Secular organizers say interfaith spaces should include atheists, nonbelievers

It is perplexing, some say, when interfaith leaders refer to the religious freedom movement as 'radically inclusive' while 'one of the biggest sections of society' is left out of the conversation.

David Mercer, top, a former minister, talks about rethinking the way people relate to and interact with believers while speaking in Polk County in central Florida. Photo courtesy of Atheist Community of Polk County

April 10, 2023

By 

Alejandra Molina

(RNS) — Six years ago this month, when Arizona State Representative Athena Salman, an atheist, delivered the invocation to open the day’s legislative session, it started an odd culture war, with faith leaders on one side supporting her and Republican lawmakers rebuking the Tempe Democrat for failing to appeal to a higher power.

Instead, Salman invoked humanity. “Remember the humanity that resides within each and every person here,” she said, “and each and every person in the city, and in all people in the nation and world as a whole.” Her prayer was found to have violated House rules.

Christians and Muslims were part of an interfaith group of clergy who stood in solidarity with Salman at a “Standing for Our First Freedom” gathering at the Arizona State Capitol as they read aloud Salman’s invocation.

Looking back on those events, Evan Clark, an atheist and humanist who helped organize the demonstration, said it was an example of how interfaith networks can “stand with our community when a small or large attack happens.”

Now Clark, the executive director for Los Angeles-based Atheists United, is among a handful of secular groups challenging interfaith organizations that include people of different religious and spiritual backgrounds to make space for those who espouse no faith at all, including atheist and secular networks.

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RELATED: Athena Salman, atheist legislator, on secular values and godless invocations

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“I’ve never found an interfaith group who wants to exist to just talk about faith,” said Clark, adding that interfaith spaces exist “to get a diverse, pluralistic group of people working together to make change in their community or society.”

In the U.S. and across the globe, interfaith leaders have denounced the violence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, advocated against President Joe Biden’s plans to restrict asylum, organized to elect “gun sense” candidates and held vigils and rallies advocating for racial justice.

To leave out the secular community from these efforts, Clark said, “is to discriminate against the largest and fastest growing religious demographic in the United States today.”

Since 2009, the number of Americans identifying as atheist has doubled, from 2% to 4%, and the number of agnostics rose from 3% to 5%, according to Pew Research.

In 2020, American Atheists — a national civil rights organization that seeks to achieve religious equality for all Americans — published its own findings about the community and showed that “nonreligious young people are the fastest growing segment of the nonreligious community.” Their claim to attract American youth tracks with Pew findings that the average nonbeliever is 34 years old.

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RELATED: Atheists, spurred by growing ranks, gather for first time since start of pandemic

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The Rev. Zachary Hoover, left, is with LA Voice, a multiracial and multifaith organization that planned the May 31, 2020, evening vigil in remembrance of George Floyd in Los Angeles. RNS photo by Alejandra Molina

The American Atheist report found that nonreligious people care about maintaining secular public schools, oppose religious exemptions that allow for discrimination, believe in access to abortion and contraception and support protecting the environment and addressing climate change, among other things. But when it comes to advocating for their positions, they are often stigmatized.

When atheist and secular groups held their first meeting with Biden White House officials two years ago, Melissa Rogers, executive director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, welcomed the opportunity to cooperate with nonreligious groups along with faith organizations.

Some religious activists, such as Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, found the meeting problematic, saying that if the Biden administration was “going to manipulate the founding purpose of faith-based initiatives by welcoming the advice of militant secularists, it would do us all a favor and simply trash this office.”

But secular leaders say fears about including nonreligious individuals is the result of misinformation and misunderstanding. 

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RELATED: New report finds nonreligious people face stigma and discrimination

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On April 4, Clark joined Sarah Levin, founder of Secular Strategies; Debbie Goddard, who serves as vice president of programs for American Atheists; and Vanessa Gomez Brake, a humanist chaplain and associate dean of religious life for the University of Southern California, for an online discussion about the challenges that occur when secular people engage in interfaith work.

“Having ‘Faith’ in Reason: Being Secular in the Interfaith Movement,” was a collaboration with Atheists United and the United Religions Initiative of North America “to promote stronger alliances for the work of peace, justice, and healing.”

The discussion highlighted suggestions on how organizers could be more inclusive in interfaith spaces, which included, building relationships with secular leaders, avoiding prayer or including a secular ritual, sharing the stage, and challenging religious privilege.

Melissa Rogers, bottom left, executive director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, speaks during a meeting with atheist and secular groups, Friday, May 14, 2021. Video screengrab

Tahil Sharma, with the United Religions Initiative of North America, said it is perplexing to see interfaith leaders refer to the religious freedom movement as “radically inclusive” while “one of the biggest sections of society” is left out of the conversation.

