Why Do So Few Identify As Atheists? Four Possible Reasons

3. Churches Spend An Enormous Amount Of Resources On Evangelism

The Catholic Church learned early that if you make people afraid enough, you can coerce them into emptying their wallets for you.  Wealth is intimidating, and the Catholic Church used the money it received from the masses to intimidate them with awe-inspiring buildings and projects.

Creflo Dollar used a similar technique in trying to fleece a multi-million dollar jet from his relatively poor congregation.

Here in the Metroplex of DFW, my former church has raised hundreds of times more money in a single weekend than all the atheist groups in the area, combined, have been able to raise over their entire existence.

Part of this is that we don’t scare people with hell and bait them with heaven.  And, frankly, a lot of us are disgusted with the expected donation method, and tend to be more insistent that contributions are volunteer-only – both on the side of the people asking and the side of the people giving.

And we don’t know how much the Catholic Church makes, but we got a small glimpse when in 2012 The Economist did a guesstimate and said that the United States arm alone spends roughly $170 billion a year.  That’s a LOT of money.  And that’s just United States Roman Catholicism.  They probably spend well over a trillion, at that rate, when you take into account their worldwide efforts.

That Old Bait-And-Switch works really well, as does intimidating others with wealth and making them dependent on you (thus, the linking of religion to feeding the poor has been a very effective enterprise).

To say that this is a story of David and Goliath doesn’t even come close to describing the situation.

We also don’t intentionally go out and try to evangelize – it’s more free-flowing and organic as far as that’s concerned.  But in spite of this, many of us care enough about our stances that we do take to the keyboards and the video cameras and the debates (usually held in churches) and share where we’re coming from.

4. Religious People Have More Kids

The Catholic Church seems to have figured out early on that the best way to swell its ranks was to ensure that parents were having children, and to make sure the children were introduced to the Catholic Church as early as possible.  This is, possibly, why the Church has an obsession, it seems, with declaring forms of birth control sin and by policing sex — if you can make it so that people feel guilty any time they engage in a sexual act that does not involve the possibility of procreation, you can ensure that people have a lot more kids.

This sentiment carries over to Mormons, many Protestants (including the Quiverfull movement I was exposed to at a young age) and so on.  Taboos on sex increase the likelihood that sex will result in the bearing of children.

Oddly enough, in everyday conversation, bearing children seemed to be discussed as a kind of arms race for many adults.  This seems somewhat disconcerting — the thought that your child is going to be a volley (often with the sentiments of a verse like Psalm 127:4-5 — “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth — blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.  They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court.”) in a war against secularism seems a bit “off.”  Children should be free to grow into their own adulthood.

But, at any rate, this seems to be a major reason why religion grows.  And this piece of the puzzle allows other items to make sense — it goes well with attacks against contraceptives and attacks against gay marriage — two items that threaten the church’s stranglehold on the production and conditioning of children (and such attacks result, it seems, in the suicides of many lgbt youth, as Bishop Gene Robinson discusses here).

There are likely more reasons, but this is long enough, so I’ll stop here.  Suffice it to say that there is reason to think that the low number of atheists — and the fact that the few times Atheists have become the majority, it has been through disturbing force — speaks more to the systemic control over thousands of years that religion has perpetuated, rather than fault with the raw thought that there is no God.  Especially since those who have had this thought have been marginalized and abused by this systemic control through the years.

In any case, in the United States, as a recent Barna poll suggests, “In many ways, skeptics [the category Barna assigns to atheists and agnostics] resemble the rest of America more than they once did. And their numbers are growing more quickly than anyone expected 20 years ago.”

So, at least in a place where systematic prejudice against atheists is decreasing (although it is still around), access to information is on the rise, less people are going and thus contributing money to churches, and the church is being forced to loosen its definition of sexual taboos, atheism is slowly on the rise (and the category of the “nones” or unaffiliated is more markedly on the rise).  Yes, correlation does not equal causation, and Christians are free to believe that — I don’t mind.  But to the rest of us…perhaps this is a sign to keep doing what we’re doing, more or less.

Thanks for reading.