religion – Sheila Kennedy

The Utilitarian Argument For Religion

When my husband and I first married, we had spirited arguments about religion. (Bad pun intended.) Neither of us was religious, but my husband held particularly negative views of organized religion; I countered by equating religion with philosophy, and arguing that humans needed to have considered beliefs about the meanings of their lives, which either philosophy or religious doctrine could supply.

Over the years, I’ve come to agree with my husband.

Dismissing all religion is, of course, is manifestly unfair. I have several friends among the clergy, and friends and family who are religious in the sense that I once saw religious belief: as a guide to help wrestle with the moral issues that confront all thinking humans. They see the bible not as some inerrant word of God, but as a repository of tales intended to illuminate those moral quandaries and suggest moral/ethical solutions.

My friends are clearly not representative of what we might call public religiosity.

I recently came across a report that illustrates–unfortunately–the sort of religion that increasingly motivates political theocrats like Indiana’s Beckwith and Banks.

A prominent and prolific theologian in the Church of the Nazarene will face a church trial later this month for advocating for LGBTQ affirmation at a time when the denomination is doubling down on its opposition to same-sex relations.

The Rev. Thomas Jay Oord, an ordained elder and a lifelong member of the denomination, is accused of teaching doctrines contrary to the Church of the Nazarene. He is also being charged with conduct unbecoming of a minister for his efforts to move the denomination to affirm LGBTQ people. The church holds that “the practice of same-sex sexual intimacy is contrary to God’s will.”

I find it fascinating that people who assert belief in the existence of an omnipotent and all-knowing deity have the hubris to believe that they are perfectly able to ascertain the will of that unknowable deity, and are confident that their God–who presumably created the people they hate– shares their prejudices.

This news item is only one of hundreds of similar examples, which brings me to the ongoing arguments about the utility of religion in society. Persuasion recently recapped those arguments, beginning with the position of those who assert that secularism is the source of our social ills.

A growing cadre of intellectuals think the decline of religious belief has created a moral and spiritual vacuum, which has been filled with surrogate religions like wokeness and political extremism. They believe there’s a crisis of meaning in Western societies as people scramble to fill the “God-shaped holes” in their lives with other objects of worship. They argue that a renewed commitment to the Judeo-Christian tradition is the only way to restore a sense of social solidarity and shared purpose—and perhaps even save the West.

As the essay notes, these “new Theists” present a remarkably one-sided view of the history of religion, and especially Christianity. In contrast, it points to a straight line from Enlightenment humanism to the liberal rights and freedoms that the New Theists erroneously attribute to the influence of Christianity.

Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire challenged the authority of scripture, religious dogmatism, and the power of the Catholic Church. Baruch Spinoza rejected the idea of God as a transcendent supreme being, resisted supernatural beliefs, and made the case for religious pluralism and tolerance. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza said the state should hold sway over religion and argued for a rational interpretation of scripture. David Hume relentlessly challenged the moral and metaphysical claims of religion. While there were gradations of belief and unbelief among Enlightenment thinkers, a core aspect of Enlightenment thought was criticism of religion. And no wonder: the Enlightenment was in large part a response to centuries of religious oppression, dogma, and violence in Europe.

The essay is well worth reading in its entirety, but its basic thrust is that a Judeo-Christian “revival” would be highly unlikely to bring cohesion– “even Christians can’t agree on what it means to live in ‘one nation under God.'”

True, freedom and pluralism can be destabilizing. But as the essay notes, the proposed religious “solutions” are worse than the problem. Reversion to a phoney and contrived “Judeo-Christian tradition” wouldn’t be a step toward “some lost renaissance of cultural cohesion. It would be a return to familiar forms of tribalism, prejudice, and dogma.”

The pastors and politicians seeking to impose religious conformity are pursuing a fool’s errand–using religion (their own, of course) as a tool to achieve social consensus. (As the opening example illustrates, even theologians within the same denomination differ about “God’s will.”)

At best, they are misreading history; at worst, they’re really advocating Christian Nationalism.

Comments

Fundamentalist Religion And Politics

If you are looking for an explanation of America’s current, toxic political tribalism, you can find plenty of theories from which to choose. There’s the yawning gap between the rich and the rest, the ability–facilitated by our fragmented media environment–to find “facts” that are congenial to your political preferences, the craven behavior of too many political figures…the list is extensive.

That said, the major element of today’s culture war is religion. Not the specifics of religious belief or theology, but the role fundamentalists and Christian Nationalists believe religion should play in modern society and governance.

I spent six years as the Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, and experienced first-hand the consistency and ferocity of efforts to ignore America’s Constitutionally-mandated Separation of Church and State. I lost count of the number of panels and discussions devoted to (hopefully patient) explanations of the First Amendment, and why–despite the fact that the exact word “separation” doesn’t appear–the history and clear meaning of the Amendment require recognition of the Founder’s intention to keep religion and government in their proper lanes.

