Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  The fact is that, if one is committed to being a Jew, then he believes that on the most serious questions pertaining to man’s survival—understanding the past, imagining the future, discovering the relation between God and humanity—that he is right and the Christians are wrong. As a believing Jew, he must certainly view the breakdown in this century of moral order and the erosion of spiritual values in terms of the inadequacy of Christianity as a sustaining force for the good. However, who would care to say such things to his neighbor?1

  This statement could be paraphrased and applied to people of many religions, as well as to atheists and secular humanists. As an atheist, I do view religion in general as an inadequate force for sustaining the good, and some religions as forces for promoting outright evil. However, who would care to say such things to her neighbor?

  One may concede the tone-deafness to painful history that characterizes much American discourse about faith, but it cannot be emphasized enough that there have, from time immemorial, been much, much worse ways to deal with the fact that people do—for whatever reasons and with varying degrees of conviction—change their religious beliefs and practices. Since these worse ways—ranging from censorship to mass murder—have hardly disappeared from the world, it is important to consider the positive as well as the negative aspects of the simplistic, comical, yet weirdly reassuring American greeting-card message that a conversion is an occasion for congratulations.

  First, this is a country in which fewer than one-third of Americans agree with the proposition that has always been the rationale for religious violence and forced conversion: “My religion is the one, true faith leading to eternal life.”2 An American may secretly consider her religion the best path to salvation without considering it the only path.

  Religious dogmas, as well as religious prejudices, that were taken for granted a century ago have lost their power and social respectability for huge numbers of Americans. Of the overwhelming majority who identify as Christians, more than two-thirds believe that Judaism can also lead to eternal life—even though eternal life is a concept central to Christian, not Jewish, thought. Americans who believe this most strongly are Catholics, of whom 77 percent say Jews can attain eternal life.3 (Remembering the daily prayers for the conversion of the Jews in my parochial school, I could hardly believe this statistic when the ever-reliable Pew Research Center reported it in 2008.) A majority of Americans believe that even Muslims—and Islam was the least popular religion in the Pew poll—can go to heaven. And 56 percent of American Muslims (compared with only 18 percent of Muslims worldwide) believe that people of other religions can go to heaven.4

  Atheists are the only group considered unfit for eternal life by a majority of Americans. Only 42 percent of all Americans—and just one out of four white evangelical Protestants—believe that atheists can hope for eternal bliss in heaven if they lead good lives on earth. This belief is of no practical importance to atheists, who of course do not believe in an afterlife, but it is a measure of the social disapproval that American atheists encounter in this life if they admit that they do not believe in any god. That the word “atheist” has a special pejorative connotation in the United States is apparent in another finding of the Pew survey. Although a majority of Americans think that heaven will be free of atheists, 56 percent (and two-thirds of Catholics) believe that “people with no religious faith” can merit eternal life.5 If you want your fellow Americans to approve, you are much better off saying that you are “spiritual but not religious” (a phrase I have never heard in Europe) or even that you are “nothing in particular”—as a vast majority of those unaffiliated with any church told the Pew researchers. Nevertheless, a survey conducted by the Pew researchers in 2014 indicated that the proportion of Americans who are willing to call themselves atheists or agnostics, while still small in absolute numbers, has increased significantly in just seven years. Those identifying themselves as atheists jumped from 1.6 percent in a survey published in 2007 to 3.1 percent in 2014. During the same period, those who call themselves Christians declined by more than eight percentage points—with most of the losses among Roman Catholics and mainline Protestant denominations.6

  There is a paradoxical relationship between the unique (in the West) American antagonism to atheism and the unique American enthusiasm for religious conversion. If you believe, as so many Americans do, that there can be no morality without religion—but you also believe, as so many Americans do, in freedom of religious choice—it follows that almost any religion is better than none, and even “nothing in particular” is better than affirmative, unashamed atheism. Atheists believe in ethics grounded in the natural world, whereas all forms of Christianity (still and for the foreseeable future the dominant religion of the West, however spottily practiced it may be) ground their ethical imperatives in the expectation of supernatural rewards or punishments.

  •

  Statistics bear out the exceptionalism of American attitudes toward conversion. Approximately half of Americans report that they have changed religions at least once in their adult lives, and many have done so more than once.7 According to a study of religious patterns in forty countries, the conversion rate in the United States is more than five times that in Norway and nearly six times that in Italy. There are similar disparities between the United States and nearly every other developed country studied in both Europe and Asia.8 (A notable exception is Canada—the only country with a higher conversion rate than the United States. Immigration, with its tendency to lead to mixed marriages that also foster conversions over generations, has played as critical a role in Canadian society as it has in the United States.)*1

  Individual religious conversions take place in every democratic society for a wide variety of reasons, but they are woven into the fabric of American society in a way considered odd in most other prosperous parts of the modern world. I would be willing to bet that no one among former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s English friends sent him a “congratulations on your conversion” card when, in 2007, he switched from Anglicanism to Catholicism (although Pope Benedict XVI, whom Blair had met while both were in office, might well have privately communicated sentiments along those lines). Aggressive professions of religious devotion, as embodied in public recognition and celebration of conversion, are so very…well, American.

