place of religion in our secular life

SO GERMANY’S treatment of Scientologists today is not, after all, quite like its treatment of the Jews in the 1930s. That was the claim made in a full-page advertisement in the International Herald Tribune last year, in which such celebrities as Goldie Hawn, Dustin Hoffman and Oliver Stone attacked Germany for its “shameful pattern of organised persecution” of the Church of Scientology. Now an investigation carried out on behalf of the UN Commission on Human Rights pours appropriate scorn on this “meaningless and puerile” comparison, rebutting not just the accusations of Hollywood’s vigilantes but also the slightly less idiotic ones made by America’s State Department. The United States, it must be remembered, having for 25 years regarded Scientology as a commercial enterprise, suddenly decided in 1993 that it was no such thing but eligible instead for the tax exemptions given to churches. These days it chastises Germany for being beastly to the godly Scientologists.

And yet, however much one may sympathise with the Germans for being sceptical about Scientology, it is hard to argue that it does not meet the dictionary definition of a religion—any system of belief in a higher unseen controlling power. Of course, Scientology tries to turn its followers’ minds and part them from their money; of course, it will try to change their lives forever. But so do lots of religions. Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, taught that humans are clusters of spirits that were trapped in ice and banished to earth 75m years ago by Xenu, the ruler of the 76-planet Galactic Confederation. Some religions teach stranger things. Some Christians, for instance, teach that God created the world in a week. This weekend others will be eating bread and drinking wine in the belief that these are Christ’s body and blood.
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All right, you may say, Scientology may be a religion, but if so what about all the cults that meet the same dictionary definition? Are the Branch Davidian, of Waco-massacre fame, and suicide-promoting Heaven’s Gate, and metro-gassing Aum Shinrikyo, also to qualify as religions? Well, yes. They may direct their message at the weak and susceptible, but so do other religions. They may hold views that are offensive, but so do other religions (many are founded on a heresy). They may even promote violence, but violence is often the handmaiden of strong religious belief. If you doubt it, go to Bosnia, or Northern Ireland, or the Middle East or countless other places where, even today, men fight their neighbours apparently irrationally. That is ethnic strife, you will be told, but in truth it is religious: Bosnians, whether Muslim or Orthodox, are ethnically identical; so are Ulster’s Catholics and Protestants; Arabs and Jews alike are Semites. It is religion, not race, that fires them up.

Awkward as it may be to admit, almost any old group of believers is logically eligible for religious status, even if their movement reeks of hatred, fraud or tax-evasion. If the practitioners call it religion, who is to gainsay them—just as who is to gainsay the creator who calls his creation art? Art is in the eye of the producer; religion is in the eye of the believer. Whether it is good religion or bad, however, is a judgment for others: the Americans evidently think Scientology good, the Germans have their doubts. Both are entitled to their views.

In the end, God’s judgment awaits. Meanwhile, godliness and goodliness are separated by more than a letter.

SADDLEBACK church could exist only in America. On any Sunday, over 3,000 people from the suburbs of southern Los Angeles flock to the main Worship Centre, which looks less like a cathedral than an airport terminal. If you want to experience the rock bands, theatrical shows and powerpoint sermons in a traditional church, you can: they are piped into one by video link. Or you can watch the service on huge video screens while sipping a cappuccino in an outdoor café.

But in case you think this is religion lite, Rick Warren, the pastor, will quickly encourage you to join one of the thousands of smaller groups that are the real life of the church. Saddleback members will help you find a school, a friend, a job or God. There is a “Geeks for God” club of Cisco employees, and a mountain-bike club where they pray and pedal.

To Europeans, religion is the strangest and most disturbing feature of American exceptionalism. They worry that fundamentalists are hijacking the country. They find it extraordinary that three times as many Americans believe in the virgin birth as in evolution. They fear that America will go on a “crusade” (a term briefly used by Mr Bush himself) in the Muslim world or cut aid to poor countries lest it be used for birth control. The persistence of religion as a public force is all the more puzzling because it seems to run counter to historical trends. Like the philosophers of the Enlightenment, many Europeans argue that modernisation is the enemy of religion. As countries get richer, organised religion will decline. Secular Europe seems to fit that pattern. America does not.

