ishmael n. daro

Last week, conservative writer S.E. Cupp was on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to discuss her book Losing Our Religion, which claims to expose the “liberal media” for having an anti-Christian bias. Cupp also says she is an atheist. Here’s the clip:

Sean Hannity asked her whether she was really an atheist considering her strong defense of Christianity.

“I don’t believe you’re an atheist. I believe you’re agnostic,” he said. “An atheist holds out no possibility that there’s a god…. You don’t hold out any possibility that there’s a god?”

Cupp responded, “Sean, today I don’t believe in God, but I’m open to being converted.”

I’m going to go ahead and say that Cupp is not really an atheist. No one who has made the conscious decision to describe themselves as an atheist would consider “being converted.” That’s not because atheists are, as often claimed, just as dogmatic as their religious counterparts. It’s because someone has usually looked at the various religions of the world and decided that even if the supernatural exists in some form, the existing groups would be the most improbable vehicles for that supernatural element to make itself known.

If she meant that if definitive proof were provided of a god that she would accept it, well that’s just common sense. All honest atheists acknowledge that if there were proof, we would all believe—but that would not be a conversion so much as accepting reality. The problem is that there is no such proof and, as such, any “conversion” would be done as a matter of faith.

Richard Dawkins discusses a person’s willingness to believe in God in his book The God Delusion. He proposes a scale of atheism from 1 to 7 with 1 representing 100% certainty in God’s existence while 7 represents 100% certainty that there is no God. Yet, even Dawkins, the most vocal atheist there is, puts himself shy of a full 7 on the scale because there is simply no way to know absolutely. Yet, he does not claim agnosticism, which would be a 50% chance of God and a 50% chance of his non-existance. “I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden,” he writes.

All that is simply to say that S.E. Cupp doesn’t sound like she’s really an atheist. And if she is, she doesn’t seem to be a particularly strong one.

The remainder of the interview was a standard reading from the conservative script against liberals and the media that so harrasses those poor, downtrodden Christians.

“It’s a really bad business model to go after 80% of the country, and they [the liberal media] do it. They mock Christianity, they condescend to it, and they actively attack the faith and values of the majority of this country,” she said. “It’s gotta stop!”

Even if it were true that the non-existent monolith that is the “liberal media” regularly attacked Christianity, her call for respecting people’s faith seems like a fairly universal value. But then she gets onto Barack Obama:

This is a guy who’s very uncomfortable with public worship. He’s always elevating atheism to the level of Christianity and Judaism and Islam, and they’re not the same. They’re apples and oranges.

All right, what exactly is the problem with recognizing that roughly 15% of Americans are non-religious? It’s true that atheism is not a religion like Islam, Judaism and Christianity, but is Cupp suggesting that non-religious people should be purposely ignored by the U.S. president? A person of faith might make such a claim, but an atheist (like Cupp purports to be) should probably be welcoming the increased recognition after centuries of neglect and occasional persecution.

At first, it would seem like a good thing to have more prominent conservative atheists out there since non-belief is too often tied to the left of the political spectrum, but S.E. Cupp seems like she’s almost more committed to Christianity than to her atheism, although I’m sure it will help her book sales among her targeted audience of religious conservatives.

I don’t mean to impugn her motives for writing Losing Our Religion, but if she’s the atheist defender of religion, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if her next book is about her “conversion” to Christianity, which would let her write a book about how an atheist saw the light and embraced Jesus.