Life as a white, male, liberal atheist in the south is what I imagine being a woman wearing a “pro-choice” shirt to a Southern Baptist church is like. It's nauseating, infuriating, and altogether isolating. At first glance, you're probably shocked by my choice of adjectives, thinking they're too drastic. Liberal and atheist are two small parts of my identity. I enjoy other things: working out, playing my PlayStation 4, going out on Friday nights, and kayaking. But, these two things, liberal and atheist, can envelop my whole life at times and dictate what relationships I can and cannot have, both romantically and platonically. Here in the Bible Belt, religion and politics intersect and infiltrate nearly every aspect of life. I cannot recount the number of times I've been angrily informed I'll be going to hell, that I support the murdering of babies, and that I'm a disappointment to my god-fearing parents. Add in that I'm a male liberal, and I may very well be the Antichrist around these parts.
Socially, I've received severe backlash. It started out as whispering behind my back that devolved into blatant and unprovoked attacks for my political beliefs and lack of spiritual beliefs. Friends I had for years in elementary and middle school turned to foe. At first, when I “came out” as an atheist in middle school, I had many try and convince me to come to church. When I would decline, they would invite me to their house on Saturday night, only to inform me on Sunday morning that I would be going to church with them. I heard the way people talked about me when they thought I was out of earshot: “he must be angry with god about something. Maybe he's gay. Maybe he just has a small [you can fill in this blank]. Maybe he's just [insert random thing that one would have a qualm with god about here]. I don't understand how he can't believe in god, how stupid! How ignorant! How dumb!” And this continued for most of high school. I made friends, even very god-fearing friends that embodied the namesake of Jesus Christ and accepted me regardless of my differences. They didn't try and convert me, as so many Christians feel is their duty. They just allowed me to exist. But, those few friends didn't compensate for the negativity, betrayal, and backlash I received.
And it didn't just stop at school. At home, I was forced to say the blessing or else not get fed that night, even though I had told my mother many times I was an atheist. I was forced to attend church semi-regularly. I'm against indoctrinating small children, but I can't see how any person can justify forcing someone to attend a church when they don't believe it at age 15. It would be like making Christians attend conferences weekly on “Why Religion is a Lie.” No one makes you do that, and you all would be up in arms if we (the atheist community) did.
Online, I was attacked still. And I developed a sort of militant atheist attitude. If Christians are allowed to post all they want about why they know god is real, why can't I post articles that support atheism, rebuttals to common Christian thinking, and memes that depict how I feel listening to them talk? It's the same concept: but I get a bad reputation for it, they get a holy one. That's always befuddled me to no end, the standard that Christians apply to Christians and then the opposite they apply to non-Christians.
Then came 2008, and I realized I was likely a liberal on top of being an atheist. Now, this is going back in time a little as I was an 8th grader at the time and this was the election year for Obama. I listened to people in middle school lament Obama's health care policy proposal (like they had any clue), decry him as the Antichrist (seriously), and use racist and Islamophobic rhetoric to describe and depict him. I couldn't be like these people. I was raised, albeit Christian and republican, better than this. I was raised to respect and love people. I was raised to appreciate the difference in ideas. I was raised that racism was a thing of the past and not to be engaged in today.
I was wrong. The next eight years would only reinforce the biased idea I had about the conservative party: they were largely a group of racist, sexist, backwards people. They knew little about what their party meant: conservative reading of the constitution, and that liberal meant a broad reading of it and the powers it entails. They clung liberally to what the second amendment meant, but conservatively to everything else. They rejected the idea that the bible was about personal accountability, and that it instead implored them to proudly proclaim the sins of others rather than recognizing their own. They saw not the New Testament for what it was and saw only the Old Testament. They were nothing like the namesake of their religion, and instead like the antichrist they decried me as.
Even college was no different. I heard many times at a small school called Wofford College, how Muslims were trying to take over our country. I heard the racist words the mostly-white school used to describe the neighbors in the city. I heard the ways they attacked the ideas of democratic candidates and hurled insults in the opposite fashion of what the college claimed to be speaking. And the college was complicit in this as well: I remember reading the rules for summer courses one day, and at one point I stumbled across the visitor section. For visitors of the same sex staying overnight, permission from the roommate had to be given. No mention was made of romantic partners of the opposite sex, just the same sex. Homophobic and isolating was a key platform of the evangelical conservative, and the school seemed right in line with that.
Now, I'm not homosexual. I've been accused of it many times because I don't objectively talk about womens' bodies the way my associates do. I've been accused of it because I'm liberal. I've been accused of it because I'm atheist. I've been accused of it because I'm white and all of these things. Not to say I haven't had ample reason to be gay: the evangelical women around here have spread nasty rumors about me, from being psychotic (I have bipolar I, so they're not entirely wrong), to just being a sex-crazed playboy (my sexual experiences would say otherwise). They also subscribe to the belief that you can't date someone who doesn't vote or believe the same things you do.
Not to say there aren't liberal male atheists that I can befriend here, or even women of like-minds. But, by and large in my experience, it's immersed in drug culture, something I've had to work very hard to escape from. Maybe it's because we're such a minority here, that drugs help ease the pain and are an easy way for us to connect to the other side of the aisle, or the inside of the church (drugs are done equally by both cultures I should add). But, I've had to steer clear of drugs the last year as I've coped with and learned more about my diagnosis of Bipolar I disorder. Many of my mental failings I can attribute to a lack of meaningful relationships, both with my family and outside of my family. And it's hard to explain to the god-fearing community here that I wanted to commit suicide because of the negativity they have shown me over the years. It's hard to hear them inform me all my solutions can be found in Christ, knowing their solace in Christ has given them peace of mind in attacking me mercilessly over the years.
Now, this article won't be well received, shared, or popular. But, I write it for me and the others like me that I'm sure are out there: stop. Stop informing us we're going to hell. Stop attacking us for our political beliefs. Just, stop. You might feel supported in your endeavors, and you all can pat yourself on the back for doing god's work, but the insults you hurl only reinforce the backwards stereotype that our region receives from the rest of the country and the world. Your insults do not encourage others to seek Christ, they merely reinforce our biased stereotypes that organized religion is a cesspool. Instead, do what my college roommate at Wofford would do: engage in polite and civil political conversation, show extreme kindness and mental fortitude, and just try and be a good person. That's all. Don't force your religion on people, especially children. If they believe in your god and savior, they will come to him by their own path, not a path laid out with angry, pitchfork-wielding mobs on each side.
And, this isn't to say I haven't met a number of great, kind, compassionate Christians. But, the number is underwhelming, especially online, compared to the hate-filled pretenders. The solution is the golden rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. I, too, need to practice it more. We all do.
