Religion Is Disappearing. That’s Great for Politics.
Before the rise of the religious right in the 1980s, most politicians
kept their faith to themselves. In 1945, for example, President Harry
Truman wrote: “I’m not very much impressed with men who publicly parade
their religious beliefs.” After his election in 1953 President Dwight D.
Eisenhower joined a Presbyterian church, but when he heard the minister
was publicly boasting about his new member the general commanded, “You
go and tell that goddam minister that if he gives out one more story
about my religious faith I will not join his goddam church!” John F.
Kennedy discussed his Catholicism only when forced to do so by critics
during the 1960 presidential campaign. In a 1964 interview with the Baptist Standard,
President Lyndon Johnson explained, “I believe in the American
tradition of separation of church and state which is expressed in the
First Amendment to the Constitution.” Richard Nixon was famously a
Quaker, but what he practiced can best be described as religious
expediency—whatever worked politically. Gerald Ford called his
religiosity “very personal” and wrote, “I am most reluctant to speak or
write about it publicly.” Even the openly evangelical Christian Jimmy
Carter prioritized his piety below that of most political issues.
This all changed in the 1980s, when evangelical pastor Jerry
Falwell and his Moral Majority (famously characterized as “neither”)
convinced Christian politicians that evangelizing for the Lord included
knocking on doors within the beltway. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s
Christian sects and faith-based organizations such as Ralph Reed’s
Christian Coalition of America and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family
used rallies and donor support to convince politicians and candidates
that if they didn’t pander to religious voters they stood little chance
of being elected. The result has been a nauseating display of political
cheerleading for Christ, from proclaiming Jesus as your favorite
“philosopher” to petitioning the almighty at the end of public political
speeches to “bless the United States of America.”
Those days
might be over. To those of us who are atheists, agnostics or “spiritual
but not religious,” and who prefer to keep the Constitution and the
Bible in separate drawers, the Pew Research Center has recently
published data from a massive representative survey of 35,000 adult
Americans, revealing that the fastest growing religious cohort in
America are the “nones”—those who check the box for “no religious
affiliation.” Such unaffiliated numbers have been climbing steadily out
of the single-digit cellar in the 1990s into a now respectable two-digit
23 percent of adults of all ages, up from 16 percent just since 2007.
More telling for politicians who cater their campaigns toward younger
voters, 34 percent of millennials—those born after 1981, and the
nation’s largest living generation—profess to having no religion. A
third! That’s a viable voting bloc.
It is really the raw numbers that should give pause to any
politician or candidate contemplating ignoring this voting bloc. There
are today about 245 million adult Americans. This translates into 56
million religiously unaffiliated adults of all ages, more than either
mainline Protestants or Catholics and second only to evangelical
Protestants. This translates into 19 million more people who have no
religion just since 2007, an encouraging trend for those who have grown
weary of America’s slide toward theocracy.
The trend lines are as
unmistakable as they are consequential. As the religious pig makes its
way through the generational python—from the Silent Generation (b.
1928-1945) to Baby Boomers (b. 1946-1964) to Generation X (b. 1965-1980)
to Older Millennials (b. 1981-1989) to Younger Millennials (b.
1990-1996)—the number of the faithful coming out the other end will
inexorably diminish in both number and influence. In addition, people
are changing religions—the Pew survey found that 42 percent of Americans
currently adhere to a religion different from the one into which they
were born and raised, further eroding the quaint notion of there being
One True Religion. Yes, some people raised with no religion became
religious (4.3 percent of U.S. adults), but four times as many went the
other direction.
Imagine no religion. This is no figment of your
imagination. It is happening now and it may be the most important trend
of the new century. Indeed, pulling back for a big history perspective,
the shedding of religious dogmas and the demolishing of ecclesiastical
authoritarianism has been underway ever since the Enlightenment, and in
my new book The Moral Arc I claim that this may well be the most important thing that has ever happened to our civilization.
Why? The rules made up and enshrined by the various religions
over the millennia did not have as their goal the expansion of the moral
sphere to include more and more people. Moses did not come down from
the mountain with a chiseled list of the ways in which the Israelites
could make life better for the Moabites, the Edomites, the Midianites or
for any other tribe of people that happened not to be them.
The Old Testament injunction to “Love thy neighbor” at that time applied
only to one’s immediate kin and kind and fellow tribe member. In fact,
it would have been suicidal for the Israelites to love the Midianites as
themselves, for example, given that the Midianites were allied with the
Moabites in their desire to see the Israelites wiped off the face of
the earth—a problem modern day Israelites are familiar with. It is in
this way that religion is tribal and xenophobic by nature, serving to
regulate moral rules within a community and impose them on other groups
through force or conversion. In other words, faith forms an identity of those like us, in sharp distinction from those not us, variously characterized as heathens or unbelievers.
Yes, of course, most Jews and Christians today are not nearly
so narrowly tribal as their Old Testament ancestors, but why? It is not
because of some new divine revelation or biblical interpretation. The
reason is that Judaism and Christianity went through the Enlightenment
and came out the other side less violent and more tolerant. Ever since
the Enlightenment, the study of morality has shifted from considering
moral principles as based on God-given, divinely-inspired, Holy
book-derived, authority-dictated precepts from the top down, to
bottom-up individual-considered, reason-based, rationality-constructed,
science-grounded propositions in which one is expected to have reasons
for one’s moral actions, especially reasons that consider the other
person affected by the moral act.
It's thanks to the
Enlightmenment that we don't impose the death penalty for saying the
Lord’s name at the wrong moment or in the wrong context, for imaginary
crimes like witchcraft, for commonplace sexual relations and for not
resting on the Sabbath—all rules that the Bible, the book considered by
over two billion people to be the greatest moral guide ever produced,
advocates.
But the West only recently rejected religion as a valid system
for determining political decision, and the change has been only
relatively progressive—relative to more extreme and fundamentalist
religious sects in the world. There are enough religious extremists in
America today that we must be vigilant and insist that our political
process—one designed for all of us to participate in—not be taken over
or unnecessarily influenced by particular home-grown sects bent on
exclusion, conversion, and tearing down Mr. Jefferson’s wall separating
church and state. Here the trends are also positive. In the case of
same-sex marriage, for example, where only a few years ago religious
groups like the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) could pour money into
campaigns to block bills that would grant homosexuals the same rights as
heterosexuals, but those strategies no longer work. Why? Because
secular values are winning out over religious values in the marketplace
of ideas.
We see too well everyday what religion can do to a
state. The Enlightenment secular values that we hold dear today—equal
treatment under the law, equal opportunity for all, freedom of speech,
freedom of the press, civil rights and civil liberties for everyone, the
equality of women and minorities, and especially the separation of
church and state and the freedom to practice any religion or no religion
at all—were inculcated into the minds of Jews and Christians and others
in the West, but not so much in Muslim countries, particularly when it
comes to those who would prefer a return to a 7th century theocracy.
Herein
lies the most profound meaning of this seismic shift in the tectonic
plates of religious belief. We've seen militant Islamism and what
happens when people take their faith seriously and refuse to accept the
hard-won secular values of the West. As Islamic State forces destroy the
remnants of thousands of years of civilization in the name of its
religion it is time we renounce faith altogether as a reliable method of
determining reality and morality. It’s time we stop electing
politicians who put their religion before the Constitution or insist
that they will pray before making political decisions (like going to
war), and instead rely on the best tools ever devised for advancing
humanity out of the trees and to the stars—reason and science.