‘Secular shadowboxing’

‘Secular shadowboxing’ by Kathryn Lofton

Jacques Berlinerblau wants to incite us and unite us. And before we travel too deeply into a critique of the what and how of such a venture, let us be happy for its mere occasion: the academy could do a lot more inciting—and uniting—of the public than it does.

In How To Be Secular (Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), Jacques Berlinerblau says that secularists need to supply a response to the recent capital-R Revival of religion, that they need to offer a “vigorous and sophisticated response” that would include “pragmatic concessions, intelligent partnering, cunning legal activism, and clear articulation of secular values and how they harmonize with the very best of American values” (Berlinerblau, 2012: 34). This is provoking talk by a scholar tired of dilly-dallying—dilly-dallying by scholars about subjects of critical public interest, and dilly-dallying by secularists around the pervading revival of conservative religion. And I want to stand with Berlinerblau’s effort to make such an accessible manifesto, as well his call for reflexivity among citizens in a secular state about the common principles of their secularity.

But I cannot agree with his description of our dire circumstances. I think things are dire, too, but I think they’re dire for different reasons than he does, for reasons not unrelated to the bleak tones of Berlinerblau’s description. I am worried that his diagnosis of urgency—that the way Berlinerblau portrays the present religious world—is exactly what contributes to our vitriolic culture of oppositional simplicity and distancing social practices.

To begin, Berlinerblau’s case rests on a constant iteration and reiteration of the lurking potency of the Christian Right. Over the past ten years, several exemplary studies of the rise of the Christian Right—especially those by Darren Dochuk (2011), Seth Dowland (2009, forthcoming), Steven P. Miller (2009), Daniel K. Williams (2010), and Molly Worthen (2008, forthcoming)—have explained the grassroots political organizing, institutional strategies, intellectual genealogies, and media mastery that led to its ascendance as a circulating political force. Even as such a historiography continues to result in admirable observations, none of the research on the Christian Right has offered a satisfying demographic profile of its participants, which is only to say that while the discursive circulation of the Christian Right is undeniable, its sociological presence is harder to track.

To be clear: a history of politics of the last 40 years would necessarily include a careful consideration of the Christian Right (and other post-1960s identity movements) and its grassroots function through local elections and activist referendum. A history of media would tie the success of such movements and the privatization of interstate and international communications. A history of religions would note the significance of this politicization of a hegemonic Christianity in an era of increased religious pluralism. Those histories are proofs of power, but that power is more amorphous than the cartoon conjure of the Christian Right can convey productively. Nevertheless, fretting about the Christian Right comprises its own cottage industry, including such propagandistic popular nonfiction exposés as: Hypocrisy, Inc.: How the Religious Right Fabricates Christian Values and Undermines Democracy (2012) by Rosemary Agonito; Religious Right: The Greatest Threat to Democracy (2012) by A.F. Alexander; Attack of the Theocrats! How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It (2012) by Sean Faircloth and Richard Dawkins; American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2008) by Chris Hedges; and The Hijacking of Jesus: How the Religious Right Distorts Christianity and Promotes Prejudice and Hate (2007) by Dan Wakefield. Standing in front of this tonnage of conspiratorial fear-mongering, it may seem futile to resist the Christian Right as a certainty. Like talk of Opus Dei or the Israel lobby, invoking the Christian Right seems like some kind of critical common sense. We all just know the world is run by a clannish group of nefarious people, don’t we?

Berlinerblau isn’t tracking conspiracies. He is doing something a bit different than those listed above who offer mere diatribe. He is calling out those outside of the secret, those regular folk—religious and irreligious—who have forsaken their democratic rights. And he is saying that because of their lack of action, our inaction, “we the people” have conceded the terms of the debate, allowing the radically religious to define the secular agenda. “American secularism is in a very bad way,” he says, because “demagogues denounce it on the campaign trail, all three branches of government give it the cold shoulder, and among the general public it suffers from a distressing lack of popular appeal” (Berlinerblau, 2012: xv). Secularism is just not likable, he argues. It needs a makeover, immediately, or else nobody will rally ‘round it and everybody will continue to talk smack about it—or, worse yet, ignore it altogether. In his concluding 12-step program for a revival of a re-surfaced secularism, Berlinerblau includes a series of discursive recommendations: Depict the Secular State as a Referee, he suggests; Use the Extremism of Revivalists Against Revivalists; and Fight Anti-Atheist Prejudice. To be sure, Berlinerblau also writes of interfaith accommodationism and legislative collaboration—he thinks, too, about tones and strategies of on-the-ground politics. But—and I say this in a positively descriptive sense—his book is more about what’s wrong with our representations of the secular (and its opposite) than a study of our social experiences as secularists. It is a book seeking to enter the given language games of religion and politics, and re-write them.

