre-dated the arrival of antagonistic responses in the form of flame wars
and trolling. A consideration of the emergence of this new media may
suggest that the optimism about a free trade in ideas asserted bynineteenth-century secularists was echoed in the aspirations of their
American mid-1990s counterparts. The idea of the internet being
uncensorable spoke to the highly regulated media landscape of 1990s
America, and sustained optimism that the online world would remain aform of commons unsullied by vested interests.
The capacity for culture wars to limit freedom of speech was also
contemplated by atheists, since the creation of new media meant thetransmission of older culture into this media could be limited. Neglect, or
cynical and partisan choice about what was moved into this new media,
or even about what was moved into it first, had potential repercussions.
The apparently laudable aims of Project Gutenberg were slightly tainted
by its nomenclature, which signalled the centrality of Christianity tolearning and enlightenment (Nash 2002, 284). Objectors to this argued
that other unhelpful biases, concerning class, race and gender, would be
an issue created around this new canon in its transfer from old to newformats. Whether the effect was anticipated or not, the change to a newform of media meant questions arose about whether the work of Voltaire
could more readily be made available than that of street orators. Likewise,
would the work of the Enlightenment’s aged white males be privileged
above that of other gender, race and demographic groups?

Blasphemy: the ambivalent communication
Blasphemy is obviously a transgression, but it is also a form ofcommunication, however unwelcome encounters with it may be. As wehave heard, historians rely on its existence as evidence of dissident views.
However, some individuals embarked, and still embark, upon blasphemy
as a communication strategy to fortify their unbelief, or as result of theirrepugnance towards or dislike of specific religious doctrines. Blasphemy’s
existence has thus been a source of ambivalence, or even problematic
thoughts, for secularists. We have seen how blasphemous writing, andlegal cases around blasphemy, were a vehicle for Richard Carlile’s

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free-speech campaigns, but secularism’s relationship to blasphemy has
not always been so clear-cut.
When blasphemy was perpetrated by individuals outside the milieu
of secularism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thesecularists themselves could effectively stand aloof from subsequent
events and choose their stance on the matter. Defending individuals
against forces ranged against them by a vengeful Christian world was
popular inside the movement, and involved forms of support which could
be offered without ideological cost. It became easy to call into question
laws that could be used to prosecute, maltreat and imprison those
suffering from mental impairment (Toohey 1987). Likewise, classnarratives could be enlisted as an attack on blasphemy prosecutions, ifstreet-corner orators could be liable to imprisonment whilst academic
works largely escaped such censure (Nash 1999, 181–2). In the latetwentieth and early twenty-first centuries blasphemy accusations andprosecutions could be actively useful to secularist groups. These were
opportunities to raise issues such as the unjustness of curbs on freespeech, the discriminatory nature of the law and the shortcomings ofreligious explanations of the universe. Thus, commenting upon
blasphemy cases headed for prosecution showed that religious progress
was a situation of uneven development (Nash 2020, 163–88; Gubo 2015,
102–24).
In the West such ‘progress’ could be met with grassroots religious
initiatives that sought to re-evangelise a world potentially lost to
Christianity. In these instances blasphemy accusations and prosecutions
were valuable warnings that the preservation of Enlightenment ideals
was a work in progress that required renewed vigilance. In instances suchas the Salman Rushdie affair secularists could easily reach out to othergroups, such as writers and artists, to demonstrate how multiculturalism
was potentially asking too much of the Western traditions of free speech
and tolerance. In demanding the equalisation of blasphemy laws toprotect religions other than Christianity, the presence and the potential
power of religion in the modern world attracted attention, unwittingly onbehalf of the secularist cause. When modern states beyond the Westbegan to readopt blasphemy laws and define them anew, the accusationthat they had ridden roughshod over Western liberal preconceptions anddesires was easily made. In cases against Westerners who transgressed
poorly understood cultural and religious prohibitions, the secularenlightenment flag could easily be waved. Indigenous individuals who
made their own statements against their former faith very easily became

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lightning-rod causes that seamlessly fed campaigns against blasphemy
laws in the West.
The situation became a little more complicated when the blasphemy
was perpetrated from within the ranks of secularism itself. Blasphemy inthis context does appear as a form of perceived legitimate expression
which had a critical message for those who consumed it. What emerged
from the survey of atheist attitudes in America in the mid- to late 1990s
was that the First Amendment offered the freedom to be scurrilous incriticising Christianity. This perhaps enhanced the idea that pervasive
religious landscapes instinctively create their own culture of resistance.
Whether this is true or not, there was evidence that blasphemous postings
were popular amongst rank-and-file atheists, potentially fortifying themfor their lives in a pervasive Christian culture. Whilst not necessarily
constituting a community that adhered to an alternative belief system,
they could nonetheless rely on First Amendment protection. Moreover,the intended audience of the like-minded was meant to be a safe space
into which the theistic world should not intrude, or in which it should atleast keep silent, preventing the disruption of a blasphemy prosecution,
whereas other contexts would welcome one. Chalfant describes thecreation of such phenomena in this volume as a species of ‘coming in’ todigital spaces (as opposed to the proselytisation of ‘coming out’ or seeking
to offend). Chalfant also saw this as an issue about the choice to be visible
or otherwise. The status of such spaces was emphasised by a regime ofwarning screens to deflect the merely curious or religious from being
offended (Nash 2002, 285–6).
Blasphemous expression as the most extreme communications
media has been used by those within the movement at specific times toadvance various causes; it could even be an accusation against what
atheists and secularists considered mainstream educative material(see below). In 1880s England G. W. Foote’s Freethinker deliberately
published blasphemous cartoons in imitation of Bible scenes and stories.
They turned religion into a series of narratives that could be consideredbizarre or silly, inviting derision. This echoes the contemporary
experiences of some Saudis, described in this volume by Khazaal, whofound themselves confronting sacred narratives that emerged as ‘silly’
after serious scrutiny. Foote saw his action here as an adjunct andsupportive action in aid of attempts to prosecute England’s leading atheistof the late nineteenth century, Charles Bradlaugh. If his cartoons drewfurther attention to the attitudes of secularists and atheists, this attention
was seen as valuable in highlighting Bradlaugh’s plight and that of all
who shared his unbelief (Nash 1999, 110–11). Not all agreed with this,

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and those who saw atheist communication and publishing as a way topromote movement culture and support for far-flung atheists in theprovinces were embarrassed by the antics of a high-profile metropolitan
campaign. Even this judgement could seem ambiguous when the resulting
court case triggered petitions from all over liberal Britain against highhanded government action (Nash 1999, 148). In the end Foote had
several days in court, and his imprisonment, though uncomfortable,
ensured that he would attain the leadership of secularism when Charles
Bradlaugh died.
The renewal, revisiting or construction anew of blasphemy laws
themselves could similarly galvanise quasi-blasphemous action in
defiance of them. Importantly, with electronic media this could be done
swiftly and effectively. In 2009 the campaigning group Atheist Ireland
were aghast to discover that Ireland’s recently passed Defamation Act
contained provisions that made blasphemous utterances and publication
an illegal act. In response, at the start of 2010 the organisation publishedon its website a page entitled ‘25 blasphemous quotes’. It contained texts
from the New Testament and the Hadith of Bukhari, and quotes fromMark Twain, Frank Zappa, Salman Rushdie, Björk, Amanda Donohoe, theRev. Ian Paisley and Conor Cruise O’Brien.1 It was later expanded withfurther lists, which fell into a range of common themes. The action of
publishing this list was a modern equivalent of Foote’s published biblicalcartoons and comic life of Christ, since it challenged the government toinstitute a prosecution and affirm the supposed viability of the law (Nash1999, 118–30). The difference was that, unlike Foote’s publication, which
had a narrower distribution, this material was so easily available on theinternet that the casual reader could far more readily interact with thequotations’ web page. As a strategy it may also have been more effectivein Ireland, because the quotations had been available in the publicdomain in many guises. Displaying them in this form was intended todemonstrate their inherent rationality and reasonableness. They werealso manifestly less offensive than the Foote cartoons.
Blasphemy laws and debates about them had only been portrayed
as anachronistic when the prosecution of activists was contemplated andexecuted by authority. In the twenty-first-century world it is the arrival of
new laws that has prompted concern and action. Communications
media’s relationship with celebrity, in some instances, exposed the
problems inherent in blasphemy laws and potential prosecutions. The
Salman Rushdie affair had proved that media coverage and the publicity
it produced around a well-known individual writer were capable ofgalvanising public opinion on both sides. Nonetheless, celebrity

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involvement in other blasphemous incidents could, through media
coverage, mean that individual high-profile causes could sustain amomentum of their own, providing immense publicity and critique of thelegal situation.
This happened in Ireland, where a regular chat show host, Gay
Byrne, interviewed Stephen Fry in 2015 on the long-running confessional
television programme The Meaning of Life. As a parting question Fry was
asked what he would say to God were he to meet him. Fry retorted with arant against a creator who would visit bone cancer upon defencelesschildren. This was a classic ‘problem of evil’ statement which ought tohave been familiar to all those who debate the nature of religious belief.
However, within the context of Ireland’s defamation laws Fry’s statement
was potentially blasphemous.2 Within a short time an anonymouscomplaint had been laid at a Garda station in Dublin requesting that thelaw be used against Fry. The actions of the Garda (or rather their longtime inaction, since they merely filed the complaint, and finally resolved
to take no action) further contributed to the anomalous situation of
Ireland’s blasphemy law.3 What was significant was that when blasphemy
laws could be made to appear untenable, the broadcast media would
occasionally create situations that did the atheist and humanist groups’
campaigning for them.
Atheist Ireland’s campaign to remove the law of blasphemy in
Ireland demonstrates what can be achieved through the astute use ofcommunications media, and a recognition that a local or national issue
can be made into an international one. Campaigning could be professionaland slick, since the cost and availability of cheap technology and places
to host its productions brought national or even international campaigning
into the realm of even small-scale groups. This democratisation oftechnology made podcasting and the creation of professional-looking
videos both important and increasingly expected. Technology, andproficiency in using it, could respond to campaigning successes, give
immediate reports on discussion with government agencies, andbroadcast reports and speeches from international meetings ofsupranational bodies.4 The last of these was significant, since highlighting
how the Irish law provided a precedent for other countries to pursue andretain blasphemy laws was crucial in marshalling hostile international
opinion about what the Irish government had instigated without due
care. This mistaken course of action could be made to assume theproportions of an international embarrassment (Cox 2019). Ireland’s
blasphemy law was abolished in 2018 (Nash 2020, 181–6).

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In Ireland blasphemy served as a vehicle for accelerating change inthe context of a country that was grappling with a liberalisation of its
religious outlook. Suddenly its moral outlook adapted, with changes tolaws allowing same-sex marriage and abortion. The only note of cautionthat could be advanced was the consideration that such liberalisation wasquite often the result of urban Ireland conversing with itself. The votes
cast in these referenda indicated a clear majority in favour of liberalisationin urban centres, with a ‘burst circle’ effect that spread into neighbouring
counties, and enthusiasm for this stance waning in more isolated
communities. Both broadcast and social media and the causes they
espoused could have real effects, but they could not stretch everywhereon every occasion.

Conclusion: the reappearance of the older dilemmas,
and their consequences for contemporary atheism
As we have noted, the tension between reaching out to new publics andconsoling and comforting a constituency of adherents has been constant.
It has appeared regularly in a considerable number of atheists’ interactions
on both sides of the Atlantic, since the rise of a recognisably modern
movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the contemporary
world this tension has to an extent continued, but the nature of thiscontinuity deserves exploration. How does this perennial issue explain
the situation of modern atheists on both sides of the Atlantic and thelandscape they find in front of them? We might obviously consider thatthe rise and prominence of New Atheism and New Atheists appear tosignal a more strident approach to proselytising and an (at least
temporary) end to the culture of assimilation, compromise andcooperation. This had pervaded local relationships between atheists andhumanists and those of other faiths. It was also the case that secularrhetoric conveyed a latent fear that the Enlightenment was somewhat ‘indanger’ from the resurgence of religious faith but also, and perhaps more
importantly, from the blurring of the distinction between rationality andspirituality, a distinction New Atheists were anxious to preserve.
The problem then became that atheism and humanism continued toassume that all who came to them were seekers who had reached the endof their spiritual road. As such, they still carried the religious baggage anddetritus from their journey. In another guise this analysis would appear
in the regularly gathered statistics about waning religious belief andbelonging, so long a valuable touchstone for atheist and humanist

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advocacy of their beliefs. Both sides of the Atlantic have seen humanist
and atheist groups speak about, some have argued fixate on, thesestatistics in their communications to the public sphere. Statistics whichshow adherence to religion waning significantly can superficially be used
to argue that countries on both sides of the Atlantic are becoming
progressively more secular. Figures may not lie about waning religious
belief, but the leeching away of religious adherence by no means equals
a recourse to secularist alternatives.
Both religious and secular worldviews have had to confront thephenomenon of the rise of the ‘nones’, those not schooled or brought up
with religion and who potentially have no need to embrace it or reject it(Quack and Schuh 2017). Modes of address and communicating withsuch people have the capacity to reshape communications agendas. Some
commentators have noticed, with a strange amount of glee, just how
much this is likely to affect the outlook of atheist humanists and theirapparent demands for rationalism, and their distaste for vague spiritualand mystical trappings (Laughlin 2016). But this is to demand of
secularists and humanists a degree of ideological purity of outlook andmotive that Christianity in the West has long since forsaken and actively
traded in. But it is possible to consider that secularism, humanism andatheism are undergoing, or experiencing, a Dietrich Bonhoeffer moment.
This is a situation in which the sum of Bonhoeffer’s message to WesternProtestantism was that it should forsake the idea that religious belief andpractice were central to the lives of Western men and women. Such ideas
reached the popular mainstream in a number of influential books andpamphlets. The entrance of such ideas into the mainstream has been seen
by one historian to have influenced a particular ‘moment’ at which British
society had actively convinced that it had secularised itself to completion,
whether or not this was true (Brewitt-Taylor 2013).
Atheism has arguably still to fully realise that its message does notcarry the weight of moral indignation and sect-like self-preservation thatit once did. Therefore it is having to respond to this constituency of ‘nones’
and follow them in both their tastes and their modes of communication.
We can see some of this in action in relation to the former in, for example,
Conway Hall’s South Place Sunday Concerts (in London), which offer the
regularity of a Sunday ‘service’ without any other commitment, either
religious or secular.5 What patrons individually gain from this is not clear
but, as in post-Bonhoeffer Christianity, their attendance is perhaps all thatcan be hoped for and their willingness to simply attend has become theentire point. For the modern waning of moral indignation we might
consider the message of the 2009 ‘bus campaign’, which did not speak to

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the intense moral outrage of previous times. Instead it offered thereassurance of diffuse, and even unspoken, doubt (Kettell 2016). Its
message that there was probably ‘no god’ and that individuals should thus
simply strive to ‘enjoy their life’ reached out to ‘nones’, who were invited
to become fellow travellers.
We might also speculate about the conclusions individuals mightreach from seeing atheist and humanist organisations widen their appeal
through some systematic use of the phenomenon of modern celebrity.
Patrons and presidents of the British Humanist Association have comefrom the world of popular comedy, but also from amongst individuals
who cross bridges that link academic subject advocacy and understanding
with factual television presenting. Thus, within the history of atheist andsecularist communications media a new episode had arrived in whichorganisations would once again have to cross their fingers about the levelof commitment they could expect from individuals who became evenpartly sympathetic to their views and outlook. Whereas, once, lecture
audiences could be counted and book sales calculated, modern media
cannot assess commitment from lurking and the occasional comment.
Whilst this may look like a difficult position, it is possible to see areas inwhich modern communications strategies link with consumer demand.
It is arguably the case that many who contact atheist and humanists
groups are in search of the rites of passage that these organisations canperform. This also highlights that religious or non-religious affiliation
might coalesce around ‘moments’ that speak to individuals in a postBonhoeffer style of requiring only specific needs to be satisfied. This is anarea in which humanism itself has tailored its offer to outperform that ofconventional religions in some specific ways. A non-invasive means ofcommunicating the worldview of humanists is through the range offuneral provision now available. Humanism in Britain has been quick toprepare publications about secular funerals, which have gone through asignificant number of editions and have shown a cycle of development.
These publications, interestingly, have been geared to being inclusive andto cornering an increasing market that wants something different fromprescribed and off-the-peg religious burial services (Wilson 1989, 1990,
1992, 1995, 1998, 2006, 2014). Humanists have been quick to state
within these works that the emphasis in secular funerals, at least the ones
portrayed in this literature, is on choice. This emphasis increasingly
enables a degree of personalisation that pleases individuals contemplating
their own funeral, or those close to them who are choosing something
they deem to be appropriate. These publications also contain templates
for a variety of circumstances pertaining to the manner of the individual’s

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death, or indeed their age and gender (Mountain 2000). Choice andflexibility are the watchwords for this provision (Nash 2017).
If we seek to draw links between some current atheist and humanist
publishing provision, ‘worship’ provision and rites of passage provision,
there is perhaps a common thread. Alongside the ‘no religion’ declarers,
and the ‘nones’ with no trace of religious culture, atheist organisations
might be dealing with and assisting some people we might once again
describe as deist. These are people who may have a sense of spirituality
and a vague sense of a supreme being but want nothing to do withreligion. Instead, these individuals seek to ‘shop’ for religiosity from aprepared list of needs (Stolz et al. 2016, 194). The creation of messages
about dissatisfaction with religious practices, and, more interestingly,
dissatisfaction with their prescriptiveness in an era of choice, means thatatheist communications strategies in their role of reaching out to society
adopt different stances. They thus use a mixture of ‘popping up’ in frontof people in a variety of media, and publicising the possibility of openended provision when it comes to rites of passage. Although this cansound as though it contains elements of the story we started with, atheist
organisations and their communications strategies have contributed toensuring that plurality and freedom of speech, however challenged andincomplete, are here to stay.

Notes
1
2
3
4

Atheist Ireland 2010.
McSorley 2018.
Collins 2017.
See, for example: ‘Atheist Ireland responds to abortion law questions at Irish parliamentary
hearing’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLrKNmocTNQ; ‘Does God exist? Michael
Nugent v William Lane Craig debate’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmlcmVye4hM;‘You have rights, your beliefs do not: Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland at OSCE meeting in
Poland’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msJ8HWvTNCc; ‘Does society need religious
faith? Michael Nugent in debate with John Waters’, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=fPV1l_ZyztU; ‘Can you believe in both science and religion? Michael Nugent debating
at UCC’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY2Sv25SrYs (all accessed 5 July 2022).
5 https://conwayhall.org.uk/sunday-concerts/history-archive/ (accessed 17 April 2022).

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Bradlaugh Bonner, Hypatia. 1894. Charles Bradlaugh: A record of his life and work, 2 vols. London:
T. Fisher Unwin.
Bradlaugh Bonner, Hypatia. 1934. Penalties upon Opinion; or, Some Records of the Laws of Heresy
and Blasphemy, 3rd edn, revised and enlarged by F. W. Read. London: Watts and Company.
Brewitt-Taylor, Sam. 2013. ‘The invention of a “secular society”? Christianity and the sudden
appearance of secularization discourses in the British national media, 1961–4.’ TwentiethCentury British History 24 (3); 327–50. https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwt012.
British Humanist Association. 1972. Education for the Open Society. London: British Humanist
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Carlile, Richard. 1821. Suppressed Defence: The defence of Mary-Anne Carlile, to the Vice Society’s
indictment, against the appendix to the theological works of Thomas Paine. London: R. Carlile.
Carlile, Richard. 1822. Report of the Trial of Mrs Susannah Wright, for publishing, in his shop, thewritings and correspondence of R. Carlile, before Chief Justice Abbott, and a special jury, in the
Court of King’s Bench, Guildhall, London, on Monday, July 8, 1822: Indictment at the instanceof the Society for the Suppression of Vice. London: R. Carlile.
Carlile, Richard. 1825. Report of the Trial of Mrs Carlile on the Attorney General’s Ex-Officio
Information for the Protection of Tyrants. London: Richard Carlile.
Cimino, Richard P. and Christopher Smith. 2014. ‘How the media got secularism – with a little help
from the New Atheists’. Oxford Handbooks Online. https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/
view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935420.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935420-e-15?print=pdf(accessed 12 June 2022). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935420.013.15.
Collins, Pádraig. 2017. ‘Stephen Fry investigated by Irish police for alleged blasphemy.’ The
Guardian, 7 May. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/may/07/stephen-fryinvestigated-by-irish-police-for-alleged-blasphemy (accessed 12 June 2022).
Cox, Neville. 2019. ‘Stephen Fry, the meaning of life and the problem with Irish blasphemy law.’
Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 8 (2): 247–69. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojlr/rwz019.
Febvre, Lucien. 1985. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The religion of Rabelais.
Trans. Beatrice Gottlieb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ginzburg, Carlo. 2013. The Cheese and the Worms: The cosmos of a sixteenth-century miller. Trans.
John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gubo, Darara Timotewos. 2015. Blasphemy and Defamation of Religions in a Polarized World:
How religious fundamentalism is challenging fundamental human rights. London: Lexington
Books.
Kettell, Steven. 2016. ‘What’s really new about New Atheism?’ Palgrave Communications 2, art.
no. 16099. https: //doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.99.
Laughlin, Jack C. 2016. ‘Varieties of an atheist public in a digital age: The politics of recognition
and the recognition of politics.’ Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture 5 (2): 315–38.
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MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 1999. Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation.
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McSorley, Christina. 2018. ‘Blasphemy, Stephen Fry and referendum in Ireland’. BBC News, 20
October. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45903094 (accessed 10 November2022).
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are unusual or tragic. London: British Humanist Association.
Nash, David S. 1995. ‘“Look in her face and lose thy dread of dying”: The ideological importanceof death to the secularist community in nineteenth-century Britain.’ Journal of Religious
History 19 (2): 158–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9809.1995.tb00254.x.
Nash, David S. 1999. Blasphemy in Modern Britain: 1789 to the present. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Nash, David S. 2002. ‘Religious sensibilities in the age of the internet: Freethought culture andthe historical context of communication media’, in Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media:
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Nash, David S. 2017. ‘Negotiating the marketplace of comfort: Secularists confront newparadigms of death and dying in twentieth-century Britain.’ Revue belge de Philologie etd’Histoire 95 (4): 963–88.
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Rectenwald, Michael. 2018. Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, religion, andliterature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Manchester: Manchester University Press, and Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
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1915. Manchester: Manchester University Press, and Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
Smith, Christopher and Richard P. Cimino. 2012. ‘Atheisms unbound: The role of the new media
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Krüggeler. 2016. (Un)Believing in Modern Society: Religion, spirituality, and religious-secularcompetition. Abingdon: Routledge.
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III
Atheism and scepticism in adigital age

9Intimate deconversions: digitalatheist counterpublics on Reddit
Eric Chalfant

Introduction: publics and counterpublics
The term ‘counterpublic’ emerged in response to a wave of criticisms ofHabermas, Lennox and Lennox’s conception of the public sphere, which
Nancy Fraser (1990, 62) neatly identifies as ‘bourgeois masculinist’.
Among these criticisms is the recognition that the public sphere, being
wrought by implicit and explicit exclusions that belie its ideally inclusive
nature, is better understood as a plurality of competing public spheres(Fraser 1990, 61). This awareness gives rise to a description of‘counterpublics’ as competing publics designed to resist or expose theideological biases that define appropriate modes of publicity. Fraser
describes counterpublics as publics that ‘contested the exclusionary
norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles of politicalbehavior and alternative norms of public speech’ (1990, 61).
Counterpublics, or more properly ‘subaltern counterpublics’ as Fraser
elaborates (1990, 68), have a dual character: ‘On the one hand, theyfunction as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand,
they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities
directed toward wider publics. … This dialectic enables subalterncounterpublics partially to offset, although not wholly to eradicate, theunjust participatory privileges enjoyed by members of dominant socialgroups in stratified societies.’

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In the wake of Fraser’s articulation of subaltern counterpublics,
Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics (2005) asks whether
subordinated status and idiomatic discourse are enough to constitute a
public as a counterpublic. Warner begins by outlining the idea of a public
as distinct both from the public (as an idealised social totality) and fromconcrete audiences assembled in visible space, as in a concert hall or
sports event. A public, in this third sense articulated by Warner, comes
into being only in relation to texts and their circulation; it is fundamentallya reading public – a collection of strangers self-organised around a text orother representational object, existing in relationship only by virtue ofbeing addressed by that object and giving that object their attention andrecirculating discourse around it.
A counterpublic, then, is first and foremost a public, already in aposition distinct from the public in the totalising, bourgeois conception.
Like any public, a counterpublic reshapes ‘the most intimate dimensionsof subjectivity around co-membership with indefinite persons in a context
of routine action’ (Warner 2005, 76). At the same time, since all publics
are self-organised around an object to be read, all publics ‘differ markedly
in one way or another from the premises that allow the dominant culture
to understand itself as a public’ (Warner 2005, 113). How, then, can we
preserve the category of counterpublic as different from any alternative
public, subpublic or specialised public? Warner gives the example of the
public of Field & Stream, a readership defined largely by a shared interestin hunting and fishing. This public is not a counterpublic, in Warner’seyes, since ‘nothing in the mode of address or in the projected horizon ofthis subculture requires its participants to cease for a moment to think ofthemselves as members of the general public; indeed, they might wellconsider themselves its most representative members’ (Warner 2005,
117). A public which, on the other hand, marks itself off unmistakably
from the dominant public more closely approaches a useful understandingof counterpublic. This is roughly in line with Fraser’s conception of acounterpublic, but Warner suggests that it is not enough that a public’s
oppositional character follow only from its content; this would better be
understood merely as a subpublic. Instead, Warner seeks a ‘difference ofkind, or of formal mediation, or of discourse pragmatics, between
counterpublics and any other publics’ (2005, 118). Here, Warner isperhaps unfair to Fraser, whose insistence that counterpublics articulate‘alternative styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public
speech’ (Fraser 1990, 61) sounds little different from Warner’s extensionof the conflict between counterpublics and the dominant public to ‘speech
genres and modes of address’ (2005, 119). Nonetheless, Warner’s

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counterpublics circulate forms of discourse that ‘in other contexts would
be regarded with hostility or with a sense of indecorousness’ (2005, 119).
There is a final facet of counterpublics that needs to be fleshed out
before we turn to our case study, and that is the particular ways in whichcounterpublics marry intimacy with impersonality. As reading publics,
counterpublics consist of people who, while self-organised around someshared interest or subordinated subject-position, nonetheless remain
strangers to one another. To the extent that the public frees its members
from the restrictions that would prevent identification with one another inpublic (for example, the requirement to remain closeted in dominantculture is lifted in a queer public), those freedoms remain bounded by areflexivity that acknowledges the subaltern status of the public. And socounterpublic discourse tends to embrace a kind of performative poesis
around identity, in which members ‘fashion their own subjectivities
around the requirements of public circulation and stranger sociability’(Warner 2005, 121). In other words, counterpublics enable and require aparticular relationship between intimacy and publicity. Standing in aposition of subordination to a dominant culture, the members of acounterpublic find themselves free to embrace forms of address ‘ladenwith intimate affect’, while simultaneously aware that those forms ofaddress ‘must also be extended impersonally, available for co-membershipon the basis of mere attention’ (Warner 2005, 121). Thus, Warnersummarises, ‘Counterpublics are “counter” to the extent that they try tosupply different ways of imagining stranger sociability and its reflexivity;
as publics, they remain oriented to stranger circulation in a way that is notjust strategic but constitutive of membership and its affects’ (2005, 121–2).
Here, then, we are ready to turn to our case study. I want to suggestthat Reddit’s atheists – members of a reading public self-organised aroundthe r/atheism subreddit and its affiliates – constitute a counterpublic tothe extent that they frame pseudonymity as a preferable and more
intimate alternative to dominant forms of public identification. They seize
upon a particular affordance of Reddit’s interface – the pseudonymous
nature of user profiles – as a way of cultivating a particular affect of
stranger intimacy that serves not as a vehicle or platform for integration
into the dominant public sphere, but as a counterpublic that provides analternative space for the performance of (non-)religious identity asneither fully public nor fully private.
It is important to note at this point that the analysis that follows is
not intended to generate sweeping generalisations about different media
forms and their compatibility with particular political strategies,
technologies of subject-formation or forms of collective organisation. I

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turn next to Madalyn Murray O’Hair as emblematic of one form of atheist
politics and one understanding of the role of media (specifically broadcast
media), in order to juxtapose that understanding with the kind of
discourse frequently articulated by atheists on Reddit. This is my attempt
to generate a contrast, not a typology or historical narrative. It would be
reductive to overlook the diverse history of atheism in North America asa collection of social movements, particularly as they intersect with media
forms. There have been diverse forms of print media aimed both at closed
groups and at the public writ large. There have been radio and television
broadcasts appealing to the ‘subaltern’ status of atheists rather thanurging them to make themselves visible. There have been digital platforms
geared towards the promotion of identity-based activism and publicity
campaigns. And of course, there is ample disagreement among Reddit’s
atheist users about how to understand their relationship to a wider
religious culture. The argument that follows is meant to draw out aparticular understanding of digital atheist identity on a particular digitalplatform with particular affordances.1 It must also be noted that myanalysis here is limited in geographic and cultural scope. My argument
about the relationship between atheism and visibility fits into the larger
history of atheism in the United States and depends in large part on theunique character of American secularism as shaped by Protestant
Christianity. And while Reddit is an internationally accessible digitalplatform, Americans account for the largest chunk of its user base by far,and so its content largely reflects American culture(s). Despite thesecaveats and qualifications, it is my hope that this case study may add some
substance to the ongoing scholarly discussion about the relationshipbetween atheist identity, the public sphere and the role of media in theformation of both.

