Absent at the Cathedral.

As did Franklin Roosevelt and most presidents since, Barack Obama took his seat alongside Michelle and the Biden’s in the first row of the National Cathedral for the Inaugural Prayer Service.  Participating this year in what is now an interfaith event were religious leaders from Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh communities.  Kansas City’s Adam Hamilton, pastor of one of the nation’s largest religious congregations, delivered the sermon.  Absent in the Cathedral was anyone representing the 20% of Americans who live without religion.  As noted in previous posts, this group stands second only to Christians in the "religious landscape" and is larger than all other faiths combined. 

Of course, those of who have left religion behind would have found no place in a religious service.  Even were that not so, who would represent them?  The people that researchers call "nones" and I call transcenders have in large measure left the organization called religion as much, and sometimes more so, as its belief system.  There may be some attempts to organize and lead them, but for the most part transcenders consciously opt for living without an organized community.  In some respects they reflect a wider disillusionment with institutions, both social and political. 

But taking this independent and leaderless stance presents a conundrum for individuals living in what remains a highly organized society.  Leaders give voice to people and communities of likes or the likeminded, especially when they are large are hard to ignore.  The women's, civil rights and LGBT movements testify to that.  Twenty percent is a huge number; about three times the population of our ten largest cities combined, six times larger than our tenth largest state, North Carolina, where I live.  Even so, transcenders' interests and points of view go unrepresented.  While that may be by design, it does leave them at somewhat of a disadvantage.

One of the most notable and heartening aspects of this year's inaugural (see earlier posts) was that President Obama accorded long overdue recognition to the gay community, perhaps most powerfully in coupling their struggle with that of women and African Americans.  In what is the run up to an expected Supreme Court decision on marriage equality that mention was of special significance.  What the president did not do this time around, however, was to give the nod he accorded four years earlier to "nonbelievers".  "We are a nation", he said then, "of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers".  At long last openly gay citizens are taking their place in the Halls of Congress and Christine Quinn may well be elected Mayor of New York in November.  But being an avowed atheist or even an admitted unaffiliated transcender remains problematic in this "religious country".

Considering that 20% of us have left religion behind, it stands to reason that a substantial number of people in public life have done so as well.  Among them are certainly women and men who are forced, if only to keep up appearances, attend religious worship services in their home districts, cities or states.  It's a sham of political expediency.  Whether they are being hypocritical or simply bowing to a pro-forma reality and out of respect for constituents makes little difference.  I accept that they are victims of the system much in the same way as elected officials find it necessary to hold back on some of their inner most personal beliefs.  I don't blame them, but do bemoan a state of affairs where the beliefs of transcenders are not accorded the same value and respect as those of the religious.  Why do we demand that our presidents are churchgoers and that they openly profess their god-belief?  Does it really matter or have anything to do with qualifications for the job or competence?  I don't think so.  To suggest that the religious are more moral and trustworthy than transcenders, for example, is factually incorrect.  Convicted influence peddler Jack Abramoff boasted of his religiosity and President Bush told an audience that Enron's soon to be discredited Ken Lay was a man "whose guidebook for entrepreneurship to help others is the Bible”.  Moreover, any such notion of inferiority or deficiency is demeaning to those who may live without religion but are guided by an equally powerful and defining moral compass as those who live with it.

There is no question but that the majority of Americans identify with a religion and Pew researchers say even a large number of "nones" claim to believe in God or some higher power.  We all cherish the notion of equality and rights embodied in the "endowed by our Creator" phrase written into our founding documents.  The incorporation and assumption of God into public speech is so ubiquitous that we have come to accept it without question.  The President and other public officials invoke God's blessing on us; the legal tender we use to pay for goods and services offers the credential, "In God we trust". 

This is not likely to change any time soon, nor am I suggesting it should.  Invocations of God are meaningful to many Americans who ground their lives in religion.  What I am suggesting is that as the numbers of those who have left religion behind grows — and consequentially religion declines — people in high places and we as citizens should give more thought to how we incorporate religious-speak into the fabric of a secular society. 

Barney Frank could not have been elected to Congress had he "come out" while first running for the House in 1980.  Tammy Baldwin who was elected to the Senate in 2012 did not have to hide who she was.  Transcenders who want to win elections and serve in high office still must keep their orientation and beliefs to themselves.  In large measure they have to remain in the closet.  With a changing landscape and in the twenty-first century, there is clearly something wrong with that picture.  Barack Obama went to the Cathedral to pray, some future chief executive may want skip or alter that event.   Hopefully even Americans who don't share her beliefs will be respectful and generous enough to accept that change.

