Being a bit burned out by the elections and nefarious Bushie plots, I searched for something else to write about and found an interview in Salon of the ever-dreary Amy Sullivan. Amy is once again lecturing us that white evangelicals might vote for Democrats if only Democrats could learn to talk about abortion correctly.

I don’t like the [pro-choice] label. I guess the reason I wrote about abortion the way I did in the book is because I have serious moral concerns about abortion, but I don’t believe that it should be illegal. And that puts me in the vast majority of Americans. But unfortunately, there’s no label for us.

If you don’t believe abortion should be illegal, the standard label for you is “pro-choice.” And wouldn’t it be nice if someone who gets as much attention on the abortion issue as Amy Sullivan actually had a bleeping clue what she was talking about.

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Also at Salon, former evangelical John Marks predicts that more white evangelicals will be voting for Democrats in the future, anyway. Marks told interviewer Louis Bayard,

When George W. Bush came along, there were a number of issues — gay marriage, repeal of sodomy laws, the Ten Commandments on the courthouse — all those issues allowed activists to go to pastors and say, “Look, this is coming right into your own backyard. These new laws are going to change your world, and they’re going to lay the groundwork for the America your children will inherit. So either you vote or you let the country go and you lose your place it.”

It was a moment of both political awakening and political naiveté. Because all of a sudden there was a sense of power that the evangelists could have as one bloc. But then they began to look at what they got for their vote, and they began to look more closely at the policies of the president that they had rallied behind.

The war didn’t turn out well, and that had been seen, in some quarters, as an ordained venture. People said, “If we’re really going to look at the Bible and Jesus as a model for our political involvement, what are we talking about? Christ never talks about homosexuality and talks a great deal about poverty. What about that?” Rick Warren, the most influential evangelist in America right now, is talking about AIDS in Africa. That has to do with a whole different part of the teachings of Christ.

We’ll see.

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I want to give a shout out to my brother About.com Guide Austin Cline, who covers the agnosticism/atheism beat. He has an article up on “Barack Obama’s Religious Beliefs & Background” that I think, praised be, is accurate and unbiased. Wow.

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Yesterday the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a survey that said nearly half of American adults leave the “faith tradition” they were raised in to either join another religion or drop out of organized religion altogether.

Some of this is old news. The old “mainline” Protestant congregations continue to shrink, while the membership of non-denominational churches and the ranks of the unaffiliated continue to grow.

This is new: The unaffiliated — people who say they are religious but don’t claim allegiance to any particular institution or tradition — are now the fourth largest religious group in America.

Also, from the report:

Groups that have experienced a net loss from changes in affiliation include Baptists (net loss of 3.7 percentage points) and Methodists (2.1 percentage points). However, the group that has experienced the greatest net loss by far is the Catholic Church. Overall, 31.4% of U.S. adults say that they were raised Catholic. Today, however, only 23.9% of adults identify with the Catholic Church, a net loss of 7.5 percentage points.

However, the number of Catholics in America remains fairly steady, mostly because of Latino immigration.

Neela Banerjee writes in the New York Times:

Prof. Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, said large numbers of Americans leaving organized religion and large numbers still embracing the fervor of evangelical Christianity pointed to the same desires.

“The trend is towards more personal religion, and evangelicals offer that,” Professor Prothero said, explaining that evangelical churches tailored much of their activities to youths.

“Those losing out are offering impersonal religion,” he said, “and those winning are offering a smaller scale: mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”

I’m not sure what Prothero says about smaller ministries makes sense, but I agree with what he says about “impersonal” religion. Someow just getting dressed up on Sunday morning and going to church just to hear a sermon and sing a couple of hymns ain’t workin’ for people.

But I think there are other factors. The time crunch experienced by two-income families with children might make “going to church” just one more burdensome thing on an already full plate. The breakup of communities possibly makes church attendance seem less compulsive. After years of televangelism, maybe people just expect church services to pack more of an emotional wallop, or at least be entertaining.

What Pew says about Buddhism is discussed on the other blog.

Some of you might appreciate my complaints about why I can’t write about Nirvana without getting it wrong.

