Penn Jillette

In November 2005 a magician read an essay on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, in the series This I Believe. Penn Jillette, of the magic act Penn & Teller, said that he believed there was no God. He was, he said, "beyond atheism": not believing in God takes no work, but believing that there is no God was a conviction, and it shaped every moment of his life.¹²

This chapter asks how a boy from a churchgoing family in a small New England town came to that belief, and how a showman, who made his living from honest deception, turned unbelief into part of the act and then, over the years, kept restating what it meant.

Greenfield and the youth group

He was born Penn Fraser Jillette in Greenfield, Massachusetts, on 5 March 1955, according to Wikipedia.³ His father worked at the county jail; his mother, by the same account, was a secretary.⁴ The family went to church; an interviewer's question in 2012 assumed that the boy had even mowed the church lawn, and his answer did not dispute it.⁵ He was, he said, interested in religion, as one should be.⁶ On the belief timeline, this is where his faith begins, and it is a weak mark: churchgoing, not a documented conviction.

At sixteen he was in the church youth group, led by a pastor he remembered as smart, well educated and wonderful. He read the Bible from cover to cover. What he found there appalled him: the contradictions, what he called its anti-humanness, and above all God telling Abraham to kill his son.⁷⁶ Asked in 2012 how he had gone from Christian to atheist, he answered: by reading the Bible. He added that he was not sure, at sixteen, that he was aware of all of it.⁸

When he had finished the Bible, he told his pastor he was an atheist, and from about sixteen he called himself one.⁹¹⁰ As he tells it, the pastor kept him in the youth group for about a year. Then he told Penn's parents that they could stop coming to church, because their son was doing a better job of turning the children into atheists than the pastor was of turning them into Christians.¹¹¹² That is Penn's recollection, forty years on, and no other account of it exists; Wikipedia's version, that he was asked to leave the church, compresses it.¹² The timeline places his doubt here, along with his private declaration, dated only by the age he gives.

His family did not divide over it. His father, he said, lived his whole life as a Christian and died one; his mother admitted she was an atheist only when she was over eighty. His parents' philosophy was live and let live, and there was no pressure either way.¹³¹⁴ In 2016 he wrote that the Christians of his childhood had treated him wonderfully, and that his saying there was no god had nothing to do with rebelling against them.¹⁵¹⁶

A magician who tells the truth

Wikipedia says that at eighteen he saw a show by the magician James Randi and admired a performer who told the audience openly that he was deceiving them.¹⁷ In August 1975 he gave his first show with Teller and Weir Chrisemer at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, and in 1981 he and Teller became Penn & Teller; the dates come from Wikipedia.¹⁸

Little survives of his unbelief in public before the new century. In a 1994 interview with Reason, arguing against censorship of violence in films and books, he remarked that every lunatic who kills people has a Bible lying around; it was an argument about the First Amendment, not a statement of his creed.¹⁹²⁰

Saying it out loud

From 2003 to 2010 Penn & Teller made Bullshit!, a series for the cable channel Showtime.²¹ One episode, in 2004, was on the Bible; it was not seen for this chapter.²² Critics in Slate and the A.V. Club found the series one-sided, by Wikipedia's summary.²³ In 2007, by Wikipedia's account, he took the "Blasphemy Challenge," denying the Holy Spirit on video.²⁴

Then came the radio essay of November 2005. It is the fullest early statement of his belief, and it is mostly about what that belief gave him. He did not need heaven; the love of his family was enough, and it seemed to him rude to beg the invisible for more. Believing there is no God meant that he could be forgiven only by kindness and faulty memories. It kept him honest, because he could be proven wrong. And it meant that the suffering he had seen in his own family was not the work of an all-powerful being who did not care to help, but something people might one day help each other with.^25262728 The timeline puts his public declaration here.

He was a showman, and his unbelief became part of the show. In August 2011 he published God, No!, in which, according to the trade journal Kirkus, each of the Ten Commandments is replaced with an atheist's suggestion.²⁹ Kirkus found it a digressive collection of thoughts from a wise-cracking atheist, and wrote that he seemed to want his readers to find him offensive and would be disappointed if they did not, while granting him a witty finesse.³⁰³¹ On the day of publication he wrote for CNN that what made him a libertarian was what made him an atheist: he did not know, and if he did not know, he did not believe.³²³³

A second book, Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday!, followed in 2012, about his family and life without religion.³⁴ In an interview that December he said he had been an "out of the closet atheist" for forty years. He called himself an atheist, but did not speak for the organisation American Atheists, and a skeptic, but did not speak for Randi's foundation.³⁵³⁶ He was in favour of proselytising, he said, though not to change anyone's mind.³⁶ Being open about it had not cost him anything; if anything it had made him more successful, and there was no real bravery in it for him.³⁷ Close to death, with guns pulled on him, in operating rooms and with a disease of the ear that might have killed him, he had never felt what the humanist Paul Kurtz called "the transcendental seduction."³⁸³⁹ What frightened him was not missing an afterlife but missing parts of this life.⁴⁰³⁹

Restatements

The belief itself has not moved in the record; what he has revised is what he calls it and what he ties to it. In 2012 he said that his atheism and his libertarianism both came from his optimism and were linked in his heart, though not by logic.⁴¹ In June 2016, for CNN, he put the labels in order. The attacks of 11 September 2001, he wrote, had not made people atheists but had made atheists speak up. "Atheist," he wrote, defined people by what they did not do. "Agnostic" answered the question of how much anyone can know, and every sane person was agnostic; but then one still had to say what one believed, and that came down to atheist or theist. A deist, he added, was really just an atheist before Darwin.⁴²⁴³¹⁶

Around 2020, according to Wikipedia, he stopped calling himself a libertarian. He told an interviewer that the break came during the pandemic lockdowns, when a libertarian group asked him to lead a demonstration against masks.⁴⁴ He kept the atheism. In 2014 a Las Vegas columnist reported him saying on his podcast that his children laughed whenever the word "god" came up.⁴⁵ On the timeline, this is his revision, and it is a restatement, not a reversal.

Did his unbelief change shape?

He came to his unbelief by a plain road: a teenager read the whole Bible and did not like what he found. After that his belief barely changed. What changed was its voice. A private remark to a pastor became, thirty years later, a credo on public radio, then a book, and then a careful set of definitions. He tied his atheism to his libertarian politics and then untied them, and he moved from "beyond atheism" to "agnostic on knowledge, atheist on belief" without, as far as the record shows, believing anything different. A magician who built his act on telling the audience it was being fooled applied the same rule to the Bible.

Christopher Hitchens, whose books shared a shelf with his in the same decade of public atheism, has his own chapter in this book.