Atheism in America, a view from 2001

I’ve been read­ing Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and in that book, he men­tions an arti­cle by Natalie Angier, pub­lished in the New York Times in 2001. I’m not really going to com­ment on it much, but I do think it’s a valu­able read. I’ll post a few choice quotes here.

In an age when flam­boy­antly gay char­ac­ters are sit­com sta­ples, a Jew was but a few flut­ters of a but­ter­fly wing away from being in line for the pres­i­dency and women account for a record-smiting 13 per­cent of the Senate, noth­ing seems as despised, illicit and un-American as atheism.

Angier goes through var­i­ous polls to show that, of course, the num­ber of Americans who say they are reli­gious on polls doesn’t reflect real­ity. The ques­tions are skewed, unclear and wrongly ori­ented, for the most part. Yet even if the ques­tions were per­fectly crafted, that doesn’t stop many peo­ple from lying to poll­sters, say­ing they are more reli­gious than they are sim­ply because that’s the polite answer to give.

Yes, Americans are com­par­a­tively more reli­gious than Europeans, but while the vast major­ity of them may say gener­i­cally that they believe in God, when asked what their reli­gion is, a siz­able frac­tion, 11 per­cent, report “no reli­gion,” a fig­ure that has more than dou­bled since the early 1970’s and that amounts to about 26 mil­lion people.

She also points out that, in a 1999 poll, 92 per­cent of Americans said they would vote for a women for pres­i­dent. Ninety-five per­cent said they would vote for a black per­son for pres­i­dent; 92 per­cent said they would vote for a Jew. Yet only 49 per­cent of Americans said they were will­ing to vote for an atheist.

She quotes Dawkins and echoes some of the ideas I’ve run into in his book so far:

“Society bends over back­ward to be accom­mo­dat­ing to reli­gious sen­si­bil­i­ties but not to other kinds of sen­si­bil­i­ties,” says Richard Dawkins, an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist and out­spo­ken athe­ist. “If I say some­thing offen­sive to reli­gious peo­ple, I’ll be uni­ver­sally cen­sured, includ­ing by many athe­ists. But if I say some­thing insult­ing about Democrats or Republicans or the Green Party, one is allowed to get away with that. Hiding behind the smoke screen of untouch­a­bil­ity is some­thing reli­gions have been allowed to get away with for too long.”

And here are a few pearls of opti­mism from near the end of the arti­cle. Call them defenses of reli­gion, I sup­pose. At any rate, they acknowl­edge that orga­nized reli­gion can play a ben­e­fi­cial role in society.

“By pro­vid­ing us with help­ful gods, and show­ing how to appeal to those gods, reli­gions armed our ances­tors — and con­tinue to arm us — with a feel­ing of con­trol,” they write. “As long as we have the meth­ods to pro­pi­ti­ate the gods, or solicit their inter­est, or appeal to their sense of fair­ness and jus­tice, or to con­nect with the pres­ence of an eter­nal unity, we feel that an under­ly­ing order and pur­pose exist in a seem­ingly chaotic universe.”

One other thing I find fas­ci­nat­ing about this arti­cle is that Angiers men­tions George W. Bush. When she wrote the arti­cle, he had just been elected to his first term, and the ter­ror­ist attacks on September 11, 2001, were still eight whole months away. I won­der, in read­ing her essay, how her words would be dif­fer­ent if she wrote the essay now.

Related posts:

1. Pew Report: Most Americans wouldn’t care much if their local news­pa­pers disappeared
2. The Focus of Our Public Libraries
3. Thoughts on Pew statistics
4. E-books catch­ing on again