Atheism and Secularity - Phil Zuckerman
Atheism and Secularity - Phil Zuckerman
Atheism and Secularity - Phil Zuckerman
Volume 1
Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
Edited by
PHIL ZUCKERMAN
Praeger Perspectives
PRAEGER
An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC
Copyright 2010 by Phil Zuckerman
In 1972, almost forty years ago, Colin Campbell, then a lecturer at the
University of York, published a book titled Toward a Sociology of Irreli-
gion.1 The inside jacket cover dubbed it ‘‘the first serious study of the
social phenomenon of the rejection of religion.’’ In this groundbreaking
treatise, Campbell observed that sociologists have ‘‘entirely ignored irreli-
gion.’’2 He sought to vigorously address this major lacuna by calling for a
new focus of study within sociology, that is, the study of people who live
their lives indifferent to, without, or in opposition to religion. Campbell
began his work by pondering why it is that sociologists have ignored sec-
ularity over the years, and he then went on to broach a variety of signifi-
cant topics ripe for inquiry and attention: the role antireligious and/or
humanist movements play in spreading secularization within society; the
various forms and definitions of irreligion; irreligion and morality; irreli-
gion and politics; the social functions of irreligion, and so on. Campbell’s
work remains significant for its insights, its thoughtfulness, and its incon-
trovertible prescience. But what is perhaps most striking about the work
is this: it fell on deaf ears. Campbell’s call for a widespread sociological
analysis of irreligion went largely unheeded.
The publication of this two-volume set seeks to redress that regretta-
ble outcome, to hear and to heed Campbell’s call, and to finally take
seriously the social scientific task of exploring, investigating, document-
ing, and analyzing various aspects of atheism and secularity. The
authors of the chapters contained in this collection have attempted to
viii Introduction
do just that and thereby offer studies of irreligiosity with the same
level of interest and rigor that social scientists have devoted to study-
ing the topic of religiosity for well over a century.
While bemoaning the dearth of scholarship on atheism, irreligion,
and secularity that has typified the social sciences,3 it must also be
acknowledged that a significant amount of academic writing and scholar-
ship has in fact been devoted to the topic of secularization—the historical
process whereby religion weakens, fades, or loses its hegemonic domi-
nance or public significance. A plethora of scholars have been aggres-
sively debating secularization for years.4 Despite the impressive amount
that has been published on secularization, nearly all of it—at least that I
am aware of—is generally theoretical, typological, or broadly historical in
nature, and doesn’t actually deal with secular life or atheism as they are
actually lived, expressed, or experienced by irreligious men and women
in the here and now. Nor does the cottage industry of scholarship on or
about secularization entail a direct focus on the social, anthropological,
and/or psychological particulars of how secularity actually manifests
itself or ‘‘plays itself out’’ in the contemporary world.
As with work on secularization, when it comes to the advocacy of
atheism—or the debunking of religion—there’s also a lot out there, to be
sure. Thousands of books, essays, and articles have been published since
the days of David Hume (1711–1776) and Baron D’Holbach (1723–1789),
which argue against theism, critique the Bible, deride religion, harangue
clergy, and/or promote naturalism, materialism, agnosticism, humanism,
freethought, and so on. Most recently, a spate of best sellers have been
published in this formidable vein, including The End of Faith: Religion,
Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004) by Sam Harris,5 God Is Not Great:
How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) by Christopher Hitchens,6 and The
God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins7—the last of which has sold over
1.5 million copies as of this writing. These books, however, are not studies
of atheists and/or secular people, per se. They are distinctly polemical
works with the expressed goal of convincing people that theism is false
and/or that religion is a bad or harmful thing. Such endeavors, however
thought provoking, are not social science. Nor are they meant to be. Lest
the reader be confused, this point bears stressing: the advocacy of atheism
and/or the urging of secularity are not to be mistaken for the social-
scientific study of atheism and secularity—just as one wouldn’t confuse
works that advocate faith and religion with those that seek to study,
explain, or analyze faith and religion. And as stated above, when it comes
to the advocacy of atheism and secularity, one finds a rich, diverse, and
undeniably copious corpus of work. But when it comes to the study and
analysis of atheism and secularity, one doesn’t find much. As William
Sims Bainbridge recently lamented, ‘‘we know surprisingly little about
Atheism from a social-scientific perspective.’’8
Introduction ix
That said, for one to suggest that absolutely no social science has
been undertaken devoted to the study of atheism or secularity since
Campbell’s call would be untrue. In fact, several years just prior to the
publication of Campbell’s book, N. J. Demerath wrote what may very
well be the first sociological investigations of irreligion ever published
in academic journals; one, coauthored with Victor Thiessen and pub-
lished in 1966, was an article on the Freie Gemeinde, a small free-
thought movement in Wisconsin and the other, published in 1969, was
an article on the Society for Ethical Culture and the American Rational-
ist Federation.9 Also in 1969, Armand Mauss published an article on reli-
gious defection among Mormons.10 And one year prior to the publication
of Campbell’s book, Rocco Caporale and Antonio Gumelli edited a vol-
ume titled The Culture of Unbelief, which was an assemblage of papers
delivered at a symposium held in Rome on the very topic of the lack of re-
ligious belief in the contemporary world. Most of the papers in this publi-
cation, however, tended to be highly tentative and/or speculative, for as
one contributor noted, there is an ‘‘appalling lack of empirical data on
unbelief’’ and ‘‘we do not know enough about the phenomenon of unbe-
lief to formulate even a minimum inventory of validated propositions
that may constitute the basis of further analysis.’’11 While a slew of stud-
ies emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with a focus on apostasy,12 aside from
these and a few additional disparate books and articles,13 in the words of
Talal Asad, ‘‘social scientists . . . have paid scarcely any attention to the
idea of the secular.’’14
That sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists have largely
neglected the study of secularity is truly remarkable, especially given
the fact that secular, irreligious, nonreligious, and antireligious men
and women have always existed.15 Even Rodney Stark and Roger Finke
can admit that atheism is ‘‘probably as old as religion.’’16 Today, we know
that atheists and secular folk represent a large slice of humanity; one
recent (and conservative) estimate of nonbelievers in God places the num-
ber somewhere between 500 million and 750 million people worldwide.17
And if the category were to be widened to include those who self-identify
as simply ‘‘nonreligious’’ or ‘‘unreligious,’’ these numbers would no
doubt increase dramatically. The fact is, the portion of humans who reject,
have no interest in, or are indifferent to belief in God and/or religion is
not limited to some miniscule batch of angry deviants or disgruntled ‘‘vil-
lage atheists.’’ On the contrary, for if our estimates are correct, non-
believers in God as a worldwide group come in fourth place after
Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in terms of the global ranking of com-
monly held belief systems. Put another way, there are 58 times as many
nonbelievers in God as there are Mormons, 35 times as many non-
believers in God as there are Sikhs, and twice as many nonbelievers in
God as there are Buddhists.
x Introduction
NOTES
1. Colin Campbell, Toward a Sociology of Irreligion (New York: Heider and
Heider, 1972).
2. Ibid., 8.
3. In the words of Benjamin Beit-Hallhami: ‘‘Those who shaped the modern
human sciences have been preoccupied with explaining the phenomena of reli-
gion and religiosity. Accounting for the absence of religious faith has never
been of much concern to them.’’ Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, ‘‘Atheists: A Psycho-
logical Profile,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 300.
4. For some major works on secularization, see Karel Dobbelaere, Seculari-
zation: An Analysis at Three Levels (Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2002); William
Swatos and Daniel Olson, The Secularization Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2000); Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford,
UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2002); Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the
World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.
Eerdmans, 1999); David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (New York:
Harper and Row, 1978); Peter Glasner, The Sociology of Secularization: A Critique
of a Concept. (London: Routledge of Kegan Paul, 1977); Peter Berger, The Sacred
Canopy (New York: Anchor, 1967).
5. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
(New York; W.W. Norton, 2004).
6. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
(New York: Twelve, 2007).
7. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
8. William Sims Bainbridge, ‘‘Atheism,’’ Interdisciplinary Journal of Research
on Religion 1 (2005): 3.
9. N. J. Demerath and Victor Theissen, ‘‘On Spitting against the Wind:
Organizational Precariousness and American Irreligion,’’ The American Journal
of Sociology 7, no. 6 (1966): 674–87; N. J. Demerath, ‘‘A-Religion, and the Rise of
the Religion-less Church: Two Case Studies in Organizational Convergence,’’
Sociological Analysis 30, no. 4 (Winter 1969): 191–203.
10. Armand Mauss, ‘‘Dimensions of Religious Defection,’’ Review of Religious
Research 10, no. 3 (1969): 128–35.
11. Rocco Carorale and Antonio Grumelli, eds., The Culture of Un-Belief
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), 3–4.
12. Including David G. Bromley, ed., Falling From the Faith: The Causes and
Consequences of Religious Apostasy (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1988);
David Caplovitz and Fred Sherrow, The Religious Drop-Outs: Apostasy among
College Graduates (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1977); Roger Louis
xii Introduction
What Is Atheism?
Jack David Eller
An atheist who avows the term for himself or herself, on the other
hand, is not merely an atheist ‘‘from some theist’s point of view,’’ that
is, a person who disbelieves in some god(s) while believing in some
other god(s). An atheist is one who possesses no belief in any god(s),
a person for whom ‘‘god’’ is a foreign and inert concept—and nothing
more than a concept, literally a word without a referent. By this
understanding—the understanding of the atheist him/herself and not
one imposed by theists—atheism is actually quite a common position,
even within religion.
the entire burden of proof, since theism is ‘‘true until proven false.’’
Socially, atheism can only exist, and thrive, by extricating itself from
the overwhelmingly ‘‘popular’’ (and highly institutionalized) theistic
system. As a minority position, it must necessarily be oppositional,
critical, defensive, and argumentative—trying to ‘‘disprove’’ what is
generally held to be true.
However, across religions it is simply not the case that theism is the
default position. Most religions do not advance theistic claims at all, or
it might be more accurate to say that most religions to not ‘‘talk about
god(s)’’ at all. There is no such word, no such concept, no such ‘‘belief.’’
It would be incorrect to say that these religions ‘‘disbelieve’’ in god(s)
and still more incorrect to say that they ‘‘oppose’’ or ‘‘criticize’’ or
‘‘argue against’’ god(s). Most of the time, they have never even heard
of such things as god(s).
In fact, where would one hear of such things as god(s)? God(s) is
(are) not obvious to the naked eye, as, say, sun and water are; the idea
of a spirit or mind or ‘‘person’’ in or of the sun or water is a small
step. Further, no child, from all we can tell, is born with a god-concept;
if they were, we would expect to find the god-concept everywhere,
which we do not. Rather, as the theist John Wesley, founder of
Methodism, realized:
After all that has been so plausibly written concerning ‘‘the innate idea
of God’’; after all that has been said of its being common to all men, in
all ages and nations; it does not appear, that man has naturally any more
idea of God than any beasts of the field; he has no knowledge of God at
all; no fear of God at all; neither is God in all his thoughts. Whatever
change may afterwards be wrought . . . he is, by nature, a mere Atheist.1
assertion, that the belief in god(s) is unjustified and false. Thus, the
putative positive/strong atheist states, ‘‘I not only lack the belief in
god(s), I assert the non-existence of god(s).’’
On the surface this may seem like a valid distinction, but upon
closer inspection it is not. There are three sources of confusion on the
subject. The first is the false dichotomy between ‘‘not believing’’ and
‘‘believing not,’’ that is, not believing in god(s) and believing that there
is no such thing as god(s). Indisputably, someone who maintains that
there is no such thing as god(s) does not believe in them; to maintain
otherwise is to be incoherent. Indisputably, someone who believes in
god(s) maintains that there is such a thing; to maintain otherwise is
equally incoherent. But what other possibilities are there? Can one
maintain that there is no such thing as god(s) yet believe in them? Not
without contradicting oneself. Can one maintain that there is such a
thing as god(s) yet not believe in them? Not in any sensible way. So, it
emerges that there are only two consistent positions: either one claims
that there is such a thing as god(s) and believes in them, or one claims
that there is no such thing as god(s) and does not believe in them. The
dichotomy, then, is not between positive and negative atheism but
between theism and atheism.
The second and more pernicious source of error is the attribution of
‘‘belief’’ to atheists, sometimes literally the insistence that atheism is a
belief. Theists certainly, and atheists occasionally too, will say that athe-
ism is a belief—the belief that god(s) does (do) not exist. This is a famil-
iar and seductive way of thinking, since ‘‘belief’’ is such a ubiquitous
and powerful concept. Surely, Christians argue, belief is universal and
essential to religion; still more, religion is only one kind of belief. The-
ists often go so far as to call science a belief-system, to equate all knowl-
edge with belief. On this count they have an ally in philosophy, which
has frequently defined knowledge as ‘‘justified true belief.’’ But such a
definition cannot suffice, if only because the adjectives ‘‘justified’’ and
‘‘true’’ suggest that belief, unmodified with adjectives, is not justified or
true—a conclusion I suspect most believers would want to avoid. In
other words, if the existence of the Christian god is a belief and not
(yet) knowledge, then it is (so far) either unjustified or untrue or both.
I have argued the case for the radical distinction between knowledge
and belief elsewhere. The relevant point for current purposes is that
absence of a belief, even active rejection of a belief, is not itself a belief.
The animist who lacks any notion of god(s) whatsoever does not disbe-
lieve in god(s) and certainly cannot be said to have a belief in the non-
existence of gods. As a case in point, the Warlpiri of aboriginal
Australia have a religious term jukurrpa, sometimes translated as
‘‘dreaming’’ or ‘‘dreamtime.’’ It would be false and meaningless to say
that most Christians disbelieve in jukurrpa or believe in the nonexis-
tence of jukurrpa, if only and precisely because most Christians have
What Is Atheism? 7
Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the
vigorous application of a single principle. . . . Positively the principle
may be expressed as, in matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far
as it can carry you without other considerations. And negatively, in mat-
ters of the intellect, do not pretend the conclusions are certain that are
not demonstrated or demonstrable. It is wrong for a man to say he is cer-
tain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evi-
dence which logically justifies that certainty.3
What Is Atheism? 9
The upshot of this analysis is that secularism most assuredly does not
translate simply and directly into atheism. Many good theists support
the secularization of the American government in the form of the ‘‘sepa-
ration of church and state,’’ and all of them go about at least part of their
day without doing religion. ‘‘Secular’’ in this sense does not mean ‘‘anti-
religious’’ but rather ‘‘religiously neutral.’’ Despite the objections of some
critics, religious neutrality, even the absence of religion from certain
human phenomena, is not atheism. When people do their banking, or
play baseball, or go on vacation without references to their god(s), this is
hardly a rejection of their god(s). Religious people most assuredly may
and do bring their religion into nonspiritual activities and occasions, but
that merely proves the point that secularization can work in two entirely
opposite directions. It can mean, and more conventionally means, the
evacuation of religion from social territories it formerly occupied (like
disestablishing a state religion). But it can also mean the penetration of
religion into social territories it did not formerly occupy and which serve
no essential religious function, like forming a church basketball league.
In fact, religion is all too keen, and all too effective, at ‘‘secularizing’’ in
this latter sense: notice that the ‘‘mega-churches’’ in the United States
offer not only ‘‘spiritual’’ services but everything from child day care to
sports to movie nights to book clubs to foreign language classes. Wasn’t
it the Catholic church that discovered long ago the religious value of
‘‘secular’’ activities like bingo and potluck dinners?
two earlier books: George Smith’s 1989 Atheism: The Case against God9
and Dan Barker’s 1992 Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist.10
But atheism entered an unprecedented period of confidence and
enthusiasm with the publication of Sam Harris’ best-selling 2004 offer-
ing, The End of Faith.11 It was quickly followed by Daniel Dennett’s
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon and Richard Daw-
kins’ The God Delusion, and Harris’ follow-up Letter to a Christian
Nation, all published in 2006, not to mention Christopher Hitchens’
2007 contribution, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.12
More quietly, a small industry of atheist publishing has produced a
wave of activity, including two of my own books, Natural Atheism in
2004 and Atheism Advanced in 2008.13
It is especially noteworthy that the ‘‘big four’’ of Harris, Dennett,
Dawkins, and Hitchens have not only enjoyed significant market and
media success but that they obtained major publishers for their work;
one can imagine a time not so long ago when a prominent popular
press would not have touched such titles. Collectively, these writers
are regarded as the founders of the so-called ‘‘new atheism,’’ which is,
if nothing else, profitable and vociferous. However, precisely how new
is it, what does it add to the discussion of atheism/theism/religion,
and where does atheism go from here?
There is no doubt that the new atheism is unabashed, even aggres-
sive, and more than a little in-your-face. There is some debate within
the atheist community as to whether this is a good thing. Some go so
far as to disown the very moniker ‘‘atheist’’ in favor of other identities
like ‘‘humanist,’’ ‘‘freethinker,’’ ‘‘secularist,’’ ‘‘agnostic,’’ or such origi-
nal names as ‘‘bright’’ or ‘‘universist.’’ Others, on the contrary, con-
sider these concessions a kind of appeasement, a way of ‘‘passing’’ in a
society that is controlled by theists and in which ‘‘our kind’’ are as
unwelcome as blacks or gays used to be (and sometimes still are).
The political/identity issues inherent in the new atheism are one
thing. A greater concern, from my perspective, is the content. For the
most part, there is nothing particularly new offered at all; what is new
is mostly that their atheism is, as we might say, ‘‘loud and proud.’’ But
much of the new atheism is aimed in two well-worn and not entirely
wise directions. The first is the never-ending effort to ‘‘disprove
god(s)’’ or worse, ‘‘disprove God.’’ Many of these works, and their less
famous counterparts, tirelessly rehearse arguments against god(s), a
project to which no new ideas have been added in decades, if not gen-
erations or millennia. Quite frankly, everyone (including an honest the-
ist) recognizes that arguments in favor of god(s) fail, and if they did
succeed, they would not establish the existence of any particular god(s)
over all the others; that is to say, the tired old cosmological or ontologi-
cal or teleological arguments would defend Zeus or Odin or Vishnu as
effectively as Yahweh or Allah.
What Is Atheism? 15
There are two other problems with the new atheism. One is that
much of its rhetoric is targeted not at the falsity of theism but at the
danger of theism. Harris’ major book pounds away at religious terror-
ism, giving Islam in particular a sound thrashing. Hitchens insists that
religion ruins everything. Both essentially argue that religion is not so
much wrong as bad. And of course much of the criticism of religion is
directed, explicitly or implicitly, at religious fundamentalism (although
Harris uniquely and equally condemns ‘‘moderate religion’’ as an
excuse for and virtually a gateway drug to fundamentalism). No one,
it turns out, likes fundamentalism, except for the fundamentalists
themselves, and so the analysis of and attack on fundamentalism not
only fails to move us very far but mischaracterizes religion.
The objection to the religion-is-bad, or more pointedly the religion-is-
violent, argument is that not all religion is violent and, quite frankly, it is
irrelevant whether or not religion is bad or violent for determining if reli-
gion is true or false. It is not inconceivable that theism might be correct—
there really is such a thing as god(s)—and violent too: if a violent god, or
a god of war, or a mortal threat to the religious community exists, then
religious violence would be a natural and justifiable part of the picture.
Further, the supposed case against religion/theism is just an instance of
the famous but refuted ‘‘argument from benefit’’ in reverse: atheism has
insisted over the years that religion’s alleged benefits are not germane to
questions of truth, so it cannot now insist that religion’s alleged costs are
germane to those questions. In fact, in the end, this new strategy provides
an out for religion: if atheism is only against bad/violent theism, then it
might have to be for, or at least tolerate, good/peaceful theism. That is a
possible position, but it is not the position of atheism.
At the deepest level, the new atheism suffers from the same syn-
drome that virtually all atheism has suffered since the beginning of
theism—namely, taking the local theism as the essence of religion itself.
The new atheism, and all past argumentative atheism, is as much in
the theist universe as theism is; in fact, so far all atheism that argues
against Christianity has been as much in the Christian universe as
Christianity is: notice that the titles, and the contents, of the new athe-
ism offerings tilt with ‘‘God’’ over and over again (e.g., The God Delu-
sion, God is Not Great, and God: The Failed Hypothesis) and never with
Zeus or Odin or Vishnu, let alone nature spirits, dead ancestors, or
supernatural forces. The new atheism is trapped in the gravitational
pull of theism generally and Christianity specifically as surely and
securely as any Christian congregation. If recent psycholinguistics is
right, then arguing against god(s) is just as effective at perpetuating
god-concepts as arguing for god(s). No doubt, this is why theists love to
debate atheists: they can get atheists publicly talking about their god(s)!
If the purported new atheism is a worthwhile first step—it certainly
has atheists energized and self-congratulatory, it is only a first step.
16 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is
it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are
we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all direc-
tions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an
infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not
become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while?16
atheism that humans can live in, will come from Nietzsche’s third meta-
morphosis, the child, the yes-sayer and creator:
To create new values—that even the lion cannot do; but the creation of
freedom for oneself for new creation—that is within the power of the lion.
The creation of freedom—for that, my brothers, the lion is needed. To
assume the right to new values—that is the most terrifying assumption
for a reverent spirit that would bear much. . . . For the game of creation,
my brothers, a sacred ‘‘Yes’’ is needed: the spirit now wills his own will,
and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.17
NOTES
1. John Wesley, Sermon 95: On the Education of Children, http://www.
godrules.net/library/wsermons/wsermons95.htm (accessed July 16, 2008).
2. Antony Flew, God, Freedom, and Immorality: A Critical Analysis (Buffalo,
NY: Prometheus Books, 1984).
18 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
Atheism, Secularity,
the Family, and Children
Christel Manning
What is the impact of atheism and secularity on the family and chil-
dren? Specifically, how are atheist and/or secular families different
from religious ones, and how does a nonreligious upbringing affect
children? This is a difficult question to answer, not only because of defi-
nitional problems addressed elsewhere in this volume, but because the
topic carries such ideological baggage. The fact that we even ask this
question says a lot about the cultural significance of religion in America.
Although the number of people with no religious affiliation is growing,
there is a common perception that religion is good for family and chil-
dren and that atheism and secularism therefore weaken families and
put children at risk. That perception is supported not just by conserva-
tive religious pundits but by the supposedly liberal academic establish-
ment, resulting in guilt and worry among many secular parents.
I should say, at the onset, that I am one of those parents. I am secular
in the sense of not identifying or affiliating with religion in my adult life,
but I was raised in a family in which religion was a powerful presence.
Religion provided moral structure. My sisters and I could not watch tel-
evision or listen to rock music (considered a corrupting influence) and
we were made to kneel and pray in front of our beds before we went to
sleep. But religion also provided magic and mystery. I remember Christ-
mas at my German grandmother’s house, how she closed the door to
the living room while she decorated the tree, forbidding entry until
Christmas Eve when we would all file in while she played Silent Night
on the piano. There were real candles on the tree, the room smelled of
wax and pine needles, incense and cinnamon, and everything glittered
20 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
with light reflecting off the glass ornaments and tinsel and the brightly
wrapped boxes below. The entire family would sing, children would
recite poems, and adults would lead religious readings and prayers.
Eventually, the children were sent off to bed, dreaming of the presents
that awaited them in the morning, while the adults sat drinking and
talking until late into the night. My daughter, now seven, has none of
that. Although I cannot, with integrity, raise her with religion, I often
wish I could give her what I had. It is this quandary that led to my
research on unchurched parents, some of the results of which are pre-
sented here.
This chapter will argue that the impact of atheism and secularity on
family and children is complex and not necessarily negative. The litera-
ture suggests that secularism may impact families in at least two ways:
its effect on family structure and its effect on children. However, a
critical review of that literature reveals that the exact nature of that
impact remains disputed. The impact of secularism on family structure
is unclear because it is impossible to determine the exact causal role of
religion. The impact of secularism on children’s behavior and well-
being is unclear because existing studies do not adequately define secu-
larism or distinguish between different types of secularism. Preliminary
research that corrects for these problems suggests that children affili-
ated with secular organizations can get benefits similar to those pro-
vided by religious affiliation.
without its stories and its poetry, without its web of symbols, and
its magic.’’11
Parent’s don’t want to deprive their kids of something that is widely
perceived as good—and religion is. Even liberal academics such as psy-
chologist Robert Coles assert that children are ‘‘naturally spiritual’’12
and for the last 50 years, numerous studies report that children who
grow up with religion do better on most measures of behavior and well-
being than those who don’t (this literature is further discussed below).
While most parents do not read scholarly journals, the conclusions are
picked up by the popular press. The result is that many secularists and
atheists worry about how their children will fare without religion and
often appear defensive in explaining their secular parenting choices.
Popular magazines and newspapers regularly run editorials (usually
around Christmas time) about the impact of atheism on children, both
in terms of the prejudice they face as a minority group, and in terms of
what they might lose (joy, comfort, and moral values) by lacking reli-
gion.13 In the early 1990s New York Times reporter Martha Fay, a lapsed
Catholic, published a book entitled, Do Children Need Religion?, in
which she reported on the growing number of secular parents and the
ways they raised their children. The parents Fay interviewed were
themselves disconnected from church, but saw religion as a source of
moral guidance and community, and worried about whether or not
their children could ‘‘become good and loving people’’ and ‘‘find a
place in the culture’’ without it. Secular parents receive little guidance
on answering these questions, compared to the vast literature of advice
books on Christian parenting. Fay’s was among the first in a small but
growing literature directed at secular parents that has more recently
included books about pagan, Buddhist, and atheist parenting.14 The
authors of these essays usually conclude that secular children will be
fine, but the very existence of these writings is testament to their need
to persuade themselves and the rest of the culture.
With all the hand-wringing, it is surprising that there has been no
systematic study of secular families and childrearing in the United
States. The literature suggests that secularization impacts family and
children in at least two ways: family structure and children’s well-
being, but there is little consensus about either subject.
but that is, in essence, how many people look at secularism. As more
recent studies are beginning to demonstrate, secularism is every bit as
diverse as religion and should therefore be expected to have diverse
impact on children.
My own research on secularism confirms the variations discussed
elsewhere in this volume. Over the last three years I interviewed 46
family members who claimed ‘‘no religious preference’’ and ‘‘no reli-
gious affiliation’’ about the upbringing of their children. Previous
research26 has shown significant regional differences in religious disaf-
filiation: the lowest rates are in the South or states where Evangelical
Christianity dominates the culture; the highest rates are in the West and
the urban Northeast (depending on whether affiliation is measured by
attendance or identification). So my respondents were selected to reflect
these differences: from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California
where ‘‘nones’’ are more numerous and from Colorado Springs and
Jacksonville, Florida, where they are less common. Previous research
has shown higher rates of secularism in single-parent households,27 so
an effort was made to include both married and unmarried respond-
ents. Respondents ranged in age from 23 to 55. There were 16 men and
30 women: all were white and had completed at least some college, and
all were employed or supported by someone who was employed (I did
not ask questions about income). Almost all respondents had them-
selves been raised with religion; their religious background included
Catholic, mainline Protestant, conservative Protestant, Jewish, Mormon,
Unitarian, and Bahai. Interviews were conducted in person, using a
semi-structured format, and usually lasted about an hour. This was a
qualitative study which included many respondents who were in fact
religious, so the numbers of actual secularists were small. Nonetheless,
the findings provide concrete illustrations of the diversity among secu-
lar families, providing valuable pointers for future research.
The analysis of my interview data, which is still ongoing, suggests
that there is considerable variation among secular families that is likely
to impact the ways in which they raise their children. One source of
variation is their worldview, that is, the set of beliefs and values that
gives meaning and order to their lives. Another is whether or not they
affiliate with a community that shares and supports that worldview.
VARIETY IN WORLDVIEW
The respondents to my study were selected because they had no
religious affiliation and did not identify as religious. Many of them,
however, turned out to be not secular in the sense of rejecting theism
or supernatural beliefs or basic Judeo-Christian values, and those
who did varied considerably in what kinds of worldviews they
adopted instead.
28 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
Pure Secularism
I will define as pure secularists those respondents who were commit-
ted to a nontheistic, materialist worldview, one that is characterized by
questioning rather than accepting particular assertions about the world.
Such individuals identified themselves by a variety of labels such as
atheist, humanist, or skeptic, but were united by their ‘‘faith’’ in rational
empiricism. The meaning of our existence, to these respondents, lies not
in god but in the pursuit of truth. That pursuit requires the opposite of
religious faith, a default position of skepticism, which subjects every
assertion about the world to rational, empirical testing. Thus pure secu-
larists saw the scientific method as the only honest path to truth.
Pure secularists often dismissed religion as irrational and misleading.
David, a married father of three young children, identifies as an ethical
humanist. He does not believe in god or a higher power. ‘‘As a way or
truth to this existence, it [theism] doesn’t hold much truth. I am very
grounded in trying to find out what is real . . . we are what we are
today and then you’re done, and so I try to live life as if this is all I
have, because I think that’s probably true.’’ Raised Presbyterian, David’s
father was a minister, but he became ‘‘alienated from traditional church
teachings from a scientific perspective . . . my undergraduate degree is
in theoretical mathematics, and so the whole notion of any real under-
standing of something beyond the concrete is doubtful.’’ Bob, divorced
father of two teenagers, identifies as an atheist. He too rejects religion
on logical grounds. Like David, he was raised Protestant and actually
intended to become a minister. It was in seminary that he became alien-
ated from religion. ‘‘The first problem was actually the problem of any
one religion’s claim to being true, it seemed like the competing claims
of the religions just negated them.’’ If Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism
all claim divine revelation, and ‘‘those religions have conflicting views
of the world, then all you can do is stand in a room and shout at one
another, I’ve got revelation, no, I’ve got a revelation . . . obviously that’s
ridiculous. And the basis for these claims cannot be established other-
wise, empirically. . . . The second big problem was the age old problem
of evil, how do I maintain traditional Christian theism in the face of all
the evil and suffering in the world, there’s a tsunami, 160,000 people
killed, it doesn’t make any sense.’’ If Bob’s ultimate purpose is finding
truth, then the logical conclusion is that religion must be rejected.
Others see religions not only as false but dangerous, legitimating
oppression, intolerance, and violence. Rosemary, married with two chil-
dren in college and one still at home, jokingly calls herself a ‘‘Pastafarian.
You know, the flying spaghetti monster.’’ She says she is ‘‘neither spir-
itual nor religious, does not believe in god or higher power or spirit
or energy. Nothing.’’ Rosemary has done her share of seeking, study-
ing the ancient scriptures, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Gnostics. But she
Atheism, Secularity, the Family, and Children 29
Naturalism
I define as naturalist those respondents who expressed an earth-
centered worldview, characterized by the belief that nature is sacred,
deserving respect as much as humans do. Like pure secularist
30 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
Pluralism
The majority of my respondents did not reject religion, but were
unaffiliated because they refused to commit themselves to one of them.
These pluralists, as I call them, see the world’s religions as different
paths to the same place, though they often find one or two they are
most at home in. Their conceptions of the divine varied: many were
agnostic, some believed in a personal god and others in pantheism, but
they are united in their conviction that ‘‘ultimately, it doesn’t matter.’’
Anne, married mother of a 9-year-old boy, was raised Greek Ortho-
dox, and began studying other religions in college. ‘‘I saw how similar
people who were called masters or saints are, like there are masters in
the Buddhist tradition and there are Christian monks . . . the Sufi mas-
ters, their divine encounters or mystical experiences were so similar, I
started thinking about it.’’ Anne eventually became a devotee of a
Hindu guru, but she rejects all labels. ‘‘I do not feel that any of these
traditions is mine, I feel like they all are, but I don’t feel like I have to
belong to one of them.’’ Now living in California, Anne may seem like
the stereotypical hippie seeker, but there are many pluralists who are
not. Susan, raised as a conservative Jew and living in Connecticut, says:
‘‘I’m a pluralist, I believe all religions are valid and true, so the question
for me is which ritual system speaks most to my heart, and makes most
sense to me intellectually and personally, I guess I would choose Juda-
ism, but it’s hard to be Jewish, there are a lot of rituals you’re supposed
to keep . . . that at this point I’m thinking I’m not going to do, and is it
32 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
Religious Indifference
A small group of my respondents were those who were religiously
indifferent. Unlike atheists, they do not so much reject religion as
Atheism, Secularity, the Family, and Children 33
ignore it. Some, like Peter, hold vaguely Christian beliefs. ‘‘The idea that
Jesus was a spiritual being who came to earth and died, I suppose I
believe that, but I do not consciously following any Christian dogma or
ethics and we don’t go to church.’’ Yet his disaffiliation is not rooted in
any kind of resentment against organized religion. ‘‘I mean I don’t know
why I don’t [attend church], I don’t have that in my life, it’s more like
why would I? Rather than why don’t I?’’ He and his wife had their three
children baptized, but when asked if he had considered sending them to
Sunday school, he responded: ‘‘Fleetingly.’’ And what happened? ‘‘I let
the thoughts pass out of my head.’’ Peter might be called an indifferent
Christian. Others, like Tom, are atheist. He does not believe in god or a
higher power and does not identify as spiritual or religious. ‘‘Spiritual to
me is more of an inner thing, when someone is interested in and think-
ing about spiritual matters,’’ whereas religious means commitment to
organized religion. ‘‘I’m neither.’’ Yet Tom has no animus against reli-
gion; he remembers the church he grew up in with fondness and claims
that he and his wife talked about joining a church, but ‘‘we’re out of
town at the ski condo two to three Sundays per month, and Sundays
we’re here we still don’t go.’’ He does not see any inconsistency in join-
ing without belief because religion just isn’t important to him.
Both Peter and Tom were raised Protestant. Like most Indifferents,
they left the religion of their childhood not because they disagree with
it, but because they are too busy with other things to be bothered.
When asked if there was some other philosophy or worldview that
gave meaning to their life, the Indifferent’s answer was usually a long
silence, followed by, ‘‘I really haven’t thought much about that.’’ Yet
Christianity was often named as a source of morality: respect your
parents, don’t kill, don’t lie, don’t steal, treat others the way you want
to be treated. As Peter puts it, ‘‘I think that my behavior . . . fits into,
like, basic Christian values.’’ Given that the religiously indifferent have
never actually rejected religion, this should not be surprising. Religion
to them is a social resource that is sometimes useful, but mostly not.
Pure Secularists, Naturalists, Pluralists, and the religiously indiffer-
ent are just four of many types of secularists that are out there. They
illustrate the difficulties in defining secularism discussed earlier in this
chapter. All of these respondents are secular in the sense that they do
not identify or affiliate with any religion, but most are committed to
alternative worldviews that could be considered equivalent to religion
in the sense of providing a coherent system of meaning and values.
Moreover, the differences between these worldviews have significant
implications for how respondents raise their children. One such differ-
ence was in the way that parents use their worldview to provide moral
guidance. Religion has historically functioned as a powerful provider
of moral order. All major religions warn against the inherent human
inclination to seek ‘‘more, more, more for me, me, me’’ and to ignore
34 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
the harm we inflict on others and the world. Thus perhaps the most
damaging critique of secularism is its perceived materialism, selfish-
ness, and moral relativism. Smith’s study confirms this critique, show-
ing that secular teens were more likely than religious teens to view
right and wrong purely in terms of pleasure and personal benefit. But
Smith’s study does not differentiate between different kinds of secular-
ism, some of which reject the consumerism and hedonism of contem-
porary society as much as religions do. It is noteworthy that many
religiously ‘‘disengaged’’ teens were no more materialistic or relativis-
tic than religiously ‘‘devoted’’ teens: 39 percent of the former rejected
relativism, 60 percent would not ‘‘choose to do whatever made them
happy,’’ 84 percent would not ‘‘choose to do whatever helped them
get ahead,’’ 33 percent care very much about the needs of the poor,
and 39 percent care about racial equality.29 One must wonder whether
the difference in value orientation comes not from a family’s religious
affiliation but from their commitment to a meaningful moral order that
grounds the individual in something greater than themselves.
Among my respondents it was pluralists, the most religious group,
who most embraced a subjectivist and relativist moral order, and pure
secularists who most rejected it. As described above, pluralists sought to
teach their children tolerance, a term they interpreted to mean
acceptance of all religions as equally valid. Pure secularists, by contrast,
saw all religions as equally false. Although pure secularists asserted
intellectual support for religious tolerance, they tended to judge one
worldview—skepticism—as superior to all others. Both pure secularist
and pluralist parents had enrolled their kids in religious education pro-
grams so that they might better understand other people. Pluralists
hoped that providing such choices would help their child ‘‘choose the
religion that’s right for them.’’ For pure secularists the purpose of under-
standing others is not to accept all religions as valid, but to question any
worldview you encounter. As Rosemary puts it, ‘‘the most important
thing that I hope I’ve taught my kids is that there is nothing else that
you can be sure of other than what you have now, you live your life,
you live it in the best, the fullest, and the most complete way that you
can in any moment, you develop your skills, whether they be thinking
skills or ice-skating, and you don’t live in isolation, but you were here. If
anybody tries to sell you anything beyond what you have here, you need to
question their motives.’’ For Rosemary, Bob, and David, a this-worldly
worldview is true in an absolute sense because it can be empirically
supported. All other worldviews are suspect.
In their passionate commitment to objective truth and suspicion of
‘‘false’’ worldviews, pure secularist parents resemble Evangelical Chris-
tians and other religious conservatives. Just as Evangelicals resist the
secularism of mainstream America, pure secularist parents often see
themselves as embattled, seeking to protect their kids from the
Atheism, Secularity, the Family, and Children 35
religious majority. David and his wife, for example, joined a Humanist
community because ‘‘it is really hard being unchurched when you live
on the edge of the Bible Belt. We feel different enough anyway, to be
ethical humanists in this society that dumps on people trying to exer-
cise their right to be free from religion, it’s very hard to be atheist in
America.’’ And it is even harder in Jacksonville ‘‘because everybody is
affiliated with the church, and the first thing people ask when you
move here is, what church do you belong to? Or, have you found a
congregation yet? They all want to recruit you.’’ Such recruitment
begins in school. ‘‘Kids here, they will ask, have you been saved? And,
why don’t you go to church? So if my son can say he belongs to a
church, they are more likely to leave him alone.’’ David and other pure
secularists such as Rosemary educate their children about the princi-
ples of Humanism as well as about traditional religions ‘‘so that they
can have ammunition’’ to fight a wider culture that they see as satu-
rated with religion. Pure secularist parents also resemble Evangelicals
in taking their worldview public, fighting lawsuits over school curricu-
lum or prayer at children’s camps and ballgames. That willingness to
fight publicly for what they believe is true sends a powerful moral
message to the children of pure secularist parents: that truth is not just
what feels good to each individual and that we can objectively deter-
mine what is right and what is wrong.
VARIETY IN AFFILIATION
A second source of variation among people who claim no religious
identification or affiliation is whether or not they affiliate with an alter-
native organization that supports and enacts their secular worldview.
Affiliation matters because most of the benefits that children suppos-
edly get from religion are tied to organizational membership. It is
therefore significant that the majority of my respondents were organi-
zationally affiliated. Although Indifferents showed little interest in join-
ing a community, Pure Secularists, Naturalists, and Pluralists often do
belong to an organization of like-minded individuals. Some of these
organizations were intentionally created to provide an alternative to
religion: what I call free-thinking denominations. Others have political
purposes such as environmental or peace activism.
Freethinker Denominations
A growing number of secularists are affiliating with free-thinker
denominations that closely resemble churches in structure and activ-
ities. There are national secularist organizations such as the American
Humanist Association that have chapters in many states. There are also
independent secular churches such as the North Texas Church of Free
36 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
Thought or the First Humanist Society of New York. Just as some peo-
ple who claim to belong to a church but never attend, some secular
individuals affiliate in name only. Many others, however, gather
weekly and on special occasions for sermons, readings, and rituals.
Depending on size, some secular associations meet independently in
people’s homes; others are large enough to have their own facility.
Some organizations serve a particular secularist population such as
atheists or humanists, and others provide a home to a variety of both
secular and religious families.
The Humanist Community of Silicon Valley (HCSV), California, is an
example of a community serving a particular secular population, those
who identify as humanist. Serving San Jose, Silicon Valley, Stanford,
and the Peninsula since 1962, HCSV offers regular Sunday Forums and
children’s programs and celebrates weddings and funerals, as well as
holidays significant to the atheist community such as Darwin Day or
Martin Luther King Day. In other locations where they are less numer-
ous or not as well funded, secularists may pool their resources with
other free-thinkers. In many states, Unitarian Universalist societies pro-
vide a home not only for liberal religious folk but for various types of
secularists, including atheists. A recent survey of the Unitarian Univer-
salist Society in New Haven (UUNH), Connecticut, for example, found
that 28 percent identify as atheist or humanist. Unitarian Universalism
is a nondoctrinal community, sharing commitment to a set of ethical
principles rather than a supernatural belief and celebrating a variety of
religious holidays to mark the diversity of their community. UUNH has
served the greater New Haven area since 1951. They offer two services
each Sunday, life cycle rituals, a religious education program, and small
groups and are deeply involved in social activism particularly on issues
such as opposing the Iraq war and supporting gay rights.
It is not surprising to find secular organizations in urban areas on
the east and west coasts, given the liberal reputation of these locations.
But I found vibrant secular communities in more conservative regions
such as Colorado Springs or Jacksonville as well. Colorado Springs, for
example, is a medium-sized city where you can find an Evangelical
church on almost every corner, as well as the headquarters of Focus on
the Family, but it also boasts two Unitarian Universalist churches that
provide a home for many secularists for whom belonging to a commu-
nity of like-minded individuals is a significant source of support in
raising their children.
Secularists seem aware of children’s need for affiliation with a moral
community. Thus some free-thinker organizations offer worldview
education and youth programming that replicates much of what
churches provide in terms of moral values, learning opportunities, and
social networking. The ‘‘dogma free Sunday school’’ of HCSV was
established in 2004 in response to an expressed need by community
Atheism, Secularity, the Family, and Children 37
members for ‘‘children who are used to hearing their classmates talk
about god to have a safe refuge to explore all the alternatives.’’ Held
parallel to the adult Sunday meetings, the children’s program focuses
on thinking and asking questions (rather than learning a particular
doctrine) and emphasizes human (rather than supernatural) answers
for how to live in a human world. Unitarian Universalist children’s
programs have been in existence longer and are therefore more com-
prehensive. They are actually called ‘‘religious education,’’ but they too
are nondogmatic, teaching children about Unitarian Universalist princi-
ples and presenting the teachings of world religions as well as human-
ism as equally valid alternatives. The curriculum has several levels
geared to different age groups, as well as providing opportunities for
youth to engage in the wider community. The Highland Park Unitarian
Universalist Congregation in Colorado Springs, for example, sends
teenagers on a trip to a Indian reservation where they engage in cul-
tural exchange and social outreach activities. In all Unitarian Universal-
ist congregations, children are encouraged to interact with adults, for
example, by conducting annual membership surveys and by participat-
ing in the first 15 minutes of the religious service.
In addition to alternative Sunday school programs, secularists have
also established children’s summer camps. The first atheist summer
camp, Camp Quest, was established in 1996 in northern Kentucky to pro-
vide children in the greater Cincinnati area with a secular alternative to
religiously based summer camps such as Boy Scouts and summer Bible
camps. The camp, which first met in a Baptist facility, provided much of
what religious camps offer: roasting marshmallows and telling stories at
campfires, sleeping in cabins with other kids, swimming, hiking, and arts
and crafts, as well as educational activities such as learning about lake
ecology or astronomy. But other activities reflect the camp’s secular iden-
tity: morning tai chi, a field trip to endangered wetlands, and—instead of
Bible school—instruction in secular humanism. The success of Camp
Quest, which continues going strong, soon spawned branches in Ohio
and other states such as Quest West in Sacramento, California.30
Clearly, the organizational resources are available to provide children
secular equivalents of the ‘‘benefits’’ associated with religious affiliation.
As described above, free-thinking organizations can provide a moral
order grounded in a larger intellectual tradition—the Humanist and the
Unitarian Universalist traditions, for example, are both more than a cen-
tury old and are associated with a vast body of learned literature. In
their Sunday schools, camps, trips, and volunteer activities, secular
organizations provide children and youth with opportunities to learn
life, leadership, and coping skills as well as acquire cultural capital such
as religious literacy and ethics. Perhaps most importantly, free-thinker
organizations engage kids with other caring adults as well as with the
wider community.
38 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
Socio-political Organizations
Not all secularists belong to organizations that are religion equiva-
lents. It could be argued, however, that some unaffiliated secularists
may have some other community involvement that provides similar
benefits. Parents who are deeply involved in social activism, perhaps for
peace or the environment, illustrate this pattern. The membership of the
Environmental Justice Network (EJN) in New Haven where I live is an
example. There are several parents who regularly bring their children to
monthly EJN meetings; when working on a particular crisis issue, the
meetings may be more frequent. The children play while the adults talk,
but the children are also involved in both the values and actions of the
organization. Parents explain to children what is at stake (the proposed
reopening of a diesel fueled power plant or the construction of a trash
incinerator in a poor urban neighborhood), and children learn about
right and wrong, truth and justice. Children and youth participate in
activism with their parents, attending public hearings, picketing, and
riding a bus on a ‘‘toxic tour’’ of polluted areas in the inner city. Some
children have literally grown up in this organization, as their parents
have been members for five or ten years. Like children who grow up in
a church, EJN kids are provided with a moral order and an organiza-
tional context that supports that order; they learn life and leadership
skills that are particularly valuable in becoming active citizens, and they
have access to caring adults beyond their own family as well as net-
working opportunities to other organizations. It seems reasonable to
expect that children growing up in this environment would experience
similarly positive outcomes as those raised in religious communities.
CONCLUSION
It is clear that we need more and better research investigating the
impact of atheism and secularity on the family and children. Although
the literature suggesting a positive association between religious affilia-
tion and childhood well-being is compelling, it does not follow that
children raised in secular environments are at risk, especially if families
are committed to positive alternative worldviews and communities that
may offer the same benefits as religion. It is not my intention to sug-
gest that such benefits can be derived from just any organization; that
would be reductionist. The religious environment surely does matter in
the sense that it provides a meaningful moral order that transcends the
individual’s subjective experience and a community that shares and
supports that order. I am simply arguing that such an order and com-
munity need not be theist or supernatural in character. Until research
on religious affiliation and identification recognizes that secularism can
be more than just the absence of religion and takes into account the
Atheism, Secularity, the Family, and Children 39
NOTES
1. Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, Religion in a Free Market: Religious and
Non-religious Americans (New York: Paramount Publishing, 2006).
2. Michael Hout and Claude Fisher, ‘‘Why More Americans Have No Reli-
gious Preference: Politics and Generations.’’ American Sociological Review 67
(2002): 165–190.
3. Gallup conducted two national surveys, The Unchurched American (1978)
and The Unchurched American—10 Years Later (1988), both available from Princeton
Religion Research Center. For unchurched Protestants, see Dean Hoge, Benton
Johnson, and Donald A. Luidens, Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline
Protestant Baby Boomers (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994).
40 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
21. For an excellent survey of this literature, see Smith, 330–31; see also
Kenneth Hyde, Religion in Childhood and Adolescence: A Comprehensive Review of
the Research (Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, 1990).
22. Smith, 234.
23. Smith, 240–51.
24. For extended discussion of ARIS results, see Kosmin and Keysar.
25. Martin Ashley, ‘‘The Spiritual, the Cultural, and the Religious: What Can
We Learn from a Study of Boy Choristers?’’ International Journal of Children’s
Spirituality 7 (2002): 257–272; Penny Long Marler and Kirk Hadaway, ‘‘Being
Religious or Being Spiritual in America: A Zero Sum Proposition?’’ Journal for
the Scientific Study of Religion 41 (2002): 289–300.
26. Christian Smith, David Sikkink, and Jason Bailey, ‘‘Devotion in Dixie
and Beyond: A Test of the ‘Shibley Thesis’ on the Effects of Regional Origin
and Migration on Individual Religiosity,’’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Reli-
gion 37 (1998): 494–506; Roger Stump, ‘‘Regional Variations in the Determinants
of Religious Participation.’’ Review of Religious Research 27 (1986): 208–225.
27. Kosmin and Keysar, 94–97.
28. Vern Uchtman, ‘‘Camp Quest 96,’’ Free Inquiry 17 (Winter 1996/97): 27.
29. Smith, 227–228.
30. Cathy Lynn Grossman, ‘‘Camps Sign Up Freethinkers,’’ USA Today, July
17, 2006.
31. Jaqueline Watson, ‘‘Can Children and Young People Learn from Atheism
for Spiritual Development? A Response to the National Framework for Reli-
gious Education,’’ British Journal of Religious Education 30 (2008): 49–58.
32. Fay, 99.
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Chapter 3
A Portrait of Secular
Group Affiliates
Frank L. Pasquale
Irreligion is not merely the absence of something, and certainly not sim-
ply the missing of something good, desirable, or pleasant. It is much
closer to adopting an active stance or posture, involving the act of
excluding another posture which, despite its popularity or naturalness, is
deemed to be a poor fit in an acquired life style. Irreligion, like religion,
can be zealous, militant, declarative, dogmatic, or [persuasive]. Like reli-
gion, it can be the product of training, existential decision-making, or
drifting. And all too often it can be the product of religious instruction!8
Pruyser suggested that the ‘‘study of belief and unbelief must come
down from the height of global generalities to the untidy details of con-
crete experience in order to produce that as yet unwritten tome: The
Varieties of Experiencing Irreligion.’’9 His challenge prompted the research
to be described here. The aim has been to cast a net wide enough in
scope, but fine enough in weave, to identify both shared and distinctive
characteristics among those who describe themselves as substantially or
affirmatively nonreligious, philosophically naturalistic, or secular.
