Just saw the Barna research on the churchless in America (which doesn’t necessarily mean atheist) from 1993-2013 and this paragraph caught my attention:

Many of these ideas are initiated, promoted and reinforced by celebrity personalities and media exposure. There has arisen a new stratum of anti-religion celebrity apologists that includes Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Peter Singer, Woody Allen, Phillip Roth, Julia Sweeney and the late Christopher Hitchens. It’s a chicken-or-egg conundrum to identify which came first: the atheist celebrity or an uptick in the number of atheists. Whatever the case, atheism has shifted in the past 50 years from cultural anathema to something the “cooler” kids are doing.

I hope this is the case elsewhere, because I’ve not seen much of it in Kansas. Though I have had a couple students who googled my name approach me while doing voice work to tell me they were atheists, and I didn’t get the impression they were closeted (this was nothing I solicited as I do my damndest to keep my politics and lack of religion out of the picture when I’m teaching voice).

Of course, atheism was always what the cool kids were doing, I’m just glad it might be starting to be perceived that way among some of their peers. 😛

In their research Barna classifies atheists and agnostics as “skeptics” and notes some shifts with regard to the skeptic demographics that we all pretty much knew about:

There’s the usual stuff: young people are becoming more and more godless, we knew that already. Ditto for the educated. It turns out the more you learn about how the world works the less you see “god did it” as a viable answer.

But I’m happiest to see the uptick in women. I’ve always marveled at how women and the LGBT can continue to participate in a religion where their own holy book rags on them. But as we do better at creating welcoming communities that replicate the familial feel of church (like Oasis) those people will have an easier time leaving churches with which they no longer align.

All in all we’re making progress. The future is bright indeed. 🙂