Jan Register drives to her job at Elon University’s Numen Lumen Multi-Faith Center every morning and enters a building that promotes open-mindedness. When she drives home at night into Alamance County, she must convert to a Christian-only mindset for her family and friends. Little do they know she accepts atheism, among other faiths.
“It’s a bubble in Alamance County. It’s a completely different world than out there,” Register said. “When we first announced we were going to build this building and that it would be multi-faith, there was pushback. There’s a certain retired preacher in town who loves to dash off letters to the Times-News saying we’re all going to hell for not trying to convert students to Christianity. It is really foreign to people around here.”
As a Christian in the South who thinks differently, Register is stigmatized. And she’s not alone.
It is against the law in North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee for an atheist to hold public office. Each of these states employs different language in its constitution barring this minority group from leadership but makes it clear to state residents that not believing is not accepted.
According to the U.S. Constitution, there can be no religious test for holding office, so why have these particular states failed to amend their state constitutions? It may be because they rest within the Bible Belt.
If atheist politicians aren’t accepted by Southern states, atheist residents within those states assume they won’t be either. This trickle-down effect encourages the silencing of a minority group that thinks differently, leaving atheists in a position reminiscent of LGBTQ-identifying citizens — with the paralyzing task of “coming out.”
“A number of elected officials have quietly told me that they, too, are non-theist but don’t want to deal with the public attention that they might trigger if they were open about it,” N.C. politician Cecil Bothwell said. “I don’t blame them, and really, most of us don’t make much fuss about things we don’t believe in. I don’t believe in a flat-earth, leprechauns, astrology or spontaneous generation of mice in piles of rags, but I’ve never told anyone I’m an A-spontaneous generationist or an A-leprechaunist.”
Bothwell was elected to Asheville’s City Council in 2009. In writing “The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire” before his campaign, Bothwell realized any critique of the evangelist might be regarded as religiously inspired. In order to avoid any perceived bias, Bothwell noted in the acknowledgements that he did not subscribe to any religion. What he got in return was hate from his hometown.
“Two smear letters were sent to thousands of Asheville voters warning them I was an atheist and intended to lead Asheville to hell,” Bothwell said.
Atheism locally
Throughout history, minority groups have had to overcome false stereotypes and the fears of the majority.
“If atheists wanted to vote as a block they would be a force to be reckoned with,” said Tom Arcaro, sociology professor at Elon University and regional atheism expert. “There’s going to be a backlash against politicians who use religious rhetoric to support their views eventually because the critical mass of atheists is increasing.”
Polls support Acaro’s view. According to a recently published Pew study, approximately 20 percent of U.S. adults do not affiliate with any particular religion. That includes 13 million atheists or agnostics and 33 million people overall who don’t identify with any religion.
“If you look at the landscape of American religious identification, the group that’s growing the fastest is the one with no religious affiliation — the irreligious,” Arcaro said. “If you extrapolate 5-10 years into the future, that’s a lot of people, and they’re going to begin having political power, making this a very timely issue.”
In the South specifically, at least 71 percent of each southern state’s population believes in God.
“My studies have shown that there is a clear difference between the stigma associated with atheism and the freedom with which people can come out in the South,” Arcaro said. “We can look in the U.S. and divide it up into four areas — The Bible Belt as the most stigmatized, next highest Midwest, next highest is the West Coast and the most secular is the Northeast. The stigma in the South is undoubtedly the highest. Coming out in Maine or Vermont is easier than coming out in Burlington.”
Atheism from a university perspective
Elon University is often referred to as a “bubble” in discussions regarding important issues. It sits in the Bible Belt but houses a majority of students from the Northeast.
“Atheism is not something that, being raised here [Alamance County], I’ve had exposure to at all,” Register said. “But if you look at statistics of how college students self identify when they come into school, you have so many ‘unknowns’ and so many ‘nones.’ And those are all people who are raised in a faith tradition, but they’re not going to label themselves as that when they leave their home. They’re searching. They’re going to figure out what it is they actually believe.”
Elon’s Numen Lumen Pavilion was erected in the spring of last year under the Truitt Center for Religious and Spiritual Life to help students do just that — sort through their beliefs — whether they associate with a religion or not.
“Our goal is to help students become rooted in their own faith traditions, whatever that is, and if that is a no faith tradition, then that’s included,” Register said. “There are 14 major religions, and one of them is atheism.”
As a devout Christian, Register said even as recently as five years ago, she wouldn’t have pictured herself holding a position in a building called the Numen Lumen Truitt Center for Religious and Spiritual Life. Alamance County, her home, only accepts one faith.
“Part of our mission is to try to educate the public on what we’re doing, what these programs are all about and why we’re multi-faith,” Register said.
Register’s ideas about exclusivity in Christianity have completely changed since accepting her job at Elon, but those of the surrounding county have not. Her 16-year-old son asked her why she was taking a job arranging field trips for Muslims, and one of her best friends, a Primitive Baptist, won’t speak to her about her job at all because it promotes the wholehearted acceptance of a religion outside of Christianity.
While the Truitt Center holds weekly cultural events that are open to the outer community, the Secular Society at Elon works to provide an outlet for the many religiously unidentifying students at Elon who may feel unwelcome in the outer Alamance County region.
“At Elon I still never said I was atheist,” said Rachael Berman, an Elon alumna. “I didn’t feel as though there necessarily would’ve been a bad result if I told people, there just didn’t seem to be a point in me [coming out as atheist] because there wasn’t a place I could turn to.”
Atheism through a national lens
When Herb Silverman ran for South Carolina office in the 1990s as an atheist, he was bombarded with hate mail and anonymous phone calls. However, in the face of scrutiny he discovered something important — there was a closeted population of atheists.
“Many had thought they were the only atheists in South Carolina, and most were closeted for fear of social and family disapproval,” Silverman wrote in his book, “Candidate Without a Prayer.” “These isolated atheists needed a supportive community, so with my list of local names I suggested meeting to see if there was interest in organizing an [atheist] group.”
This interest meeting, after years of cultivation, formed into the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, or SHL, and Silverman was its leader.
Less than 18 years later, Silverman was a national figurehead for atheists as president of the Secular Coalition for America. He currently blogs for The Washington Post and has spoken at numerous national debates.
Silverman and other national figureheads like him have provided the inspiration atheists need to come out in a country that’s always expressed belief in God.
“The community has just exploded in the last four and a half years,” said Seth Andrews, admin of “The Thinking Atheist” Facebook page. “Research shows the [number of] people who are saying they aren’t religious has doubled in the last 20 years, and I largely credit the Internet. Now information is no longer logged up, no longer out of reach of those who want to double check the claims of preachers, pundits, parents and anyone else.”
Now, with questions answered and resources available in bulk, skeptics are more comfortable policing the separation of church and state within their local governments — no more connecting the polls with the pews.
Until then, Faith supports political identity in the South, faith and political views shape the direction of voting and those things combine to result in a seemingly permanent bond of church and south. But more than that, a possibly permanent residue of church and state upon the laws of our nation and the representatives it elects to serve.