Secular Americans Research Articles

The Beliefs of Nonbelievers: Exclusive Empiricism and Mortal Finitude Among Atheists and Agnostics

Abstract This essay argues that “atheist” and “agnostic” are not merely negative labels that indicate a person lacks belief in God or is not religious. Relying on a new survey of very secular Americans and the General Social Survey, we demonstrate a statistically significant and substantively meaningful relationship, in both predictive directions, between identifying as atheist or agnostic and holding certain beliefs about how best to know the world and what happens when we die. We can reliably predict that most people in the United States who trust science, reason, and evidence and do not trust religious sources will identify as atheist or agnostic—and vice-versa. We find the same bi-directional relationship with belief in mortal finitude, i.e., that death is the final end. Our findings suggest that exclusive empiricism and mortal finitude are positive tenets of belief systems that those who identify as atheist or agnostic are likely to hold.

What Makes Politicians “Religious”? How Identity Congruence Shapes Religious Evaluations

AbstractHow do Americans evaluate politicians’ religiosity? We theorize extra‐religious “identity congruence,” the perceived correspondence between others’ group identities and our own, will powerfully shape evaluations. We test this expectation using data from two large, nationally representative surveys that ask Americans to rate the religiosity of prominent politicians. Consistent with our theory, the strongest predictors of how Americans rate politicians’ religiosity are their congruence on party identification and ideological identity as well as expected alignments with racial identity and Christian nationalism. Respondents’ religious characteristics are relatively weak predictors. And these trends hold regardless of Americans’ knowledge of leaders’ professed religious identity. Patterns are consistent with our theory even when we split samples by party. When we compare ratings between politicians who are widely regarded as irreligious to those who are regarded as conventionally religious, partisan congruence and racial identity largely mitigate the religious advantage of the latter. Racial identity also moderates congruence on key factors. Finally, identity congruence on party, ideology, and Christian nationalism follows expected patterns even among secular Americans for whom “religious” less intuitively implies “my group.” In a time of growing identity‐alignment along partisan, ideological, racial, and religious lines, extra‐religious “identity congruence” powerfully shapes how Americans evaluate politicians’ religiosity.

Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular. By David A. Hollinger

For much of the twentieth century, white American Protestants were divided into two ideological camps. Evangelical Protestants resisted the civil rights movement, feminism, and religious and racial pluralism. Ecumenical Protestants, in contrast, welcomed these developments because they viewed ethnoreligious pluralism as a positive good. Those two ideological camps within Protestantism still exist, but ecumenical Protestant denominations have experienced such steep membership declines over the past half-century that evangelicals have been able to redefine the word “Christian” as synonymous with “evangelical” and write ecumenical Protestants out of the story. And with the decline of ecumenical Protestantism, secular Americans have become the leading champions of the racial and religious pluralism that ecumenical Protestants of the mid-twentieth century played a role in shaping. David A. Hollinger’s Christianity’s American Fate explains why ecumenical Christianity declined even as its political causes succeeded, why white evangelicals became the leading ideological party in American Christianity, and why this religious shift reshaped American politics.

Freedom Believers 2020: anti-vaccine activism and political liberalism in Oregon

ABSTRACT This contribution examines recent developments in the activism of a Russian religious minority community in the United States. After fleeing persecution in Russia to Manchuria, Turkey, and Brazil, since the 1960s 10,000 Old Believers have settled in the Williamette Valley, Oregon. The contribution describes how and why this paradigmatically ‘closed’ religious group, which has eschewed active political engagement for centuries, made a sudden and effective entry into Oregon politics in 2019–20. Initial political mobilisation was provoked by Oregon State Legislature’s attempt to pass a law to eliminate exemptions on religious or philosophical grounds for children’s vaccinations. Following the theorising of Rawls, I argue that the Old Believers formed with other Americans opposed to mandatory vaccinations an ‘overlapping consensus’ of political liberalism. Their exclusive reliance on political arguments grounded in the secular American tradition of liberal rights and freedoms conflicts with the influential thesis of ‘public religion’, articulated prominently by Casanova and Habermas, who highlight the spiritual and theological character of interventions by religious groups into modern politics. Notwithstanding the secular tenor of their political intervention, I argue that it constitutes a form of ‘religious activism’ motivated by the pursuit of values at the heart of their centuries-old religious project.

