Living the Secular Life_New Answers to Old Questions

by Phil Zuckerman

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  MANY RELIGIOUS BELIEVERS can probably relate to such sentiments of Einstein’s, and to aweism in general. And some may even see aweism as a manifestation of a sort of religious orientation to the world. But it is not. The similarities between various religions and aweism only go so far. As American philosopher Louise Antony explains, “Like theists, we affirm the limitations and fallibility of the human mind; like them, we acknowledge, with awe, the vastness and complexity of the natural world. Unlike theists, however, we have no master story to tell about the origins or the ultimate future of the world … we have no sacred texts, no authorities with definitive answers … no list of commandments.” And, I would add, no gods.

  After Charles Darwin lost his Christian faith and became an agnostic, he nonetheless retained a great feel and sense for the sublimity of creation, but he also said that “however difficult it may be to explain the genesis of this sense, it can hardly be advanced as an argument for the existence of God.” But a religious or religiously spiritual person will do just that: interpret feelings or experiences of wonder, awe, and the sense of rapturous mystery as evidence of there being Something More, Something Else, Something Holy Out There. An aweist makes no such leap of faith. An aweist just feels awe from time to time, appreciates it, owns it, relishes it, and then carries on—without any supernatural or otherworldly baggage.

  Joseph Conrad spoke of living in what he dubbed an “enchanted state.” And yet for Conrad this enchantment is purely natural and wholly of this world. As he explained, “All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature, and however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is.”

  As French philosopher André Comte-Sponville has mused, “We live within the unfathomable.” But while such a reality can often inspire oceanic feelings of transcendence, “there is nothing innately religious about this oceanic feeling. Indeed … when you feel ‘at one with the All,’ you need nothing more.” Or as American atheist Sam Harris further expresses, though our universe is indeed “shot through with mystery … no myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshipped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation.”

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  THUS AWEISM, THOUGH steeped in existential wonder and soulful appreciation, is still very much grounded in this world. It is akin to what philosopher Robert Solomon dubs a “naturalized” spirituality: a nonreligious, nontheological, nondoctrinal orientation that is “right here, in our lives and in our world, not elsewhere.”

  I live this life in the here and now, and as the days and nights pass, I occasionally experience a profound sense of transcendent, swelling awe. And I simply enjoy that feeling. My awe stops there. As Einstein wrote, “We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world as far as we can grasp it. And that is all.” I thus make little attempt to identify the source of my feelings of awe, and furthermore, I am perfectly content to explain my occasional sense of deep wonder or happiness or poignant joy in strictly naturalistic, neurological, or psychological terms. The source, in fact, is irrelevant to me. The awe is what I care about, and it is that feeling of awe which I consider a deeply important part of my personality and life experience.

  A lack of belief in God does not render this world any less wondrous, lush, mystifying, or amazing. A freethinking, secular orientation does not mean that one experiences a cold, colorless existence, devoid of aesthetic inspiration, mystical wonder, unabashed appreciation, existential joy, or a deep sense of connection with others, with nature, and with the incomprehensible. Quite the contrary. One need not have God to feel and experience awe.

  One just needs life.

  Conclusion

  A few years ago, while attending Cranston High School West in Rhode Island, Jessica Ahlquist took issue with the large Christian prayer banner that was affixed to the wall of the school auditorium. She felt that her public school should not be in the business of pushing religious faith, and so she sought to have the banner removed, insisting that it was a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. In response to her activism on this issue, and the eventual lawsuit it inspired, Jessica was verbally harassed, received death threats, and ultimately had to have police protection while walking to and from class. The day after the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island ruled in favor of Jessica and ordered that the banner be removed, Rhode Island state representative Peter Palumbo went on a local radio show and castigated her as an “evil little thing.”

  It still isn’t easy being secular in America.

  A clear majority of Americans—in fact two-thirds—say that they consider the United States to be a “Christian nation.” This means that for many people, being an atheist or agnostic is seen as being somehow intrinsically un-American. Indeed, the current state constitutions of South Carolina, Arkansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas bar atheists from holding public office. And given that the very Pledge of Allegiance includes the words “under God,” and that leading American politicians often proclaim that it is our faith in God that unites us above all else as a nation, it makes sense that anyone who doesn’t believe in God is clearly less than fully patriotic, right?

  That was at least the first President Bush’s position back in the 1980s, when he publicly said, “I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriotic. This is one nation under God.” Many Americans clearly agree with such a sentiment, as evidenced by the numerous surveys that reveal Americans’ unwillingness to vote for an atheist for president. As we have seen, more Americans would be willing to vote for a Muslim, a homosexual, a Mormon, a Latino, a Jew, a Catholic, a woman, or an African American than for an atheist.

