Category: secularism

A conservative argues for mandatory school prayer to stem the increase in nonbelief

May 16, 2020 • 11:30 am

Where else would you find a mushbrain argument like this except in The American Conservative? For it not only sees the decline in religiosity in America as a bad thing, but, importantly, blames it on the lack of mandatory prayer in schools, which, they say, makes religion seem “taboo” to kids and weans them from their faith.

Implicit in all this is that the First Amendment is a bad thing, at least insofar as it is held by the courts to apply in schools. Also implicit is the idea that religion is a good thing. The argument, also implicit, is that we should change the First Amendment, or at least the way it’s been interpreted, so that kids can not only pray in schools (which they can—on their own), but have organized prayer in schools.

So here is the argument:

1.) Religion has declined in America not because of increasing wealth, well being, education, but because of the increasing secularization of education. Author Helen Andrews gives two lines of evidence for this conclusion:

A new report from the American Enterprise Institute has a different explanation. “The most likely causes of declining religiosity are the increasingly intense role that more and more secularized educational institutions play in children’s lives,” author Lyman Stone writes, plus “the continuing delay and decline of marriage.” It is not education that makes people less religious, he argues, but specifically secular education.

There’s no further mention of marriage in the article, though it’s also supposed to contribute to America’s godlessness.

I haven’t read the report, and maybe they have real data about this, but I doubt it, for the “increasingly intense role” of secularized education simply means the banning of mandatory school prayers in American schools, which occurred in the Sixties. And, as the chart below shows, the real increase in “nones”—those lacking affiliation to a church or feeling that they have no religion—has occurred after 1970. When I went to secondary school in the sixties, there was already no school prayer, and yet since then the loss of religion has skyrocketed. If the author’s argument is correct, nonbelief should have begun increasing in the 1960s, not as late as 1975, and of course there would be no reason for a continual increase.

 

Source

2.) In fact, the decline of religiosity is imputed almost solely to a “more secular schooling” rather than people becoming less religious because they either give up faith or were raised in a less religious home. The New Atheists take a hit:

That education would have something to do with secularization fits with what we know about when secularization happens. Contrary to the New Atheists’ heroic pose, the rise of the “nones” is not driven by the mature decisions of adults but by habits being formed (or not) in childhood. “The story of secularization in America is not mostly a story of lots of people who were raised religious leaving their religious faith as adults,” Stone explains. “It is a story of fewer people having a religious upbringing at all.”

Yes, but why are people having less religious upbringings? Even if this were the case, It must be a case of the priorities of the parents, not the absence of prayers in schools.

3.) Further evidence for the importance of religion in schools comes from—get this—countries where religious school systems shift to secular ones:

Stone points to test cases in France and Turkey where secularization followed not just from expanded access to education but from shifts from religious to secular schools. “If educational attainment drives secularization, then spending two more years in school should reduce religiosity, even if that school is a religious school,” he theorizes. In fact, longitudinal studies have found that attending a religious school is associated with greater religiosity later in life.

But of course when you’re immersed in religious education during the whole day, and that’s taken away, you’re not going to be as wedded to faith. But that’s different from having a two-minute school prayer once a day: the frequent drill in America in the Sixties.  In religious schools you’re marinated in delusion all day.

3.) Equally dubious is Andrews’s argument that if you can’t pray in school, kids see that as abnormal, a taboo. And that makes them less religious.

But if the AEI report is right, there is something irreplaceable about those hours between nine and three. The atheist’s knockdown argument against school prayer — that there are plenty of other hours in a day to pray in — was based on a fallacy. Society either teaches its children that religion is something normal or something taboo. Banning prayer from schools teaches them that religion is not normal.

Seriously? If there’s no mandatory prayer in school, people are going to think religion is taboo? I doubt they’d think of it at all. And if they asked “why can’t we pray in school”, they could get an answer from Andrew Seidel of the Freedom from Religion Foundation: you are allowed to pray in school on your own time; it just can’t be mandated. You can pray in the cafeteria, at recess, on the playground, and so on, and no teacher is going to stop you! In fact, they wouldn’t be allowed to stop you.