Examining Average Age at First Marriage within Orthodox Judaism: A Large Community‐Based Study

AbstractMarriage trends across global communities are influenced by demographic and cultural factors. The marriage age of secular Americans, and multiple religious groups are affected by gender and religious affiliation, but this has not been examined in Orthodox Jewish subcultures. This study explored how gender, cultural affiliation, and shifting cultural affiliation affect the age at first marriage within Orthodox Jewish subcultures differing in openness to Western culture: Yeshiva Orthodoxy and Modern Orthodoxy. Respondents (n= 3865) provided information about themselves and members of their family but respondents’ information was excluded to increase sample representativeness, focusing instead on the 8856 family members. Gender, subcultural affiliation, and individual cultural shifting were all found to affect the age of the first marriage. We interpreted these results in the context of varying cultural beliefs, education, and a perceived surplus of available women. Further examination of related factors may aid community efforts to support individuals in their pursuit of finding marriage partners.

Race, Sex, and God

Race, Sex, and God

Beyond The God Gap: Mapping Religiopolitical Heterogeneity in the United States1

Research has consistently found that the link between religious and political identification and behavior in the United States has grown significantly, as religious populations have increasingly aligned with the political right while secular Americans move toward the political left. Yet, other research cautions that most Americans are not extreme either politically or religiously. In this study I seek to integrate these claims by applying a latent class analysis to religious and political indicators from the 2016 American National Election Study. Results show six distinct profiles of religiopolitical orientation. Two of these profiles partially correspond to a religious conservative versus secular liberal binary but differ in key characteristics such as size and style of political engagement, exhibiting a dynamic of what I describe as asymmetric polarization. The remainder of the population exhibits religiopolitical orientations that fit with neither extreme. Instead, they fall into one of four internally coherent groups: (1) Religious but apolitical, (2) religious and political but ideologically diverse, (3) nonreligious and apolitical, and (4) nominally religious but behaviorally disengaged from both domains. Rather than polarization or moderation and incoherence, the relationship between religion and politics in the United States may be usefully described in terms of structured heterogeneity.

Retirement Without God: Activism and Community Among Secular People Over 60

There are more than 1,400 nonbeliever communities in the United States and well over a dozen organizations that advocate for secular people on the national level. Together, these local and national groups comprise a social movement that includes atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers, and other kinds of nonbelievers. Despite the fact that retired people over 60 dedicate most of the money and energy needed to run these groups, the increasingly vast literature on secular people and secularism has paid them almost no attention. Relying on more than one hundred interviews (including dozens with people over 60), several years of ethnographic research, and a survey of organized nonbelievers, this paper demonstrates the crucial role that people over 60 play in the American secular movement today. It also considers the reasons older adults are so important to these groups, the challenges they face in trying to recruit younger members and combat stereotypes about aging leadership, and generational differences that structure how various types of nonbeliever groups look and feel. This paper reframes scholarly understandings of very secular Americans by focusing on people over 60 and charts a new path in secular studies.

Roth Memorial

Roth Memorial Patrick O'Donnell (bio) Arguably the most compelling final paragraph of an American novel, perhaps only second to that of The Great Gatsby, occurs in Philip Roth's The Human Stain, published on the cusp of the new millennium: I turned from the shore, once I was safely there, to look back and see if he was going to follow me into the woods after all and to do me in before I ever got my chance to enter Coleman Silk's boyhood house and, like Steena Palsson before me, to sit with his East Orange family as the white guest at Sunday dinner. Just facing him, I could feel the terror of the auger—even with him already seated back on his bucket: the icy white of the lake encircling a tiny spot that was a man, the only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate's signature on a sheet of paper. There it was, if not the whole story, the whole picture. Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that's constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America. (Stain 360-61) "The only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate's signature": thus Roth's ironic acceptance of the unreadability—the sheer opacity—of the human and the possibility of ever relating "the whole story." Yet Roth's life-project was a prolific and relentlessly provocative attempt to do so, or at least to fill in as many of the blanks as he could, in the time that he had, through all of those flawed and stained narrators and protagonists who inhabit his novels, blind and blind-sided here, illuminated by visions pure and peaceful there. No American novelist I know of, with the exception of Hawthorne, understood how deeply riven with contradiction the "nature" of "human nature" can be. In charting its excesses and its limitations, especially in the realm of self-understanding, Roth lost a lot of friends and made a lot of enemies, members of either party unwilling to accept his scorn for familiar categories; a novelist of filiation, he had no time for affiliation. His satirical proclivities, his attraction to the scandalous, his comic [End Page 111] outrageousness—qualities that both vie and correspond with the philosophical seriousness and the probative cultural and historical density of his fiction—have confused some and irritated others. At century's end, he captures perfectly in The Human Stain the antinomies of our growing intolerance of our own deep imperfection, paired with our growing lassitude in the face of human corruption and violence. In this novel, Roth implicitly protests against reductionism in all of its forms; he is an adversary of the binary, the all-too-easy separability of guilt from innocence and pure from impure that seems to have invaded every aspect of our contemporary Manichean existence in the difficult new century he anticipates, via Nathan Zuckerman, as he takes a last look at a Vietnam veteran alone, ice-fishing on a lake "that's constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America." Nature, or the paradoxical snapshot of impermanent, ever-changing nature captured in this "whole picture," may offer a vision of purity against which the illegibility of the human can be marked, but the unreadability of the human stain viewed not as DNA but as "X," a cross-out or cipher, signifies for Roth our impenetrability and excess beyond any mappings offered by science, law, politics, or religion. In a designation that he would have immediately recognized and embraced, he was the most secular American writer of his time. Roth was not interested in life as a singularity, but in lives as pluralities, alterities. Most Roth protagonists live at least two lives, and though we sometimes have Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh to try to sort things out, they almost inevitably fall back on a recognition that the story they can tell is only half the...