Oregon/ British
Group/type Washington* Columbia* Total respondents
The focus on one region enabled the use of both intensive and exten-
sive methods on a limited budget.18 This said, given the mobility of
North Americans, the sample reflects a wide range of geographical
backgrounds. Among the U.S. affiliates, 26 percent were Northwest
born and bred. Roughly 15 percent each were raised in the West, Mid-
west, or Northeast; 8 percent were from central or southern states,
12 percent were raised in multiple locations, and 8 percent were raised
internationally. This, in fact, broadly reflects the regional distribution
of seculars throughout the United States.19
Age
The average age of the group affiliates was 62.68 and median age
was 64, with a range of 15 to 92 years of age. This is consistent with
48 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
Table 3.1
Age distribution among secularist groups
Gender
Overall, roughly 56 percent of respondents were male and 44 percent
were female (Table 3.2). Again, this is consistent with substantial prior
indications that females tend, in general, to be more (or males less) reli-
gious with regard to belief, identification, affiliation, or behavior. Differ-
ences in gender distribution among group types or philosophies are
also consistent with this general tendency. Men are more strongly rep-
resented in groups with a more analytical or critical focus (e.g., Skeptic,
Atheist) and women in groups that tend to be more focused on cultural
values and transmission (Jewish and Unitarian Humanist).27
Table 3.2
Gender distribution by group type
Gender
Group type/affiliation Male Female Totals
Table 3.3
Group affiliates’ educational attainment
Cultural Background
The group affiliates are overwhelmingly white and of European
descent. Among 899 individuals supplying this information, 79.8 percent
described themselves as ‘‘Euro-Caucasian,’’ with another 16.4 percent
‘‘Jewish’’ or ‘‘Jewish’’þ‘‘Euro-Caucasian’’ and 3.8 percent as other
(including [East] Asian descent, Indian [South Asian], Middle Eastern
[Persian, Iraqi], African American, and Native American).
Those of Jewish descent are overrepresented among group affiliates.
Among the U.S.-based groups (n ¼ 782), 17.5 percent indicated Jewish
backgrounds. Excluding the two Jewish Humanist groups, 7.1 percent
of respondents indicated Jewish backgrounds among the remaining
groups. This compares with an estimated 2.2 percent in the U.S. popu-
lation and 0.7 percent in Oregon and Washington.31
By contrast, Asian, African, and Latin Americans are noticeably
underrepresented. Only ten group affiliates (or 1.1 percent) indicated
East Asian or Asian þ Euro descent, and two indicated South Asian/
Indian descent (or 0.2 percent). Based on 2006 census data (East and
South), Asian Americans make up 4.4 percent of the U.S. population
and 5.5 percent of the population of Oregon and Washington. Only
seven affiliates indicated African American or African þ Euro descent
(or 0.78 percent). This compares with 12.8 percent in the United States
52 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
Table 3.4
Religiosity of cultural/ethnic groups in the United States
Atheist 2 <0.5 3 1 1 2
Agnostic 3 1 4 3 1 2
Secular unaffiliated 7 3 11 7 4 6
Religious unaffiliated 5 8 5 9 8 6
Total 17 12 23 20 14 16
Values are percentage of Pew survey respondents.
Source: Pew Forum. ‘‘U.S. Religious Landscape Survey 2008.’’ http://religions.pewforum.org/.
A Portrait of Secular Group Affiliates 53
25.0%
20.0%
15.0%
24.7%
10.0%
17.4% 17.9%
5.0% 10.1%
9.5%
8.7%
4.8% 4.4%
25.0%
20.0%
15.0%
23.0%
10.0% 19.1%
18.5%
10.9% 10.5%
5.0% 9.0%
5.0%
4.0%
0.0%
<10 10-19 20-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70+
Religious/Philosophical Upbringing
Differences in the reported nature of respondents’ religious or philo-
sophical backgrounds offer some insight into the stances they adopted.
McTaggart referred to members of Canadian humanist groups as ‘‘re-
affiliates,’’ because the majority affiliated on the basis of their world-
views after having abandoned religious upbringing, but this time on
the basis of irreligiosity.38 The same is true of the Pacific Northwest
affiliates (Table 3.5). About 79 percent indicated religious backgrounds
(both parents religious and some family religious participation), 12 percent
indicated secular or nonreligious backgrounds, and 9 percent indicated
mixed religious and/or nonreligious backgrounds.
A Portrait of Secular Group Affiliates 55
Table 3.5
Secularist group affiliates’ religious/philosophical backgrounds
Religious strictness
None/non-religious,
secular humanist, agnostic,
atheist parents (n = 103)
what Catholic school training did to me during the 1930s and 1940s.’’
Another attributed his irreligiosity to ‘‘negative reactions to oppressive
Catholic upbringing.’’ Those raised in Protestant/Christian family con-
texts generally characterized their upbringings as less strict, on average,
than Catholics.39 By contrast, those with Jewish/Judaic backgrounds
viewed their religious upbringings as lax or voluntary—more similar to
those with Secular or mixed (religious and nonreligious parental) back-
grounds than to those raised Catholic or Protestant.
The attitudes of Catholic-raised respondents about ‘‘religion’’ tended
to be comparatively more severe, those raised Jewish/Judaic were less
severe, and those with Secular, Protestant, or mixed backgrounds, mid-
dling. For example, those raised Catholic were most likely to describe
themselves as ‘‘antireligious’’ (Table 3.6). Fewer with Jewish/Judaic
backgrounds did so. Those raised Catholic indicated greater anger, on
average, compared with respondents raised Protestant, Jewish/Judaic,
and Secular (Table 3.7). Those raised Jewish/Judaic were less likely, on
average, to indicate that a reason for group affiliation was to ‘‘counter-
act religion’’ (Table 3.8; 1-5 response scale used for this item). Lastly,
those raised Catholic were somewhat more likely to indicate conflict
about religion (with parents, with siblings, and at work).40 Those raised
Jewish/Judaic generally indicated less conflict, as did those with Secu-
lar backgrounds (except with friends; Table 3.9).
The strongest critical reaction to something-called-religion, then, was
evident among those raised Catholic, who also rated their religious
upbringings most strict, on average. By comparison, those with Jewish
or secular backgrounds reported both less strictness in their religious/
philosophical upbringings and less severity in their attitudes about
‘‘religion.’’
Chose ‘‘antireligious’’ as 130 (28.3) 53 (41.4) 25 (21.9) 29 (27.9) 17 (34.0) 7 (19.4) 261 (29.3)
self-description
Total respondents 460 128 114 104 50 36 892
Values are number of respondents, with percentage of category in parentheses.
Table 3.7
Religious background and anger about religion
Anger about religion 5.46 5.89 5.42 5.26 5.63 5.75 5.51
(Scale: 1 = not at all;
7 = very)
Standard deviation 1.68 1.54 1.60 1.87 1.78 1.46 1.68
Number of respondents 450 123 112 101 46 36 868
Table 3.8
Religious background and motivation to affiliate with group (to counteract religion)
Table 3.9
Reported conflict involving religion
1. Properties that are intrinsic to the nature of the physical universe or all
that exists, and nothing more
2. A coherent organizing principle that we cannot, or do not yet, fully com-
prehend that is pervasive throughout the physical universe or all that
exists
3. An organizing principle or force that in some way transcends the physi-
cal universe or all that exists
4. An impersonal, but in some sense intelligent, creative force that has
brought all that exists into being
5. A personal, and in some sense intelligence creative force, or ‘‘God,’’
with which human beings can make contact or have a communicative
relationship
6. An omniscient, omnipotent, intelligent God that designed and created all
that exists
Table 3.10
Response patterns for several worldview items
Transcendent entity
Meaningless/ Maybe or Metaphorical Probably or
nonexistent sometimes (as though) definitely Total
Personal essence
Meaningless/ Maybe or Metaphorical Probably or
nonexistent sometimes (as though) definitely Total
Ultimate purpose
Meaningless/ Maybe or Metaphorical Probably or
nonexistent sometimes (as though) definitely Total
Impersonal force
Meaningless/ Maybe or Metaphorical Probably or
nonexistent sometimes (as though) definitely Total
women; 11.4 percent of men). But both male and female Jewish
Humanists accepted the concept more often than those in other groups.
Although substantially nontheistic, group affiliates were by no means
equally naturalistic. This was further evidenced by data on something
called ‘‘spiritual/ity.’’
Table 3.11
Use of ‘‘spiritual/ity’’ in specifically psychological/experiential senses
Uses of ‘‘spiritual/ity’’a*
Describe self as
N Avoid term Psychological Transcendental ‘‘spiritual’’b
Worldviewscà
Level 1 299 83.3 15.7 0.0 1.06
Level 2 453 77.7 21.2 0.0 1.13
Level 3 534 74.7 23.4 0.0 1.14
Level 4 700 65.9 32.6 .1 1.34
Self-descriptions
Atheist(ic) 555 67.0 30.8 .5 1.34
Anti-religious 264 62.9 34.8 .8 1.55
Skeptical 449 60.6 35.6 2.0 1.57
Freethinker 415 58.3 37.3 2.4 1.62
Secular 497 53.7 41.8 3.0 1.54
Agnostic 323 48.3 47.1 2.5 1.90
Naturalistic 292 47.6 45.5 4.8 1.87
Group affiliations
Atheist 101 75.2 23.8 0.0 1.15
Skeptic, rationalist 151 65.7 29.8 2.0 1.48
Secular Humanist 381 62.5 33.3 2.4 1.55
Freethought 30 50.0 50.0 0.0 1.90
Unitarian Humanist 126 47.6 47.6 3.2 2.04
Jewish Humanist 107 30.8 59.8 8.4 2.82
a
Values are percentage of respondents.
b
Values are means (Scale: 1 = not at all; 7 = very much).
c
Level 1 = God/soul/force/purpose meaningless/non-existent (‘‘straight-ticket rejecters’’)
Level 2 = God/soul/force/purpose meaningless/ non-existent OR don’t know/unknowable
Level 3 = God/soul/force meaningless/non-existent OR don’t know/unknowable
Level 4 = God/soul meaningless/non-existent OR don’t know/unknowable
N = number of respondents
A Portrait of Secular Group Affiliates 69
Table 3.13
Reported anger about the role and effects of religion in the world
groups (Table 3.14). Jewish Humanists were least likely to consider reli-
gion a harmful force followed by Unitarian Humanists; Freethought,
and Atheist affiliates were most likely to be of this opinion.
Respondents were offered the opportunity to indicate that ‘‘religion
is too complex a phenomenon to generalize about in this way’’ in addi-
tion to, or instead of, a scaled response.
In Table 3.14, those who chose this option instead of a scaled response
are reported. In Table 3.15, those who chose this option whether or not
they provided a scaled response are reported. In both cases, Jewish
Humanists were most likely to feel that ‘‘religion’’ is too complex to
generalize about in such a manner, followed by Unitarian Humanists;
Freethought, and Atheist affiliates were least likely to do so.
Overall, more than a third of respondents felt that ‘‘religion’’ was
too complex to characterize or evaluate simply (whether or not they
provided scaled responses).
Additional items provided further insight into respondents’ attitudes
about ‘‘religion’’ and related issues. In general, Jewish Humanists
were less critical of ‘‘religion’’ and more (self-critical) of ‘‘skeptical and
nonreligious people’’ than others, with the Unitarian Humanists close by.
Close inspection of the data indicated that this was true of both males and
females in comparison with other groups. Atheist and Freethought affili-
ates tended to be most critical of ‘‘religion.’’ Skeptic and Secular humanist
affiliates generally held the middle ground, with Secular humanists more
severe, on average, and Skeptics somewhat less so.
Religion a harmful 302 (78.6) 61 (56.0) 81 (63.8) 90 (87.4) 110 (72.4) 29 (96.7) 673 (74.4)
forcea
Religion too com- 50 (13.0) 29 (26.6) 19 (15.0) 5 (4.9) 14 (9.2) 0 (0) 117 (112.9)
plex to general-
ize aboutb
Total respondents 384 109 127 103 152 30 905
a
Values are number of respondents rating religion a harmful force (1 to 3 on a scale with 1 = harmful force, 7 = positive force); percentage in paren-
theses.
b
Values are number of respondents who gave no scaled response and indicated that religion is much too complex a phenomenon to generalize about
in this way; percentage in parentheses.
Table 3.15
Religion too complex to evaluate generally as a harmful or positive force in human affairs
Group type/affiliation
Secular Jewish Unitarian Skeptic,
Humanist Humanist Humanist Atheist rationalist Freethought Total
Religion too complex 126 (32.8) 53 (48.6) 55 (43.3) 30 (29.1) 48 (31.6) 7 (23.3) 319 (35.2)
to generalize about
Total respondents 384 (00.0) 109 (00.0) 127 (00.0) 103 (00.0) 152 (00.0) 30 (00.0) 905 (00.0)
Values are number of respondents, with percentage in parentheses.
A Portrait of Secular Group Affiliates 73
Table 3.16
Reported fear of death
Scale
Total
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 respondents
Notably, the older the respondents, the less the reported fear of death.
Although this relationship was modest, it was statistically significant
(r ¼ 0.272; p < 0.01, two-tailed). A pervasive theme was, in a word,
‘‘acceptance.’’ The sense among many was that this is an attitude
worth cultivating no matter how difficult this may be. Death is a part
of life/nature, it happens, it’s unavoidable, it’s final, and there is little
to be done about it other than to do what one can to live a healthy
and positive, productive life. In text responses, many respondents dis-
tinguish between fear of death ‘‘in principle’’ and fear of the process
of physical decline or dying. It was repeatedly made clear that scaled
responses pertained to the former rather than the latter. The impor-
tance of personal control over the dying process was also mentioned
by many.
It may be that because secularists tend to reject the notion of an after-
life or the suggestion that belief is necessary for acceptance of death,
the reported lack of fear may reflect a degree of dismissive bravado that
conceals deeper or neglected fear. Relevant texts and interview discus-
sions suggest that this is likely true among some, but not all. Many
respondents wrote on the general theme of inevitability, acceptance,
and getting on with the business of living to the best of one’s ability.
A Portrait of Secular Group Affiliates 75
This is not to deny, entirely, that the fact of death is an unsettling one
(because of the natural tendency for consciousness to want to persist). It
is, rather, to say that the mature individual is one who accepts reality—
however undesirable—without whining or throwing a tantrum. It is
even, some suggested, possible to embrace death as a beneficial conclu-
sion to human life, in both natural and personal terms. It is possible for
human beings to cultivate a mindset concerning mortality that nullifies
death’s ‘‘sting.’’ This is a model of mature human living to which many
secularists say they openly aspire. This said, some noted in interviews
and survey comments that it is the quality of life that is important, lead-
ing them to support ‘‘death with dignity’’ and ‘‘physician-assisted sui-
cide’’ measures like those in Oregon or the Netherlands.
Table 3.17
Respondents’ rated importance of selected values
Importance
Total Standard
Values respondents Meana deviation
insight into the nature of human social life that, many noted, predated
Christianity.
With regard to ‘‘moderation of one’s own appetites and emotions,’’
endorsement was notably weaker and more variable. The question arises:
how much moderation, and of what appetites or emotions? In a study of
the ethical values of religious ‘‘skeptics’’ and ‘‘believers’’ by Middleton
and Putney,45 a pertinent distinction was made between ‘‘ascetic’’ and
‘‘social’’ ethical standards. They found that social standards (that devalue
actions intrinsically harmful to social life, such as lying, stealing, or phys-
ical injury) were held strongly and equally among religious ‘‘skeptics’’
and ‘‘believers.’’ By contrast, ‘‘ascetic’’ standards (concerning personal
behavior such as smoking, gambling, alcohol consumption, or sexual
activity) were stronger among religious believers than skeptics.
Moderation of one’s appetites and emotions, at least in general prin-
ciple, would seem to fall into the ‘‘ascetic’’ category. Even so, when
asked whether it is ‘‘important to focus our own and our children’s
attention on values and aims beyond material consumption or consum-
erism,’’ 95 percent of the group affiliates agreed (5 to 7 on a 1–7 scale;
mean ¼ 6.42). Moreover, the manners and lifestyles of the secularists
whom I have come to know well over the past several years, both inde-
pendent and affiliated, can only be described as modest (to the point,
some would say, of being downright ‘‘square’’). These are, in the main,
responsible and generally serious-minded parents, employees, and citi-
zens whose attitudes and actions—apart from their worldviews—
would attract little attention from their neighbors. Indeed, because
many report that they tend to be strategically circumspect about their
views in public or in unfamiliar contexts, little does attract attention
and most blend quietly into middle-class North American life. This
A Portrait of Secular Group Affiliates 77
Table 3.18
Affiliates’ attitudes about controversial ‘‘moral’’ issues
Should be
Completely Accept with limited or Completely
Na acceptable reservations discouraged unacceptable
discouraged (27.6 percent). It is, after all, the law, and the law is
reasonably designed to protect the young from sexual predation and
victimization. Again, the prime directive is ensuring individuals’ well-
being—in this case, children. Even so, reasonable judgment must be
applied, as in the case, say, of a 17- and 21-year-old ‘‘in love.’’ As a
result, general-principle responses were frequently qualified with ‘‘it
depends on the circumstances.’’
Although there is strong support for the use of embryonic stem cells
in research on, for example, chronic illnesses (over and against reli-
gious objections), many have reservations about genetic research in
general. The latter covers a broad range of phenomena with both
potentially desirable and undesirable outcomes. Some express concern
about potentially harmful environmental and human impact of geneti-
cally modified plants, and although knowledgeable, voluntary, and
carefully monitored termination of one’s own life is deemed an intrin-
sic human right, the state’s right to punitively take individuals’ lives
(and the deterrent value or justness of the death penalty) is viewed
more critically.
The common thread in such matters is the application of prudent
judgment and critical reason with the aim of discerning what is, or is
not, likely to advance or threaten individuals’ well-being and the com-
mon good. Not surprisingly, among the most highly regarded values
was that of critical reasoning. Nearly 98 percent endorsed the impor-
tance of ‘‘critical, logical thinking’’ and nearly 96 percent endorsed the
value of ‘‘guiding children to think critically and logically’’ (5 to 7 on a
1–7 scale with 7 ¼ extremely important).
Many of the affiliated secularists were noticeably less confident about
what, exactly, the content of children’s philosophical guidance should be
or how this should be provided. Because the majority experienced, and
then rejected, religious upbringing, moral ‘‘inculcation’’ and religious (or
philosophical) ‘‘proselytizing’’ are anathema. The line between ‘‘educa-
tion’’ and ‘‘proselytizing’’ is difficult to draw, and there are frequent dis-
cussions of this issue in secularist meetings. So it is that when asked on
two occasions, a year apart, one secular humanist group was split down
the middle about the advisability of a children’s program.46 A few mem-
bers have struggled for more than a decade with limited success to insti-
tute a children’s educational program. They are not alone. Among the
groups observed and surveyed here, only the Jewish Humanist groups
have maintained multiyear children’s educational programs (that focus
on Jewish cultural heritage and general ethical principles embodied in
that heritage—such as tikkun olam, one’s responsibility to ‘‘repair the
world’’ and contribute to the welfare of the community).
There are signs that ambivalence about children’s instruction in
organized secularity is beginning to abate. Widely publicized atheist
and skeptic summer camps have emboldened some locals to renew
A Portrait of Secular Group Affiliates 79
SUMMARY
These findings are consistent with Beit-Hallahmi’s conclusion that ‘‘the
modal atheist in Western society today . . . is much more likely to be a
man, married, with higher education’’48 and Hunsberger and Altemeyer’s
conclusion that ‘‘[d]emographically, active [or affiliated] atheism appears
to be mostly an educated, ‘left-winger,’ old, guy, thing.’’49 To these char-
acterizations might be added ‘‘a substantially white, Euro-American’’
thing. This said, there are signs that affiliated secularism continues to
replenish itself with younger participants, in part through the mechanism
of the Internet as a marketing, sorting, and assembling mechanism.
There has been an observable tendency over the past 200—and
2,000—years for particular skeptical or secularist movements and col-
lectives to emerge and fade away, continually replenished by new ones
under new leadership and labels with distinctive slants, from the kako-
daimoniotai to ‘‘brights.’’50 Substantial or affirmative secularity has been
a minority position throughout Western history, and organized secular-
ity has perennially attracted an infinitesimal portion of the secular or
skeptical population. But this persists, even as it waxes and wanes over
time and across societies.
No research takes place in a historical vacuum, and it is important
to acknowledge the environment in which the data just presented were
gathered. Secularists of various stripes have been wrested in recent
years from a comforting mid-twentieth-century presumption of inexo-
rable, straight-line secularization (heading toward the positions they
themselves hold). Both independent and affiliated secularists have been
upset by a resurgence of religion in governance, public life, and world
affairs in recent decades. Many have become more vocal, assertive,
and/or engaged as secularists. They have been emboldened, to some
extent, by a series of published tracts that give voice—sometimes quite
80 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
NOTES
1. Thrower, 1980.
2. This has been observed repeatedly by, for example, Vernon, 1968; Capor-
ale and Grumelli, 1971; Hale, 1977; Pruyser, 1992; Bainbridge, 2005; Hunsberger
and Altemeyer, 2006; see also, Pasquale, 2007b.
3. For example, Bainbridge, 2005; Beit-Hallahmi, 2007; Cimino and Smith,
2007; Hunsberger and Altemeyer, 2006; Kosmin and Keysar, 2007; Pasquale,
2007b; Zuckerman, 2007 and 2008.
4. Caporale, 1971, 3.
5. Such as Budd, 1967; Campbell, 1965, 1969, and 1972; Cimino and Smith,
2007; Demerath, 1969; Demerath and Thiessen, 1966; Black, 1983; McTaggart,
1967; Hunsberger and Altemeyer, 2006.
6. Hale, 1977, 97.
7. Pruyser, 1974, 195.
8. Ibid., 174.
9. Ibid., 196.
10. Pasquale, 2007a.
11. Atheist, skeptic, or rationalist student groups at some universities in the
region were not sought out for inclusion in the study. Membership is typically
small and shifts annually as students matriculate and graduate.
A Portrait of Secular Group Affiliates 83
12. It should also be noted that the nature and quality of mailing lists varied
noticeably among the groups. This reflects, in part, differences in the purposes,
activities, and nature of affiliation in these groups. Some exhibit formal organi-
zational structure with governing boards, committees, regular meetings, and
clearly defined levels of membership. Others are less structured networks of
interested individuals and supporters who meet irregularly, distribute newslet-
ters or other bulletins, maintain continuing contact largely via e-mail, and have
less well-defined affiliation levels or requirements, As a result, some were
clearly regularly updated lists of active or dues-paying members, whereas
others were less frequently updated and/or more inclusive lists covering both
active participants (in meetings, e-mail correspondence, or other activities) as
well as people who had inquired about the group or asked to receive electronic
or printed newsletters.
13. Nearly 60 percent of Unitarian humanist affiliates indicated affiliation with
a Unitarian church or fellowship; in other groups 10.5 percent or less did so.
14. A secularist movement dedicated to ‘‘illuminating and elevating the nat-
uralist worldview.’’ See http://www.the-brights.net/.
15. As in, for example, Robertson, 1936, or Jacoby, 2004.
16. From here on, when referring specifically to the surveyed groups, the
group category names will be capitalized.
17. Because of small sample size, limited reference will be made to results
for the Freethought group affiliates.
18. I am grateful for a Shand Award from the Society for the Scientific Study
of Religion (2006), which helped defray survey distribution costs.
19. Preliminary analysis of response patterns among the United States and Brit-
ish Columbia humanists disclosed no strong or systematic differences for many of
the variables reported here. Data are therefore reported for the full sample.
20. McTaggart, 1997.
21. Personal communication, Tom Flynn, ed., Free Inquiry, September 13, 2007.
22. Hunsberger and Altemeyer, 2006.
23. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meetup (accessed June 24, 2008).
24. Bainbridge, 2005.
25. Lee, 1995.
26. Members, organizers, and young visitors at established secularist groups
have repeatedly mentioned that the old-age skew is a recruitment problem,
because young secularists do not feel at home among a majority of ‘‘elders.’’
27. Gender distribution of survey respondents was a fair reflection of the
actual gender distributions in the groups (based on mailing list counts or
group reports; indicated in brackets).
28. For example, Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle, 1997; Roozen, 1980; Stark, 1963;
Vetter and Green, 1932.
29. Campbell, 1965, 333.
30. See, for example, Argyle, 1958; Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle, 1997; Spilka,
Hood, Hunsberger, and Gorsuch, 2003; Thalheimer, 1965; Vetter and Green, 1932.
31. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/usjewpop.html.
Source: Ira M. Sheskin and Arnold Dashefsky, ‘‘Jewish Population of the United
States, 2006,’’ in American Jewish Year Book 2006, Vol. 106, ed. David Singer and
Lawrence Grossman (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2006).
84 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
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Chapter 4
Cimino and Smith further argue that secular humanists and atheists
have begun to construct themselves as a minority movement, termed
the freethought movement. As examples of the progression of the
movement and its claiming of minority status for atheists and secular
humanists, they point to the founding of the Center for Atheism in
Washington, D.C., a political lobbying group, and the Anti-Discrimination
Support Network, a group based out of the Freethought Society of
Greater Philadelphia to which one can report incidents of discrimination
against nontheists. Similarly, there has been some discussion among athe-
ists regarding the use of a more positive-sounding word than ‘‘atheist’’ to
describe those who do not believe in God. One prominent organization,
The Brights Network, promotes the use of the word ‘‘Bright’’ instead of
e.g., atheist or agnostic, claiming that transitioning to using this more pos-
itive-sounding word is analogous to the gay rights movement encourag-
ing the use of ‘‘gay’’ instead of ‘‘homosexual.’’18 Thus, as gay men and
lesbians had to make conscious decisions to organize and to construct
themselves as a minority movement19 so have some atheists begun to
organize as an emerging social movement and identity politics is a key
tactic within this movement. Like other contemporary movements, differ-
ent groups and organizations within the freethought movement make use
of the Internet and other forms of media to promote their message and to
allow individuals active in the movement to connect, organize, and ‘‘try
on’’ atheist/activist identities.20
In this chapter, using both analysis of national survey data and
analysis of Internet discussions from a major atheist organization, we
explore the ways in which atheists and agnostics think about homo-
sexuality and the movement for lesbian and gay rights. We move
beyond the assumption that, given their common freedom from reli-
gion, atheists and agnostics will similarly and overwhelmingly sup-
port the movement for gay and lesbian rights. Using both sources of
data, we show that atheists think about homosexuality in multifaceted
ways.
SECONDARY ANALYSIS
Methods
To analyze the attitudinal connections between secularism and
homosexuality, we use data from the GSS between the years 1988 and
2006. The GSS is an almost annual face-to-face interview survey con-
ducted by the National Opinion Research Center. The population from
which the GSS samples are drawn is all noninstitutionalized Americans
aged 18 and above. The multistage probability sampling procedures
used for the survey have consistently produced response rates between
73 and 82 percent.
Sexuality and the Secular 93
We begin in 1988 because this was the first year in which the GSS
asked a question they call simply GOD:
Please look at this card and tell me which statement comes closest to
expressing what you believe about God:
1. I don’t believe in God.
2. I don’t know whether there is a God, and I don’t believe there is any
way to find out.
3. I don’t believe in a personal God, but I do believe in a Higher Power of
some kind.
4. I find myself believing in God some of the time, but not at others.
5. While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God.
6. I know God really exists, and I have no doubts about it.
asking these questions in 1973, the same year the American Psychiatric
Association removed homosexuality from its list of disorders.21 To
maintain the ability to measure opinion trends over time, the GSS has
kept the wording of these questions the same.
For the dependent variable in our regression equations, we com-
bined these homosexuality questions into a single additive index. We
gave equal weight to the attitudes regarding sexual behavior and atti-
tudes regarding civil rights. That is, we took the HOMOSEX variable,
with values ranging from zero to three, and combined it with the di-
chotomous civil rights variables (0/1, 0/1, 0/1) to create an index that
ranged from zero to six. Respondents scored a zero on the index if they
believed gay sex was always wrong and they denied civil rights on all
three questions. Respondents scored a six on the index if they believed
that gay sex was not wrong at all and supported all three civil rights.
In addition to these attitudinal questions, since 1991 the GSS has
asked a subset of its respondents about their sexual behaviors. We use
the variable SEXSEX5, which asks: ‘‘Have your sex partners in the last
five years been exclusively male, both male and female, or exclusively
female?’’ By combining this question with the respondent’s own sex,
we are able to identify those respondents who, for example, identify as
male and claim that their sex partners have been male. Using these
variables, we classified people into two categories: those whose sexual
behavior has been exclusively heterosexual and those whose sex life in
the past five years has involved same-sex behavior. We realize that this
technique is less than ideal: those engaging in same-sex behavior may
not identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. In addition, people who have
not had a sex partner in the last five years bear the additional misfor-
tune of being left out of these analyses.
Findings
Atheists and Agnostics: An Overview of Demographics and
Religious Behaviors
The GSS has included the GOD question in seven different years of
its administration. Of the 11,335 people who have responded to this
question, 7,042 of them (64.1 percent) are believers, 269 of them (2.4
percent) are atheists, and 454 of them (or 4.1 percent) are agnostics.
Because of these small frequencies for the atheists and agnostics, we
did not conduct trend analyses, as the frequencies of these groups for
each year of data would simply be too small. Table 4.1 illustrates some
differences among the three groups. Although some of the differences
between believers and the other groups are to be expected (and reflect
previous research22), there are also some interesting differences
between atheists and agnostics. For example, the average agnostic has
Sexuality and the Secular 95
Table 4.1
Demographic differences among the groups
0.75 more years of education and is 2.75 years younger than the aver-
age atheist. Also notice that, with regard to overall political views,
atheists tend to be slightly more liberal than agnostics. These differ-
ences will come up again in our regression analyses.
Another aspect that will arise in later analyses concerns the effects of
religious behaviors on the attitudes of atheists and agnostics. One might
assume that those who state they do not believe in God would not ex-
hibit religious behaviors. This is not always the case. Where Hout and
Fischer identified ‘‘unchurched believers’’ in their research,23 we iden-
tify ‘‘churched nonbelievers.’’ Just over half of the atheists (55 percent)
and agnostics (51 percent) express no religious denominational prefer-
ence. Therefore, there are GSS respondents who identify as Protestants
or Catholics but who do not believe in God. One explanation for this is
some of the respondents may have been raised in particular religious
traditions and still identify with these on a cultural level. Perhaps more
interesting is the finding that only a third of atheists (32 percent) and
agnostics (34 percent) claim they never pray, and only half of the athe-
ists (55 percent) and agnostics (52 percent) claim they never attend reli-
gious services. Of course there are the stories of the atheist who is
dragged to church during the holidays, but the GSS contains a number
of respondents who, although they claim they don’t believe in God,
attend religious services on a regular basis (even once a week or more).
This allows us to examine the effect of connection with religious com-
munities on the attitudes of atheists and agnostics, and we do so below.
Table 4.2
Attitudes toward homosexuality
against same-sex sex or against civil rights. Even though the sample
sizes of atheists and agnostics are small, all of the differences between
these two groups reach statistical significance at the p < 0.05 level
(based on simple cross-tabulations). To what can we attribute these dif-
ferences? One reason may be the more dichotomous and dogmatic
worldview held by some atheists. Agnostics, in contrast, might be less
willing to make definitive stands, and thus may be less likely, for
example, to say that homosexuality is ‘‘always wrong.’’
Another set of possibilities involves the demographic differences we
described above. Perhaps these differences between atheists and agnos-
tics can explain away their differences in opinion around homosexual-
ity. To address this, we turn to Table 4.3, which presents a set of
regression models that use the index of attitudes toward homosexuality
as the dependent variable. Model 1 shows a 0.59 point difference
between atheists and agnostics on the six-point index: a significant dif-
ference (p < 0.01, as judged by a simple difference-of-means test). Recall
that agnostics had on average 0.75 more years of education than athe-
ists. It is a well-known finding that education increases support for gay
and lesbian issues.24 Including education in Model 2 does decrease the
difference between atheists and agnostics, from 0.59 to 0.42, and it
increases the explained variation from 7 to 16 percent. However, almost
a half-point difference remains, so education is not the entire explana-
tion. Adding in the other variables also does not decrease the effect. In
fact, adding Political Views in Model 5 actually increases the size of the
effect. The difference between atheists and agnostics is quite robust.
This difference is limited to attitudes toward homosexuality and
does not apply to other sexuality-related issues. We constructed a nine-
point attitudinal index using three GSS variables with similar response
choices to the HOMOSEX variable: variables concerning premarital sex,
extramarital sex, and sex between teenagers 14 to 16 years old. Atheists
and agnostics, while differing significantly from believers on this index,
do not differ from each other in any statistically significant way. With
regard to sex-related behaviors measured by the GSS (watching X-rated
Sexuality and the Secular 97
Table 4.3
Explaining attitudes toward homosexuality
0.52 (keeping in mind that taking into account the SEXSEX5 variable
decreased the number of cases by nearly 1,700). Running the results
with only the LGB respondents erases the difference between atheists
and agnostics completely, but it also reduces the number of valid cases
to 106, making comparability to the previous results questionable.
We also ran simple cross tabulations using a GSS variable regarding
gay marriage. Unfortunately, this variable appeared in only the 1988
and 2006 GSS, leaving us with a small number of cases. Atheists and
agnostics hardly differ in their attitudes toward gay marriage: 35 per-
cent of atheists and 31 percent of agnostics either disagree or strongly
disagree with gay marriage. Removing the GLB respondents from this
crosstab produces altered results: these percentages change to 42 per-
cent for atheists and 25 percent for agnostics. Given the very small
number of cases left for such an analysis, this difference does not reach
statistical significance. However, it is at least in the direction that the
other results had shown: atheists seem less supportive of GLB people.
The results from the GSS analyses shed some light on the heretofore
unexamined relationships between homosexuality and secularism. As
with findings from most exploratory research, these results raise more
questions than they answer. We were also troubled by our reliance on
a single survey question to measure atheism and agnosticism, espe-
cially when we realized that those who claim they don’t believe in God
sometimes engage in religious behaviors. We decided it was important
to study how avowed atheists, people for whom atheism is a signifi-
cant component of their lives, discuss the issue of homosexuality. To
hear these voices, we turned to the Brights, one of the largest groups
in the freethought movement today.
Results
The Brights’ Movement Web forum covered a vast array of topics
relating to the lives of the participants. Some of the posts to the forum
were mundane, but often the participants engaged each other in exten-
sive discussions on a wide variety of political and social issues. Discus-
sions of homosexuality were quite prevalent within the forum. Of the
total number of threads on the forum, 7.2 percent mentioned homosex-
uality. In compiling and analyzing the discussions and mentions of
homosexuality from the Brights’ movement Web forum, three domi-
nant themes emerged. Below, we critically examine each of these
themes by analyzing the parts of the discussions in which the themes
were most clearly demonstrated. We attempt to offer representative
Sexuality and the Secular 101
Situations like this are where religion and ‘‘commonsense morality’’ part
ways—like homosexuality, stem cells, drugs, pornography, blasphemy.
Since [religious people] believe in an ultimate morality that isn’t based
on suffering and rights, you have suffering, on many levels and massive
scales, caused by the supposed guiding light of mankind. (45 years old,
from the United States, sex unknown)
I say it is generally irrational attempts to oppress others in areas like
sex, pornography, homosexuality, censorship, attempts to denounce love,
and general persecution of those they deem ‘‘immoral’’ out of no expla-
nation but their religion that not only made me give up the idea of reli-
gion altogether, but in fact I have a very negative view on it. Curiously,
I have a negative view on Christianity, Islam . . . and Judaism . . . but
none against Buddhism, Wicca, and several other religions. This is
Sexuality and the Secular 103
For many Brights, then, organized religion is seen as problematic not only
because Brights lack the belief in God necessitated by most religions, but
also because they claim that believing in God inspires a host of other
damaging social and political ramifications. The way some religions treat
homosexuality provides these Brights with a clear example of one of their
primary problems with religion. In making their case, some Brights (such
as in the first quote above) paint religion with a single, wide brush. They
do not acknowledge the wide diversity of religious thought on homosex-
uality, much of which has developed only in recent years, both among
and within various religious traditions.29 The second quote above takes a
step toward making distinctions among religions, but still puts all Chris-
tian traditions into a single, discriminatory category.
Brights also discussed the ways in which damaging beliefs have
affected individual gays and lesbians, criticizing these beliefs both for
their content and their effects.
When you base your morality on an ancient book that ‘‘says’’ it’s the ulti-
mate authority, instead of what alleviates human suffering, you are will-
ing to forsake your [gay] children. Throw in some silly antiquated view
of what is manly, and you have the potential for a whole lifetime of
human suffering. (30 years old, from the United States)
There are issues that we, Brights, would never even imagine they
have to deal with . . . Knowing about religious gays who struggle with
their homosexuality always evokes deep emotions in me: I’m convinced
that non-believer gays actually suffer much less than believer gays—
because at least they don’t have to battle with their own selves. (20-year-old
female from England)
I would almost have to give Phelps & Co. props, if they weren’t causing
pain to so many already suffering people. I’m sure many fundamentalists
dislike the WBC [Westboro Baptist Church] because it strips away the
‘‘love the sinner, hate the sin’’ line that said fundamentalists like to dish
out for PR purposes, and exposes the basic message of religion-based
homophobia for what it is. (33 years old, from the United States)
One word arises again and again in these postings: suffering. These
Brights construct gay men and lesbians as victims whose lives have
104 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
When people use the language of pain in politics, they risk perpetuating
hierarchy and further isolating people, and there can also be broader
unintended political effects as well. The politics of emotion has contrib-
uted, of late, to a political climate where being a victim, being wronged
or pained, is what gives people a right to challenge the way things are;
victimhood has become the righteous position from which to make politi-
cal interventions, the only political position from which to make political
interventions, the only political position that is not immediately suspect.30
These Bright discussion participants put lesbians and gay men in the
position of ‘‘sufferers,’’ and, according to Moon, this limits the political
possibilities for achieving change. In addition, Brights are in the odd
position of pitying the suffering of gay men and lesbians while at the
same time envying the progress the lesbian and gay rights movement
has made, as the next section makes clear.
I see very little difference in our usage of the word bright, in comparison
to homosexual people wanting to use ‘‘gay’’ as their title. We both
wanted something positive to show that being an atheist isn’t a sad or
depressive, or immoral thing. We both do not wish to tell anyone who
goes by such a meme that they must follow any rules and that individu-
ality is encouraged. It may mean different things to different people, but
Sexuality and the Secular 105
given enough time and exposure people will stop associating the word
with the original definition. The word ‘‘homosexual’’ gives off a worse
vibe than ‘‘gay’’ does, just like ‘‘godless’’ and ‘‘atheist’’ sound worse than
‘‘bright.’’ (21-year-old female from Australia)
The term ‘‘gay’’ is now becoming (or has become) the biggest insult you
can throw at anyone . . . I remember reading the ‘‘gay’’ reference on my
first visit to the Brights.net and hoping then, as I hope now, that the
same fate does not await the term ‘‘Bright/s.’’ But I like the term myself.
I call myself a Bright. But I very rarely (seven times to date) tell anyone
else I am one. (no personal information given)
So why not say Bright? Really! Why not? The reason that the word
‘‘gay’’ worked is that homosexuals used it. They used it proudly, and
even defiantly. They made the word stick, despite ridicule, and they
changed their image in this country. We can do the same, but we have to
use the word. We have to correct people when they call us atheists and
we have to make the word stick. We have to do it. No one else will do it
for us. (40 years old, from the United States)
According to the Brights’ movement, and the Brights who post on the
forum, by using the term Bright, they can begin to change the way in
which atheists are viewed in our society. This can be viewed as a type
of identity deployment, which Bernstein defines as ‘‘expressing identity
such that the terrain of conflict becomes the individual person so that
the values, categories, and practices of individuals become subject to
debate.’’32 The goal here, by confronting people with a new term, is to
force the listener to ponder his or her prejudices against atheism. But
where the terms ‘‘gay’’ and ‘‘queer’’ (which has been reclaimed by
some lesbian and gay activists) already bore some familiarity among
the general public, the term ‘‘bright’’ is virtually unknown, making this
strategy of identity politics all the more difficult to pursue.
Brights moved beyond these linguistic comparisons to discussions of
the stigmatization of atheism and homosexuality. One fifty-three-year-old
man from Mexico even cited the Edgell et al. study.33 Other Brights dis-
cussed this stigma as it plays out in their everyday experiences. One
106 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
You know what is funny? We have one gentleman in the classroom who
is very obviously gay and the Fundie tolerates him, even though in our
gov[ernment] the Religious Reich is forbidding gays from having civil
unions and making snide remarks. Not that I want her to pick on the
guy, I don’t and would not like it, but why can’t she have the same toler-
ance for me as she does of him? (41-year-old woman from the United
States)
A gay man from the United States also compared the stigma surround-
ing atheism and homosexuality when giving advice to a sixteen-year-
old struggling to tell his parents that he is an atheist:
Edgell and her coauthors claim that atheists are the group most reviled
in their sample of Americans.34 According to these Brights, such survey
results prove true in their own lives.
Like the atheists and secular humanists interviewed by Cimino and
Smith,35 Brights discussed the process of coming out of the closet as a
way to describe the revelation of their identity, and, also, as a way to
begin to overcome some of the stigma surrounding that identity:
father trying to decide how best to tell his children that while their
mother makes them go to church, he does not believe in God. Here are
two examples of coming-out stories. We chose the first because it is
fairly typical of coming out stories on the forum, while we chose the
second because of the striking parallels that can be drawn between it
and discussions of coming out among gay men and lesbians:
Like gay and lesbian identities, one’s atheist identity is not readily
apparent to those with whom one interacts and is something that can
be concealed if that person so chooses. Also similar to gay and lesbian
identities, once an individual reveals her atheist identity, odds are
good it will develop into a master status within her community, affect-
ing all aspects of this person’s interactions with those close to her.36
This leads atheists to consider these moments seminal and explains
why it is common to have coming-out stories in their narrative reper-
toires.37 However, one possible difference between the two groups is
the perceived ability to change one’s behavior. Clearly there are many
who believe that a refutation of homosexuality is possible, and the ex-
gay movement has gained in prominence in recent decades.38 But just
as many consider homosexuality to be inherent and unchangeable (for
example, the one time the GSS asked Americans about this issue, in
1994, 52 percent of respondent said sexual orientation could not be
108 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
CONCLUSION
We often tell our students that sociology’s job is to complicate that
which seems simple. The understanding of relationships between secu-
larism and homosexuality, as far as we had seen, was vastly oversim-
plified: of course atheists and agnostics support gay men and lesbians;
why on earth wouldn’t they? We hope that this chapter has done its job
and that we have added some much needed nuance to these relation-
ships. The first problem we identified is that, too often, atheists and
agnostics are equated (or, worse, put into a category of ‘‘no religion’’).
Our GSS research shows that separating them exposes confounding dif-
ferences between the two groups. Second, even though many atheists
offer their support of lesbians and gay men, we use our Brights
research to argue that this support is sometimes less than ideal and
that these faulty connections between atheists and gay men and les-
bians hold the potential for political discord.
We readily admit that our explorations here are just that: preliminary
steps toward a better understanding of these connections. We end with
suggestions for moving beyond our findings. Undoubtedly, the differ-
ences between atheists and agnostics need further attention. As far as
we were able to tell, these differences are real and persistent. As with
any representative quantitative research on these groups, though, the
sample sizes were frustratingly small. There should be attempts to rep-
licate these differences with other sources of data, especially interna-
tional sources, given that rates of atheism in other countries are
markedly higher than in the United States.39 If the differences do
remain, explaining them is the next step. We acknowledge defeat in this
respect, and welcome any suggestions for why these differences exist.
Our research on the Brights is enlightening, but admittedly small scale.
We hope we have shown enough complexity in their thinking about
homosexuality to spawn more expansive research, either through study-
ing a longer period of time on the forum, or studying other atheist groups.
We also realize that the study of preexisting Internet discussion forums
has its limitations. Though the entries seemed sincere, there is no way to
verify this. Our roles as complete observers did not permit us to ask for
Sexuality and the Secular 109
clarification to some of the arguments Brights made. But one thing was
clear: talk of homosexuality conjures many emotions in atheists: respect,
sympathy, envy, and hope. A full analysis of these emotions, perhaps
through in-depth interviews, would bring us closer toward understanding
the complex relationships between sexuality and the secular.
NOTES
1. Moon, 2004; Linneman, 2003; Hartman, 1996.
2. Erzen, 2006; Wolkomir, 2006.
3. Wolkomir, 2006; Gray and Thumma, 2005; Wilcox, 2003; Rodriguez and
Ouellette, 2000; Warner, 1995; Thumma, 1991.
4. Bull and Gallagher, 1996; Herman, 1997.
5. Beit-Hallahami, 2005.
6. Clark, 2004.
7. Zuckerman, 2006.
8. Beit-Hallahami, 2005, 305.
9. Hoffmann and Miller, 1997.
10. Laumann et al., 1994.
11. Hout and Fischer, 2002.
12. Reimer and Park, 2001; Miller, 1996; Ellison and Musick, 1993.
13. Edgell, Gerteis, and Hartmann, 2006.
14. Ibid., 230.
15. Cimino and Smith, 2007.
16. Kurtz, 2000, 6.
17. Cimino and Smith, 2007.
18. Ibid.; www.the-brights.net.
19. D’Emilio, 1983.
20. Taylor and Whittier, 1992.
21. Bayer, 1987.
22. Beit-Hallahmi, 2007.
23. Hout and Fischer, 2002, 165.
24. Loftus, 2001; Yang, 1997.
25. Moon, 2004; Hartman, 1996.
26. Dawkins, 2006.
27. www.the-brights.net.
28. Craig, 2007.
29. Moon, 2004; Hartman, 1996.
30. Moon, 2004, 236.
31. Cimino and Smith, 2007.
32. Bernstein, 1997, 537.
33. Edgell, Gerteis, and Hartmann, 2006.
34. Ibid.
35. Cimino and Smith, 2007.
36. Linneman, 2003.
37. Plummer, 1995.
38. Erzen, 2006.
39. Zuckerman, 2007.
110 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
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WEB SITES
The Brights. http://www.the-brights.net.
The Brights’ Web Forum. http://www.the-brights.net/forums.
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Chapter 5
they like?’ ‘Didn’t you know?’ he said laughing, ‘a clever man can do
what he likes,’ he said.’’11 Earlier in the book, Father Zossima presents
an overview of the contrast between contemporary secular Europe,
immoral and revolutionary, and the great popular Russian tradition of
faith and obedience: ‘‘It is different with the upper classes. They, fol-
lowing science, want to base justice on reason alone, but not with
Christ, as before, and they have already proclaimed that there is no
crime, that there is no sin. And that’s consistent, for if you have no
God what is the meaning of crime? In Europe the people are already
rising up against the rich with violence, and the leaders of the people
are everywhere leading them to bloodshed, and teaching them that
their wrath is righteous. But their ‘wrath is accursed, for it is cruel.’
But God will save Russia as He has saved her many times. Salvation
will come from the people, from their faith and their meekness.’’12
William James, writing in 1891, described the difference between a
religious and a secular morality in terms of energy, music, and objec-
tive power:
‘‘. . . in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to our moral
energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power. Life, to be sure, is
even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony; but it is played in
the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and the infinite scale of values
fails to open up. . . . When, however, we believe that a God is there, and
that he is one of the claimants, the infinite perspective opens out. The
scale of the more imperative ideals now begin to speak with an alto-
gether new objectivity and significance, and to utter the penetrating, shat-
tering, tragically challenging note of appeal.’’13
inferior. The moral calculator does a whole legal proceeding in a split sec-
ond, judging intentions, consequences, circumstances, and character. It
leads to frequent condemnation and rare praise, whether of ourselves or
of others. We know that condemning others brings some pleasure and a
feeling of superiority, while praising others seems less satisfying. The
algorithms behind all these calculations must be based on general princi-
ples, intuitions, and ideals, which are known collectively as morality.
A leading researcher defined morality as ‘‘. . . prescriptive judg-
ments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to
relate to each other.’’17 This definition is designed to steer us away
from cultural conventions: ‘‘Moral judgments are primarily about wel-
fare, justice, and rights, distinguishable from judgments about conven-
tional uniformities.’’18 Shweder19 and Haidt20 correctly point out that
such definitions are too secularized and Western, because in many cul-
tures some domains of ‘‘conventional uniformity’’ give rise to moral
judgments, emotional reactions, and severe condemnation. Thus, in
some Indian communities, a widow eating fish may be condemned, as
may be parents refusing to sleep in the same bed with children.
Shweder suggested a universal morality triad of Autonomy (harm,
rights, and justice, with violation leading to anger), Community (duty,
hierarchy, and interdependency, with violation leading to contempt),
and Divinity (natural order, sacred order, sanctity, sin, and pollution,
with violation leading to disgust). Haidt21 proposed a division of mo-
rality into five domains: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, in-group/loy-
alty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. If we use Shweder’s and
Haidt’s divisions, what we observe is that the elements of the triad or
the five foundations cannot be regarded as having an equal standing in
practice, and some domains are underemphasized or absent in specific
belief systems. A hierarchy of moral domains is universal. Whatever
concerns some individuals may have about purity, we have reason to
assume that they do not lead to the same emotional reactions as con-
cerns about harm and fairness.
