Probably no better quote can be found about fundamentalist religion’s theological stance towards intellectualism, the need for reason, the progressive nature of human knowledge, the inevitable rise of specialization and expertise in a complex world, and the institutions that promote and sustain them, and the folly of superstition and dogma, than this from Bill Donahue writing for the radically theocratic Catholic League: “Susan Jacoby.... is not ready for the asylum, but she is ready to find a home in the asylum’s first cousin—the academy. Indeed, there are few colleges or universities that wouldn’t be proud to hire her. And that is because she entertains a radical secular world-view, one in total harmony with the elites on campus.”                                                                                                                                      

Ms. Jacoby is a historian, journalist, astute cultural and sociological analyst, and leading figure in the secular movement in the United States today. Donahue was reviewing her first major book publication Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (Metropolitan, 2004) and wrote the aforementioned quote in reference to Jacoby’s observation of the Bush presidency’s continued assault on the the First Amendment’s separation clause: “It is no secret that the Bush administration is engaged in the most radical assault on the separation of church and state in American history.” Mr. Bush, we remember, wasn’t able to keep very much secret, especially a remarkable lack of interest in history and his persistent abasement of the English language.

 

Four years later, Jacoby would publish what would be a more focused recent history detailing the  trend in the cultural and psychological make-up of the American population, and her conclusions were not optimistic. The events of the past four years should inspire anyone interested in the origins of the strain of mass insanity racing through the American citizenry as fast as COVID-19 to check out The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008). She introduces the book with a tribute to Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life as a work that “provides the foundation for insights that may lie decades or centuries in the future. She explores the thesis that the most recent version of American anti-intellectualism “can  best be understood as a complex of symptoms with multiple causes, and ...over time possesses the potential to turn a treatable, livable condition into a morbid disease affecting the entire body politic..” She  narrows the vectors of anti-intellectualism to the two she considers as foundational: mass media, and secondly—in an indirect rebuke to Donahue’s nonsense–the recent resurgence of fundamentalist religion.

 

In the chapter “The New Old-Time Religion”, Ms. Jacoby recounts a time within the past 75 years that, for a vast majority of the American public, religion seemed to assume its logical place as a guide for living and a way of looking at life’s big questions that accommodate such direction: its place as a private belief and understanding, and not as a force in legislating its tenants as  matters of public policy in a secular government. After the sensational Scopes “Monkey Trial”, fundamentalist political meddling seemed to go into hibernation. But we learned that hibernation is a time to rest, refresh, and re-group. As early as the mid-1950s we witnessed the beginning of its return to the public sphere with large revivals, now televised on America’s new favorite pastime, the television execs apparently inspired by the popularity of The Greater Los Angeles Billy Graham Crusade, a literal old-time tent revival in 1949 in the heart of LA that drew over 350,000 in eight weeks. “As we now know, the conclusion that American fundamentalists were a dying breed was a misjudgment of historic (dare one call it biblical?) proportions. The growth of fundamentalist denominations at the expense of mainstream and liberal Protestantism, which began in the fifties, accelerated throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties and gave birth to the Christian right.”

 

Borrowing the name from previous religious revivals in the country, one could think of the current spiritual fervor as a “Third” Great Awakening, after the first in the mid-18th century and the second in the early 19th, as a “cyclical manifestation” and “course-correction in an unsettled society. But today’s revival is more troubling for a couple of  reasons, a double-edge sword swung by archangel St. Michael that promises to make the current trend an indefatigable and cunning foe in the culture wars. The first is what she calls the “disjunction of the fundamentalist faith and the sum of human knowledge.” Today we simply know much more about how the world works than we did in recent centuries past, and we have it all accessible at our fingertips for those able or interested in discovering it. Failing public education–and private, in a different way–are certainly to blame. But this choice between learning or fantasizing about the world may be involved a feedback loop with the second edge of that sword. That problem was never  more obvious than in the last presidential cycle: “the political engagement of modern fundamentalists on the side of one party and their belief that it is both a right and religious duty to institutionalize their moral values” (italics mine). 