But today’s battles are different from that older, persistent effort to erode operation of the First Amendment’s religion clauses.

The rise of Christian Nationalism is part and parcel of the angry, knee-jerk fundamentalist reaction to cultural change. That reaction is what’s behind the morphing of what used to be a political party into a cult frantically trying to return the country to a time they largely misremember. Just as the racists among them are reacting to demographic changes eroding Whites’ majority status, fundamentalist Christians are reacting to the decrease in public performative religiosity and to what has been termed the “rise of the nones”– to the loss of Christianity’s cultural hegemony.

I rarely make predictions, because I’m not very good at them (mine tend to be based more on hope than evidence). But I feel fairly confident that efforts to turn the U.S. into a fundamentalist Christian theocracy are doomed. The public reaction to court decisions based on religious dogma rather than legal precedent–Hobby Lobby, Dobbs, and the recent Alabama ruling equating embryos with children, among others–is telling.

The argument for injecting religion into the broader culture, rather than honoring the right of individuals to determine their own belief structures, is almost always based on assertions that religiosity equates to morality. An allied charge is that, absent rigorous religious grounding, children will grow up to be selfish and immoral. Neither of these assertions is supported by evidence.

Quite the contrary.

I recently came across a fascinating study suggesting that raising one’s children without religion may be a healthier alternative.

Gone are the days of the unyielding God-fearing mother as the archetype of good parenting, suggests a recent article from the Los Angeles Times. According to multiple reports, research has shown that a secular upbringing may be healthier for children. According to a 2010 Duke University study, kids raised this way display less susceptibility to racism and peer pressure, and are “less vengeful, less nationalistic, less militaristic, less authoritarian, and more tolerant, on average, than religious adults.” But the list of benefits doesn’t stop there.

Citing Pew Research, the Times’ Phil Zuckerman notes that there’s been a recent spike in American households who categorize themselves as “Nones” — their religious affiliation being “nothing in particular.” According to Zuckerman, modern nonreligious adults account for 23 percent of Americans. As early as the ’50s, that figure was only four percent. And with godlessness on the rise, researchers have begun analyzing the benefits of nonreligious child rearing more closely.

“Far from being dysfunctional, nihilistic and rudderless without the security and rectitude of religion,” writes Zuckerman, “secular households provide a sound and solid foundation for children, according to Vern Bengston, a USC professor of gerontology and sociology.” Bengston oversees the Longitudinal Study of Generations, the largest study of families and their religious affiliations in America. After noticing an uptick in nonreligious households, Bengston added secularism to the study in 2013. “Many nonreligious parents were more coherent and passionate about their ethical principles than some of the ‘religious’ parents in our study,” said Bengston in an interview with Zuckerman. “The vast majority appeared to live goal-filled lives characterized by moral direction and sense of life having a purpose.”

Little by little, that dreaded “cosmopolitanism” is undermining the fundamentalist battles that historically triggered wars and currently fuel so much social discord.

Both secularism and the more liberal iterations of Christianity, Judaism and Islam that increasingly characterize today’s culture are signs of social and human progress. Despite the current blowback, I predict they’ll prevail.

Comments

Defining Our Terms

A recent headline asked the wrong question. The TIMES headline read “America’s Becoming Less Religious. Is Politics to Blame?”

The correct question is: has politics become religion?

The article begins with statistics. It quotes results from Gallup, Pew, and PRRI, showing that the percentage of Americans who identify with any religion is in steady decline, “as are those who believe in God, the devil, Heaven, Hell, or angels; who say religion is a very important part of their life; maintain membership in a church or synagogue; or attend church regularly.”

The article proceeds to examine the possible causes of that decline.

Economic prosperity and functional governance (both wonderful things) can weaken our felt need for religious resources. For example, much of what religious institutions historically provided America’s citizens—education; counseling; support for the needy; marriage options; entertainment; and explanations for how the world works—are increasingly provided by the state and the market. Church participation has become more optional, just one more activity middle-class families do in the suburbs—or not.

Another factor is simply the inevitable consequence of living in an increasingly cosmopolitan, multiracial democracy where liberal values of tolerance are celebrated. Diverse neighborhoods, schools, and civic institutions force us to confront the reality that there are wonderful people out there who don’t share our religious beliefs. Our children will be friends with one another, maybe even spouses. Rising generations find the divisive dogma of many religious groups increasingly strange, if not offensive.

There is another explanation that the article explores: politics.

For the past few decades, sociologists and political scientists have demonstrated across multiple studies that as Christianity has become increasingly aligned with right-wing conservatism and the Republican Party, Americans who might have otherwise identified as Christians on surveys are now identifying as “nothing in particular” or “none.” The conclusion many seem to be drawing is “If this is what it means to be religious, count me out.”

