Secular vs. Religious Values: Reflecting on the Meaning of the Election

In her recent reflection on the results of Tuesday's election, writer and blogger Greta Christina touted the outcome as a "Victory of Secular Values."

To support this perspective she focused on several outcomes in particular: The success of marriage equality initiatives--and the defeat or an anti-same-sex marriage amendent in Minnesota; the election of the first openly gay or lesbian senator; the success of marijuana-legalization initiatives; the sound trumping of misogynistic rape-apologizing candidates; the defeat of a Florida amendment that would have allowed taxpayer money to support churches; and the failure of the Republican effort to win votes by demonizing birth control (and hence sex-for-pleasure).

As Greta Christina sees it, "the Republican Party tried to win, in large part, through religious fear-mongering about gays and drugs and sex and abortion and women who don’t know their place," and the effort failed big-time. Thus, she concludes, "This election was, to a great extent, a referendum on secular values versus the values of the theocratic religious right — and secular values won."

Now in casting the outcome of the election in these terms, Christina is in danger of playing into the very same narrative that is fueling the religious right in this country. The narrative, in short, is that our nation and the world confronts a conflict between the forces of faith and the forces of secularism, and any victory for the latter is a defeat for the people of God. We find elements of this narrative starkly displayed in Todd Akin's concession speech, when he says "that life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness come from almighty God not almighty government." We find it in those persistent religious-right warnings of the dire consequences of rejecting "God's values" (which, surprisingly, seem to be largely about sex and gender relationships) in favor of the secular ones touted by political liberals.

Now it's not uncommon to find that some of the more polarized atheists have the same basic assumptions about the relationship between the secular and the sacred that are rampant among those in the religious right. Dawkins and Ken Hamm agree that science and religion are fundamentally opposed--what they disagree about is which needs to go. But it is just this sort of polarization, this either/or division, that I think warrants serious critical scrutiny.

To be fair, Greta Christina frames her view as a victory of secular values over those of the "theocratic religious right," not over religion in more general terms. What was defeated was "religious fear-mongering." But she makes no mention of any other form of religion--a religion not rooted in fear--that might also declare victory in Tuesday's election. And this means some important points get missed. Two in particular are in danger of being overlooked, I think, unless they're made explicit.

First, and most obviously, this week's election was not merely a victory (on many fronts, at least) for secular values over the values of the religious right. It was also, on many fronts, a victory of progressive religious values over the values of the religious right. When I reflect on the states that voted for marriage equality, and on the evidence of the waning power of the prejudices that would have prevented an openly lesbian woman from gaining a senate seat, what I see are trends in America fully harmonious with the love ethic I and other religious progressives discover in the life and ministry of Jesus--an ethic that stands with the marginalized and oppressed and against the sort of legalism that's invoked to exclude, to create in-groups and out-groups, us and them.

Within Christianity today there is a struggle among rival ethical understandings, and homosexuality has become a central battleground. Any quick gloss on the nature of this struggle would oversimplify it, but one thing is clear: While many on the religious right want very much to paint progressive Christian opponents of the traditional condemnation of homosexuality as sell-outs to secular culture, the effort to do so fails to acknowledge how consistently Christian progressives root their case in terms of the most central Christian value of all: neighbor-love. Conservatives would like it to be otherwise--their case within the Christian community would be stronger if their opponents were simply buckling to secular forces. But this is not what is going on--it is a false characterization that impedes real dialogue.

It is important that secular voices not only remember this, but that they not reinforce--wittingly or unwittingly--this false characterization.

The other point that gets lost when we represent this week's election as the triumph of secular over religious values is this: There are some serious questions that need to be asked, not only about what should properly be called "secular," but also about what deserves the label "religious." On the former question, I think there really are such things as secular values--and I think they are best understood in something like the terms laid out by John Rawls, as found in this shared set of principles of fairness that everyone, regardless of their sectarian values, would embrace if they didn't know what position and privileges they and their sectarian community would enjoy within the social structure. And it may well be the case that the values Greta Christina highlights as having triumphed on Tuesday fall within this class.

