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Advertising atheism sparks backlash |
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Written by Tom Robinson
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Friday, April 03 2009, 10:28 PM |
Atheists have started advertising campaigns on buses — from London and soon to Lethbridge.
“There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life,” the slogans announce. Encouraged by the Atheist Bus Campaign, other groups are getting on the bandwagon. The American Humanist Association’s Washington, D.C. campaign proclaimed “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake.” Other ads tout a side benefit of atheism: being able to sleep in on Sunday mornings.
The present campaign of atheists is mild stuff, however, when compared to what was taking place in the United States 80 years ago. In 1925 the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (the 4As, as it was called) was formed. It declared itself the “Militant Foe of the Church and Clergy.” The association tried to shut down campaigns of revivalist preachers, they established a Junior Atheist League for school children, they set up the American Anti-Bible Society, they successfully argued against having the Ten Commandments read in public schools in New York, they called the Bible “a cesspool of Asiatic superstition,” they established a seminary, and they may have encouraged their members to steal Gideon bibles from hotel rooms. They even sent out missionaries to foreign lands — to British Columbia and then to Sweden, apparently two areas of the world most in need of the message. They asked U.S. President Coolidge to cancel the Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, a celebration they hoped to change to Blame-giving Day, an annual event on which one would assume the existence of God — for just one day — and then blame him for all the ills of the world. They also developed a new doxology, cribbed from the popular Christian hymn “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow,” but changed now for an atheistic chant into “Blame God from whom all cyclones blow, Blame him when rivers overflow, Blame him who swirls down house and steeple, Who sinks the ships and drowns the people.” Others were inspired to establish their own atheist groups, with names such as “Sons of Satan,” “The Society of the Godless,” “The Legion of the Damned,” “His Satanic Majesty” and if one had a particular fondness for the letter “H,” “The Hedonic Host of Hell-Bent Heathens.” Even young children, hardly out of the cradle, joined the chorus. One little girl, Queen Silver, became a lecturer of atheism and Darwinism at the age of four and started her own atheist magazine when only 12, calling on atheists to “kill religion.”
On the other side, and equally vaudeville-like, were some revivalist preachers, who challenged the bold attacks of the atheists. Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson drew massive crowds to their campaigns. And children joined in on this side, too. The 1920s became the golden age of girl evangelists. One little girl started preaching at the age of three, standing on top of a piano to be seen. Some of the young girls were able to fill the largest venues of the greatest American cities, preaching night after night for revival campaigns that lasted often for three weeks. Atheists and Darwin would not escape the wrath of these preachers — young or old.
The fight between evolutionists and revivalists even made its mark on the novelists, playwrights and movie directors of the period, in such productions as Cecil B. DeMille’s last silent film, “The Godless Girl” (1929) and Sinclair Lewis’ novel “Elmer Gantry” (1927), two of the better known works of the day, though hardly the only efforts of social commentators of the period to capture the atmosphere of the 1920s.
One thing seems sure: whatever slogans the various advocates promote today, they will probably appear fairly mild by the standards of the conflict in the 1920s.
(For an informed and entertaining review of religion and atheism in the 1920s, see Charles W. Ferguson, The New Books of Revelations: The Inside Story of America’s Astounding Religious Cults (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1929).
Tom Robinson is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Lethbridge.
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