Coming out: Madalyn Murray O’Hair and the politics
of visibility
The first thing to do when thinking about atheist publics is to distinguishthe strict materialism or rational scepticism of ‘Atheism’ (noted foremphasis here with the capital ‘A’), that only exists in philosophicaltreatises and dictionary entries, from the diverse and frustratingly
complex human beings who identify their own subject-positions according
to much more nebulous and common understandings of ‘atheism’. Most
people find it relatively easy to understand Atheism as, roughly speaking,strict disbelief in personal deities and a more or less rigorous commitment

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to scientific empiricism. What is more difficult is wrapping one’s head, in
any satisfying way, round what it means or how it feels to be an atheist.
For the sake of argumentative clarity, this chapter will begin with anoversimplification: atheism has been, from its emergence as a self-identity
around three hundred years ago,2 inextricably linked to the politics ofvisibility. Unpacking what exactly this politics of visibility entails is one ofthe primary aims of what follows, but for now I will claim that the primarysocial or political ambition of atheists in the West has long been to renderatheism visible to a wider religious public.
The ambition to render atheism visible is an intuitive response toatheism’s marginalised status in a religious society. The image of theatheist – immoral, licentious and philosophically confused – long
preceded those who identified as atheists themselves; it was first a
chimera created by theologians and religious leaders to conflate anddenigrate various forms of heterodoxy. To identify as an atheist, then,long meant to inhabit an already visible (if imaginatively non-viable)
subject-position and to attempt to recuperate it by making it viable – bygiving it a coherent and defensible re-presentation.
The emphasis on rendering atheism visible reached its zenith in themid- to late twentieth century with the work of American atheist Madalyn
Murray O’Hair, founder and president of American Atheists and selfappointed representative of atheist identity writ large. Made famous by
her involvement in the 1963 Supreme Court decision that prohibited
mandatory prayer in public schools, School District of Abington Township,Pennsylvania, et al. v. Edward Schempp, et al.; Murray, et al. v. Curlett, et al.,Constituting the Board of School Commissioners of Baltimore City, O’Hairarguably had as her overarching career ambition simultaneously to takecontrol of her own public image as ‘the most hated woman in America’(Howard 1964) and to force a Christian society to confront the figure of
the atheist. While O’Hair’s primary political tactic was legal, her larger
ambition was to create a coherent and highly visible atheist subjectposition with which religious sceptics could identify. O’Hair was singularly
concerned with visibility. She took every opportunity to represent atheismon broadcast media, appearing on television shows like ‘The Tonight
Show’ with Johnny Carson and ‘The Donahue Show’ with Phil Donahue.
Her aim throughout her career was primarily to conjure into being thefigure of the outspoken atheist:
She did expend great effort to desensitize the nation to the ‘A-word’.
She used the words ‘Atheist’ and ‘Atheism’ – capitalized, no less –over and over in every possible venue. Before Madalyn, most248

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Atheists were afraid to use the word other than in whispers. Things
are much different now, thanks to her, although I can’t say thedesensitization of society as a whole is yet complete. Nevertheless,
Madalyn made it much safer – and much more natural – to call
oneself an Atheist.
(Zindler 2013, 28)
O’Hair’s preferred medium was radio, where she could present herself on
her own terms without the interference of television hosts or formats(O’Hair 1968a). She founded and operated the American Atheist Radio
Series out of KTBC Austin from 1968 to 1977 as a platform from which toelaborate her plea for atheism to render itself as visible as possible to theAmerican public. The quest for equal rights for atheists, in O’Hair’s
descriptions, was predicated on the articulation of an identity as explicitly
visible as ethnicity: ‘We seek ethnic identity and the right to be free fromreligion in our cultural milieu, a right now specifically denied us by law’
(O’Hair 1972a). O’Hair situated the political ambitions of atheists firmly
among other countercultural movements of the time that were finding
increased acceptance (O’Hair 1971).
The goal of developing a coherent definition of atheism that
encapsulated and unified historical variants of religious scepticism was
inextricably linked in her mind to the goal of rendering atheism visible to
the wider public: ‘The biggest underground in America is Atheism. This
group has never been organised before to have our voices heard and thatis what we are trying to do now. … You are not alone, not anymore’(O’Hair 1968b). O’Hair’s goal in 1968 was ‘to have people who are
Atheists admit this and to announce to the world that they are Atheists,
for we have much to offer the American culture’ (O’Hair 1968c). Visibility
was power, and by 1983 O’Hair had distilled her goals down to a motto:‘Unity today, power tomorrow’ (Murray 1988, 7).
To return for a moment to the language of publics and counterpublics,
O’Hair’s articulation of atheist identity politics as a means of integrating(albeit without assimilating) atheists into the larger public spherecomplicates attempts to conceive her listening public as a counterpublic,in Fraser’s and Warner’s senses of the term. Fraser notes (1990, 59), forexample, drawing on the work of scholars like Joan Landes, Mary Ryan
and Geoff Eley, that alternative publics are typically situated in tension
with the exclusions that constitute the official public sphere, even while
the public sphere is idealised as universally accessible. In this sense,
O’Hair clearly understands herself and her listeners as members of justsuch a public excluded from the public sphere writ large. If counterpublics,

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in Fraser’s (1990, 64) sense, attempt in various ways to expose themythical nature of the public sphere as a space of ‘zero degree culture, soutterly bereft of any specific ethos as to accommodate with perfectneutrality and equal ease interventions expressive of any and every
cultural ethos’, then O’Hair’s project is easily read in this light as an
attempt to highlight the fiction of American secularism as a true
bracketing or privatisation of religious belief. When O’Hair broadcasts in1971 her claim that ‘the need for complete assimilation into the dominantculture is no longer recognised as being absolutely essential to being a“good American” ’, she may very well be emphatically rejecting theinfluential logic of Will Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An essay in
American religious sociology (1955), which married American citizenshipwith religious identity. In other words, O’Hair’s form of identity politics
can be read as an attempt to expose the fiction that the public sphere isneutral towards public declarations of religious belief and disbelief.
Where the idealised bourgeois public sphere purports to restrict religion
to the private sphere, O’Hair wants to show that this restriction is only
applied in practice to those who hold heterodox religious views. The
important question here, however, is Warner’s: do the discursive forms ofthis subpublic work towards eradicating this fiction and gaining access tothe public sphere, or do they work instead towards maintaining asubordinate position in which to carry out an alternative poesis ofidentity? In the case of O’Hair, the goal seems to be to gain access to the
public sphere, to reshape the public sphere so that it no longer excludes
atheists. And for this reason, her public is not quite a counterpublic, forrather than ‘keeping the counterpublic horizon salient’ (Warner 2005,120), it seeks the elimination of the implicit exclusions that would regard
atheist identity as indecorous or incompatible with public speech. O’Hair’s
discourse does not ‘supply different ways of imagining stranger sociability
and its reflexivity’ (Warner 2005, 121–2), instead aiming only to hold the
public sphere to its own ideals: her public’s poesis is not transformative,
but merely replicative (Warner 2005, 122).

Coming in: deconversion online
In comparison with the emphasis on visibility and traditional identity
politics espoused by Madalyn Murray O’Hair and others in the twentiethcentury, Reddit’s atheist community expresses a much more ambivalentapproach to the question of atheist identity in the process of coming out.3
This is evident from r/atheism’s front page. A link at the top of the page

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asks, ‘Thinking about telling your parents? Read this first.’ The link directs
users to a page devoted to offering advice to those who wonder ‘Should I
come out to my parents as being an atheist?’ and ‘The short answer’, thepage emphasises, ‘is No.’ Given the risk for young people still living at
home that their parents might evict them from the home, ‘r/atheism willalmost invariably respond that you should wait’. Such advice, it seems, isin response to ‘the constant flow of submissions from people who
discovered their parents were not nearly as understanding as they
imagined’, some 100 examples of which are then hyperlinked (‘Comingout– Atheism’, n.d.). Thus, a scepticism about the value of coming out isendorsed by the official face of r/atheism. This scepticism is reflected in
the most substantial subreddit devoted to the collection of coming-out
stories, r/atheismcomingout, the majority of which describe feelings ofbeing misunderstood, ostracised or disowned.
If ‘coming out’ was one of the primary objectives of O’Hair’s atheist
identity politics in the twentieth century, it has here begun to give way toan emphasis on what I call ‘coming in’ to digital media spaces. A numberof scholars have deployed the term ‘coming in’ in various and productive
ways. For example, Hammoud-Beckett (2007) describes ‘coming in’ as
the process of reversing the direction of disclosure of sexual orientationand selectively inviting personal relations into one’s intimate identity
rather than vice versa. Wilson (2008) describes ‘coming in’ as the process
by which some Two-Spirit people recognise the interdependence (rather
than declaring the independence) of sexual difference. And Rosenberg(2018) describes ‘coming in’ as the process of accepting one’s sexuality
while eschewing society’s emphasis on social visibility and disclosure.
In this chapter, ‘coming in’ refers first and foremost to a dynamic ofmediation, in which digital media constitutes a form of public thatreconfigures the relationships between visibility, identity and intimacy.
Coming out privileges the visibility of identity at the expense of intimacy,
for the unity that comes with shared identity at least implicitly involves
the dissolution of individuality on which intimacy is predicated. Comingin, on the other hand, involves a form of visibility that is circumscribedboth by the fact of digital media’s relative seclusion from the traditional
public sphere and by the pseudonymous nature of participation in some
digital platforms. Pseudonymity refers to a particular affordance of media
in which a user’s digital activity is connected not to that user’s offline
identity but instead to a more or less stable pseudonym.4 Not every digitalplatform is pseudonymous, though many are. Facebook has madeheadlines for explicitly rejecting pseudonymity, insisting instead thateach profile should correspond to exactly one ‘authentic identity’

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(Facebook Transparency Center n.d.). Reddit, on the other hand, ispseudonymous. Users may have as many pseudonyms – in the form ofusernames – as they want, and Redditors frequently employ multiple
usernames for different contexts and burn through new usernames as ameans of clearing their history. It is important also to distinguishpseudonymity from anonymity. Reddit usernames are stable by virtue ofbeing subscribed to individual subreddits and by being attached to aviewable history of posts, comments and comment replies. Thus, incomparison to anonymity, pseudonymity allows users to cultivate
relatively stable relationships with other users as well as media-specificforms of personal memory and collective history.
Users of digital media are able, more than in most other media
forms, to control the relationship between the visibility of their
participation and the facets of their own identity that they find salient indifferent contexts. In the context of the pseudonymous space of Reddit,
then, atheists can render their atheism highly visible online (and in a
relatively durable sense) and still invisible offline, while at the same timerendering their ‘real’ identity invisible to the online world. Importantly forour consideration of whether Reddit’s atheists constitute a counterpublic,
the reconfiguration of the relationship between visibility and identity
deployed in the process of ‘coming in’ allows digital media users todevelop new forms and formations of intimacy.
A growing body of scholarship has begun to unpack the myriad
personal circumstances and justifications that precede and precipitate anindividual’s decision to identify – either internally or to others – as an
atheist (Barbour 1994; Bullivant 2008; Fazzino 2014; Hood and Chen
2013; Jacobs 1987; Perez and Vallières 2019; Smith 2011; Starr, Waldo
and Kauffman 2019; Streib et al. 2009). Like any scholarship that takes
human experience as its data, this body of work covers a broad range ofapproaches to the relationship between the processes of ‘deconversion’ andthe ‘deprivatization of disbelief’ (Ribberink, Achterberg and Houtman2013). Though they are often conflated, deconversion and ‘coming out’ orthe ‘deprivatization of disbelief’ are not synonymous: the former refers to abasic internal self-understanding as reported in individual testimony, while
the latter refers to a public declaration of one’s identity. A deconversion
narrative is a story that describes how one came to identify oneself as an
atheist, more to oneself than to others, while ‘coming out’ is typically aprocess by which one reveals a pre-existing atheist identity to anotherperson. Deconversion narratives primarily describe moments of realisation,
while ‘coming out’ stories primarily describe moments of revelation. Thereis ample room for scholarly interpretation, however, in theorising the252

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relationship between the two. For example, scholars vary in the extent towhich they regard deconversion narratives as accurate enough recountingsof experiences to constitute useful sociological data or as texts to beinterpreted as discourse, literature or performance. And if there is aslippage between the two ideas – deconversion and coming out – it depends
in part where one theorises the line between public and private.
Thus, in the analysis that follows, stories of deconversion offer aninterface between atheists’ purely interior understandings of self-identity
on the one hand, and a performative deprivatisation of disbelief
circumscribed by digital media on the other. While r/atheism tends todiscourage its users from publicising their atheism too broadly, subreddits
like r/thegreatproject actively encourage and celebrate the sharing of
deconversion narratives. The difference between these two facets of atheist
identification – deconversion and coming out – I argue, gets to the heart ofan important ability of pseudonymous digital interfaces to alter traditional
understandings of the relationships between public and private. The
general celebration of deconversion narratives in conjunction with the
scepticism concerning public acts of coming out points to a conceptualisationof the digital space as the proper site of the deprivatisation of disbelief.
Traditional notions of ‘coming out’ are then replaced with a kind of ‘coming
in’ in which the digital arena constitutes the truly public – now a kind of
pseudonymous publicity – and the traditionally public sphere becomes arealm of enforced privatisation. For many atheist users of Reddit, in otherwords, the digital provides a more authentic form of publicity than the ‘realworld’, suggesting a performative poesis of identity productively understood
through the lens of counterpublics.

Digital deconversion: the complication of agency
The reorientation of the public/private divide that takes place in
pseudonymous digital arenas like Reddit goes hand in hand with acomplication of individual agency best understood through recourse toan analysis of the digital interface. In part because algorithmic culture
obfuscates simple attributions of agency, rendering invisible and porous
the processes that interpellate subjects, users tend to express a
preoccupation with the question of agency. Put differently, as it becomesincreasingly difficult in the digital arena to determine whether one’s
identity is freely chosen or determined by machinations outside the self,
digital atheists express increasingly complex understandings of their own
agency in relation to their identity as atheists.

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We can take one striking moment from Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s
radio broadcasts as our point of departure. On 31 March 1969, O’Hairinterviewed an atheist named Bill, eventually revealed to be her son
William J. Murray III, on her weekly radio programme. At a certain pointin the conversation, O’Hair sets Bill up to outline his deconversion story,
asking, ‘What kind of background would you say that you come from, thatyou have accepted the overall philosophy of life – Atheist thinking … inorder to improve the condition of human beings and therefore of yourself,
I suppose, in living?’ (O’Hair 1972b, 230). Bill’s response immediately
pushes back against O’Hair’s use of the term ‘accept’ in a way that
foregrounds individual agency:
First we have to realize that an Atheist does not accept. An Atheist
critically examines a situation and then does what he feels is right.
So, I do not feel that I have accepted anything. I feel that I have cometo an intellectual decision as to what my ideas are as to working inthe society, and what I should do. I think that with myself, as with
any Atheist, these things are completely individualistic and do notreflect acceptable or non-acceptable ‘anything’, really.
(O’Hair 1972b, 230)
Bill’s ardent defence of his own agency, though obviously anecdotal, serves
as a jumping-off point from which to analyse the rhetoric common todeconversion narratives on the internet. Deconversion narratives areexamples of what Colin Campbell (1971) calls ‘irreligious experience’.
Campbell’s ‘irreligion’, a departure from the intellectualist language ofatheism or secularism, draws attention to the subcultural ethical andemotional underpinnings of non-religious identity. The focus on experience
implicitly draws attention to those moments in a story of deconversion
when the subject is unable or unwilling to distinguish between immanentand transcendent, force and agent, and passivity and activity. Using
terminology more popular today, one might say that ‘irreligious experiences’
occur in an affective register, referring more to the blurry arena of felt
experience than to that of clearly defined epistemology.
This affective quality explains, then, the ambivalent rhetoric thatsaturates accounts of deconversion, as individuals struggle to articulate
an irreligious experience using inadequate terminology. Digital
deconversion narratives often exhibit language that celebrates individual
agency while simultaneously expressing countervailing disavowals ofagency that are lacking in Bill’s broadcast narrative. It is not uncommon
to see, in stories of deconversion online, the very language of ‘acceptance’254

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that Bill rejects. A number of popular threads on Reddit emphasise afeeling that there is little agency at play in becoming an atheist.
In a popular thread called ‘[Does anyone else] think being atheist is
not a choice’, user u/secme (2011) writes, ‘This is how it is with me atleast, I don’t think I could even chose to be religious ever again’. The mostpopular comments echo this sentiment: ‘Atheist is simply the default
operating system every human is born with before the virus of religion is
implanted’ (u/ALIENSMACK 2011). ‘Belief is not subject to the will.
You’re either confronted with evidence that obligates belief, or you’re
forced to reject it as unsupported’(u/Painordelight 2011). ‘I do not think
one can choose to (not) believe something. It is a response’ (u/dembones012011). Other strongly upvoted threads and popular comments replicate
similar discussions: ‘People do not choose to be atheists; they realize theyare’ (u/emblemparade 2015). ‘Atheism is not a “choice”’ (u/Humanst2011). These explicit disavowals of agency are accompanied by more
implicit linguistic tropes common to deconversion narratives on theinternet.
One recurring trope in deconversion narratives is an account of a
precise and instantaneous moment in which the deconvert wastransformed into an atheist (Bullivant 2008; Chalfant 2011; Chalfant2016). The trope of conversion as a kind of sudden gestalt shift or
irreversible transmutation often implies a sense of passivity in relation toindividual agency. In many cases, the instantaneousness of deconversion
is connected to spiritual or quasi-spiritual language. Instant epiphanies,
Damascene conversions and bolts from the blue mark deconversions as
events visited upon passive individuals. Terms like ‘epiphany’ maintain
pseudo-religious trappings of ‘the time when the hand of the divine ismost plainly visible … in which the individual feels guided, or coerced, or
enraptured by a divine presence’ (Buckser and Glazier 2003, xii). The
claim is often that deconversion ‘happened’ according to its own inertia
and that the individual undergoing deconversion did little to consciously
enact the transformation.
Deconversion narratives also tend to highlight the social andemotional upheaval which follows ‘coming out’ (Bullivant 2008). These
descriptions of deconversion as a moment of crisis imply that it is aprocess which happens whether the subject wants it to or not (Chalfant
2011, 2016). This is best understood as a reaction to a particularunderstanding of religion as a kind of ideology that preys on the agency
of individuals. Because religion is constructed as wish-fulfilment – acorruption of agency in which normally rational individuals are coerced
into believing what they want to believe – the claim that deconversion

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occurs against the individual’s desires serves to establish an understandingof atheism as somehow more true than religious identification. Truth ispositioned in an inverse relationship to desire and, accordingly, agency.
One might interpret the linguistic conventions of deconversion
narratives in Foucauldian terms as confessional technologies of the self
aimed at reinforcing the sovereignty of atheist subjectivity. Michel
Foucault’s discussions of confessional practices in The History of Sexuality:
Volume 1 (1978), as well as ‘Technologies of the self’ (1988), consider theways in which truth is inscribed at the heart of the individual subject. For
Foucault, confession is one of most potent means by which individual
truths are objectified, by being placed deep in the body of the individual
where they are purportedly out of reach of historical contamination:
The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different
points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as
the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to
us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only tosurface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it inplace, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally bearticulated only at the price of a kind of liberation.
(Foucault 1978, 60)
Confession thus constitutes, for Foucault, a disciplinary power which
strips truth from sovereignty, attributing its obfuscation to repressive
force. Foucault’s work on confession suggests that deconversion narratives
may serve to insulate truth from relations of power by removing theindividual agent – the vehicle of cultural construction – from thetechnology by which atheist subjectivity is constructed. In those tropes inwhich deconversion strikes an unwitting and passive individual like a bolt
from the blue, truth is positioned as something external to the individual,
who is understood as the locus for all of those desires that contribute toreligious ideology. The emphasis on truth as originating from an external
reality or as emerging suddenly from somewhere deep within thesubconscious of the confessing subject serves to mask that ‘its productionis thoroughly imbued with relations of power’ (Foucault 1978, 60).
Of course, the disavowals of agency common to digital deconversion
narratives are complicated by discourse which celebrates individuality
and choice against the oppressive conformity imposed by religion. One
area in which r/atheism’s users celebrate agency revolves around frequentdiscussions of LGBT identity. Given the popular embrace of the rhetoricof ‘coming out’, it is perhaps no surprise that atheists on the internet often

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find affinity with the queer community. But while it might seem intuitivethat digital atheists would embrace wholesale the popular discourse thatemphasises the naturalness of queer identity in response to critics who
regard sexual non-normativity as a choice, instead one finds atheists
rejecting disavowals of agency. Consider the following: user u/Cleev(2012) started a thread called ‘Being gay is a choice’, in which they
caricaturise the conservative understanding of homosexuality as a choice:‘What is the gay agenda? Recruitment. Since no one is born gay, gay
people have to try and indoctrinate and recruit the rest of us at an earlyage, before we have the wherewithal to figure out for ourselves that thegay agenda is a lie’ (u/Cleev 2012). u/Cleev then asks readers to substitutethe word ‘Christian’ for the word ‘gay’, implying that it is precisely theissue of agency that renders religion problematic and divorces atheism
from the realm of ideology. This replicates, then, a familiar logic in which
it is only that which cannot be chosen (in this case, queerness or atheism)that is immune from criticism.
But the responses to u/Cleev’s post are hardly universally positive.
The most popular serious comment isolates the issue of choice as a
distraction: ‘What I want to know is … Who really cares if it is a choice ornot? What difference would it make if it was a choice? Are we not free
men and women living in a free country with a guaranteed right to pursue
happiness?’ (u/Demaestro 2012). In another thread, a similar
conversation transpires when user u/dperr117 links to an image of
comedian David Cross overlaid with the text of a quote from Cross, inwhich he argues for an exclusively genetic understanding of homosexuality(‘David Cross …’ 2012). For Cross, we read, the humour lies in theabsurdity of pretending that someone would choose to adopt an identitythat made them the target of bigotry and hatred. Again, the most popularcomments are highly critical: ‘So fucking what if it’s a choice. Why is thata reason to hate someone. Go about your life and don’t say or do mean shit
to people’ (u/Wasmyfault 2012). ‘Even if it was a choice, so what?’(u/Msheno 2012). In other words, while r/atheism’s users often shunchoice when it is said to underlie atheist identity, one sees simultaneous
attempts to reclaim agency from those who would downplay it in theformation of identity. To account for this confused or paradoxical
understanding of agency, we have to consider again the material
specificity of the interface.

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The invisible hand of the interface
One of the themes that course through the history of media is the extent towhich particular anxieties provoked by particular media partially shape thenotions of identity articulated there. For Madalyn Murray O’Hair – abroadcast media native – the primary anxiety around atheist identity had
to do with visibility. Radio, her preferred medium, trafficked in invisibilities– of the material substrate of transmission, of the experience of listening, ofthe presence of the consuming audience. Thus, there is a constitutive
resonance between the politics of visibility advocated by O’Hair and theaffective contours of the media form through which she operated.
With the pseudonymous digital interface, the play of visibility andinvisibility remains, but it is now relocated so that the digital becomes theprimary site of visibility, and the anxiety concerning visibility becomes
more than ever inflected by the question of control. This is one of thequestions that theorists of ‘algorithmic culture’ (Chun 2013; Striphas2015) attempt to isolate: is it possible any longer to differentiate between
the free choice of the individual user and the determining machinationsof invisible algorithms and aggregate data? On a pseudo-anonymous andhighly algorithmic interface like Reddit, a traditional understanding ofagency as free will appears hopelessly simplistic.
Thus, it is not adequate to theorise deconversion narratives on theinternet as simply confessional technologies of the self aimed at
establishing the sovereign subject. Instead, the interface, as a mediator
between the visible and the invisible, aims at ‘the resurgence of theseemingly sovereign individual, the subject driven to know, driven to map,
to zoom in and out, to manipulate, and to act’ (Chun 2013, 8). To an
extent, neoliberal subjectivity has always relied on this interplay of thevisible and the invisible. The freedom of the subject is always
circumscribed and enabled by invisible forces (economic, genetic,
cultural, ideological) that determine it.
Foucault’s discussion of the economic subject, homo oeconomicus,
provides a more useful means to understand a conception of truth whichremoves truth from the reach of sovereignty. In The Birth of Biopolitics,
Foucault engages in an unconventional reading of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible
hand’ metaphor for describing economic rationality. In Foucault’s reading,the invisible hand operates in a space in which the forces that constitutesubjects are invisible to the eye of the sovereign:

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Homo oeconomicus is someone who can say to the juridical
sovereign, to the sovereign possessor of rights and founder of
positive law on the basis of the natural right of individuals: You
must not. But he does not say: You must not, because I have rights
and you must not touch them. … You must not because you cannot.
And you cannot in the sense that ‘you are powerless’. And why are
you powerless, why can’t you? You cannot because you do not know,
and you do not know because you cannot know.
(Foucault 2010, 282)
This radical unknowability in the face of sovereignty is what, for Foucault,
makes economics an ‘atheistic discipline; … a discipline without God; …
without totality’ (2010, 282). It is also what allows us to ask the inverse
question: whether atheism as it is constructed in these deconversion
narratives has affinities with a kind of economic view of truth. This would
be a response to sovereignty in which truth is not simply objectified or
historicised, but obscured.
By analogy, when deconversion narratives undermine traditional
notions of agency, what is rendered invisible is not the economic
mechanisms that produce a collective good, but the very personal forcesthat constitute (a)religious identity. One cannot help what one believesbecause this facet of identity is mysterious and invisible, with its origins
in the dark recesses of biology and the subconscious and rupturing thesurface of consciousness in one brilliant moment. The denial of agency
then produces an ‘indispensable’ (Foucault 2010, 280) form of invisibility
which prevents an association between atheism and sovereign subjectivity
while maintaining some notion of truth. In the same way that economic
rationality is ‘founded on the unknowability of the totality of the process’(Foucault 2010, 282), the atheist subject-position in these narratives isfounded on the irrationality of atheist identity, which is partiallysynonymous with its truth.
Extending Foucault’s insightful divorce between the sovereign
subject and impersonal truth, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2013) has framed
digital media as providing a metaphor and arena with which to play out
their relationship: ‘The linking of rationality with mysticism, knowability
with what is unknown, makes it a powerful fetish that offers its
programmers and users alike a sense of empowerment, of sovereign
subjectivity, that covers over – barely – a sense of profound ignorance’(Chun 2013, 18). In the context of atheism, what the digital offers is an
explicit recognition of the relationship of ‘rationality with mysticism,knowability with what is unknown’. That is to say, despite atheists’

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frequent appeals to pure rationality, there has always been an element of
mysticism to the question of subjectivity, wherein the self is simultaneously
and paradoxically a free willing agent and a determined body. This is theparadox that Campbell’s (1971) ‘irreligion’ is meant to illuminate: thatthe experience of becoming an atheist tends to exceed the language
available to describe it. The digital provides the perfect interface forarticulating this confusion of agency that simultaneously extends andundermines the sovereign subject. As Chun puts it:[The] paradoxical combination of visibility and invisibility, of
rational causality and profound ignorance, grounds the computer
as an attractive model for the ‘real’ world. Interfaces have become
functional analogs to ideology and its critique – from ideology as
false consciousness to ideology as fetishistic logic, interfaces seemto concretize our relation to invisible (or barely visible) ‘sources’and substructures.
(Chun 2013, 59)
The digital interface, by explicitly executing the power of the invisible,
enables a more explicit engagement between traditional understandingsof sovereign subjectivity and the invisible determining forces on whichthat subjectivity is founded. Hence, the confused understanding of agency
articulated on r/atheism represents an accurate response to a‘postmodern/neoliberal confusion’ (Chun 2006, 59) in which subjectivity
is perpetually determined by invisible forces. In this regard, the digitalarena offers ‘a simpler, more reassuring analog of power, one in which theuser takes the place of the sovereign executive “source”, code becomes
law, and mapping produces the subject’ (Chun 2006, 59). The atheist
online, then, is caught in a paradox enabled by the digital interface –simultaneously more insistent than ever that her identity is absolutely
true and more aware than ever that this identity is merely a result of a
mapping operation executed by inhuman forces – and simultaneously
abstractly convinced that she is a free willing agent and specifically awarethat her identity has been selected and imposed from a range ofpredetermined options.
How, then, can we consider the question of algorithmic culture in thecontext of counterpublics? Warner’s discussion of counterpublics considers
agency in primarily collective terms – that is, whether publics have agency
in relationship to the state – but does offer resources to draw out therelationship between agency and the performance or narration of identity.
Warner notes, for example, that publics with an uncomplicated sense of

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agency often deploy verbs of private reading that can be transposed
upward to the aggregate of readers. Publics as well as their individual
members are said to scrutinise, reject, decide, judge, etc. Counterpublics,
on the other hand, ‘tend to be those in which this ideology of reading does
not have the same privilege’ (Warner 2005, 123). And thus, counterpublics
tend to conceive of agency in alternative terms. What then, can we makeof a public that expresses a heavy scepticism of agency in general in theface of the determining effects of algorithms? In the first instance, it mustbe said that this interrogation of agency reflects a friction with dominantculture, in which the ideal neoliberal individual is a self-determining
subject. That most atheists on Reddit enthusiastically embrace
individualism even while some express scepticism about self-determinationsuggests a particular source of that friction. I would suggest that atheists
frequently aim to expose a hypocrisy among their religious counterpartsin that the religious think they are self-determining, while being in
actuality religiously indoctrinated. And so, the scepticism about agency iseasily understood as a distrust of any subject-position that can be freely
chosen, for such a subject-position would be vulnerable to emotional
manipulation (that is, wish-fulfilment, delusion).
Another fruitful line of reasoning has to do with Warner’s emphasis
on a counterpublic’s performative character. According to Warner (2005,
114), every public deploys discourse performatively in that it necessarily
attempts, through a variety of techniques, to specify in advance ‘thelifeworld of its circulation’. Put differently, a public tends to negotiate thetension between being open to any stranger and yet generating sociability
by deploying poetic-expressive discourse that situates the addressee orreader in idiomatic ways. Doing so creates a sense that one can trust a
potential reader to understand your intention (Warner 2005, 116).
However, this performative dimension of public discourse, Warner (2005,
114) writes, is routinely misrecognised when publics imagine, by analogy
with the public, that their discourse is culturally neutral. Implicit in
Warner’s analysis is that this misrecognition succeeds or fails in obscuring
the performative dimension of a public’s discourse to the extent that theanalogy between a public and the dominant culture feels appropriate or
frictionless. If a public’s members are able to imagine themselves asemblematic members of the public, they will have little problem
overlooking the role of poetic-expressive discourse in the formation of
their lifeworld. Here again, the question of stranger sociability isparamount. The ability to navigate and understand (albeit below the levelof consciousness) the relationship between a public and the publicdepends in large part on being able to conceive, at least in theory, of the

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imaginary borders of a public, for the difference between being in and outof a public depends not on personality or affiliation but only on attention.
How can we theorise the specificity of stranger sociability within apublic when the boundaries that circumscribe its self-organisation aredetermined largely by algorithmic processes? Crucially, for Warner (2005,123), counterpublics share the tendency that they embrace their own
performative poesis when they, for myriad reasons, have difficulty finding
counterparts in public articulations of agency. Counterpublics embrace
performativity because the misrecognition of that performativity ishindered by friction with the dominant public sphere. I am suggesting here,
then, that the highly algorithmic affordances of Reddit’s interface generatethat friction. If subreddits can be thought of as publics, the processes thatbring individual users in and out of those publics by way of manipulating
and directing attention as well as the circulation of discourse arealgorithmic, and thus both relatively unpredictable and invisible. This is tosuggest that digital algorithms are uniquely capable of encouraging thekinds of poetic lifeworlds that constitute counterpublics by virtue of the factthat they explode the simple notions of affiliation or voluntary associationthat often render subpublics compatible with the dominant culture.

