From "The Nation"
(June 25, 2007 issue)
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070625/aronson
"What began with publisher W.W. Norton taking a chance on a gutsy,
hyperbolic and idiosyncratic attack on religion by a graduate student
in neuroscience has grown into a remarkable intellectual wave. No
fewer than five books by the New Atheists have appeared on bestseller
lists in the past two years--Sam Harris's The End of Faith and Letter
to a Christian Nation, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard
Dawkins's The God Delusion and now Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not
Great. The scandalized media have both attacked and inflated the
phenomenon. After the New York Times Book Review, for example, ran a
thoughtful review of Harris and then a negative front-page review of
Dawkins, the daily paper published two weak op-ed attacks on the
writers and a vapid article on how atheists celebrate Christmas,
followed by tongue-in-cheek admiration in the Book Review for
Hitchens's ability to promote his career by saying the unexpected.
Despite such dubious blessings, the four have become must-read
writers. The most remarkable fact is not their books
themselves--blunt, no-holds-barred attacks on religion in different
registers--but that they have succeeded in reaching mainstream readers
and in becoming bestsellers. Is this because Americans are beginning
to get fed up with the religiosity of the past several years? It would
be comforting if we could explain this as a cultural signal of the end
of the right-wing/evangelical ascendancy. Such speculations are
probably wishful thinking--book buyers are such a small slice of the
population that few sociologists would stake their careers on claiming
that book buyers' preferences reflect anything like a national mood.
The success of the New Atheists may, however, reflect something
significant among their audience. In the past generation in the United
States, atheists, agnostics and secular humanists have been a timid
minority--almost voiceless, often on the defensive, routinely derided,
both warned against and ignored. As Susan Jacoby pointed out in her
book Freethinkers, it is symptomatic of the situation that the most
dramatic presidential address in generations took place in the
National Cathedral three days after September 11, 2001, so filled with
religious language that it sounded like a sermon. It was delivered by
a President flanked by Jewish, Muslim and Christian representatives, a
model of religious inclusiveness, without anyone standing alongside
them representing the tens of millions of nonreligious Americans. At
this most important collective moment in our recent history, it was as
if they did not exist. This is what the polls are telling us:
Virtually everyone in America believes in God.
We know how zealously the conservative Christian denominations have
politicized themselves in the past generation, how the GOP has
harnessed this energy by embracing their demands--opposing stem-cell
research, gay marriage and abortion rights, championing government aid
to religious schools and faith-based social programs--and by
appointing sympathetic judges. So effectively have they framed the
issues that, according to the Pew Research Center's 2006 report on
religion and public life, fully 69 percent of Americans believe that
liberals have "gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools
and government."
We commonly hear that only a tiny percentage of Americans don't
believe in God and that, as a Newsweek poll claimed this spring, 91
percent do. In fact, this is not true. How many unbelievers are there?
The question is difficult to assess accurately because of the
challenges of constructing survey questions that do not tap into the
prevailing biases about religion. According to the American Religious
Identification Survey, which interviewed more than 50,000 people, more
than 29 million adults--one in seven Americans--declare themselves to
be without religion. The more recent Baylor Religion Survey ("American
Piety in the 21st Century") of more than 1,700 people, which bills
itself as "the most extensive and sensitive study of religion ever
conducted," calls for adjusting this number downward to exclude those
who believe in a God but do not belong to a religion. Fair enough. But
Baylor's own Gallup survey is a bit shaky for at least two reasons. It
counts anyone who believes in a "higher power" but not God as
believing in God--casting a vast net over adherents of everything from
spirit to history to love. Yet the study allows unbelievers only one
option: to not believe in "anything beyond the physical world,"
leaving no space for those who regard themselves as agnostics or
skeptics, secularists or humanists. Contrast this with a more recent
and more nuanced Financial Times/Harris poll of Europeans and
Americans that allowed respondents to declare agnosticism as well as
atheism: 18 percent of the more than 2,000 American respondents chose
one or the other, while 73 percent affirmed belief in God or a supreme
being.
A more general issue affects American surveys on religious beliefs,
namely, the "social desirability effect," in which respondents are
reluctant to give an unpopular answer in a society in which being
religious is the norm. What happens when questions are framed to
overcome this distortion? The FT/H poll tried to counteract it by
allowing space not only for the customary "Not sure" but also for
"Would prefer not to say"--and 6 percent of Americans chose this as
their answer to the question of whether they believed in God or a
supreme being. Add to this those who declared themselves as atheists
or agnostics and, lo and behold, the possible sum of unbelievers is
nearly one in four Americans.
All this helps explain the popularity of the New Atheists--Americans
as a whole may not be getting too much religion, but a significant
constituency must be getting fed up with being routinely marginalized,
ignored and insulted. After all, unbelievers are concentrated at the
higher end of the educational scale--a recent Harris American poll
shows that 31 percent of those with postgraduate education do not avow
belief in God (compared with only 14 percent of those with a high
school education or less). The percentage rises among professors and
then again among professors at research universities, reaching 93
percent among members of the National Academy of Sciences. Unbelievers
are to be found concentrated among those whose professional lives
emphasize science or rationality and who also have developed a
relatively high level of confidence in their own intellectual
faculties. And they are frequently teachers or opinion-makers.
