I was so pleased when my colleague Wendy Cadge, a sociologist of religion at Brandeis University, approached me to see if I wanted to write a short article for a public audience about the election of Greg Epstein, who identifies as an atheist humanist Jew, as the head chaplain at Harvard University. I’ve known Wendy for decades, and jumped at the chance to write something together that would draw on insights from her research on the chaplaincy movement and my research on anti-atheist sentiment. The result just came out in this piece in The Conversation, an online site that gets academics to write about the implications of their research for a wider public audience.
Two main ideas motivate our interpretation of what Mr. Epstein’s election represents and why it’s been controversial. The first comes from Wendy’s research on the chaplaincy movement — that, while many Americans are distancing themselves from churches and “organized religion” more generally, they are still seeking out spiritual guides and interlocutors. The second comes from my research on attitudes toward the non-religious which shows that an underlying moral unease drives not only anti-atheist sentiment but also discomfort with the decline in religious affiliation, and a preference for distance from a range of religious and non-religious minorities, among those who want to preserve a White, Christian culture as central to American identity.
Mr. Epstein’s election, then, signals the increasing visibility and legitimacy of non-religion, along with the trend among many (tho not all) of the non-religious to embrace spiritual practices and ways of being. But it also makes clear how uneasy many Americans are about the decline of Christianity (in both members and in cultural influence) in the United States. Mr. Epstein’s strategy, in the face of this cultural dilemma, is to weave together his atheist identity with moral discourse rooted in hymanist traditions as he speaks out in favor of equality, social justice, and democratic norms. As Wendy and I argue, Mr. Epstein is worth watching, to see whether this kind of moral, justice-oriented atheism is taken up by others — and whether it shifts the needle on anti-atheist prejudice.