Intimate digital counterpublics
The question of intimacy lies at the heart of the intersection between
public sphere and media studies. Diverse forms of intimacy central topersonal and impersonal relationships alike pose a challenge to neatdichotomies between public and private spheres. Berlant and Warner’s
influential ‘Sex in public’ (1998) offers the touchstone for thinking about
the relationship between intimacy and the formation of counterpublics.
Berlant and Warner’s provocative elaboration of the relationship between
queer culture and sites of counter-intimacies provides a useful lens withwhich to understand r/atheism and r/thegreatproject. For Berlant andWarner (1998, 553), heterosexuality as a property of subjectivity is a myth
to be replaced with the notion of heterosexual culture, which ‘achievesmuch of its metacultural intelligibility through the ideologies andinstitutions of intimacy’. Specifically, heteronormative conventions of
intimacy ‘conjure a mirage: a home base of prepolitical humanity fromwhich citizens are thought to come into political discourse and to which
they are expected to return in the (always imaginary) future after politicalconflict’ (Berlant and Warner 1998, 553). One of the goals of queer
politics, then, is to generate new spaces of intimacy which are neither

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a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bearno necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, toproperty, or to the nation’ (Berlant and Warner 1998, 558).
I do not wish to argue that digital atheism is queer in any substantial
sense. While many atheists articulate a number of affinities between
atheist identity and queer identity, the overwhelmingly white, male andheterosexual make-up of the American atheist population along with achequered history of problematic and exclusivist language necessitates
restraint in taking these affinities too seriously. At the same time, there
are noteworthy lines of connection between Berlant and Warner’s aims
and my own. One of my research projects has been to demonstrate thatatheism, as an attribute possessed by subjects, is an illusion best replacedwith the notion of atheist culture. And this culture, like queer culture or
any other, ‘indexes a virtual social world, in ways that range from arepertoire of styles and speech genres to referential metaculture’ (Berlant
and Warner 1998, 558). And as in the queer world-making project
articulated by Berlant and Warner, there is an extent to which the users
of r/atheism and r/thegreatproject are engaged in the creation of formsof counter-intimacy.
Indeed, many deconversion narratives published on r/thegreatproject
exhibit a form of intimacy perhaps unique to pseudonymous media.
Sharing a personal account of a momentous transformation in one’s
identity is already a deeply intimate act. But this sense of intimacy isheightened by the ambivalence of Reddit when it comes to personalencounter: that is, any contribution to Reddit might be immediately lost ina sea of impersonal information or it might speak directly to anotherindividual user. This, of course, is one of the fundamental principles ofreading publics, in which reaching strangers is the public’s primaryorientation (Warner 2005, 74). It is not uncommon for populardeconversion stories to end with appeals to this duality. One of the mostpopular deconversion narratives, an account by user u/makinwaffles(2012a), ends ‘Thanks r/atheism, for listening, and even if you didn’t (since
this is way too long), thanks for existing. Its [sic] more than can be said forGod.’ Other stories end in a similar fashion, by facing up to the possibility
that no one is paying attention or that any reaction will be negative: ‘Feel
free to ignore this or downvote to oblivion, too. I just had to put it
somewhere’ (u/Lunamanar 2012).
The invisibility of the audience is not unique to digital media, having
been a defining problem of broadcast media (Lacey 2013), and yet thepseudonymous digital interface offers the audience a more direct avenue

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of response and a heightened visibility to any lack of response. Given theease of voting and responding, it would be fairly obvious if a thread
received no traffic; the audience in this case is not invisible but virtual, inthat there is for any digital content a simultaneous potential to gocompletely unnoticed or to go viral and catapult a profile into highvisibility. Again, this is true of all reading publics, according to Warner’s
description. The more interesting line of thought, in terms of the questionof media, is how particular publics utilise the duality between theimpersonal and the personal addressee to generate intimacy and ‘how they
make stranger relationality normative’ (Warner 2005, 76). Reddit users
can respond to an original poster’s thread in public, or they can send thema private message, but the fact of that response takes on a significanceproportional to the virtual size of the digital mediascape. If posting on
Reddit is something like whispering into a cacophonous roar of othervoices, there is always the potential that your whisper might fall precisely
on the ears of someone receptive to it. Thus, when u/makinwaffles’ thread
receives supportive replies, their response (2012b) is very intimate:
When I posted this, I did it so that I could have a chance to write out
my story in solid form and express what it meant to me. I did tellsome friends in junior high, but didn’t include that in the original
post since their reactions were just more of the same shit. After all
that, I have a really hard time saying any of this out loud, and I
figured I’d take a shot in the dark on a relevant anonymous forum toget some of it off my chest. I hardly expected such a supportive
response, and I don’t know that people will begin to understandhow much it means to me.
Here, u/makinwaffles posits the digital space as providing more intimacy
than their offline friendships. What’s more, this intimacy is connected inpart to the very pseudonymity characteristic of the digital arena: the factthat the original post constituted a ‘shot in the dark’ makes it that much
more significant that the message was positively received.
If we recognise r/atheism and its affiliated subreddits as sites for the
production of counterpublics, we must ask how the notions of intimacy
generated there differ from those common to contemporary religion or toatheist engagements with other media forms. I am suggesting here thatone key to this differentiation lies in the role of pseudonymity. Theinternet, more than other media, is capable of generating a close
association between anonymity and intimacy, an association that lends
digital atheism some degree of uniqueness. Where religious intimacy is

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commonly predicated on identity – of God, of the individual believer –atheist intimacy here is predicated on anonymity or pseudo-anonymity.
Rather than being tied vertically to a mass-media broadcaster, intimacy
in digital spaces is tied horizontally between users, who are themselves
imbricated in complex algorithmic networks.
If, as Warner (2005, 120) argues, ‘friction against the dominantpublic forces the poetic-expressive character of counterpublic discourse
to become salient to consciousness’, then Reddit’s atheist public ispredicated on pseudonymity. The poetic-expressive character of thisatheist counterpublic is the awareness that one must, by virtue of one’s
subordinated position with relation to dominant culture, tell their mostintimate story – the story of their own self-fashioning – in the mostimpersonal of ways. Writing a deconversion narrative on Reddit is likesending a message in a bottle. It might drift endlessly and never be read,or it might float into the hands of someone for whom it has tremendous
meaning. Warner (2005, 113) reminds us that all public discourse‘abandons the security of its positive, given audience’ and yet must, at thesame time, perform the all-important function of ‘poetic world making’ by
specifying the lifeworld of its own circulation (Warner 2005, 114). If
Reddit’s atheist public performatively conjures its own character, thenthis character is defined by these two necessary features of its medium:first, by virtue of pseudonymity, intimacy is inextricably tied toimpersonality; second, by virtue of its algorithmic constitution, thegeneration of intimacy as an affective glue cementing the formation of the
public is dictated largely by an invisible process more akin to chance thanto individual agency, and so the self-fashioning of subjectivity is a process
more of narrative performativity than of actual agential autochthony.
Their embrace of these forms of poesis in the face of dominant culture’s
emphases on authentic identity and self-determination are what enable
us to read Reddit’s atheists as a counterpublic.

Notes
1 I use the term ‘affordances’, following Donald Norman’s (1988) co-option of James J. Gibson’s(1979) coinage, to refer to the properties of an object – in this case a media artefact – that
determine its possible uses.
2 I am taking Jean Meslier’s (d. 1729) Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean
Meslier (2009) as the first significant public self-identification with atheism in the West.
3 Despite her preoccupation with atheist visibility, O’Hair only infrequently used the specificrhetoric of ‘coming out of the closet’ (see for example O’Hair 1990). Nonetheless, ‘coming out’
has today become the most common shorthand for public declarations of atheist identity.
4 Pseudonymity should not be confused with ‘pseudo-anonymity’, which I take to refer to media
platforms that appear anonymous to users while nonetheless collecting personal information
for network managers, developers, moderators, etc.

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Foucault, Michel. 1988. ‘Technologies of the self’, in Technologies of the Self: A seminar with Michel
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Foucault, Michel. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (ed.
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Habermas, Jürgen, Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox. 1974. ‘The public sphere: An encyclopedia
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Herberg, Will. 1955. Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An essay in American religious sociology. Garden
City, NY: Doubleday.
Hood, Ralph, Jr and Zhuo Chen. 2013. ‘Conversion and deconversion’, in The Oxford Handbook ofAtheism, Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse, eds, 537–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Meslier, Jean. 2009 Testament: Memoir of the thoughts and sentiments of Jean Meslier (trans.
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O’Hair, Madalyn Murray. 1968a. ‘History of atheists’ fight for radio time.’ American Atheist Radio
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Starr, Chelsea, Kristin Waldo and Matthew Kauffman. 2019. ‘Digital irreligion: Christian
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395–412.
u/ALIENSMACK. 2011. Comment on ‘DAE think being atheist is not a choice.’ /r/atheism. https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/gr75q/dae_think_being_atheist_is_not_a_choice/c1po33v (accessed 22 June 2022).
u/Cleev. 2012. ‘Being gay is a choice.’ /r/atheism. https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/
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American Atheist (Second Quarter): 24–9.

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10
Pumpkins at the centre of Marsand circlejerks: do atheists findcommunity online?
Evelina Lundmark

This volume prompts us to ask what forms of sceptical publicity atheists,
sceptics and the religiously indifferent engage in, and what types of media
encourage community formation or facilitate different expressions ofreligious scepticism in public. It thus allows us to consider the diversity of‘sceptical publics’, which also obliges us to think about what publicness is inrelation to the non-religious. Kate Nash has argued that ‘“Public” is a kindof placeholder to allow consideration of the moral dimension of democratic
politics’ (Nash 2014, 1). This allows us to explore the notion of publicness
beyond the idea of the polis, beyond definitions of the public as a social
totality. Michael Warner’s (2005) work has also been influential in thisrespect, specifically in his attempt to define the public beyond externalorganisation, instead focusing on it as a space co-effected by the circulationof texts. Thus, one can argue that publicness broadly can be construed as aset of heterogeneous interlinking or opposing discourses centring on moral
considerations or ideals related to issues of social organisation and‘desirable’ identities. Similarly, a microcosm of minority discourse – such as
discourse focusing on atheism – is no less heterogeneous, and thus
necessitates reflection on this diversity, and on what characterises different
discursive formations in this space. The aim of this chapter is thus to explore
the role of conflict in atheist community formation, looking at how antireligious sentiments should be conceived vis-à-vis atheist community

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formation online, the purpose of which is to bring nuance to if and how
practices of engaging with atheist content online – or of ‘“reading with”
like-minded strangers’ (Cimino and Smith 2011, 33) – should be conceivedof as participation in or formation of diffused communities.
Building on ideas of atheism potentially being experienced andexpressed as imagined community in online spaces, I have previously
analysed discourses on /r/atheism, a subforum of reddit.com
populated mainly by US users,1 finding that atheism was conceptualised
by /r/atheism users as ‘merely’ a way of thinking rationally, as opposed
to being a movement or an identity (Lundmark and LeDrew 2018).2 In
this chapter I consider the insights from this work in relation tofindings from another study focusing on atheist vloggers on YouTube,
specifically the comment section of one of Ana Kasparian’s videos (theco-host and producer of The Young Turks, a progressive news andcommentary channel on YouTube; Lundmark 2019).3 The comment
section of Kasparian’s video stood out from the rest of the material in
the study because of the strong focus commenters put on the lack of
an atheist community and the lack of an atheist message in theircritique of Kasparian’s video. As these key themes, which dominatedKasparian’s comment section, appeared to cohere with the hegemonic
discursive formation of /r/atheism I had previously studied, theanalysis presented here considers more deeply what appears to be aparadox observable in both data sets, a community forming aroundthe notion that there cannot be an atheist community. Using theframework of antagonism and agonism posited by Chantal Mouffe(2013), the analysis in this chapter reflects on atheist community
formation, and the role of conflict in atheist discourse, and asks if
these types of online practices should be conceived as diffused or
imagined communities, or as recursive echo chambers embodying
atheist frustration.

Atheist community?
Atheism experienced a surge in visibility in the mid-2000s, something that
has in part been attributed to the greater visibility enabled by the internet
and social media technologies in general (Laughlin 2016; Smith andCimino 2012). Research on atheist communities forming online (e.g. Starr,
Waldo and Kauffman 2019), on the use of online resources by existing
communities (e.g. Fader 2017), or following broader swathes of atheist
discourses enacted on various platforms (e.g. Smith and Cimino 2012;270

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Cimino and Smith 2011; Laughlin 2016) shows that online resources form
an important part in the deconversion and coming-out processes of someatheists. For example, Chelsea Starr, Kristin Waldo and Matthew Kauffman
show that their respondents ‘depended on the [studied forum] to process
their intellectual, emotional, and social changes’ (Starr, Waldo andKauffman 2019, 508). In this case the online forum functioned as a type ofcommunity, providing respondents with a safe space for coming to termswith and handling the fallout of their atheist convictions. Previous research
has indicated that, for atheists, being involved in atheist groups or feelingconnected to other atheists is associated with higher well-being (Abbottand Mollen 2018; Brewster et al. 2020). However, it is important to note
that, despite this, atheists do not tend to join organisations (Altemeyer
2010; Bullivant 2008; Manning 2010). Thus, atheists in the US have been
posited to relate to a form of imagined community at the cross-section of
atheist spokesmen, the reading of their texts and various social media
platforms (Cimino and Smith 2011). This imagined community is thought
to exist in tension with the religious majority, and to provide feelings oflegitimisation, as well as exacerbating feelings of exclusion (Cimino andSmith 2011; Edgell, Gerteis and Hartmann 2006). The characteristics anddiversity of this imagined community are less clear, but the heterogeneityof the group is recognised (e.g. LeDrew 2016).
Jack Laughlin (2016), opposing the idea that atheism forms acoherent community, has explored a particular type of atheist discourse
he labels as ‘progressive’, which he describes as standing in opposition to‘dictionary atheism’. Laughlin describes how such progressive atheist
discourse foregrounds social responsibility, thereby disavowing thedictionary definition of atheism as being not a comprehensive system ofthought but simply and exclusively referring to God’s non-existence(Laughlin 2016, 329–30). In this chapter I focus on the second type ofatheism Laughlin describes, the dictionary atheist discourse which argues
that atheism is simply the disavowal of a certain type of belief, and not an
identity, community or worldview. As previous research has not tended to
distinguish between different types of atheist discourse, some of thegeneral characteristics attributed to atheists may refer mainly to thisformation, such as a perceived tendency in atheist discourse to constructatheist identity as existing in opposition to religious others (Guenther2014; Guenther, Mulligan and Papp 2013; J. M. Smith 2011). Atheist
identity can in such cases be understood to be deployed in order to signal
a set of antagonistic presuppositions about religion – as inherently
fundamentalist and a threat to science – which in turn is thought toempower atheists in their disbelief (Taira 2012; Lüchau 2010). OtherPUMPKINS AT THE CENTRE OF MARS AND CIRCLE JERKS

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characteristics include scientism, epistemic dogmatism, a reduction ofreligion to the status of a primitive science and a general disdain for both
fundamentalist and moderate religious practitioners (Asad 1993, 2003;
Gorski 1990; Kaden and Schmidt-Lux 2016; Kidd 2017; Lundmark and
LeDrew 2018; Martin 2014; Olson 2008; Stenmark 1997; Zenk 2014).

Social media dynamics
The data sets analysed here came from Reddit and YouTube, which calls
for some reflection on the particular affordances of both technologies. To
begin with, YouTube is a subsidiary of Google and the second most visited
website in the world (Wikipedia 2021), and variously functions as a tool
for the dissemination or uploading of hyperlinkable video content, as apublic space and as a social networking site. Reddit also functions as a toolfor dissemination of hyperlinkable content but is much more centred on
discussion. It is a hubforum, and subreddits like /r/atheism focus on niche
topics or areas of interest, and are generally moderated by users. Bothplatforms rely on user interaction, and function by ranking systems – likes
and interactions on YouTube, up- and downvotes on Reddit – which to alarge degree affect what the average user of either site is likely to see.
While YouTube relies on users producing and publishing video content,
Reddit works through its users submitting a broader range of content –links to news articles, memes, stories from their lives, questions, and so on– to particular subreddits, where users can vote on it. Content that receives
many upvotes appears on the front page of any given subreddit, and if
popular enough on the front page of Reddit itself. Thus, Reddit isparticularly dependent on user interaction, which was especially true for/r/atheism at the time of the study as it was largely unmoderated. Reddit
has thus been argued to function variously as a news aggregator and as aspace for virtual community, both as a public forum and as a ‘safe space’(Darwin 2017; Jürgens and Stark 2017; Robards 2018). Both sites function
with a certain amount of anonymity and allow users to access content andcomments or forum discussions without registering an account. Moreover,even users with accounts are afforded relative anonymity on both sites, an
important thing to note since relative anonymity has been found to foster
less cordial debate online, which tends towards hostility (Halpern andGibbs 2013, looking specifically at YouTube).
The anonymity afforded by Reddit is identified as one of the key
affordances of the site in recent work by Naveena Prakasam and Louisa
Huxtable-Thomas (2021). They further highlight credibility, echoing and

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creating membership. The first of these refers to the way authority iscreated and maintained by users on Reddit via the karma system; users
who receive up- and downvotes from others when they comment or postcontent receive ‘karma’, which gives credibility to their activities on thesite. In addition, users are restrained by the rules established by each
subreddit. Prakasam and Huxtable-Thomas argue that this brings about anecho-chamber effect, as moderators are able to delete any posts orcomments which they feel do not adhere to the rules. Prakasam and
Huxtable-Thomas also point out that in-group membership is established
via particular jargon, and suggest that the ‘material aspects of anonymity,
upvoting, karma and the rules of each subreddit provide ways in which
Users can create a “safe” space to air their views, use convincing language
and narrative to recruit others and to reward those that share the same
attitudes whilst excluding alternative views’ (Prakasam and HuxtableThomas 2021, 24). In stark contrast to Reddit, most YouTube content
focuses on specific people: vloggers. However, as noted by Stuart
Cunningham and David Craig (2017), this type of content is still highlyinteractive, as it is centred on the relationship between vlogger andaudience. Cunningham and Craig argue that key affordances of such vlogs
include authenticity and community, and that the authenticity vloggers
seek to establish exists in relation to the perceived artificiality of traditional
media formats. Vloggers are thus able to forge authority in relation to theiraudiences, characterised by authenticity, connection and vulnerability(Lövheim and Lundmark 2019). While this vulnerability is often a strengthfor vloggers, the example of Kasparian analysed in this chapter shows that
this emphasis on connection and authenticity also opens up vloggers toharsh personal attacks and critique (Lundmark 2019).

Articulating atheism
The analysis presented here builds on discourse theory, a methodology
developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), which posits thatas meaning cannot be ultimately fixed there exists a constant struggle
between different discursive formations for the fixation of the hegemonic.
This struggle takes place via articulations, the linguistic acts that seek toestablish a relationship between elements (any unarticulated difference),
thus fixing them as moments (fixations of meaning; Laclau and Mouffe
1985). Looking at the shape of hegemonic discourse on /r/atheism,
important moments include religious people, religion and atheism. User
articulations of atheism suggest a different relation: ‘Atheism is not and will

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never have a “word” or “message” to spread … We do the opposite of that,
try to show critical thinking to people so they can reason for them selves
what is and isn’t real’ (/r/atheism thread). Such an articulation is indicativeof users’ broader attempts to empty the concept of ‘atheist’ of meaning.
Users almost never say ‘atheism is …’, but rather focus on what it is not; inthis case it is articulated as not having a message. Within this discourse theelement of ‘atheist’ is articulated as a moment in a way that indicates that
it is neutral, without value, a natural state of the mind. This way ofarticulating atheism was in line with the /r/atheism FAQ at the time, which
defined atheism as ‘nothing more and nothing less than a lack of belief inany god or gods’, and further stated that a ‘person can be both atheist andreligious, provided that he or she believes in a religion that does not haveany deities’, and that the ‘word “atheism” is not a proper noun (we do not
worship the All Powerful Atheismo), so there is no need to capitalize it’.
Moreover, the FAQ clarified the relationship between atheism andagnosticism, stating that the two are not mutually exclusive and that callingyourself an agnostic is ‘completely uninformative, and does not make you“not an atheist”’. These articulations proliferated on the forum, and werealso the issue around which Kasparian’s video and comment section circled.
In her video, Kasparian opened by introducing the issue: she hadlabelled herself as agnostic when asked about her beliefs during aninterview. After this she describes having received negative feedback
from atheists, which had prompted her to respond to these concerns in avideo addressing the ‘atheist community’.4 To begin with, she inserts aclip of herself from the interview in which she says: ‘I just feel really
uncomfortable calling myself an atheist and pretending as though I know
without a shadow of a doubt that there is no higher being. The truth is I
don’t know, and no one really knows’ (Kasparian’s video). She follows thisby inserting a clip from a video response she received, in which another
YouTuber outlines the difference between atheism and agnosticism:
The two [presumably Kasparian and the interviewer, Dave Rubin]seem to want to put agnosticism between atheism and theism but
agnosticism is about knowledge: it is the idea that we can neverknow whether or not a God exists, while atheism and theism isabout belief. So, for example, I’m an agnostic atheist – I’m both anagnostic and an atheist. Also, Christians are gnostic theists, so to say‘I’m not atheist, I’m an agnostic’ doesn’t make any sense. It’s likesaying ‘I’m not a liberal, I’m a vegetarian.’ They’re not on the sameline of ideology. But what’s worse is Ana is claiming that all atheists
are completely gnostic about God – they know with one hundred

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per cent certainty that God does not exist and in fact I’ve tried to
criticise atheists who act in this way. I think it’s wrong and I thinkit’s not within the ideology of atheism. I think at the centre ofatheism is scepticism – the idea that we only accept claims when
there’s sufficient evidence for them.
(Kasparian’s video)
This particular way of articulating atheism and agnosticism is most likely
familiar to many. It is often accompanied by an image illustrating the differing‘lines of ideology’ referred to. Variations of it exist, but it is essentially a chartthat on one axis measures belief (labelled atheism versus theism), and on theother measures claims to knowledge (labelled agnosticism versus
gnosticism).5 Thus, someone like Kasparian, who does not know but does notbelieve that God exists would, according to this understanding, be anagnostic atheist – which perhaps is why she receives responses like ‘Atheism
is NOT a claim to knowledge. Its an absence of belief in a deity. Simple,’ and‘You dont believe in a god, you are unconvinced that there is one.
BY DEFINITION YOU ARE AN ATHEIST also you are a pathetic coward
unwilling to acknowledge reality’ (Kasparian’s comment section).
In this discursive formation, atheism is articulated as a statement– of knowledge of belief – that lacks substance in and of itself, which is
not conceived as a ‘proper noun’, suggesting that it is not understood as
an identity or community that one can inhabit or take part in. Thesetypes of articulations claim that ‘Atheism is not an ideology’ (Kasparian’scomment section), and reject the notion that there is such a thing as an
atheist community:
I don’t like how people say ‘the atheist community’. I believe thatyou belong to the ‘catholic community’ if you subscribe to that
religion, same with ‘muslim community’ and ‘anglican community’.
Atheists are people who lack religious faith, they are a negative. It’s
like splitting hundreds of different coloured marbles into a redgroup and a green group, and then labelling the remaining as‘rainbow’. They lack a set group.
(Kasparian’s comment section)
Instead, atheism is articulated as referring to people who – unlike religious
people – simply are reasonable: ‘I don’t like to be labeled an Athiest, I label
myself a Normal person who just doesn’t believe in God, Santa Claus, The
Devil, the Tooth Fairy or any other fairies!!!!’ (Kasparian’s comment
section). This type of articulation divides the discursive field into two

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opposite, antagonistic poles. As one of Kasparian’s commenters puts it:‘you think agnosticism is a middleground between theism and atheism,
theism and atheism are BINARY positions there IS NO MIDDLE GROUND’.
This antagonistic binary explains why Kasparian, who states several times
that she does not believe in God, still receives these types of comment:‘Don’t be weak minded. You are smart enough to know that goofy god is abad joke on the idiot masses’ and ‘I wanna bang the Jesus out of Ana … Oh
wait ... we don’t know if he really exists’ (Kasparian’s comment section).
As she does not clearly identify herself as an atheist (and thus reasonable),
she is perceived by some to be irrational, or simply wrong: ‘It ain’t thatcomplicated, Ana. If there is no evidence for the objective existence ofGod(s) – and rationalism dictates that existence is illogical andastronomically improbable, then why waffle? You’re an atheist’(Kasparian’s comment section). These types of antagonistic articulations
should be understood as attempts to maintain the coherence of a particular
discursive formation. This is achieved by repeating that articulating
atheism in any other way simply does not make sense. Kasparian’scomment section is thus filled with suggestions that her calling herself
agnostic is absurd – ‘Are you agnostic about there being a pumpkin in thecentre of Mars, Ana?’ – or simply wrong:Do people ever research their beliefs before spouting out
convictional ignorance??? It’s really sad that we live in a digital age
where knowledge is spread throughout the world instantly and yet
people don’t have a clue of how to properly identify and represent
their beliefs!
(Kasparian’s comment section)
While the hegemonic discourse apparent on /r/atheism similarly divides
the discursive field into a binary, there the binary is one in which primarily
religious people are othered as irrational. The religious moderate wasperceived as particularly problematic for trying to combine ‘actual’rationality with religion, which was apparent in comments like ‘Pleasestate your beliefs. I’ll be happy to explain to you why they are either silly
and/or rediculous or, alternatively, why you shouldn’t be calling yourself
a Christian’ (thread on /r/atheism). In contrast, in Kasparian’s comment
section the irrational other is the agnostic, but as should be apparent fromthe examples taken from the /r/atheism FAQ, claiming to be agnostic as
opposed to atheist was similarly articulated as absurd on /r/atheism.
Thus, the coherence of this discursive formation was maintained byarguing that anyone who disagrees is irrational, that atheism is a neutral,

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natural position, and those who claim not to be atheists like Kasparian do
not know their own minds: ‘Agnostics are the Atheists without balls’(Kasparian’s comment section).
It is not unreasonable for me to criticise the atheist community inthe sense that there are gradations and I think that there aredifferent interpretations, so there definitely are atheists without
question that say ‘Hey, you know what, God does not exist withouta shadow of a doubt.’ Now, I don’t know what percentage of atheiststhat is, but there are some people.
(Kasparian, video)
This is said by Kasparian in response to the video she cites, explaining
why she prefers the term agnostic. This claim – that different peopleinterpret atheism differently – appears to be threatening to the coherenceof the discursive formation I am focusing on here. Within this discursive
formation, which attempts to empty atheism of meaning by defining it as
the natural state of mind, the idea of an atheist community is rejected.
Ideas of atheism being a neutral position, and atheism not being acommunity or a positive claim of any kind, are related: ‘Atheism makes noclaim about the existence or non existence of gods. It is simply the lack ofbelief in gods. Nothing more, nothing less. It makes no positive claim.
Assigning meaning because of positive claims by some atheists is
disingenuous’ (Kasparian’s comment section). Moreover, somecommenters go further and claim that there is no such thing as an atheist
who expresses absolute certainty about the non-existence of God:I know very few atheists, in fact none, that would declare that there
is absolutely no god or higher power. Instead we just have no reason
to believe there is a god or higher power. The universe could havebeen created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I have no evidence
that points to that possibility so there is no reason to believe that itwas created by FSM. However I am completely sure there is no
Christian god because of the overwhelming evidence that in myopinion is so great that I cannot even consider the possibility(Kasparian’s comment section)
This articulation affirms that atheism is not a positive claim and is a naturalstate of mind by maintaining that no atheist would declare that there is noGod, while simultaneously emphasising that there is no way they themselves
would consider the possibility there could be (at least a Christian) one.

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Kasparian’s choice to label herself as agnostic comes to be contentious, as itsuggests that in maintaining definite disbelief, atheism may not always be
entirely rational. She thus receives many comments restating the definitionof agnostic atheism she cited in her video, coupled with the wish that theinternet ‘was a dictionary alone rather than a forum that allows
misconceptions to perpetuate themselves’ (Kasparian’s comment section).
This type of atheistic discourse, which was hegemonic on /r/atheism
at the time, and which proliferated in Kasparian’s comment section, is far
from being the only form of atheist discourse. Kasparian herself is an
example of this: in response to the video she cites she says that while she
could consider herself an agnostic atheist under this definition, there areatheists who appear certain that there is no God and that was what she wasdistancing herself from in calling herself agnostic. She thus articulates
agnostic in opposition to atheism, as referring to someone who does notbelieve in God, but recognises that ‘we don’t have any evidence disapproving
the possibility that there could be a god’ (Kasparian’s video). She did also
receive comments either agreeing with her definition, or defending it invarious ways:
For every who wants to tell us what an atheist really is – atheism has
two definitions. Both are correct. This is from Dictionary.com:
1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God.
2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings.
(Kasparian’s comment section)
The comments section of her video is thus an example of clashingdiscourses, a struggle over different definitions of atheism: one that is
highly antagonistic in its division of the discursive field into rational/
irrational, where atheism is conceived as natural and neutral, and all
attempts at bringing any sort of nuance to the understanding of thatconcept are articulated as absurd. On the other hand, we have otherdiscursive formations that appear less clear, but do imply a more agonistic
acceptance of differences in definitions, and a willingness to makeconcessions. Kasparian herself readily admits to being an ‘agnostic
atheist’ under the given definition; she just does not think that this is the
only definition. As a commenter puts it: ‘I can’t believe people have spent
this much time wailing about her use of terms on whether or not she calls
herself an atheist or agnostic. She clearly doesn’t have a belief in theism,and that’s really all that matters’ (Kasparian’s comment section).

