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I think the there is an opening along the culture war’s line of contact in the zone of religious behavior. Specifically, that the non-left has the opportunity to take ground among the growing percentage of persons who do not believe in god.
I assume that there is general agreement on the following points:
religiosity, in general, is on the decline. Pew’s longitudinal religious landscape study tracks associated metrics, as do many others.
many individuals and groups are experiencing negative outcomes due to the overall decline in religiosity. There is the often talked about crisis of meaning, the declining birthrates particularly among the non-religious, etc.
putting aside the question of whether or not the leftism is a religion (a proposition I support), that the general decline in religiosity is broadly favorable to leftists.
Taken the above as weak, but broadly agreed upon, I would also argue that, similar to @erwgv3g34 post on Scott’s Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning, the cat is largely out of the proverbial bag on the question of whether or not any particular diety or similar set of theological claims is true. To be clear, I don’t think that every single person will inevitably believe that god doesn’t exist. I do think, however, that there is sufficient atheism, and scientific thinking and knowledge in our society that significantly many people cannot be convinced to believe or to feign belief.
The avowedly religious probably think that this state of affairs is an unalloyed, net negative, but is it? Returning to the generally agreed upon points at the top, there is a growing number of people who don’t believe in god, but are suffering and seeking out the type of benefits that religion classically provides. From the perspective of these atheists, all religions are obviously false in the sense that god doesn’t exist, but religiosity is still important and desirable.
Accordingly, I think there is a lot of ground to be gained by offering these people a way to participate in religion that doesn’t, in Scott’s words, make them insist that lightning comes after thunder. I think there is an opportunity for something like a Christian Atheism, where people can feel connected to the obviously Christian origins of American culture, can participate in group rituals and be supported by a moral framework that they obviously desire, but without the humiliation of professing that thunder comes first.
Is there a good analogy for something like this? I’m not sure. Secular Judaism is the model that comes to mind but I’m sure there are other examples.
Is this optimal from the perspective of the faithful? No. But so what? The devout are hemorrhaging adherents and the only other game in town is the enemy’s.
If I was the Catholic Church or [insert non-Catholic denominational leadership], I would be funding such groups as hard as possible and conditioning my political donations on candidates plugging the idea in their stump speeches. Obviously, I would prefer them to come to Jesus. But if they aren’t coming to Jesus anyway, surely I would prefer to funnel those people into a group where they can proudly and honestly proclaim that ‘of course Jesus isn’t real, but that’s not the point; the 10 commandments have served our people well for 2 thousand years because they work and you should follow them too.’
I think a well crafted message along these lines could be highly effective in the current environment.
Yeah, big winner there. "Let's all be lukewarm vaguely-Protestant non-churchgoers who just want to be respectable and go along with whatever is currently the Zeitgeist". Not that this hasn't happened; a lot of "go to Mass on Sunday" Catholics happily fell away when the social force of conformism round that disappeared (look at the vocations crisis).
You want people to sign up to a church-that's-not-a-church, but why would they do that? If they want to join something, they'll join a sports club or hobby group or something that gives them a sense of enjoyment in return for participation and effort, not "out of your limited after work free time, go to this meeting to agree over how there should be more litter bins on the streets".
Also the Ten Commandments are being edited down to fit in with social mores; no of course we don't approve of murder, but abortion is not murder. Euthanasia is just mercy and death with dignity. No adultery? Well me and Mrs. Jones have a thing going on, we both know it's wrong, but it's much too strong to let it go now. Anyway, divorce is now legal and why are you trying to force me to stay in a dead marriage? Lying? Oh come on, everyone tells fibs. Don't steal? Shoplifting is a victimless crime, that's what insurance is for. No taking the name of the Lord in vain? Jesus H. Christ on a fucking crutch and the bicycle he rode in on, what kind of language police crap is this? The New Commandments are pretty much Racism Bad, Phobes Bad, Capitalism Bad. (Orange Man Bad optional).
EDIT: Isn't there already Christian Atheism in America, in the guise of the Civic Religion? Fourth of July is the sacred holiday, Washington and Lincoln the blessed saints, anecdotes like Washington and the cherry tree being the new Golden Legend (and indeed nearly deliberately created to be so), we are the shining city on a hill, exceptionalism, the Heavenly Father (carefully not getting any more denominational than that) has blessed us, God (of your own personal choice or value system) bless America, hail the flag our sacred relic and emblem!
But that sort of patriotism is now bad and wicked and evil, isn't it? I think the new civic religion is growing up to be Pride Month our sacred holy days, Pride Flags in all their novel iterations the sacred emblems, Happy Holidays the festivals and feast days where we worship at the altars of Mammon, the shopping malls and online stores (Black Friday and Cyber Monday as Lenten/Advent replacements) etc. People make jokes about the blessed martyr St. Floyd but I think that's truer than you know. You have Secular Religion Christian Atheism already, you just don't recognise that yet.