Andrews is making a desperation argument based on the unstoppable secularization of America. But she’s not going to get her school prayer, and the “nones” will continue to increase. So it goes.

h/t: Barry

Pandemic relief causes U.S. government to violate First Amendment by paying churches

April 9, 2020 • 9:30 am

You can either read the transcript of this 3-minute National Public Radio report or listen to it—both by clicking on the link below. It turns out that, as part of the $350 billion dollars that the U.S. government has earmarked for loans to help cash-strapped small-businesses during the pandemic, churches and “faith-based organizations” have also been classified as “businesses.”

You can read the guidelines from the Small Business Administration here, which note that “faith-based organizations are eligible to receive SBA loans regardless of whether they provide secular social services.”  Note that this distinguishes religious organizations from other non-profit outfits, which do provide secular social services.

In this case, then, the government is taking the place of the collection plate, and by so doing violating the First Amendment, which has been interpreted to forbid government subsidies to religion. (Will they give loans to atheist organizations?) According to NPR, this initiative was the product of—who could guess it?—President Trump and Vice-President Pence, clearly trying to firm up their religious base.

Now I wouldn’t object too strongly if, during emergencies like this, subsidies could be given to religious organizations to help fund purely social activities: feeding the homeless, providing clothing and essentials, and the like, but not for proselytizing or doing religious outreach. But, over time, federal courts have slowly been taking down the wall between church and state, allowing religious monuments on public lands because they’re said to be “cultural monuments without religious significance,” and so on. That’s on top of continuing but palpably unconstitutional activities like allowing ministers (but not heads of organizations like the Freedom From Religion Foundation) to have a tax-free housing allowance. As the report notes:

Advocates for government funding of religious institutions argue that denying them aid that is available to nonreligious institutions amounts to discrimination, and the U.S. Supreme Court has recently declined to challenge such support.

“In the last 15 years, the Court has moved increasingly in a permissive direction,” says John Inazu, who specializes in religion and law at Washington University in St. Louis’ School of Law. “There’s just an increased willingness by the court to allow for direct funding of religious entities.”

In prior years, the federal government has generally steered clear of such funding, although it has freed religious institutions from paying taxes and made donations to them tax-deductible.

Under existing SBA regulations, among the for-profit businesses declared ineligible for loans are those “principally engaged in teaching, instructing, counseling or indoctrinating religion or religious beliefs, whether in a religious or secular setting.”

That rule, however, may soon be eliminated.

The SBA statement on the participation of faith-based organizations in the new loan program declares that some agency regulations “impermissibly exclude some religious entities. Because those regulations bar the participation of a class of potential recipients based solely on their religious status, SBA will decline to enforce these subsections and will propose amendments to conform those regulations to the Constitution.”

The rationale, then, is that by not giving loans to churches and other religious organizations, the government is discriminating against them, which advocates say is itself a violation of the First Amendment. But it’s one thing to further secular activities of businesses, and another thing entirely to support proselytizing and worship, as the current SBA policy recognizes. If anything violates the First Amendment, it’s our government giving financial aid to further worshiping and proselytizing.

Texas man endows first professorship of secular studies at a public university: UT Austin

February 8, 2020 • 10:30 am

You may already know that the country’s first—and still, I think, only—college program in Secular Studies is at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, founded by the estimable sociologist Phil Zuckerman. (You can see the curriculum here.)

Well, as the Austin Statesman (should they change it to “Statesperson”?) reported yesterday, The University of Texas at Austin has now received a $1 million endowment from a long-time secularist to fund a faculty position in secular research. It’s not a program, nor even a position for a new faculty member, but a lucrative chair for an existing UTA faculty member. And it’s the first endowed chair for secular research at a public university in the U.S. (They may exist in other countries, but I don’t know.)

Click on the screenshot to read the story.

Bolton somehow managed to accumulate a lot of money as a professor, which is unusual but, in this case, useful (he may have been independently wealthy). From the paper:

A Georgetown resident who has never set foot on the University of Texas campus has given $1 million to the school for a new professorship to focus on a growing segment of the U.S. population that holds no religious views.

The endowment is coming from Brian Bolton, 80, who is retired after a 35-year career in academia. He was an assistant professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology from 1968 to 1971. From 1971 to 2002, Bolton was a professor of rehabilitation and an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas.

Bolton said he has never visited UT but shares common values with the educational institution. “My 35-year career was dedicated to scholarship and research in academia,” he said. “I know UT is a great university, and that’s all I need to know.”

Bolton said he wanted to donate the money to make a lasting impact.