But if so, that doesn't preclude them from also being religious values. On the contrary, the idea that you should abide by principles that you would like to live under even if you are not the one in power, even if you are not positioned as you are--this idea is the essential heart of the Golden Rule. Freedom of religion--including freedom from being subject to the mandates of a religion whose contestable sectarian doctrines you don't embrace--is arguably an expression of the Golden Rule, a rule enunciated with clarity by Jesus and repeatedly endorsed in Christian history as a way of living out the ethic of love. And it is a striking fact that the Golden Rule finds recurring expression in diverse religious traditions, so much so that it almost qualifies as ubiquitous. If this is right, than the core perspective that gives rise to "secular" values is also a deeply held religion one. Theocracy violates the Golden Rule--and hence violates religious values.

More significantly, I think there is a real problem with uncritically attaching the term "religious" to the values that Greta Christina takes to have been defeated on Tuesday. In other places I've argued that the religious right, to the extent that it relies on fear-mongering (and it isn't defined wholly by fear-mongering), puts itself outside the boundaries of any sort of religion or faith that is intellectually defensible, morally benign, and attuned to the transformative religious experiences that are the continuing wellspring of the human impulse to connect with the transcendent.

My own inclination, following the division I adopted from Plutarch in Is God a Delusion?, is to refer to the sort of fear-mongering that we saw among many far-right Republicans as superstitious fear-mongering. Religious faith professes to be about trust and love of God--and these things are not only different from but exclude anything that smacks of appeasement. If the divine is defined as a transcendent good worthy of our worship, as opposed to a powerful tyrannical force that demands our fawning subservience on pain of retaliatory strikes, then fear-mongering by its very nature is divorced from the divine. And if religion is about connecting with the divine, then "religious fear-mongering" becomes a nonsequitur.

Triumph over fear-mongering is, on this view of things, triumph over something that is by its very essence in opposition to the religious. And so, if secular values did triumph over fear-mongering this week, then those secular values have done religion a service. They have, if you will, cleared away one of those forces that prevents religion from blossoming in the world.

Cherry Picking Problems

Greta Christina thinks religious progressives have a cherry-picking problem. Since I launched this blog with a response to her infamous post on atheist anger, and since her cherry-picking essay is getting some attention, it seems fitting for me to say something about this so-called problem. And I seem to be uniquely situated to do so. After all, not only am I a self-professed religious progressive, but I also have experience picking cherries.

Back in college I had a summer job at a fruit orchard in Orondo, Washington. At the height of the cherry harvest, I was pulled away from trimming apple trees and spreading paraquat so that I could help pick cherries. And I must admit that I did have something of a cherry-picking problem.

The thing is, when you pick cherries at an orchard, you need to be fast. One of my co-workers, Rippin' Rod Ripley, had his name for a reason: He ripped those cherried from the tree so fast that he was actually able to earn enough for a few weeks of hotels, booze, and whores when the season was over (Rippin' Rod was a Vietnam vet who lived in a trailer on the orchard grounds during the fruit-picking season, but was homeless once the season was over and the money ran out).

You need to be fast--if not as fast as Rippin' Rod, then at least fast enough so that you aren't losing the orchard money. But you also need to be picky. Some cherries are split. You don't want too many of them in your bucket, or that whole batch becomes a lower grade. More serious are the cherries that have mold on them. If those go in the bucket, they can ruin the cherries around them.

And you don't just need to be fast and picky. You also need to be skillful. You see, when you pluck a cherry from the tree, it's very easy to leave the cherry stem behind. It's hooked onto the branch at least as strongly as it is to the fruit, so that if you just rip a bunch of cherries down off a branch into your bucket, chances are it'll be a bucket full of stemless cherries.

But consumers want their cherries with stems. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's so that they won't lose out on opportunities to be entertained (tittilated?) by those rare individuals (such as my wife) who can pop the stem in their mouth, work it around for a minute with their tongue, and spit it out again with a perfect little knot tied in it. Yes, my wife can do that. It's part of why I married her.

