Tag: Secularism

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The Joy of Secular Christmas

What do secular people do at Christmas?

A Christian friend recently asked me how nonreligious people like me celebrate Christmas. I said, “Well, we put up a tree, decorate the house, eat cookies and drink mulled wine. We give presents and have fun with friends and family. We sing Christmas songs and watch Christmas movies.”

Nonreligious people pretty much do what everyone else does. We don’t go to church. But Christmas is much more than going to church.

This may come as a surprise to those who insist that we keep the “Christ” in “Christmas.” But Christmas can be enjoyed without the dogmas of Christianity. The decorating, gift-giving, eating and drinking have very little to do with Bethlehem and the birth of Christ.

More Americans embrace Christmas than are Christian. Christianity is the religion of about 63% of Americans. But one recent survey indicates that more than 70% of Americans plan to put up a Christmas tree in 2023. Another survey (from an obviously biased source—the American Christmas Tree Association) puts the number above 90%.

I know lots of nonreligious people who decorate their homes and put up a tree. Indeed, the tree is not originally a Christian thing. It comes from the pagan winter rituals of northern European. Christmas trees were not usual in the United States until about a hundred years ago.

Christmas is a weird mash-up of German, English, and American traditions. This includes much of the “magic” of Christmas as conjured up by Hollywood films. Hollywood teaches us that Christmas is a time of spiritual transformation, when Grinch and Scrooge learn their lessons, when George Bailey discovers that this is a wonderful life, and when children of all ages keep the magic alive by believing in Santa Claus.

This stuff is fun. It involves the spirit of play, magic, and fantasy, and the familiar nostalgia of repetition and ritual.

One scholar, Christopher Deacy, has argued that secular Christmas is in fact “religious”—as a set of rituals and communal practices that have a broadly “sacred” significance (even if not specifically Christian). Christmas makes a festival of consumerism. But it is also about transformation, love, gratitude, generosity, wonder, and hope.

Those Christmas values are not uniquely Christian. Indeed, the American and Hollywood versions of Christmas are decidedly secular and inclusive. You don’t need to be Christian to enjoy the fun.

People do not typically say at Christmas, “You must accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior.” That’s ultimately what it means to keep Christ in Christmas. The religious story is about the birth of a savior—the “Christ,” which means the anointed or chosen one.

The Christian tradition teaches that God became man through the mystery of the virgin birth. Christ is born in Bethlehem to save us from sin. This makes it possible to be reunited with God, and to merit eternal life.

All of that theological stuff is mysterious and miraculous. How and why did God become man at that place and time? It is a mystery. Why do we need salvation from sin? The fundamental assumption of Christian theology is that without the savior, we are doomed. And how does the birth, life, and death of Christ accomplish this? Well, that’s a mystery that requires faith.

The Christian joy celebrated in hymns like “Joy to the World,” rests upon a deep sense of sin and fear of death. Christian joy includes a sense of relief and gratitude directed toward a mysterious God, who condemns sin. But the incarnation of Christ somehow transforms God from a harsh judge to a loving father.

Thus, Christian joy is tinged with fear and gloom. This may explain why the Puritan colonists of early America were anti-Christmas. They viewed Christmas as a frivolous celebration tainted by “pagan mockery” and “mad mirth.” As I explained in previous column on Christmas, “For Puritans, salvation is serious business. Merriment in this world distracts us from the need to be saved from sin.”

Secular joy is different from Christian joy. Nonreligious folks who make merry at Christmas are not worried about sin or the metaphysics of salvation. We know that death is always present, as we remember those we’ve lost and those at risk of dying.

But at Christmas, we do not dwell on death. Instead, we affirm life. Here we are, together again. We celebrate despite our mortality. We are fortunate to laugh and sing and play with our loved ones. We know that someday the party will end. But while the candles are still burning and the songs are being sung, our hearts are warmed by love, gratitude, and the joy of secular Christmas.

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Religious liberty, atheism, and the question of faith

Fresno Bee, July 30, 2023

The atheists are coming out the closet.  A new Gallup poll shows that 12% of Americans don’t believe in God. Only 74% of Americans say they do believe in God. The other 14% are not sure. Back in 2001, 90% of Americans believed in God, and the atheists and agnostics only made up 10%. 

The Pew Research Center published a report last year suggesting that in a couple of generations about half of the population will be non-religious and Christianity will be a minority religion. Earlier this year, a Wall Street Journal poll found that only 39% of Americans said that religion was “very important” to them. That was down from 62% in 1998.