In fact, points out Peter Berger, head of the Institute on Religion and World Affairs at Boston University, few developing countries have shown signs of religious decline as their standards of living have risen. It may be Europe that is the exception here, not America. There is no doubt, though, that America is the most religious rich country. Over 80% of Americans say they believe in God, and 39% describe themselves as born-again Christians. Furthermore, 58% of Americans think that unless you believe in God, you cannot be a moral person.

There is also some evidence that private belief is becoming more intense. The Pew Research Centre reported that the number of those who “agree strongly” with three articles of faith (belief in God, in judgment day and in the importance of prayer in daily life) rose by seven to ten points in 1965-2003. In the late 1980s, two-fifths of Protestants described themselves as “born again”; now the figure is over half.

The importance of religion in America goes well beyond personal belief. Back in the 1960s, Gallup polls found that 53% of Americans thought churches should not be involved in politics, and 22% thought members of the clergy should not even mention candidates for public office from the pulpit. By 1996, these numbers had reversed: 54% thought it was fine for churches to talk about political and social issues, and 20% thought even stump speeches were permissible in church.
AP For God and Republicanism

These shifts in opinion have given a boost to one particular group of churches: evangelical Protestants. They embrace a variety of denominations, including Baptist, Confessional and Pentecostal churches, all of which stress individual salvation and the word of the Bible rather than sacraments or established doctrine. In 1987, they were the third-largest religious group in America, with a membership of 24% of the adult population; now they are the largest, with 30%. The percentage of Catholics has stayed stable, largely thanks to Latino immigrants, but established Protestant churches, such as Presbyterians, have declined sharply.

Evangelical Protestants bear out the European view that religion in America is politically active, socially conservative and overwhelmingly Republican. Almost two-thirds of committed evangelicals—the ones who attend church most frequently and say they hold strictly to the Bible—describe themselves as conservative, by far the largest proportion of any religious group. They are also more likely than other churchgoers to rate social and cultural issues as important, somewhat more likely to say homosexuality should be discouraged, and most likely to want to rein in the scope of government.

Over time, evangelicals have become more willing to engage in politics, too. White evangelical Protestants represent almost a third of registered voters now, up from slightly below a quarter in 1987. Their leaders have tried to unite the various evangelical churches as a political force, establishing the Moral Majority in 1979 and the Christian Coalition in 1989. Their comments speak for themselves. Franklin Graham (Billy's son) called Islam “a wicked religion”. The former president of the Southern Baptist Convention called the Prophet Muhammad “a demon-possessed pedophile”.

Such political activism, the growth of new churches and the increased intensity of belief has led some to argue that America may be in the early stages of a fourth Great Awakening, a period of religious fervour when the variety, vigour, size and public involvement of religious groups suddenly increases. Earlier awakenings occurred in the late colonial period, the 1820s and the late 19th century. Might the same thing be happening again?

The evidence seems to be against it. Church attendance has not been increasing, as a new awakening would suggest. The Gallup organisation found that it fell slowly in the 1960s and 1970s, stabilised in 1980 and has remained level since then, with about two-thirds of the population claiming membership of a church.

These findings are based on how often people say they go to church, something they tend to exaggerate. But a collection of records from the churches themselves, summarised by Harvard University's Robert Putnam, shows the same pattern (see chart 4). So do figures from the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, which show that in 2000 some 141m Americans—or half the population—were members of a church. That is a lot, but it falls well short of the four-fifths who believe in God as a private matter. And it is active churchgoing that makes the difference between private belief and public consequences.

Even among fundamentalist Protestants, public influence is patchy. There was, for example, no huge turn-out of conservative Christians in the 1998 mid-term elections, even though the Lewinsky scandal infuriated religious voters. After President Bill Clinton's impeachment and acquittal, Paul Weyrich, a leader of the Moral Majority, wrote to the Washington Post to say that conservative Christians had “lost the culture wars”—hardly evidence of growing influence.

It is not even clear how important religion is in determining the political and social views of evangelical Protestants. The largest concentration of these churches is in the South, among whites. But white southerners held conservative views on homosexuality, government, defence and so on long before the Moral Majority was invented. It is just as likely that social conservatism has encouraged evangelical churches as the other way around.

