<i>Up With Chris Hayes</i> Will Do an Atheism-Themed Show Tomorrow

The best cable news show on television is about to get even better. Apparently inspired by the Reason Rally, tomorrow’s episode of Up With Chris Hayes is billed as “an unprecedented look at atheism in America,” and will feature a panel with Richard Dawkins, Jamila Bey, Susan Jacoby, and Steven Pinker. Also appearing will be comedian and Reason Rally speaker Jamie Kilstein, journalist Robert Wright (an agnostic), and “a Christian clergyman [who] will reveal himself as an atheist.”

The show airs live at 8 AM EST on MSNBC, and lasts two hours. The complete episode will be made available online later in the day. They usually start posting segments at about 1:30 PM EST. Up, which premiered last September, gets good ratings, and clips from it are often picked up by blogs and news sites. This is an opportunity for very good visibility, and a step forward for getting atheism into the mainstream of national political discussion. For those who watch the show live and have Twitter accounts, the hashtag #Uppers is used by viewers who tweet about the show while it’s in progress.

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Anonymous

That’s great to hear. Being immature for a moment…uppers? Really? The chance that Hayes is unaware of the normal meaning of uppers is about equivalent to that of Marcus Bachmann having straight porn on his computer.
Anonymous

Yeah, I think the pun is intentional.
Jtlarsen

We didn’t actually choose the hashtag. Our viewers came up with it themselves and it stuck. Pretty sure that they, as early risers, were aware of the double meaning! (And thanks for the kind words about the show…)
Nilda Urrutia Estrany

Yeap! I’ve been a follower of Chris since before the show started, and the name of the show was a secret or undecided until a day or two before it’s first airing in September 2011. “Up”, which the show vaguely “defines” in the intro = “speak up, listen up, stand up, etc,”, plus he always ends the program with “thanks for getting up”. So, all of this to say that the fans of Up, ended being #uppers. Almost every week the hashtag gets hijacked by a few young people talking about “uppers” meaning amphetamines or other drugs, and I have made it my mission to respond with a nice tweet, something like this “This is a liberal political forum of fans of the show Up with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. Not a drug forum. Thanks.” In about 90% of the cases it ends there. I have also encountered a few a$$hole$, and those I ignore. I want to make clear I do that every time I see one, but jus as a personal mission.
Anonymous

It’s actually a pretty funny name. I love Chris, because he is actually willing to get into the wonky weeds of a subject and spend a good long time explaining a complicated concept to his viewers, instead of merely assuming they are idiots and throwing random 3D pie charts at them (I’m looking at you, CNN). I don’t live in the US though, so no Up for me until the podcast fairies at MSNBC get around to releasing the show as a podcast, since I’m rarely at liberty to spend much time in the video site, and I hate the format.

I’m sure Chris has plenty of fans in the heathen blogosphere, so give him our regards!
John A. Anderson

Enjoyed the show this morning. Very refreshing. It was nice to hear Chris describe himself as an atheist (I wonder if Maddow or Olbermann would have the courage to do that?), but was a bit disappointed in his accommodationist views, which he kept pushing on his guests.

Up With Chris Hayes Will Do an Atheism-Themed Show Tomorrow