Over at the NonProphet Status weblog here on Patheos, Wendy Webber has written a piece called “Atheist communities need religious ambassadors“. Wendy argues that we need to have religious messengers of peace and acceptance to come over to atheist communities and therefore bring us the message of peace between religious people and the atheists.

There is power in speaking as a religious outsider. Therefore, I would love to see more religious people showing up in atheist settings too. I want atheists and believers to better recognize each other’s humanity, and ambassadors are more effective than spokespersons. I am doing my best to be an effective humanist ambassador. The atheist community sorely needs religious ambassadors to atheist communities. I need my counterpart in atheist circles. Of course, some religious people are already reaching out to atheists and nonreligious communities. They are proving that not all religious people fear and despise atheists. I recognize that this can’t be easy. Atheist circles can be hostile environments for religious believers. Many atheists react extremely negatively to other atheists who aren’t sufficiently anti-religious; it’s hard to expect they’ll treat religious believers any better.

I left a comment on that blog, stating my initial problem with this proposal. But no matter how I rethink it, I have a problem with this piece, and that I find it an extremely privileged piece, one that entirely ignores the situation many atheists are in. This problem is very evident in this last paragraph:

I’m not suggesting that simply showing up is enough to sway the diehard anti-theist. But not showing up will certainly not change anything. Showing up—showing us your compassion and willingness to engage—might just be the catalyst we need for change. That is why I show up in religious circles, and that is why I ask more religious people to go out of their way to seek engage with nonreligious people on their own terms.

I am, of course, a diehard anti-theist. And no, seeing compassionate religious people won’t help my case, because I have already seen them. I have seen all kinds of religious people. I have seen more religious people than I have seen atheists. My problems is not an absence of religious people. Actually, my problem is the exact reverse. I’m being suffocated among these religious “ambassadors”. My problem is not little engagement, but too much. Religious people dictate my life, religion is omnipresent, and I have no respite.

In Iran, obviously, there is no secular or atheist community. I guess many unlucky atheists go on with their lives without even knowing a single other atheist. I’m lucky to be able to find many atheists online, to participate in the Western atheist movement and community via the internet, and I have found many atheists friends offline too. But that is why we need an atheist society – because atheists feel outnumbered, out-powered, and lonely. Because atheists feel ostracized and desolate from their own communities. Some atheists need to get away from the constant contact and engagement with religious people.

I am not against interfaith. I think those atheists who ridiculed Wendy for her expertise are extremely wrong. And while I wouldn’t say there should be no atheist society who hosts religious ambassadors, I think we need to have purely atheist societies too. However, my motivation here is not to reject the proposal, but to point out how indifferent Wendy is here to atheists like me, who live in highly religious societies and are marginalized by them.

I mean, what type of lucky person does it take to think the problem of atheists and religious people is that atheists don’t know enough religious people? What type of lucky person can conceive of atheist isolation and echo-chambers? This piece can only be written by someone who already enjoys a secular comfortable life, and now can afford to sit back and look at religion with a sort of mild pleasant curiosity.

This piece

Wendy feels very comfortable about speaking out as an atheist ambassador of peace in religious communities. That’s very good. As for me, every time I speak up as an atheist I’m risking death at worst, (if a religious person kills me there’s a high chance that the courts will acquit them), or being ridiculed and shunned at best. Wendy is lucky to be able to find welcoming theist societies, but it’s always a risk for someone like me, because I’ll never know what even the most tolerant of theists will think of me when they find out I’m an atheist. I wouldn’t claim that my life among theist is a perpetual game of Russian roulette, but it feels like it.

Sometimes I do change the theists’ mentality, sometimes I am delightfully surprised to see a tolerant theist. But in those cases, I’m the marginalized one coming out, not them. They’re the ones who are learning, not me.