Ye of Little Faith

At the Republican National Convention last August, Florida Senator Marco Rubio was loud and clear: what makes us Americans is our shared belief in God. That’s it. Forget adherence to the Constitution, forget hatred of tyranny, forget watching reality TV while ingesting a double cheeseburger, large nachos and a 62-ounce orange soda. What binds Americans together, he proclaimed, is theism.

“We are special,” he said, “because we’re united not by a common race or ethnicity,” but rather “by common values.” And “almighty God is the source of all we have,” he announced.” “Faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all.”

But Rubio’s wrong. There are countless things that are far more important than having faith in an invisible, unknowable deity. Valuing education, for example. Or democracy, human rights or free speech. Or trees, mountains, rivers and the ozone layer. Or one’s spouse, one’s friends, one’s neighbors. It’s far more important to value and love one another, and to act on that love, than to have faith in a god.

Rubio is wrong about something else, too: Americans don’t necessarily share a faith in God. In fact, millions of hard-working, child-raising, military-joining, coal-mining and liberty-loving Americans live without it. And millions more live their lives without any interest in religion whatsoever. The statistics are surprisingly clear on this front.

There are countless things that are far more important than having faith in an invisible, unknowable deity.

In the 1990s, about 8 percent of Americans claimed “none” as their religion. Then, in 2007, the Pew Forum found that the percentage of non-religious Americans had doubled, up to 16 percent. In 2010, a national survey put the percentage at 17 percent, and in 2011, at 18 percent. This year, the Pew Forum bumped it up to 19 percent. And then, according to the WIN-Gallup International “Global Index of Religion and Atheism” released a few months ago, a whopping 30 percent of Americans describe themselves as nonreligious. In other words, there are tens of millions of Americans who are more secular than not.

While those who claim to be non-religious are not necessarily atheists or agnostics, a significant proportion of them are. According to the most recent American Religious Identification Survey, of those who self-identify as non-religious, about half are atheist or agnostic in orientation. Another quarter believe in a higher power but not a personal God, and only about a fifth are firm God-believers. So as the proportion of Americans identifying as nonreligious rises, so too does the proportion of atheists and agnostics.

The brilliant founders of this nation made their vision quite clear in the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797: “The government of the United States of Americas is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” This treaty was passed unanimously by the United States Senate—only the third such unanimous vote in the Senate, out of 339 votes that had taken place up to that time. And the writers of our Constitution left God out of the entire body of that foundational, visionary, and oh-so-secular document.

These important matters—the increasing proportion of Americans who are stiff-arming religion, the secular foundations of American democracy, and the ways constructions of religiosity and secularity are used for various political ends—are merely three possible topics within the newly emerging field of secular studies. Historically, the subjects of atheism, agnosticism, and skepticism have fallen under the domain of philosophy. Or intellectual history. But lately, social scientists have begun to take secularity seriously.

We need to be studying secularism and secular people. We need to explain why some cultures and countries are more secular than others. We need to differentiate and typologize the various forms and types of secularity. We need to explain why certain groups, such as Jews, Scandinavians, and Asian Americans, have relatively high rates of secularity, while other groups, such as Mormons, El Salvadorians, and African Americans, do not. We need to explain why men are much more likely to be atheist or agnostic than women. We need to observe how secular men and women find community. We need to understand how secular people develop moral frameworks. There’s a lot to study, and a lot to learn. Hopefully, the recent rise of social scientific interest will bear some valuable fruit.

And who knows—Senator Marco Rubio might even learn something about his fellow humans. One can hope, at least.