I’ve often pointed out that the mainstream media seems curiously soft on religion, taking the stance that religion is good for America and can heal it in these troubled times. But they never ask—and don’t seem to care—whether religion is true. Instead, they insist that filling the “God-shaped hole”—a spiritual lacuna that supposedly exists in all of us—is what we need to be complete and happy human beings.
The New York Times is particularly guilty of pushing superstition as a nostrum. For two years, until 2023, they had a regular column and newsletter called “On Faith,” by Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest who relentlessly pushed religion. (You can see my many posts criticizing her here.) There were, of course, no atheists writing to point out that the God that Warren extolled weekly didn’t seem to exist.
Now Lauren Jackson, who professes nonbelief but is a spiritual “seeker”, has replaced Warren with a weekly newsletter and column called “Believing”. You can see the list of her columns here, and my post about the column here. Here’s one example below (click to read, or find it (archived here)
Jackson mourns her inability to fully believe:
I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.
For years, I haven’t been able to say that publicly. But it feels like something is changing. That maybe the culture is shifting. That maybe we’re starting to recognize that it’s possible to be both believing and discerning after all.
I don’t think so—not without evidence for God. Can you be discerning and believe in the Loch Ness Monster? That would be easier than believing in God, for at least there used to be some (now discredited) evidence for Nessie.
Here’s another more recent one (click to read), a column that proves that God is made in the image of humans and not the other way around:
A quote:
Reverend Albert Cleage, a leader in the Detroit civil rights movement, wanted to counter what he saw as white dominance of Christianity. He was also trying to make the church into an important center for Black political power. So he and his team commissioned an artist, Glanton Dowdell, to replace the old church building’s iconography, which at the time depicted a white pilgrim. Dowdell scouted a young Black mother and her 3-year-old son at a laundromat and told her she had a memorable face — a crisp jawline and sharp cheekbones. Would she allow him to paint her as a Black Mary?
She said yes. The resulting mural was radical for the time, but it served to both illustrate and venerate an emerging doctrine of Black liberation theology. Cleage was developing a gospel of Black nationalism, one that claimed Jesus was a Black revolutionary whose identity as such had been obscured by white people.
“The basic problem facing Black people is their powerlessness,” he once said.
Look, I don’t care what color God is, because I’m fully convinced that God is a man-made fiction. He’s a coloring book in the mind, and you can make God whatever sex or ethnicity you want. But none of that makes God’s existence more probable.
It’s curious that Jackson, who professes nonbelief, only writes positively about it, and doesn’t allow an atheistic point of view in her column. Though she herself is an unbeliever, you won’t see her discuss the problems with religion, nor will you see her write about Islam, save for tiny mentions. That’s because her brief is to console NYT readers by allowing them to think that religion is compatible with a modern, scientific outlook. Jackson, I believe, replaced Warren because Warren’s take on faith was too strong and was alienating readers. So the paper got themselves a “none” who writes good things about faith.
This also applies to the Free Press, whose softness on religion I’ve often mentioned. This piece, for example, came out just last week:
Here’s an excerpt:
There’s something simple yet profound about mingling with people who are different. At its very best, religion can tamp down feelings of distrust, disenchantment, and disconnection. At their very best, religious institutions are places where people from every economic background and political affiliation can set aside their differences and worship together. Instead of churches being engines of social capital generation and catalysts for building trust and tolerance, the growing polarization of American religion has left us lonelier, angrier, sicker, and more divided than ever before.
. . . . I am under no illusion that American religion is the greatest panacea for all that ails the United States. But people gathering under one roof to sing together, pray together, and work in common cause to create a better community and a better society will certainly move us closer to the ideals that were set forth by the Founding Fathers of our country. There’s nothing simpler and more consequential than people getting up on a Sunday morning, getting dressed, and making their way to a local house of worship.
