Lately, I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with people who tend to be over-zealously anti-religion, in kind of that knee-jerk, predictable, uncritical way — be they atheists, agnostics, antitheists or whatever label is needed to hold oneself in bitter distinction from half of America’s population.
    
Surely there is the potential for unflattering levels of smugness, self-satisfaction and intellectual complacency wherever one finds true belief. The term “religi-tard” comes to mind, as does, well, I don’t actually know what would be a pejorative term for someone non-religious. I’m really curious now. Anyway, culture, that innate framework through which we may come to know ourselves and existence, sure has a way of getting us upset with each other. And sadly, it can be the most intelligent people that it makes the biggest fools of.
    
It’s the Bill Mahers and Richard Dawkinses among us, the people who think that every time they reveal how illogical a religious person or religion in general is, it’s the most profound, aware and edgy thing in the world. And it’s really not. There’s a reason why the most vehemently atheist among us are ambivalent about dispelling the myth about god and an afterlife to children. We all get god — and few, if any, among us are unable to recall a time in our lives when we were not confronted with the allure of an all-powerful, anthropomorphic embodiment of incredibly intuitive order and meaning. The most pedantic atheist knows that if you go around aggressively contradicting whatever soothing constructs are invoked to reassure children, you might as well be being a jerk to at least one of your close relatives. But religious ubiquity is not an accident.
   
If you’re trying to make a point about religion, don’t just laugh at people who believe in something that there’s no literal scientific evidence for, because if that’s honestly the crux of the issue for you, you’re just as superficial and willfully uninformed as people you’re mocking. Instead, use the shared experience of culture to your advantage and deconstruct them into oblivion. Make it America’s plight: It’s our lack of anything resembling a homogeneous non-commercial culture that’s keeping religion so relevant to people; who would honestly resist an opportunity for such an automatic, easy and lasting sense of cultural orientation and certainty shared by so many people? Aloof seculars, no doubt, who know naught but bitterness and dismay. See how well that works? If you treat religion like a theory in a social science textbook instead of like a cultural threat, you’ll be more enlightened than Dawkins and Maher combined.
   
 If only it were that easy. On a personal level, when it’s people just trying to get through the day, the duality of theism and atheism is annoying, but benign. People have to put up with each other in America. Unfortunately, successfully compartmentalizing or deconstructing religion does not make Christianity’s coercive presence in the realm of politics go away, nor does it make the culture war rhetoric any less depressingly relevant.
    
As we Tennesseans know well, some of the most dangerous and civilly abhorrent legislation (“Don’t Say Gay”) comes from trying to appeal to a religious constituency. It’s a matter of de facto political suicide for a politician on either side trying to gain national appeal not to assume a Christian identity. However you feel about Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament, we have to stay ever vigilant about how widespread Christian pandering continues to subvert the Constitution, scientific progress and education, and our personal liberties.


— Wiley Robinson is a junior in ecology and evolutionary biology. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.