Anda di halaman 1dari 2

Excerpted from Living the Secular Life by Phil Zuckerman.

Reprinted by
arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin
Random House Company. Copyright Phil Zuckerman, 2014

Causes
What is going on? How do we explain this recent wave of secularization that is washing over not
only Sally LaContes family but so much of America as well?
The answer to these questions is actually much less theological or philosophical than one might
think. It is simply not the case that in recent years tens of millions of Americans have suddenly started
doubting the cosmological or ontological arguments for the existence of God, or that hundreds of
thousands of other Americans have miraculously embraced the atheistic naturalism of Denis Diderot.
Sure, this may be happening here and there, in this or that dorm room or on this or that Tumblr page. The
best-sellers written by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harrisas well as the irreverent
impiety and flagrant mockery of religion by the likes of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, House,
South Park, and Family Guyhave had some impact on American culture. As we have seen, a steady,
incremental uptick of philosophical atheism and agnosticism is discernible in America in recent years. But
the larger reality is that for the many millions of Americans who have joined the ranks of the
nonreligious, the causes are most likely to be political and sociological in nature.
For starters, we can begin with the presence of the religious right, and the backlash it has
engendered. Beginning in the 1980s, with the rise of such groups as the Moral Majority and the Christian
Coalition, the closeness of conservative Republicanism with evangelical Christianity has been
increasingly tight and publicly overt. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, more and more politicians on the
right embraced the conservative Christian agenda, and more and more outspoken conservative Christians
allied themselves with the Republican Party. Examples abound, from Michele Bachmann to Ann Coulter,
from Mike Huckabee to Pat Robertson, and from Rick Santorum to James Dobson. With an emphasis on
seeking to make abortion illegal, fighting against gay rights (particularly gay marriage), supporting prayer
in schools, advocating abstinence only sex education, opposing stem cell research, curtailing welfare
spending, supporting Israel, opposing gun control, and celebrating the war on terrorism, conservative
Christians have found a warm welcome within the Republican Party, which has been clear about its
openness to the conservative Christian agenda. This was most pronounced during the eight years that
George W. Bush was in the White House.
What all of this this has done is alienate a lot of left-leaning or politically moderate Americans
from Christianity. Sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer have published compelling research
indicating that much of the growth of nones in America is largely attributable to a reaction against this
increased, overt mixing of Christianity and conservative politics. The rise of irreligion has been partially
related to the fact that lots of people who had weak or limited attachments to religion and were either
moderate or liberal politically found themselves at odds with the conservative political agenda of the
Christian right and thus reacted by severing their already somewhat weak attachment to religion. Or as

sociologist Mark Chaves puts it, After 1990 more people thought that saying you were religious was
tantamount to saying you were a conservative Republican. So people who are not Republicans now are
more likely to say that they have no religion.
A second factor that helps account for the recent rise of secularity in America is the devastation
of, and reaction against, the Catholic Churchs pedophile priest scandal. For decades the higher-ups in the
Catholic Church were reassigning known sexual predators to remote parishes rather than having them
arrested and prosecuted. Those men in authority thus engaged in willful cover-ups, brash law-breaking,
and the aggressive slandering of accusersand all with utter impunity. The extent of this criminality is
hard to exaggerate: over six thousand priests have now been credibly implicated in some form of sex
abuse, five hundred have been jailed, and more victims have been made known than one can imagine.
After the extent of the crimesthe rapes and molestations as well as the cover-upsbecame widely
publicized, many Americans, and many Catholics specifically, were disgusted. Not only were the actual
sexual crimes themselves morally abhorrent, but the degree to which those in positions of power sought to
cover up these crimes and allow them to continue was truly shocking. The result has been clear: a lot of
Catholics have become ex-Catholics. For example, consider the situation in New England. Between 2000
and 2010, the Catholic Church lost 28 percent of its members in New Hampshire and 33 percent of its
members in Maine, and closed nearly seventy parishesa quarter of the total numberthroughout the
Boston area. In 1990, 54 percent of Massachusetts residents identified as Catholic, but it was down to 39
percent in 2008. And according to an American Values survey from 2012, although nearly one-third of
Americans report being raised Catholic, only 22 percent currently identify as sucha precipitous
nationwide decline indeed.
Of course, the negative reaction against the religious right and the Catholic pedophile scandal
both have to do explicitly with religion. But a very important third possible factor that may also account
for the recent rise of secularity has nothing to do with religion. It is something utterly sociological: the
dramatic increase of women in the paid labor force. British historian Callum Brown was the first to
recognize this interesting correlation: when more and more women work outside the home, their religious
involvementas well as that of their familiestends to diminish. Brown rightly argues that it has been
women who have historically kept their children and husbands interested and involved in religion. Then,
starting in the 1960s, when more and more British women starting earning an income through work
outside the home, their interest inor time and energy forreligious involvement waned. And as women
grew less religious, their husbands and children followed suit. Weve seen a similar pattern in many other
European nations, especially in Scandinavia: Denmark and Sweden have the lowest levels of church
attendance in the world, and simultaneously, Danish and Swedish women have among the highest rates of
outside-the-home employment of any women in the world. And the data shows a similar trajectory here in
America. Back in the 1960s, only 11 percent of American households relied on a mother as their biggest
or sole source of income. Today, more than 40 percent of American families are in such a situation. Thus
it may very well be that as a significantly higher percentage of American moms earn a living in the paid
labor force, their enthusiasm for and engagement with religion is being sapped, and thats playing a role
in the broader secularization of our country.

Anda mungkin juga menyukai