‘Positive Atheism': The Production Of Non-Religion Through Philanthropy

In current debates in the sociology of religion a consensus has constituted itself which rejects the juxtaposition of the religious and the secular as a stable binary. The alternative is then a perspective which takes into account not only the simultaneous co-production of religion and its other but also empirical findings which seem to disrupt the binary altogether. The proposed paper takes this as a starting point for analysing the activities and conceptual rationales of the Atheist Centre, a South Indian non-religious organization dedicated to “social change” via the eradication of “superstitions” and the propagation of “positive atheism as a way of life”.

The activities of the Atheist Centre are situated in a genealogical and pragmatic context of socio-religious reform in India where philanthropy and social activism are the constitutive frames within which the secular-religious binary is both challenged and reproduced. The Atheist Centre characterises itself as part of a larger “Gandhian” movement for social change and betterment. The paper retraces the complex transformation of the explicitly spiritual discourse of Gandhi’s philanthropy – in itself an attempt to transcend the secular-religious divide – into a project of “secular social work”. Furthermore, it will be shown that the philanthropic activities of the Atheist Centre, i.e. practices based on and striving to overcome social inequalities, are not just incidental but foundational and operative for this transformative process.

This paper argues that the historical production of the secular is (1) played out through the construction of binary antagonisms as well as (2) simultaneous mediations or disruptions of these binaries and is always (3) embedded in structures of social inequality. The empirical case study retraces the historically and socio-culturally specific production of a conceptual distinction of “superstition” versus “positive atheism” which informs the idea of “ways of life” in need of eradication or propagation.