Purity rules are also about identity. Thus, food taboos serve as iden-
tity markers, which are always tied to self-esteem and superiority.22
Individuals feel superior to members of their caste who choose not to
observe the taboos or sometimes to nonmembers who naturally do not
observe them. The arbitrary and sometimes symbolic meaning of food
taboos can be illustrated with the case of the Nation of Islam in the
United States, which expects its followers to avoid cornbread and okra,
because they have been identified for so long with Afro-American cul-
ture and the history of slavery. The group seeks to renew Afro-
American identity, and the rejection of such foods clearly symbolizes
that. In this case we know the circumstances that led to the choice of
an object as tabooed. In other cases the historical roots are unknown,
but the function as an identity marker is clear.
Morality and Immorality among the Irreligious 117
punishment. In Plato’s plan for an ideal state, the lower classes must
believe that the social order had supernatural sanction, being unable to
consider it a purely human creation and still regard it as binding. This
idea became known as the Noble Lie. Defenders of Plato mention that he
also hoped that the upper class would believe that lie for the good of the
state. That religion was a fraud designed to keep lawlessness at bay was
a notion which was being openly expressed 2,500 years ago in Athens.45
The idea that the elite can give up religious illusions, but that the
spread of unbelief among the masses would lead to anomie, has been
expressed and discussed in modern times. Stewart46 suggested that the
philosopher Leibnitz was a closet atheist, who believed that the masses
needed religious belief, but Jean-Jaques Rousseau openly suggested
that the basis for public order is the belief in a powerful Divinity, to be
enforced by the state.47
Himmelfarb48 praised Victorian agnostics, who were ready to hide
their own absence of faith in the interest of maintaining public moral-
ity. Sigmund Freud did not hide his atheism, but was among those
who thought that the elite does not need external authority, whereas
the masses will deteriorate into lawlessness without the promises of
divine judgment and retribution.49
Describing the educated classes in Europe and the United States in
the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, Leuba stated:
‘‘There is among us a large number of well-intentioned persons of influ-
ence who go to great length to hide their disbelief. The masses, they
think, are not able to live decently without the support provided by the
religion they profess.’’50 Leuba did not hesitate to name names and
denounce those, such as G. Stanley Hall, one of the founding fathers of
psychology in the United States, who presented a facade of religiosity
for the sake of their public image and the benefit of the masses.
Kristol51 presented a clear rationale for the Noble Lie. ‘‘If God does
not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot
live without . . . let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot
do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth
and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided
into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men,
and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine—for if the illusions
of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what mad-
ness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish. It would
become the duty of the wise to publicly defend and support religion,
even to call the police power to its aid, while reserving the truth for
themselves and their chosen disciples.’’52
Leo Strauss, one of the great inspirations to US neo-conservatives,
was an atheist, but thought the truth known to the educated elite
should not be available to the masses, lest it destroy the social order.
He proposed a state religion as a way of creating social cohesion and
Morality and Immorality among the Irreligious 121
state control.53 Similarly, Bork,54 while claiming that religion is vital for
the social order, never said that we should believe the claims of reli-
gion because they are true.55
One clear answer to the Noble Lie argument has been given by
George Santayana: ‘‘To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better
than to live in harmony with the truth; it is not nearly as safe, not
nearly as sweet, and not nearly as fruitful.’’56
times, the carnage was not less horrifying. The only significant differ-
ences between the horrors of the twentieth century and the horrors com-
mitted in earlier times were technological capacity and moral outrage,
which were not to be found before the coming of the Enlightenment.
Long before modern genocides, there were religious texts reporting
and commanding the total annihilation of some human groups. The
Old Testament offers us narratives of the extermination of the Midian-
ites and the Canaanites by the Israelites, as ordered by divine authority
(see Numbers 31, 1 Samuel 15). These blood-curdling narratives are
totally fictitious, but they reflect very real ideals. They were invented
to justify and explain prescribed exclusionary attitudes towards non-
Israelites. Those who composed them more than two millennia ago
were not worried about anybody being outraged by them. Moore64
claimed that the readiness to persecute and kill people of different reli-
gious and political persuasions in the defense of ‘‘moral purity’’ had
its origins in Old Testament monotheism, responsible for some of the
most virulent forms of intolerance in history. However, we can easily
discover that followers of nonmonotheistic religions are just as commit-
ted to lethal intolerance.
Traditional religious morality is ethnocentric, which meant that
moral compassion ended at the boundary of the religious community.
The celebrated ‘‘Love thy neighbour’’ command in the Old Testament
quite explicitly covered only members of the tribe. The original verse
states: ‘‘Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the chil-
dren of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am
the Lord’’ (Leviticus 19:18).
Pre-Enlightenment ideals were always close to pre-Enlightenment
practices. The Age of Faith was the age of unchecked human cruelty.
The Middle Ages were marked by unimaginable barbarities, including
many public displays of sadistic violence presented without apologies
but with great pride. Torture was considered just one privileged way
of discovering truth. Countless millions died in various crusades
against heretics and infidels, whether in Europe or in West Asia. When
genocide was carried out in the Middle Ages, moral outrage by wit-
nesses was hard to detect, as such behavior was taken for granted. No
medieval intellectuals protested the inhumanity of the Crusades. The
European sphere was not unique, and we can assume that untold acts
of horrific carnage were taking place on other continents.
The reality of European colonialism, starting in 1492, was one of
genocidal cruelty, often sanctioned by religious authorities. Christian
missionaries were often part of the colonial enterprise which enslaved
whole continents. Secular intellectuals were prominent in the global
anticolonialist struggle, promoting the rights of non-Europeans, most
visibly in the cases of Algeria, Vietnam, and Palestine. Anticolonialist
movements were likely to be made up of the least religious. During the
Morality and Immorality among the Irreligious 123
have made great fortunes by selling salvation to the masses. Little has
changed since Sinclair Lewis wrote about Elmer Gantry,83 except the enor-
mous increase in the sums of money involved. New generations of Gan-
trys, with names like (Dr.) Kreflo A. Dollar, have taken over the mantle.84
When all the world’s nations are ranked on measures of the quality
of life, happiness, and longevity, we find at the top of the list more or
less the same names. On the World Map Of Happiness, produced
recently, the 10 happiest nations in the world are Denmark, Switzer-
land, Austria, Iceland, The Bahamas, Finland, Sweden, Bhutan, Brunei,
and Canada. East Asia is another region where we can observe the con-
nection between public morals and secularity. Japan and South Korea
present a European-like picture of low religiosity, low levels of violence,
and much solidarity. Japan holds the world’s average life expectancy re-
cord. The most secularized nations demonstrate a high level of solidar-
ity and have crime rates that are a fraction of that in the United States.
They show no signs of moral anarchy, but some signs of contentment.85
Prosocial Behavior
What are the predictors of compassion, altruism, honesty, and readi-
ness to help? Do religious people feel more empathy towards their fel-
low men and are more likely to provide help to a person in need?
According to Duriez,94 the answer is no.
When college students in the United States were given a chance to
cheat and to perform an act of helping, there was no correlation
between their eventual behavior and their religiosity level.95 On the
other hand, it has been found that for adults in the United States religi-
osity was inversely related to a predisposition to cheat on taxes. Find-
ings over many years in the United States indicate that religiosity does
predict more generous donations to charity and doing volunteer work
with the needy.96
Darley and Batson97 wanted to test whether the parable of the Good
Samaritan, taken from the New Testament and presented as a model of
true altruism, would affect helping behavior. Christian seminary stu-
dents, who had just read the parable, some of whom were supposed to
give a talk about it, were put in a situation where that could help
someone in apparent distress. After meeting the experimenter and
being asked to help, they ran across a man who was clearly incapaci-
tated. The results showed that the parable of the Good Samaritan had
no effect on the students’ readiness to help.
128 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
Hedonistic Offenses
Research has consistently shown the effects of religiosity on ‘‘sinful’’
behaviors such as gambling, extramarital intercourse, and illicit drug
use. When it comes to psychoactive substances, which are tied to the
experience of pleasure and loss of control, religiosity predicts less use,
less abuse, and less dependence.
Serious Crime
Studies in different countries found that some measures of religios-
ity are negatively correlated with deviance of all kinds. For adolescents
who are at risk because of poverty and family history, ritual attendance
is a protective factor, reducing the probability of delinquency, drug
use, and later maladjustment. Religious commitment reduces delin-
quency when church membership is the norm, but not where is it un-
usual. Large-scale surveys of adults find that a wider range of offenses
and deviance is affected, including rape and other crimes of vio-
lence.101 However, religiosity appeared to serve as a weaker deterrent
on serious crimes such as murder and theft. Jensen102 found that homi-
cide rates were higher in nations where beliefs in a God and the devil
were prevalent, such as the United States.
If this is the case, then religion has survived without being adaptive
and without offering believers any real advantage. This seems to be the
dominant view among those who have developed evolutionary explan-
ations of religion.
Other researchers hold to a evolutionary logic which assumes that
religion could not have survived so successfully among humans with-
out making a real contribution to adaptation, and what could be that
contribution if not the presumed privileged connection with morality.
In the behavioral sciences today, assertions about the vital role of reli-
gion in the survival of the social order are part of a wider discourse of
psychological pragmatism. Benton Johnson expressed this view in the
following way: ‘‘Although religious ideas are not true, there is much in
religion that is good.’’105 And so the question becomes ‘‘Is a belief in
the world of the spirits good for you? Is it good even though it is not
true? Does it have positive consequences?’’
We can find hundreds of books and articles, published over the past
few decades, most often in the United States, telling us that religion is a
‘‘resource for well being,’’ and specifically for ‘‘prevention, healing and
empowerment.’’106 In other publications, religion is assessed in terms of
‘‘costs and benefits.’’107 As revelation lost its authority, these arguments
emphasize positive consequences of collective and individual religious
commitments, rather than assert the truth and authority of a particular
religious message.108 In this instrumentalist line of defense, the refer-
ences are always to a generic ‘‘religion’’ or ‘‘faith,’’ reflecting the reality
of secularization. When those seeking a desecularization of culture talk
about ‘‘faith,’’ they are careful to use the most generic and nebulous lan-
guage, speaking out of clear weakness.
Claims about religion’s role in adaptive individual and social behav-
ior have been made recently by psychologists, anthropologists, and soci-
ologists. Alcorta and Sosis,109 Bering,110 Norenzayan and Shariff,111 and
Rossano112 are among those who suggested that religions facilitate costly
prosocial behaviors, primarily where reputational concerns are height-
ened. One thing religions do is to promote the idea of ever-vigilant spir-
itual monitors. Believing that the spirits were always watching may
have helped reduce the number of noncooperators in human groups.
One hypothesis is that the evolution of cooperation could not have
proceeded without the support of religious ideas.113 McCullough and
Willoughby114 present findings relating religiosity to various measures
of self-control. They then suggest that religion may have evolved
because of its ability to help people exercise self-control. The explicit
notion is that the connection between religion and prosociality had
evolutionary value in the past and has social value at present.
Several interesting experiments, which measured the behavioral
effects of introducing religious ideas into one’s consciousness without
awareness, have been carried out. Randolph-Seng and Nielsen115 found
130 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
that participants who were primed with religious words cheated signif-
icantly less than participants who were primed with neutral words.
Conscious priming demonstrated a greater effect than the nonconscious
priming.
Shariff and Norenzayan116 reported that priming with religious con-
cepts promoted cooperative behaviors, regardless of personal religiosity.
However, similar effects were found when the stimulus words were
‘‘jury,’’ ‘‘contract,’’ or ‘‘police.’’ Randolph-Seng and Nielsen117 suggested
that the Shariff and Norenzayan118 experiment was flawed because
respondents were probably conscious and the religious priming effects
were general. When presented with the word ‘‘God,’’ respondents,
whether believers or not, were responding to the cultural association, just
as they did with the word ‘‘police.’’ These findings clearly show that reli-
gious stimuli do affect behavior even in a secularized culture, but these
findings also demonstrate that secular impulse control stimuli, such as
‘‘police’’ or ‘‘jury’’ had the same effect as ‘‘God.’’ Historically speaking,
the transition from the religious to secular control seems easy, smooth,
and well established, despite the powerful legacy of historical religions.
blamed for an emotion that predates its appearance in the lives of indi-
viduals and collectivities. Both religions and nationalisms merely pre-
scribe socially conventional ways of expressing hate.
It seems that evolutionary thinking has not provided the hoped-for
support for ideas about the privileged religion–morality connection. If
humans are hardwired to cooperate because of particular phylogenetic
forces and then also hardwired to develop religious beliefs, because of
a separate set of particular phylogenetic forces, then we see two sepa-
rate and powerful phenomena, which can be combined in history and
culture, but in not in evolutionary time, going far into the past to the
earliest of humanity.
Looking at the historical record, we do find circumstantial evidence
for a cultural–structural connection. Stark124 found that religion sus-
tains the moral order only when it is based on belief in powerful and
morally concerned gods, but in some highly developed societies, the
religious basis for morality is missing. Moralizing religion, like the
wheel or farming, may be a cultural invention, and moralizing gods
appear in large, differentiated groups where religious elites control
many resources.125
ONTOGENESIS OF MORALITY
How should we think about the genesis of the internal moral calcu-
lator, or the ‘‘moral faculty,’’ in any given individual? Children are
made into moral agents quite early on in their lives, through socializa-
tion and social control mechanisms, as they are assigned blame and
learn to blame others and especially themselves. Whatever we call mo-
rality is tied to powerful bonds developed between children and care-
takers. The panhuman experience is that parents are the carriers of
morality, as they convey to their children a fantasy of a world ordered
into right and wrong, reward and punishment.
Socialization in all cultures focuses first on impulse control and then
on competition–cooperation skills. Ethical reasoning everywhere involves
the capacity to transcend self-interest.126 Morality is an abstraction, while
discipline and impulse control are what children and parents experience
in all cultures. The universal early experience of every human includes a
total dependency on other humans, who create an internalized system of
impulse control, as well as heightened sensitivity to external impulse
control systems. Parents everywhere teach their children compassion,
responsibility, and honesty, values that are promoted via exemplary
models. They limit aggression and reinforce altruistic acts among their
children.127 The young are asked to reduce their egocentrism and impul-
sivity in return for parental love. Erikson128 stated that ‘‘the internaliza-
tion of the parental voice’’ creates what he calls ‘‘the judicial’’ in human
life and culture.
132 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
not believe that we need any religion to serve as the source of ethics:
‘‘Rather, I am speaking of what I call ‘secular ethics,’ which embrace
the principles we share as human beings: compassion, tolerance, con-
sideration of others, the responsible use of knowledge and power.’’136
This statement is another recognition of the historical victory of the
Enlightenment and the new public morality.
NOTES
1. A. Powell, Athens and Sparta: Constructing Greek Political and Social His-
tory from 478 BC (London: Routledge, 2001).
2. R. N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975),
ix; F. Ferraroti, ‘‘The Destiny of Reason and the Paradox of the Sacred,’’ Social
Research 46 (1975): 648–681.
136 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
26. Ibid.; E. Turiel, The Culture of Morality: Social Development, Context, and
Conflict (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
27. J. Haidt, ‘‘The New Synthesis.’’
28. Hauser, Moral Minds.
29. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1832/1962), 103.
30. J. Offer, ed., Herbert Spencer: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 93.
31. C. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York: Totem
Books, 1887/2004), 94.
32. E. Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–
1930 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931), 125.
33. Law, The War for Children’s Minds.
34. I. Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: The Free Press, 1978).
35. R. H. Bork, Slouching towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American
Decline (New York: Regan Books, 1997), 295.
36. N. Symington, ‘‘Religion: The Guarantor of Civilization,’’ in Psychoanal-
ysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or Collaborators? ed. D. M. Black
(London: Routledge, 2006), 200.
37. Quoted in P. R. Ehrlich, Human Natures: Genes, Cultures and the Human
Prospect (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000), 430.
38. S. Rothman, ‘‘The Decline of Bourgeois America,’’ Society 33 (1996):
147–201.
39. C. Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain (Edison, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 2006), 50.
40. I. Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism.
41. I. Kristol quoted in N. Glazer, ‘‘Neoconservative from the Start,’’ The
Public Interest (Spring 2005): 12–18.
42. G. Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late
Victorians (New York: Knopf, 1991).
43. G. Himmelfarb, One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of Ameri-
can Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1999).
44. Quoted in J. H. Toner, Morals under the Gun (Lexington, KY: University
Press of Kentucky, 2000), 74.
45. Powell, Athens and Sparta.
46. M. Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibnitz, Spinoza, and the Fate of
God in the Modern World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
47. A. Dacey, The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008).
48. G. Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1959).
49. P. Rieff, Freud, The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1959).
50. J. H. Leuba, ‘‘The Making of a Psychologist of Religion,’’ in Religion in
Transition, ed. V. Ferm (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 198.
51. I. Kristol, ‘‘God and the Psychoanalysts: Can Freud and Religion be
Reconciled?’’ Commentary 8 (1949): 443.
52. I. Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism; I. Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Auto-
biography of an Idea (New York: The Free Press, 1995).
138 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
53. S. B. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1999); S. B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
54. Bork, Slouching towards Gomorrah.
55. P. R. Ehrlich, Human Natures.
56. G. Santayana, Character and Opinion in the U.S. (New York: Anchor,
1956), 53.
57. D. D’Souza, ‘‘Atheism, Not Religion, is the Real Force behind the Mass
Murders of History,’’ Christian Science Monitor (November 22, 2006): A4.
58. O. Bartov and P. Mack, eds., In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the
Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2001); G. Lewy, The
Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); R. Steig-
mann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
59. H. Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868–1988 (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
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60. B. Victoria, Zen at War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).
61. O. Bartov and P. Mack, eds. In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the
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62. D. Morris, ‘‘Commentary, Mugabe Plays the God Card’’ The Globe and
Mail (June 27, 2008): A13.
63. N. Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (London:
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64. B. Moore, Jr., Moral Purity and Persecution in History (Princeton: Prince-
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65. B. Beit-Hallahmi and M. Argyle, The Psychology of Religious Behavior,
Belief and Experience (London: Routledge, 1997).
66. R. Buis, Religious Beliefs and White Prejudice (Johannesburg: Raven Press)
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67. G. Shimoni, Commentary and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South
Africa (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2003).
68. M. Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Berkeley: Univer-
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69. A. Hassall, Louis the XIV and the Zenith of the French Monarchy (New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895).
70. H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods (New York: Knopf, 1930), 305–306.
71. J. Z. Smith, Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982), 110.
72. A. M. Schlesinger, Jr. ‘‘Human Rights and the American Tradition,’’
Foreign Affairs 57 (1978): 503; A. A. An-Na’im, J. D. Gort, H. Jansen and H.
Vroom, eds., Human Rights and Religious Values: An Uneasy Relationship?
(Amsterdam/Grand Rapids: Rodopi/Eerdmans, 1995).
73. C. H. Partridge, The Re-enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities,
Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture (New York: Continuum Interna-
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74. R. Morin, ‘‘Voters: Take a Chill Pill,’’ The Washington Post (October 10,
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75. P. Zuckerman, Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can
Tell Us about Contentment (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
Morality and Immorality among the Irreligious 139
76. S. Zizek, ‘‘Defenders of the Faith,’’ New York Times (March 12, 2006): A23.
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78. Ibid., 28.
79. Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion; Himmelfarb, The De-moralization of
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80. Leuba, ‘‘The Making of a Psychologist of Religion,’’ 197.
81. W. G. McLoughlin, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on
the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America. 1840–1870 (New York: Knopf,
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82. Ibid., 98–99.
83. S. Lewis, Elmer Gantry (New York: Harcourt, 1927).
84. L. Martz and G. Carroll, Ministry of Greed: The Inside Story of the Tele-
vangelists and Their Holy War (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988).
85. P. Zuckerman, ‘‘Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns,’’ in The
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86. A. Colby and W. Damon, Some Do Care: Contemporary Lives of Moral
Commitment (New York: Free Press, 1992); M. K. Matsuba and L. J. Walker,
‘‘Extraordinary Moral Commitment: Young Adults Involved in Social Organi-
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87. A. F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Alfred A.
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88. A. Saradijan and D. Nobus, ‘‘Cognitive Distortions of Religious Profes-
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(2003): 905–923.
89. W. Rodarmor, ‘‘The Secret Life of Swami Muktananda,’’ Coevolution
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90. S. M. Asser and R. Swain, ‘‘Child Fatalities from Religion-Motivated
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91. T. W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson, and R. N. Sanford,
The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1950), 213.
92. B. Beit-Hallahmi and M. Argyle, The Psychology of Religious Behavior,
Belief and Experience (London: Routledge, 1997).
93. J. Greenberg, S. Solomon, and T. Pyszfynski, ‘‘Terror Management
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94. B. Duriez, ‘‘Taking a Closer Look at the Religion-Empathy Relationship:
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95. Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle, The Psychology of Religious Behavior.
96. A. C. Brooks, Who Really Cares; The Surprising Truth about Compassionate
Conservatism: America’s Charity Divide—Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Mat-
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97. J. Darley and C. D. Batson, ‘‘From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Sit-
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and Social Psychology 27 (1973): 100–108.
140 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
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Morality and Immorality among the Irreligious 145
For the first time since modern humans evolved democratic modernity
has confronted popular religiosity with a set of scientific and socioeco-
nomic pressures and threats of a scope it has not previously faced. As a
result theism has been effectively ruined in some first world nations in
favor of popular nontheism. In turn, the data generated by this fast and
voluntary loss of mass first world theosupernaturalism has produced
the statistical information that provides the key to finally answering
some of the most fundamental and perplexing questions of why the
majority of the world believes in deities whose objective reality is as
plausible as that of other supernatural entities such as ghosts, gremlins,
and fairies.1 Based on the sociological analysis conducted by a number
of researchers in recent years, this new synthesis of popular religion
and secularism explains the fundamental questions of mass religion,
including why theofaith appeared, why it has been so popular around
the world for most of history, why belief in and worship of a creator
150 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
Barna (2007a, b), Rainer (2007), and Paul and Zuckerman (2007)
describe the past and current status of theism and nontheism around
the globe and in the First World that forms the core of the discussion
in the next few paragraphs. At the end of the 1800s popular theism
was still nearly universal, with nontheists probably less than a percent
(Figure 6.1). Although making some gains in particular regions, Africa
especially, Christianity has remained stable at a third of the total. De-
spite the exceptional population growth of the population of India Hin-
duism has experienced minimal growth and remains limited to one
ethnic group. Then an eight and now a fifth of the population, Islam is
the only major faith to enjoy significant growth, but mainly through
rapid reproduction. Paganism has drastically declined in spite of the
appearance of New Ageism. None of the chief religions is growing via
large-scale conversion. Mass religiosity, often of an increasingly funda-
mentalist nature, remains the norm in the rest of the Third and Second
Worlds, but secularism is rising in some Latin American countries.
Over the last century the nonreligious have ballooned to about a sixth
of the population. The recovery of mass theosupernaturalism in for-
merly communistic states has been exaggerated.
The most historically radical, and for the purposes of this inquiry,
the most scientifically informative circumstances have arisen in the First
World. In eighteen of nineteen of the most prosperous democracies—
Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan—only a few
percent to at most half absolutely believe in the gods, and in some exam-
ples two thirds or more qualify as atheists and agnostics. Levels of reli-
gious activity are correspondingly suppressed, and majorities—up to and
more than 80 percent in some cases—accept human descent from animals.
152 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
memes that spread religious ideas like viral infections even if religious
devotion is maladaptive to a given individual or group.
The supernatural hypothesis contends that faith is popular because
it is part of the human mental condition to believe in their creator; the
exact mechanism of this speculative connection is obscure because of a
lack of reliable scientific data.
No predominantly internal mental causes, either natural or supernat-
ural, survive the test of large-scale First World secularization for the
simple reason that if any or all were crucial to mass belief then all pop-
ulations would be strongly religious unless subject to severe coercion
by an antireligious ruling elite. If fear of death and hope for a never-
ending paradise are primary driving forces behind mass belief, then
why have the great majority of the French, Swedes, and Japanese spon-
taneously abandoned religion even though they face the same lethal
fate as faithful Americans? Likewise, if need for social community is so
compelling, then why are western Europeans and Australians not
flocking to the churches? Political ambitions are not crucial because
public expressions of deep piety have become an electoral detriment in
the strongly secular democracies. Nor is the highly skeptical French
population genetically or neurologically distinct from highly religious
ones, so factors that potentially involve selective forces, including ex-
cessive pattern recognition and gullibility, are not predominant. There
a no reason to think that the brains of the French and Canadians are
more or less resistant to infectious memes.
The nonhomogeneity of faith that has resulted from the spontaneous
loss of theofaith among large populations falsifies the hypothesis that
belief and worship of supernatural entities is inherent to most much
less all human brains. The forces most responsible for generating and
deconstructing large-scale religiosity must be environmental. To the
extent that internal mental causes of religion and nonreligion are real,
they can contribute to the level of religiosity only when environmental
conditions are suitable for high levels of popular theosupernaturalistic
opinion (Paul 2009d).
why faith has since declined much more sharply in Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand than the United States. There is one modern democ-
racy where a specific WWII-related event helped spark a failure of mass
faith. Shortly after the conflict Emperor Hirohito admitted he was not
divine, and the Japanese majority has been leery of supernaturalistic
claims ever since. The Cold War against atheistic communism seemed
to inspire a pro-God reaction in the United States, but this does not
explain why Christianity was already imploding in postwar Europe,
even though they were subject to direct invasion by the Soviet alliance.
The comparison of the PRVSS to levels of immigration, and ethno-
cultural diversity failed to demonstrate statistically significant relation-
ships. Other factors must explain the American Anomaly.
Figure 6.5. SSS versus PRVSS. See Figure 6.4 for country letter key.
Singh and Darroch 2000; Wellings et al. 2006; Finer 2007; Trenholm
2007; Paul 2009a; Rosenbaum 2009).
Patterns within the United States support the proposition that high
levels of societal dysfunction are associated with high levels of religios-
ity, especially when traditionalist in nature. Levels of homicide, STD
infections, abortion, and teen pregnancy are especially high in the pro-
creationist Bible Belt, which is also the primary location of the rise in
mortality that is already unusually high in the region (Aral and
Holmes 1996, Nisbett and Cohen 1999; Doyle 2000, 2002; Beeghley
2003; Ellison et al. 2003; Messner et al. 2005; Ezzati et al. 2008). One
reason America has a high level of divorce is because of the excessive
rates characteristic of born-again married couples (Barna 2004; Sider
2005; Bennett 2007).18 Keister (2008) explores how conservative Protes-
tantism can hinder personal finances. The longitudinal investigation in
Appendix 1 finds that the United States did not enjoy markedly supe-
rior conditions prior to its recent secularization, the same applies to
once Christian Europe, and much of the recent improvements the
United States occurred in parallel with the national secularization.19
Not only does the validity of the secular-democratic socioeconomic
and the socioeconomic security hypotheses fail to substantiate the real-
ity of spiritual capital, the verification is sociologically intriguing
because, as Shermer (2006) and Bloom (2008) note, they appear to con-
tradict the proposal that Americans often benefit from participating
in religious activities (Putman 2000; Powell et al. 2003; Norris and
Inglehart 2004; Brooks 2006; Gillum et al. 2008; Norenzayan and Shariff
2008; Pew 2008; McClullough and Willoughby 2009), although this
effect is not consistent (Powell et al. 2003; Blumenthal et al. 2007; Keister
2008; Paul 2008d). Individuals frequently profit from being members of
one or more connected groups (Sampson et al. 1997; Putman 2000;
McNeely et al. 2002; CASA 2003; Eisenberg et al. 2004); the last two cita-
tions show that salutary group activities can be as simple as regular
family dinners. Such social ‘‘clubs’’ can be private or governmental, reli-
gious or secular; in other words Putman’s ‘‘social capital’’ is more effi-
cacious than ‘‘spiritual capital.’’ This is particularly true in a nation like
the United States where government support systems are relatively
weak in favor of private alternatives, belonging to religious ‘‘clubs’’ can
provide benefits not available to those who are unable (often due to
cost) or unwilling to join secular private cooperatives. In the secular
democracies people belong to critical support groups, including the
health care club, simply by being citizens, boosting overall general soci-
etal health to higher levels. It is therefore proposed that ‘‘secular capi-
tal’’ is a significant contributor to the success of irreligious democracies.
The empirical patterns and theoretical analysis indicate that the rela-
tionship between popular religiosity and societal circumstances is both
passive and active—a positive socioeconomic environment indirectly
166 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
reason why a highly religious country never has been, and probably
cannot be, socially healthy and vice versa. The tendency of conservative
theists to oppose effective policies is a contributing factor to the poor
performance of nations of faith. Can a more science friendly, liberally re-
ligious national society better cope with modernity? Although liberal
and moderate, proevolution churches tend to support progressive social
policies and values that converge with those of secularists (Wallis 2005;
Weisman and Cooperman 2006), the progressive values characteristic of
these seem too secular to inspire widespread devotion, and improving
social conditions and economic security degrades religiosity from liberal
to conservative. It follows that only voluntarily secular cultures, not reli-
gious ones of any type, can enjoy historically low levels of dysfunction
because the beneficent environment suppresses religion and because sec-
ularists favor the policies that create that environment. This pattern
explains the lack of any example of such a country.
The Naturalistic Science, Socioeconomic Security, and Corporate–
Consumer Culture Contributions combine to form the Triple-Threat
Hypothesis of Democratic Secularization. Falsification of the hypothesis
requires demonstration of the existence of a highly religious and crea-
tionist prosperous democracy that enjoys low income disparity, high
security for the middle-class majority, and low levels of societal dys-
function or the existence of a strongly secular, proevolution prosperous
democracy that suffers from high income disparity, low security for
the middle-class majority, and high levels of societal dysfunction. To
demonstrate that other factors are important contributors, it must be
shown that they provide effective explanations for the disparate levels
of religiosity in modern nations.
A thought experiment further reveals the central role played by the
human environment in setting the level of majority non/religiosity and
the nonuniversality of faith, while helping discern why theofaith arose
in the first place. Assume that from the very beginning of humanity
that every person enjoyed secure, middle class, well educated lives
broadly similar to those experienced by today’s western Europeans.
Also assume that scientific evidence for the supernatural was absent.
Considering how these circumstances have consistently suppressed
popular religiosity, it is hardly likely that extensive supernaturalism
would have ever evolved if these conditions prevailed from the start.
PREDICTIONS
Because materialism is a much deeper part of the human psyche
and a more stable feature of human societies than is religion, the per-
petual hope by theists that a profound human need for spirituality
inevitably forces a revival of faith is unsubstantiated. The Triple Threat
to Hypothesis of Democratic Secularization predicts that the future
course of religion versus secularism will continue to be determined
mainly by the scientific, social, economic, and commercial environmen-
tal conditions populations live in. Organized religion has never faced
anything as hazardous as the Triple Threat before, and their ability to
directly challenge the forces of modernity appears to be minimal.
That evolutionary science makes disbelief in creator deities possible
explains why the theoconservative elites are desperate to destroy evo-
lutionary science, but they lack realistic prospects of doing so since
advanced research is likely to only reinforce the theory.27 If the gap
between Genesis literalists and Bible literalists continues to grow—and
considering the consistent decline of the former for the last three de-
cades this is likely, then the erosion of the Bible literalist base will
apply growing pressure that should undermine young youth creation-
ism, leaving it increasingly vulnerable to sudden collapse.
Although the half-century-old alliance of the religious right with cor-
porate powers under the umbrella of the Republican Party has
increased the theoconservative’s political power (Frank 2004; Phillips
2006; Hedges 2007; Paul 2008c), the cultural secularization effect of the
corporate consumer culture is so extensive that the alliance is doing the
cause of faith more harm than good while capital gets the better results
from this arrangement (Frank 2004). The concern of some (Gilbert 2007;
Hedges 2007) that the conservative church–corporate alliance is conspir-
ing to impose a theocracy is incorrect in view of the mercantile forces
preference for an irreligious, materialistic citizenry.28 The theoconserva-
tive leadership is boxed in; if they abandon their collaboration with the
corporations they lose most of what political power they have, and—
being dependent on member charity and other revenue streams that
amount to only tens of billions a year—the churches cannot hope to
match the tens of trillions commerce wields to promote the exciting
‘‘hip’’ and ‘‘cool’’ aspects of modern consumerism that persistently
trump the dull, ‘‘square’’ values associated with cultural traditionalism.
The American theoconservative movement as a whole has been badly
damaged by its inevitable inability to run the government, the incompe-
tence stemming from the inherently impractical nature of faith-based ide-
ology, one that believes it is not possible for government to be run well in
174 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
CONCLUSIONS
Combining past research with the analysis contained in this chapter,
the following conclusions ensue.
The Evolution of Popular Religiosity and Secularism 175
is unlikely. The Karl Rovian project to play the political margins to es-
tablish a faith-based permanent Republican majority was correspond-
ingly as sociologically and politically na€ive as it was doomed.30
Because the churches lack workable mechanisms to defeat the Triple
Threat to First World theofaith as long as egalitarian democratic pros-
perity remains extant. The best hope for a Great Revival in the West is
a similarly great economic reversal, but corporate interests are likely to
continue to promote cultural secularization. Religion should continue
to thrive in the faith-friendly dysfunctional environment of Second and
Third World nations.31
The statistical analyses presented herein were conducted by Peter
Nardi. Special thanks also are given to Phil Zuckerman for discussions
on the subject and the invitation to contribute this chapter.
NOTES
1. Four in ten Americans believe in haunted houses (Gallup 2005a), and the
occultist Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Coming of the Fairies.
2. Creationism includes all forms of belief that disfavors natural explana-
tions of the origins and evolution of the universe and its contents (Paul 2005).
3. The widely held fear of death, free market of religion, and socioeconomic
hypotheses are all plausible, but only the last is compatible with the available
data.
4. However, the Republican 2008 presidential nominee was not particularly
religiously active nor creationist.
5. The seeming jump of support to majority status for special creation in a
Gallup survey (2006b) was due to a one-time change in wording.
6. Stark (2008) selected a very small portion of available survey data since
WWII to claim that nonbelievers have remained a consistently small minority.
He included only two Gallup surveys from the 1940s, ignoring the 1950s data
showing extremely few nonbelievers, and all recent Gallup or Harris results
showing much higher rates of disbelief (see Figure 6.2; Paul 2009c). The poorly
documented conclusion by Finke and Stark (1993) and Stark (2008) that U.S.
church membership has risen since the 1950s is likewise contradicted by con-
sistently gathered Gallup results (see Figure 6.2, Paul 2009c).
7. Even this may be somewhat elevated considering the disinclination to
admit nontheism to pollsters (Taylor 2003). Note that absolute belief in a per-
sonal God is not the same and is a subset of absolute belief in a God whose
characteristics are not defined by the pollster. Also note that almost all those
who express absolute belief in a personal God must include the nearly equal
number who believe in the recent creation of humans.
8. Dawkins (2006) is an example of the many who remain mystified by this
novel event.
9. Since the discussion of the history of this hypothesis in Paul (2005),
recent proponents of the moral-creator socioeconomic hypothesis include the
best selling Boyle (2005), Coulter (2006), O’Reilly (2006), and D’Souza (2007),
the widely released (but not highly successful, Paul 2008a) 2008 intelligent
design documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the TV program
The Evolution of Popular Religiosity and Secularism 179
22. It is ironic that capitalism is a major contributor to the loss of mass faith that
Marx predicted would result from antisocially Darwinistic egalitarian communism.
23. The speculative and overly elaborate explanations by Dennett (2006),
Dunbar (2006), and King (2007) do not incorporate the primary roles played by
the prehistoric socioeconomic environment. The multimillion Templeton/Oxford
University collaboration to investigate the origin and popularity of theofaith
(www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2008/000219.html) appears redundant.
24. The common opinion expressed by Chris Hedges (on Book TV) that
‘‘those who fail to fully explore the religious impulse, the ability to connect
with those transcendent forces, are not fully human’’ is correspondingly
exposed as both inaccurate and casually bigoted.
25. This effect is supported by the highly inconsistent response of Americans
to questions on evolution and creationism depending on whether they are
framed in scientific or religious terms (NORC 2008).
26. A large portion of the population switches religions (Pew 2008) in a
manner that suggests it is more a cursory consumer product subject to being
dropped than a deep set and unshakeable devotion.
27. It is ironic that the faith-based traditionalist opponents of Darwinian sci-
ence have allied with the Darwinian social economic powers, the latter being a
radical and crucial part of modernity that constitute the greatest force ever seen
for radically transforming First Worlders into hypermaterialist members of the
cultural revolution that theoconservatives despise.
28. The architect of the wedge strategy to make intelligent design a part of
mainstream academe, Phillip Johnson, has lamented the project is not proceed-
ing as envisioned (Apsell 2007).
29. Schlesinger (1986).
30. Judis and Texeira (2002) appear more prescient.
31. Lester (2002), Longman (2006), Shah and Toft (2006), and Griswold (2008)
observe that the flourishing of faith in unstable nations can be pathological.
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The Evolution of Popular Religiosity and Secularism 189
APPENDIX 1
Measuring Popular Religion versus Secularism and
Socioeconomic Conditions in the First World
The nations sampled are seventeen of the nineteen most prosperous
First World democracies (per capita income at least $23,000 circa 2000)
with a population of about 4 million or more that have not recently
experienced systemic ethnic violence such as Northern Ireland; Belgium
and Finland are excluded as explained below, and their absence is
unlikely to significantly alter the results. This sample limitation is similar
to that of other studies (such as Panchaud et al., 2000; Singh and
Darroch, 2000) and is a recommended procedure because it minimizes
extraneous variables that are associated with dramatic differences in edu-
cation and income levels as well as political systems (Neapolitan 1997;
Jowell 1998; Paul 2005, 2009d), contra Jensen (2006). Because all but
Japan are share Western cultures with a predominantly Euro-Christian
heritage this variable is also minimized, whereas the inclusion of the
Asian Japanese culture adds a potentially informative variation. The limi-
tation to advanced nations also maximizes the size and quality of the
data set; sociological statistics from Second and Third World nations are
often unreliable if they are available at all (Gartner 1995; Neapolitan
1997; Jowell 1998; Paul 2005, 2009d). The next most comprehensive mea-
sure of national conditions is limited to only three variables because
190 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
quality statistics are not available for most of the large number of coun-
tries included in their sample (Marks et al. 2006). Also, by definition only
First World nations have the potential for the great majority to be socio-
economically healthy in critical factors such as life spans and financial
prosperity. Nor is it advisable for an advanced democracy like America
to look to Second and Third World nations, many of which are not dem-
ocratic, as examples for the highest standards of societal success yet
reached. The prosperous democracies comprise a mass epidemiological
experiment consisting of 800 million citizens.
Because the competing hypotheses center on popular opinion regard-
ing religiosity on the one hand as opposed to secularism on the other,
relations between church and state are not pertinent to this type of anal-
ysis (contra Moreno-Riano et al. 2006).1 Mass opinion is measured by
absolute belief in a supernatural creator deity, which is a superior mea-
sure of religious devotion than general belief in God because the latter
includes the following: partial doubters; Bible literalism, which is a
proxy for the conservatism of mass faith; frequent attendance at reli-
gious services and frequency of prayer that measure religious activity;
belief in an afterlife; agnostics and atheists; and acceptance of human
descent from animals, which is also a measure of creationist opinion
(Appendix 2). In order to maximize data uniformity, most plotted data
for popular religiosity is from the International Social Survey Program
(ISSP) 1998 Religion II poll. The ISSP statistics for western and eastern
Germany were combined in accord with their respective populations.
That the ISSP sampled absolute belief in a creator is another reason it
forms the database for this study, although this excludes Belgium and
Finland because they are not members of the consortium. Because the
ISSP did not ask the Japanese their opinion on the Bible, the nation’s
small percentage of Christians was divided by two to arrive at an
approximation of the probable figure. The high rates of church activity
for the Swiss reported by the ISSP are anomalous compared to other
indicators and are excluded. To test the hypothesis examined by Jensen
(2006) that ‘‘benevolent’’ versus ‘‘malevolent’’ religious cosmologies
impact societal conditions, ISSP sampling on absolute belief in heaven
and hell is analyzed separately. International data on acceptance of
human descent from animals is from the ISSP 1993, and values from
the Eurobarometer Europeans and Science and Technology of 2005 sur-
veys are averaged when the same country was sampled by both polls.
That polling on evolution is very limited outside the First World is
another reason to focus on the prosperous democracies. Data on opin-
ion on evolution in regions of the United States is from the National
Opinion Research Center General Social Survey.
In order to approximately measure the overall cumulative level of
popular religiosity and secularism, the absolute data values for each in-
dicator that are available for each nation are normalized by scoring
The Evolution of Popular Religiosity and Secularism 191
them on a 0–10 scale, with zero being applied to the most religious
value present in a given sample of prosperous democracies and 10 to
the most secular value. The average score on the 0–10 scale is then cal-
culated for each nation, less any data gaps, creating its cumulative Pop-
ular Religiosity Versus Secularism Score for each nation that are used
to construct the Popular Religiosity Versus Secularism Scale (PRVSS)
for First World nations.2
Because the ISSP Religion II poll was conducted around the turn of
the century, social indicators from the same time period were favored
over more recent data sets, which differ little from the former because
there has not been sufficient time for major change. The indicators cho-
sen provide a broad overall measure of societal and economic conditions
in each nation because they include the major categories that are based
on sufficiently reliable data. The primary indicators examined are homi-
cide, incarceration, juvenile mortality, lifespan, adolescent and all age
gonorrhea and syphilis infections, adolescent abortion, adolescent births,
youth and all age suicide, fertility, marriage, marriage duration, divorce,
life satisfaction, alcohol consumption, corruption, income, income dispar-
ity, poverty, employment, work hours and resource exploitation base
(Appendix 2). This totals 25 specific factors within 21 primary socioeco-
nomic indicators; four of the primary indicators include two specific fac-
tors. It will be difficult to build a significantly broader data set that more
comprehensively measures socioeconomic conditions. Of the 10 indica-
tors also used in Paul (2005) the same data sets are used except for hom-
icide. Scatter plots for some of the correlations not included here are in
Paul (2005, 2009d). The indicator comparisons were statistically analyzed
with Pearson correlations (Appendix 3). Because the United States is of-
ten a strong outlier, the correlations were run both with all 17 nations
sampled and also with the United States excluded. To add a historical
perspective some longitudinal information is included.
Homicide data (from the rigorous tallying by Barclay and Taveres
2003) is reliable because it is based on forensic analysis and body
counts. A comparison of nonlethal crime data is more a comparison of
rates of inconsistent reportage by victims and recording of crime
according to differing official criteria rather than of actual acts and
should not be used for direct quantitative assessments (as per Paul
2005, 2009d, contra Jensen 2006).3 As Neapolitan (1997) states, homi-
cide ‘‘is generally regarded as the most valid and reliable of official
cross-national crime indicators. . . . In general, violent crimes other than
homicides—such as rapes, assaults, and robberies—should probably not
be compared cross-nationally, unless there is substantial improvement in the
quality of the data [italic emphasis added]. Indications are that defini-
tional, reporting, and recording differences are too great for these
crimes to be suitable for analysis. This is particularly true for sexual
offenses and rapes. Thus, cross-national comparisons of violent crime
192 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
rise, the United States is not keeping up with the general Western pace
and now suffers from the lowest life expectancy in the First World
(OECD 2007). This slippage is attributable to an actual decline in aver-
age lifespans in some regions (Ezzati et al. 2008), a disturbing failure
occurring in none of the secular democracies.6 With hypotheistic
Denmark exhibiting low life expectancy, the correlation in favor of secu-
larism is modest with the United States included and not significant
with the United States excluded. Nor is there a compelling historical,
mass epidemiological or clinical evidence that high rates of prayer are
associated with lower levels of mortality and illness; if anything, the
reverse may be true (Paul 2005, 2008e; Blumenthal et al. 2007).
Gonorrhea and syphilis infections are recorded sufficiently well to
be compared cross-nationally, albeit only in a limited number of West-
ern nations according to the source utilized herein (Panchaud et al.
2000); information for HIV, chlamydia, genital herpes, and human pap-
illoma virus is grossly inadequate for quantitative cross-national com-
parisons. STDs ravaged old Europe, and high infection rates promoted
national campaigns to suppress rampant prostitution in America in the
later 1800s and early 1900s (Brandt 1987; Aral and Holmes 1996). After
being suppressed by post-WWII campaigns, STDs became epidemic in
the 1970s in the First World. Since then there has been a general
decrease in Western nations, but syphilis and especially gonorrhea
remain at epidemic levels in the theoconservative United States, includ-
ing middle-class whites for the latter (Aral and Holmes 1996; Panchaud
et al. 2000). Teen gonorrhea infection rates, for example, are dozens to
literally hundreds of times higher in the United States than in secular
western Europe and Canada, and gonorrhea and syphilis have been
nearly exterminated in the highly secular Nordic countries and France.
The correlations are very strong in favor of secularism with the United
States included in all cases. They are strong in favor of secularism with
the United States excluded for gonorrhea. For syphilis the correlation is
not significant for youth and is moderate in favor of religiosity in the
all age case. Because the sample size is limited some caution is neces-
sary, but it is unlikely that addition of additional prosperous democra-
cies will markedly alter the results. The data that are available suggest
that the infection rates of other STDs are not lower in the United States
relative to more secular prosperous democracies (Aral and Holmes
1996; Panchaud et al. 2000), so inclusion of the latter would probably
not significantly alter the SSS results in favor of the United States.
The degree to which abortion is a societal problem is controversial,
but it often signals a failure to use contraceptives. Sufficiently robust
adolescent abortion rates are available for only a portion of the nations
examined (Singh and Darroch 2000). Abortion rates are persistently
high even when illegal (Sedgh et al. 2007). After a modest reduction
over time, youth abortion rates remain markedly higher, up to a factor
The Evolution of Popular Religiosity and Secularism 195
of two, in the religious and creationist United States than in the more
secular advanced democracies. The correlation favoring secularism is
very strong whether or not the United States is included, and the corre-
lation is strongly progressive in either case.
Youth birthrate data is generally well recorded (Singh and Darroch
2000); this indicator is compared in an age cohort where marriage is
infrequent. Despite previous declines, birth rates among teens who are
not married are two to dozens of times lower in the secular democra-
cies than in the United States. The correlation is very strong in favor of
secularism with the United States outlier included, it remains moderate
with the United States excluded.
Low national birth rates may in part reflect a high perception of per-
sonal security and may be a societal positive in nations that lack
adequate habitable land area and at a time when the global population
is rapidly approaching 7 billion. Because this reliably recorded indica-
tor (UN 2005) is often cited by advocates of the moral-creator socioeco-
nomic hypothesis as important to societal health, it is included to
discover whether it substantially improves the cumulative status of the
United States. The theoconservative United States is matched in fertility
only by moderately secular New Zealand, but highly secular France in
not far behind. Strongly secular Japan and Germany have very low fer-
tility rates, but so do the four most religious western European nations.
The Pearson correlation is not significant with the United States
included and is even less so with it removed.
Marriage versus cohabitation is a lifestyle choice, and there is little
evidence that the much lower rates of marriage in secular democracies
is adversely impacting the children of unmarried couples (Reid 2004).
Because this dependably recorded indicator (UN 2001) is often cited by
proponents of the moral-creator socioeconomic hypothesis, it too is
included.
The marriage rate in the religious and creationist United States is so
high that it is a strong outlier compared to the more secular countries.
With the United States included, the correlation is moderate in favor of
religiosity; with the United States excluded the correlation is not signif-
icant. Divorce laws are inconsistent between democracies, so the statis-
tics on marriage duration before divorces among married couples
reflect both legal as well as social differences (Divorce Reform 2002;
OECD 2001). The United States performs poorly in marriage duration
and divorce, being uniquely low in the former and edged out in the
latter only by highly secular Sweden. With the United States included,
the correlations are not significant. With the United States excluded the
correlation for marriage duration is moderate in favor of more religious
democracies, and for divorces this correlation is strong; but these
results may be skewed by restrictive divorce laws in some of the more
religious examples.
196 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
APPENDIX 1: NOTES
1. The authors of this criticism of Paul (2005) are faculty at Cedarville Uni-
versity, a fundamentalist institution that hosted a research conference promot-
ing the belief that the Genesis creation story that the earth is a few thousand
years old is literally true (www.cedarville.edu/departments/er/geology).
2. When scores for more than one country differ slightly when the original val-
ues listed are the same is because the latter were rounded off during tabulation.
3. Interpol merely gathers and reports nonlethal crime statistics provided by
member nations without standardizing or vetting them (Neapolitan 1997; Bar-
clay and Taveres 2002, 2003). For example, assaults are reported at a rate about
six times higher in Australia and Sweden than in Canada and France, but this
level of disparity is suspect. Rates of theft are reported to be twice as high in
Sweden as in France. Are the former actually twice as larcenous as the French,
198 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
or are the latter twice as unlikely to file a report, or is the reality somewhere
in-between? Similarly suspicious discrepancies exist in International Crime Vic-
tims Survey results.
4. Reported rates of rape are two to twenty times higher in the United States
than in other First World nations (Jay 2004; MASA 2003), but this only means
that American females report being raped at far higher rates, not that Ameri-
can males are more prone to committing sexual assaults.
5. Seemingly very high homicide rates for some European cities in UN
(2000) are inflated by the inappropriate inclusion of attempted homicides
(Barclay and Taveres 2003; Barclay, personal communication).
6. The United States has lost its stature as a nation of exceptionally tall citi-
zens, a probable reflection of problems in providing health care (Komlos and
Lauderdale 2007).
