As the presidential campaign winds down, members of America’s largest and most silent minority may be excused for feeling a little left out. As Republicans and Democrats escalate their appeals to 2008’s most contested and prized constituency ”” swing voters among evangelicals and Catholics ”” they treat those who are not religious as if they are invisible….
But something is wrong with this picture. It erases vast numbers of Americans ””not only atheists, agnostics and secularists, but also those who have turned away from the God and religion of the Old and New Testaments. And it makes it seem as though most of those who claim to be “believers” believe pretty much the same things ”” though this is manifestly false. It encourages the sense that there are two kinds of Americans, the overwhelming majority who believe and belong, and those few do not believe, and are outsiders. But the conventional wisdom that nearly all Americans believe in God is wrong.
The Distinguished Professor of the History of Ideas, Ronald Aronson, has informed us that the “myth of a nation of believers reached a kind of psychological and political highpoint” when President Bush announced a Day of Prayer and Remembrance in the wake of 9/11. I suppose that the announcemnet of a National Day of Prayer in 1775 by the Continental Congress, by Lincoln in 1863, by Truman in 1952 and by Reagan in 1987 didn’t have quite the same psychological nor political impact on the good professor’s understanding of the history of ideas.
In a nation that has elevated secularism to the status of a state religion, I’m not sure what this about.
…….In the vast heartland of suburban and semirural America, they grow accustomed to new acquaintances greeting them by asking what church they go to. At work, they get used to God-talk as an unstated norm, having to decide again and again whether to “out” themselves or to just remain silent……..
I am having a hard time typing this out because I am laughing so hard. God-talk as an unstated norm. How absurd.
At the close of his modest little tirade, the author says “When will secularists demand recognition for their enormous contributions to American history, culture, science, education and public life…?”
Pluralism may be argued as a force to open up those areas of endeavor, but secularism per se? How does secularism contribute to culture or science? He doesn’t try to say, and i’m having trouble making the imaginative leap that would get me there! How would rejection of God per se generate those things in any way . . . or does he mean they want to take credit for abstract expressionism, nihilistic memoirs, and coarsened discourse around our political life?