Political Weakness Of The Secular Left In The United States

Second, the authors speculate about the “birth of a Secular Left analogous to the Religious Right,” but they have “reason to think that secularism will remain inchoate and thus politically ineffectual.” Amen, but only if the Democratic Party’s faith-friendly majority pushes back. In 2008, I joined clergy and other leaders, including other “pro-life, pro-family, and pro-poor” Democrats, as a speaker at the 2008 Democratic National Convention’s “Faith Caucus.” The ballroom was so full of people and energy that it scared the hell out of the convention’s anti-religious zealots. Unfortunately, those zealots currently hold sway in the party, and they made sure nothing similar happened again in 2012, 2016, or 2020. They also scrubbed all talk of God from the party’s platforms. But look for 2024 to be a year when the party’s more moderate and religious constituents have their say, show up, and pray out loud.

Third, America’s religious individuals and institutions are enormously civic-minded in ways that tangibly benefit people of all faiths and none. In a 2001 report titled Better Together, I joined Harvard University’s Robert D. Putnam in documenting how the nation’s churches, synagogues, mosques, and other faith-based organizations “build and sustain more social capital…than any other type of institutions in America,” whether “measured by association memberships, philanthropy, or volunteering.” In stark contrast, as Secular Surge notes, Secularists and their organizations “specialize in politics”—in fact, Secularists do so little by way of “nonpolitical engagement” that the authors are obliged to caution against damning them as “civic deadbeats.”^[2]

It tells you something that in a time when "no religion" is the category of roughly 20% of Americans, virtually none of the hundreds of Democrats and Republicans vying for congressional seats identify as a religious "none."

.... atheism and related forms of non-belief are about the worst thing a candidate can be associated with.^[3]

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victory dealt that movement a body blow when he garnered 81 percent of the white evangelical vote and 60 percent of the white Catholic vote. Mormons, too, voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

Despite Trump’s not being a particularly religious person, his platform was seen as anti-secular in many atheist and humanist circles. He said he would appoint religiously conservative Supreme Court justices, ban Muslim immigrants, favor Christianity and repeal the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits certain tax-exempt organizations from endorsing political candidates — issues antithetical to organized atheism and humanism.^[4]

...it has really affected us. We are suffering a level of defeatism that I have never seen before...

We feel the loss. And we feel like we have lost. We feel like we lost the election... We see this cascade of attack coming down at us over and over from all different directions and we feel like it's over. I have heard so many times it makes me sick. It makes me sad. It feels like we lost.

The apathy that follows. It doesn't matter. We can't win anyways. It's useless to fight. This apathy is infecting us. It's hurting us.

And people are reacting to each other now. And so that is causing a division. Lots and lots of division in our movement. Hard, bad division... And that has resulted in a splintering and factioning of the movement that I have never seen before and none of us have.

In other words, we're in a bad situation and it's getting worse.^[9]