This radical shift in American values helps explain the Christian nationalist backlash among those who want to make American Christian again. As Christianity loses its dominance, it is understandable that some Christians want to demand that the U.S. be a Christian nation. But the idea of forcing religion on people seems doomed to fail in the modern world. The First Amendment to the Constitution prevents the establishment of any religion. It also guarantees the free exercise of religion.

Religious liberty means that individuals are free to choose their faith. This idea is deeply rooted in a modern understanding of religious belief. Modern thinkers tend to agree that external conformity to religious rituals is not sufficient for genuine faith. Rather, faith is thought to require consent and subjective commitment. 

In the late 1600’s, the British philosopher John Locke said, “All the life and power of true religion consist in the inward and full persuasion of the mind; and faith is not faith without believing.” He suggested that people may go through the motions of religious life without genuine belief. But external conformity is not real faith. That’s why trying to use violence, force, or law to establish religious conformity is wrongheaded. Locke famously said that with regard to religion, “all force and compulsion are to be forborn.” In fact, Locke suggested that external conformity breeds hypocrisy. 

Locke’s writings on government and religion had a profound influence on the American Founders, as I noted in a column earlier this month. The Declaration of Independence appealed to Locke’s idea of a right to revolution. And his thinking about religion appears to undergird the view of religious liberty found in the First Amendment. 

Again, the issue is that when people are forced to go through the motions of faith because they fear punishment or social disapproval, they simply become liars and phonies, lacking in authenticity. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard made this a central theme of his work in the 19th Century. Kierkegaard understood faith as an inward or subjective experience. For Kierkegaard, faith was a passionate existential commitment. Kierkegaard was also critical of the hypocritical conformity of those who simply go through the motions of faith. 

According to this modern understanding of faith, your religion is not about your ethnicity or your family identity. Nor is it a matter of which church you grew up in, or which Bible you have on your bookshelf. Nor is faith about what you wear, what you eat, or which holidays you celebrate. Rather, faith is about what you freely choose to believe in the depth of your soul and with the whole of your mind.

With this on the table, let’s reconsider the rise of atheism and agnosticism. If people don’t believe in God, isn’t it better that they are honest about that lack of belief? Do the Christian nationalists want atheists to just play along and pretend they believe? And if not, what would they propose to do about those who are not persuaded by the claims of Christianity?

It is best for people to be honest about what they believe or don’t believe. Only then can we have genuine and free conversations about faith. Of course, free and open conversations about faith may result in some people becoming atheists. But it’s better for people to make that choice freely than to try to enforce conformity and push nonbelievers back into the closet. The growth of disbelief is a sign of our liberty. It is also an opportunity for deeper discussions of faith, and of freedom. 

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The Wisdom of Secular Education

School of Athens

Right-wing commentator Dennis Prager said at a recent “Moms for Liberty” conference: “There is no such thing as a secular institution with wisdom… That is why the stupidest institutions are the most secular: the universities.”

He’s wrong. The wisdom of secular universities is found in their reluctance to teach wisdom. That may sound like a paradox. But it is an approach to teaching that is as old as Socrates.

I am a professor of philosophy—a “lover of wisdom.” But I don’t teach wisdom. I think that what I teach may help students develop wisdom. But I would never presume to teach wisdom. I can teach about the world’s wisdom traditions. But I do not have the right to teach wisdom in my role as a secular professor.

Prager’s critique of secular education

Prager is a frequent critic of secularism, and of public education. He is not happy with what secular schools teach about racism, gender, and religion. Prager wrote, in a column in July 2022: “When America was more religious, wisdom was taught to young people. This is another reason to fear a thoroughly secularized America—we are producing a nation of fools. The proof lies in our universities. The most secularized institution in America is the most foolish institution in America.”

Really? American universities lead the world in research and creativity. People come here to study from across the globe. American universities are not stupid or foolish.

But Prager is right that secular universities do not teach wisdom, in his sense. He thinks that wisdom implies the specific content of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

But it is not the job of a secular university to instill the values of a specific religious tradition. This does not make universities foolish or stupid. Rather, secular universities refrain from teaching wisdom because in a diverse society grounded on liberty, we leave wisdom to the private sphere. If you want wisdom, go to a church or temple. But if you want knowledge, go to a secular school.

Secular universities should be neutral, inclusive, and pluralistic. They ought to disseminate knowledge, without staking a claim about wisdom. They ought to train students in the art of sifting and winnowing. They should teach skills in scientific method, critical thinking, and hermeneutics. But knowledge and critical thinking skills do not produce wisdom.

