Best of 2022: Two Big Trends
This is the last of my highlights from 2022: an overview of the long-term decline of religious belief in America. It is a story that explains the underlying forces beneath a lot of today’s politics, a claim I will be following up on soon, in several articles.
I covered this in the piece below from September, after some new polling data was released, but I have been discussing it for some time, including in a Discourse article in April examining the Enlightenment-influenced moral philosophy that can and should take religion’s place as a source of meaning and guidance.
I will be resuming with new articles next week, but in the meantime, this is your last opportunity to get a subscription to The Tracinski Letter at a discount.
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Occasionally, it’s a good idea to step back from the daily back and forth of politics and take a look at a bigger picture that helps explain a lot of what happens day to day.
I want to draw your attention to two such trends—large-scale, long-term social changes that have interesting political and philosophical implications.
I can summarize them very briefly: We have become a rich nation, and we are quickly becoming a secular nation.
You can see how this could be discomfiting to both the left and the right. To the left, America becoming a rich nation undercuts the idea that we need to fundamentally transform our whole society in order to save the poor from ruthless exploitation. To the right, the fact that we are becoming a secular nation undercuts their pretension of speaking for a dominant religious and cultural majority. These two developments, which many of us would look upon as slow-motion triumphs, are seen by the major political factions as slow-motion catastrophes, setting off spirals of denial and compensation that shape our politics in ways we may not realize.
First let’s just review the facts behind these two trends.
The War on What Now?
That America is a wealthy nation may not seem controversial. We still have the world’s largest economy, and by a good margin, and we definitely enjoy the standard of living of a “developed” or “First World” country. But you still hear complaints about the persistence of poverty in the United States that supposedly gives the lie to any triumphalism about our amazing economic progress.
Both the left and the right have an interest in making America, and the world in general, seem like it is constantly on the brink of catastrophe. I just posted a podcast with Marian Tupy of HumanProgress.org and coauthor of the new book Superabundance, where we talk about this rejection of progress and the political and cultural consequences of that rejection.
Whatever the reasons, this is why we get claims like a British economist declaring that the US and Britain are not rich societies, but merely “poor societies with some very rich people.” That is an excellent description of Russia, a country where millions still don’t have indoor plumbing, but Moscow is crawling with politically connected billionaires. But it definitely does not describe the United States.
This came to my attention by way of Noah Smith, who has some terribly blinkered Big Government biases yet still produces some interesting ideas. He provides a lot of facts and figures to refute this poor-mouthing of America.
[W]hichever numbers we use, it’s clear that the median American earns more income than the median resident of almost any other country on the planet.
And it’s worth noting that higher average incomes partially cancel out the deleterious effects of higher inequality. A good measure of inequality is the relative poverty rate—the percent of people living at or below half of the median income. In the US, this number is higher than for other rich countries—in 2019 it was 17.8%. That means that someone at around the 18th percentile of income in America in 2019—a working-class person on the edge of being considered poor—lived in a household making $21,400 a year. That’s about the same as the median income of households in Japan, and about 84% of the median income of households in the UK.
In other words, a working-class American on the edge of poverty makes as much as a middle-class person in some rich countries….
In any case, it’s very difficult to look at a country where the typical person lives in a larger house, is more likely to own a car, eats more meat, and uses more electricity than people in other rich countries, and to conclude that this is “a poor society.” All of these indicators fit with what we see from aggregate statistics, as well as anecdotes and stereotypes—the typical middle-class American lives a more lavish life than their counterparts in Europe or other rich nations.
I mentioned that Smith is a blinkered welfare statist, so in between all these statistics, he peppers his argument with disclaimers that he is still in favor of “redistribution,” i.e., taxing the richer rich people to provide benefits for the not-so-rich rich people. But—why?
The fact that we are a wealthy country—and by far the world’s wealthiest large country—undercuts a lot of the traditional case for big government and the welfare state. How do you have a War on Poverty if there’s not that much poverty left?
I remember interviewing Steven Pinker years ago, and when the subject of the welfare state came up, he immediately referred to “The Little Match Girl,” a Hans Christian Anderson story from 1845 about a six-year-old turned out by her cruel father to sell matches on the street on a bleak winter night until she freezes to death. This is more a story of parental neglect than of poverty per se, but the whole story is only possible because of the kind of callous indifference that is normal in a society that is desperately poor and used to seeing children living in squalor.
How long has it been since this was remotely typical of any developed society? Yet here we are at the pinnacle of wealth in all of human history, acting as if we are just one government program away from having six-year-olds turned out into the streets to die.
If the goal is to provide a “safety net” for those on the verge of dropping into genuine poverty—well, in a society as wealthy as ours, that is a relatively small number of people. But if you look at entitlement spending in America (and in Europe), you will find that the overwhelming majority is tax money taken from our vast, prosperous middle class and paid right back to the middle class.
The View from the Top of the Pyramid
The right has its own version of these biases, except that their complaint is not that the average person is poor, but that it is difficult for a single earner to support a whole family. The man of the family is not able to support the lavish standard of living to which we have become accustomed while still living a properly traditional, Leave-it-to-Beaver lifestyle.
Notice, though, that this is less an economic issue than a cultural or lifestyle issue, and across the spectrum, these lifestyle issues have taken over as our chief political concerns, pushing out the old “kitchen table” issues.
In the 1960s through the early 1980s, our dominant political issues included the War on Poverty (for the left) and the Misery Index (for the right). But now that we’re rich, we’re ascending to the top of Maslow’s pyramid (or Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs). No longer so concerned with keeping our bellies full or a roof over our heads, we are free to obsess over our spiritual lives—too often, not in a good way. Our political controversies are about whether we’re living a traditional lifestyle or a green lifestyle or whether our men are masculine enough or we’re too stuck in an outdated “gender binary.” And so on.