Tohono O'odham Legal Systems

This short essay surveys the Tohono O’odham’s legal system through three periods. First, it discusses the traditional O’odham legal system, which relied on himdag (culture or way of life). Second, it reviews how the Spanish, using an inquisitorial system based on Christian religious law, altered the O’odham’s legal system. Third, it analyzes how the secular American adversarial system changed the O’odham’s legal system.

Institutional Confidence in the United States: Attitudes of Secular Americans

The First Amendment to the United States’ Constitution addresses freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. However, the historical influence of religion in laws, policies, and political representation have left secular individuals feeling excluded. At the same time, levels of confidence in social and political institutions in the United States are at an all-time low. This begs the question: Is there a relationship between secularity and confidence in various social and political institutions (e.g. the armed forces, churches, major companies, government, police, and political parties)? This question is examined using data on the United States from the World Values Survey from 1995–2011. While controlling for a range of key demographics, the findings show a negative relationship between secularity and institutional confidence. More specifically, atheists and nonreligious individuals are less likely than those who are religious to have confidence in all six institutions. Based on previous literature and the empirical evidence presented in this study, we argue that overall lower levels of institutional confidence among secular Americans is an outcome of the exclusion of such individuals from American social life. Thus, it highlights the importance of addressing the stereotypes and prejudice that this minority group faces.

Developing and Transmitting Religious Identity: Curriculum and Pedagogy in Modern Orthodox Jewish Schools

This paper argues that American modern Orthodoxy is facing a crisis caused at least in part by problems of student identity formation. A range of ethnographic research conducted over the last decade suggests that modern Orthodox students feel increasingly disengaged from religious studies classes—and that this disconnection is a factor in the movement’s decline. I argue that student disengagement may be a result of these schools’ inability to accommodate students’ own epistemological commitments to religious pluralism and autonomy, as well as the mainly secular American concerns central to their developing personal identities. Using data from fieldwork in an American modern Orthodox school that has implemented an entirely Problem Based Learning (PBL) centered curriculum, as well as from interviews and discussions with teachers participating in a PBL community of practice, I suggest that PBL may be uniquely suited to address these problems, offering a means by which modern Orthodox students can work autonomously to construct more integrated religious identities in the classroom.

Godless Democrats and Pious Republicans? Party Activists, Party Capture, and the “God Gap”

Since the 1960s, the Republican Party has increasingly become the party of religious traditionalists and evangelical Christians, while the Democratic Party has become the home of religious liberals/modernists and secular Americans. This rising partisan “God gap” has led scholars and pundits to pay close attention to religion in modern politics, but the true causes and consequences of the religious divide are still debated. The prevailing scholarly wisdom is that American political parties have been “captured” by religious and secular activists. Specifically, this “mobilization” thesis argues that the Christian right hijacked the Republican Party by mobilizing evangelical activists against liberal policies during the 1960s and 1970s. Secular activists—the story goes—captured the Democratic Party as a result of the backlash over the Republican Party being taken over by conservative Christians. While mobilization has certainly occurred, Ryan Claassen advances a new “representation-based” model to explain the changing role of religion in party politics. The story that Claassen tells is remarkably—and perhaps dishearteningly—simple: evangelicals and secular Americans are more influential in party politics today in large part because there are comparatively more of them today than during the 1960s (because of better generational retention than, namely, mainline Protestants) and because they have become wealthier and better educated. For instance, evangelicals are increasingly Republican activists and voters, but this is primarily the result of improved socioeconomic status and the southern party realignment over race rather than mobilization over so-called morality politics.

