A place for atheism at a Catholic college?

TORONTO — Talk about an unlikely course in an unlikely place.

The main chapel at Jesuit-run Regis College at the University of Toronto is adorned with stained glass windows, icons of Mary and Joseph, and the Stations of the Cross.

The eight-week course, which meets every Wednesday afternoon, is on atheism. Or more precisely, “Responding to 21st-Century Atheism.”

It’s an attempt, says the Rev. Scott Lewis, for people of faith to understand and come to terms with the increasingly muscular secularism and atheism that has arisen in Western societies over the past generation.

Atheism “has become militant, aggressive and proselytizing,” said Lewis, a Jesuit scripture scholar, who teaches the class with three other scholars. “It’s made great in-roads and is now socially acceptable. If you’re young and educated and believe in God, you’re (seen as) a jerk.”

While the course examines the increasing polarization between non-believers and people of faith, it will not be about confronting secularists or engaging in polemics, Lewis stressed before the first class of about 155 students in the adult-education program.

Both sides need to lighten up, he said.

“One idea for atheists to leave behind is that people who believe are stupid or naive,” Lewis suggested. “And perhaps we should leave behind the idea that an atheist is someone who is not ethical or a good person.

“A person can be a believer and be quite intelligent. A person can be an atheist and be quite a morally upright person.”

It’s the first time in memory that a Catholic academic institution in Canada has formally explored non-belief, but it nonetheless reflects the times. Five universities in the U.S. have secular humanist chaplains, and the University of Toronto now has two.

“I think it’s very natural to offer this course,” said one of the two Toronto chaplains, Mary Beaty. “Universities are encountering more and more students asking these types of questions.”

A study last autumn by the Pew Research Center found the number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace: One-fifth of the U.S. public, and a third of adults under 30, are religiously unaffiliated today, “the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.”

The study found that in the last five years alone, the unaffiliated have increased from just over 15 percent to just under 20 percent of all U.S. adults. Their ranks now include more than 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics (nearly 6 percent of the U.S. public), as well as nearly 33 million people who say they have no particular religious affiliation.

Other polls have suggested that as many as one in 10 U.S. adults are atheists.

Canadian census data show that atheists, agnostics, humanists and those with no religious affiliation account for 16 percent of the population, up 4 percentage points over the previous decade. They now represent the second-largest religious group in the country.

A Canadian Ipsos Reid poll released in 2011 found 30 percent of respondents did not believe in a deity.