“A lot of communities are behaving as if interfaith cooperation is the goal of society, when in reality, the goal of society should be justice and equity, and the lens at which we do everything is interfaith cooperation,” said Sharma, who is Sikh and Hindu.

Sharma, an interfaith activist in Southern California, said of the more than 50 people who registered for the Having ‘Faith’ event, about half were people of faith. He saw the event as a bridge for people of faith and those who are secular, helping them to realize that “it’s very possible for us to work together.”

Levin noted the importance of dispelling the stereotype that secularists’ aim was to eliminate religion. While a loud minority of the community is anti-theist, Levin said, “most people we work with are not interested in ‘deconverting people.’” 

“We have a moral base. Atheists and humanists, secular people, think a lot about what we believe in. That absence of a higher power … leads us to think a lot about it,” Levin said. “People who believe that there’s only one life, and one world, are really motivated to make this one life count and to be good stewards of this one planet that we have.

“We have a lot in common around values and making the world a better place,” she added.

Gomez Brake has seen atheist, agnostic and humanist students lead efforts to have dialogue about religion with other religious students and organizations. “It was in service of greater understanding between the two,” she said.

Because organized religion comes with institutions, networks and buildings, Gomez Brake added, it makes sense for atheist communities to partner with groups with established resources to put “values into action.”

“You can easily pop in to the food bank at the church and lend a helping hand because it’s already an existing program in your neighborhood,” she said.

Gomez Brake said it’s a move “just to be in community with folks who want to do good in the world, irrespective of whether they share the same beliefs.”

Adelle M. Banks and Heather Greene contributed to this report.

SATANISM IS ANOTHER FORM OF LIBERTARIAN  ATHEISM

BUDDHIMISM IS ALSO A FORM OF ATHEISM 

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict a religious war or struggle by the colonised against the coloniser?

Human pulsion toward sadism and destruction is as natural as our pulsion toward pleasure, and Gaza has become a museum of the death drive.




Arpan Roy 

DAWN

Published May 27, 2024 

It is often said that the bloodiest wars in history were fought in the name of religion. In fact, the opposite is true.

The most inhumane conflicts in history were all secular, modernist, and conducted according to the logic of the rational sciences. While it is true that the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and other holy wars dragged on for centuries in the medieval world, these were always interlaced with “secular” interests like economics and politics of power, and their death tolls (if known) pale in comparison to those of modern warfare.

Forty million people were killed during World War I, over 50 million during World War II, the great atheist Stalin killed millions during his reign as General Secretary of the Soviet Union (even if the standard 20 million number may have been American propaganda), and Pol Pot was responsible for the genocide of two million of his fellow Cambodians (again, the numbers are disputed).

The exact number of casualties in all the wars varies, but when we enter the language of “giving or taking” a few million here and there, we have already entered the realm of humanity reduced to bare life.

Counting souls, not bodies

By comparison, the so-called religious conflicts of recent history were much more benign. The Yugoslav wars, ostensibly rooted in an immortal Catholic/Orthodox rivalry, saw around 140,000 deaths, and Islamic State terror in Iraq and Syria did not top 35,000 casualties (at the highest estimate).

Even the Hindu/Muslim fratricide during Partition “only” resulted in around one million deaths; a “small” number compared to the 20th century’s secular world wars, but perhaps more painful because it was brother against brother, neighbour against neighbour. Its pain can still be felt in a way that the spectacular numbers of the world wars’ military casualties perhaps cannot be.

There are two points to be taken from the discussion so far. One, it is simply not true that religion has been the cause of the most inhumane wars and killings in history. The facts clearly illustrate an inverse situation, to the extent that one might wonder who or what benefits from this often-repeated myth.

Moreover, whereas secular politics driven by Enlightenment ideals or utopian projects like communism have regarded human life as a statistical fact subordinate to a greater imminent good, it is religion that has maintained its fidelity to the idea of a soul, that which uniquely inhabits each and every body. The soul, in its afterlife, designates a place for the individual beyond the collective good, as seen in concepts like martyrdom — a theology for which secular ideologies have no viable alternative.

And, two, the pain caused by violent conflicts cannot be measured in numbers. If this were true, then our capacity to feel pain from the deaths of our loved ones would be trivial compared to the pain felt from knowledge of distant wars. No amount of solidarity in the world can move us to such extremes of empathy.
Secular vs religious

I offer these thoughts now in a time of great suffering in the world — in Palestine — where secular and religious ideologies meet in complicated and often contradictory ways.

