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If you’ve ever been to a landfill (consider wearing heavy boots and getting a tetanus shot first) its mostly what you would think a huge pile of garbage, but you can find things that might be useful like odd pieces of wood to build a table or small book case. Christopher Hitchens is a lot like a landfill, mostly useless junk, but on occasion he has says something worthwhile, God Bless Me, It’s a Best-Seller!

One of America’s most seminal books is William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he argues that the subjective experience of the divine can be understood only by the believer. I have just been finding out how true this is. You hear all the time that America is an intensely religious nation, but what you don’t hear is that there are almost as many religions as there are believers. Moreover, many ostensible believers are quite unsure of what they actually believe. And, to put it mildly, the different faiths don’t think that highly of one another. The emerging picture is not at all monolithic.

Very obvious, but rarely acknowledged.

Town Square and church by Cornelius Springer

The Curse of Modernity 

Contemporary social science has pretty well established that believers and unbelievers commit unbridled immorality in roughly equal proportions. Nevertheless, the assumption that one cannot be reliably good without God persists in the United States, explicitly or implicitly, to the extent that a declared unbeliever almost certainly cannot be elected to national office. Around half the population identify themselves as born-again Christians and believe in angels, miracles, the inerrancy of the Bible, and the special creation of the Earth within the last 10,000 years. So if (as everyone seems to agree) America is in decline morally, an excess of skeptical rationalism is probably not to blame. Still, the modern world is undeniably more secular than the premodern one, especially among the educated, and that fact must surely have large psychological, if not behavioral, consequences. What have been, and will be, the effects of the Enlightenment on the individual and collective moral psychology of the West?

Statistically our prisons are filled with Catholics and Protestants, while atheists make up the smallest percentage of the prison population. I don’t know that the U.S. is in a particular period of  moral decline, but if it is the reason cannot be because of lawless Darwin reading disbelievers. That leaves millions of people afraid to look at the truth, at the way things are and come up with another explanation and even more challenging to come up with some other answers to our social and moral issues besides calls for yet another big tent meeting revival. Organized religion or better the true dogmatists have become the guy that keeps banging his head against the wall thinking that eventually he’ll see a different result.