In the latest edition of Sightings (no link, sorry), Martin Marty flags an interesting study about the incidence of involvement by atheists in religious institutions:
The hyper-theistic make up a larger number than the hyper-atheistic, but both speak with similar incaution, for example between quarterback snaps in the theistic case and in most utterances of “the new atheists” on the other. Ecklund finds that one in five polled or interviewed atheist scientists with children “involve their children with religious institutions.” One is tempted to say that that is probably about the same percentage of non-atheist non-scientists. Why do scientists “practice” religion even at second-hand? Some see it as a carry-over from childhood training, in the spirit of Hilaire Belloc: “So always keep a-hold on nurse for fear of finding something worse.” Mild “involvement” with religious institutions is a safe way to hedge bets or develop quiet habits. Ecklund and others in her generation are making a fresh run and exploring all this.
I’ve long, very long, been observing what I call “practical atheism” in religious institutions or in the penumbra of social circles around them. Fifty-five years ago next Thursday—I can’t resist noting—I got a Ph.D. for tracking “the varieties of unbelief.” Having set out to find the hidden skeptics of stature that I thought must have lurked in our national past—the Nietzsches or Marxes or other titanic “god-killers”--and finding mainly humorists (a la Mark Twain, always worth a reading) or inventors of new faiths that were not called faiths, it has struck me that what goes on in a blurry-lined set of publics is that millions do not bother to fight God or strongly to affirm God but to act the same way whether or not God exists.
I think that last insight (which is not Marty's last word in his column), is the key to both much of American religiosity and American a-religiosity. I suppose it goes back to our pragmatist inclinations in the end: Americans are ultimately less interested in what you believe than in what you do. I'm not sure if I find that comforting or not, but at least its a form of consistency.
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