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Atheist discourses in the wild: community or circlejerk?
Emphasising the role of conflict in discursive formations, Laclau andMouffe (1985) understand the limit of every objectivity as antagonism,
which reveals objectivity as a partial and precarious objectification.
Antagonism is thus the experience of the limit of all objectivity, a relation
which shows the limit of every objectivity. It occurs when the alternative
meanings a particular discourse has excluded threaten to undermine thefixity of meaning in the discourse and therefore the integrity or very
existence of that discourse. Antagonism is thus not the same as conflict,but rather the undermining of fixity, the constant threat of modificationor subversion (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). In the analysis above I haveshown the ways in which one discursive formation, which defines atheism
as simple negation, attempts to defend itself against being undermined bya perceived threat that renders atheism as sometimes less than perfectly
rational. Mouffe (2013) has refined the notion of antagonism in her later
work as conflicts between non-negotiable values and struggles between
enemies who wish to destroy each other, contrasted with agonism, which
she defines as a struggle between opponents that is based on a mutual
recognition that differences in perspective are important, and that leads
to discussions that improve democracy. To further distinguish antagonism
and agonism, Nico Carpentier (2018) has presented a typology which
identifies antagonistic discourse as discourse characterised by radicalothering, as a discourse which seeks to eliminate the other, attempts toestablish total differentiation and distance from the other, and thus
produces a homogenisation of the self. The antagonistic discourse centres
on articulations of us and them, sometimes resulting in the complete
dehumanisation of the other, but at the very least predicated on theestablishment of a hierarchy in which the other is articulated as inferior.
These types of articulations are often expressed as if they were commonsense, neutral statements. As a result, the ‘us’, or the self, is united against
the other as its antithesis – not via articulations of positive qualities, but
as the negation of the perceived qualities of the other (Carpentier 2018).
This is very much in line with the analysis above, which identifies
articulations of atheism that assert that it is not a positive claim, an
identity or an inhabitable worldview, but a natural state of mind.
/r/atheism users themselves identify the discussion on the forum ascharacterised by a ‘circlejerk’, a metaphor for recursive discourse that does
not lead anywhere. In the case of /r/atheism, the circlejerk consists of thecontinuous othering of religious people, mainly for comedic purposes, but

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also as a way to vent frustration. The different ways users articulate thecirclejerk reveal a tension in the perceived purpose of /r/atheism as being
either primarily a space meant to foster rational thinking, in which atheists
can hone their argumentation skills in order to deploy them against
religious others, or primarily a space for atheist entertainment or venting,and thus for finding confirmation of one’s minority identity (Lundmark and
LeDrew 2018). /r/atheism was in either case predominantly characterisedby antagonistic articulations of religious people as the prime example of an
irrational other, who existed in opposition to the rational atheist. Following
Carpentier’s typology (2018), this discourse was marked by radicalothering, seeking to eliminate the irrationality of others and to sustain atotal differentiation between the two. This is apparent in articulations
meant to police how other users argued for their atheism: ‘You need torealize that when you argue these things you are in a sense using circularreasoning to say “our situation is different because we are right”, and thatis virtually the exact same rationale they use’ (/r/atheism thread). ‘They’ inthis case refers to religious people. Much as Carpentier (2018) argues, thisline of reasoning appears to be predicated on a view of the radically othered– religious people – as inferior to atheists, as they are articulated as having
given up their inherent rationality (‘They neatly fold up their reason andskepticism and put it in a locked box. Then they chuck it in the nearest canalwith a hearty cry “Well, reality’s not for me after all”’, /r/atheism thread).
Moreover, the atheist self that is established is articulated throughopposition; that is, it is explicitly articulated as not having any positive
content, but simply as being a negation of the irrational, religious other.
This particular way of arguing for the atheist self as neutral and objective isin line with Charles Taylor’s (2007) concept of the secular self as buffered;articulations of the atheist self as neutral, factual, rational and reasonable
are thus in line with those articulations of the secular self that have marked
political discourse in Western states (Asad 2003; Scheer, Fadil andSchepelern Johansen 2019; see also Binder in this volume).
A very similar antagonistic discursive formation is present in
Kasparian’s comment section. Again, we see the explicit articulation of
atheism as lacking any form of positive content. This is an attempt toarticulate atheism as a moment defined as common sense, rational andinherent, again in line with Taylor’s (2007) notion of the buffered self.
Atheism is articulated as not referring to a community, but to people whoare simply reasonable or normal. While the othering of agnostics was lesscommon on /r/atheism, it was central to the discursive formation in
Kasparian’s comment section. However, these processes of radicalothering appear to follow similar logics. In this process the presented

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GLOB AL SCEPTICAL PUBLICSdefinition (via the atheist compass) is not introduced as the best or mostuseful definition of atheism or agnosticism; rather, it is presented as
objective and as the only possible definition. This articulation divides thediscursive field into two opposite, antagonistic poles. As one commenterarticulates it, there can be no middle ground between these ‘BINARY
positions’ (Kasparian’s comment section). Claiming to be agnostic is
articulated as absurd and irrational, and Kasparian is associated withreligion and faith in God despite explicitly stating that she does notbelieve in God and that she is against organised religion. The type of
vitriolic responses Kasparian receives can be perceived as attempts tomaintain the coherence of this discursive formation: they are instances ofantagonism which expose how the alternative meanings this discourse
has excluded threaten to subvert its fixity of meaning, and thus undermine
its integrity. Thus, users argue both that there is no such thing as a ‘gnostic
atheist’, despite what Kasparian may claim, and that there is no way they
themselves could entertain the idea of God existing. This of course
functions to establish them as rational (by articulating their inability tobelieve in God), while solving the threat of Kasparian’s statement andidentification (by maintaining that no proper atheist would claim that
God does not exist, for certain).
The wish to erase the radically othered is clear in the responses,
apparent in the way Kasparian is told either that she does not know her
own mind (reasserting the atheist compass as the only possible definitionof atheism), or that her refusal to assert an atheist identity means that she
is ‘a pathetic coward unwilling to acknowledge reality’ (Kasparian’scomment section). The radical other in both discursive formations is theirrational human, the human who refuses to acknowledge the objective
reality presented by the atheist; in other words, the radical other is the
projected unbuffered self. The radically other is neither religious nor
agnostic, but irrational; the coherence of the discursive formation is
maintained by arguing that anyone who disagrees is irrational and thatatheism is a neutral, natural position lacking positive content, and by
repeating that articulating atheism in any other way simply does notmake sense. The characteristics of the discursive formation I have outlined
are thus in line with previous research that shows that atheists constructatheist identity in opposition to religious others (Guenther 2014; J. M.
Smith 2011). That is, within this discursive formation atheist identity is
deployed to signal a set of antagonistic presuppositions about not just thereligious other (Taira 2012; Lüchau 2010), but anyone who disagrees.
Thus, if atheists go online to imagine themselves as part of a communityof any kind (Cimino and Smith 2011; Smth and Cimino 2012), these

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communities might be described as forming through processes ofantagonistic othering and the projection of the undesirable (Ahmed
2014; Carpentier 2018; Chun 2016) – in this case irrationality – onto
everyone not adhering to a narrow definition of atheism. This type ofantagonistic othering has been described as an outcome of the affordancesof Reddit in particular (Prakasam and Huxtable-Thomas 2021) and is oneof the reasons why some argue that Reddit subverts any attempt to forma political identity or kick-start a political movement (Buyukozturk,
Gaulden and Dowd-Arrow 2018).
This antagonistic othering was in both cases accompanied byarticulations seeking to erase the projected other by emphasising theemptiness of atheism as a category and its naturalness as a state of mind.
In this way, the atheist ‘we’ was established through negative projectionof the irrational other as the only organising factor of what it means to beatheist. Communities forming through processes of antagonistic othering
are fragile, as any nuanced articulation of the other threatens thecoherence of the discursive formation. They can be understood ascommunities forged through hatred, and thus through a process whereby‘all that is undesirable [is projected] onto another, while concealing any
traces of that projection, so that the other comes to appear as a being witha life of its own’ (Ahmed 2014, 73). The central ‘us’ is thus established as
the centre which implicitly needs to be protected from the threat of theother, through the hatred of the other: ‘Those who hate excessively needtheir objects, because they become part of a community through this
attachment. This hatred organizes bodies and spaces’ (Chun 2016, 157).
Agonism, by contrast, is the articulation of conflict as inhabiting acommon symbolic space where interaction is based on mutual respect,and further seeks to harness pluralism for democratic purposes rather
than attempting to erase it. Differences are not articulated as
insurmountable or total, but as legitimate and necessary parts of afunctioning social formation (Carpentier 2018; Mouffe 2013). As theabove analysis shows, there are instances of agonistic discursive practices
apparent in the comment section of Kasparian’s video, as well as in thevideo itself. It should thus be emphasised that the particular discursive
formation I have focused on is not necessarily characteristic of atheist
discourse in general, and nor does it necessarily represent a majority ofatheists on- or offline. However, it is a discursive formation that appears
to have informed the negative stereotypes some atheists fight against.6
One aspect should be considered, however, before the types ofpractices discussed in this chapter are written off as simply
communities of hatred. The first is how people relate to online content,

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GLOB AL SCEPTICAL PUBLICSespecially /r/atheism, on which several users, responding to others
calling the forum a circlejerk, declared that it was a place whereatheists who are subjected to prejudices and discrimination in theireveryday lives can vent frustration by laughing at caricatures ofChristians. It is important to note that digital play was one of themarked characteristics of discourse on /r/atheism at the time,
especially through the sharing of memes and short comments
consisting of puns or pop culture references that are added to by others
developing the joke. This type of collaborative digital play is a defining
feature of interactions on various social networking sites (Lüder
2011), and present across a number of popular Reddit forums. On/r/atheism these instances of play functioned to foster a sense of
belonging on Reddit in general, and on /r/atheism in particular, as
they established a sense of interior and exterior. Thus, on /r/atheism,
these antagonistic discourses were ways through which users
expressed frustrations that were not necessarily meant for the eyes of
the radically othered. By contrast, in the case of Kasparian this type ofantagonistic atheist discourse was mobilised in an attempt to eradicate
the position of the radically othered in a very explicit sense – an otherthat was in no way hostile to atheism. And indeed, there were examples
of /r/atheism users being mobilised to harass specific people’s social
media profiles outside of Reddit after a story had been posted about
them on /r/atheism. 7 This type of mobilisation links to larger
discussions about the effect of violent online speech on democratic
inclusivity (e.g. Jane 2014); even if online harassment is intended asa ‘joke’ by perpetrators, it may not appear as a joke to the victim, nor
to people who want to participate in online spaces but feel unable to
do so because of the proliferation of such practices. So while theintention may be to vent frustration, finding resonance in shareddiscontent may function to mobilise frustrations in a more directed
way, for example through targeted online harassment.

Conclusion
The aim of this chapter was to explore the role of conflict in atheist
community formation, looking at how anti-religious sentiments can beconceived vis-à-vis atheist community formation online in order to bringnuance to questions of if and how practices of engaging with atheist
content online – or of ‘reading with’ – should be conceived of as
participation in or formation of diffused communities. Using a discourse

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theory approach focusing on the framework of antagonism and agonism(Mouffe 2013), I have analysed the role of conflict in atheist discourse.
The analysis showed what might be described as a type of antagonistic
discursive formation, meaning a discursive formation that seeks to divide
the discursive field into two binary poles via a process of radical othering(Mouffe 2013; Carpentier 2018). The atheist ‘we’ of this particular
discursive formation was forged through the projection of the undesirable– in this case, irrationality – onto everyone not adhering to a narrow
definition of atheism, and thus established through negative projection of
the irrational other what it means to be atheist. The discursive formation
was further characterised by a need to protect the implicit ‘we’ from theperceived threat of the other, mobilised via hatred and attempts to erase
all difference, a hatred that can be seen as the primary organisingprinciple of an antagonistic discursive formation. The characteristics ofthis discursive formation appear to be in line with what previous research
has argued, namely that atheist identity is constructed in opposition toreligious others (Guenther 2014; Guenther, Mulligan and Papp 2013;
Smith 2011), and is deployed in order to signal a set of antagonisticpresuppositions about religion which in turn works to empower atheists(Taira 2012; Lüchau 2010).
I would take this one step further and suggest that the ‘we’ of theparticular antagonistic atheist discursive formation I have looked atradically others not just religion or religious people, but anyone whostrays from the perceived objective, neutral definition of atheism. Thus,
this discursive formation seems to correspond to the projected other ofthe ‘progressive’ atheist discursive formation that Laughlin (2016)
identified as ‘dictionary atheism’, meaning an atheist discourse centred
on atheism as nothing but the disavowal of a certain type of belief. What
we see is thus something that appears paradoxical, namely a strong senseof coherence around the idea that atheism could not possibly be acommunity or a worldview. Recognising one’s individual beliefs in theother is not necessarily about ‘imagining community’ but can be about
reassuring oneself that although a great many people appear to be
irrational, there are other rational people out there one can laugh alongwith. Distinguishing between communities proper – such as atheist
organisations on- or offline – and this type of diffused engagement is, I
think, crucial to understanding the difference between a wish to link up
with like-minded people for various purposes and the impulse to use
different online spaces as recursive echo chambers of atheist frustration
and anger. While I show how the latter correspond to a particular
discursive formation, it is less clear to me that this should be conceptualised

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as a community rather than simply a type of public discourse. Whileatheists on Reddit, for example, do appear to ‘read with’ and engage withlike-minded strangers (Lundmark and LeDrew 2018), they do not seemto imagine themselves to be part of a community. Instead, they simply
imagine themselves to be right, normal and rational. Looking at this as aform of publicness organised around the concept of atheism allows us toview it instead as a type of discursive tendency in a set of heterogeneous
discourses centring on moral considerations or ideals, in this caseidentified as a complete rejection of belief in God (while maintaining that
this complete rejection is in fact not complete) as the only normal way of
being, thus rendering any opposing opinion not only wrong but
completely absurd, much like believing that there are pumpkins at thecentre of Mars.

Notes
1 A majority of YouTube and /r/atheism users were from the US (Erik [hueypriest] 2012a, 2012b;
Google 2021). Furthermore, these particular social media technologies were created in and for
the US market and are very reliant on US cultural norms and discourses (Lange 2007).
2 Quotations are always transcribed directly from the YouTube comment section or from reddit.
com/r/atheism as they were written, including spelling errors. Usernames have been omitted.
3 The larger study looked at videos by 60 US women, gender-nonconforming vloggers and theaccompanying comment sections. These videos were collected using the search terms ‘Mydeconversion story’, ‘Why I’m an atheist’, ‘deconversion’, ‘deconverted’, ‘atheist’ and ‘atheism’,and focused on the experiences of atheists and of non-religious people more broadly, though amajority of vloggers did identify as atheists in their videos (Lundmark 2019).
4 The video, which was five minutes long and titled ‘Am I an atheist?’, was published in January
2014 and had at the time of data collection (September 2016) received 21,1449 views, 4,887
upvotes, 513 downvotes and 5,148 comments.
5 It should be noted that ‘gnosticism’ in this chart appears to simply refer to ‘knowledge’ or‘absolute knowledge’, that is, it is an antonym of agnosticism, rather than referring to
Gnosticism as a religious or philosophical movement.
6 I have considered the positive content of atheist identity formation in a previous publication,
which explores other forms of atheist discourse than the type discussed in this chapter(Lundmark 2019).
7 These practices were not encouraged by moderators and were one of the major reasonsmoderators would go in and delete content. Still, users would encourage each other to engage
in these types of behaviour on several occasions.

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deconversion in an online community.’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 58 (2):494–512. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12599.
Stenmark, Mikael. 1997. ‘What is scientism?’ Religious Studies 33 (1): 15–32. https://doi.
org/10.1017/S0034412596003666.
Taira, Teemu. 2012. ‘More visible but limited in its popularity: Atheism (and atheists) in Finland.’Approaching Religion 2 (1): 21–35. https://doi.org/10.30664/ar.67489.

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Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Warner, Michael. 2005. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.
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php?title=List_of_most_popular_websites&oldid=1023620874 (accessed 15 June 2021).
Zenk, Thomas. 2014. ‘New Atheism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, Stephen Bullivant andMichael Ruse, eds, 245–60. New York: Oxford University Press.

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11
From ‘talking among’ to ‘talking
back’? Online voices of young
Moroccan non-believers
Lena Richter

Introduction
I met Ikram, a student from Fès, by chance during a seminar. Only after
we got to know each other better did she tell me, ‘Hey, I actually fit into
your research group about Moroccan non-believers,’ and kindly offered tomeet for an interview.1 During our long conversation, the complexity,
contextuality and fluidity of talking about non-belief became clear. For
Ikram, her choice of words to talk about being non-religious depended on
various factors, including her surroundings and the person she wastalking to. She illustrated this with an example: ‘I wouldn’t go to themedina and cry out loud that I don’t believe. I just seek dialogue with myclosest friends and as far as possible with my family.’In Morocco, in part because of the impact of social media and the
February 20 Movement,2 the number of non-believers has increased to 13
per cent of the population (Benchemsi 2015; Arab Barometer 2019, 13).
Nevertheless, many are hesitant to publicly identify as non-religious, as
the dominant public discourse is not in favour of people who leave or
doubt Islam. Being outspoken about non-belief can lead to private,
educational or professional obstacles. Legal aspects further restrict thepossibility of being vocal, as everyone who promotes non-religious ideas
risks being penalised for ‘shaking the faith of a Muslim’ (Penal code

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§220). Consequently, non-believers are excluded from most formal talkshows and interreligious dialogues. Against this backdrop, social media
remains one of the few places where non-believers can express themselvesmore freely (Mohammed 2019).
In the Moroccan diaspora in Western Europe, more members of theyounger generation embrace a cultural interpretation of Islam. Yet the
number of public non-believers remains very small (Saaf, Hida andAghbal 2009). As Hussein, a young journalist and poet from Antwerp,
told me: ‘I’m only 26 years old and Muslims have been in Belgium for two,
three generations, maybe even four. And it’s a bit strange that in all thistime I’m the first to make my non-belief public.’ Shortly after he shared hisstory on Flemish television, the right-wing populist party Vlaams Belang
tweeted: ‘Congrats Hussein, for this brave decision to leave Islam.’ That
was the opposite of his intentions: ‘I didn’t want to make a statement
against Islam – not at all, I just wanted to share my personal story to say“Hey, there are people like me, who grew up in a Muslim family but are
not religious”.’3 Since only a few former Muslims speak out in public,
those who do quickly find themselves in the spotlight, something whichis accelerated by the fast and reactive nature of social media.
To further analyse the relationship between online spaces and nonreligious expressions in Morocco and the Moroccan diaspora, I takeinspiration from bell hooks’s4 book Talking Back: Thinking feminist,
thinking black. Hooks (1989) defined talking back as an empowering actof speaking as an equal to those in power. For her, ‘true speaking is not
solely an expression of creative power; it is an act of resistance, a politicalgesture that challenges politics of domination that would render [themarginalised] nameless and voiceless’ (hooks 1989, 8). While hooks’s
notion of talking back is based on the intersecting experiences of black
women in the US, talking back has been proved to be a useful concept forother marginalised groups, such as Muslims in Western Europe (Van den
Brandt 2019; Loukili 2021). In this chapter, I expand upon the idea oftalking back to the experiences of Moroccan non-believers. Taking her
theory as a starting point, I distinguish three different forms of talking:talking among, talking back and talking with. This approach begs thequestion ‘Do online expressions of Moroccan non-believers remain atalking among like-minded people or do they constitute a talking back oreven a talking with that seeks dialogue with fellow religious citizens?’
This question will be answered on the basis of my fieldwork about
non-religious activism, which I conducted intermittently between 2016
and 2022 in Morocco and with the Moroccan diaspora in Western Europe.
The hybrid ethnography also covered Facebook groups, such as Atheists

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in Morocco, Marocains pour la Laïcité (Moroccans for secularism) and
MALI,5 as well as Atheist Antwerp and Ex-Muslims Belgium.6 My researchgroup included young, educated non-believers7 who mostly grew up in
urban Muslim middle-class families in Morocco or within the Moroccan
diaspora in Europe. While the majority of them do not see themselves asactivists, their acts and words are often perceived as activism, as theychallenge religious expectations. Therefore, my analysis applies anactivist perspective, handling a broad understanding of activism that
includes everyday acts of normalising non-religion. The insights in thischapter draw on the experiences of the research group as a whole while
concentrating on the accounts of one female protagonist from Morocco,
Ikram, and one male protagonist from Belgium, Hussein.

Thinking Arab, thinking Muslim?
The question of talking back is closely linked to power structures, as nonbelievers face multiple forms of interpellation. Althusser (1971) definesinterpellation as the process of spreading systematic values and ideologies
to the point that citizens consider them their own. In general, Moroccans
are interpellated as being Muslims, regardless of their actual convictions(Quack and Schulz, in preparation). From an early age, they learn that
Islam is not supposed to be questioned, neither publicly nor in private.
While this interpellation is inevitable, one can decide whether to embrace,
criticise or ignore this call to be Muslim (Bracke 2011).
Former Muslims, such as Ikram and Hussein, can rectify theassumption of thinking Arab, thinking Muslim, by showing that thinking
Arab can also mean thinking atheist (P. Hecker, conversation, 2021). Their
personal counter-narratives not only respond to clichés and stereotypes but
also describe what it means to be non-religious. By doing so, they form a
new counterpublic, as they not only oppose prevalent religious ideas but
also embrace multiple alternative non-religious discourses (Smith 1993).
As former Muslims are expected to remain silent about their deviant views,
this mere act of speaking as a non-religious minority8 to a religious majority
can be seen as a challenging counter-conduct (Derrida 1982; Odysseos,
Death and Malmvig 2016; Kaulingfreks 2015; Lorde 2018).9 Those inpower not only decide who is being addressed but also determine whichstatements are rewarded and which are met with disapproval (hooks 1989,
80). Despite being excluded from the public discourse, their voices often
attract publicity (Fraser 1990; Fattal 2018), which shows that rather than

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being a passive and deprived site, the margin can be a space for resistance(Derrida 1982).
In Western Europe, the question of whether members of the
Moroccan diaspora are religious or not is often not even posed. Instead,the question is to what extent their presumed Muslimness could becomea threat to ‘European’ values, such as secular liberties (Benchemsi 2015).
In this context, public former Muslims are often interpellated as secularsubjects and receive unwanted praise as examples of successful
integration. Against this backdrop, Hussein sees himself in limbo between
the core (in terms of non-religious views) and the margin (in terms of
being part of a diasporic minority). By not fitting into the simplified
dichotomy of a population divided into ‘secular Western Europeans’ and‘bad Muslims’, former Muslims continue to be othered on the basis of their
alleged ‘country of origin’.
Responses to these interpellations can take shape in myriad ways.
Taboo topics, such as publicly leaving Islam, are often creatively
communicated through art or music. For Hussein, poems offer him acreative way of expressing his views. Others communicate religious
critique through humour, which is a central component of counterpublics(Warner 2002; Hecker, this volume; Gupta, this volume; Richter 2021).
For a long time, stories of minorities have gone unwritten, miswritten or
unread, but recently more marginalised groups have explored social
media as an avenue of dissent to talk back to dominant power structures(Smith 1993; Mitra 2001; Peeren, Stuit and van Weyenberg 2016). These
online expressions, which can range from one-liners to elaborated
narratives, will be the focus of this chapter.

The impact of digitalisation on talking backAs counterpublics are text-based and evolve around a shared discourse,
they emerge and change according to historically specific media practices(Hirschkind, de Abreu and Caduff 2017). In the past, a few thinkers, suchas the poet Al-Ma’arri (973–1057), spread their critical thoughts on
Islam. With the printing revolution, the possibility of reaching a wider
audience increased, but the scope remained restricted to those privileged
to read, write and print. Today, books are predominantly produced by a
few well-known non-believers, many of whom publish under apseudonym. For instance, the autobiography Notes of a Moroccan Infidel(2020) is written by Hicham Nostik, a pen name derived from ‘agnostic’.
In the diaspora, Dutch Moroccan Mano Bouzamour is part of a collective

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of writers, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2007) and Lale Gül (2021), whoreflect on their Muslim upbringing.
In the digital age, some online platforms are used by only a few, vocal
non-believers. YouTube channels such as kafer maghribi (Moroccan infidel)
and podcasts like Secular Jihadists are mainly initiated and maintained by
activist non-believers. Other platforms, such as private Facebook groups,
offer a space for various non-believers to share their personal narratives
online. In addition, Twitter hashtags such as #ExMuslimbecause havecontributed to the new vocality of former Muslims.
Ikram experienced the impact of digitalisation at first hand: ‘There
were two different phases: before high school, I didn’t even have internet.
But after 2011, following the Arab uprisings, a lot of people, including
non-believers, went on Facebook and Twitter. I was in different groups:
L’athée marocain, the AA (ArabAtheist) and there was this online forum
called il7ad, which means atheism in Arabic.’ Such spaces were lacking
for Hussein and other non-believers who grew up in the diaspora. Besides
local groups, transnational Facebook groups exist that form a link
between Morocco and the diaspora. This leads to a linguistic mix:
sentences in Moroccan Arabic are intertwined with French terms, such aslaïcité. In Darija (Moroccan Arabic), it is often more difficult to express
non-religious views. One interviewee compared the lack of non-religious
vocabulary to 1984, the famous novel by Orwell: ‘They developed a new
dictionary, picking the new words so well, that it becomes impossible toformulate critique towards the party, so if you’re disloyal you don’t havethe words to express that.’ Moreover, non-believers often deliberately
refrain from using certain keywords that might attract attention. For
instance, they opt for blurred and symbolic expressions, such as le7t lfota(to throw in the towel) rather than il7ad (atheism). It is also common toshare running gags and insider jokes, such as the ironic use of religious
terms. This development of distinct phrases and sayings is a typical aspectof communication among counterpublics (Warner 2002).
As meeting in person can be difficult or even dangerous, many
interviewees perceive it as less risky to express deviant opinions online,
where they can choose whether, and with what level of anonymity, theywish to disclose their experiences (Fileborn 2014). Especially, closed
Facebook groups allow a certain level of privacy. For this reason, thedegree of publicity is complex. It is not always accurate to divide people
into hidden (silent) and public (talking) non-believers. Even closeted
non-believers might have some confidants to talk to, and more open nonbelievers may be hesitant about telling everyone their story. Manyinterviewees said that they opt for a stronger self-identification, such as

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atheist, online than they would do offline. This is also true of doubtersfrom other religious backgrounds (Fader 2017).
The internet, and in particular platforms such as Facebook, haveopened up new pathways for former Muslims to connect with one anotheranonymously. They can share personal and intimate thoughts about
leaving Islam while keeping an anonymous distance (Chalfant, thisvolume). Consequently, the internet provides a space for strong
counterpublics with the potential to stimulate a new image of nonbelievers (Fader 2017; Hirschkind 2006). According to Ikram, ‘theinternet changed a lot, but outside social media, you wouldn’t find a lot of
people who are courageous enough to say the same things, as they would
probably face a lot of backlash.’
Speaking out online is not without its risks. While interpersonalcommunication is more ephemeral, what is said online lasts almost ad
infinitum, eternally stored and findable. Other perils include online
harassment, shaming, trolling and surveillance (Shayan 2016). Ikram
reflected on this: ‘I know that people trust Facebook, but you never know
who reads it. Some people said bad things to me because of the things I
posted about Islam and the Prophet.’ In reaction, she blocked those who
threatened her and sometimes restricted who had access to her posts: ‘I
used to write a lot about illogical surahs [verses]. I would just put it on mywall, but I don’t let my family see what they don’t need to see [laughs].’
For a while, Ikram also preferred a pseudonym, which is, in combination
with using a false picture, common among non-believers.

Why (not) talking?
The internet has created more space for marginalised groups to talk back,but what are the motivations to engage in talking? The reasons behindbeing vocal can be manifold and shift according to context, personalconvictions and the intersectional position from which one speaks (Vanden Brandt 2019). The main motive for sharing personal stories about
how and why one left Islam is to talk back to misconceptions by providing
a more nuanced, alternative and diverse understanding of non-believers.
If many non-believers engage collectively in the act of talking back, they
can create a counterpublic that resists dominant depictions of former
Muslims (Dunajeva 2018). This unity of speaking is more viable in
Morocco than in the diaspora, where internal differences can bepronounced. While some former Muslims incorporate anti-Islam rhetoric

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and become the spokespersons of right-wing groups, most former
Muslims opt for disengagement or show solidarity with Muslims.
Disparaging statements which accuse non-believers of being
immoral or lacking autonomous thinking are prevalent, especially about
women. To counteract negative rhetoric, online storytellers seek more
understanding and empathy from readers. By revealing their personal
struggles they also raise awareness about the restrictive environment(Mulder 2018), which can motivate witnesses to become allies. Solidarity
can thus be another aim of talking back. As hooks (1989) states, ‘When
we end our silence, when we speak in a liberated voice, our words connect
us with anyone, anywhere who lives in silence.’
Not talking can also be mentally taxing. For Hussein, it was difficult
to pretend to be religious: ‘It is as if you’re leading a double life and thatmeans investing twice as much energy and thinking.’ He adds: ‘I had tolie, not because I wanted to lie, but because I thought it’s for the best, formy parents and me; to have my freedom and to be able to do my thing
without hurting anyone else.’ Although he started questioning Islam at
the age of 13, because he had never vocalised his doubts to others hesometimes had reservations about their validity. A few years later,
speaking about his non-belief became a stepping stone for passing on his
experience on to closeted non-believers. ‘Every voice counts in making
leaving Islam more negotiable and acceptable, so that parents like mine
may become more tolerant towards their children.’ Describing personal
struggles in relation to structures of domination can also inspire andencourage others to do the same (Shayan 2016).
The choice to come out as a non-believer can initiate a shift frombeing invisible to being highly exposed, from carrying the burden ofremaining silent to being compelled to talk. This means moving from noninterpellation, being made invisible, to negative interpellation, being
hypervisible (Hage 2010; De Koning 2016). Constantly having to talk andexplain oneself on and outside the internet can be burdensome. Hussein
often gets asked why he is not fasting: ‘It’s sometimes tiring to explain it
every time. I shouldn’t have to justify why I drink water but somehow you
have to do it because you can’t walk around with a sign that says: “I’m not
a Muslim”.’ The motivation to talk is also prone to change over the years.
This was the case for Ikram:
I had this phase where I was more active, I think everyone has thatphase in the beginning [laughs] because you feel you’re finally freeto think whatever you want, so you want others, Muslim and nonMuslim friends, to know about it and understand your way of

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thinking. But after 2012, I kind of stopped being active on Facebook.
It became repetitive – you don’t always want to talk about religion.
I think I’m a bit over that phase of talking.
While there are many arguments for talking back some non-believers
refrain from talking about their beliefs altogether, afraid of being
misunderstood or disappointing others. The price for talking back can behigh: from losing friends to being fired at work, or, in rare cases, getting
arrested. This anxiety to talk is characteristic of the way those in a lower
power position speak to those further up in the hierarchy (hooks 1989,
15). Being aware that it is risky to criticise Islam as part of the tabootroika: God, the nation and the king can lead to (self)censorship (Rahman
2012; Iddins 2020; Kettioui 2021). Silencing can happen in different
situations, online and offline, and can come from different people, suchas family, colleagues and strangers. Ikram stated that, although her
private school was laid-back, she was often stopped when she posed
critical questions.
Hooks (1989, 13) makes a key distinction: ‘There is the silence ofthe oppressed who have never learned to speak and there is the voice of
those who have been forcefully silenced because they have dared to speak
and by doing so resist.’ For hooks, remaining silent is more than a lack of
speaking: it is a submissive act, which is viewed as the ‘appropriate’ role
for the oppressed. For many, talking back remains a talking among. The
anonymity of social media offers an outlet for people who do not want or
cannot reveal their non-belief to those in their immediate social
surroundings but wish to liberate themselves from keeping their identity
completely hidden (Fader 2017). In non-religious Facebook groups, nonbelievers can share, empathise with and validate intimate opinions andthoughts.
Many non-believers also consciously and voluntarily decide not totalk back. They do not want to take part in this discourse, as they see
atheism as a response to religion and argue that ‘the whole concept ofatheism is something religious people came up with’. By remaining silent,
they ignore the expectation that they will engage in debate on the terms
set by the dominant discourse, and focus their efforts elsewhere (Bracke2011). Ikram, for example, considers dialogue important but thinks otherapproaches, such as education, are more effective means of achieving
acceptance of non-religious viewpoints. The meaningful absence oftalking is especially common in the diaspora, where former Muslims canpotentially serve as ‘living proof’ for right-wing politicians that Islam is296

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harmful. This appropriation of marginalised voices jeopardises theessence of counterpublics (hooks 1989, 14).