There is no mistaking that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a colonial conflict, meaning that it is a secular conflict in which the colonised refuse the terms laid out by the coloniser on basic principles of human dignity and justice. But this basic framework is also imbued with significant religious overtones, and a kaleidoscope of other undertones.

For half a century, leftist internationalists have invested in the Palestinian revolution as a litmus test for a potential world revolution. Similarly, for over a century, Muslims have viewed Palestinian suffering as synonymous with Muslim suffering, and Jewish dominance over Palestine as representative of diminishing Muslim sovereignty.

Israelis, too, construct their unique form of colonialism not on scientific concepts of racial superiority (akin to Nazi Germany’s colonial aspirations) but on Jewish supremacy derived from biblical prophecy.

Regardless of the efforts made by secular Jewish intellectuals, both in the past and present, to dissociate Zionism from religious influences, the fact remains that the millennia-old Jewish connection to Palestine finds its foundation solely in the Torah, the Mishnah, and the Talmud — the sacred texts of Judaism.

At the same time, to Israelis who are convinced that their colonised subjects are inherently antisemitic Jew-haters, the question must be asked: Would Palestinians hate their colonisers any less had Israel been a Hindu or Christian settler colony? A related version of the question can also be posed to Muslim publics around the world who pray for Palestinians because they are (mostly) Muslims: Would the Ummah abandon Palestine if its inhabitants were Buddhists or Sikhs?

These are difficult questions, but we are in difficult times. Israeli soldiers have consistently used Jewish symbols during the genocide in Gaza, from erecting menorahs in bombed-out neighbourhoods to underwriting a genocidal subtext into Jewish holidays.

True, this is a perverted Judaism that does not speak for all Jews, in the same way that Islamic militancy does not speak for all Muslims, but the religious nature of Israel’s war cannot be brushed aside as a mere curiosity.

One can see shades of the militant Islamic State (IS) in videos of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank. A particularly disturbing instance that comes to mind is a recent video in which an Israeli soldier shoots an elderly Palestinian man — a convert to Judaism — for not being sufficiently Jewish.

The video shows the soldier interrogating the elderly man’s religion and then cuts out before he is shot at point-blank range. Its cruelty jolts the memory of videos that surfaced from Raqqa and Sinjar a decade ago. So the question then becomes: Is the genocide in Gaza a religious one or a secular one? And if it is both, as is probably the case, where does one seep into the other?
The evolution of Zionism

Zionism is a project with many faces, currents, countercurrents, and evolutions. In the past two decades, its way of self-narration has adapted to global sentiments, but without sticking to any one of them exclusively. The basic frame narrative of European Jewish settlers establishing a state on the fringes of Arabia has gone from a story of utopian nation-building in a barren desert to a bellicose narrative in which there was a war with the Arabs and the Jews fairly won their spoils.

More recent shifts use the language of decolonisation and indigeneity, purporting to depict the Jews as indigenous people shouting in the wilderness for their ancestral land rights (as if they were the Navajo nation) but nobody hears them.

These shifts indicate that Israel is not immune to changing global sentiments, and that adapting to these new horizons is hard and constant work. But because the Palestinian story is now known to the world, and because this story touches the hearts of whoever hears it, Israel has had to search for new discursive strategies to situate itself in this changing world.

A new kind of narrative voice has emerged in Israel since Hamas’s uprising on October 7. This is one that acknowledges the dark matter of Israeli history that were long circumvented: massacres of Palestinian villages in 1947 and 1948, collusion with succeeding imperial powers like Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, manipulating peace treaties signed on lavish lawns of Western capitals, and so on.

Perhaps because it is no longer possible to conceal truths in the age of the internet, perspectives that were once taboo in Israeli society are now game for legitimate discussion.

Another reason for this new voice is that Palestinians have also changed. Long having favoured some version of a binational model as a solution to the Israel-Palestine impasse, younger Palestinians have shifted to a revolutionary Algerian model, one in which there is no solution but driving the colonisers out of the homeland, en masse, and even after generations. Not aloof to this new world order, the new Israeli voice says: “We are refugees, and should the Palestinian resistance win, we would have nowhere to go.”

There is a tragic sincerity in this voice. Yet, when I watch the videos from Gaza, it is difficult to empathise with Israelis who believe that genocide is the only solution to permanently safeguard their own existence on the land. We know from psychoanalysis that the death drive, as Freud called it, meaning the human pulsion toward sadism and destruction, is as natural as our pulsion toward pleasure, and Gaza has become a museum of the death drive. But it does not have to be this way.
Can the Israeli youth contemplate an exit from violence?