What’s curious about this report are three issues. First, a million bucks is enough to endow a new professor, but they’re going to choose somebody already on the faculty. I doubt that there would be someone already there who’s doing “secular studies” in the manner of Zuckerman.

The indented statements are from the Statesman piece:

UT will not be hiring a new professor for Bolton’s endowment but will choose one who is already on the faculty, said Justin Michalka, the executive director of development for the College of Liberal Arts. The university has not yet chosen who that will be, he said.

Second, the University’s director of development is curiously silent about Bolton’s endowment:

Michalka declined to comment further on Bolton’s donation.

Finally, the paper says there’s a university news release on Bolton’s endowment, but I can’t find it (my emphasis):

“During the past two decades there has been significant increase in the U.S. among those who associate with a secular worldview, a trend particularly pronounced in younger people, prompting increased research in this emerging field,” according to a university news release on Bolton’s endowment.

I’m sufficiently cynical to think that they’ve deep-sixed that statement (readers can see if it’s on the Internet), and are playing down the endowment. Perhaps they like the dosh, but secularism, while it may play well in Austin, isn’t particularly popular in the rest of Texas. Or so I think, and I’d be glad to be proven wrong. The reader who sent me the link to the newspaper piece is contacting the reporter to try to find the university statement.

Bolton’s endowment has already been announced by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which recounts his generous support of their organization—also implying that Bolton has a source of money beyond an academic salary.

Brian Bolton is a longtime Life Member, for whom the executive wing of FFRF’s office, Freethought Hall, is named, due to his support of FFRF’s headquarters expansion. Bolton has also singlehandedly underwritten for a decade now FFRF’s essay contest for grad/older students, with up to $10,000 prize money in total. And he is financing a bible accountability project to call attention to the continuing harm of the bible to society that includes subsidization of the cost of mailing FFRF Director of Strategic Response Andrew L. Seidel’s recent book, The Founding Myth, to every member of Congress last fall. FFRF will be publishing Bolton’s new work, tentatively titled Why the Bible Is Not a Good Book, this year. Bolton, who lives in Texas, will be speaking briefly at FFRF’s annual convention in San Antonio in November.

“Now, the best public university in an immensely important state has a researcher focusing on a woefully neglected segment of the population,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “And it’s all thanks to Brian Bolton, who has been munificently boosting the secular movement.”

I’ve been to that new executive wing; it’s lovely, and must have cost a pretty penny. Here’s a photo I took when I visited in March of 2018:

By the way, if you’re ever in Madison, you must visit the headquarters. You can even pose with the life-sized statue of Darwin, as I did. It’s amazingly lifelike:

But enough about the money; here’s some more stuff about Bolton from the FFRF:

Bolton is a retired academic psychologist with a background in mathematics, statistics and psychometrics. His contributions in psychological measurement, personality assessment and rehabilitation psychology have been recognized by universities and psychological societies. His 10 edited and authored books include Handbook of Measurement and Evaluation in Rehabilitation, Psychosocial Adjustment to Disability, Rehabilitation Counseling: Theory and Practice, and Special Education and Rehabilitation Testing: Current Practices and Test Reviews. He is a licensed psychologist, Humanist minister, Karate black belt, and Distinguished Toastmaster.

If you want to read even more, nine years ago the FFRF featured an interview about Bolton on its “Meet A Member” feature. A few excerpts:

Where I’m headed: The same terminal condition as all sentient life forms — eternal nonexistence or everlasting nothingness.

Person in history I admire: Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant statesman and intellectual whose numerous accomplishments helped establish the robust government under which we thrive today.

A quotation I like: “Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause.” (George Washington, 1792 letter to Edward Newenham)

These are a few of my favorite things: Supporting animal welfare and environmental protection, reading philosophy and science, writing freethought articles, and raising African leopard tortoises.

These are not: FOX News, religious fundamentalism, sports evangelism, conservative politics.

How long I’ve been a freethinker: All my life.

Why I’m a freethinker: Even though I attended Sunday school as a child, my soul was never captured. My transition from indifferent unbeliever to outspoken nontheist was brought about by Falwell, LaHaye and Swaggart.

He’s an animal and environment lover, too—a fellow after my own heart! We’re still digging to find out of the University of Texas deleted the announcement of the donation, and I’ll report back.

h/t: Reese

The NYT’s Christmas sermon: Jesus presented as real

December 24, 2019 • 12:45 pm

The op-ed piece below, which is the most prominent article in today’s New York Times Opinion section (top right of webpage), is an example of how religious delusions get mainstreamed, simply by being presented as if they were incontestably real. (Note: the piece isn’t the paper’s opinion, but they decided to publish it.)

