Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
A Jewish Atheist for a More Christian America
A few years ago I got sucked into a LinkedIn college alumni chat group where political discussions were going on. For the most part, the participants were smart, articulate adults, not college students, all of whom, moreover, had endured the famously rigorous classical core curriculum of our alma mater. Nonetheless, in due course, every Media Matters talking point and lunatic piece of campus-Marxist SJW nonsense was trotted out one by one and presented as revealed truth requiring no further proof. These debates — which were heated but civil by Internet standards — went on for close to two years before they finally succumbed to a combination of acrimony and the meddling and censorship of the university’s busybody apparatchiks who ran the thing. Apparently, people don’t like to have their core beliefs about the world subjected to critical scrutiny and found wanting. No minds were changed. It was, on the whole, a depressing experience.
Anyone who has ever engaged in political debate must at some point have come to the conclusion that such arguments are pointless. In the long history of political debate, from the Athenian assembly to the lamentable farce that is the so-called World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, no fully-formed adult human has ever walked away from the experience a convert to the opposing position. When conversions do happen, as with Irving Kristol or David Mamet, they are the result not of rational inquiry, but of protracted mugging by reality. You can’t reason a man out of something he wasn’t reasoned into, and politics, like religion, falls into the category of things whose core precepts are not susceptible to rational interrogation.
Which brings me to my subject – the relationship between politics and religion in America. My claim is that the demise of traditional American political values – democracy, individual liberty and limited government – has a lot to do with the decline of traditional Christianity in the United States. I make this claim as a strong partisan of traditional American political values, but as a disinterested nonpartisan when it comes to traditional Christianity. The title of this post is a bit of an overstatement – I am not really a committed atheist. I am, however, as close to an atheist as it is possible to be while still remaining agnostic. I don’t have a God in this fight, in other words.
❧❧❧
There is no question that traditional Christianity and traditional religious beliefs in general have been in sharp decline in the United States for the last 50 years. The drop-off has been especially precipitous recently. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who described themselves as Christian dropped from 78.4 percent to 70.6 percent between 2007 and 2014.
This decline has coincided with a sharp, leftward shift of the country’s political center of gravity. According to Pew, atheists are far more likely than almost any other religious category to identify with the Democratic Party. Only 15 percent of atheists lean Republican, and the figure for agnostics is 21 percent. The only denominations more loyal to Democrats than atheists are Unitarians and the historically black churches.
This relationship between non-belief and left-wing politics is more than mere correlation: there is a causal logic at work. Just as modern humans are hard-wired for language, so with it is with religion. Most people possess a religious instinct that compels them to distinguish between the sacred and the profane. These categories are an important part of our mental machinery. When this religion instinct is not channeled through traditional religious belief, it finds expression in other ways. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed:
In ages of fervor it sometimes happens that men abandon their religion, but they only escape from its yoke in order to submit to that of another. Faith changes its allegiance but does not die.
Nature abhors a vacuum. The decline of traditional Judeo-Christian belief has opened up a psychological void into which all manner of pernicious ideas have flowed dressed up in quasi-religious garb. When the religious impulse slips the restraints of traditional forms of worship and breaks out into open terrain, it is highly likely to attach itself to the State as the object of its veneration.
❧❧❧
Among the errors of the French Enlightenment was the conviction that, as Diderot put it, men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. For the 17th century Rationalists, religion was nothing more than a dark night of ignorance, fear and prejudice, to be purged by exposure to the cold light of reason. To them, the decay of religion was a necessary consequence of the extension of liberty and the diffusion of knowledge.
The United States was fortunate in the fact that its founding generation – all children of the Enlightenment – was not hostile to religion. With the exception of Thomas Paine, they were all men who had a deep respect for traditional religion, even if they did not fully partake in it, and understood that limited government is not possible in a society of atheists.
The place to start to understand the relationship between religion and politics in America is with Tocqueville. In Jacksonian America, atheism was practically unknown. Tocqueville was puzzled and delighted by the ubiquity and strength of religion in America. He writes:
On my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America, I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.
Tocqueville discovered that what gave religion its powerful influence in American culture was its recognition of two distinct realms in the life of a democracy: the spiritual and the secular. This strict separation of religion from the state was the key to understanding the success of American democracy. Tocqueville says:
Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions, for although it did not give them the taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use thereof.
