About 45 years ago, a Time magazine cover asked, “Is God Dead?” More recently, a report delivered to a meeting of the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, no less, declared that an analysis of census information in nine countries indicated that religion would soon be “extinct” in those locations.
Faith in God is at an all-time low, especially in places that are actually part of the modern world, like Western Europe. Polls show that only a small fraction of people in Western Europe believe in God, and the same is true in places like Japan, where the religious traditions never were very strong on belief in a Supreme Being in the first place.
Wherever you look, the people who have the highest education are the least likely to believe in God, and those who have little or no formal education have the greatest faith in God. It would appear that the more you know, the harder it is for you to see how God can exist. Or to put it another way, it seems that faith and ignorance go together like a horse and carriage and are just as unfashionable.
Americans don’t fit this trend, however. Although the average American has a higher level of education than in most countries, more of us believe in God than people living in places just about anywhere except predominantly Muslim countries. But in America, even though just about everyone says that they believe in God, our faith is pretty shallow. Overall, the number of Americans who attend church regularly is lower now than just about any time in the last century, and when they are asked by pollsters, twice as many people claim to attend church regularly than actually do. Even before the twentieth century, church attendance was really quite low, even though most Americans think that our forefathers and foremothers were an especially pious bunch.
Today, our personal piety is also pretty thin. Despite all the arguments about prayer in schools and other civic places, few Americans actually pray every day, at least not very earnestly. (Sorry, but I don’t think “God is great, God is good…” or “Now I lay me down to sleep…” represents heartfelt piety.) A lot of Americans say that they think the Ten Commandments should be posted on courthouse lawns and in public schoolrooms, but if asked, disturbingly few of those same Americans would be able to name more than four or five easy ones, such as thou shalt not kill, steal, or commit adultery. Most of those same Americans would be upset to see the return of the so-called blue laws that kept stores closed on Sundays a few decades ago and would think them a violation of their God-given right to sell and shop whenever they want. Anymore, even the most hard-nosed fundamentalists don’t think twice about stopping at the Piggly Wiggly on their way home from church.
Even in one of the most supposedly religious countries in the world, religious faith doesn’t seem to penetrate very deep into people’s public lives. Think about it: When was the last time you saw someone pausing to say grace over a Big Mac? Most of us think that such public displays of devotion are odd, maybe even downright peculiar, and so even the most devout people adjust their public behavior to conform to the prevailing secular standard.
For a country that thinks itself very religious, we’re surprisingly narrow-minded about other people’s religiousness. The vast majority of times when religious people appear in a TV show or movie, they’re shown as buffoons, hypocrites, or dangerous fanatics. Some people might say that this is just because Hollywood is run by a cynical, profane elite, but this argument is pretty weak. After all, when other kinds of bigotry have appeared on the screen, protests have swiftly persuaded media executives to tone it down or get rid of it altogether. Racial and ethical stereotypes are not allowed unless they are being lampooned. And yet two types of people who can still be ridiculed are the religious and the overweight. (As a member of both groups, I feel especially picked on.) If even a small minority of the American audience was serious enough about religion to be offended by such portrayals, they would be off our screens faster than you can say the N word.
Even in private, few people spend much of their time being religious. Maybe most families have a Bible (hopefully not one with the word Gideons embossed on the front), but not many Americans actually read it regularly. Few families make it a point to pray together, except maybe at mealtime, and fewer still try to give their children even a basic religious education.
If anything, the state of religion in our common political life is even worse. Our leaders feel like they have to claim to be pious Christians (or in a handful of cases, pious Jews), but our government hardly shows the influence of real Judeo/Christian values. Oh, there’s a lot of trumpeting about a “culture of life,” but the same leaders who make the most noise about it have pushed us into wars that have caused the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians. Why is it that “What Would Jesus Do?” seems limited to matters of personal morality but somehow never affects our foreign and social policy? Or does anyone think that Jesus would start a war against anyone, much less a preemptive war against a far-off nation that posed no imminent threat to us? Or does anyone think that Jesus would push cuts in programs that care for the poor and disabled to pay for tax cuts for the rich? When did Jesus ever say anything nice about the rich or tell the poor that they deserved scorn for their condition? (Sorry. I couldn’t help letting the pissed-off preacher in me come out.)
I think it’s clear that our country really doesn’t care about how sincere our leaders are in their religious beliefs, just as long as they seem to agree with our own narrow and self-centered worldview. Otherwise, how can we explain how evangelicals lined up against arguably the first born-again President (Jimmy Carter) to help elect a candidate who was the first divorced President (Ronald Reagan), all in the name of “family values”? The truth is that the majority of Americans don’t really care that much about our leaders’ real beliefs, just so long as what the candidate claims to believe is able to gain the support of a small-but-powerful religious minority with enough money and influence to tilt an election their way.
