A complaint I heard a lot, about ten years ago, was that Online Atheists were ‘smug.’ This was seen as a major complaint about us, which didn’t really do anything to bring our attention to the very real problems we had with misogyny and racism and transphobia and islamophobia, but it also worked as a really good kind of social brush to tar a group with because even now, you’ll hear the word used like it’s an automatically necessary descriptor: ‘smug internet atheists.’
Good news, I have no desire at all to ask you to change your mind on internet atheists, because there sure are a bunch of them who seem to be complete tools. Again, the ones I think of as tools, I would probably recommend that it’s much more important to confront them on, again, the racism and the misogyny and the transphobia and the islamophobia and then on the misogyny again because that… that sure is the actual problem, but I’m not seeking to claim unsmugness.
Just, like, what does ‘smug’ mean?
I got started on this thread when I realised if I had to see another well intentioned atheist youtuber bring up a clip of Mike Winger to provide an illustration of a Christian apologist delivering a particular family of bad point, I was going to stop watching them altogether. Not because what they did was fundamentally a bad thing, that they were somehow platforming a bastard, but because Mike Winger as a person to me, is painfully, unpleasantly smug and condescending and almost always, completely and utterly wrong.
I find Mike Winger really smug.
Smug in this context isn’t really a fact or a testable trait. I don’t think people mean smug as smug as like, the dictionary word. Smug means, in the dictionary, that someone is ‘highly self-satisfied.’ This is a complaint I hear a lot about a type of person, usually a type of person I am, usually around me, without actually realising I am a member of that community, which often results in me asking some questions making a mental note about someone to never bother talking to again and peace the heck out. Pretty consistently, I hear it used as a way to describe someone who is right but do they have to be an asshole about it? Or, someone who isn’t right enough, like Jon Stewart when he derided George W Bush for being bad at being a president, was just ‘smug’ about it.
You do know one of the people that atheists present themselves as against is the pope, right? Like, it is a not insignificant thing that there is a man whose job title is ‘the voice of god on earth,’ who is the head of a corporation and a country and who oversees what his church claims is 1.3 billion people. That organisation claims that membership and boasts of its charity work running 5,000 hospitals worldwide, which is a heck of a number, but also seems pretty titchy when you line it up alongside the claimed populace of 1.3 billion. For comparison, India, population 1.4 billion, is estimated to have around 70,000 hospitals. And I know it’s a cheap shot to bring up the way that the Catholic church compares badly to a country, but it is a little weird, right, for a thing that’s ostensibly empowered by god itself and headed up by, again, the voice of god on earth, to boast about 5,000 hospitals when a mere country, a country with comparatively few Catholic people, is able to lap that number ten times and change? Is it smug to think that India builds more hospitals than the Catholic church does? Is it smug to think that owning a golden throne is still bad even if you don’t sit on it?
At that point it’s kinda a positional thing, an aesthetic, right? It’s not what’s said, it’s the overall demeanour of the person saying it. And the thing that messes me up on this front is that like, atheists are people primarily responding to the most powerful social organisations in their societies, who in addition to their positions of actual literal privilege and prestige, are making claims about knowing the creator of the universe personally and being able to make value judgments about who you should or shouldn’t marry or why, based on that insight. Right?
You know they’re still mad about gay marriage, don’t you?
Okay okay, but like, ‘what is smug,’ it’s being highly self-satisfied. And I find Mike Winger smug. Well, yeah, and you might wonder ‘who is Mike Winger?’ He’s a Christian apologist. He has an audience for his youtube channel in which he delivers a really badly made point across ten minutes or so about his faith, usually in an attempt to ‘address’ some problem with his opposition, which, like
You gotta remember that a lot of the time it’s gay marriage.
Now this is entirely a point. This is, strategically speaking, a thing that Mike Winger is actively trying to do. Mike Winger has an affect and a disposition that comes from the overt position that he is an expert in the most important thing in the world, and that he is humble about it, and that everyone who doesn’t agree with him just chooses not to agree with him. And this is where a lot of these professional wheezes wind up falling into a problem of just being bad at their jobs, because rhetorically, they’re not making good points or making them well, because you can always see the seam when they have to ignore the actual argument and make it about something else. Winger believes that Atheists don’t really mean it, even if they think they mean it, because they don’t really mean it, because he says they don’t really mean it.
And remember: atheists are the ones he even complains about being smug.
What I would ask, is if you’re someone on the sidelines, who doesn’t know what the discourse atheism is engaged with, and if you’re not familiar with the parties involved, is to interrogate what the smugness is that you dislike. Delivery? Aesthetics? And if that’s the case, sure, don’t engage with it, seems like a great reason to not bother. But it’s really important to remember that one side of this argument has golden thrones and laws made for their benefit and billionaire lobbyists and asserts it knows the future and is willing to support genocides to make that future happen and that they’re good people for it and that maybe that’s kinda highly self-satisfied too.
Oh and stop responding to Mike Winger, the man is at best an insincere liar and deserves to be spat on in the street.