Tribalism in action

Nothing illustrates the tribalism of religion better than the upswelling of anger directed at Richard Dawkins in response to The God Delusion. Now let’s get one thing straight from the start: I disagree with Dawkins in his broadside on religion. While I agree with many of his individual arguments, the whole he has constructed with them I find lacking in sophistication. He has taken a load of perfectly good bricks and built a wall where it isn’t needed. And besides, as I wrote last time, I believe in championing humanism above atheism. While Dawkins has been a lifelong champion of humanism, in The God Delusion he takes aim squarely at religious belief in general. I can understand the anger of religious folk at Dawkins’s long and powerful attack on any belief in god. I can even appreciate the anger of those who have never advocated violence and yet see themselves collected in The God Delusion in the same bracket as the 9/11 jihadists. I would be angry too. But the telling detail is the way the anger, which warranted no more than a sharp reply and then a considered response to the particulars of his argument, has mutated into an orgy of vitriol.

In review after review, Dawkins is described as intolerant of belief, as if that in itself was a sufficient rebuttal. And while it’s certainly true that Dawkins is dismissive of religious faith, I am trying to understand why this has unleashed such a volley of abuse. After all, no matter how little respect Dawkins accords religion, it is nothing compared to the sheer vitriol directed at atheism, and via the shell game I described last time, at the humanist values he holds dear. Consider the following snippets of recent history:

Pope John Paul II spent the last phase of his life building bridges between religions. He reached out to Protestants, and even across the deepest schism in Christian history to the Orthodox churches. He reached out beyond Christianity to Islam and Judaism, and even further past the Abrahamic religions to Buddhism. But while he was making these efforts to reconcile different faiths, he was on the attack against atheism and humanism. He repeatedly described liberal belief in legalised abortion as “the culture of death” — and then extended that phrase to include reproductive technology such as IVF, and even non-abortifacent contraception and safe sex practices.

While visiting Cuba in 1988 he called state atheism “capitalist neo-liberalism which subordinates the human person to blind market forces.” The idea that Communist Cuba was actually a haven for capitalist neo-liberalism must have caused a quite a few stunned looks among his audience in Havana’s Revolution Square that day. Then he added, “A modern State cannot make atheism or religion one of its political ordinances.” Which sounds very much in keeping with the Enlightenment until one remembers that he was speaking in atheist Cuba. In Europe, on the other hand, he saw no reason to step aside from the political process. He is most famous for his role in the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe. While this was a laudable outcome, the fact remains that he chose to play a crucial role in politics from the seat of his Archbishopric. And later, when the European Union was debating whether to allow homosexual marriage, John Paul put the entire political weight of the Catholic Church against it, writing, “It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man.” To John Paul II, separation of church and state was a one-way street. The state had no right to impose upon religion, while religion had a duty to impose upon politics. Human rights were only to be applied within the boundaries of Catholic doctrine, and anyone whose liberal humanism disagreed with the Pope’s religious agenda was part of “a new ideology of evil” and “the culture of death.”

Vice President George W. Bush (Senior) has been reported as saying, “I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.” There is some dispute about the veracity of the quotation, but I note with interest that the American Atheist Society has on many occasions asked Bush Sr to verify or reject the quotation, but internal memos from the White House Counsel show that their strategy was to keep the request from Bush himself, refuse to search the library for the transcript of the interview, and to avoid answering the question until the questioners got frustrated and went away.

The letter alleges some campaign remarks by the President…that might not be too easy to defend, if in fact they were made. I thought it best to ignore these specific allegations.

And later:

I think the best course is to ignore this follow-up correspondence: continuing to exchange letters would only make it increasingly obvious that we are refusing to address the issue he is raising.

Of course, if Bush really was misquoted, it would take very little effort on his part to deny the quote. If he wanted to. But then, here is George Bush Sr on MSNBC in 2004:

Bush:…Lincoln said you cannot be President without spending some time on your knees. I have repeated that and a bunch of Atheists got all over me. Wait a minute. Does that mean that you cannot be President if you are an Atheist? I say yea that does mean that.”
(laughter)
Bush: “One Nation Under God.”

Meanwhile, there is absolutely no dispute about this quote from his son George Bush Jr.: “I can’t see how you can be president without a relationship with the Lord.”

In the US, seven states retain statutes prohibiting atheists from public office, and in some cases, testifying in court.

Around half of all Americans would refuse to vote for an atheist, even one who was “well-qualified for president.” And that figure has been increasing, from 22% in 1959, to 40% in 1978, to 49% in 1999.

The Boy Scouts of America refuses to admit atheists. This is not mere rhetoric. In 1992, an Eagle Scout of with more than 10 years experience and 1,000 hours of community service under his belt was expelled because of his atheism.

