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Introduction African American Atheism A Cause for Hope “I simply rejected religion. I rejected God. Not my instincts, but my deepest feelings revolted compulsively—not because I was I, a sort of neutral human stuff reacting directly to experience, but because I was a Negro.” J. Saunders Redding, On Being Negro in America This book contains uncharitable observations about belief in God and religious communities. The atheists in this study do not mourn the retreating sea of faith (Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach), nor do they consider a godless world just a heap of broken images (T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land). On the topics of God and religion, they are blasphemous, unkind, and relentless. The tone in their writing is mocking, irreverent, and flippant, and their judgments are decisive. Instead of finding hope and love through belief in God, the African American atheists in this book claim that “God and the word of God have been used to perpetuate the wicked idea of human inferiority” (Redding 147). Indeed, for the writers in this study, since God is primarily a weapon that can be used to oppress and violate culturally designated inferiors with impunity, they consider the leap of faith an unethical act of the intellect. This is not to say that the writers in this study consider the God concept an inherently evil idea, which leads necessarily to crimes against humanity. Rather, they consider the God concept an empty signifier, a semiotic vacuity that political powers can easily control and exploit in order to construct and sanction an oppressive politics, to mobilize the necessary forces to disseminate and legislate an unjust legal system, and to conceal atrocities from both themselves and their victims. Abolishing the God concept would certainly not eliminate a politics of oppression, they would argue, but it would divest the dominant power of its most effective weapon for enacting its political agenda and for interpellating the masses, those individuals who must accept the sys- 2 / African American Atheists and Political Liberation tem with their whole heart, their whole soul, and their whole mind for it to function. For the African American atheists in this study, killing God would be the first step toward the construction of a truly tolerant and egalitarian democracy. There is not only value in but also a profound need for a sustained study of African American atheism. While there have been some excellent books on atheism in the last forty-five years, like J. Hillis Miller’s The Disappearance of God, John Towner Frederick’s The Darkened Sky, Susan E. Lorsch’s Where Nature Ends, Alfred Kazin’s God and the American Writer, and A. N. Wilson’s God’s Funeral, these studies do not address the rich contributions of African American atheists. As a consequence, these studies, focusing as they do on writers like Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Frost, tend to frame the questions and issues regarding God’s death in a way that radically differs from black atheists. Moreover, this intellectual orientation leads to an emotional response that is the exact opposite of those in the African American tradition. Consider, for instance, this passage from Jean-Paul Sartre, an atheist who articulates the seemingly dominant response to God’s death: “The existentialist . . . thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it” (Sartre 40–41). From this atheistic perspective, God legitimizes authentic knowledge, which can be used to establish a well-grounded moral system. God’s death, therefore, means the loss of not only true knowledge but also a moral universe, which is why such atheists fall prey to melancholic mourning .1 Indeed, on discovering that there can be neither a priori knowledge nor a metaphysics of morals, atheists in this tradition languish over humanity’s “radical sense of inner nothingness” (Miller 8) or how “we live in an empty, Godless universe, devoid of purpose” (Wilson 25). Foundational to the despairing atheists’ emotional orientation toward life is a philosophical yearning for certain Knowledge or an objective Truth, a yearning that is thwarted by God’s exit from the universe. Since God has so very often been used as a weapon against black people , atheist writers of African descent reject the idea of certain or objective Knowledge as...

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