For religion to effect these changes, isn’t it true that worshipers must share common beliefs about what’s true, and foremost among them must be the existence of God? Well, no, because I have friends who are atheists and nevertheless go to church for the social aspects: the singing, the fellowship, the comity based on a false premise that Kurt Vonnegut called a “granfaloon.” Oh, that we could have a latter-day Mencken, who made his name in journalism even though he wrote stuff like this!:
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
The worst thing is religions that conceal themselves.
New Age religions – like the swill Oprah has mainlined into the United States Zeitgeist for instance – are more obvious examples I think everyone would agree upon, but never come in a box labeled “Religion Inside!” (cf. “Intel Inside!”, remember?).
These appeal to the “spiritual but not religious” checkbox checkers. Homeopathic-Deepak-woo doesn’t advertise itself as “Religion Inside!”.
Maybe the books are in a “New Age / Spiritual / Religious” section in a bookstore. But even so…
The popularity of religion seems to be inversely proportional to the stability and security of a nation. So the more insecure and uncertain one’s life is, the more likely to seek comfort in the fantasy that religion offers.
The outlier is the pre-Trump US, the wealthiest and strongest nation in history yet soaked in religion. Perhaps that’s an indication of its levels of inequality — life is insecure for many in the US.
It also doesn’t explain people such as Jackson, who is presumably secure financially, yet still needs some source of spiritual comfort. Perhaps she just needs some mental therapy to determine the cause of her insecurity.
Who was the first major thinker in The West to promulgate “an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable?”
Plato.
We are still stuck in his toxic sandbox.
Until plato’s metaphysics is utterly rejected, “belief” will fester.
Ms Jackson appears to be filling the hole in her heart with Schrodinger’s catechism.
These days it’s pretty clear that Idealism from Plato thru Hegel thru NewAge thru the latest po-mo politics (Left and Right) has done a lot of damage. But empirical science is a latecomer to the party and its culture has not had much influence on the mainstream. I asked GPT-5 about it; you may be interested in the response:
What does C P Snow say about why the culture of empirical reality has had so little influence on mainstream Western culture?
[c. 300 words]
Compounds are jolly good things, like compound interest. Sir Humphrey was in scholarship form — classics not chemistry. 🙂
It’s unfashionable to criticize religion sharply, perhaps because most believers are not monsters but are sincere, and attacking sincere people who mean no harm is impolite. Often the believers are family members, friends, and neighbors.
Soft persuasion—no prayer in schools, no religion in the workplace, an increasingly secular background to life—encourages a drift away from religion as, of course, does the passing of one generation into another. Religious belief is so deeply embedded in U.S. that it will lose influence only slowly.
Despite occasional setbacks—and occasional columnists—I still think that religion is waning. The same factors that have led to its decline over the past couple of centuries are still in force.
Well, I guess that Dawkins, Hitchens, and Sam Harris were impolite with their three New Atheist books.
They, and I, have been attacking ideas, not people, and if they take it personally, that is their mistake. I for one am not going to use soft persuasion, which does not work anyway.
I have an emotional yearning for a higher power that will protect me and usher me into a next existence. I just can’t believe that one exists. Losing that belief has neither enriched my life nor made me a different person. But it has made me think about many things more deeply and skeptically.
The reason the press doesn’t have a Hitchens or Mencken-type figure blasting religion today is that therapy culture has taken over. Everyone is supposed to be a traumatized victim, and religion is considered a major form of therapy. Additionally, in an increasingly atomized world, where people spend more time looking at screens than talking to each other, some believe religion could bring people together. They forget that when religions are strong they spend their time fighting each other.
There needs to be an end to therapy culture. How refreshing it would be for media figures to say that one needs to be strong and reject superstition and religious sentiment, to say that “God-shaped holes” are for the weak and those who cannot handle life, and to say that we need to stop being victims and try to live and think as heroically as we can.
“Can you be discerning and believe in the Loch Ness Monster? That would be easier than believing in God, for at least there used to be some (now discredited) evidence for Nessie.”