7. See Note 2.
APPENDIX 2
Cross-national data sets and scores
Absolutely believe
in Goda Bible literalistsa Religious servicesa Prayera
b
Country PRVSS score % Score % Score % Score % Score
Absolutely believe in
afterlifeb Agnostics and atheistsb Acceptance of evolutionc
Absolutely
believe in Absolutely
heaven believe in
Country % Score (%)b hell (%)b % Score % Score
W 7.1 1.11 9.7 78 9.7 8.3 7.7 14.2 4.7 4 10 78.6 6.7
J 6.0 1.05 9.8 60 10 8.5 7.5 18.8 1.1 4 10 80.0 10
D 7.3 1.02 9.8 77 9.7 7.9 8.0 17.5 2.1 5 7.5 75.7 0
F 5.8 1.73 8.3 88 9.6 8.9 7.2 19 0.9 5 7.5 78.1 0.6
G 5.7 1.15 9.7 97 9.4 8.2 7.7 14.2 4.7 5 7.5 77.2 3.5
E 6.2 1.61 8.6 141 8.8 6.7 8.9 7.4 10 6 5.0 77.2 3.5
N 8.0 0.95 10 68 9.9 12.6 4.4 12.1 6.3 4 10 78.1 5.6
201
H 6.9 1.51 8.8 127 9.0 7.9 8.0 7.9 9.6 5 7.5 77.9 5.1
A 4.8 1.87 8.2 120 9.1 18.5 0 14.3 4.6 5 7.5 78.3 6.0
Z 5.0 2.5 6.6 181 8.2 15.1 2.6 15.3 3.8 6 5.0 76.9 2.8
C 6.2 1.77 8.3 107 9.3 13.7 3.6 12.3 6.2 6 5.0 79.0 7.7
S 5.0 1.12 9.7 140 8.8 5.3 9.9 8.6 9.1 6 5.0 78.0 2.4
L 5.7 1.12 9.7 81 9.7 15.3 2.4 20.2 0 5 7.5 78.7 7.0
R 5.4 1.23 9.4 108 9.3 12.9 9.3 19.2 0.8 5 7.5 77.0 3.0
T 5.6 1.50 8.8 97 9.4 5.2 10 8.2 9.4 6 5.0 78.2 5.8
I 5.3 1.42 9.0 85 9.6 15.2 2.5 11.3 7 7 2.5 76.4 1.6
U 2.9 5.56 0 724 0 11.1 5.6 11.3 7 8 0 76.7 2.3
APPENDIX 2 (continued)
Gonorrhea, 15–19 Gonorrhea, all Syphilis, 15–19 Syphilis, all Abortions, 15–19 Births, 15–17
yearsh agesh yearsh agesh yearsi yearsi
Per Per Per Per Per Per
Country 100K Score 100K Score 100K Score 100K Score 1000 Score 1000 Score
W 1.8 10 2.8 10 0.6 9.0 0.8 8.3 17.2 8.1 2.7 9.5
J — — — — — — — — — — 1.1 10
D 5.0 9.9 3.4 9.9 0.8 8.8 0.4 9.3 14.4 10 2.2 9.7
F 7.7 9.9 8.4 9.6 — — — — — — 3.5 9.3
G — — — — — — — — — — 4.4 9.0
E 77 8.7 22 8.4 0.2 9.7 0.2 9.8 18.6 7.2 14.6 5.9
202
Corruptionp Per capita Incomeq Income inequalityq Poverty indexq Employment levelsl
Country Value Score U.S., $K Score Index Score Score Value % Score
APPENDIX 3
Pearson correlation coefficients for correlation of secularism
with social and economic circumstances
PRVSS compared to
SSS 0.705 0.534 17
Homicides 0.611 0.262 17
Incarceration 0.606 0.273 17
Suicides, 15–24 years old 0.326 0.379 17
Suicides, all age 0.322 0.297 17
Mortality, under 5 years old 0.835 0.746 17
Life expectancy 0.304 0.198 17
Gonorrhea infections, 15–19 0.937 0.676 7
years old
Gonorrhea infections, all age 0.938 0.643 7
Syphilis infections, 15–19 years old 0.886 0.213 6
Syphilis infections, all age 0.856 0.596 6
Abortions 15–19 years old 0.938 0.825 8
Births, 15–17 years old 0.716 0.443 13
Fertility 0.188 0.038 17
Marriages 0.310 0.197 17
Marriage duration at divorce 0.148 0.354 15
Divorces among married couples 0.298 0.639 17
Alcohol consumption 0.174 0.345 17
Life satisfaction 0.202 0.233 17
Corruption indices 0.280 0.312 17
Adjusted per capita income 0.390 0.205 17
GINI income inequality 0.813 0.707 17
Human poverty index 0.682 0.572 14
Employment levels 0.205 0.392 17
Average hours worked 0.422 0.283 17
Resource exploitation base 0.299 0.157 17
% of population who are foreign born 0.174 0.178 17
Cultural fractionalization 0.296 0.257 17
Accept human descent from animals 0.837 0.754 16
Accept human descent from animals 0.739 0.612 16
compared to absolutely believe
in God
SSS compared to
Absolutely believe in God 0.709 0.551 17
Bible literalists 0.549 0.256 16
Attend religious services at least 0.536 0.530 17
several times a month
Pray at least several times a week 0.711 0.484 16
Absolutely believe in an afterlife 0.669 0.417 16
Absolutely believe in heaven 0.725 0.447 16
The Evolution of Popular Religiosity and Secularism 207
and their bodies and desired more egalitarian sexual relationships inside
and outside marriage.
In addition, second-wave feminism posed challenges to the traditional
link between religion and femininity. One common theme was the focus
on patriarchy as a concept or theory on gender power and gender differ-
ence. Many feminists viewed traditional religion to be patriarchal and
oppressive.4 Some decided to stay in their religious communities while
they redefined and renegotiated their religious traditions. Indeed, several
feminist theologians criticized Christianity and attempted to form a fem-
inist spirituality and theology.5 Other women joined new religious
movements and alternative spiritual communities. Some feminist theolo-
gians rejected traditional religion and turned to feminized versions of
spiritualities, such as the Goddess movement and Wicca.6 Yet, other
feminists rejected all forms of religion, left religious institutions, and
became secular. These women were often involved in full-time and pro-
fessional careers. Leaving could be due to profound disagreements with
traditional religion, especially when it came to its teachings on sexual pi-
ety, abortion, and homosexuality and its focus on marriage and wom-
en’s role as caretakers. Many feminist women found it hard to remain
within traditional religion.7 Leaving religion was, however, not a phe-
nomenon that only took place among women. The radicalism of the
1960s and ’70s also led to disaffiliation from traditional forms of religion
among men.
In general, the sociological research on atheism and secularity has
been slim. In the 1960s and ’70s, some sociologists of religion
attempted to analyze irreligion as a social phenomenon. During the
first International Symposium on Unbelief, held in Rome in 1969, sociolog-
ical programs for the study of nonbelief were outlined.8 Later, British
sociologist Colin Campbell proposed a more systematic sociology of
irreligion.9 More recently, this body of research has been growing.10
Nevertheless, social scientific studies of irreligion tend to focus on the
secular society11 or secular movements12 rather than affirmatively irre-
ligious individuals. They also tend to ignore gender. In contrast, this
chapter will address the subject of women and men who have moved
away from religion and see themselves as nonreligious.
Table 7.1
Secular beliefs and practices according to gender
M F M F M F M F M F
Don’t believe 15 10 61 50 14 8 22 13 23 11
in God
Definitely no 31 18 74 63 25 13 30 20 29 14
faith in the
afterlife
Never pray 39 24 78 64 45 24 48 38 56 37
Values are percentages. M, male; F, female.
Source: International Social Survey Program: Religion, 1998.
212 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
data show that there is a relatively wide pattern at play where men tend
to score higher than women on atheist values and practice in several
European countries.
women’s secular outlook on life? These are some of the issues analyzed
here. The turn toward secularity can be a turn toward an identity as ‘‘a
skeptic,’’ or it can be a totalizing attempt at ‘‘creating my own life.’’ It
is the issue of how gender informs our understanding of secularity that
we want to discuss further.
Table 7.2
Religious beliefs according to gender
remoteness with small, poor farms scattered far away from each other.
Jan’s story portraits a baby boomer born in the early 1950s who grew
up in the post-World War II era. His narrative contains information
about the historical context of his life and its impact upon his life
course. Jan grew up in the rural periphery as one of three children of
parents who only had elementary school educations. Yet, he could look
at higher education as a matter of course. He attended the country’s
largest university in Oslo during the 1970s and ’80s. This was a time of
political activism and a growing skepticism toward church and reli-
gion, which became shaping influences in his life. After obtaining a
Master’s degree, he decided to move back to his childhood home in
the North, where he works as a high school teacher.
During Jan’s childhood, no one in his family demonstrated much in-
terest in religion. His parents were members of the Church of Norway,
but they only went there if there was a confirmation or other types of
ritual events. Today, Jan is not affiliated with any church or worldview
organization. He marks in the questionnaire that he does not know
whether God exists and that he does not believe that there is any way
to find out, which 16 percent of the men report. He used to have a reli-
gious faith, but not anymore. Jan does not believe in life after death,
although he is not quite sure, which 21 percent of the sample and 25
percent of the men state. He absolutely does not believe in heaven,
hell, or in miracles. For him, the Bible consists of old legends, an
answer given by 45 percent of the sample and 50 percent of the men.
Jan has a negative view of religion. He defected from the Church of
Norway when he was a teenager and today he characterizes himself as
‘‘strongly nonreligious,’’ a response 11 percent of the men gave in the
quantitative study. He believes that religious people tend to be intoler-
ant and that the world would be a better place if religion had less influ-
ence. Jan never prays and he never attends church, except during rites
of passage. He is quite sure that he does not believe in reincarnation,
horoscopes, or that people can foresee the future or have contact with
those who have gone before us. He is somewhat open to alternative
medicine, although he has doubts. By looking at the percentages of the
total sample and the men who give the same response as Jan does in
the questionnaire, we find that Jan is more secular than the majority of
the total sample as well as the men, but that his lack of religious prac-
tice is similar to that of the majority.
Jan belongs to the leftists and votes for the Left Socialists (SV). Con-
sistent with his political orientation, he has ‘‘relatively high trust’’ in
the parliament, the judicial system, and the educational system, but
less so in the Church of Norway and religious organizations, and
hardly any in private enterprise. As the large majority in this study,
Jan believes that sex before marriage is not at all wrong. Indeed, he
thinks that it is a good idea for people to live together before they get
Atheism, Secularity, and Gender 217
married. He does not see sex between two people of the same sex as
wrong, a view found among 38 percent of the total sample and 32 per-
cent of the men. However, Jan has a strict view on abortion. For him,
abortion is almost always wrong, including the situation where the
woman does not want to have a child. Jan is relatively supportive of
gender equality. He strongly disagrees with the statement that ‘‘men
should work and women should stay home with the family.’’ Only 28
percent of the men share his view on this issue. Yet, he is not sure
whether he should agree or disagree with the statement that ‘‘the fam-
ily suffers when women have full-time work.’’
There is a tension in Jan’s narrative between the rural boy who suc-
ceeded in obtaining an academic degree and returning to his home
community as a high school teacher and the outsider and the reclusive
man who seeks gratification and meaning in solitude. In many ways,
this tension has to do with tension between consistency and skepticism,
involvement and distance.
It must have been during the period when I began in high school and
studied at the university. I developed an antipathy to the propaganda
I heard, and I became quite anti-Church, anti-Christian in many ways,
218 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
but that was partly because I thought the Christianity I heard in school
was so extreme. I actually think it was during junior high school when I
took a standpoint, under the influence of friends who were not Christian.
His move away from faith was not a process where he as an individual
broke away from the group and opposed the views accepted by those
around him. Instead, he refers to his group of friends and claims that
their views affected him. Once again, he demonstrates that he was part
of the group by adopting its accepted views.
Although Jan seemed to be group-oriented in his approach to reli-
gion, this was not so when it came to education. He finished high
school and decided to attend the University of Oslo. This was not a
common path for a boy in rural northern Norway, who usually ‘‘went
to sea.’’ In this area, Jan broke away from the group and went out on
his own. Yet, in his narrative he presents the picture of a young man
who more or less passively follows the opportunities laid before him.
He says: ‘‘I sort of continued in school; it was that which existed. I
applied to the University of Oslo without any conscious decision to
become a teacher.’’ The educational opportunities were just there, and
as doors opened, Jan entered.
Nevertheless, compared to a commonly expected life course for baby
boomers, Jan is atypical. Upon finishing his Master’s degree, he decided
to return to his home village and work there. At the time of the inter-
view, he is divorced and not involved in any long-term relationship,
and he has no children. Jan seems to live at the margins of social life.
He gives little information about friends or people with whom he inter-
acts. His professional life is also a topic that is almost absent in his nar-
rative. This is atypical for a male life story, which tends to focus on the
work life career.26 One possible explanation is found toward the end of
the interview when Jan reveals that he has been on sick leave for one
year without a diagnosis. He believes he has chronic fatigue syndrome,
characterized by headaches, dizziness, and general fatigue. Being unable
to work may pose a threat to Jan’s masculine identity, especially because
his illness is one associated with women more so than men. The picture
of the man suffering from a typical ‘‘women’s illness’’ represents a
breach with the picture of the successful male high school teacher.
As most men of his generation, Jan believes that both women and
men should pursue their careers. Yet, he has a notion of women as
more emotional and easily misled than men. When asked about alter-
native medicine, he says: ‘‘persons of the opposite sex, whom I have
the impression act more and believe in such, whereas I shake my head
and fret.’’ Jan is a professed rationalist, who states in the questionnaire
that he strongly disagrees with the statement that ‘‘we do not trust
faith and emotions enough.’’ For him, rationality is masculine, whereas
Atheism, Secularity, and Gender 219
I don’t believe, but I can’t say that there’s no form of god. I don’t believe
in the god described in the Bible, but I can’t exclude the existence of the
creative power of god, although I don’t see any evidence that there’s
something that rules, I can’t see that there is a god who personally inter-
venes in people’s lives.
easily fit into the political and religious landscape of Norway. His anti-
Christian position would initially lead one to expect that was a member
of the Norwegian Humanist Association, which he is not. He explains
I felt that this [joining] would replace one congregation with another con-
gregation who is a competitor to Christianity. Without doubt, I sympa-
thize with their views, but I don’t care much for being a member of such
permanent movements, neither political nor religious.
sex before marriage is not at all wrong, and neither is sex between two
persons of the same sex. However, sex with someone else than your
spouse is almost always wrong. Although she strongly supports free
choice, she believes that abortion, in many instances, is morally wrong.
Bente’s life story is characterized by her belief that human beings
create their own lives. According to her, life has meaning, not because
of the existence of a god, but because human beings are part of the life
cycle. She has a positive view of life and she believes that people have
choices in life. Nevertheless, there is a tension in Bente’s story between
her hopefulness toward others and her own unhappiness. As she grap-
ples with adult life, she attempts to create consistency between her life
experiences and her fundamental beliefs.
worked to extend the rights of women. She says: ‘‘I wanted very much
to do something. Not just to think or have ideas, but to demonstrate
how it could be done, or what could be changed. I wanted to partici-
pate and have an effect.’’ For her, ideals or theories were viewed as
negatives, unless they were demonstrated in everyday life. She also
joined the protests against the European Union. The fact that the grass
root mobilization actually affected the end result of the referendum in
1972, where the opponents won, became a sort of evidence to her that
it was action and not ideas that changed the world.
When we ask her about her perceptions of the meaning of life in her
youth, Bente recalls that her high school years ‘‘were a time when I had
a need to put things together. I knew my own views, but I wanted to
see if I could find a larger ideological or moral frame around them.
When I made up my mind that I will leave the Church, I was 17.’’ Bente
actively searched to create and formulate her own individual worldview,
where she could ‘‘recognize herself’’ and ‘‘feel at home.’’ In many ways,
her worldview is similar to the one Jan harbors. However, her approach
is strikingly different. Rather than seeking to formulate an individual
meaning system, which Jan largely attempts to do, Bente searches for a
ready formulated meaning system where she can ‘‘fit in.’’ In her attempt
to integrate her view of life within a larger frame, she tries to make a
system whereby she harmonizes different aspects of her life.
At the time of the interview, Bente works within the school system.
It is a striking feature in her story that she directs very little attention to
her career. In spite of the fact that she is a full-time professional, she
gives little information about her professional life. It becomes obvious
that her identity is to a very small degree connected to work and career.
Instead, her story centers on her family, friends, and close relationships.
Bente’s two children are not baptized. At the time when they were
born, it was not yet common to arrange secular ‘‘name-giving’’ ceremonies
among irreligious couples. Therefore, Bente and her husband had no rit-
uals or ceremonies that celebrated the birth of their children, which Bente
misses. Because the children were not baptized, they were not members of
the Church of Norway and would therefore, not normally be confirmed
there. However, Bente’s oldest daughter chose to be baptized and con-
firmed in the Church two years ago. Bente admires her daughter’s inde-
pendence in this matter, resisting the tradition of her secular family. In
many ways, she seems to fulfill Bente’s ideal of the independent person.
Bente’s identity is related to her definition of herself as a humanist. She
does not see herself as an atheist, which she defines as ‘‘one who denies
that there’s something beyond oneself, meaning that there’s nothing reli-
gious or a divinity beyond.’’ Instead, she sees herself as an agnostic:
experienced this in relatively specific ways, that there are some commu-
nications or some presence. I don’t believe in something religious or a
god or anything, but I can’t prove that it doesn’t exist.
herself, but also her children. As she strives to save her family, she has
to put herself aside. And as she attempts to create her own life, she is
also dependent on the lives of those with whom she interacts, and their
choices. There is, thereby, a celebration of consistency as well as a real-
ization that consistency between ideals and life experiences is not
always possible.
CONCLUSION
The fact that secularity is gendered in Norway is expressed in sev-
eral different ways. Our analysis of the data from ISSP Norway: Reli-
gion, 1998, shows that Norwegian men score higher than women on
several measures of secularity. Norwegian women and men reveal a
similar pattern to the ones found in Germany, Great Britain, the Neth-
erlands, and Sweden. The two life stories confirm the picture of gen-
dered worldviews, and they provide information about some of the
ways in which gender structures these worldviews.
Jan and Bente organize their discourse on secularity in different ways.
As Bente describes her worldview, she focuses on the meaning that it
provides in her life. This is revealed in her language of ‘‘finding a larger
ideological frame.’’ Bente’s search for meaning led her to the humanist
association. In contrast, Jan’s discourse centers on morality. He focuses
on the behavior that he believes religious people should have. For him,
meaning does not constitute a major theme, but morality does.
Bente and Jan also speak about their experiences differently. Bente’s
worldview reflects her position as a woman and mother of two. For her,
it is a direct connection between giving birth and her idea of being part
of the great cycle of life. Bente emphasizes issues relating to personal
relationships and emotions. She speaks of her worldview as a search for
‘‘an ideological frame’’ that harmonizes with her inner, true self. Her
quest is not to find some sort of truth, but to find something to which
she can ‘‘relate’’ or ‘‘recognize’’ herself. The emotional and relational
aspects are also evident in her perceptions of some sort of unexplainable
reality. She uses words such as ‘‘connections’’ or ‘‘communications.’’ In
contrast, Jan as a single man attempts to formulate his worldview by
picking and choosing from different theoretical traditions. When he
describes his beliefs, he speaks about truth and a ‘‘creative power.’’ For
him, his secular worldview is not discussed in terms of emotional fulfill-
ment or personal relationships, but in terms of its truth and power.
In complex ways, the secular identities of Jan and Bente are related to
their gender identities. Even if Jan’s story shows that his male identity
does not lie in the work sphere, it is located in his education or status as
an ‘‘academic.’’ His story points to the importance of higher education
in personal and intellectual fulfillment. For him, gender is also related to
his secular worldview. It is his identity as an academic with his
226 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
emphasis on masculine rationality that led him away from religion. For
him, a male identity excludes a religious identity. Bente’s story suggests
that the feminist movement and new roles for women lead to changes in
the role that religion plays in women’s lives. Bente’s aim to find whole-
ness brought her on a quest for a worldview that would combine the dif-
ferent aspects of her life. Her search led her away from religion to
secular humanism. Here, she found a worldview that brings together
her identity as a mother, partner, working woman, and political activist.
This study has attempted to show that Norwegian women and men
not only differ on measures of secularity, but that gender structures
the ways in which they speak about their secular worldviews and the
role that secularity plays in their lives. The analysis is tentative and
more studies are needed in the study on gender and secularity.
NOTES
1. See for example, Young, Serinity, ed. 1999. Encyclopedia of women and
World religion, Vol. I–II. New York: Macmillan Reference; Aune, Kristin, Sonya
Sharma, and Giselle Vincette, eds. 2008. Women and religion in the West. Chal-
lenging secularization. Aldershot: Ashgate.
2. Vincett, Giselle, Sonya Sharma, and Kristin Aune. 2008. Introduction:
Women, religion and secularization: One size does not fit all. In Women and re-
ligion in the West. Challenging secularization, ed. Kristin Aune et al., 1–19. Alder-
shot: Ashgate.
3. Furseth, Inger. 2006. From quest for truth to being oneself. Religious change
in life stories. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
4. See Woodhead, Linda. 2003. Feminism and the sociology of religion:
From gender-blindness to gendered difference. In The Blackwell companion to
sociology of religion, ed. Richard K. Fenn, 67–84. Oxford: Blackwell.
5. Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/ecology. The metaethics of radical feminism. Boston:
Beacon Press; Ruether, Rosemary Radford, ed. 1974. Religion and sexism. Images
of women in the Jewish and Christian traditions. New York: Simon and Schuster.
6. Berger, Helen A. 1998. A community of witches: Contemporary neo-Paganism
and witchcraft in the United States. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press;
Finley, Nancy J. 1994. Political activism and feminist spirituality. In Gender and
Religion, ed. William H. Swatos, Jr., 159–172. New Brunswick and London:
Transaction; Salomonsen, Jone. 2002. Enchanted feminism: Ritual, gender and di-
vinity among the reclaiming witches of San Francisco. New York: Routledge.
7. Aune, Kristin. 2008. Singleness and secularization: British evangelical
women and church (dis)affiliation. In Women and religion in the West. Challeng-
ing secularization, ed. Kristin Aune et al., 57–70. Aldershot: Ashgate; Furseth.
From quest for truth to being oneself; Sharma, Soya 2008. When young women
say ‘‘yes’’: Exploring the sexual selves of young Canadian women in Protestant
churches. In Women and religion in the West. Challenging secularization, ed. Kristin
Aune et al., 71–82. Aldershot: Ashgate.
8. Caporale, Rocco, and Antonio Grumelli, eds. 1971. The culture of unbelief.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Atheism, Secularity, and Gender 227
American history has not been kind to atheists, agnostics, and secularists.
To examine the unfolding of the country’s history through the standard
accounts of nontheists in American history textbooks is to present a very
short study indeed. In fact, from a student’s point of view, the narrative
simply does not exist. Due in large part to the overwhelming success of
the Christian establishment to both formally and informally censure the
act of history writing, the traditions of atheism, agnosticism, and secular-
ism in America have been generally supplanted by myth, mischaracter-
ized by historical revision, and silenced through scholarly omission.
In this chapter I will attempt to unearth the hidden history of
American atheism, agnosticism, and secularism from its burial under the
weight of popular myth and its obstruction at the hands of historical
censors. From era to era, persona to persona, America has been home to
countless nonbelievers who have faced relentless persecution from the-
ists, particularly Protestant theists. Sometimes the attacks originated
with the state and other times they flowed from an agitated populous.
More often than not, antiatheist activity came from a combination
of state-sponsored scapegoating and reactionary populist hysteria.
At different times these forces targeted nonwhites, nonconformists,
intellectuals, socialists, and scientists. Atheists—or those accused of
atheism—found themselves imprisoned, ostracized, and in some cases
exterminated. Yet, within this continuum of unabashed hostility reside
pockets of tolerance and the flowering of freethought. By excavating
230 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
COLONIAL AMERICA
Christian European America was initially sown in the native soil of
disbelief. From the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the turn of the
eighteenth century, only a handful of European Christians lived among
hundreds of thousands of non-Christian Natives.2 In a world where
even slight deviations from Christian denominational orthodoxy would
result in cries of atheism, American Indians presented a special chal-
lenge to the Protestant English. Even before the first permanent English
colonies took root, Anglo writers identified the profound religious defi-
cit of the continent’s natives. In early Virginia colony booster Richard
Hakluyt’s Discourse on Western Planting (1584), he warned potential set-
tlers that North America was bursting with ‘‘infidells,’’ and that Eng-
lish Christians needed to work for
the dombe idols to the lyvinge God, from the depe pitt of hell to the
highest heaven.3
His conceit is, that when the devil was put out of his throne in the other
parts of the world, and that the mouth of all his oracles was stopped in
Europe, Asia, and Africa, he seduced a company of silly wretches to fol-
low his conduct into this unknown part of the world, here he might lie
hid and not be disturbed in the idolatrous and abominable, or rather dia-
bolical service he expected from his followers; for here are no footsteps
of any religion before the English came, but merely diabolical.5
the near extermination of the natives, like the conquest of the Canaan-
ites, was seen as a gift from God to his chosen people. For instance, as
natives died in mass after exposure to smallpox, Puritan leader John
Winthrop thanked the creator for more free land. Reading the pox as a
providential sign, Winthrop penned, ‘‘God hath consumed the Natives
with a great Plauge in those partes, soe as there be few Inhabitants
lefte.’’7 All things beneficial to the Puritans were deemed ‘‘providen-
tial,’’ while acts against them were often characterized as tied to the
influence of accused nonbelievers.
Natives were not the only ones, however, to suffer because of their
visible heterodoxy in the face of Puritanism. Scores of European immi-
grants among the America’s self-proclaimed saints found themselves
open to punishment at the hands of Puritan authorities. Stocks, brand-
ing, whipping, and dunking were common forms of remediation for
religious transgressions. Those beyond repair were either cast out or
executed. In both lethal and non lethal cases, charges of atheism were
as common as they were imprecise. In the Puritan worldview, atheism
described all religious expressions incompatible with Puritanism. Thus,
Quakers, Catholics, and Jews fell into the same general category as Indi-
ans and witches.
One of the earliest accusations of atheism was levied within a dec-
ade after the Pilgrims first arrived. The accused, Thomas Morton, con-
sidered himself an aristocratic bon vivant, with little in common with
Puritans other than English birth. Morton arrived in New England in
New England 1624 and soon found himself at odds with the Puritan
authorities. Establishing an outpost outside of the established English
perimeter, Morton infuriated Puritans by undercutting established
trade, fraternizing with Indians, and erecting a Maypole in the middle
of his compound. A literate and adventurous man, Morton rejected
Puritan rule and instead established his Indian trading post and chris-
tened it Merry Mount. There, Morton, his Anglo comrades, and Indian
men and women imbibed, danced, and sang bawdy songs—much to
the chagrin of local, town-dwelling leaders. In 1628, Massachusetts Bay
Colony Governor William Bradford had Merry Mount sacked and
eventually burned to the ground. In his History of Plymouth Plantation,
Bradford recounts the ‘‘the beastly practices of mad Bachanalism’’ at
play in Morton’s compound and claimed that Morton was the ‘‘lord of
misrule, and maintained (as it were) a schoole of Athisme.’’8 Morton
was arrested, held, and eventually deported to England.
Perhaps the most significant element in New England’s role in the
history of religion, secularism, and atheism in America is the near uni-
versal acceptance of the region’s place in the founding of America. This
ahistorical account posits the notion that religious principles motivated
the colonization of America’s eastern seaboard. The tale is often enacted
in the public sphere in two ways: the Thanksgiving story and the
Freethinkers and Hell Raisers 233
came here.’’13 This false history and imaginative context also frames
current views of revolutionary history, the motives of the founders, and
the meaning of the U.S. Constitution.
REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA
Americans still rage over the presumed beliefs of the founders.
Pseudohistorian David Barton typifies the nonacademics who have
attempted to recast American history as the history of Christians in
America. Asking his audience to ‘‘discover our nation’s godly history,’’
Barton has recast the country’s founders as a cohort of evangelicals
attempting to forge a modern state from a premodern religious text. In
his mind, the course of American history has been steered by orthodox
religion from the first moment Europeans made land.14 In this context,
the fact that the American political system’s founders intentionally and
systematically strayed from religious orthodoxy rings of falsehood.
How could the most influential people of their time and the paragons
of elite society reject religion amid a populous of dogmatic believers?
The answer, of course, is that they were not anomalies, but representa-
tive of their time and status. The principle founders of the constitu-
tional government of the United States were not atheists, but they were
not Christians either. They were Deists. Jefferson, Adams, Franklin,
and Madison all tended to understand religion in its pragmatic appli-
cation in social control and rejected supernaturalism, but held to the
notion of a creative force in society. They believed, though some to a
greater degree than others, in an unobtrusive supreme being who cre-
ated the universe, but paid scant attention to earth’s occupants. In their
views, this ‘‘clock-maker’’ did not suspend natural law, answer pray-
ers, or magically procreate with virgins.
Thomas Jefferson towers above all other early political figures as the
most secular and perhaps the most influential. Jefferson, the author of
the Declaration of Independence, the third U.S. president (and in that
capacity refused to proclaim a day of thanksgiving), and the founder of
the University of Virginia, rejected ‘‘demoralizing dogmas of Calvin’’ in
favor of a natural religion based on reason and charitable human inter-
action.15 Jefferson, who wrote knowing that his words would later be
scrutinized, left a clear paper trail on his unorthodox religious beliefs.
Though somewhat reticent in his official writings, his correspondences
and library shelves paint a picture of a man with a distain for dogma,
orthodoxy, and superstition. In his letters to John Adams, Jefferson dis-
puted the Trinity, bashed Protestantism, and mocked the apostles. In
spiritual matters, Jefferson aligned himself with pre-Christian Greeks
such as Epicurus, who believed in the existence of gods, but insisted
that divine beings ignored the humans altogether. To his friend and
mentee, William Short, Jefferson identified himself as an ‘‘Epicurean,’’
236 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
persuaded by the ‘‘moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left
us.’’ Jefferson broke his official silence on the topic of religion in his
only published book, Notes on Virginia. Here, he argued against a singu-
lar tradition within a narrative highly critical of Christian proselytizing:
And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished
that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son,
and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger;
because there was no room for them in the inn.17
settled into the normative, disciplined piety of the latter. On the first
end of this equation, this early evangelism has profoundly imprinted
American religious consciousness. During the Second Great Awakening
(1790–1840) Americans discarded strict Calvinism in favor of a more
democratic form of religious expression. Though uneven and chrono-
logically staggered, the era’s revivalism stressed personal faith as key
to salvation coupled with anti-intellectual emotionalism. Denomina-
tions battled for souls, and new religions arose while established tradi-
tions accommodated those who cried for change. The result was a
complex mix of sometimes reformist, sometimes otherworldly churches
with the innate ability to transform during times of crises and always to
appeal to one’s heart rather than head.25
From the vulgar to the urbane, America’s nineteenth century then
shifted—in the public imagination—to Victorianism and the rise of the
middle class. According to scholars, Americans increasingly retreated
into the privacy of their own homes during a period of accelerating in-
dustrialization. Gender roles became more defined as men engaged in a
competitive business world and women settled into the domestic realm.
Within the walls of the Victorian home women found a new identity as
homemakers. Purity, submissiveness, and piety defined the house-bound
woman, and within this role she bore the responsibility of maintaining a
religious household and raising the next generation of spiritually devout
children. Although this ‘‘cult of domesticity’’ and ‘‘self-made man’’
model only serves as a limited conceptual framework for the study of
the nineteenth century, it remains a powerful paradigm for the ‘‘tradi-
tional’’ family as advocated by contemporary American conservatives.26
When taken together as the singular dominant paradigm for under-
standing the nineteenth century, revival to Victorianism (while a bit
prude) allows theistic historians the opportunity to claim the era’s pro-
gressive social movements. For instance, it is commonly understood
that social reform emerged as the byproduct of the Second Great Awak-
ening and found its greatest advocates amongst the emerging middle
class. In this context, abolitionism and women’s rights are thus seen as
the result of the era’s religiosity and millennial zeal. Americans can look
back to the age of Garrison, Lincoln, and Susan B. Anthony and illus-
trate how religious belief inspired these few but important generations
to expand the rights of marginalized people while secularists and athe-
ists (if they even existed in the period) sat on the sidelines. However,
the people and events of the nineteenth century defy such simple cate-
gorization. The people we now celebrate as orthodox then were less so,
and many who would be considered infidels now (if we considered
them at all) then were among America’s most popular figures.
As Susan Jacoby has shown in Freethinkers, some nineteenth-century
American icons adopted by the current religious right were suspi-
ciously unorthodox. Chief among them is Abraham Lincoln. No doubt,
240 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
the view that Lincoln led his life as an archetypical frontier Christian is
axiomatic among believers, but evidence shows that his religiosity has
been perhaps overstated.27 Lincoln never joined a church, did not
believe in revealed truth, and saw no reason for prayer in his own
life.28 Biographers have strongly disputed the characterization of
Lincoln as a Christian. Soon after Lincoln’s death his long-time friend
and personal security guard, Ward Hill Lamon, presented The Life of
Abraham Lincoln to an unreceptive American reading public. In it,
Lamon asserted that Lincoln was a man of great conviction and spirit-
ual want, but alas, a man of little faith. ‘‘Mr. Lincoln’’ he wrote, ‘‘was
never a member of any church, nor did he believe in the divinity of
Christ, or the inspiration of the Scriptures in the sense understood by
evangelical Christians.’’ Lamon even quotes Mary Todd as stating,
‘‘Mr. Lincoln had no hope, and no faith, in the usual acceptance of those
words.’’ In the 1880s, one of Lincoln’s long-term associates opened up to
the Louisville Times on the subject of the former president’s beliefs:
He went to church a few times with his family while he was President, but
so far as I have been able to find he remained an unbeliever. . . . I asked
him once about his fervent Thanksgiving Message and twittered him about
being an unbeliever in what was published. ‘‘Oh,’’ said he, ‘‘that is some of
[secretary of state] Seward’s nonsense, and it pleases the fools.’’29
Yet the myth persists as to Lincoln’s religiosity. Due to the myth of the
‘‘Great Emancipator’’ and Lincoln’s status as the country’s most
beloved leader, many Americans refuse to accept Lincoln’s ambiva-
lence towards religion.
Like Jefferson and Paine, one can either recast significant Americans
or erase them. The same can be said of Lincoln (the most popularly rec-
ognizable figure in abolitionism) and Elisabeth Cady Stanton, the for-
gotten mother of women’s suffrage. Schooled by Lucretia Mott while
fighting for the abolition of American slavery, Stanton, by the 1840s,
redirected her energy away from abolitionism and devoted herself (as
did Mott) to women’s suffrage. Though she did not live to see the Nine-
teenth Amendment, her contributions to the cause are unparalleled. She
was the principal author of the first popular call for women’s rights in
America, the Declaration of Sentiments. Modeled after Jefferson’s Declara-
tion of Independence, the document was signed in 1848 at the first
women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York. In 1869, she
founded the National Women’s Suffrage Association with Susan B.
Anthony. Stanton argued not only for women’s suffrage, but more
broadly for women’s rights. Many of her radical views, including a call
to liberalize divorce laws and her acceptance of interracial marriage,
ultimately caused fissures in the women’s movement. But Stanton truly
raised the ire of conservatives when she criticized Christianity. She
Freethinkers and Hell Raisers 241
made the mistake, it appears, of letting her private views influence her
public discourse. In 1880, she summed up her view of Christianity in a
letter to her son: ‘‘How anyone in view of the protracted sufferings of
the race,’’ she penned, ‘‘can invest the laws of the universe with a tender
loving fatherly intelligence, watching, guiding and protecting humanity, is
to me amazing.’’30 Like the other historical figures, Stanton retained some
loose sense of faith, but rejected organized religions altogether.
In 1895 Stanton published the Women’s Bible, a text that amounted,
according to one historian, to a ‘‘sustained ideological assault on reli-
gious orthodoxy.’’31 Stanton had already earned a grand measure of
hostility by supporting resolutions before suffrage organizations con-
demning all religions, but by focusing her gaze on the structural sex-
ism of Christianity, she found herself marginalized from the movement
she helped found. Such utterances as ‘‘[T]he Bible and the Church have
been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipa-
tion’’ alienated Christian suffragettes.32 As the women’s movement
gathered steam at the beginning of the twentieth century, the next gen-
eration of suffragettes distanced themselves from Stanton. Christian
and pious, these women argued that their presence would bring moral-
ity to politics. They cared little for full equality and even less for irreli-
gious criticism. The result of this shift to the new generation was the
virtual disappearance of Stanton from the pantheon of women’s rights.
That the only consequence of Stanton’s public lambasting of Christi-
anity was marginalization rather than demonization speaks to the insur-
gent trend of American freethinking in the latter half of the nineteenth
century. Figures like Mark Twain, William James, and Stanton’s compa-
triot Susan B. Anthony all questioned the existence of a Christian god
to some degree and suffered little public scorn. But what had changed?
Because of a series of scientific discoveries, a generation of post-Civil
War freethinkers and unbelievers joined the public discourse on reli-
gious subjects. Pointedly, after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Spe-
cies (1859) all things in nature that had once only been explainable
through the model of a divine hand now fell within a the realm of sci-
ence. Science intruded into a space previously reserved for the creator.
Although this somewhat complicated the Deist (or later transcendental-
ist) notions of divine nature, it directly contradicted the static world of
the Bible. Before the popular release of Origin of a Species, the musing of
the educated elite as to the process of human development was rarely a
concern of the general public. Darwin, however, wrote lucidly enough
for a general audience to comprehend his theory, thus ensuring its
popularity, dissemination, and even tacit acceptance. The country, it
appeared, was moving toward a tentative embrace of freethought.
In American history, the first popular anti-Christian figure arrived
in the form of a Civil War veteran and Midwestern lawyer with a flair
for public speaking. Robert Ingersoll was the son of a Presbyterian
242 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
Each nation has created a god, and the god has always resembled his cre-
ators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved, and was inevitably
found on the side of those in power. Each god was intensely patriotic,
and detested all nations but his own. All of these gods demanded praise,
flattery and worship. Most of them were pleased with sacrifice, and the
smell of innocent blood has ever been considered the divine perfume.35
TWENTIETH CENTURY
In a variety of public venues, atheists, agnostics, and secularists
made great gains in the twentieth century. In court, cases for the strict
separation of church and state and against the reciting of Bible verses
in public schools opened the door for greater atheistic expression. The
century also witnessed the emergence of atheist organizations such as
the American Atheist Association founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair
in 1963. After launching the lawsuit that ended the practice of Christian
prayer in public schools, O’Hair established a cable television program
and subsequently saw her organization’s mailing list reach 50,000.43
Yet the marginalization of unbelievers continued throughout the cen-
tury, and at some points the fight against the ‘‘enemies of God’’ reached
a near hysterical pitch. The story of atheism, secularism, and agnosti-
cism in the last century is less about the personas of freethinkers and
more the tidal wave of religious intolerance and government complicity.
The sleeping giant of fundamentalism, being somewhat inactive during
the first two decades, stirred during the Scopes trail, awakened with the
Cold War, and became fully animated with the rise of the New Right.
During the Great Reversal (1900–1930), American religion dramati-
cally changed. Social reformers such as Jane Addams still applied the
social gospel to modern problems, but concurrently another—and even-
tually stronger—movement took shape in southern tent revivals and
northern Bible colleges. Antimodern fundamentalism made its way from
the academic realm and into northern congregations. Churches subse-
quently split along liberal versus conservative theological lines in most
major denominations. In many ways this new religious expression in the
North resembled white southern religiosity: an emphasis on personal
salvation, belief in the inerrancy of the Bible, and a distrust of modern-
ism. Melded together as a national religious bloc, the marriage of north-
ern fundamentalism and dominant southern revivalism served as a
potentially powerful counterbalance to the trend towards unbelief.44
The fundamentalist-inspired backlash of the 1920s presaged the role
of the New Right in the latter part of the twentieth century. Most point-
edly, proponents of traditionalism boldly attacked science—the very
thing that Ingersoll and Goldman believed would lift humans out of the
dark ages of superstition. The Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, gave
Americans the first real inkling of what to come. Waking from their
slumber, fundamentalists reentered the political realm in an effort to
block the teaching of evolution in public schools. High school teacher
Freethinkers and Hell Raisers 245
Red Scare crept into every facet of American life and solidly linked
communism and atheism in the American mind. Communism, it was
argued, extolled collectivism and atheism as the logical objective of all
modern societies. The Soviet Union for its part, would invade all free
countries by force or subterfuge in order to crush capitalism, freedom,
and religion. Thus, those adhering to liberal and secular principles was
deemed suspect. In 1954 the government inserted ‘‘under God’’ into
the flag salute (originally written by a nineteenth Christian socialist)
and in 1957 placed ‘‘In God We Trust’’ on American paper currency.
In an age of paranoia, an allegiance to the American Christian God
became a patriotic litmus test.
Evangelical minister Billy Graham in particular pitted American
Christian nationalism against foreign atheistic communism. Arguably
the most influential American clergyman of the twentieth century,
Graham cut his teeth on anticommunism. In 1951 Graham argued for a
more militant approach towards godless communists. A 1962 advertise-
ment for an essay called ‘‘Billy Graham Speaks’’ reads:
NOTES
1. James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 2–4.
2. Michael R. Haines and Richard Hall Steckel, A Population History of North
America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 23–24.
248 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
Over the years, most of the real action in church–state matters has
involved members of the judiciary. Even those few academics who are
interested tend to be relegated to the sidelines and that is almost always
the case with those of us who profess disciplines other than the law
itself. Occasionally, however, opportunities arise for scholars in the aca-
demic hinterland to play a role in the judicial spotlight. One such role
involves that of an expert witness in a court proceeding. Here I want to
report on my first and only experience in this capacity. After describing
the case in question, I shall share my written testimony and its re-
sponse, describe the results of the case, and then discuss further the
major issues involved in developing a definition of religion that bears
up under both judicial and social scientific scrutiny and does not veer
too far toward either secularizing the sacred or sacralizing the secular.
But first consider the following self-description drawn from a branch
of the religious organization on which I was asked to pass judgment:
Does anything seem amiss? I suspect not. But after briefly describing
the case, I shall fill in the ellipses and ask again.
The case involved a young woman, Kimberly Cloutier, who began
working in September 1997, for a Costco retail outlet, where her duties
ranged from food handling in the deli to ‘‘front-end’’ duties as a cash-
ier. In March 2001, she was informed of the company’s new dress code,
which banned employees from displaying any form of facial adornment
such as tattoos, scarification, piercings, or jewelry other than earrings.
Although her clothing covered several hours of bodily tattoos (hours
are the preferred measure of quantity because tattoos are often covered
over), Ms. Cloutier’s one offending adornment was a small, thin gold
ring through a pierced eyebrow. Once personally confronted with the
store’s new policy, she declined to remove the ring but volunteered to
cover it with a Band-Aid. The store declared this unacceptable and soon
acted to terminate her employment. Ms. Cloutier indicated for the first
time that this would violate her freedom of religion. When the store
manager asked what religion that might be, she replied that she was a
member of the Church of Body Modification (CBM).
At this point in my oral accounts of the case, a pause for laughter is
required. (Even during the case’s initial court hearing, the judge made
light of the CBM with joking references to the body in both senses of
the term.) Once the guffaws subside, it is necessary to explain that such
an organization is both very real and quite serious, though one of its
many Web sites does refer to it as the ‘‘blingdom of God.’’ Here it is
worth reconsidering the CBM’s earlier self-description with the missing
material replaced:
we strengthen the bond between mind, body, and soul, and ensure that
we live as spiritually complete and healthy individuals. . . . The Church
of Body Modification is the spiritual hub in which modified individuals
around the world will find strength, and procure the respect from society
as equal, intelligent, feeling human beings, modified individuals will
no longer be dismissed as a minority in our world. . . . This is our
birthright.
Not long after the events described above I received a call from
Michael Shea, an attorney who had agreed to represent the young
woman and take her case to U.S. District Court following affirmation
by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on May 8, 2002.
He asked me to serve as an expert witness in support of the Church of
Body Modification’s status as a constitutionally legitimate ‘‘religion.’’
As the affidavit attests, I agreed to serve, but only after some explora-
tion of the matter (and after a younger brother who is the head of liti-
gation for a major law firm in a large Midwestern city warned that
questions asked of me were not invitations for fifty-minute lectures). In
any case, my first obligation as a witness was to prepare an ‘‘Expert
Witness Report’’ (see Appendix 1) to alert the judge and opposing
counsel to my bona fides and my position on the issues in question.
Frankly, I was proud of this first dip into legal waters, and I confess
that I was expecting compliments. Certainly I was not prepared for the
onslaught that ensued. Much to my surprise, I had violated a basic rule
of the witness role by presuming to instruct the court on matters of
law rather than remaining within the narrow confines of my nonlegal
expertise.
The judge was so unhappy that he leaked word to court bystanders
and the press that I was likely to be disqualified. Opposing counsel
described me as ‘‘an affront to the Court,’’ and formally moved ‘‘to
strike’’ me as a witness. However, the plaintiff’s attorney was able to per-
suade the judge to consider a second memo from me in response to his
concerns and those of opposing counsel. Chastened, I went back to work
and produced Affidavit of N. J. Demerath III in Response to COSTCO’s
Motion to Strike Plaintiff’s Expert Witness Designation and as Supplemental
Report (see Appendix 2).
For whatever reason, the judge relented. In the aggressive language
of the court, I narrowly avoided being ‘‘struck,’’ and now I was to be
‘‘deposed.’’ On September 22, 2003, Lynn A. Kappelman, a lawyer
from the opposing law firm, made the two-hour drive from Boston to
examine, test, and challenge me as a witness with the plaintiff’s attor-
ney, Michael Shea, also present in a conference room that he provided.
Once I was sworn in, the deposition took more than three hours.
Attorney Kappelman apparently did her job well; she took the offensive
from the start and was alternately combative and dismissive throughout.
254 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
The definitional changes experienced over the past forty years have
been major. But they also leave major questions in their wake. There is
no doubt that constraints on free exercise have been substantially loos-
ened, and this can only be a gain for adherents of movements such as
the Church of Body Modification. But beyond my allegiance as an
expert witness, I have a gnawing sense of solutions begetting problems.
Accordingly, I want to conclude by considering three potential problem
areas involving first, a looming reassessment of the relationship
between establishment and free exercise clauses; second, a needed shift
from a psychological to a more sociological conception of the sacred;
and third, the implications of moving not only from ‘‘religion’’ to the
‘‘sacred’’ but ultimately from the sacred to the ‘‘secular.’’
CONCLUSION
This chapter began with the confessions of an inexperienced expert
witness in a case involving an employee who claimed a violation of her
freedom of religion because she was required to remove a facial adorn-
ment despite her involvement in the Church of Body Modification.
I agreed to testify that the CBM qualified as a religion despite its seem-
ing unconventionality. As it happened, both the church’s and the plain-
tiff’s religious status were accepted, though the defense was ultimately
granted summary judgment by the First Circuit Court of Appeals on
the grounds that the accommodation requested of the employer would
have constituted an ‘‘undue hardship.’’ A further appeal to the U.S.
Supreme Court was not heard.
In reflecting on the case and its implications, my conclusions as an
analyst differ somewhat from my position as a witness. In both roles, I
find that the CBM qualifies for free exercise. But as an analyst I have
reservations about the definitions that have guided the courts over the
past forty years. Although I certainly approve of the increasing respect
granted the First Amendment’s establishment clause, I have two reser-
vations about the extent to which the door has been opened to free
exercise: one, because the implicit psychological model of ‘‘sincerely
held belief’’ needs to be placed in social—and dare I say it, sociologi-
cal—context; the other because decisions may soon be reaching not
only beyond narrow religion to the broader category of the deserving
sacred but also beyond the genuinely sacred to the still broader but
Defining Religion and Modifying Religious ‘‘Bodies’’ 261
much less deserving category of the secular. At the end of the day and
the end of this chapter, I should declare my grudging respect for the
courts’ apparent determination to leave definitions implicit. Judicial
discretion can be an important precondition for wise decisions.
REFERENCES
Adams, Arlin M., and Charles Emmerich. 1990. A nation dedicated to religious
liberty: The constitutional heritage of the religious clauses. Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press.
Berger, Peter. 1967. The sacred canopy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Christiano, Kevin, William Swatos, and Peter Kevisto. 2002. The Sociology of reli-
gion: Contemporary developments. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira.
Claborn, David. 2007. Can the states increase religious freedom if they try? Judicial
and legislative effects on religious actor success in the state courts. Ph.D. Disser-
tation. Dept. Of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Demerath, N. J., III. 1965. Social class in American protestantism. Chicago: Rand
McNally.
———. 1992. A bridging of faiths: Religion and politics in a New England city.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2001. Crossing the Gods: World religions and wordly politics. New Bruns-
wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
———. 2007. Secularization and sacralization deconstructed and reconstructed.
In Handbook for the sociology of religion. eds. James Beckford and
N. J. Demerath, III. London: Sage Publishing.
Demerath, N. J., III., and Phillip E. Hammond. 1976. Religion in social context.
New York: Random House.