  The low rate of European conversion is attributable not to deep faith in traditional religion but, as several recent popes have noted, to the displacement of religion by secularism. That one no longer attends the church in which one was baptized—whether the default religion is Protestantism in Northern Europe or Catholicism in Southern Europe—is not considered a reason to begin searching for another faith. Many European atheists get married in church to please the older members of their families but then have nothing more to do with religion. “My wife and I were married by a priest to please our mothers,” a Florentine friend told me, “but we drew the line when it came to religious education for our children. We don’t believe in any of that, and we don’t want our children to be taught by priests and nuns.”

  In most of the historically Christian countries of Europe, it is no liability if a political candidate is known to be an atheist, and voters would find it perfectly normal if their nation’s president or prime minister had never been known to attend a church service in his or her adult life. What Europeans would find strange is a religious odyssey like that of Nevada’s Democratic Senator Harry Reid, a lukewarm Protestant who married a Jew and, after their wedding, converted to Mormonism along with his wife. French voters may tolerate an unmarried president who leaves his longtime mistress for another mistress, but they might not be as accepting of a once-Catholic prime minister who, having married a Jew, decided that he and his new wife would take the “mixed” out of mixed marriage by becoming Huguenots. Or Mormons, for that matter.*2

  The parents of Reid’s future wife, Landra Gould, had wanted their daughter to marry a Jew and would tear up Harry’s letters before she coul
d read them. Reid even knocked his future father-in-law to the ground in his front yard as they battled over the prospective mixed marriage. (It is tempting to see this as a bad omen for a man who eventually became a leader in the Senate, where literally punching out your opponent is a poor way to make a political deal.) In an interview in The New Yorker, Mrs. Reid said, “Before we got married, we had talked about it and decided we were not going to let religion divide us after what we’d been through. If we were going to find something, we were going to find it together.”9 The Reids’ assumption that they must “find something” is what makes this a quintessentially American story, even though the religion they found had almost nothing to do with either of their backgrounds.*3 A cynic might suspect that, even as a young man, Reid had political ambitions, and the religion to which he and his wife converted just happened to be the faith of the most powerful voting bloc in the state of Nevada. But Reid said he was most impressed by Mormonism’s emphasis on family. (Apparently, Judaism did not take enough of an interest in family for the Reids—especially since Jews do not constitute a large proportion of voters in Nevada.) In any event, Landra’s parents, like so many Americans who would have preferred that their children marry within their faith, eventually reconciled with the couple. Until his wife’s parents died, Reid said, his family observed the Jewish holidays. The Mormon Reids had a traditional Jewish mezuzah at the entrance to their longtime house in the serendipitously named town of Searchlight, Nevada (they have since moved to Las Vegas).

  In the United States, the Reids’ decision to switch to a third religion after a mixed marriage is actually the choice of a surprisingly robust minority. The authors of American Grace suggest that 15 percent of religious switches involve mixed couples who choose a third faith rather than pick a religion already observed by one of the partners.10 That this practice should be so prevalent strikes me as much more peculiar than the high rate of conversion in the United States. I cannot imagine, for instance, that I might marry an observant Jew and that we would decide to become Unitarians as a compromise between my atheism and his Judaism. I know a Unitarian couple who made just such a decision, but the husband was not a devout Jew; he celebrated Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur (though he almost never got through the entire fast day without a forbidden snack) and rarely observed Shabbos. And the woman was not seriously committed to her atheism; she was content to avail herself of the “spiritual but not religious” escape hatch. A couple’s selection of a third religion may have little to do with spiritual conviction, but it fits perfectly into the “religious marketplace” model. He wants to live in an apartment in Manhattan, she wants to live in the suburbs, so they settle on a townhouse in Brooklyn (before townhouses in Brooklyn moved into New York City’s fashionable and unaffordable real-estate stratosphere).

  The option of picking a third religion may seem bizarre to anyone who takes either religion or atheism seriously, but it probably makes more sense than a choice made by some naïve members of my generation, who actually thought they could raise children in two faiths. The idea was that children could hear Jesus hailed as the Messiah by a Christian priest, and a rabbi would tell them the Messiah had not yet arrived. Then, when the time came, the lucky kids (Free to Be…You and Me) could simply choose their own religion, after they had sorted out the dual messages.*4 That seems to be what happened after Muhammad Ali’s daughter married a Jew and their son chose to become bar mitzvah. The adoption (and adaptation) of a third religion and the decision to raise children in two religions have one thing in common: they regard faith as a commodity.

