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.

From the Archives: Evidentialism and Theistic Belief

Because I start talking about evidentialism in my philosophy of religion class today, I wanted to reprise the following post which I composed a year ago, and which stimulated quite a lot of discussion at the time. Also, I think it has bearing on an issue I want to blog about in the near future, having to do with the fundamentalist tendency to treat the Bible as "evidentially basic" in the way that most of us treat our senses as evidentially basic--and why I think that the most radical cases of "deconversion" followed by "evangelical" atheism often begin from such a fundamentalist starting point. And so, without further ado, here it is again: "Evidentialism and Theistic Belief":

One of the most important grounds for challenging religious belief, especially theism, has involved invoking “evidentialism,” that is, the doctrine that one ought never to believe any claim, C, on insufficient evidence. Taken together with the premise that there isn’t sufficient evidence in support of the claim that God exists (a premise denied by not a few theists—but that’s another matter), evidentialism entails that belief in God is illegitimate.

Probably the clearest and most uncompromising articulation of this doctrine was offered by William Kingdon Clifford in the 19th Century. In his essay “The Ethics of Belief,” Clifford argued that all of our beliefs have the potential to affect what we do in ways that, should our beliefs prove false, can be very harmful. As such, belief is not a private affair but a public one, and we have a solemn responsibility to extend belief only to “truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning.” Clifford thus concludes that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

Formulated in such strident and sweeping terms, evidentialism does not appear to be a tenable doctrine. Among other things it would mean that it’s wrong for children to take anything on trust from teachers or parents—and this seems a recipe for the impossibility of children ever arriving at a state in which they could actually engage in the sort of investigative activity that Clifford demands.

Furthermore, this kind of sweeping evidentialism falls prey to the following problem: In order to operate in accord with the evidentialist principle, we need to know what counts as evidence. But how do we arrive at the correct belief concerning what counts as evidence? What evidence do we use?

This is a variant on the problem of the criterion—basically, the problem of ascertaining in a non-circular way what criteria we should use for deciding what to believe. The problem can be summarized as follows: for any proposed criteria for deciding what to believe, one might ask, “Why should I believe that these criteria are the ones I should use?” If we answer this question by invoking the criteria in question, then we have begged the question. If we answer this question by appeal to different criteria, we can then ask the same question about them.

The difficulty that this poses for evidentialism can be emphasized with an example. Assume that “C” is the following proposition: “My senses are reliable.” A sweeping evidentialism would insist that we not believe this on insufficient evidence. But what is to count as sufficient evidence? How could we test the reliability of our senses without appeal to the very senses we are not supposed to trust until their reliability has been established?

This, of course, is the path to a radical skepticism which precludes having any beliefs at all. But, of course, it is impossible to actually live a human life—to make choices, to act on those choices, to form and maintain relationships, to work, etc.,—without having any beliefs. While Clifford rightly notes that our beliefs imply certain actions, it is equally true that our actions presuppose beliefs. Whenever we act, we act as if something is the case. Radical skepticism is therefore pragmatically impossible for anyone who actually gets on with the business of living (as Hume famously noted).

And in this business of living, isn’t it the case that we trust our senses unless and until we have good reason not to—unless they generate inconsistencies of various sorts? More broadly, doesn’t the business of living routinely require that we trust a range of propositions unless and until there is evidence that calls that trust into question? To put this point a bit more formally, the business of living requires that, with respect to some propositions, our “default” position should be belief (that is, we should operate as if the proposition is true unless we are confronted with reasons not to). Evidentialism, by contrast, insists that the default position for every claim C is disbelief or agnosticism. Put bluntly, then, one cannot be a faithful evidentialist of this sweeping sort and still lead a human life.

But a defender of evidentialism could seek to salvage the doctrine by making some distinctions. For example, there is a difference between what we might call “actual belief”—where you are convinced that something is the case, that you've got the truth—and “presumptive belief”—where you are merely operating as if something is the case. The criminal justice system in the US (and elsewhere) operates on the presumption of innocence. That is, if there is insufficient evidence to establishing guilt, the accused is treated as innocent. But everyone has heard stories of juries that quietly harbor the view that the accused is “guilty as hell” while delivering an acquittal. The jurors don’t “actually” believe that the accused is innocent in such cases, but they operate in accord with the presumption of innocence (at least in their role as jurors--they might in their private lives take steps to make sure that their children are kept away from the accused).