In any event, back to cherry-picking. While I could be fast, it was at the cost of selectivity and skill. And while I could be selective and skillful, it made me really slow. I never did get the knack that Rippin' Rod displayed out there among the trees, this ability to rip cherries from the trees at a frenetic pace and end up with buckets of pretty, unsplit, mold-free, stem-sporting cherries.

So, I confess to having a cherry-picking problem. But here's the thing: This problem has absolutely nothing to do with my religious progressivism. In fact, back when I was picking cherries at that orchard, I wasn't a religious progressive at all. That was the time in my life when I got sucked in by a more fundamentalist form of Christianity. I was recently "born again." I occasionally spoke in tongues and convinced myself I wasn't just making $#!t up. While at the orchard, I went with a friend most Sundays to a small Seventh Day Adventist church with a pastor whose mantra was "Just believe!"

Oh, wait.

Just glanced back at Greta Christina's post. Looks as if this "cherry picking" language is a metaphor. Whoowee,  am I embarrassed.

Well, taken in those terms her argument's a bit more interesting. But all kidding aside, I think my earlier conclusion still stands: I do have a cherry-picking problem. We all do. So does she. It's called "the problem of the criterion." The problem arises whenever we consider our judgments about our standards of judgment. By what standards do we decide that we have the right standards? How can we be critical of our own starting points without either implicitly abandoning those starting points in favor of different ones which we then use to critique the earlier starting points (but then we're still not critiquing the starting points we have now) or relying on our starting points and so begging the question?

But this problem isn't a problem with my religious progressivism. Instead, my progressivism is an attempt to pursue a solution to the problem--a Hegelian solution, if you will.

I think her framing of the problem as a special problem for religious progressives is rooted in the same misconceptions about the nature of progressive religion that Sam Harris falls prey to when he calls religious moderates "failed fundamentalists" who betray both faith and reason equally. I talk about Harris's mischaracterization in Chapter 1 of Is God a Delusion?, and much of what I say there is applicable to the cherry-picking challenge.

But here I want to pursue a slightly different line of response. Greta Christina, like Harris, is assuming a foundationalist epistemology, and in effect arguing that if you "cherry pick" the Bible you are rejecting the religious fundamentalist's foundational source of evidence--namely, Scripture--in favor of the standards you're using to distinguish the "bad" biblical cherries frome the keepers. And these standards, she argues, are either the same one's that serve as the epistemological foundations for naturalism, or they're standards that are clearly unreliable ("what's in my heart").

And so Greta Christina concludes, in effect, that if you're prepared to "pick cherries" you have in effect abandoned the foundations of faith (blind allegiance to The Holy Book) and so need different ones--and the only tenable ones are the foundations that scientists rely on. And as soon as you limit yourself to those foundations you pretty much have to throw out God and the Bible altogether. And so you should be an atheist rather than a religious progressive. (I just had to go back and correct an interesting typo at the start of this paragraph--I'd mistakenly written "Great Christian").

But this whole argument is premised not only on an implicit embrace of a foundationalist epistemology (as opposed, say, to a more Hegelian approach). It is also premised on an understanding of the Bible that's drawn from Biblical fundamentalism (in which Scripture serves the same foundational evidential role that, for example, sense experience serves for the empiricist) and on a sweeping dismissal of alternative foundations (moral intuition, mystical experience, "first principles of the intellect," etc.)--a dismissal that implicitly relies on an indiscriminate lumping together of all of these things into the same "what's-in-my-heart" subjective category that, while defensible if you assume the naturalist's view of what counts as epistemically foundational, is not defensible if you want to avoid begging the question about what can and cannot qualify as foundational. We need a way to decide among foundations that doesn't beg the question, which means we need to replace epistemic foundationalism with something more nuanced--like the Hegelian dialectical method I favor.

