Losing my religion

I'm going to interrupt the series on medical costs for today and talk about religion. I'm sure it won't come as a surprise to anyone that I am very pleased by the graph below. I took it from this Daily Kos diary about the actual meaning of "Christian" identity to Trump cultists, which is not really the main point of this post although it's relevant.

The majority of poll respondents still say they identify as Christian, but it's a sharply declining majority. Furthermore, many people who say they identify as Christian do not attend church regularly. Church is for weddings and funerals and maybe Christmas and Easter to many people. For some people Christian is just an ethnic identity, as is Jewish for many people, who do not actually have firm religious convictions, if any. As I say, I am happy to see this trend, but my feelings about it are a bit complicated and I want to make myself clear, especially as I am undertaking the project of reading the Bible and people may wonder why I am doing that.

When I was a child, we went to church every Sunday. In fact, my mother taught Sunday school, and my uncle was an Episcopal minister, the rector of Trinity Church on the Green in Branford, Connecticut, which is a national historical landmark and quite a spectacular building. When we moved from Branford to Madison, Connecticut, my family switched to the Congregational church, basically because it was the center of what was then the rural community in North Madison, and that's where our family friends and neighbors went to church. I sang in the choir and went to Sunday school. But by the time I was 13 I figured out that it was all bullshit. My parents weren't upset because church for them was really never more than a way of participating in the community. I don't think they ever really believed in it either.

However, I was, and remain, a great admirer of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and I recognize that the Freedom Movement was led in large part by Christian ministers. It is obviously possible to channel Christian belief into good works, and there are plenty of other examples. Unfortunately, because it is the nature of religion to believe without evidence, and believe whatever your particular leadership wants you to believe, if you believe one thing, you can believe anything. So we get the crusades, the Inquisition, human slavery (justified in the case of European settler enslavement of Africans by Christianity) and genocide (viz. the indigenous population of North America), among innumerable other atrocities. 

The challenge is that we need to find ways of replacing the positive functions of religion. These include the creation of community, and inspiration to self-sacrifice in service of the greater good. Of course, people have varying definitions of the greater good, but I suspect that mostly, people without religion are more likely to share mine. The Kos diary linked above, based on reporting by the New York Times, argues that Trump cultists aren't actually Christian in any historically valid sense, but that they have replaced the Christian God as an object of veneration with an orange painted malignant narcissist and sadistic psychopath. If you've been reading the Bible along with me, you will recognize that apart from the orange paint, this is an accurate description of Yahweh, so it isn't much of a stretch.

But the point is, secularists do face challenges. People need a sense of belonging, they need community, and they need purpose. I'm reminded of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, which concludes:

 

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Well, no, it doesn't have to be that way. Morality is human intuition. We are by nature mostly cooperative, honest and caring. The challenge is to make those qualities triumphant, while accepting the truth about the universe, in which we matter only insomuch as we matter to ourselves, and to each other.