“Spiritual but not religious” is one of the most popular positions of the modern American. We call people who believe in God but want to disassociate themselves from the responsibilities of denominational faith “Nones.” They now make up around 30% of Americans.
Me? I’m “religious but not spiritual,” a nonbeliever who’s a big fan of organized Western faith — the more orthodox, the better. We probably make up a fraction of 1% of Americans.
And, so, I often feel unrepresented in the great debate between the faithful and atheists. Case in point, a recent Free Press event in Austin pitted believers Ross Douthat and Ayaan Hirsi Ali against Michael Shermer and Adam Carolla over the question: “Does the West need a religious revival?”
It should be noted that this query sparked a far more valuable conversation about faith than any of the numerous fruitless debates we saw between New Atheists and various clerics over the years regarding God’s existence, which is not a disprovable proposition.
Since my position on the need for a religious revival is based on worldly, rather than celestial, grounds, my biggest beef was with Shermer, whose case rested on counterhistories and the “comparative method.”
The founder of Skeptic magazine points out that non-Christian civilizations can also be great. Neither Homer nor Sappho were Christians, after all. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World weren’t inspired by Jesus’s promise of salvation. What about the great pre-Christian civilizations of Samaria, Babylonia, Acadia, Assyria, and Egypt? Did China and India not produce impressive civilizations before the birth of Christ?
And if Christianity inevitably leads to economic and democratic freedoms, Shermer asks, why didn’t the Byzantine Empire, which existed for over a thousand years, have them? For centuries, he says, Christians built kingdoms, tyrannies, and nations that held slaves and didn’t even let women vote.
That is all, of course, true. It is also true of every civilization that Shermer mentions. A far more relevant question is: Which non-Christian civilization evolved into a free, democratic, and wealthy civilization on its own? I’d contend, none.
Let’s take Adam Smith, who suggested that the free market’s success was dependent on moral behavior and social norms of Christianity. Smith himself was a product of that civilization. Neither China nor Arabia nor the Incas had an intellectual tradition that could produce an Adam Smith. Even today, the most successful nations on earth depend on ideas conceived in a civilization that values open inquiry. Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong are glittering meccas of affluence because the Westerns invented combustion engines, electric circuitry, Portland concrete, and steel beams.
More relevant, though connected, is the fact that Christianity widely spread the idea that every human life is valuable and has agency. In the end, it was in the name of Christ, not Ashur, that the slave trade was eliminated. William Wilberforce and Martin Luther King Jr. both came to their positions by way of Christianity, not Zen Buddhism.
No educated person can deny that there were atrocities committed in the name of Christianity. And no educated person argues that there are no great achievements outside of Christendom or that every other philosophy is wholly devoid of any moral worth. Indeed, Christendom was built on the foundations of Classical Europe and ancient Jewish monotheism. Early Church philosophers read Aristotle and Plato. The Catholic Church itself was built on the structure of Roman hierarchy. Organized faiths haven’t been nearly as close-minded as its critics maintain.
There is a reason that churchgoers are more likely to volunteer in their community and give charity. They are also more likely to marry and more likely to have children.
Churchgoers are also more patriotic. They are more likely to treat natural rights with reverence. Nearly every argument for equality and liberty is predicated on ideas that sprung from Christian beliefs. It’s trendy to debate whether the founders were really Christians or not — it seems that some were, and some were not. But it is largely irrelevant. It is the providential nature of rights that has girded the most successful national project in history. The Constitution doesn’t work if you don’t believe rights are provided by a higher power. Without a Creator, rights tend to become negotiable.
While churchgoers are more resistant to modernity, they are also less inclined to surrender to destructive social science trends. At one time, anticlericalism balanced the power of the church with liberal or seemingly transgressive ideas. Today, we need clerics to check the growth of the vapid universalism and “multiculturalism” that’s gripped our society. Many churches have, regrettably, adopted new social trends or are too cowardly to stand up aggressively for their own traditions.
Certainly, I’m in no position to lecture churches on how to keep or expand their flocks, but one suspects hanging rainbow flags rather than crosses and mimicking the racialist language of a DEI manual isn’t it.
Tradition is a key component here. I’m no theologian or moral philosopher, but my preferred organized faith is Judaism, the culmination of thousands of years of roiling debate. I find the history of that faith beautiful, intellectual, and useful in navigating the modern world. Organized tradition was vital in keeping Judaism alive through a quite bumpy history. So American Jews who abandon that tradition and use the faith merely to brand their pagan denominations Jewish are charlatans.
Indeed, without organized traditional religion, Americans are inclined to fill the void with something far worse than “love thy neighbor.” Some turn to Eastern religions, wellness cults, animism, or the worship of celebrities, or, worst of all, they treat the state as their church and political ideologies as scripture.
One of the most popular contemporary faiths is “science.” Without morality, science can lead us to terrible places; as we’ve seen with the normalization of eugenics and antihumanism. We don’t need a counterhistory to understand that the 20th century’s two greatest evils, fascism and communism, were stand-ins for faith. But the real problem with “science” these days is that for many, it is no longer an observed knowledge of the universe but societal wish casting that denies objective reality, including biology.
Anecdotally speaking, I don’t find nonbelievers any more rational than religious people. None of this is to say that secular ideas are all depraved or useless, either. And if everyone was as obsessed with facts and rational morality as Shermer, perhaps a religious revival wouldn’t be necessary. But does anyone believe that most students in our top universities, allegedly centers of wisdom and open minds, are less extreme or hateful than those sitting in pews?
There are no Homers or Sapphos on the Columbia teaching staff.
Secular Americans like to feign offense when you point out that we live in a Christian nation. But it’s indisputable. That doesn’t mean we are a theocratic state, even if some Christian nationalists would like it to be so. It means our norms are governed by traditional Christian mores. As the historian Tom Holland once noted, even Western secularism is “a distinctive Christian idea and it’s not remotely neutral because it obliges Muslims and Jews and Hindus and whoever to alter their understanding of themselves to fit into this template.” Though, without vibrant churches, that will not last forever.
Unlike many nonbelievers, I’m envious that you’re comforted by the existence of salvation and heaven. It beats the promise of a dark pit, I assure you. But God is something you believe in. Religion is something you can admire and adopt because it is the culmination of thousands of years of experience that provides for humanity’s best practices.
Now, I do think some people exaggerate the moral decline of the United States. And obviously, there are many bad people claiming the mantle of Christianity out there. But “spirituality” without rules is self-soothing, and often just an offramp into secularism and crackpottery. Needless to say, as a societal matter, organized religion is a vital component of preserving Western civilization. And I’m a big fan.
Can society evolve beyond organized faiths and find something equally positive to replace it? Who knows? Right now, however, there’s no evidence that we’ve found it.