Demerath, N. J., III., and Rhys Williams. 1984. ‘‘The separation of church and
state: Notes on a mythical past and an uncertain future.’’ Society 21/4
(June-July): 3–10.
Drackman, Donald L. 1991. Church-state constitutional issues: Making sense of the
establishment clause. New York: Greenwood Press.
Durkheim, Emile. 1912 (1995). The elementary forms of the religious life. Trans. by
Karen Fields. New York: Free Press.
Farnsley, Arthur E., III, N. J. Demerath, III, et al. 2004. Sacred circles and public
squares: The multicentering of American Religion. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Glock, Charles Y., and Rodney Stark. 1967. Religion and society in tension. Chicago:
Rand McNally.
Gunn, T. Jeremy. 2003. The complexity of religion and the definition
of ‘‘religion’’ in international law.’’ Harvard Human Rights Journal 16:189–
215.
Hammond, Phillip E., David Machacek, and Eric Mazur. 2004. Religion on trial:
How Supreme Court trends threaten the freedom of conscience in America. Wal-
nut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.
Hargrove, Barbara. 1979. The sociology of religion. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth
Publishing.
262 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
APPENDIX 1
Expert Witness Report
On May 1, (2003), attorney Michael Shea contacted me about the
possibility of serving as an expert witness in the case of Kimberly Clout-
ier vs. COSTCO. He needed to know more about my experience and
credentials, and I briefly reviewed them for him. I was unaware of the
case, and he briefly reviewed it for me. Subsequently, I sent him a copy
of my curriculum vitae (c.v.). He sent me materials bearing on the case,
including pertinent documents from the Church of Body Modification,
U.S. District Court, and the Massachusetts Commission against Dis-
crimination, plus a letter and motions from the defendant’s attorneys
Seyfarth and Shaw dated 9/20/01, 1/17/03, and 1/21/03; Kimberly
Cloutier’s letter to the U.S. EEOC as of 10/16/2001 (and the EEOC’s
determination of 5/8/02) and her plaintiff’s affidavit to U.S. District
Court of 1/28/03.
On Wednesday, May 7, we agreed that I would join the case for a
fee of $100 per hour, and I have not billed or received a retainer on this
case to date (n.b. nor did I ever collect a fee). In what follows, I shall
briefly review my experience and expertise in the area, indicate my
acquaintance with the Church of Body Modification and the principals
involved, and state my position on the matters at issue. In addition to
attaching my c.v., I should also note that I have not served as an expert
witness in this or any other area during the last four years.
Personal Qualifications: For the past 40 years, I have been an active
scholar and teacher in the field of sociology. My publications include sev-
eral scores of published articles, and I have been author or co-author—
editor or co-editor—of some eleven books with another due next year.
Defining Religion and Modifying Religious ‘‘Bodies’’ 263
changed. While the courts seemed to know intuitively that there had to
be some limits, it was difficult to know where to draw them, and there
was no clear legal definition of religion on which to lean.
Recently a solution has emerged from social scientific research on
religion. In emphasizing what religions ‘‘do’’ rather than what religions
‘‘are,’’ it asks about the chief functions that all religions fulfill for their
followers and what binds followers to the practices and traditions that
compel them. Reflecting a consensus among social scientists in this
area, religion may be defined as ‘‘any shared sense of sacred meaning
that is ritually enacted and communally reinforced through a like-
minded group or organization.’’ Clearly this describes more than a
purely individual conviction. It places individuals within a community
whose commitments are shared and whose sense of mutual support
offers important affirmation. The criteria of sacred meaning, ritual
activity, and communal belonging can be found in every faith, ranging
from the most traditional and familiar churches to less conventional
forms that are no less saliently sacred for their members.
On the basis of the evidence at hand and based on my education
and experience, I find to a reasonable degree of social scientific certainty
that the Church of Body Modification qualifies as a religion. Like many
other non-conventional religions, CBM does indeed nurture shared
sacred meanings that depend upon members’ participation in common
rituals such as body piercing and tattooing. Although formally only
some four years old, the national organization and its local groups now
have approximately 1,000 members. According to its president, its
members often voice two common sentiments. The first reports a ‘‘spir-
itual inner peace’’ provided by experiencing the modification process
and displaying its results; the second expresses a sense of ‘‘strong per-
sonal support’’ that comes from involvement in the church itself. It is
also important to note that Ms. Cloutier’s membership in the CBM pre-
dates her employment termination and subsequent events.
Still, it is not unusual for outsiders to find the practices of religious
groups strange and even threatening. In fact, this is more the rule than
the exception for new religious movements. It certainly characterized
the struggles of the first Christian sect at the hands of generally hostile
bystanders. Moreover, the physical body is commonly implicated in
religious rituals, and bodily modification itself has taken myriad forms
in various religions. These forms may include the long-term effects of
extreme fasting and sensory deprivation, circumcision (both male and
female), celibacy and its various techniques, ritual hair and beard styl-
ings, body building, hook swinging, flagellation, scarification, amputa-
tions, and even suicide, including memetic crucifixions.
Although it may seem difficult to imagine that a U.S. legislative body
might have a group like the CBM in mind when crafting statutes con-
cerning religion, both the First Amendment’s establishment clause noted
Defining Religion and Modifying Religious ‘‘Bodies’’ 265
APPENDIX 2
Affidavit of N. J. Demerath III in Response to COSTCO’s
Motion to Strike Plaintiff’s Expert Witness Designation and
as Supplemental Report
I, N. J. Demerath III, do depose and say the following, based on my
personal knowledge, information, and belief, which I believe to be true.
Specifically, I respectfully disagree with all four basic premises on
which the motion rests; namely, questions of fact, of methodology, of
law, and of prejudice.
1. Questions of Fact: The defense asserts that any expertise I might
have would be unnecessary because whether a practice is religious is a
matter of ‘‘common sense’’ and ‘‘nearly every citizen . . . [is] familiar
with the concept of religion and is readily able to determine whether a
given set of beliefs constitutes a religion.’’ With all due respect, I dis-
agree on three counts. First, religion is not just a matter of ‘‘beliefs’’ as
the quote indicates. Adherents often hold to patterns of meaning even
Defining Religion and Modifying Religious ‘‘Bodies’’ 267
without the kind of cognitive conviction that the term ‘‘belief’’ implies.
Moreover, belief is only one aspect of religion, and understanding reli-
gion requires an appreciation of how its several dimensions relate to
each other, as in the core social science definition provided in my ini-
tial report and repeated below. Second, in assessing such matters, com-
mon sense alone can be more of a problem than a solution. Most
citizens have a view of religion that is highly colored by the types of
religions to which they have been exposed––for example, Christians by
Christianity, Protestants by Protestantism, and even particular sect and
cult members by the particular sects and cults they have experienced.
Third, assuming that a social scientifically grounded knowledge of the
rich variety of experiences that are genuinely ‘‘religious’’ is preferable
to a conception of religion that is constrained by a layman’s familiarity,
I offer assistance based on forty years of research and scholarship in
the field. I have studied a wide breadth of American faiths and prac-
tices, including some that are new and some that are old, some that
are large and some that are small, and some that originated in this
nation and some that have come from elsewhere to find a home here.
In addition to analyzing various forms of both Catholics and Protes-
tants in the U.S., I have devoted special research to groups ranging
from the American Ethical Culture Society to the Buddhist Soka Gokai
Movement that began in Japan and spread westward.
2. Questions of Methodology: The defense suggests that any claim I
might have to expertise is obviated by my lack of any scientific method-
ology and that my interpretations are purely matters of personal option
‘‘premised not on any sociological principle, but on a 1997 amendment
to M.G.L. c. 151B.’’ Here too I respectfully disagree. First, as I was
at pains to indicate in my earlier report, my judgment rests on well-
established sociological principles, including a consensual definition of
religion that emphasizes what religions ‘‘do’’ rather than what religions
‘‘are.’’ This definition invokes three basic criteria that constitute a meth-
odology of assessment, and I went on to show how sacred meanings, rit-
ual enactment, and communal support are all present in the Church of
Body Modification. It is important to understand that my definition and
its criteria represent a summary statement of a very large body of social
scientific work on religion that has converged upon such a ‘‘functional’’
definition over the past half-century. I myself contributed to the devel-
opment in my 1976 co-authored text, ‘‘Religion in Social Context.’’ But
there are many works worth citing, some of which I drew upon in the
work above, others which I have benefitted from more recently, most of
which begin with a discussion of definitions, and all of which reflect
general agreement on the basic conception of religion at issue. A repre-
sentative list would include Charles Glock and Rodney Stark, Religion
and Society in Tension (Rand McNally, 1967); Peter Berger, Sacred Canopy
(Doubleday, 1967); J. Milton Yinger, The Scientific Study of Religion
268 Issues, Concepts, and Definitions
EDITOR
CONTRIBUTORS
Volume 2
Global Expressions
Edited by
PHIL ZUCKERMAN
Praeger Perspectives
PRAEGER
An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC
Copyright 2010 by Phil Zuckerman
In 1972, almost forty years ago, Colin Campbell, then a lecturer at the
University of York, published a book titled Toward a Sociology of Irreli-
gion.1 The inside jacket cover dubbed it ‘‘the first serious study of the
social phenomenon of the rejection of religion.’’ In this groundbreaking
treatise, Campbell observed that sociologists have ‘‘entirely ignored irreli-
gion.’’2 He sought to vigorously address this major lacuna by calling for a
new focus of study within sociology, that is, the study of people who live
their lives indifferent to, without, or in opposition to religion. Campbell
began his work by pondering why it is that sociologists have ignored sec-
ularity over the years, and he then went on to broach a variety of signifi-
cant topics ripe for inquiry and attention: the role antireligious and/or
humanist movements play in spreading secularization within society; the
various forms and definitions of irreligion; irreligion and morality; irreli-
gion and politics; the social functions of irreligion, and so on. Campbell’s
work remains significant for its insights, its thoughtfulness, and its incon-
trovertible prescience. But what is perhaps most striking about the work
is this: it fell on deaf ears. Campbell’s call for a widespread sociological
analysis of irreligion went largely unheeded.
The publication of this two-volume set seeks to redress that regretta-
ble outcome, to hear and to heed Campbell’s call, and to finally take
seriously the social scientific task of exploring, investigating, document-
ing, and analyzing various aspects of atheism and secularity. The
authors of the chapters contained in this collection have attempted to
viii Introduction
do just that and thereby offer studies of irreligiosity with the same
level of interest and rigor that social scientists have devoted to study-
ing the topic of religiosity for well over a century.
While bemoaning the dearth of scholarship on atheism, irreligion,
and secularity that has typified the social sciences,3 it must also be
acknowledged that a significant amount of academic writing and scholar-
ship has in fact been devoted to the topic of secularization—the historical
process whereby religion weakens, fades, or loses its hegemonic domi-
nance or public significance. A plethora of scholars have been aggres-
sively debating secularization for years.4 Despite the impressive amount
that has been published on secularization, nearly all of it—at least that I
am aware of—is generally theoretical, typological, or broadly historical in
nature, and doesn’t actually deal with secular life or atheism as they are
actually lived, expressed, or experienced by irreligious men and women
in the here and now. Nor does the cottage industry of scholarship on or
about secularization entail a direct focus on the social, anthropological,
and/or psychological particulars of how secularity actually manifests
itself or ‘‘plays itself out’’ in the contemporary world.
As with work on secularization, when it comes to the advocacy of
atheism—or the debunking of religion—there’s also a lot out there, to be
sure. Thousands of books, essays, and articles have been published since
the days of David Hume (1711–1776) and Baron D’Holbach (1723–1789),
which argue against theism, critique the Bible, deride religion, harangue
clergy, and/or promote naturalism, materialism, agnosticism, humanism,
freethought, and so on. Most recently, a spate of best sellers have been
published in this formidable vein, including The End of Faith: Religion,
Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004) by Sam Harris,5 God Is Not Great:
How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) by Christopher Hitchens,6 and The
God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins7—the last of which has sold over
1.5 million copies as of this writing. These books, however, are not studies
of atheists and/or secular people, per se. They are distinctly polemical
works with the expressed goal of convincing people that theism is false
and/or that religion is a bad or harmful thing. Such endeavors, however
thought provoking, are not social science. Nor are they meant to be. Lest
the reader be confused, this point bears stressing: the advocacy of atheism
and/or the urging of secularity are not to be mistaken for the social-
scientific study of atheism and secularity—just as one wouldn’t confuse
works that advocate faith and religion with those that seek to study,
explain, or analyze faith and religion. And as stated above, when it comes
to the advocacy of atheism and secularity, one finds a rich, diverse, and
undeniably copious corpus of work. But when it comes to the study and
analysis of atheism and secularity, one doesn’t find much. As William
Sims Bainbridge recently lamented, ‘‘we know surprisingly little about
Atheism from a social-scientific perspective.’’8
Introduction ix
That said, for one to suggest that absolutely no social science has
been undertaken devoted to the study of atheism or secularity since
Campbell’s call would be untrue. In fact, several years just prior to the
publication of Campbell’s book, N. J. Demerath wrote what may very
well be the first sociological investigations of irreligion ever published
in academic journals; one, coauthored with Victor Thiessen and pub-
lished in 1966, was an article on the Freie Gemeinde, a small free-
thought movement in Wisconsin and the other, published in 1969, was
an article on the Society for Ethical Culture and the American Rational-
ist Federation.9 Also in 1969, Armand Mauss published an article on reli-
gious defection among Mormons.10 And one year prior to the publication
of Campbell’s book, Rocco Caporale and Antonio Gumelli edited a vol-
ume titled The Culture of Unbelief, which was an assemblage of papers
delivered at a symposium held in Rome on the very topic of the lack of re-
ligious belief in the contemporary world. Most of the papers in this publi-
cation, however, tended to be highly tentative and/or speculative, for as
one contributor noted, there is an ‘‘appalling lack of empirical data on
unbelief’’ and ‘‘we do not know enough about the phenomenon of unbe-
lief to formulate even a minimum inventory of validated propositions
that may constitute the basis of further analysis.’’11 While a slew of stud-
ies emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with a focus on apostasy,12 aside from
these and a few additional disparate books and articles,13 in the words of
Talal Asad, ‘‘social scientists . . . have paid scarcely any attention to the
idea of the secular.’’14
That sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists have largely
neglected the study of secularity is truly remarkable, especially given
the fact that secular, irreligious, nonreligious, and antireligious men
and women have always existed.15 Even Rodney Stark and Roger Finke
can admit that atheism is ‘‘probably as old as religion.’’16 Today, we know
that atheists and secular folk represent a large slice of humanity; one
recent (and conservative) estimate of nonbelievers in God places the num-
ber somewhere between 500 million and 750 million people worldwide.17
And if the category were to be widened to include those who self-identify
as simply ‘‘nonreligious’’ or ‘‘unreligious,’’ these numbers would no
doubt increase dramatically. The fact is, the portion of humans who reject,
have no interest in, or are indifferent to belief in God and/or religion is
not limited to some miniscule batch of angry deviants or disgruntled ‘‘vil-
lage atheists.’’ On the contrary, for if our estimates are correct, non-
believers in God as a worldwide group come in fourth place after
Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in terms of the global ranking of com-
monly held belief systems. Put another way, there are 58 times as many
nonbelievers in God as there are Mormons, 35 times as many non-
believers in God as there are Sikhs, and twice as many nonbelievers in
God as there are Buddhists.
x Introduction
NOTES
1. Colin Campbell, Toward a Sociology of Irreligion (New York: Heider and
Heider, 1972).
2. Ibid., 8.
3. In the words of Benjamin Beit-Hallhami: ‘‘Those who shaped the modern
human sciences have been preoccupied with explaining the phenomena of reli-
gion and religiosity. Accounting for the absence of religious faith has never
been of much concern to them.’’ Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, ‘‘Atheists: A Psycho-
logical Profile,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 300.
4. For some major works on secularization, see Karel Dobbelaere, Seculari-
zation: An Analysis at Three Levels (Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2002); William
Swatos and Daniel Olson, The Secularization Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2000); Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford,
UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2002); Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the
World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.
Eerdmans, 1999); David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (New York:
Harper and Row, 1978); Peter Glasner, The Sociology of Secularization: A Critique
of a Concept. (London: Routledge of Kegan Paul, 1977); Peter Berger, The Sacred
Canopy (New York: Anchor, 1967).
5. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
(New York; W.W. Norton, 2004).
6. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
(New York: Twelve, 2007).
7. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
8. William Sims Bainbridge, ‘‘Atheism,’’ Interdisciplinary Journal of Research
on Religion 1 (2005): 3.
9. N. J. Demerath and Victor Theissen, ‘‘On Spitting against the Wind:
Organizational Precariousness and American Irreligion,’’ The American Journal
of Sociology 7, no. 6 (1966): 674–87; N. J. Demerath, ‘‘A-Religion, and the Rise of
the Religion-less Church: Two Case Studies in Organizational Convergence,’’
Sociological Analysis 30, no. 4 (Winter 1969): 191–203.
10. Armand Mauss, ‘‘Dimensions of Religious Defection,’’ Review of Religious
Research 10, no. 3 (1969): 128–35.
11. Rocco Carorale and Antonio Grumelli, eds., The Culture of Un-Belief
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), 3–4.
12. Including David G. Bromley, ed., Falling From the Faith: The Causes and
Consequences of Religious Apostasy (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1988);
David Caplovitz and Fred Sherrow, The Religious Drop-Outs: Apostasy among
College Graduates (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1977); Roger Louis
xii Introduction
How many Americans do not believe in God? Not very many, according
to the polls. The 2006 General Social Survey (GSS) found that 2.2 percent
of its respondents declared they ‘‘do not believe in God,’’ and 4.3 percent
stated they did not know if God exists. A 2008 Pew Research Center sur-
vey reported that atheists accounted for only 1.6 percent of the sample
and agnostics 2.4 percent. So nonbelievers embody but a little of the
American population. Furthermore, the masses are hardly swarming to
their ranks. In 1988–1991, when the GSS first asked the question, 1.9 per-
cent said they did not believe in God, compared to 2.2 percent 15 years
later, and 4.1 percent were agnostics, compared with 4.3 percent in 2006.
Secularism, the disregarding of religious concerns whatever one’s
belief about the supernatural, runs a bit thicker, with 6.3 percent of the
PEW sample saying they had no religion at all and could care less.
Another 5.8 percent also had no affiliation but stated they were reli-
gious in some way. And the number of unaffiliated ‘‘Nones’’ has been
growing over time. Five percent of first GSS, conducted in 1972, said
they were Nones. In 2006 the figure topped 16 percent. This tripling of
people stiff-arming organized religion signals a noteworthy shift in
American religious attitudes.
Furthermore, some of the ‘‘religiously affiliated’’—by far the largest
group in the polls—affiliate in name only. Many people call themselves
‘‘Protestant,’’ ‘‘Catholic,’’ or ‘‘Jew’’ for cultural or family reasons, but
scrupulously avoid going to church, showing up for only the most im-
portant religious holidays and for marrying and burying. The 2006 GSS
found that most Americans (53 percent) seldom or never attend
2 Global Expressions
1. That is a thinking, self-aware being, not just some physical force like the
‘‘Big Bang’’?
2. That is almighty: that can do anything it decides to do?
3. That is eternal: that always was and always will be?
4. That intentionally created the universe for its own purposes?
5. That is constantly aware of our individual lives and hears our prayers?
6. That is all-loving and all-good?
7. That will judge us after we die, sending some to Heaven and others to
Hell?
these are not supernatural entities in the usual sense. Thus the active
American atheists denied the existence of any sort of divine being.
friends, and to their minister. They pray for guidance and read the
Bible. Not surprisingly, almost all their doubts are allayed—if not
directly answered.
Other students take a more two-sided approach to the issue. They
too seek out believers, but they also talk to disbelieving peers and
teachers, and they read up on scientific findings and Bertram Russell.
Most of all, they seem determined to hammer out a real decision, to
make up their own minds on the matter, whereas the ‘‘one-siders’’
appear mostly searching for reassurance so they will not have to con-
front the issue. When all is said and done, many two-siders continue to
believe in God. But some do not. Almost all the students who became
nonbelievers had made two-sided searches.
Amazing Apostates
Why do some ‘‘two-side searchers’’ stop believing in God? We can get
insight from interviews of ‘‘Amazing Apostate’’ Canadian students. Like
some of the active American atheists we are trying to understand, they
had come from very religious backgrounds, and yet they had rejected the
family faith and become nonbelievers by the time they entered college.
The decision had often cost them plenty, even shunning and disownment
by their families, losing their best friends, and becoming social pariahs in
their communities. Why on earth then did they do it?
Over and over again, these students said they wanted to believe what
their families believed, but they could not make themselves do it
because ‘‘It’s too unbelievable!’’ What made it so unbelievable then?
After all, almost everyone else accepts it!
The disbeliefs basically arose ‘‘internally’’ from the student’s knowl-
edge of his religion. The Bible seemed to overflow with contradictions—
sometimes in successive verses. It hardly smacked of a competent editor,
much less a supreme being. Furthermore the classic arguments for the
existence of God crumbled when given a good shake. The reasoning
behind the Uncaused Cause, for example, turned out to be circular, self-
contradictory, and incapable of demonstrating even a conscious god,
much less a benign one. The ‘‘argument from order’’ assumed that
because some things obviously had a conscious builder, all things must,
and so on. Furthermore, so much of the religion’s teachings flew in the
face of scientific discovery.
When the Amazing Apostates brought these concerns to their
parents, teachers, or ministers, they were given unsatisfying stock
answers. Or the elders told them to have faith, that unquestioning faith
was the highest virtue. Or the grown-ups chastened them for even hav-
ing the thoughts. It was wrong to ask questions; Satan was obviously
working on them. They must not let others know they had wondered
about such things.
6 Global Expressions
The problem was that they had usually been told their religion
topped all others because it was the true religion. Their teachers had
made quite a point of that; everything they taught was so deeply, so
totally, so fundamentally true, they said. So truth was the bottom line,
not the teachings. In these students such instruction had, it seemed,
sparked a desire for the truth that became more important, ultimately,
than all the pressures to have faith. When their religion failed by the
criterion it had itself established, these students felt almost helpless to
do anything but reject it. In short, the Amazing Apostates had taken
their religion too seriously, been influenced by it too much, to continue
believing in it. Socialization had trumped itself.
deeply planted in them, that if they abandoned God they would burn
forever in the hottest flames of Hell. So they said they would love to
return to the bosom of Abraham, but they just could not make them-
selves do it. It takes an uncommon amount of courage to take that
stand, and that is probably another reason why disbelief is so rare.
(Incidentally, this study also investigated ‘‘Amazing Believers’’: stu-
dents with no religious background who nonetheless became very fer-
vent Christians. In contrast to the Amazing Apostates, the Amazing
Believers typically joined a religion to meet emotional needs. For exam-
ple, they became terrified of death or became depressed over the mess
they had made of their lives. Also unlike the apostates, who typically
worked things out alone in their own minds, the Amazing Believers
were usually ‘‘brought to God’’ by peers who belonged to church
youth groups. The feeling of acceptance, love, and community support
led them to join the religion, not a voice from above, Pascal’s Wager,
or an airtight syllogism. Indeed, often they did not know much about
what the religion taught and had to learn what they now believed.)
Zealotry
Active atheists might also be very zealous, attempting to convince
others there is no God. Indeed, their opponents commonly speak of ‘‘the
atheist agenda,’’ perceiving challenges to school prayer and so on as part
of a vast, long-range effort to destroy religion in the United States. So
the survey had three measures of missionary zeal. In one, the atheist
was asked what he would do if a Christian teenager experiencing reli-
gious doubts came to him for advice. Most (62 percent) responded they
would have thumped the drum for atheism—some softly (‘‘I would
have told her why I became an atheist’’), some loudly (‘‘I’d tell her reli-
gion was ridiculous.’’). Most (51 percent) would have wanted the teen to
become an atheist, but a smaller number (42 percent) said they would
actually try to convert the teen to atheism.
The second measure of zealotry simply asked the atheists what they
had taught their own children regarding religion. About 20 percent
said they had directly tried to pass on their disbelief in God. The rest
said they wanted their children to make up their own minds, not just
copy them. So here the atheists looked positively nonzealous.
The third measure of zealotry involved school prayer in which
the atheists were asked to react to the following proposition. ‘‘Suppose
a law were passed requiring strenuous teaching in public schools
against belief in God and religion. Beginning in kindergarten, all
children would be taught that belief in God is unsupported by logic
and science and that traditional religions are based on unreliable
scriptures and outdated principles. All children would eventually be
Atheism and Secularity in North America 9
Religious ethnocentrism
The active American atheists were also asked to rate various reli-
gious groups on a 0–100 scale. Not surprisingly, they gave their highest
marks (90) to atheists and their second-highest (60) to agnostics. On the
other hand, they give very, very low ratings (0–10) to religious funda-
mentalists, be they Christians, Jews, or Muslims. The data reveal a
strong streak of ‘‘Us versus Them’’ ethnocentrism in the active atheists,
which is hardly amazing given how often they battle fundamentalists
over various issues.
races of people clearly do not have the natural intelligence and ‘get up
and go’ of the white race,’’ and ‘‘Black people as a rule are, by their
nature, more violent than white people are.’’
Parent atheists were also asked if they would like to see nonbelief
taught in public schools. None of them said he would. And the parents
also answered a Zealotry scale, which asks people how much they pro-
mote their basic outlook on life through items such as, ‘‘I try to explain
my outlook to others at every opportunity,’’ and ‘‘I think every sensible
person should agree with this outlook, once it has been explained.’’
Atheists had the second-lowest score in the sample.
Giving to charity. The Canadian parents were also asked what per-
cent of their income they gave to charities. (The question said not to
count gifts to one’s church or to church activities such as tuition to
church schools or support of missionary work—but they could count
gifts to religion-sponsored aid programs.) According to their reports,
atheists gave the least (1.7 percent of their income) to social charities of
all the groups in the study.
14 Global Expressions
Happiness. Finally, parents were asked how happy they were in gen-
eral, on a 0–6 scale. Atheists had the lowest self-rating of happiness of
all the groups (3.6, between ‘‘moderately’’ and ‘‘pretty’’ happy.)
Summary. One cannot assume that these results would apply to per-
fectly ordinary middle-aged Canadian atheists, much less American
ones. But they do provide a point of comparison for the findings on
active American atheists. The atheist parents seem as dogmatic as the
active Americans. They showed even less inclination to proselytize,
and the parents proved much less religiously ethnocentric. Within the
Canadian parent sample, the atheists scored low on all these measures.
The parent studies used a broader range of measures than the
American survey and suggest what atheists in general might be like.
First they are very uninclined—as most people would surmise—to fol-
low the established authorities in society. Compared with others, athe-
ists show little prejudice against traditional targets of discrimination.
They do not see the world as a scary place and cannot be easily pan-
icked into supporting the destruction of constitutional freedoms. They
(obviously) have little inclination to conform to group norms. In many
respects, they seem to be good democratic citizens. But in two ways at
least they do not shine: they are not very charitable, and (as was sug-
gested in the studies of the active American atheists and Amazing
Apostates), they are not particularly happy.
Ordinary Agnostics
Many agnostics appeared in the Canadian parent samples—more
than three times the number of atheists, which again corresponds to
the results obtained in national polls. How did they become agnostics,
and what are they like?
Origins of agnosticism
Agnostics, like atheists, tended to be guys (54 percent), and they had
14 years of education compared with the atheists’ 15. When asked, they
declared they were agnostics rather than atheists or theists. Their 85 per-
cent ‘‘no’’ answers to the Seven Attributes of God questions show they
clearly do not believe in the traditional God; but the residual 15 percent
‘‘yes’’ answers show they maintain a little wiggle room on the issue.
Only 11 percent of the agnostic parents had come from nonreligious
homes, and overall they had experienced only slightly more religious
upbringings than the future atheists had. So the agnostics, like the
atheists, usually had theistic parents who seldom went to church,
prayed as a family, and so on. But more than twice as many agnostics
as atheists (16 versus 6 percent) had highly religious backgrounds.
Atheism and Secularity in North America 15
Personalities of agnostics
In general, agnostic and atheistic parents mustered very similar
scores on the personality tests. On all of the measures described earlier,
when the atheists came in lowest on a trait, the agnostics finished sec-
ond lowest. When the atheists scored second lowest, it was the agnos-
tics who beat them out. Usually the differences were trivial and not
‘‘statistically significant.’’ Recall, for example, that 0 percent of the
atheist parents wanted nonbelief taught in public schools. Well, only 1
percent of the agnostics did. You cannot get a more trivial difference
than that.
Bigger gaps existed however and should be noted. Atheists scored sig-
nificantly lower in being authoritarian followers than agnostics did. This
makes sense, because atheists take a bigger step away from the estab-
lished, authority-blessed norm than agnostics do. Atheists also notched
significantly lower scores on prejudice against homosexuals and ethnic/
racial minorities. Agnostics in turn proved significantly less dogmatic
than atheists on all the measures used. For example, although 64 percent
of the atheists said they would be unmoved by ancient scrolls supporting
the Gospels, only 38 percent of the agnostics said this. This also makes
sense, as agnostics have not declared there is no God. And although par-
ent atheists appeared markedly nonzealous, the agnostics predictably
wound up even lower. One does not find many ‘‘Agnostics Clubs.’’
Agnostics, like atheists, reported giving 1.7 percent of their income
to social charities. They also appeared a little happier, with an average
of 4.0 (‘‘Pretty happy’’) on the 0–6 percent scale.
THEISTS
Inactive Theists
Origins of believing in God yet being ‘‘unchurched’’
Inactive theists, who say they believe in God but almost never go to
church, made up the largest group in the parent sample—again reflect-
ing a result found in national polls. In fact, if you throw in the 20–25
percent who were atheists or agnostics, you have accounted for about
60 percent of the survey. Thus most of the parents were nonbelievers
or believers who for most purposes might as well be nonbelievers.
Nonbelievers do not stand nearly as isolated as one might think.
Most (57 percent) of the inactive theists were females, and they went
to school for 12 years on the average. They said they believed in the
traditional God, with 74 percent of their answers to the Seven Attrib-
utes questions being yes, compared with only 15 percent for the agnos-
tics and 1 percent for the atheists. What was their biggest hesitation
about the deity? Nearly half did not think God would judge them after
they died, which may have helped them sleep in on Sundays.
The inactive theists had notably more religious upbringings than the
atheists or agnostics. A sizeable number of them (27 percent) even came
from highly religious homes. So why did they end up Nones or at best
names on the parish roll who would not even get a participation award?
The ‘‘inactives’’ almost never went to church—which they made
clear on the Doubts scale—because of the people they encountered
there. Some lay persons and clergy members pressured others to
believe what they believed and often seemed to be hypocrites and prej-
udiced. Religion thus did not appear to make people better; if any-
thing, it seemed to provide springboards for being worse. The church
experience itself drove these members out of the congregation.
These disclosures by the inactives reinforce the results of an earlier
study that focused on parents who decided not to raise their children
in the family religion—and thus to break a tradition that usually went
back many generations. Most of these religious dropouts said they quit
because of problems with their churches, not because doubts arose
about God. Most of all, they spotted too much hypocrisy in the church
community. People talked a good game on Sunday and put on a pious
display, but then they acted otherwise the rest of the week—sometimes
before they even exited the church parking lot. Also, many parishion-
ers and some of the clergy were intolerant of others on racial, ethnic,
religious, and sexual orientation grounds, as well services became bor-
ing, it seemed the church was always asking for money, the social
norm of going to church every week was fading away, and so on.
The dropouts’ dissatisfaction with the religious experience had usu-
ally begun in their teen years. Obviously they had not just been going
Atheism and Secularity in North America 17
through a youthful ‘‘phase,’’ for now in their late forties, they seldom
darkened a church door. Most of them doubted they would ever
become religious again. And of course, as a direct consequence of their
loss of interest, nearly all of their children had secular upbringings: the
rich seedbed for agnosticism and atheism.
Regular Church-Goers
Origins
A little over a quarter of the parents said they attended religious
services at least three times per week, qualifying as regular church
goers. Again 56 percent were women, and the regularly attending
parents had gone to school for 13 years on the average. They had the
most traditional view of God, with 88 percent of their answers to the
18 Global Expressions
Seven Attributes questions being Yes. They came from more religious
backgrounds, by far, than any other group in the sample. Most of them
(58 percent) had very religious upbringings. They also had the fewest
doubts of any of the subgroups.
Authoritarianism
Scores on the scale that measures a tendency to be an authoritarian
follower can range from 20 to 180. The atheists averaged 51, and the
fundamentalists placed over twice as high at 135.
Prejudice against minorities could also vary from 20 to 180. A smaller
difference emerged between the two groups here, 64 versus 84—but an
Atheism and Secularity in North America 19
Summary
The data make it clear that, within this population at least, atheists
and strong fundamentalists are cut from very different cloth. As well,
do not the findings challenge the common notion that belief in God is
necessary for moral behavior? True, the fundamentalists did give more
to charity, and while nonbelievers can probably live with the realiza-
tion that they would be happier if they became deeply religious, it
would be interesting to see how they explain the difference in charita-
ble giving. But on the other hand, one might be interested in seeing
how fundamentalists deal with the fact that, when tested, atheists
showed more integrity, open-mindedness, acceptance of others, inde-
pendence, and so on than fundamentalists did, who showed instead
double standards, closed-mindedness, prejudice, and authoritarianism.
NOTES
1. Several studies are involved. Most of the findings reported in this chapter
came from a 2002 survey answered by 836 parents of introductory psychology
students at the University of Manitoba. These results are summarized on page
127 of Atheists, by Bruce Hunsberger and Bob Altemeyer. A second study
involved 638 similar parents who answered a booklet in 2005. It included the
Zealotry Scale, the Group Cohesiveness Scale, the Dangerous World Scale, sup-
port for abolishing the Charter of Rights and Liberties, and the measures of
giving to charity and happiness. As well, a 1999 study of 634 parents provided
the data on religious dropouts reported toward the end of the chapter.
REFERENCES
Altemeyer, Bob, and Bruce Hunsberger. 1997. Amazing conversions: Why some
turn to faith & others abandon religion. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
General Social Survey (GSS). 2006. National Opinion Research Center (NORC),
University of Chicago. http://www.norc.org/GSS+Website/ (accessed Au-
gust 27, 2009).
Hunsberger, Bruce, and Bob Altemyer. 2006. Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of
America’s Nonbelievers. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Pew Research Center for People & the Press. 2008. Pew Forum on Religion and
the Public Life. http://religions.pewforum.org/ (accessed August 27, 2009).
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Chapter 2
JAPANESE RELIGIOUSNESS
Though this is not the place for a detailed description of contempo-
rary Japanese religiousness, we cannot discuss atheism or secularity
without mentioning some of the core characteristics of what it means
to be religious in Japan.
For many scholars of religion in Japan, the most common aspects
include (1) a focus on practices and rites over doctrines, theology, or
Atheism and Secularity in Modern Japan 25
the not religious, or the sacred from the profane. For example, many
describe acts such as ancestor veneration and visits to Shinto shrines or
Buddhist temples as ‘‘traditions’’ or ‘‘customs’’ (Fitzgerald 2003;
Omura 1996), so it is difficult to categorize them as religious or not. As
expected, this confounds the study of secularity and atheism in Japan,
and I address these concerns throughout the chapter.
From the early 1600s until 1868, the government favored Buddhism
over Shinto in terms of political connections and economic support.
Shinto, on the other hand, remained important for the (then politically
powerless) imperial family. When Emperor Meiji was given control of
Japan from a rather weak shogun in 1867, he and his advisors decided
to support Shinto instead of Buddhism. Shinto myths and legends pro-
vided support for the emperor’s right to rule by tracing his ancestry to
Japan’s alleged first emperor in 660 BCE and more importantly to the
Sun Goddess, Amaterasu no O kami. Buddhism, on the other hand,
was imported from Korea and China, and though it had been widely
accepted by the people and supported by governments past, it did not
offer the same kinds of nationalistic support that Shinto could provide.
This was also the first time that Shinto and Buddhism were officially
separated. For centuries, the two religious traditions were practiced
concurrently. Kami were considered guardians or were seen as mani-
festations of Buddhist deities at Buddhist temples, and Shinto shrines
conducted Buddhist rituals for buddhas alongside worship of kami.
Thus, when the Meiji government decided to favor Shinto over Bud-
dhism, it forced the temples and shrines to choose one or the other as
their ‘‘official’’ religion.
A third major change of this period was the creation of State Shinto.
The purpose of this move was to allow the government to use the sup-
port of Shinto for nationalistic purposes while still maintaining a sepa-
ration of church and state. By officially developing a ‘‘nonreligious’’
branch of Shinto, the government created a secular means by which the
people could show their patriotism to the country and their loyalty to
the emperor. In reality, as some have argued, this secularization process
was not wholly successful, and Shinto—its priests and shrines—benefited
very little from and even disapproved of this type of political support
(Breen and Teeuwen 2000; Earhart 1974; Shimazono 2006). Shinto
priests were not always the main players in the creation of State Shinto,
and Sect Shinto (the ‘‘religious’’ branch of Shinto) ranked lower in sup-
port and influence. To make matters worse, the early Meiji period saw
serious division between several Shinto sects, and they were unable to
assert themselves as a unified voice (Murakami 1983).
Overall, these changes led to significant losses in religious authority
for both Buddhism and Shinto, and no other religious groups replaced
their influence. When Buddhism lost political and financial support,
thousands of temples were closed, priests lost their livelihoods, and
Buddhism became less socially influential. There were even attempts to
eradicate Buddhism and its teachings (Sharf 1995). Additionally, with-
out forced registration at temples,2 Buddhism lost community support,
financial and otherwise.
Shinto did not fair much better. On the surface, the creation of State
Shinto added to Shinto’s authority in Japan; however, its restructuring
Atheism and Secularity in Modern Japan 29
(Noriyoshi 1996). For the past 60 years especially, the main interaction
between Japanese individuals and Buddhist priests has been limited to
funeral and postfuneral services (Covell 2005; Earhart 1974; Tamaru 2000).
Since the seventh century, Shinto and Buddhism had supported and
were supported by the court, state, and aristocracy (Takayama 1998).
Japan’s modernization period has seen a distinct separation of religion
and politics, and it is clear that differentiation has occurred, particularly
in the past 140 years. Coupled with intense urbanization that began in
the 1960s and 1970s, these two major religions are still struggling—
particularly in rural areas across the country where temples and shrines
have been abandoned (Ishii 1996). Additionally, Christianity and New
Religions have not replaced Shinto or Buddhism in terms of political
influence. At the macro level, Japan has secularized significantly.
Having said that, it is worth noting a few important exceptions to
this general trend. For instance, one political party that has strong—
albeit ‘‘unofficial’’—ties with a religious organization is the New
Komeito.3 This party is affiliated with S oka Gakkai, a New Religion
that grew tremendously in the 1960s. In the 2009 elections, the New
Komeito remained the third most powerful political party in terms of
Lower and Upper Diet seats (out of seven established parties). Argu-
ably, Japan is moving closer to a two-party system, though (Govella
and Vogel 2008), and the New K omeito has not gained the kinds of
governmental ties that Shinto and Buddhism once experienced.
Another prominent exception is the recurrent link between Yasukuni
Shrine and official support from elected politicians. Yasukuni is a
Shinto shrine dedicated to war dead, including war criminals from
World War II. Thus, governmental support is interpreted by many as
both a violation of the separation of church and state mandated by the
Japanese constitution and a political offense to Koreans, Chinese, and
other nationals who suffered under Japanese control during the war.
Since 1956 various nationalist groups have been encouraging govern-
ment leaders and the emperor to rekindle their (financial and political)
ties with Yasukuni—with varying degrees of success (Hardacre 1989).
Recently, this issue returned to prominence when Japan’s Prime Minis-
ter Junichiro Koizumi (April 2001 to September 2006) made repeated
visits to the site. Though he is only one of many prime ministers who
have visited the shrine since the 1970s (Nelson 2003), Koizumi’s visits
served as a very contemporary reminder that religious organizations
continue to garner support from elected officials (also Deans 2007).
By no means are these examples exhaustive. As Hardacre (2005) has
shown, religious organizations have also been influential in very recent
attempts to make constitutional revisions. Still, these links are some-
what sporadic and almost always met with trepidation by the general
population. Distrust of religious organizations has not waned signifi-
cantly since the end of the war, and many Japanese are outwardly
Atheism and Secularity in Modern Japan 31
concerned with official ties between religions and the government. For
these reasons, the differentiation process has been rather sweeping in
contemporary Japan at the macro level.
the New Year safely and wipe their slates clean and to pay respects to
their ancestors and the recently departed. A 1984 survey revealed that
81 percent of the sample visited a shrine or temple at New Years, and
89 percent made pilgrimages to their ancestral tombs in August (Okada
1994, 606). Other events such as Shinto rituals for the purification and
safe development of seven-, five-, and three-year-olds (shichi-go-san)
and purification rites for adults who are in particularly inauspicious
years of their lives (yakudoshi) are also popular.
Presently, data are not available to examine long-term trends con-
cerning whether or not these shrine- and temple-related activities have
declined or escalated in recent decades. The fact that they remain com-
mon, though, is a strong indicator that Japanese religious practices, val-
ues, and beliefs remain influential in society and for the individual.
Though religious organizations do not maintain the amount of political
sway they once enjoyed, they retain influence at the cultural and indi-
vidual levels.
Table 2.1
Religious affiliation, 2000–2003 and 2005
Table 2.2
Recent statistics on religious beliefs and practices
AVS H&F
N¼1000 N¼333
1. There’s a mysterious power in Nature — 71.99%
2. It is important to respect ancestors — 87.86%
3. There is something like fate that goes — 71.64%
beyond human powers
4. Kami/hotokeà protect me — 40.59%
5. Kami/hotokeà help me when I am troubled — 28.55%
6. Kami/hotokeà curse me — 24.82%
7. When I pray, I am purified and at peace — 56.70%
8. I get comfort from religion 73.70%* 25.27%
9. Kami/hotokeà exist 62.60%* 47.48%
10. There is an afterlife 46.54%* —
11. Souls/spirits (tamashii) exist 64.02%*
12. I own a kamidana (Shinto shrine) — 70.90%*
13. I own a butsudan (ancestral/Buddhist altar) — 39.70%*
14. I pray, meditate, or contemplate 27.87%* 53.74%
Notes: These percentages do not include missing data. Due to nonresponse, sample sizes
vary somewhat per question. Percentages for the H & F are weighted to reflect true popu-
lation and age ranges of Kyoto Prefecture residents in 2005.
à
Kami are loosely translated as god(s), deities, or spirits; hotoke can be translated as
ancestors or buddhas.
*
Indicates that response categories are Yes or No; otherwise, they are combined percentages
of Agree and Agree somewhat. Though kami and hotoke are not identical, it is common for
surveys in Japan to ask about both simultaneously rather than in separate questions.
Atheism and Secularity in Modern Japan 35
Table 2.3
Changes in beliefs over time (WVS 1981–2000)
Table 2.4
Religious identification
who identified themselves as atheist in the AVS, WVS, and H&F data
sets. Interestingly, there are some important distinctions in the results
of these three data sets. There are also some noteworthy similarities.
In these models, the age category includes individuals 20 years old
and older (18 and older in the WVS), and I created two dummied con-
trols for whether respondents are married (1 ¼ married and 0 ¼
divorced, single, widowed, etc.) and whether they live in urban areas
(1 ¼ largest cities/other cities, 0 ¼ towns or villages). Education in the
AVS is measured by age ranges (14 and younger, 15–18, 19–22, and 23
years and older) at which respondents completed their formal educa-
tions (range ¼ 1–4, mean ¼ 2.43), and the other data sets report the
highest levels of education achieved (WVS range ¼ 1–9, mean ¼ 6.79;
H&F range ¼ 1–5, mean ¼ 2.59). Income measures total household
income and is also coded differently for the datasets (AVS range ¼ 1–
11, mean ¼ 5.31; WVS range ¼ 1–10, mean ¼ 4.98; H&F range ¼ 1–9,
mean ¼ 5.08). There was substantial nonresponse for this question in
the AVS (25.30 percent), so I created a new income variable that
includes the mean of the original income to replace the missing data.
An Income_miss variable is included in the AVS model to account for
this change. Except for the income in the AVS, missing values were
deleted using list-wise deletion, and the WVS and H&F models include
standardized weights.
As Table 2.5 illustrates, Japanese atheists are much more likely to be
men than women and more likely to be young than old. Based on the
odds ratios, men are 1.67 (AVS), 2.25 (WVS), or 2.54 (H&F) times more
likely than women to identify as atheists. Also, with each unit increase
in age, respondents are 18 percent less likely to be atheists in the AVS
data and 4 percent less likely in the H&F data. Age is not significantly
correlated with atheist identity for the WVS sample. Beyond that, none
of the other AVS variables are significantly related. The H&F data,
however, indicate that education is a positive predictor (OR ¼ 1.74),
and income (OR ¼ 0.61), married (OR ¼ 0.37), and urban (OR ¼ 0.36)
are negatively related. Interestingly, the urban category is positively
linked to atheism in the WVS data (OR ¼ 1.50).
Of these findings, perhaps the most surprising is that H&F respon-
dents who live in urban areas are significantly less likely than those
in smaller towns or villages to identify as atheists. Those in rural
areas tend to be more traditional in thought and action, so this find-
ing is counterintuitive. It is possible that the substantial decline in the
number of religious institutions in rural areas explains this phenom-
enon in part. It is also not clear why this varies per dataset. One ex-
planation might be that a majority of the WVS sample (53.88 percent)
reported living in cities with over 150,000 people (coded as urban),
whereas a smaller percentage (47.71) of the H&F sample live in urban
areas.
Atheism and Secularity in Modern Japan 39
Table 2.5
Binary logistic regression coefficients and odds ratios for
predicting atheist identification in Japan
b OR b OR b OR
Intercept 1.62*** — 2.22*** — 1.08 —
(.49) (.53) (1.32)
Male .51** 1.67 .81*** 2.25 .93* 2.54
(.19) (.20) (.43)
Age .19** .82 .01 .99 .04** .96
(.07) (.01) (.01)
Education .15 1.17 .04 1.04 .56* 1.74
(.14) (.06) (.27)
Income .01 .99 .03 1.03 .49*** .61
(.04) (.03) (.14)
Inc_miss .03 1.03 — — — —
(.22)
Married .24 .79 .34 .71 1.00* .37
(.22) (.23) (.43)
Urban .15 1.16 .37* 1.45 1.01* .36
(.22) — (.19) — (.52) —
N 926 — 1051 — 296 —
Max-rescaled R2 .05 .06 .38
LR w2 26.28*** — 34.21*** — 69.50*** —
(7) (6) (6)
2 Log Likelihood 777.42 — 779.39 — 165.13 —
b Unstandardized coefficient (standard error)
OR Odds Ratio
*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001 (two-tailed test)
Sources: 2001 AVS, 2000 WVS, 2007 H&F
Because this is the first time multivariate analysis has been used
to examine sociodemographic correlates of atheism in Japan, these
results are important despite some of the conflicting statistics. Overall,
we can see that atheists in Japan tend to be younger men, but it is not
yet clear what other characteristics they might have. Much more
research is needed on this topic before we can make more conclusive
arguments.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
In this chapter I have presented historical, ethnographic, and quanti-
tative data to provide a general overview of atheism and secularity in
contemporary Japan. I argued that secular forces have been most visi-
ble at the macro level—especially since the late 1800s—but not as much
40 Global Expressions
ceremony, for example. Most likely, the average Japanese would not
equate ancestor veneration, festival involvement, or the belief in kami
with the tea ceremony. They are all traditional and full of rituals, how-
ever, the former more obviously include the supernatural or are linked
to religious organizations.
In Japan, belief and belonging are not absolutes, and underlying
these ‘‘traditions’’ and ‘‘customs’’ are recognizably ‘‘religious’’ sym-
bols, actions, and beliefs that continue to permeate (though often lie
latent in) Japanese society. Secularity in Japan thus becomes muddled
and difficult to research, and people like the woman I described at the
beginning of this chapter and the Zen atheist are not unusual. In Japan,
one can deny the existence of kami but fear their retribution or be an
atheist by personal choice and Buddhist by ancestral ties. Ultimately,
we should rely on how individuals label themselves—rather than place
labels upon them, and in the future we should ask what they mean by
‘‘traditional’’ and ‘‘customary’’ to understand better the extent to
which ‘‘religion’’ plays a part in these behaviors and beliefs.
NOTES
1. Japanese New Religions include those established in the past 150 years or
so. Often, they include beliefs and practices taken from Buddhism, Shinto, and
other traditions.
2. During the Tokugawa era (1603–1868), Japanese families were required to
register with a local Buddhist temple. This served as a census and was used to
reinforce the ban on Christianity because individuals had to step on an image
of Jesus Christ (fumie) and renounce Christianity (e.g., Covell 2005).
3. There is also a subgroup within Japan’s largest political party (the Liberal
Democratic Party) that has close connections with the Association of Shinto
Shrines, a secular entity that lobbies on behalf of Shinto and has been active
since 1969 (e.g., Hardacre 2005, 241).
4. The Japanese General Social Surveys (JGSS) are designed and carried out
at the Institute of Regional Studies at Osaka University of Commerce in collabo-
ration with the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo under the
direction of Ichiro Tanioka, Michio Nitta, Hiroki Sato, and Noriko Iwai with
Project Manager, Minae Osawa. The project is financially assisted by Gakujutsu
Frontier Grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science
and Technology for 1999–2005 academic years, and the datasets are compiled
with cooperation from the SSJ Data Archive, Information Center for Social Sci-
ence Research on Japan, Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo.