In a fascinating recent book on genocide, the anthropologist and psychiatrist Richard Rechtman draws from years-long research with asylum seekers in France to reach a highly original insight — that the millions of asylum seekers from Afghanistan, tribal areas of Pakistan, and Iraq who have flooded Europe over the past decade are, in many cases, not seeking asylum because they are afraid for their own lives.

These men often belong to the same religion and sometimes the same tribal lineages as the jihadists from whom they seek asylum, and therefore the probability that these men would be killed is low. Rather, they are fleeing their villages, families, and lifeworlds because they do not want to be recruited by jihadist groups that would essentially oblige these young men to become killers.

In other words, they leave everything and flee because they refuse to kill. To contain their experience to the generic category of “migrant” is a lack that does not adequately capture the ethical sacrifice that these men have made.

In lieu of such an insight, one wonders what would happen if, as the world changes around them, a generation of Israeli reservist soldiers and conscription-age teenagers wake up one morning and decide not to kill; to not participate in a holy war.

They would indeed have to leave Israel under these circumstances, but this would be an exit not as disgraced colonists but as asylum seekers — like the hundreds and thousands of young men resettled in monotonous small towns in Germany, Austria, Sweden; building new lives in distant places — who refuse to participate in a genocide in the name of religion.

Header image: Women and children mourn people killed in Israeli bombardment, at a health clinic in the area of Tel al-Sultan in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. — AFP


Arpan Roy is an anthropologist researching in Palestine and currently based in Berlin. His book Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference will be published in 2024 by University of Toronto Press.

How Muslims are creating a new vocabulary of secularism for Indian democracy
Indian Muslims have entered a post-Islamist phase, marrying a constitutional phraseology of freedom, justice and equality with religious notions.
 

A demonstration condemning Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the new citizenship law in Bangalore on January 20. | Manjunath Kiran/AFP

CITIZENSHIP TANGLE
Feb 16, 2020 · Sharik Laliwala

The demonstrations against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens have re-inserted secularism into India’s mainstream political vocabulary. This shift in political discourse has come at the behest of the Muslim community and was then picked up by students, civil society groups and political parties. The arguments made by the Muslim community – even by Islamic activists – against these citizenship initiatives are mostly articulated in the language of Constitutional rights guaranteed to all Indians.

This focus on fundamental rights belies the conventional wisdom that the hegemony of majoritarian politics would provoke radical tendencies among the Indian Muslims. The onslaught of Hindutva politics, implemented by the Bharatiya Janata Party, is increasing state hostility against Muslims day by day. It is exacerbating their socio-economic marginalisation. Bias against Muslims is not just evident in the deliberate misconduct by police forces but is even written into the law. For instance, the Disturbed Areas Act in Gujarat severely restricts property transactions between Hindus and Muslims in urban Gujarat to “maintain demographic equilibrium”.

On top of that, the Muslim community’s political representation is at one of its worst levels since Independence: the current Lok Sabha has only 25 Muslim MPs out of 543 MPs, six more than in the last Lok Sabha. This translates into a little over 4.5% share in the Lok Sabha, even though Muslims form 14.2% of India’s population. In January 2018, out of BJP’s 1,418 MLAs, only four were Muslim – though the BJP’s dominance in Northern and Western Indian states has somewhat faded since then.

Despite this, the growing invisibilisation of Indian Muslims – the “fifth column” of Indian society for the Hindu nationalists – has not led to radicalisation, barring exceptional instances in Jammu and Kashmir and a few anecdotal instances in Kerala. To the contrary, as the recent pro-democracy protests show, India’s Muslims are introducing a new vernacular idiom of secularism through civic symbols while sometimes innovatively merging them with religious motifs.
Rights-based language

This signifies a fundamental transformation in the political strategy of the Muslim community over the years: Indian Muslims are privileging a language of rights over the religious-moral duties emphasised by Islamic reformists.

Muslim feminist groups have almost always employed an understanding of human rights. A case in point is Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, which has been vocal about women being denied entry to dargahs and demanding autonomy over personal life decisions. However, the “non-religious” groups among Muslims – such as pasmanda, or low-caste and Dalit Muslims, organisations working primarily in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, have devoted their energies to addressing the question of caste-based socio-economic backwardness among Muslims through representative politics.

In the current pro-democracy protests, especially by leaderless Muslim women in many parts of India, the act of holding portraits of BR Ambedkar, MK Gandhi, Savitribai Phule; reading the Preamble of the Indian Constitution; and upholding the national flag have been prioritised over religious ideals, at least in the public sphere. Indeed, the storm of Hindutva is making Muslims secular – quite unlike, Mohammad Iqbal’s poetic revelation about the “storm of West”. This is not to claim that Indian Muslims were not aligned with secular aims earlier, but to indicate that the active assertion of constitutional and secular symbols is their new and unique contribution. 

