Why Are Atheists Always Described as Militant?

Gustave Flaubert wrote a lovely book, Dictionnaire des idées reçues, published posthumously in 1913. (The title roughly translates as "Dictionary of Platitudes".) In it, he poked fun at, among other things, nouns that are nearly always accompanied by certain adjectives. Germans, he noted, are always described as "blond", a professor is always "learned", and jealousy is always "unbridled".

In a similar vein, the comedian Robert Klein once noted that President Garfield is nearly always described as "shot by a disappointed office-seeker". Klein went on to claim that if you look up Garfield in the dictionary, it says "See office-seeker, disappointed".

The intelligent design crowd plays the same game with "Darwinists". They never refer to their ideological opponents as scientists or biologists; they are nearly always "Darwinists", or, as Wesley Elsberry has pointed out, "dogmatic Darwinists".

Now look at this otherwise unnoteworthy article by Associate Press religion reporter Rachel Zoll, about the reaction to recent books by atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Notice anything, well, trite about the title? Yes, it's the "militant atheist" platitude. Atheists must never be described as intelligent, thoughtful, friendly, questioning, or thought-provoking. Instead, they must be described as "militant".

From the meaning of "militant", you might expect that Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens are burning down churches, or at least leading protests, stirring up crowds with their fiery rhetoric. You would be disappointed, of course. What Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens have done is write books. Hitchens is more of a curmudgeon than a militant, and Dawkins and Harris are both rather mild-mannered. Nobody is leaving their public events carrying torches and singing the atheist analogue of the Horst Wessel song.

I'm not sure when the juxtaposition of "militant" and "atheist" became a cliché. The earliest citation I've been able to find so far is a 1928 book review of Edward Lucas White's book Why Rome Fell by Elmer Davis. Davis wrote, "Militant atheists ought not to read it; they will be too likely to swallow it all uncritically."

Whatever the origins, the term "militant atheist" eventually became a description to be used whenever the writer wanted to express disapproval about nonbelievers. Madalyn Murray O'Hair was often so described; a 1970 article in Time sneered at her attempt to found a new church. True, O'Hair was, by all accounts, a nasty person. However, when she was killed in 1995, obituaries routinely referred to her as "militant". Her murderer, however, was not so categorized.

When Jerry Falwell died recently, newspaper obituaries rarely described him as "militant", even though the adjective fit him much better than mild-mannered atheists like Harris. Ironically, however, the Associated Press obituary by Sue Lindsey, referred to Falwell's father and grandfather as "militant atheists".

Flaubert would have appreciated the "militant atheist" cliché. In Dictionnaire des idées reçues, he reported the following platitude about atheists: "A nation of atheists could not survive." Sadly, that cliché is still prevalent today among the morons of the Religious Right.

Added June 6 2007: over at Pharyngula, commenter Jurjen S., whose command of history is evidently better than mine, tells me about the League of Militant Atheists, an anti-religious group in the Soviet Union from 1925-1947. Probably this is the source of the term "militant atheist"; indeed, many of the 1920's citations for this phrase discuss actions in the Soviet Union.

Added January 4 2011
Google's n-gram viewer

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=militant+theist%2Cmilitant+atheist&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

has now revealed some earlier uses of the term: the earliest I have found is from Progress: a monthly magazine of advanced thought, Volume 6 edited by George William Foote, in 1886. On page 466 he writes "He was not only an Atheist, but a militant Atheist..." Perhaps this is the earliest usage of the term. But as the google n-gram viewer indicates, the term really took off in the 1920's, with the rise of the "League of Militant Atheists" in the former Soviet Union.

Oddly enough, the term "militant theist" gets no citations at all.