Related to the American civic religion, I've sometimes wondered why the people who don't want all that actual-Christianity stuff but still want rituals and history and a framework for continence and self-development and community don't gravitate more towards Freemasonry, which would in fact provide all that. There's a requirement to believe in a Creator but my understanding is that it doesn't feature too prominently.
Anyone else old enough to remember the Flintstones cartoon (the original, not the movie remakes) and how Fred and Barney were members of the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes? I think that, for a period, groups like this were the kind of alternate community for ritual and belonging in a secular sense for people, as they slowly transitioned away from church-going being more than the social obligation but before we got full atomised individualism.
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The stats indicate that the future of the United States has less organized religion, but most people are still likely to believe in the supernatural. Atheists are still only 3% of the population, and in the ever growing category of "Nones" 66% currently claim to believe in a god, 37% believe in Heaven, and 27% believe in Hell. Heck, 23% of the people who explictitly identified as atheists believed in "some kind of higher power." Under Pew's current projections if the historical trends continue then in 2070 Christians will still outnumber Nones 46% to 41%. I see no reason to believe that a majority of those nones will be atheists.
All this to say that while organized religion in the United States is on the decline, atheism will still be a strongly minority position.
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Many philosophers/theologians already self describe as Christian atheists, and they usually have much more complicated theologies than you're suggesting. They're complicated enough that I've spend the last 30 minutes trying to think of a decent summary that responds to your post, and I can't do it. So instead I'll just link to the wikipedia page and let you learn more if you'd like.
Personally, I struggled for a long time with the "humiliation of professing that thunder comes first" part of Christianity. I find the Christian atheist solution to this problem to this problem quite satisfying, and probably closer to what the "original" Christianity of Jesus looked like than what most modern American Christians believe.
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You need something stronger than an argument for the historical usefulness of Christianity to give people the “type of benefits that religion classically provides”. Because so many, perhaps all, of the classical benefits require belief. If Christianity is just an elegant story from the past, then there’s no expectation of reward, no reason for prayer, no judge of behavior, no individual and communal purpose, and nothing that can bond people together under the dominion of a Great Leader. Belief is a prerequisite for all the tangible benefits of religion, like stress reduction, delayed gratification, peace of mind and better communities. (Maybe this is why Jesus’ healing in the gospel is always predicated on faith). The most that a “Christian atheism” can say is that behaving Christlike is best for the common good, by making the dead Jesus a role model for the community. The immediate problem is that no one is motivated to imitate “just another Jew who tried to lead a revolt against the Romans and was killed for his troubles”, to quote Ben Shapiro. Even atheists can see that Jesus was a moral paragon, but this hardly compels them to study his words or imitate his moral character. Let alone stave off nihilism, etc.
IMO there are only three viable avenues for reintroducing religion with all of the old benefits among the desacralized West: (1) A willful, poetic, decidedly unscientific faith belief, which comes from pure unadulterated social influence and contagion. I think this can be accomplished with social pressure, but I don’t think this is preferable, because it will always result in the negation of science. (2) Debunking scientific thinking where our evolved social nature is concerned; this would be an argument against rational thinking where rationality has no utility. This is complicated, will not persuade normal people, and is not a positive argument for Christianity specifically. (3) An emphasis on symbolic and mystical truth: the events in the Bible are believed because they mysteriously represent the reality of human nature. They are non-literally true, yet truth is “revealed” upon belief, like a mathematical proof may be revealed under assumed premises. This allows someone to believe in their heart that Adam and Eve are the first humans, while also believing that materially speaking humans evolved over millions of years. I am partial to this last one.
I think the last one is the best option.
Similarly, I think #3 would work particularly well because other red-coded, Anglo-coded, and American-coded thought patterns are so similar. The common law and our natural rights, for example, are a system which Anglos believe to be the best system of law in large part because it evolved with the culture for so many thousand years and thus represents the reality of who Anglos are as Anglos, etc. I think these concepts and sentiments can easily be combined or messaged along side your #3.
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This already exists in the form of, e.g., Unitarian Universalism. It has not been hugely popular. I think there are a couple of reasons for this that similar proposals generally run into as well.
First, its teachings aren't different enough from intuitive "be nice" ethics to have any point. People who even think about the idea of ethical living generally do not need such basic levels of guidance, which makes the enterprise little more than a social club. But demanding more is too exclusionary or too "irrational", and therefore left to the other churches. I think that being exclusionary in at least some ways is critical to fostering a bond and creating a sense of actual belonging.
