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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
Thank you for such a wonderfully cogent post. This is not a new concept for me but is so well-articulated.
Thanks, also, for a particular nugget that I must chew on further:
Oblomov:
I had not previously thought of Progressivism as a recapitulation of Paganism in this way. I thought that it had its pagan factions and thought of the whole thing as a substitute religion as you so well describe. But the similarity to paganism in the ancient world does seem to describe it so well. I have contended for a while now that Progressivism does not operate via core principles in the way that Conservatism does. But to see it as a panoply of various gods and cults quite similar to the pantheon of ancient cultures makes a lot of sense. Some are dominant and pervasive while others are obscure and mysterious. There are competing allegiances and conflicting beliefs in both ancient paganism and Progressivism yet they each form a whole.
More food for thought.
I agree with that. I’m not for knocking down anything here.
My point is simply that it seems, to me, more important that we have inherent rights and dignity than that we squabble over their source. I’m not even denying that they come from God — honestly, it’s perfectly good argument — only that Prager presents a false choice.
The supernatural is not required for rights. A society can determine that it’s more efficient or more practical for certain conditions to be applied (like not indiscriminately killing one another). That is different than saying that rights are inherent and arise out of the chaos of nature. However, rights do not ever exist inherently in nature. They exist when someone, whether it be a supernatural creator, a society, or an individual, declares them to be so (and in that sense, society or the individual are essentially natural creators).
What other argument for rights is there other than force? We may have reached a point where most of us free-ride on the cultural and moral assumptions of our civilization, but make no mistake, if it were not the implicit threat of force (be it physical, peer pressure, public shame) underpinning the whole venture by the individual, society, or the state, our rights for all practical purposes would cease to exist. Without the threat of the state, or from a religious standpoint fear of divine retribution, there is nothing stopping me from killing my neighbor for whatever reason I choose.
Let’s use Ricochet as an example. As there is a Code of Conduct that outlines the boundaries of acceptable behavior, we have a right as paying customers to expect those guidelines to be enforced and to have civil conversations here. Those rights didn’t arise from nothing; they were delineated by creators as to what the guidelines of their site would be. Further, when people choose to ignore those guidelines, the members are powerless to do anything except speak out. Sometimes that is enough if the violator is sensitive to peer pressure. If not, the staff is required to step in and take action. If the staff did not act, we can claim we have a right to expect the guidelines be followed by everyone, but for all practical purposes that right does not exist because it is unenforceable. The right is dependent on the use of force to ensure its practice.
Whiskey,
You are a natural Kantian. Yes, exactly correct. Right requires you (your duty) to coerce the coercer by force if necessary. Add to this the maximization of Freedom and you have a Law of Right.
Regards,
Jim
But this is true regardless of the rights’ source.
But the source is external. If it were inherent, it wouldn’t needed to be protected by force. You can say you have a right to live, and I can say you don’t and kill you. So was your right to live inherent or not?
What O has pointed out is the Progressive lie that we have removed the religious underpinnings of our culture when we have simply replaced it with a secularized religion. It’s still this outside paradigm that defines our rights, not something inherent. This is why we can’t even agree on what rights we have.
Whatever disagreement we’re having here strikes me as very narrow. Perhaps “inherent” was the wrong word for me to use (more on that in a moment), but I don’t see any moral difference between the situation you described and one where the victim says “But I am endowed by God with dignity and rights!” before being dispatched.
Agreed.
Disagree. The outside paradigm doesn’t necessarily define our rights, but recognize them. This is true regardless of their source.
Wiskey,
You are on track. You are looking for the idea of a Maxim of Virtue. That is morality and it is strictly internal. Your own personal autonomous behavior depends upon your will being disposed to a Maxim of Virtue. Your will being disposed to a Heteronomous Maxim would change your behavior away from the good. Right as in a Law of Right is always external and involves creating a just government to enforce it.
An external government even justly conceived can do little to maintain Right if all of its citizens have abandoned their individual Maxim of Virtue. That is how a Kantian would phrase the subject of Oblo’s post.
Regards,
Jim
This argument convinced no one when I posted it some years back, but I’m going to throw it out there again.
The difference between this:
And this:
… is only that the former makes the source of the rights explicit, the latter does not.
(For the record, I not would change the Declaration, as that’d be super-creepy in so many leftist ways. Nor, had I a time machine, would I suggest he change it. But if he asked my opinion …)
EDIT: For some reason, I originally wrote “to which they are entitled” instead of “with which they are endowed.” Not sure what I was thinking, as I’d intended to keep the meanings parallel.
Second Edit: Wow, I missed the bolded “not” in bold above initially. Really not sure where my brain was on this.