The Pew study tried to disentangle the role of religion in determining churchgoers' views from other factors, and found that only in social and cultural attitudes (on matters like abortion and homosexuality) was religion alone a powerful factor. Even there, broader demographic factors were more important.
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Lastly, although the number and membership of charismatic churches has certainly grown, there has been an offsetting increase in those who describe themselves as of no religion at all. Since 1960, the number of self-described secularists (atheists, agnostics and those not affiliated to any organised religion) has roughly doubled. According to a survey by the City University of New York (CUNY), 14% of Americans between 18 and 34 describe themselves as “secular” and a further 9% as “somewhat secular”.

Secularists are more likely to live on the Pacific coast or in the north-east, in a city, have a college degree, be male, single, and either lean towards the Democrats or be politically independent. Committed evangelicals are more likely to live in the south, vote Republican, lack a college degree, live in towns or rural areas, and be female and married. In other words, America looks like two tribes, one religious and one secular.

But the really distinctive feature of American religion is the area in the middle. Most Americans do not become members of a church to sign up for a crusade or to sit in judgment on miserable sinners. For them, churchgoing is a matter of personal belief, not conservative activism. Their religion is mild.

In 1965, according to Gallup, half of respondents said the most important purpose of their church was to teach people to live better lives. Since then, the share has grown to almost three-quarters. This is the biggest change in America's religious life in the past 40 years.

Alan Wolfe, of the Boisi Institute for the Study of Religion at Boston College, points out that American religion is exceptional in two senses: not only are Americans more religious than Europeans, but they have no national church. Thanks to the separation of church and state, the country has nothing comparable to, say, the Catholic churches of Italy and Spain, or the Church of England. Americans are members of sects.

The two kinds of religious exceptionalism are connected. Rather as in the economic sphere competing private companies tend to produce wealth and activity, whereas monopoly firms have the opposite effect, so in the religious sphere competing sects generate a ferment of activity and increased levels of belief, whereas state churches produce indifference.

This has implications for the quality of American belief. Churches come and go with astonishing speed. The statisticians of American religious bodies tracked 187 denominations (and there were many more) between 1990 and 2000; in that time 37 disappeared and 54 new ones appeared on the scene. Adherents and pastors, too, are constantly on the move. One study found that half the pastors of so-called “mega-churches” (suburban ones like Saddleback, with Sunday congregations of 2,000 or more) have moved from another denomination. According to the CUNY study, 16% of American adults—33m people—say they have switched denominations. For some churches the share of new adherents was startlingly high. In 2001, 30% of Pentecostalists had joined from another church and 19% had left; among Presbyterians, 24% came in and 25% went out.

Such churning limits doctrinal purism, which might otherwise be expected in a new church. Instead, churches try to attract floating believers—what Wade Clark Roof, a sociologist, calls “a generation of seekers”. According to Mr Wolfe, American churches are therapeutic, not judgmental. They stress “soft” qualities such as guidance and mutual help, not “hard” ones like sin and damnation.

This means that the charismatic and evangelical churches are not typical of the whole of religious life in America. If the pattern of public opinion in general is bell-shaped, that of religious belief has the profile of a Volkswagen Beetle: a bump of evangelical Protestants at the front, a bigger bulge of uncensorious congregations in the middle and a stubby secular tail. That must temper the notion that religion is running amok in America, or that it is causing America to run amok in the world.

At Saddleback church, Rick Warren preaches that abortion is wrong. On a recent Sunday, anti-abortion groups lobbied for their cause as parishioners left church. Mr Warren told them not to return. He agreed with their views, but members of his church, and newcomers, might not. He did not want abortion to get between members and the more important matter of their relationship with God.

IN FRANCE, a Jewish-born cardinal defends the country's secular system and insists that it must not be watered down to accommodate Muslims. In Italy, a nation that cheerfully ignores Roman Catholic teaching on contraception, many citizens are indignant over the removal of crucifixes from school walls. In the tense atmosphere that gripped Britain after last summer's London bomb attacks, people who had never been near a church were heard to mutter: “I suppose it's going to be a crime to be a Christian soon!”

