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1 Frantz Fanon and J. Saunders Redding The Psychological and Political Necessity of Atheism “The church does not usually profess to be a group of ordinary human beings. It claims Divine Sanction. It professes to talk with God and to receive directly His Commandments. Its ministers and members do not apparently have to acquire Truth by bitter experience and long intensive study: Truth is miraculously revealed to them.” W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Color Line and the Church” The title character of Jean Toomer’s experimental short story “Kabnis” makes a rather odd remark about the Creator: “God, he doesn’t exist, but nevertheless He is ugly. Hence, what comes from Him is ugly” (85). There are at least two things in this claim that should give an attentive reader pause. First, if God does not exist, then how can He be ugly? Only that which exists can be dubbed beautiful or ugly, and since God is, according to Kabnis, a nonexistent being, saying anything about the quality of His existence could only be an incoherent or nonsensical proposition. Putting aside for a moment the seeming contradiction of Kabnis’s assertion, let us turn to the second, even more baffling part of his claim. How can Kabnis specifically justify calling God ugly? If anything, God has traditionally been configured as a spiritual comforter, the Good Shepherd, the loving Father, or the righteous One. Obviously, to call God ugly flies in the face of millennia of theological wisdom. And yet, when examining the writings of prominent African American atheists, it is imperative that one have in place an intellectual framework that reconciles the seeming incoherence at the core of Kabnis’s remark, for such writers consistently portray God, a being that does not exist for them, as a hideous entity. In this chapter, I offer a theoretical model that clarifies Kabnis’s puzzling observation. This theory I derive from the writings of Frantz Fanon and J. Saunders Redding, two atheists who think that the primary function of the God concept is to justify racial oppression. But exposing this darker side of the God concept is no easy task, for as Ralph Ellison makes abundantly 18 / African American Atheists and Political Liberation clear in the closing lines of his brilliant novel Invisible Man, social systems of injustice, which have been so effective in marginalizing and degrading culturally designated inferiors, sound at a frequency almost too low to be heard (581). Therefore, to make the oppressive structures of theism readily accessible to rational and enquiring minds, Fanon and Redding expose how the God concept, which for them is a sociopolitical construct and not an ontological reality, operates “on a level of subconsciousness” (Redding, On Being Negro 138). “God! Bah!” Nella Larsen, Quicksand In On Being Negro in America, J. Saunders Redding rejects belief in God from a very distinct perspective: “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” (144). Were Redding an objective observer of the world (a Cartesian self-enthroned Subject or a Kantian Transcendental Ego of sorts), he would be able to claim that he accepts or rejects a concept like God from an unbiased vantage point. But as a man who has witnessed how “God and the word of God have been used to perpetuate the wicked idea of human inferiority” (147), he forgoes any pretense to objectivity or neutrality and instead acknowledges that he rejects God as a man of African descent. On the surface, such an admission should automatically disqualify Redding from making any intelligible comment about the God concept; after all, God is supposedly a being that transcends spatial, temporal, or cultural contingencies, so by acknowledging that he perceives the world through a culturally contingent (“Negro”) lens instead of a transcultural metaphysical (“neutral human stuff”) lens, Redding implicitly denies himself the possibility of knowing God. But for Redding, the God concept is nothing more than a human idea, “an implicit assumption in the thought of our age” (137). To know God, therefore, is to know what individuals within the culture have psychosemiotically projected into being or what the sociopolitical community has legitimized as Divine.1 To paraphrase Zora Neale Hurston, God is a creature of our own minds (201), a conceptual being that assumes a provisional form in and through a semiotic sign. Redding’s specific motivation for rejecting God places...

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