American religion facilitates American liberty because its strictures are themselves a form of self-government. And it was the specifically Christian character of Jacksonian America that made democracy possible. According to Tocqueville, Christianity — in all its American variants — was uniquely conducive to democratic government:
For the Americans the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of the one without the other[.]
As a matter of doctrine, Christianity draws an explicit distinction between God and Caesar. Unlike Islam, which is a comprehensive system of doctrine encompassing political maxims, civil and criminal laws and theories of science, the Bible imposes no demands on faith beyond the establishment of a proper relationship between God and men and men with each other. In the American democratic order, it was essential that believers not confuse the worship due the Creator with homage to secondary objects.
❧❧❧
How touchingly naïve we conservatives are! We persist in the belief that politics is a process of horse-trading and compromise based on common interest. But since at least the 2000 election, it has been clear that politics in the United States is basically a one-sided religious crusade. I say one-sided because, for most conservatives, politics is not a substitute for religion, as most conservatives still have religion. On the other side, it’s a different story. Progressive politics is functionally indistinguishable from religion – a polytheistic hodgepodge of cults and deities. The deification of President Lightworker is only the most obvious example of this. But it is also impossible to understand enthusiasm for a criminal sociopath like Hillary Clinton, except as a form of religious fanaticism.
The oldest temple in the Progressive pantheon belongs to the Equality Cult, which is the source of the left’s irrational hatred of the market. The appeal of this cult has very deep roots in human psychology, which evolved when our ancestors lived in small, kinship-based bands of nomadic foragers where egalitarianism was an aggressively enforced social norm. This equality instinct coexists with other competing and conflicting instincts, as well as with reason. But, because it is so easily exploited by demagogues, this instinct serves as an endless source of mischief and tears. We know of only two kinds of strongly egalitarian societies: hunter-gatherers, such as the few remaining Amazonian and Papua New Guinea tribes; and totalitarian hellholes like Cuba and North Korea. But the call for an egalitarian social order remains a permanent fixture of the Progressive creed.
Another important pillar of the Progressive theology is the Diversity Mystery Rite, which is really just an ideology about the wickedness of white people. In my Federal Workers’ Collective, the coming of October heralds the year’s biggest festival: Diversity Day. You might think that the most important celebration in the federal calendar comes in late December, when the humble servants of the People pause to celebrate Holiday, but this is not the case. While Holiday is an important celebration, it is not as sacred: Diversity is the towering federal Deity. Diversity Day is a time of year when all who toil in the vineyards of public service lay down their pitchforks and pruning shears and contemplate the benevolent splendor of Diversity. There is a Feast, of course, and skits, poems, and personal testimonies. I wish I were making this up.
There is much more, of course. Leftism possesses all of the attributes of religion. There is terror before the sacred and submission to the majesty, benevolence, wisdom, awe-inspiring mystery and superior power of the State. There are not one but two versions of original sin – racism and crimes against Gaia – as well as an eschatology connected to one of them (climate apocalypse). There are witch trials and rituals of confession and expiation for the sin of White Privilege. There are saints and martyrs, priests and heretics and – briefly – a messiah. And there is a canon of sacred texts, the most important being the New York Times editorial page. Its dogma brooks no dissent.
Books can and should be written about this. Unfortunately, most anthropologists are also cult members.
❧❧❧
Having experienced the after-effects of the French Revolution at close range, Tocqueville understood atheism and its revolutionary manifestations. He says of the leftists of his day:
Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot. Religion is much more needed in the republic they advocate than in the monarchy they attack, and in democratic republics most of all. […] How could society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened?
Good question. Tragically for all of us, my mild, low-conviction atheism is not scalable to society as a whole without dire consequences.
Published in General
I really don’t have a religous bone in my body either, But I am a practicing Catholic who goes to mass every week, I am raising my kids religiously, reads the bible every day, and does a decade of the rosary every night. I don’t have that deep devoted faith that I envy in so many others that seems to come easy to them. Why I do all of this, even though I don’t really feel it? I’m faking it until I make it (as the 12 step program as wisely put it) . Everything you wrote in this is the reason I am religious even though I don’t feel it. I do not doubt the existence of God at all because I think you can reason that he does exist. But it doesn’t come easy but you can be a rational, religious person. Also, I am a behaviorist. Doing this stuff has brought me closer to God but it isn’t easy for me.