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 I’ve left out of this one-chapter snapshot of Jacoby’s magnum opus  examples making her points, and some of those examples could easily be updated with fresher ones. And thumbnail peeks into other chapters titled “Social Pseudoscience in the Morning of America's Culture Wars,” “Junk Thought,” “The Culture of Distraction,” and “Public Life: Defining Dumbness Downward” have been left as possible motivations for the reader; but all suggest the cause for Jacoby’s admission of the book’s pessimistic outlook. She concludes that in America’s new age of unreason, the inescapable theme of our time is the erosion of memory and knowledge. She does not conclude without at least suggesting  several conditions that could offer some hope out of a modern day Dark Age, all primarily concerning recapturing the those two eroding qualities that separates humans from real progress. It should go without saying that Bill Donahue and his Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim counterparts are not a part of the solution and therefore a part of the problem.

 

Reporting for The Humanist Advocate

Marty Bankson

March 3, 2021

 

 

Occasionally there is an event or circumstance in New Orleans that can lead our thoughts and imaginations to very interesting and sometimes even large topics or principles about the humanist experience, and how it meshes with the reality of that circumstance. The existence and revelation and consequent public reaction of the visibility of the remains of a construction worker pinned in the collapsed rubble of the Hard Rock Hotel building site at the corner of Canal and Rampart street in the heart of the city is one of those events.

 

There are two bodies still entombed in the wreckage, and the fact that the remains of one of them was always visible, although hard to see, was never to my knowledge publicized, and were  screened from view with a fluttering tarpaulin when first discovered as the building and cranes were being secured. Recent strong winds partially unfastened the tarp and exposed the legs of the victim, and the news was out. The words in reaction expressed outrage at the very thought that the city could have permitted this to have happened, and was responsible for seeing that this travesty of  decency be remedied, and quickly. On Friday, January 24th, a march from the building site to City Hall was organized to draw attention the whole affair and what seemed a lack of urgency by the city in seeing that action is taken on dealing with the wreckage. The widow of the worker is understandably overcome with grief. They know which of the two bodies buried there is this one.

 

Why though, asks Karl Ove Knausgaard in the first pages of the first volume of his Proust-like 7-volume epic My Struggle, given that we are surrounded daily with “objects in the realm of death” —anything and everything that is non-living material in the world, from doorknobs to suitcases to fields, rocks, the sky—why is there such a distaste for seeing a human being caught up it? Why, as Knausgaard graphically exemplifies, is there such haste to remove from public view the body of a small girl “who ends up under the wheel of a bus…..

      Decency? What could be more decent than to allow the girl’s mother and father to see her an hour or two later, lying in the snow at the site of accident , in full view, her crushed head and the rest of her body, her blood-spattered hair and the spotless padded jacket? Visible to the whole world, no secrets, the way she was. But even this one hour in the snow is unthinkable. A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and parking lots, is not a town but a hell. (1).

 

Knausgaard answers this, surmising that we know what death is, but we “don’t want to face it. Hence, the collective act of repression symbolized by the concealment of our dead.”

 

Martin Hägglund, author of This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, liberally refers to Knausgaard’s materialism, and agrees with this answer. Our human existence is  dependent on our bodies, but our bodies are not dependent on us; and the tissues, cells, atoms, and chemical compounds of our material bodies will decompose and take on other forms of earthen material, and are “indifferent to our absence.” There is no transitioning from one life to another, only transformation of matter of our bodies to other forms of matter. This fact, says Hägglund, 

 

    Presumably, this is why the dead body is so uncanny and tends to be hidden away. The dead body reminds us that 

we are not only in the world but also of the world, made of materials that will degrade and decompose...To see the living body thus reduced to its dead counterpart is to see that nature is indifferent to our interests and desires…(2)

 

To offset this apparent  nihilistic evaluation of human fate—and keep one’s sanity— we can adopt a belief in an afterlife, through religious salvation or natural reincarnation of spirit, which  is considerably more pleasant and popular than facing the morbid finality of death. But this is a form of escapism, and should be noted for what it is.

 

Even if we accept that the sight of a fresh corpse is nothing macabre or to shun or be repulsed by, and its viewing is an acknowledgement and an appreciation of a person’s last moment in life before being frozen in timeless death, we can't let them lie where they die forever—for obvious reasons.  In the case of the stranded, half-crushed body dangling from the Hard Rock site, however, the time for removal must be delayed until it can be safely recovered, in as much wholeness as  possible. My humanitarian concern on recovery efforts ends ultimately in the well-being of the living rescuers. Physical law reminds us that you cannot remove a piece from the middle of a house of cards or stack of dominos without causing the rest to crash down for lack of just one supporting piece. The same goes for buildings reduced to heaps of concrete and steel.

