Religious art's religious (?) evocations

When is art religious? When is art religious art?

According to some recent reviews, the religiousness of art resides in its ability to put an audience in a particular emotional state, a state similar to that of a church service. Art is deemed religious, by these critics, because it has the power to move people in ways similar to how people are moved in a church.

One example of this: Morgan Meis, writing on the recent art installation "Aten Reign" at the Guggenheim in New York City, finds a link between art and church in the way the art turns observers into practitioners. Meis writes:

The direct connection between [James] Turrell’s art and the practices of Quaker worship are obvious.

So obvious, that I’d like to suggest that the best way to approach and interpret Turrell’s installation at the Guggenheim is to say it is a Quaker meeting. Observe, if you will, what happens when people enter the ground floor of the museum. They stop and look up. They see that the spirals of the Guggenheim have been transformed into a glowing light installation. They roam around for a minute or so looking up. Then they find a space to lie down on the floor. Generally, they stop talking. They watch the glowing lights and the luminescent egg. This silent watching goes on for many minutes. More than ten minutes. More than fifteen minutes for many people, and more than that for others.

In other words, James Turrell has managed to get people in New York City to lie on the floor silently meditating.

For his part, Turrell has been more hesitant on the "obvious" connection between his faith and his art. I share that hesitancy. It seems to me to be too easy to make too much of the connection.

In a 2003 interview Turrell said, "I’m not sure whether that has impacted my art-making, because my work is not about specific issues -- perhaps being a Quaker influences how I live my life and what I value. People tend to relate any work in light to the spiritual. I don’t think this is actually correct."

Meis persists, though. It's not the issues that make this art religious, it's the effect:

It doesn’t matter, in the end, whether the people who view 'Aten Reign' believe in Turrell's Quaker God. It is not even clear exactly what are Turrell's beliefs regarding this God. The point is to sit or lie down and submit to the light. If you allow yourself to stare at that light for a few minutes you will inevitably have some experience of meditation. You will enter a quieter, more contemplative space. The light will do its work.

Emotional efficacy is also cited as key to the religiousness of Robert Randolph's "sacred steel" music. This is another example. Randolph is quoted as saying in the Pittsuburgh Tribune-Review last week, that his music has an energy "that's kind of from my background, growing up in church, where music was like this big rock 'n' roll show. We were all singing and dancing. Everybody singing together and interacting and having the music bring about this joyous feeling."

The New York Times went to Randolph's church, a black Pentecostal church, in 2001. The reporter, Neil Strauss, also made note of the evocation of joy:

The loud, unmistakable sound of vintage rock 'n' roll blared one recent Sunday afternoon from the open windows of an unlikely location, the House of God, Which Is the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth Without Controversy Inc., in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.  

Inside, parishioners banged tambourines against their palms and hit drumsticks against church pews in perfect rhythm. Even the children joined in on toy tambourines and plastic drumsticks. In front of the long, narrow, wooden-floor room, just to the right of the pulpit, Robert Randolph sat alongside a large purple pedal steel guitar, fingers flying across the strings to tease out lead lines that sounded like John Lee Hooker and rickety rhythms reminiscent of Bo Diddley, two musicians whom he claims never to have heard.

According to Strauss, Randolph's music also had the effect outside of church of bringing people into a church-like experience, even if there were differences. The "churchgoers made noise to praise the Lord, the clubgoers to express their individuality and enthusiasm."

Are those experiences so radically different?

In a review of the latest album from Randolph and The Family, PopMatters critic Neil Kelly says this steel guitar music only makes sense as "the fury of true black gospel music," and that it's success is its ability to induce religious states in the not-church-going crowd.

"I've seen them live," Kelly writes.

The gospel-infused funky rock roots band that commandingly whips a crowd of drug-laced earth muffins and hopheads into some sort of a revivalist frenzy ... that’s the Family Band I’ve seen. If you haven’t witnessed the fury of true black gospel music (from ANY denomination) in the church house on any given Sunday morning in the South, then think of the effect James Brown had on Joliet Jake in The Blues Brothers .... This ability to move the crowd to that level of excitement is why Randolph’s name is frequently in huge font on the posters of the festivals he and the Family Band play. This is the bread and butter of what makes him a superstar.

The "frenzy" of the crowd, for Kelly, is religious, or religious-like, and that response makes the music religious, not in and of itself, but in its effect. In its evocation.

The emotional state of Randolph's audience is pretty markedly different than that of Turrell's. One wouldn't mistake the one audience for the other. Contemplation and meditation wouldn't easily exist in the same space as concert enthusiasm and a whipped-up crowd. But both of these responses are seen as "religious," for producing responses similar to those of their creators' respective religious traditions.

That biographical info might be key to these interpretations, though.

Unless all art, any art, is going to be judged religious for evoking emotions and moving audiences, it's hard to see how these emotions thus moved are specifically religious.

Interpreting Turrell via reference to Quaker practice makes sense because he's Quaker. But there are many art exhibits by many non-Quaker artists that cause similar reactions in the museum-going public. Randolph's music is certainly Pentecostal, and it's useful to think about it and talk about it in that context -- but that's a historical fact one couldn't deduce just from watching the audience. Many other concert crowds could be described in the same way as the crowds dancing and singing with Randolph, and if all of them are thought of as religious, then that's not really a meaningful description anymore.

People tend to relate certain works that evoke emotions to religion, but that doesn't seem right. They use the creator's biographical information to make claims that, while they're not wrong, seem to be too strong.

Visual art produces a response that's analogous to the response one gets at a Quaker meeting. Music in a secular space produces a response that's pretty similar to the response that the same music gets in a dedicated religious space. It's possible to make too much out of these similarities.

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Robert Bellah, 1927 - 2013

Robert Bellah, a sociologist whose work deeply informed the study of American religion, died on Wednesday from complications following heart surgery. He was 86.

Bellah's original work focused on Japan, but his work on modern individualism and civil religion -- a term he's credited with popularizing -- have been absolutely critical to those thinking about religion in the contemporary American context. According to Jeffery Alexander, of Yale's Center for Cultural Sociology, Bellah was the last living founder of cultural sociology, and "there's a sense in which every contemporary sociologist is Bellah's child, niece, or nephew." Something similar could be said for those studying 20th and 21st century American religiosity as well. In an important way, thinking about religion in American public life and thinking about spirituality in Americans' private lives is thinking after Bellah.