Also, this is such an excellent post. This needs to be promoted. Thank you for taking the time to write it
That’s a nonsense argument. Rights cannot inherently exist out of nothing. If we’re going solely by a matter of nature then whatever exists is right. Without a God to base rights on or people who decide rights and use force to impose them on others, the only rights that exist are whatever one can do. If I want to kill someone, I can and will simply because I can. In that formulation, no one has any right to exist any more than an animal or a plant do.
So all non-theistic philosophy is a waste of time?
Pretty much unless you’re going solely from a pragmatic/utilitarian aspect. Meaning does not arise from randomness. That has always been one of the great philosophical problems non-theistic approaches have been unable to solve. If I randomly put words in a book, it doesn’t matter how long I do it. It will never have meaning. Rights are based in meaning. I can kill an animal or a plant for food, but not another person. Why? Because either man is a created being whose intrisic worth is in being created as a higher order of being by a creator, or as a society we determine it is better for everyone on average to not have people killing indiscriminately. Beyond that, there is no reason for me not to kill someone just because they’re another person. They have no intrinsic right to exist any more than anything else does.
Okay, this is why we are Ricochet members.
Greatest post. Ever.
Will print and distribute.
Hmm… I’m ok for now, thanks.
Thanks SoS, it’s now on my list.
Well put.
Oblomov, I LOVE YOU!!
(And btw, loved you in your eponymous novel and film version..!)
You had me at “I don’t have a God in this fight”. I’m wracking my brain to envision the context in which I could say, or write, “That God won’t hunt!” or “It’s enough to make a good God break His leash!”
I just wrote an article about how our whole “secular” society is based on oath-taking, i.e., putting your immortal soul in peril if you don’t keep your word. Can’t enter on the duties of public office, become a doctor or lawyer, or even get married, without “vows” or some secular parody thereof.
Your riff on Diversity Day recalled Robespierre’s Festival of Reason. L’Incorruptible soon realized he better speedily make overtures to re-open diplomatic relations with the Supreme Being, who had been banished from France, if he hoped to maintain civil order and the hierarchy of command in the military.
For many years we had a de facto civic religion here, pretty darn close to the enlightened Deism of the Founders. Now it’s under constant attack by the ACLU et al ( though they made no demur when our state and local governments spent billions–some even had to apply for disaster relief!–and suspended all their services to prostrate themselves before Pope Francis last year, I guess cuz he agrees with ’em on AGW and immigration).
So far SCOTUS usually says “mere ceremonial Deism” is OK, in line with the obvious fact that it can’t really be ripped out of the Constitution; it’s like the parchment on which it’s inscribed. But I don’t know if that’ll hold for long.
I’m not sure we’re really that far, MOST of us, from that tacit consensus. I really think the majority of Americans believe there is a God and He’s watching, and He wants us to do unto others, etc., and we can and should live and let live; He’ll sort us out in the Sweet Bye ‘n Bye. We will even enthusiastically tolerate, nay, actively seek community with, less benign creeds.
And in exchange for “tolerance” and acceptance, those less tolerant creeds have to accept minority status–which they ought to be ecstatically grateful to do, since there are so many countries in the world where they would be hunted down and beheaded by their co-religionists over arcane doctrinal differences.
But this fragile, precarious, blessed consensus will be destroyed if we go on down the path we’re on, toward mere “power-sharing” with creeds and ideologies that don’t tolerate tolerance.
UP with ceremonial Deism! We can all live (as opposed to die) with that!
Let’s assume you’re correct and I’m wrong. If so, there is still no difference between our positions: we both believe that rights and dignity are inherent to individuals.
That consensus seems much more important to me than disagreement over the specific origins of those rights.
“Take care that the laws be faithfully executed”
Son,
Obama swore to that on a phone book.
Regards,
Jim
A distinction should be made in the type of oath. For example the oath I took when I was sworn in as a police officer made no mention of the Mayor or City Council. Upholding the US Constitution, the Oregon State Statutes, and City Ordinances, and protecting life and property were in the oath.
