Living the Secular Life_New Answers to Old Questions

by Phil Zuckerman

  As expected, when it comes to nearly all standard measures of societal health, such as homicide rates, violent crime rates, poverty rates, domestic abuse rates, obesity rates, educational attainment, funding for schools and hospitals, teen pregnancy rates, rates of sexually transmitted diseases, unemployment rates, domestic violence, the correlation is robust: the least theistic states in America tend to fare much, much better than the most theistic. In fact, Forbes magazine recently ranked all fifty states in terms of the overall best and worst places to live, taking into account various national indexes and calculating numerous variables, such as self-reported levels of life satisfaction, physical health, job opportunities, economic opportunity, and basic access to food and shelter, and the expected correlation is there again: the most theistic of states clustered toward the bottom of the rankings, being among the worst places to live, while the more secular states clustered toward the top, being among the better places to live overall.

  Heck, we can simply look at which states have higher rates of child abuse fatalities—perhaps the most heinous, tragic form of violence imaginable. On average, the rates of kids being beaten to death by their own parents are markedly higher among the most God-fearing states, and significantly lower among the most God-indifferent. For example, the child-abuse fatality rate in Mississippi is twice that of New Hampshire, and Kentucky’s is four times higher than Oregon’s.

  As the data above reveals, high rates of secularity or nonbelief do not result in communal decay or contribute to societal degradation. And conversely, high levels of faith or religiosity don’t seem to produce impressive levels of societal well-being. Gingrich and his ilk are simply wrong.

  Common Critiques Considered

  Whenever I bring this matter up—be it in some op-ed on Huffington Post, or while attending an academic conference with esteemed scholars, or while riding on an airplane next to some businessman from Wichita who wants to know what kind of work I do—I am met with the same standard critiques. Here they are:

  First, people will insist that correlation is not causation. This is all too true. Just because secularity is correlated with societal well-being doesn’t mean it is actually causing it. There are many, many factors—economic, demographic, historical, cultural, political, geographical—that are responsible for creating and causing societal goodness, and they may be much more important or significant than mere rates of secularity in a given population. And as alluded to earlier, it is quite likely that when societies become wealthy, peaceful, egalitarian, and democratic, secularity ensues. In other words, secularity does not necessarily cause societal goodness and well-being, but rather it may be the other way around. Independent researcher R. Georges Delamontagne’s studies reveal just that: it is not a lack of secularity that causes societal dysfunction, but rather it is societal dysfunction that causes a lack of secularity.

  Admitting all of the above, however, I would still argue that in many instances, and in the historical development of many societies, secularism—being a conscious, nonspiritual, rational ideology for social betterment in the here and now—has definitely been a key causal ingredient instigating and promoting various forms of societal goodness and contributing to beneficial social progress. For merely one significant example, consider the major historical-political improvement in the West that successfully moved us away from divine-right monarchies to modern-day democracies—this beneficial shift was largely spearheaded by secular philosophies and humanistic ideologies. The essential, progressive divorcing of religious authorities from the halls of government is truly one of secularism’s greatest gifts to modern society. Women’s rights is another obvious societal improvement that has been specifically spurred on by secularism; just about wherever secularism has become a strong force in society, the status, health, and wealth of women have dramatically improved. Secularism has also played a powerful role in the fight against caste in India. And it has been essential in the development of sane, effective sex education. And the creation of the enviably successful welfare state in Scandinavia was envisioned and enacted by decidedly secular social democrats.

  A second criticism that often arises when discussing the correlation between secularity and societal goodness is the unavoidable matter of all those horrible atheist regimes of the twentieth century, like the former Soviet Union under Stalin or Cambodia under Pol Pot. We can hardly call such antireligious, ardently secularist societies models of societal goodness. There is no question that totalitarianism plus atheism makes for an ugly, repressive combination. But atheism isn’t the main problem here; totalitarianism is. After all, some of the world’s most tyrannical, corrupt regimes of the past century have also been explicitly religious: Uganda under Idi Amin, Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, Haiti under “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Chile under Augusto Pinochet, Iran under the ayatollahs, Spain under Francisco Franco, the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, the apartheid regime in South Africa—heck, the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler, a Catholic who was perpetually in good standing with the Vatican.

  But rather than get into a meandering, macabre, and possibly pointless tallying of religious dictators versus atheist dictators, it is better to simply acknowledge that when state power is held undemocratically, the result will always be deleterious. That is, all non–democratically elected regimes of the past century have been corrupt. Fascism, totalitarianism, communism—all such modern forms of political dominance have been based on might and repression, rather than freedom and liberty. They have all squelched societal progress and severely limited societal well-being, be they religious or secular in form or façade.

