why are atheists always described as

Why Are Atheists Always Described as Militant?

Gustave Flaubert wrote a lovely book, Dictionnaire des id�es re�ues,

published posthumously in 1913. (The title roughly translates as

"Dictionary of Platitudes".) In it, he poked fun at, among other

things, nouns that are nearly always accompanied by certain

adjectives. Germans, he noted, are always described as "blond", a

professor is always "learned", and jealousy is always "unbridled".

In a similar vein, the comedian Robert Klein once noted that President

Garfield is nearly always described as "shot by a disappointed

office-seeker". Klein went on to claim that if you look up Garfield in

the dictionary, it says "See office-seeker, disappointed".

The intelligent design crowd plays the same game with "Darwinists".

They never refer to their ideological opponents as scientists or

biologists; they are nearly always "Darwinists", or, as Wesley

Elsberry has pointed out, "dogmatic Darwinists".

Now look at this otherwise unnoteworthy article by Associate Press

religion reporter Rachel Zoll, about the reaction to recent books by

atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Notice

anything, well, trite about the title? Yes, it's the "militant

atheist" platitude. Atheists must never be described as intelligent,

thoughtful, friendly, questioning, or thought-provoking. Instead, they

must be described as "militant".

From the meaning of "militant", you might expect that Dawkins, Harris,

and Hitchens are burning down churches, or at least leading protests,

stirring up crowds with their fiery rhetoric. You would be

disappointed, of course. What Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens have done

is write books. Hitchens is more of a curmudgeon than a militant, and

Dawkins and Harris are both rather mild-mannered. Nobody is leaving

their public events carrying torches and singing the atheist analogue

of the Horst Wessel song.

I'm not sure when the juxtaposition of "militant" and "atheist" became

a clich�. The earliest citation I've been able to find so far is a

1928 book review of Edward Lucas White's book Why Rome Fell by Elmer

Davis. Davis wrote, "Militant atheists ought not to read it; they will

be too likely to swallow it all uncritically."

Whatever the origins, the term "militant atheist" eventually became a

description to be used whenever the writer wanted to express

disapproval about nonbelievers. Madalyn Murray O'Hair was often so

described; a 1970 article in Time sneered at her attempt to found a

new church. True, O'Hair was, by all accounts, a nasty person.

However, when she was killed in 1995, obituaries routinely referred to

her as "militant". Her murderer, however, was not so categorized.

When Jerry Falwell died recently, newspaper obituaries rarely

described him as "militant", even though the adjective fit him much

better than mild-mannered atheists like Harris. Ironically, however,

the Associated Press obituary by Sue Lindsey, referred to Falwell's

father and grandfather as "militant atheists".

Flaubert would have appreciated the "militant atheist" clich�. In

Dictionnaire des id�es re�ues, he reported the following platitude

about atheists: "A nation of atheists could not survive." Sadly, that

clich� is still prevalent today among the morons of the Religious

Right.

Added June 6 2007: over at Pharyngula, commenter Jurjen S., whose

command of history is evidently better than mine, tells me about the

League of Militant Atheists, an anti-religious group in the Soviet

Union from 1925-1947. Probably this is the source of the term

"militant atheist"; indeed, many of the 1920's citations for this

phrase discuss actions in the Soviet Union.