‘Living the Secular Life,’ by Phil Zuckerman - The New York Times

‘Living the Secular Life,’ by Phil Zuckerman - The New York Times
‘Living the Secular Life,’ by Phil Zuckerman


By Susan Jacoby
Dec. 19, 2014






ImagePhil ZuckermanCreditCreditElliott Zuckerman
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Many years ago, when I was an innocent lamb making my first appearance on a right-wing radio talk show, the host asked, “If you don’t believe in God, what’s to stop you from committing murder?” I blurted out, “It’s never actually occurred to me to murder anyone.”

Nonreligious Americans are usually pressed to explain how they control their evil impulses with the more neutral, albeit no less insulting, “How can you have morality without religion?” Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in California, attempts to answer this question in “Living the Secular Life.” He offers an insightful mixture of academic research on shifting American religious views, his own experience as a parent, and interviews with others facing moral crises without God — from a woman overcoming drug addiction to a Holocaust survivor who bristles at the idea that God was looking out for anyone when the Nazis were murdering Jews.

Adults unaffiliated with any religion now make up nearly a fifth of the American population, but only about 30 percent of this group chose to identify themselves as atheists or agnostics in a 2012 study by the Pew Research Center. The rest described themselves as “nothing in particular,” giving rise to the media label “Nones.”

While slightly more than half of Americans say they would be less likely to vote for an atheist for president, the comparable figure in 2007 was closer to two-thirds. It is not inconceivable that the negative American image of atheists is beginning to change in a fashion that might one day resemble the dramatic shift in opinion about gay rights.

For now, though, many atheists find it impossible to eschew a slightly defensive tone, calibrated to show that they are as virtuous as anyone else. Zuckerman, whose previous works include “Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment” (2008), is no exception. He extols a secular morality grounded in the “empathetic reciprocity embedded in the Golden Rule, accepting the inevitability of our eventual death, navigating life with a sober pragmatism grounded in this world.”

The Golden Rule (who but a psychopath could disagree with it?) is a touchstone for atheists if they feel obliged to prove that they follow a moral code recognizable to their religious compatriots. But this universal ethical premise does not prevent religious Americans (especially on the right) from badgering atheists about goodness without God — even though it would correctly be seen as rude for an atheist to ask her religious neighbors how they can be good with God.

Zuckerman’s interviews — especially with nonreligious parents trying to raise children in highly religious regions of the country — provide ample explanation for the reluctance of atheists and agnostics to come out of the closet.

Tonya Hinkle (a pseudonym) is a mother of three who lives in a small town in Mississippi because her husband’s job is there. Her children were harassed at school after it became known that the Hinkles did not belong to a church. When Tonya’s first-grade twins got off the school bus crying, she learned that “this one girl had stood up on the bus and screamed — right in their faces — that they were going to HELL. That they were going to burn in all eternity because they didn’t go to church.”

Such experiences make plain that being a secular parent in Southern California or New York City is very different from raising a family in areas where the first question asked of a newcomer often is “What church do you go to?”


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Zuckerman is a sensitive interviewer who lets people speak for themselves without extraneous comment. An 87-year-old atheist recalls her reaction when her second child died of leukemia at age 4. “I remember, just after Billy died, when the first person said to me something like, ‘Well, you know, the Lord has called Billy home — it was just Billy’s time.’ I said to him, ‘No — don’t you tell me it was “Billy’s time.” I won’t hear it.’ ”

Many assume it must be harder for the nonreligious to cope with tragedy, but interviews like these indicate that in the realm of grief, atheists are grateful for not having to face the theodicy problem, with its unanswerable question of how a presumably loving God can allow evil and suffering.

On the more mundane concerns of the secular life — such as relations with religious relatives — Zuckerman’s observations are honest and useful. Over time, he and his wife, Stacy, have stopped trying to “protect” their children from the beliefs of her devout, born-again Christian parents. “They have a right to know what their grandparents believe, to know who they are,” Stacy says.

Yet it comes as something of a surprise that the author himself, when someone “asks what I am,” has reservations about using the word atheist because “it is essentially a term of negation.” That is etymologically true, but atheism can easily be paired with humanism, as Erasmus is called a Christian humanist. Alas, Zuckerman prefers the awful term “aweist” because he is “often full of profound, overflowing feeling.” We get it: Atheists love sunsets, music and babies as much as (sometimes more than) their religious neighbors.

There is no need for an invented euphemism to respond to the dimwitted stereotype of the atheist as coldhearted automaton. Otherwise, this book is a humane and sensible guide to and for the many kinds of Americans leading secular lives in what remains one of the most religious nations in the developed world.



LIVING THE SECULAR LIFE


New Answers to Old Questions

By Phil Zuckerman

276 pp. Penguin Press. $25.95.