Unraveling the American Orthodoxy, Part One--The Problem

Recent events, including the Supreme Court's evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, a general push in Republican-led statehouses to change voting rules--viewed as increasing barriers to those on the left; as decreasing the chance of (nearly non-existent) voter fraud by those on the right—and increasing restrictions on abortion rights raise a large question.  A question that is complicated by the recent Supreme Court rulings on the federal Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8 barring same-sex marriages in the state.   Why are these things happening at this historical moment, by which I mean, in the main, since the election of Barack Obama in 2009, though evidence of these movements can be seen sooner?

One of the standard narratives is that these represent some sort of racial backlash to the election of the nation's first African-American president.  Angered at Obama's election, Republicans in charge of the House and of most state governments have begun retrenching on policies that led to increased minority voter participation, which led to Republican defeat in 2008 and 2012.  Abortion restrictions represent resistance to "rights" created by judicial fiat and which trample the states underfoot.

These causes are near and dear to the president and to Democrats, after all, and whatever he is for Republicans must be against.  Surely this is what is at work in Republican resistance to the president's health care plan, itself a carbon copy of the program implemented by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, and a product of the Heritage Institute in many particulars.  Or so the story goes.  While most of the proponents of the rollback on voting and abortion rights are Republicans and while Republicans are certainly the inheritors of the racist Democratic coalition that broke up in part because of the push for civil rights that included the Voting Rights Act, this seems insufficient.  

As suggested above, moves to restrict abortion and to tighten voting regulations have a history that is longer than that.  Certainly in the case of abortion, in places the push to restrict access to the procedure immediately post-dates the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that effectively legalized the practice in the United States.  And states targeted under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have long tried to skirt the act's provision, attempting to follow the law's letter while ignoring its spirit.  But these voices have never been sufficient to do much damage until now.  

Same-sex marriages, on the other hand, have always been at a legal disability and it has been suggested more than once that the push for their recognition is the next stage in the struggle to extend the promise of America to all of her citizens.  It's advance seems something of an anomaly, since its opponents are the same crowd working on abortion and voting restrictions.  

I would like to suggest, however, that the DOMA and Prop 8 decisions are, in fact, not anomalies.  Rather, they confirm the pattern that includes the erosion of basic liberties for certain groups of citizens, especially women and racial minorities.  For this reason, while we should praise the signal these decisions send that there is no constitutional impediment to marriage equality, we should be careful to follow this victory with concerted action to make sure this equality extends to all citizens.  Because what these rulings actually seem to do, at least until further legal action, is return the decision over who can marry whom to the states.  This handover of authority on matters of basic civil liberties to state governments  is part of the process that is also leading to erosions in women's and minorities' rights.

This erosion is in some senses intentional and in others systemic.  By intentional I mean that there are some people who are genuinely interested in rolling back advances made by women and minorities, with the aim of increasing their own status and power.  This is not true of all the participants in this rollback, but seems likely true of the leaders.   Others are likely actually motivated by concerns over federalism, but this does not excuse them from responsibility for the effects of their actions.  By systemic I mean that there are deeper structural reasons new limitations are being proposed and adopted.   

What we are witnessing, I contend, is the unraveling of what I will call the American orthodoxy.  This orthodoxy is one that was established in stages from the aftermath of the Civil War through the middle of the 1970s.  At its core was an extension, albeit imperfect and uneven, of the promise inherent in America's founding documents, to those whom it had previously been construed to exclude.  It began to be attacked in the late 1970s by an alliance of Republican politicians and adherents to a certain brand of Protestant ideology.  Following the conclusion of the Cold War, it truly began to unravel.

In this series of posts I would like to explore this notion.  The next post will take us back in history, explaining briefly how orthodoxies are constructed in response to threats and in tension with heterodox ideas.  Following that, I will engage in a brief discussion of how these forces played out in the early years of the Republic, and how they birthed the notion of American exceptionalism.  Moving forward in time, I will then discuss the formation of the American orthodoxy, its relationship to the idea of American exceptionalism, and the conditions of its creation.  Finally, I will approach the unraveling of the American orthodoxy that is occurring now, its effects, and consider what might be done about it.

Atheism and the Limits of Certitude

In a previous post I addressed the possibility that atheism is a religion.  I was forced to reject this possibility, suggesting instead that atheism, like theism, was nothing more than a religious opinion concerning the existence (or not) of deities.  Formal religion, I argued, came not from belief in a deity, but from the implications of that belief for the lives of believers.  Deism, for instance, would not be a religion, since it accepts creation by a deity who set initial conditions, but made no demands on adherents for religious practice.  Judaism and Islam were discussed (briefly, inadequately... I know) as theisms that derived a set of practices from what they thought about the creator and their relation to "him," creating religions that were essentially orthopractic.  Christianity took this a step farther and added a number of things (i.e. the Trinity, transubstantiation of the Eucharist, etc.) to practice, creating a faith based on proper belief, orthodoxy.  Finally, by analogy to atheistic religions such as Buddhism and Taoism, along with secular movements like Communism, suggested that some atheists do act in a religious manner.

