I Want to Believe (Just Not Too Much)

“Religion poisons everything,” screeched the atheists. Now as an addendum, some are mournfully adding, “even us.” In an eye-opening article for Slate, Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, outlines a number of experiments and studies that demonstrated that religious people in America are, broadly speaking, nicer than atheists. They contribute more to society and are happier. After venturing some explanations for this — religious people believe God is watching them, for instance — he blames American religiosity for the rudeness of atheists. Because a study tied the niceness of believers to religious attendance, rather than religious belief, Bloom credits the “togetherness” of church-going rather than adherence to religious doctrine.

After examining the relative happiness of God-ignoring countries like Sweden and Denmark, he concludes that anti-social atheism “may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens.” Will Wilkinson, an outspoken atheist blogger, concurs: “American atheists would be both happier and more cooperative if we were less marginalized by our culture.”

Superficially, Bloom's thesis sounds good, but it's too easy. Bloom notes, for example, that Sweden and Denmark are prosperous secular societies that report high levels of individual happiness. But he doesn’t examine the history of either country very closely. Both countries, until very recently, had incredibly strong Protestant work ethics in their culture, and neither have America’s ethnic diversity or history of race-slavery.

The larger problem, though, is that neither Bloom nor Wilkinson seem to realize that all people with firm convictions about metaphysical questions — religious and atheist alike — feel alienated from American society. This is why a religious journal like First Things, every once in a while, gets so angry that its editors talk openly about ending “democracy.” This is why strongly religious conservatives turn to populism. They feel that the commanding heights of culture are occupied by the enemies of their faith. American society may be too religious for atheists, but it’s a religion too shallow for many of the religious.

Atheists constantly remind us that they cannot be elected president. But what about the deeply, openly religious, those who express their religious devotion through anything more than anodyne ceremony? Yes president Bush can ask the country to pray. But we cannot picture Eugene McCarthy, who led his supporters in the Catholic rosary, winning office either. Atheists may complain that Americans think it rude to say, baldly, “There is no God.” But Americans find it just as rude to say, “There is only one true, holy, and apostolic Church, outside of which there is no salvation.” Or, “there is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.” Time magazine once asked, “Is God Dead?” and responded with a vague, non-committal answer. But even today, in supposedly religion-soaked America, Time would never use its cover to ask, “Was Calvin Right About the Doctrine of Total Depravity?” Most Americans, even those who attend church, believe in beliefs — not traditional religions.

Even America’s most famous preachers often come across as little more vaguely spiritual. Joel Osteen, T.D. Jakes, and Creflo Dollar hardly ever talk about traditional Christian doctrines like the Trinity, the Incarnation, or Salvation by Grace. Instead they offer self-help palaver with a light religious gloss. Americans have rarely admired religious figures who were all that serious. The exceptions are Billy Graham, whose television presence was unusually congenial, and Bishop Fulton Sheen, whose public Catholicism was popular inasmuch as it was anti-Communist.

Serious debates about religion are marginal. For years, Catholic and Protestant apologists would square off, sixteenth-century style, in “Great Debates” in Long Island, arguing over Scriptural authority, the doctrines of Mary, and whether salvation is granted by faith alone. In a truly religious society, wouldn't we expect to see these sorts of debates generate enormous attention? Instead they attract a few hundred people and a sub-cultural following on the internet. The same goes for atheists. When Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great, debated his brother, Peter, a traditional Anglican, hardly anyone noticed. Americans either cannot follow these debates, or more likely, find them a disquieting interruption.

Or perhaps they worry that such ideas are dangerous. That might be right. One of the leading “new atheists," Sam Harris, takes his metaphysics very seriously. In The End of Faith, he writes, “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.” There you go: the logic of the auto de fe isn’t exclusive to the religion. When American Protestants argued against electing Al Smith, they were taking their religion, and his, seriously. They pointed to the anti-liberal encyclicals of the 19th century popes, and the Vatican’s denunciations of Americanism, and concluded, with some merit, that Catholicism was hostile to the American regime. Kennedy’s election signaled not so much the end of anti-Catholic prejudice as it did the public’s newfound identification of Catholicism with the popular and innocuous: Bing Crosby movies and Notre Dame Football.

The English journalist and Catholic apologist, G.K. Chesterton, noticed the phenomena of oppressive indifference over a century ago in his book Heretics. An introductory passage is worth quoting at length:


Atheists and believers often imagine themselves to be persecuted, but they are not — or at least no more so than the devout. Atheists like Richard Dawkins are almost never attacked in the press for their atheism, only for their “stridency." Their fault is not holding their beliefs, but in holding them as loudly and as boldly as they do. Contra Bloom, the cardinal sin in American culture isn’t atheism. It’s conviction.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a contributing editor to Culture11.