When Andrew Sullivan wrote “America’s New Religions” in New York magazine recently, it’s possible he thought he was being somehow original or profound in declaring that everything — especially atheism — is “a religion”. In his fantastically long diatribe, full of magnificent words like “self-immolation” and “depravity”, he makes plenty of statements but never reaches a conclusion.

But no, he wasn’t being original. For many decades, religious apologists have mistakenly (or dishonestly) declared that “atheism is a religion” or the even funnier “it takes more faith to be an atheist than to believe in God”. It’s such a commonly repeated trope that I devoted an entire page to debunking it when I came out as an atheist. In short, There are no reasonable definitions of “atheism” and “religion” that overlap. But Sullivan is a smart guy, so he found an easy way around that problem: invent a new definition:

“By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).”

Which is weird because even that definition doesn’t overlap with atheism. In any way.

Sullivan’s essay veers after this, bouncing around from “scientism” and “materialism” to politics in the U.S., but I want to focus on this specific topic: Why is it so difficult to understand not having a religion? What is it about religion that is so toxic, so abjectly horrifying, that even religionists feel they must accuse their opposites of being infected with it too?

Imagine a person dying of a terrifying virus insisting that everyone else has the virus too. “Even you healthy people have this virus!” Does it somehow make him feel better to believe this?

Some might answer that the reason non-religiousness is so difficult to grasp is because it’s so rare and unusual. (In certain countries, this isn’t true. Sweden, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, and even the U.K. report atheist majorities.) Yet this doesn’t hold true for other topics in our lives. Most people in the U.S. drive or ride in automobiles, but we still believe it when we meet someone who doesn’t. It would be strange, in fact, if you met a non-auto user and insisted that they must also be riding in cars. “You just don’t realize it, sonny, but you ride in cars all the time.” No, he doesn’t, actually. He rides his bike or walks. Or vegetarianism. Only about three percent of U.S. adults are vegetarians, yet if someone tells me that they don’t eat meat, I take their word for it.

Atheists are also about three percent of the population in this country, yet it’s still startling how often the religious will accuse us of secretly believing in God, or making a “religion out of atheism”, or “having faith in evolution”. When I came out to my friends and family in 2015, one aunt wrote to me, accusing me of lying about not believing in God.

I have a couple of guesses, based on my previous experiences in religion.

One is that we were told early and often that “everyone believes in something” and that “all humans have a god-shaped hole in their hearts’. (Seriously. Multiple preachers and evangelists used this exact phrase.) The idea is that humans were created by God with the inability to live without belief. This isn’t necessarily backed up by the Bible, but the idea is propagated anyway. Some people, they say, will “harden their hearts’ or “sear their conscience” and it might seem like they don’t believe, but they really do. So, even when confronted with a real-life person who has zero current belief in any gods, they will smugly assume that I’m only fooling myself.

A second guess as to why they do this is their own firm belief that theirs is the right religion. As seen in Sullivan’s column, he lists other possible belief systems and concludes they must be empty or meaningless, a half-hearted attempt to replace the real thing (his version of Christianity, of course), which is the only belief system that can truly satisfy one’s spiritual cravings.

This reminds me of the Coke song: “It’s the real thing”. You might be drinking that unsatisfying generic cola, but we cool kids are drinking Coke. Nothing satisfies like the real thing.

For someone who is truly convinced, this is a reasonable position to take. It makes sense in that paradigm that anyone not experiencing the soul-satisfying “relationship with Jesus” must necessarily be longing for it and trying to fill that void via some other method. If this is the case, then, they’re not necessarily accusing us of having religion, per se, but that we’re trying to imitate or emulate religion without its true substance (God).

A third guess, and this is my final one, is that quite a few of the people making these claims are engaging in what is often called lying for Jesus. This means they really do understand that I have a complete lack of belief in any gods, and that nothing in my life meets any reasonable definition of “religion”, but that it serves some higher purpose for them to obfuscate the issue or outright lie. Perhaps to encourage their followers, or maybe it’s to confuse and draw in someone with doubts. I don’t know. But I have a difficult time believing that so many really smart people actually don’t understand this.