The author, Peter Wehner, is a conservative Presbyterian who works at a right-wing think tank and served in the Reagan administration as well as both Bush administrations. He’s also a contributing opinion editor for the Times, and seems to come up with a faith-osculating piece every Christmas (here’s 2018‘s and 2017‘s), as well as various other kinds of apologetic palaver (e.g., here, a piece that I criticized).

His homily for 2019 (click on screenshot below) is a sermon on the misunderstanding of “the power of Jesus.” And the paradox lies in its title: Christmas is supposed to “humble” us, but who has more hubris than a man willing to state in the New York Times that the entire Jesus story—complete with the Incarnation and the actual words Jesus is quoted in the Bible as speaking, really happened?  Wehner is not using Jesus as a metaphor to guide our behavior, but as a real-life person who was the son of God.

Wehner’s message, though long-winded, is simple, and summarized in the first four paragraphs:

If you were wholly unfamiliar with the life of Jesus and listened only to what many Christians in America say today, you could be forgiven for thinking that the most important thing Christianity values is worldly power — the power to control and compel, to impose one’s will on others, to vanquish one’s enemies. Blessed are the politically powerful and the well connected, you might assume, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The birth and life of Jesus shatter this narrative. Those of us of the Christian faith believe that Christmas Day represents the moment of God’s incarnation, when this broken world became his home. But it was an entrance characterized not by privilege, comfort, public celebration or self-glorification; it was marked instead by lowliness, obscurity, humility, fragility.

The circumstances of Jesus’ birth “were calculated to establish his detachment from power and authority in human terms,” wrote Malcolm Muggeridge, a 20th-century British journalist who converted late in life to Christianity.

That could be said not just about Jesus’ birth but also his entire life, which was in many respects an inversion of what the world, including much of the Christian world, prizes.

Well it’s a good thing that Wehner is deeply familiar with the life of Jesus—as recounted in that work of fiction known as the Bible—so he can pile Jesus’s episodes of humility atop one another. “Blessed be the meek”, footwashing, rich men seen as camels straining to go through a needle’s eye, etc., etc. Jesus held no worldly power: indeed, as the 2000-year-old novel tells us, he was destroyed by people with power, the Romans.

So Wehner tells us the locus of God’s real power, to wit:

.  . . strength that is not coercive, domineering, prideful and self-seeking but rather compassionate, sacrificial, humble and empathetic. God’s power, perfected through our weakness, makes us instruments of mercy, seekers of justice, agents of reconciliation. It helps us see the world in a different way.

Well, he doesn’t mention that God also has the power to cast people into Hell if they don’t believe in Jesus, for, as Jesus told us in the Big Novel, the only way to the Father was through him. God as a tyrant is constantly on display in both Old and New Testaments. But let’s not emphasize that on this Christmas eve!

Like most liberal religionists, Wehner’s essential message is a humanistic one: be good to each other, support each other, and help those less fortunate than we are. I have no quarrel with that. What bothers me is that he draws these messages from the Jesus story, and tells the Times‘s readers that the whole kit and kaboodle, as presented in the New Testament, really happened.

I wonder how the Times editors would react if some author presented the theology of Scientology, complete with Xenu, thetans, and nuclear weapons, as if it were all true, and then used it to draw conclusions about how we should treat our fellow humans. (After all, Scientologists claim that they’re all about helping humanity.)

Of course we’ll never see a column like that, for Scientology is a new religion and it’s palpably clear that its “theology” is pure hokum. The only reason Christianity can be presented as real, and as a support for morality, is that over two millennia its fictional background has become so widespread that it doesn’t seem ridiculous. But it is, and Wehner makes himself a figure of fun by presenting an Iron Age Paul Bunyan as a real character.

