Practicing Atheism: Culture, Media, and Ritual in the Contemporary Atheist Network by Hannah K. Scheidt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Practicing Atheism: Culture, Media, and Ritual in the Contemporary Atheist Network by Hannah K. Scheidt Charles McCrary Hannah K. Scheidt, Practicing Atheism: Culture, Media, and Ritual in the Contemporary Atheist Network (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021) Like scholars of religion, but also unlike them, American atheists spend a lot of time and energy thinking about religion. To study their ideas and rhetoric, then, can offer a window—at times a fogged or tinted one, or maybe a funhouse mirror—onto American religion writ large. If we want to know how certain Americans imagine "religion," or how they critique relationships between religion and politics, or why they leave religion, then atheist discourses offer a trove of data. Atheists have a lot to say about religion. But what do they do? In Practicing Atheism, Hannah Scheidt analyzes not just contemporary atheist discourses but also their networks, famous figures, and rituals. As yes-or-no questions go, "is atheism a religion?" is not a very good one. But, to use the tools of religious studies, as Scheidt does, to study atheists—to study atheists like one might study religious people—is an intriguing project. Somewhat surprisingly, for a book about practicing atheism, the tools employed are mostly discourse analysis. Across five chapters, Practicing Atheism analyzes "deconversion narratives," television shows, charismatic authority, formal debates, and parenting. The sources include the media themselves, such as television shows or atheist parenting manuals, but also discourse about these materials, in the form of blogs, comments, and posts. [End Page 128] Scheidt's focus on discourse is shaped by how she defines her object of study, which she describes as "on-the-ground theorizing of religion: how religion comes to be understood as much more than a set of beliefs and is also associated with specific formations of identity and modes of authority, with certain practices, traditions, and ways of organizing. The analyses that follow," she continues, "observe a robust and multidimensional theorizing" (13). In short, she is analyzing the theorizing. Discourse and practice are always related, of course, and some of Scheidt's most interesting contributions come when she analyzes those complex relations. Still, though, I admit that I found myself wanting more practicing—more, for lack of a better term, lived religion. But what is a practice, anyway? Scheidt's book shows how participation in a public, "the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation," is fundamentally discursive.1 Scheidt did not interview atheists or send out a survey or conduct an ethnographic study of atheist organizations. Instead, her book focuses on "the stories and artifacts of contemporary atheist culture—the works and words that circulate through a complex network of institutions and individuals," taking as her "source material the rich, vast (and ever-expanding) archive that already exists" (7). As students of religion and media know, texts and infrastructures are not neutral vehicles for religious ideas and practices but are, rather, the very stuff of religion. As these atheist communities make themselves through the circulation of discourse (much of that discourse being about religion, differentiating it from science or reason), they make new communities through rituals of subjectivation. TLDR: posting is religion now. The arguments come together most compellingly in the fourth chapter, which analyzes the ritual of staged debates between atheists and religious people. Scheidt opens the chapter with a description of a 2014 debate about evolution, hosted by the Creation Museum, that pitted Bill Nye "The Science Guy" against Ken Ham, the evangelical creationist who founded the museum. The debate itself is interesting enough, but more so is Scheidt's analysis of such debates as "a site for the creation and circulation of culture" (102). She argues, then, that debate is a "ritualized practice [that] … effectively does 'ritual work'" (102). What kind of ritual work? Here, Scheidt picks up a thread that runs throughout the book: the relationship between ritual and sincerity. She draws from the work of Adam Seligman and others, who argue that rituals posit "a subjunctive world: a world 'as if' or as it could be. To act 'sincerely' on the other hand, is to act 'as is'" (11...