Even if easier it might not be as comforting. Perhaps it’s time for the US to change the constitution and have a national religion. An innocuous form of Christianity would do the trick. Maybe Jefferson Christianity? Just make it official that the US was founded upon God’s word and these people will be happy. Not sure if that would have made Jefferson happy, but we needn’t care. Those who don’t believe can do exactly that: not believe. England has a national religion that’s quite harmless. Why not the US? The constitution can be amended to protect people of other religions as well those who are not religious. And if God exists, He might do a better job of protecting us from the enlightened.
That is a deeply flawed proposal, not least because the claim that the U.S. was “founded upon God’s word.”
“As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense
founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of
enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, and as
the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility
against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no
pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an
interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”
— Treaty of Tripoli, 1796
Separation of church and state protects freedom of conscience. We need more of it, not less.
During the sixties and seventies Father Rousas Rushdoony wrote a number of books outlining his philosophy of Christian Reconstructionism. He felt the world was doomed unless everyone submitted to God. Rushdoony therefore demanded the death penalty for adultery, blasphemy, homosexuality, idolatry, lying, and witchcraft. People of the wrong religion and obstinate children would not be spared. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson realized that removing the calls for the death penalty would make Rushdoony’s philosophy palatable to millions of Americans. The resulting philosophy became known as Christian Dominionism.
The Republican Party today is full of Christian Reconstructionists and Dominionists. They have a stranglehold on government. The idea that they would change our Constitution to provide an innocuous form of Christianity is laughable.
Whenever I’ve been called for legal proceedings such as jury duty, I’ve made it quite clear that I’m an atheist and refuse to swear an oath to God. I’ve been lucky: a secular oath is available in my state. And yet an acquaintance of mine in the same state had to fight it out with a bailiff who insisted the God oath was mandatory. How innocuous is that? The bailiff lost, but in other states atheists I know have been jailed. Making religious people happy has pitfalls.
You cannot be serious. You want us to establish a national religion? A form of Christianity? You are joking, aren’t you?
Yes. Absolutely. I am joking. But there are people who want Christianity as a national religion, or close. I used to listen to Catholic radio while driving and I recall someone explaining his interpretation of the First Amendment. In his opinion, the federal government was meant to be neutral with respect to denominations of Christianity. Therefore it was perfectly all right for the government to suppress religions that did not have roots in the Christian tradition. I can’t recall if he expressed a view on Judaism. I was amused. But I was not being serious above.
I don’t listen to Catholic radio as much now. But it kept me entertained at one time.
The gorgeous cathedral at Einsielden in Switzerland has a Black Mary, of medieval origin.
Years ago I read a biography of Augustus, who (among many other things) promoted religions throughout the Empire, including Judaism in the province of Judea. According to the author, Augustus was not a believer himself but regarded religion as a force that promoted social cohesion. Perhaps that is where these writers in the NYT and Free Press are coming from. Or perhaps the focus on the Judeo-Christian traditions of the West is a reaction to the aggressiveness of Islam. Or maybe both.
Speaking of which, the previous comment “England has a national religion that’s quite harmless” is incorrect. Islam is far from harmless!
“The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.” – Gibbon
Great quote!
Trump’s letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister is about as elegant an Exhibit for applying the 25th Amendment as would be possible to write.
Heather Cox Richardson writes:
” The message read:
“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”
International affairs journalist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic the childish grammar in the message, and pointed out—again—that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is not the same thing as the Norwegian government, and neither of them is Denmark, a different country. She also noted that Trump did not, in fact, end eight wars, that Greenland has been Danish for centuries, that many “written documents” establish Danish sovereignty there, that Trump has done nothing for NATO, and that European NATO members increased defense spending out of concern over Russia’s increasing threat.
This note, she writes, “should be the last straw.” It proves that “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him….”
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctor Jonathan Reiner agreed: “This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.””
Whether channeled this way or that, isn’t religious faith a product of evolution? All human societies have faith(s). Just as all have stories, fantasy, boogie-men, singing, hierarchies, etc. Humans have a desire, maybe a need, to bond. One is free to reject or opt-out (in many societies). Institutions like the NYT try to promote cohesion, and good. Truth serves science, but not necessarily society.