Young people continue to abandon religion in America

December 15, 2019 • 9:30 am

Nate Silver’s site FiveThirtyEight is famous for accurate election forecasts, though it ruined its record in 2016 by giving Hillary Clinton a 71% chance of winning. Well, to be fair, that was a close one, and at any rate today’s report is not about politics but religion. And it’s not even the site’s own poll, but a report on two new polls by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Pew Research Center. Both show that Millennials are abandoning established religions in droves. Given that AEI is a somewhat conservative site while Pew seems to be soft on faith, the data showing that Millennials are less religious than expected, and, unlike previous generations, are not coming back to the faith after leaving it, can be seen as credible.  Click on the screenshot to read 538’s report:

I’ll be brief here because this is part of a continuing trend of secularization in America, a trend that has been shown in many earlier surveys, and that I’ve written about several times.  The site defines “Millennial” as someone between age 23 and age 38, i.e., those born between 1981 and 1996.  Here are the salient results:

  • Four in ten Millennials identify as “nones,” in other words they are not affiliated with a church. As for the trend, the recent Pew survey shows this:

. . . the data shows a wide gap between older Americans (Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation) and Millennials in their levels of religious affiliation and attendance. More than eight-in-ten members of the Silent Generation (those born between 1928 and 1945) describe themselves as Christians (84%), as do three-quarters of Baby Boomers (76%). In stark contrast, only half of Millennials (49%) describe themselves as Christians; four-in-ten are religious “nones,” and one-in-ten Millennials identify with non-Christian faiths. 

You can see the generational trend in the bar graph below, as well as the fact that loss of religion in the last decade—or at least formal religion, as not all “nones” are unbelievers—cuts across all demographic groups. Note that unaffiliateds have increased significantly in every group save the silent generation, with a paltry 1% increase. And, of course, the nones have grown faster among Democrats than among Republicans, but even in the latter group there’s been a decrease of 7% in self-described Christians and a 6% increase in “nones”:

Across all Americans, those who self-describe as Protestant or Catholic have decreased since 2007, the “nones” have increased, while self-described atheists and agnostics have risen moderately (about 2-3%, which is still more than a doubling from 12 years ago). I suspect that there are actually more atheists and agnostics than depicted in the graph below, as it’s easier for people to say they’re “nothing in particular” than to say that they’re nonbelievers.

  • The AEI survey compiled Millennials’ reasons for their increased “none-ness.” First, more of them have been raised as “not religious” (17% compared to 5% of Baby Boomers), and raising has a big influence on your beliefs later in life. Of course this fact doesn’t explain why increasingly fewer kids are raised religious, but punts the data to the question: Why are fewer children raised as religious? There are many possible reasons for this, but I’m just documenting the facts.Second, Millennials are married to nonreligious people more often, and religious spouses tend to draw people back to the church. But this, too, is simply a reflection of the increasing number of “nones”: the more nones there are, the more likely you are to marry one.Finally—and here at last we have a reason—538 says “Changing views about the relationship between morality and religion also appear to have convinced many young parents that religious institutions are simply irrelevant or unnecessary for their children.”

In other words, Enlightenment Now! As time passes, and we see the increasing immorality of religion (viz., Catholic child rape, Islamic oppression), its attractions wane. And we also see European countries, far more secular than the U.S., not being immoral, but in fact being more moral than America in many ways. Finally, the well-known positive correlation between being well off and being less religious is taking effect as the rising tide in America is affecting all the boats.

There’s one more reason in the 538 piece: “A majority (57%) of millennials agree that religious people are generally less tolerant of others, compared to only 37% of Baby Boomers.” I’m not sure why the increasing recognition of what is true (American religion by definition is intolerant), but it’s a synergistic effect, I think. For as secularism increases, religious people become more defensive and vociferous, and that can manifest itself as intolerance.

At any rate, FiveThirtyEight sees two big implications of this trend. The first I see as just plain weird, for they’re worried about it:

Why does it matter if millennials’ rupture with religion turns out to be permanent? For one thing, religious involvement is associated with a wide variety of positive social outcomes like increased interpersonal trust and civic engagement that are hard to reproduce in other ways.

We hear this all the time, and some of the results may be correct. On the other hand, I don’t much care given the data from nonreligious countries like Denmark and Sweden, which show us that the loss of faith in a nation needn’t have dire consequences. (The data cited are, of course, all within the U.S.) “Hard to reproduce in other ways”? Ask the Swedes and Danes! Finally, I’d rather have a country based on rationality, especially when the citizens do practice “civic engagement.”

The site’s second conclusion is that because Democrats lose faith faster than Republicans, the gap between parties will widen:

As we wrote a few months ago, whether people are religious is increasingly tied to — and even driven by — their political identities. For years, the Christian conservative movement has warned about a tide of rising secularism, but research has suggested that the strong association between religion and the Republican Party may actually be fueling this divide. And if even more Democrats lose their faith, that will only exacerbate the acrimonious rift between secular liberals and religious conservatives.