In the UK, the government threatened to remove the right of religious schools to exclude children from non-religious backgrounds. The Archbishop of Canterbury launched an effective counter-attack by going around established political process and appealing directly to religious cabinet members. He cajoled the government into allowing his schools to continue their religious discrimination, and then with astounding hypocrisy blamed the whole thing on “public atheism (which) is itself an intolerant faith position.” The Archbishop was able to persuade Tony Blair that his schools should be allowed to discriminate on religious grounds despite the fact that the religious school system relies on public funding for its survival. Every year, the UK government gives hundreds of millions of pounds to the religious schools, and funds 90% of their capital expenditure, which becomes the property of the church, not the government. Largely for these reasons, 64% of the British public oppose public funding of faith schools. So how did the Archbishop manage to persuade his religious allies in cabinet that his schools should be allowed to flaunt government standards and public opinion while receiving huge government subsidies? Well just look at what he said. He pulled the same three-card trick that Phillip Johnson pioneered: blame atheism as a distractor and hope nobody notices where the money card is hidden.

In the US, Eugene Volokh has documented dozens of child custody cases in which judges have counted a lack of religious attendance against a parent’s right to custody.

That time and place, it turns out, is 2005 Michigan, where a modern Shelley might be denied custody based partly on his ‘not regularly attend[ing] church and present[ing] no evidence demonstrating any willingness or capacity to attend to religion with [his children],’ or having a ‘lack of religious observation.’ It’s 1992 South Dakota, where Shelley might have been given custody but only on condition that he ‘will agree to present a plan to the Court of how [he] is going to commence providing some sort of spiritual opportunity for the [children] to learn about God while in [his] custody.’ It’s 2005 Arkansas, 2002 Georgia, 2005 Louisiana, 2004 Minnesota, 2005 Mississippi, 1992 New York, 2005 North Carolina, 1996 Pennsylvania, 2004 South Carolina, 1997 Tennessee, 2000 Texas, and, going back to the 1970s and 1980s, Alabama, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska. In 2000, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered a mother to take her child to church each week, reasoning that ‘it is certainly to the best interests of [the child] to receive regular and systematic spiritual training’; in 1996, the Arkansas Supreme Court did the same, partly on the grounds that weekly church attendance, rather than just the once-every-two-weeks attendance that the child would have had if he went only with the other parent, provides superior ‘moral instruction.’

On January 31 2007, CNN’s Paula Zahn “chaired” a panel discussion about atheism. The panel included a sportscaster who, of all people, turned out be the sole voice of moderation — a Christian who stuck up for the right of people to hold atheistic views. Beside him stood a less moderate Christian who said “I think they (atheists) should just shut up”, and a Jewish woman who claimed that violent Islamism was all the fault of atheism in Europe. The panel was cut short when they had to cross to the Super Bowl. There was time in the last few seconds for the panelists to give their Super Bowl predictions. This is low journalism, to be sure, but really…has the integrity of reporters sunk to such depths that the CNN newsroom thought it was a good idea to run a panel with the suggestive title “Why do atheists inspire such hatred?” without an atheist to respond?

So here we have Richard Dawkins being vituperative towards religion. And yes, it must be irritating to be a religious humanist and read about yourself in such invective. And yet, despite Dawkins’ anger, his only power is the power of intellectual persuasion and the actual policies he advocates are hardly the stuff of nightmare. He rejects violence; he does not ask for people to be excluded from political office because of the church they attend. His most partisan conviction is that schools should be prohibited from indoctrinating children with religious dogma — and he believes that atheist indoctrination is just as much an abuse of children’s trust. That’s the extent of the Dawkinsian Devilry. And yet he is constantly and abusively pilloried from left, right, and centre.

On the other hand, atheism and by extension humanism are routinely and obscenely denigrated. And we’re not talking about a couple of drunken football louts mouthing off in the back of a bar. The tirade comes from presidents and prime ministers, from popes and archbishops, from family law courts and scout leaders, and from TV journalists with an audience of millions and less than a thimbleful of professionalism. Nor are these powerful people speaking off the cuff — they hurl their abuse in prepared speeches and controlled interviews. And do they pay for it? Not in the least. When Pope Benedict made a single insult against Islam, he was forced to make a retraction within days. But he and his ilk have been abusing atheism and humanism for decades and they suffer not a whit. They lose no converts. They lose no votes. They hold on to their audience. They keep their jobs. They keep their hooks in the public treasury. And when they finally die, as did Pope John Paul II after a lifetime of undermining humanism, they are numbered among the Great Lives of the Century and their obituaries read like those of real, largely forgotten, heroes like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Herbert de Sousa.

Secular humanists like myself would like nothing better than to work with religious moderates to promote Enlightenment values. After all, this is what happened in the Dover trial. Christians and atheists alike banded together to defeat creationism in the schoolroom. But you know, it is not enough to stand up for Enlightenment values when one’s own children’s schools are at risk and then retire gracefully when it’s atheists’ rights on the chopping block. One of the great virtues of humanism is the principle of universalism. Religious moderates might like to apply it some day.