Who’s talking?
As we have seen, in the digital era it has become possible for more nonbelievers to be heard. While not everyone has the opportunity or skills towrite a book, it is relatively straightforward to post something on
Facebook or Twitter. In spite of these developments, it is important to ask
whether new digital forms of self-expression are truly inclusive. Who has
the power to speak and to be heard? And who is not talking (hooks 1989,
129)? The barriers which hinder talking can be very tangible, such as nothaving internet access, or more indirect, such as not feeling safe enoughto speak. Although online platforms offer a space for people of any
conviction to express themselves, it continues to be chiefly activist nonbelievers who receive the most attention.
Often a combination of different intersecting factors is in play,affecting how people experience (dis)advantages when talking about
non-religion (Yuval-Davis 2006; Crenshaw 2017; Salonen 2018). For
instance, male non-believers seem to express themselves online more
frequently. In general, talking back is perceived differently in relation togender, as Ikram states:
Women are supposed to be more obedient and honourable. So justthe fact that you’re thinking differently and dare to express that is
not very accepted like it is for men. I was told that these are not my
own ideas and that someone else is influencing me to think and talklike that. As a woman I get these reactions a lot: ‘you werebrainwashed’ or ‘someone is pushing you to do it’.
In Hussein’s narrative, gender played a less focal role but was importantin relations with women. He mentioned that his parents blamed his
Flemish girlfriend for bringing him on the – supposedly false – nonreligious path (see also Khazaal, this volume). A comparison of these two
examples shows that women can be framed as both passive followers andactive instigators (S. Loukili, conversation, 2021).
Former Muslims do not talk back in a single voice. Such heterogeneity
in speech is distinctive among (minority) groups and even within
individual narratives (Spivak 1988). A few collective narratives of nonbelievers use the we-form to stress common struggles. For instance, the

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Moroccan MALI movement unitedly campaigns for the rights of nonbelievers, with slogans such as ‘Stop Article 222’, according to which
public non-fasters can be arrested. Yet most narratives are written froman individual perspective. Especially in the diaspora, non-believers areless organised and opportunities to speak as a collective voice are harder
to find. While most voices remain individual, they form a powerful andaudible ensemble, contributing to the creation of a counterpublic.

What’s the talking about?
The intersectional position of the narrator and the geopolitical context
not only influence the choice of whether and where to speak but also theframing and emphases that are being made. The narrated experiences ofa straight, upper-class, female non-believer might look different from thenarrative of a queer, lower-class male. While Moroccan narratives might
focus on the legal restrictions that are in place, those in the diaspora deal
with the expectations of being a Muslim. As a more mixed group of nonbelievers are able to express themselves on online platforms, the topics ofthe narratives became more diverse.
The agenda of talking is still often set by those in power: topics areoften a response to the interpellations of the majority. Thus, non-believers
mainly respond to societal perceptions and interpellations of what being
non-religious entails. The discussion is further guided by ad hoc reactions
to major events, such as the arrest of non-believers, and rarely takes place
on a more abstract meta-level. Yet the internet has also made room for
more subtle, nuanced and alternative narratives, that describe doubts andthe right to personal choice, as well as the postcolonial structures within
which they were enculturated. The question remains as to whether thesealternative voices are also heard (Van Zoonen, Vis and Mihelj 2010).
Expressions of anti-religious sentiment garner the most attention
and are therefore perceived as the most dominant characteristic of people
disavowing from Islam. Such sentiment resonates among others in theposts of some ex-Muslim organisations. Anti-religious discourse is often
closely connected to ideas from the Enlightenment that oppose religion
with science and rationality, criticising the supposedly illogical basis of
the Qur’an. While this is assumed to be common ground among nonbelievers, many former Muslims dispute this generalisation, in which
Islam is portrayed as misogynistic and backward.
However, many do criticise certain aspects of Islam and draw upon
human rights issues when discussing their reasons for apostasy. Human

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rights are frequently referenced by online activists, especially when nonbelievers are arrested. Non-believers also vocalise their sense of discord
between religious and legal texts and their ideas about gender and
LGBTQ+ rights. In this case, talking back becomes talking with, as ameans of showing solidarity with other minority groups which experiencesimilar restrictions and call for more rights and reforms.
Much emphasis is also put on the struggles associated with being a
non-believer in a Muslim-majority or -minority context. This notion
resonates when talking with fellow Muslims as well as among nonbelievers. Problems can occur on personal, psychological, family andsocietal levels. Speaking out about the problems that come withidentifying as non-religious can encourage others, regardless of theirbeliefs, to show empathy and back non-believers who face stigma.
Next to these more salient discourses, the internet offers a spacefor other more subtle ideas and views, where initial doubts can bevoiced. As Ikram recalled, ‘You cannot announce right away that you
left Islam, you’re more like, “Hey, I’m thinking about this particularĀyah [verse], what do you think of it?” People appreciate it when you
start talking to them about Islam. They really want to explain it to you.’Those expressing doubts are often questioning everything, including
their own non-religious stance, and do not want to convince others thatthey have found the truth. Instead, they stress commonalities with
Muslims and challenge the dualistic categories and associations of being
religious or not. This fluidity also permeates the narratives, which are
not always clearly formulated or coherent but rather relational, syncretic
and at times contradictory.
Another understated but pertinent discourse stems from the right ofpersonal choice which stresses that being religious or not should be a freedecision. Advocates of freedom of choice argue that parents and teachers
should teach about different religions. This discourse was present in
Ikram’s account as well: ‘Raising awareness is a good thing to do, we doneed these kinds of conversations, but people are free to believe whatever
they want. I don’t want to be pushed in a certain way, so why would I try
to do it to other people?’ Those in favour of personal choice do not engage
as much in public discussion because they deem it to be an individual
decision, often favouring voluntary silence instead of talking.
Postcolonial discourse also plays its part within the narratives ofnon-believers and includes two core aspects: 1) deconstructing colonial
thinking and structures and 2) finding local counter-narratives.
Harnessing postcolonial thought can be seen as an act of talking back toclaims that non-religion is something ‘Western’. Many non-believers are

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critical of French secularism and cannot identify with the most vocal nonbelievers, who are overwhelmingly middle-aged Western men. They
further criticise the colonial roots of several laws that restrict nonbelievers in Morocco, such as Article 222, which criminalises eating inpublic during Ramadan.
Dominant discourses portray non-religion as rooted in
Enlightenment thinking and inflicted upon formerly colonised countries,
such as Morocco. While critically acknowledging these aspects, nonbelievers also stress that non-religion can be something intrinsically
Moroccan, referring to their Amazigh history or Arabic proverbs about
freedom of (non-)religion (Ben-Layashi 2007). Additionally, they seek
inspiration from non-religious YouTubers, activists and bloggers from theWest Asia and North Africa (WANA) region. This was also visible in
Ikram’s narrative, in which she argued that Morocco should follow Tunisia
in terms of secularism and further referred to the importance of the
Moroccan February 20 Movement. For her, freedom of conscience is nota merely European concept: ‘We have this saying in Arabic, and it’s basedon the Qur’an, that nobody can oblige you to do something that you do
not want to do when it comes to religion.’
Looking at the diverse meaning-making processes of the less vocal
majority shows that talking back is not simply about criticising Islam but
also about talking back to more dominant and common conceptions about
non-believers. Consequently, their purpose is to differentiate themselvesfrom the religious majority as well as from the perceptions of more vocal
non-believers.

Who is listening?
Looking at the diverse make-up of narrators and topics of talking back, we
can come to the interim conclusion that the internet has set in place thebasic conditions for a new counterpublic of non-believers. Against thisbackdrop, we can return to the question: do online narratives remain acase of talking among, or do they become a form of talking back to – orwith – Muslim citizens? Exchange is a condition for change, somethingwhich hooks (1989, 16) explicitly calls for: ‘We must be in dialogue. We
must be speaking with and not just speaking to.’Non-believers are compelled to deal with a multiplicity of audiences
and their accompanying queries (Van den Brandt 2019). These target
audiences, again, depend on the form of talking. Talking among happens
inside the group of fellow non-believers. Talking back can address

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conceptions about former Muslims and Moroccan religious authorities or,in the diaspora, right-wing groups and Muslim citizens. Talking with canbe multidirectional; it can be directed to other minorities, closeted nonbelievers and Muslim relatives or friends. Furthermore, the form oftalking depends on the medium. More interactive media platforms, suchas Twitter, allow more talking with than the one-directional
communication of YouTube channels and podcasts.
Drawing on the case of Hussein, three main audiences can be
distinguished. He aims to talk back to the Flemish audience and theMuslim minority yet envisions talking with other former Muslims. Whenhe shared his story on television, these audiences reacted very differently.
From non-religious Flemish viewers he received many supportive
messages, which he considered, on the whole, well intentioned but
unnecessary. Some responses were clearly against Islam, as theappropriation of his narrative by Vlaams Belang showed, which heparaphrased as follows: ‘Look, here you have an ex-Muslim, do you seethat Islam is bad and must leave Flanders?’ Hussein considered it very
opportunistic to appropriate his personal non-religious viewpoint aspolitical propaganda. He immediately clarified his position, because, forhim, ‘if you see something, you cannot remain silent about it’. Ultimately,as the topic provoked too many unintended reactions and interpretations,
he became less active about this topic on Twitter.
From the Flemish Muslim audience, Hussein mostly received a lackof understanding: ‘The guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about! Why
does he have to declare that on television? Couldn’t he just do his thing
and abandon Islam in silence?’ He felt misunderstood: ‘They see that as akind of attack on their faith but miss the point of what I said. It is not
because I want to attack Islam but because of the people who are at theturning point in their lives, to give them a little more clarity.’ Hussein
considers the latter group the most important audience: ‘Everyone has
their own story. And you can tell a story to someone who tries tounderstand it, or you can tell your story to someone who fully understands
you and that gives much more fulfilment.’ This is acknowledged in the
many messages he received from young people who said, ‘I recognise
myself in your situation, I’m not a believer but my parents are believing
Muslims and I don’t know how to tell them.’ As many former Muslims feel
isolated, listening to the narratives of other non-believers can be an
important source of comfort.
In Morocco, talking with each other mostly occurs at a family andfriendship level. This kind of dialogue challenges mutual stereotypes andfosters understanding. Sometimes, interviewees brought religious friends

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with them to the interview or told me about crucial Muslim dialogue
partners. Many interviewees first confided their doubts to people close tothem who had extensive knowledge about Islam. For Ikram, who theinterlocutor is matters in deciding how to talk: ‘Sometimes you just saythat you don’t practise. You phrase it differently, you need to know how
to react, to be aware of what to say to whom. Sometimes it’s not very safe
to say you’re not religious, and sometimes it’s fine. I wouldn’t say it tosomeone I’d just met or who really practises religion and uses a lot of
religious words. Also, abroad, people just assume that I’m Muslim and I
just let them believe it.’According to hooks (1989, 28), when a subaltern group speaks tothose who dominate, the presence of the latter changes the direction andshape of their words. The public can thus influence and govern thelanguage of talking. Depending on the audience, non-believers fluctuate
between different identifications. In some conversations they prioritise
their non-religious identity, while in others it is downplayed or denied.
This manoeuvring of different narratives requires mental effort and is also
visible in language (Cotter 2015). Hussein told me that in the presence ofMuslims, he automatically says Hamdulillah (‘Praise be to God’): ‘It justhappens without thinking.’ This shows that non-believers do not live in a
vacuum: growing up in a Muslim environment, their speaking is
influenced by Muslim terms.
For hooks (1989), speaking does not suffice to overcome being
silent; one must also be heard. Being heard does not require agreement
but it does need an acknowledgement of one’s position. Hussein described
his trajectory as follows:
For a long time, we never talked about it in a good conversation of‘sit down, what do you feel; what do you think?’ My parents simply
assumed that I’m a Muslim. There was no doubt about it. Of course
I’m a Muslim, I was raised as a Muslim, why should I be anythingelse? Before telling them straight away, I first prepared them slowly.
I went to live alone and then they realised that’s not the usual courseof things. I was almost 25 when I finally said to my mother, ‘Look,
there is something I have to say, something that comes from myheart – I’m not a believer.’ That was a very difficult conversation,with a lot of frustration and incomprehension, but it was better
because the hiding was just not healthy.
Hussein doubts that his mother really listened to him, as she often tells
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Muslim, get married to a Muslim woman.’ It is different for his older, nonreligious sister, who is a close confidante: ‘My sister is someone who
understands me and that’s very liberating. She really knows how andwhy, because we have taken the same “rebellious” path.’ Someinterviewees had the same experience with Muslim friends: ‘And if wetalk, it’s not like we want to change each other’s opinion. We’re justtalking, to understand each other, that’s what talking is about.’
Talking on the internet has some peculiarities. Online narratives areoften decontextualised and are heard by a wider public that goes beyond
friends and family members. This makes it more difficult to anticipate thepossible responses and attitudes of dialogue partners. The inexhaustible
scale of social media can lead to a hazy overview of the audience. At thesame time, this feeling of anonymity makes people feel more at ease whensharing their experiences. Sometimes it is easier to talk about this topic
with a stranger than with a friend or family member.
The capacity to disseminate those stories in an already saturated
online environment impacts the reach of stories. This explains why thenarratives of ordinary non-believers often go unnoticed (Deseriis 2011).
Online narratives that are more provocative, by being explicitly against
Islam, have more outreach than more subtle narratives which focus on
doubt or commonalities between Muslims and non-believers. This does
not mean that the messages shouted the loudest actually reach theaudience. Many interviewees pointed out that if you do not formulate yourideas thoughtfully, no one will listen to you. The struggle for attention
between different narratives takes place not only among non-believers but
also in relation to other groups. Non-believers are not the only ones who
aim to talk back to the interpellations of religious authorities.
The internet is not always a suitable place to talk with others who
have a different view. Because of algorithms and friendship networks,
online echo chambers emerge. The degree of accessibility andintermingling between believers and non-believers also depends on thenature of the group. Some Facebook groups are not findable just by thegroup name and explicitly state that Muslims are not allowed to enter, toprovide a safe space for Moroccan non-believers. Other groups do provide
a meeting platform for Muslims and former Muslims. However, most of
the talking with happens in face-to-face conversations.
Exchange in the form of talking with can also take place between
different kinds of non-believers. In Facebook groups such as Atheist Republic,
former Muslims interact with former Christians, Hindus and Buddhists.
Often the administrators initiate dialogical questions, such as ‘Did leaving
religion impact your everyday life?’ or ‘Does being religious or not religious

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play a role in the choice of a potential partner?’ These questions are widely
discussed and gain considerable attention. In terms of their intersectional
positions, non-believers can learn from each other when sharing personal
narratives. While online groups are sometimes further divided into
subgroups – for example of Amazigh or female non-believers – someassemble a mix of different people. Consequently, in talk among nonbelievers, sub-talking with different kinds of non-believers takes place.

Conclusions
Both in Morocco and in the Moroccan diaspora in Western Europe, former
Muslims form a group that is often silenced, talked on behalf of or talked
about, while rarely getting the chance to talk for itself. In this respect,they face a double interpellation. When they remain silent about theirviews, they are wrongly addressed as Muslim subjects. Once they identify
openly as non-religious, they are confronted with new interpellations
ranging from clichés about being non-religious in the Moroccan context
to unwanted praise for being exemplary secular citizens in the diaspora.
Following the advent of social media, it has become easier for a larger
and more diverse group of non-believers to talk back to these interpellations
by sharing their personal narratives online. According to many interviewees,
talking about non-religion might become even more acceptable because‘the future is in the hands of the next generation. The teenagers of today areedgier, they’re going to decide the culture of talking.’ Social media has
already led to new publicity and a diversification of talking, as the internet
has provided a platform for alternative stories. Dominant discourses andactivists remain the most heard, such as those that focus on anti-religious
claims, human rights and struggles. Yet, more subtle counter-narratives,
which discuss doubt, personal choice and non-religion from a postcolonial
perspective, have also found their space. Together they build an emerging
counterpublic that consists of different sub-counterpublics.
The content, form and platform of online narratives depend on
personal, situational and intersectional aspects, influencing whether
people feel in a position to talk. As a result, remaining silent can be a
voluntary or an involuntary decision. Being silenced happens as a reaction
to the fear of being misunderstood, judged or instrumentalised.
Remaining silent can also be a symbol of not taking sides or of expressing
solidarity with Muslims by consciously not wanting to feed anti-Islam
discourse prevalent in right-wing European movements.

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Talking among, talking back and talking with address different
audiences. Talking among takes place within the group of non-believers. In
addition, sub-talking takes place between non-believers who have different
intersectional positions. Talking back is mainly directed towards dominantdiscourses about non-believers and towards majority groups. In Morocco,
this public consists of religious authorities and a substantial Muslim
majority. In the diaspora, talking back addresses the expectations of religious
members of the diaspora as well as society as a whole and political parties.
At times, talking back can develop into talking with if all parties are willing.
Talking with also takes place with other minority groups. In Morocco, thesecan include religious and sexual minorities, as well as non-believers fromother religious backgrounds. In the diaspora, less allyship is visible between
different minorities and talking with rather reaches out to closeted nonbelievers. The line between talking among, talking back and talking with istherefore fluid. Moreover, the same talking can simultaneously havemultiple audiences and, hence, multifunctional forms of talking.
On a final note, while I have analysed exchanges in terms of talking
back and listening, ideas move in a more circular way. It is not only about
sending and receiving messages, but about multiple modes of talking andtalking back (Warner 2002). There is no single voice or vocabulary withwhich non-believers can talk back to interpellations, and nor is there asingle audience. While the voices of non-believers are diverse, they do form
an emerging counterpublic which has barely been heard. This counterpublic
is still in the making: the basis for it is formed in Facebook groups, where
non-believers talk among themselves. Thus, this talking among does notneed to be the final stage but can be a basis for future, more overt talking.
Online platforms are spaces in a constant state of flux, whose dynamicchanges influence how, where and with whom talking takes place. What
started with just a few blogs has spread to social media and will continue toshift in tandem with the ever-evolving digital landscape.

Notes
1 Interview with Ikram, 6 April 2019, Brussels.
2 The February 20 Movement is seen as the Moroccan version of the Arab uprisings. Part of the
movement asked for secular reforms.
3 Interview with Hussein, 28 March 2019, Antwerp.
4 The professor and social activist bell hooks purposely wrote her pen name in lower case tosignify that the substance of her work is more important than the author herself.
5 MALI is the Mouvement Alternatif pour les Libertés Individuelles (Alternative movement forindividual freedoms).
6 Names of people and hidden groups are pseudonymised.

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7 Acknowledging the diverse identifications of this group, I use the broad terms ‘non-believers’and ‘non-religion’, which also come closest to the Arabic term lā dīnī.
8 ‘Minority’ does not refer to a numerically smaller group, but to the social construct of being a
disadvantaged group.
9 Counter-conduct, a term coined by Foucault, is small-scale forms of resistance performed bycitizens who refuse to be governed by the hegemonic principles that are set in place and findalternative ways of conduct.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my PhD supervisors Professor Dr Karin van
Nieuwkerk and Dr Araceli González Vázquez, as well as the editors andreviewers for their fruitful comments. I am also thankful to my colleagues
who shared their expertise on bell hooks with me, such as Dr Martijn deKoning, Dr Samira Azabar, Dr Margreet van Es, Dr Nella van den Brandt,
Fouzia Outmany and Sakina Loukili. Moreover, I’m grateful to myinterviewees for taking the time to share their thoughts on this topic.

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12
Ungodly visuals: confrontations,religion and affect in the everyday
lives of atheists in India
Neelabh Gupta

In 2014, a Bollywood film titled PK made headlines for its engagementwith ‘non-religiosity’. The film tells the story of an alien and his(mis)adventures on earth in search of a medallion-like communicating
device he needs in order to return home, a device that has found its way
into the hands of a popular godman (spiritual guru). The film’s major
female protagonist, who belongs to a very religious family whose
members are ardent disciples of the godman with the medallion, trusts
the alien’s story and becomes his quest companion. She begins to question
the influence of godmen and religion in her personal life, including on her
relationship with her estranged Muslim boyfriend from Pakistan, whom
she met while living in Belgium. As the alien and the female protagonist
race to locate the medallion, various social aspects of religion –communalism, blind faith, astrology and notions of God – are depicted
critically. Throughout the film, the protagonist learns and unlearns
various aspects of religion through encounters which generate humourand question contemporary practices within various religions. Clips of thefilm continue to circulate within the digital spaces I have been studying.
Though the atheists I discuss in the chapter are not aliens, theireveryday experiences include many similar instances. This chapter is anattempt to understand the encounters atheists have with ‘religious fields’
in their everyday lives, in both online and offline contexts. It examines

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attempts made by atheists to publicise atheism, and their interactions
with various aspects of religion, including an online religious public.
The religious field is shaped by socio-political contexts, bothcontemporary and historical, that mark out the space of atheistic
expression. My notion of religious field is expansive, including direct andindirect ways in which religion becomes a relevant factor. Its meaning
here is manifold. It is not simply a confrontation between religious belief
and its denial, but an ongoing conversation that informs everyday lives.
The intent is not to mark the boundaries of the ‘religious field’, becausesuch strict boundaries will be hard to delineate. I will, instead,demonstrate various ways in which edges of the ‘religious field’ become
visible by showcasing examples of visuals circulated in digital spaces suchas closed Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups. When these different‘edges’ are confronted, various affects come into place, informing theprocesses of becoming atheist and the expression of atheist views,
including visual media in digital spaces. Affects here mean a complex ofsensibilities and emotions that come into place, shaping navigation of thereligious field on the part of atheists. Though particularities of religion
and the religious field are important factors to consider when we try tounderstand how atheists experience religion after leaving it, my argument
is focused more on atheist spaces of expression in everyday matters. I also
examine confrontations that happen in varying forms governed bydifferent sets of relations among groups such as family, religious publics,
digital platform guidelines for religious content, and the state.
The focus of the chapter is on unorganised atheism in India,
mediated through digital spaces, on atheists coming together in online
spaces in different forms (groups, pages, channels, among other forms),
and sharing and exchanging views, but living their individual lives in
geographically dispersed socio-religious contexts that share similarities
and differences. There is marked variation in how Indian atheists enact‘digital atheism’ (Copeman and Schulz, this volume). It can be a simple
extension of a social world online, a part of everyday life, where views are
openly expressed. But I have found such expression to be quite rare foratheists in India. On the other hand, atheists may guard their digital
activities carefully, and take measures to remain anonymous or hide theirviews and sharing of media from people they know personally. Ayala
Fader’s work among Hasidic Jews in New York who are critical of Judaic
orthodoxy offers interesting insights into this kind of subject position. The
heretics Fader studied enact almost parallel lives and online networks,
remaining digitally anonymous or revealing their identities only after
achieving mutual trust. They maintain digital anonymity because of the310

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fear of being ostracised by their community (Fader 2020, 14–17).
Similarly, many young atheists in India keep their online atheist lives
separate from their physically known networks. But there are key
differences as well. The atheists I have been working with do not hail froma single geographical location or community but from various parts ofIndia and different religious communities. For example, in a WhatsApp
group of around 20 atheists of which I am a member, members hail fromdifferent states of India, such as West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Assam,
Odisha, Kerala, Delhi, Haryana and Punjab. They are also of different
religious backgrounds: Hindu, Muslim, Jain and Sikh. Meanwhile,
multiple other factors, such as state laws and online religious publics,
contribute to regulating the digital expression of Indian atheists. Theirdigital activities range from a simple extension of their offline social life
to the setting up of a parallel digital life in which they can freely discuss
atheism and share ungodly visuals; this life is quite distinct from theiroffline one in which they maintain silence on these matters.
People use different terms for themselves in relation to their nonbelief, such as rationalist, freethinker, non-believer, and also some regional
words like nastik (Hindi for atheist),1 Vastvik (loosely translated asmaterialist), adharmi (without religion) and Mulhid (Urdu for nonbeliever), with different connotations of non-belief. These identities are‘ambivalent’, as they emphasise different aspects of non-belief and involve
subtle political positioning as well (Lee 2015, 6–7). I am using the word
‘atheist’ in this chapter as an umbrella term for people on the spectrum of
non-belief. Also, I am considering atheistic expression foregrounded in a
relational approach towards non-religion (Quack 2014, 448–51), in which
expression is regulated and influenced by the specific socio-political andgeographic context of the religious beliefs atheists have grown up with and,to a large extent, still live in. Relationality of religion with non-religion canbe understood in many ways, but I am describing it by using the word‘edge’. Edge here means a not so strict boundary, but at the same time itestablishes a distinction between religion and non-religion.
I will describe the lives and experiences of young atheists who aremostly in their twenties. They are active participants in various digital
media spaces for atheism in India. Making and sharing visual media,
including but not limited to memes, informs the everydayness of these
digital spaces. Usually such spaces are small, having only a few hundred
active members. Many of my interlocutors are pursuing a degree, either
living with or dependent on their parents and extended family. They
usually do not have many atheists in their network of personal relations,which means that practising or expressing atheism is riddled with

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dilemmas. I do not put much emphasis here on the various ways throughwhich non-religion is acknowledged or represented. Rather, I focus on
everyday encounters with the religious field in which these atheists operate.
The sharing of visual media offers meaningful insights in locating
encounters with the religious field and how it is navigated. I particularly
focus on visuals, as they form a part of everyday media sharing, whichgains importance in terms of atheistic expression in digital spaces (Richter
2021, 4–6). Visuals can be considered a part of conversations aboutatheism that are already happening in India, in which visuals are used togenerate humour and other affects to signify shared experiences orcommonalities. In any case, visuals shared in atheist spaces capture thecomplex entanglements of expressing non-belief within a society that islargely religious. Richter (this volume) notes a similar media-sharing
practice among the young populace of Morocco, where memes about
Islam are shared in closed private spaces. These visual media, which I call‘ungodly’ visuals, may be blasphemous or simply provoke accusations of
blasphemy, and they are often based on iconography of gods or refer togodly figures of various religions. Such visuals become a point of conflict
between atheists and believers. These conflicts may remain confined tocomment sections, but they harbour the potential to spark larger conflicts
as well, including physical violence and legal action from the state. But,
along with content, the process of regulating circulation in digital spaces
is equally important for understanding atheistic expression, both online
and offline.

Everyday encounters with religious ‘edges’
In the late afternoon of a very cold Sunday in Delhi, I was anxiously waiting
for an interlocutor’s response to my messages about a scheduled interview
call the same day. I had just begun my fieldwork and sent numerous
messages to establish a network of online atheists to work with. While
waiting for responses, I browsed through some notes from my previous
conversations with some of these atheists. I had noticed reluctance on thepart of some young atheists to come online and talk, particularly in a videocall format. The reluctance stemmed from concerns about privacy, whichis understandable as many of them operate through anonymous (profiles
with names such as ‘Atheist’ or ‘Thinker’) or pseudonymous accounts(profiles with fake names), with no trace of personal information.
Conversing with an unknown person who claims to be a researcher could
spell danger as they partake in sharing ‘ungodly’ visuals actively. But that312

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was not the only concern. Many of my participants live with their families,
who are blissfully unaware of their atheistic beliefs, let alone their activities
in online spaces. Several times, concerns were expressed about attracting
the unwanted attention of people at home, particularly parents, throughbeing overheard in the house. They usually spoke to me very softly,
censoring words every now and then or suppressing gleeful laughs, in order
to avoid creating noise. I had been interviewing people during the
pandemic, another potent reason for them to live in the confines of family
homes. The kind of secrecy enabled by smartphone screens, then, becomesa blessing for atheists, who can thus express their views, rather vividly, on
social media platforms. A similar thing happened in this interview, during
which my interlocutor looked away from the screen every few minutes tolisten for approaching footsteps.
I share with you a small excerpt from a chat with a person who
manages a Facebook page named Atheists of South Asia. He agreed to talkto me, but only through text messages (figure 12.1). Since then, we havechatted many times about atheistic work online and, every now and then,about his personal life. He refused to meet me in person or even chat on avideo call to avoid any confrontation with his family. He jokingly suggested
that we can only meet once he is in his thirties, implying independence
from parents. This palpable reluctance to talk in the presence of family
points to various factors at play in the expression of non-belief outside
digital media spaces. For online spaces, the choices of privacy settings
offered by different platforms help in media-sharing practices, offering
control over what becomes visible to family and other personal relations.
There have been some exemplary studies that have documented theeveryday experiences of atheists in India. Stefan Binder, in his work withatheist activists in South India, employs the term ‘ex-centricity’ to refer topractices of making atheistic aspects of life visible in various ways, inpublic and in one’s personal life (Binder 2020). He emphasises various
ways of accomplishing this, such as making a wedding a subdued, secularaffair, with no ritual element. My research with individual atheists
connected via digital spaces shows that ex-centricity often becomes anaspiration, particularly in personal life. However, in online spaces,
atheists find ways to express atheism, particularly through the ideologicaland atheistic media content shared. The personal accounts of atheists on
different platforms usually have elements that outrightly convey atheism.
This comes in the form of biographical description, profile pictures,
pictures with logos of atheism, content shared through their profile andother forms of media sharing. But in offline lives, making atheism visible
can be difficult.

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12.1 Excerpt of chat with an interlocutor, translated from Hindi.
Created using fakechatapp.com.