  Thus, the American tolerance for politicians who change faiths for whatever reason is perfectly consistent with the high incidence of conversion among the population as a whole. Several years ago, an essay by the perceptive religion writer Mark Oppenheimer appeared in the New Republic with the interrogatory headline “Why Are American Politicians Always Switching Religions?” The answer—which the headline writer obviously did not know—is that politicians don’t switch religions more frequently than other Americans, and that explains why conversion is rarely a negative and often a positive factor in campaigns. Just as voters no longer penalize candidates for being divorced (if the divorces have been conducted with a modicum of discretion), they are not about to penalize a candidate for religious behavior similar to their own.*5

  Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is on his third wife and his third religion, although he is (probably) never going to run for office again. Why would he, when he is now aboard the pundit-consultant gravy train reserved for ex-politicians who can still speak fluently and show up on time in one television studio after another? Gingrich was baptized a Lutheran and later became a Southern Baptist (an advantageous, whether adventitious or not, step for a politician from Georgia). His religious odyssey ended (probably) in 2009, when, married to a new Catholic wife, he converted to Catholicism. In an essay for the National Catholic Register, Gingrich explained that, although he was a Baptist when he met Callista Bisek, a congressional staffer, he attended Mass with her every Sunday and listened to her sing in the choir of the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. (The essay does not tell readers whether Gingrich was attending Mass with Callista while they were having the six-year affair that ended his second marriage.) “Throughout our travels,” he recalled, “whether Callista and I were in Costa Rica or Africa, she was adamant about finding a local Mass on Sunday. Listening to ‘Amazing Grace’ being sung in Chinese at Mass in Beijing was a beautiful experience, and worshipping with believers across the world opened my eyes to the diversity and richness of the Catholic Church.”11 (The song “Amazing Grace” cannot have been new to Gingrich, since the lyrics were written by an evangelically inclined Anglican minister—a reformed slave trader—around 1772. It is one of the most famous Protestant hymns in history and could never have been sung at a Catholic Mass before the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, when restrictions on the inclusion of “Protestant” music at Catholic services were eased. But it would certainly have been sung in the Lutheran and Baptist churches of Gingrich’s previous incarnations.)

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  The doubling of “nones”—Americans unaffiliated with any religion—since the turn of the millennium deserves special attention, because it is likely to have a significant impact on conversions and mixed marriages. Two-thirds of Americans who were raised as Catholic or Protestant but now say they are religiously unaffiliated, have changed faiths more than once in their adult lives.12 Exactly how many of these leaps of faith are thoroughly considered intellectual and spiritual shifts—comparable, say, to the conversions of G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis—is unclear. Those who converted to another faith, as opposed to becoming unaffiliated and more secular, were much more likely to say that their spiritual needs were not being met in their former religion. Thus, the changing American religious landscape of the twenty-first century combines a lapse into secularism more characteristic of European countries with a search for another religion that is uniquely American. The Pew pollsters found that the “unaffiliated” do not necessarily “lack spiritual beliefs or religious behaviors; in fact, roughly four-in-ten unaffiliated individuals say religion is at least somewhat important in their lives.”13

  I am skeptical about the validity of this conclusion—though I do not doubt that it is based on what the Pew researchers were told. The main caveat about the purported importance of religion to “nones” is the existence of strong pro-religious pressure in American society. Who but a committed atheist is going to tell a pollster, “Not only do I not belong to a church, but I have no intention of ever joining”? After I wrote an op-ed column for The New York Times, urging atheists to come out and not hide behind the “spiritual but not religious” label, I received a sobering letter from a mother in a suburb of Dallas.14 She said, “I am an atheist, but I pretend to be a Unitarian because I’m afraid my kids would be bullied at school if I were known as an atheist. So we sa
y we’re Unitarians because it’s closer to what my husband and I really believe than most religions. Would you be willing to sacrifice your kids for your convictions?” This is an excellent question—one I am ashamed to admit that I never considered as a resident of New York City, where atheism is not stigmatized as it is in many parts of the country.

  Among the 22.8 percent of Americans who call themselves unaffiliated in the 2014 Pew poll, 15.8 percent describe themselves as “nothing in particular,” with the rest split between atheists and agnostics.15 The popularity of the “nothing in particular” category is another reason for doubting that religion has any serious significance to those who do not practice their faith in a visible (to themselves as well as others) way. Some of the unaffiliated could also be described as confused or flat-out lazy. There are, without question, many Americans who want to keep some religious option open—in theory—without assuming the practical duties of anyone who actually belongs to a church, temple, or mosque. This insurance-policy religiosity hardly qualifies as the kind of faith that is even somewhat important in a person’s life, although it may be more comfortable for the “nones” to keep up the pretense for a pollster. There may also be sincere people who place themselves in the “spiritual but not religious” category because to them, spirituality means concern for truths that transcend the material and the physical. By this definition, everyone—from atheists to religious fundamentalists—is spiritual. One might as well call oneself “philosophical, but not religious.”

  That the United States remains an overwhelmingly Christian society—albeit one composed of many different types of Christians—is often forgotten in the nation’s larger, more cosmopolitan cities. Even now, more than 70 percent of Americans still identify themselves as Christians (either Protestant or Catholic).16 Jews make up only about 1.9 percent of the total American population, Muslims 0.9 percent, Buddhists and Hindus 0.7 percent apiece.*6 The overestimation of America as a society in which pluralism nearly always promotes tolerance—and where we all get along if only we believe in God—has fueled many of the religion-centered culture wars of the past thirty years. We all get along until some public issue like abortion or assisted suicide, which reveals deep fault lines between and within religions, comes up for a vote.