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Chapter 3
Baltic
Estonia Estonian 67.9% Lutheran
Russian 25.6%
Latvia Latvian 57.7% Lutheran
Russian 29.6%
Lithuania Lithuanian 83.4% Roman Catholic
Polish 6.7%
Russian 6.3%
Central Asia
Kazakhstan Kazakh (Qazaq) 53.4% Islamic (Sunni)
Russian 30%
Kyrgyzstan Kyrgyz 64.9% Islamic (Sunni)
Uzbek 13.8%
Russian 12.5%
other 5.7%
Tajikistan Tajik 79.9% Islamic (Sunni)
Uzbek 15.3%
Turkmenistan Turkmen 85% Islamic (Sunni)
Uzbek 5%
other 6%
Uzbekistan Uzbek 80% Islamic (Sunni)
Russian 5.5%
Tajik 5%
Southern Caucasus
Armenia Armenian 97.9% Armenian Apostolic Church
Azerbaijan Azeri 90.6% Islamic (Shi’a)1
Georgia Georgian 83.8% Georgian Orthodox
Azeri 6.5%
Armenian 5.7%
*
Source for ethnic composition data CIA World Factbook Web site. Groups comprising
less than 5% of population are not included.
1
Shortly following the U.S.S.R.’s collapse, it was estimated that 75 to 85 percent of Mus-
lims in Azerbaijan were Shi’a. Shireen T. Hunter, ‘‘Azerbaijan: search for industry and new
partners.’’ In Nations & Politics in the Soviet Successor States, edited by Ian Bremmer
and Ray Taras. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 237.
52 Global Expressions
Table 3.2
Growth of self-identifying atheists and nonreligious in USSR,
1900–1970
% Atheist* % Nonreligious
Central Asia
Kazakhstan 0.0 22.9 0.0 31.4
Kyrgyzstan 0.0 23.6 0.1 29.0
Tajikistan 0.0 14.3 0.2 19.4
Turkmenistan 0.0 14.6 0.1 20.3
Uzbekistan 0.0 16.9 0.0 25.1
Southern Caucasus
Armenia 0.0 23.0 0.1 38.4
Azerbaijan 0.0 14.5 0.0 19.3
Georgia 0.0 16.5 0.0 36.3
*
Data derived from Barrett, David B., George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, eds. World
Christian Encyclopedia: A comparative survey of churches and religions in the modern
world, second edition [Volume 1, The World by Countries: Religionists, Churches, Minis-
tries]. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Atheist Nonreligious
Mid-1990 Mid-2000 Mid-1990 Mid-2000
Percent Percent Percent Percent Percent Percent
pop. of 1970 pop. of 1990 Percent of 1970 Percent of 1990
Baltic
Estonia 12.7 45.7 10.9 14.2 27.1 9.7 25.1 7.4
Latvia 7.4 55.4 6.0 18.9 28.4 8.4 26.0 8.4
Lithuania 1.5 85.0 1.1 26.7 13.0 32.3 10.9 16.1
Central Asia
Kazakhstan 12.0 47.6 10.9 9.2 32.3 þ 2.9 29.3 9.3
Kyrgyzstan 9.6 59.3 6.3 34.4 24.2 16.5 21.6 10.7
Tajikistan 3.8 73.4 1.9 50.0 13.2 32.0 12.0 9.1
Turkmenistan 2.5 82.9 1.4 44.0 11.3 44.3 9.0 20.4
Uzbekistan 4.9 71.0 3.5 28.6 19.0 24.3 18.1 4.7
Southern Caucasus
Armenia 10.1 56.1 4.9 51.0 17.9 53.4 8.4 53.1
Azerbaijan 0.8 94.5 0.5 37.0 12.4 35.7 10.8 12.9
Georgia 4.4 73.0 2.7 38.6 17.2 52.6 15.3 11.0
*
Data derived from Barrett, David B., George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, eds. World Christian encyclopedia: A comparative survey of churches
and religions in the modern world, second edition [Volume 1, The World by Countries: Religionists, Churches, Ministries]. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2001.
Atheism and Secularity in the Former Soviet Union 57
Table 3.4
Percentage who believe in God and regularly attend church
Armenia* 86 30
Azerbaijan* 98 14
Georgia* 93 27
Belarus 83 15
Russian Federation 70 9
Ukraine 80 17
Estonia 51 11
Latvia 80 15
Lithuania 87 31
Kyrgyzstan 95 24
*
1995 wave of the European Values Survey and the World Values Survey. Data for all
other countries were collected in the 2000 wave of the European Values Survey and the
World Values Survey. Source: Halman et al. Changing Values and Beliefs in 85 Countries:
Trends from the Values Surveys from 1981 to 2004. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008.
Although the encounter he describes doesn’t fit the statistical trends illus-
trated in Table 3.4, it demonstrates how beliefs and actions are not neces-
sarily consistent. Eastern European scholars argue that Bishop Alfeyev’s
story is not so strange, if taking into account the historically and culturally
unique case of Soviet-led modernization. Individuals in post-Soviet soci-
eties may seek to reject communism (through baptism), yet still question
if they believe in God. Likewise, they may feel devoted to God, but not
express it in church attendance. In fact, scholars like Tomka contend that
this latter scenario only looks contradictory from Western perspectives
that rely on the use of ideal types and their own culturally-specific
60 Global Expressions
This issue [the constitutional right to freedom of expression and its legal
form, freedom of conscience] is largely underdeveloped in Russia, both
from scientific viewpoint as well as in the realm of constitutional princi-
ples. Hence, Russian legal system in this sphere is exclusively devoted to
regulating the activities of religious entities and their monitoring. . . .
[L]egislation, which should be directed at facilitating rights to freedom of
expression, is substituted by ‘‘particular religious’’ legislation that is
aimed at monitoring the activities of religious entities. This meets the
demands of certain power structures and the religious bureaucracy, but
not the society in general.55
Atheism and Secularity in the Former Soviet Union 63
CONCLUSION
This chapter describes the shared history of state-imposed atheism
in the republics within the USSR and the campaign’s inconsistencies.
It has examined how the laws on freedom of religion and conscious-
ness have been treated across the former Soviet Union, as well as the
dynamic nature of belief in God and religious practice since the sys-
tem’s collapse. It illustrates how the visionaries of the revolution, and
then more specifically of the antireligious campaign, had difficulty
reconciling the differences between their ideals (especially their hopes
that people would embrace these ideals without resistance) and the
everyday realities. People throughout the territory of the USSR were
vastly different culturally. Any efforts to standardize them only
heightened peoples’ sense of desiring a unique identity. Because reli-
gion was part of the tightly woven fabric of one’s experience and
daily way of life and because some national religions were active in
promoting these ideals for independence, the Soviet state was con-
stantly forced to either assert its antireligious efforts or to temporarily
retreat. The antireligious campaign’s seemingly clumsy and erratic
application seemed highly unsuccessful, as by mid-1990 a vast num-
ber of people throughout the republics claimed to believe in God. For
onlookers, this sharp rise in believers demonstrated the resilience of
religion and that the former USSR was in the midst of a religious
resurgence. However, what was also apparent was that this belief did
not directly lead to the typical indicators of religious participation.
Rather, the unique experience of being raised in a state-imposed athe-
ist society (each having its own cultural-historical experience) seems
to have led to eclectic expressions of religiosity. This chapter con-
cludes by pointing out that the campaign to build atheism in the
Soviet Union was not necessarily a complete failure. The number of
atheists and nonreligious is still quite large relative to most other soci-
eties in the world. There is also some indication the atheism that has
remained intact is not a relic of Soviet scientific atheism, but one
which seeks to build a post-Soviet society on the principles of free-
dom of consciousness valuing human rights.
NOTES
1. Paul Froese, ‘‘Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an Atheistic
Monopoly Failed.’’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43, no. 1 (2004): 35.
Atheism and Secularity in the Former Soviet Union 65
23. Ibid., 58. Bociurkiw prefers to define the existence of religious organiza-
tion (such as the Catholic Church in Lithuania) as evidence of dissident behav-
ior. He reasons, ‘‘religious dissent in the USSR may be defined as an overt
repudiation of the existing relationship between institutional religion and the
Soviet State, involving an explicit or implicit challenge to the legitimacy of the
norms and structures governing this relationship. . . . It also reflects the inevita-
ble ‘politicisation’ of religious dissent in the USSR resulting from the far-reach-
ing involvement of the political authorities in the conduct of internal affairs of
all officially recognized (‘registered’) religious groups, including the determina-
tion of the groups’ statutes and selection of their leaders.’’
24. Irena Borowik argues the organizational and structural traditions of the
Orthodox churches made it more difficult for them to sever links with the
Soviet state, and therefore they were vulnerable to co-optation. ‘‘Orthodoxy
Confronting the Collapse of Communism in Post-Soviet Countries,’’ Social Com-
pass 53, no. 2 (2006): 269.
25. Pedro Ramet, Cross and Commissar: The Politics of Religion in Eastern Europe
and the USSR (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 14.
26. Zrinscak, in fact, describes how she observed ‘‘people who were more
religious [in Croatia] tended not only to be more critical of the system but also
belonged to families that had undergone negative experiences of communism.’’
Sinisa Zrinscak, ‘‘Generations and Atheism: Patterns of Response to Commu-
nist Rule Among Different Generations and Countries.’’ Social Compass 51, no.
2 (2004): 221–234.
27. Hank Johnston, ‘‘Religio-Nationalist Subcultures under the Communists:
Comparisons from the Baltics, Transcaucasia, and Ukraine.’’ In Politics and
Religion in Central and Eastern Europe: Traditions and Transitions, ed. William H.
Swatos (London and Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994): 22–23.
28. Paul Froese, ‘‘ ‘I Am an Atheist and a Muslim’: Islam, Communism, and
Ideological Competition.’’ Journal of Church and State 47, no. 3 (2005).
29. Alexandre Bennigsen, ‘‘Islam in the Soviet Union: The Religious Factor
and the Nationality Problem in the Soviet Union.’’ In Religion and Atheism in
the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, ed. Bohdan R. Bociurkiw and John W. Strong
(Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1975): 91.
30. Paul Froese, The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment
in Secularization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2008), 103.
31. Ibid., 93.
32. Ibid., 95–96.
33. Yaacov Ro’i, ‘‘The Task of Creating the New Soviet Man: ‘Atheistic Prop-
aganda’ in the Soviet Muslim Areas.’’ Soviet Studies 36, no. 1 (1984): 27.
34. Ibid., 27–28.
35. Ibid., 32. Original quote found in an editorial piece in Pravda Vostoka
[The Truth of the East], October 23, 1981.
36. Ibid., 30.
37. Ibid., 32.
38. Yegor Gaidar, ‘‘The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil.’’ American Enterprise
Institute for Public Policy Research, 2007. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise
Institute. www.aei.org (accessed August 15, 2008), 4–5.
Atheism and Secularity in the Former Soviet Union 67
39. Paul A. Marshall, Religious Freedom in the World (Lanham, MD: The Row-
man & Littlefield Group, 2008), 411. The three Orthodox churches include
Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patri-
archate, and Ukrainian Orthodox Church Kiev Patriarchate.
40. Catherine Wanner, ‘‘Advocating New Moralities: Conversion to Evan-
gelicalism in Ukraine.’’ Religion, State & Society 31, no. 3 (2003): 285. Catherine
Wanner. Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press), 246–247.
41. Paul A. Marshall, Religious Freedom in the World, 180.
42. Ibid., 91.
43. Ibid., 344.
44. Ibid., 420.
45. Andrew M. Greeley, Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers), 2003; Andrew M. Greeley.
‘‘A Religious Revival in Russia?’’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33,
no. 3 (1994): 253–272.
46. Using the World Values Survey results over the 1990s, Norris and Ingle-
hart compare generations in their study of secularism in the former Soviet
Union as one solution to this deficiency in the data. Their statistical models
suggest that secularism is still growing in post-Soviet societies, finding a linear
relationship between age and secular beliefs. The results of their work contra-
dict the hypotheses associated with religious markets theory. Pippa Norris and
Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 2004.
47. Miklos Tomka, ‘‘Is Conventional Sociology of Religion Able to Deal with
Differences between Eastern and Western European Developments?’’ Social
Compass 53, no. 2 (2006): 251–265.
48. Larissa Titarenko, ‘‘On the Shifting Nature of Religion during the
Ongoing Post-Communist Transformation in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine,’’
Social Compass 55, no. 2 (2008): 244. Interestingly, these seemingly inconsistent
behaviors are even observed in the United States. In his fieldwork in Butte,
Montana, John Mihelich has found that many Butte Catholics would have their
fortunes told. Many themselves learned different ways to tell fortunes, such as
the art of reading tea leaves. John Mihelich, ‘‘Fortune in Butte’’ Interview data
from field research in Butte, Montana. Unpublished.
49. Melissa L. Caldwell, ‘‘A New Role for Religion in Russia’s New Con-
sumer Age: The Case of Moscow.’’ Religion, State & Society 33, no. 1 (2005): 25.
50. Ibid., 29.
51. Ibid. Also, Alex Vinikov, ‘‘Freedom of Religion and Faith-Based Philan-
thropy in Ukraine,’’ Seal: on-line resource for social economy and law professio-
nals working at European level. http://www.efc.be/cgi-bin/articlepublisher.pl?
filename=AV-SE-06-03-2.html (accessed June 10, 2008).
52. Leontina Hormel, ‘‘Family with Five Children Interview: November 27,
2002.’’ Field research notes in Komsomolsk, Ukraine. Unpublished.
53. Catherine Wanner. Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global
Evangelism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 181.
54. Data derived from David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M.
Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and
68 Global Expressions
Religions in the Modern World, 2nd ed., Vol. 1, The World by Countries: Religionists,
Churches, Ministries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
55. Liberty of Conscience Institute Web page. ‘‘About.’’ http://www.
atheism.ru/lci/about/?lang=eng (accessed June 10, 2008).
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid. and ‘‘Religion in Russia is Big Business—Russian Orthodox Church
Investments in Tobacco, Banking and Petroleum.’’ American Humanist Associ-
ation and the Gale Group. The Humanist 57, no. 5 (1997): 47.
58. Phil Zuckerman, ‘‘Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns.’’ In The
Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge UK: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2005), 58.
59. Loek Halman et al. Changing Values and Beliefs in 85 Countries: Trends
from the Values Surveys from 1981 to 2004 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), 186.
60. Ibid., 187.
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Atheism and Secularity in the Former Soviet Union 69
of time (Agbeti 1986). Not surprisingly, the areas where the Christian
faith became dominant included areas such as the Colony that came
under direct European rule. In the case of Ghana, this appears to be
the southern regions, even though in some parts of the North espe-
cially in the Dagare areas such as Nandom, Wa, and other places
where Catholic missionary activities were very prominent. Although
the great mass movement toward Christianity stopped, Christian faith
kept playing an important role in Nandom (van der Geest 2004).
Not only is Ghana a highly religious country, several studies have
also documented that religion has become a potent social force in both
public and private life.2 Pobee (1991), Kudadjie and Aboagye-Mensah
(1991), Ninsin and Drah (1987, 1991), and Yirenkyi (1999; 2000) have
examined the role of the Christian churches in the recent democratiza-
tion process in the country. Other scholars have also examined how
religion is influencing the behavior of Ghanaians, including for exam-
ple, contraceptive use (Addai 1999), HIV/AIDS behavior (Takyi 2003),
education (Takyi and Addai 2002), maternal child health behavior
(Gyimah, Takyi, and Tenkorang 2006), and fertility of couples (Gyimah,
Takyi, and Tenkorang 2008).
Even though the single largest bloc of religious adherents in Ghana
is Christian,3 some scholars have pointed to the changing religious
landscape in the country, with the traditional African Independent
Churches loosing a significant number of their members to other
denominations.4 Both Nukunya (1992) and Assimeng (1986) have sug-
gested that the growing popularity of these ‘‘new’’ Christian groups
reflect the growing disenchantment of the people with the monotony
of the mainline churches, and the fact that the new denominations
often use ‘‘healing’’ and ‘‘salvation’’ in their preaching, something that
appeal to the needs of an impoverished population who have been dis-
satisfied with their socioeconomic situation since the 1970s. Thus while
the mainline Protestant churches are relatively stable, although mem-
bers switch from churches within the Protestant denominations, the
Catholic Church in particular has lost about 2 percent of its members—
despite being still the church with most members.
Admittedly most Ghanaians consider themselves religious and
Christians; this generalization also masks the realities of the African re-
ligious landscape which is somewhat fluid and includes some people
who consider themselves as nonreligious, or atheists.5 Writing about
the religious landscape in Ghana, Pobee (1991) notes that while the reli-
gious context of Ghana for the most part consists of a combination of
various Christian denominations, Islam, and indigenous religious prac-
tices rooted in chieftaincy and family institutions, there are also some
Ghanaians who claim to be atheists, secular humanists, or agnostics.
Despite the fact that some Ghanaians self-report as unaffiliated with
any religious persuasion in the country, it is unfortunate that we know
Atheism and Secularity in Ghana 75
very little about this group of Ghanaians. This knowledge gap has some-
thing to do with the fact that most of the existing studies on African reli-
gions focus on the foreign-originated ones (Christianity and Islam), and
to some extent indigenous African belief systems, or what some scholars
refer to as African Traditional Religions (ATRs). Another possible reason
may have to do with the fact that in a highly religious society such as
Ghana, unaffiliated people may be stigmatized, hence may be less likely
to be visible as Christians and their Muslim counterparts. It is thus not
surprising that a review of the existing literature on religion suggests
that very little has been written about this population and it has been
virtually ignored in the discourse of religions in Africa. This is not
exactly the case with some parts of Europe and North America where
there is an increasing interest and a growing literature on atheism.6
Our main objective in this chapter then is to fill some of the gaps in
our knowledge about the African atheists or secular humanists in
Ghana, one of the most religious nations in West Africa. We are also
interested in exploring the magnitude or size of the atheist community
in that country. Our central questions in this chapter deal with Ghana-
ians who self-identify as atheists or non-believers. We pose some of the
following questions: How many atheists or secular people are there in
Ghana today? Have rates of atheism/secularism increased or decreased
in recent decades? Who are these Ghanaians who identify as atheist?
Are atheists most likely to come from a certain segment of society or
class? Is atheism discouraged by the government, if at all? Are there
atheists or secular organizations in Ghana? Do these organizations or
movements, if any, play a role in the political arena? Do atheists face
any challenges in the country today?
some of our survey respondents in 2008 did not find any inconsisten-
cies in claiming to be Christians and at the same time stating that they
do not believe in the existence of the Judeo-Christian God. However,
there are other traditional Christians who challenge the self-identification
by these Christians who claim to be atheists. According to these critics,
how can one call himself/herself a Christian without believing in
Christ, as God incarnate, ‘‘the ground of salvation’’? While some Gha-
naians debate these definitions about who is a Christian and who is
not, others both in the country and other societies do not find the term
atheist and the claim to be a Christian objectionable. Along these dis-
cussions Ghanaians are not unique. For example, in the United States,
some Unitarian-Universalists self-identify as Christians but do not
believe in God.
Another challenge faced by Ghanaian atheists has to do with other
peoples’ attitudes toward them. For example, during the field survey,
any time we introduced ourselves to people including university pro-
fessors and students and told them about the purpose of our research,
we were frequently informed that Ghanaians are generally reluctant to
identify themselves as atheists for fear of being ridiculed or stigmatized
by others. Those who called attention to this attitude always added
that atheists or secular humanists may not be physically attacked if
they identify themselves as atheists but may be criticized or ridiculed
by the community. In explaining this attitude, the people who talked
to us stated that since the overwhelming majority of Ghanaians are
Christians, the messages from some of the pulpits of these churches
indicate an urgency to convert non-Christians and that would include
atheists. Therefore, they pointed out that the appeals or the attacks are
not specifically aimed at atheists but at people who have not accepted
Christianity as the only true way by which people are saved. In sum,
the Christians are concerned about their salvation. Whatever interpreta-
tion is given to these attitudes from theists, specifically Christians,
there is no doubt that atheists are very concerned about the protection
of their freedom of expression, the protection of their democratic rights
as citizens, and their ability to make their own choices. We also learned
that the government has no stance on this issue and does not interfere
or harass atheists, or any religious groups for that matter. They all
agree that there are constitutional protections for all religions in the
nation. On the whole, Ghanaians generally believe that they have free-
dom to worship. Therefore any harassment, subtle or not, becomes a
matter of concern for those who see themselves as victims, especially
in a very democratic society like Ghana.
There is another view that claims that the whole idea of atheism is
foreign to Africans leading to the accusation that Ghanaian atheists
have been influenced by western culture. What these Christian critics
have ignored in their argument or fail to notice is that Christianity itself
Atheism and Secularity in Ghana 77
METHODS
Despite the limitations we have alluded to earlier for the scholar
studying atheism in Ghana, we have drawn on a limited set of data to
provide some insights into the atheists or secular humanist community
in that country. For this study, we relied on data from two main
sources. The first data comes from a survey conducted in Ghana in July
and August 2008 among a segment of Ghanaians including respondents
from the University of Ghana, Legon, some areas in Accra, Takoradi,
and also Keta and surrounding areas.7 With the help of trained research
assistants from the University of Ghana, those selected for the study
were interviewed on a host of questions dealing with religion and athe-
ism in Ghana. Of those interviewed (n ¼ 96), nearly half (49.5 percent)
were between the ages of 18 and 29, another 24 percent were between 30
and 40 years old. Two out of every three people surveyed was male
(68.8 percent). In addition, about 60 percent of our respondents had
some formal education beyond the primary level. This includes those
who said they had a secondary (high-school) education, had attended a
training college, or similar higher institutions such as a Technical school
or university. There were also professionals such as pharmacists, medical
78 Global Expressions
officers and managers, a soldier and a police officer and a farmer. Over-
all, slightly more than two-thirds of our sample were urban residents
(68.8 percent).
Because the first data set is limited in many ways (for example, it
was not broadly representative of Ghanaians and was a small sample
size), we decided to use a second data set that is nationally representa-
tive and has some information on religion in Ghana—albeit the ques-
tions did not ask about atheism. This data set is the Ghana
Demographic and Health Survey (GDHS) which have been conducted
since the mid-1980s. So far, four separate surveys have been conducted
as part of the GDHS—1988, 1993, 1998, and 2003. These cross-sectional
surveys (GDHS) were designed to provide policy makers with the most
up-to-date information on demographic and health processes in Ghana.
The sample employed a two-stage cluster sampling method using enu-
meration areas (EAs) as the sampling frame in identifying the women
who were interviewed. In all, about 150 EAs were used to identify
households from the various ecological zones, and rural and urban
localities. From these households, women aged 15–49 were surveyed.
Since the 1990s, men aged 15–59 have also been surveyed under the
auspices of the DHS. To better represent the population, the sample
was weighted using a weighting factor developed by DHS.
In addition to the demographic and health items—the main focus of
the DHS surveys, the GDHS also collected detailed information on the
respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics, including for example,
their age, education, place of residence, and religious affiliation. Reli-
gious affiliation was ascertained by asking the respondents the following
question: ‘‘What religion do you belong to?’’ Responses to this question
were used to construct a measure of religious affiliation or involvement
that had the following values: Catholics, Protestants, other Christians,
Muslims, traditionalists, and those who reported no religion. It is the
responses on religion that we use for our analysis. Since we are inter-
ested in the nonreligious group, we created a new variable which was
coded as ‘‘1’’ if the respondents said they were not affiliated with any
religious traditions in Ghana and ‘‘0’’ for all others.8 Because comparable
data that allow us to track changes over time are available only for the
women sample, the analysis we report here is restricted to women.9
FINDINGS
Results from our interviews, which involved both fixed-choice
responses and narrative accounts, provide some information about the
atheist community in Ghana. Since we were interested in getting infor-
mation about the atheist community, one of our questions asked them
to tell us how they describe themselves. The most cited definitions by
our respondents were: ‘‘no belief in the existence of God,’’ ‘‘having
Atheism and Secularity in Ghana 79
No Religion
No Religious Preference
Secular-Humanist
Atheist
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
53
52
51
50 Decreasing
Increasing
49
48
47
46
45
44
decreased in recent years, half of the respondents (50 percent) said that
based on their knowledge, they believe atheism is on the rise rather
than decline in Ghana (Figure 4.2).
On the question of why is it so difficult to obtain this information, the
first reason cited by our informants was the stigma previously discussed
that is attached to atheists, secular humanists, and freethinkers simply
because they do not believe in the existence of the Judeo-Christian God.
For those who claim a belief in other gods such as practitioners of Afri-
can Traditional Religions, their critics, especially Christians perceive
the traditional gods as idols and not gods and hope that one day these
traditionalists would convert and accept Christ as their savior. Others
had noticed or experienced some verbal criticisms from the pulpits or
from other religious leaders or organizations, or individuals against
atheists and secular humanists.
According to the respondents, some of whom were University of
Ghana students, there are no known atheist or secular-humanist associ-
ations on their campus or the other state-owned university campuses.
It is also not likely that they are at the other state universities. A num-
ber of the private universities are owned by churches and are not likely
places for these organizations though most of their students have no
affiliation with these universities they attend. Indeed, when asked
whether they knew of any organizations in the country that cater spe-
cifically to the interests of atheists, most of them (90 percent)
responded in the negative. Among the reasons cited for the absence of
an organization devoted to unaffiliated people in Ghana was the idea
that since most people do not want others to know of their private
Atheism and Secularity in Ghana 81
Table 4.1
Knowledge and views on atheism, 2008 Ghana atheists survey
% n
lives, there is no need to associate with such organizations that may ex-
pose them to the public. If atheists are reluctant to make their stands
open it means the stigma is intimidating them and therefore do not
want to expose themselves to ridicule. We probed such an observation
by inquiring about discrimination and stigmatization of nonreligious
believers in Ghana. While about 39 percent of the participants said they
were discriminated against, most of them said they face some form of
stigmatization in the country (see Table 4.1).
Overall, the findings from our survey suggest an absence of any reli-
able information about the size of the atheist community in Ghana. We
compensated for these data limitations by analyzing responses given
by a representative sample of women on their religious identity to pro-
vide some rough estimates of this population. In the four surveys that
have been conducted in Ghana as part of the Demographic and Health
82 Global Expressions
120
100
80
Affiliated
Percent
60 No affiliation
40
20
0
1988 1993 1998 2003
Marital Status
Never married 20.9 11.5 21.2 6.9 24.3 14.1 29.3 9.6
Currently married 69.2 78.9 68.3 84.9 64.0 74.4 61.5 80.4
Formerly married 9.9 9.6 10.5 8.2 11.7 11.5 9.2 10.0
Education
None 36.0 67.4 30.8 66.5 26.8 63.3 26.1 74.7
Elem 55.6 31.5 57.8 31.8 18.0 18.2 20.1 16.5
HS 7.3 1.1 9.6 1.5 52.8 18.5 51.0 8.8
PostHS 1.0 1.8 0.2 2.4 2.7
Ethnicity
Akan 55.3 36.2 52.5 28.8 54.8 37.6 51.8 27.1
Ga&Adg 9.2 6.2 8.6 3.5 8.4 6.4 8.4 4.0
Ewe 15.7 17.9 13.7 23.4 15.6 19.1 12.9 18.3
Mole&Dag 9.2 24.3 13.7 29.7 6.7 8.6 12.4 21.9
Others 10.6 15.4 11.5 14.5 14.5 28.3 14.6 28.7
Urban Residence
No 64.3 79.1 59.2 85.3 62.9 81.8 50.1 82.8
Yes 35.7 20.9 40.8 14.7 37.1 18.2 49.9 17.2
N 3957 531 4024 538 4529 314 5441 250
84 Global Expressions
of all Akans report some affiliation, among the unaffiliated also, they
represent slightly more than a third of the population (36.2 percent).
This pattern is to be expected as Akans account for nearly half of the
population in Ghana. The other groups with a sizable proportion of
unaffiliated women are Mole Dagbanis (24 percent) and Ewes (18 per-
cent). It is clear for all four survey years those rural women are more
likely to be unaffiliated compared to their urban folks. For the most
part, the pattern reported for the 1988 sample is similar to that of the
women surveyed in the subsequent years.
became atheists in the urban areas where they live. The survey had
actually indicated that majority of the respondents live in urban areas.
On the one hand, the Ghanaian religious arena indicates a sense in
which religion has lost some of its influence on the larger society. For
example, in the traditional past chiefs had tremendous power and
influence over their people and in the traditional religious arena they
were the symbols of religious authority. Although chiefs continue to
play constructive roles in their traditional areas, they no longer assert
the same powerful religio-cultural and political influence on their peo-
ple. Church organizations played similar powerful roles within their
church structures. However, today values of the larger society that are
reflected in the Ghanaian Constitution and in other areas of Ghanaian
life are not necessarily religious values. Politicians are not elected
based on any religious criteria. However, one may not be able to sepa-
rate religious moral values from political and other values that help
shape the society as a whole.
There are many social scientists who are still involved in the secu-
larization debate. For example, Swatos rightly points out that since the
‘‘1980s the concept of secularization has become a contested discussion
among scholars who debate its predictive and descriptive accuracy and
continued relevance in the postmodern world’’ (2006).
Following the secularization debate and its impact on religion, Berger
has noted that ‘‘the world today, with some exceptions is as furiously
religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever’’ (1992, 2;
cited in Roberts 2006, 310). One thing that is clear in Ghana and many
parts of Africa is that secularization has not shown any evidence of the
decline of religions. We also do not see any evidence that secularization
has any specific effect on the growth or decline of atheism in the coun-
try. Future research in this area is needed to fill the knowledge gap. Our
study shares a similar conclusion with Roberts, who states that the
movement toward a purely secular outlook is not an inevitable process
that spells a substantial and long-term decline of religion. He further
points out that rational theorists argue that secularization does not mean
a decline of religion, but it may entail a reformation of traditional reli-
gions and the spawning of new religious movements (2006, 313). There
is no doubt that some of the Catholic and Protestant churches are in
decline, but numerous Pentecostal or Charismatic churches have sprung
up, especially since the 1980s, in urban and rural areas in Ghana.
Among them are mega-churches that Ghana had never before seen.
CONCLUSIONS
Our focus in this study is to fill in some knowledge gaps about Afri-
can atheists, secular humanists, and freethinkers in Ghana. There is no
doubt that atheism has established some roots in Ghana. To a large
86 Global Expressions
NOTES
1. The growth is not reported among Christians only because there have been
widespread reports from the region about the growing influence of Islam as well.
2. More than 96 percent of the population surveyed in a 2000 Gallup Inter-
national poll considered themselves as religious (Gallup International 2000).
3. Christians in Ghana run the gamut of the various denominations, rang-
ing from mainline Protestants, Evangelicals, Catholics, African Independent
Churches, and Assemblies of God to Seventh Day Adventists.
4. Indeed besides the mainline Christian denominations (i.e., old estab-
lished churches) such as Protestants and Catholics, growth has risen in the
population of ‘‘other Christians’’ or denominations. The latter include a collec-
tion of groups that include African syncretic, and faith-healing organizations,
as well as charismatic and Pentecostal Churches, whose growth has been phe-
nomenal (Yirenkyi 1999; Gifford 1998).
5. We consider these people as Ghanaians who do not believe in God and
do not consider themselves religious.
6. The literature includes some of the following best-selling books: Richard
Dawkins, The God Delusion; Sam Harris, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian
Nation; Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
7. These people were not randomly selected and ranged in age between the
ages of 18 and 70.
8. We acknowledge the limitations in our using these unaffiliated women
as provided by the recoded GDHS files as proxy indicator for atheists.
Atheism and Secularity in Ghana 87
9. Data on men were collected in the 1993 survey, but it was limited to
only a select sample of men whose wives were interviewed. Since then,
detailed information about Ghanaian men has been collected, but given our in-
terest in looking at trends, these data are not included in our analysis. More-
over, existing studies also indicate that African women tend to be more
religious than their male counterparts, so we suspect that this restriction would
in no way affect the basic results of our study.
10. We acknowledge the potential limitations arising from our use of this
group of people to identify atheists, but given that there was a category for all
those who claim a belief in African traditional religions, we sincerely believe
that the unaffiliated ones are probably secularist.
11. This is true if we think the ‘‘nonreligious group’’ members are the same
as those who self-identified as atheists in the 2008 survey.
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Chapter 5
however, and when the revival began to lose momentum, so did the
movement for ‘‘secularism,’’ as Holyoake had named it. As passionate
religion fell out of fashion, so too did fervent denial of it. Secular soci-
eties declined in number and membership, and the movement gradu-
ally died down.7 Though public intellectuals like Bertrand Russell, A.
J. Ayer, and Chapham Cohen kept on denying God in their writing
and speeches, atheism as a movement lay dormant in Britain for deca-
des.8 But the stage had been set, and atheistic opinions had lodged
themselves in the British mind: as the twentieth century progressed,
British opinion on the subject evolved slowly and without fanfare to-
ward acceptance of atheism as a legitimate ideology.
By the time atheism resurfaced as one line of attack on the establish-
ment during the social revolution of the 1960s, it had been integrated
within a rationalistic moral philosophy and life stance dubbed ‘‘human-
ism.’’ One effect of this reframing trick was that the atheistic viewpoint no
longer appeared as a simple rejection of God or Christianity—and in fact,
many Christian moral tenets are mimicked in humanist ethics. When the
Anglican Church fought against the women’s and gay rights movements,
though, they were harshly rebuked on nonreligious moral grounds. The
British Humanist Association (BHA), the second of the two major secular
activist groups, was born during this revival of radical politics.9
The BHA, amalgamated from several different preexisting groups in
1963, is quite different in character from the NSS, which was founded
in an era with relatively few secular people. As a result, the main goal
of the NSS was tearing down the privileges afforded to religion; as
noted above, this is still its major stated objective.10 It is often seen as
more categorically antireligious than the BHA, which was founded
when far more people were ready to reject the reigning religious para-
digms and so could afford to be more conciliatory in its stance against
religion. The BHA merely had to voice the concerns of the many who
already supported their positions, rather than convince a religious
supermajority that it shouldn’t mix religion with politics.
Both organizations survive to this day, but as a result of the condi-
tions under which they were formed, the NSS focuses more on the pro-
tection of the secular from the abuse of the religious and the radical
separation of church and state, whereas the BHA seeks to provide con-
crete alternatives to religion, in the form of the humanist moral system
and replacement ceremonies, such as weddings, funerals, and baby-
namings. To put it a different way, the NSS is abolitionist toward
religion—they would get rid of it entirely––whereas the BHA is substi-
tutionist: they would replace it with something that has a similar func-
tion but different content. The memberships of both groups have
fluctuated in sync with the prominence of religion in public discourse,
but even at their heights, both could claim only a miniscule following
compared to that of the churches. Like many lobbying groups, however,
94 Global Expressions
they have a larger national presence and far more political influence
than their memberships would suggest.11
In 1965, a survey question asked respondents whether they would
vote for a prime minister who was otherwise qualified and represented
their preferred party, but who did not believe in God. Fifty-eight per-
cent of British voters answered that they would.12 This may seem low
at first, but it shows a stark contrast with the United States, where the
parallel figure at the time was below 20 percent;13 today, the United
States still polls with less than 50 percent of the voting public express-
ing confidence in an atheist candidate.14 By contrast, Britain’s Parlia-
mentary Humanist Group—with members across both houses and all
major parties—counts over 80 openly atheistic members of Parliament
among its ranks.15 Additionally, it is commonly accepted that certain
Labour leaders have been atheists, though they never made a point to
publicize their views.16 One commentator has written, rather aptly, that
if one considers that, in 1842, George Jacob Holyoake was jailed for profess-
ing atheism, but that 160 years later, in 2002, British atheism’s most press-
ing concern was its ongoing exclusion from Radio 4’s Thought for the Day
(allegedly a breach of human rights!), it becomes clear quite how much ac-
ceptance and toleration it has gained in such a relatively short time.17
Indeed, since the revival of the 1960s and 1970s, the radicalism associ-
ated with atheism has all but disappeared.
Instead, the British pride themselves on their self-proclaimed ‘‘mod-
eration,’’ tending to view both fundamentalist religion and ‘‘militant’’
or crusading atheism with skepticism, but being quite tolerant of any-
thing in between. Britons have become more ‘‘secular’’ in their every-
day lives (churchgoing, membership, and Sunday School enrollments
have all been in decline for over a century) but this doesn’t necessarily
mean an increased prominence for atheism. On the contrary, being
‘‘secular’’ often means simply not caring enough about religion either
to defend or deny it, so active atheism as a phenomenon is most often
a feature of particularly religious societies. Even the ‘‘New Atheists’’
who have appeared in the past decade—Hitchens, Dawkins, and the
rest—fit this trend: first, they have all appeared since 9/11 as religion
has become increasingly important to global society; and second, they
are largely based in America—even the British among them have fre-
quently directed their gaze across the pond.
In the Victorian era, with conservative evangelical churches attracting
huge crowds,18 there was a reaction that culminated in the founding of
the NSS. In an era when the Church was campaigning hard against an
onslaught of social reforms, the BHA pushed back. And in an era when
fundamentalist Islam is the newest perceived threat to Western culture,
the New Atheists are among those who have answered the call to fight
The Triumph of Indifference 95
the negative impact of religion. But for most of the time, between these
surges in religious fervor, British unbelief doesn’t have a particularly
fearsome enemy in the Anglican Church. In a society where earnest reli-
gion is often not taken seriously and where a religious prime minister
worries about being considered a ‘‘nutter,’’19 the motivation for atheists
to fight against the status quo is hardly compelling. When the twin pil-
lars of the monarchy and the Established Church, once the foundation
of British society, have become little more than decorative artifacts in
the eyes of most citizens, atheists have little to worry about.
Nevertheless, the British character is also deeply reverent; a distinctly
Burkean pathos is still present behind the ‘‘consumer society’’ that char-
acterizes modern-day Britain. The fact that the Monarchy and the Estab-
lished Church still exist at all speaks volumes about the quintessentially
British respect for authority and tradition, especially in light of the aboli-
tion of both institutions in many of its European neighbors. After all, the
current status of religion is only noticeably poor because of its former
prominence. It is still by far the most widely attended voluntary activ-
ity,20 and more than 70 percent of British people still identify, however
weakly, as Christian.21 Though church attendance is very low in com-
parison to former totals, there is a widespread feeling that religion—and
in particular the Church of England—is a good thing to have around.
Many parents strive to send their children to ‘‘faith’’ schools, where the
injection of religion into the daily routine is supposed to encourage a
more obedient and successful ‘‘ethos.’’22 A prayer before the opening of
the houses of Parliament, the presence of bishops in the House of Lords,
and the Queen’s role as the head of the church are all taken for granted
by a majority of Britons; though a few certainly question all three of
these practices, the tide shows no signs of turning against them.
In light of this conflicted attitude, Liberal Democratic leader Nick
Clegg was left in an awkward position as he both asserted his unbelief
and attempted to cast his position as neither extreme nor anti-Christian.
‘‘I have enormous respect for religious people,’’ he quickly explained,
and followed that by pledging to raise his children as Christians with
the help of his Catholic wife. To top it off, he maintained that though he
was not an ‘‘active’’ believer, he had an ‘‘open heart and an open mind’’
about the subject of religion.23 Clegg’s situation was not unlike that
of the British people, muddling through a confusing, mismatched set of
beliefs and rarely practicing and yet unwilling to give up the sense of
Christian-ness that has been central to the formation of British identity
and culture.
‘‘without’’ or ‘‘away from’’ God. Though we’ve just laid out a history
of distinctly avowed atheism, the truth is that in modern Britain, there
are many ways to live without God. Most obvious are the ‘‘out-and-
out’’ atheists just described, who are the always visible but also among
the smallest groups of the irreligious. But the biggest difference
between people, even just regarding their religious behavior, is not
their answer to the question of God. Even for many British believers,
the role that ‘‘God’’ plays is next to nothing. Some who consider them-
selves Christians may use this nominal category as an ethnic label
rather than a religious one.24 There are others for whom God has never
been a serious factor, and as a result, the very terminology of theism
and atheism might not be familiar to them. It is not just the avowed
atheists, but all of these people—and anyone in British society who can
be fairly called irreligious—that we wish to describe in this chapter.
Traditionally, there are three metrics that social scientists use to
measure religiosity: belief, behavior (or practice), and belonging (or
affiliation). One might say that people are ‘‘perfectly’’ religious if their
beliefs are strong and faithful to a tradition, if they practice in some
way on a regular basis, and if their religious affiliation is central to their
identity. Thus, we might measure irreligion by the absence of these
characteristics and paint the irreligious ideal as disbelieving, nonpractic-
ing, and unaffiliated. However, describing only those people who fit
either model would leave most Britons unaccounted for. That is, there
are plenty of ‘‘Anglicans’’ whose beliefs could hardly be called ortho-
dox, confirmed theists who never pray or attend church, and nonbe-
lievers who go to the occasional service and identify as Christians. Even
Richard Dawkins, probably the most famous living atheist, has called
himself a ‘‘cultural Christian.’’25 Classifying such people as either reli-
gious or irreligious can be dangerous, because it ignores the complex-
ities inherent in religious identification.
Each metric in itself is quite complex: we must attempt to gauge not
just whether beliefs, practices, and affiliations exist, but also whether
their existence is significant to the individuals and faith traditions
involved. Belief in supernatural entities, for example, is extremely high,
but belief in and understanding of the Trinity is drastically lower.
Clearly, the latter belief is a more significant identifier of religiosity
than the former. Measurement of behavior is also notoriously difficult,
as self-reported church-going is often more than twice as high as
observed attendance.
Finally, tracking belonging (that is, the number of people who iden-
tify as religious) might appear to be simpler than estimating belief and
practice, but it turns out that differences in the way the question is
asked can cause significant variation in levels of self-identification.
When a tick-box in the context of ethnicity and nationality, for instance,
prompts people to self-identify as ‘‘Church of England’’ or ‘‘Christian,’’
The Triumph of Indifference 97
the numbers for affiliation tend to be far higher than when the relevant
question is open-ended. In the 2007 British Social Attitudes survey,
which asks respondents if they consider themselves as ‘‘belonging to a
particular religion’’ in the context of a wide-ranging review of beliefs
and attitudes, fully 46 percent gave no religious identification. By con-
trast, less than 20 percent answered ‘‘none’’ in a Gallup survey asking,
among other census-type questions, ‘‘What is your religions denomina-
tion?’’ The only possible explanation is that the Christian affiliation of
at least a quarter of the population is so tenuous that it hinges on the
wording and context of the question.26
there is some religious or spiritual impulse in this woolly middle, but the
ambiguity surrounding it gives the social scientist reason to doubt its sig-
nificance.
One theory about such fuzzy fidelity explains that dwindling prac-
tice and membership in the church over the years is associated with
declining willingness to participate in all voluntary organizations,30
and that sweeping claims about the decline of religion overstate their
case. In this view, those with fuzzy fidelity are still Christians in most
of the relevant ways. It makes intuitive sense: if one obvious sign of a
supposed religious decline can be explained as a result not of detach-
ment from religion itself but simply as one more instance of a perva-
sive social phenomenon, then perhaps religion is not suffering the
drastic fall that is frequently ascribed to it.
However, this thesis depends on the assumption that practice is the
only declining variable—or that it is at least declining faster than the
others—and this is simply not the case. Belief in God has declined as
well, but more notably, those who still hold some sort of fuzzy fidelity
hold a different kind of belief than the traditionally religious. It is a
belief that often does not require them to go to church or pray with
any consistency. It is a belief that leaves them unsure of their affiliation
to the church. And it is a belief that often rejects major tenets of Chris-
tianity, replacing them with some combination of naturalism, alterna-
tive spirituality and indifference.
Another explanation of fuzzy fidelity comes from observers like Paul
Heelas, Linda Woodhead, and Colin Campbell, who take this tendency
toward alternative spiritualities as a sign of the ‘‘easternization of the
West’’ or ‘‘the spiritual revolution,’’ to use the titles of books by those
authors.31 A decline in traditional adherence accompanied by resilient
belief in the supernatural is explained with reference to the increase in
Eastern practices like Yoga and meditation. This view is also an alter-
native to traditional secularization narratives: Heelas et al. theorize that
some people are merely switching from one religious tradition to
another, rather than abandoning religion entirely. Even they concede,
however, that the rise in alternative spirituality is not enough to offset
the decline in traditional religiosity.
The most powerful explanation of the woolly middle phenomenon
is perhaps the most intuitive: Britons who make up this section of soci-
ety are between the religious and the irreligious temporally as well as
descriptively. In other words, the people who are now in the middle
have generally come from parents who are more religious than they
are and have children who will be, on average, less so. In this way,
fuzzy fidelity is merely a stepping stone between religion and irreligion
in an increasingly secular society.
This simplified narrative still misses something about the enormous
size of the middle and the persistence of certain characteristics within
The Triumph of Indifference 99
it; for example, both nominal Christianity and a belief in some sort of
God are maintained by almost everyone in this category. And while the
woolly middle is somewhere between the religious and the irreligious
in terms of religiosity, they tend to have less education and lower
incomes than both their religious and their irreligious compatriots.32
This suggests that there is something about higher levels of education
and income that lead people to a more definitive stance on religion (be
it pious or atheistic) and casts doubt on naive versions of the seculariza-
tion thesis predicting that higher education and income necessarily lead
to greater secularity. Instead, it seems, there is something distinctive
about this middle ground, the historical narrative that has led Britain to
its creation and the direction it is likely to take in the future.
going to church so often, but they will still identify with the religion of
their birth and often believe in the same God. Religious practice is
more immediate and has more competition than either belief or affilia-
tion; regular practice demands time and energy, while maintaining
belief and affiliation requires very little of either. In fact, a decision to
change beliefs or affiliation would probably take far more time and
energy than simply not thinking about them.38
When parents have drifted away from regular church attendance
and pray less in the home, their children will not take on the same
beliefs or affiliations as the parents did during their own childhoods. If
the children do take on some form of religiosity, it will tend to be of a
more confused variety. With less formal religious instruction and a
reduced emphasis on the importance of religious observance in their
formative years, most children of drifting parents will carry this con-
fused or reduced religiosity with them for the rest of their lives. An
ounce of behavioral drift on the part of a generation of parents will
lead to a pound of secularity in their children.
This narrative of behavioral drift leading to gaps in intergenerational
transmission explains the ‘‘how’’ of religious change, but not necessarily
the ‘‘why.’’ As we’ve noted, such religious change is not universal, so
why did it happen in Britain, in the twentieth century and not before,
and not in some other similar countries? In order for behavioral drift
away from religion to occur, a number of conditions must converge.
Most obviously, religious attendance must not be a compulsory activity.
Secular alternatives must also be available to satisfy at least some of the
other functions fulfilled by the church, especially during the crucial Sun-
day morning time slot. But most importantly, the religious environment
has to be such that nonattendance is socially acceptable. In nineteenth
century Britain, the first two assumptions came to fruition, but they also
did in the United States at roughly the same time, and the United States
has not experienced such rapid drift. A major reason the United King-
dom has diverged in the twentieth century from the United States, then,
is the substantial difference in the social acceptability of irreligion.
established but quite liberal and tolerant, at least since the nineteenth
century. William Wolf writes in ‘‘The Spirit of Anglicanism’’ that
The Anglican Church took on its present form after the Elizabethan settle-
ment, which was adopted primarily with a practical purpose; to persuade
people to stop killing each other after years of religious war. As a result,
it became the ‘‘church of reconciliation’’ between four distinct camps: the
Anglo-Catholics, the evangelical Protestants, and the liberal advocates
both of pure reason and of empiricism.45 The Church emphasizes histori-
cal ties and national identity over theoretical attachments, and individual
conscience over enforcement of dogma. In essence, Anglicanism is
extreme only in its breadth. Thus, the only defectors were those who
were so dogmatic that they could not accept its wealth of opinion.46
The Anglican Church was ripe for the behavioral drift that began in
the latter nineteenth century. When secular alternatives began to present
themselves, many Britons had no doctrinal allegiances pulling them back.
Neither was their nonattendance threatening to their identity or social sta-
tus, as they could still convincingly call themselves Anglicans in the
broadest sense. The default option was chosen widely, as defaults often
are, but with very little fervor. The Americans, forced to choose, would
commit strongly to a tradition, but the British, not made to think twice
about their religious choices, passively accepted the benign, tolerant
national default, and moved on with the rest of their lives. To drift away
from church for an American within a denomination was to withdraw
from the community and to remove a central fact of one’s identity. Laps-
ing from practice, for an Anglican in Britain, was a much less dramatic
affair, as he could keep both his identity and his community intact.
TRANSFORMING BELIEFS
Behavioral drift away from church attendance is the initial impetus
for change in this model, but soon afterward it is followed by a
decrease in religious belief and affiliation. Among the other conditions
that facilitate a decline in belief is the presence of public atheists as
examples for the general population. While we’ve established that
secularity in Britain often triumphs not through conscious decision-
making but through the slow evolution of behavior patterns and failure
of intergenerational transmission, there must be a few trendsetters in
The Triumph of Indifference 105
few reasons had yet been presented that would convince normal Brit-
ish citizens to reject God outright.
This is where the revolutionary social change posited by Brown
comes in. Although the 1960s did not see drastic shifts in any of the
variables used to measure religiosity, it did trigger cultural confronta-
tion and brought social attitudes up to date with the demographic real-
ities of a Britain that was far less religious than when those attitudes
were formed. For the first time since Bradlaugh’s day, people began to
seriously challenge the widespread assumption that religion, on the
whole, was a force for good, and because of demographic changes, the
religious climate this time was far more open to such public challenges.