Yes, culture war issues have always been part of our political mix. There have been moral panics and moral crusades over alcohol and drugs and homosexuality, and there was a counter-culture in which a bunch of long-haired hippie freaks tried to tear down whatever was built by those untrustworthy squares over the age of 30. And there has always been someone to complain that the rising generation of men are a bunch of feminized sissies. But I’m not sure there has been a time when the culture war swallowed everything else in quite the way it has done in the last ten years. See an interesting observation from Reason’s Stephanie Slade, who notes that just in the past three years, gatherings of nationalist conservatives have gone from devoting a significant effort to policy and economics to being “all about grievance politics.”
We’re living through a twisted version of something John Adams predicted in a letter to Abigail Adams: “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” Our forebears mastered agriculture and commerce so that we could have the leisure to argue over “woke casting” in the latest Tolkien adaptation. Somehow, this seems less inspiring.
If a rich country is a country that can afford to spend all its time obsessing over the culture war, additional urgency is added to that conflict by the second big trend.
“Where a Christian Majority Exists”
I have written before about the ongoing collapse of religious belief in America, but I recently came across some new statistics and projections on this.
A new report by Pew Research Center and the General Social Survey published on Tuesday found that the large numbers of people in the U.S who practice Christianity are declining. The religion's demographic has been dwindling since the 1990s, the report said, as many adults transition to an identity of atheist, agnostic or "nothing in particular."
In the early '90s, about 90% of people in the US identified as Christians, the report said. In 2020, Christians accounted for about 64% of the U.S. population, including children. Meanwhile, those who are not affiliated with a religion has grown from 16% in 2007 to 30% in 2020, according to the research.
That is the reality I have already discussed. What is more interesting is Pew’s projection of the trends.
"Depending on the future of religious switching, people who identify as atheist, agnostic or 'nothing in particular' could become America's largest (non)religious group within our lifetime," Pew researcher Stephanie Kramer tweeted…. "If switching among young Americans continued at recent rates, Christians would decline as a share of the population by a few percentage points per decade, dipping below 50% by 2060," the report says.
The new information in this article that I thought was interesting is that Pew has specific figures on the rate of “religious switching”: “in each new generation, 31% of Christians become religiously unaffiliated before they turn 30, and 21% of unaffiliated people become Christian.” Notice the asymmetry. There are more Christians, and they are losing their faith at a faster rate, so many more young people are falling away from Christianity than are being converted back to it. Pew projects that this disparity will continue to grow, and I agree. As fewer people profess a clear belief in God, the inhibition against disbelief will continue to fade. I have already seen it fade considerably in my lifetime. So Pew’s most likely projection is that practicing Christians will cease to a majority of the US population somewhere around 2050—about a generation from now. Put it this way: I will likely live to see America no longer be a majority Christian nation.
To put that in perspective, a recent nationalist conservative manifesto declared, among other troubling provisions, the following: “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” Note that preamble: “Where a Christian majority exists.” In a few decades, that may not include the United States.
As a lifelong atheist, I view this as something to celebrate. We are becoming secularized like much of Western Europe: a peaceful, orderly, prosperous society in which the majority no longer holds any strong religious belief. I think we will need to think clearly and rationally about what takes the place of religious belief. We will need art and philosophy to step up and provide a kind of secular spirituality. That this is already happening is a large part of the explanation for how we became a secularizing society in the first place, but it can clearly be done far better than now, and more consciously and deliberately.
But you can see how religious conservatives would regard this as the apocalypse, and not just because they project that a godless society will collapse from within. Perhaps the worse outcome for them is that it would not collapse, that such a society would continue to be “peaceful, orderly, prosperous”—that religion would be demonstrated to be unnecessary for human flourishing.
I think you can begin to see now why there is such pressure and urgency behind nationalist conservative schemes to have the state come to the aid of religion. It is not because they are confident of having a Christian majority. It is because they believe this is their last opportunity to appeal to such a majority before it melts away.
Incidentally, I don’t think it will work. Consider the upshot of theocratic rule in Iran: In attempting to enforce religious conformity, the regime is arguably causing the collapse of religious belief. If the Christian nationalists ever come to power here, they will probably drive people away from their faith even faster. I would warn them to try to lead people back to their faith by persuasion and moral example, but I think it is all futile. Traditional religion ultimately cannot coexist with the rational, scientific worldview that has been developing and taking hold for the past millennium. After centuries of fighting secular learning, then centuries of trying to make an accommodation with it, Christianity is now simply just giving way.
To be sure, in fulfillment of all the conservatives’ fears, we also have a “woke” left eager to fill the void left by Christianity by appropriating all of its worst qualities, all of the things we won’t miss about religion: its zealotry, its proclamations of faith in the irrational, its appeal to guilt, its attempt to proscribe sinful thoughts and ban sinful words. The urgency for the left is their eagerness to take religion’s place as the new orthodoxy, rather than allowing a liberal ethos of rational discussion and intellectual freedom to take hold.
I am also optimistic that woke ideology will not establish itself as the new faith and stamp out all intellectual opposition, despite its best efforts. We will have to push through threats from both the left and the right to get there, but we are entering an exciting era of opportunity in which we will end up living in a wealthy, technologically advanced, entrepreneurial, and secular society.
If we keep that in mind, it will help us to understand the daily political turmoil that springs up in reaction against this progress—and to keep it in perspective.
Honestly,if you think $21’000 is enough to live in this country ,you are mistaken. Looked at rents lately? Even renting a trailer home out in the country would not leave you enough to live anything like what an American needs to live , buy a used car & food ,& have $1 ,left for anything else.