Atheists & Agnostics

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Thinking about divided America: Our complex land is getting more secular AND more religious

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In the overheated world of political fundraising and public-relations, America remains on the verge of theocracy, with women forced into red capes and white bonnets.

That’s the view of the political and cultural left, of course. On the right there are people who are absolutely sure that the drag-queen story hours held in some public libraries will soon be required in private religious schools. (Personally, I would like to see some of the folks on the right in those zip codes head to their public libraries and propose Narnia story hours or rosary-class meditation circles. If they are refused access, then it’s time to talk to authorities.)

The bottom line is that America is a very big, complex place and what flies in blue urban zones will not work in most of the heartland. While there is plenty of evidence that the nones-agnostics-atheists side of American life is growing (it is), there are also trends on the cultural and religious right that must be considered. As GetReligion has been arguing for years, the messy truth is that the mushy middle is what is vanishing.

This brings us to this weekend’s think piece at Religion & Politics, which ran with this headline: “Why the Partisan Divide? The U.S. Is Becoming More Secular — and More Religious.”

What does that mean? Well, for starters, consider trends among Hispanic Americans. You know that top Republicans and Democrats are thinking about that, right now.

In the end, there is plenty of evidence that the warring halves of American culture are real and they are not going away. What does religion have to do with that? Plenty. Click here for a recent GetReligion look at half of that: “'Blue Movie' time again: Massive New York Times op-ed says the 'pew gap' is real and growing.”

But back to this new essay by Spencer James, Hal Boyd, and Jason Carroll, who are faculty members in Brigham Young University’s School of Family Life. Here’s a key chunk of their thinking:

The data suggest that our national divide is deeper than just knee-jerk partisanship — it involves a confluence of religio-geographic trends in the United States that all but guarantee the kind of political gridlock we saw manifest this month at the ballot box. The United States is not a purely secular nation — nor is it a fully religious one. The country stands out among its international peers as distinctly balanced. And acknowledging this reality may be the first step to burying the country’s cultural weapons of war and embracing a posture of greater political pluralism and cooperation.


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Thinking about Georgia, while looking at some 2020 religion numbers from Ryan Burge

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Did you enjoy a day or two away from political Twitter? Me neither.

So let’s move on to Georgia, where voters in greater Atlanta and then the rest of Georgia are going to be hearing the voice of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) quite a bit in the next few weeks.

All together now, here is that Schumer quote from a celebratory street party in New York City: “Now we take Georgia, then we change America!”

Because of its unique election rules requiring a 50% win in key contests, Georgia currently has two open U.S. Senate seats — which means that Schumer and his colleagues can control the next U.S. Senate (with the tie-breaking vote of soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris) by taking both of them. Thus, Georgia is suddenly on everyone’s mind.

That includes folks at the New York Times political desk, who are asking the obvious question: What is causing Georgia to move from the forces of darkness to the world of love and light? Trust me, that’s pretty much the tone of this analysis feature that is not labeled an analysis feature. The overture is spot-on perfect, from a New York-centric point of view:

MARIETTA, Ga. — It took a lifetime for Angie Jones to become a Democrat.

As a young woman, she was the proud daughter of a conservative family active in Republican politics. Ten years ago, after a friend’s son came out as gay, Ms. Jones became an independent, though one who watched Fox News. After the 2016 election, Ms. Jones, a stay-at-home mother in Johns Creek, a pristine wealthy suburb north of Atlanta, became frustrated with her conservative friends defending President Trump through scandal after scandal.

And this year, she voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr., after spending months phone banking, canvassing and organizing for Democratic candidates with a group of suburban women across Atlanta.

“I feel like the Republican Party left me,” said Ms. Jones, 54. “It very much created an existential crisis for me.”

I have family in Georgia and I’ve paid close attention to politics there since the mid-1970s (and almost moved there, from Illinois, in the early 1980s). The bottom line: Georgia may be turning into Illinois, a rural state dominated by a super-city and its suburbs (and the corporations and media therein).

Now, there is a crucial question missing from that Times overture, a question that millions of Georgians — Black and White — would spot instantly. The anecdote doesn’t tell us (a) where this woman goes to church, (b) where her conservative family went to church in the past or (c) where she is now refusing to go to church. If she has changed churches, that would be crucial.