Women are leading the Citizenship 

Amendment Act protest 

at Delhi's Shaheen Bagh. Credit: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters

To speak this rights-based language more confidently, Muslims are increasingly adopting socio-political and educational means for progress, reducing the emphasis on moral reform. Despite the stereotype, most Muslim children in India attend secular schools. In 2006, only 7% of Muslim children of school-going age (7-19 years) attended a madrassa. Half of those who went to a madrassa undertook part-time religious education as they also attended a mainstream school.

Even Islamists have begun to articulate themselves through a rights-centred vocabulary, though they often prefer religious morality over constitutional ideals, especially on the issue of personal law and religious practices.
New symbols, new identity

My research on two Islamic reformist organisations operating in Gujarat, a state that was the laboratory for Hindu nationalist politics, confirms this discernible shift in prioritising socio-economic concerns over reformist activities. For example, Muslim charity schools run by these groups, with gender-segregated classrooms and a part-time religious syllabus, use the state-prescribed curriculum – in some sense, merging the site of a secular school with that of a part-time madrassa. Their aim is clear: to develop skills and learning capacities among Muslim children in light of continuous state neglect. By doing so, these Islamic activists negotiate secular modernity on their own terms, via justifications from Islam. They find a new moral ground to adopt secular positions by somewhat renouncing rigidities held regarding the infallibility of religious truth.

My findings are congruent with those described by Irfan Ahmed in his 2009 book Islamism and Democracy in India, which traces the remarkable metamorphosis in the value system of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, an Islamist group founded in 1941. From a rejection of secular democracy and nationalism around the time of the Indian subcontinent’s Partition, the Jamaat began to trust religious pluralism, tolerance and a democratic system, particularly from the 1990s. These ideological transformations are most crucial, given Jamaat’s support to the Pakistan movement, including its role in Pakistan’s Islamisation project and alleged participation in terrorist activities through its student wing, Students’ Islamic Movement of India.

The Jamaat in India has not only abandoned its aim of establishing an Islamic state but also prompts its members to pursue careers in the social sciences, journalism and the civil services, while frequently collaborating with civil society organisations. This trend also can be witnessed in the functioning of political parties specially devoted to the Muslim question such as Asaduddin Owaisi’s All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and the Welfare Party of India 

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Political parties centred on Muslim identity, including Asaduddin Owaisi’s All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, are evolving. Credit: AIMIM/Twitter

This discursive shift is slowly allowing Muslim groups to nurture solidarities with other marginalised groups facing similar threats and insecurities. The overwhelming Muslim support for Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad among Muslims in the past few years exemplifies this tendency. However, the alliance between Muslims and Hindu Dalits is still somewhat incoherent given the over-representation of elite ashraf castes in Muslim groups whose socio-economic interests do not match with Dalit-led associations.

All this makes it clear that Indian Muslims have entered a post-Islamist phase, marrying a constitutional phraseology of freedom, justice and equality with religious notions. Their renewed faith in this vernacularised secular politics is borne out of the frustrations with the dominant liberal brand of secularism, which either preferred a limited adoption of mostly majoritarian religious symbols or abhorred display of religion in public altogether.

At best, the liberal custodians of secularism overlooked socio-economic concerns of the Muslim community – especially of the low-caste and Dalit Muslims – rallying behind an empty discourse supporting secularism, without mass appeal. At worst, Muslims were castigated as a community with antediluvian beliefs. By exposing these fault-lines, though it is premature to say, the pro-democracy agitations led by Indian Muslims have provided a new life and meaning to not just secular democracy but even participatory democracy.

Sharik Laliwala is a researcher focusing on Gujarat’s contemporary politics and Muslim politics in north India. He has been associated with the Centre for Equity Studies and Ashoka University.Support our journalism by subscribing to Scroll+. We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

How staunch atheists show higher morals than the proudly pious

Phil Zuckerman, Salon
August 21, 2021

Twitter

Two recent events have shed an illuminating light on who is and who isn't moral in today's world.

First, Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leader in the U.S. Catholic Church and a staunch anti-masker/vaxxer, was put on a ventilator as a result of his suffering from COVID-19. Second, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations released its latest data-rich report, warning that "unless there are rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5 degrees Celsius or even 2 degrees Celsius will be beyond reach."

The global pandemic and the rapidly warming of our planet — these dire phenomena are, above all, deeply moral matters in that they both entail care for the well-being of others and a desire to alleviate misery and suffering.

