by Grania

Salon has posted an except from Phil Zuckerman’s new book Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions. Zuckerman is a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in California, I mentioned him briefly in my post “Will Religion Ever Disappear?”, and this new excerpt makes me want to read his book.

This extract focuses on why America has moved towards secularism.

What is going on? How do we explain this recent wave of secularization that is washing over so much of America?
The answer to these questions is actually much less theological or philosophical than one might think. It is simply not the case that in recent years tens of millions of Americans have suddenly started doubting the cosmological or ontological arguments for the existence of God, or that hundreds of thousands of other Americans have miraculously embraced the atheistic naturalism of Denis Diderot.

He points at the Religious Right that since the 1980s has steadily alienated both moderates and left-wing Americans from Christianity as it allied itself more closely with the Republican party. He also points to the pedophile scandals in the Catholic Church that alienated substantial numbers of its former members. Zuckerman also attributes the demise of faith to the increased proportion of women working outside the home.

British historian Callum Brown was the first to recognize this interesting correlation: when more and more women work outside the home, their religious involvement—as well as that of their families— tends to diminish. Brown rightly argues that it has been women who have historically kept their children and husbands interested and involved in religion. Then, starting in the 1960s, when more and more British women starting earning an income through work outside the home, their interest in—or time and energy for—religious involvement waned. And as women grew less religious, their husbands and children followed suit.

The general rise in acceptance of homosexuality and the dawn of instant access to the Internet has also caused many people to distance themselves from their former religions. Traditional religions continue to stigmatize homosexuality, and this view is now largely regarded as morally repugnant and damaging.

The fact that Americans today between the ages of eighteen and thirty are the generation most accepting of homosexuality in the nation’s history, and are simultaneously those least interested in being religious—and the fact that the states that have legalized gay marriage tend to be among the most secular—might be coincidental, but I highly doubt it.

Finally, the Internet has given people an unprecedented way to communicate ideas and issues that they have with their religion. It allows them to reach out to people going through the same challenges as they, and of course, exposes people to the multitude of sites devoted to debunking religious claims or comparing religions’ origins and rituals. But Zuckerman thinks there may be even more to it that this:

. . . perhaps most subtle, the Web may be partly responsible for the rise of irreligion simply by what it is, what it can do, what it can provide, how it functions, and how it interfaces with us and our minds and our desires and our lives. The Internet may be supplying something psychological, or feeding something neurological, or establishing something cultural via its individual-computer-screen nexus, something dynamic that is edging out religion, replacing religion, or weakening religion. The entertainment available on the Internet, the barrage of imagery, the simultaneity, the mental stimulation, the looking and clicking, the hunting and finding, the time-wasting, the consumerism, the constant social networking, the virtual communication—all of it may be undermining religion’s ability to hold our interest, draw our attention, tap our soul.

This doesn’t mean that Zuckerman feels that religion will disappear. Nevertheless, he feels that the argument that the ‘faith instinct’ is innate to all humans is untrue, pointing out that, with between 450-700 million non-believers in the world, non-belief can hardly be regarded as aberrant or unnatural. He uses this analogy to illustrate the point, one which bound to upset some people:

For yet one more analogy, consider violent crime. It is just as widespread as religion and dance. It exists in all societies and cultures, past and present. And yet we know that not all people are violent criminals. Most aren’t. So just because a phenomenon exists in all human enclaves does not make it innate or natural to all people.

[JAC note: I find this comparison flawed. One can in fact make a good case that humans do harbor “aggression genes” that were adaptive in our ancestors, but that are either expressed only when appropriate or whose expression has been muted by the overlay of modern culture. Many of us have the impulse to physically injure someone we dislike, but keep that under control.  One can’t make such a good case for the innateness of religious belief, as its adaptive advantages aren’t as obvious, nor do we see religion in our closest primate relatives, as we do aggressive behaviors.]

Zuckerman argues that the ‘doubt instinct’ or the ‘reason instinct’ is every bit as inherent as the ‘faith instinct’. Reason may be more difficult than faith, but that doesn’t mean it is any less a part of humanity for it.

The reviews on Amazon for his book are very positive, and they appear to have been written by people who have actually read the book rather than by people trying to skew the system by down-voting, so I think I am going to check this one out.