Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  Nor do religious identification statistics reveal what it means to individuals when they describe themselves as Protestants, Catholics, Jews, or members of any other religion. This is particularly true of Jews, many of whom consider themselves Jews—and are considered Jews by others—regardless of whether they practice any form of religious Judaism. “Catholic,” too, no longer has an agreed-upon meaning. Are you a Catholic who believes and follows the teachings of the church hierarchy forbidding contraception, abortion, and remarriage after divorce, or do you, like the majority of American Catholics, disagree with these precepts and live by your own conscience?

  As for “Protestants,” are you a Protestant who goes to church every Sunday or once a year? If you are an evangelical Protestant, are you theologically and politically liberal or conservative? Evangelicalism is often thought to be synonymous with political conservatism—the mass media are particularly prone to this generalization—but there are liberal as well as conservative evangelicals. Former President Jimmy Carter, for instance, is a liberal evangelical Baptist who left the Southern Baptist Convention because he disagrees with its stance on many social and economic issues—but especially on equality for women. Carter is still a Baptist; he is simply a different kind of Baptist from many Southerners of his generation. Even when people stay within the boundaries of the religion in which they were brought up, they may undergo changes of belief as profound as those associated with any traditional conversion.

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  A new and critical factor has entered the American religious mix—growing public ignorance, particularly among the young, about religion itself. Since the beginning of the 1990s, studies have shown that a majority of American adults—in what is supposedly the most religious nation in the developed world—do not know such basic facts of religious history as the names of the four Gospels.17 This decline in what the historian Stephen Prothero calls religious literacy is part of the more general decline in education (and therefore knowledge) in the humanities, and it has serious cultural implications that extend beyond religion. The answers to a 2010 Pew poll about religious knowledge make one wonder not about the teaching of religion in homes and church schools but about the teaching of history in public elementary and secondary schools over the past fifty years. Only 46 percent of Americans know that Martin Luther began the Reformation, and just 45 percent know that the Jewish Sabbath begins on Friday. Fewer than a third know that the Puritan Jonathan Edwards, author of that immortal sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” was a key figure in the First Great Awakening. (Presumably, most of these people do not know what the First Great Awakening was.) How do you teach world history in high school without mentioning Luther? Or the history of colonial America without talking about fire-and-brimstone Puritans? Many Americans know as little about their own religions as they do about other people’s religions. Roughly 45 percent of Catholics, for example, do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist have been transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus (a dogma that was involved in many conversions to Protestantism during the Reformation and, like the Trinity, was a cause of great bloodshed). Information about religions other than Christianity and Judaism is in even scarcer supply, with the exception of obvious references to religion-related political developments that appear regularly in the news. Slightly more than half of Americans can name the Quran as Islam’s holy book, and 62 percent have somehow managed to learn that Hinduism is the majority religion in India. Fewer than half, however, know that the Dalai Lama is a Buddhist.18

  Self-identified atheists and agnostics scored highest on the test, followed by Jews, Mormons, white evangelical Protestants, white Catholics, and white “mainline” Protestants. The three lowest-scoring groups were Hispanic Catholics, black Protestants, and those who identified themselves as “nothing in particular.” For anyone interested in the future of religious belief or nonbelief (or both), it is significant that, among the unaffiliated, those who think of themselves as “nothing in particular” are so ignorant about all religion. That the largest group among the unaffiliated knows less about religion than most other Americans—and much less than committed atheists—does not lend support to the wishful thinking of some secularists that the growth of the “nones” is likely to produce a more coherent and socially powerful secular movement in the United States. Atheism, because of its strong pejorative connotation in the United States, cannot easily be accepted by Americans unless they have educated themselves about the history of both belief and doubt. Until recently, most atheists grew up in nonatheist homes, so the starting point for their journey was some form of religious education. Adult atheists over age forty today are likely to have read both the Bible and Thomas Paine (which was also true of freethinkers in the nineteenth century). But those content to be and think of themselves as “nones” are unlikely to have read even the most basic works about either religion or atheism. What cannot be foretold from these studies is whether children who have been raised by atheist parents—there will be many more in twenty years—will have as much religious knowledge as older, self-educated atheists do today.

  One reason I place so much emphasis on the relatively high level of religious knowledge among American atheists is that the findings contradict the contention of many anti-secularist scholars and theologians that religious ignorance is the real driver of secularism in Europe. The French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger, for example, has described the secularism of once-Christian Europe as a form of cultural amnesia rather than as an intellectual choice—the product of a broken chain of memory rather than of doubt about the truth of traditional religion. If that were true, atheists ought to know less, not more, about traditional religions than the religious. I have no doubt that Europeans, like Americans, are more ignorant about religion and the history of Western civilization today than they were even a decade or two ago (although the religion polls offer more data on the United States). But committed atheism—in the United States and nations where atheism is more acceptable than it is here—develops more frequently as the result of extensive rather than deficient religious education.