We see quite a bit of that reaction on this site. And as the article notes, that reaction is mirrored by political conservatives, who have become increasingly likely to identify with religion because they see it identifying them as Trump supporters–actually (although the article doesn’t explicitly acknowledge it) as White Nationalists. White Americans identifying as “White Evangelical,” see the label itself as meaning “pro-Trump MAGA conservative.”

The article assumes that “This is another way that politics has driven secularization”– that the association between right-wing politics and religion driving young progressives away from religion is also secularizing religious folks. It compares the former phenomenon to the resurgence of Russian Orthodoxy in Putin’s Russia, where the number of Russians who identify with Russian Orthodoxy has grown, but the growth doesn’t reflect a rise in religious practices like church attendance and prayer. Instead, it reflects a rise in nationalistic fervor, ethnocentrism, and a fondness for the old Soviet Union and Stalin.

And that brings me back to my long-ago interpretation of Soviet Communism, which I saw not as an economic theory–at least, not primarily–but as a religion, a belief system.

The linked article is interesting, and as far as it goes, informative and factual. But it doesn’t grapple with what I see as the most important question, namely what is religion? I’d define it as a belief system based in faith rather than on demonstrable fact– a belief system that elevates certain values and behaviors on the basis of convictions that are simply not subject to empirical confirmation.

How is a belief that White Christians are superior beings entitled to pre-eminence in American life any less “religious” than a belief in the existence of heaven or hell?

You can undoubtedly come up with numerous examples of what we usually call “ideological” beliefs. What the studies cited in the linked article really demonstrate is that–at least in today’s contentious culture– “religion” and “ideology” have become virtually indistinguishable. And that’s a problem, because what we have come to call “culture war” is really a debate about whose belief system should be imposed on everyone else.

Political scientists tell us that laws are legitimate when they are agreed to by majorities of citizens holding very different world-views: for example, Americans of virtually all beliefs agree that murder, robbery and rape are wrong, and should be punished. (Although we still debate the definitions of even those terms.)

Americans aren’t really getting “less religious,” but they are admittedly getting less traditionally religious. Political ideologies have morphed into a different kind of religion. One is grounded in respect for pluralism and equal liberty of conscience. The other is intent upon protecting what they believe to be their god-given superior social status.

Compromise seems unlikely.

Comments

A Double-Edged Sword

This blog tends to highlight the negative aspects of religion–or, more accurately, the negative aspects of the misuse of religion. Lest readers come to see me as an indiscriminate and cranky critic of all people of faith (granted, I am cranky), I have obtained permission to share a recent column by Phil Gulley, who leads a local Society of Friends. (I’m told that Quakers don’t use the term “pastor.”)

Phil is someone whose writing (and the wisdom that writing reflects) I have long admired.

Today, you get Gulley rather than Kennedy…

__________________–

The Rise of Religion and Why I Fear It

My parents took me to church when I was two weeks old and thereafter every Sunday until I turned 14, which in my family was the age of religious emancipation. I stayed away for two years, then discovered the Quakers, where I have remained ever since. When I returned to the church as a teenager, my father was pleased, pointing out that religion was good for the country. I once thought the same, but now wonder, in light of the rise of Christian nationalism, whether America continues to be well-served by religion, and more specifically the strain of evangelical Christianity so prevalent these days.

There is something inherently dangerous when a fervent subgroup in any country believes themselves ordained by God to tell the rest of us how to think and live. Thank you, but no. I’ll take my chances with freedom, democracy, reason, and the rule of law, all of which have been the targets of religion. Today, we are witnessing firsthand the tyranny of abusive religion when pregnant women, whose very lives are imperiled, are forced to travel far afield for the medical care they need. If America has never had a Taliban, it most certainly does now. If you doubt that, just ask Kate Cox of Texas if she has been well served by religion when Texas hospitals were prohibited from helping her after she experienced a reproductive medical emergency. When religious extremists are placed in charge, misogyny, ignorance, and tyranny are sure to follow.

When I was a child, my friends and I would play a game we called, “If you had to live anywhere but the United States, where would it be?” The game never lasted long, since we all said we’d rather be dead than live anywhere but here. I don’t feel that way anymore. Religious extremism, aided and abetted by the Republican Party since the days of Reagan, has dimmed my affection. Christian reactionaries had no sooner acquired power, than they used it to diminish ours. According to the CATO Institute, the United States ranks 23rd on the human freedom index. The embrace of totalitarianism is fueled in no small part by fanatical Christians determined to make the rest of us bow the head and bend the knee. Today, the five leading nations in freedom are Switzerland, New Zealand, Estonia, Denmark, and Ireland. What do those countries have in common? They are all post-religious nations, where Christianity has a diminishing role. Even Ireland, once ruled and roiled by religion, is experiencing an uptick of secularism, especially among the young. We can only conclude that as a country grows less religious, its liberties expand.