  In the United States today, numerous pundits and politicians—usually Republican, but sometimes Democratic—insist that religious faith and being American go hand in hand. As the second President Bush—who claimed that Jesus was his favorite philosopher and that he consulted with God before invading Iraq—said in his 2003 State of the Union address, “We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone—we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.” The operative words in that passage are “we Americans.” The unabashed implication of the nation’s forty-third president is that if you don’t place your confidence in a “loving God,” then you aren’t “we,” and thus you aren’t really American.

  Such sentiments are quite mainstream these days. To list all the times that such an assertion has been put forth by some powerful person at a podium would take too many pages. So let me just offer one recent, all too typical example. On August 30, 2012, at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, Senator Marco Rubio was given a very important, penultimate slot on the final night of the gathering: to give the speech just before Mitt Romney was to take the stage and accept his party’s nomination. Youthful, articulate, and a very proud American, Marco Rubio embodies all that the current Republican Party stands for: a hatred of taxes and government bureaucracy, a love of family and freedom, and—perhaps above all else—faith in God. I say “perhaps above all else” because that’s exactly what Senator Rubio stressed in his speech. As he declared that night, “Our national motto is ‘In God We Trust,’ reminding us that faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all.” He additionally argued that America is a blessed and special nation “because we’ve been united not by a common race or ethnicity. We’re bound together by common values … that almighty God is the source of all we have.”

  I couldn’t disagree more. Nor could the facts of American history and demograp
hy.

  Senator Rubio is simply wrong in his insistence that a shared faith in God is what unites us as Americans. It is not—for the obvious reason that such a faith is not embraced by all Americans. As I’ve reported in this book, millions of Americans—be they psychiatrists or nurses, veterans or secretaries, lawyers or stay-at-home moms, students or property managers, drug rehab directors or Holocaust survivors, receptionists or camera operators, truck drivers or police officers—live their lives without faith in God. And millions more live their lives without any interest in religion whatsoever. As touched upon in the introduction, the statistics are surprisingly clear on this front; with the current percentage of Americans identifying as nonreligious being somewhere between 20 and 30 percent, we’re talking about tens of millions of Americans who are more secular than not.

  What unites us as Americans, then, is clearly not our faith in God. And it never has been. From Thomas Jefferson to Ethan Allen, from James Madison to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, from Thomas Paine to Margaret Sanger, from Frederick Douglass to Frances Wright, from John Henry Kagi to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from Charles Knowlton to H. L. Mencken, from Robert Ingersoll to Susan B. Anthony, from William Howard Taft to A. Philip Randolph, from Clarence Darrow to Ayn Rand, from Felix Adler to Nella Larsen, from William Lloyd Garrison to Emma Goldman, from Andrew Carnegie to Matilda Joslyn Gage, from John Dewey to Betty Friedan, from Mark Twain to Pat Tillman, from Kyrsten Sinema to Juan Méndez, from Mary McCarthy to Charlie Parker, and from Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Gates, freethinkers, skeptics, agnostics, doubters, humanists, secularists, and atheists have always been an important contributing part of American culture.

  What does and should unite us as Americans is our adherence to and respect for the U.S. Constitution—and that’s about it. Love of, belief in, and a willingness to defend freedom, liberty, and democracy: government by the consent of the governed. But as for metaphysical, spiritual, otherworldly, religious, or transcendental matters—is there a God? What happens after we die? Why are we here? How does karma operate? Who was Jesus? Where does chi reside? What is the Holy Ghost? How can we best mollify jinn?—the answers to such questions, whatever they may be, are not what define us as Americans, as citizens, or as human beings. And to suggest—as more and more politicians seem to be doing—that to be a good, decent American requires faith in a Creator, or to imply that Christian values are the only values, or to argue that our laws are given to us solely by God, or to constantly denigrate nonbelievers as somehow less-than-welcome partners in the American enterprise … that’s all, quite frankly, very un-American.

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  AFTER ALL, the brilliant founders of this nation made their new American vision quite clear, as they proclaimed in Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797: “The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” That’s a very bold declaration to be made only ten years after the drafting of the Constitution. And what is even more amazing is that the treaty was passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate—only the third such unanimous vote in that body, out of 339 votes that had taken place up to that time. Although the Declaration of Independence of 1776 refers to God without apology, once American independence was won, and the arduous task of actually forming a new nation was under way, the writers of our Constitution deliberately left God out of the entire body of that foundational, brilliant, and oh so secular document. All authority was placed in the hands of “we the people”—not in a deity. Faith, prayer, Jesus, the Bible, a Creator, heaven, salvation, Christianity, the Ten Commandments, God—all were deliberately left out of America’s official blueprint.

  But there’s more.

