The convention kicks off with a screening of Contradiction: A Question of Faith. It's a 2013 documentary that attempts deconstruct the mystique of black churches. Through the narration of its creator, Jeremiah Camara, the film argues that the church's venerated status among black communities is in fact exploitative, that these communities are being robbed of ambition (if not money) by religious leaders who glorify submissiveness to a higher master.
After the credits roll, Camara watches from a seat as his hype man, Steve Hill, works the crowd. A Missouri native, Hill grew up in University City, a few minutes' drive from Washington University's campus. He's also slated to perform during the "Atheists Are Funny" block Saturday night.
"I want to conduct a quick scientific survey," Hill says after the initial applause dies down. He peers around the auditorium. "Black people in here: What you think about the movie?"
The question is met with silence. Then, the sound of one black guy clapping in a back row. People laugh. Camara and Hill, a black atheist filmmaker and black atheist comedian, have spent the past year touring across the country in rooms similar to this one — mostly white people.
Hill pivots back to the film. "This movie means a lot to me," he says. "I grew up dirt poor here, fled here in 1979. My mother prayed all the time, and I can see by this whole Ferguson incident that the praying is still not helping us. As long as we're praying, we're going to be in trouble."
Hill then introduces Camara. After two or three questions, Camara is hit with a query that, with just one or two different word choices, wouldn't sound out of place at a conference of evangelicals.
In essence: How do we reach people who aren't like us with these ideas we feel strongly about? How do we convince them our cause is meaningful?
But because he's talking about race, and he's trying to do it with the utmost sensitivity, the questioner quickly devolves into babble.
"So, I have a lot of black friends," he begins. "I have a lot of atheist friends. I have zero black atheist friends. What's the best way to have these conversations...without being offended? And without coming off as, I'm trying to embarrass or talk down to, I feel like sometimes that can come across very condescending. How do I do that with my black friends, knowing this now, and to have an opportunity...?"
His question trails off into merciful silence. I'm cringing with muscles I've never felt before.
"That's a good question," Camara says calmly. He proceeds to turn the question back to his film's central thesis. "I would just say ask questions, as opposed to making statements. Why do you go to church? What is it actually doing for the community? Why are there so many churches in the community yet there are so many problems? Why are they coexisting in the midst of poverty and powerlessness?
"That's going to force them to think about it."
After the presentation, I find Hill sitting behind Camara's booth display of T-shirts and DVDs. He's wearing a leather jacket featuring patches from his time in the Marines and as a prison guard in California.
Hill tells me that he and Camara have had little luck gathering black audiences for the movie, and even those few successful screenings featured "excruciatingly, painfully low" attendance.
Hill bemoans the prevalence of religion among African Americans. Watching clergy members rise to prominence during the Ferguson protests made him furious.
"It's false hope," he says. "That's the worst thing you can have, is false hope. We have to get politically active."
I head back to the auditorium, where I catch most of the speech from Russell Glasser, a host of The Atheist Experience webcast and cable access TV show. During the question and answer session, a young woman with short blonde hair and a brown dress takes the microphone. She says she recently abandoned plans to become a Catholic nun. She doesn't know how break the news to her religious friends or, for that matter, what to do about the five nuns who follow her on Twitter.
Glasser answers thoughtfully, advising that total digital transparency might be a noble goal but, given the circumstances, she's shouldn't feel pressured to notify social media of everything all at once. Coming out as an atheist is a process, he says, and it can be a lengthy and complicated one.
"And we've got your back!" someone yells. The auditorium briefly erupts in cheers and whoops of encouragement. The young woman beams.
I catch up to the young woman by a row of tables holding stacks of atheist newsletters. I must know more about her problems with Twitter nuns. Do sisters subtweet? Can a catechism be recited in 140 characters?
Gabrielle Gojko, I learn, is eighteen years old and a native of Edwardsville, Illinois. This is her first atheist convention, but just two weeks ago she was attending a major Catholic youth conference on the campus of Missouri State University in Springfield.
