Transcript
You heard it from Richard Dawkins. I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country, although I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith. You heard it from Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And that idea that there is something above us, a higher power, I think that is rooted in Christianity, it’s rooted in the Judeo-Christian traditions, and in many ways, it is superior to the nihilistic, Nietzsche-type, atheistic theology. You even heard it from Joe Rogan. We need Jesus. I think, for real. Like, if he came back now, it’d be great. Like, Jesus, if you’re thinking about coming back. Right now? Now’s a good time. Pretty soon. Yeah.
Everyone’s starting to realize that the New Atheists, with all their assurances that if we just get rid of religion, people will become more rational, had absolutely no clue what they were talking about. The New Atheists had as much blind faith in the coming scientific utopia as the jihadi has in his 72 virgins. And that blind faith of the New Atheists is destroying Western civilization. Here’s a new article from The Atlantic (SOROS) to add to our ever-expanding collection of lamentations from all the atheists and agnostics who are in the process of being repeatedly throat-punched by reality. The True Cost of the Church-Going Bust And the description, Many Americans Seem to Have Found No Alternative Method to Build a Sense of Community by Derek Thompson As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence. Richard Dawkins saw it long before you saw it, Derek. You call it a retaining wall, he called it a bulwark. Dawkins was referring to something a certain religion was protecting you from when he said, And way back in 2010, I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, insofar as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse. Or, as he warned in a 2018 tweet, Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively benign Christian religion, let’s not forget Hilaire Belloc’s menacing rhyme, Always keep a hold of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse. More than one quarter of Americans now identify as atheists, agnostics, or religiously unaffiliated, according to a new survey of 5,600 U.S. adults by the Public Religion Research Institute. This is the highest level of non-religiosity in the poll’s history. Two-thirds of nonbelievers were brought up in at least nominally religious households, like me. I grew up in a Reform Jewish home that I would describe as haphazardly religious. In kindergarten, my parents encouraged my sister and me to enthusiastically celebrate Hanukkah and, just as fervently, to believe in Santa Claus. But more Americans today have converted out of religion than have converted to all forms of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam combined. No faith’s evangelism has been as successful in this century as religious skepticism. And, as this religious skepticism has spread, so have science and logic and reason and— ah, who am I kidding, we
can’t even figure out what a girl is anymore.
Secularization is old news. The scientific revolution that pitted the Church against stargazers like Galileo comes from the 1600s, and Nietzsche famously declared God is dead in the 1880s. I think Derek needs a refresher on the history of science and philosophy. But even as secularism surged throughout the developed world in the 20th century, America’s religiosity remained exceptional. 7 in 10 Americans told Gallup that they belonged to a church in 1937, and even by the 1980s, roughly 70% said they still belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque. Suddenly, in the 1990s, the ranks of non-believers surged. An estimated 40 million people—1 in 8 Americans—stopped going to church in the past 25 years, making it the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history, according to the religion writer Jake Meador. In 2021, membership in houses of worship fell below a majority for the first time on record. Anyone else notice that, as membership in houses of worship plummeted, people losing their minds skyrocketed? Maybe it’s just a coincidence. The sudden decline of religion likely relates to changes in both politics and family life. In the 1970s and 80s, the religious right became a formidable fundraising machine for the Republican Party. As the GOP consolidated its advantage among conservative Christians, religion seemed less appealing to liberal young people, especially if they or their parents already had a tenuous relationship with the church. In the late 1980s, only one in ten liberals said they didn’t belong to any religion. Thirty years later, that figure was about four in ten. Meanwhile, the decline of marriage, especially among low-income Americans, accompanied their move away from the church. So, there’s some sort of correlation between moving away from the church and a decline in marriage. But that’ll be good for society, too, right? Who needs that archaic, I-now-pronounce-you-husband-and-wife nonsense? That relationship with organized religion provided many things at once. Not only a connection to the divine, but also a historical narrative of identity, a set of rituals to organize the week and year, and a community of families. PRRI found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services a few times a year, included experiencing religion in a community and instilling values in their children. So, as people abandon religion, they’re losing a connection to the divine, a historical narrative of identity, rituals to organize the week and year, a community of families, experiencing religion in a community, and a system for instilling values in their children. But what could go wrong? How about everything? Everything can go wrong. When I read the PRRI survey, this emphasis on community is what caught my eye. As I recently reported, the United States is in the midst of a historically unprecedented decline in face-to-face socializing. The social collapse is steepest for some of the groups with the largest declines in religiosity. For example, young people, who are fleeing religion faster than older Americans, have also seen the largest decline in socializing. