By Gina R. Dalfonzo
9/25/2007

America‘s Leap from Faith

Anyone studying the state of religion in America over the last several years might easily conclude that the best word to describe it is schizophrenic. How do you explain a society in which 90 percent of adults say they believe in God, and 82 percent call themselves Christians, while at the same time books advocating atheism keep rocketing to the top of the bestseller lists?

It is tempting to write off the phenomenon by pointing out that for many who call themselves believers, their belief is little more than nominal. And as W. Bradford Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Husbands and Fathers, has found, “nominal evangelicals” in America have even higher rates of teen sex and divorce than the rest of the population, and their rates of cohabitation are about the same. Wilcox traces these statistics back to the “cultural inheritance,” high poverty rate, and low education rate of many of these nominal evangelicals. But their behavior helps to make the case that faith is something that many Americans hold very lightly and would be willing to drop if someone just gave them a few good reasons to do so.And yet it is not an entirely convincing case. To go from a vaguely comforting belief in a benevolent Deity who gives without requiring anything—Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, as sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton have christened it—to outright atheism, is still quite a leap. In fact, one might argue that such an undemanding belief might make people more inclined to hold on to faith.
So why the suddenly heightened interest in atheism? The reasons seem to be too varied and complex to pinpoint easily. But we may be able to learn something about its development if we take a closer look, not just at the militantly anti-theist authors that have been drawing so much attention, but also at other cultural voices that have been pleading the atheists’ case for many years now—more quietly, perhaps, but no less persistently than the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Though their impact may have been far more limited than that of these “new atheists,” those other voices, arising in various fields from politics to science to popular culture, still have much to tell us about how and why interest in atheism has exploded in recent years.

DIVIDED NATION
“The American Humanist Association applauded Rep. Pete Stark for publicly acknowledging he does not believe in a supreme being,” announced the Associated Press this past March. “The declaration, it said, makes him the highest-ranking elected official—and first congressman—to proclaim to be an atheist.”

The fanfare that greeted this announcement was telling. It signified, for one thing, just what a rare and surprising event this really was—and perhaps also that it was not an event likely to be repeated often in the near future. The announcement, after all, was an upshot of a project launched by the Secular Coalition of America offering prize money to the person who could name the “highest level atheist, agnostic, humanist or any other kind of nontheist currently holding elected public office in the United States,” meaning that finding such a person was not an easy task. Politicians who are not, at the very least, willing to pay lip service to religion are few and far between, especially at the top levels of government.

Even what many see as the waning influence of the “Religious Right” has done little to alter this particular situation, as even a brief look at the 2008 presidential race shows us. From the few hardcore religious conservatives to the social moderates to left-wing candidates making a bid to draw traditionally conservative Christians by emphasizing social justice—“try[ing] to frame a message in terms of broadly shared values,” as ­TIME magazine put it—religion continues to play a major factor. This is true even in a race where issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, long considered bedrock issues for religious voters, have been placed on the back burner.

But the broadening appeal of religion cannot quite hide a growing mutter of discontent and frustration. Mark Lilla, professor of the humanities at Columbia University, helped give voice to it when he wrote in the New York Times,

Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.

Though Lilla is speaking, at that point, primarily of radical Islam, he goes on to speak of the problems with “political theology” in general. So it is worth asking, to whom does his “we” refer? To a class that has long been living with, and trying to decipher, a puzzling paradox. Sociologist Peter Berger has famously said that if India is the world’s most religious nation, and Sweden the least religious, then America is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. But we need only look again at the presidential race to see that ruled may be a relative term. For it is the views of the “Indians,” the religious voters, that set the tone, if not the agenda, in American politics. We thus have the peculiar situation of a nation led by those at least nominally religious, with a general population ranging from nominally to fervently religious, and an intelligentsia and a media largely made up of those who neither know nor care much about religion.

It is hardly surprising to see such a situation lead to widespread frustration. Many conservative Christians have grown accustomed to complaining about the views of the secular elite being forced on us. What we have not always realized is that they might feel the same way about us.
PLATFORM FOR COMPLAINTS
Thus, we have another paradox, expressed unwittingly by British intellectual and atheist Jonathan Miller in The Humanist when he said of America: “Judging by how well the Dawkins and Harris books have sold, I think the reaction will be an increasing sense of relief on the part of the, previously unacknowledged, large minority of unbelievers who have never come out in the open, who will suddenly say, ‘Well, things are getting easier now.’”

