Secular Revival

Tags:: Barack Obama,; Charles Darwin,; Chateaubriand,; secularism,; Sigmund Freud,; Warren Breckman

As to the second assumption, far from retreating into the private sphere, religion in America has reasserted its public role. This has been a crucial dimension of the political landscape of America since the early 1980s, when the Moral Majority burst onto the scene. In the ensuing decades, we have seen Christian fundamentalists exert an extraordinary influence on the Republican Party, while grassroots fundamentalist activists have gained power in local politics and school districts. Public education has been a particular target, because from the 1940s to the 1960s, American public schools were the objects of a vigorous secularizing effort that had prohibited religious exercises and Bible reading. Recent years have witnessed repeated efforts to roll back these measures, bring prayer back into the schools, and offset the teaching of Darwinian evolution with instruction in creationism. George W. Bush supported these campaigns in various ways, including his controversial faith-based initiatives, which allowed religious organizations to compete for government money without a strict separation between their religious activities and their social-service programs.

The reinvigoration of religion’s public role has not been the sole preserve of the Christian Right. Progressive movements have drawn heavily on religious themes, most prominently the civil-rights movement. Barack Obama’s eloquence is often leavened by biblical resonances, and his message of hope taps the veins of religious yearning and expectation that marble the bedrock of American oratory. Moreover, even though Obama has reversed some of Bush’s religiously driven policies, such as the restriction on human embryonic stem-cell research, he has continued Bush’s willingness to partner with faith-based social organizations. What separates the two administrations is Obama’s promise to refuse to endorse employment discrimination based on faith within religious organizations receiving taxpayer dollars. This in turn signals one of the most important departures of the new administration, namely Obama’s much stronger emphasis on the inclusiveness of America as a land of faith. “We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness,” he said in his inaugural address. “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews, and Hindus—and nonbelievers.”

Obama speaks in the tongue of America’s civil religion, and here “religion” means more than just a metaphor for love of flag and country. True to Obama’s claim, Christianity may have provided the predominant frame in this country, but it is remarkable that the American civil religion seems capable of drawing all the major faiths into its ambit. Indeed, it seems that America is a machine for generating faith—studies have found that immigrants of all faith traditions often become more, not less religious as they steep in the melting pot. That is, perhaps, not as surprising as it might sound. Alexis de Tocqueville, after all, had already described the potent link between religion and democracy in America. To this day it is difficult to overlook the paradox that in a land that prides itself on the constitutional separation of church and state, religion nonetheless provides crucial ligaments that tie many people to their civic identity. (Witness a 2006 survey that suggested that Americans consider atheists the least trusted minority in American society. In light of that, Obama’s inclusion of nonbelievers was not incidental.)

« Previous
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Next »

Single page /
Email

First Name Please enter a first name.

Last Name Please enter a last name.

Address Please enter an address.

Apt./Suite

City Please enter a city.

State Please select a state.

Postal/ZIP Code Please enter a valid
zip code.

Email Address Please enter a valid email address.

Country Please select a country.

Canadian subscribers add $10; All other international subscribers add $40.

More Essays

Comments Post a Comment »

In volume III, numberI, Religion, on pg. 211 there are superhero avatars for different 'faiths', however for Muslims there is none. It may be suspected that 'political correctness'/fear has reared its censorious head by the exclusion of an avatar for Allah. Say it isn't so. Was it the publisher? I'm sure this has probably been pointed out by others.

Posted by john lewis beaufait on Wed 3 Feb 2010
Well its time to make the division between the true and pure secularist and the one that is 'tainted' by religion. I think the answer the author searches, yes searches, for is not in what secularism expounds but what it lacks. The weakness lies in the un-conformity of the secularism belief. If the foundation allows hypothesis that verge on any spritisitc satisfaction than the end does not justify the means. I speak of the other realm that does exist and if this belief eludes it and acts as if it is not there then there will forever be a lack of satisfaction of a basic human need.

Posted by Tara on Mon 1 Mar 2010
"Barack Obama’s eloquence is often leavened by biblical resonances, and his message of hope taps the veins of religious yearning and expectation that marble the bedrock of American oratory."

C'mon now. You have to admit that's stretching the definition quite a bit. If leavening one's eloquence with biblical resonances and delivering a message of hope (or reacting to the same) counts as being religious, then I daresay none of us are secular.

Posted by Aaron on Fri 19 Mar 2010
Proud to be a member of the least trusted minority. To 'believers' I say, "I don't trust you either."

Posted by Diomedes on Fri 20 Aug 2010
"...Defenders of religion are all too ready to claim that secularism offers at best a wizened form of experience and sensation. Such a view has us moderns living within a purely immanent world, blocked from any relation to a truly transcendent sphere. In such a world, the colors are a shade paler, the sounds a tone flatter than in a world touched by the divine...."

Yes, they would have us believe that believing in the fantasy of the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus makes life more beautiful. In reality, it only keeps us children wanting someone else to be responsible for our lives, abdicators en masse - abdication from taking charge of our lives, and dumping it all instead on a Santa Claus on a cross or on a dead Easter Bunny revived after three days.

We might as well accept Disney's realities where animals talk in English and walk on their hind paws - and clutch things in thumbless front paws.

Religion, at best, is an open-hearted social club; at worst it is the War of the Roses and 9/11, mixed with beheadings and the Inquisition, right wing religious wackos (and Wacos) and burning innocents at the stake. Left to its own devices, those are precisely what religion becomes. Religion without secular tempering is a terribly dangerous thing, destructive of individuals and intemperate in the extreme. The idea of religion as a benign connector of people or as a conduit to the divine is a cover story, a scam, a hucksterism of the lowest sort. The end goal is always to tell people that a free and pleasurable life is undesirable and contrary to the will of some imaginary deity, in order to empower a select few to control and destroy those whom the few disagree with.

Compare the joys of life on a wide scale during the eras when religion dominated, versus our secular times - which has brought individuals' lives more joy, more prosperity, more capacity to live, more ability to experience the world that was created?

What deity would choose for his most sentient creations the former over the latter?

I rest my case.

Posted by SteveGinIL on Wed 13 Jul 2011