Relying on Peter Berger, Berlinerblau suggests that we live in a time of Revival in which “conservative or orthodox or traditionalist movements” are on the rise (Berlinerblau, 2012: xix), that there is a “demographic expansion of evangelical Christianity” (p. 18). He worries that a “Talibanization of the United States” could transpire if not for religious moderates, who Berlinerblau sees as “the future of secularism” (p. xxii). This is how Berlinerblau rightfully distinguishes himself from the New Atheists: he does not see religion as the problem, but certain modes of religion as the problem. Conservative religious believers want to bully us into their agenda, whereas everyone else—by his presumptive rendering—wants to pursue reasoned compromise to relative difference. You can’t stop religion, he says, but you can smother its more extremist proponents. “Nonbelief cannot be spread by force,” he writes, and in fact he encourages détente between those who are religious and those who are not (p. 82). The alliance to be formed is between the indifferently irreligious, the passionately atheist, and religious moderates, as those groups share more than they don’t.

Most importantly, they share a common enemy. Berlinerblau believes that an “ideological battle” currently exists between conservative and moderate religious people (progressive vs traditionalist Muslims, reform and ultra-orthodox Jews), and that this conflict “will shape the future of this country, and it engages the entire slate of divisive national issues, ranging from abortion rights to gay rights to foreign policy” (Berlinerblau, 2012: xxiii). Extremist Christians, extremist Mormons, extremist Catholics: they’re the problem. The average secular Jew, cafeteria Catholic, and occasional UCC parishioner are the solution—if and when they form common cause with the rabid atheist, the occasional meditator, and McSweeney’s hipster.

In addition to forming a secular alliance, these newly-identified secularists also have to reproduce more, as one of the statistics Berlinerblau deploys is that of birth rates, writing that birth rates among “more secular populations are stagnating or declining”, whereas “religious traditionalists bring forth their basketfuls and quivers of progeny” (Berlinerblau, 2012: xx). I can’t accede this threatening image, as it assumes that children do as their parents do, when most statistics—and common sense—say that such a genealogical presumption (kids raised Mormon stay Mormon) isn’t right. Some stick in the orthodox fold, and some leave, but the statistics on intergenerational conservative adherence is steady (or declining). The parents may be extremists, but that does not mean the kids will do the same. If anything, they are just as likely, or more likely, to do the opposite.

But if those statistics don’t worry you, Berlinerblau offers others: 65 percent of Americans think that the Founders intended this to be a “Christian Nation”; 70 percent of Americans claimed that, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, they were praying more. 91 percent of Americans believed the words “under God” should remain in the Pledge of Allegiance; 72 percent of those polled prefer “Merry Christmas” as a salutation to the secularized “Happy Holidays.” As you read these statistics, Berlinerblau wants to arouse your concern—how can a country be so easy about being so blatantly Christian? But as a student of contemporary American culture, I think it’s a misreading of these numbers to see them as revealing of the successful work of the Christian Right. Are we so certain that everybody thinks the words “Christian” or “under God” are creedal claims, or that “Merry Christmas” is a religious particularism? Do we truly think that talk of prayer means religious resurgence? I suppose I think these statistics are, simultaneously, meaningful and meaningless. I think they’re meaningful insofar as they reveal a kind of generic discourse that circulates as our contemporary consensus; I think they’re meaningless inasmuch as they reveal nothing about how those surveyed would feel about Roe vs Wade or gay marriage.