In fact, I think religious progressives in general have made just this kind of shift, even if they've never heard of Hegel. They have lost faith in foundationalism--or, more broadly, they've lost their confidence in the human capacity to "get it right" with respect to evidential foundations. Often, this loss of faith starts with the foundations posited by fundemantalist religious traditions--but their sketpicism extends further than that. Not that they reject the conclusions that scientists reach based on their foundations, but the lived experience of progressives suggests to them that what science can offer based on those foundations is far too limiting, that there is something deep and profound beneath the empirical surface that science explores. To rule this out in advance, to rely on an epistemology that makes any such "something more" eternally inaccessible should it prove to be there, seems as bad as the Biblical fundamentalist's insistence that the Bible offers unassailable foundations from which to build a system of beliefs and a way of life.

And as progressives look at their religious traditions, inherited stories, holy books, and oral teachings, they begin to see that viewing them according to a foundationalist lens is a very modern distortion of what is going on, a misconstrual of what the tradition had been up to until Cartesian Foundationalism got a hold of it. What they see in, say, the Bible, is not some singular "source of evidence" a la sense perception, but an evolving worldview, a holistic way-of-seeing the totality of human experience which, while it presupposes standards for evaluating beliefs, is constantly refining those very standards and methods in the light of lived engagement with the world.

The picture of God in the Bible is not univocal, but evolving. The ethical notions are not univocal, but evolving. There is a direction, a trajectory, that suggests viewing the Bible as a record of the growth and development of a way of seeing a reality that's more mystery than clarity, but which impresses itself upon us and transforms us no matter what standards of evidence we happen to be working with. No matter how inadequate out interpetive scheme, the reality that lies behind experience has a way of breaking through, producing cracks and fissures, exposing inadequacies.

And the religious progressive sees promise in the process. The progressive sees a trajectory that this evolution is taking, and so steps with a hopeful spirit into the evolving tradition to be part of its further evolution in the light of lived human experience. And in taking on that tradition and modifying it in the light of experience, the proper metaphor is not "picking cherries" at all. A better metaphor--derived from my recent history--would be road-testing a new bicycle.

You take it out on the road and, in the light of what you experience, you adjust the seat a little bit upward. You move the handlebars a bit. You decide that the saddle isn't right for your butt, and so you buy a different one. The tires are perhaps the wrong kind for the gravelly roads on which you have to ride--making you too susceptible to a flat. So you get "armadillo" tires. When you start out the process, you don't even really know what you should be looking for. Does the disturbing numbness in your unmentionables mean you've got the wrong seat, or just that your body needs to adjust to riding? What about the ache in your lower back? The very standards by which you decide what changes to make are part of what you discover over the course of road-testing the bike.

If someone watching this process were to say, "Hey, you're cherry-picking!", you'd probably scratch you're head in befuddlement. If they went on to say that you were just being a hypocrite for not trading in the bike for a car--well, you get the idea. The "picking cherries" metaphor presupposes that we have in place a set of foundational standards of judgment (freedom from splits and mold, etc.) that are clearly distinct from the cherries being selected on the basis of those standards. But when we're talking about a holistic worldview, there is no such ready dichotomy between the "correct" standards of judgment and that which is being judged. The road-testing metaphor is far more helpful here.

And you need a vehicle in order to do a road test. It's not something you can dispense with. Even Greta Christina has her metaphorical "vehicle"--her metaphysical naturalism with the evidentiary standards it implies (and the ones it rejects). While there might be a time and a place for telling someone that their bike is a piece of crap and they should consider a new one rather than keep tuning up and replacing parts on the one they have, the mere fact that someone is pursuing such refinements isn't evidence that the bike should be thrown out. The person who tunes up their bike is not thereby a hypocrite. And just because a bike needs more frequent maintenance than a minivan doesn't mean that people should give up riding bicycles. 

I could develop these ideas more precisely in terms of the Hegelian dialectic and its implications. But I already intend to offer a more rigorous treatment of this Hegelian approach as it relates to religion and science, and since I'm getting ready to leave for a conference in the morning, I'll leave matters at that for now. If you want more detail, you can always check out the online video of my University of Tulsa lecture, in which I respond to this species of challege if not to Greta Christina's specific formulation of it. Or you can look at this post, in which I describe the progressive approach to the Bible.