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Why are U.S. voters so wary about electing atheists? What about voting for evangelicals?

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THE QUESTION:

Why are U.S. voters so wary about electing atheists?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Political firsts are piling up!

Joe Biden was America’s first Catholic vice president elected alongside the first Black president, Barack Obama, and hopes to be its second Catholic president. Running mate Kamala Harris would be the first female, first African-American, and first Asian-American as vice president. Jimmy Carter was not the first evangelical president but the first whose faith got such scrutiny. (See note below on how Americans view evangelical candidates.)

In other landmarks on major party tickets, losing nominees for president include the first woman, Hillary Clinton, the first Latter-day Saint, Mitt Romney, the first Eastern Orthodox candidate, Michael Dukakis, and the first Catholic, Al Smith, in 1928. Vice presidential hopefuls on losing tickets include the first Catholic, William Miller, the first woman, Geraldine Ferraro, and the first Jew, Joseph Lieberman.

Ted Cruz was the first Latino to win a primary election, and Pete Buttigieg the first openly gay candidate to do so. The halls of Congress have welcomed numerous Blacks, women, Latinos and those of other immigrant ethnicities, as well as Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims.

One exception. “Why is it so hard for atheists to get voted into Congress?” That’s the title of an October article by Pitzer College sociologist Phil Zuckerman for theconversation.com that was picked up by The Associated Press, patheos.com, Religion News Service and other outlets.

In a Gallup Poll last year, Americans said they’re willing to elect a president who is:


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Lots to think about: Weiss and Sullivan on rise of illiberalism in news media and America

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If you were going to nominate the public-square “think piece” of the month, it would have to be the latest salvo from former New York Times scribe Bari Weiss. You remember, of course, her earlier letter to the Gray Lady’s Powers That Be when she hit the exit door, after lots of Slack channel pressure from colleagues?

The headline on her new Tablet piece proclaims, “Stop Being Shocked: American liberalism is in danger from a new ideology — one with dangerous implications for Jews.” Trends in American journalism get quite a bit of attention in this essay.

Reading it made me think of a problem that I’ve been having here at GetReligion for a decade or more. Here is the opening of a piece five years ago entitled, “Short test for journalists: Label the cultural point of view in this commentary.”

One of the big ideas here at GetReligion is that we live in an age in which many of our comfortable journalistic labels are becoming more and more irrelevant. They simply don't tell readers anything.

For example, there is this puzzle that I have mentioned before. What do you call people who are weak in their defense of free speech, weak in their defense of freedom of association and weak in their defense of religious liberty (in other words, basic First Amendment rights)? The answer: I don't know, but it would be totally inaccurate – considering the history of American political thought – to call these people "liberals."

You can call use the term “illiberal,” of course. A Muslim human-rights activist I interviewed a few years ago said that he is considering reaching back to the French Revolution and calling them “Jacobins.”

The key is that Weiss is suddenly being called a conservative for defending the beliefs and traditions that surrounded her as she grew up in old-school liberal Jewish circles. Now, she’s a conservative of some kind because she is saying things like this:

Did you see that the Ethical Culture Fieldston School hosted a speaker that equated Israelis with Nazis? Did you know that Brearley is now asking families to write a statement demonstrating their commitment to “anti-racism”? Did you see that Chelsea Handler tweeted a clip of Louis Farrakhan? Did you see that protesters tagged a synagogue in Kenosha with “Free Palestine” graffiti? Did you hear about the march in D.C. where they chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children too”? Did you hear that the Biden campaign apologized to Linda Sarsour after initially disavowing her? Did you see that Twitter suspended Bret Weinstein’s civic organization but still allows the Iranian ayatollah to openly promote genocide of the Jewish people?


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Podcast: Political facts about evangelicals make news, but what about all the nones?

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Let’s assume, faithful readers, that you have heard that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Citizen Donald Trump in the 2016 election. It’s been in all the papers.

Now, if you have been reading GetReligion over the past 17 years you are also familiar with another important trend, which is the growing number of Democrats who fit into a very different faith-defined (sort of) political niche. That has been part of our call for increased coverage of the Religious Left, especially on the evolution of doctrine over there (including the whole “spiritual, but not religious” theme).