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Along with making atheism visible, practising a rational, logical orreason-driven life may be complicated. Individually, atheists do try to
make space for such practice, but within the domain of intimate familial
relations there can be obstacles to overcome. Johannes Quack’s work withorganised ‘rationalists’ in the state of Maharashtra theorises ‘modes of
unbelief’ in which atheist activists aspire to lead completely rational lives(Quack 2012a, 236–41). Arguments promoting rational ways of thinking
are found in abundance in online spaces. It is worth noting that these two
positions, ex-centricity and ‘modes of unbelief’, were defined in settings
in which atheism is professed as social activism, with a strong support
network present in the form of rationalist organisations. Further, it isoften the case that males are in a position to be open about being atheists
in a way that women cannot, since men are in general more able to assert
authority and influence. Unorganised individual atheists, though sharing
deep mediatised connections with other atheists, are often embedded ina religious field, where the scope for exhibiting and expressing atheism islimited. Here, ex-centricity and modes of unbelief turn into negotiation
for atheistic expression within personal relations.
I have shared an old but popular meme (figure 12.2) which surfaces
every now and then. In the meme, a woman has placed a hand on themouth of her dog, in order to stop it from barking. The text adds meaning
to the affect of forced silence, here in the context of atheism and religious
conversations. For many of my atheist interlocutors, atheism is tied inwith affective relations shared with family, a space where atheist beliefs
are negotiated. Just a few months ago, as I was about to commence
research on atheism, my mother asked me to pay for an online course on
Hindu astrology. As an atheist, I did not want her to pursue it, but she
argued that she accepts my non-belief and I should extend her the same
courtesy. My case is not an isolated one, because many young atheists areembedded in this collective familial religiosity, within which theexpression of atheism is actualised in the process of creating spaces of
expression and marking boundaries, or trimming, even if only slightly,
the edges of a religious field.
Collective religiosity is present in everyday lives as well as beingreflected in events like life-cycle rituals relating to death. This has been
noted, even among the established atheist activists, particularly withreference to death rituals. Opting not to have a funeral that accords withreligious guidelines, either pre-planning for oneself or for some family
member, meets with strong resistance from religious family and friends.2
Negotiations take place to persuade people to donate the body to science
instead of having a religious burial or conducting death rituals, which are

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12.2 ‘Silenced dog’ meme. Image taken from a closed Facebook group.
considered by atheist activists a Brahmanical form of monetary
exploitation because of the price of conducting the rituals over several
days and the social obligation to feed the Brahmins on the last day(Copeman and Quack 2015, 51). Other superstitions about the dead comeinto play: where the afterlives of the dead are assumed to be in jeopardy
or worse, a form of haunting is expected if rituals are not completed(Copeman and Reddy 2012, 66). Such concerns about marriages, births,
deaths and calendrical events such as festivals also constitute the religious
field in everyday lives. One of my interlocutors, a queer ex-Muslim, vented
about the pressure from his family to carry out religious ceremonies for his
brother’s wedding. Many fellow atheists came forward with sympathy andsuggestions to help him navigate this familiar situation. His father did not

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anyway lest their omission raised questions from religious hard-liners
within their community. Even though he did not want to perform thoserituals, understanding the situation, he agreed.
It is not always a forceful assertion of religion or non-belief thatcreates confrontations in everyday life. Such confrontations are better
understood as sensibilities of operating in a religious field, where spacefor expressing non-belief is negotiated within a balance of silence andargument. Also, the negotiations expand the space for atheistic expression
as well as secure the space already present. Many atheists prefer to avoid
conversations about religion and beliefs with their close family members
and friends. Some even take part in rituals and festivities, in order toavoid hurting the feelings of family members or inviting unwanted
arguments that slip into personal conflict. Another ex-Muslim, Tariq(pseudonym), in his late twenties, who works in a digital marketing firm,recounted many similar experiences. While coming to one of our physicalmeetings in Delhi, held during the brief spell of calm between coronavirus
pandemic waves, he brought biryani cooked by his mother, at the requestof a few members of the ‘God Delusion’3 WhatsApp group, a subset oftwenty-odd people from a larger Facebook group. But his mother was notaware that he was going to meet atheists, nor that they were from an
online group. Tariq chose to conceal this particular detail and simply
referred to the group as friends, thus avoiding an argument that might
have resulted in his missing the get-together. For another participant, aqueer Dalit atheist, silencing came in the form of shushing or interrupting
them while they were talking in order to prevent them from taking up
some of the arguments in discussions with their neighbours. They wereasked to avoid arguments about religion with neighbours as such disputes
are not good for their image in the community. Such confrontations,
resulting in forced silence for atheists, come from the religious field that
becomes visible in everyday life in different forms. It is important to notethat these young atheists, particularly those who do not express their
atheist identity openly in front of their families, often feign interest in
religious activities, in order to escape scrutiny. The closest that they can
get to making their non-belief visible is in the form of religious indifference(Copeman and Quack 2019, 50), whereby they simply appear to beuninterested but non-critical about matters of religion.
I will illustrate the confrontations with the religious field throughtwo examples. The first is the construction of the Ram Mandir (a Hindu
temple) in Ayodhya, a coveted project of right-wing Hindu (‘Hindutva’)politics that commenced in August 2020, and the subsequent donation

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collection drive in January 2021, in various neighbourhoods of Delhi. The
second is the everyday experience of non-straight/non-binary atheists.
On 5 August 2020, the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi,
participated in a priest-led foundation ceremony (Bhoomi pujan) for the
Ram Mandir in the city of Ayodhya, birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. In
November 2019, the Supreme Court of India had legally paved the way
for the construction of a Ram Mandir, in a major victory for Hindutva
organisations across the country.4 The building of Ram Mandir has beena fundamental ideological issue for many decades, provoking waves ofcommunal violence in different parts of India. Since the Supreme Court
judgement, it has been an active point of discussion in online spaces,
making Ram Mandir almost indexical to the contemporary Hindu
nationalist political regime. On the day of the foundation stone laying
ceremony, various social media influencers who favour the ruling politicalparty called for the lighting of five lamps in front of houses, as a mark ofthis ‘holy’ spectacle of the prime minister laying the foundation stone fora long-awaited religious, or rather political, achievement.5 Many visuals
and texts circulated on WhatsApp, reaching my participants, among
others. In the evening, social media posts of lamps lit on the porches ofhouses or in windows and on balconies and terraces started circulating.
Many atheists expressed a general disdain online by sharing screenshotsof Instagram and WhatsApp stories or pictures of their neighbourhood,
where lamps were in abundance. I was staying in South Delhi at that time,
witnessing something similar there. Some atheists expressed concern
about their own families participating in the ongoing celebration. Many
expressed surprise, seeing the sheer number of people in their personal
networks, whom they had never thought of as politically or religiously
active, putting such stories6 on social media platforms. Many atheists felt
isolated and lonely, overwhelmed by the collective religiosity unfolding
throughout their personal networks, both online and offline.
After that day, the phrase ‘Jai Shree Ram’ (Glory to Lord Ram) andreferences to Ram Mandir generally increased in atheistic digital spaces
such as WhatsApp groups. A few months later, in January 2021, a drive
to collect money for the construction of Ram Mandir was initiated byright-wing-affiliated Hindu organisations that supported the religiouspolitical cause.7 Soon, this collection drive reached many neighbourhoodsof Delhi. People clad in saffron or bearing a symbolic saffron piece ofclothing could be seen going around neighbourhoods, asking for small
contributions (figure 12.3). These collectors soon reached the doorstepsof members of ‘The God Delusion’, the WhatsApp group, prompting thegroup to express derision at what was happening.

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The discussion of the donation drive lasted for nearly three weeks on
the WhatsApp group. Siddharth, one of the longest-standing members,
shared his experience with the group. He resides in a gated community inNoida, an area south-east of Delhi, with his parents. They wanted to donate
to the Ram Mandir construction, something quite typical of upper-castefamilies in India. He had persuaded his parents not to. His parents agreed,
but were not entirely convinced. When he shared a snippet of his
conversation with his father on the group platform, other members had
similar stories to share from their own personal experiences. After a few
days, Siddharth had another encounter. While going up in the apartment
lift with his mother, he found himself trapped with two people who werecollecting donations. They started talking to his mother, who was alreadyinterested in giving a donation for the temple. This time, he witnessed his
mother eagerly agreeing to donate. She informed the donation collectorsthat she would prefer to donate online, which bought Siddharth time topersuade her otherwise. Apparently, she was inspired by the publicity of afamous Indian actor, Akshay Kumar,8 who was rallying support for thesame cause. Siddharth’s partner, Aditi, also a group member, replied that
she would talk to his mother. She did talk to her, suggesting she donate
instead to a charity supporting education or feeding street dogs, but
Siddharth’s mother was not convinced. After a few days, Siddharth shareda post on a Facebook group expressing anguish at his own silence when all
this happened. Some members of the Facebook group shared similar
stories, about how they had not been able to stop their parents or friends
from donating money. One of my interlocutors revealed that his family had
donated 50,000 Indian rupees (around £500 or $650) for the temple
because his grandfather was a former Member of the Legislative Assembly(MLA) for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He was repulsed by the fact,
expressing absolute disgust towards his family members for doing it. He
shared such sentiments on various occasions when the political andreligious views expressed by his family made him feel alone, vulnerable andsuffocated. He has been actively job hunting, which would enable him to
move out of the family home and live an independent life. Those living by
themselves or with friends were able to resist and did not donate, usuallyby ignoring the doorbell and shouts for them to come out. But those staying
with their families faced multiple challenges, to varying degrees.
In between these conversations, running jokes about creating a fake
donation drive were going on in our WhatsApp group. The plan was
simple: a door-to-door collection in various neighbourhoods, wearing
saffron clothes with devotional music in the background. The money
gathered would be put to a productive use promoting science. The

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12.3 Ram Mandir donation-drive bike rally, Delhi, January 2021.
thoughts about what to do with the money evolved over time, but the joke
stayed for several weeks and neutralised tensions emerging fromconflicting experiences in their personal lives. Here, the affect of silence
was produced by the entanglement of atheists in the group in politicalreligion, which was actively espoused by state and familial religiosity anddecisions, where they had limited say. The silence was maintained inorder to avoid confrontation, heated debates and possible violence, from320

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family members and from the people collecting money for the temple.
Silence becomes an important affect through which everyday religiosity
is navigated by young atheists.
The Silenced Dog meme about family and religious conversations
shows the nature of silence that atheists experience. The fact that itremains popular suggests an affective relation among atheists in online
spaces, established through an understanding of the particularities ofsuch silence. Silence becomes instrumental in the navigation of religious
places, relations and the politico-religious activities of the state.
I will explore another meme (figure 12.4), which has been
circulating in different digital spaces. In this meme, a disappointed andsad naked pubescent kid is sitting in bed with two naked women, a scenefrom Rick and Morty, a popular animated comedy show about the12.4 Screenshot of meme shared in a secret Facebook group, withtext caption.

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adventures of a scientist and his grandchildren in a multidimensional
intergalactic world.9 The text in the meme uses the affective image toconvey the dissatisfaction awaiting gay Muslims in jannat (heaven). The
humour lies in the fact that a gay Muslim will not be happy with theafterlife reward of 72 female virgins or hoors in heaven, a reward
suggested in Islamic texts.10 As the text above the meme suggests, thevisual questions the stance that many religions have taken on
homosexuality. Some people commented on how difficult it was for themto come out, as since childhood they had been taught that homosexuality
is a sin. A member cheekily commented that he would ignore the hoors
and focus on Farishtey or angels, but a genuine discomfort with religion
was visible in the ensuing discussions, with atheists criticising religious
texts and moral stances that marginalise non-heteronormative choices. It
brings out the complexities in dealing with familial relations in whichbeing queer is already difficult and being an atheist adds a further strain.
Atheism and sexuality have a mutually complementing relationshipfor many of my non-binary, non-heterosexual interlocutors. Many havestruggled with coming out both as an atheist and as a non-heterosexual/
non-binary person. In my research, I have come across many instances inwhich sexuality and the reasons for leaving a religion are affectively
linked. For example, a queer atheist from Bengal told me a story that hadformed part of his journey to atheism. As a child, around 10–11 years ofage, they were experiencing conflicting feelings about their gender
identity and sexuality, which led to a lot of frustration and unhappiness.
They were unaware of how to make sense of these personal conflicts, andbecause of a staunch silence about gender and sexuality within theirfamily and community, they had no one to talk to. Desperate for asolution, they prayed to God to eliminate all this turbulence, and just letthem feel normal. When the feelings did not go away, they became angry
with God and eventually started to question God’s existence.
The affective relation between atheism and sexuality comesprimarily from a sense of marginalisation and lack of visibility in public
discourse (Brewster 2013). In atheist digital spaces, there are ample
discussions about sexuality, gender identities and inherent patriarchy inreligion, usually reflecting on difficulties faced by queer atheists living ina deeply religious society. This conflict of being a gay Muslim or Hindu or
Sikh becomes a binary dilemma: either reconcile faith with your sexuality
or deny the faith that does not accept your sexuality. Many queer atheists
I was in contact with chose the latter. Through their experiences anotheredge of religious field becomes visible in everyday life, involving sexuality
and prescriptive religious perspectives.

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Some gay atheists shared their encounters on gay dating andmeet-up apps in the group. While networking for intimate partners on
digital apps one often comes across people who follow some religion. In
addition to the usual forms of confrontation that being gay and being an
atheist can invite, I became particularly fascinated by what happens in theintimate sphere of homosexuality when a gay atheist comes into contact
with intimate partners who believe in God or follow some religion. One
post in the same secret Facebook group mentioned that it was not easy tohook up with people around festivals such as Navrati or Ramzan, becausesome religious members of these dating apps chose to abstain from sex
during these times, in order to preserve the religious sanctity of thefestival. The creation of ‘sacred’ space and time, within a discreet queer
marginalised network, regularly deemed sinful or immoral, shows
another way in which the religious field operates. The ‘edge’ becomesvisible in the choice between accommodating faith with sexuality andleaving faith because of sexuality. Another queer atheist activist, Prateek,
shared a story with me of his encounter with a Muslim cleric in a town in
Uttar Pradesh. When they asked the cleric why he engages in homosexualacts, when his religion clearly forbids it, the cleric replied that he has beenpossessed by Jinnat or an evil spirit and he cannot fight against it and has
to submit to its demand. The cleric’s reply left Prateek stupefied.
Here, the religious field operates through stigma around queer
identities, which is shaped by strong moral undertones such as deeming
gay sex sinful or unnatural. Similar notions were reinforced when thegovernment of India opposed in the Supreme Court a legal plea tolegitimise same-sex marriage.11 The current Hindu right government,
which takes into consideration the religious voter base, has describedhomosexuality as being against ‘the Indian family unit concept’, reiterating
heteronormative notions about marriage and family, which come with areligious, moral undertone. This is not to suggest that homophobia does
not exist among atheists, but to point out the everyday connections
between religion and sexuality encountered by queer atheists.
The visuals that I have shown situate atheists in a religious field. But
atheists use other visuals, such as Instagram reels or art, to critiquereligion, pushing against the religious field. More forms of religious edges
become visible, which shape the everyday activism of atheists, particularly
in digital spaces.

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Pushing against the religious field
In this section I will focus on visuals that confront religion throughcritique, making visible the religious field through online religious
publics, as well as the limits of atheistic expression in digital spaces.
Visuals that mock religion, religious figures, norms, rituals, myths, gods
and goddesses also inform the everyday digital feed of my atheist
interlocutors. Most of the circulation happens either anonymously or inclosed networks, but I will focus on the manner in which they circulate
and what happens when ‘ungodly’ visuals get unwarranted publicattention. Mocking religion is an important element of atheistic visual
culture, so it is important to understand how these visuals are received
and what their reception can tell us about the state of atheism in India.
Sushmita Sinha is a journalist in her mid-twenties residing in Delhi,
and a vocal feminist activist. I came across her online profile on Instagramin late August 2020, when a video she shared as an Instagram reel, a shortless than a minute long, went viral. In response, hashtags calling for her
arrest trended on Indian Twitter. In atheist spaces online, various posts
declared their support for her and called out people who were abusing
her online for their bigotry and misogyny. The whole episode lasted foraround two weeks, then people found new images to become outraged
about (the next visual in this chapter).
Sushmita’s reel focused on a book about the Hindu festival known
as Teej or Haritalika Teej, a monsoon-related festivity in which women
observe a fast for their husbands, celebrated in different forms acrossIndia. She had come across this book a year before she shot the video,
when her family asked her to read it as part of the rituals the family had
to perform. While reading this book, she could not stop laughing during
the rituals as stories in the book were quite amusing to her feminist self.
A year later, when the festival came round again, she decided to readsegments of the stories from this book and put them on Instagram. In thefilm, she read a section and then made some humorous comments, andrepeated this several times. For example, in one part of the video, shereads a story that suggests a woman would be reborn as some animal if
she drank water and broke the fast during this time, and she commentson the absurd misogyny this fast symbolises. Curiously, the video has
peppy background music, similar to music in pranks or viral funny videos
on social media streams. In the end, she says ‘I have wasted Rs.15 [Indianrupees] on this book; now I don’t know what to do with this. I should use
it as a tissue or toilet paper.’ This served as the hook that made her video

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go viral for ‘hurting Hindu sentiments’, something akin to the outrage that
Jaffrelot (2008, 2) suggests is a part of a ‘discourse of victimization whichis the very matrix of Hindu nationalism’. Later that day she uploaded a
picture (figure 12.5) on her Instagram story, where the book is placed onwhat seems to be a toilet-roll stand.

12.5 Screenshot of viral Instagram story (Sushmita Sinha), with‘religious’ book placed above a toilet roll.

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Sushmita was not actively seeking to outrage people, she told me in ourinterview. She described the video as a humorous attempt to gain people’s
attention and highlight the misogyny in such practices as Teej. Her video
went viral overnight and her account was flooded with notifications of allsorts. It was not a unique event, as many media objects go viral and gain
attention. Facebook posts, stand-up comedy clips, images, texts andmemes go viral, and create outrage of different sorts across South Asia,
leading to unforeseen consequences. Such consequences were apparent
in a case of student politics at a public university campus in Bangladesh,
where a Facebook post had repercussions – fines and demotion – for aprofessor as things got heated (Schulz 2019, 10–12). Similarly, in India,
political commentaries such as satire or stand-up comedy usually lead tocontroversies through social media’s viral trajectory (Punathambekar
2015, 398), initiating legal cases or public outrage. This happened toSushmita too; when her video went viral, there were calls for her arrest.
Two things are significant about the video that went viral. First, it
was an edited clip of a video made by someone else, containing only thelast bit, in which she equated the book with toilet paper. Second,
screenshots of her Instagram story were circulated widely to portray her
as ‘anti-Hindu’, indicting her for using a ‘holy’ Hindu book as toilet paper.
Online trolls bombarded her with threats of sexual and physical violence.
(Such abuse has become commonplace in political conversations on
digital spaces, where gaali or abusive expletives form a repertoire ofpolitical expression and staunch beliefs (Udupa 2018b, 1515).) Outrage
spilled over into the public domain over the next couple of days. She
consulted some of her friends and made her account private on Instagram.
But Sushmita struggled with switching to a private account as she did not
believe there was anything wrong with the video. She switched her
account back to being publicly visible. It is important to note this, because
the sudden pressure from the online religious public left her scared. Thiskind of presence of an online religious public often comes from theorganised online networks of the ruling party in India (Udupa 2018a,465), among other, allied right-wing organisations such as Hindu IT
Cell.12 Legal cases were filed against her in Delhi, though they were
eventually dropped as the judge in a local court did not find anything tosubstantiate the charges. But the fear of being persecuted and abused by
the online religious public as well as the state machinery did stop herfrom sharing a few more, similar, videos that she had planned. Here, theedge of the religious field becomes visible in the form of a religious public
online as well as in national laws about blasphemy and state persecution
on religious matters.

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The media Sushmita shared, particularly the Instagram story, wereconsidered offensive by certain religious adherents. W. T. J. Mitchellargues that offending images have the ability to spark affective reactions
through various elements. The media debacle took attention away fromthe critique of religion in the original video, shifting the focus towards‘anti-Hindu’ rhetoric.13 This particular screenshot of an Instagram story
gained a meaning of its own, carrying an offence through disgust andcontempt (Mitchell 2005, 125). Though not intended by Sushmita in thiscase, offence is an important affect, because it is through this ‘offence’that atheistic visual cultures seek to break the silence around the critiqueof religion and religious institutions.
After a few days, Sushmita shared another video, urging her
audience to watch the whole of the original video in order to understandthe context of the viral short clip. A week later, she uploaded anothervideo, this time of her wearing a T-shirt with Bhagat Singh’s picture14 andtext reading ‘why I am an atheist’, urging people not to abuse her. Before
she had uploaded the last video, calls for her arrest had been made, withmembers of ruling parties calling her Hindu-phobic on mainstream news
channels. She had to flee from Delhi to her hometown in order to avoid
the potential violence. After a couple of months, she stopped paying
attention to whatever was happening and focused on her journalism
covering elections in her home state Bihar.
The religious public, along with the organised online networks suchas ‘Hindu IT Cell’ on Twitter or ‘Internet Hindus’ (Mohan 2015, 341),
which are keen to make a spectacle of offence in order to create
controversy, is another form in which the religious field becomes visibleon the internet. It has been one of the primary reasons for many atheists
refraining from sharing ungodly visuals publicly. The visuals that do
appear are shared carefully, alterations in privacy settings offered bydifferent platforms being used to limit their public reach. Many atheist
spaces, to avoid such active conflicts, choose to remain private with someform of vetting, avoiding the religious public by sharing content that is a
critique of religion using carefully worded posts. There are many like
Sushmita who have much to say and share about religious beliefs in India.
But the complexities of media sharing, in terms of controlling who canread the posts and avoiding giving offence, or curbing certain expressions,thus establish a limit on expression, in terms of both space and content.
As controversy around Sushmita’s particular video was reaching an end,
another emerged, with a much greater impact on online atheists.
In the first week of September 2020 there was an explosion of
tweets about atheism in India; #atheism trended in India, perhaps for the

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first and only time. Following the hashtag, I came across multiple tweets
condemning an ‘assault on Hindu beliefs’. The outrage had come afterArmin Navabi, founder of Atheist Republic, tweeted about an artwork of
Kali (figure 12.6),15 a Hindu goddess. Atheist Republic is an atheist
organisation with global networks on various digital platforms. The text

12.6 Screenshot of the ‘Sexy Kali’ image as tweeted by Armin Navabi, 3September 2020.

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of the tweet read ‘Okay! I’m in love with Hinduism. I never knew you had
sexy goddesses like these. Why would anyone pick any other religion?
Source: bit.ly/2Z43qag.’ Navabi’s tweet shared the artwork from a digitalcomic art platform that is no longer available.
When I asked the CEO of Atheist Republic, Susanna Mcintyre, about
this tweet, she laughed out loud and called it ‘the sexy Kali episode’.
Susanna is based in the United States, but she talked about the presenceof Atheist Republic in India, which has a very active community, withprivate Facebook groups (whose content is visible only to the members)
in multiple cities. As the organisation’s digital media presence in India
grew, its platforms, such as its Facebook page and YouTube channel,
started to attract Hindu fundamentalists who enjoyed their memes/visuals trolling Islam and Christianity. Before sharing this particularvisual, Armin had posted a video in which he burnt the Qur’an, which wasshared extensively in India. Susanna told me that they had not paid muchattention to Hinduism before the response to the Kali post.
The decision to share the image of Kali was an attempt at ‘shaking
off the Hindu fundamentalist crowd that their media spaces had gathered’.
The group had expected outrage and it was a calculated decision to go
ahead with the tweet, but the scale of outrage was a surprise. The Sexy
Kali image is not the first instance of religious authority being questioned
through the sexualisation of images of gods or goddesses. As has been
documented in relation to various artists in the preceding decades(Maheshwari 2018, 155–7), such as Maqbool Fida Husain for his nude
representations of Bharat Mata (Jain 2010, 200–1; Juneja 2018, 166–9),
there was an amplification of outrage caused by the intervention of rightwing Hindu organisations (Anderson 2015, 47). It was no different in thiscase. The Hindu IT Cell, founded by people associated with Hindu rightwing organisations, ran active campaigns on Twitter, tagging and incitingrage against Armin Navabi and Atheist Republic. The point of outrage was
obvious: the goddess Kali and its pornographic representation. The mobsof digital religious people went on a rampage about Armin, morphing his
mother’s image with pornographic images. For a couple of months, theoutrage continued in different forms.
This tweet sparked both scepticism and humour within the atheist
spaces. Initially, people responded with ‘haha’ reactions and agreed thatthe artwork was indeed ‘sexy’. But as the Twitter outrage escalated, thesense of threat grew. The fear was increasingly felt by covert atheist
communities in India, particularly those constituted of young atheists.
The debates, among other things, were about the timing of this tweet.
Armin currently lives in Vancouver, and one user commented, ‘Voh to

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Canada mein baitha hai, yeh humein jail bhijwayega’ [He is sitting in
Canada and we will end up in jail because of him]. Administrators of aparticular group, associated with Atheist Republic though based in India,
shared some guidelines (figure 12.7) with the members, three days after
the tweet. They informed members about the existing blasphemy laws inIndia and the trouble that posting the image could invite, both for people
based in India and for members of the group. Many people agreed withthe guidelines and did not post the image publicly.
Interestingly, there have been nude representations of Kali in various
art forms in the past and many users have shared similar memes (figure12.8) to point out that outrage over nudity does not make sense. Arminshared this image knowing about this background. There were many
opinions about the artwork, its timing and the growing outrage overatheism. But this image was shared mostly in closed spaces, not even

12.7 A warning about blasphemy laws shared in a secret Facebook
group affiliated to Atheist Republic.

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appearing in the personal profiles of most of my interlocutors. This
migration of a blasphemous artwork from Vancouver, Canada was anactively shared contention. A member of a closed Facebook group, a groupwith members across South Asia, when we met at a café in Gurgaon,
Haryana later that month, shouted angrily: ‘This man-child has nosensibilities of timing and difference in the context. He is sitting there safewith no blasphemy laws and here I am working in my office, with people

12.8 Meme shared in Indian atheist online spaces in support of Armin.

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outraging over Sexy Kali!’ She had to make an alternative profile to remaina member of other atheist groups, remove her profile pictures from public
accounts and change privacy settings, just to hide her association in any
form with Atheist Republic. Even Atheist Republic instructed its groups inIndia to change their privacy setting to ‘hidden’ on Facebook (where only
members can look it up), and stopped taking new members.
Recent years have seen many such examples of ‘outrage politics’
throughout South Asia, in which religious publics interact with media
critical of religion (Blom 2008; Frøystad 2019). Understanding thecontext of outrage enables us to see how blasphemous visuals work, but
in the case of these atheist activists and their visuals a further meaning ispresent. When I talked to several content makers for atheist spaces, it
became clear to me that they do not single out any particular community
to target. Nor is the purpose to insult. Rather, through these visuals they
are seeking to breach the silence about non-belief and are trying tonormalise blasphemy. In the case of Atheist Republic, a digital art project
has been developed, known as the blasphemous art project, in which
artworks that combine gods and religious icons of various religions are
mixed up and shown in a pornographic manner. Many of these themes
can be deemed offensive, such as the one depicting a homosexually erotic
act between Ram and Muhammad.16
After the outrage over the Kali meme died down, the government ofIndia intervened and managed to get Armin’s Twitter account suspended
permanently, and a similar fate awaited the CEO of Atheist Republic.
They both incurred permanent suspension for violating hate speech
guidelines. The Facebook page of Atheist Republic is still banned in India,
Pakistan being the only other country to ban it.17 This particular incident
was also cited in a public interest litigation case in the Supreme Court ofIndia as a reason for regulating the content shared on online platforms,
which has resulted in a new regulatory framework for social media
platforms in India. In addition to following the existing guidelines, theplatforms now need to comply with the regional laws about free speech
and related matters.18
It is very common for atheists to come across warnings aboutcommunity guidelines violations in relation to the content that theyshare on social media platforms. In one secret group on Facebook, there
are guidelines about how to type certain words and phrases in order toavoid detection by Facebook or Instagram. The group has now
disappeared because someone reported some content and Facebook
deleted the entire group. Hence, atheists usually rely on multiple
accounts and fake profiles, as they face censure whenever their content

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is reported and they are subject to account restrictions and, sometimes,
deletion. In conversation, many interlocutors said that although these‘community guidelines’ set out to protect individual religions, they
prevented the critique of religion in general, which was just what theywanted to do. In fact, some atheists have argued that the guidelines
constitute a limit on freedom of speech online. Also, the changes inpolitical regime have made it more difficult for atheists to express views
that are critical of religion, particularly Hinduism, in the past few years.
The fear of state persecution has been documented in various South
Asian and neighbouring countries, such as Indonesia (Duile 2020, 456)
and Malaysia (Rashid and Mohamad 2019, 1–6).
In digital spaces, these images do not exist in isolation, but form apart of continuous stream of visuals and discussions about major religions
and religious events, sharing affective relations. Here, the religious fieldcomes in the form of community guidelines about ‘hate speech andharmful content’, limiting the circulation of ‘offensive’ atheistic visuals toclosed or hidden digital spaces. While atheists see these images as part ofa critique, digital platform guidelines consider them ‘hate speech’, whichplaces limits on media-sharing practices in the context of India. In thecase of the Sexy Kali image, these limitations spread as far as North
America, when the image triggered the suspension of Armin’s andSusanna’s accounts, although many accounts based outside India whichshared the same image are still present on Twitter.
The experience of everyday life and community or platform
guidelines about sharing content pose a contentious challenge foratheists. When religious sentiments are so frequently expressed, andindeed predominate, on social media platforms, atheists understand thatthrough the act of questioning they can hurt people. The religious
sensibilities of online publics are borne in mind by many online atheists.
There are multiple ways of dealing with this. The first is to frame
arguments in an acceptable way, without abusive terms or generalised
criticism of a community. This is particularly common in Hindi atheist
groups, which put an emphasis on the art of effective argument. Many
avoid sharing visuals in public, shield them from personal networks andshare them anonymously. But fear of prosecution by the Indian state,
unpredictable community guidelines and prevailing religious sensibilities
about sharing ‘offensive’ images overlap and form another edge of thereligious field, producing silence as affect through a policing of sorts.