This was the era of legal battles over restrictions on birth control, homo-
sexuality, and divorce, the onset of religious satire on public television,
and the hyper-sexual, drug-laden ‘‘summer of love,’’ all of which the
Church vehemently opposed.51 The second major wave of irreligious
movements began, and the BHA was founded amidst this fervor.
The movements eventually lost energy, but many of the changes
stuck. No longer was it generally assumed that the Church of England
had the answer to moral questions; rather, it was now often assumed
to have the wrong one. Its role morphed from definitive moral arbiter
to one voice among many. Even if it was (and is) still privileged, it is
certainly not the only voice that is taken seriously by the British peo-
ple. This change allowed people to openly flout the moral authority of
the Church, loosening the last tether that kept them to the foundation
of Christian affiliation. The loss of the moral superiority of the Church
allowed people, finally, to drift away from identification with Christi-
anity. Before this point, whatever an individual’s particular beliefs or
practices were, his Christian affiliation signified to others that he was a
moral person and that he respected the Western traditions of law and
liberty. While being Christian still means that to many people, an alter-
native was provided at this point that many have chosen to take ever
since: affiliating with no religion at all.
CONCLUSIONS
Britain has a thorny relationship with religion, and its relatively long
history of atheists plays no small part in that. Interestingly, the times
of greatest prominence for atheism have tended to coincide with the
periods of greatest religiosity, and for this reason, the late Victorian era
is often seen as the golden age of British atheism. Even the latest re-
vival of interest in atheism can be attributed largely to the recently ele-
vated prominence of religion in the news. This small and largely
Ameri-centric trend aside, though, modern Britain is neither particu-
larly religious nor overtly irreligious, but secular:52 neither religion nor
irreligion plays a large role in daily life. The religious tend to be fairly
108 Global Expressions
NOTES
1. ‘‘Nick Clegg says: I don’t believe in God,’’ The Times, Dec. 19, 2007: ‘‘His
admission is nonetheless unusual for a British political leader, most of whom
have tended to try to avoid upsetting believers and non-believers alike by
referring to or hinting at their faith before saying religion is a private matter.’’
2. Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann, (2006) ‘‘Atheists
as ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society,’’
American Sociological Review 71 (2): 211–234.
3. David Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain (Kent, UK: Routledge,
1988); particularly ‘‘The Repression of Atheism,’’ p. 1–47. The Britannica entry
is quoted in this chapter, on page 1.
4. Ibid., 64, 101, and 134.
5. Colin Campbell, Towards a Sociology of Irreligion (London: Macmillan,
1971), 46–57.
6. Ibid., 50.
7. Ibid., 50.
8. Ibid., 57–83.
9. Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow,
UK: Pearson Education, 2006), especially ‘‘The Sixties Revolution, 1960–1973,’’
224–270.
10. http://www.secularism.org.uk/generalprinciples.html (accessed August
31, 2009).
11. Colin Campbell, Towards a Sociology of Irreligion, 91–96. http://www.
humanism.org.uk; personal conversations with Terry Sanderson, president of
NSS and Andrew Copson of the BHA.
12. George H. Gallup, ed., The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls: Great
Britain 1937–75: Volume Two 1965–1975 (New York: Random House, 1976), 829.
13. Penny Edgell et al. ‘‘Atheists as ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural
Membership in American Society,’’ 215.
14. Ibid.
15. Stephen Bullivant, ‘‘Sociological Perspectives,’’ draft chapter from ‘‘The
Salvation of Atheists: The Catholic Engagement with Atheism,’’ doctoral work
in progress, University of Oxford, 2008, 22.
16. ‘‘Nick Clegg is a believer . . . in families, not God,’’ The Times, Dec. 20,
2007: ‘‘Neil Kinnock, Michael Foot, and Hugh Gaitskell were the last political
leaders to admit to being non-believers.’’
17. Stephen Bullivant, ‘‘Sociological Perspectives,’’ 23.
110 Global Expressions
18. Edward Royle, Modern Britain: A Social History (London, UK: Arnold
Publishers, 1997), 316–330.
19. ‘‘Blair Feared Faith ‘Nutter’ Label,’’ BBC News, Nov. 25, 2007.
20. Grace Davie, ‘‘Praying Alone? Church-going in Britain and the Putnam
Thesis: A Reply to Steve Bruce,’’ Journal of Contemporary Religion 17, no. 3
(2002): 329–335.
21. See 2001 Census of Population; 72 percent in England and Wales and 65
percent of those in Scotland are categorized as Christian.
22. Though the reasons for their popularity are, admittedly, more complex.
23. ‘‘Nick Clegg says . . .’’
24. Abby Day, ‘‘Researching Belief without Asking Religious Questions,’’ in
Fieldwork in Religion 4, no. 1 (2009).
25. ‘‘Dawkins: I’m a cultural Christian.’’ BBC News, Dec. 10, 2007.
26. David Voas, ‘‘Surveys of Behaviour, Beliefs and Affiliation,’’ in Handbook
of the Sociology of Religion, ed. J. Beckford and N. J. Demerath (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 2007), 128–150.
27. David Voas, ‘‘The Rise and Fall of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe,’’ European
Sociological Review 25, no. 2 (2009): 155-68. The argument in this section is
developed more fully in this ‘‘Fuzzy Fidelity’’ article.
28. Robert Piggott, personal conversation.
29. Ipsos-MORI poll; details to be confirmed. (2003) http://www.ipsos-mori.
com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemId¼773 (accessed
August 31, 2009).
30. Much of this draws on R. D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Re-
vival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); applica-
tions of the idea to Britain include Grace Davie, ‘‘Praying Alone? Church-going
in Britain and the Putnam Thesis: A Reply to Steve Bruce,’’ 329–335.
31. Colin Campbell, Easternization of the West. (London: Paradigm Publishers,
2007); Paul Heelas, and Linda Woodhead The Spiritual Revolution (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2005).
32. Though the average difference is relatively small, the data show strongly
that the effect exists.
33. Edward Royle, Modern Britain: A Social History, 337, quoting Manchester
Domestic Missionary, 1848.
34. Ibid., 335, quoting Thomas Frost.
35. Ibid., 337.
36. Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, 224.
37. David Voas, ‘‘The Continuing Secular Transition,’’ in The Role of Religion in
Modern Societies, ed. D. Pollack and D. V. A. Olson (London: Routledge, 2007), 25–48.
38. This intragenerational change would not manifest itself in the BSA statis-
tics we used to show the primacy of generational effects over age effects,
because the self-conception of those parents has not changed very much; thus,
the fact that the religiosity of each cohort appears to hold steady is unsurprising.
39. Among those who have advocated this approach are Roger Finke,
Rodney Stark, Laurence Iannaccone, William Bainbridge, and R. Stephen
Warner.
40. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Poli-
tics Worldwide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 95–106.
The Triumph of Indifference 111
41. See John Schaar, ‘‘Political Thought of John Winthrop,’’ Political Theory 19,
no. 4 (1991): 493–518.
42. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. H. C. Mansfield and
D. Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
43. Edward Royle, Modern Britain: A Social History, 316–326.
44. William J. Wolf, ‘‘Anglicanism and its Spirit,’’ in The Spirit of Anglican-
ism, ed. William J. Wolf (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1981), 186.
45. Ibid., 178.
46. A conversation with Tim Jenkins contributed a great deal to this analysis.
47. Edward Royle, Modern Britain: A Social History, 330.
48. Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels (Manchester, UK: Manchester University
Press, 1974).
49. Robin Gill, Churchgoing and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), chapter 3. See also David Voas and Alasdair Crockett,
‘‘Religion in Britain: Neither believing nor belonging,’’ Sociology 39, no. 1
(2005): 11–28.
50. David Voas, ‘‘Intermarriage and the demography of secularisation,’’
British Journal of Sociology 54, no. 1 (2003): 83–108.
51. Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, 224–70.
52. Here, we mean ‘‘secular’’ in the sense to follow, not in the sense of
French la€icite or American secular government.
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Chapter 6
Most of the public and many experts would no doubt agree with the
assessment of Ernest Gellner, the eminent scholar of anthropology and
history, that ‘‘I think it is fair to say that no secularization has taken
place in the world of Islam: that the hold of Islam over its believers is
as strong, and in some ways stronger, now than it was 100 years ago.
Somehow or other Islam is secularization-resistant.’’ (p. 2)1 Especially in
a time of war, it is not surprising that the more extreme and polarizing,
if not literally distancing and exoticizing, images of ‘‘the enemy’’ would
prevail, drowning out the voices of moderation and complexity in the
din (a particularly ironic term, since din—pronounced ‘‘deen’’—is the
Arabic term for faith or religion). Certainly the loudest voices in the con-
temporary Islamic world are the nonsecularists and the antisecularists.
However, the claim that there is no secularization is Islam would be
very surprising to Fu’ad Zakariyya, Husain Ahmad Amin, Muhammad
Nur Farahat, and Farag ‘Ali Fuda, for instance, whom Alexander Flores
calls the four main spokesmen of ‘‘outspoken secularism’’ in Egypt
today (p. 28)2 or to earlier secularists such as Taha Husayn, Ya’qub
Sarruf, Faris Nimr, Nicola Haddad, Salama Musa, and Lewis Awad, not
to mention the influential Ali Abd al-Raziq; or to parties and organiza-
tions such as Jam’iyyat al-Nida’ al-Jadid (New Appeal Society), Jam’iyyat
al-Tanwir (Enlightenment Society), Hizb ‘Almani (Secular Party, with its
slogan ‘‘Religion belongs to God, the homeland belongs to us all’’), and
Tayyar al-‘Almani (Movement for Secularism); or to secular regimes and
governments including Nasser’s and Mubarak’s Egypt, Bourguiba’s
Tunisia, even Hussein’s Iraq, and of course Ataturk’s Turkey.
114 Global Expressions
Clearly then, while secularism may not be the dominant force in Is-
lamic societies—and then again, in a certain sense, it may be, as we will
examine below—it is a real force. The assumption or conclusion that sec-
ularism does not exist at all in those contexts, or that it is a small insig-
nificant factor, or that it is in retreat, is a product of a variety of factors
including unfamiliarity with the realities on the ground, exaggerated
attention to the ‘‘resurgent’’ religionists, and the conventional ‘‘Oriental-
ism’’ that views non-Western societies as irreconcilably different from
and inferior to the West. But it appears that the problem may go deeper,
to a profound misunderstanding of what secularism is, what Islam is,
and for that matter what religion in general is. We will have the occa-
sion, and the obligation, to consider all of these issues below.
In this chapter, we will be focusing on the ‘‘Arab world,’’ but that
calls upon us to determine what precisely to what the ‘‘Arab world’’
refers. Simplistically, the Arab world (al-‘alam al-‘arabi) consists of those
places where Arabs live. But what is an Arab? Albert Hourani, the
great historian of Arab societies, writes
Most Arabs, if asked to define what they meant by ‘‘the Arab nation,’’
would begin by saying that it included all those who spoke the Arabic
language. But this would only be the first step, and it would carry them
no more than one step farther to say it included all who claimed a link
with the nomadic tribes of Arabia, whether by descent, by affiliation, or
by appropriation (through the medium of language and literature) of
their ideal of human excellence and standards of beauty. A full definition
would include also a reference to a historic process: to a certain episode
of history in which Arabs played a leading part, which was important
not only for them but for the whole world, and in virtue of which indeed
they could claim to have been something in human history.3
Thus, ‘‘Arab’’ does not specify any particular race or country or even,
necessarily, religion; there were Arabs before there was Islam. ‘‘Arab’’
is not a synonym for ‘‘Muslim.’’ Many—in fact, the vast majority—of
the world’s Muslims are not Arabs: of the 1.4 billion Muslims, less than
three hundred million are to be found in the traditionally ‘‘Arab’’
countries, which include Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Iraq, Syria,
Jordan, Lebanon, and the strip of North Africa (known as the Maghreb
in Islam) that contains Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and
Morocco. The Arab world does not contain major Islamic states and
regions such as Iran or Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan and Central
Asia, northern India, Bangladesh, Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, and
of course Malaysia and Indonesia, the latter of which is far and away
the most populous Muslim-majority country.
Nor are all Arabs Muslims: between 8 and 12 percent of Arabs are
Christians, particularly in Lebanon and Egypt, and Arabs can theoretically
Atheism and Secularity in the Arab World 115
belong to any religion. Finally, not all people living within the ‘‘Arab
world’’ are Arabs, nor are all Arabs resident in the ‘‘Arab world.’’ Kurds
constitute an important minority in Iraq (15–20 percent) and Syria (5–10
percent). Berbers occupy much of Morocco (35 percent) and Algeria
(20 percent). Significant numbers of non-Arabs live in the Gulf states, if
only as temporary laborers, including Persians, Indians, Baluchs, and Fili-
pinos. A mere 39 percent of Sudanese are Arab. Meanwhile, many Arabs
find themselves outside the conventional ‘‘Arab world’’ in such states as
Israel, Chad, Turkey, Iran, and Mali, not to mention Europe and the
United States.
The complex and contested nature of Arab identity suggest that few
generalizations can be made about this constituency; ‘‘Arab’’ is not any
one concrete thing. Neither is ‘‘Islam’’ any one concrete thing: there are
multiple doctrinal schools, historical interpretations, and local versions
of Islam. That is to say, there is serious—although often invisible to the
West—internal controversy and debate over what exactly Islam is,
what it was in the past, what it should be in the future, and, perhaps
most critically, how it should relate to ‘‘the West,’’ to ‘‘modernity,’’
and to ‘‘secularism.’’ It only seems obvious, then, that secularism
would not be any one concrete thing either; this is true in Christian
and other societies, so there is no reason why it should be untrue in Is-
lamic ones. Some Arab people have embraced secularism thoroughly,
others rant against it in absolute terms, and others have found a way—
or at least proposed that there is a way—to integrate it with religion.
As we will discuss below, some like Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im
plead that one can only be a true Muslim in a secular state.4 The possi-
bility of such an opinion indicates that the familiar notion of secularism
as religion-less or even antireligion is inadequate. In a word, we will
find in this chapter that secularism takes on its own local meaning in
al-‘alam al-‘arabi—or at least that it will as they work out their own
local version of Arab modernism and Arab secularism.
. . . the state has never been disconnected from religion. The traditional
ulama class legitimized the state with the leverage it had with the
masses. Historically, ‘‘official Islam’’ enjoyed the protection and patron-
age of the ruling elite in Muslim society. . . . The ulama, especially in the
Sunni world, have more or less stood with the status quo by refusing to
support opposition to existing political authority.8
the Islamic umma never was a political unit. It was always founded on
spiritual unity, the unity of witness and adoration. Its unity was never
political. On the political level there have constantly been conflicts and
wars, right from the moment of the ‘‘great sedition’’ (al-fitna l-kubra) to
the present day.12
Islam did not determine a specific regime, nor did it impose on the Mus-
lims a particular system according to the requirements of which they
must be governed; rather it has allowed freedom to organize the state in
accordance with the intellectual, social, and economic conditions in
which we are found, taking into consideration our social development
and the requirements of our times.13
As time passed and Arab/Islamic society grew and evolved, ‘‘this ini-
tial differentiation of religious and communal institutions from the po-
litical institution of the Caliphate grew more profound and more
clearly defined. In later centuries . . . the Caliph lost his de facto politi-
cal power to secular military and administrative regimes, albeit to
regimes nominally loyal to Islam.’’15
Ibn Warraq, in a stinging attack on Islam, goes further, to discuss a se-
rious, even if minority and unpopular, current of ‘‘rationalism’’ or ‘‘free-
thought,’’ sometimes verging on atheism, in medieval Islam. He holds
up, for example, the Mu’tazilites as a movement influenced by Greek
philosophy and committed to reason (‘aql). Reason in their view even
constrained or compelled Allah (when they still believed in him): their
doctrine of human rationality and ‘‘self-determination leads to the rejec-
tion of the notion of God’s arbitrary rule; divine omnipotence is limited
by the requirements of justice.’’16 Ahmed bin Habit rode his rationalism
into virtually disbelief. Others, still faithful, subjected the Qur’an, the tra-
ditions of Muhammad, and the doctrines of Islam to critical inquiry.
Various other kinds of zindiq (heresy, more specifically ‘‘dualism’’)
cropped up in Islam as well. Ibn al-Muqaffa questioned aspects of the
Atheism and Secularity in the Arab World 121
din, while Ibn Abi-l-Awja went so far as to assert the eternity of the
natural world and to deny the existence of a supernatural creator.17
Warraq lists a large number of other philosophers and freethinkers in
Arab history, many of whom were persecuted or executed, including
Salih Abd al-Quddus, Hammad Ajrad, Aban bin Abd al-Humayd bin
Lahiq al-Raqqasi, Qays bin Zubayr, Abu’l Atahiya, Abu Tammam,
Ibn al-Rawandi, and of course the infamous Abu ‘L-ala Ahmad bin
Abdallah al-Ma’arri, who wrote scathing verses in the eleventh century
calling religion a ‘‘fable invented by the ancients’’ and ‘‘noxious weeds’’18
and asserting the superiority of reason over prophecy and belief.
Certainly, then, the premodern Arab world did not lack its ‘‘secula-
rists’’ or rationalists, even if the society was not kind and tolerant to-
ward them. However, the more profound issue, raised at the outset of
this section, is whether the sacred/secular dichotomy applies to Islam
at all, if to any religion. Plenty of Muslim observers have commented
on the Western-Christian basis of the very concept of ‘‘secular,’’
founded on an unacceptable dualism of ‘‘world’’ versus ‘‘spirit’’ and a
fundamental desacralization or even denigration of the ‘‘world.’’ To
begin, Bernard Lewis reminds us that, unlike in the early centuries of
Christianity, which left an indelible mark on that religion, in Islam:
political authority was not a human evil, not even a lesser or a necessary
evil; it was a divine good. The body politic and the sovereign powers
within it are ordained by God himself, to promote his faith and to main-
tain and extend his law. The Muslim, like the Christian, sees God as
involved in human affairs and as subjecting his people to a variety of
tests. But for the Muslim, God’s main concern is to help rather than to
test his people, in particular to help them achieve victory and para-
mountcy in this world.19
In other words, while Islam undeniably has spiritual aspirations and oth-
erworldly interests (like heaven), it is also a very thisworldly religion—
which may sound like a contradiction to many readers but is not.
An-Na’im, for instance, posits that from the Muslim point of view,
‘‘Islam provides a comprehensive model for individual and communal
life, in the public as well as the private domain.’’20 It is more than ‘‘pri-
vate belief’’ as religion has come to be seen since the Enlightenment in
the West—more than ‘‘private’’ and more than ‘‘belief.’’ It is, as we
noted above, law and tradition and precedent and model and paradigm.
It touches, potentially and depending on the particular ijtihad employed,
every aspect of human life, society, and the world. As Lewis writes in
another place,
The idea that any group of persons, any kind of activities, any part of
human life is in any sense outside the scope of religious law and
122 Global Expressions
Of course he overstates his case, since shari’a law is not the only law in
all Arab and Muslim societies, but it has the capacity—and in more
than a few situations the intent—to be the one and only law.
While this view of religion as an all-encompassing worldly and
social system may confuse and offend Western readers, it is in fact not
contradictory from an Arab–Muslim perspective. More like medieval
Christianity than most observers might realize or care to accept, Islam
is an otherworldly originated and legitimated system for life in this
world; perhaps less like medieval Christianity, while its source and na-
ture is otherworldly, its attention is very much directed here, to the
real world of human problems. Fazlur Rahman says it best:
Although God consciousness and the conviction of the Last Day are
powerful and persistent themes in the Qur’an, there is no doubt that
belief in God or human accountability play a strictly functional role
here. . . . In Qur’anic terms no real morality is possible without the regu-
lative ideas of God and the Last Judgment. Further, their very moral
function requires that they exist for religiomoral experience and cannot
be mere intellectual postulates to be ‘‘believed in’’. . . .
But the substantive . . . teaching of the Prophet and the Qur’an is
undoubtedly for action in this world, since it provides guidance for man
concerning his behavior on earth in relation to other men. God exists in
the mind of the believer to regulate his behavior if he is religiomorally
experienced, but that which is regulated is the essence of the matter.22
the Tanzimat. Among these moves were the disbanding of the Janissary
corps (the traditional soldiery of the empire) in favor of a modern-type
military, for which purposes officer-training colleges were created. Also,
medical schools and programs for civil servants were established, news-
papers were introduced, and governmental administration was reorgan-
ized and modernized; even Western-style clothing was adopted.
Thus, at the center of Ottoman power and in the Arab periphery
(not only Egypt, but Tunisia, Syria, and Lebanon, which were also feel-
ing the penetration of the West and responding with their own ver-
sions of reform, often for their own local reasons, as especially in the
case of Tunisia), modernization was arriving in force by the mid- to
late-1800s. One of the components of this modernization was seculari-
zation, or perhaps what we might better call liberalism, especially in
terms of education, politics, and culture. Among its first Arab advo-
cates was Rifa’a Badawi Rafi’ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), an Egyptian who
studied in Paris for five years under the orders of Muhammad Ali,
learning French and English literature. For him as for many of his con-
temporaries and descendants, the immediate problem was the per-
ceived backwardness and weakness of Arab vis-a-vis the expanding
West; for him as for them, the solution was to learn selectively from
the West. In that sense a liberalizer or modernizer or reformer, he was
far from an atheist or anti-Islamist. In fact, he represents the main
trend in Arab–Islamic modernization, which is to borrow discerningly
from Western civilization while often sharply criticizing some or most
of that civilization, all within a distinctly Islamic idiom.
Al-Tahtawi in particular studied and admired aspects of European
political theory, notably the ideas of individual freedom and democ-
racy. In his writings such as Manahij al-albab al-misriyya fi mabahij al-
adab al-‘asriyya (loosely translated, The Paths of Egyptian Hearts in the
Joys of the Contemporary Arts),25 he described and praised Western de-
mocracy, but in a recognizably Islamic way. To those who resisted
learning anything from the West, he wrote, ‘‘Such people are deluded;
for civilizations are turns and phases. These sciences were once Islamic
when we were at the apex of our civilization. Europe took them from
us and developed them further. It is now our duty to learn from the
just as they learned from our ancestors’’ (p. 18)26. That is, civilization—
presumably even Arab–Islamic civilization—is a product of its unique
moment of development, that is, a secular product in the original sense
of the term.
While al-Tahtawi recommended the rule of law and civil freedom,
he continued to accept the absolute executive power of the political
authority; in this regard he was no modern democrat. However, his
most revolutionary contribution was an emphasis not on religion or
even on Arabism as the root of Egyptian identity but on membership
in the watan, the country or nation. He advanced a modern concept of
Atheism and Secularity in the Arab World 125
‘‘orientalist’’ view), al-Afghani held ‘‘that the essence of Islam was the
same as that of modern rationalism’’ and that the Qur’an anticipated
many things that Western science had only just discovered. Even more,
he insisted that Islam contained the moral and personal code that
‘‘could save the secular world from that revolutionary chaos’’ observ-
able in the political, social, and economic upheavals of the day.32
The student Muhammad ‘Abduh concurred with the master that the
West was ‘‘a political force to be resisted and a social ideal to be imi-
tated,’’ which led not to an abandonment of Islam but a reformulation
of it.33 The Arab world was surely in a state of decay and stagnation, he
allowed, and many benefits could be derived from the West, but these
benefits—science, limited government, and rational thought—were not
only well-suited to Islam but were actually contained in the foundations
of Islam (the salafiyyah or ways of the ancestors/forefathers). A rejuven-
ated and rightly-interpreted—some might say ‘‘modernized’’—Islam
would solve nineteenth-century Arab problems. For he recognized, in
the classically secularist way, that ‘‘laws vary as the conditions of nation
vary,’’34 that is, that a society and even a religion is a product of its
historical moment. Western civilization could not be simply transplanted
into Islamic territory, but neither was Islam a static and fixed thing.
One of his greatest complaints against Islam was its habit of taqlid or
blind imitation; drawing on the opposite tradition, maslaha (interest/
well-being/usefulness) and talfiq (‘‘piecing together’’ or combining the
best of multiple sources of knowledge/interpretation), he distinguished
between what was permanent and obligatory in Arab–Islamic civiliza-
tion and what was temporal and optional or at least modifiable.
Through such modern media as the journals al ‘Urwat al Wuthqa
(commencing in 1883) and more influentially al Manar, he propagated
the notion that Islam was every bit as rational as European science and
philosophy and that Islam could be the basis for a modern progressive
Arab way of life. He went so far as to integrate the idea of evolution
and the prophecy of Muhammad, as well as to support the notion of
causality (which some Muslims saw and see as a denial of Allah’s final
authority). Islam, in his mind, was a religion of reason, of nature, and
of the future, and he went so far as proposing changes to the curricu-
lum of the leading Egyptian university, Al Azhar, to add modern natu-
ral and social sciences. This modern knowledge was essential to the
wealth and happiness of the people and to the strength of the society
and was therefore not un-Islamic or un-Arab—if taught in Arabic with
a firm moral underpinning. Many of his changes were enacted,
although he was forced to resign from the reform committee in 1905,
partly due to pressure from conservatives.
Al-Afghani and ‘Abduh were hardly the only figures of moderniza-
tion and reform in the colonial Arab world, nor were they the most
radical. Muhammad Rashid Rida contributed to and perpetuated the
Atheism and Secularity in the Arab World 127
economic conditions, all grappled with the challenge not only of West-
ern civilization but of colonialism, globalization, and modernity in gen-
eral, and all referred to—and most, including the liberals and some
secularists—the specific heritage of Islam, raising the question of
Islamic or Arab ‘‘specificity.’’
If the colonial era in al-‘alam al-‘arabi had opened hesitantly with the
1798 invasion of Egypt, it was in full effect by the French conquest of
Algeria (starting in 1830) and of Tunisia (starting in 1881), the British
administration of Egypt (from 1882) and Sudan (from 1898), and of
course the defeat of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, which
brought French and British occupation to the Arab heartland. With these
events, the victory of the West seemed complete, and the crisis of the
East seemed acute. Interestingly if not ironically, the period from the
1880s, through the independence of the various Arab or Muslim states,
until 1967 at least, may be remembered as the great age of Arab secular-
ism. In fact, according to the analysis of Ibrahim Abu-Rabi’, of the four
main currents of twentieth-century Arabic thought—nationalist, liberal,
Marxist/leftist, and Islamist—three might rightly be dubbed ‘‘secularist.’’
Secularism was one movement or dream among many until outside
events once again—specifically the First World War and the break-up
of the Turkish empire—brought secularism to power in Ataturk’s new
modern state of Turkey. As described elsewhere in this volume,
Ataturk sought to modernize Turkey by eradicating the most backward
and superstitious elements of religion and by putting the remainder of
religion in its place within a secular society, which meant out of pub-
lic/political affairs and under the authority of the state, which included
after 1924 a ‘‘Department of the Affairs of Piety’’ to manage and
administer religion secularly.
In the Arab world from Iraq to Morocco, most often postcolonial
state government, including ‘‘development and administrative strat-
egies, coercive functions, information flow, and educational systems
were firmly in the group of men whose training and outlook were
overwhelmingly secular’’ (p. xiii).38 As John Esposito adds,
While the separation of religion and politics was not total (as it is not in
fact in many secular countries in the West), the role of Islam in state and
society as a source of legitimation of rulers, states, and government insti-
tutions was greatly curtailed. . . . The central government also attempted
to bring Islamic institutions (mosques, religiously endowed properties or
awqaf, religious courts, etc.) under state control.39 (p. 2)
This was, in the words of John Entelis, an era of optimism, coming after
the flush of successful independence movements, ‘‘envisioned [as] a sus-
tained period of ‘modernization’ involving expanded social opportunity,
sustained economic growth, and cultural diffusion or ‘Westernization’’’;
Atheism and Secularity in the Arab World 129
despite the fact that such regimes were often ‘‘blatantly authoritarian,’’
hopes were still high and such rigid social control from the central was
frequently seen as necessary if not actually beneficial (p. ix).40
The most conspicuous cases of secular Arab governments, usually
with more or less strongly secularizing policies for their societies, were
Algeria, Tunisia (especially under the rule of Habib Bourguiba from
1957 to 1987), the Ba’athist regimes as in Syria and Iraq, and of course
Egypt under Nasser and his successors, Sadat and Mubarak. Tunisia
may be the most overt example: after French invasion in 1881, a ‘‘Young
Tunisian’’ movement soon began, along the lines of the ‘‘Young Turk’’
movement within the Ottoman Empire, that sought to reform society
through ‘‘adaptation of desirable and useful Western social, economic,
and political values.’’ (p. 32).41 It is not at all insignificant that Tunisia,
like the rest of the Maghreb, was a French colony, exposed to a particu-
larly stringent version of secularism known as laicisme; a product of rev-
olutionary France, laicisme (related to the English word ‘‘laity’’) was a
radical program of not only separation but suppression of religion,
which, in the words of Rachid al-Ghannouchi literally ‘‘declared war
against the church,’’ and it was men who were ‘‘graduates of the French
school of thought’’ who inherited the levers of power there (p. 97).42
Bourguiba sought to modernize his country in a definitely Western
mold. He introduced reforms of politics and government, the media,
and education. He also championed a ‘‘code of personal status’’ that
contradicted Muslim custom and shari’a law in a variety of ways,
including outlawing polygamy and extending women’s rights in mar-
riage, which institution was reconceived as a voluntary civil contract
rather than a religious bond. His administration embraced family plan-
ning and limited waqf religious properties and endowments. In his later
years he became a staunch opponent of militant Islamism.
Algeria has been another case of post-French secular government.
By World War I there were ‘‘new voices protesting the colonial condi-
tions,’’ not traditionalist or Islamic ones but ‘‘city voices speaking
almost exclusively in French and demanding not the world of the
Qur’an, the Sunna, or of the local holy men but the world envisioned
by European thinkers—Voltaire, Rousseau, Auguste Comte. . . . At first
assimilationists and later liberal nationalists, these men were over-
whelmingly secular in outlook’’ (p. 75).43 The Algerian struggle against
French occupation, starting in 1954, also ‘‘was instigated by secular
militants,’’44 and the struggle eventually brought to power the Front de
Liberation Nationale (FLN), which governed as an Arab socialist and
revolutionary party with ‘‘a thin veneer of Islam’’ while it ‘‘pursued an
essentially secular path of political and economic development.’’45 As
recounted below, in the late 1980s the FLN faced a stiff challenge from
a populist Islamic party that caused it to negate the electoral victory of
the Islamists—thus choosing secularism over democracy.
130 Global Expressions
prosperity were not met: scholars and the masses alike noticed that
increasing ‘‘modernization’’ did not seem to bring wealth and eco-
nomic independence but rather increasing dependence on and hegem-
ony of the West; Arab regimes actually often appeared to be in
collusion with the West (especially the Persian Gulf states, Saudi Ara-
bia in particular), or at best unable to mount an effective response. In a
word, the secular-nationalist option seemed have failed.
A number of commentators note the wider failure to develop a mod-
ern secular ‘‘civil society,’’ which took various shapes. For one—and
this complaint is echoed in from many sources—the secularizing forces
in most Arab states were always a small elite group. As Abu-Rabi’ puts
it, the ‘‘social base’’ of secularist nationalist modernization was always
‘‘narrow,’’ attracting little of the general populace of the state.50 Even
worse, he suggests that in many instances there was not only a class
but a tribal or sectarian division between the ruling secular elite and
the majority of the citizens. Furthermore, and partly because of this
structural weakness, regimes could not and did not support the devel-
opment of independent institutions of a civil society, such as trade
organizations, professional groups, free political parties, and the like.
Again in Abu-Rabi’s formulation, leaders tried to accomplish modern-
ization without modernism—without the cultural and social founda-
tions upon which such values and practices are securely built.
Finally, there were political reasons—both internal and external—for
the perceived retreat of secularism. One was the continuing irritant of
the Israel–Palestine issue. The Arab defeat in the 1967 war was seen by
many as a total indictment of the secular modernizing project. Later,
the collapse of the USSR and the exhaustion of Marxism drove others
away from that source of secularist thought. More than few observers
claim that the West did not really want or support truly free and suc-
cessful Arab democratic and secular systems; however, perhaps most
directly, secularism was often associated with the bitter experience of
political oppression and even violence at home. As John Voll states,
‘‘the processes of Westernization as experienced in North Africa [and
most of the Arab world] in the past century lead not to democracy but
to authoritarianism’’ (p. 14).51 Thus, much of the resistance to secular
regimes, from Iran to Algeria, was not only or mostly about the secu-
larism but about the tyranny and repressiveness of those regimes.
We must then see the rise of Islamism in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries as partly a response to the failed economics and
exclusionary politics of the existing Arab states. In this sense, however, this
resurgent and muscular religion is in a sense an effect of secularization—
and in a sense more than a bit secular itself. Bichara Khader writes that the
new Islamism is not traditional religion, certainly not eternal religious
truth, but rather ‘‘the product of a given space and time. You do not need
to search in the Koranic texts to understand Islamism. Instead, you need to
Atheism and Secularity in the Arab World 133
analyze and interpret the social, political, and economic realities in which it
has developed. The explanation lies not in theology, but in the human sci-
ences’’ (p. 58).52 Islamism is religion, to be sure, but it is religion in reaction
and thus is very much a creature of its particular historical and social con-
text, of its ‘‘age,’’ and thereby ‘‘secular’’ in the original sense of the term.
As Abu-Rabi’ summarizes,
Such Islamism has always been one of the currents in the response to
the encroaching West. Thus, the ‘‘causes’’ of the Islamic movement are
more than slightly secular: unemployment, poverty, inadequate hous-
ing, corruption, repression, cultural/political/military weakness, most
recently unaffordable or simply unavailable food, and so on. One Alge-
rian man complained that his only four options were unemployment,
participation in the black market, emigration to France, or membership
in the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS, the party that ‘‘successfully’’ chal-
lenged the ruling FLN for power, only to be denied that power by
force).54 One last time, the origins and strength of contemporary Is-
lamic movements ‘‘are to be found primarily in the political and eco-
nomic circumstances of these countries rather than in the religious and
cultural traditions of their inhabitants.’’55
Reference to Islamic ‘‘movements’’ reminds us too that, while there
is religion (among other things) in their message, there is secularity and
modernism in their medium. Islamists form political parties and use all
of the tools of modern technology (print, television, computers, the
Internet, not to mention modern weapons) to achieve their goals. Some
Islamists engage in debates with secularists and other opponents, as
occurred in 1986 in Egypt between secularist Fu’ad Zakariya and Islam-
ists Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali and Yusuf al-Qardawi (with con-
verted Islamists Tariq al-Bishri and ‘Adil Husayn serving as
commentators—an event which was formally entitled ‘‘A Seminar [on
Islam] and Secularism’’ (Nadwa hawla al-Islam wa al-‘ilmaniyya).56 Similar
encounters happened in 1997, including a debate between Syrian secu-
larist Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm and conservative Shaykh Yusif al-Qaradawi
(which was broadcast on the Arab television station al-Jazira) and
another between Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd and Egyptian religious thinker
Muhammad ‘Imara. Running arguments also take place in newspapers
and journals. Some, like Khalid Muhammad Khalid, have gone so far as
to endorse representative democracy, multiparty elections, and freedom
of the press, as desirable and compatible forms of Islamic politics.
134 Global Expressions
NOTES
1. Ernest Gellner, ‘‘Islam and Marxism: Some Comparisons, ’’ International
Affairs 67, no. 1 (1991): 1–6.
2. Alexander Flores, ‘‘Egypt: A New Secularism?’’ Middle East Report 153
(1988):27–30.
3. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (London and
New York: Oxford University Press), 1.
4. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the
Future of Shari’a (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press,
2008).
5. S. Parvez Manzoor, ‘‘Desacralizing Secularism,’’ in Islam and Secularism
in the Middle East, ed. Azzam Tamimi and John L. Esposito (Washington
Square, NY: New York University Press, 2000), 81–96.
6. Hourani, op. cit., 10.
7. Ira M. Lapidus, ‘‘The Separation of State and Religion in the Develop-
ment of Early Islamic Society,’’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 6, no.
4 (1975):363–385.
8. Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi’, Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967
Arab Intellectual History (London and Sterling VA: Pluto Press), 15.
9. Hourani, op. cit., 21.
10. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddima, Vol. 3, 2nd ed., Franz Rosenthal, trans.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 427.
11. Quoted in Maurice Boormans, ‘‘Cultural Dialogue and ‘Islamic Specific-
ity,’ ’’ in Islam, Modernism, and the West: Cultural and Political Relations at the End
of the Millennium, ed. Gema Martin Munoz (London and New York: I. B. Tauris
Publishers, 81–93), p. 92–93.
12. Quoted in ibid., 91.
13. Quoted in Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development
Ideologies (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 131.
14. Lapidus, op. cit., 364.
15. Ibid., 384.
136 Global Expressions
16. Ibn Warraq, Why I am Not a Muslim (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books,
1995), 247.
17. Ibid., 254.
18. Ibid., 283.
19. Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1988), 25.
20. An-Na’im, op. cit., 49.
21. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002),
100.
22. Falur Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradi-
tion (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 14.
23. Quoted in Hourani, op. cit., 49.
24. Rahman, op. cit., 59.
25. Hourani, op. cit., 72.
26. Quoted in Azzam Tamimi, ‘‘The Origins of Arab Secularism,’’ in Islam
and Secularism in the Middle East, ed. Azzam Tamimi and John L. Esposito
(Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 2001), 13–28.
27. Quoted in Hourani, op. cit., 88.
28. Quoted in M. A. Zaki Badawi, The Reformers of Egypt (London: Croom
Helm, 1976), 23.
29. Ibid., 29.
30. Ibid., 28.
31. Hourani, op. cit., 114.
32. Ibid., 123.
33. Badawi, op. cit., 40.
34. Quoted in Hourani, op. cit., 137.
35. Ibid., 162.
36. Badawi, op. cit., 22–23.
37. Quoted in ibid., 24.
38. John Ruedy, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Islamism and Secularism in North Africa,
ed. John Ruedy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996 [1994]), xiii–xx.
39. John Esposito, ‘‘Introduction: Islam and Secularism in the Twenty-First
Century,’’ in Islam and Secularism in the Middle East, ed. Azzam Tamimi and
John L. Esposito (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 2001)
1–12.
40. John P. Entelis, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Islam, Democracy, and the State in North
Africa, ed. John P. Entelis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1997), ix–xxv.
41. Kenneth J. Perkins, ‘‘‘The Masses Look Ardently to Istanbul’: Tunisia,
Islam, and the Ottoman Empire, 1837–1931,’’ in Islamism and Secularism in North
Africa, ed. John Ruedy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996 [1994]), 23–36.
42. Rachid al-Ghannouchi, ‘‘Secularism in the Arab Maghreb,’’ in Islam and
Secularism in the Middle East, ed. Azzam Tamimi and John L. Esposito (Wash-
ington Square, NY: New York University Press, 2001), 97–123.
43. John Ruedy, ‘‘Continuities and Discontinuities in the Algerian Confron-
tation with Europe,’’ in Islamism and Secularism in North Africa, ed. John Ruedy
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996 [1994]), 73–85.
44. Ibid., 78.
Atheism and Secularity in the Arab World 137
45. John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Islam and Democracy (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 152.
46. Emad Eldin Shahin, ‘‘Secularism and Nationalism: The Political Discourse
of ‘Abd al-Salam Yassin,’’ in John Ruedy, ed. Islamism and Secularism in North
Africa, ed. John Ruedy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996 [1994]), 167–185.
47. Hourani, op. cit., 348–349.
48. Esposito and Voll, op. cit., 174.
49. Ibid., 177.
50. Abu-Rabi’, op. cit., 52.
51. John O. Voll, ‘‘Sultans, Saints, and Presidents: The Islamic Community
and the State in North Africa,’’ in Islam, Democracy, and the State in North Africa,
ed. John P. Entelis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1997), 1–16.
52. Bichara Khader, ‘‘The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership: A Singular
Approach to a Plural Mediterranean,’’ in Islam, Modernism, and the West: Cul-
tural and Political Relations at the End of the Millennium, ed. Gema Martin Munoz
(London and New York: I. B. Tauris Publishers), 47–62.
53. Abu-Rabi’, op. cit., 53–54.
54. Mark Tessler, ‘‘The Origins of Popular Support for Islamic Movements:
A Political Economy Analysis,’’ in Islam, Democracy, and the State in North
Africa, ed. John P. Entelis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1997), 93–126.
55. Ibid., 93.
56. Nancy E. Gallagher, ‘‘Islam v. Secularism in Cairo: An Account of the
Dar al-Hikma Debate,’’ Middle Eastern Studies 25, no. 2, (1989):208–215.
57. Alexander Flores, ‘‘Secularism, Integralism, and Political Islam,’’ Middle
East Report 183 (1993):32–38.
58. Quoted in ibid., 37.
59. Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim; Ayaan Hirsch Ali, Infidel (New
York: Free Press, 2007); Susan Crimp and Joel Richardson, eds. Why We Left
Islam: Former Muslims Speak Out (Los Angeles: WND Books, 2008).
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Chapter 7
youth into the mainstream of secular society. His book Muslim Politics
provoked much discussion. Facing the wrath of many Hindus by ques-
tioning the ban on killing cows, he vigorously propagated the scientific
method as a solution to several problems facing obscurantist India. His
book Scientific Method made a rare breakthrough in Indian academia
when it was prescribed as a textbook in Bangalore University when H.
Narasimhaiah was the vice chancellor. Shah started several publica-
tions and magazines (Humanist Review, New Quest, and The Secularist)
and educational reform campaigns for humanism and secularism. Cur-
rently, Mr. V. K. Sinha edits The Secularist and New Quest magazines
from Mumbai.
Shah’s scientific approach to religion and politics faced several diffi-
culties, especially from fundamentalist Hindus and Muslims. He organ-
ized study camps, meetings, seminars, and symposia, instituting a
dialogue of all sections of religious organizations. He challenged the
cult gurus and fanatic Muslim mullahs, and he opened debates about
holy books. He stood for human values and human rights. He tried to
spread the ideas through scientific method and education. The move-
ment took strong roots in some states of India, especially Maharastra,
Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Kerala.
PERIYAR MOVEMENT
Periyar E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973) was a great social revolutionary
who opposed caste hierarchy and Hindu Brahmin domination of other
castes and sought equal rights in temple priesthood. Hitherto, only
members of the Brahmin caste were allowed to become priests. Periyar
wanted all castes, including the downtrodden castes, to be able to offi-
ciate at marriages and perform religious ceremonies in temples. He
142 Global Expressions
myths surrounding the public’s fears of such places. The Atheist Centre
takes up programs to promote the scientific outlook and rational think-
ing. Fire walking demonstrations are organized in the villages. Many
so-called miracles are exposed. God-men are challenged to prove their
so-called supernatural abilities. When Sai Baba visited Vijayawada, the
Atheist Centre questioned him to prove his miracles. Scores of people
were arrested in this connection. It also exposed the hoaxes of rebirth.
In a traditional society where people are still steeped in superstition,
the belief in witchcraft and sorcery wrecks havoc on many innocent
lives. It leads to feuds and even murders in the villages, with allega-
tions and accusations of sorcery. In the Hyderabad State, the belief in
witchcraft and sorcery is still deeply entrenched in the minds of the
people. In 1983, leaders in the district administration in Medak invited
the Atheist Centre to help dispel such superstitions. A team of doctors,
social workers, psychiatrists, and scientists, headed by Dr. Samaram,
visited Medak District to study the mass hysteria that had reached epi-
demic proportions. Similar assignments were undertaken in Nalgonda
district to educate the people about the nonexistence of witchcraft. In
exposing and debunking witchcraft and sorcery, the Atheist Centre
receives the cooperation of the Indian Medical Association, the police
and the government departments, and other social organizations.
With a view to promoting literacy and education along secular and
humanist lines, the Atheist Centre also organizes education and aware-
ness programs. Adult and women’s education are important ingredients
of these activities. Substantial work has been done by the Atheist Centre
in the field of social and adult education. Gora’s books for adult literacy
and scientific and social outlook are widely read. In a traditional society
like India, championing sex education is an uphill task. Undaunted by
the hurdles, the Atheist Centre is championing sex education. Dr.
Samaram of the Atheist Centre has been writing on sex science in the
most popular Telugu daily newspaper Eenadu for more than five years.
His five volumes Sex Science have become very popular. So far,
Dr. Samaram has published more than 150 books on health education,
family planning, and popularizing medical science. The books are
widely read. For the last thirty years, Dr. Samaram has been contribut-
ing every week in the dailies and weeklies on various aspects of health
and his column of questions and answers on sex problems receives
wide attention. Dr. Samaram is not only a medical science writer, but
also a practicing doctor. He and Dr. Maru are helping in the organiza-
tion of health camps and AIDS awareness programs on a wider scale.
GORA (1902–1975)
One of the shining lights of southern India’s unbelief movement was
Gora, or Goparaju Ramachandrarao. He was a Brahmin who stood
146 Global Expressions
BIHAR STATE
The Bihar Buddhiwadi Samaj (Bihar Rationalist Society, BRS) was
founded in 1985 by Ms. Kawaljee and Dr. Ramendra as a nonparty,
nonprofit, educational society for the promotion of rationalism. Kiran
Nath Datt, Shivendra, Manavendra, Ramanand Mandal, and Rahul
148 Global Expressions
MAHARASTRA STATE
In Maharastra, a big campaign was organized to convert the Hindus
into Buddhists so that they could get rid of inequality, untouchability,
and attain human rights with dignity. B. R. Ambedkar led this move-
ment, though without much success. In 1983 Dabholkar started working
in the field of superstition eradication. After helping form MANS in
1989, he helped it grow to more than 170 branches in nearly all districts
of Maharashtra. He has been the executive president (Karyadhyaksha)
of MANS since its founding. He has written eleven books on various
aspects of superstitions and their eradication. In the past decades he
has confronted many Babas, Buas, Tantrics, and Mantrics, among
others, and has led many agitations against various forms of supersti-
tions, water pollution, and animal sacrifice. Inculcation of the scientific
outlook is one of the main functions of MANS, a mobile van named
‘‘Scientific Attitude Promotion Van’’ or ‘‘Vidnyan Bodh Vahini.’’ It has
helped spread a scientific attitude in school children, especially in rural
areas. Since its inception, MANS has carried out more than 1,200
programs in different schools all over Maharashtra. MANS workers
travel in this well-equipped van, visiting schools and presenting a four-
hour program; in this program they teach basic principles of science by
using scientific toys and other aids. There is also a program for impart-
ing sex education wherein films made for adolescent boys and girls are
shown separately. Posters about astronomy are displayed to develop in-
terest in students about the universe. Books promoting scientific and a
moral ethical outlook are displayed and sold at affordable prices. A
mini-science festival-like atmosphere is created whenever this van—the
Vidnyan Bodh Vahini—conducts a four-hour program in any school.
Atheism and Secularity in India 149
The vehicle is equipped with a small kitchen, toilet, and bath and
boarding accommodations for five people. Three sides of the rear por-
tion of the van can be opened and can be used as a bookshop as well
as a stage. It is also equipped with a big screen and a projector to show
educational films to many people at a time. The new custom-made van
providing for the stay of MANS workers will surely help us further our
mission—Promotion of Scientific Attitude.
The Moral Rational Movement or Vivek Vahini is a movement initi-
ated by MANS for teachers and colleges students. It aims at making
students into thoughtful, discerning, judicious, ethical, principled, civi-
lized, honorable, rational, wise, and cultured citizens, enabling them to
put their rational thinking into practice through concrete programs for
the betterment of themselves and society. This organization has gained
accreditation from the education department of the government of
Maharashtra State and works under the chairmanship of the lecturers
and professors of the respective colleges. Study Circle and some novel
programs are a few of its activities.
WEST BENGAL
Prafulla Kumar Naik, with the help of local humanists and rational-
ists, questioned the claims of miracles by Mother Theresa. In Andhra
Pradesh and Kerala, focus has been against god-men and -women who
claim to provide miracle cures. Andhra rationalists opposed unscien-
tific alternative medicines (homeopathy), exposing the bogus claims of
Alex Orbito (psychic surgery), the swallowing of live fish for asthma
cures, the hugging of Matha Amrithananda Mayi in order to obtain
prosperity, and geomancy (Vaastu).
Mr. Manoj Datta, Mr. Subhankar Ray, Mr. Ajit Bhattacharya, Bhaskar
Sur, and others are continuing to spread the Humanist message. Prof.
150 Global Expressions
ANDHRA PRADESH
Andhra Pradesh has the Atheist Society of India, the Radical
Humanist Centre, Inkollu, Chirala, the Renaissance Institute, two Rationalist
Atheism and Secularity in India 151
Additional Organizations
The Social Development Foundation (SDF) in Uttar Pradesh works
under the leadership of Mr. V. B. Rawat to uplift the untouchables. It
holds humanist workshops regularly. Projects are undertaken to edu-
cate and train girls. The Goa Science Forum is a well-known group of
science and rationalist activists based in Goa, India. Affiliated to the
Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA), it conducts work-
shops on various issues with a view to spreading scientific points of
view, humanism, rationalism, and a spirit of inquiry and reform. The
Forum also encourages the critical investigation of paranormal and
fringescience claims from a scientific point of view. Its current presi-
dent is R. G. Rao, and under the leadership of Manavatavadi, secular
activities are taken up in the state of Haryana.
