The Current State of Irreligion

Two recent publications caught my eye on the subject of religion -- or, more precisely, irreligion -- in the United States.  Let me briefly list them, highlight the main points, and add a comment or two.

1)  One was a study, released yesterday, by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “'Nones' on the Rise: One-in-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation” (Oct. 9).

The main finding of the study is straightforwardly stated in the opening paragraphs:

The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public -- and a third of adults under 30 -- are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.

In the last five years alone, the unaffiliated have increased from just over 15% to just under 20% of all U.S. adults. Their ranks now include more than 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics (nearly 6% of the U.S. public), as well as nearly 33 million people who say they have no particular religious affiliation (14%).

This increase in irreligious persons is not only of demographic interest.  It is also almost certainly to be consequential for the nation both politically and morally.  Consider these voter numbers and their positions on political-moral topics:

With their rising numbers, the religiously unaffiliated [approx. 20% of U.S. population] are an increasingly important segment of the electorate. In the 2008 presidential election, they voted as heavily for Barack Obama as white evangelical Protestants did for John McCain. More than six-in-ten religiously unaffiliated registered voters are Democrats (39%) or lean toward the Democratic Party (24%). They are about twice as likely to describe themselves as political liberals than as conservatives, and solid majorities support legal abortion (72%) and same-sex marriage (73%). In the last five years, the [religiously] unaffiliated have risen from 17% to 24% of all registered voters who are Democrats or lean Democratic.

About a decade ago, Democratic pollsters saw the promise of future electoral dominance in the growing Hispanic population.  Although I think that voting bloc possibility is real, it has not exactly played out as forecasted (perhaps for religious and moral reasons).  A more reliable future voting bloc might be found in the growing numbers of the irreligious or religiously unaffiliated.

If so, one must wonder what policy levers are or will be employed to curry favor with this particular voting bloc.  This is just the sort of thing that shrewd governments do -- and have done from time immemorial. 

2)  The other piece was by Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The Once-Born and the Twice-Born:  The militant quest for certitude among the New Atheists has a peculiarly old-fashioned feel about it" (Wall Street Journal, Sept. 29, page C5).

William James (1842 - 1910)

In this essay, Ms. Himmelfarb discusses William James's lecture "A Will to Believe" (1896) and book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and she does so in connection with contemporary atheistic movements.  She contrasts the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett with the religiously sympathetic atheism of Alain de Botton.  (I have previously reflected on Mr. de Botton in two posts, "God without God?" and "An Atheist Objects.")  The brother of Henry James, one of my favorite novelists, developed a rubric for understanding people's approaches to religion that was itself a contrast, that between the "once-born" and the "twice-born."

The Harvard professor, according to Ms. Himmelfarb, saw the two categories of people in these terms:

They [the once-born] are not self-righteous, but they are romantic and complacent, because they make little of sin and suffering, of human imperfection and the "disordered world of man." Theirs is the religion of the "healthy-minded." Accompanying the advance of "so-called" liberalism in Christianity, it represents a victory over the old "morbid," "hell-fire theology." So far from dwelling on the sinfulness and depravity of man, the once-born belittle sin, deny eternal punishment and insist upon the dignity rather than the depravity of man. "They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible rather than admirable."

The twice-born, by contrast—the "sick souls" and "morbid-minded"—are all too aware of the existence of evil, indeed, of the "experience of evil as something essential." Where the once-born look upon the "children of wrath" as "unmanly and diseased," the twice-born look upon the "healthy-minded" as "unspeakably blind and shallow."

Ms. Himmelfarb suggests that the New Atheists fit the pattern of the once-born and that the religiously-sympathetic atheists (she says Neo-Atheists) resemble the twice-born, which is also where William James himself shook out.  He manifested the will to believe not, of course, out of religious conviction but as a way of encountering the fullness of the human experience -- something which the Neo-Atheist Mr. de Botton recognizes that religion possesses and atheism lacks.  So Ms. Himmelfarb, at times quoting Prof. James:

"It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience." Healthy-mindedness is simply inadequate as a philosophical doctrine "because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth." ...

... a will to believe is the motivating force for many people who are distrustful of those institutions and skeptical of those dogmas and rituals but who nevertheless feel a spiritual need and seek a faith responsive to their personal needs and passions. There is no doubt that James counted himself among the twice-born and experienced such a will to believe. ...

For the varieties of irreligion reflect the same once-born/twice-born dichotomy as the varieties of religion. The "New Atheists" easily fall into the category of the once-born, being as monolithic in their devotion to science as religious fundamentalists are in their monotheism. "Neo-Atheists," on the other hand, are aware of the psychological and spiritual deficiencies of atheism and eager to import into secular society some of the enduring "goods" of traditional religions. Thus, they exhibit more of the character of the twice-born.

I find this analysis of New Atheism and "Neo-Atheism" in light of William James's writings to be both fascinating and illuminating.  Some of this may be for self-justificatory reasons.  I like to think of myself as (much of the time at least) a realist.  I also like to think of myself as increasingly appreciating the beautiful, if often difficult, fullness of human life.  As it happens, according to Mr. James,

The real world is a "double-storied mystery" in which the pluses and minuses, good and evil, are inextricable and ineradicable. It is this world that the twice-born inhabits and understands. Toward the end of "Varieties," James observed, "the outlook upon life of the twice-born—holding as it does more of the element of evil in solution—is the wider and completer."

"Wider and completer."  This, shall we say, liberal notion seems like it should lead to a more virtuous path in life.

It might also open up the conversation more fruitfully to the verities, in addition to the varieties, of theism and religious experience.