Today on About.com: Buddhism — Burmese residents of Singapore screen the new Rambo movie. Blood! Revenge! Buddhism?

Excellent article at TomDispatch — this is a point I tried to make in the Wisdom of Doubt series. Quoting Ira Chernus:

Candidates increasingly keep their talk about religion separate from specific campaign issues. They promote faith as something important and valuable in and of itself in the election process. They invariably avow the deep roots of their religious faith and link it not with issues, but with certitude itself….

… When religious language enters the political arena in this way, as an end in itself, it always sends the same symbolic message: Yes, Virginia (or Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina) there are absolute values, universal truths that can never change. You are not adrift in a sea of moral chaos. Elect me and you’re sure to have a fixed mooring to hold you and your community fast forever. …

…In itself, faith in politics poses no great danger to democracy as long as the debates are really about policies — and religious values are translated into political values, articulated in ways that can be rationally debated by people who don’t share them. The challenge is not to get religion out of politics. It’s to get the quest for certitude out of politics.

Somehow, we got the idea that Certitude Is All. Certitude is better than competence or smarts or even facts. As Peter Birkenhead wrote, a major hallmark of the Bush Administration is an almost psychotic (I’d leave out the “almost”) false optimism and self-confidence that whatever Bushies do is Good. President Bush speaks of doubt as if it were a venereal disease. Right-wingers cling to their grab bag of ideological myths — tax cuts, guns and free markets fix everything –and no amount of reason or empirical evidence can shake them. Even questioning their beliefs is disloyalty to the tribe. Certitude is the ultimate virtue.

Voters reward faith talk because they want candidates to offer them symbols of immutable moral order. The root of the problem lies in the underlying insecurities of voters, in a sense of powerlessness that makes change seem so frightening, and control — especially of others — so necessary.

The only way to alter that condition is to transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires. That would be genuine change. It’s a political problem with a political solution. Until that solution begins to emerge, there is no way to take the conservative symbolic message of faith talk out of American politics.

” … transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires.” Elsewhere Chernus writes,

The essence of our system is that we, the people, get to choose our values. We don’t discover them inscribed in the cosmos. So everything must be open to question, to debate, and therefore to change. In a democracy, there should be no fixed truth except that everyone has the right to offer a new view — and to change his or her mind. It’s a process whose outcome should never be predictable, a process without end. A claim to absolute truth — any absolute truth — stops that process.

The right-wing extremists who have dominated our national political discussion for years have done a great job of stopping the process. As a nation, we can’t even engage in rational debate on issue after issue, because the Right shouts down anything that doesn’t conform to their phantasm of an ideology. Too many Americans don’t seem to understand that government is even supposed to be responding to our will to solve problems. We’ve forgotten the most basic premise on which our nation was founded.

I have argued elsewhere that certitude has a similar effect on religion. The monotheistic religions rest on some basic doctrines — that there is a God, Jesus died for our sins, etc. — and through the centuries true believers have tormented each other over their beliefs. But for mystics — people like Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart — those doctrines were only the beginning of a quest for deeper understanding. When religion degenerates into nothing but tribal loyalty to dogma, the spiritual quest has been stopped.

People cling to certitude because it gives them comfort, but certitude really is a big impediment — to progress, to understanding, to everything.

“Christian Libertarian” blogger Vox scores big in his comments on the Steven Pinker article that I discussed yesterday. Vox writes approvingly of Pinker’s article,

I can only marvel at the way my various atheist critics get tremendously upset when I point out the very same conclusion that secular scientists are reaching. If God does not exist, then no objective and universal morality exists either. This is really not up for debate among anyone who is sufficiently educated and capable of basic logic.

And furthermore, this is precisely why the secular position gravitates so readily and reliably towards totalitarianism, because in the absence of any objective and universal morality, one must be created and imposed.

The only flaw here is that Pinker argued exactly the opposite point — that morality can be built on reason and rational thought and does not have to rest on religious doctrine. If you read in particular the last two pages of Pinker’s article, you see he was quite explicit on this point.

Way to go, Vox! (What is it with wingnuts and reading comprehension? Somebody should do a study.)