A significant thrust of Bellah's work was a moral critique of the forces that prevent and undermine group belonging, paired with a critique of what he saw as misuses of such group belonging.

He told the Berkeleyan in 2006 "group belonging is inherently a fulfillment of our humanity, [and] the idea of living totally alone, totally in isolation, is totally unnatural." For Bellah, that belief was undergirded by both the Christian practice of communion and the sociology of Emilé Durkheim.

"The great danger," he said of modernism, "is radical individualism -- 'I'm in it for myself,' 'I'm my own brand,' as somebody said. This is a kind of terrible reductionism of an ethical individualism to pure self-interest."

The problems of individualism, for Bellah, could be seen in the rise of "spirituality." The individualism of much of the spirituality of Western Buddhism, for example, contributes to the pathologies of the modern age, rather than ameliorating them. He told the Buddhist magazine Tricycle,

The way 'spirituality' is often used suggests that we exist solely as a collection of individuals, not as members of a religious community, and that religious life is merely a private journey. It is the religious expression of the ideology of free-market economics and the radical 'disencumbered' individualism that idolizes the choice-making individual as the prime reality of the world.

At the same time, Bellah believed that certain forms of group belonging were horrible. He described religious nationalism as "something I above all hate," and rejected his youthful Marxism -- for which he suffered -- in part because of the authoritarianism of the American Communist Party. Writing about the American taboo on socialism in 1975, Bellah argued,

Socialism has often seemed to compound the evil that is contained in capitalism. Rather than releasing the autonomous individual and placing him in a context of genuine participatory community, socialism has been seen as a system that crushes the individual under a centralized bureaucratic structure even more effectively than corporate capitalism. With the example of state socialism in the Soviet Union since 1917, that argument has been especially hard to refute. But there are concepts of socialism and socialist movements in the world that reject the Soviet model

Bellah believed that what was necessary was to "come to terms with the balance between dependence and independence, solidarity and autonomy." He believed that group belonging is good, but not free from moral ambiguity. This was the point he tried to make with his account of American "civil religion." He concluded that that set of symbols and themes and sacralized values making up the "religious dimension of political life" in the United State had been and were being misused, but that the civil religion could also be a great moral force. As he concluded, in that famous essay:

[Civil religion] has often been used and is being used today as a cloak for petty interests and ugly passions. It is in need-as any living faith-of continual reformation, of being measured by universal standards. But it is not evident that it is incapable of growth and new insight.   

It does not make any decisions for us. It does not remove us from moral ambiguity, from being, in Lincoln's fine phrase, an 'almost chosen people.' But it is a heritage of moral and religious experience from which we still have much to learn as we formulate the decisions that lie ahead.  

Taking a communitarian stance lead Bellah to critique rightist defenses of free-market economics (he clashed with the editors of First Things on this point) and also leftist dismissals of the importance of religion and tradition and liberal constriction of moral concerns (he clashed with The Nation as well).

Not all of Robert Bellah's "nieces and nephews" accept these normative claims and moral arguments, of course. To think after Bellah has, in important ways, been to argue with Bellah. Wherever one positions oneself on the values of individualism and group belonging, though, his sociological descriptions of these phenomena as he observed them in private spirituality and public sacralization have been critical to analyses of contemporary American religion.

One important aspect of Bellah's work was this exploration of the "profound tension between individualism and commitment to community, as Mark Juergensmeyer, sociologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, writes at Religion Dispatches.

According to Juergensmeyer, Bellah "founded a whole new enterprise for religious studies scholars: probing the political significance of religious ideas and the religious significance of political ones," and, "promted religious studies scholars to take seriously the social dimensions of religious belief, even -- or perhaps especially -- when they seem so personal and devoid of social significance."

Many examples of Bellah's work can be found at www.robertbellah.com.

Late last year, Bellah came to Heidelberg, Germany, as part of the promotion of his last work, Religion in Human Evolution. He spoke on the Axial Age, and lead a graduate seminar (which I was lucky enough to attend) on the possibility of a global civil religion, and also gave a long interview at the German American Institute. In the video, he is frail with age. He had recently lost his wife of 61 years, and talked openly of the work he knew he wouldn't finish.

"The temptation is despair," Bellah once said of getting older.

I have to fight this degree to which I'm gloomy. When I speak to undergraduates, which I still do from time to time. I'm never gloomy. Undergraduates are at a fragile emotional stage, and they're easily depressed, and they're easily elated. But if you want to encourage them to be active citizens, the worst thing you can do is tell them that everything is going to hell. 

Still, as the video attests, even at the end he still very much evinced the sprightliness that infused all of his work:

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New Atheism didn't beget the 'nones'

New Atheists can take credit for the recent increase in religiously unaffiliated people, the so-called "nones," according to Daniel Dennett. The movement of best-selling books and their readers took a country where religious identity was de rigueur and made is possible to announce one didn't have any such religious identity.

In a recent five minute debate with Guardian editor Andrew Brown, arguing for New Atheism's accomplishments, Dennett says:

It was important to turn the tide and I think we've done that. I'm really very proud to say that the New Atheism has changed the face of America, as far expression of religious belief or disbelief .... What we gave [the religiously unaffiliated] was permission to declare their lack of interest in religion, which was something people were rather afraid to do before we wrote our books. 

There are several obvious problems with this claim.

The first and most obvious problem with saying that New Atheism made it possible to "declare a lack of interest in religion" is that significant numbers began making that kind of declaration a full decade before New Atheists' wrote their books. As a matter of simple chronological fact, the claim of a link is hard to support:

There isn't a New Atheist book that can take credit for a social trend that started in the 1990s.

Dennett should know this. After all, when he was arguing people should come out and call themselves "brights," he noted that a significant number of people -- 27 million -- already didn't consider themselves religious. He was attempting to organize those people with a new name, and encourage others to take on this name too. But it wouldn't have made sense in 2003, just when New Atheism was becoming a thing, to take credit for those people's freedom to be not religious.

Nor does it really make sense now. The evidence doesn't support it.