A modified evidentialist could hold that what living a human life requires is not that we actually believe that our senses are reliable, but that we presumptively do so. We operate as if our senses are reliable unless and until we encounter sufficient reason not to. And so the modified evidentialist could say that one ought never to actually believe any claim C on insufficient evidence, but that one should be free to presumptively believe a range of things, within certain limits, so long as there is no evidence against these things.

Several issues arise, however, in relation to this modified principle. First, there is the question of the limits within which presumptive belief (if not actual belief) is taken to be legitimate. Here there will be room, I think, for considerable dispute—especially in connections with “meaning bestowing beliefs about the transcendent” (religious beliefs). The evidentialist challenge to theism, then, will have to take a position in this disputed territory, making a case for the view that the class of propositions for which presumptive belief is appropriate excludes belief in God. But if this is what the evidentialist wants to argue, there are a number of important opposing arguments. Since I will be covering a number of these arguments later in my philosophy of religion class (when discussion pragmatic arguments for religious belief), I won't take up this version of evidentialism in detail at this time.

But there is another way of construing the evidentialist challenge to theism that I do want to explore a bit further here. Perhaps the evidentialist challenge to theism is merely targeting “actual” belief, while accepting the legitimacy of presumptive belief. In this case different concerns arise. First of all, as a challenge to theism it is radically attenuated insofar as it leaves space for the epistemic legitimacy of people organizing their lives around a presumptive belief in God.

But second, there is the question of the extent to which our actual beliefs are in our control. When it comes to the reliability of my senses, for example, I don’t just presumptively believe their deliverances. I really believe them. Of course, I could say something along the following lines: “Although living a human life requires that I presumptively believe the deliverances of my senses, I affirm that I have no compelling reason to actually believe them.” But saying this doesn’t make it the case that my belief here is merely presumptive. It remains an actual belief. Converting it into a merely presumptive belief seems beyond my power.

What is not beyond my power is lifting up, alongside this actual belief in the reliability of my senses, the judgment that such actual belief exceeds what is warranted by the evidence and as well as what is demanded by the pragmatic requirements of living (which only requires presumptive belief). Pairing this judgment with my actual belief might produce a kind of "functional equivalent" of mere presumptive belief.

But in that case, we would still need to ask, “On what basis should I believe this judgment about my actual belief in the reliability of my senses?” Is this belief about my belief itself an actual one or is it a presumptive one? And if it is a presumptive one, does that mean we are to act as if our belief is merely presumptive even though it is actual? This will be possible only if there is a discernible pragmatic difference between actually believing C and presumptively believing C. In other words, the behavior you exhibit when you behave as if C is true is different from the behavior you exhibit when by actually believe C is true. But in that case, in what sense are you behaving as if C is true when you presumptively believe C?

Assuming these difficulties can be overcome (and I think they can), acknowledging that what we actually believe is often out of our control forces evidentialists to truncate their evidentialist principle even further. They can no longer say that, on insufficient evidence, presumptive belief can be okay but actual belief never is. Rather, they'll have to say that actual belief can be okay too, so long as we pair that belief with a clear recognition of our fallibility with respect to it—a recognition which serves to generate the functional equivalent of mere presumptive belief.

But now, an evidentialist challenge to theism that makes room for presumptive belief will have to make room for actual belief as well—so long as that belief is paired with fallibilism. In other words, if we follow this path, we no longer have an evidentialist opposition to theism at all. What we have is a challenge to fanaticism.

I suspect very many theists would be very happy to accept that conclusion--because it isn't really a case against theism at all, but rather a case for favoring moderate forms of theism over fanatical ones. And what this shows, I think, is that in order really to have an evidentialist case against theism, the evidentialist would need to argue that presumptive belief in God is illegitimate—in other words, that it is wrong to live as if there is a God.

I think an argument of this sort can be made with respect to what I call (in my book, following Plutarch) “the god of superstition.” And there may be other specific forms of theism for which a case can be made that presumptive belief is illegitimate. But I think it would be very difficult indeed to make this case with respect to every species of theism--for example, the species which conceives of God as that whose existence would (borrowing language from my book) fulfill "the ethico-religious hope" (the hope that, in some fundamental way, reality is on the side of the good).