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Understanding silence
Writing of the Danish cartoon controversy that erupted in 2005 after aDanish newspaper published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad,
Saba Mahmood suggests that visualising the Prophet is not itself the causeof outrage; it is how this visualisation puts the individual Muslim’s
cherished relationship with the Prophet in jeopardy that creates a moral
injury (Mahmood 2013, 62). Though the atheist visuals shared, particularly
those of religious figures, can be considered an injury to religious sentiment,a question emerges, in my research, about the motivations of atheists incausing this offence. As I mentioned earlier, even though such visuals arecommon, their circulation remains limited for fear of a backlash. The Sexy
Kali meme shared by Armin through a global media platform would be
extremely hard for a person living in India to make and share for the reasons
I listed above. For atheists, sharing blasphemous content is a way to breakthe silence and normalise criticism of religion. Moreover, for many, theircritical views towards religion are shaped by bitter experiences withreligion, in which they are deemed immoral for simply disagreeing with, or
not conforming to, the norms of religiosity.
The pervasiveness of silence in different modes of atheistic expressions
should be considered in a broader framework. It is not to suggest that silence
gains more meaning or that silence itself is an act of resistance. Rather, I
understand the prevailing silence as an affect which constitutes the processof becoming atheist, where transcending silence in everyday matters
becomes important in the creation of space for atheistic expression. Veena
Das writes of the importance of speech acts in everyday life that constitutethe potential for violence: saying something can itself become an aggressiveact (Das 2020, 70–6). In the case of atheists, silence has a similar function:
the simmering silence in everyday life carries the potential for conflicts,
arguments and even violence. The particularities of silence as affect are madevisible through the visuals that I have talked about in this chapter. Silence isneither compelled nor a free choice, so how can we make sense of this silence
that pervades everyday conversations, both online and offline? For example,
carefully crafted and guarded digital spaces become cornerstones of ‘free’
expression, while the administrators of these spaces are vigilant to remove
visibility from public sight. Silence here is a state of expression which bears
affect that informs the sensibilities of being seen and heard as a non-believer.
On a larger scale, this silence about atheism is visible in the fact that nonreligious or atheist is not recognised as an official ‘religious’ affiliation in state
documents such as the Census of India. A group of ex-Muslims are aspiring

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to have ‘atheist’ recognised as an official category in state documents inwhich citizens have to fill in their personal details. The non-recognition of
atheism is mirrored in the lack of public debate in popular media, and, as
happened in the Sexy Kali episode, attention shifted from atheism as a nonbelief position to the targeting of Hindu beliefs and to the obscenity of thevisual. Though there are many organised rationalist organisations that havebeen working in India for many decades (Quack 2012b, 72–7), atheism isstill not a mainstream position as it is in Western secular nations. Whenrationalists in India have gained voice and visibility in public, they have been
subjected to a lethal form of silencing. Numerous rationalists have beenassassinated in the last decade, and legal investigations are pending in almost
all the cases.19 These everyday acts of ungodly media sharing gain meaning
in contemporary India to seek voice and resilience at the same time.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have outlined various ways in which atheists operate andencounter the edges of the religious field. These edges operate throughvarious means such as online religious publics, familial religiosity, and statelaws about blasphemy or community guidelines for digital platforms. Theseedges overlap and pose multiple challenges for atheistic expression. Visuals
that circulate within these atheist spaces are grounded in affective sensibilities
connected with being an atheist in India. These digital formations of atheist
spaces are situated within a broader religious field, where multiple checks
and balances are used to control the circulation of atheist visuals. At the sametime, these visuals are employed to challenge the hegemonic silence aroundatheistic expression through the sharing of blasphemous content. Whileseeking to secure space for sharing atheistic content, silence and humour asaffects circulate widely, informing the everyday experiences of being an
atheist in India, in both online and offline contexts.

Notes
1 For more on regional terms relating to atheism, and translation, see Quack and Binder (2018).
2 Also see Copeman and Hagström, this volume
3 The group is named after Richard Dawkins’s book of the same name, very popular among
atheists. The profile picture of this WhatsApp group was the cover of the same book.
4 For details of the judgement, see the BBC News report, ‘Ayodhya verdict: Indian top court gives
holy site to Hindus’, 9 November 2019: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asiaindia-50355775 (accessed 24 June 2022)

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5 For details of the ground-breaking ceremony for Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, see Amrit Dhillon,‘Ayodhya: Modi hals “dawn of new era” as work on controversial temple begins’, The Guardian,
5 August 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/05/ayodhya-narendramodi-temple-foundation-stone-ceremony (accessed 24 June 2022).
6 ‘Stories’ are visuals shared on various social media platforms that disappear after 24 hours.
They have become a very common way to share everyday events as they offer much control over
the audience, and allow overlapping of media (images, videos, effects, music, GIFs, stickers,etc.). Also, they are more interactive than public comments on normal posts and allow for
private communication about a particular story.
7 There have been multiple donation drives in the past for the same cause. This was the latest
donation drive, which collected money as the construction of Ram Mandir was about tocommence. See Avaneesh Mishra, ‘Nearly Rs 2,000 crore collected so far: Ram temple donation
campaign concludes’, The Indian Express, 28 February 2021: https://indianexpress.com/
article/cities/lucknow/nearly-rs-2000-crore-collected-so-far-ram-temple-donation-campaignconcludes-7207863/ (accessed 24 June 2022).
8 Akshay Kumar has actively participated in many Hindutva campaigns, giving publicity to their cause
and mobilising support. See ‘The player’, The Caravan, 1 February 2021: https://caravanmagazine.
in/reportage/akshay-kumar-role-hindutva-poster-boy (accessed 24 June 2022).
9 See Bosman, this volume, for a detailed look at Rick and Morty, and atheism and nihilism as
portrayed in the animated series.
10 When a man who has been an ardent and obedient follower of Islam dies and goes to Jannat,
or heaven, his reward is 72 virgins. Many atheists quote references from religious texts to
support the arguments they are making. For claims about 72 virgins, this link or its screenshot
have been shared: https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi/38/40 (accessed 24 June 2022).
11 After the decriminalisation of homosexuality, when Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code wasremoved, activists are trying to gain civil rights for LGBTQ+ individuals, including the right tomarry. See ‘Same-sex marriage not comparable with Indian family unit concept: A timeline ofSection 377’, The Indian Express, 26 February 2021: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/
timeline-of-section-377-7205718/ (accessed 24 June 2022).
12 Hindu IT Cell is an organised network of Twitter accounts, present also on other platforms,
closely allied with the current regime. The purpose of this network is to find ‘anti-Hindu’elements and hold them accountable over social media as well as legally. See more at Srishti
Jaswal and Shreegireesh Jalihal, ‘Inside the Hindu IT Cell: The men who went online to protect
gods’, NewsLaundry, 1 March 2021: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/03/01/inside-thehindu-it-cell-the-men-who-went-online-to-protect-gods (accessed 24 June 2022).
13 There were ‘news’ reports about her act, widely shared in online spaces to portray her as antiHindu. Many online news portals write reports to give more effect to the outrage. In the caseof Sushmita, similar articles were shared online, for example OpIndia, 26 August, ‘Journalist
urges people to use Hindu religious book as toilet paper, netizens demand arrest over image of
Teej Vrat book kept in toilet’: https://www.opindia.com/2020/08/journalist-hindu-it-cellcomplaint-social-media-hariyali-teej-book-toilet-paper-instagram/(accessed 24 June 2022).
14 Bhagat Singh is a celebrated atheist youth icon in India. His book Main Nastik Kyun hun? (Why I
am an Atheist) is one of the most popular atheist texts in Hindi. For more, see Elam, this volume.
15 Many news portals carried the screenshot of Armin Navabi’s tweet or shared the controversial
image to report the incident. For example, OpIndia shared this news post in Hindi: https://hindi.
opindia.com/social-media-trends/atheist-republic-founder-armin-navabi-insults-hindu-godesskali/ (accessed 9 July 2022) and India Times reported it as well: Bobins Abraham, ‘Atheist activist
Armin Navabi who tore up Quran angers Hindus by calling goddess Kali sexy’, 5 September 2020:
https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/atheist-activist-armin-navabi-who-tore-up-quranangers-hindus-by-calling-goddess-kali-sexy-522084.html (accessed 9 July 2022).
16 See more at ‘The blasphemous art project’: https://www.blasphemousart.com/ (accessed 25
June 2022).
17 See a detailed report at Tushar Dhara, ‘Facebook blocks Atheist Republic page on government
directive, Twitter suspends founder’, The Caravan, 8 February 2021: https://caravanmagazine.
in/media/facebook-blocks-atheist-republic-page-twitter-suspends-founder-on-governmentdirective (accessed 25 June 2022).
18 Further discussion of this is beyond the scope of this chapter.
19 Read more in Ajay Sukumaran, ‘Who killed Gauri, Kalburgi, Dabholkar, Pansare? The puzzle cracks,
slowly’, Outlook, 3 September 2018: https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/who-killedgauri-kalburgi-dabholkar-pansare-the-puzzle-cracks-slowly/300555 (accessed 25 June 2022).

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Afterword: paradox laxity andunwordy indifference: non-religious
figurations beyond emancipatory
narratives and declamatory genres
Johannes Quack

The contributions in this rich volume are manifold. This afterword begins
with an outline of how the volume both expands on and advances thestudy of non-religion. The volume does not only augment scholarly
understanding of central questions within the interdisciplinary study of
non-religion by illustrating and analysing the diversity of non-religion
beyond the simple binary of the religious and the none. It also illuminates
new avenues for exploring how sceptical publics are formed through thelenses of aesthetics and affects, emotions and embodiment, andmateriality and media.
This afterword then takes up the volume’s more implicit focus onsilences and visibilities, normativities and normalisations and theimplications that these subjects have for further research on sceptical
publics. To that end it discusses the use of ‘emancipatory’ analytical
vocabulary – awareness raising, silence breaking, coming out, reclaiming
and self-empowerment – within the study of non-religion.
To conclude, and drawing on Joel Lee and Dorothea Weltecke’s
recent work, the afterword reflects on why and how we might seek tolocate sceptical publics beyond organised atheism, secularist activism,
other declamatory genres of self-representation and the respective public

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controversies or legal prosecutions. How do we approach non-religious
figurations that are constituted by ‘logophobic’ and ‘unwordy’ ways oflife? Which kinds of media and forms of publicity are at stake here?

Relations, objectives and contested values
This volume contributes to scholarly understanding of persistentquestions within the study of non-religion by reconstructing different
modes of non-religion in their societal contexts and underscoring the vast
diversity of non-religious positionings and ways of being in the world.
Non-religious ‘figurations’1 (Elias 1978) appear in this volume in a
multitude of ways: as positions in and types of public discourse, as
dispersed individuals who at times form affective or imaginedcommunities, as organised groups, as instances of ‘lived secularity’ basedon claims to and practices of being ‘other-than-religious’ (Binder2), andtraditions perceived as ‘distinct from, though sometimes in competition
with, and at other times complementary to, the religious’ (Bradbury and
Schulz). Some chapters depict outward-oriented non-religious
figurations, while others are described as inward-oriented (Hagström,Nash). Some talk among like-minded people or to a ‘secularising public’(Hagström), while others talk back to as well as with fellow religious
citizens (Richter). They have varying objectives: weakening the(religious) other; creating public controversies via humour and ridicule(Binder, Bosman) or transgression and insults (Gupta, Hecker); reachingout to new publics by proselytising; influencing the larger society throughcampaigning; inhibiting private quietism, fortifying existing communities
or groups or consoling and comforting their constituency. They directlycompete with, challenge and criticise religion (Copeman and Hagström),
participate in processes of ‘antagonistic othering’ (Lundmark) and relate
indirectly to religion, for example through certain styles and forms ofartistic expression associated with secularism (Bradbury and Schulz,
Hecker). Many strive not only for wider atheist or non-religious visibility
vis-à-vis the religious mainstream but also for viability ‘by giving[atheism] a coherent and defensible re-presentation’ (Chalfant). In sodoing, they negotiate and navigate different positionings and tactics,
ranging from confrontation to assimilation and from compromise todialogue and cooperation, often in very gendered ways (Khazaal).
As this volume exemplifies, understanding non-religion andscepticism requires both an investigation of the different relations andobjectives of specific non-religious figurations and research on varying

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understandings of religion and secularism and contested values. The
latter might include classical topoi like truth, enlightenment, rationality,
scientific and critical thinking, and evidence-based lifestyles as well as
questions of social justice, social equality, minority rights and individual
liberty (for a systematisation of such relations, objectives and values, see
Schuh, Quack and Kind 2019, 21–6).

Modes and medialities of non-religion
As this volume challenges us to think sceptical publics and non-religious
figurations anew, its contributions place particular emphasis on the roleof (new) media and materiality in the expression and production of nonreligious affects, communities, imaginaries, practices, emotions andpositionalities. The focus is not only on what the non-religious say and do
but also on the media forms they employ and how such mediatedrepresentations change what as well as who they represent (see also
Binder 2020). The discussions include themes like the evidence of thesenses (Copeman and Hagström), how secular difference is madeperceptible (Binder) and the importance of affects (Khazaal).
Such a focus on aesthetics and affects, emotions and embodiment,
media and materiality might not be seen as something ‘new’. After all,
Talal Asad’s influential work (which is not represented in this volume)
focuses both on changing meanings of concepts and worldviews withrespect to the secular and on the materialities and background conditions
that preconfigure religious as well as secular publics. He asks how theseare embodied and internalised and how they ‘mediate people’s identities,
help shape their sensibilities, and guarantee their experiences’ (Asad2003, 14). But Asad – in contrast to many of this volume’s contributors –gives insufficient attention to the diversity of religion’s Others. That is tosay, he does not ask whether and how ‘heterogeneous and entangled
secular and religious normative orders produce the diversity of bothreligious and non-religious concepts, institutions, and ways of being in
the world’ (Quack 2014, 442).
Although other volumes (e.g., Scheer, Fadil and Johansen 2019)
have also set out to explore ‘how certain groups of people use aesthetic or
sensorially perceptible means to constitute themselves and their ways ofliving as different from, or not, religious’ (Binder), the range of media
investigated in this volume is unprecedented. It spans oral and rhetorical
traditions, public lectures, superstition and miracle-exposure campaigns,
conferences and training courses, pamphlets, newspapers, books,

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cartoons, comedy, theatre, music, dance, literature, painting, film, video,
adult animated sitcoms and reality TV along with multiple and various
online presences including blogs, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Instagramand YouTube. In selecting various sites of exploration, the contributors
are able further to elucidate the diversity of non-religion, while, in theiranalyses, they convince.
How are these old and new media formats and technologies linked
to changing secular styles, narratives, tactics and strategies? How are therespective modes and medialities of non-religion linked to the production
and transformation of sceptical publics and publicities? To answer suchquestions, the individual chapters frequently draw on specific ‘affordances’and implications of particular media or techniques, ranging from orality
and rhetoric (Binder), to slow motion (Copeman and Hagström), theimpact of moderation (Lundmark), ranking systems and algorithms(Chalfant, Richter), and the role of anonymity and pseudonymity(Chalfant, Copeman and Schulz, Gupta, Khazaal, Lundmark, Richter).
Many chapters also point to the alleged downsides of new media, such asincreased antagonistic othering (Lundmark), online harassment(Khazaal, Richter), shaming and trolling (Gupta, Richter), and therelationships between increased media visibility and unwanted publicity(Hecker) or other unintended side-effects, including increased violence(Copeman and Hagström).
Much ink has been spilt, or rather many keyboards have beenpounded, to reflect on the impact of new media forms and formats ingeneral. Taken together, the volume takes a balanced view of the widely
discussed but intricate question of how the internet, and digitalisation
more broadly, have impacted religious–non-religious entanglements.
While some scholars (particularly Copeman and Schulz, Nash) question
the emphasis of ‘newness’ in this matter, others point to importantchanges. As the contributions to this volume emphasise, the challenge isto acknowledge but not overstate various developments, particularly the
striking differences between people who display their non-religiosity
online but are silent offline (Gupta).
Another way to illustrate the importance and impact of the internet
draws on the ‘long-tail’ metaphor, which has been used to explain why
companies like Amazon make available for purchase books that are readby very few people, although they can barely be found on the offline
market (e.g., Anderson 2006). Arguably this metaphor also helps toexemplify the significance of the internet for deviant religious as well as
non-religious visibility. The internet’s connectivity provided an
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build upon their offline world by furthering the articulation, networking
and perceptibility of less extroverted, more dispersed and unorganised
non-religious positions. The polarisation of debates apparently also
contributed to the visibility of deviant figurations (Stevens and O’Hara
2015). Richter contends that the ‘internet has set in place the basic
conditions for a new counterpublic of non-believers’. Possibilities ofanonymity or pseudonymity are crucial here. As Chalfant notes (p. 246,
this volume), these enable a
way of cultivating a particular affect of stranger intimacy that serves
not as a vehicle or platform for integration into the dominant publicsphere, but as a counterpublic that provides an alternative space forthe performance of (non-)religious identity as neither fully public
nor fully private.
Although the internet did not create atheism, non-religion or other formsof sceptical publics, as these examples show, pseudonymity provided
cover while possibilities for engagement expanded with increased
visibility and new forms of perceptibility.

Silence, visibility and normalisation
These observations also point to a second, more implicit theme thatthreads this volume: a focus on visibility in connection to processes ofnormalisation that challenge enforced silences and problematise
underlying normativities. This focus mainly draws on insights from thestudy of emancipatory social movements, such as activism around topics
like racism, gender and feminism. To illustrate this point, I assemble anarrative of non-religious emancipation and problematisation. While
such a narrative was not put forward by individual authors, it nonethelessemerges when several of the volume’s chapters (particularly Chalfant,Gupta, Hagström, Khazaal, Lundmark and Richter) are read together.
These chapters describe and analyse how marginalised people, whohave struggled with widespread silence, have formed non-religious
figurations and sought public visibility. On the path from silence tovisibility, they encounter the problem that people need to know that likeminded individuals exist. In many instances, such emancipatory processes
start with attempts to raise awareness of each other – ‘You are not alone,
not anymore’ (Chalfant, quoting O’Hair) – and initiate talking ‘among
themselves’ (Richter). Like-minded individuals then begin to organise

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themselves by forming stronger communities and identities, thereby
rendering ‘atheism visible to a wider religious public’ (Chalfant) or, more
specifically, establishing ‘an apostate politics of visibility’ (Hagström),
which makes it easier to further ‘challenge the hegemonic silence aroundatheistic expression’ (Gupta). To secure the space they have alreadycarved out or to ‘expand the space for atheistic expression’ (Gupta), they
not only need ‘to overcome being silent’, they also need to speak up so thatthey can be ‘heard’ (Richter, with reference to hooks (1989)).
Representatives of these non-religious figurations not only want tobecome more vocal and visible but also to be acknowledged as valid
actors with viable ways of thinking and acting (Chalfant).
Once the respective groups and communities reach a certain sizeand degree of coherence and self-confidence, they can further support
their members. Such processes provide spaces for ‘closeted non-believers’(Richter) to ‘come out’ and ‘publicise the kinds of experiences, ambiguities
and hardships that “closeted” atheists’ (Hagström) experience. Indeed,
Chalfant describes ‘coming out’ as one of the primary objectives oftwentieth-century American atheist identity politics. Visibility enables
individuals to ‘reclaim’ (Hagström) and ‘reappropriate’ (Binder)
disrespectful labels and derogatory terms, which in turn further increases
these marginalised groups’ visibility and broadens awareness. Selfempowering steps towards reclamation contribute simultaneously to the‘normalisation’ (Hagström, Gupta, Khazaal, Richter) of marginalised
positionalities and ways of life. Accordingly, individuals are enabled tobetter navigate the ‘balance’ between ‘silence and argument’ (Gupta), to
decide when, how and where they prefer to ‘come out’ or ‘come in’ todigital media spaces and to explore ‘the relationships between visibility,
identity and intimacy’ (Chalfant), in whatever way they see fit.
All these mutually enforcing steps of community building,awareness raising, silence breaking, coming out, challenging, claiming,
reclaiming and self-empowerment contribute to the subversion or
problematisation of ‘religio-normativity’3 (Khazaal) and a ‘normalisation’of non-religious deviance. Thus, the marginality and visibility of
individual and collective non-religious figurations, as well as thenormative orders within which these are situated, are at stake. Processesof problematisation can lead to a ‘form of identity politics’ that ‘can beread as an attempt to expose the fiction that the public sphere is neutral
towards public declarations of religious belief and disbelief’ (Chalfant).
Finally, such processes may eventually lead to the emergence of ‘areligion-sceptical counterpublic’ that challenges religious power(Hecker), a ‘counterpublic which has barely been heard’ (Richter).

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These steps are not a linear process but are mutually reinforcing.
They are also, to repeat the caveat I outlined above, my summation of thelarger emancipatory narrative that emerged as I read the individual
chapters and not necessarily shared by the authors I have cited in thissection. For example, while Hagström writes of ‘“closeted” atheists’,
Richter does not use scare quotes when she speaks of ‘closeted nonbelievers’; Chalfant explicitly states that he does not wish to argue that‘digital atheism is queer in any substantial sense’. This is also not my goal
here. Instead, this section points to the apparently growing use of‘emancipatory’ analytical vocabulary by non-religious figurations as wellas within the study of these to stimulate a set of questions. Why arereferences to gender, sexuality and LGBTQ+ themes more prominent? Is
this specific to certain movements, geographies or other factors of culture,class, age or religious environment? Is the focus on emancipation part ofa larger narrative of ‘ethical progress’ (Keane 2016, 172–9) and‘enlightenment’, of which many non-religious individuals and groups
tend to see themselves as an important part? What are the reasons,advantages and disadvantages of doing so?
The increasing prevalence of emancipatory analytics can be traced
to the ties that exist between non-religious and emancipatory movements(see also Blechschmidt 2018, 2019).4 Indeed, such groups share similar,
if not overlapping, structural positions. In some cases, both non-religious
protagonists and the scholars who study them see such groups as
emancipatory. In this volume, Gupta claims with reference to Brewster(2013) that the ‘affective relation between atheism and sexuality comesprimarily from a sense of marginalisation and lack of visibility in public
discourse’. Richter describes how ‘talking back becomes talking with
[LGBTQ+ groups], as a means of showing solidarity with other minority
groups which experience similar restrictions and call for more rights andreforms’. Other reasons for an increased conceptual borrowing from thestudy of emancipatory movements might be related to an increased public
interest in ‘identity politics’, with such conceptual vocabulary particularly
available in our current moment.
Three things must nonetheless be noted here. First, there are
obviously analytical as well as political limits to such comparisons, toassumed commonalities and to the borrowing of analytical vocabulary.
After all, there are not only important disparities in the way in which thedifferences are experienced, embodied and evaluated in everyday life but
also disparities concerning the resulting forms of discrimination,
exploitation (in connection with labour and capitalism), pathologisation
and, indeed, dehumanisation. Second, it would be worthwhile to discuss

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whether we scholars build on unexamined premises if we tacitly adopt andreproduce narratives of emancipation and moral progress (and probably of
enlightenment). Third, certainly not all non-religious figurations andtransformations comprise stories of emancipation and empowerment.

Non-declamatory and paradox figurations
Joel Lee’s book Deceptive Majority: Hinduism, untouchability, andunderground religion (2021) reminds us that a lack of visibility should notalways be equated with silence. Indeed, anthropological literature islittered with references to the tactics that vulnerable (‘subaltern’) groups
use in the form of ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott 1985) to deal with more
powerful and dominant groups. Lee contributes to this literature byfocusing on active and conscious ‘ethics of [religious] self-disclosure
sensitive to context and alert to the ways in which coercion structures social
life’ (2021, 271). Analogously to some of Bradbury and Schulz’s
observations in this volume, the tactics such groups employ range from theuse of ambivalence, self-protective ambiguity and cultivated misrecognition
to tactical retreat, which are at times coupled with active concealment anddissimulation (Lee 2021, 267–71).5 More generally, Lee exhorts us to pay
attention not only to ‘declamatory’ genres of speaking and selfrepresentation but also to other semiotic traditions, including the use ofnon-verbal signs and other semiotic forms that are ‘unwordy, unquotable,
even logophobic’ (2021, 264). It is for scholars of non-religion to thinkcritically about where we might find non-religious figurations that do not
struggle to make their existence visible through a ‘declamatory publicity’.
In this volume, Nash laments that ‘[t]racing the very existence ofwhat we would now call atheists, agnostics and freethinkers becomes
more fraught with difficulty for historians the further back they gochronologically. Their visibility scarcely breaks the surface for a host ofreasons’. This aptly describes a challenge masterfully tackled in Dorothea
Weltecke’s ‘Der Narr spricht: Es ist kein Gott’: Atheismus, Unglauben undGlaubenszweifel vom 12. Jahrhundert bis zur Neuzeit [‘The fool says in hisheart: There is no God’: atheism, unbelief and doubt from the twelfth
century to the modern era] (2010). A landmark study of non-religious
deviance in Europe between 1100 and 1500, it is not only rich in original
historical sources and heuristic, conceptual and methodologicalclarifications but also provides much-needed, constructive historicisationof the academic discourse on atheism. In other words, it is a history of
non-religion as well as a history of historical knowledge of atheism.

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Before Weltecke’s intervention, prominent and durable debates
persisted about the existence of atheists in the Middle Ages. At their crux
was the question of whether atheists remained underground(discrimination thesis) or whether it is anachronistic to speak of medieval
atheism (anachronism thesis). Representatives of the anachronism thesis(most famously Lucien Febvre [1947] 1982) argued that the Middle Ages
were a time of omnipresent and comprehensive faith, a period when theword ‘atheism’ was not commonly used and faith in God and corresponding
religious ways of being in the world were – so the argument goes –exhaustive and inevitable. 6 Representatives of the opposing,discrimination thesis (e.g., Strauss 1952; Sommerville 1990) contend
that while the Middle Ages were indeed notoriously religious, they were
not exclusively so. They argue that the apparent lack of historical sourceson medieval atheism is the product of persecution. Atheists thus faced
such discrimination that they had to remain underground.
By contrast, Weltecke argues that discrimination does not explain
the alleged absence of atheism in the Middle Ages. Despite the richnessof judicial sources, there is no relevant historical evidence for a supposed
underground non-religious subculture in legal history; thus, she declares
the prosecution of atheism in the Middle Ages a ‘modern myth’ (Weltecke
2010, 55). At the same time, she cautions that this does not imply that
there was an all-encompassing religiosity. To challenge the anachronism
thesis, Weltecke discusses a whole range of alternative sources that show
where and how people did not simply take the existence of God(s) andother such entities for granted, as well as moments when they doubted
religious experts and rejected religious practices and ways of life.
My interpretation of Weltecke’s findings can best be summarised in
the distinction between doxa, paradox, heterodox and orthodox.7 Many
religious beliefs and practices attributed to the Middle Ages were indeed
doxa, that is, generally taken for granted or regarded as common sense.
They formed the basis for religious orthodoxies and religious heterodoxies’arguments. A widely shared view was that knowledge of God is natural.
Or, in the words of a contemporary, the work of God is as palpable in theworld as is the heat of fire (Weltecke 2010, 444). Paradox positions,which went past or beyond (para) such common sense (doxa), were
nonetheless present. Accordingly, religiosity could not be comprehensive
and inevitable. Such positions were not, however, prosecuted asheterodoxies, which explains the lack of mentions of atheism in legal
sources. What, then, were these paradoxes?
Weltecke finds these paradoxical ‘sceptical publics’ not among theusual suspects but in other places and other terms. On the one hand, she

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identifies how critical reflections concerning, for example, the existence ofGod could be located at the heart of the orthodoxy (Weltecke 2010, 459),
mostly in the form of abstract thought experiments that were, however,generally dismissed because of their ‘obvious’ stupidity and ignorance vis-àvis what was considered common sense. On the other hand, and more
importantly, Weltecke illustrates that it was not legal, scholastic or academic
sources that discussed processes of alienation from religion and various
kinds of religious doubt, but books used for spiritual edification andeducation which describe a vacuum of belief, spiritual despair or dismissive
laziness concerning religious practice. As this does not reflect contemporary
understandings of ‘atheism’ or ‘unbelief’, scholars must be open to othervocabulary and figurations such as a ‘blasphemy of the heart’ or the viceacedia (laxity). These confessional topoi were attributed to those who
appeared ignorant of or indifferent to religious belief, behaviour andbelonging, whose distance from faith and the church might eventually leadto contestations, conflicts and doubts (Weltecke 2010, 369–78). Pastoralcare and spiritual guidance are needed to save the victims of such ignorance
or indifference from the threat of desperatio. Because they did not propose
an alternative worldview (an ‘-ism’, such as scepticism or materialism), they
were seen as neither philosophers nor scholars. They were also not treatedas rebels or rivals (danger was ascribed to alternative religious convictions
but not to a lack of belief), or criminals (as heretics were often considered tobe), because they were seen as sinners and fools. Following the doxa of thattime, their behaviour was commonly explained as the result of the devil
whispering ‘destabilizing thoughts’ in people’s ears (Weltecke 2013, 173).
In sum, such non-religious figurations were not seen as serious
epistemological and political challenges, that is, not as heterodoxy.8 Hence,the point was not to prove their arguments wrong or to lock them up for
creating upheaval and turmoil but to offer them the pastoral care that would
lead them back to the right path and save them from spiritual confusions thatwent past (para) common sense (doxa). As para- rather than heterodoxies,
these examples were considered insignificant (Weltecke 2010, 463) at thetime and thus remained below the radar of later historians.9
What both Lee’s and Weltecke’s work underscores is that a lack ofvisibility is not necessarily equivalent to silence. In consideration of thediversity and in/visibility of non-religion depicted in this volume, a next
step would be to carefully consider where less vocal non-religious
figurations might be found, to locate sceptical publics beyond organised
atheists and secularist activism, beyond explicit political or philosophicalconfrontations, and beyond declamatory genres of self-representationand narratives of emancipation.

