What is Godlessness?
By: Benjamin Cain
Tags: America, Philosophy, Liberalism, Atheism, Religion

Atheism and Godlessness

When new atheism was a thing (a fad), Richard Dawkins liked to say that atheists merely go one step further than Christians, Muslims, or any other religious people, since the latter reject all gods and religions but theirs. The atheist rejects all of those too, plus the gods of the last religion standing.

This is the unphilosophical level of thinking common to science-centered atheists. Atheism becomes just a matter of simple arithmetic, you see. When the atheist is talking to a Christian, she takes all the non-Christian deities they both reject, and she adds the Christian’s god to the list. Poof! That’s how you can make an atheist — a godless person — out of a Christian. You merely convince the Christian to negate one further deity.

What this conception of atheism leaves out, though, is all the other aspects of religiosity, such as reverence, worship, and spirituality, which re-emerge in secular forms.

Take idolatry, for example, the worship of money, power, or pleasure, or the holding of these material goods as effectively sacred and worthy of ultimate concern. Is the atheist godless when she treats something as though it were her god, when she trusts in the merit of some way of life while lacking sufficient reason for doing so?

Soviet communists were explicitly atheistic, but they effectively worshipped the state as an ultimate good, revered Vladimir Lenin as a saint, and treated Josef Stalin as an absolute monarch able to decide the fate of millions on a whim. That political model of absolute rule is saturated with religious connotations, since for thousands of years deference to a king was justified theocratically, by appealing to religious myths about how the gods confer authority on the ruler, making the king or queen an agent of divine order.

Likewise, the Nazis worshipped the Volk, the essence of a purified ethnicity, and they revered Adolph Hitler as the visionary leader of this spiritualized supreme race. Nazis saw themselves as fulfilling Nietzsche’s expectation that a new religion would have to replace the old ones after the functional death of the ancient and medieval gods at the hands of modernists.

Liberalism defeated both Soviet communism and Nazism in the last century, creating the new, supposedly secular world order of capitalism, consumerism, democracy, and endless technoscientific progress.

So is this liberal world godless? Does this late-modern civilization lack any deified person or sacred object?

Certainly, there’s no dictator or god-man ruling over bastions of liberty, although cults like Scientology and Trumpism demonstrate that the religious urge to worship can still surface paradoxically in secular parts of the United States. And while people are free to worship privately in liberal societies, this freedom is meant to be patronizing, since religions are merely tolerated by those with the liberal sensibilities that determine the nature of the ruling institutions.

The idea of liberalism is that all individuals have equal value because of their capacity to exercise rational self-control. “Individual person” is an abstraction, one which used to be identified exclusively with rich, white European men, but which eventually moderns understood to apply to free-thinking, responsible minds and bodies in general. Liberalism entails, then, that everyone should be free to pursue their goals. Society should reflect that equal freedom of every individual, by empowering them and by getting out of their way.