Burgess Hill, England – Every morning on his walk to work, high school teacher Graham Wright recited a prayer and asked God for strength in the day ahead. Then two years ago, he just stopped.
Wright said he was overwhelmed by a feeling that religion had become a negative influence in his life and the world. Although he had once considered becoming an Anglican vicar, he suddenly found that religion represented nothing he believed in, from Muslim extremists blowing themselves up in God’s name to Christians condemning gays, contraception and stem-cell research.
“I stopped praying because I lost my faith,” said Wright, 59. “Now I truly loathe any sight or sound of religion. I blush at what I used to believe.”
Wright is now an avowed atheist and part of a growing number of vocal nonbelievers in Europe and the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, membership in once-quiet groups of nonbelievers is rising, and books attempting to debunk religion have been surprise best sellers, including “The God Delusion,” by Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins.
New groups of nonbelievers are sprouting on college campuses, anti-religious blogs are expanding across the Internet and, in general, more people are publicly saying they have no religious faith.
More than three out of four people in the world consider themselves religious, and those with no faith are a distinct minority. But especially in richer nations, and nowhere more than in Europe, growing numbers of people are saying they don’t believe there is a heaven or a hell or anything other than this life.
9/11 changed viewpoints
Many analysts trace the rise of what some are calling the “nonreligious movement” to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The sight of religious fanatics killing 3,000 people caused many to begin questioning – and rejecting – all religion.
“This is overwhelmingly the topic of the moment,” said Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society of Britain. “Religion in this country was very quiet until Sept. 11, and now it is at the center of everything.”
Since the 2001 attacks, a string of religiously inspired bomb and murder plots has shaken Europe. Muslim radicals killed 52 people on the London transport system in 2005 and 191 on Madrid, Spain, trains in 2004.
People apparently aiming for a reward in heaven were arrested in Britain last year for trying to blow up transatlantic jetliners. And this month in Germany, authorities arrested converts to Islam on charges that they planned to blow up American facilities there.
Many Europeans are angry at demands to use taxpayer money to accommodate Islam, Europe’s fastest-growing religion, which has as many as 20 million followers on the continent. Along with calls for prayer rooms in police stations, foot baths in public places and funding for Islamic schools and mosques, expensive legal battles have broken out over the niqab, the Muslim veil that covers all but the eyes, which some devout women seek to wear in classrooms and court.
Religious militancy
Christian fundamentalist groups that want to halt certain science research, reverse abortion and gay rights and teach creationism rather than evolution in schools are also angering people, say Sanderson and others.
“There is a feeling that religion is being forced on an unwilling public, and now people are beginning to speak out against what they see as rising Islamic and Christian militancy,” Sanderson said.
Though the number of nonbelievers speaking their minds is rising, academics say it’s impossible to calculate how many people silently share that view. Many people who do not consider themselves religious or belong to any faith often believe, even if vaguely, in a supreme being or an afterlife. Others are not sure what they believe.
The term atheist can imply aggressiveness in disbelief; many who don’t believe in God prefer to call themselves humanists, secularists, freethinkers, rationalists or, a more recently coined term, brights.
“Where religion is weak, people don’t feel a need to organize against it,” said Phil Zuckerman, an American academic who has written extensively about atheism around the globe.
Fighting violent tenets
One group of nonbelievers in particular is attracting attention in Europe: the Council of Ex-Muslims. Founded this year in Germany, the group now has a few hundred members and an expanding number of chapters across the continent.
“You can’t tell us religion is peaceful – look around at the misery it is causing,” said Maryam Namazie, leader of the group’s British chapter.
“We are all atheists and nonbelievers, and our goal is not to eradicate Islam from the face of the earth,” but to make it a private matter that is not imposed on others, she said.
The majority of nonbelievers say they are speaking out only because of religious fanatics. But some atheists are also extreme and want, for example, people to blot out the words “In God We Trust” from every dollar bill they carry.
Associations of nonbelievers are also moving to address the growing demand in Britain, Spain, Italy and other European countries for nonreligious weddings, funerals and celebrations for new babies. They are helping arrange ceremonies that steer clear of talk of God, heaven and miracles and celebrate, as they say, “this one life we know.”
Behind believers
28 percent: Atheists with post-graduate degrees or professional training.
15 percent: Non-atheists with post-graduate degrees or professional training.
1.3: Atheists’ average number of children.
1.95: Non-atheists’ average number of children.
3 percent: Atheists who are “strong Republicans.”
16 percent: Non-atheists who are “strong Republicans.”
Source: 2005 Baylor University Religion Survey and Barna Group