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My book Transcenders: Living beyond religion and the religion wars is now available in print and as an eBook.  Both versions are available at Amazon; the electronic iBooks version can be found at iTunes; a  Nook version at Barnes & Noble.

Take note!

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Nearly one in three (32%) American Millennials (18-29) are living without religion in their lives.  That’s a major finding of a just released study from The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.  Stunning is that just four years ago that number stood at one in four (25%).  Indeed, those classified by Pew as “Nones” (I call them “Transcenders”) across all age groups have risen from 16% to nearly 20% of the population in the same four year period.  Aside from other (non-Christian) religions (6%), only Transcenders have grown in the entire religious landscape (and they have grown much more).  Religion’s decline is most noteworthy among the Protestants who, at 48%, no longer have majority for the first time since the founding of the Republic. 

Pew Center proprietary research

In reporting its Landmark Study four years ago, Pew researchers pointed out that being unchurched did not necessarily mean that the “nones” had permanently given up on religion.  Even today only about 6% consider themselves atheists or agnostics.  Two-thirds have some god belief, though less than half of them a belief of absolute certainty.  I have always been skeptical about poll responses to the “God question”.  How can one really get a totally candidate or uncolored answer in an environment where God is so entrenched in the language (God bless you, God bless the United States of America)?  Invoking God has become pro-forma, almost a marker, a passport, of good citizenship.  How much substance that has is questionable.  So more significant to me is that in the 2012 study, 88% of respondents say they are not looking for any religious affiliation.  In short they are satisfied to be declared Transcenders and are  not turning back.

Alienation from religion seems to be accelerating.  It took ten years (1998-2008) to move eight percentage points from 8-16%, but only four to move up from there to 20%.  Neither the absolute numbers nor the trend surprises me at all.  Both are consistent with my own study of the subject over the last decade and with my own experiences.  They are exactly what prompted me to write my book on the Transcenders. 

The Pew researchers list a number of reasons for the increasing abandonment of religion — political, social and ideological — all of them confirmed in part by aspects of their own study.  I have suggested that those who have moved beyond religion are responding to a series of “alienators”.  For sure, some people have left religion behind because they no longer believe in its teachings or never did.  The predatory priest scandal and cover-up in the Catholic Church, the draconian behavior of Taliban-like Muslims and the land grab by Orthodox Jews on the West Bank have turned people off inside and outside of those religions.  Attitudes of sexism (tokened first by a he-god), homophobia and the denial of science may also play a role.  That religion separates us at a time when the world is opening up and becoming more inclusive can't be discounted.  But no single alienator or group of alienators fits all.  These are very personal decisions.

The point is that Pew’s research quantifies the large number of us that now live without religion and affirms that this number is growing.  Regardless of the specifics that any one of us could site, this is not some overnight wonder, but long in the making.  Alienation or at least distancing has been going on below the radar for as long as I can remember.  When I served as a rabbi in the 1960s, it was clear that a good percentage of our congregational members had what was in all honesty a most tangential relationship to religion.  They may have sincerely and proudly identified — most especially for Jews in the immediate post Hitler era — but they attended worship infrequently, often but once a year.  They may have paid lip service to their faith, but functionally it was remote from their daily lives. 

To say they lived a lie would be unjust, but inescapably their interaction with religion can only be described as inconsistent.   This reality was there for anyone to see and both they themselves and more importantly their children and grandchildren were first hand observers throughout.  Now in a time less hospitable to charade, the proverbial chickens have come to roost.  I see it as only a delayed but inevitable reaction.  Just consider how this Pew study fits into its logical place for you, globally and perhaps personally.

There is also a political side to all of this, a story that remains pretty well in the background.  Over the past decade, religion and specifically the religious right has received an inordinate amount of attention and airtime.  God and religion have been treated as the unquestioned default.  Just think back a few weeks to the big deal made of the Democratic platform not including God in its language.  A rapid-fire insertion aborted a potential cause célèbre.  To some considerable degree this is all based on an American religiosity myth sustained by the self-interested religious or those intimidated by threats of retribution.  It may surprise you in that regard that Pew’s numbers show as many Transcenders as White Evangelicals, the first on the numerical rise and the second in some decline.