And so we find ourselves in a nation that is pretty much superficially religious, a nation whose citizens rarely let what little faith they have affect their actions and who make fun of those who do.
As we become more separated from our religious roots, we find ourselves cut off from the values that gave us a strong foundation for our lives. Our lives become more and more empty and meaningless and we end up trying to fill that emptiness with things that we think will make us happy. Instead of honoring people whose lives reflect virtue and integrity, we most admire people who are rich and famous, without really caring how they got that way. The quickest path to celebrity is being notorious, and while we might give the Paris Hiltons of the world a cursory “tsk tsk,” we still give them more attention and admiration then we do to people who actually achieve something important. The people we think are successful are those who look good, who get (or are born) rich, and who are able to keep their faces on the cover of People magazine.
To make things even worse, though, we export this cultural toxic waste around the world through our media and consumer-obsessed corporations. Try to imagine how our movies and TV shows, filled with partial nudity, extramarital sex, and openly gay people is received among people who think that a woman is indecent when she shows her face in public. It’s easy to see why there’s a fundamentalist backlash in the Muslim world against us. I hate to admit it, but there’s a good reason why they call us the Great Satan: In the Bible, Satan is the tempter, and we are certainly tempting much of the rest of the world to abandon their traditional values so they can imitate our casual self-indulgence and profanity.
Naturally, the Muslim world isn’t the only place where a fundamentalist backlash is taking place. America has a sizable fundamentalist movement, too. Even though Christian fundamentalism represents a small minority of Americans, it’s a very vocal movement that is able to shape people’s opinions even if it’s not able to convert them to its core beliefs. As a result, a sizable chunk of Americans think that evolution and global warming are still controversial among scientists and that the Bible can be used like a textbook to answer questions about biology, geology, and history. Without a doubt, this is because Americans feel that society is changing just too damn fast, and so they nostalgically cling to a Golden Age when everybody’s faith had a firm foundation in God’s excellent Word. Not that people really want to go back to the way things were a hundred years ago, but they do miss what they like to imagine were the solid virtues of the past.
But religious people aren’t the only fundamentalists, of course. There’s also a scientific fundamentalism that is at least as influential as religious fundamentalism because of the way it controls how scientists go about their business and because of how it shapes what educators do, especially at the college level. Believe it or not, scientific fundamentalism is even less tolerant than religious fundamentalism because, while religious fundamentalists have to accept at least a part of the scientific worldview (mainly because it works so well), scientific fundamentalists think that they have to reject the entire religious worldview. For the most part, religious fundamentalists are at least willing to admit the truth of the ideas of Galileo, Newton, Mendel, and Einstein—in fact, practically all scientific pioneers except for Darwin and his heirs—but scientific fundamentalists crusade against all religious faith, even to the point of rejecting belief in a generic, impersonal, uninvolved God. The scientific community usually treats with contempt those few scientists who have the courage to even suggest that there might be any reality beyond what can be proven by experiments. These scientists find it hard to get their works published and to get funding or associates for their research, even when that research has nothing to do with religion. It’s no surprise, then, that most scientists who do manage to keep some sort of religious faith hide it from their colleagues rather than risk crippling their careers.
The problem for the rest of us is that all kinds of fundamentalism are totalitarian. That is, they delude themselves into thinking that they provide the only correct answers to all questions and so they insist that everyone must adopt their particular beliefs and none other. For most of us, scientism (the religion of science) is especially attractive because its practitioners are so useful to us. After all, science is the source of all of the medical wonders and technological gizmos that make our way of life possible. And it’s hard to argue with the claims of scientism when science has shown itself to be so successful at figuring out how the world really works. The problem is that while science is really good at answering the question How?, it’s completely unable to answer the deeper question Why?, a question it doesn’t even think is important.
So most of us find ourselves stuck between these two militant factions. For the most part, we agree with the scientific worldview because it’s so reliable. Science tells us that natural laws, not God, control the universe, and since we hardly ever see true miracles that defy those laws, it’s hard to argue with science on that point. On the other hand, we can’t completely surrender to scientism because it can’t give our lives meaning and direction. Even though our everyday experience doesn’t really jibe with religion’s emphasis on the supernatural, at least religion is better at helping us find the meaning and direction that scientism just plain ignores.
As we’ll see next, the scientific worldview is the one that we live by day to day. We almost always trust reason, not revelation, as the way to understand how the world works, even when reason seems to push our spiritual needs to the fringe of our lives.