Of course, we are talking about the famous “nones” — “religiously unaffiliated” is the better term — who crashed into American headlines in 2012, with the release of the “Nones on the Rise” study by the Pew Research team. That launched thousands of headlines, but not many — this is actually pretty shocking — on how this trend has affected life inside the Democratic Party.

That was the subject of our discussion on this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). The podcast chat grew out of my post earlier this week with this headline: “How powerful are 'nones' in Democratic Party? That's a complex issue for reporters.”

The talk, as often happens, took us back through quite a bit of GetReligion history, much of it linked to the work and wisdom of pollster and scholar John C. Green of the University of Akron and the now omnipresent political scientist (and GetReligion contributor) Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University (must-follow Twitter handle here).

Here are a few crucial dates on this timeline.

First, there were the studies done by political scientists Gerald De Maio and Louis Bolce, who were intrigued with the rise — inside the machinery of Democratic Party life — of what they at first called the “anti-fundamentalist voters,” but later changed that to “anti-evangelical.” Here’s a bite of an “On Religion” column from 2004.

Many are true secularists, such as atheists, agnostics and those who answer "none" when asked to pick a faith. Others think of themselves as progressive believers. The tie that binds is their disgust for Christian conservatives.


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How powerful are 'nones' in Democratic Party? That's a complex issue for reporters

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Sorry to bring this up again, but I really have to because of the many religion-news angles unfolding in the final weeks of this year’s presidential race, and lots of U.S. Senate races as well.

Hang in there with me. We are heading toward a puzzling passage in a recent Religion News Service analysis that ran with this headline: “ ‘Humanists for Biden-Harris’ to mobilize nonreligious vote.”

Now, that flash back: Frequent GetReligion readers will recall that, in the summer of 2007, political scientist and polling maven John C. Green spoke at a Washington Journalism Center seminar for a circle of journalists from around the world. The topic was press freedom in their home countries, but most of the journalists — especially those from Africa — wanted to talk about the young Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who was jumping into the White House race.

The bottom line: Obama was speaking directly to Democrats in the black church, but he was also reaching out to an emerging power bloc in his party — a group Green called the “religiously unaffiliated.” These so-called “nones” were poised to form a powerful coalition with atheists, agnostics and liberal believers. They shared, you see, a common cultural enemy on many issues, as in believers in traditional forms of faith. As I wrote in 2012:

On the right side of the American religious marketplace, defined in terms of doctrine and practice, is a camp of roughly 20 percent (maybe less) of believers who are seriously trying to practice their chosen faith at the level of daily life, said Green. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, there is a growing camp of people who are atheists, agnostics or vaguely spiritual believers. …

In recent national elections this growing camp of secularists and religiously unaffiliated people have formed a powerful coalition with Catholic liberals, liberal Jews and the declining numbers of people found in America's liberal religious denominations (such as the "seven sisters" of oldline Protestantism). Add it all up, Green said in 2009, and you had a growing camp of roughly 20 percent or so on the cultural left.

The bottom line: This coalition was emerging as the dominant voice in the modern Democratic Party on matters of culture and religion.

In those days, Green was doing quite a bit of work with the Pew Research Center — so this was a foretaste of the information that would create waves of headlines with the 2012 release of the “ ‘Nones’ on the Rise” studies.

At press events linked to the release of that data, Green said, once again:


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Would the United States of America be better off without all that tacky religion stuff?

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Would the United States of America be better off without all that tacky religion stuff?

THE QUESTION:

“Would America Be Better Off Without Religion?”

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

That provocative big-picture question is the title of an article by grad student Casey Chalk, which we’ll turn to after some ground-clearing. Atheism (or its cousin, agnosticism) isn’t what it used to be. Folks who didn’t believe in God used to mostly downplay it while polite public debate engaged certain thinkers like Bertrand Russell (“Why I Am Not a Christian,” 1927) or J. L. Mackie (“The Miracle of Theism,” 1982).

In recent times, faith has been thrown more on the defensive, not just by skepticism from without but damaging developments from within — Horrid scandals of sexual predators among Christian clergy. Angry Protestant splits over whether to shed traditional sexual morals. Terrorism by Muslim sects and certain Buddhists and Hindus.