A 2012 report from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life revealed what scholars of religion have long expected: Protestants have lost their majority status in the United States. Pew additionally suggested that one in five Americans (19.3%) claim no religious identity at all. Berlinerblau would reply that his book is, in part, a call to arms for those individuals, rallying them (and others) to think about their shared values, and advocate upon those shared values. If they don’t, the religious extremists—the Christian Right—will win. They will win because they are really good at being unified, and we’re not; they’re really good at involving themselves in the public sphere, and we’re not; they’re really good at tolerating their simplification while we’re squabbling about our representative democracy. Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, this has been a stock liberal anxiety, and a stock liberal explanation, for the seemingly inconceivable electoral and legislative success of neoliberal personages and programs. Yet neoliberalism is successful precisely because of this card trick, leaving the public to skirmish around boogeymen while corporate interests slowly take over public works, federal activity, and social life.

What if the 2012 election showed what a red herring the threat of Christian extremism is? “The road to any Republican presidential nomination still must pass through evangelical America,” Berlinerblau writes, but even if it does, this litmus doesn’t guarantee political victory (Berlinerblau, 2012: 106). Evangelicals did vote overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney, according to exit polls. But not all of them. And Barack Obama was decisively re-elected by the rapidly increasingly diverse demography of these United States. And same-sex marriage was adopted by voters in some states. And anti-abortion candidates were defeated in conservative red states. As Martin Marty asked in the week following the election: “The Religious Right, aka the Christian Right, aka the Evangelical-Catholic Right experienced losses on its key chosen issues enough to raise questions about its influence: has it been over-rated all along?” (Marty, 2012).

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, seemed to admit as much in an interview with The New York Times—or at least he suggested that whatever they once were, they were no longer. “The entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.” And pollster Robert P. Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute, summarized the defeat: “This election signaled the last where a white Christian strategy is workable” (Goodstein, 2012). I am tempted by such diagnoses not because I believe we have arrived at the end of the power of Christianity as a social experience, but because I think we have arrived at the end of its usability as a conservative political platform.

What would Berlinerblau revise, if anything, in his book if the document of this election was his to have? Because in his book Berlinerblau seems to believe that there is no “secularized America,” as Mohler would have it—or, at least, he would have that they could not be victorious, given the capital-R Revival. In his words, “this book is about the recent crackup of American secularism and the therapeutic steps required for its rehabilitation” (Berlinerblau, 2012: xii). At other locations he uses a variety of phrases to describe the decline of secularism: “secularism … has fallen upon some very difficult times” (p. xiii); “American secularism is in a very bad way” (p. xv); “secularism’s ego has been struck” (p. 16). It is hard to believe that secularism is so suffering. Put another way, how does Berlinerblau explain the success of Obama in an era of the suffering secular?

The foregoing represents my own worries about the premise of Berlinerblau’s ardency. But do these worries really matter? Does this premise—the suffering of secularism—matter to make this book matter? After all, what Berlinerblau really wants is for everyone to rally around a better revival. “Secularism needs to take stock of its predicament, to conceptualize itself anew, to commit itself to a season of rebuilding,” he writes (Berlinerblau, 2012: xxix). And for this to happen, everyone—everyone occupying this disestablished nation—must see themselves as secularists: Jains, Catholics, evangelicals, and Trekkies alike. “The trick lies,” he puckishly admits, “in getting the believers to see themselves, in some small but significant way, as secular or secularish” (p. xxix).

How to Be Secular focuses no small amount of energy on trying to define just what it means to be secular. First and foremost, secularism is a governing principle. “The job of secularism is to maintain order,” Berlinerblau explains. Secularism keeps “federal and state government from molding you into an obedient subject of someone else’s religion” (Berlinerblau, 2012: xvi). Let us put aside the questions of how well the government does that, or how we feel about such obedience, or whether we think it is inevitable that an effort to discipline external rite deduces to a kind of milquetoast Protestantism. Let us put this all aside because Berlinerblau takes up such subjects in his book. I agree with Berlinerblau—as does the historiography of U.S. religions—that secularism is a hybrid of both the Reformation and the Enlightenment (ibid., xxvii); that secularism is hardly an atheism; that secularism does not lead to the formation of murderous statist regimes; that the Protestant architects of secularism conceived of the world in terms of individuals, not collectives; that it is a mistake to “fetishize” the separation of church and state (p. 91); that hating religion is as dumb, if not dumber, than being passionately religious; that even something like the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships could “plausibly be considered a form of secularism,” as it endorses a pluralism of laborers on behalf of social service (p. 123). In other words, I largely agree with Berlinerblau’s popularizing account of what secularism is, and how it came about.

