August Berkshire: Atheist Talk-Show Producer

In today’s media circus, evidently, even the man upstairs has to deal with backlash. With such atheist tomes as Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion clogging The New York Times bestseller list, and the Christian right’s favorite president suffering historically low approval ratings, August Berkshire, the president of Minnesota Atheists, believed the time was right for—a radio show?

Atheists Talk is a one-hour radio program that Berkshire has been producing at 9 a.m. on AM 950 every Sunday (gasp!) since January. On air, Berkshire and his choir of nonbelievers discuss the shortcomings of religion, interview like-minded advocates such as the University of Minnesota–Morris’s prominent evolutionist PZ Myers, examine such cultural touchstones as Ben Stein’s pro-Intelligent Design movie Expelled—or talk about what they plan to wear to the National Conference of American Atheists (which was held at the Minneapolis Marriott City Center in March). I sat down with the forty-eight-year-old former Catholic altar boy to talk about why he’s betting against the existence of God and broadcasting it to the world.

I don’t understand how you guys managed to take the sexy out of godlessness.

[Laughs.] It’s fun! It’s fun being able to think for yourself and just be excited by the natural world.

You said there was dancing at the atheist convention?

Yeah.

What do atheists dance to?

Oh, all kinds of music. They had three bands that night, starting off middle of the road and getting progressively harder as the night grew on—the old people dropped out and the younger people stayed for the hard stuff.

How long have you been an atheist?

Since I was about nineteen. See, religious people often talk about their overnight conversions. Christians will often talk about these overnight conversions—something happens and they find God. It doesn’t work that way for atheists. So it’s hard for me to pinpoint like exactly a day or even a year, so I would say late teens.

Where did you grow up?

Well, the first sixteen years I was in New England, in a small town west of Boston called Acton. Everybody was Christian there, so everyone you know believes a certain way—your parents do and all your relatives do—and you think they’re not lying so it must be true. That’s why it’s so hard to leave your religion in a small town. When I was sixteen, my father, who worked for Honeywell, got a job in Minneapolis, so we moved to Edina. As soon as I was eighteen, I ran to Minneapolis, to the big city [where you can believe anything you want to believe]. I sort of came out as an atheist in 1984,  when I helped start the Minnesota chapter [of American Atheists] and was the first president of the organization. And in 1984, that did create a lot of friction with my family.

What did you say to them when you came out?

I was an atheist in 1980, but I didn’t really tell anybody about it, and then by 1984 the atheist group started, and I saw a need for it, and I had the time and the ability to do it. My parents found out I was an atheist by reading an article in the Minneapolis Tribune. They were shocked that I was not only an atheist, but I was leading an atheists group. They had the usual questions like, What did we do wrong? You didn’t do anything wrong, I told them—you took me to church, you took me to Sunday school. I just don’t buy it. But I said it’s not just your religion I’m rejecting, it’s all of them. I don’t see any evidence for any religion or the supernatural in general—gods, angels, devils, heaven, hell, ghosts. All that stuff. So they felt a little better that I wasn’t picking on just their religion to reject; it was all of them.

So what do you do for a living? Are you a scientist or something?

No, no, no. I spent most of my adult life just volunteering for nonprofits, mostly in the atheist movement. And the atheist movement doesn’t pay anything, so it’s all volunteer. Before that I had the artistic life of a poet, so I just did whatever jobs could make me some money. Most of it was managing small stores or driving vans and small trucks—fairly easy jobs that I could do and, when the day was over, I could leave the job behind and do whatever artistic or nonprofit thing I was interested in.

Where does Minnesota rank in the national atheist movement?

Well, Minnesota Atheists is one of the largest local atheists groups in the country. We’ve got about 350 members. There are only a handful that are as big as we are, not only in terms of numbers but in terms of activity. We have a newsletter, we have a website, we have a public-access TV show, we have a radio show, we participate in festivals such as May Day and Gay Pride, and we attend book fairs.

Not believing in God is one thing, but with some radio and TV shows and a few bestsellers, atheism is starting to look like a promising business.

Look, no one was more surprised that The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins would be a bestseller than Richard Dawkins himself. Who knew that it was suddenly fashionable to be an atheist, but evidently it is.

Why is that? More importantly, where do you see this crusade going? Marriage is already secularized—what’s next?

We need a society in which laws are based purely on secular reasoning. So, for example, let’s take the marriage laws. There’s no reason to prohibit same-gender, same-sex marriages. The government is supposed to treat all citizens equally, so there’s no secular reason to be against same-sex marriages. But there are religious reasons, and they try to infuse those into the debate. That’s the kind of thing we worry about. Stem cell research. Sex education. These people who want abstinence-only sex ed when we can demonstrate that comprehensive sex  ed has better results. Those are the kinds of things that we as a society are struggling to get rid of—the last vestiges of religious control by the government.

Of the so-called four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse—Hitchens, Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Dennis Dennett—who makes the most compelling argument?

I haven’t read them enough to judge.

Really?

I mean, I don’t tend to read books on atheist apologetics, which is basically what those are. They’re not written for atheists, they’re written for the general public. I’ve heard a lot of those arguments before. The only time I really look at atheist apologetics is if someone comes up with a religious argument I haven’t heard before, as in the claim that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. I’m not a physics major, so I look it up, and, “Oh, OK, creationists are wrong—it doesn’t violate it,” and now I have the argument.

Do you see your role as converting new atheists by helping them to formulate their own arguments?

If I’m talking to a general audience, or even when I talk to Christian colleges such as Bethel University and Northwestern College, what I do first of all is acknowledge the good things about religion, because they’ve done some good things. You can’t just talk about the bad things that have happened. You have to acknowledge that certain religious ideas sound very compelling. It’s a really nice idea to think that we’re a special creation of a god. It’s a nice idea to think that some cosmic something out there created us and cares about us.

Aren’t those ideas tied up with American identity?

In the sense that we don’t have as much of a social safety net here as in Europe. I think as countries get more of a social safety net they lose the need—the psychological need—to believe in a god. You see that happening in Britain and France, for example. So while you can acknowledge that these are comforting ideas—that a god created you, that a god cares about you, that he listens to you, that he has a nice place where you can go after you die—you should acknowledge these are nice ideas. Acknowledge them, but then say, “You know what, there’s no evidence for it. And, in fact, what evidence we have—evolution and how the brain works—all speak against these ideas.” Atheists are just people who follow the evidence wherever it leads. If the evidence should come out that there is a God, we’d follow it there too.