Freethought = Radicalism
A while back, I read two articles from recent academic journals. One was Jerry A. Coyne’s “Science, Religion, and Society: The Problem of Evolution in America,” (2012, Evolution 66-8: 2654-2662); the other was Frederick Solt et al., “Economic Inequality, Relative Power, and Religiosity” (2011, Social Science Quarterly 92-2: 447-465), which I had found cited in the first article. Together, they reinforced my feeling that a history of freethought that connects secularism with science and social progress is very important. And also that the secularist movement needs to become socially radical in the ways it had been in the nineteenth century—ways that catalyzed a lot of the social progress now being eroded because we take it too much for granted.
Coyne, who wrote a 2009 bestseller called Why Evolution Is True, argued in the Society for the Study of Evolution’s journal that “American resistance to accepting evolution is uniquely high among first world countries,” and that, “This is due largely to the extreme religiosity of the United States.” Coyne began by citing a 2006 survey of Americans asked to respond to the statement, “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from an earlier species of animals.” Sixty percent of Americans either disagreed with this statement or were unsure of what answer to give. Only four out of ten Americans agreed with the most basic statement of the concept of evolution.
It gets worse. According to a 2011 study, seventy-eight percent of Americans—almost four out of every five people in this country!—either believe that humans were “directly created by God in their present form within the last 10,000 years” or believe that humans developed from “less advanced forms…through a process guided by God.” And just twelve percent of Americans believe that only evolution should be taught in public schools—while twenty-three percent said only creationism should be taught. Fifty-five percent weaseled, and said the two “theories” should be given equal time.
It gets even worse. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, ninety-two percent of Americans answered “Yes” when asked if they believed in God. And the arguments today’s religious apologists use, that a secular society would be devoid of “morality, meaning, and human significance,” are identical to the ones they used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America, and even earlier in Europe.
Science, as an organized profession, has done little to help the problem. Although ninety-three percent of top scientists (National Academy members) are agnostic or atheist, their professional organizations are spineless accommodationists. The American Association for the Advancement of Science claims “the overwhelming majority of scientists” believe science and religion are compatible. The National Center for Science Education claims “evolution does not make claims about God’s existence or non-existence.”
Follow the money. Scientists get nearly $100 million in grant money from the Templeton Foundation alone. This is the same religious organization that funded The Historical Society’s recent multi-million dollar grant to study “Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs.” I was a member of The Historical Society at the time, so I sent them a proposal for a token study on the influence of freethought—both on innovation itself, and on the religions these folks claim were so innovative. It was rejected, of course; so I turned my attention to writing popular freethought history and stopped hoping for an institutional or academic endorsement that would never come (more on that later).
Coyne concluded that the reason America is so much more religious and anti-evolution than the rest of the developed world is that we are “socially dysfunctional compared to other nations.” He cited a 2009 study that listed twenty-five indices of social well-being. Of the seventeen prosperous First World democracies surveyed, the US placed lowest, both in terms of social quality and rejection of evolution (and really, science in general). Several other studies have suggested two possible causes. Either “pathology breeds religiosity,” as hopeless people turn to God for help, or the wealthy use religion as a tool for “urging conformity and quelling discontent.”
The second article, by Solt, Habel, and Grant, concluded based on two different statistical analyses that increases in religious participation are caused by increasing economic inequality. In a time-study of the US since the 1950s, the sociologists found that whenever wealth becomes more unequal, religion increases both among the poor and the rich. The rich “adopt religion to justify their privilege” and to gain control over the restless poor. Social science expects “democracies…to respond to higher inequality with greater distribution,” but this process is short-circuited in societies where religion is powerful.
Although the Solt study didn’t go back farther than the 1950s in American history, if we adopted their reasoning we might expect the greatest periods of success for social justice movements to correspond with a high degree of secularity and the low points to line up with peak periods of religion. A quick glance at the timeline of America suggests this may be true, and I think it’s an issue that urgently needs some very serious study. Another implication, with which Coyne ended his paper, is that “weakening religion may itself require other, more profound changes: creating a society that is more just, more caring, more egalitarian.” Improving social justice and expanding secularism may each be impossible without the other.
American freethought, seen as a movement, has always been closely aligned with radical social change. In 1825, Frances Wright began her commune at Nashoba in an effort to emancipate southern slaves. In 1831, freethinker Abner Kneeland offered his stage to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison when no one else in Boston would “platform” him. In 1833, Dr. Charles Knowlton was jailed for writing a birth control book that claimed women should be free to (and responsible to) limit the sizes of their families to affordable levels. These are just a few examples, from the early-nineteenth century years I covered in An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy. Over the next few years, I’ll continue studying and writing about these connections, on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the meantime, “movement atheism” seems to be at some type of impasse, trying to identify its priorities and develop some type of shared agenda for action. If Solt and Coyne are correct, the movement needs to get behind a social justice agenda that addresses American society’s growing inequities. Creating a better society, says Coyne, will help weaken religion and support science and progress. And being leaders in fights that bring meaningful, lasting change to regular Americans (regardless of their current religious affiliations) will not only create conditions supporting the growth of secularism, but give people reasons to join us.