Isn’t it ironic that nations are better served when religions are on the wane? Wherever religion has gained the power to govern, progress and freedom have slowed to a halt. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. Religions can just as easily champion justice, equality, and progress. Why so many don’t bears testimony to the religionist’s love of power and privilege. I remain in religion to speak the truth about its excesses, to challenge its tendency to dominate, to elevate the good and noble in it, to remove the dross from its gold. Don’t give me that old-time religion. Give me the hundred years after it, when the superstitions of regressive religion have been finally and totally defeated, and only the good remains.

_______

To which this atheist says, AMEN.

Comments

Explaining The Fury

I routinely hear from people who are pissed off by the essays I post here, but–hey!–I’m retired, so I don’t have an employer’s reaction to worry about, and my long-suffering family members tend to agree with me. So let me set off the critics with today’s politically-incorrect post.

I think a lot of the problems we face (“we” being humans, not just Americans) are rooted in bad religion.

Religion developed as a method of dealing with two very human needs: first, as a way to understand the world we live in–why did stuff happen?– and later as a way of wrestling with the nature of morality. Science has undermined that first purpose (it seems disease is caused by germs, not God’s disapproval…) The clergy I respect are focused on helping people grapple with moral responsibility –they aren’t the multiple pious scolds issuing prescriptive fatwas.

America’s nasty politics is largely driven by the reaction of White Evangelicals (the fatwa issuers) to social and demographic change.

They are throwing a tantrum.

Robert P. Jones recently shared five charts that explained White Evangelicals’ embrace of MAGA politics. Jones is the head of the Public Religion Research Institute, and the author of The End of White Christian America.

He reports that White Christian Americans are facing a steep demographic decline.

As recently as 2008, when our first Black president was elected, the U.S. was a majority (54%) white Christian country. As I documented in “The End of White Christian America,” by 2014, that proportion had dropped to 47%. Today, the 2022 Census of American Religion shows that figure has dropped further to 42%.

All Christian denominations have experienced decline, but it has been especially pronounced among White Evangelical Protestants, who now comprise only 13.6% of Americans. The decline is likely to continue; 18% of seniors, compared with only 9% of young adults, identify as White Evangelical Protestant.

Hence the tantrum–what Jones calls “a desperate corrective for their waning cultural influence.”

While I held out some possibility in “The End of White Christian America” that white evangelicals and other conservative white Christians might accept their new place alongside others in an increasingly pluralistic America, their steadfast allegiance to Trump’s MAGA vision — actually increasing their support for him between 2016 and 2020 — and their unwillingness to denounce either Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen or the violence on Jan. 6 have dashed those thin hopes.

The question isn’t whether these folks will ultimately prevail. They won’t. They can and do cause unnecessary social upheaval, but their zealotry is already beginning to sideline them.

Americans–and all humans–are far better served by religions that focus on how we should behave, on how we should treat the other people with whom we share the planet.

I’ve previously quoted Phil Gulley, a Quaker pastor who writes columns for Indianapolis Monthly and for his local small town newspaper. In a recent column, Gully writes that he had

decided long ago that my commitment to the way of Jesus was not predicated upon miracle, myth, or superstition. His teachings are so demonstrably true, I have no need to resort to religious parlor tricks to defend them. In history, virgin births and bodily resurrections served only one purpose—to persuade pre-scientific people of someone’s unique importance, in this case, Jesus. But if tomorrow the bones of Jesus were found in Palestine, the value of his principles would not be diminished. I would still believe in justice, in compassion, in sticking up for the underdog….

He went on to note that, in many congregations,

One can dot every theological i and cross every orthodox t, but scorn the poor, deny others their rights, lend their support to tyranny, and still be thought a “good” Christian, when all they have done is believe a certain thing, however farfetched. Beliefs have supplanted the weightier matters of justice, mercy, and faithfulness….

To accept the myths of religion as literal, historical fact is to insist our minds remain in their infant state, untouched by wisdom and insight. Religionists fear enlightenment and education, knowing the threat they pose to dictates and doctrines. They would rather keep us ignorant and compliant than intelligent and bold, which is always a threat to their power, since the uninformed and dim are not only easier to lead but also mislead. Thus did Voltaire rightly warn us that anyone who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities. So I will forego the absurdities and embrace truth, which truly does set us free.

As I told him, these are sentiments with which this very Jewish atheist agrees.

At the end of the day, theological belief (faith) without more is irrelevant–it is behaviors (works) that matter.

Comments