But over the past generation they have come to feel beleaguered and,
except for rare individuals like comedian and talk-show host Bill
Maher, voiceless in the public arena. The great success of the New
Atheists is to have reached them, both speaking to and for them. These
writers are devoted, with sledgehammer force and angry urgency, to
"breaking the spell" cast by the religious ascendancy, to overcoming a
situation in which every other area of life can be critically analyzed
while admittedly irrational religious faith is made central to
American life but exempted from serious discussion.
This does not make for restraint. Harris displays brash
self-confidence, Hitchens and Dawkins angry intellectual bite and
Dennett an inexhaustible theoretical energy and range of inquiry.
Harris excoriates religious moderates, accusing them of providing
cover for fundamentalists at home and abroad by refusing to contest
the extremists' premises--because they share them. More upbeat,
Dennett is devoted to creating the intellectual conditions for future
discussions, in which religion will be treated as just another
"natural" phenomenon and accordingly subjected to critical scrutiny.
Dawkins bulldozes his way through every major argument for religious
belief, and a great many minor ones. And Hitchens endlessly catalogues
religion's crimes and absurdities. Each man is at war, writing as if
no others had preceded him, and with a passion that can only be
described as political.
Above all, each sees himself as breaking a taboo. This explains not
only the vigor and urgency of these books, their mainstream character
and their publishing success but also the common refrain in reviews
that they have "gone too far." Of course they have, because their many
faults are often inseparable from their strengths. Self-indulgence is
their common flaw: Dennett and Dawkins might have considered their
readers more and disciplined their own need to follow out every line
of thought, while Harris is so full of his point of view that he, like
Hitchens, is unable to consider faith as anything but stupid. They
show little understanding of religion or interest in it [see Daniel
Lazare, "Among the Disbelievers," May 28]. Still, I am surprised by
the hostility and bemusement expressed toward them by their fellow
travelers in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The
London Review of Books. In attacking religion the four have been
breaking the taboo against talking about it seriously, and they may be
forgiven for not being calmer, more expert or more measured. Doing
battle with what they see as the most pervasive and bothersome
phenomenon in American life during the past generation, Harris,
Dennett, Dawkins and Hitchens deserve praise for their courage and
tenacity in shattering its spell.
Where does the work of the New Atheists leave us? I hope they have
roused a significant portion of America from its timidity. But to what
end? Living without God means turning toward something. To flourish we
need coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer
life's vital questions. Enlightenment optimism once supplied
unbelievers with hope for a better world, whether this was based on
Marxism, science, education or democracy. After Progress, after
Marxism, is it any wonder atheism fell on hard times? Restoring
secular confidence will take much positive work as well as the fierce
attacks on religion by our atheist champions. On a societal level, as
Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris point out in Sacred and Secular,
living without God requires creating conditions in which people are
free from the kinds of existential vulnerability that have marked all
human societies until the advent of Europe's postindustrial welfare
states. Markedly more religious than any of them, the United States
provides a life that is far more unequal and far more insecure.
The surprising response to the New Atheist offensive should thus
inspire us to think politically as well as philosophically. As a first
step this demands creating a coalition between unbelievers and their
natural allies, secular-minded believers. I am speaking first about
many millions of Americans who nominally belong to a religion but
effectively live without any active relationship either to it or to
God, or belong to a church and attend services but are "tacit
atheists," living day in and day out with only token reference to God.
And I also include the many believers who accept the principle of
America as a secular society. These include members of the liberal
Jewish and Christian denominations, who have long practice in
accommodating themselves to science and the modern world and who, as
the National Council of Churches website tells us, may remain inspired
by Genesis while not needing to take it in "literal, factual terms."
Many of these turned up in the most significant finding of the Baylor
survey, namely that more than one in four American "believers" does
not mean by this a personal God at all but a distant God who has
little or nothing to do with the world or themselves. This sounds very
much like the deist God of "unbelievers" Thomas Jefferson and Thomas
Paine.
These believers, along with those who think of themselves as
"spiritual," as well as professed unbelievers, help to explain why
according to the Pew study so many Americans--32 percent--want less
religious influence on government. Twenty-four percent say that
President Bush talks too much about his religious faith and prayer,
and 28 percent deny that the United States is a Christian nation. Most
dramatically, a whopping 49 percent believe that Christian
conservatives have gone too far "in trying to impose their religious
values on the country." This, then, is an unreported secret of
American life: Considerable numbers of Americans, religious and
secular, are becoming fed up with the in-your-face religion that has
come to mark our society.
Where does the work of the New Atheists leave us? I hope they have
roused a significant portion of America from its timidity. But to what
end? Living without God means turning toward something. To flourish we
need coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer
life's vital questions. Enlightenment optimism once supplied
unbelievers with hope for a better world, whether this was based on
Marxism, science, education or democracy. After Progress, after
Marxism, is it any wonder atheism fell on hard times? Restoring
secular confidence will take much positive work as well as the fierce
attacks on religion by our atheist champions. On a societal level, as
Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris point out in Sacred and Secular,
living without God requires creating conditions in which people are
free from the kinds of existential vulnerability that have marked all
human societies until the advent of Europe's postindustrial welfare
states. Markedly more religious than any of them, the United States
provides a life that is far more unequal and far more insecure.