Ask me if I care! Are we supposed to engage in superstitious delusions just so Democrats and Republicans can be friends? We don’t have to hate Republicans to reject their ideology and their platform, but neither should we worry about increasing secularism exacerbating the political divide. For one thing, in the distant future almost nobody will be religious in America. And really, what can we do about it—save the unpalatable solution of re-indoctrinating our children in baseless superstitions?

___________

UPDATE: Reader Pliny the in Between has a relevant cartoon at The Far Corner Cafe, making the point that “nones” can still—and often do—subscribe to magical thinking.

h/t: Barry

Is the religiosity of the Right driving the secularization of the Left?

September 22, 2019 • 9:30 am

In this piece from last Wednesday, Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux in Five Thirty Eight (henceforth “538”) discusses the increasing religious nonbelief of liberals, as opposed to that of conservatives or moderates. (Click on screenshot to read.)

There’s little doubt that liberals are losing their faith (or not taking up faith) at a higher rate than are other political groups, as you can see from this graph:

And, as a group, the more liberal you are, the more likely you are to be a “none”: those people unaffiliated with a religion or church. (Note: nones can believe in God, though many don’t.) As 538 notes:

As recently as the early 1990s, less than 10 percent of Americans lacked a formal religious affiliation, and liberals weren’t all that much likelier to be nonreligious than the public overall. Today, however, nearly one in four Americans are religiously unaffiliated. That includes almost 40 percent of liberals — up from 12 percent in 1990, according to the 2018 General Social Survey. The share of conservatives and moderates who have no religion, meanwhile, has risen less dramatically.

Other statistics quoted by Thomson-DeVeaux:

  • ” . . . since 1990, the share of liberals who never attend religious services has tripled. And they’re less likely to believe in God: The percentage of liberals who say they know God exists fell from 53 percent in 1991 to 36 percent in 2018.”
  • “. . . views about religion and its role in American society have become increasingly polarized. According to surveys by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of liberals who believe that churches and religious organizations positively contribute to society dropped from nearly half (49 percent) in 2010 to only one-third (33 percent) today. And according to 2016 data from the Voter Study Group, only 11 percent of people who are very liberal say that being Christian is at least fairly important to what it means to be American — compared to 69 percent of people who identify as very conservative.”

This difference, and the trend, are facts that have been documented before. There are two questions, however: why the connection between political ideology and religiosity?, and “why are liberals becoming secular faster than those adhering to other ideologies?” While Thomson-DeVeaux doesn’t answer the former, I’m not sure that her answer to the latter question is correct.

What’s her explanation? That as the Right becomes increasingly religious, and its political stands increasingly bound up with Christian dictates, it’s driving people (especially young people) to the Left. And that may be true, at least in part. But the evidence adduced by 538 to support this claim isn’t very convincing. Here it is:

1.)  Thomson-DeVeaux says this:

For one thing, the timing made sense. In the 1990s, white evangelical Protestants were becoming more politically powerful and visible within conservative politics. As white evangelical Protestants became an increasingly important constituency for the GOP, the Christian conservative political agenda — focused primarily on issues of sexual morality, including opposition to gay marriage and abortion — became an integral part of the the party’s pitch to voters, but it was still framed as part of an existential struggle to protect the country’s religious foundation from incursions by the secular left. Hout and Fischer argued that the Christian right hadn’t just roused religious voters from their political slumber — left-leaning people with weaker religious ties also started opting out of religion because they disliked Christian conservatives’ social agenda.

Yes, but a temporal correlation is not a causation. Perhaps the causes were reversed: the Right became more Christianized as a reaction to what they saw as an increasing secularization of America—a trend that is pervasive not just in the U.S. but in the West as a whole. I think secularization is inevitable given the rise of science, the spread of education, and the lack of evidence for religious claims that, in earlier times, seemed to be the only explanations for phenomena now seen to be purely naturalistic.

2.) More from the article:

But within the past few years, [Michele] Margolis and several other prominent political scientists have concluded that politics is a driving factor behind the rise of the religiously unaffiliated. For one thing, several studies that followed respondents over time showed that it wasn’t that people were generally becoming more secular, and then gravitating toward liberal politics because it fit with their new religious identity. People’s political identities remained constant as their religious affiliation shifted.