  Just as religion comes in all shapes and sizes—some vicious, others benevolent—so it goes with secularism. It is thus essential to always differentiate between secularity that emerges organically in a free culture versus secularism that is forcefully imposed upon a nation by totalitarian regimes. These are two very different vegetables altogether. In the totalitarian situation, religion is demonized and often outlawed, believers are vilified or worse, and the whole situation is not only repressive and inhumane, but generally quite untenable. But in the other, more organic situation—and this is the situation we’re now witnessing in the United States and elsewhere in much of the world today—many people living in open, democratic societies simply stop finding religious beliefs sustainable or compelling, they lose interest in participating in religious organizations, and they maintain values, exhibit virtues, find meaning, and develop a sense of identity outside the canopy of religious faith. And as the data presented in this chapter shows, this cultural, organic manifestation of secularism is not a detrimental threat to society, but if anything is correlated with positive societal outcomes.

  So even if we admit that correlation is not causation, and even when we acknowledge that some of the worst societies of the past century have been led by atheist tyrants (as well as religious tyrants), we are still left with the undeniable reality that today, when we compare nations, as well as states within nations, the more secular are faring qualitatively and quantitatively better than the more religious, which are faring worse on just about every indicator of societal goodness imaginable. It may not be because they are religious, but their religiosity is clearly no panacea, to be sure.

  —

  I’VE ARGUED IN this chapter that a loss or weakening of religion is not detrimental or dangerous to society. But I’ve gone further than that by showing that those countries around the world—and those states within our own nation—that have undergone a process of organic secularization are actually faring much better than the religious on just about every measure that one can imagine. Societal well-being and secular living thus seem to go hand in hand. Not always, to be sure—throw a maniacal atheist dictator into the mix and things can get very ugly very fast. But when you’ve got a more democratic situation in which millions of individuals simply happen to live their lives without faith in God or much concomitant participation in religious rituals or religious organizations, and
when such organically secular societies and cultures emerge freely and nonaggressively, the result is glowingly positive.

  And this is good news. For as I mentioned in the introduction, there are more secular men and women alive today than ever before. And their numbers continue to increase. Why this is happening is the subject of the next chapter.

  Chapter 3

  Irreligion Rising

  Secularity is not completely new. There have always been people who doubted religious teachings, were suspicious of priests, rabbis, gurus, and imams, and felt uncomfortable in pews. There have always been men and women, even thousands of years ago, who were—in the gracious of words of Max Weber—religiously unmusical. And thus before accounting for the recent wave of secularization currently surging in our country—and in so many other countries today—a brief acknowledgment of the rich history and quite prominent existence of secularity throughout the ages is warranted.

  Consider, for example, a group of philosophers known as the Carvaka, who lived in India during the seventh century BCE. We’re talking some twenty-eight hundred years ago, and in one of the most religious regions on earth. And yet even so long ago, and even in such a location, we find clear evidence of secularity in the doggedly naturalistic philosophy of these skeptical men. The views and teachings of the Carvaka—adherents of a school of philosophy known as Lokayata—constitute some of the earliest examples of consciously, purposively articulated secularism. The Carvaka were materialist thinkers who rejected the supernaturalism of ancient Hindu religion and were vociferous in their mockery of religious authorities. They were essentially atheists who saw no evidence for the existence of god or karma or any afterlife whatsoever. “Only the perceived exists,” they argued, and “there is no world other than this.”

  Beyond the Carvaka of ancient India, we can find additional evidence of early irreligion in the philosophy of Xunzi, who lived in China in the third century BCE. Xunzi taught that there is no heaven other than the natural world and that morality is not divinely established but humanly constructed. Also from China, we find the proto-secular, naturalistic skepticism of Wang Ch’ung, from two thousand years ago, who argued that there is nothing spiritual or supernatural behind the wonders of the world, that fortune and misfortune are the mere result of chance alone, and that immortality is impossible.

  Existential angst and earnest doubt are also abundant within the writings of the Jewish philosopher known as Kohelet of ancient Israel, third century BCE. Kohelet, the presumed author of the book of Ecclesiastes, suggested that all life is ultimately meaningless and that there is no life after death—facts that may be disheartening, and yet should not keep us from enjoying what we can, loving those around us, and seeking to do good. And the unknown author of the book of Job gave clear voice to ancient Jewish doubt and skepticism, an orientation that emerged even more prominently in Central Asia in the ninth century with the overt skepticism of Jewish philosopher Hiwi al-Balkhi, who blatantly questioned the divinity of the Torah, reportedly causing many people to lose their faith.

  Emergent agnosticism, antireligiosity, and an all-around debunking orientation are also well represented among the ancient Greeks and Romans of the classical age. For example, Lucretius argued that the gods did not exist, that there was no life after death, and that everything we experience, even the most wondrous, is essentially natural. Epicurus taught that death is a nothingness that no one need fear and yet its unavoidable eventuality renders our efforts to enjoy this life all the more pressing, and that this life is, or most certainly can be, pleasurable and good. Democritus rejected the existence of anything divine, and argued that an individual’s morality must stem from his or her own sense of self-respect. Protagoras articulated a proto-agnosticism, believing that it was simply impossible to know, one way or the other, whether gods existed or not. Carneades, a true skeptic, debunked standard arguments for theism and theories of divine creation. Anaximander sought to understand the workings of the universe scientifically, and was an early proponent of a naturalistic orientation. These individuals are but a handful among many other voices from ancient Greece and Rome who criticized the truth claims of religion and articulated a very secular this-worldly ethos.

