Moving to Creationism, there never seems to be a debate about this issue among Democrats. And yet black American are by and large Creationist. The difference between the political parties and ideologies isn’t that great. My own hunch is that the difference here between the two parties has to do with the degree of unanimity among the elites.

To explore these issue I looked to the GSS. In particular, the variables:

ABANY
EVOLVED
POLVIEWS
PARTYID
DEGREE

For PARTYID I looked only at Democrats and Republicans. For POLVIEWS I only looked at liberals and conservatives. For DEGREE, I created two categories, those with 4 year college degrees or higher, and those without. ABANY & EVOLVED are both dichotomous yes/true vs. no/false. I also limited to the sample to 1998 and later. Here are the exact questions for ABANY & EVOLVED:

Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if: The woman wants it for any reason?

…

Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals. (Is that true or false?)

The table below shows the difference between college and non-college educated among the two political parties and ideologies when it comes to evolution & abortion:

The data above show that there is a difference between college educated and non-college educated in both variables, both as a raw percentage difference and as ratio. In both cases those with college degrees support abortion on demand and accept that human evolution is true more than those without college degrees. But, the difference between the elites and the masses among the Democrats/liberals is greater than among Republicans/conservatives, in particular on abortion, where among Republicans/conservatives there is convergence. Though the Republican/conservative education gap isn’t as large as for Democrats/liberals on evolution, it is far greater than for abortion.

The following table now compares the ratios of opinions within a particular category (e.g., college educated Republicans). The closer the ratio is to 1, the more balanced the opinion (i.e., 50% support abortion on demand and 50% oppose abortion on demand in a particular class means a ratio of 1).

I put in bold ratios between 0.8 and 1.2, which indicates a balance of opinions within a demographic segment. When it comes to evolution, liberals and Democrats who are not college educated are divided, as are liberals without college degrees on  abortion on demand. When it comes to evolution, college educated Republicans and conservatives are divided! This to me explains why there is no controversy about evolution in the Democratic party, the Democratic elite is totally unified, and can ignore the masses. By contrast, the Republican masses are unified against evolution, while the elites are split. When it comes to abortion Democrat and liberal elites are exceptional in their support for abortion-on-demand. This goes back to my suspicion that the peculiar manner in which pro-choice Democrats talk about abortion emerges out of an ideological bubble where they simply never encounter anyone who might think that an abortion is a more morally charged health service than say a biopsy.

Elsewhere in this volume, she talks about creationism, saying she “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” In everything that happens to her, from meeting Todd to her selection by Mr. McCain for the G.O.P. ticket, she sees the hand of God: “My life is in His hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years ago, invite Him in to take over.”

Just clearing up an issue which came up in the comments before. This seems like a rather definitive statement.

GENEVA — The World Council of Churches on Thursday called on churches around the world to ring their bells 350 times during the Copenhagen climate change summit on December 13 as a call to action on global warming.The leading council of Christian and Orthodox churches also invited places of worship for other faiths to join a symbolic “chain of chimes and prayers” stretching around the world from the international date line in the South Pacific.
“On that Sunday, midway through the UN summit, the WCC invites churches around the world to use their bells, drums, gongs or whatever their tradition offers to call people to prayer and action in the face of climate change,” the council said in a statement.
“By sounding their bells or other instruments 350 times, participating churches will symbolise the 350 parts per million that mark the safe upper limit for CO2 (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere according to many scientists,” it added.
The chimes are meant to start at 3.00 pm local time in each location. The WCC brings together 348 Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican churches representing about 560 million Christians in 110 countries. The Council of European Bishops Conferences, which gathers Roman Catholic bishops and archbishops, is also supporting the campaign, according to a letter released by the WCC.

Similarly, President Obama, memorializing those who were killed at Fort Hood, said: “We know that the killer will be met with justice — in this world, and the next.”

“In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath,” observed Dr. Johnson. I suppose the same is true of tabloid headlines and presidents speaking in the diction of “ceremonial deism.”  I always find myself wondering, though, how many people, and to what degree, really take comfort in these references to cosmic justice. I vaguely recall that most Protestant theologians, and some Catholic ones, have long since concluded that hell is probably empty. The very conservative and orthodox RC Paul Johnson, in his Quest for God is careful to qualify his remarks about hell accordingly (see the Johnson quote on  p. 175 of We Are Doomed:  “Those who find themselves in Hell — if anyone does …” etc.)

In popular belief — below the level of academic theology and argumentative log-rolling, I mean — is belief in hell still widespread? Is even belief in an afterlife? I mean real belief, real gut behavior-moulding conviction.

