Btw, I think CCC’s name change was mostly about getting rid of the serious baggage associated with the word “Crusade”. Gotta love the C-bomb when you’re trying to have a civilized conversation with a Muslim.

I was super involved with CCC in college, and there were a few barely-interested Christians that came to our Bible studies and meetings seemingly because we invited them and gave them a place to belong (or maybe we just helped them check a box). I wonder what the SSA’s value proposition is for people who aren’t religious, but also aren’t that fired up about secularism.

Thanks, James!

For those who are unfamiliar, The Foundation Beyond Belief picks five humanist-friendly charities per quarter (one in each of five different areas of charitable service) and let’s you decide how your donation gets distributed among those five (you can nominate charities for consideration). It’s thus a highly streamlined version of what I was proposing. And it’s awesome. Highly recommended.

As for the Humanist Community Project, please tell me what substantial gains it has made in achieving what I had in mind. I don’t know how it could, unless it is facilitating atheist families moving to the same neighborhoods (which it isn’t). For example, how many HCP “church” analogs (like a permanent meeting hall) are there in the country (outside of Harvard), and what is the projected rate of increase in that number over the next five years?

I fear that it is still the case that there are generally no communities of sufficient density that such a building could cost-effectively serve. That’s why the only gains in this area I know of are made by other orgs that don’t actually serve concentrated communities but scattered individuals across large metro areas (e.g. CFI has achieved a few permanent structures, like in LA and Indianapolis, loosely serving this goal, but not many, and most who make use of them do so only by undergoing a hardship getting to them because they do not live within walking distance of them, which greatly limits attendance and effectiveness in rallying significant action).

That’s why I think I see most atheists work with local charities already established (like Habitat for Humanity), because there is no atheist equivalent that can be feasibly constructed right now.

Or am I wrong? If there are real changes in this situation in the works, I definitely want to know!

I would point to the Foundation Beyond Belief as the national secular charity and volunteering organization, and to the Humanist Community Project as the institution seeking to develop dense congregational communities at the local level 😉

I concur. We have a variety of orgs that meet that need for different demographics. And the SSA helps get students aware of those orgs and so greatly increases the probability that they will join and remain connected to one. But the SSA could still push this as a goal (not to get students to join any specific org, but to get them to think about picking at least one to join and remaining a member of going forward).

What the orgs themselves can do is (a) work with the SSA in organizing or promoting college conferences, events, and activities (whether charitable, activist, or just entertainment), and it does appear that that is happening; and (b) define themselves in a way that fills all niches of interest and thus all aspects of future interest will be covered and thus available for students to choose from (and unlike religion, their choices would not have to be exclusive).

That latter task is something that needs doing.

For example, no single national org has stepped up to fill the niche of organizing atheist charitable giving and volunteering. A few have done little things along those lines, and several local orgs have done more, but it is self-evident that there is an unexploited market niche for a skeptical-godless charity org, which collates data on the religiosity and efficiency of existing charities (Charity Navigator already suffices and would be a major resource to use and point users to, but it doesn’t vet charities by how much they evangelize or otherwise spend resources on antiskeptical or superstitious or other undesirable goals, and an org could devote staff to vetting charities on this dimension, which might be two dimensions, “secularity” and “scientificity,” which would be a great service to atheists; it could also put front-and-center charities that directly serve secular interests like the SSA, the NCSE, or FFRF), pipelines access (using a centralized website to help connect atheists with existing charities, e.g. Habitat for Humanity for volunteer work; Red Cross for monetary giving; etc.), logs and promotes actual atheist charitable works (e.g. AOF of Sacramento runs a soup kitchen every month, etc., info atheists might like to know about and that might inspire more orgs to do similar things), and perhaps eventually even organizes its own charitable works (although it should focus on the first three tasks before moving on to the much more challenging task four).

There are other niches that could be filled and thus served besides that one, and existing orgs are best positioned to parcel out which ones they are best at (and then get cracking at meeting the need in that niche well).

These need to take into account the one single difference between atheism as a movement and religions: we are scattered geographically and thus do not have concentrated communities. That’s why we don’t have a church-building model of movement growth: such a model depends on at least two hundred active atheists being within walking or very short driving distance of the central meeting hub; we just don’t have communities of that geographic density yet, and this limits what we can do, not just in organizing and movement building but also in atheist charity work–our community is connected, and cooperates, along the online dimension, not the physical one, which makes much of our current charitable work invisible to the public, the more so as we work within existing secular charities like the Red Cross and Kiva, which do not get counted as “atheist” charities when comparing churches with atheist orgs.

All in due time.

In any case the most promising trend for secularism is our youth. The evangelical/fundamentalist anti-science attitude is something that disturbs and distresses us for good reason. However, in the end I think it will also be the death of it for young people.

I also think the church attendance statistics that are often used as an indicator of religiosity in the U.S. are misleading and hide a trend towards secularization. Living in Texas I know a lot of regular church attendees that appear to live completely secular lives the rest of the week. The fact that you attend church says nothing about what you really believe. Georges Rey has argued that religious believers don’t act like they really believe. Some do, but my experience is that many don’t.