  The founding fathers went out of their way to establish a clear “wall of separation” between religion and state, to quote Thomas Jefferson. They reasoned, as James Madison so cleverly articulated, that both religion and government exist in greater purity if kept apart. To this end, the creators of the United States explicitly stated that no “religious test” shall ever be required in order to hold public office. And they also stipulated that the presidential oath shall make no reference to God (or anything supernatural). And the congressional oath constructed by the nation’s first lawmakers, and signed into law by George Washington in 1789, also left out any reference to God, or anything supernatural. Thus, as David Niose, recent past president of the American Humanist Association, concludes, the fact that the bodies of both the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution are God-absent, the fact that the framers did not want to make presidents or members of Congress swear religious oaths upon taking office, and the fact that the Senate unanimously approved the Treaty of Tripoli—all of this “would hardly reflect the handiwork of a Congress that was seeking to construct a Christian nation.”

  And as for the national motto of “One Nation Under God” that Senator Rubio referenced—that was not our original national motto! The actual founding American motto, adopted by an act of Congress in 1782, was “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of many, one”)—a decidedly secular motto if ever there was one. But in 1956, at the height of the Cold War, and in an effort to distinguish ourselves from those godless communists over in Russia, the motto was changed to “In God We Trust.” And the words “under God” were also not in the original Pledge of Allegiance; they were added in 1954.

  The founders of the United States knew the damage that religious fervor can cause a nation. They knew the problems that religious divisions, disagreements, and sectarian strife can stir up in a society. They knew the evil that can be done in the name of religion by those in power. They were fully cognizant of the threat religion can pose to a neonatal democracy. That said, however, most of them were personally religious to varying degrees, and they knew how important religion is to most people, how inspirational faith can be, how essential religious congregations can be, and that religious freedom is a necessary freedom. And so in the very first amendment to the U.S. Constitution—before getting to the issues of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly—they made their brilliant, biprincipled position on religion clear: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” So, on the one hand, government should not be in the business of religion. There shall be no Church of America. There shall be no House Committee of God. The government should not promote, subsidize, or “establish” religion. No one should ever pay taxes to support religious beliefs that they do not share or religious activities that they oppose. However, government should definitely not take away people’s right to be religious. It shall not suppress, destroy, persecute, or subvert religion. That is, government should not impinge on the “free exercise” of religion. What an enlightened, balanced position to take—and one that is originally, quintessentially American.

  Thus when pundits and politicians such as Senator Marco Rubio conflate being American with being a religious believer, they do so not only in gross ignorance of the demographic realities of America, but in direct opposition to the vision of our founding fathers.

  As President Ulysses Grant declared in 1875, “Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the Church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the Church and the State forever separate.” Or as President Ronald Reagan declared a century later, in 1984, “We establish no religion in this country … church and state are, and must remain, separate.” That is, in fact, exactly what political, Jeffersonian secularism is all about: keeping the public square, if not free from, then at least aggressively neutral when it comes to religion. In such a situation, both secular and religious Americans win.

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  BUT ACHIEVING SUCH a state of affairs has never been easy. As Professor Jacques Berlinerblau has observed, “Nonbelief is, and always has been, treated with contempt in the American public square.” Many studies and opinion polls, such as those discussed in the introduction, bear this out. And while I definitely do not think that secular A
mericans have ever faced the kind of prejudice, exclusion, or hostility experienced by Native Americans, African Americans, Latino/a Americans, Asian Americans, Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, or homosexuals, there is still no question that atheists, agnostics, secularists, and others who eschew religion are often disliked and distrusted, or widely regarded as immoral, or not considered fully American.

  Heck, we aren’t even allowed in the Boy Scouts, the American Legion, or the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Humanist chaplains are barred from serving in our nation’s military. Charities regularly reject donations that are offered by secularist organizations. And the only way that this cultural exclusion, political stymieing, and social stigmatization will ever change is if nonbelieving, nonreligious Americans straighten up their secular spines a bit, clear their humanist throats, and assert their position with knowledge, confidence, and pride. Our secular humanism is not something to be hidden from family, friends or colleagues; it is something to be proud of, explained, and discussed. And our secular humanist values should propel us to get actively involved in shaping our schools, our cities, our nation, our world. And we should work with other secular humanists—as well as those religious Americans out there who share our values and vision—in an organized fashion.

  It is essential to assert, both publicly and privately, that religion is clearly not the sole source, arbiter, or purveyor of morality and values. For to equate religion with morality, or to conflate theism with “having values,” is to commit a grave historical, sociological, and philosophical fallacy. Historically, some of the greatest moral and ethical advances have been predicated upon strictly secular ideologies championed by the nonreligious. The Enlightenment push for democracy, the modern movement for women’s rights, the fight against caste in India, and the acceptance of homosexuality are but four obvious examples. The creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is another. As for technological, medical, and scientific advances—the contributions of secularism on these fronts are truly enormous and awesomely unparalleled.