I remark that a Christian youth conference seems like a strange event to attract a non-believer, and she explains that she had actually attended it for the previous four years. She made friends, bonded with pastors and joined fellow Christians in being part of something greater. This was the first year she attended as an atheist.
"I mainly went because I wanted to be with the people who I loved and cared about and hadn't seen in a while at church. I was still kind of hoping that they would say something that actually made sense. But they didn't."
Gojko was baptized a Catholic as a high school freshman. Earlier that year, on a Friday evening in March, seven-year-old Macie Crow had been playing in a culvert behind her Edwardsville house when the decrepit structure collapsed. The little girl's life was snuffed out by a six-foot slab of concrete. Crow was one of Gojko's neighbors.
"I couldn't grasp the idea of death," she reflects. "My way of coping with it was going to the church."
What began as a coping mechanism became, for Gojko, a portal to a world of clarity and empowerment. Somewhat ironically, her final push toward religion came after a bitter argument with an atheist classmate.
"She took an aggressive approach, called me a bigot, called my religious friends bigots, and after all that, I was very turned off by atheism," Gojko says. "I wasn't Catholic yet. If she had persisted in a kind way, maybe I wouldn't have ever become Catholic. Who knows?"
I'm certain she intended it as rhetorical, but Gojko's trailing question strikes me as something more, a kind of psychoanalysis wrapped around a theological thought experiment: If her friend's hated of religion was so repulsive that, at least in part, it enabled Gojko's turn to Christ, what does that say about atheism? Should we just chalk it up to the friend being an asshole? Or does it indicate something deeper, a bitter intolerance among atheists that comes across as spiteful?
I know that bitterness. I feel it when I read about Orthodox rabbis who forbid their followers to report child molesters to secular authorities. It's that twinge in my chest when I remember how a fairly recent version of myself considered the Torah a timeless moral guide, even though I was spending hours a day studying laws that hadn't been applied in more than a millennium. I get angry knowing that I spent most of my life following a book whose author deemed homosexuality and shrimp "abominations" while simultaneously establishing a legal framework to buy, sell and breed slaves.
Google the word "atheist" and it becomes immediately apparent that a certain slice of self-identifying rationalists turn downright brutal when it comes to the Bible. Kirkman's illustrated works of Biblical horror appeal to that crowd, and Gateway to Reason's schedule features at least half a dozen presentations devoted to similar Biblical mockery. (Sure, you could have just as much fun deriding Islam or Hinduism, but Christianity is the prevalent religion in the Midwest; its teachings are the petri dish that most conference attendees swim in.)
As for Gojko, that first, negative impression of atheism drove her to enroll in a Catholic high school. Soon after, she started making preparations for her future life as a nun.
Something changed a few months ago. At the urging of a different atheist friend, she started watching atheist-themed YouTube videos and webcasts. She can't put her finger on what exactly shook her Christian faith, but it's gone. She's sure of that — even as she mourns what has been lost.
"I got this sense of joy from the other nuns that I had met. They were just so compassionate and everything. They were wonderful. It was so hard to give that up," she says. "It was almost exactly two years ago that I decided I was open to becoming a nun, and then almost exactly a year ago when I was like, 'I'm definitely gonna do it.' If I could have, I would have joined a convent right then."
After Gojko saunters back to the auditorium for the next speaker, I head to the snack table. Of course, this is when I realize that I am cashless. I mumble a stream of apologies and begin fumbling for my debit card so I can purchase a $1.50 bag of Mini Oreos.
The guy behind the counter waves away my card.
"Actually, she just paid for you," he says, pointing to a woman with a shaved head who's walking away. I spot her just in time to watch her disappear around a corner. I hadn't even noticed her standing in line next to me.
I walk to the auditorium, open the bag of Oreos and take my seat for the next speaker. I think of Maimonides, the 12th century Jewish scholar and philosopher. He once wrote that the act of giving anonymous charity — without seeking acknowledgment or praise — is a perfect act of kindness. Maimonides classified the act, or mitzvah, as among those deeds performed solely "for the sake of Heaven."
I stuff five cookies in my mouth. So much for Maimonides.