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism by Sam Haselby

Reviewed by: The Origins of American Religious Nationalism by Sam Haselby Ava Chamberlain (bio) The Origins of American Religious Nationalism Sam Haselby New York: Oxford University Press, 2015 336 pp. The Origins of American Religious Nationalism is a frustrating book. Its central argument is important and provocative, but its development is disorganized, obscured by frequent digressions, and compromised by methodological problems. Haselby maintains that in the decades following the Revolution a distinctively American mode of nationalism developed. The defining features of this new American nationalism were populism, antielitism, racism, and religion, represented in their fullness by the presidency of Andrew Jackson. He argues persuasively that Protestant activism played a central role in creating this national identity. In his analysis, religion in the early Republic was not only shaped by political forces, it actively contributed to the formation of the nation. Given that this argument complicates a common paradigm, which views religion more as an effect than a cause, the book makes an important contribution. It is unfortunate, therefore, that its execution is flawed. Haselby begins by considering a commonly identified source of American nationalism, the foundational documents that informed the Revolution and determined the structure of the federal government. One of the book’s “revisionist claims” is that neither the Revolution nor the Constitution determined America’s national identity. “[T]he War of Independence,” Haselby writes, “posed rather than answered the question of American nationality” (1). Thomas Jefferson and James Madison offered one answer to this question in the framework of the federal government, which was weak [End Page 206] by design and secular by definition. They envisioned the gradual emergence of a secular American nation, in which religious belief is “private” and “remote from political power” (30). Although disestablishment succeeded, secular nationalism failed. Religion did not decline; it flourished as never before. Haselby locates the solution to the problem of American identity in the spiritual hothouse of the early Republic. Out of it emerged a distinctive religious nationalism that continues to influence party politics and outcomes of elections today. Haselby’s argument centers on the competition between two rival conceptions of evangelical Protestantism that developed in this period, which he labels “frontier revivalism and national evangelism” (2). The book’s central contribution lies in delineating the competing social and national visions of these two movements. The locus of their conflict was the American frontier, rapidly expanding with a diverse population of settlers and immigrants. This territory, Haselby argues, presented to the new Republic “two formidable nation-building challenges,” establishing sovereignty over the frontier and addressing Native Americans’ land claims (4). Both required a unifying idea of the nation, which the weak and secular federal government was ill equipped to provide. In the absence of a strong federal state, national evangelism and frontier revivalism developed as two competing approaches to the challenge of westward expansion. Haselby locates the seeds of national evangelism in the Connecticut Wits, the eighteenth-century literary movement founded by a group of Yale-educated writers having deep and aristocratic Puritan pedigrees. Admitting the Wits “were not great writers,” he concentrates on the nationalist message of their verse (64). His analysis focuses primarily on John Trumbull’s M’Fingal (1782) and Timothy Dwight’s Greenfield Hill (1794). Aiming to nationalize the regional culture of New England, these epic poems envisioned a Protestant America populated by hard-working, small property owners, who were educated and engaged in civic affairs (103). This image of America was undermined by Thomas Jefferson’s election, which promoted secularism and a rival national model based on Virginia planter society, and was discredited by the Hartford Convention. Despite these setbacks, its core nationalist vision reemerged in the missions movement organized and led by northern Protestants. Northern Protestants imagined America as a “sacred political community” unified by shared religious beliefs, social structures, and cultural [End Page 207] values (14). The principal challenge to the formation of this union was the western frontier, which from the perspective of these sober, middle-class Yankees was rapidly filling with people of questionable character, low morality, and heretical faith. To address this challenge northern Protestants became nation builders. Haselby labels this movement “national evangelism” because it viewed “missionary work...