For another thing, religious disaffiliation isn't the same thing as "lack of interest in religion." This has been extensively documented. Belief hasn't notably declined; affiliation and identification have. It's easy to misrepresent this demographic, and Dennett seems to listing into that territory.

Thirdly, it doesn't seem like an accurate representation of Dennett's own ideas to say that he worked for or was interested in getting people to not be interested in religion. In his book Breaking the Spell, one of the main targets is actually tolerance of faith. He doesn't just want people to not have faith themselves, but to reject the idea that other people's faith is good or even benign. He writes,

Are we like families in which the adults go through all the motions of believing in Santa Claus for the sake of the kids, and the kids all pretend still to believe in Santa Claus so as not to spoil the adults' fun? If only our current predicament were as innocuous and even comical as that! In the adult world of religion, people are dying and killing, with the moderates cowed into silence by the intransigence of the radicals in their own faiths, and many afraid to acknowledge what they actually believe for fear of breaking Granny's heart, or offending their neighbors to the point of getting run out of town, or worse.  

If this is the precious meaning our lives are vouchsafed thanks to our allegiance to one religion or another, it is not such a bargain, in my opinion. Is this the best we can do? Is it not tragic that so many people around the world find themselves enlisted against their will in a conspiracy of silence.

It's not at all clear how that argument connects at all to people saying they're not religious.

Even if the "nones" were, as Dennett implies, disbelieving, rather than just disaffiliating, and even if it were possible that a movement that started in the early 21st century could be credited with social change that started in the end of the 20th century, the New Atheists weren't advocating religious disinterest. They worked to end religious accommodation, the casual acceptance that faith is a fine thing to have.

To say that New Atheism "changed the face of America," making it socially safe for "nones," is a misrepresentation of the facts, a misrepresentation of the "nones," and a misrepresentation of New Atheism. Dennett's just wrong here.

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Mis-measuring American irreligion

Americans, polls report, are convinced that America is fast losing religion.

Earlier this year, Gallup found that 77 percent of Americans agree with the statement, "religion is losing its influence on American life." Some thought that was good, others bad, but most agreed it was happening.

Part of that belief, at least, is due to the Pew studies and subsequent headlines that have trumped the recent, rapid rise of the religiously unaffiliated, the "nones," in the United States. This has been one of the big stories in religion in America in the last few years.

Those reports are problematic in how they simplify the "nones," which is something I've looked at.  What it means when someone says they're not religious should be interrogated more fully that it usually is. But the studies do show a change. The question is what the change means, not whether or not there is something shifting in American religiosity.

Or maybe not. Maybe the studies aren't to be trusted.

The methodology of the studies that have reported on a rapid rise in American "nones" has recently been called into question. Perhaps, it has been suggested, American religiousness isn't changing, it is just being mis-measured.

According to Rodney Stark -- a sociologist of religion who's done important work but who has also been "out in left field" on some things -- there are serious problems with the major studies that shows a decline in American's religious affiliations. It's a serious problem that he suggests undermines the whole story of "the rise of the 'nones.'"

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Stark writes:

When I was a young sociologist at Berkeley's Survey Research Center, it was assumed that any survey that failed to interview at least 85% of those originally drawn into the sample was not to be trusted. Those who refused to take part in the survey or could not be reached were known to be different from those who did take part. Consequently, studies were expected to report their completion rates. 

Today, even the most reputable studies seldom reach more than a third of those initially selected to be surveyed and, probably for that reason, completion rates are now rarely reported. The Pew Forum researchers are to be commended for reporting their actual completion rates, which by 2012 had fallen to 9%.

Given all of this, only one thing is really certain: Those who take part in any survey are not a random selection of the population. They also tend to be less educated and less affluent. Contrary to the common wisdom, research has long demonstrated that this demographic group is the one least likely to belong to a church.

As the less-affluent and less-educated have made up a bigger share of those surveyed, so has the number of those who report having no religion.

Maybe the much touted change is a matter of mis-mesauring?

Or maybe not. There are reasons to be believe that the measurements are reliable.

This isn't a new or unheard of issue that Stark is raising, and current polling practices are calibrated to deal with the issue. Dropping response rates and completion rates have been documented by pollsters, including Pew. Polling experts have been thinking about this problem for a while, and have developed methodology they think counter balances the possible problem of bias and over or under sampling certain groups.

They have done this, according to statistician Nate Silver, "mostly through the 'magic' of demographic weighting."

This means that the people who do respond are taken as representative for their demographic. Perhaps a poll reaches and gets responses from fewer hispanics than there are in the population. The pollsters can re-calibrate, valuing each hispanic response as representative for three, ten, etc. This is logic by which polls work anyway -- i.e., they're "representative" -- so while it might seem that demographic weighting is "cheating," it's part of the process, part of the analysis that's necessary to produce those numbers.

The people at Pew, where the questioned study was done, have thought about this question that STark is raising and have responded at length. Citing multiple studies on the matter of response rates, Pew concludes that "carefully conducted polls continue to obtain representative samples of the public and provide accurate data about the views and experiences of Americans."

Where polls accuracy can be checked, for example with elections, this methodology, which is really a defense mechanism for what Stark is criticizing, has be shown to work. Silver calls it the "uncanny accuracy of polls." Looking at voter surveys prior to elections specifically, Pew found "there is little to suggest that those who do not participate hold substantially different views" than those who do.

Perhaps questions of religious affiliation are different. Stark, at least, seems to think so. Given the research that's gone into the methodological question he raises, though, and the continued good-enough accuracy of polls in other, more easily verified, areas, the declining poll response rates aren't enough, in and of themselves, to seriously call the reports of declining religious affiliation into question.

It's necessary to be careful and thoughtful in interpreting the reports of rapid rising rates of irreligion. They probably don't mean as much as they're commonly thought to mean. However that change should ultimately be understood, though, it seems likely that the reports that there is a change are reliable.

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How New Atheists are like Victorian-era bishops

The secularization thesis -- the most traditional version, rather crude, which predicted religion would disappear from the modern world -- is dead. I don't know that there's a generally agreed upon moment when that theory died. Certainly by the late 90s it was clear to sociologists that while certain social relationships, such as that between the general population and religious authorities, were changing, and that many religious beliefs and practices were morphing and diversifying, religion itself wasn't going away.