REFERENCES
The following are general references for information of secularism in India:
Web Sites
Rationalist International of Sanal Edamaruku. http://www.rationalistinter
national.net/ (accessed August 31, 2009)
Ramendra Buddhiwadi Samaj. http://www.geocities.com/brs_patna/ (accessed
August 31, 2009)
Vidya Bhushan Rawat. http://www.blogger.com/profile/11765166843439006384
(accessed August 31, 2009)
Books
Karnik, V. B. 1960. Indian Trade Unions: A Survey. Bombay, India: Manatalas.
Karnik, V. B., and M. N. Roy. 1967. Strikes in India. Bombay, India: Manatalas.
Narayan Ray, Shib, ed. 1987. Selected Writings of M. N. Roy. 4 volumes. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Atheism and Secularity in India 153
Ramendra, Nath. 1992a. Dr. Ambedkar ne Hindu Dharma ka tyag kyon kiya (Why
Dr. Ambedkar renounced Hinduism). Patnar, Bihar, India: Buddhiwadi Foundation.
———. 1992b. Sampoorna Kranti aur Buddhiwad (Total Revolution and Rational-
ism). Patnar, Bihar, India: Buddhiwadi Foundation.
———. 1996. Hindutva, Sangh Pariwar aur Fascism, in Cooperation with the Indian
Renaissance Institute. Patnar, Bihar, India: Buddhiwadi Foundation.
———. 1997. Buddhiwad aur Manavtavadi Dristikone (A Secular Humanist Declara-
tion). Hindi translation of A. Solomon’s Rationalist and Humanist Outlook
1997. Patnar, Bihar, India: Buddhiwadi Foundation.
Roy, Manavendra Nath. 1985. Kya Ishwar Mar Chuka Hai? (Is God Dead?).
Patnar, Bihar, India: Buddhiwadi Foundation.
———. 1986a. Buddhiwadi Ghoshna-patra (Rationalist Manifesto). Patnar, Bihar,
India: Buddhiwadi Foundation.
———. 1986b. Roy ka Nav Manavatavad (New Humanism). Patnar, Bihar, India:
Buddhiwadi Foundation.
Roy, Samaren. 1970. The Restless Brahmin: Early Life of M. N. Roy. Bombay:
Allied Publishers.
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Chapter 8
argue along such lines. The question is: Are they correct? Do we really
have to be afraid of the atheists and secular people? If atheists and
nonreligious people do not regard the church and church leaders as
their moral guides, what implications will this have on the moral state
of a nation? Can we find evidence that nonreligious people are more
individualistic and more permissive or even in favor of an ethos of
anything goes? To address such questions, we explore the moral con-
victions of the unchurched, the atheists, and nonreligious people in
Dutch society and compare them with the morals of the Dutch
churched and religious people.
We start this chapter with an overview of the trends with regard to
religion in Dutch society using data from a long-term survey project on
God in Dutch society (God in Nederland; see Bernts, Dekker, and de
Hart 2007; Dekker, de Hart, and Peters 1997; Goddijn, Smets, and van
Tillo 1979). This data set enables us to look back in recent Dutch his-
tory and to investigate the trends since 1966. The further exploration of
the characteristics of atheists in Dutch society is based on survey data
from the EVS (Halman 2001; www.europeanvalues.nl). This data set is
also analyzed to investigate the moral consequences of the trends.
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1966 1979 1996 2006
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1966 1979 1996 2006
those respondents who claim to be atheist and also claim that they do not
think that there is any spirit, God, or life force, the percentage of atheists
in Dutch society would only be three! For 55 percent of the Dutch
respondents, being religious seems to imply either belief in a personal
God or belief that there is some kind of spirit or life force. Six percent con-
sider themselves religious but do not really know what to think.
What is clear from such figures is that a majority of Dutch people
still claim to be religious and that atheism is a phenomenon that
applies to a very small or even negligible minority of the Dutch popu-
lation. The figures also reveal that since the 0 90s not much change can
be reported. The main changes took place before and during the 0 80s
and boil down to an increasing number of nonreligious people at the
cost of the number of religious people. However, this increase in the
number of nonreligious people does not reveal a trend toward disbelief
or unbelief. Even nonreligious people appear to ‘‘believe in some-
thing.’’ More recently, the situation seems to have stabilized and
hardly any changes can be reported.
Figure 8.5. The ‘‘beliefs’’ of the religious, not religious, and atheists in
the Netherlands
Source: EVS 1999
Table 8.1
The religious beliefs of the religious, not religious, and atheists in
the Netherlands
Belief in (% yes)
Life after
God death Hell Heaven Sin Telepathy Reincarnation
sharply in the last decades, also and especially in the Netherlands, more
than in other countries Dutch women are mainly involved in part-time
jobs. Eurostat figures on employment reveal that in the Netherlands 68
percent of employed women are in part-time jobs. Because more men
than women are engaged in paid full-time employment, men are less
involved in church or religious activities and are likely to be less reli-
gious. That women will be more religious than men can also be argued
from yet another perspective. Women are, more often than men,
employed in ‘‘caring jobs,’’ e.g., nursing activities, childcare, and school-
teaching, which, owing to the historical link between the caring activities
of deaconesses in Lutheran churches and women who are religious, are
often associated with higher levels of religiosity. We are not going to
elaborate on these findings, but these arguments make it understandable
that fewer women than men appear to be atheist.
That more highly educated people appear more often to be con-
vinced atheists may also not come as a big surprise. As can be argued,
education implies increasing cognitive skills and being more critical
toward authorities, including the religious ones. Highly educated
people, more than less educated people, emphasize individual
autonomy and personal judgment. Hence, people with more education
will display lower levels of religiosity. This hypothesis is based on
Weber’s idea of the absolute incompatibility of religious and scientific
orientations. It is argued that people are either scientific or religious,
but not both (Johnson 1997, 232). Although the relationship may
be more complex (see, e.g., Johnson 1997, 233), most empirical evidence
indicates a negative association between level of education and degree
of religiosity. The higher level of education also seems to imply that
people do not have to escape into vague terminology, such as being
nonreligious, but they are able to define themselves as atheists.
Are atheists more modern than religious people, and do atheists also
differ in terms of modernity from nonreligious people, or is it justified
to lump these two categories together as is done so often in empirical
analyses? There is not much empirical evidence that atheists are indeed
more modern than religious people. Modernity is understood as reject-
ing traditional women’s roles and authorities, emphasizing individual
freedom, and being more rational. In Figure 8.6 the differences between
religious and nonreligious people and atheists on a few dimensions of
modernity are shown.
The traditional female role as housewife is indeed slightly less
accepted by atheists than by religious people, but atheists resemble non-
religious people in this respect. The same applies for single parenthood,
which is slightly more accepted by atheists and nonreligious people
than by religious people. Contrary to what could be expected, religious
people stress emphasis on the individual more than atheists and nonre-
ligious people, and they also put more emphasis on technology than
168 Global Expressions
100,0
90,0
80,0
70,0
60,0
50,0
40,0
30,0
20,0
10,0
0,0
follow single parent technology individual housewife authority freedom
instructions above
equality
Religious person Not religious person Convinced atheist
CONSEQUENCES?
The waning of the dominant position of religion in modernizing so-
ciety fostered the establishment of a ‘‘new morality’’ or ‘‘permissive
morality’’ (Wilson 1982, 86). Since the moral guidance of the churches
and religion is less self-evident and under heavy pressure, it can be
assumed that people’s religious orientations are no longer, or less
Atheism and Secularity in the Netherlands 169
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1 ex y
di n
br y
s
a g
jo tax
ad g
su ia
lit e
sp ing
ng
g
th ce
ab lity
sm sex
su es
oi ho
g its
ug
os iber
r
tio
r in
n
id
so din
as
te
eu or
ca tax
i
di
ua
tin ef
ly
ic
av lco
ok
on
dr
or
ul
te
an
al
ee
i
v
ea en
yr
d
ft
ch te b
m
a
ho
st
5.00
4.50
4.00
3.50
3.00
2.50
2.00
1.50
1.00
0.50
0.00
ns
d
ry
ily
ed
ts
en
nd
le
or
io
de
ea
n
m
oy
ab
m
g
ki
hb
ra
fa
el
re
an
pl
is
ig
w
ig
ro
em
,d
m
llo
m
ne
Eu
im
hu
fe
ck
un
si
religious person not religious person convinced atheist
Figure 8.8. Solidarity among religious, not religious, and atheist people
in the Netherlands
Source: EVS 1999
CONCLUSIONS
Writing about Dutch atheists is not so easy because in surveys the
number of atheists is rather limited and often too limited to justify sta-
tistical analyses. Although many people in the Netherlands are not
(any longer) affiliated with one of the religious denominations, it does
not imply that Dutch society has turned into an atheist society or into
a society of nonbelievers. There is a decline in the number of religious
people and thus an increase in the number of people who claim not to
be religious, but the number of people in the Netherlands who con-
sider themselves atheist is modest and has hardly increased in the last
decades. That atheism has not increased is not a result of certain poli-
cies in the Netherlands. In Dutch society, church and state have been
separated for a long time, and there is freedom of religion and of athe-
ism. Being an atheist is not a hindrance to becoming a minister! It is not
Atheism and Secularity in the Netherlands 173
an issue in Dutch politics although there are some Christian and even
Orthodox Christian political parties, and representatives of them are in
the Parliament and current government.
The Dutch atheists appear not to have special characteristics in
terms of sociodemographic features. They do not appear as being the
most modern or postmodern group in society. In fact they appear to be
a very diffuse group, and in many respects they resemble nonreligious
people. Both the nonreligious group and the atheists can together be
differentiated from religious people. Atheists appear slightly more tol-
erant when it comes to the acceptance of all kinds of sexual and ethical
behaviors. The behaviors that are more acceptable to them all relate to
the private sphere that is increasingly regarded as a sphere in which
traditional authorities are not allowed to interfere. Also religious peo-
ple in Dutch society are more lenient toward these sexual behaviors
than to accepting indecent behavior. As such, neither in the religious
group, nor among atheists, is an ethos of anything goes developing.
Civic morality was and remains high throughout Dutch society.
The conclusion therefore is simple: Dutch atheists are as ordinary
and common as religious people in the Netherlands. Apart from the
fact that they do not believe in the existence of God, they have no typi-
cal characteristics that makes them special. They can be found among
all layers in Dutch society. They are as moral and responsible as religious
and nonreligious people, but they remain a small minority. Although
in the Netherlands the number of people that claim to be not religious
has increased, and the number of unchurched people exceeds the num-
ber of religious-affiliated people, most people remain believers and
have not become atheists. Apart from belief in God, most Dutch people
believe in ‘‘something.’’
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Atheism and Secularity in the Netherlands 175
and an atheist. The a-religious are individuals who are simply not reli-
gious according to any of the measures applied here: Someone who
does not believe, does not attend church, and generally claims not to be
religious when asked directly. A-religious individuals are people for
whom religion makes very little sense. They have no need for religion,
and in their minds religion is basically irrelevant. An atheist on the
other hand is someone who is actively a-religious or maybe it would be
better to say actively antireligious. They share with the a-religious a
lack of belief and religious activities and can be considered a subgroup
of the a-religious. What separates the atheists from the a-religious is
their interest in religion. The a-religious do not care about religion one
way or the other, whereas atheists actively try to curb the influence of
religion. They care about religion but in a negative sense. Using the
word atheist about oneself is not a neutral description but rather a way
to signal a set of particular values regarding religion. It is a way for
individuals to show their surroundings that they find religion a threat
to their own way of life. Either the threat is confined to the public
sphere and the atheist could live with the existence of privatized
religion, or the threat is all encompassing as religion is seen as a threat
to rational thought itself. Since what the atheists are engaged in is a
power struggle, their prime targets should tend to be organized reli-
gion, particularly established majority churches. It is also very likely
that behind the atheists’ skeptical attitude toward religion lies a compre-
hensive worldview much like that of a trained theologian. Atheists fight
religion both outside as well as inside themselves. They need an all
encompassing, well thought through worldview to show themselves (and
the world) that religion is not needed in order to explain the human condi-
tion. The a-religious are much more likely not to think too deeply about
life in general. They do not need religion nor a humanistic answer to it.
As mentioned above, comparatively few Scandinavians attend
church and believe in central tenets of the Christian faith. This means
that the number of a-religious individuals in Scandinavia could be
quite high, maybe as high as 38 percent.4 If the above description of
atheists is true, then it is highly unlikely that athiests would be mem-
bers of an established church. They would most likely make it a point
to be unaffiliated. Because formal membership rates are high in the
Scandinavian countries, the potential number of atheists should be
lower than 16 percent of the population.5 Hence the potential number
of atheists in the most secularized countries in the world is potentially
rather small, which is somewhat surprising.
To find an explanation for this contradictory situation it is prudent
to look at exactly how the process of secularization has run its course
in the Scandinavian countries. Since a theoretical discussion of seculari-
zation is outside the scope of this chapter, the definition proposed by
Dobbelaere will be used here. According to Dobbelaere secularization
Atheism and Secularity: The Scandinavian Paradox 179
things look very different. At the societal level none of the Scandina-
vian countries can be said to be secularized to any noteworthy degree
compared to the rest of Europe or the United States.
Denmark has an established church, the Danish People’s Church
(‘‘Den danske folkekirke’’), the existence of which has been established
in the Danish constitution since 1849.13 The Danish People’s Church is a
state church in the sense that it is controlled by the Danish parliament
through both constitutional and common law administered by the state
bureaucracy. According to Espersen, the Danish parliament has the
power to control both administrational matters as well as strictly reli-
gious matters, for example, liturgy and matters of faith.14 The Danish
People’s Church is part of the state bureaucracy in that all newborn
babies must be registered as new citizens by contacting the local parish
office of the Danish People’s Church regardless of the religious heritage
or religious affiliation of the parents. The information on the newborn
is then sent on to the central registration bureau, which has information
on all Danish citizens. Being registered here is the key for gaining
the benefits of the comprehensive Danish welfare state. According to
the Danish constitution, the monarch is obliged to be of the Evangelical
Lutheran faith although not necessarily a member of the Danish Peo-
ple’s Church.15 The Danish People’s Church is financed through a
church tax collected by the tax authorities and through a direct subsidy
from the state, neither of which are available to other religious entities
in Denmark. Only members of the church pay church tax, but all citi-
zens contribute to the direct state subsidy. Most official holidays in
Denmark are Christian (in name), and the Danish People’s Church is
represented at many official ceremonies, including the opening of par-
liament and royal weddings. Christianity is taught in public schools but
is claimed to be nonconfessional. It is however possible to be exempted
from these lessons on religious grounds.
The Church of Norway (‘‘Den norske kirke’’) is the established
church of Norway, connected to the state through the constitution.16
The constitution also states that members of the Church of Norway are
obliged to raise their children in the faith of the church. The king of
Norway is obliged by the constitution to profess the Evangelical
Lutheran religion. It is also stipulated that the Council of State consist-
ing of the prime minister and at least seven members of the government
must have at least half of its members professing the official religion of
the state. This is usually interpreted as half the members of the Council
of State must be members of the Church of Norway. The Church of
Norway is funded primarily by a state grant. This grant is not tied to
church taxes and is paid for by all inhabitants of Norway. In order not
to discriminate on religious grounds, any officially registered religious
community or (beginning 1981) ethical association is entitled to a state
grant approximately equivalent to the sum given to the Church of
Atheism and Secularity: The Scandinavian Paradox 181
and chances are that many of the users of Atheistic Forum are also
members of the Atheistic Society, even though the society has its own
Internet-based debate forum. The Atheistic Society has managed to get
some news coverage, but beyond that they have little power. There has
not been any serious discussion about the separation of church and state
in Danish parliamentary politics, and there seems to be little debate in
parliament on the intricacies of the tight integration of church and state
in Denmark in general. This leaves little room for any initiatives on the
part of the Atheistic Society as they have to raise the discussions all on
their own. Whether the Atheistic Society would be invited if there were
for instance an official government report on the relationship between
church and state is anyone’s guess.
The largest atheistic or humanistic organization in Norway is the
Norwegian Humanist Association (Human-Etisk Forbund). Founded in
1956, they currently have, according to their own account, more than
72,000 members.25 The large number of members is not the product of
a steady increase over the years but the result of a combination of
aggressive campaigning beginning in the mid-seventies and state and
municipal subsidies. The Norwegian Humanist Association started as
an association consisting mainly of academics in the Norwegian capital
with only 256 members.26 In 1976 the Norwegian Humanist Association
had only accumulated 1,768 paying members, adding up to a net
increase in membership of a little over 1,500 people in 20 years.27 Under
new leadership the association managed to increase the membership
rate dramatically during the late 1970s, and in 1979 the Norwegian
Humanist Association had more than 5,000 members.28 In 1986, thirty
years after it was founded, the association reached 30,000 members.29
While increasing their membership, the association also expanded geo-
graphically and established local branches in most of Norway, changing
from a big city phenomenon to a true national association.30 To finance
their activities, the Norwegian Humanist Association started to obtain
municipal grants beginning in the latter half of the 1960s,31 and in 1981
the Norwegian Humanist Association managed to become the first, and
to this day only, nonreligious organization to get a grant from the state
proportionately equal to that received by the Church of Norway each
year.32 This was the product of the association’s lobbying parliamentary
politicians, but it would not have been possible had the association not
grown to a considerable size during the late seventies.33
The size of the grant from the Norwegian state depends on the num-
ber of members the Norwegian Humanist Association has, but since
adult members still have to pay a yearly fee (members between 15 and
24 years of age are exempt) chances are that the association’s member-
ship rate of 72,000 is not particularly inflated. The Norwegian Humanist
Association runs a string of secular services. They perform rites in con-
nection with birth, coming of age, and death and can perform legally
184 Global Expressions
particularly through its legal privileges (the state grant and the ability
to perform legally binding marriages) and its role in the formulation of
state reports. Even if it is difficult to ascertain whether the established
Scandinavian churches have accommodated to the surrounding society
and its secularization at the societal level something can be said about
the organizations most likely to press for reforms of the churches and
their stance vis-a-vis society as a whole. It could be argued that pres-
sure for secularization at the organizational level is most evident in
Norway and rather weak in Denmark and Sweden. In Norway there is
a major organizational demand for reforms of the way church and state
interact. This demand has not gone unheard as the participation of the
Norwegian Humanist Association in the preparation of the government
report demonstrates. In neither Denmark nor Sweden has the organiza-
tional pressure been so big as to be officially noted.
One way to interpret the differences in size and influence of the athe-
istic/humanistic organizations in the Scandinavian countries could be
that the very tight integration between church and state in Norway has
produced a strong response from organized atheists, whereas the less
tight integration in Denmark and Sweden has not. Because church and
state have been formally separated in Sweden under a social democratic
government, it could be that Swedish atheists have found an organiza-
tional outlet for their atheism through existing political organizations
rather than specifically atheistic/humanistic organizations. It may also
have been important that Norway has been home to a very conservative
interpretation of Protestantism (including belief in demons as late as the
1970s), which the Norwegian Humanist Association managed to capital-
ize on to get the attention of the mass media. This would fit well with
the assumption that atheists are actively nonreligious people. They act
when provoked and need an object at which to direct their anger. An
established church that is highly integrated with the state through the
constitution seem the perfect focusing point for such anger. However,
the stark differences in the sizes of the Scandinavian atheistic/humanistic
organizations suggest that it is not just a question of the degree to which
church and state are integrated. Even though the integration of church
and state may be the tightest in Norway, church and state are still very
tightly integrated in both Denmark and Sweden. This suggests that part
of the explanation for the relative sizes of the atheistic/humanistic organ-
izations in Scandinavia could be the number of atheists in each country.
If so, then it could be expected that the number of atheists will be largest
in Norway, much smaller in Sweden, and almost minimal in Denmark.
From the short discussion of who atheists are assumed to be, several
indicators could be used to delineate atheists in surveys. To cut the opera-
tionalization of atheists short, the easiest thing to do is to let the respon-
dents decide for themselves. This means that in the following, atheists are
individuals who when faced with the choice are willing to define
186 Global Expressions
Table 9.1
Atheists (in percent)
a b a
Denmark Norway Sweden
Atheists 5 4 7
Non-Religious 18 49 54
Religious 77 47 39
Design weight applied
a
EVS 1999
b
WVS 1996
Atheism and Secularity: The Scandinavian Paradox 187
Table 9.2
Demography and education (in percent)
Atheist Other
Female 29 52*
Male 71 48
Age (mean) 37 45*
Size of Town
< 100,000 45 65*
100,000þ 55 35
Education
Less 50 59*
Secondaryþ 50 41
Design and Population weights applied
* Statistically significant at 5 percent level
Table 9.3
Politics and trust (in percent)
Table 9.4
Church membership (in percent)
Atheist Other
reasons they may have. Atheists are, after all, more likely to act (at least
politically) and hence theoretically more likely to leave the established
church. Surprisingly this expectation is contradicted by the survey data.
Among the atheists about 47 percent are members of an established
church compared to about 80 percent among the rest of the population
(Table 9.4). This means that there are about half a million atheists in the
Scandinavian countries who are also members of an established church.
Even though they are ready to declare themselves atheists (rather than
just nonreligious or nonbelievers), almost half the atheists for some rea-
son are still members of an established, and state supported, Christian
majority church. This is very puzzling indeed as the tendency for politi-
cal activity does not seem to readily translate into religious action on
the most basic level. There is of course a marked difference between
atheists and the rest of the population with regard to membership in an
established church as atheists are much more likely not to be members,
but many of them still retain their membership regardless of the fact
that they claim to be atheists.
Traditionally the Christian churches have promoted a specific kind of
morality that their adherents were expected to follow. It could be argued
that secularization has undermined the church-sponsored morality as
the churches can no longer influence society as a whole. It could on the
other hand be argued that this is not necessarily a problem in the Scan-
dinavian countries as they are not particularly secularized at the societal
level. Even with this caveat it could still be argued that in the Scandina-
vian countries atheists should be less inclined to adhere to a strict moral
code because they are actively nonreligious and hence should not be
particularly bound by whatever moral guidelines the established
churches may promote. In fact their antireligious stance may even moti-
vate them to choose a moral standpoint that is exactly the opposite of
that of the churches. Using the EVS/WVS morals can be divided into
civic moral and private moral, the latter often being referred to as per-
missiveness.45 Here civic moral is whether respondents think it can be
justified to claim state benefits one is not entitled to, cheat on one’s
taxes, or accept a bribe. It is a moral that relates to the individual’s role
192 Global Expressions
Table 9.5
Morals (median)
Atheist Other
Civic 25 26*
Private 12 19*
Design and Population weights applied
* Statistically significant at 5 percent level
hold back what could have been a much larger number of atheists.
There is a large group of nonreligious Scandinavians; how many
depends on how they are defined, but for some reason they do not
seem to be attracted by being self-described atheists. If atheism is seen
as a reaction of nonreligious people to the presence of religion in the
public sphere and particularly an opposition to the traditional Christian
majority churches of Europe, then it is plausible that it is the combina-
tion of the Scandinavians’ bottom-up relationship to the state and the
relationship between the state and the established churches that is the
cause of the low number of atheists in Scandinavia. Even though many
Scandinavians are de facto a-religious, they do not feel resentment to-
ward nor threatened by the established churches because they see them
as part of the comprehensive welfare system. Without an ‘‘enemy’’ at
which to direct their resentment of religion, atheists are unlikely to
materialize. Because the established churches are seen as part of the
welfare states, they are part of something that all Scandinavians regard
very highly. The established churches may be the cause of the low lev-
els of religiosity in Scandinavia,47 but it would seem that they are also
the cause of the low number of atheists in Scandinavia.
NOTES
1. Loek Halman et al., eds., Traditie, secularisatie en individualsering. Een studie
naar de waarden van de Nederlanders in een Europese context (Tilburg: Tilburg Uni-
versity Press, 1987); Peter Ester et al., eds., The Individualizing Society: Value
Change in Europe and North America, 2nd ed. (Tilburg: Tilburg University Press,
1994); Loek Halman et al., ‘‘The Religious Factor in Contemporary Society. The
Differential Impact of Religion in the Private and Public Sphere in Comparative
Perspective,’’ International Journal of Comparative Sociology 40, no. 1 (1999): 141–
60; Christian Albrekt Larsen et al., Danskernes forhold til religionen—en afrapporter-
ing af ISSP 1998 (Aalborg: Institut for Økonomi, Politik og Forvaltning, 2002).
2. Larsen et al., Danskernes forhold til religionen—en afrapportering af ISSP
1998, 33.
3. Peter B. Andersen and Peter L€ uchau, ‘‘Tro og religiøst tilhørsforhold i
Europa,’’ in Danskernes srprg, ed. Peter Gundelach (København: Hans Reit-
zels Forlag, 2004).
4. According to data from the EVS 1999 and the WVS 1996 less than 70 per-
cent of the Danish and Norwegian samples believe in God, and in the Swedish
sample it is less than 55 percent. For the combined (and weighted) sample about
62 percent claim to believe in God. If belief in God is considered a minimum of
belief for someone to be considered religious in a Christian sense, then the num-
ber of a-religious could be as high as 38 percent. Those who are religious but
not Christians would have to be subtracted from the 38 percent, but it is difficult
to ascertain how many religious non-Christians there are in Scandinavia because
the current surveys have very few items on non-Christian religiosity.
5. According to data from the EVS 1999 and WVS 1996 about 90 percent of
the Danes and Norwegians claim to be members of a church or other religious
Atheism and Secularity: The Scandinavian Paradox 195
organization. The number for Sweden is more than 75 percent. For the com-
bined (and weighted) sample about 84 percent claim to be members of a
church or other religious organization. If atheists are unaffiliated on principle,
then they would have to be among the 16 percent unaffiliated.
6. Karel Dobbelaere, Secularization: An Analysis at Three Levels (Brussels:
P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2002), 19.
7. Ibid., 21–22.
8. Ibid., 140.
9. Ibid., 134.
10. Ibid., 167–168.
11. Ibid., 169.
12. Peter B. Andersen et al., ‘‘Religion in Europe and the United States:
Assumptions, Survey Evidence, and Some Suggestions,’’ Nordic Journal of Reli-
gion and Society 21, no. 1 (2008): 61–74.
13. Inger D€ ubeck, ‘‘State and Church in Denmark’’, in State and Church in the
European Union, 2nd ed., ed. Gerhard Robbers (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlags-
gesellschaft, 2005).
14. Preben Espersen, Kirkeret. Almindelig del. (København: Jurist—og Øko-
nomforbundets Forlag, 1993), 76.
15. Hans Gammeltoft-Hansen, ‘‘§6’’, in Danmarks Riges Grundlov med kom-
mentarer, ed. Henrik Zahle (København: Jurist- og Økonomforbundets Forlag,
1999). Gammeltoft-Hansen does however argue that it would not be very prac-
tical for the monarch to be member of a church other than the Danish People’s
Church, and it has in fact never been the case since 1849 when the Danish con-
stitution was established.
16. Njål Høstmlingen, ‘‘The Permissible Scope of Legal Limitations on the
Freedom of Religion or Belief in Norway,’’ Emory International Law Review 19,
no. 2 (2005): 989–1032.
17. Ibid., 1003.
18. Lars Friedner, ‘‘State and Church in Sweden’’, in State and Church in the
European Union, 2nd ed., ed. Gerhard Robbers (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlags-
gesellschaft, 2005).
19. Rune Larsson, ‘‘R€atten till befrielse från skolans religionsundervisning i
Sverige,’’ in Religion, skole og kulturel integration i Danmark og Sverige, ed. Peter
B. Andersen et al. (København: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2006).
20. Richard K. Fenn, ‘‘Toward a New Sociology of Religion,’’ Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion 11, no. 1 (Spring, 1972): 16–32.
21. This is not possible in Denmark because the Danish People’s church
does not have a synod, church council, or any kind of official organ to decide
an official stance of the church.
22. The secretary of the Atheistic Society; e-mail message to author, August
14, 2008.
23. See http://www.ateist.dk (accessed September 1, 2009).
24. See http://www.ateist.net (accessed September 1, 2009). Being a society
is a Danish legal construct that basically makes the society a legal person with
the rights and duties inherent in such a status.
25. See http://www.human.no (accessed September 1, 2009).
26. Paul Knutsen, Livet før døden. Human-Etisk Forbund 1956–2006 (Oslo:
Humanist Forlag 2006), 10. The book is a history of the Norwegian Humanist
196 Global Expressions
of actions between people and supernatural beings, and therefore the per-
son who bestows favors on ancestors normally anticipates a response or
return from them in the future. Favors done for others are often consid-
ered what may be termed ‘‘social investments,’’ for which handsome
returns are expected. The more a certain ancestor who is esteemed by his
worshipers wins offerings, the more he will potentially reciprocate favors
(Yang 1976, 357–358). The interaction between worshipers and ancestors
with reference to pao can be looked on as a vivid example of the special
Chinese ‘‘relation-faith pattern’’ (Li 2006, 80–81) and as a theoretical
explanation for the principle of Chinese ancestor worship.
Since the Shang dynasty, there are formal and systematic rituals of
family ancestral sacrifices, which are classified as communicative behav-
iors or magic ones (Leach 1966, 403), and the Chinese characters zu
and zong (ancestors), which are originally two ritual names, eventually
combined into the general name of family ancestral sacrifices (Li 1998,
172). With the development of patriarchy, the rituals of family ancestral
sacrifices seem to focus on the legitimacy of the orthodoxy and ortho-
praxy of a religious belief system (Watson 1988, 9–11). It can be inferred
that old male members, particularly admired or respected ones, are
linked more and more closely with sacrifice rituals of the family
system. Thus there develops the ancestor worship, which lasts several
thousand of years and maintains the consistency and integrality of
Chinese culture.
Besides the ancestor worship, certain spirits of nature also receive
worship in ancient China. In the Shang dynasty, there is mention of a
series of spirits of nature, such as the Eastern Mother, the Western
Mother, the Ruler of the Four Quarters, the Dragon Woman, the Snake
Spirit, and the Wind, who were reverenced deities (Strassberg 2002,
48–49). Mention of these names is in honor of nature spirits and deities
of fertility. The loess soil of north China is quite fertile on the condition
that it receives sufficient rainfall. On the other hand, the Yellow River
flowing through loess country has historically deposited silt, which built
up its bed above the surrounding land in such a way that, when floods
did occur, the damage was enormous and widespread. Hence the balance
of nature, between too little rain and too much, is obviously regarded as
a delicate one, and it is necessary for the chieftain of a certain tribe or
village to preserve the balance of nature by due sacrifices not only to
heaven but also to the gods of the earth (Granet 1989, 168–170).
Crude and primitive as the forms of worship of ancestor and spirits
of nature are, the presence of the above worship with an emphasis on
fertility is clearly attested in China, as elsewhere in the world. The
characters for zu (ancestor) and she (god of the soil) both contain a
phallic symbol that honors reproductive humans (Fan et al. 1998, 472)
or grain (Yuan 1985, 18–19, 209). The before-mentioned forms of wor-
ship enjoy equal concern, with shrines placed east and west of the
202 Global Expressions
the god’s will. And there comes the trend of skepticism of the existence
of God or gods. Consequently the atheism comes into being.
Confucius is the latinized name of the person who has been famous
in China as K’ung Tzu or Master K’ung. His family name was K’ung,
and his personal name Ch’iu. He was born in 551 BCE in the state of
Lu (Fang et al. 1994, 170), in the southern part of the present Shandong
province in eastern China. His ancestors had been members of the
ducal house of the state of Sung, which was descended from the royal
house of Shang, the dynasty that had preceded the Chou. Because of
political troubles, the family had lost its noble position and migrated to
Lu before the birth of Confucius (Kuang 1990, 18–23).
Confucius was impoverished in his youth, but entered the govern-
ment of Lu, and by the time he was fifty had reached high official
rank. On account of political intrigue, he was soon forced to resign his
post and leave his homeland. For the next thirteen years he traveled
from one state to another, invariably hoping to seek an opportunity to
realize his ideal of gradual political and social reform. However,
nowhere did he succeed, and finally as an old man he returned to Lu,
where he died three years later in 479 BCE (Kuang 1990, 86–88).
So far as modern scholarship can determine (Kuang 1990, 286–268),
Confucius was the first person in Chinese history to teach large num-
bers of students in a private capacity, by whom he was accompanied
during his travels in different states. In regard to tradition, he had sev-
eral thousand students, of whom several tens became famous thinkers
and scholars. The former number is obviously a gross exaggeration,
but there is no question that he was a very influential teacher, and
what is more important and unique, China’s first private teacher (Wu
1997, 55–56). His ideas are best known through the Lun Y€ u (Analects), a
collection of his scattered sayings and apothegms that was compiled
by some of his disciples.
As the founder of the Ju school (Confucian School), Confucius was
more than a ju (literatus) in the common sense of the word. Confucius
wanted his disciples to be ‘‘rounded men’’ who would be useful to
state and society, and therefore he taught them various branches of
knowledge based on the different classics especially on ‘‘Six Classics.’’
In the eyes of Confucius, his primary function as a teacher was to
interpret to his disciples the ancient cultural heritage. That is why, in
his own words as recorded in the Analects, he was ‘‘a transmitter and
not an originator’’ (Yang 1980, 66). By teaching the ancient classics,
Confucius and the descendant Ju School inherit the ancient cultural leg-
acy and carry forward the skeptical soul of rationalism and necessary
intellect resources for atheism as well.
On the other hand, while transmitting the traditional institutions
and ideas, Confucius gave his disciples interpretations derived from
his own moral concepts, which are involved with the transcendent
204 Global Expressions
Tzu-lu (one disciple of Confucius) asked about serving the spirits [of the
dead], the Master said, ‘‘While you are not able to serve men, how can
you serve [their] spirits?’’6 [Tzu-lu added], ‘‘I venture to ask about
death?’’ He was answered, ‘‘While you do not know life, how can you
know about death?’’7 (Legge 1870, 57–58)
Instead of serving the spirits of the dead, Confucius told his disciples
to show concern for secular business of the living, which seems to foster
the filial piety of young generations (Ya and Wang 1992, 67). Thus the
essentials of sacrifice were replaced on the quiet by the Confucian idea
of self-cultivation. Atheist as Confucius may not be, he risked universal
condemnation to ingeniously carry out his humanistic propositions in
the era of prevalent theistic conceptions. If Confucius did not take the
suspension stand, he would hardly be a teacher in the midst of a long
career during the turbulent but worshipful Spring and Autumn period.
Generally by speaking, Confucius scarcely talked of supernatural
beings in terms of his disciples’ recordation because he acknowledged
the inevitability of the world as it exists, and so to disregard his exter-
nal success or failure (Lao 2005, 102–103). Suppose one does his duty,
which is normally done through his very act, regardless of the external
success or failure of his action. The subjects on which the Master did
Atheism and Secularity in China 205
actual substances, such as water and fire, instead of abstract forces bear-
ing these names, as the Wu Hsing came to be regarded later on. During
the third century BCE, Wu Hsing became vaguer in its meaning because
the Chinese character hsing had acquired its transferred meaning ‘‘to
act’’ or ‘‘to do.’’ Therefore the term Wu Hsing, literally translated, would
mean the Five Activities, or Five Agents. They are also known as the
Wu Te, which means Five Powers (Needham 1990, 260–262).
According to the well-known ancient Greek figures Aristotle and
Hippocrates, everything in the world consists of four fundamental ele-
ments: earth, air, fire, and water. Similarly, the ancient Chinese consid-
ered metal, wood, water, fire, and earth to be fundamental. There are
two important differences between the theory of Five Phases and that
of Four Elements in ancient Greece. First, the Five Phases were consid-
ered as the basic components of the universe, yet they did not apply to
exploring the substantial constitution of particular things because of
the unfavorable technical and social conditions. Nevertheless, the Five
Phases are five basic categories13 for classifying things according to
their properties and relationships to other things. Second, the Five
Phases are not independent of one another, but have significant rela-
tionships and laws of transformation among them. The ancient Chinese
showed much concern for the relationships and laws among five
phases rather than five phases themselves, which was inspired by the
concept of nature in the organic philosophy (Needham 1990, 311–312).
There are two basic kinds of relation or sequence among the five
phases: Mutual Promotion (production or Sheng in Chinese) and Mu-
tual Subjugation (conquest or Ke in Chinese). The principle of Mutual
Promotion says that five phases may activate, generate, and support
each other. It is through these promotions of the substances that five
phases continue to survive, regenerate, and transform. The sequence of
Mutual Promotion is as follows: wood promotes fire, fire promotes
earth, earth promotes metal, metal promotes water, water promotes
wood, and wood again promotes fire.
However, the principle of Mutual Subjugation, concerns relations
such as restraining, controlling, and overcoming. Mutual restraint
keeps the dynamic and conditional balance and harmony among the
five phases. Wood subdues earth; earth subdues water; water subdues
fire; fire subdues metal; metal subdues wood; wood in its turn acts on
earth. Figure 10.1 shows the mutual promotion and mutual subjugation
relationship among the five phases.
The meaning of the above principles comes from experience yet not
merely experience. Fire is created when wood is burned. Ash (earth) is
left after burning. All metals come from earth and liquefy on heating,
while water is indispensable for growing trees and vegetation. These
relations support the principle of Mutual Promotion (Production). On
the other hand, the ancient Chinese noticed that trees grow on earth,
Atheism and Secularity in China 209
Mutual Promotion
Mutual Subjugation
impoverishing the soil. To prevent floods, dams and channels are built
with earth. Water puts out fire while metals can be softened and
melted by fire. A sword or ax made of metal can be used to fall a tree.
These relations are summarized in the principle of Mutual Subjugation
(Conquest). In addition, five phases have their origin in the observation
and recordation of breadthways, apparent motions of five planets
including Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, and Saturn, in contrast with
the lengthways ones of twenty-eight Chinese hsiu (constellations; Liu
1991, 197–199). Thus it seems that more than experience can account
for the meaning of mutual relationships of the Five Phases.
Most things in the world can be classified into one of the five basic
categories according to their properties, function, and relations with
others. Table 10.1 shows some objects relevant to nature, human, and
their secular relations. For example, the liver is similar to wood with
respect to its mild features, and the heart warms the whole body so it is
analogous to fire. The spleen is responsible for assimilation of nutrients
and corresponds to the earth. The lung is clear, analogous to metal. The
kidney is similar to water by virtue of its responsibility of regulating
fluids in the body. On the whole, the classification and correspondence
in terms of the Five Phases illustrate the mutual relationship between
the human body, the seasons, climate factors, senses, and emotions.
Table 10.1
The five phases as five categories and their correlations adapted from science and civilisation in China
(Needham 1990, 285)
Five
Heaven (Nature) Phases Human (Society)
Yin-Yang Taste Colors Devel- Weather Cardinal Seasons Viscera — Sense Body Affective Dynasty
opment Points organs State
Less Yang Sour Green Birth Wind East Spring Wood Liver Gall Eyes Muscles Anger Xia
Yang Bitter Red Growth Heat South Summer Fire Heart Small Lingua Pulse Joy Zhou
intestine (blood)
Equilibrium Sweet Yellow Change Wet Center Later Earth Spleen Stomach Mouth Flesh Think Yellow
summer (desire) Emperor
Less Yin Acrid White Reaping Dry West Autumn Metal Lungs Large Nose Skin & Sorrow Shang
intestine Hair
Yin Salt Black Storing Cold North Winter Water Kidneys Bladder Ears Bones Fear Qin
(marrow)
Atheism and Secularity in China 211
connotation, Ch’i means the material and energetic basis of things and
their transformations. Further, there are three points worth considera-
tion. First, Ch’i is not a type of substance and has no fixed shape or
constitution. Second, it is indispensable for explaining the dynamic
changes or transformations that take place among nature, human, and
society. Third, it is responsible for the resources of the function and
operation of the organic whole, i.e., the vivid human body or balanced
ecosystem. Ch’i has variously been interpreted in terms of the Greek
pneuma, vital force, or energy (Lloyd 1996, 8, 65, and 110), and there-
fore it serves a dual purpose of spirituality and materiality.
Ch’i seems to become a philosophical concept no earlier than the
publication of the book Mencius (Onozawa 1990, 37). Mencius thinks
that Hao Jan Chih Ch’i (Great Morale) is a matter concerning humans
and the universe and therefore is a super-moral value. It is the morale
of the man who identifies himself with the universe, so that Mencius
says of it that ‘‘it pervades all between Heaven and Earth’’ (Yang 1960,
62). As the bridge of understanding correlations between heaven,
human beings, and earth, Ch’i integrated with Wu Hsing and Yin and
Yang offered ancient Chinese people an efficient and rational pattern of
thought instead of a theistic and teleological one as in other nations.
Whatever confronted them—the natural phenomena, secular life or
social institution, the ancient Chinese pattern of thought provided peo-
ple with correlative, coherent, and conditional explanations in spite of
its disadvantages (Schwartz 2004, 363–368). Hence, in virtue of everlast-
ing and dynamic holism inspired by the pattern of thought, atheism
sprang up vigorously in ancient China.
Table 10.2
The latest survey data of Chinese religious affiliation (Grim 2008)
Total Religious 14 18 16
Believers
Buddhist 12 16 11
Christian 2 1 4
Protestant 1 1 2
Catholic 1 <1 2
Muslim <1 1 1
Taoist <1 <1 <1
Other — <1 <1
None 81 77 77
Refuse or DK 5 5 7
Total respondents 4,104 2,180 2,191
Sampling error þ/ 1.6 þ/ 2.3 þ/ 2.3
Question wording: What is your religious faith?
Note: The differences in the three estimates may be due to sampling error and the cities
sampled rather than significant shifts in religious adherence among years.
Source: For 2007, Horizon survey reported by C100; Source: For 2005 and 2006, Horizon
survey reported by the Pew Global Attitudes Project.
During the Cultural Revolution, under the slogans of ‘‘class struggles are
the guiding principle’’ and ‘‘completely break up with conventional
ideas,’’ religion was listed as part of the ‘‘four olds’’ [old ideas, old cul-
ture, old customs, and old habits] and of ‘‘feudalism, capitalism and revi-
sionism’’ that should be eradicated. Religious beliefs of the great masses
were said to be reflections of class struggles in the sphere of ideology
216 Global Expressions
NOTES
1. ‘‘Husband guides wife’’ is one of the three cardinal guides that belonged
to the moral laws in olden times of Chinese society, and the other two are
‘‘ruler guides subject’’ and ‘‘father guides son.’’ Moreover, women had to obey
the three obediences: (1) to father before marriage, (2) to husband after mar-
riage, and (3) to son after the death of husband, and the four virtues consisting
of morality, proper speech, modest manner, and diligent work. The three obe-
diences and four virtues are spiritual fetters that were imposed on women in
the patriarchal society (Fairbank 1958, 30–32).
2. The famous ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle has made a point of
‘‘mesotees (moderation).’’ He said, ‘‘For both temperance and bravery are
destroyed by excess and by defect, and are preserved in perfection by modera-
tion’’ (Williams 1869, 39). The ‘‘moderation’’ of Aristotle and the ‘‘golden-
mean’’ of Confucius are different in approach but equally satisfactory in result.
3. In the case of Confucius’ attitude toward theism, most scholars hold that
Confucius is a theist, some even think that he is a pantheist, and a few scholars
insist on the atheistic stand of Confucius (L€
u 1987, 184–85). However, I maintain
that Confucius takes a skeptical stand in theism and gives neither affirmative
nor negative comments on the existence of God or gods. However, it doesn’t
mean Confucius takes no account of sacrifice to ancestors. Confucius thinks
highly of the moral value of rituals (li in Chinese) in sacrifice to ancestors
Atheism and Secularity in China 217
Of the saying, ‘‘The word ‘sacrifice’ is like the word ‘present’; one should
sacrifice to a spirit as though that spirit was present’’, the Master said, if
I am not present at the sacrifice, it is as though there were no sacrifice.
(Waley 1998, 31).
Waley’s translation has a little difference from Legge’s in the connotation of ‘‘spi-
rit.’’ In Waley’s translation, the ‘‘spirit’’ seems to denote ghosts, some of which
originates from the deceased, and spirits including nature gods. In contrast,
Legge’s translation distinguishes the ghosts and the spirits, since ‘‘the dead’’ sug-
gests not only those ghosts originating from the departed people but also
deceased ancestors, and ‘‘the spirits’’ refer to spirits of nature and other deities.
6. The word ‘‘spirits’’ here refers to the hun (spiritual souls or personality
souls) rather than spirits of nature and other deities.
7. Waley’s translation is as follows: ‘‘Tzu-lu asked how one should serve
ghosts and spirits. The Master said, ‘Till you have learnt to serve men, how
can you serve ghosts?’ Tzu-lu then ventured upon a question about the dead.
The Master said, ‘Till you know about the living, how are you to know about
the dead?’ ’’ (Waley 1998, 133).
8. Hereinafter is Waley’s translation: ‘‘The master [Confucius] never talked
of prodigies, feats of strength, disorders or spirits’’ (Waley 1998, 87).
9. Waley translates the saying into ‘‘the Good (ruler) loves men’’ (Waley
1998, 157). Waley regards the saying as Confucius’ illustration of the proper
way that a ruler treats his subjects.
10. Similar philosophical expression can be found in Hegel’s works. The Ger-
man philosopher Hegel says: ‘‘though in determinate being there is involved an
element of negation, this element is at first wrapped up, as it were, and only
comes to the front and receives its due in Being-for-self’’ (Hegel 1980, 203).
11. The saying has an English version of liberal translation from Chinese
original text by Paul Carus: ‘‘Homeward is Reason (Tao)’s course’’ (Carus
1903, 118).
12. The English translation for the proverb can also be ‘‘Pride leads to loss/
downfall while modesty brings benefit’’ (Wang et al. 1996, 248).
218 Global Expressions
13. Five Phases (fivefold divisions) emerged as one kind of several analo-
gous sets for classifying things. Besides, there were fourfold and sixfold divi-
sions that were less popular than the fivefold one (Liu 1998, 144–146).
14. Besides the dichotomy of the Yin and the Yang, there were other division
methods such as trichotomy and quartation in the ancient history of China
(Pang 2003, 174–194). The trichotomy cited in ancient Chinese classics was no
less than dichotomy.
15. Anyone who is interested in their statements or remarks on atheism in
the history of China can read the book The History of Atheism in China (Ya and
Wang 1992) for further acquaintance.
16. For additional reading to learn more about the New Culture Movement,
please browse the Web page: New Culture Movement, Wikimedia Foundation,
2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Culture_Movement (accessed Septem-
ber 2, 2009).
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Hourani, Albert, 114, 125, 127 Iraq, 115, 129, 130
Hsai Hsian-hseng (Sir Science), 214 Islam, 116. See also Arab world; in
Hs€un Tzu, 212 former Soviet Union, 52–53;
Hubb al-watan (love of country/ anti-Islamic propaganda, 49
territorial patriotism), 125 al-Islam wa Usul al-Hukm, 119
al-Hukm (governance and Isma’il Pasha, 123
government), 117
Humanistic-Ethical Society Jahiliyyah (era of religious ignorance),
(Human-Etiska F€ orbundet). See 116
Humanists (Humanisterna) Jamaat al-Jihad (Society of Holy War),
Humanists (Humanisterna), 184 131
Hume, David, 92 Jamal Abd’ul Nasir, 130, 131
Hun (personality soul), 200 Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, 125, 126
Hungary, 60 Jana Vigyana Vedika, 151
Hung Fan (Great Plan), 207 Japan, 23; atheism in contemporary,
Hu Shih, 214 36–39; political secularity in,
Husserl, Edmund, 217n4 27–31; religiousness in, 24–26;
Hyderabad Rationalist Forum, 141 secularity in modern, 26–; social
secularity in, 31–36
Ibrahim Abu-Rabi, 119, 128, 132, 133 Japanese General Social Surveys
al-‘Iilmaniyyah (secularism), 117 (JGSS), 33, 41n4
Ijma (consensus), 117 Jen (virtue), 205
Ijtihad (independent reasoning), 117 Junichiro Koizumi, 30
Imam (leader), 116
India, 139; Andhra Pradesh, 150–51; Kafir (infidel), 116
Atheist Centre, 144–45; Bihar state, Kami, 28
147–48; Center for Inquiry India, Kawaljeet, 147
151–52; Dravidar Kazhagam, 142– Kerela Bangalore Rationalist
44; Gora, 145–47; Indian rationalist Humanist Association, 141
movement, 141; Indian secular Khairuddin al-Tunisi, 125
movement, 140–41; Maharastra Ibn Khaldun, 119
state, 148–49; Periyar movement, Khalid Muhammad Khalid, 133
141–42; Radical Humanist move- Khalifah (successor to authority of
ment, 140; Satyashodhak marriage Muhammad), 117
ceremony, 149; West Bengal, 149–50 Khrushchev, 49
Index 227
EDITOR
CONTRIBUTORS
Samuel Bagg graduated from Yale in 2009 with a degree in ethics, pol-
itics, and economics, for which he concentrated in social theory. He
grew up in Durham, North Carolina, where he first became interested
in the social science of atheism because of conversations with his reli-
gious peers. Academically, he is primarily interested in the relationship
of religion—or its absence—to civil society and national identity.
Liang Tong, a member of the Chinese Society for the History of Sci-
ence and Technology, graduated from Sun Yat-sen University with a
master’s degree in philosophy of science. Liang considers himself a col-
umnist who is interested in the culture, philosophy, and religion of an-
cient China.
rituals and festivals in Japan, and religion, health, and aging. Recent
publications include a book chapter in the Sociology of Religion’s Religion
and the Social Order series (2006) and articles in the Journal for the Scien-
tific Study of Religion (June 2007) and in the Review of Religious Research
(March 2009).