While I was in Iraq, I met a good friend, Jimmy, who was the first openly agnostic person I ever met. The discussions we would have were fantastic; his doubt was so enlightening to me, as apathetic as I was at the time. The conversations we would have sitting on top of our headquarters building burning down cigarettes were undoubtedly what began to open up my mind, so irreverently and so intuitively. The seeds that were planted during those chats undoubtedly led to my later ability to accept that religion was worth questioning, that it was fallible, that it wasn’t beyond reproach, and that, in total, it’s a harmful way of approaching the world and one another. From those rooftop discussions it was a cascade, one that only accelerated.
When I left the Marine Corps, in my first semester at community college, I began studying Western Civilization. My fantastic professor went to great lengths examining Greek humanism and the way in which the Greeks turned the tide of human thought. He explained how a cultural belief emerged that human beings could do good on their own, that there was inherent value and worth in being human. This was before Christ, and the Greeks progressed dramatically in philosophy and science, something that hadn’t been fully taught in my public school education. To that point, it seemed to me and to most people I knew that everything happened after the year zero, with Christianity being central to everything. The Greeks were religious to an extent, of course, but it was soap opera religion of very human deities. Greek humanism was paramount, with Greek rationality having an incredible cultural impact.
I began to realize that people simply don’t need religion or faith-addled thinking; 2,500 years ago people had created a fantastic, amazing society by relying on humanity and our abilities alone, before the onset of the dominance of religious and supernatural thinking during much of the Middle Ages, before the Dark Ages, when monotheism ran rampant. I began to believe that that idea — that humanity is capable of living prosperous, peaceful lives — is worth fighting for on its own. That concept is what turned me. I felt as though I had a clear modern distinction at that time as well, a distinction between objective rationality and the rampant faith and dogmatism of the Bush administration.
At that time I began reading two blogs, Throw Away Your TV and One Good Move. They saved me as I was falling out of any vague religious notions that I still had. They gave me ideas to cling to as I was finding my feet. I began feeling impassioned by both seeing how awful religion can be, how it does poison everything, and how much better the alternatives are. It was like an ignition — I can’t repeat that word enough. The dogmatic, supernatural, and faith-based thinking that religion encourages is bad, a combination of the worst of human cognition and psychology, both personal and social. With the information I had access to on the internet, the threat and the solutions became much clearer. I almost couldn’t help but have an activist’s view. I examined both sides of the religious argument and simply had to do something.
Losing my religion was never all that difficult personally though, I’m sure in part because my family was never really religious. In fact, it was invigorating to realize that secularism, rationality, and the scientific method and honest, doubtful philosophy are amazing ways to examine the world. It’s much more fun to appreciate science, appreciate philosophy, appreciate humanism, as haphazard as they sometimes are. Everything looked brighter to me after I began to adopt this mentality. It felt good to be intellectually honest. I love the spirit of inquisitiveness, philosophical argumentativeness, examining big questions without appeals to God, without retreating to the easy answer.
I’ve become an activist for secularism, and from my perspective, I think the movement at large needs to reconsider its tactics. I’ve learned a lot recently about the research that’s been done by Dan Kahan of Yale about the tactics of persuasion. I think it’s naïve to think that only rationality and the presentation of evidence wins people over. Simply making good arguments doesn’t change minds, our debt to the Greeks and their rationality be damned. If you want to change someone’s mind, you have to lead with emotion. Most people don’t really care whether what they believe is true or false. They care if it works for them, if it makes them feel good, if it is makes their worldview cohesive. People only care about the truthfulness of their beliefs if they’re suddenly hurt by the falsity of their convictions. If something is true but it hurts, people will deny that it’s true. If, for example, you’re talking about the problems of faith, in order to persuade people of your thinking, you should lead with examples of when faith-based thinking has led to suffering, human stories that trigger people’s empathy. Propagandists lead with emotion but never bother to back up their arguments with facts. They can’t. They lie. Secular activists can have both emotion and honesty, emotion and fact. We need to make sure to have our evidence and facts, but we also need to remember the importance of emotion when making our point. I don’t think that’s manipulation, I think it’s just being tactful, being honest in itself. On their own, Enlightenment principles often don’t work because people are rarely truly rational — instead people are always rationalizing. There’s no sin in recognizing that, no shame in admitting it. We’re apes!
This approach takes more effort. It takes more thinking. It takes being more respectful. It’s more like playing a symphony than it is like swinging a baseball bat. Often, secularists are lazy in arguments, especially during conversations with those on the other side who are so often blissfully wrong and lazy themselves. However, our side has to humbly understand a simple fact: to be religious and to rely on faith and dogma is just as human as being rational, being free thinking, and demanding evidence. Only one methodology, though, has proven itself to lead to correct, more productive, more predictive answers. Only one has proven itself as a good way, a successful way, of navigating the world truthfully.
Many in the secular movement don’t want to accept that we rationalists and doubters are a severe minority and that if we want to gain traction in our society, we must act with that understanding. We’re not going to get anything done unless we are wise and can build coalitions with the majority. We like to say that we’re 15-20% of the population. The hell we are. 2% to 3% of people in America will say that they’re an atheist, an agnostic, a skeptic, that they don’t believe in God. The rest of that 16%-17% nonreligious slice are deistic and New Age-y, they’re just not traditionally religious. That’s a good start, but not entirely “our side” as we like to believe.
While we have our problems, I do think that the secular movement is effective in bringing out the nonreligious, making a community, making people feel welcomed. People who are trapped in a religious family, especially high schoolers who feel trapped, are feeling better about coming out. They’re speaking up at their schools. Yet still, I think, in terms of affecting culture writ-large, the secular movement is not nearly as effective as we should be, could be, or think we are. Not even close.
Part of our collective problem is our strategy. Not long ago, I remember “Christian historian” David Barton was on The Daily Show, railing against the separation of church and state as he’s so wont to do. He began talking about how atheists are colluding to ensure that there is no faith in American public life — a claim beyond false, of course. Yet Stewart, without being taken aback or missing a beat, suggested that some people are just going to be jerks. This was such a great example of where Stewart, completely on our side regarding the separation of church and state, could not use effective language to argue against David Barton on this one issue — an issue about which Barton is both frankly wrong and clearly manipulative. The only word that Stewart needed to use was “neutrality.” Enforcing the separation of church and state by getting rid of the National Day of Prayer, by getting rid of school-sponsored prayer, is about neutrality. Simple. This is one word that works for damn near all of our issues and, if understood, it should — it will — appeal to everyone. Because we can’t get our message out effectively, we movement secularist-types are too often viewed as being as extreme as the religious right. The majority of Americans who are liberal and religious are going to make that false equivalency because we can’t control our message and our language. We’re marginalizing ourselves more than anyone else can, Fox News included.