About a decade later, there were the New Atheists. While of course this movement made arguments about the validity of theistic beliefs, a major emphasis was actually on the moral imperative of secularization. The argument was that religion was a destructive, negative force that should disappear from the modern world. The New Atheists didn't rely on secularization as an empirical claim, particularly, saying that religion was, observably, disappearing (though sometimes they said that too), but made, more, a normative moral claim that religion ought to disappear.

Is there a connection between the demise of the sociological theory of secularization and the emergence of New Atheists' arguments for secularization?

Philosopher Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age, said that there might be during an international, interdisciplinary graduate seminar at the University of Tübingen this last week.

Asked about the New Atheists during a question-and-answer period, Taylor said:

They are people who are really in a position where they’re, where they have a feeling ... of being besieged. I think I understand why they’re so upset. They had this sense that history was on their side and then this didn’t happen. It’s rather like bishops in the Victorian church and then there was Darwin.... That’s a very interesting phenomena. It used to be the picture, where dogmatic views were dying and freethinkers felt they owned the future. I don’t really understand this development. I’m just reporting on it. But it’s very interesting that there’s been this reversal, so that they now feel besieged.

Taylor's suggestion was that the much commented-upon style of the New Atheists -- the "militancy" and aggression -- comes from a sense that history is arcing in the wrong direction. In that way, if not in any other, these public atheists might be compared to American fundamentalists.

For their part, at least some of the New Atheists remain committed to the sociological thesis of secularization that sociologists have now either completely abandoned or dramatically modified (into various neo-secularization theories, including Taylor's own). In an interview to promote their recent documentary, both Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss said they thought theistic beliefs would, eventually, come to an end.

Krauss said, "When I was a kid in the ’60s, I was sure that by now there would be no religion. In a way it’s very surprising that there are these momentary resurgences. I think it’s going to be a long road."

Dawkins was more adamant that religion is vanishing, even if not as evenly and as quickly as was once commonly predicted. He said, "If you look at the broad sweep of history, then clearly we’re on the winning side. I think things are moving in the right direction, probably not as fast as I would like to see."

Only time will tell "who owns the future." There's an interesting question, though, that could be further explored, about how the sense of whether or not historical trends are tending towards or against one's position shape the way that position is articulated and the tenor of the general arguments.

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The correlation of unaffiliated people, unaffiliated churches

There are two major changes in the recent American religious landscape, which both start in the 1980s and get to be really dramatic by the 90s but continue into the 00s. 

Here they are depicted in graphs created by sociology professor Bradley Wright:

Here we see that the growth of religiously unaffiliated people is quite similar, historically, to the growth of denominationally unaffiliated churches. 

Regarding the growth of "generic" Protestants, Wright reports it is "One of the more robust trends in American Christianity," that "the percentage of Protestants who are inter- or non-denominational has skyrocketed."

The growth of the religiously unaffiliated has been much discussed, here and elsewhere (see: Time, USA Today, PBS). Wright, with this second graphs, notes that three different polls, asking different questions, have ended up with very similar results.

Looking at the similarities between the two cultural shifts, I can't help but wonder if they're not best understood as connected. Not that these two distinct developments should be collapsed into one, but that they both result from underlying changes. My intuition is that a good explanation of one development would work, as well, for the other. 

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Science vs. religion vs. facts

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, perhaps America's most popular promoter of science, pointed out several years ago that there's no necessary conflict between science and religion. Not if you're being scientific about it. As a matter of a concrete fact, discoverable by investigation of the world around us, there are people who are scientists and religious, and there are likewise many religious people who embrace science. The idea that there's an intractable, inevitable, necessary struggle to the death between the two abstractions, "religion" and "science," is not supported by any evidence that can be discovered by an empirical investigation.

"The notion that if you're a scientist you're an atheist, or if you're religious you're not a scientist," Tyson said, "that's just empirically false."

Historians have made this argument for a long time. The "warfare model," the "conflict thesis" offered to explain the relationship between religion and science, just doesn't work.

Over a decade ago, Colin A. Russell wrote that the narrative frame of opposition dates back to two anti-religious science history books from the Gilded Age, both of which had political reasons rather than historical reasons to use that frame. There were axes to grind. The historiography was problematic. The evidence didn't support the guiding metaphors of opposition, struggle, and conflict. The narrative of an age-old fight, Russell showed, obscured a lot of important details. Missing from all such histories is the recognition of the many cooperative relationships and cases of close alliance between science and religion. Relatively minor squabbles are exalted, according to Russell, and normativized. Besides: the assertion of conflict has come to stand in for any actual historical explanation of the conflicts that did happen. Conflict thesis histories don't say why conflicts happened, but assume that they have to.

The whole thing is "at best an oversimplification and, at worst, a deception," Russell wrote.

At the time, Russell's thesis was pretty familiar to historians. Changes in the study of history in the 1980s and 1990s led to a near complete rejeciton of the story of a triumphant, progressive march of science through history that was so easily accepted in the 1870s, '80s, and '90s. Concern about "Whiggishness," "presentism," and the "retrospective fallacy" changed how things were done. Now historians' totem was "complexity," and a standard test for historians was whether or not they could persuasively, sympathetically present an account of a position or figure or movement with which they personally disagreed. According to David B. Wilson, "This radically different methodology yielded a very different overall conclusion about the historical relationship of science and religion." The simplicity of the story that these two traditions of knowledge and practice had always and everywhere of necessity been opposed, and also has always and everywhere been clearly distinguishable, became very suspect. And that simple story didn't stand up to suspicion very well.

Ronald L. Numbers assessment was more blunt. Way back in 1985 he said the conflict thesis was "historically bankrupt," and persisted only because of "cliché-bound minds."

"Cliché-Bound Minds" might have been a good title for the new documentary that premiered this week to a full house in Toronto. Instead the film, which features Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, and a raft of celebrities spouting about the conflict between science and religion, was titled The Unbelievers.

The first four showings of the documentary reportedly sold out, and the audience's response to the premiere was overwhelmingly positive.