Speaking of lapidary inscriptions, here is George Orwell, writing 62 years ago:

Skelton is not an easy poet to get hold of, and I have never yet possessed a complete edition of his works. Recently, in a selection I had picked up, I looked for and failed to find a poem which I remember reading years ago. It was what is called a macaronic poem — part English, part Latin — and was an elegy on the death of somebody or other. The only passage I can recall runs:

Sepultus est among the weeds,
God forgive him his misdeeds,
With hey ho, rumbelo,
Rumpopulorum,
Per omnia saecula,
Saecula saeculorum.

It has stuck in my mind because it expresses an outlook totally impossible in our own age. Today there is literally no one who could write of death in that light-hearted manner. Since the decay of the belief in personal immortality, death has never seemed funny, and it will be a long time before it does so again. Hence the disappearance of the facetious epitaph, once a common feature of country churchyards. I should be astonished to see a comic epitaph dated later than 1850.

The kinds of intellectual convolutions Dinesh D’Souza goes through in the book I posted about last week, are interesting to those who are interested, no doubt. I think Orwell is right, though. The widespread, bone-deep conviction of an afterlife, the conviction that could generate those comic epitaphs, died out among European Christians sometime in the 19th century. You’ll get an affirmative answer from big majorities if you poll Americans (or even Europeans) on belief in the afterlife, but actual behavior suggests this belief is a pale shadow of its former self.

And of course, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his pals don’t think they are going to hell at all. Last year they all offered to plead guilty before a military tribunal and accept execution. They think they did meritorious acts, for which they will be rewarded in heaven. Likewise with the suicide pilots and bombers. Now that is belief in an afterlife.

The American affinity for Britain, and in particular England, is such an assumed background condition that many would never even consider it a foreign tie or loyalty. But all nations have histories, pasts, and relationships with other nations.

But the relevance of multiple loyalties varies from group to group. There is for example one majority-Jewish nation. And there are only two majority-Hindu nations. There is only one Cuba. By contrast, there are ~1.5 billion Muslims scattered across the World Island. One reason Islam has bloody borders with other civilizations likely has to do with the fact that it has many borders, period. This means that Muslim populations are likely to be faced with a test of loyalty far more often than Hindu populations, or Sikh populations.

In a democratic society which is also pluralist in regards to religion there is always the problem that the manner in which a given religion is accommodated is contingent upon the opinions of other religionists and irreligionists. In fact, this is also the case in a non-democratic society. Jews are an excellent illustration of this dynamic, what we today term “Orthodox Judaism” is a religious tradition which was incubated largely within the civilizational framework of Christianity and Islam. Though Jews within Christian and Muslim polities had a certain level of autonomy, they were strongly shaped implicitly and explicitly by the will and opinions of non-Jews (guess whether European Jews or Yemeni Jews accept polygyny). One thesis for why Jews as a whole adopted matrilineal descent is that it was a Roman legal practice, and most Jews were resident within the Roman Empire, or right beyond the frontiers of Rome (in Mesopotamia, where the population was likely mostly Christian by the 5th century despite rule by Sassanian Zoroastrians). I mooted this thesis to an acquaintance who was an Orthodox Jew. As a point of support I noted that Joseph, the son of Jacob, had two sons by an Egyptian woman, and that these two sons were the ancestors of two tribes of Israel. This fact presented no problem for my friend, she reported that “oral law” held that in fact Asenath, the Egyptian wife of Joseph was adopted by the priest Potipherah, and that she was by origin Jewish. As a non-Jew, and non-believer in the God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims at that, I immediately found it more likely that the rabbis simply concocted this story after the fact to “tie up loose ends.”

I did not of course push this line of reasoning with my friend because there are limits to the utility of these discussions with sincere believers in religion. The axioms which an unbeliever and a believer hold are so fundamentally different on these questions that the probability of given inferences will be something one can never agree upon. But, there is an asymmetry in the discussion, and that is that many religious individuals imbue their beliefs, practices and customs with very powerful emotional valences.  The asymmetry is of course not always the case, some atheists have very strong emotional responses to religious symbols. To which one might wonder, what power does the image of the lie hold upon you? Atheists in religious societies often develop identities which are negations of the majoritarian sensibility. So an atheist from a Christian culture may find the display of the cross offensive, but other religious symbols interesting from the perspective of cultural anthropology. In other words, the offense lay not in the truth or falsity of claims pointed to by a given representation (e.g., crucifix or mandala), but the emotional associations which that given representation has in one’s mind (e.g., it seems likely that atheists from Protestant backgrounds would be conditioned by their religious culture to view the crucifix as a representation of a particularly medieval and oppressive religion).