Yes, but the question is why their religious affiliation has shifted. Young people throughout the West are becoming more secular, and it can’t always be in reaction to Right-wing religiosity.  As The Washington Post reported in 2016, exactly 0% of young Icelanders believe that God created the Earth, and the secularization of that nation is increasing very quickly:

But this can’t be due to a reaction against the Right, as Icelandic politics are in general progressive, and I could find no evidence that the more conservative politicians are increasingly embracing religion. I think it’s far more likely that Bjarni Jonsson is correct when he says:

“Secularization [in Iceland] has occurred very quickly, especially among younger people,” said Bjarni Jonsson, the managing director of the Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association, an atheist nongovernmental organization. “With increased education and broad-mindedness, change can occur quickly.”

3.) Finally, here’s the only “telling” evidence supporting 538’s hypothesis:

Other research showed that the blend of religious activism and Republican politics likely played a significant role in increasing the number of religiously unaffiliated people. One study, for instance, found that something as simple as reading a news story about a Republican who spoke in a church could actually prompt some Democrats to say they were nonreligious. “It’s like an allergic reaction to the mixture of Republican politics and religion,” said David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame and one of the study’s co-authors.

The first paper (pdf here)says this:

Rising none rates are more common in Republican states in this period [2000-2010]. Moreover, when the Christian Right comes into more public conflict, such as over same-sex marriage bans, the rate of religious nones climbs.

So yes, the greater the religiosity of a state, the faster the rise of the nones, but while this provides a modicum of support for Thomson-DeVeaux’s hypothesis, it doesn’t explain why the rise of secularism is higher among liberals than among more conservative groups. (I’m not rejecting her hypothesis, but arguing that the evidence is not very strong, and there could be other factors as well.

As for reading the news story—a classical undergraduate psychological “prompting” experiment—this is a short-term effect, and I’m wary of what this kind of study means. After all, one such study showed that after reading a “no free will” prompt, undergraduates cheated more often in an immediate psychological test. That led the authors, and many others, to claim that promulgating the doctrine of determinism would lead to society’s downfall. But at least two attempts to replicate that study, using identical methods, gave no result, and another study gave the opposite result. And really, is an effect that lasts ten minutes going to last a lifetime?

So while Thomson-DeVeaux might be partially correct in her “liberals become secular as conservatives cling to God” hypothesis, it’s likely not as simple as that.

The article concludes by suggesting that, in fact, this religious polarization of the electorate is a bad thing for Democrats, as it hurts that party’s need to collect religious voters, and also tends to polarize politics as a whole:

The political implications of this shift are already evident. As more liberals become nonreligious, the Democratic Party’s base is growing more secular, complicating the party’s efforts at reaching more religious voters.

. . . But [David] Campbell warned that this shift is already reducing churches’ ability to bring a diverse array of people together and break down partisan barriers. That, in his view, threatens to further undermine trust in religious groups and make our politics more and more divisive. “We have very few institutions left in the country where people who have different political views come together,” he said. “Worship was one of those — and without it, the list is smaller and smaller.”

My feeling about that: meh.  The Democrats are hardly touting their secularism and/or atheism; in fact, given the bad odor attached to nonbelievers in this country, Dems tend to avoid saying anything about their faith unless they’re already religious, like Pete Buttigieg.

Do we really want to pretend to believe in God so that we can herd believers into the Democratic party, or to reduce the polarization of American politics? We can for sure become more conciliatory, treating our opponents with more politeness and seeking consensus on issues that don’t involve religion. And we don’t have to proclaim our atheism when it’s not relevant. But we are nonbelievers and nones, and we’ve become that way not just because Republicans embrace superstitions, but because there’s no evidence for those superstitions.

h/t: Barry

 

 

More First-Amendment shenanigans: Federal court rules that a Christian cross on a county emblem is not religious

September 5, 2019 • 1:30 pm

In late June, the Supreme Court made a portentously bad decision, ruling that the “Bladensburg Cross”, a giant cross on public land in Maryland, did not violate the First Amendment’s stipulation of freedom of (and from) religion. (The vote was lopsided: 7-2.) The reasons was the usual one: that by merely existing for a long time, the cross had shed its religious significance—just like the National Motto, “In God We Trust”, is seen to be cultural rather than religious, ergo it gets to stay on U.S. currency. As I wrote at the time:

As usual, the pretense is that the cross is no longer a wholly religious symbol. Here are the words of Justice Alito, who wrote for the majority:

The cross is undoubtedly a Christian symbol, but that fact should not blind us to everything else that the Bladensburg Cross has come to represent . . .  For some, that monument is a symbolic resting place for ancestors who never returned home. For others, it is a place for the community to gather and honor all veterans and their sacrifices for our Nation. For others still, it is a historical landmark.

