I was a regular panelist at a regional New England science fiction convention for decades. Part of my participation was suggesting panel topics every year. One topic I suggested was atheism, specifically conversations between theists and atheists.

Like many American atheists, I was raised as a Christian, evolving to agnosticism and finally atheism in my teens and twenties. I noticed over the years that although many atheists were quite familiar with religion in general and Christianity in particular, the reverse was NOT true - most Christians had never knowingly met an atheist, and what they “knew” about atheists in general were nightmares they learned from pastors and the media.

So I decided to encourage Christians and atheists to understand each other better by fostering dialog between them online. There were some great conversations; sadly, virtually all of them were deleted when the sites they were on were taken down.

Back to the atheism panels at the convention: They were HUGELY popular. Absolutely jammed, standing room only. The atmosphere was the most positive experience I ever had at panels there, and I’d been on hundreds of panels there over a quarter-century. People from the audience would rush up to the panel afterwards, bursting with enthusiasm. The next panel would have to push everyone out of the room.

But things were going on behind the scenes. New leadership came in to the con; highly enlightened leadership which made a particular point of their moral superiority. Bathrooms became gender-free. Food in the con suite and Green room became gluten-free, meat-free, and sugar-free - and, of course, taste-free. It was basically all the lentil casserole you could eat, which for many of us was absolutely none.

The attitude of the new leadership towards the atheism panels was particularly odd. They started by changing the panel descriptions from focusing on friendly conversation and mutual understanding between theists and atheists to confrontation; literally nothing more than arguments between the two groups. At which point they then cancelled all of the atheism panels, because “they’re nothing but arguments”.

The final revelation came to me through back channels. Programming and the con committee had deliberately decided to permanently cancel atheism as a topic because “Atheism only interests straight white males”. Apart from the obvious hypocrisy of a self-proclaimed safe space con to justify banning a topic on that basis (and believe me, they allowed all sorts of topics of interest only to sub-groups), the claim wasn’t even true! The audiences at the atheism panels were easily among the most diverse of any I ever saw.

Things went downhill for the con from there. Old-timers were ruthlessly purged. I was banned from Programming because I’d used a balloon as part of my cosplay which was latex; latex wasn’t banned at the con, but that was still sufficient reason for excommunication. In a major scandal, it came out that some of the new leadership had been molesting and r@ping some attendees; the con leadership as a whole worked together to cover that up for as long as possible. Last I’d heard total attendance was down by 2/3.

But isn’t it interesting that atheism was the one acceptable target for complete exclusion?