Well-publicized “new atheists” have emerged more aggressively to attack believers as not merely mistaken but downright stupid, even evil.

Take James Haught, who wrote for the Freedom From Religion Foundation that because people are getting smarter they “perceive that magical dogmas are a bunch of hooey — just fairy tales with no factual reality…. Right before our eyes, supernatural faith is dying in America.” (Actually, there’s a slide, not death.) Notably, Haught was West Virginia’s most important journalist, as longtime editor of the Charleston Gazette.

Such bludgeoning can have limited persuasive power except among those already convinced. But Max Boot offered an interesting new anti-faith line this year in a Washington Post column (behind a pay wall). This Soviet immigrant is a public intellectual to reckon with, as a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and acclaimed author (also conservative Never-Trumper on cable newscasts).

“Too much religion is bad for a country,” Boot contended. He made that case by compiling nation-by-nation statistics on e.g. per capita gross domestic product, unemployment, poverty, homicide, life expectancy, infant mortality, education and political liberties.


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Freethought Caucus in U.S. House reflects the rise, and political potential, of the 'nones'

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Rashida Tlaib of liberal “squad” fame on Capitol Hill, the first Palestinian-American and one of two Muslim women in the U.S. House, won this month’s primary against the president of Detroit’s City Council and is guaranteed re-election in a heavily Democratic district.

Now the “Friendly Atheist” blog on patheos.com revealed that Tlaib has quietly joined the Congressional Freethought Caucus. Aysha Khan, Religion News Service’s Muslim specialist, quickly grabbed the report.

Lest there be misunderstanding, this doesn’t mean Tlaib is spurning Islam like, say, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, celebrated author of “Infidel.” In theory, a religious believer can back such Freethought Caucus goals as “public policy based on reason and science,” protection of government’s “secular nature” and opposition to “discrimination against atheists, agnostics, and religious seekers.”

There are dozens of these special-interest caucuses in the House (.pdf here), covering anything from Cannabis to International Religious Freedom to LGBT Equality to rugby. One of the largest is the Prayer Caucus, chaired by North Carolina Baptist Mark Walker. The House members who lead the Ahmadiyya Muslim and American Sikh Caucuses are not adherents of those faiths, only interested friends.

There are now 13 House members in the Freethought Caucus, all of them Democrats, while 18 representatives decline to list a religious identity. Another 80 label themselves generic “Protestant” without specifying any particular church affiliation. See rundown on all Congress members here (.pdf).

These facts echo the increase of religiously unaffiliated “nones,” now 26 percent of the over-all U.S. population in Pew Research surveys. If effectively organized, they should exercise growing influence in the Democratic Party — though churchgoing Catholic Joe Biden’s nominating convention featured the customary God-talk.

Three Freethought members are among those who specify no religious identity: Representatives Sean Casten of Illinois, Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin.


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Thinking with David Briggs and Ryan Burge: Whoa, is religious left really on rise (again)?

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If you know your religion-beat history, then you know this name — David Briggs, who is best known for his years with the Associated Press.

If you know your GetReligion history, then you know that — for 17 years — we have been saying that the “religious left” deserves more attention. This is specially true in terms of the doctrinal beliefs of people in these blue pews and how those beliefs help shape their politics.

It seems that, every four years or so — a telling interval — we see a few stories about a surge of activity on the religious left and how that will impact politicians opposed by the Religious Right. It’s like politics is the only reality, or something.

Thus, several readers noted this recent Briggs byline for the Association of Religion Data Archives: “The decline of the religious left in the age of Trump.”

Say what? Here’s the overture:

President Trump has had a powerful mobilizing effect on the liberal and secular left in U.S. politics.

But will religious liberals also play a significant role in getting out the vote for Democrat Joe Biden in November?

Almost immediately after the 2016 election, some commentators began heralding the likelihood that a revived religious left would emerge from what many liberals considered the ashes of Trump’s victory.

But such hopes may be based more on a wing and a prayer than solid evidence of any such new awakening. Rather, there are several signs indicating “a notable decline” in political activity among religious liberals.


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