American secularism: cultural contours of nonreligious belief systems

A rapidly growing number of Americans are embracing life outside the bounds of organized religion. Although America has long been viewed as a fervently religious Christian nation, survey data shows that more and more Americans are identifying as religious. There are more non-religious Americans than ever before, yet social scientists have not adequately studied or typologized secularities, and the lived reality of secular individuals in America has not been astutely analyzed. American Secularism documents how changes to American society have fueled these shifts in the non-religious landscape and examines the diverse and dynamic world of secular Americans. This volume offers a theoretical framework for understanding secularisms. It explores secular Americans' thought and practice to understand secularisms as worldviews in their own right, not just as negations of religion. Drawing on empirical data, the authors examine how people live secular lives and make meaning outside of organized religion. Joseph O. Baker and Buster G. Smith link secularities to broader issues of social power and organization, providing an empirical and cultural perspective on the secular landscape. In so doing, they demonstrate that shifts in American secularism are reflective of changes in the political meanings of in American culture. American Secularism addresses the contemporary lived reality of secular individuals, outlining forms of secular identity and showing their connection to patterns of family formation, sexuality, and politics, providing scholars of religion with a more comprehensive understanding of worldviews that do not include traditional religion. Data Analyses Appendix Instructor's Guide

Dating in Light of Christ: Young Evangelicals Negotiating Gender in the Context of Religious and Secular American Culture

Studies of young evangelicals’ dating patterns tend to analyze gender by focusing on ideology. This paper suggests a view of gender and religion that examines the two institutions as interrelated by considering how and when gender and religion emerge as salient in Christian dating. Drawing on a study of young evangelicals’ relationships, I explain how ideal discussions of Christian dating emerged as gender-neutral against a backdrop of secular conceptions of romantic relationships but how their personal accounts reveal a series of divergent gendered evangelical worldviews when they turn to focus on their experiences constructing relationships within the evangelical subculture. The three worldviews of idealist, independent, and ambivalent each represent different patterns of how young evangelicals emotionally understand their life as both gendered and religious indicating more complicated patterns of gender, dating, and religion than presented in previous studies.

ATTITUDES ABOUT SOCIO-MORAL ISSUES AMONG RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR YOUTH

Recent headlines suggest that Americans, and American youth in particular, are growing more liberal in their attitudes about social and moral issues. Do these trends suggest that the oft discussed “culture wars” are nearing an end? We examine this possibility by asking whether younger generations of religious and secular Americans do indeed espouse more liberal attitudes about sociomoral issues than their counterparts in older generations. We focus specifically on differences within and across religious groups in attitudes about four issues: abortion, same-sex marriage, stem cell research, and the environment. We are especially interested in comparing generational differences in attitudes about high profile, “old-line” wedge issues (abortion and same-sex marriage) in the culture wars with newer, lower profile issues (stem cell research and the environment). Using the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey, we find that religious youth are generally not more liberal than older religious individuals.

Ye of Little Faith

Despite the proclamations of Republican senators, there are more secular Americans now then ever before; sociologist Phil Zuckerman argues that their growth warrants greater attention to secularity on the part of social science.

Nonbeliever nation: the rise of secular Americans

Introduction The Wedding Invitation A Religious People? A Secular Heritage Secularity and Morality The Disaster of the Religious Right Better Late Than Never: Secular Americans Emerge Reason for Hope: Secular Students When 'Happy Holidays' is an Act of Hostility A New Plan of Action A Secular Future Afterword

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: Building American National Identity Through Art

With the adoption of the Constitution, the government of the United States took on a new role. Unlike other governments of the time, the United States was primarily founded on ideas, and, as a result, there were many challenges at the beginning of the newly-created republic. One of the biggest challenges was establishing credibility and legitimacy. In addition, republics require the support of the people; thus, to support the new political system, people needed to believe in the principles and ideals of the nascent government. As one form of communication, art has the capacity to reflect social contexts, depict specific events, and provide a visual link that makes words memorable, lasting, and compelling. Following this idea, we seek to examine the role the visual arts played in the early decades of the newly formed republic. What were the artists who worked during these years seeking to convey to their audiences? We argue that through art, a foundation for a national identity and a secular American civil religion was laid. We find that the art of the early republic with its clear symbolic meanings provided the necessary visual images to help turn abstract political concepts into something more concrete. We examine selected pieces of art from the early republic, including depictions of the Founders in portraiture and sculpture, with a particular emphasis on George Washington, as well as historical paintings available to the public. These works reveal how “visual rhetoric” helped to illustrate the republican ideals and values the Founders articulated for the new government. Art contributed to creating the necessary shared identity, civil religion, and national narrative that allowed the United States to keep its republic in its formative years.