For many of these people, destroying or defacing the Cross that has stood undisturbed for nearly a century would not be neutral and would not further the ideals of respect and tolerance embodied in the First Amendment.

In other words, religious symbols are okay on public land because they have assumed other meanings as well. And we must have “respect and tolerance” for believers. But why a cross rather than a religion-neutral monument? Would the court be so tolerant of a Jewish Star of David, or a statue of Ganesha? Of course not, because they see America as a “Christian nation”.

Now an equally bad ruling, from a Federal appeals court, cites the Bladensburg decision as a precedent, as I knew would happen. The pretense that religious symbols lose their religious significance over time is a mindset seriously threatening our cherished separation of church and state.

You can read about that decision at the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF; click on the screenshot below).

The issue at hand was the seal of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, which is shown below. As you can see, there’s a Christian cross figured prominently in the center.

A religious symbol on a secular governmental seal should be unconstitutional, and, in a suit brought by the FFRF earlier, they prevailed in a lower court. But the appeals court, citing the Bladensburg precedent, overturned that decision. For now, the seal can stay, and I doubt that the FFRF will appeal to the Supreme Court, which will just affirm the appeals court because the Supremes are, by and large, religious conservatives and Christian nationalists.

From the FFRF report:

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a national state/church watchdog, and four individual plaintiffs won resoundingly in district court in 2017 when a judge found unconstitutional the Lehigh County seal that features a prominent cross. “The undisputed facts demonstrate that the county’s original purpose for including a cross on the seal is not secular,” Judge Edward G. Smith had ruled in 2017.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia unfortunately relied on the Supreme Court’s recent Bladensburg cross decision to rule the clearly Christian seal acceptable.

The opinion, written by Judge Thomas Hardiman, who was rumored to be on President Trump’s short list for the U.S. Supreme Court, says that the 3rd Circuit was bound to uphold the seal and cross because of the Bladensburg ruling. Hardiman holds that, after Bladensburg, “longstanding symbols benefit from ‘a strong presumption of constitutionality,’“ by which he means, “longstanding religious symbols.” The seal dates back to 1944.

The alarming nature of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bladensburg judgment can be seen in this opinion. Instead of protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority, Hardiman rules that the majority can trample the First Amendment in the name of their religion, concluding that the seal “has become part of the community.”

“Part of the community”. Yes, that is the flimsy ground on which the First Amendment will founder. After x number of years, any religious symbol, according to the courts, loses its religious patina and becomes a “part of the community.”

Well, not MY community, which is secular and atheistic. And if it’s no longer religious, why is it always religious groups defending things like the Bladensburg cross?  Believe me, it’s not because the cross is a cultural icon.

Indeed, the court affirmed the Christian background of the symbol:

FFRF’s appellate brief, filed in April of last year, highlighted the bedrock constitutional principles that the Christian seal violates as the symbol of Lehigh County government.

The federal lawsuit was filed in August 2016 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Co-plaintiffs with FFRF are four of its local members who’ve objected to encountering the religious symbol on county property. The seal is on documents, many official county forms and reports, the county’s website, in a display in the Board of Commissioners meeting room and even on flags displayed prominently at the entrance of county buildings. The board adopted the imagery that appears on the seal in 1944. (Allentown, the third-largest city in Pennsylvania, is located in Lehigh County, with a population of about 350,000.)

After FFRF complained, creating a minor firestorm, the Board of Commissioners sent a reply that proved the state/church watchdog’s point: “The cross, one of more than a dozen elements, was included to honor the original settlers of Lehigh County, who were Christian.”

That’s why it’s incongruous that the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has found the Lehigh County seal acceptable.

FFRF lawyer Andrew Seidel, taking the long view, says that this “cultural heritage” nonsense will eventually pass as the U.S. becomes more secular. But the thing is, I’d like to see this happen in my lifetime, and it won’t.