Ultimately.
Would you please elaborate? An oath holds you accountable to the All-Seeing God who sees into the heart of man. Without belief in an omniscient deity, the “oath”-taker is beholden only to his or her conscience. How does the type of oath matter?
Or it attaches itself to a savior, a strong-man, a secular messiah who will offer nebulous promises of “Hope and Change” or to “Make America Great Again.”
I use the terminology of rights because we are conditioned to think within that frame of reference, but in a true state of nature, there are no rights. There simply is existence. I don’t have a right to kill you or not in the sense of rights as we use them in a political/philosophical sense. I kill you, or I don’t kill you. You live, or you don’t. I don’t have a right to kill you, and you don’t have a right to exist. They are simply things that happen.
Just wanted to add my appreciation. I usually say that I am a lapsed but cultural Catholic (no religious bones in this body, either, alas). Your post is a perfect explanation of this. Many thanks, and may you receive a thousand comments!
Nothing wrong with being confused; thanks for trying to explain it.
Statements like “I don’t have a religious bone in my body”, or “Faith doesn’t appeal to the rational and pragmatic side of my brain” imply that there is some innate quality or trait, either of body or character, that makes faith easier. What is that quality? Is it a willingness to accept something without all the answers? An attraction to mysticism? Is it more than one?
To be up front, the idea that there are inherent traits that affect how we respond to religion is entirely plausible. However, the implication that faith and rationality are at odds doesn’t ring true to me, though that is a common theme.
-E
My personal belief is that G-d does not deceive, nor can G-d be deceived. Lawful orders are mentioned in the oath. Conscience or a lack of conscience are present in anyone taking an oath.
The best example I can give you is that two deputies were assigned to ensure that Terry Schiavo did not receive a drop of water as she was being starved to death. I would have resigned rather than accept that assignment.
I think it does matter, Tom, because humans care about authority. Otherwise, what is to distinguish what I make up from what you make up? We also need to recognize, as O does in his OP, that the idea of rights and equality before the law came from somewhere. Even if you don’t believe in God, these ideas came from our Judeo Christian past and the people who endeavored to work out the meaning and logic, the requirements of it. It is, in other words, the foundation of the edifice. Knock down the foundation and the whole house starts to crumble as we see daily all around us. It’s pretty hard to reclaim the house if we deny the foundation. Many people believe in the concepts because they have profoundly affected western history, but now we’ve drifted into a kind of nihilism that denies the foundations while trying to make a creed out of some of the emptier concepts like equality and rights that are worse than meaningless without the underlying belief in God, Holy Writ and the like to allow them to be interpreted.
The larger problem that O is getting at in this point is that these philosophical concepts about the origin of rights, morality, the meaning and purpose of life are not being taught in our schools. Our educational elite have been hijacked by the cult of scientism which declares that science is the ultimate answer to all questions, and anything unquantifiable is inherently void. These are questions beyond the ken of science, though, so science has intruded into areas it should remain silent on.
Oh the hubris…
Tom gets at this partly when he says to some degree we are all cultural free-riders. In the American context, a large portion of our foundation derives from the writings of Locke which were influenced by Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex. Rutherford’s writing (putting the Law above the King in the very title of his book) got him charged with high treason it was so controversial at the time.
Ah yes–Locke and the retreat into the long night of enlightenment.
Locke was largely the secular interpretation of Rutherford’s argument based on Scottish Presbyterianism.
Honesty compels me to admit, though, that creedal Christianity is not always a cure for absurdism. It is possible to find oneself a Christian absurdist.
Thanks for this post. In a crowd of great points, this one stood out.
I have always regarded this argument as a cop-out, as it presumes its conclusion.
No rights in nature -> super-natural required for rights is a tautology. A bald statement of same is no more persuasive than quoting scripture to an atheist.
And it leaves no argument for rights other than force with someone who does not share your deism, or indeed your particular flavor of deism. As witness the OP and the current political scene.
From a former atheistic agnostic to a current one – keep searching. It will happen. By it will happen, I mean just that the door will open. The ultimate challenge becomes the willingness to make the leap of faith and step across the threshold.
Thank you for the post. I’ve had a similar experience. It was depressing.