There is no War on Christmas—it’s been more like a surrender.
Overall, Christianity is in steep decline. We are witnessing what Dr. Robert P. Jones has accurately described as “the end of white Christian America.” The percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has dropped 12 points in the last decade, while that of the “nones” (atheist, agnostic, spiritual-but-not-religious) has increased 9 points.
At the same time, those who have remained faithful are more fundamentalist than ever. Moderate Protestantism has declined, while conservative evangelical religion has increased as a percentage of America’s religious, with immediate political consequences: Donald Trump would not be president had conservative evangelicals and Catholics not rallied to his side, despite his many personal transgressions and evident lack of faith.
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For secular and progressive-religious people, this trend is a puzzle. How do people believe this stuff? How do they maintain belief in biblical literalism and inerrancy, despite the literal typos, contradictions, and clear linguistic marks of having been written by multiple human hands? The pending end of the world (something more than three-quarters of U.S. evangelicals say they believe)? The notion that some of the voices we all hear in our heads are, in fact, the Holy Spirit, Satan, God, Jesus, angels or demons?
Science, ironically enough, has provided an intriguing answer to this puzzle, which is, in short: We’re wired that way.
As Pascal Boyer showed in his 1994 book, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion, the religious ideas that recur over and over again are successful because they are transmittable, and they’re transmittable because they fit the nature of the human brain.
Religious stories, in another irony, have survived human history’s version of natural selection. They are the ones that have stuck around, and they’ve done so not because of their truth or value, but because they are the kinds of stories that human brains understand, and want to repeat.
In 2011’s Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not, Robert McCauley argues that religion is “cognitively natural”—it reflects how we think, thanks to millions of years of evolution. Natural cognition is “fast, (mostly) unconscious, automatic, effortless, intuitive thought”—unlike slower, conscious, effortful, reflective thought.
Science, McCauley shows, is actually very unnatural and counterintuitive. For example, we “naturally” look for agents who take actions in the world; we look for quasi-people, not impersonal forces. But science has shown that impersonal forces—the laws of physics and natural selection, for example— actually are responsible for most of the world around us.
Or to take another example, we look for reasons; a thing is here for some purpose, we think. But that’s not actually the case when it comes to most of the natural world.
So, while religion’s claims of original sin or an anthropomorphic judge-god may seem incoherent to some, they’re more coherent in terms of cognitive science than the Big Bang. Writes McCauley, “modestly counterintuitive, theologically incorrect representations are ideas that human minds find good to think.”
And rational argumentation doesn’t really make much of a dent in religious faith. As McCauley puts it, “people are rarely argued out of beliefs that they were not argued into in the first place.”
On the contrary, when confronted with scientific or other evidence that confronts their worldviews, fundamentalists often attack the science. Antony Alumkal’s 2017 book, Paranoid Science: The Christian Right’s War on Reality, shows how conservative Christians not only mistrust science in principle, but often develop conspiracy theories about how scientists are in cahoots to undermine religion and traditional morality, creating parallel pseudo-sciences to counter them.
Alumkal’s examples are familiar: climate denial, intelligent design, “gay conversion therapy,” and opposition to stem cell research. In each case, drawing on Richard Hofstadter’s classic The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Alumkal shows how rather than simply state that their faith disagrees with the scientific evidence, Christian Right figures have created a fake scientific discourse to compete with the real one, which they allege to be a conspiracy.
For example, the evangelical-led “Cornwall Alliance”—which, in fact, gets most of its money from oil companies and oil industry executives—sometimes says that climate change isn’t real for purely religious reasons. After all, God promised in Genesis 8:22 (right after the Flood), that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” Therefore, God’s promised that there will be no catastrophic climate change.
But in order to explain how 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists are totally wrong, Cornwall, like other climate denial factories, has to resort to conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, and “paranoid science.”
