By Liam McLaughlin in New Statesman

Liam McLaughlin speaks to members of the London Black Atheists group about the consequences of their decision to turn their backs on religion.

When Clive Aruede’s twelve-year-old daughter asked him “What is science?” he couldn’t have known quite how much it would change his life. But when I meet him in a gloomy bar in Borough, Clive pinpoints this innocent question as the beginning of a long and arduous journey towards atheism.

The phrase he uses is that he “came out”, which implies that he had been hiding ‘in the closet’ – that he felt the beliefs or lifestyle of an atheist would be seen as objectionable to wider society. But being an atheist in the UK is hardly controversial. In the 2011 Census around 14 million people – a quarter of the UK’s population – claimed to have ‘no religion’. But for Clive this didn’t matter, because Clive is black.

According to figures from Christian Research in their 2005 English Church Census, black people are much more likely to be religious than most other demographic groups. The census showed that though black people only made up around 2 per cent of the population at the time, they nonetheless accounted for 7 per cent of churchgoers nationwide, and 44 per cent of churchgoers in London. In fact, at the time his daughter asked him about science, Clive was included in these figures because he, too, was a practicing Christian – a Eucharistic Minister, no less.

Lola Tinubu also fell into this demographic, though she had already been questioning God and religion since she was young. “It started with the tribal culture,” she tells me. “I asked my father about his relationship with my mother because I didn’t understand the inequality, and he said ‘That’s what God wants’, so that bothered me.” But despite her growing doubts throughout her teenage years, she went along with the tide of belief. When she came from Nigeria to the UK, she even joined an Evangelical church and preached in public. She laughs about this, and supposes she did it mostly because she needed to feel a part of a community.

For both Clive and Lola, like many millions of other black people, belief in God was never a matter of choice – it was just a fact, like the sun or the sky. The Bible held all the answers to any question they could possibly ask, and church formed the backbone of their social life. They grew up attending church every Sunday – filling the rest of their time with Bible studies and prayer meetings. Neither ever had the space to ask why. Click link below for full article;

http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2013/08/it-harder-come-out-atheist-if-youre-black

Posted By F. Sheikh