Thank you to everyone who stood in line all day for The Unbelievers! You made it an amazing evening for everyone involved!
— The Unbelievers (@unbelieversfilm) April 30, 2013

Just finished world premiere of @unbelieversfilm . Standing ovation. Was one of the most remarkable and gratifying sights I can remember.
— Lawrence Krauss (@LKrauss1) April 30, 2013

The first review posted at Rotten Tomatoes confirms that the film is not exactly nuanced in its depiction of the relationship between science and religion. The audience reviewer reports: "Very good to see that there are people out there fighting for science, reason and intellect. Some great scenes of Muslim protesters being shouted down and heavily outnumbered."

The trailer also shows a woman in a hijab holding one of Krauss' popular books about science and looking very happy and shaking Krauss' hand. While that image could be understood as an example of the many ways people engage religion and science simultaneously, as this woman is both practicing her religion and engaging science without imploding, Krauss talks over the scene, interpreting it as a moment of liberation for the woman, freeing her from her crazy beliefs. He says "If you confront a belief they have and show them immediately that they can see for themselves that it's crazy, then they remember it."

Or perhaps it's just the condescension that sticks out so clearly in their minds.

The most problematic moment of the trailer, though, is when Krauss leans over a podium and says "There's no one whose views are not subject to question." The very obvious exception to this, given the tenor of the trailer and the rest of the promotional material about The Unbelievers, are those who have their own documentary made about them globetrotting from packed hall to packed hall like heroes to perpetuate a myth about a necessary conflict between science and religion.

The filmmakers could have at least given some space to Neil De´Grasse Tyson, a non-religious scientist who has questioned not only this false opposition but the value of Dawkins' rhetorical style, saying, for instance,

Your commentary had a sharpness of teeth .... Being an educator is not only getting the truth right, but there's got to be an act of persuasion in there as well. Persuasion isn't always, 'here's the facts and either you're an idiot or you're not'. It's, 'here are the facts, and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind.' And it's the facts plus the sensitivity, when convolved together, creates an impact. And I worry your methods, and your -- how articulately barbed you can be, ends up simply being ineffective.

This film at least appears to be untroubled by this or any other serious question, though.

The real question that this documentary raises, though, is why there's such a market for the conflict thesis. Why does it persist in its obfuscations and false oppositions so long after it was demonstrated to be historically bankrupt as a theory and demonstrably empirically false? It's an entirely contingent historical fact that Dawkins and Krauss and others would be so warmly hailed as they preach this message. It's not necessarily the case that it makes sense to score their speaking tour to rock anthems in a documentary that gets a standing ovation in Toronto. It would be good to have a good historical account to explain the accident of time and place that is The Unbelievers.

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Habemusnt papam

A joke: The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded. Indian warriors are on all sides and there's no way out. The Lone Ranger is panicking. He looks to Tonto and says, "what do we do know?"

Tonto says, "what do you mean 'we,' kemosabe?"

Anyway, they're saying "we" have a new pope.

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A theory of famous and forgotten atheists

In the New York Times, in a review of Susan Jacoby's new book on Robert Ingersoll, there's a proposed theory of famous and forgotten atheists, and of why they're famous or forgotten. It's not clear if the theory is Jacoby's or the reviewers' (presumably it's Jacoby's), but this is the theory:

There have been atheists and religious doubters throughout history, but the ones who remain famous after their deaths tend to have been equally famous for something else as well; otherwise, people most notable for their bravery in the face of religious conservatism have to be celebrated by a population equally brave, and that is often too much to ask.

Is this true?

Besides the problem of the question of the definition of "atheist" and whether there have been those "throughout history," and how "atheist" and "religious doubter" are being mushed together, is this true?  Is there really any way to divide public religion-doubters in such a way as to predict their permanence, their public memory?

The model for the remembered atheist/religious doubter that is being proposed here would apparently be Thomas Paine; Ingersoll's the model of the forgotten atheist. Paine had the "something else" of the American Revolution and the French Revolution. But then, it's not like Ingersoll did nothing but doubt at the religious. He fought in the Civil War. He had an active political career.

Maybe it's just the vagueness of "something else as well" I am having a problem with. It seems very unclear what this wouldn't apply to.

Did Ayn Rand do something else? Probably that's how her other political and artistic efforts would be thought of here, though she might not have accepted those distinctions separating her philosophy from everything else. Did Madalyn Murray O'Hair do something besides atheist activism? It wouldn't seem so, but surely she counts as one who's remained famous. Emma Goldman could fit into the Paine model of an atheist who's remembered but who's "equally famous for something else." What about Marcet Haldeman-Julius? She did lots of other things besides doubt, but isn't particularly remembered, I don't think.

Besides, isn't it because one is remembered that multiple aspects of one's life and work are remembered?  Not the other way around.

The proposed theory of why remembered atheists are remembered elides over the many complications of the functions of discourses that publicly preserve a memory. In place of a more nuanced explanation for why some public figures remain that way after death and others do not, it slides into talk of "celebration" and "bravery." Which is to say, it into a case for a kind of hagiography.

The proposed theory seems like it's going to be a historical argument, an interesting explanatory device. But then it  seems like it turns out to be really something else entirely.

This is my concern with Jacoby's history of American freethinkers, and why I'm skeptical about her book on Ingersoll.

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Understanding the "nones" as a demographic dissent

Some people are very uncomfortable with the category of race. Whether for personal, biographical reasons, they just feel like they don't fit any particular category, or for political or philosophical reasons, they get the US census at the beginning of every decade and balk at the question, What is this person's race?

This reticence, interestingly, does not show up in the final results. The final census doesn't list some small percentage of people as not having a race or as not having answered the question. This is because, as NPR recently reported:

When respondents don't choose a race, the Census Bureau assigns them one, based on the racial makeup of their neighborhood, among other factors. The method leads to a less accurate count.

A similar phenomena has happened with the new studies of religious demographics, where an increasing number of people have refused to answer the question, the now notorious "nones." Analysts have tried to interpret this response in various ways. The fundamental mistake that has been made, as I have argued, is to treat the people who answer the religious affiliation question this way as a unified group of people.

The problem may go deeper than that, though.



My interpretation of this group has been to insist on pluralizing the "nones," and talk about how cultural shifts have allowed for a new variety of ways to position oneself in relationship to religion. I.e., there are more people willing to self-identify as atheists and humanists, but there are also increased numbers of religious people who understand themselves to be religious but who aren't affiliated with any group, there are those who are affiliated but uncomfortable with public identification, the spiritual-but-not-religious, and so on.

