Devangelism?

 I've heard some atheists use the term "devangelism" to describe their attempts to get theists to give up on bullshit and start basing their lives on reality. And I get it, especially as an exvangelical. I get the drive to guide people out of error into truth, out of darkness into light - especially now that I finally have seen which is which. 

But I think maybe atheists are in danger of falling into the same trap that Christians do: Coming across as fanatics, zealots, and assholes.

Let's be clear, Evangelicals are in FACT fanatics, zealots, and assholes, and it's super important to change their minds and get them to stop being those things. Especially because as a group they are destroying everything that was ever good about this country (INCLUDING the things that they claim to value). It's important to fight for a country that runs based on things that are true instead of things that are false, and we won't get there until enough people in enough key states stop believing the falsehoods. It's vital that we achieve the numbers to prevent theocracy, and we'll have to de-convert a lot of people from their cults in order to get there. But we can't do it by making the same mistakes that the worst of them do.

We can't do it by arguing them out of their bullshit positions. It's tempting to try, but it doesn't work because it's not the route that CAN work. They didn't get into religion by way of reason, they won't be able to get out that way. Their beliefs aren't ABOUT reason, they're about identity, and they aren't going to give that up unless they can find a damn good substitute.

We can't do it by isolating ourselves from them, living in an insular world where we never have to deal with people who infuriatingly refuse to accept the simple truth. As tempting as it is to wash our hands of the people who treat us as enemies, we have to figure out how to turn them into allies (or at least non-combatants).

We can only do it the way that actually works: 

When someone joins a community, they do so because that community meets a need for them, and the primary need that community can meet is to make them feel wanted and needed.

So there needs to be a community that is accessible, and that community needs to make people feel wanted and needed. And it needs to do a better job of that than religion does. 

That's actually a tall order. Religion has had millennia to build rituals, symbolism, music, traditions around when and where to gather and what to do during the gathering, traditions around eating and drinking together... all powerful adhesives to bond groups of people. And it's GOOD at making people feel needed - someone's ALWAYS needed to serve the food or print and pass out the bulletins or mow the lawn or fix the roof or polish the pews or drive the youth group's bus or sing in the choir... they're GOOD at making people feel like they're helping and doing something valuable by perpetrating this inherently valueless thing.

There really aren't many specifically non-religious equivalents to that (except for holidays, which all have at least the trappings of religion even if they're not really religious in practice anymore.) There's no hymns to science and reason, and no one would want to sing them if there were. There's no "Happy God-isn't-real Day", and no one would celebrate it if there was. There are crosses and stars and moons to show tribal allegiance to religions, but no symbol to show lack of tribal allegiance to an imaginary friend, and it would feel pretty pointless to wear one if it existed. Why advertise the absence of a thing, even when the thing itself is imaginary? The truth doesn't NEED advertisement to prop it up, it's just true and it stands on its own.

But humans don't make decisions based on what's true. We're barely evolved from monkeys, and despite having much bigger frontal lobes than monkeys we don't really make our decisions with those; we make our decisions with the limbic system, and that is all about emotion, bonding, feeling safe, feeling like part of a group, feeling like the world is predictable and controllable, and protection from threats. The cortex comes up with post-hoc justifications for the decision that the limbic system has already made... but the limbic system is where the decision was really made. Just like if we had to give a logical argument for why we chose our partners, we can't do that. We might describe a bunch of objectively great things about them, but those things probably are true of other people we know too and yet we don't love those other people in the same way. We love our partners because they ARE our partners. By the same token, we don't choose our communities because of some logical reason, we love them because they're ours. Even when there are objectively horrifying things about them (as there always are, in religions).

So how DOES one build a community that can provide in fact the things that religion only pretends to provide? How DO we build something that really gives people hope rather than the pretense that things get better after we die? How DO we build something that really gives people purpose rather than the pretense that our purpose is to tell our imaginary friend how great he is, forever? How DO we build something that really gives people help rather than pretending that "I'll think really hard at my imaginary friend" is helpful? How DO we build something that appeals to both the emotional brain's need for a tribe based on common rituals AND the rational brain's need for a life based on reality?

I don't know what the answers are, but these are the questions that atheists need to ask. And the best way to describe why that's important, ironically, comes from the book The Cross and the Switchblade, wherein an Evangelical preacher recalls a story told by his grandfather (also an Evangelical preacher.) He talked about how, if a dog is chewing on an old dry bone that has no nourishment in it but at least satisfies the urge to chew, you're not going to convince the dog to drop it by trying to wrestle it away from him. You've got to offer him a lamb chop, and he'll drop the bone all on his own. In other words, you can't take away the thing that kinda sorta feels like it meets the need, until you can substitute something that ACTUALLY meets the need.