The holiday season

Thanksgiving has come and gone and, as we move now into December, the holiday season is upon us with all that it bears in tow: exams, shopping, travel and, for one particular stretch of highway in New Jersey, religious dispute.

The controversy finds its origin in a billboard that, standing along I-495 en route to the Lincoln Tunnel, currently displays the nativity scene under a large white slogan: “You know it’s a myth. This season, celebrate reason!” The message, which went up last week and which was paid for by a national atheist organization known as American Atheists, represents a sort of escalation in atheist advertising that was formerly to be found mostly in public transportation, although different groups were responsible for those campaigns.

Predictably, it did not take long for the victimized party to respond. In just a week’s time the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights had commissioned a billboard of its own, featuring a more intimate nativity scene and the retaliatory, albeit slightly less lyrical, slogan: “You know it’s real. This season, celebrate Jesus.” Catholic League President Bill Donohue was quoted in The New York Times as saying that the response should not be taken as “a statement against atheists or agnostics, most of whom are good people,” but rather as a rejection of “aggressive, militant atheism.” Of course, he also went on to suggest that “they believe in nothing, they stand for nothing and they think we came from nothing,” demonstrating a profound lack not only of appreciation for the complex biological foundations and mechanisms of life and evolution, but probably credibility as well.

That, however, is beside the point. What’s not beside the point is whether or not this amounts to anything more than infantile mudslinging, which it very well may not. Even if it doesn’t, though, it does provide a rare platform for an examination of atheism’s place in America and if that place will be changing shape anytime soon.

Some critics of the American Atheist billboard, for example, feel that it is intrusive, and that the organization, its members and all those sympathetic are free to believe whatever they choose, but in arrogantly advocating for the supremacy of their belief are breaking a boundary of personal privacy and respect. Taken from an angle of practicality and day-to-day consideration, that is probably true. When viewed in a larger, more historically and philosophically focused context, though, the allegation that atheism’s self-advocacy borders on intrusive is likely to fall apart as at least somewhat overstated in relation to its current rival. If ever there were a religious disposition maligned for its expansionist tendencies, atheism was not its name.

Furthermore, there is a component to atheism that by definition divorces it, in its sense of the collective, from all other religious communities. While religious communities are oftentimes solidified through ethnic identification and traditional practices that bring their members together both physically and otherwise, the atheist community exists primarily void of these ingrained seasonal rallies, perhaps as a result not only of its belief system but also of its limited history as an acceptable affiliation. To put it more plainly, nobody ever looks back with nostalgia on their atheist grandparents’ solstice traditions, simply because they usually didn’t exist. Atheism lacks the unified longevity of world religions. It’s easier to understand, then, the ways in which members of that community might feel more isolated, and the reasons for which an organization might implement a public show of support in a particularly other-minded atmosphere.

That other-minded atmosphere extends past just the holiday season, too, in a nation where only 15 percent of the population identifies itself as “without religion,” a classification which itself includes at least five categories other than atheism. American Atheists may also be attempting to cull non-believers out of an obscure apathy for that reason, in pursuit of a more realized public and political influence, although the realm of atheism’s political influence is an interesting one as well. After all, a 2007 Gallup Poll demonstrated atheist as the single least desirable descriptor a well-qualified presidential candidate could have, coming in last behind, in order, Catholic, African-American, Jew, woman, Hispanic, Mormon, triple-divorcee, 72-year-old and homosexual.

Now, it’s difficult to sustain a discussion in such generalized terms, because of the risk of typecasting. Many might agree with what’s been said but still find the public spat to be in poor taste during what is supposed to be such a festive season, especially when the billboards in question are unlikely to contribute to any real sense of progress in either direction. The measures could even have the opposite of their intended effects, alienating the more pacified of their respective followers and couching them firmly on the sidelines.