In The Impossibility of Religious Freedom the legal scholar Winnifred Sullivan shows through a review of history and recent case law that the American conceit that our nation is neutral in matters of religion is not empirically tenable. Rather, the American polity has defined religion in a manner which makes neutrality more viable. Concretely, this has involved driving religion to the “private” domain, and making belief the sine qua non of religion. Immigrants from societies where belief is not the sine qua non of religion often have a difficult time understanding the parameters of the debate in the United States because they need time to update their assumptions. As I have asserted before, both Catholicism and Judaism have adapted to American assumptions. While in most of the world Jews are “religious” or “not religious,” in the United States most Jews are religiously affiliated with sects which are not considered to be religious Judaism in most of the world, the Reconstructionist, Reform and Conservative movements (as I have noted before, Reform Judaism even explicitly rejected Jewish nationhood for a span of several decades). The British situation is somewhat different, as it can be argued that the Establishment of the Anglican Church in England tacitly affirms that religion is not necessarily a matter of individual confession, rather, that the nation itself has a vested interest in a specific sect. The head of the British state is also simultaneously the head of the Anglican Church. This arrangement may seem exotic to Americans, but it is as old as civilization itself, and there is a high probability that it was temporal power which was fused onto sacral supremacy in terms of historical precedence. Different nations have different sensibilities, and a universal “solution” to the problem of religious pluralism is probably wrong-headed, and puts theory before empirical reality.

From the perspective of one who denies supernatural phenomena these facts compel one to accept the reality that responses to religion and its intersection with the public domain will be ad hoc, conditional on local variables. There is no true religion, simply the emotional and conceptual substance which human minds place onto religious symbols, beliefs and practices. The differences between Shia and Sunni may seem trivial to non-Muslims, but these abstruse differences serve as organizing principles which can tear societies apart. From the perspective of the unbeliever who operates within a society where most people take religious truths as givens, the key is to channel those “truths” to serve order, peace, stability, and human flourishing more generally. It is irrelevant, for example, whether “true Islam” is violent and antinomian, or an explicitly unitarian flavor of monotheism. In a society where most are non-Muslim only the latter is acceptable, permissible and viable. Practitioners of given religions have shown an empirical tendency to reshape “truth” post facto to minimize cognitive dissonance. American Judaism has by and large rejected the orthopraxy which is the sine qua non of Judaism the world over, but American Jews do not view themselves as false Jews. In fact, some Reform Jewish thinkers have developed ingenious revisions of Jewish history whereby they are the true heirs of Classical Judaism, with the 1,500 year ascendancy of Rabinnical Judaism being a historical anomaly. Your mileage may naturally vary as to what “truth” really is in this case, but from the American perspective Jews within these shores have stumbled upon a most convenient truth indeed!*

Though theology often depicts itself as a rational science, and religious law as a legal tradition premised upon eternal truths, in many ways religion is more analogous to art, and arguments about the evolution and development of religion similar to arguments about the history of art. Art co-opts and leans upon human intuitions and perceptions about the universe, and also has a “high culture” aspect whereby elites channel and shape its exemplary forms which are presumed to be closer to some ideal truth. Art in fact can serve as a totem or symbol which binds societies together, and reflects the spirit of the age. But from the perspective of evolutionary psychology art is also naturally constrained by our cognitive predispositions, and its utilitarian role within society is often prosaic. One can assent to the proposition that art will remain with us, that people will disputatiously argue about the naure of art, and invest emotional and financial capital into specific instantiations of art, without agreeing that art is in some metaphysical sense “True.” Partisans of disparate artistic movements may argue their cases with passion, sincerity and precision, but one knows at the end of the day that specific dominant forms of artistic expression are more often a reflection of the tenor of a society, than causal drivers of social change.

* One of the peculiarities of the American circumstance is that religious affiliation is often necessary for one to be “respectable.” So purely secular Jewishness is a less attractive option than it is in Europe or Israel. Reform and Conservative Judaism are popular in large part because they are religious traditions which allow American Jews to claim an affiliation, but not ones which are excessively exotic and would set Jews as a denomination apart.

By many standards, the JFS applicant, identified in court papers as “M,” is Jewish. But not in the eyes of the school, which defines Judaism under the Orthodox definition set out by Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. Because M’s mother converted in a progressive, not an Orthodox, synagogue, the school said, she was not a Jew — nor was her son. It turned down his application.

That would have been the end of it. But M’s family sued, saying that the school had discriminated against him. They lost, but the ruling was overturned by the Court of Appeal this summer.

In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”

The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.

…

It is unclear what effect the ruling, if it is upheld, will have on other religious schools. Some Catholic schools, accustomed to using baptism as a baseline admissions criterion, are worried that they will have to adopt similar practice tests.

…

“How dare they question our beliefs and our Jewishness?” David Lightman, an observant Jewish father whose daughter was also denied a place at the school because it did not recognize her mother’s conversion, told reporters recently. “I find it offensive and very upsetting.”