Related to this, the entire idea of religiosity without contradicting material existence is oxymoronic and counterproductive. The thing that people with a religious void feel they are missing is mystery, an insistence that there are some things that are beyond our comprehension, that are above and beyond us, forever. The peace that religion offers is from knowing that you don't have to think about it or justify it, you know and believe it without thinking. You cannot replicate the things that religion offers without offering undoubtable truth, but this is something that materialists cannot really bring themselves to do.
Another problem is that organizations without an unshakable grounding in text or canon will be highly vulnerable to entryism and taken over by activists. We saw this precise thing play out already in the Atheism movement, which tore itself apart when activists started trying to add political planks to the Atheism belief framework. Wishy-washy "be excellent to each other" churches will quickly succumb to the exact same issues simply because activists are more motivated than people who are there to sing hymns and pat each other on the back about how moral and ethical they are.
Strong agree on your comments about the New Atheism movement that went hard left, entryism, and the value of canon. This is why my loose proposal was framed in terms of 'Christian Atheism' or secular Judaism, instead of an example without a canon actively policed by the actually/avowedly faithful.
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You can have religion without god, but I don't see how you can have religion without faith. By "faith" I mean roughly this definition that popped up when I googled it: "Firm belief based upon confidence in the authority and veracity of another, rather than upon one's own knowledge, reason, or judgment."
In this form of the religion you have faith in the Ten Commandments or in biblical laws more generally. If the adherents take this faith seriously, then they end up being every bit as "religious" as if god existed. As you put it, people would still have to be "convinced to believe or to feign belief" in the inerrant properties of the Ten Commandments. So at best you have effectively replaced god with the ten commandments, and I think you will find it just as hard to convince atheists to truly believe in them. Alternatively, if the adherents don't really take their faith seriously, then it's hard to see what holds the religion together, or how it answers the kinds of existential questions that people look to religion to answer. It's reduced to a social club at that point. If people were excited to join secular social clubs we'd see participation in clubs like Rotary Club, bowling leagues, etc., rising rather than declining.
Open to being wrong here, but secular Judaism has threaded this needle; at least somewhat better than American Christians, no? Secular Jews identify as jewish, don't make bones about their non-belief in the literal existence of YHWH, participate in jewish rituals which are fundamentally religious but often carried on in a secular form. Again, I'm not an expert, but if what I said is loosely true, then secular Jews have a sort of belief in the Torah/Talmud, if not a belief in YHWH, and yet they still participate in jewish-coded social activities.
As to the larger body of atheists in America, I think most of them actually do believe in the 10 commandments, but just don't identify their belief with the commandments as such. I think most of them actually do believe that adultery and murder are wrong, etc. However, unlike the Secular Jews, they don't identify as Christian Atheists or associate their belief that murder is wrong with its likely causal origin (from their persepctive) in the 10 commandments.
This is where I think there is room for maneuver. The atheists basically already believe the underlying moral framework of Christianity but don't identify their beliefs and behaviors as such. What they need is the identity (and some supporting rituals, etc.), the attachment to Christian Atheism, not just atheism, in the same way that we can speak of self-identifying Secular Jews.
It seems to me that secular Judaism is more of an ethnic or cultural identity than a religion. But I don't really know enough about the topic to have an informed opinion. And I doubt that secular Judaism is actually capable of succeeding at the goal you mentioned in your OP: "to take ground among the growing percentage of persons who do not believe in god." It doesn't evangelize and doesn't seem capable of "taking ground."
They may agree with these statements, but they don't give any weight to the fact that they're part of the 10 commandments. And there are a number of commandments that atheists explicitly reject, such as the first four.
They agree with certain aspects of the Christian moral framework, but reject many other aspects. And most of the aspects of the Christian moral framework they agree with are not specific to Christianity and are common in most cultures all over the worlds (e.g. murder and theft are bad).
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What works for a small ethnic minority doesn’t necessarily work for the majority. ‘We believe in the last seven of the Ten Commandments’ isn’t a unifying principle when there’s no common blood, no real other commonalities.
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What secular Jews have that others lack is a recent, living memory history of the Holocaust (stoked by propaganda or not). Jews are constantly reminded of their Jewishness in ways that others are not similarly reminded of their differences from others.
I take your point but secular Judaism arose before the holocost. I'm not really familiar with the details, so I can't speak to how wide-spread or successful it was.
Prior to the Holocaust, anti-semitism was so common, pogroms so regular, that there never existed a generation of Jews that hadn't had direct experience of it, between King David and today. The Holocaust is something I mention because it is signal enough that even a Jew growing up in the USA who hasn't experienced violent antisemitism today has awareness of it.
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