The shifting axis of moral values in the United States

It’s referred to as the “American secular movement.” What it refers to is the deep dissatisfaction of a fast-growing number of Americans with official religious values and the institutions that oversee their observance.

Identified among this disaffected horde of non-traditional believers — let us call them that for now — are atheists, humanists, freethinkers, agnostics, Unitarian Universalists, pagans, and other categories of not-formally-religious and non-theistic Americans.

A report published by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life in October 2012 said one-third of adults under 30 call themselves “religiously unaffiliated” and in the five years prior to the publication of that report the so-called “Nones” increased by a percentage point a year.

It’s a phenomenon that has not gone unnoticed or without concern and comment by a wide range of interested parties, and for a diverse set of reasons.

During the spring semester of this year, Douglas Knight, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University, is teaching a course called “Secularism” in which 29 of his colleagues are involved as guest lecturers to explore what’s occurring in the United States with respect to the shifting axis of moral values.

Four years ago, California’s Pitzer College established a once-inconceivable Department of Secular Studies where students can major in different aspects of “secular studies” under the direction of Professor Phil Zuckerman and his departmental colleagues.

In his 2014 “Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions,” Zuckerman set out to explore the parameters of the movement as well as divine how “believers of another sort,” defined as atheists or agnostics by traditional believers, can be as giving, and “self-sacrificing,” and committed to community as the most traditionally religious devotee. And without pietistic rigmarole.

Zuckerman makes clear that many people who have adopted humanist values and ethics do not have an ax to grind with (formal) religion. They are more interested in understanding the fact-based foundations of their own beliefs and how those beliefs continue providing support in meeting life’s challenges with propriety and dignity.

Paul Kurtz, the late professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who is recognized as “the father of secular humanism” long ago warned that, when formal religious beliefs and practices no longer hold meaning for a person, that person’s aim ought not to be bashing them and the people who live traditional religious lives but rather to find out how to proceed with his or her own life with meaning.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2010, Kurtz said, “Most of my colleagues are concerned with critiquing the concept of God. That is important, but equally important is, where do you turn?”

In 2009, Kurtz resigned from the board of the Center for Inquiry, a group he founded, because he felt its derisive tone toward others was too contentious a path to follow.

When “the movement” is discussed, it needs to be pointed out that invidious comparisons are made at the outset by the way we speak about its diverse aggregate. It’s fruitless to talk about a-theists, a-gnostics, secularists, pagans and related nomina because they are inherently pejorative. With the use of the alpha privative in a-theist and a-gnostic, for example, the assumption is already made these “infidels” are second-class knockoffs of their real-deal theo-believing counterparts.

You will see articles such as: “Is goodness without God good enough?” and “Why Americans Hate Atheists.” Arkansas, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas still retain articles in their constitutions that prohibit atheists from holding public office. Maryland’s requires a belief in God to serve as juror or witness. And it seems the long-standing shibboleth that no atheist will ever be elected President of the United States remains true to this day.

In his 175-page “Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism,” published last year, Philip Kitcher provides a systematic and somewhat convincing argument for how a person can lead a moral life without God and formal religious beliefs and institutions.

I keep saying “formal” as in institutional because humanists do have beliefs based in religious values. And they are religious because “religion” comes from the Latin religare, which means to bind, to connect to the world around you.

And, even if we accept Cicero’s derivation that religion comes from relegere (to treat carefully) — the religiosi were those who took seriously all things pertaining to the gods — the aforementioned derivation holds true because we treat with care those to whom we’re bound. That is the nature of pietas.

But the issue of whether a person who lives a fact-based as opposed to faith-based life can live a moral life remains the wishbone of contention, so it is not surprising that Charles Darwin is turned to because through his work he reminded us that the basis of moral values is found in our social natures. He did say his “theory will lead to a new philosophy.”

I’m not here to provide an apologia for “secular humanism,” no, scratch the secular part, only to point out that our “social instincts” — a 19th-Century phrase that still retains legitimacy — allow us, as Darwin said, “to take pleasure in the society of [our] fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.”

And sympathy here does not mean the now-commonly-accepted feelings of pity and sorrow for someone suffering loss but more feeling bound to others in meaningful relationships that require care and, at the most basic level, reciprocity. Let’s call it an economic-based empathy.

And the tool that enables empathetic-bound-to-other-persons to proceed firmly on moral ground is the imagination. When I see your suffering, I imagine myself to be similarly situated, to be you, and I am moved to action.

I am also moved to envision new ways of being, of creating social institutions and societies in which suffering is eliminated. But, since pain and suffering are part and parcel of the human situation, that envisioning manifests itself through a society in which pain and suffering are responded to with loving care, in which structures are set up to meet human needs at all levels.

The great 20th-Century American poet Wallace Stevens in his poem, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” comes up with the astounding “God and the imagination are one.” 

That is what the humanists are saying, that they have in their power the tool to imagine all as one, and that that connectedness is the basis of all moral values (and subsequent remorse when harm is done), and that a Supreme Being of any sort seems if not inconsequential highly superfluous.