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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
Tom: I like your thought experiment–time machine or no. So….
If your “advice” had been taken, where then is the source of the “entitlement” you suggest?
To be honest, I’m not sure. God is a viable hypothesis, but it may be just something that exists. As Midge said, we talk all the time about being endowed with various attributes without reference to God.
And regarding “entitlement”… wow, I completely screwed that up. Not sure what I was thinking as my intent was to keep the meaning parallel to Jefferson’s, but it should have read:
Passive voice, “action” without an actor. You wouldn’t even consider writing that under other circumstances.
The passive voice is sometimes used to emphasize the action over the actor.
Tom,
I would like to remind you of something. Jefferson composed the Declaration first in executive committee with Adams (his philosophical opposite) sitting right next to him. The Declaration was submitted to the full Continental Congress. Each delegation had the power to veto any of the language they deemed unacceptable. The Declaration that we read is about 1/3 shorter than the one submitted because of strike-outs. Finally, they got a unanimous vote for the Declaration. If any document ever reflected exactly the will of a legislative body the Declaration was it.
Why in the world do you imagine they didn’t intend the text as ratified. To your dulled down 21st century ears the obviously religious reference is redundant. They most certainly didn’t think so. I don’t think so either. It was the Judeo-Christian civilization that created the American foundation of pure rights. They were stating it clearly because they meant exactly that.
They were right about it then and they are still right about it now.
Regards,
Jim
It was intended as a dig against a POTUS who shows little evidence of religiosity and has repeatedly followed his own counsel rather than fulfilling his oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.
Yes! In college I wrote a paper for a “Psychology of Religion” class that looked at the relationship between religiosity and suicide. I discovered that researchers struggle to find a good way to measure religiosity; affiliation is not enough. The most robust and reliable measure — what has become more or less standard for researchers — is whether someone attends services at least once per week.
At the time I took the class, the professor compared global responses to the survey question, “Do you believe in God?” The US placed first among Western nations by a large margin, with 98% answering in the affirmative. (The atheist Jewish professor remarked, “And we know something about the other 2%: They’re Jewish.”) Today, 20 years later, the number has fallen to about 85% IIRC.
Jim, I apologize. I accidentally deleted the negative (really not my night). Should have read:
Great post and wonderful discussion by one and all. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Tom,
I feel better already. I have made quite a few typos in my time too. However, you still feel like you want to suggest as your opinion that the Gd of Western Civilization didn’t really need to be invoked.
One of the reasons I like Kant so much is that he goes directly to this issue and attempts to show you that the Gd of Western Civilization is one of the fundamental postulates of Morality. Without this postulate any moral system will become unraveled due to the is/ought dichotomy. I am giving very little time to a very large subject. What is very interesting is that this finally shows how Western Civilization didn’t just take a wrong turn and slip off into Mysticism. It isn’t an accident that modern science, commerce, and human rights are all generated in an environment of a very pure moral monotheism. We didn’t make a big mistake that social science must run around and fix.
I think if we really could see things clearly it is the other way around. Hyper-secularity has made a hash of everything. It will be religious morality that pulls us back from the brink.
Regards,
Jim
A typically SOS civil dig–too civil for my yawping taste. POTUS knows next to nothing of our Constitution. His Living Constitution is a product of Progressive Magical thinking and govco monopoly power. In his mind–where his Constitution exists–I’m quite content to accept that he thinks he is upholding and defending that Constitution–the only one he knows.
Hmmm. Are you into ‘black swans’? What is “what happens”–ie reality observed over time–if not “proof”?
I fully agree that the secular left is redefining our ‘Rights’ to fit their conception due to their lack of any moral anchor. This is a problem, mainly because they refuse to use the Constitutional means of Congressional action reviewed by the Courts in light of the clear textual meaning in the written document. So we get bureaucratic mandates and court rulings based on where they decide we should be going instead of based on the clearly expressed will of the voters as constrained by the founding documents.
I define myself as a believing skeptic. I attend Church regularly but can’t accept everything said or done there as provably true. Just because it can’t be proven doesn’t make it false…or true. I can’t prove the Gospel story to be true but I certainly hope it is. Is that a sufficient measure of Faith? I can’t say for sure but that is the plane I occupy.
As Martin Luther said, “I can do no other.”
Yes. Statistically, musically, and ornithologically :-)
I’m also into queer uses for probability theory, which is very relevant here, but would probably take me too long to explain in just a comment!