When I have done that, though, I was still insisting on reading this group as defined in terms of ways of affiliating and belonging, as essentially being a complicated subset of a category but still, despite the complications, in that category of religious affiliation. Perhaps, though, that is what the "nones" object to.

Another way to understand this group is as objecting to religious classifications. Not strictly religious affiliations, though there's some of that, but to the project, in general, of religious demographics. 

Elizabeth Drescher, who I have criticized on this before, makes this point excellently in a recent piece, "None" means "None". After re-reading her more recent piece, and reflecting back on a point that Michael J. Altman made about the implicit problems of understanding the "nones" in terms of affiliation, I'm having to rethink my approach. It still seems fairly accurate, as far as it goes, but the unwieldy complication of the taxonomies of (dis)affiliation cause me to suspect I'm missing the point when someone says "none."

Drescher reports on one interview with a young "none" that's specifically enlightening in this regard:

When I asked if he would see himself as 'spiritual but not religious,' he rolled his eyes and groaned dramatically.  

'I don't want you to be thinking of me in terms of spirituality or religion,' he continued. 'Not my religion—if I have one—not your religion. These designations just should not be part of how we relate to each other no matter what we believe.' So, he eventually concluded, 'You can go ahead and call me ‘none.’ But only if you know I really mean "none" by that.'

The suggestion, I think, is quite interesting: rather than thinking of this group as religious in a specific way, might we not think of them as simply dissenting from the category?

Perhaps the "nones" aren't mainly to be thought of as religious or non-religious in a new or different way, but as a group that has a problem with the question, in much the same way that some protest self-identifying with a particular race.

Those people aren't themselves a new demographic, but rather are saying that they think the category is a problem.

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Most popular posts of 2012

6. America's first atheist

If [Joel] Barlow was America's first atheist, he was tentative about it. "Flirtation," [James] Turner's term, seems to be accurate. He came to his unbelief privately, in the context of his reading and his private notebooks, and he kept it private too. It's significant, nonetheless, that he did go so far as to disbelieve, even if only cautiously. It was, in his notebooks, a crazy thought. And not one without consequences. Barlow hesitated, in the face of those consequences, but still might be rightly understood as marking an early moment in a significant societal shift. 

Barlow's private unbelief, as possibly America's first atheist, is an important moment in that move Charles Taylor describes as "a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood as one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace," the shift from a society in which "it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believes, is one possibility among others." 

In this sense, Barlow is significant to late 18th, early 19th century America. There may have been a historical moment, there, where in the privacy of his notebooks Barlow was the only American anywhere who thought of himself as rejecting all conceptions of God. Where he was the one who thought what was almost unthinkable, that there is no God, and thought it even to the point of tentatively, privately, accepting for himself what to most was an insult, a slur, the name "atheist."

5. On the meaningfulness of books bought, but not read 

Even if one does, eventually, read all the books one owns -- itself a dubious proposition -- there's a delay, a lag. There's no easy, simple link between buying a book and reading it. There's no simple formula by which one could predict readership based solely on sales. 

If this seems obvious, it should. Yet, without fail, cultural critics act as though there's no difference between book purchase and book reading, as if measuring the one were measuring the other. As if the one always and everywhere&nbsp meant  the other. As if there were a simple relationship between the two acts, and the only reason anyone ever bought a book was to read it, the purchase a promise always made good. 

Somehow, this needs to be broken. 

There has to be a way to talk about book purchases as culturally meaningful and yet distinct from and different from acts of reading.

 4. The myth of infatuated Žižekians

I couldn't name even one orthodox Žižekian. One really dogmatic one. One good apologist for or public proclaimer of true Žižekism.

Rather, what one finds is an almost ritual distancing and disowning.

Talk about Žižek is regularly prefaced with disclaimers. One has to apparently deny, first, any affiliation with a broader Žižek project, deny buying into a big Žižek system of thought, deny going too far, or accepting all of it, or not being critical enough. One has to start with a little ritual reiteration about how of course he's wrong, but there's some salvageable aspect in spite of all that.

If Žižek has followers, they're all Peter right before the cock crows that third time.

3. Mark Driscoll on Pot: sloppy, lazy and deeply unserious

This whole booklet seems to presuppose the reader is not a half-way intelligent, reasonably capable adult human being in 21st century America. The assumption on every page is that the reader needs the most basic information explained. Driscoll may say he wants Christians and his congregants specifically to think these issues through like adults, but he doesn't act like he's writing for adults. This booklet makes no sense unless you think the intended audience is people who are incapable of considering an issue like the morality of marijuana without a lot of handholding and rudimentary help.

2. Prophecies

1. Ignoring David Foster Wallace's religion

Though it's known that, at one point, Wallace belonged to a church in Illinois -- maybe a Mennonite church -- and also he reportedly twice attempted to join the Catholic Church, there's not much more information about his religiousness. Beliefs, practices, problems or questions, affiliations -- it's all question marks. A lot is known about his life, but not about this. His life fascinates people, and moves people. His ethical-religious reflections especially.

But no one in the position to find out more about his religious beliefs or practices seems to have been interested in doing so.

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Interrogating the "nones"

One of the big, big stories in the study of religion in the last few years has been the "rise of the nones." The Pew Forum on Religious & Public Life has documented a shift in religious identifications, and popularized the term "none," a new category of religious affiliation, that of disaffiliation.

At least, that's one way to understand what's meant by "none."

The term has begotten lots of confusions, it seems. When I was last in America, and spent a little time in  an evangelical church in Chicago, I was told by both ministers and lay leaders that atheism and agnosticism was sweeping America. These people didn't know the Pew poll, and but they knew the phrase "nones," and they used that phrase to explain what they thought was happening to the culture around them. They were quite surprised when I told them that while there were some atheists among the "nones," more than 90 percent of them actually say they believe in God.

Others have similarly used the term to reach foregone conclusions.

A recent example of this is a piece at Religion Dispatches, where author Elizabeth Drescher suggests a reading list for those "keen to explore what Nones are up to on their own terms." Those terms, as Drescher understands them, are spiritual but not religious.