Now, while most people assume that such a morality is grounded in religious faith, and while it is certainly true that all religions contain plenty of moral ideals, in our nation today, it is actually the most secular among us who are exhibiting a greater moral orientation — in the face of deadly threats — than the most devout among us, who are exhibiting the least.

Before proceeding, let me make it clear: When I say the "most secular among us," I mean atheists, agnostics, people who never attend religious services, don't think the Bible is the word of God, and don't pray. Such self-conscious and deliberatively irreligious people are to be distinguished from the lackadaisically unaffiliated — often called "nones" — who simply don't identify with a religion.

And by the "most devout among us" I mean religious fundamentalists who believe in God without any doubts, who attend church frequently, who consider the Bible the infallible word of God, who pray a lot, and who insist that Jesus is the only way, the only truth, and the only life. These strongly religious folks are to be distinguished from moderately religious Americans, who are generally liberal and tolerant.

Think of it like two ends of a spectrum, with one end representing the staunchly secular and the other end representing the deeply devout. Most Americans fall somewhere in the middle; both the "nones" and the moderately religious together comprise the majority of Americans. But as to those who occupy the end points of the spectrum, it is — as stated above — the affirmatively godless who are exhibiting greater moral proclivities in our nation today than the proudly pious.

We can start with the global pandemic. COVID-19 is a potentially deadly virus that has caused — and continues to cause — dire woe. Surely, to be moral in the face of such a dangerous disease is to do everything one can — within one's limited power — to thwart it. No moral person would want to willfully spread it, bolster it, or prolong its existence. And yet, when it comes to the battle against COVID-19, it is the most secular of Americans who are doing what they can to wipe it out, while it is the most faithful among us, especially nationalistic white Evangelicals, who are keeping it alive and well. Taking the vaccine saves lives and thwarts the spread of the virus. So, too, does sheltering in place as directed and wearing protective face masks. And yet, here in the U.S., it is generally the most religious among us who refuse to adhere to such life-saving practices, while it is the most secular who most willingly comply. For example, a recent Pew study found that while only 10% of atheists said that they would definitely or probably not get vaccinated, 45% of white Evangelicals took such a position.

Consider climate change. The best available data shows that — as a direct result of human activity — we are destroying our planet. The results are already manifesting with greater and deadlier frequency: poisoned air and water, massive wildfires, stronger hurricanes, brutal mudslides, quickly melting glaciers, rising sea levels, the wanton disappearance of forests and coral reefs. Such developments do not bode well for the future; more suffering and death are on the rapidly approaching horizon. And, yet again, what do we see? It is the most staunchly secular among us who understand the science behind climate change and want to do what needs to be done in order to prevent it, while it is the most pious among us who dismiss the science and don't want to address the dire threat. For example, a recent PRRI study found that over 80% of secular Americans accept the evidence that human activity is causing climate change — and they place addressing climate change at the top of the list of their political priorities — while only 33% of white Evangelicals accept such evidence, and thus place is towards the bottom of their list of political priorities.

But it's not just the pandemic and climate change that illustrate this widening religious/secular moral divide. Take gun violence. Currently, more Americans die annually from firearms than automobile accidents; since 2009, there have been 255 mass shootings in the U.S.; every few hours, a child or teen dies from a gun wound. When the founders of the country passed the Second Amendment, they couldn't have imagined the instantaneous devastation a semi-automatic rifle can do in the hands of one vicious person. And there is no question that Jesus — who taught an unmitigated message of non-violence — would denounce the existence of such weapons. And yet, who is more pro-gun in today's America? Not the hardest of atheists. Rather, it is the most fervent of Christians. For but one example: While 77% of atheists are in favor of banning assault rifles, only 45% of white Evangelicals are.
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In terms of who supports helping refugees, affordable health care for all, accurate sex education, death with dignity, gay rights, transgender rights, animal rights; and as to who opposes militarism, the governmental use of torture, the death penalty, corporal punishment, and so on — the correlation remains: The most secular Americans exhibit the most care for the suffering of others, while the most religious exhibit the highest levels of indifference.

But wait — what about the rights of the unborn? While many people oppose abortion on decidedly moral grounds, it is also the case that many others support the right of women to maintain autonomy over their own reproductive capacities, on equally moral grounds. Hence, the deep intractability of the debate. And yet, most Americans — both religious and non-religious — do not see the abortion of a non-viable fetus as being akin to the murder of a living human being. And let's be frank: It is impossible to square the assertion that the strongly religious are "pro-life" while they simultaneously refuse to get vaccinated, to wear a mask, to fight climate change, to support universal healthcare, or to support sane gun legislation. To characterize such an agenda as "pro-life" renders the label rather insincere, at best.