Europe's religious scene is rich, diversified and contradictory. It presents a far more subtle picture than is suggested by the American caricature of Europeans as feeble and benighted atheists. In some places—Britain and Scandinavia, for example—active commitment to Christianity may be fairly weak but national Christian churches enjoy ancient privileges. France has formally excluded religion from the public arena, but that has not prevented faith from surviving in vigorous pockets. In Spain and Italy, where intellectual and cultural life is steeped in Roman Catholicism, people are at once anti-clerical, blasphemous and intensely protective of their Christian heritage.

For a deeper understanding of this peculiar state of affairs, there could hardly be a better place to turn than Michael Burleigh's encyclopedic account of religion and politics in Europe between the French revolution and the first world war, in which a vast range of material is handled in a deft, readable way. Mr Burleigh's “The Third Reich” won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. Drawing in part here on his expertise as a historian of modern Germany and the Nazi movement, Mr Burleigh traces—in one country after another—the process whereby religious understandings of reality and identity were replaced by the ideologies of the modern world: secular or semi-secular notions of national identity, as well as belief in science, progress and technology.
What makes this book excellent is its understanding of the way in which religion fought back, mutated and often remained relatively robust in the places where it came under attack. In particular, the book sheds light on the subtle interplay between traditional religion, secularism and religious nationalism—a dynamic which is crucial to understanding the modern politics of the Balkans, the Middle East and many other places.

The relationship between a universal religion—like Christianity or Islam—and earthly political communities will never be a simple one to describe. On the face of things, these world religions are subversive of all national, administrative or ethnic divisions—because they recognise only one distinction, between believers and unbelievers, as having ultimate importance.

But as Mr Burleigh's book shows, the decline of old-fashioned religion and the rise of secular nationalism—which, of course, resembles religion in its claim to deal in eternal truths—was never a simple, zero-sum affair. Among all the European nations or proto-nations threatened by the power of revolutionary France, “national” resistance to French expansionism was fused with religious indignation over the impiety of the new French order; that gave a new burst of legitimacy to clerical elites which might otherwise have declined faster.

Among religiously divided nations like the Germans, modern nationalism meshed more easily with Protestantism than it did with Catholicism, where loyalty to a newly united “nation” was at odds with the old allegiance to the Vatican's supra-national authority. But that did not prevent a profound convergence of religion and nationalism in two bastions of Catholicism—Poland and Ireland.

Mr Burleigh is good at showing how weak and hollowed-out religion was in places where it seemed strong, such as Victorian England: those vast churches were a reflection not of imperial confidence but of official panic at the plunge in religious observance. Despite the complexity of all these movements and counter-movements, it was a widespread assumption, until quite recently, that the relationship Mr Burleigh is examining could evolve in only one direction. People thought religion as a social category and token of identity would gradually lose ground—either to modern nationalism or to liberal or Marxist internationalism. But in the Middle East recently, the opposite has been happening: secular Arab nationalism seems to be in decline, and the umma or world community of Muslims is regaining importance. In the face of this development, Europeans need a subtle understanding of their own (often unexamined) assumptions about religion and politics. This book, first published in Britain last October and now coming out in America, is an excellent place to start.

OT long ago, an American philosopher, John Searle, ruefully observed that his colleagues seldom bothered to discuss the existence—or otherwise—of God: “It is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not to be discussed in public.”

Diderot and Bertrand Russell, two famous earlier non-believers, would also have been puzzled by what has happened to God at the hands of the western intelligentsia. Unbelief is widespread, yet few can be bothered to argue for their unbelief. This is partly because religion is now commonly treated in western societies as a lifestyle choice, a matter of taste, not reason. Yet can religious faith, with its many political and social consequences, be neatly ring-fenced in this way?

Religious toleration rightly requires that you must let your neighbour practise his religion without fear of persecution or reprisal. In the light of the West's awful history of religious warfare, if nothing else, that is a hard won and admirable principle. But there is also a prevalent attitude—call it religious correctness—with which genuine toleration is easily confused: a polite and well-meaning reluctance to engage believers in the sort of robust clash of ideas that might discomfit them.

