Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans
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“Religious freedom is a cherished American value,” writes David Niose in his new book, Nonbeliever Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), “but religious predominance is not.” Published in July, the book takes the reader through a history of secularism in the United States and renders the powerful rise of the conservative religious right in sharp detail. But what makes the book groundbreaking is Niose’s survey of the growing number of Americans who call themselves secularists, humanists, atheists, freethinkers, and skeptics—in general, the nonbelievers who have been organizing and growing as a force to be reckoned with, namely by the religious right that continues to impose its dogmatic agenda upon the nation. An attorney who is also the president of the American Humanist Association and author of a humanist-themed blog for Psychology Today, Niose is perfectly poised to check and report on the pulse of the current secular zeitgeist. Richard Dawkins characterizes the book as “simultaneously disturbing and reassuring” and Michael Shermer calls it “The Feminist Mystique of this movement, destined to be a classic in freedom literature.”…
…Reason for Hope and Hope for Reason
AS SECULAR AMERICANS have emerged over the last few years, one of the most fascinating and exciting areas within the movement has been the phenomenon of student activism. Religious skepticism on college campuses is nothing new, but what’s happening today is truly unprecedented. Across all lines of wealth, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, students are standing up together to identify as personally secular.
The historical role of religion in higher learning is somewhat paradoxical. On one hand, by definition higher learning should be an exercise in skepticism—questioning facts, finding flaws in arguments, and developing work that can withstand intellectual scrutiny—so it should not be surprising that colleges and universities are havens for the critical analysis of religious claims and doctrines. Nevertheless, established churches have historically wielded enormous influence over social and political life in both Europe and America and, therefore, have often had close relationships with institutions of higher learning. Harvard, Yale, the College of William and Mary, and virtually all of the oldest colleges in America were mainly incubators for clergymen in their earliest years. When Connecticut legislators founded the college that would later become Yale in 1701, they declared that they were motivated by “Zeal for upholding & Propagating of the Christian Protestant Religion” to educate “a succession of Learned & Orthodox men” who through “the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church & Civil State.” Thus, it is ironic that these bastions of intellectual pursuit, which would ultimately do more to chip away at the credibility of established religion than any other social institutions, were often established by men for whom the idea of separating God from academia would have been unthinkable.