What distinguishes Berlinerblau’s work from other treatises on the religious and the secular in contemporary America is his argumentative focus. Finally, after understanding the terms under consideration, Berlinerblau wants us to dig deep in ourselves, and recognize the universal ethos of goodwill that underpins our privilege as secularists. I think he is right when he says that people “already believe to be true” the basic values of secularism, if we believe that most people know that quietly working alongside one another in situations of general equality is a basic good (Berlinerblau, 2012: xxix). The problem is, even if people do know this, they don’t altogether practice it. “If the secularish had a motto, it would be ‘Don’t get overwrought’,” Berlinerblau writes, “They confront grand metaphysical concerns with a temperate spirit” (p. 177). Elsewhere, he offers up “moderation, dignity, and restraint” as “hallmarks of the secular worldview” (p. xiii). When was the last time any of us saw any of that (temperance, moderation, or dignity), other than from that exemplum of secularism, Barack Obama? These are, we must admit, fairly squalid times for those admiring of temperance.

What I want us to talk about is what we think keeps us from moderate spirit, dignified exchange, and restrained emotion in our public sphere. I do not think it is religion that makes us undignified. I think it’s something else. I think we live in an age where it is not productive to describe the secular as just good values (be moderate! be cooperative!), when secular society is also one wrought with bad action premised on right freedoms. Somehow we secularists (those living within the privileges of the secular state) are not so secularish.

Although the election may not serve Berlinerblau’s premise (since the Christian Right figured in such a diminished way), election 2012 certainly evinces his greater complaint. This was, by all accounts, a grotesque election in tone and combat—not as much between the leading candidates as in the crevices of the public sphere: cable news, internet caverns, and political action committee advertisements. Why don’t we yet have an ordered or reasoned society? Berlinerblau explains this when he offers this—to me, devastating—description of the social consequences of secularist logic. He writes:

At its core, secularism retains an inveterate mistrust and fear of what masses and majorities can do. Individuals, by contrast, are viewed as both crucial and vulnerable. This is a powerful, even venerable, intellectual conceit. But it keeps running against one basic political verity: in democratic societies, majorities, not individuals, retain the right to rule. Secularism’s holy scriptures imbue the individual with so much sanctity that group formation seems like an afterthought, if not something of a mortal sin. But group formation is a sterling defense for secularism against groups that wish to vote secularism out of existence! (Berlinerblau, 2012: 115)

Berlinerblau diagnoses something rightly as wrong. What he gets right is his naming of the utter indifference in contemporary society to the concept of collective action, to the concept of the collective good, and to the concept of, frankly, a better world (unless it can be done by texting $5 to the following charity, or liking something on Facebook). We live in a world where people wish regularly for the diseased death of others in online comments; we live in a world where nobody publicly cheered the Sikh temple shootings (not even the Christian Right), yet somebody did, still, shoot Sikhs near a Wisconsin temple. The question for our collective academic, political, and popular thinking is this: Berlinerblau says we have to join together to build a better world. Why is this so hard?

I argue that it is difficult to do so in part because we live in a world that prefers the image of the Christian Right to its debunking. We like easy enemies and heroic solutions; we like action anti-heroes. We ache for Daily Show deconstruction yet have no idea what to do after all the satire. Who is to blame for our inability to speak on behalf of a positive good, other than our own Manichean inclinations, our own desire for quip-talk and monolithic enemies? The problem is that we’re addicted to the idea of the Other as our menace, when in fact the menace isn’t over there (some Christian institute for political action) but it is in fact within us. The problem is that our individualism has become an addiction—a manic, compulsive, thoughtful hunger to differentiate and distance ourselves from collective thought and action. It is our solipsism, and not religious political manipulation, that keeps us from recognizing the common good we must practice as secularists. If secularism is, in part, the sanctification of the individual, is it any wonder that it attracts such vitriol from a ranting religious minority—and yet still remains ultimately triumphant after all? Our current technological and market matrices seem to make even more difficult the possibility of social consciousness, as they only reiterate the centrality of individual consumer option over and above all other obligations and ambitions. Berlinerblau presses me to ask not how we can be secular, but how we are not: What values do we think we do have if we are not practicing the admirable ones he denotes as secular? What world is this, now, if we take away the easy caricature of us-versus-them, and instead stare hard at us, in our diffidence, now?