Wisdom vs. knowledge

Wisdom is about meaning, value, and purpose. It is a matter of the soul, the conscience, and our fundamental beliefs. Universities can and should include courses that teach about the varieties of opinion about wisdom and the meaning of life. But no secular university professor should presume to grade and evaluate students based upon the condition of their soul. That would be obnoxious, and it would violate the spirit of open inquiry that is essential to the secular pursuit of knowledge.

The pursuit of wisdom is different from the pursuit of knowledge. In religious traditions, teachers of wisdom provide definitive answers about meaning, value, and purpose. The teachers of religious wisdom aim to transform the souls of their disciples. They inspire, admonish, and guide their pupils toward a vision of the good life.

This is not what university professors should be doing. University professors teach knowledge, and methods for discovering it. But they should avoid any attempt to peer into the soul of a student. They may inspire students to seek knowledge. But they should not pick sides in cultural, religious, or spiritual struggles.

The pursuit of knowledge is, of course, part of wisdom. Wisdom requires knowledge. Ignorant and stupid people are not wise. But wisdom is not simply the accumulation of knowledge. And there are knowledgeable people who lack wisdom. Wisdom is a virtue or character trait. It is more a way of being than a pile of facts.

Wisdom involves judgement, discernment, and a sense of justice. Wisdom is about what we do with our knowledge, how we apply it to solve problems, and how we construct a life of meaning and value.

The Socratic model

An important model for the contemporary secular approach is Socrates. Socrates never claimed to be wise. He was a questioner, and a gadfly. He did not pontificate about the meaning of life, apart from suggesting that to be fully human is to think. This what he meant when he said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Socratic wisdom is a lifelong commitment to the ongoing labor of thinking. But this is an open-ended kind of wisdom that avoids picking sides in cultural or religious squabbles.

And now, finally, let’s return to Prager’s contention that when America was more religious, wisdom was taught to young people. He’s probably right. In a homogeneous world young people are often trained to conform and identify with a specific answer to life’s questions. Some may call that training wisdom. But it is narrow and limiting.

Such a narrow training in wisdom is not appropriate for a world that values liberty, free inquiry, and diversity. For that world—our world—we need a secular, Socratic approach. The secular approach is oriented around the Socratic “love of wisdom,” and a process of arguing and inquiring that is open-ended. Secular universities do not teach wisdom. Rather, they teach us how to decide for ourselves what is wise.

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Religious Liberty, Modesty, and The Morality Police

Fresno Bee, October 2, 2022

Morality is not external conformity. Let’s keep this in mind when thinking about recent protests in Iran against the “morality police.” Those protests broke out in response to the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who died after being detained by the morality police for wearing her hijab (a head covering) too loosely.

For Americans of the present generation, the notion of the morality police is hard to fathom. How strange that anyone cares whether women cover their hair.

Of course, societies have often attempted to control women’s lives, bodies, and sexuality. A hundred years ago in the United States, swimsuit police tried to prevent women from showing too much skin at the beach.

We’ve come a long way. Thanks to the secular principles found in the First Amendment, we are free to wear what we want. There is no morality police here because we view fashion as a form of free expression.

There are limits, of course. Schoolchildren are not free to wear pornographic or offensive T-shirts. Nudity is prohibited. And in a recent case out of Everett, Washington, the courts upheld a law prohibiting baristas at the Bikini Hut coffee shop from dressing like strippers. The Ninth Circuit Court drew a line at “pasties and a G-string” with your coffee.

But beyond those limits, our secular system holds that fashion, sex, and sexuality are private matters, not subject to policing. This is the result of a long struggle against a more restrictive worldview. And some Americans might prefer a return to modesty and conformity. Until recently, school districts prohibited girls from wearing tight leggings or yoga pants — including here in Clovis, which only changed its policy this year.

So, let’s not take the struggle for liberty and privacy for granted. It’s only been about 20 years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned laws against sodomy, in Lawrence v. Texas. It’s only been seven years since Obergefell v. Hodges gave same sex couples the right to marry. And challenges remain. The court has called the idea of a “right to privacy” into question with the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year.

Behind these legal issues is a basic argument about the importance of liberty. This is related to a claim about the futility and absurdity of trying to police fashion, sex, and modesty.

Americans pledge allegiance to the idea of a country founded on the idea of liberty and justice for all. Liberty means that you can wear a hijab or a bikini. The choice is up to you.

And if I don’t like your choice, I can choose not to look. We forget this important point with regard to modesty. Rather than worrying about women flaunting their bodies, why don’t we insist that men stop ogling them?