Indeed, the climate denial of the Trump administration is a direct descendant of this work: Andrew Wheeler, now head of the EPA, was chief counsel to Senator James Inhofe, Congress’s most anti-scientific climate denier, who has participated in several Cornwall events. “God’s still up there” Inhofe wrote in his 2012 book, and “the arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”
These should be sobering thoughts. The survival of the planet as we know it today depends on our species’ cognitive limitations.
If there is hope, it is in the varieties of non-religion and progressive religion that “deliver the goods” of fundamentalist religion without the baggage, dogmas, and blinkered thinking that fundamentalism at once requires and engenders.
In this regard, Jerome Baggett’s 2019 book, The Varieties of Nonreligious Experience: Atheism in American Culture (NYU, 2019), is a fascinating, important read: the first systematic, large-scale analysis of what atheists here believe.
For one thing, there are a lot of them. Atheists comprise 5 percent of the U.S. population—more than Mormons, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists (and many others) combined.
Second, most atheists are quite different from the strident, often vitriolic “New Atheism” of popularizers like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens. While the “New Atheists” seek to get rid of religion—which they usually construct as a fundamentalist “straw man”—most atheists simply want to be left alone. They may not like religion, but they’re not crusading against it so much as simply opting out.
And yet, Baggett also shows, persuasively, that “opting out” is only half of the picture. Atheists also have many positive values, such as integrity, open-mindedness, and the importance of progress. Many have beliefs in “spiritual” forces such as mana or chi. And they have many reasons for rejecting religion, from science-based doubt to morality-based objections to religions’ depredations.
Constructing a “positive” atheism is the subject of the newest book by longtime Darwinian theorist Michael Ruse, A Meaning to Life. Ruse takes seriously the loss of meaning that often accompanies the decline of religion, and is determined to construct a positive philosophy of meaning in the absence of God.
Ruse quotes Steven Weinberg, the Nobel prize-winning physicist, as noting that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” But Ruse begs to differ. In a warm, personal writing style, he claims that evolution itself provides a map to leading meaningful life: “to live our human nature properly, to the full.”
In other words, Ruse says, meaning is generated by fulfilling our human nature: love of family and friends, living a moral life in society (giving to others has been shown, in numerous empirical studies, to generate more happiness than acquiring stuff for oneself), leading the life of the mind (which here includes appreciating art, music, and culture of all kinds).
At times, it can feel like Ruse is answering a question that few non-philosophers really have—many people want a sense of “meaning,” of course, but few really care about whether it’s grounded in anything or not. Then again, his book is a useful rejoinder to the common claim of religionists that life without God is meaningless.
At the other extreme is Christian Smith’s Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can’t Deliver, which takes seriously another religious claim: that there is no grounding for morality without religion. Perhaps surprisingly, Smith ends up partly agreeing with this statement. Yes, many atheists are good people (just as many religious ones are bad), but why, exactly? Ultimately, Smith doubts that there’s really a satisfying answer to Hume’s sensible knave, who concludes that since there are no laws and no judge, it’s rational to be selfish. (The knave sounds like a lot of Ayn Randist Republicans, in fact.)
And yet, like Ruse, Smith seems to give philosophy too much importance here. Surely, it matters more how religion and atheism do empirically, in the ‘real’ world, rather than philosophically. And when the rubber hits the road, it’s hard to say that religion’s firm grounding in a judgmental God has really yielded better, more ethical people than secular values like compassion, kindness, reason, progress, and pluralism.
The rapid changes in America’s religious landscape have transformed our world: they have brought about a radical new nationalism, and brought us to the brink of climate catastrophe. Perhaps non-theists and progressive-religious people can simply wait; perhaps religion will diminish enough that its most fervent adherents can no longer hold the levers of power.
But the scientific evidence is that anti-scientific thinking has a strong foothold in the human brain, and thus in human societies as well. In other words, we can’t just wait. Progressives have to understand why fundamentalism works and build viable alternatives to it to save not just our country but the planet as we know it. It’s hard to see how the stakes could be any higher.