Talking about the problems with that interoperation of the "nones" started a twitter exchange that became something of an impromptu internet round table interrogating the term, the category, and consequences of various taxonomies in understanding religious and nonreligious groups.

I've storified the twitter discussion below in the hopes that, as Michael J. Altman says, we might use it a place marker to know where to dig.

Starting the conversation is Chris Cotter of the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network, who is joined by me, Michael J. Altman of Emory University, and Per D. Smith co-chair of the Secularism and Secularity group of the American Academy of Religion.




Update: Elizabeth Drescher says she doesn't mean to lump all the "nones" into the category of spiritual-but-not-religious. She points to other articles, such as here and here, as examples of where she was clearer on this point.

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Mark Driscoll on pot: sloppy, lazy, deeply unserious

Full disclosure: I am a public transportation user.

This makes it difficult to achieve or maintain the necessary distance to dispassionately review Mark Driscoll's new e-book, Puff or Pass? Should Christians Smoke Pot or Not. Because, it turns out, Driscoll's big argument opposing the recreational use of marijuana is the same as his argument against taking the train. Bus riders and pot smokers turn out, in Driscoll's understanding, to have the same problem. His message to both sets of "users" is identical: grow up.

I am not making this up, and I'm not stretching to make this argument.

Driscoll, "one of the world's most downloaded and quoted pastors," according to his church's website, explicitly makes this comparison.

He writes that the question of marijuana use comes up in his ministry because he works with "a high (pun intended) percentage of single young guys living typical, irresponsible urban lives." The real problem, the root problem of the issue of marijuana use, is that irresponsibility and immaturity: marijuana is just another example of the spiritual epidemic of boys who won't grow up, according to Driscoll. So even though smoking a joint isn't illegal anymore in Washington State, where Driscoll ministers, and even if marijuana isn't specifically prohibited by his church and maybe won't bring down church discipline, it's wrong because it's another way people avoid maturity.

Driscoll writes:

[...] as a pastor I have noticed that people tend to stop maturing when they start self medicating. Everyone has very tough seasons in life, but by persevering through them we have an opportunity to mature and grow as people. Those who self-medicate with drugs and/or alcohol (as well as other things) often thwart maturity as they escape the tough seasons of life rather than face them. 

[...] when a man acts like a boy, that’s a real problem. A recent article even noted that young men are now less likely than ever to own a car, as taking public transportation allows them to use their smartphone more hours every day playing video games and downloading porn. The last thing these guys need is to get high, be less motivated, and less productive; instead, they need to "act like men, [and] be strong" (1 Cor. 16:13).

The article that Driscoll cites about public transportation users doesn't say anything like he says it says. He links an Atlantic Monthly piece entitled "Why are Young People Ditching Cars for iPhones?" The author writes that economic changes and changes in consumer culture explain the 11 point drop in young people's car purchases between 1985 and 2012. There's nothing in there -- at all -- about a somehow new age of irresponsibility, and not even a single mention of publicaly viewed porn or lives devoted to video games.

I don't know if Driscoll's just making stuff up or what.

I can tell you what people do on buses and trains, though. I commute to work on a train and spend, some semesters, up to eight hours a week on public transportations. I made the decision to take public transportation rather than buy a car for financial reasons, and also to make better use of my time. I read, grade papers and prep classes on the train. I have also slept on the train, had breakfast on the train, and occasionally played computer games on the train. The other commuters I've seen are like me: they read, write e-mails, listen to music, do homework, talk to people, watch TV, and sometimes just stare off into space. Apparently, to Driscoll, this looks like a public health crisis of immaturity. To me it looks like people doing stuff. Maybe Driscoll looks at commuter traffic and sees manliness: I see waste and frustrating boredom.

If car culture encourages adult behavior and car ownership correlates to personal responsibility, I'm sure I don't know how. 

But this is the thing about this little digital booklet. Supposedly the value upheld and advocated is maturity. On a certain level, that's what's happening. However, this work is also itself enormously lazy, and, I think it can be argued, encourages and fosters immaturity.

This is a slight book, free to download from The Resurgence, which offers resources to train and equip people in Driscoll and Mars Hill's brand of evangelical Reformed theology. It's only 36 pages, but with lots of white space, oversized fonts, and half an excess of front matter, it's more like 15.

And some of that is filler.

Part one of Puff or Pass? is labeled "Statistics." Driscoll -- with the help of a research group -- uses this section to recap two Pew Research Center studies about marijuana, both of which are freely available online (here and here). The reports have to do with public support for legalization, and also mention the percentage of people who say they've tried marijuana. Driscoll simply quotes the studies. There's no interpretation, no explanation, no arguments, and no effort -- not even a minimal one -- to try to connect those sociological facts to the question the book is supposed to answer. The relevance of this information is completely mysterious. If the statistics are supposed to be "evidence," what are they evidence of?  Driscoll just packs it in, and then moves on.

Part two of the book is dedicated to setting out a variety of opinions on the legality of marijuana and the morality of using marijuana. Driscoll calls these "Evangelical Views," but cites and quotes many who aren't evangelical leaders or even speaking specifically for or to Christians, such as an editorial by Kevin A. Sabet, who's worked on drug policy for the last three presidential administrations, and Marc Emery, an imprisoned advocate for the legalization of marijuana, who has written about Rastafarians in the magazine Cannabis Culture. The Christians cited range from Pat Robertson to Douglas Wilson, several Christianity Today writers, and official statements from a variety of churches, including the Presbyterian Church USA, the Episcopal Church, the United Methodists, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ("whose members," Driscoll mentions parenthetically, "consider themselves Christian").

Driscoll doesn't actually review these various opinions, or do much in the way of evaluative work, thinking through the available arguments or ideas. He just says what they are. He classifies the opinions into options, so one can see several choice quotes for "OPTION A: Any Illegal Use of Marijuana is Immoral," "OPTION B: Recreational Use of Marijuana is Immoral; Medical Use of Marijuana is Immoral Until Science is More Conclusive," and so on.

After a certain point, with various positions being re-capped, it becomes difficult to discern what the point is. Surely American adults who are even half-way paying attention -- maybe they've been to high school, worked in a restaurant or spent time in a suburban parking lot -- can give a more or less decent account of why some people have a problem with marijuana and others don't.