Admittedly, how morality plays out in the world is always complex, with numerous exceptions to the correlations above. For example, African Americans tend to be highly religious and yet are also extremely supportive of gun control. The Catholic Church, which has deftly overseen the most extensive pedophile ring in history, and continues to ban the life-saving use of condoms, also happens to morally oppose the death penalty. One study has found that Evangelicals actually get vaccinated at higher rates than the religiously unaffiliated (though not at a higher rate than agnostics). And members of religious congregations tend to donate more money to charity, on average, than the unaffiliated. And of course, the 20th century has witnessed the immoral, bloody brutality of numerous atheist dictatorships, such as those of the former USSR and Cambodia.

However, despite such complexities, the overall pattern remains clear: When it comes to the most pressing moral issues of the day, hard-core secularists exhibit much more empathy, compassion, and care for the well-being of others than the most ardently God-worshipping. Such a reality is necessary to expose, not simply in order to debunk the long-standing canard that religion is necessary for ethical living, but because such exposure renders all the more pressing the need for a more consciously secular citizenry, one that lives in reality, embraces science and empiricism, and supports sound policies — not prayer — as a way to make life better, safer and more humane.

Religious ‘woke’ capitalism? The problem with conservative arguments against ESG

Opinion by Alan Brownstein, opinion contributor • Yesterday - The Hill

For many business leaders, corporate norms today have expanded beyond the focus on maximizing shareholder value to take into account the broader needs of the community — what is colloquially described as environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.



Yet ESG is also regularly condemned today, primarily by conservative critics, as wrongheaded and inappropriate manifestations of “Woke” ideology. Republicans in Congress and in state governments plan to challenge private sector companies for their support of ESG policies.

The thrust of the criticism is that for-profit, commercial corporations should base their decisions solely on conventional business concerns — that is, interests that further the purpose of making money for the enterprise. Decisions grounded in environmental values or the betterment of society or programs designed to bring marginalized groups into the company and create a workplace environment where they can thrive are problematic distractions at best. To ESG critics, these are costly, misguided distortions of the profit maximizing free enterprise system.

The focus of these challenges to allegedly “Woke”-influenced decision making are secular values or at least values that are expressed in secular terms.

But what if the ESG concerns are grounded in religious beliefs? Should religious values justify deviations from profit-making goals while secular values, however sincerely motivated, should not?

Assume for a moment that the environmental component (the E of ESG) is grounded upon an asserted religious obligation imposed by God for humanity to care for the earth. As the Pew Research Center reports, “Most U.S. adults — including a solid majority of Christians and large numbers of people who identify with other religious traditions — consider the Earth sacred and believe God gave humans a duty to care for it.” Is it improper for a company to take that faith-based obligation seriously? Must for-profit companies ignore what God requires?

Consider also another religious understanding of ESG. May a company communicate religious messages with the distribution of its goods and services — expressing “Merry Christmas” on cups or prayers on napkins with meals — only if it concludes that doing so will improve the bottom line? Or may these messages be offered for spiritual reasons and for the betterment of society?

The Supreme Court’s analysis in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014) provides some partial guidance on this question. At the time of the lawsuit, Hobby Lobby was a very large, closely held corporation of over 500 stores with 13,000 employees. The owners claimed that a federal regulation requiring them to provide health insurance coverage for medical contraceptives for their employees interfered with their religious beliefs and, accordingly, violated their rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). The court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, a result generally applauded by conservatives. (For the record, I thought the court’s ultimate judgment in Hobby Lobby was correct, although I also thought the majority opinion was badly reasoned and poorly drafted.)

In order to reach its conclusion, the court had to address two basic questions. First, should religious beliefs be recognized as controlling the decisions of a for-profit commercial enterprise and protected as such? The court answered that question in the affirmative. Second, should Hobby Lobby’s status as a corporation undermine its religious liberty claim? Here the court rejected the idea that corporations could not hold and act on religious beliefs and be protected in doing so. Put simply, a for-profit corporation could make decisions based on religious values. The impact of the decision on the profitability of the business was largely beside the point.

To be fair, the fact that Hobby Lobby was a closely held corporation controlled by a family and not a publicly traded corporation made this an easier case for the court to resolve in its favor. And the court acknowledged the practical difficulty of determining the religious commitments of a publicly traded company. But as a conceptual matter, there didn’t seem to be anything inconsistent or inappropriate about a company’s decision makers being influenced or controlled by religious beliefs divorced from profit making concerns.

To be clear here, I am not suggesting that secular beliefs are protected under religious liberty statutes like RFRA. My question is whether we can justify moral and political opposition to ESG grounded in secular values while supporting and even protecting ESG based on religious beliefs.