  It is often seen as a paradox that Americans, who are much more religious than Europeans if religious commitment is measured by formally expressed belief in a traditional God, eternal life, and miracles, know so little about the religions that most claim to practice. I am not so certain that there is an inherent contradiction between a high level of faith and ignorance about the teachings and history of that faith. It may even be easier to consider religion important in your life if you do not know exactly what that religion traditionally teaches and demands. (After all, opposition to reading the Bible in the vernacular was always based on ecclesiastical authorities’ entirely reasonable fear that a little knowledge was a dangerous thing when it came to acceptance of dogma.) However, religious conversions, or switches of faith, that take place in the absence of knowledge are very different from the examined conversions of Muhammad Ali or the Baal Teshuva of the 1960s and 1970s. Regardless of what one thinks about those conversions—shaped by an era of social rebellion, and disturbing to individual families as well as the larger society—or of the religions themselves, they were not undertaken lightly but, to borrow from the Book of Common Prayer, reverently, soberly, and in the fear of God. They fit my definition of conversion because they required a major change in the convert’s way of life.

  God is not dead, but many of the institutions purporting to represent Him on earth are on life support (as is the weekly news magazine that posed the question more than half a century ago). My best guess—and it is only an educated guess—is that both the rate of religious conversion and the European-style shift to secularism will continue to rise over the next thirty years in the United States, as children born in the first decade of the twenty-first century begin to marry and have children of their own. For the majority of Americans, who still do identify—however tenuously—with a religion, conversi
ons as a result of interfaith marriage are likely to become even more common. If I were a gambler, I would bet that young atheists today will raise their children as atheists but that those who call themselves “nothing in particular” will not be anxious to pass that label on to their offspring. It would not be entirely surprising if children of the “nones”—raised neither in a serious religious nor in a thoughtful atheist and humanist tradition—provided fertile recruiting ground for a new generation of religious converts. The unanswerable question is whether more secular Americans will realize that nothing has never proved to be a very good substitute for something, will stop fearing social censure, will openly identify themselves as atheists or humanists, and will establish institutions that provide yet another choice within the American religious marketplace. We can be sure of one thing: the marketplace, in contrast to areas of the world still cursed by religious coercion, will remain open for business.

  * * *

  *1 A caveat: This study’s last conversion statistics date from 2001. It is entirely possible that conversion rates have increased in some developed countries, particularly in the nations of Eastern Europe where restrictions on freedom of religion were eased with the end of the Soviet empire, during the past fifteen years. It is also likely that a new generation of Muslim immigrants has had an impact—however one views that impact—on second- and third-generation Muslims, particularly in Europe, whose religious observance had lapsed.

  *2 We have known that Mormons do send missionaries to France since Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign revealed that he had performed his compulsory missionary service in that skeptical society. I have always felt sorry for Romney on this score: imagine what it must be like to spend a year in France, proselytizing for a religion that forbids the consumption of both coffee and wine.

  *3 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does consider its founding members to have been descended from the “lost tribes of Israel,” but this is, needless to say, a doctrine rejected by all branches of Judaism.

  *4 Free to Be…You and Me was a 1974 book, conceived by the actress Marlo Thomas with the support of the Ms. Foundation, designed to break down gender stereotypes and emphasizing that both boys and girls can grow up to do anything they want to do.

  *5 Actually, many voters no longer seem to care even if divorce is conducted with the utmost indiscretion. Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was elected to Congress after a marital split characterized by the maximum indiscretion of having ignored state business and lied about taking a hike on the Appalachian Trail when he was actually in Argentina with his mistress. Newt Gingrich’s checkered marital history begins with his divorce from his first wife, who was suffering from breast cancer at the time.

  *6 These figures, derived from Pew research surveys and other, less comprehensive sociological studies, are not and cannot be exact—although they are a fair reflection of the statistical relationship between minority and majority religions in the United States. The U.S. Census Bureau is prevented by law from asking questions about religion. The difficulty of reaching an accurate count is well illustrated by the American Jewish community. There are many more Americans who consider themselves Jewish in an ethnic and cultural sense than there are Americans who practice religious Judaism. My guess—and it is only a guess—is that all of the small minority religious groups are slightly larger than data from surveys suggest at this time.

  CONCLUSION

  DARKNESS VISIBLE

  IF IT WERE POSSIBLE to divide our planet into impermeable compartments, it would also be possible to end this secular history of religious conversion on a more optimistic or, at the very least, a less anxious note. Forced conversion would no longer be an issue worth talking about if the Enlightenment concept of natural rights, which gave birth to secular law that forbids the slaughter of people for choosing one supernatural philosophy over another, had taken root throughout the world. But, as everyone who eschews weak-minded religious and political correctness knows, religious persecution and coerced conversion remain realities, not half-forgotten nightmares from the distant past, for millions around our uncompartmentalized and uncompartmentalizable globe.

