It's the night before the convention. We're at Opal Divine's, the downtown Austin pub where the atheists are collecting their plastic name tags. Dawkins is white-haired and rosy-cheeked, wearing a beautifully cut gray linen suit. He's not wearing a name tag. He hardly needs to; everywhere he goes in the bar, the crowd of atheist conventioneers falls silent, a little awed at his presence. Along with the now-departed Christopher Hitchens, Dawkins is one of atheism's leading lights. One of its living saints, if you want to be obnoxious about it.
"I can't believe he's just...hanging out," one of the conventioneers stammers in awe, his voice barely above a whisper.
Photo by Anna Merlan
Aron Ra poses for photos with Houston street preacher David Stokes.
Photo by Anna Merlan
Houston street preacher David Stokes believes "hell awaits" atheists and an assortment of other people whose lifestyles and beliefs he opposes.
Details
Related Content
More About
Dawkins decides, without my prompting, that I'm probably "friendly." He brushes off a question about how he came to speak in Texas. "It was probably fixed up for me," he says vaguely. He adds that he's "very encouraged" by the Pew poll showing the rise in unaffiliated Americans. That rise is necessary "for the eventual destruction of religion," he says, "which must be what every reasonable person wants."
Though he travels the States frequently, he says, he doesn't run into religious people often. "I don't come across those people," he says. "It's almost like there are two species. I only seem to meet the educated ones."
The crowd around Dawkins has another important thing in common besides their atheism. Paul Cooper, the president of the Freethought Convention, is standing by the check-in table, handing out tags to conventioneers. Aron Ra is leaning against a pole, towering above everyone else. Nearby is Darrel Ray, a psychologist and researcher who often writes about atheism and sex. He conducted a huge survey on sexual attitudes among atheists, and found them to have less sexual guilt than Mormons, who top the list, but more than Unitarians, who are apparently the least inhibited among us. Ray is tiny and animated, with a graying mustache and a delightful willingness to talk at length about sex with absolutely no prompting. During his lecture the next day, he cheerily talks about the positive effects of masturbation, and for a finale displays a naked photo of himself, covered only with a strategically placed cracker. The crowd goes wild.
These are the main attractions of the convention. They're all white men.
Critics of organized atheist groups often point out that they can feel like boys' clubs, just like the religious institutions they're meant to negate or replace. That's evident throughout the convention; although there are plenty of women in the audience, and a smattering of people of color, they rarely appear onstage.
One famous atheist blogger, Rebecca Watson, addressed that earlier this year. During a talk at a national conference, she told the mostly male attendees that some women don't enjoy coming to atheist events because of how mercilessly they get hit on. Shortly after she finished her speech, a fellow convention-goer cornered her in an elevator around 4 a.m. and invited her back to his room "for coffee."
"Guys, don't do that," Watson wrote in a blog post. Those words set off a furious argument about whether what the guy had done was inappropriate. It spiraled outward into a huge, raw, angry discussion about feminism and women in the atheist community. Things got much worse when Richard Dawkins himself waded into the comments, sarcastically comparing Watson's incident with the oppression faced by women in the Muslim world.
Female and minority atheists, though, are starting to address the homogeneity of their movement. Melanie Clemmer, another FOF board member, held a "Feminine Faces of Freethought" conference earlier this year; despite an unexpected surge in attendance, some 70 attendees all still fit neatly into the lunchroom at the Resource Center.
For Clemmer, though, the gathering sent a message: "We wanted to show that the freethinking movement has many other faces," she said before the conference, "both in gender and diverse backgrounds, and in the wealth of knowledge that we bring."
They just don't bring it in very large numbers. At the bar, some of the male atheists can't wait for more women to show up, probably for the reasons Watson described. Johnny and Ting, both in their late 20s and from Houston, are sitting a little glumly in a corner, several empty glasses in front of them. Johnny is a former Muslim; after he told his parents he was an atheist, his father "didn't speak to me for two years," he says. Ting is a Buddhist. He just came down for a weekend trip with his buddy.
"There are no girls here," Johnny says bluntly. "Look at these guys. Would you hang out with them? Do pretty girls want to hang out with these guys? I don't think so." Beyond that, Ting is East Asian and Johnny is Indian; this crowd, Johnny says, "is not our age group, and it's not our demographic."
But he's confident that'll change soon, he says.
"The atheist community, it's not the cool kids yet. But it will be. Right now, it's still a bad word, especially in Texas. What we're doing, we're paving the way for the cool kids to come on board."
He smiles and takes in the room, which is filling up with people. "Ten years from now, this is gonna be really big."