A telling recent example of this new correctness is provided by Stephen Jay Gould's “Rocks of Ages”. Mr Gould is a zoologist and geologist at Harvard—a practitioner, that is, of the two sciences that did the most to undermine traditional Christian belief. Mr Gould says that he is not a believer but that he has “great respect” for religion, and: “I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between...science and religion.” His book is full of respect for religion, but nowhere is there any hint of what makes it worthy of such veneration. Is religion among the boons or ills of mankind? Does it do more harm than good? These are proper questions. But Mr Gould avoids them. He has proved himself an eager controversialist in several scientific fields, but here he seems unable to submit religion to the same rigorous questioning that he has applied elsewhere in his work. Instead, it seems, he opts for the polite and caring attitude.

Mr Gould calls his thesis the principle of non-overlapping magisteria. Science and religion operate, he says, in different but “equally vital” spheres, with no common ground. They ought to observe “respectful non-interference” in their dealings with one another. The alleged conflict between the two “exists only in people's minds and social practices”. Science tries to document and explain facts, whereas religion operates in “the realm of human purposes, meanings and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve.”

This intellectual apartheid is less coherent than it may seem. By contrasting the religious realm of values with the realm of facts, Mr Gould exposes himself to a dilemma. Do all facts lie outside the realm of religion, or only facts about the natural world? If the former, then each religion is simply a set of moral teachings and attitudes which one accepts or rejects as a matter of taste. If the latter, and there is a mysterious class of “supernatural” facts that are allegedly outside the realm of science, then the age-old wars of science and religion are bound to break out once more.

The result of any attempt such as Mr Gould's to insulate religion from criticism is the evisceration of faith. Deprived of its right to assert facts, Christianity, for example, is reduced to the status of a fan club for the sayings of Jesus. Many atheists would be perfectly happy to join it.

Mr Gould's “separate-but-equal” solution is hardly original. These arguments are old—and abiding—ones, as Peter Bowler reminds us in his history of earlier attempts to reconcile modern science and contemporary religion. Focusing on early 20th-century Britain, he describes in scholarly detail different strategies for harmonising faith and knowledge: the sought-after alliance between liberal theologians in the Church of England and religious-minded scientists, and the rather different efforts of science-minded writers such as Julian Huxley and George Bernard Shaw to foster a modern, non-Christian religion. All the while, as Mr Bowler also reminds us, the conservative faithful on the one side and the atheists on the other—rationalists such as H.G. Wells or Marxist socialists—resisted calls for reconciliation of any kind.

Has anything changed? Perhaps more than appears. Despite its title, Daniel Harbour's “An Intelligent Person's Guide to Atheism” is not so much an explanation or history of unbelief as a powerful piece of advocacy for rejecting the religious attitude altogether. Mr Harbour does a strong job of defending atheism against some of the secondary charges that have been levelled against it—such as the complaint that atheistic political regimes have turned out to be worse than religious ones, or that atheists, if they follow through on what they believe, are bound to be amoral. But he also, and this is the core of his book, makes a positive case for the rational superiority of unbelief.

Starting from the sound premise that we know much less than we would like to about all sorts of things, Mr Harbour, an Oxford University graduate in mathematics and philosophy and now a student of linguistics at MIT, argues that we ought to aim for a world view that is a “Spartan meritocracy” rather than a “Baroque monarchy”. A Spartan approach, in his sense, endorses as small a set of assumptions or theories as possible; and a world view that is meritocratic is one in which beliefs are maintained only if they stand up to criticism and the test of evidence.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are, by contrast, in his view, Baroque monarchies. Taken as beliefs, they are teeming nests of unwarranted assumptions that are not required to pass any tests of merit, but are maintained largely because they are found in scripture or accepted by tradition. Much of his reasoning will be familiar to the devotees of anti-clerical writers such as Voltaire or openly godless ones such as Russell, but the overall structure of his approach is new. As Mr Harbour has a great deal of ground to cover in a mere 143 pages, many of the arguments are compressed, and his style of writing is not polished. But, with its powerful and wide-ranging arguments against theism of all kinds, Mr Harbour's short book, nevertheless, makes what may be the most powerful case available to the widely held but strangely silent creed of atheism.