"The administration won't recognize them," Butler says, sounding a little exasperated. The Baylorites don't meet on campus, for fear of possible expulsion. "They have to meet secretly. It's funny, but it's sad, too."
But according to Sean Faircloth, the former Maine legislator now with the Richard Dawkins Foundation, Texas's burgeoning atheist movement is more promising than many around the country.
Photo by Anna Merlan
Houston was represented at the Texas Freethought Convention in Austin.
Details
Related Content
More About
"I love it here," he says, the night before the convention begins. He's standing at the bar at Opal Divine's, the downtown pub where people are checking in for the event. He's wearing a slightly rumpled dark suit and holding his briefcase in one hand, for some reason, along with a huge plastic cup of Sprite in the other.
"Texas is rather strongly organized for humans, atheists and secular people," he explains, waving his glass for emphasis. Some Sprite sloshes on the floor. "But there's an issue with church-state separation here, as represented by Rick Perry. But there may be a tipping point in sight."
And that's why it's so important, as he'll later tell convention-goers, that they become "citizen lobbyists," ones who can speak knowledgeably to politicians about the issues that are important to the nonreligious. The goal is simple, he tells the room: "I want us to be in the weeds of American public policy."
_____________________
It was back in 2008, with that goal of being "in the weeds" of public life, that Zach Moore launched his polite attack on The Dallas Morning News. Specifically, Moore asked for a place at a table where it hadn't previously occurred to anyone that the nonreligious might desire a seat: the newspaper's "Texas Faith" blog.
Moore is a former devout Presbyterian who started questioning his faith in college. He moved to Texas in 2005 to earn his Ph.D. in pathobiology and molecular medicine; his day job is at a medical research consulting firm. He's also the coordinator for DFWCoR and the director at-large for the Fellowship of Freethought, the Dallas area's single largest group, and its former executive director. Along with Alix Jules, the current FOF executive director, Moore has led many of the efforts to get Dallas's godless out of the shadows and onto the front page.
Moore set his sights on the Texas Faith blog as part of DFWCoR's efforts to be "a public face for secular people," and to amend the public perception of atheist groups as a "'let's get together and bash religion' club." Texas Faith has a panel of participants that includes several different denominations of Christians, a couple of Jews, a Buddhist, and even at times a "pluralist" and a Wiccan. The blog describes its purpose as a way to promote "a discussion among formal and informal religious leaders whose faith traditions express a belief in a transcendent power — or the possibility of one." One question they pondered made it obvious that a nonbelieving voice could contribute: "Could an atheist ever be elected president?"
But when Moore asked the moderator at the time, a Morning News editorialist named Rod Dreher, to put a secular thinker on the panel, Dreher demurred.
"He thought that the Texas Faith blog was a place only for religious people to comment," Moore said last year. "It was not really intended for any other perspectives and he didn't think, and the other participants on the blog didn't think, that somebody who was secular would have anything to say about this. I disagreed with him."
"It struck us as strange that someone who professed no faith at all wanted to be part of the editorial mix on a blog devoted to religious perspectives," Dreher says. "Of course he was welcome in the comments thread, but Zach wanted to be on the roster of regular commenters. It seemed to me that this would be like a Republican asking to be part of a blog called 'Texas Democrats.' Or, to put it another way, if the News had started a blog called 'Texas Atheism,' and a Baptist pastor contacted us to request that he be included on the roster of regular commenters, I'm pretty sure we would have turned him down, too."
Dreher left the paper in 2009; Moore tried again last year with the new moderator, columnist Bill McKenzie. This time, he claims, the idea was apparently put up to a vote among the panelists.
"I've enjoyed your regular voice in the comments section," one of them wrote in an e-mail to Moore. "I was at the last gathering of the panel when Bill brought it up before and it was two for (the Unitarian and I) and everyone else voting nay. The chance of that shifting a whole lot more in your favor is small."
McKenzie says no vote took place, and the decision not to include an atheist was the blog moderator's alone. He adds that most of the conversations are only relevant to people of faith and don't touch on atheism at all: "I just don't remember that many questions like that."
The Dallas atheists' next big moment of publicity happened in February of this year, when a New York-based organization called African Americans for Humanism sponsored a series of atheist billboards in black communities across the country. In Dallas, a billboard placed in South Dallas featured a photo of Fellowship of Freethought Executive Director Alix Jules, who is black, alongside a picture of the poet Langston Hughes. The tagline: "Doubts About Religion? You're One of Many."