I wanted to pick this thread up now because a number of discussions I have had, with both believers and non-believers, have convinced me that something important is going on and that this illuminates another way some atheists are acting like their more traditionally "religious" counterparts.  It was also stimulated in part by an "atheist mythology" suggested by John Shook at the Center for Inquiry.  Shook, I think, is on to something here.  What he has reached, it seems, is the problem of certitude among a large segment of the atheist community, the certitude I wrote about in the post linked above and which contains the beginnings, one suspects of an atheist fundamentalism.

Atheist fundamentalism begins, as does religious fundamentalism, with absolute certitude on the "god question."  Of course the answers are diametrically opposed, but the commitment is still the same.  Atheist fundamentalists are absolutely certain that there is no god (they are even more certain that there is no God, but I'll come to that in a bit).  Science, they suggest, has killed god, a claim that goes even farther than Stephen Hawking's recent assertion that the Big Bang could have proceeded without God (or god).  Even the chief prophet of the New Atheism isn't that certain.  In "The God Delusion," Richard Dawkins classified himself as "agnostic...to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden."  On his seven-stage scale, with seven representing absolute certainty that there is no god, Dawkins said he was a six leaning towards seven.  Of course, there isn't much in the rest of the book (remember, according to the title belief in god is delusional) to buttress that moment of humility.

When one  atheist suggests to another that, however remote the possibility, a deity might exist, there are generally two responses from these atheist fundamentalists.  One is to immediately conflate any suggestion of a deity with the Abrahamic god.  Another is to demand incontrovertible proof of God's (the capitalization here is deliberate) existence.  Can't provide it?  There is no god (or God).  QED.

I will answer both of these points in a way that I hope does not compromise my atheism, since I would hate, hate, hate to be branded a heretic in the non-religion.

On the question of the existence of a deity, it needs to be repeated: admitting the possibility of a god, presumably a creator (for what else, in this universe, would define a god) is far from endorsing any particular vision of god.  It is suggesting a minute possibility that theism, as a religious opinion, might be correct.  From my own atheistic standpoint, I would argue that, if there is an intelligent creator, the deists have come closest to describing such a being.  If there is a watchmaker, this designer seems to have wound things up and let them run according to fixed rules.  History lacks credible evidence of "divine interventions" in the lives of men; science sufficiently explains the workings of the cosmos.   These two facts are enough for me to discard the deist position and consider myself an atheist.

On the question of proof, I can only shrug and sigh.  Divinity, ultimately, is not amenable to proof; ancient and medieval theologians knew this, despite attempts to use logic to prove the existence of God.  While history can teach us that divinity doesn't show up in the historical record and science can teach us that the universe can get along fine without it, neither can as yet definitively rule it out; absence of evidence, as it is said, is not evidence of absence.  The leap from this uncertainty to either atheism or theism is ultimately a leap of faith.  I am an atheist because I do not believe gods exist.  I am an atheist not because science has proved there is no god, but because neither history nor science has provided evidence for god.

Those capable of absolute certitude on this question, whether they embrace a cosmos that does not or cannot have a designer or a cosmos that absolutely must have one have, it seems to me, surrendered their faculty for wonder.  Lack of complete data requires a humility that is lost when we are so certain.  Whether you believe in god or God or gods, or none at all, without the occasional doubt that touches the minds of all thinking people, what are we?  Even those most identified with holiness, for example Mother Teresa (whether you think her a saint or the worst kind of sinner), admit to the occasional moment of crisis in which they feared they were alone in the universe.  For atheists and theists alike, who live in a universe of wonder, one that is stranger not only than we do think but than we can think, completely shutting down any possibility is the worst failure of imagination.

Common Problems, Uncommon Grounds--Initial thoughts

Note: Back in March, as a result of an editorial  I wrote, I was invited by the editor-in-chief of Theoecology, an on-line journal associated with the Southeast Baptist Theological Seminary that explores the intersections of theology and ecology, to write a paper.  It is to be a thought piece on getting believers and non-believers onto the same page concerning ecological issues.  I have put together a preliminary sketch of how the paper is going to be structured, but wanted to get some thoughts down here at the beginning of the process.

When Pope Francis extended a hand to the religiously unaffiliated soon after his election to the papal throne, suggesting that Catholics and non-believers could be “our precious allies in the effort to defend human dignity, in building a peaceful co-existence between peoples, and in carefully protecting creation,” it was music to the ears of many in the non-theistic community.  Later still, when he suggested to atheists, "Just do good, and we'll find a meeting point," voices could be heard among non-theists thanking the pontiff for his recognition of their potential for good (to be fair, there was also a good bit of snark in the response, as well).  This goodwill was somewhat undercut as the Vatican began rolling back the more radical implications of this message.  Still, a hand of cooperation was offered, one which I have suggested atheists would be foolish to ignore, inasmuch as we are able to agree on what constitutes human dignity, cooperation and environmental stewardship.