Inherent could be where we part. Inherent to me is my eyes are blue. That is inherent and obvious to anyone who can see my eyes. Regardless of what someone says or does, my eyes are still blue. Inherent rights therefore implies the rights are there and observable by others regardless of their acceptance of them. They are an aspect that attaches to my humanity (although sometimes my humanity is in dispute).
Now, a theistic viewpoint would say man is a created being because God has communicated this truth to us both in propositional format through divine revelation of scripture and through an inherent recognition each human has of another person which is bound up in the concept of an inherent conscience. Therefore all men have certain qualities and rights by nature of being a created being instilled with a purpose. This anticipates these rights being enforced by adherence on Earth to a moral code handed down by God, and ultimately by God in the afterlife. This is where someone claiming to have rights by God that are violated on Earth would anticipate that the ultimate enforcement of those rights will be at a final judgment after death.
I can say as a member of society, we recognize that man is different than other creatures and therefore has inherent rights other creatures do not. This is a basis for ordering society, but does not mean there are intrinsic rights people innately have. They are rights assigned by society in order for society to function best. That kind of skips the whole question of inherency and just uses pragmatism or efficiency to make life simpler or more productive. In this scenario, my rights begin and end when society (usually in the form of the state) decides they do. I see this as where many Progressives are when they openly talk about removing freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, etc. We’ve already ceded our right to freedom of association and right of conscience when we say we are not allowed to discriminate in our private interactions. If the Progressives really believed our rights were inherent, they wouldn’t transgress them with authoritarian governmental behavior.
The former defines where the rights originate. The Founders understood that simply declaring rights for themselves lasted only as long as they were in power. The moment someone else came to power, those rights could be taken away if they were mere declarations. That’s why they appealed to a higher authority as the source of those rights. They were effectively saying the Laws of Nature and God trump all man-created law, and this is why we have a right to reject the abuses of the King. That phrase is what their entire argument rests on going back to the reasoning of Locke and Rutherford. They could justifiably reject the abuses of the King because he had violated a higher authority.
What a fantastic post.
I don’t think that the Left limits itself to two original sins, racism and crimes against Gaia. Sexism is another original sin in their view, with its corresponding anti-sacrament, abortion. Opposition to homosexuality is now another, with its own anti-sacrament, SSM.
Hypatia, please, my wife reads these things…
But thanks for the kind words.
One possible problem with my argument is that if you look at that very interesting Pew bar chart that breaks down the denominations by their political affiliation, it’s not that clear that religious people are all that politically conservative, on the whole. It’s probably true that Republicans are more religious than the Donks, but I’m not sure that religious people are much more Republican. The only ones for whom that is generally true are the Evangelicals. Catholics are the largest Christian group in the country, and they break down 44 to 37 Democrat.
Any thoughts about this?
Here is the link: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/23/u-s-religious-groups-and-their-political-leanings/
Having had the opportunity to observe Tom for a while now (which is totally less creepy than it sounds), Tom seems to believe that the Laws of Nature trump all man-created law. So do Maj (atheist) and Ball Diamond Ball (who’s if I remember rightly some sort of reluctant atheist or agnostic) – and Oblomov, evidently. All believe in an external, objective reality which, simply by being and being true, is authoritative.
And all are, perhaps not coincidentally, fairly geeky people – the type of people who have an innate reverence for laws of nature (and so curious about the sciences, math, and so forth, even in areas that aren’t their expertise). Maybe a lot of people don’t share that innate reverence. Maybe most people wouldn’t be predisposed to revere the natural order if they did not believe there was a God behind it. Maybe a God is necessary to supply to more normal people what geeks (theistic and atheistic alike) already have: a sense of wonder before the constraints reality imposes on us.
I realize the following is no more than a cheesy advertising stunt, but most geeks can relate to, say, loving giant squids, or tornadoes – or any number of things that simply are – enough to sing a stupid song about them:
Yeah. That poll doesn’t include frequency of church attendance, which I think is a good proxy for depth of belief.
I think that there a lot of people who self-report as Catholic, but who have little or no actual belief or participation. They say that they’re Catholic because they were born Catholic.
This is doubtless true of other groups, too, but my impression is that it’s more common among self-reported Catholics.
In 2012, Catholics who attended church weekly were 11% of the electorate, and favored Romney 57%-42%. Catholics who did not attend weekly were 13% of the electorate, and favored Obama 56%-42%. Here’s the exit poll link.
Son, What does your quotation mean, in the context of what I wrote? Do you mean you just see an oath as a promise to the people to faithfully execute the laws, instead of a conditional self-cursing invoking vengeance of a supernatural force if you are forsworn?
Religious polling can be problematic (Barna has done a lot of research on this) because people identify as a religion almost as a cultural identifier or social club, but when you start polling them on their specific beliefs, they don’t align with the religious affiliation they claim. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance here. It’s why many evangelicals dispute the cited evangelical support for Trump. Those claiming to be so supporting Trump rarely attend church, don’t believe the Bible is authoritative, etc. In fact, Trump himself would fit that criteria: claims to be a Christian, doesn’t believe in a need for repentance which is a central tenet of Christianity. Religious/cultural free-riders.
