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London: More than 100,000 former Christians have
downloaded "certificates of de-baptism" in a bid to
publicly renounce the faith, according to the
London-based National Secular Society (NSS).
Terry Sanderson, the society's president,
 says
the group started the online de-baptism initiative five
years ago to mock the practice of baptizing infants too
young to consent to religious rites.
Their web site invites visitors to "Liberate yourself
from the Original Mumbo-Jumbo that liberated you from
the Original Sin you never had" and allows them to print
out a paper certificate that uses quasi-formal language
to "reject baptism's creeds and other such
superstitions."
But in recent months, as tens of thousands began to
download the certificate, organizers realized that they
had struck a chord with atheists and once devout church
members who are leaving churches they see as
increasingly out of tune with modern life. "Churches
have become so reactionary, so politically active that
people actually want to make a protest against them
now," Sanderson says. "They're not just indifferent
anymore.
They're actively hostile." The campaign has become so
popular with nearly 1,000 certificates downloaded each
week that the NSS has started taking orders for
certificates printed on parchment, at $4.50 each;
they've sold nearly 2,000 in just three weeks. "Every
time the Pope says something outrageous we get another
rush on the certificate," Sanderson says, noting that
traffic to the site skyrocketed last month following
Pope Benedict XVI's comment that condoms could worsen
the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa.
Public gaffes like that one may explain the
anti-Catholic backlash driving similar movements
elsewhere in the world. In October last year, Italy's
Union of Rationalist Atheist and Agnostics sponsored the
country's first-ever "De-baptism Day," when the no
longer faithful attended protests and passed out
de-baptism forms to areligious people who didn't have
internet connections to download them. More recently, on
March 2, 2009, atheists and feminists in Argentina
teamed up to launch the "Not in my Name" Internet
campaign which encourages Roman Catholics to notify
their local bishops of their desire to officially leave
the church. So far more than 1,800 have joined their
Facebook group or signed the petition on their website.
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