Given that the intelligentsia is by its very nature given to putting its views out in the open, and has for some time been dominated by secularism, the quotation sounds odd, to say the least. But it can be explained by keeping in mind the mentality that goes with being surrounded on all sides by a belief one does not share, heightened by the conviction that so many secularists share that religious belief can lead nowhere but to ruin. As intellectual and New York Times columnist Stanley Fish puts it, with a touch of self-parody:

One thing we can’t do is appeal to some common ground that might form the basis of dialogue and possible rapprochement. There is no common ground, and therefore Lilla is right to say that “agreement on basic principles won’t be possible.” After all, it is a disagreement over basic principles that divides us from those who have been called “God’s warriors.” The principles that will naturally occur to us—tolerance, mutual respect, diversity—are ones they have already rejected; invoking them will do no real work except the dubious work of confirming us in our feelings of superiority. (We’re tolerant, they’re not.)

So, as “political theology” and secularism jockey for position, we end up with situations in which, for example, openly religious candidate John Edwards hires two political bloggers whose anti-Catholic slurs stir up so much outrage that they finally have to quit. Or TIME magazine profiles the faith of the three leading Democratic candidates not long after 69 percent of poll respondents at one of the leading liberal blogs, DailyKos, identify themselves as atheist or agnostic. In other words, situations that go well beyond paradoxical all the way to bizarre.
BLURRING THE LINES OF BELIEF
But if politics tends to highlight the differences between the secular intelligentsia and the religious general population, popular culture tends to blur them.

For instance, one of the best-known atheists in Hollywood, writer Joss Whedon, has books, college courses, and symposia dedicated to religious themes in his television shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly). Despite defining himself publicly as “a very hard-line, angry atheist,” Whedon skillfully uses religious imagery to the point where Mormon writer and editor Jana Riess, author of the book What Would Buffy Do?, posits “the vampire slayer as spiritual guide.” She’s hardly the only religious writer to do so.

Yet Whedon’s vision, as he states in so many words, is of a dark, nihilistic universe where the true hero is one “who looks into the void and sees nothing but the void—and says there is no moral structure, there is no help, no one’s coming, no one gets it, I have to do it.” Despite borrowing liberally from such Christian themes as self-sacrifice and atonement, Whedon has no desire to be mistaken for a believer. His episodes dealing specifically with religion either keep the focus on Wicca and paganism, practiced by some of his protagonists, or revolve around such practices as witch-burning and worship of demons, practices usually carried out in a state of mindless ecstasy. All such religions are shown to be shallow and empty; there is no meaning to be found except in acknowledging the meaninglessness of the world and simply “continuing to fight even for small and temporary victories against cruelty, violence and fear.”

But while writers like Whedon and fellow Hollywood atheist Aaron Sorkin manage to restrain their bitterest feelings about religion, and occasionally even create religious characters and themes that Christians manage to relate to, another atheist writer has no such ambition.

The work of Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, has frequently been compared to that of Christian fantasy writers C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. (The trailer for the upcoming film The Golden Compass, based on the first book in Pullman’s series, explicitly draws the comparison to the latter.) This is ironic because of his determination to break away from their mold, to the point where he called Lewis’s Narnia series “one of the most ugly and poisonous things I have ever read” because of their underlying Christianity.

Pullman deliberately takes Christian themes and turns them upside-down—for example, maneuvering his characters into a retelling of the Garden of Eden story in which eating the fruit and losing innocence is portrayed as the right thing to do. And the fact that the series culminates in the death of “God”—a weak, pathetic figure—drives home the point with a sledgehammer. Pullman is one “angry atheist” who is not interested in cooperating, even tacitly, with the religious preconceptions of his readers.
SOFTENING US UP
So whether half-hidden or out in the open, in the end we see again in popular culture the same thing we saw in the political philosophers, the news media, and academia: a sense of boiling rage and frustration at being surrounded by religious belief. Small wonder that these widespread feelings, simmering for so long, would eventually explode in a series of vitriolic screeds against religion by Dawkins, Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. But now, perhaps, we can begin to understand why these books are attracting a larger-than-expected audience—and why Moralistic Therapeutic Deism may have something to do with that after all.

A nominal, feel-good faith may survive a long time in a culture where the primary institutions are oriented toward religion. In a culture where the majority of those institutions—with the exception of government, which after all has less of a day-to-day relationship with citizens than do the university or the television—have become steeped in secularism, it will erode faster. And when that secularism changes to “angry atheism,” it soon clears the ground for outright evangelizing for atheism, and finds a willing audience prepared to meet it. Not all the readers of these books are going to become atheists, naturally, but many of them are going to buy into the militant worldview being peddled, in which secularism is the only view worth taking seriously, and religion a bunch of silly, outmoded superstitions.

Despite the comforts their faith might offer, it might not be so surprising that those who have been acclimated to atheism, without a solid grounding in the basic tenets of faith and the fundamentals of a Christian worldview, are easy prey for Dawkins’s definition of God as a “delusion” in which no thinking person would believe. Maybe, if you look below the surface, our nation’s beliefs aren’t quite so schizophrenic after all.