There is no doubt that state power can dominate people. But police power does not actually create modesty or virtue. It is futile to use police power to enforce external conformity to norms of fashion, virtue, and modesty.

Clothing and hairstyles have nothing to do with the content of your character. It’s what’s inside your head and your heart that counts, not what you wear on the outside. That’s why the idea of fashion police is absurd. It is a meaningless exercise in enforcing conformity that is only skin deep.

Morality is simply not the kind of thing that results from the application of external force. The way to make people moral is to educate them, not to beat them into compliance. External force is useful for animals. We fence them in and leash them. But that’s not how you treat human beings.

Arresting people for what they wear (or don’t wear) also breeds discontent and further nonconformity. Women protested against the swimsuit police in the United States a hundred years ago. They are pushing the limit in the case of bikini baristas. And in Iran, women are burning their hijabs.

To force human beings to conform to some standard of modesty is degrading and ineffective. Secular systems of law respect our freedom to decide for ourselves about what we believe about modesty and how we adorn our bodies. This approach is respectful of our humanity, our rationality and our liberty.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article266575386.html#storylink=cpy

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Is the US a Christian Nation?

Fresno Bee, January 23, 2022

In our secular society, Christianity has become an interest group vying for influence in the marketplace of ideas. It is no longer taken for granted that this is a Christian country.

Consider a recent case before the U.S. Supreme Court, involving a Christian group that wanted to raise its flag outside city hall in Boston. The court is considering whether this would be an endorsement of Christianity by the city, or whether the flag is merely the private expression of Christian citizens.

Christian Flag SCOTUS Blog

If the Christian group wins the case, its victory will mean only that the group has the right to express its religious beliefs in a public forum. They must take turns along with advocates of LGBT rights, BLM protesters, and other groups who want to fly their flags. No one is arguing here that the state ought to reserve a privileged place for Christian symbols and beliefs.

American secularism is grounded in the First Amendment to the Constitution. The First Amendment’s “establishment clause” prevents government entities from endorsing any faith. Its “free expression clause” permits individual citizens to express their own religious (or non-religious) beliefs.

Clarity about this is important, given the shifting religious identification of American citizens and the threat of religious violence. Our system allows people with diverse religious and non-religious beliefs to peacefully coexist. And it prevents the government from oppressing religious minorities.

Some people continue to maintain that America is a Christian nation. A recent report on NPR quoted a minister at a “patriot church” in Tennessee, who said, “You know why there’s churches everywhere and not mosques? Because we’re a Christian nation.”

But the First Amendment and our shifting demography point in another direction. In a report published at the end of 2021, the Pew Research Center indicates that the Christian population has continued to decline. Only 63% of Americans identify as Christian. Non-Christian religions (Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, etc.) account for another 6% of the population. And even among the faithful, religious belief is often lukewarm. Fewer than half of Americans report that they pray daily. Only about 40% say that religion is very important in their lives.

The fastest growing group in our country is the “nones,” those who answer “none of the above” when asked about their religious affiliation. The “nones” have nearly doubled since 2007, when Pew began tracking the data. Nearly one in three Americans (29%) are “nones.” This includes some atheists (4%) and agnostics (5%). But many of the non-religious simply do not identify with traditional religious categories.

It is true that at one point in our history, Christianity was the dominant faith. But even that claim needs qualification. Many of the founders had unorthodox views. George Washington attended church infrequently. When he did go, he refused to take communion. Thomas Jefferson admired Jesus, but was skeptical of the Bible’s miracles. John Adams claimed that the Christian view of the trinity was absurd. And America is the home of alternative Christian faiths such as Mormonism, Adventism, and Christian Science.

Critics will also argue, as Frederick Douglass did, that a nation founded on slavery could hardly be called “Christian.” Douglass argued against “the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” He said, “I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton said something similar. She thought that Christianity contributed to the oppression of women. She worked with a team of feminists at the end of the 19th century to rewrite the Bible. The result was “The Woman’s Bible,” which thoroughly revised the Bible’s patriarchal and misogynistic texts.

And so it goes. We disagree about what Christianity means. A growing number of us no longer identify as Christian. And Christian groups must vie time on the flagpole along with other interest groups.

This is the reality of our secular system, operating under the First Amendment. Under our Constitution, religious liberty is valued while the government is prevented from endorsing any specific religion. In this country we are free to argue about the meaning of the Bible. We are also free to gather round the flagpole and argue about history and the role of religion in our public life.