The claim of the Founders is explicitly an appeal to the authority of God, though. Nature’s has laws and they take precedent over man because God created them and transcends all others. That is the explicit claim used to justify the American revolution as more than just rebellion to the King. You can’t go back to what we had which O is proposing without going back to the original premise for it. Otherwise, you go back to something similar, but different, and that’s a different argument than he’s making.
OK in the small picture, not sustainable in the bigger picture IMHO. In other words, most people need to understand and believe in the source (God) for them to last. We only need to look at the left in ou country and around the world now and historically to see that this is true.
I don’t really disagree with that, which ranks high among the reasons why I’m not evangelical about my lack of belief and why I don’t care for the New Atheists.
To your credit Tom.
Sure, the Founders made an explicit appeal to the authority of God, and in seeing Nature as God’s creation, must have seen the appeal to “Nature and Nature’s God” ultimately as an appeal to God alone, since Nature was herself God’s creature.
But what Tom seems to be asking is whether believing – for any reason – that “Nature has laws and they take precedent over man” is enough.
People might differ on the explanation as to why “Nature has laws and they take precedent over man”. Perhaps many humans would find sincerely believing that proposition difficult without also tacking on the explanation “because God created them and transcends all others”.
But it seems evident to me that there are also people who can believe the proposition “Nature has laws and they take precedent over man” without tacking on the because you offered – I’ve interrogated enough of these people and their beliefs to accept that they mean what they say. I speculated, though, that perhaps these people are in the minority.
Perhaps most people find it difficult to maintain a belief in and respect for the natural order of things unless they believe the natural order is upheld by a God or gods.
It’s the distinction between being inherent in nature or arising from a supernatural creator that I regard as a cop-out. I might just as well say (and with more evidence) that natural rights come from the nature of man qua man – a (limited) reasoning being – as from the presumption of a particular creator. It leaves you in the same place as far as convincing someone who doesn’t share your premises – and without the need for buy-in to your particular deist creed.
Inevitably, argument from either nature or the supernatural must be backed up with the willingness to use force in defense of rights, since not all will share that view or be willing to respect it. On that I suspect we agree.
I do not regard the distinction as a cop-out, but I think it’s a distinction often given more weight than it can really bear.
Given that we theists are capable of treating stuff as inherent in nature, too, without referencing God every time, I think it would be a little easier for us to sympathize with those who see stuff as inherent in nature and never see it as referencing God.
God may be the Ultimate Cause – I must believe “because God” is the answer to every question in some ultimate sense, else I wouldn’t be a theist. But for so much of human reasoning, more proximate causes will do. So I don’t always think of God when I think about gravity, or when I recognize that water makes things wet, or even when I reflect on human nature. And I don’t think any believer always thinks about God when thinking of these things.
Even those who cultivate the kind of spiritual discipline that treats every breath, every action (or inaction) as prayer aren’t consciously thinking about God the whole time. Indeed, anyone who literally prays without ceasing must of necessity sometimes be praying without thinking.
Uhhuh!
A refusal to “squabble over their source” leads to sourcing “rights” in government and to denying the inherent nature of the rights “you” claim as opposed to those I prefer and claim.
Someones once said, inter alia,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men—-
Clearly what was once “self-evident” no longer is and squabble we now do not only over the source of our rights as pre or post government, but over exactly which of our preferences are “rights” and over just how secure those “rights” are in the face of those who “think different.”
Well, curious for your thoughts on comment #70.
That is what we fear will happen, and what we fear has happened. Nonetheless, it seems that proof that one inevitably leads to the other is more difficult to establish than many of us like to think.
Clearly, not everyone must believe that what is inherent is inherent because God made it so in order to avoid believing that the source of rights is in government.
For example, one does not have to believe in God to believe that a government – even a just and limited government – is at greater risk of abating the rights it purports to enforce than any other institution. And an institution known for its tendency to turn against the very thing it purports to enforce is, to put it mildly, an unpromising candidate for being the source of that thing.
No, the problem seems to be that so many human hearts crave something sacred to love, typically something sacred to love in fellowship with others who love the same thing. When we satisfy that craving by attaching ourselves to a shared religion different from the State, then we reduce the risk of satisfying that craving through worship of the State. If, instead, we have not satisfied that craving through some institution other than the State, then that craving is free to attach itself to the State instead.
Throughout much of human history, religions have also been State religions. Indeed, many, including Christians, who did not participate in the cult of the State were deemed “atheists” for not worshiping the State as a manifestation of the divine. For us to have a shared religious culture that rejects the State as a manifestation of the divine is really rather special.