This Christmas, my personal hero David Niose uses the recent Harris Poll data in a Psychology Today article titled “Merry Times for Atheism”. The gist of the article, as I mentioned in my own analysis of the data, is that de facto atheists and agnostics (though they may shun the labels are they are socially taboo) make up an unprecedented percentage of the society, which is really the best gift I could ask for for Christmas.
Atheism continues to grow in America. That’s the clear message from a Harris poll released last week, which shows that God-belief is declining sharply. While 74 percent still say they believe in God, that figure is down from 82 percent in three previous polls in 2009, 2007, and 2005. The remaining 26 percent said they did not believe in God (12 percent) or were not sure (14 percent).
And yet, as it happens, more could be in the pipeline. I have written in the past about the impact of social inequality and existence of a huge underclass in the US in holding back secularization, and the cause and effect relationship that sociologists have found between the two. But there is hope that we may finally be turning the corner. As explained by journalist Chris Mooney.
I am by no mean a fan of Mooney. Yet, I find his latest column in Mother Jones intriguing, and it has a counterintuitive title: “Why Obamacare could produce more atheists”.
Could it?
(For my overseas readers, who may not be current on the political climate here in the US: the Affordable Care Act (ACA, aka pejoratively “Obamacare”) of 2010 is taking effect here, and its main provision, requiring consumers to shop online through a government exchange website for affordable insurance coverage, has become highly controversial due to the site’s technical snags. And while most of the technical issues seem to be resolved for now, the law’s long term success remains anyone’s guess; that is not something I’d want to write about, except to the extent that it ties in with secularism.)
Mooney discusses the matter with religion psychologist Ara Norenzayan, who has already raised eyebrows with his work on the subject:
Again and again in Norenzayan’s research, societies that are existentially secure—meaning that people have access to health care and a strong social safety net, that there is a strong rule of law, but also that they are not facing deadly diseases or natural disasters—tend toward less religion and also more tolerance of atheism. Perhaps the most powerful demonstration of this came in an amazing study in which a New Zealand earthquake was found to have produced more religious belief in those who were directly affected by it—even as the rest of the society was growing more secular all around them.
Existential threat, in the form of an earthquake, produces more religiosity; existential stability—in the form of an established rule of law, universal health care systems, and strong welfare states—leads to the opposite. And that, says Norenzayan, helps explain low levels of religiosity in Europe, even as it may also explain why the US is an outlier among developed countries when it comes to religion. “Compared to other advanced democracies, there is much more existential insecurity in the United States,” Norenzayan says. We didn’t have health security (until recently, anyway), and we have a large gap between rich and poor compared with many other industrialized countries.
What this line of thinking suggests is that passing a major US policy change like Obamacare could, in the long run, produce more atheism by making people’s lives more secure.
I will sure be keeping my fingers crossed.