Without a clear answer to that question, contemporary critics of ESG are vulnerable to the challenge that they accept religiously based ESG, but reject its secular counterpart — not because they think company decisions must focus exclusively on profits, but because certain religious beliefs comport with their political ideology and secular values do not.

Alan Brownstein is a professor of law emeritus at the University of California, Davis School of Law. He has written numerous articles for academic journals and opinion pieces for other media on a range of constitutional law subjects. He is a member of the American Law Institute and served on the Legal Committee of the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union. He received his B.A. degree from Antioch College and earned his J.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Law School, where he served as a Case Editor of the Harvard Law Review.

 Opinion

Why America’s secularization is good for American democracy

Belief has benefits for society. But American religion’s decline may nonetheless save the country.

The U.S. Capitol in the reflecting pool. Photo by Jeffrey Clayton/Unsplash/Creative Commons

August 2, 2023

By 

Phil Zuckerman

(RNS) — The decline of religion in America continues. 

Last week, Gallup released new data showing that standard Christian beliefs are at all-time lows. Back in 2001, 90% of Americans believed in God; that figure is now down to 74%. Belief in heaven has gone from 83% down to 67%; belief in hell from 71% down to 59%; belief in angels from 79% down to 69%; belief in the devil from 68% down to 58%.

These declines in personal belief are tracking with church attendance, which is at an all-time low (even when accounting for the pandemic’s social distancing). Religious wedding ceremonies are similarly at an all-time low, as the percentage of Americans claiming to have no religion has hit an all-time high.

Some readers will despair at this sweeping secularization. They know the value of strong congregational community, the meaningfulness of sacred rituals, the comfort of spiritual solace and the power of religiously inspired charitable works.

But even those who experience and treasure these benefits of belief should take solace in the fact that the decline of religion in American society is nonetheless good for our democracy.  of 

There are two basic types of secularization: The oppressive kind comes from the barrel of an atheist dictator’s gun. Think of the former U.S.S.R. or Khmer Rouge Cambodia, where the communist regime, seeking to stomp out any and all ideological rivals, repressed religion systematically and often violently. Such forced secularization is to be resisted and condemned.

“Americans’ Belief in Five Spiritual Entities, 2001-2023” Graphic courtesy Gallup

The other type of secularization is organic. It emerges naturally as societies become more modern, educated, prosperous and rational. Think of Scandinavia or Japan. When secularization occurs naturally within free societies and people simply stop being religious of their own volition, such a change comes with many positive correlates — not least healthier democratic values and institutions.

This is what we are seeing here in the United States: No one is being forced to become secular. Millions of Americans are simply choosing to do so. And this will be good for our republic, as the existing data shows.

A healthy democracy requires active participation in the very enterprise of self-governance. On that front, atheists and agnostics stand out. When it comes to attending political meetings, protests and marches, putting up political lawn signs, donating to candidates, working for candidates or contacting elected officials, the godless are among the most active and engaged. Americans who are affirmatively secular in their orientation — atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers — are more likely to vote in elections than their religious peers. 

Another crucial pillar of democracy is tolerance, the acceptance of people who are different from us, or behave and believe differently. In a diverse and pluralistic nation such as ours, civic tolerance of difference is essential. In study after study, nonreligious people are found to be much more tolerant than religious people.

For example, when Americans are asked if they are willing to grant the same rights that they enjoy to political groups they personally oppose, secular people are much more likely than religious people to say yes. When it comes to supporting civil liberties for various stigmatized minority groups, the secular are, again, notably more tolerant than the religious.

Additionally, atheists have markedly lower levels of in-group bias than religious people, which actually makes them more accepting and tolerant of religious people than religious people are of them.

A third necessary component of a healthy democracy is for its citizens to be informed and knowledgeable about current events, to be critical thinkers and to be able to differentiate between fact and fiction. This is especially in our social-media-saturated world, in which we are bombarded with fake news. Research shows that secular people are on average more analytically adept than religious people. Religiosity, especially strong religiosity, is significantly correlated with greater acceptance of fake news. 

The very first sentence of the U.S. Constitution’s very First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This fundamental principle of our democracy, which bars the government from either promoting or persecuting religion, is essential in a society that contains millions of people with multiple religious faiths, and no religious faith at all. In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has shown a willingness to bulldoze this safeguard, threatening one of the founding premises of our nation.

Phil Zuckerman. Courtesy photo

The best hope for our democracy may be the growing number of secular Americans, who are by far the most supportive of repairing this principle.

(Phil Zuckerman is a professor of sociology and secular studies and associate dean of faculty at Pitzer College. He is the author of several books and, most recently, is a co-author of “Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

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