 At this point, more than three months after the event, that body may well have been the motivation to stir civic-minded locals to question the apparent lack or slow follow up of expediting the cleanup of the site. For the economic leftist, it can be used as a lesson about the hazards of speculative real estate development, venture capital, gentrification, and the corrupt insurance game. For those associated with historical preservation in one of North America’s oldest and most novel cities, it may be a call to advocacy for stronger building codes and diligent enforcement. And for the humanist, stirring a new vitality and direction into all of these interests should act as a reinforcement of her secular faith that there can be purpose and meaning in a material world, and exist even in the material remains of one sole former human. For the distraught relatives of the victims, and especially those of the visibly exposed,  we can only hope that in time they will come to recognize there can be positive aftereffects in their loved one’s end—that the deaths have brought some new action from the living; hoping also that they will be materially compensated for those material bodies that will never again be seen as they were at the moment of their deaths. 

 

 

 

 

Reporting forThe Humanist Advocate

Marty Bankson

January 26, 2020

 

(1)  Knausgaard, Karl Ove. My Struggle  Book 1. New York: Archipelago Books, 2012

(2) Hägglund, Martin. This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. New York: Pantheon Books, 2019.

 

 

 

The trend of the changing religious landscape in the United States began in the 1980s. The country is the Christian hub of the West with an unprecedented influence of church into politics. In 1990,  88 percent of Americans identified as Christians but since, that percentage has been been in decline. By 2007, it was 77 percent and by 2016 it reached a historic low of 69 percent with only 62 percent belonging to church congregations.

 

This shift is heavily linked to the dissociation of religiosity and national identity to Americanism. Additionally, increasing waves of multi-ethnic immigrants from all over the world has heightened the need for secularism with neutral laws that are inclusive of all residents. According to the website www.religioninpublic.com , the unaffiliated Americans increased from 22.2 percent in 2008 to 29.5 percent in 2018. The study indicated that states like Hawaii and Wisconsin witnessed the biggest increased for the nones by 22.9 percent and 19.5 percent simultaneously. Alaska, Wyoming and South Dakota are the only states that experienced a very slow net growth of Evangelicals primarily due to internal migration of the younger population and the rapid increase in the number of the elderly who have the tendency to lean more religious. 

 

The increasing tendency to intertwine religion and social conservatism with politics is the lost hope of restoring the wrong-headed dogma-based policy which was once normal for the public to accept.Numerous reasons led to this escalating change in the religious landscape across the United States. 

 

First, the desegregation which transformed homogeneous populations in urban America to invent a new set of norms that embraced inclusiveness; the Martin Luther King era eliminated racial and religious superiority and made religion less of a priority to a significant percentage of the population that had started to experience the modernization within suburban America. 

 

Second, the irreversible changing definition of women’s role in society. It all began by gaining the right to vote in 1919 when the 19th amendment was ratified, to the right of abortion in 1970s with Roe v. Wade. When the U.S. experienced an economic boom in the 1950s, there were far fewer concerns about the explicit role of women that the Bible dictates. Tens of millions of American women joined the labor force making them comparable, though not equal to men as breadwinners.   Women now comprise 48 percent of the U.S. labor force. Such incremental changes made the role of women in America irreversible and will likely be even more progressive in the future. 

 

Third, and this is perhaps the most important element, is immigration. With over 55 million foreign-born citizens, Americans became heavily influenced in adjusting their beliefs to become more accommodating to an increasingly diverse society. It has been noticeable that religiosity among the younger wave of immigrants is significantly less in comparison to first generation immigrants. 

 

 

With two-thirds of the country’s population residing in cities, it will only be a matter of time for America to unleash its true identity as a secular, multiracial and multilingual country which will make it more desirable than its current motto suggests as  a “nation founded on Judaeo-Christian” principles.

 

 

Reporting for The Humanist Advocate

FIDEL AZAZI 

 

August 5, 2019