The title is tongue-in-cheek, as the Church of England, a Protestant denomination (unless you talk to some obstinate Anglo-Catholics), is the established church of England. My point though is that the British authorities seem to be enforcing a Protestant understanding of religious identity, in fact, a specifically dissenting Protestant conception of religious identity, that what you believe & confess is what “counts”. This is of course not something which is widely agreed upon, and in fact, implicitly it is probably a minority viewpoint, even in other jurisdictions of the United Kingdom. Within Judaism the historical tradition for the past 2,000 years has been upon the necessity of matrilineal descent, or, conversion. Judaism is understood as a nation as well as a religion. The British authorities seem intent on rewriting this understanding, and by doing so are imposing a very sectarian Christian understanding of the nature of religious identity. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that’s what’s going on.

And these sorts of issues are why the concept of religious “neutrality” is simply incoherent. By the act of definition and demarcation one is engaging in an act of discrimination and preference.

Many Americans who are indifferent to faith will confess they find themselves challenged as they try to raise good and decent children without the religious confidence their parents had.

writes William McGurn, for whose sagacity I have the utmost respect.  But if I may offer an alternative perspective, while taking Bill fully at his word:  The problem for child-rearing today, if one exists, may stem less from lack of belief in God than from lack of belief in authority.  If parents are unwilling or unable to restrain their children, my guess is that it is their absorption of the 1960s ethic of authenticity, rather than skepticism towards supernatural claims, that is most influencing their practices in the home.  Jesus is not the source of the mandate to say please and thank you; a due respect for civilization is.  Self-restraint, manners, artifice, the ideal of behaving like a gentleman or a lady, these are courtly virtues, not necessarily religious ones, and they were all trashed by the pseudo-cult of “getting back to nature” (i.e., no haircuts, bathing optional, no more suits and ties, no more waiting till marriage, and, from what I observe in some of my peers and their progeny, forks, spoons, and knives expendable).  Religious zeal can in fact trump respect for authority and manners in the pursuit of holy Truth, no less than the baby-boomers’ pursuit of maximal self-expression, which latter quest I suspect is the real child-rearing culprit here (along with a hyper charged multi-billion dollar youth industry). 

Nor are Jesus or other deities the source of parental authority.  It comes with the genes.  The only question is whether parents have the commitment and ability to use that authority wisely.  You don’t need to consult the Bible to figure out whether your eight-year-old should be allowed to wallop his baby sister, nor do you need to refer to the Bible to thunder forth with a non-appealable ban, complete with dire penalties, against such walloping.  People for whom religious practice was a vital and enriching part of their upbringing may have fully understandable difficulty imagining life without it.  Going to church every Sunday with your family, buffed and polished, is a wonderful, important ritual.  But I can testify to the possibility of a civilizing childhood without religion.  No one whom I went to school with through grammar school (and to my knowledge for a long time thereafter) came from a religious family, with the one exception of a friend whose mother was a Christian Scientist, but they were “good and decent children.”   Despite the usual predilection for tormenting the class scapegoat, they have gone on to become productive citizens at the same rate as most groups of children.   To the argument that they were simply living off the capital of the Ten Commandments, I will only observe here that no society condones murder, though all make exceptions for certain categories of deliberate killing.  And self-professed Christians can make lousy parents, too.  I have noticed recently that the mothers of young gangbangers in Chicago have a tendency to thank Jesus when their sons beat the rap. 

As for non-religious family rituals, here’s just one among many possibilities: I went when young with my parents every Sunday to the Dorothy Ahmanson Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles for Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts, also buffed and polished.  I cannot imagine my life being any more enriched had I spent those hours being taught that Lazarus rose from the dead or that Joseph Smith deciphered runic holy tablets with magic spectacles than it has been from early and formal exposure to Beethoven’s piano concerti.

The data is here.

It’s sadly telling that the “compromise” proposal limiting abortion was offered by Bart Stupak, and seconded by a Republican male. The opposition was led by Diana DeGette, and seconded by Rosa DeLauro. Stupak’s proposal has female supporters, to be sure, a decision that will mainly govern women is being made primarily by men. I would bet that the final vote will show a majority of congresswoman vote against this bill.

I’ll have to look at attitudes to abortion of the duly elected representatives of the people at some point, but might be useful to remember that there is really no sex difference when it comes to attitudes toward abortion. Below are some questions from the GSS broken down by sex for the years from 1998-2008.

If you do look at the data on a more fine-grained scale, for example, limiting the set to the college educated who support abortion rights, you can discern that the issue has more salience and importance to women of this set. So I think that may explain the dominant perception among elite pundits that women feel more strongly about this issue in a particular direction: among their social class that may be so.

My review of Nick’s previous book Before the Dawn is here.