Left out of this discussion are Protestant and other religious groups.  In the United States, at least, this is an untenable position, as action to address major issues spinning out of protecting human dignity, international peace and the environment will be political.  Even assuming an idyllic union of Catholics and the religiously unaffiliated in America, this accounts for only about 40 percent of the population.  Protestants of various sorts (mainline, evangelical, members of historically black churches), on the other hand, account for slightly more than 50 percent.  Further, writ large, this division is a political division, with Catholics and the unaffiliated tending to skew Democratic and Protestants—with the notable exception of the historically black churches—tending to skew Republican.  This division is, according to polling data, reflected in positions of members of these communities on issues of human dignity, international cooperation and the environment.  This paper will explore the last of these divides by focusing on a single environmental issue, anthropogenic climate change or global warming, by trying to tease out some of the underlying tensions, and by offering some thoughts on how the divide might be bridged.  

Some preliminary observations are possible at the outset.  Polling in 2011 suggests that 63 percent of the U.S. population accepts the premise that there is solid scientific evidence that the earth is growing warmer.  Of this group, 38 percent accept that this is a man-made problem, 18 percent believe it is caused naturally, and 6 percent do not know; 28 percent of overall respondents did not accept the premise and 9 percent were unsure.  This is down from 2006, when the poll was first conducted, when the numbers were 77 percent in the affirmative (47 man-made/ 20 natural/ 10 don't know), 17 in the negative, and 6 percent unsure.  Such numbers mark a steep decline, to be sure, but represent a slight improvement over 2009's numbers: 57 percent affirmative (36 man-made/ 16 natural/ 6 don't know), 33 percent negative and 10 uncertain.  Self-identified Democrats were most likely to accept the reality of climate change, with 77 percent accepting the evidence, compared to 63 percent of independents and 43 percent of Republicans.  These numbers should be compared with the large majorities of scientists and, especially, to the 97 percent of climate scientists who are reported to accept anthropogenic climate change as a reality.

Partisan divide on the issue of climate change can be, to some extent, correlated with the political identification of religious groups. Evangelical Protestants and Mormons in the 2008 religious landscape survey identified themselves as Republican or Republican-leaning by 50-34, and 65-22, respectively.   Mainline protestants were essentially tied, leaning slightly Democratic by 43-41.  Historically black churches, Catholics, Jews and the unaffiliated all skewed Democratic by 78-10, 48-33, 65-23, and 55-23, respectively.  Voting in the 2012 elections generally reflected this identification, with evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Mormons supporting Mitt Romney over President Obama 79-20, 54-44, and 78-21, respectively; black Protestants, Catholics, Jews , and the unaffiliated supported President Obama by 95-5, 50-48, 69-30, and 70-26, respectively.

However, despite the political leanings of members of these groups, there is a large area of agreement on issues relating to the environment and even to global warming.  For instance, across all of these faith (and non-faith) groups, majorities agree that environmental regulation is worth the cost in money and jobs.  There are also majorities in each group that accept the fact that global warming as a phenomenon is real, though there are differences on whether it is attributed to man-made or natural causes.  For instance, among unaffiliated, whit mainline Protestants, white Catholics, black Protestants, and white evangelicals, majorities of 75, 73, 70, 80, and 58 percent accept that the earth is warming.  However, only among the unaffiliated did a majority of respondents (58 percent) attribute warming to man-made causes.  Among white mainline Protestants, white Catholics, black Protestants and white evangelical Protestants, the percentages were 48, 44, 39, and 32, respectively.

Still, we see a clear consensus around two ideas.  First, that environmental regulations are worthwhile and, second, that the earth is getting warmer, whatever the cause.  This should, it would seem, form the foundation of action to combat global warming.  Knowing this, it would seem, is the first step for members of faith, and non-faith, groups who wish to work together on common issues.   But, as Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus noted in their powerful 2004 indictment of the environmental movement, "The Death of Environmentalism," legislation is at a virtual standstill.  The situation has not improved since then.  

Why?  And why aren't groups working together across the faith (and non-faith) divide?  Part of the problem may be political.  Though majorities in all faith groups accept the reality of global warming, groups such as white Protestants who tend to vote Republican are least likely to accept that the cause of—and from this one can infer the solution to--global warming is man-made.  But there are also some potential structural impediments that also need to be explored.  For instance, does end-times theology play a part in making certain believers towards the need to address warming as an issue?  Does the very idea of global warming, and its apparent injustice, threaten notions of a just world?  Is it a matter of group dynamics, one in which religious leaders have failed to rally the faithful to the cause?

On the other hand, we have the potential problem of science, the language in which issues of the environment need to be addressed…