After years of devoutly practicing the well-worn and often discredited accusation of Islamaphobia, the church members of He-Who-Cries-Islamaphobia have finally landed their long-awaited offender. “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day” has never seemed more appropriate.
Predictably, most of the focus has been on Craig Hicks’s atheism and dislike of religion, rather than his surface obsession with guns, parking space and building policing, and violence. The irony of many a religious person’s distrust of nonreligious individuals and their accusing atheists of perpetuating death and hatred through Islamaphobia is side-splitting, and a quick look at the contrary evidence proves otherwise.
Of course, facts don’t support the mainstream (though it’s never clear what exactly is the mainstream) Muslim narrative – appropriated by bandwagon liberals – of Islamaphobia being a significant threat. If the 2013 hate crime statistics published by the FBI is any indication, anti-black sentiment – with 1,856 incidents of hate crime as a proxy – is the greatest menace to American acceptance of diversity, followed by anti-LGBTQ (1,233), anti-white (653), and anti-Jew (625) biases. Anti-Muslim incidents, tied with anti-Asian, reached a comparatively paltry 135 in that year alone. Given that Jews comprise 2% of the US population and Muslims 1%, it is evident that Muslims are not particularly enticing targets.
The claims that atheists also especially dislike Muslims and that Muslims are the most marginalized in western society are just as easily discredited. A 2014 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center showed atheists tended to view Muslims slightly less favorably than Catholics, but more positively than Mormons and Evangelical Christians.1 In contrast, atheists were ranked lowest by nearly all other religious groups, and studies have shown public trust of atheists in the US to be on par with that of rapists, and atheists behind gays, lesbians, and Muslims in electability. If persecution by other groups is a warrant for poor behavior, it’s a wonder why there aren’t more recorded cases of atheist violence or atheist mobs or collective acts of mass religious book burnings by angry nonbelievers.
That we’ve banded around this singular man – and by singular, I do mean without use of hyperbole – as a representative of the atheist community shows the willingness of some to truly trudge through the viscous lake of hypocrisy to label those without religious affiliation as evil without the slightest token impression of introspection. If even outliers are indeed to be taken as embodiments of their respective, self-identified groups, then surely every Catholic is a pedophile due to the acts of various priests, and each Muslim a terrorist for the actions of radicals and extremists. There is no doubt that atheists are likely the subject of at least some legitimate criticisms, but the accusation of deliberate incitement of physical violence against believers is pure propaganda by the most cynical and disingenuous of religious proponents. I won’t mention any of these Ministers of Disinformation, like Reza Aslan, by name here.
No, the Chapel Hill shooting is about as causally connected to atheism as a like of jelly donuts is connected to someone sneaking into a Krispy Kreme and stealing every jelly-filled pastry in sight. There is nothing about liking donuts that enjoins a person to steal, but it is admittedly more likely that a donut enthusiast steals donuts rather than, say, a package of salami from Walmart (given that he or she dislikes salami and we assume the market for salami is not exceptionally profitable). In the same way, it is possible – if Hicks is eventually found guilty of carrying out a hate crime – that atheism may have potentially caused him to focus more of his attention on Muslims or religious individuals, but given a different passion, it’s far from inconceivable that he would have committed murder for nearly the exact same reasons. It should not be surprising that crazy men with access to dangerous weapons occasionally kill other people, regardless of or despite what they purport to believe.
This is not a unique idea, and a version of this general concept has been adopted by some US Muslim leaders, such as Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Said Awad on the subject of extremism,
There’s no such thing as radical Islam. There’s no violent extremist ideology within Islam. Islam is one. Some people become extremists, but it’s not because of the religion — it’s because of themselves as individuals. I think people get entangled in terminology when, in fact, we are dealing with criminality. Criminals are criminals.
Especially given that atheism, solely the lack of belief in a deity, has no doctrines, commandments,or injunctions, no holy books or leaders who implicitly or explicitly demand any amount of bloodshed for any reason, it is only expected that those who share that belief, who – in addition – do not have any unified or codified set of morals, be immune from unsubstantiated accusations of provoking or executing nonexistent instructions of savagery. I won’t defend atheism as a whole here, as Sam Harris has done so already with an eloquence currently beyond my own ability, but I do wish to be a lighthouse in the absence of Harris’s sun. Tragedy is not and should not be used as an opportunity to make false claims about a group of people, and those who believe in the notion of Islamaphobia (and I deliberately use the word “notion” here) and proclaim it loudest should understand this better than others.
1 While one of the referenced charts from Pew shows public sentiments regarding Muslims to be the lowest in the US, this is only due to atheists and agnostics inadvertently skewing the score with their abnormally high rating of other atheists.
Filed under: Religion, Atheism, Atheist, Chapel Hill, Craig Hicks, Extremism, Islam, Islamophobia, Sam Harris
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