Evidence is not proof. Proof satisfies a certain burden, depending on the field (for example, in mathematics, no amount of mere evidence counts as proof, as no amount of evidence proves that no counterexamples exist; in a courtroom it is different; and so on). The unfolding of a particular history over time, even by historians’ standards, is perhaps better classified as evidence, not proof.
Now, evidence is nothing to sneeze at, either, but I think you and others on this thread might have the causality behind the evidence wrong:
It simply does not logically follow that if people don’t believe rights come from God, then they must believe rights come from the State instead. That claim is pretty much nonsense. If it logically followed, there would be no counterexamples (individuals capable of reasoning otherwise), and instead counterexamples are plentiful.
I claim it is likely true, however, that when people don’t share a God (and – very importantly – a God whose authority is not mediated through the State) to attach their hearts to, they are more likely to attach their hearts to the State instead, and then, because of that attachment, see the State as a quasi-divine source of rights. I described this claim in this prior comment. It seems to me our disagreement is over causality, rather than correlation.
Reasoning about rights doesn’t come first. Lack of belief in a non-State God does not cause a man to reason that rights must come from the State instead. Instead, emotional attachment comes first.
If the State fills a void of attachment that God used to fill, then it is that attachment, not logical inevitability, that causes people to feel that there’s something sacred enough about the State, and from that feeling of sacredness springs the sense of a source of rights.
We desire our rights to have a sacred character, so we desire them to “spring” from a “sacred source”. God and the State aren’t the only options for that source – though, since both are objects an entire populace could venerate, both are obviously attractive candidates.
IIRC, Ayn Rand’s objectivist approach was that that source of man’s natural rights is his rationality. (That is, that the species is capable of rationality.)
Yeah, some people venerate reason, some the achievements of Western civilization, some venerate our Founders or Founding Documents (still distinct from venerating the State as such, though too close for comfort for many of us). Some folks venerate greatness (we have a few members who aren’t shy about that) – whatever is big, famous, spectacular, powerful…
American exceptionalism might be what National Greatness conservatives venerate. And venerating one’s own people is of course an attractive idea in many circles….
None of these is identical to venerating the State, though it’s reasonable to suspect that some of these objects of veneration are more easily conflated with the State than others.
Seconded.
The rise of Paganism is real. Those on the left, however, don’t realize that they are attached to a religion though they are. They think they are attached to “reason” and so forth, which manifests itself in devotion to environmentalism (gaia), correct ways of eating, vague “rights-n-equality” and the like. They have no doubt that the state should uphold their unacknowledged religion, which will lead to perfected end times, and they are utterly certain that those who oppose them (conservatives) are evil. The relationship is rather like the one between the Gospel and the church, the organization that supports the Gospel. It seems like the state is basically their church organization. Having been a member of a church all my life, I know that sometimes it is hard for members to separate the Gospel and the church.
Anabaptist societies, especially Amish and Hutterites, tend to be strongly egalitarian. However, the Amish in North America are losing some of that as they become less agricultural and more of them make their living as business owners. It’s not yet clear how it will all turn out.
Also, Native American agricultural societies in North America tended to be strongly egalitarian, but they were not far removed from hunter-gatherer societies.
They probably wrote about this, right? I just don’t remember any quotes. Do you think they were right? What’s the evidence?
Two relevant quotes on the matter:
Adams:
Washington/Hamilton:
Thanks for the quotes, Tom.
Maybe I just don’t have the right experience and study under my belt, but I still don’t consider it obvious that morality requires religion. Nor is it obvious to me that a successful, free nation can not be set up whose very machinery brings about proper behavior by people, rather than needing a precedent morality.
It’s not a problem as long as you don’t think about it too deeply. Lots of people manage. It makes no sense for people to call some behavior right and other behavior wrong, but lots of things don’t make sense.
I’m actually in the same camp as you: I am willing — with some caution — to indulge the notion. Where I agree with the Founders and Oblomov is that no one has ever successfully created a society of unbelievers capable of maintaining liberty of the kind they described. I don’t think it’s impossible, but I also not particularly eager to find out.
My view of the likelihood is probably close to yours … plus, Chesterton’s fence and all that. But, maybe when we move to space, there will be a great enough variety of societies that one may arise. That is, maybe enough “heathens” will find themselves in the same place, and their society will, per force, be one of a majority of their kind. One reason we haven’t seen one yet, is that most people are religious.