The surprising response to the New Atheist offensive should thus
inspire us to think politically as well as philosophically. As a first
step this demands creating a coalition between unbelievers and their
natural allies, secular-minded believers. I am speaking first about
many millions of Americans who nominally belong to a religion but
effectively live without any active relationship either to it or to
God, or belong to a church and attend services but are "tacit
atheists," living day in and day out with only token reference to God.
And I also include the many believers who accept the principle of
America as a secular society. These include members of the liberal
Jewish and Christian denominations, who have long practice in
accommodating themselves to science and the modern world and who, as
the National Council of Churches website tells us, may remain inspired
by Genesis while not needing to take it in "literal, factual terms."
Many of these turned up in the most significant finding of the Baylor
survey, namely that more than one in four American "believers" does
not mean by this a personal God at all but a distant God who has
little or nothing to do with the world or themselves. This sounds very
much like the deist God of "unbelievers" Thomas Jefferson and Thomas
Paine.
These believers, along with those who think of themselves as
"spiritual," as well as professed unbelievers, help to explain why
according to the Pew study so many Americans--32 percent--want less
religious influence on government. Twenty-four percent say that
President Bush talks too much about his religious faith and prayer,
and 28 percent deny that the United States is a Christian nation. Most
dramatically, a whopping 49 percent believe that Christian
conservatives have gone too far "in trying to impose their religious
values on the country." This, then, is an unreported secret of
American life: Considerable numbers of Americans, religious and
secular, are becoming fed up with the in-your-face religion that has
come to mark our society.
Until now the most vocal left-of-center response to the Christian
right, for example by Sojourners, has been to call for more religion
in politics, not less. In early June the group organized a nationally
televised forum at which John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton testified to their faith, talking about the "hand of God"
(Edwards), forgiveness (Obama) and prayer (Clinton). Few
loud-and-clear voices have been agitating in the mainstream on behalf
of the separation of church and state, for secular and public
education, or demanding less rather than more political discussion of
religion. Yet tens of millions of Americans worry about such things.
Whether most of them continue to believe in God matters much less than
that they are comfortable with secular knowledge and America's secular
Constitution. Barry Lynn, for example, executive director of Americans
United for Separation of Church and State, is a Protestant minister.
Although Harris and Dawkins castigate all believers for sharing the
premises of conservative Christians, the fact is that many believers
could easily be working with out-and-out atheists and agnostics on key
issues.
Such a coalition should take the offensive on behalf of American
constitutional promises of a secular society, increasingly under
threat from Bush's Supreme Court appointments. It will gain support in
unexpected places: Judge John Jones III, a Bush appointee, delivered a
devastating blow to the forces behind "intelligent design" in his
December 2005 decision in the Dover School Board case. The first half
of his impressive decision contains a crystal-clear reflection on what
science is and why intelligent design, a refurbished form of
creationism, is religion, not science. The second half reads like a
whodunit, revealing how a minority on the school board conspired to
impose intelligent design on the district. It should be a rallying
point for the nearly half of all Americans who are disturbed by
right-wing religious attempts to impose their faith on the rest of us.
An immediate goal should be a call for the publication and widest
possible distribution of the Dover decision. It could become another
bestseller--by a conservative judge no less!--and a text for civics,
current events, history, law and basic science classes.
A second goal of such a coalition might be a campaign to reorient
American thinking about atheists and atheism. In recent polls, far
more respondents have declared themselves willing to vote for a woman
or African-American for President than for an atheist--atheists are
more unpopular than gays. Television news viewers are encouraged to
nod in agreement with such ageless gibes as "There are no atheists in
foxholes" without seeing just how nasty they are. This obnoxious
remark, by Katie Couric on NBC's Today show, drew a few complaints and
letters, but no wider protests or apology. A coalition determined to
widen the range of socially acceptable belief could make a significant
difference on such issues.
A broad secular coalition could also demand more nuanced discussion of
the range of belief and unbelief in America today. Rather than
consciously or unconsciously promoting religious belief, public
opinion research should try to register a full range of beliefs,
including the interesting and perplexing ways in which people live
secular as well as religious lives and their sometimes contradictory
combinations. These are rejected by Harris, Dawkins, Dennett and
Hitchens, and ignored by the media and mainstream politicians.
Finally, such an alliance could become one place where Dennett's goal
of discussing religion openly and critically--as well as atheism and
agnosticism--could begin to be realized. A number of questions might
be explored: What, for example, is the common ground and what are the
differences between believers and unbelievers? And--I save for last
the touchiest question of all--shouldn't all Americans be instructed
in the great religious and secular traditions, as well as their
greatest books? After all, achieving literacy in both religion and
secularism might allow us to discuss them more intelligently."
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