Beyond Atheism ep1 background, What the Hell is a “None”?
Nonbelievers make up a huge voting bloc, but people doubt their existence.
Episode one of Beyond Atheism is live and ready for the world. Check it out at anchor, Spotify or wherever all the cool kids listen. There are some bugs to get worked out stylistically and technically, but it is a good first go. There is room for growth and improvement but the base is strong. The first episode is an elaboration of a short article we wrote for The Humanist where we argued that people with no religion are the most important group of voters for Democrats right now and this importance will continue to grow in the future.
The article grew out of Nathan’s observation that there were plenty of articles being written that championed every group with a small lean towards Biden while overlooking the enormous and solidly progressive atheist bloc. People without a religion (who I will just refer to as atheist with a small a from this point on) represent between 20–25% of the US population and roughly 70% vote Democrat. It was a little strange to find atheist voters omitted from the post-election dialogue since voter preferences are so heavily segmented and categorized in polling. Polling among race, gender and education gets so specific and fine-grained that you can easily find data on the voting habits of White, college educated women, and can probably get that by age and residence with a little digging. It is even stranger when you consider that the atheist voting bloc is about the same size as White Evangelicals, and as solidly Democrat as Evangelicals are Republican.
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I have a lot of guesses as to why “Nones” are so overlooked in the political discourse, but I really only know the concerns that people have shared with Nathan and I when we talked about the atheist bloc. There are two basic claims that come up when criticizing this bloc. The first is that this is not really a voting bloc — this claim has two lines of thought but both suggest that the statistical category “None” is wrong and the vote behavior is an invalid correlation. One claim is that “None” is really just a bunch of other variables being measured together. In this argument the lack of religion doesn’t drive the outcome, instead it is the other aspects that make up “Nones”, namely that they are young, educated, urban, etc, etc, and that is just describing modern Democrats*. Another line of thinking interprets “Nones” to be so broad as to be meaningless. Although it includes Atheists and Agnostics, the majority of “Nones” still actually claim to be spiritual, and many believe in a “higher power” and might even pray regularly or occasionally attend a religious service. Therefore, many of the people swept up in “None” might really be people who are actually very religious and are just confused or embarrassed to self report that way.
The second criticism is that it is meaningless to bother talking about atheists if it doesn’t tell us a story about contemporary politics. The big journalistic questions are largely left unanswered, since just knowing a demographic doesn’t give you the who, what, when, where and how of the next political showdown. Here a comparison to White Evangelicals is very telling. With evangelicals you can immediately think of a number of prominent political leaders and church leaders, their positions, the bills they want passed, the judges they want on the bench and the lawsuits they hope go their way. (Oddly, the words “pool boy” come to mind immediately.) For atheists, almost all of this is lacking** since there aren’t any candidates, think-tanks or institutional leadership you can easily point to for policy prescriptions.
Ultimately, though, ignoring atheist voters is a choice. In the article and the first podcast Nathan and I lay out reasons why we think the bloc is real and why people should take it seriously. We choose to invest time and energy into finding out more about who and what atheists are. As the podcast moves along, these are claims that will be addressed in greater depth and we will have strong, rigorous defenses for the existence and importance of an atheist bloc, and even what atheist politics are, soon enough. The important thing is that building a case for an atheist bloc means actually building a case — forging a real bloc through recognition of commonality, coordinating action and building the world in the manner that we choose through legitimate forms of political power. Understanding the world is great, but the goal is to change it.
*This could be pushed even further by reversing the cause and effect by claiming that atheism is the outcome of being a leftist. If that were true the category of “None” would only tell us that leftists who have no religion are leftists.
**Of course, this could already exist and no one is aware of it. It might just be overlooked as the result of no one talking about an atheist bloc because they assume it isn’t important.