  But wait—there’s more. We can also turn to early Islamic civilization for evidence of secular thought weaving throughout the past. There is the critical rationalism of Muhammad al-Warraq of the ninth century, who doubted the existence of Allah and was skeptical of religious prophets; there are the freethinking, antireligious assertions of Muhammad al-Razi of the early tenth century, who was overt in his criticisms of religion and worked hard to advance the sciences of physics, chemistry, and medicine; and then there are the soothing, inspirational affirmations of Omar Khayyám of eleventh-century Persia, who waxed poetic about the all too natural, all too mysterious, and yet compelling beauty of existence. “Men talk of heaven,” he noted, yet “there is no heaven but here.” And then we have the towering intellectual figure of Averroes of twelfth-century Córdoba, considered a founding father of nascent secular philosophy; Averroes’s skepticism was so pronounced that the poet Dante included him by name in his Divine Comedy as one of those prominent heretics who dwells in hell.

  In short, the evidence of various nascent forms of what we today would refer to as agnosticism, skepticism, atheism, naturalism, secularism, and humanism throughout history, going back even thousands of years, is quite rich.

  It must be granted, however, that such secular expressions and articulations from long ago represented a tiny minority of humanity. Secular men and women were undeniably few and far between in the past, especially a thousand years ago. Or even a hundred years ago.

  But today, they are rare no more.

  In the beginning of the twenty-first century, secularity abounds. There are now literally hundreds of millions of people who eschew religious faith and religious involvement in favor of other forms of association and a decidedly naturalistic worldview. And in their recent research, demographers Vegard Skirbekk, Eric Kaufmann, and Anne Goujon have documented what may very well be a historic first: there are now more people leaving religion than embracing it.

  So while the existence of secularity is nothing new, what is new is the sheer scope and magnitude of that secularity in our world today. Secularity has never been so widespread, open, or overt.

  What the Numbers Reveal

  Secularization is the historical process whereby religious faith, religious involvement, religious identification, and religious institutions weaken, fade, or become less significant in society. And while secularization is in no way inevitable or irreversible—what social phenomenon is?—when we look at the world today, the evidence for dramatic trajectories of secularization, occurring in many countries all over the world, is simply staggering.

  Consider, for example, that in Canada one hundred years ago, only 2 percent of the population claimed to have no religion. But today nearly 30 percent of Canadians claim as much, and approximately one in five Canadians does not believe in God. Or consider Australia, where a hundred years ago less than 1 percent of the population claimed no religious identity, but today approximately 20 percent of Australians claim as much—and the country’s recent prime minister Julia Gillard is an open atheist. Exploding rates of secularity are even more dramatic in Europe. A century ago in Holland, around 10 percent of the population claimed to be religiously unaffiliated; today, it is more than 40 percent. In contemporary Great Britain, nearly half of the people now claim no religious identity at all, and British historian Callum Brown has documented the degree to which “a formerly religious people have entirely forsaken organized Christianity in a sudden plunge into a truly secular condition.” We find a similar situation in Sweden, where religion has become exceedingly marginal, and approximately half the population self-identifies as secular. Furthermore, 61 percent of Czechs, 49 percent of Estonians, 45 percent of Slovenians, 34 percent of Bulgarians, and 31 percent of Norwegians do not believe in God. Thirty-thr
ee percent of the French, 27 percent of Belgians, and 25 percent of Germans do not believe in God or any sort of universal spiritual life force. And the most recent survey information from Japan illustrates extensive secularization over the course of the last century: sixty years ago, about 70 percent of the Japanese claimed to hold personal religious beliefs, but today that figure is down to only about 20 percent. Such levels of atheism, agnosticism, and overall irreligion are simply remarkable—not to mention historically unprecedented. And beyond those nations mentioned above, there are also significant chunks of nonreligious people in regions all around the globe—including Uruguay, Chile, South Korea, Israel, and Azerbaijan—to name several disparate examples.

  What about us?

  For many years, the United States—“God’s country”—has been held up as a glaring exception to this widely observable wave of secularization. Rates of religious belief and church attendance have persistently been much stronger here than in other industrialized democracies, especially Europe. And while this certainly still holds true—Americans, on average, continue to be a relatively religious lot—secularity has nonetheless increased significantly in the United States over the past twenty-five years. As Harvard professor Robert Putnam has recently acknowledged, there is now a truly burgeoning “secular swath” in this country.

  Consider the following:

  The percentage of Americans who claim “none” when asked their religion has grown from less than 10 percent in 1990 up to somewhere between 20 and 30 percent today. This means that the number of “nones” in America has increased by well over 200 percent over the last twenty-five years, making it the fastest-growing “religious” orientation in the country.

  In absolute numbers, during the last decade approximately 660,000 Americans every year have joined the ranks of those claiming no religion, and there are now between 38 and 45 million nonreligious adult Americans. So nonreligious Americans are now the second largest “religious” group in the country, and Americans without a religious affiliation now comprise the only “religious” group growing in all fifty states.