Religious practice is on the decline in the West, particularly among our millennial generation in the United States. Just last month, Harvard released its annual freshman demographic survey, which revealed that for the first time in the history of the school’s freshman class, atheists and agnostics outnumber professed Christians, Jews or Muslims. And in August, ESPN the Magazine did a cover story on Houston Texans running back Arian Foster, who is a self-proclaimed secular agnostic.
Some might conclude from those and similar developments that theism and organized religion have been out-selected in Darwinian fashion by secular progress. Science, technology and evolving social views, they might claim, have eliminated the place in the Western socio-cultural landscape for religion and its antiquated understanding about how the world works.
Yet such conclusions would overstate the extent of affirmative agnosticism and atheism and misstate the reasons for declining religious practice in America. The increase in secularism today is not about “developments” in the philosophical answers to questions about God but about a practical materialism that ignores questions about God and human meaning entirely. Indeed, Pew Research reported earlier this year that, even on a changing religious landscape, only some 7 percent of Americans identify as agnostic or atheistic. Another 16 percent, however, identify as “Nones,” or “nothing in particular.”
The increase in Nones reflects a broad cultural shift in how we understand knowledge and faith. To an increasing number of Americans, knowledge is defined solely by the empirical and material. Only “science” can tell us the “facts.” Non-empirical truths, even if supported by sound reasoning (e.g. metaphysical demonstrations as to why “God” must exist) and experience (e.g. the way we “know” our friends), have been relegated to the domain of personal opinion and private judgment.
That cultural development cannot be surprising. At all levels of education, matters pertaining to the transcendent have been ignored and excluded. Consider your own experience. Unless you were in a religiously affiliated school, have you had a single course in any grade that has taken seriously as its subject matter the existence of God? Or that has treated religion as making rigorous claims about reality that would have important implications for morality? What about at Duke?
Such a materialist epistemology — a way of knowing — leaves the basis on which one might assert religious belief fragile at best. But that singular devotion to data-based knowledge has unfortunate consequences. As an initial matter, the fact that a third of millennials identify religiously as “nothing in particular” does not bode well for their answers to Life Questions, like the meaning of a good, fulfilling life. A metaphysics of “nothing in particular” can answer Life Questions only with a regrettable “nothing in particular.”
In this context, “faith” becomes synonymous with “private belief” or “superstition.” “Morality,” which for centuries had indicated a system of right and wrong, gives way to the demands of empiricism. The resulting vacuum is filled by a relativistic “morality of consent” in which right and wrong are arbitrated solely by “Yes, I will” or “No, I won’t.” While that “consent” can reflect one’s personal preference, it cannot explain why that preference should be respected when it conflicts with the preference of another. If non-material truth is out of the picture, claims to “human dignity” or “empathy” have no foundation. Human dignity must be grounded in the metaphysical and non-scientific. “Empathy” is a genuine concern for the condition of another. Neither can be legitimated by personal preference or found in a biopsy, so for the materialist, neither exists.
In philosophical circles, the materialistic view of knowledge and truth and its implications for ethics are known as “utilitarianism.” Utilitarians seek to maximize preferences, or “rational self-interest,” as the only “tangible” value that a data-driven worldview can recognize as real. Sadly, love — willing the good of another for the sake of the other — and an authentic sense of community become irrational on that metric. Worse, in trying to account for love through the logic of “giving to others makes individuals feel good,” utilitarianism reduces self-gift to a pleasure-seeking act of self-interest.
The path from materialism to moral relativism to a society that exalts self-interest is thus direct and uncomplicated. It also presents a dark picture of existence and our place in it, a picture that T.S. Eliot called “The Waste Land.”
How can our culture regain a sense of the purpose and joy that accompany true love, community and belief? The answer is equally straightforward. We must broaden our view of truth and knowledge to include that which cannot be touched or measured. We must embrace a “common-sense” epistemology in which the truths that practical experience reveals to us are taken seriously. We must credit right and wrong as poles on an objective moral compass. We must recognize as real the inner voice that speaks to us in the form of a conscience.
Only then can we answer the Nones by asserting with confidence that religious belief makes truth claims about transcendent reality just as science makes truth claims about material reality. “Faith” is not a blind, irrational “leap” but rather an act of rational “assent.” Religious belief claims that God exists and that right and wrong have objective content. It also claims that truth, beauty and goodness are real values that infuse life with a vitality that transcends the measurements of the laboratory. Religious belief, properly understood, is a thinking belief.
At stake in the rehabilitation of faith as “thinking belief” — and truth as including more than the empirically verifiable — is human meaning itself. The theme of my columns — Imago Dei — aims to remind us that, when we lose touch with objective truth, we surrender human dignity. As John Paul II observed in his landmark piece “Fides et Ratio” (On Faith and Reason), when we exalt personal preference as defining morality, we “erase from the countenance of man and woman the marks of [our] likeness to God, [which leads] little by little either to a destructive will to power or to a solitude without hope.” By reclaiming the transcendent dimension of truth, we are able to answer the Life Questions in the affirmative and to assent to “Something in particular.”
William Rooney is a Trinity senior. His column runs on alternate Wednesdays.
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