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Conclusion
This afterword explores two key questions, one based on, and the othercomplementary to, this volume’s fruitful discussion of pertinent themesin the study of non-religion, particularly concerning the importance ofaesthetics, materialities and the use and impact of (new) media. The firstquestion considers how the volume is shaped by themes of silence,visibility, problematisation and normalisation, by drawing on insightsfrom the study of emancipatory movements, such as queer and feminist
literature and studies of racism. Through this lens, the volume’scontributions depict why and how non-religious groups try to raiseawareness of their existence, and when and how non-religious groupsalign themselves with other, more or less marginalised, groups. How dothey try to link isolated individuals across space and time to establish asense of community and form (imagined) communities? How do they try
to increase their visibility, circulate their ideas and make their position
heard as well as recognised and viable? How do they try to cultivate
shared sensibilities and establish a shared language and new forms of
intimacy? How do they understand and display their difference fromhegemonic positions? Do they try – and, if so, how – to form a counterpublic?
While marginalised groups show similarities in their reactions todiscrimination, this afterword also points to the analytical and politicallimits of such a comparison, given the important differences between
forms of marginalisation, subordination and discrimination and the
difficulties presented by unexamined commitments to a framework or
narrative of declamatory forms of emancipation and their relationships
to publicness.
Second, this afterword suggests that we may need to look for
sceptical publics beyond organised atheists and freethinkers, secular
movements and activism, or other forms of declamatory non-religion andrespective public controversies or legal prosecutions. Lee’s and Weltecke’s
work highlights that a lack of visibility, although it might be a concern forsome actors, cannot be equated with silence. This invites scholars of nonreligion to reflect further on why some non-religious figurations remain‘under the radar’. Lee discusses an ethics of self-disclosure that is sensitive
to local contexts, asking us to look beyond declamatory genres of speaking
and self-representation and to pay attention to non-verbal signs.
Weltecke’s work shows the importance of becoming sensitive toalternative non-religious figurations in other places. On the one hand, shedisplays how sceptical publics can also be found at the heart of orthodox

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positions. On the other, she argues – in my words – that we have to takeparadox positions seriously.
My suggestion is not, however, simply to look for medieval-style
paradoxa in the contemporary world, not least because the doxa
constantly changes and is time- and place-specific. In many instances,non-religion is obviously seen not as paradox but as a means to participate
in the public. The point is rather an invitation to listen to alternative
voices and spaces that complement the focus on emancipatory (andenlightenment) narratives with unwordy and logophobic positions andgenres, even if these do not seek visibility and therefore partake in publics
in less obvious ways. Broadening our perspectives in such ways is also
relevant to the apparently growing group of people largely indifferent toreligion and religiosity (Quack and Schuh 2017), even if these do not feel
marginalised or discriminated against, and even if their stance towards
religious matters may be part of common sense (doxa). Indifference does
not usually find its voice in declamatory genres but can be part of‘logophobic’ semiotic forms. How do we approach non-religious
figurations that are constituted primarily by shared secular habitus orthat constitute ‘unwordy’ non-religious ways of life? Could sceptical
publics also be based on shared indifference? What kinds of media andforms of publicity are at stake here?

Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Stefan Binder, Jacob Copeman and Mascha Schulz for
helpful comments on drafts of this afterword and to Janine Murphy forcorrecting and improving my English. I also want to acknowledge thesupport of the European Research Council (ERC) under the European
Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant
agreement no. 817959).

Notes
1 The use of ‘figuration’ in this afterword is meant to signal a relational approach to non-religion.
Relational thinking in the study of non-/religion can be operationalised differently; Bourdieu’s
field theory is but one of many possibilities (Quack 2014).
2 References without dates are to chapters in this volume.
3 The notion of ‘religio-normativity’ – inspired by the concept of heteronormativity – wasdeveloped to describe the ‘means by which religion is experienced as carrying certain social
orders’ (Quack, Schuh and Kind 2019, 5), and was further elaborated by Schulz (2021).
4 But there are heteronormative and patriarchal tendencies also within many non-religious
groups (Binder 2020). My research in India suggests a very strong generational gap in this350

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5

6
7
8

9

respect. Those non-religious groups dominated by people born after the 1990s tend to alignwith LGBTQ movements. Having said this, the large majority of organised non-religion acrossthe world always was and remains a male-dominated sphere (Binder 2020, 196–227; Brewster
2013; Quack 2012, 290–3).
Lee thereby draws on the Shia concept of taqiyya, understood as an ethics that acknowledges
that ‘the stakes of self-disclosure can differ radically’, depending on the social position of thepeople concerned, for example ‘between landlord and labourer, colonizer and colonized,
majority and minority’ (2021, 272).
Atheism was supposedly, in Bernard Williams’s words (Williams 1993, 60), a ‘historicalimpossibility’.
My interpretation of Weltecke’s book is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between doxa,
heterodoxy and orthodoxy and supplemented by my use of the notion paradox(a).
This afterword is not the place to operationalise how such paradoxes may eventually result ina heterodoxy. Standard accounts (often themselves part of an emancipatory narrative) suggestthat from roughly the seventeenth century onwards one is able to speak of a (still) emerging
non-religious heterodoxy in Europe, coupled with the gradually growing affinity between
philosophy, science and atheism (Weltecke 2010, 44), the beginning of a more general andcomparative ‘history of religion’ (Kippenberg 1997), and the establishment of an identity andcommunity (partly based on the alleged discrimination during the Middle Ages) that was later
coupled with themes like enlightenment, emancipation, progress, social reform, freedom anddemocracy (see Nash in this volume). Importantly, such shifts also led to changes in the doxa
with respect to ‘religion’, for example with respect to the growing importance of belief rather
than orthopraxy and loyalty, as well as with respect to the normativities associated withreligion more generally.
Weltecke identifies clear exceptions. Another famous case (albeit after the time period Weltecke
discusses) is Carlo Ginzburg’s investigation of a Friulian miller in his book The Cheese and theWorms: The cosmos of a sixteenth-century miller (Ginzburg 2013). His views are – in my reading– not to be seen as ‘the creation of a strange heterodox universe’ (Nash) but as a paradox
intervention.

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IndexAbou Hamdan, Mazen 146, 158–60
abuse, forms of 145
activism 1–3, 71–6, 134, 136, 291
Adam 208–12
advocacy 5
aesthetics 20–4, 80–6, 127–8, 131–2, 135,
137–8
as a dimension of religion 129
of persuasion 136–8
of religion 129–31, 139
of science and politics 129–31
of the secular 131–4, 139of speech 135
affect 20, 149–58, 164, 167, 246, 254, 310
affordances 40, 342,
digital 6, 29
afterlife 112–14, 122–3, 313, 319
agency 253–6, 260–1
disavowal of 255–6
agnosticism 274–8, 281
agonism 279
Aid Without Religion (organisation) 14
AKP see Justice and Development Party
Alevi community 196
Al-Ma’arri 292
Alșahin, Mehmet Emin 197–8
Althusser, Louis 291
Altıparmak, Kerem 199
Al Zidjaly, Najma 26–9
ambiguity of concepts xviii
American Atheist Radio Series 249
anonymity 145, 310–11
antagonistic discourse 277–83
anthropology 39–40, 47, 173–4, 346
of apostasy 190
apostates 14–15, 29–30, 144, 176–85, 189–90,
195–6
and asylum 173–8
definition of 173, 183–6
enabling conditions for 189
hardships suffered by 188
protection for and support of 176
Arab Spring (2011) 2
Arabic language 145–6
Aral, Oğuz 203
Aristotle 175
Arman, Ayșe 203

artillery shells 46
Artuk, Mehmet Emin 197–8
Aryan immigration theory 133–4
Aryan invasions 135
Asad, Talal 131, 341–3
asylum claims 176
ataraxia xvi–xvii
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 194
atheism xvi–xviii, 3–9, 15, 18–19, 41–2, 99,
198, 203, 247–9, 254, 259–65, 270,
275–8, 280–3, 294, 320
articulation of 273–8
capitalization of the word (Atheism) 133–8,
274
criticism of 122
culture of 263
definition of 249, 279, 284
digital 3–6, 15, 24–30, 259–60, 263–5, 310
and the existence of evil 110–14
history of 219–22, 227–31, 237–8
material culture of 19
as a natural state of mind 279–81
nature of 148–9
not a comprehensive system of thought 271
online 229, 310–13
public 146–7, 150
recognition of 335
spectrum of 311
types of 270
use of the word 274
Atheism Ireland (campaigning group) 234–5
Atheist Republic 11, 304, 332
atheists
characteristics of 271–2
image of 248
number of 146–7
Atsiz, Nihal 196
attainment, theory of 29
audiences 12–13, 56, 87–9, 222–5, 263, 299
awareness-raising 185, 343
Badawi, Raif 27
Bahçeli, Devlet 196
Bangladesh 1–3, 17–18, 27, 177
Barbour, Ian 103–5, 121
Baruter, Bahadir 202–3
Bate, Bernard 138

INDEX

353

Baxstrom, Richard 48
Bayan Yanı (magazine) 205,
Belgium 10
Bengali theatre 4
Benjamin, Walter 130
Berlant, Lauren 262–3
Betar, Kosay 165–6
Bharti, Uma 52
bias against atheists 164
biblical epics (films) 121–2
biblical references 100–5
Bigg Boss 58–64
bin Walayat, Hamza 174–8, 184
Binder, Stefan ix, 22–3, 59, 313, 340–1
Blanes, Ruy 149, 189
Blankholm, Joseph ix, 22
blasphemy and blasphemy laws 195–6, 208,
211, 214–15, 221–5, 231–5, 312, 330–2,
335
blogging and bloggers 1–2, 17–18, 27
Blommaert, Jan 26
Boland, Tom 57
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 237–8
Bonhomme, Julien 47
Bora, Tanıl 196
Bosman, Frank ix, 12–14
Bouzamour, Mano 292–3
Bradbury, James ix–x, 3, 12–13, 18, 22–4,
42–3, 340, 346
Bradlaugh, Charles 224–7, 234
Brazil 178
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 50,
229
British Humanist Association (BHA) 228, 238
British Social Attitudes Survey 179
broadcasting, religious 229
Brockway Room 174
Bronowski, Jacob 229
Brooks, Marshall 185–6
Bruno Giordano 89
Bubandt, Nils 47
Buddhir Mukti Andolon 18
Byrne, Gay 235
Caduff, Carlo 7, 45
Campbell, Colin 254, 260
Carlile, Richard 223–6, 231
Carpentier, Nico 279–80
Carson, Johnny 248
cartoons 13, 193–4, 202–7, 210–15, 233–4,
334; see also comic books
caste system 40
Chalfant, Eric x, 4, 9–10, 15, 26, 28, 42, 59,
110, 179, 233, 340, 343–4‘cheap editions’ concept 229
Christianity 100, 105–6, 121–2, 181, 209–10,
225–9, 232–3, 247, 274–8
criticism of 233
Maronite 148
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong 259–60
Cimino, Richard 29, 220, 270‘circlejerk’ 279–80, 283
circular movement of ideas 306‘citability’ 45
climate change 57
Cobb, Kayla 98

354

INDEX

Cody, Francis 17
collective voice 296
comic books 193–5, 207–8, 211–15‘coming out’ as an atheist 42, 144, 146, 250–5,
256–7, 293, 322, 344
commitment 238
common characteristics of unbelievers 224
communication 224–5, 228–31
analysis oriented towards 100
between atheists 222
text-external and text-immanent 99–100,
199
community formation 11, 15, 269–71, 282–3
Comte, Auguste 178
consumer protection 44
contemporary art 194–7
Conway Hall 173–7, 238
Copeman, Jacob (co-editor) x, 8, 15, 18, 24,110, 134–6
Cottee, Simon 30, 185–6, 189
counter-narratives 305
counterpublics 9–10, 13, 28, 215, 244–6,
249–50, 253, 260–5, 289–98, 306, 344,
349
definition of 244–6
court reports 221, 223
covert relations 26
Covid-19 pandemic 313
Craig, David 273
criminalisation 27, 44, 145, 197–9, 215, 298
critical theory 130
4critical thinking 274
Cross, David 257
cults and cultic understanding 105–9, 186
culture wars 231
Cunningham, Stuart 273
Daily Star (of Bangladesh) 1, 3, 17
Däniken, Erich von 112
Dante Alighieri 114
Das, Ananta Bijoy 89, 177
Das, Veena 334
dating apps 323
Dawkins, Richard 16, 27, 200
de Abreu, Maria José A. de 7, 45
debunking 44, 56–8
deconversion narratives 253–6, 259, 263–4
decorum 138
deism 239
Demirkol, Gökhan 204–5
denigration of values 197–8, 202, 211, 215
Denmark 334
Denver, the Last Dinosaur 120
deregulation 51
Derharoutyounian, Nishan 161–3
de-secularisation 214
deviation from religio-normativity 148
difficult choices 220
digital atheism see atheism: digital
digital technology 2, 5, 16, 24–9, 138, 220
digital voice recorders, use of 174
digitalisation 342
discourse, clash of 278
discourse theory 273, 283
discrimination 166, 182
discussion forums 30

Domestic Abuse Bill (2019) 176
Donahue, Phil 248
donations 319–20
of dead bodies and human organs 23, 135,
315–16
Dravidian civilization 133
Durham Peters, John 48
Duyar, Gürdal 200
Ecevit, Bülent 200‘echo chamber’ effects 272, 304
Edamaruku, Sanal 52–8, 63
edges of the religious field 3010–23, 326, 333,
335
Egypt 27, 149
Elçioğlu, Abdülkadir 204, 210
Elisha, Omri 176
emancipatory movements 345–6, 349–50
emic and etic dimensions xviii, 190‘emotional habitus’ 136
empathy 151
empirical testing of reality xvii
engagement 5, 51, 151, 224–5
Engelke, Matthew 20, 110, 180–3
Enlightenment thinking 219, 232, 296, 298
Erbakan, Necmettin 200
Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 193–6, 214
Erer, Ramize 205–6, 210
ethnography 47–8, 64, 173
Eurocentrism 7, 39, 129, 133
Eve 100 209–12
evil, problem of 110–14, 235
ex-centricity 313, 315
exposure see debunking
fabrication 20–4
Facebook 6, 27, 144, 146, 198, 251, 288–95,
303–6, 323, 332
Fader, Ayala 2, 28–9, 310
faith in a supreme being 118, 122
Faith to Faithless (organization) 174, 176,
179–84, 189–90
falsifiability xvii
family members 313–24
Farman, Abou 132
fascism 130–1
February 20 Movement 287, 298
Febvre, Lucien 221, 347
femininity 150, 164
feminism 214, 288
Field and Stream 245
film 43
Flynn, Tom 16
Foote, G.W. 233–4
Foucault, Michel 256–9
frames 167
Frangieh, Tony 161, 164
Frankfurt School 130
Fraser, Nancy 9, 243–5, 249–50
free will 28, 259
freedom of conscience 298
freedom of religion 197
freedom of speech 223, 231–2, 239, 332–4
freedom of thought and expression 145, 197,
199, 211, 215
Freethought movement 225

Freke, David R. 182
frustrations 282
Fry, Stephen 235
funerals and funeral provision 238, 315
Futurama 99
Gandhi, Indira 49
Gellner, Ernest 174
gender differences 150–1, 164
Ghana 7Ghanem, Pamela 146, 155–8
Gilmartin, David 8–9
Ginzburg, Carlo 221–2
Gırgır (magazine) 203–5
gnosticism 275
Godbelief in existence of 103, 110–11, 115,
118, 123, 203, 237, 270, 273–7, 280,
284, 322–3, 347–8
knowledge of 347
mocking, ridiculing or criticising of 195
Gogineni, Babu 58–64
Gönülay, Suat 212–14
Goody, Jack 18–19
Google 272
GTC group 53, 56–8, 63–4
Gündüz, Ergün 206–7
Gupta, Neelabh x, 9, 11, 13, 22, 26, 230,
344–5
gurus 12–13, 43–9, 53, 57
Haasan, Kamal 60
Habermas, Jürgen 6–7, 244
Haddad, Joumana 151–8, 163
Haddon, A.C. 174
Hagström, John x, 8, 14–15, 18, 340, 344–5
half-life of institutional religions 179
Hammond-Beckett, Sekneh 251
Hansen, Thomas 50
harassment online 283
Harmon, Dan 97–8
Hassan, Muhammad 165
hate speech 196–7, 332–3
hatred 284–5
al-Haybi, Edgar 148
Haydar, Ali 146, 160–4
Hecker, Pierre x–xi, 13, 18–19, 24
Herberg, Will 250
heresy xvii; see also blasphemy
Heston, Watson 23–4
heterodoxy 348
heterosexuality 262
Hick, John 111
Hilal character 206–12
Hinduism 7, 63, 133, 137, 323, 329, 333
Hirsch, Eric 43
Hirschkind, Charles 7, 45, 51, 131
history 343–5; see also atheism: history of
Holyoake, George 14
Home Office 175–6
homo economicus 258–9
homosexuality 322–3
hooks, bell 288, 293–4, 298, 303, 344
human rights 145, 197, 199, 211
Human Rights Council 177
humanism 228–9, 236–7

INDEX

355

secular 20–3
‘Humanist lives’ course 180
Humanists International 177
Humanists UK 174, 178–82
Husain, Maqbool 329
Huxley, T.H. 227
Huxtable-Thomas, Louisa 271–2
hyperlinks 271
hyperliteralism 138
identity, atheist 270, 280–1
identity politics 196, 249–51, 344
imagined audiences for atheists 222–5
imagined communities 9, 12, 340
inclusivity 282
India 7, 11–12, 18, 22–7, 39–44, 51–60, 64,
127, 132–9, 308–10, 315, 320–32
Ingersoll, Robert 16
Instagram 11, 320internet resources 2, 5–6, 10, 15, 25–9, 234,
264, 269, 292–3, 297–8, 301, 339–40
intimacy 262–4
invisibility of the audience 263
Ireland 234–5
irony 291
Islam 25, 181, 183, 193, 198, 202–3, 211, 215,
290–302, 312, 322
criticism 298
defence of 196
political 194–7, 201, 206, 215
Islamic fundamentalism 1
Islamism 197, 200
Jaffrelot, Christophe 325
Jain, Kajri 17
Jamaat-e-Islami 1–2
Jewish communities 2, 29, 102
journalism 43
Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey
197, 200, 214
Karabulut, Ersin 207
Kashima, Yoshihisa 151
Kasparian, Ana 9, 270, 273–83
Kauffman, Matthew 271
Kazan, Şevket 201
Keane, Webb 128
Kemalism 201
Khalife, Tony 148
Khazaal, Natalie xi, 13–14, 17, 22, 28, 189,
222, 233
King, Stephen 103
Kirsch, Anja 131
Kötü Kız character 205
Kovoor, Abraham 41, 46, 53–6, 64
Kumar, Akshay 319
Kurtcebe, Nuri 207, 210
Kyrgyzstan 25‘labelling’ 135, 184–6, 190
Laclau, Ernesto 273, 278
Lakoff, George 167
lampoons 225
Landless Workers’ Movement-Parsi (MST) 178
Large Hadron Collider xvii
Laughlin, Jack 29, 271, 284

356

INDEX

Leach, Edmund 174
Lebanon 1, 20, 22, 144–51, 165
Lebner, Ashley 41–2, 48, 176–9
Lee, Joel 339, 346–9
Lee, Lois 20–3
Lennox, Sara and Frank 243
Lewis, Tania 7LGBT identity 1, 177, 256, 298–9
Lichtenberg, Arne 199
like-minded people 11, 25, 28, 144, 180–1,
221, 224, 233, 270, 285, 290, 340,
343–4
literalism 104–5; see also hyperliteralism
literate culture 19
lived secularity 127–32
Liverpool 183–6
loaded questions xv
Louw, Maria 27
Loxton, Daniel 11
Lundmark, Evelina xi, 9–10, 30, 222, 230, 340‘lynching culture’ 196
McDowell, Stephen D. 63
McLuhan, Marshall 45
magic 57
Manchester 184
Mandape, Kumar 44
Marcella, Valentina 215
marginalised groups 349
Marshall, David 9–10
Marx, Karl 104
Marxism 178
masculinity 150, 158, 164, 167
mass media 10, 42, 56
massive open online courses (MOOCs) 180,
183
materiality and materialisaton 4–6, 23, 110
Maymun, H.B.R. 206
Mcintyre, Susanna 326
meaning and purpose in life 124
media as a filter and a conduit xvii
media forms 4–5
media technologies 219–20
mediated discourses 4
meme 11, 282, 312, 315–22, 330–1‘mental slavery’ 133–5
Meyer, Birgit 20–3
Middle Ages 347
Miller, Daniel 6, 17, 29
Milton, John 100
miracles 24, 42, 45, 47, 51, 134
misogyny 166
Mitchell, T.J. 327
mobile phones 47
mockery 324
Modi, Narendra 318
Mohiuddin, Asif 1
moral panics 27
Morocco and the Moroccan diaspora 10, 17,230, 287–92, 296–8, 304, 312
Morris, Rosalind C. 10
Mouffe, Chantal 269, 272, 277–8
Muhammad the Prophet 195, 334
Mukto-Mona 17–18
Murray, William J. III 254–5
Muslimness 291

Muslims and Muslim faith 149, 294, 302–3; seealso Islam
Namazie, Maryam 25
Narasimha Rao, P.V. 49
Nash, David xi, 12, 18–19, 195, 346
Nash, Kate 269
naturalness as a state of mind 281
Navabi, Armin 328–34
Nayak, Narendra 44
Nesin, Aziz 196–7
New Atheism 4, 15–16, 57, 147, 236
New Humanist (magazine) 227
newness 6, 15, 17, 29
Nietzsche, Friedrich (and Nietzschean
standards) 97, 99, 114–18, 123
nihilism 98–9, 114, 122–3
Nișanyan, Sevan 200‘nones’ xvii, 237–9, 339
normal way of being 284
normalisation 144, 189
normativity 341
nostalgia 123
nudity, women’s 201, 204
occult practices 47
offensive behaviour 324, 333–4
O’Hair, Madalyn Murray 247–51, 254, 258
Omar Khayyam 198–9
online atheism see atheism: digital
online communication 294, 303–5
Open Society concept 228
oratory 136–8
Orsi, Robert 23
Orwell, George 291
othering 279–84
Oustinova–Stepanovic, Galina 149, 189
outreach 11, 24–5
Paine, Thomas 223–6
Pakistan 27, 177
Papineau, David 41
patriarchy 205–6, 210–11, 214
Penguen 202–3
periodicals 225
Philippines, the 147–8
philosophy 122
PK (film) 308
Plato 175
play 282
Pluto (planet) 104
Polat, Mehmet 201
polymedia 17
Popper, Karl 228
populism 214
Posen, Izzy 186
positivism 123, 178‘post-truth’ 104
postcolonial discourse 299–300
posting 296; see also Facebook; meme; Reddit
platform; social media
Prakasam, Naveena 271
Premanand, Basava 46–51, 56
present book, contents of 5, 8–9, 16, 20, 23
press coverage 177

privacy and privacy settings 6, 312–13, 326–9,
332‘progressive’ discourse 270
Project Gutenberg 231
proselytising 340
proto-science 108–9
pseudonyms, use of 26, 145, 251–3, 264–5,
292, 311, 342
public opinion 196
public sphere 5–8, 12, 144, 164, 194, 237,
244, 249–50, 263, 344
generalised 5
publicity 4–6, 13–17, 26, 40–2, 146–51
and gender 150–1
publicness 269
publics 5–10, 14
characteristics of 8–9
plurality of 9
political nature of 10
and the public xvi, 245, 261–2
publishing 225–8
punishment for atheists 145
Pyrrho xvi
Quack, Johannes xii, 110, 134–5, 315
queer identity 256–7, 262–3, 322–3
the Qur’an 160, 165–6, 298, 329
racism 197
Rajagopal, Arvind 7
Rajamouli, S.S. 60–1
Ram Mandir temple 317–20
Rao, Naraasimha 49
rationalism and rationality 39–51, 55–64, 67,
278–84, 315, 335
Rationalist Press Association (RPA) 226–9
reading habits 227
reality tv 59‘realization humanists’ 182, 189–90
Reddit platform 9–11, 15, 26–8, 42, 246–7,
252–5, 258, 261–4, 272–3, 282–5
religionabandonment of 146
absence of xvii–xviii 3–6, 9–25, 28, 30,
39–41, 128, 131, 179, 336–44, 349–50
attacks on 99, 271
as a ‘bad story’ 121
as a coping mechanism 99, 108–9, 112
criticism of 197, 329–31, 33
definition of 23, 198
high-control form of 186
indifference to 347
interactions with atheism 310
and materiality 21
nature of 148
overt form of 99
reflections on 13, 147
Rick and Morty’s view of 104, 109
and science 103, 105
and the state 130
study of 128–9
use of the term 149
waning of 237
religiosity 149, 239, 315, 320–1, 334, 347, 350
collective 318
popular or lived forms of 129

INDEX

357

religious activities, interest in 316
religious communities 11, 19
religious culture 221
religious practitioners 272
research projects 150
rhetoric 138
Richardson, Ste 176, 186
Richter, Lena xii, 10–15, 27, 189, 220, 230,
312, 340, 343–5
Rick and Morty (tv show) 12, 14, 97–124,
321–2
Riesebrodt, Martin 108–9
rites of passage 238–9
rituals 315–17
Robertson, John Mackinnon 227
Roiland, Justin 97
Roman Empire 19
Rosenberg, Shoshana 251
Rubin, Dave 273
Rushdie, Salman 232
Russell, Bertrand 4, 16, 229
Ruud, Arild Engelsen 64–5
sabbatarianism 229
Sai Baba Seduced Me (film) 48–9
Saleem, Aliyah 180–2, 186
Salehi, Asma 183–6
same-sex marriage 323
Şansal, Barbaros 197
Sanwais, Jan 44
Satanic Temple xvii
satanism 230
Sathya Sai Baba 46–7, 50, 57–8
Say, Fazıl 198–9
sceptical publics xvi–xviii, 3, 6–20, 144, 147,
268, 339, 342, 347–50
location of 348–9
use of the term 6
scepticism 2, 4, 10, 18, 25, 193, 208, 214–15,
268
definition of 274
Schielke, Samuli 149
Schmidt, Leigh Eric 21, 24
Schulz, Mascha (co-editor) xii, 3, 12–13, 18,
22–4, 42–3, 144, 340, 346
science and scientific materialism 103–5
scientific method xvii xvii, 41–2
secularism and secularisation xvi–xviii, 1, 7–8,
12–13, 22–3, 128, 178–80, 183, 186,
189, 197, 214–15, 224–7, 230–2, 237,
247, 297
secularity 39–42, 48, 50, 127–32, 139
definition of 41‘seculars’ 12semiotic forms 346
Sextus Empiricus xvi
sexuality 106, 201, 204–6, 322–3‘sexy Kali’ 328–35
Shahbag movement 2, 18
Shaheed, Ahmed 177
Shams, Imtiaz 180–6
shared identity 30
sharing of media 327, 332–3
Sharma, Surinder 51–3
Sheffield 184–5
Shih, Fang-Long 147–8

358

INDEX

Sikha (journal) 18
silence and silencing 26, 30, 297, 305, 316,
320–2, 334, 348
Simmel, Georg 25
Simmons, Audrey 186
The Simpsons 99, 114, 122
Sinha, Sushmita 324–7Şirin, Tolga 198
Sivas Massacre (1993) 196
slow motion 45–51
Smith, Adam 258
Smith, Christopher 29, 220, 270
social media 2–5, 17, 25–8, 59, 144–6, 149,
198, 203, 220, 236, 270–3, 283, 289–90,
294, 296, 303–6, 313, 318, 326, 332–3
socialism and socialist realism 130–1
Solar Opposites 99
South Park 99, 122
Stark, Rodney 47–8
Starr, Chelsea 270‘Stranger Church’ 221–2
Strauss, Claudia 150–1
Strauss, David Friedrich 226
Strauss, Leo xviii
subaltern groups 151, 244, 247, 303, 346
superhumans 117
superstition and the supernatural 41–2, 45,
55–6
Tagore, Rabindranath 73, 75, 80, 87‘talking back’ 59, 290–1, 294–7, 300, 305–8,
345
tantric acts 57
Taylor, Charles 279
technological forms 39
television 44–6, 49–59, 63–4, 146, 148
television rating points (TRPs) 53
terms, use of 311
theism 147, 274–8
theodicy 111, 114, 123
Thought for the Day 229‘thought experiments’ 123
torture 145
Tottoli, Roberto 210‘tournaments of reality’ 41
training 182–6
Trawick, Margaret 136
tree of knowledge 210, 212
Tremlett, Paul-François 147–8
Tunisia 299
Turkey 13, 23, 193–215
Article 216/3 of Penal Code 194, 197–202,
214–15Constitution of 197
national culture 194
Twitter xvii-xviii, 26, 29, 198, 297, 301, 329,
332
Übermensch concept 99, 114–17, 123
Udupa, Sahana 63
United States 151, 230–3, 247, 271
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 145‘us and them’ 279
user interaction 272
van Nieuwkerk, Karin 27

van de Port, Mattijs 43
Vedic recitation 137
veiling 145, 165
vibhuti 46–7
‘vigilante censorship’ 63
violence 27, 63, 145, 320, 334
viral media 323
visibility 6, 42–3, 50, 55, 222, 248–52, 270,
334, 343–9
politics of 173, 179, 182–4, 189, 248, 258
visuals 312, 322–4, 327–9, 332–5
Wadud, Kazi Abdul 18
Waldo, Kristin 271
war crimes tribunals (Bangladesh) 2
Warner, Michael xvi, 9–10, 245–9, 260–5, 269
Watts, Charles A. 227
Weiner, James 43
Weltecke, Dorothea 339, 346, 349–50
Wesch, Michael 45
WhatsApp 11
Whitmarsh, Tim 19
Williams, Bernard 229
Williams, Raymond 149
Wilson, Alex 251
women 146, 150–8, 165–6
accounts of 151–8
and atheism 315
role of 28–9
‘world making’ 10, 131, 263
worldviews 132
Wright, Susannah 223
Yarar, Kenan 206–8, 211–14
Young Bengal movement 18
YouTube 9, 17, 44–5, 50, 52, 55, 59, 146,
270–3, 293, 300–1
Zillinger, Martin 12
Zindler, Frank R. 248–9

INDEX

359

‘When it comes to the burgeoning study of atheists, humanists, and the like, Global Sceptical
Publics is just the volume we need. It deserves a prominent place on the shelf of any serious
student of media, aesthetics, and non-religion.’ Matthew Engelke, Columbia University‘This vibrant collection offers a major conceptual incentive to rethink the non-religious from amaterial and corporeal angle. Importantly, non-religion is not reduced to a mere abstract andintellectual project, but instead shown to emerge through actual political-aesthetic practices
and media representations. A marvellous intervention which liberates us from the straitjacket ofthe religious-secular binary!’ Birgit Meyer, Utrecht University‘Global Sceptical Publics provides vital insight into the formation and transformation of nonreligious identities, communities and publics through media. It is an outstanding achievement
and one of the most significant publications of recent years in the several fields it brings
together.’ Lois Lee, University of Kent
Global Sceptical Publics is the first major study of the significance of different media for the(re)production of non-religious publics and publicity. While much work has documented
how religious subjectivities are shaped by media, until now the crucial role of diverse media
for producing and participating in religion-sceptical publics and debates has remained
under-researched. With some chapters focusing on locations hitherto barely consideredby scholarship on non-religion, the book places in comparative perspective how atheists,
secularists and humanists engage with media – as means of communication and forming
non-religious publics, but also on occasion as something to be resisted. Its conceptually richinterdisciplinary chapters thereby contribute important new insights to the growing field of
non-religion studies and to scholarship on media and materiality more generally.
Jacob Copeman is Research Professor, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, andDistinguished Researcher (Oportunius).
Mascha Schulz is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC project ‘Religion and its
Others in South Asia and the World (ROSA)’ and based at the Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology, Halle (Germany).

Free open accessversion available fromwww.uclpress.co.uk

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