  When I began the research for this book a decade ago, I never imagined that I would be writing the conclusion at a time when there was actually a real controversy about the question of whether a conversion to Islam by a Christian hostage held by ISIS (a.k.a. ISIL, a.k.a. the Islamic State) could be considered “voluntary.” James Foley, an American journalist beheaded in Syria by ISIS in 2014, was by all accounts a devout Catholic before being taken hostage (for a second time) in the Middle East. After the gruesome video of his execution was released, some of his former fellow captives, released for ransom, said that Foley had converted to Islam during his imprisonment and that his conversion appeared to be a genuine change of faith. But his mother, Diane Foley—a Eucharistic minister*1 at the family’s parish church in New Hampshire—was told a different story by other released French and Spanish captives who knew her son. “What the hostages had told me was that by saying that he had converted to Islam, he would be left alone five times a day, without being beaten, so that he could pray,” said Ms. Foley. Pope Francis, according to the Foley family, had called their son a martyr in a phone call of condolence. After the dispute about the possible conversion to Islam surfaced, Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, said that any discussion about declaring Foley a martyr would be premature but that a change of faith “not done freely does not indicate a conversion.”1 That such a subject is even being discussed in the second decade of the twenty-first century is a measure of the darkness that has reached out from a medieval past to involve otherwise sensible people in a nonsensical argument about whether there can be such a phenomenon as voluntary conversion when the “convert” in question has been starved, tortured, and threatened with execution. There cannot be. There never could be, at any point in history.

  The issues raised today by either the frequency or the scarcity of religious conversions in the United States and Europe may be of critical concern to religious institutions, but they are luxury problems insofar as the progress of human liberty is concerned. Even from a devoutly religious standpoint, does it really matter if God appears dead to some, as long as others are perfectly free to reach a different conclusion? Are conversions of convenience—motivated more by some social need, including the desire for community, than by any deep spiritual conviction—harmful to either society or individuals? Can conscious and conscientious secular humanism offer coherent moral precepts that will be recognized in the public square by those who insist that only religion can serve as a basis for both private and public morality? How are we to educate children about the historical role of religion when fewer and fewer people are being exposed to a serious education in their own faith—much less any other? None of these questions, debated with varying degrees of respect and rancor by theologians, politicians, and academics, mean as much to people’s daily lives as persecution for choosing the wrong faith once did in the West, and still does in societies where people must continue to live with the knowledge that they may be thrown out of their homes, imprisoned, tortured, raped, or murdered for what they believe—or do not believe—about God.

  Although knowledge about religion, encompassing differences as well as commonalities among faiths, is essential from a cultural standpoint, concentration on the fine points of dogma does little to shed light on more important issues involving ethical values. I doubt that anyone other than a practicing Catholic needs to know the particulars of the doctrine of transubstantiation, or that anyone but an Orthodox Jew needs to understand the laws of family purity, which (among other requirements and prohibitions) regulate sexual relations between husbands and wives to avoid the “uncleanness” associated with menstrual periods. I am certain, though, that responsible citizenship in every democracy, on every continent, requires knowledge and understanding of the long, tortuous b
attle for the liberation of men and women from religious compulsion. Both the modern American dream of absolute religious tolerance and the more limited ideal of toleration that emerged from the carnage of seventeenth-century Europe remain just that—dreams—in societies blind to the vision of a free conscience as a human right.

  From the Middle East and Africa to Southeast Asia, fear is an omnipresent reality for countless numbers of Christians; atheists and freethinkers; practitioners of ancient Middle Eastern creeds that incorporate elements of many religions; and Muslims whose beliefs differ from those of Islamic theocrats. The terrorist theocrats—possessors of twenty-first-century technology with minds stuck in the eighth century—defy any concept of predictable human progress with the violence they have inflicted on religious dissidents (many of them dissidents only vis-à-vis the warped religio-political ideology of their captors).*2

  Fear of religious persecution is not confined to those menaced by Islamic terrorist groups. The status of Christians and practicing Buddhists—ranging from second-class to persecuted—in China remains an unresolved human rights issue. In many areas of India, mixed couples (usually a Hindu woman and a Muslim man) now live in fear of physical attacks from right-wing Hindu nationalists who consider such unions an abomination and a plot to convert Hindu women to Islam.2 The same people are also opposed to intermarriage with Christians and have attacked Christian churches and businesses. The Hindu extremists, like the nuns who taught me in the 1950s (but reserved their predictions of punishment for the afterlife), are right in terms of their own narrowly defined religious interests: when someone marries a person of another faith, the union often results in the conversion of one partner. So what?, says the post-Enlightenment society. Never, says the pre-Enlightenment theocratic mentality.