Aside from covering stories on this and other Pew studies, or similar ones by other organizations, there is little public discourse about Transcenders.  The Presidential and other campaigns pay huge deference to religion and religious groups but give at best (and infrequently) a nod to “nonbelievers”.  Transcenders, Pew suggests, skew more Democratic than Republican, but there are certainly people in both parties who have openly or functionally walked away from religion.  What is clear is that no one seems to be taking account of this important group of voters.  These are people who are beginning to say, “what about me and my beliefs?”  The present neglect may have consequences in the future.

Much has been made since the election of Barack Obama about “change”.  The word means different things to different people; for some it is merely a catchy slogan.  Others, myself included, take change very seriously.   All these millions of Transcenders represent a substantive change in the American landscape.  As Mrs. Willy Loman might put it, “attention must be paid.”

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I call them Transcenders.  To brand them nonbelievers is to assume religion and its particular belief system the human default.  Worse it suggests that those who have left religion behind lack beliefs.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  For more read my book.

Under God

Trying to prove or disprove God’s existence, I contend in my book Transcenders, is a fool’s errand.  People on both sides are likely to disagree.  I respect and understand their point of view, but think that when it comes to the divine in the absolute, we must ultimately rely on a leap of or from faith and move on from there.  My chapter on God is called The Arrogance of Attribution.   The problem that many of us have is not with a god per se, but with what is attributed to that deity with such absolute and arrogant surety.

Over the past weekend Republican nominee Mitt Romney used the pledge of allegiance as the text for a campaign speech in Virginia Beach.  The effort by some committee members to eliminate God from the Democratic Platform, made for a sure-fire Republican campaign applause line.  In using it, Romney sanctimoniously promised never to do such a thing.  What a surprise.  Whether God belongs in a a political party platform is a valid question — I think not — but challenging its incorporation only serves as distraction at a moment when the election stakes are so high.  Moreover, that platforms have become such a sham is probably the more important issue as is whether the conventions themselves make sense any more. That’s for a future post. 

Michelangelo's Creation from the Sistine Chapel

What interests me here is not the applause line but the content of Romney’s remarks.  According to the NY Times, he said: 

“We pledge allegiance to that flag, we believe in a nation under God, a nation indivisible, a nation united, a nation with justice and liberty for all and for that to happen we’re going to have to have a new president that will commit to getting America working again, that will commit to a strong military, that will commit to a nation under God that recognizes that we the American people were given our rights not by government but by God himself (my emphasis).”

Justice Anton Scalia made similar claims from the bench during 2005 oral arguments before the Court regarding the constitutionality of displaying the Ten Commandments on public property. 

It isn’t that Governor Romney and Justice Scalia believe in God; they are hardly alone in that and in some very good company.  It’s that they so arrogantly claim divine actions or intent they can’t possibly know.  Every time such pronouncements are made I want to stand up and ask, “how do you know that, Sir?”  It may be accurate to say with some surety that those who fashioned our Constitution were, for the most part, individuals who believed in God.   Moreover, Scripture and other religious teachings might well have informed their moral compasses.  But to go from there to claiming “God himself” gave us rights is a real stretch and an arrogant one at that.  It is the kind of thinking and attribution that also gives license to the religious imposing their ideologies on the rest of us in so many other areas.  Romney, for one, has reiterated his support of overturning Roe as well his opposition to same-sex marriage.  Both positions can be justified only on religious grounds, and of a certain orthodox kind.

Romney’s comments at that Virginia event were not new.  The candidate also believes that some Americans have taken the separation of church and state too far, "well beyond its original meaning."  In an interview with the Washington National Cathedral's magazine, Cathedral Age, Romney said those who "seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God" aren't acting in line with the Founders' intent, which was not, "…the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation 'Under God, 'and in God, we do indeed trust."

With a still deeply troubled economy and the more overriding issue of government’s role in our society on the table, one would have wished that dueling over God would not factor in the 2012 campaign.  In large measure of course it is just a smoke screen.  If God were in the mix, isn’t it fair to ask if the sad state of the economy reflects divine will or for that matter if the Almighty favors more or less government.  Are Democrats or conversely Republicans carrying forward God’s will or are they subverting it?  Is it God’s providence that the disparity between rich and poor is so great or that the gap is widening between those of have far more than they will ever need and those who need so much more than they can ever hope to have?