But that's exactly the point.

This whole booklet seems to presuppose the reader is not a half-way intelligent, reasonably capable adult human being in 21st century America. The assumption on every page is that the reader needs the most basic information explained. Driscoll may say he wants Christians and his congregants specifically to think these issues through like adults, but he doesn't act like he's writing for adults. This booklet makes no sense unless you think the intended audience is people who are incapable of considering an issue like the morality of marijuana without a lot of handholding and rudimentary help.

Driscoll protests that this is not supposed to be a "comprehensive" or "definitive" treatment of the question, but is meant to help "Christians think through the matter in an informed way," but what he offers is more or less a cut-and-paste job, as if the intended readers couldn't Google this stuff for themselves.

This is not to say that there are no arguments made here, but they are precious few.

In at least one case, his argument is nothing more than a statement that he believes something "as a Christian." How the one thing connects to the other he doesn't bother to say.

Driscoll concludes that recreational use is always wrong but that medical use is OK "in some cases, under a doctor's supervision." The argument for medical use is just that he's not skeptical of the science that shows it's helpful in some cases. The argument against recreational use is that getting high is wrong, or anyway wanting to get high is wrong, and also there's the above-mentioned comparison to public transportation users and the injunction to "grow up!"

Driscoll notes here that he aligns with the Presbyterians, Methodists and Episcopalians on this issue. That conclusion isn't beyond the pale or in anyway crazy, but it's also not really supported as much as just stated. There's a patina of research, a gloss of "careful consideration," but in the end Driscoll isn't doing anything more than making a declaration. A press release in response to Washington State recent legalization of marijuana would have been just as informative.

The real question of this booklet is why it exists.

At several points, Driscoll notes that he used to deal with the question of marijuana by just saying that Christians shouldn't break any law they're not morally required to break by God, but that now that objection to smoking a joint is gone. The change in the state law meant the issue came up again in this new context, and this is Driscoll dealing with it.

Mostly by not dealing with it.

As best I can determine from the textual evidence, this book exists so that Driscoll and his followers won't have to think about the question of marijuana usage. This is something Driscoll can reference and people in his church can reference and be done with, without really doing any serious work. This work exists so that when someone asks if it's OK for a Christian to smoke weed sometimes, an elder won't have to answer the question, but can instead just recommend the church's website. This isn't the kind of work one produces when a topic is important or something one cares about -- it's a sloppy and lazy and deeply unserious.

The only reason it might be taken as anything else is because it has Driscoll's name on it. If that happens, it'll be a prime example of exactly the sort of facile immaturity that Driscoll is supposed to opposed to but, nevertheless, seems to be encouraging.

If this is what it means to "act like men," I'd recommend taking the train.

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The very, very basic problem of scientism

"Scientism" is the idea that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge, subject to experiments, empirical verification, and so on. It is "the view that all answerable questions are empirical."

Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and the author of A Universe from Nothing, recently argued for (and, more, from) this position in The Guardian. He argued that philosophy should be replaced by science, since answers, to count as answers, have to be science's answers. What some might see as science's "imperialism," he said, is actually "merely distinguishing between questions that are answerable and those that aren't. To first approximation, all the answerable ones end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science."

The standard challenge for scientism -- dealt with, kind of, in the interview -- is about ethics. How can a statement about what one ought to do be proven empirically? How could an injunction against, say, cannibalism, be verified by observation? What would "verification" in such a case even mean?

Another issue with this idea that all answerable questions are empirical is raised by Mark de Silva at the New York Times' philosophy blog. Math, de Silva says, is generally not considered to be empirical. The answer to the square root of negative one can't be found in experience, but that doesn't mean there's not an answer.

There's an even more fundamental problem with this idea, though.

The claim is nonsense by its own standards of nonsense.

If it's the case that "all answerable questions are empirical," what empirical evidence could be proffered to answer the question of whether all answerable questions are empirical? There's an induction problem here, and also a self-referential coherence problem. What possible scientifically acceptable test could there be to prove that scientific tests offer the only real form of knowledge? What observable fact can be cited to support the claim that questions have answers if and only if such answers are observable facts?

The claim can't logically be grounded in empirical evidence. Which means, it itself isn't grounded in itself at the very moment it claims to arbitrate the only available ground of reason. If it's true that "all answerable questions are empirical," then the question "are all answerable questions empirical?" is not an answerable question.

This is not a novel argument I am making. In the history of philosophy, the above issue is most directly associated with the critique of the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. I make no claim to originality on this point. It would be helpful, though, if those claiming science has or can or should replace philosophy knew enough philosophy and history of philosophy to at least recognized the very well established problems with their overly simplistic claims for science.

Scientism -- or at least this version of it -- has a problem with morals, and it has a problem with math. It also especially has a very very basic problem of making its own claims meet the standards those claims set for legitimate claims.

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'Theory': a class in 6 videos

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Andrew Sullivan's anti-Mormon biogtry, ctd

Andrew Sullivan has -- kind of amazingly -- now discovered that Mormon theology of America is -- OH MY GOD! -- complicated.

A Sunday afternoon post, citing an actual news piece with actual scholars actually quoted: "it turns out Mormon patriotism has a more complex past than you might think."

Unless, of course, "you" thought about it.

Or, like, googled.

These scholars quoted in the piece, Kathleen Flake and Quin Monson, aren't exactly difficult to find. They're not hiding from the press. Flake has been on PBS. Monson on NPR. Both have been quoted in the Washington Post.

A few minutes of due diligence would have answered some of Sullivan's questions about the policy implications of Mormon beliefs about America's part in the divine plan, if those questions hadn't been just rhetorical cloaks for anti-Mormonism.

Besides, even the most rudimentary knowledge of Mormon history -- e.g., what happened to Joseph Smith, and why the Mormons ended up in Utah anyway -- would, if reflected on a little, show that Mormon patriotism is of course tempered by critiques of America.

This is how it is with "refined" and "classy" bigotry. The "scrim of rhetorical finesse" covers up sloppy, sloppy thinking, and stupid, stupid research.

And just as a general point, a good rule of thumb: theology is always complicated.

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