Donald B.
Ardell – February 27, 2011
When good things happen, such as the fall of a dictator's
totalitarian government, other hopeful possibilities come to mind. Could Iran's
theocracy be next? How about Mugabe in Zimbabwe? How about Ratzinger in Vatican
City? Yes, the latter would be on a fantasy list of ignoble states I'd love to
see go down.
Ingersoll wrote extensively about the decline of religion and predicted it
would be rare in the century to come (writing in the final years of the 19th
century). His optimism was not prophetic. Philosopher-historian Will Durant
half a century later also professed the coming decline of religion, not just
within this country but in all Western democracies. Durant saw it as the basic
event that would define modern times. Another half century has passed and we
are still hip deep in the muck of religious babble, fervor and nastiness.
Is there a freethinker in today's America announcing the end of faith? Well,
there is Sam Harris, who wrote a best-seller by this title. And most recently,
there is the highly regarded reporter James A. Haught, author of many wonderful
books on the hazards of religion (e.g., Holy
Horrors, one of my favorites), doing just that - saying in effect
that the end is nigh. In Fading
Faith: The Rise of the Secular Age, Haught anticipates this
consummation devoutedly to be wished. But, is Haught's hopeful vision any more
likely to come to pass than the prognostications of the brilliant Ingersoll and
the genius Durant?
Well, things look pretty good in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and other
advanced democracies, where religious affiliation is down to five to ten
percent of the populations. Don't you just love it when the pope laments as
follows: Europe has developed a culture that, in a manner unknown before now to
humanity, excludes God from the public conscience. Go Europe.
Alas, American is another story. We have no fewer than 350,000 churches. Religion
takes in $100 billion annually - and it's almost all exempt from taxation.
There are rich mega-churches, Rapture books are best-sellers, evolution is
controversial and under
attack from fundamentalists, televangelists are flourishing in the
media and Billy Graham has still not been indicted for fraud. Pentecostals are
babbling and evangelicals have taken over the Republican Party.
Where does Haught get off suggesting religion is on the decline?
Well, for starters there are data he offers that suggest we are, albeit slowly,
following in Europe's footsteps. Secularism is on the rise, especially among
younger age cohorts. Numerous polls document a rise in Nones, respondents who
choose none when asked for a religious preference. It seems 45 million U.S.
adults (about 15 percent) are what the devout might consider unchurched. Some
suggest it's much higher. Robert Putnam in Bowling
Alone stated that 40 percent of young Americans answer none in faith
surveys.
Also, membership in mainline churches has collapsed. No less than 20 million
Americans have quit Catholicism - one-tenth of U.S. adults are ex-Catholics,
myself included. (Of course, like everyone else, I started out as an atheist.
My parents declared that I was a little Catholic and tried over the course of
my first ten years to make me believe it. By eleven, I was convinced they had
me confused with someone else.)
There has also been a decline in the power of religions to constrain personal liberties and choices. When I
was young, church-sponsored laws and customs and community rituals were far
more pervasive than today. Think of Sunday blue laws, censorship of
magazines and movies, restaurant and other restrictions on liquor, the limits
on access to birth control information and devices, the absence of sex
education, the inability of unwed couples to rent a room or buy a home. Recall
the role of religion in criminalizing abortion and the damage to the wall
separating church and state with the addition of under God to the Pledge of
Allegiance. As Haught writes in Fading Faith:
Gradually, decade by decade, religion is moving from the
advanced First World to the less-developed Third World. Faith retains enormous
power in Muslim lands. Pentecostalism is booming in Africa and South America.
Yet the West steadily turns more secular. Arguably, it's one of the biggest
news stories during our lives - although most of us are too busy to notice.
Durant may have been correct when he wrote that it is the basic event of modern
times.
Maybe Ingersoll was right, too, but it's simply taken an extra
century to become evident. That would be consistent with his observation in Some
Mistakes of Moses:
It is hard for many people to give up the religion in which
they were born; to admit that their fathers were utterly mistaken, and that the
sacred records of their country are but collections of myths and fables.
To paraphrase the late great comic Lenny Bruce, I think it's
about time we gave up religion and tried reason, science and common sense for a
change.
POSTSCRIPT: I sent this essay to the TPJ columnist we all
know and love, namely, the Science Junkie. I asked for comments. I thought you
would enjoy his take on the issues as much as I did.
THE SCIENCE JUNKIE: Very well said. It is very refreshing to
read something plausibly hopeful about this declining nation.
One thing I have been worrying about is an imminent takeover
by the coalition of right-wing crazies, in which the religious right will play
a prominent, perhaps dominant, role. Appalling as it seems, there is a very
real possibility that the lunatics will be voted into power in the next
election, after which we may well look back on the Bush administration as a
bastion of rationality.
There are other hopeful signs besides polls: Just take a
look at popular culture through the lens of TV for a few days. All that
crassness, violence, exhibitionism, consumerism, and mindless self-indulgence
does not bode well for aspiring theocrats. So I say, Bring it on, popular
culture! If this is what huge numbers of Americans like to do with their precious
spare time, it's hard to see how the religious fanatics are going to get them
to take Jesus seriously. Maybe that's where religion really stands: a
relatively small group of hard-core zealots propped up by a great majority of
hypocritical hedonists who pay lip service to the Lord without having the
slightest idea what they're doing just because . . . well, just because that's
what they think everyone else expects them to do. Or something like that.
So I find it hard to believe that the frivolous morons who
populate TV's vast wasteland can be serious about
religion, or anything else for that matter. And that may be a lesser-of-evils
blessing, because religion tends to be dangerous in direct proportion to how
seriously people take it. Thanks, now I feel better.
Donald B.
Ardell is the Well Infidel. He
favors evidence over faith, reason over revelation and meaning and purpose over
spirituality. His enthusiasm for
reason, exuberance and liberty are reflected in his books (14), newsletter (564
editions of a weekly report) and lectures across North America and a dozen
other countries. Write Don at awr.realwellness@gmail.com