When all is said and done, the majority of our government officials believe in God or at least profess such a belief.   Many feel guided by their faith.  So the issue between them is not whether they see our nation as “Under God” — something which they would assumably attach to the world as a whole — but rather, what is the human role?  What should the humanly run government do, and what should we do as individuals?  In that discussion we dare not pass the buck, dare not claim that we carry endorsements of any “higher” order, stacking the cards in favor of our point of view.  God shouldn't factor in a partisan or philosophical debate.  In a country where those living without religion are growing faster as a percentage of the population that those who with follow one, God’s role will need to be addressed at some time in the future.  For now, we have more immediate and urgent questions to resolve.

Transcenders

A journey.

Leaving the pulpit was like exiting any bubble — we all inhabit them — and finding myself in somewhat unfamiliar territory.  Until then my working years had been punctuated by religious holidays, my weeks measured by their Sabbaths and my days largely filled with pastoral activities.  To be sure, the pews were rarely filled to capacity but they also weren’t empty.  There seemed a natural cohesiveness to it all, a sense of “everyone is on board”.  It’s been decades now and I’m in a very different place.

What struck me early on was that in this regularly proclaimed “religious country” many people outside the bubble had at best a tangential relationship to religion, much more so than I could have imagined.  It wasn’t that I ever deluded myself into thinking everyone is religious, but rather the realization that being religious was far from a given or even necessarily the norm.  Perhaps more surprising was finding myself traveling down the same road.  This was somewhat of an eye opener since I hadn’t left the rabbinate for loss of faith, but simply wanted to do something different with my life.

Over the years my awareness of and interest in people’s living without or beyond religion became more acute.  I saw my own evolution, a distancing from religion in my own children, family members and of course among those with whom I came into daily contact.  It had nothing to do with having grown up Jewish or Christian (the people I encounter most).   It was birth-faith agnostic.  My interest became more serious about six years ago when I started sketching out a book on the subject, one that seemed not to have been written by others.  What began as an impression that more individuals were moving from religion grew into a conviction, sustained in the release of Pew’s 2008 Religious Landmark Survey.  As noted in previous posts, Pew found that 16% of us were saying, “none” when asked about their faith and that number shot up to 25%, 1 in 4, among those 18-29.  That’s a number one can’t ignore.

Most stunning, the “none” group had doubled – 100% — in just a decade.  We’re talking here about 50 Million Americans.  To put this in a larger context, 16% is the same number as Latinos, considered our fastest growing demographic.  But they have grown only 33% in a comparable ten-year period.  Add to that my own experience with consumer research, which would suggest that if anything Pew’s number likely understates the reality.  Against the backdrop of being told that ours is a religious country, you can expect some respondents to either feel intimidated or engage in wishful thinking.  “Are you keeping on your diet, or going regularly to the gym?” Of course!  Even if we accept the reported number, 16% is significant, second only to Christians in Pew’s landscape.

Since I began this journey, a number of best selling books came to market, all written by what I would describe as public atheists.  Each made a compelling case for their collective cause, and that’s exactly what it seemed to be.  Somehow they missed the bigger picture, and the far bigger story.  For the most part Pew’s 16% are not ideological and they certainly aren’t angry — living without religion is not a cause.  They neither disdain those who follow religion or, for that matter, do they give much thought to religion any more.  The latter is probably a mistake.

Part of my challenge in writing on this subject was coming up with a better name for all of these people.  “None” certainly isn’t helpful.  Who am I?  None — right.  To me, even worse is the widely used descriptor “nonbeliever”.  Not only does that assume religion as the default, it implies (meant that way or not) that those who don’t believe in a god don’t have beliefs.  I see it a pejorative.  Of course those who live beyond religion have beliefs, they are just a different set with a different grounding.  So I came up with the name “transcenders”, people who have transcended to another place.  It isn’t prima fascia a better place than those who follow religion but the right place, even an excellent place, for them.

Out of this comes my book, Transcenders: Living beyond religion and the religion wars.  While hopefully telling a compelling story that will resonate with many readers, it seeks neither to proselytize nor to dismiss the religious.  It speaks with conviction, but rejects out of hand the notion that anyone possesses the truth, a claim often made by both followers of religion and by some atheists. I believe that my take on this very important phenomenon is different from what has been offered by others.  Most important, the fastest growing group in this country, a large percentage whom are our children, demands our serious attention.

Transcenders: available exclusively as a Kindle e-book.