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 have reduced their hangouts by more than three hours a week according to the American Time Use Survey. There is no statistical record of any period in U.S. history where young people were less likely to attend religious services, and also no period when young people have spent more time on their own. But that’s working out really well for young people. Just check TikTok to see how things are going. Be sure to bring some soap, because you’re going to want to wash your eyeballs out after a few minutes. A similar story holds for working-class Americans. In 2019, a team of researchers published a survey based on long interviews conducted from 2000 to 2013 with older, low-income men without a college degree in working-class neighborhoods around the country. They found that, since the 1970s, church attendance among white men without a college degree had fallen even more than among white college graduates. For many of these men, the loss of religion went hand-in-hand with the retreat from marriage. As marriage declined, the authors wrote, men’s church attendance might have fallen in tandem. Today, low-income and unmarried men have more alone time than almost any other group, according to time-use data. That’s one way to stick it to the patriarchy. Did the decline of religion cut some people off from a crucial gateway to civic engagement? judgment, or is religion just one part of a broader retreat from associations and memberships in America? It’s hard to know what the causal story is here, Eric Kleinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, told me. But what’s undeniable is that non-religious Americans are also less civically engaged. This year, the Pew Research Center reported that religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely. Clearly, more Americans are spending Sunday mornings on their couches, and it’s affected the quality of our collective life, he said. Less civically engaged, less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, more likely to say they feel lonely. Small price to pay for getting rid of Jesus, though, am I right? Kleinenberg doesn’t blame individual Americans for these changes. He sees our civic retreat as a story about place. In his book, Palaces for the People, Kleinenberg reported that Americans today have fewer shared spaces where connections are formed—churches, libraries, parks, school gyms, and union halls. People today say they just have fewer places to go for collective life, he said. Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether. Many people, having lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community. Don’t miss that last part. People are losing the scaffolding of organized religion, but they haven’t found an alternative method for building a sense of community. As we’ll see in the coming months and years, they haven’t found an alternative for lots of things. For more than two decades, the New Atheists have been ripping up the foundations of society. But they’ve never come up with anything that can replace those foundations. It turns out, patting yourself on the back and bragging about how smart you are and spending every waking moment posting Sky Daddy, Sky Daddy, Sky Daddy, Sky Daddy, Sky Daddy on Twitter just isn’t enough to keep society from collapsing. Now for a thought experiment. Imagine, by analogy, a parallel universe where Americans suddenly gave up on sit-down restaurants. In surveys, they named many reasonable motivations for their abstinence. The expense, the overuse of salt and sugar and butter, the temptation to drink alcohol. As restaurants disappeared by the hundreds, some mourned their closure, while others said it simply didn’t matter. After all, there were still plenty of ways for people to feed themselves. Over time, however, Americans as a group never found another social activity to replace their dining out time. They saw less of one another with each passing decade. Sociologists noted that the demise of restaurants had correlated with a rise in aloneness, just as the CDC noticed an increase in anxiety and depression. I’ve come to believe that something like this story is happening, except with organized religion playing the role of restaurants. On an individual basis, people can give any number of valid-sounding reasons for not frequenting a house of worship. But a behavioral shift that is fully understandable on the individual level has coincided with, and even partly exacerbated, a great rewiring of our social relations. Ah-ha! You are an individual, but you’re also part of a society. If one person acts differently, society doesn’t change. But if millions of people start acting differently, society gets rewired. So, how do you like the direction society’s heading? And America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual—the smartphone. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation, to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmos. To skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. The Internet is timeless in the best and worst of ways, and everything’s store with no opening or closing times. In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things, Haidt writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary. When people lose their external structure, they begin to lose their internal structure, their mental structure. And they go insane. Religious rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional—Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews daven. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. It’s no surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital devices as a Sabbath. Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people, whether in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner table prayer. In other words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, and collective. You can think of religious rituals as a trellis for you to grow on. You’re a grapevine. You can exist as a grapevine on the ground, but you’re not going to be very fruitful. If you want to be fruitful, you need a structure to grow on. I’m not advocating that every atheist and agnostic in America immediately choose a world religion and commit themselves to weekly church or synagogue or mosque attendance. congregants. But I wonder if, in foregoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. Making friends as an adult can be hard. It’s especially hard without a scheduled weekly reunion of congregants. Finding meaning in the world is hard too. It’s especially difficult if the oldest systems of meaning-making hold less and less appeal. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost. Ever notice that everyone who promises to guide us to some utopia inevitably ends up leading us closer to a dystopia? Communism, Socialism, the New Atheism, Wokeism. People come up with theories that make sense in their heads. These deep thinkers solve all the world’s problems in their heads, with their theories. But they should have kept those theories in their heads. Because their theories don’t work in the real world. As the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reed put it, A traveler who has good judgment may mistake his way and be led unawares on to a wrong route. And for as long as the wrong road in front of him is open and passable, he may go on without suspicion, and be followed by others. But when the road ends at a coal pit, he doesn’t need much judgment to know that he has gone wrong, and perhaps to find out what has led him astray. New atheists, you thought you were guiding society on the right path. But now we find ourselves falling deeper and deeper into a coal pit. Will there come a time when you champions of evidence actually pay attention to the mountains of evidence all around you and conclude that you are way out of your depth and that your theories about how to improve the world are far more dangerous to the world than the boogeyman of religion that frightens you so.
Afterword
A wonderful tirade exposing the Professional New Atheists who actually admit wanting Christianity to continue because it has so many redeeming features after all.
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