How Low Can You Go?

A Gallup poll released last summer suggested Americans are finally waking up to reality, although clearly they still have a long way to go. An article about this hopeful change in American thinking on Gallup’s website was titled, Belief in Five Spiritual Entities Edges Down to New Lows. Exciting as that headline seems, the figures showing belief in the supernatural are still way too high for a supposedly modern, advanced nation. And never forget that the Talibangelists still have a chokehold on US politics and when they are in power, they use that force to compel their form of religious practice a la Margaret Atwood’s Gilead.*

When I look at all the people who believe Trump’s blatant lies, and who subscribe to risible conspiracies about a flat earth, fake moon landings, microchipped vaccinations, and creationism, I realize getting Americans to believe in any truth and facts, much less basic science, has a long journey ahead. Just read the comments following any science post on Facebook and you will soon despair for humanity’s future if these people are allowed to vote and breed.**

Not that Canadians fare much better in our capacity to be fooled: a Leger poll conducted in December 2023 found “79% of Canadians believe in at least one of the conspiracy theories we asked them about. Conservative voters (94%) are more likely to believe in at least one of the theories.” Conservatives more likely to be conspiracy-addled and hard-of-thinking? Hardly surprising: just look at their leader, spinning his daily lies and spreading disinformation to help Putin’s agenda. And given how many Canadians didn’t believe medical authorities during the pandemic, I should not be surprised many of us have slipped into American-ish suspicion toward science or truth.

The Leger site adds what is probably a tautology: “Americans are more likely than Canadians to believe in conspiracy theories.” More concerning to me is that a recent survey conducted for the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) found that roughly “one-sixth of Canadians have no knowledge of any genocide, including the Holocaust.” Survey results online here. This partially explains but does not justify the rise in anti-Semitism in Canada since the recent Israel-Hamas war: perhaps those responsible are ignorant of basic history.

How could so many Canadians not be aware of recent history? That bodes ill for our ability to reject the claims of the rightwing fascists when they blast their siren calls about nationalism and racism. And then I remember the insurrectionist convoy occupying Ottawa, waving Confederate and Nazi flags, and the support they got openly and enthusiastically from Pierre PoiLIEvre… but I digress.

What if what Gallup found about religious belief in the USA is really a trend away from the supernatural and not just a demographic blip? How low can these numbers go? Is there any realistic chance they could drop below 50 percent within the next few years? Personally, I doubt it: America has always been a superstitious nation prone to religious beliefs, and susceptible to all sorts of pseudo-religious grifters, bizarre faiths, and fringe cults, from the Mormons to Scientology to the rich con artist evangelists and their mega-churches. I don’t see the latest figures as a “loss of faith” as much as a slow awakening to reality by a portion of the populace.

The article notes that while Repugnicans are more liable to believe in the supernatural, Democrats are not really far behind. And people with more money are somewhat less likely to be superstitious than those with little:

Between 78% and 87% of Republicans believe in the five entities, while 51% to 68% of independents do. From 56% to 66% of Democrats believe in God, angels and heaven, while less than half say they believe in hell and the devil.
Americans with annual household incomes under $40,000 are more likely than those with incomes of at least $100,000 to believe in each of the entities. Yet, majorities in the two higher-income groups believe in each spiritual concept.

Not too surprising: money usually equates with better education, and generally people with better and more education are less likely to fall for conspiracies, myths, or, one hopes, faith-based ideologies that ignore science or promote superstition. (This includes homeopathy, astrology, reflexology, reiki, anti-GMO and anti-gluten diets, anti-vaxxers, so-called psychics, and faith healers).

What about Canadians? A Leger poll released last April found only 51 percent of Canadians believe in a god, and only a third of respondents believed it strongly:

Nationally, 32.8 per cent of Canadians strongly agree there is a God, compared to 18.5 per cent who “somewhat agree,” a split of nearly 15 points. In Alberta, that split is much higher at more than 25 points (39.3 per cent strongly agree, and 18.5 per cent somewhat agree). In the Prairies, the split is more than 35 points, with barely one person in ten saying they “somewhat agree” that God exists.

A significant difference, then, between Canadian and American beliefs in the supernatural. Poll results are online here. Gallup’s recent findings run counter to what previous polls have found. For example, in 2018, Pew Research found Americans had a Medieival-like religiosity: “The vast majority of Americans (90%) believe in some kind of higher power, with 56% professing faith in God as described in the Bible and another 33% saying they believe in another type of higher power or spiritual force. Only one-in-ten [sic] Americans say they don’t believe in God or a higher power of any kind. In the U.S., Christians are particularly likely (99%) to believe in God or a higher power, with 80% claiming faith in a biblical God.”

But wait… aren’t there multiple versions of that biblical god? Based on my reading of it and related texts, I would argue that Jews, Protestants, and Catholics all imagine a different deity with fundamentally different attributes, goals, and powers. And further, the aspects of said deity differ depending on which book is being read, ranging from capricious to plotting, random to calculating, supportive to vindictive, malicious to caring. Godzilla seems far more consistent than the biblical god.

The same applies to angels, demons, ghosts, the devil under any name, as well as any sort of afterlife… these are not singularities, but rather have variations and shades of belief that cannot be simply defined by single words like the poll asked. All of them are supernatural, of course, and mostly based on various interpretations outside scripture, often millennia after such scripture was written. And most have a particularly Christian or pseudo-Christian ideological perspective that has no biblical basis.

In 2023, Pew found that atheists only make up a mere 4 percent of Americans, a modest increase from their surveys of 2014 (3%) and 2007 (2%). That study also found that “An overwhelming majority of atheists (94%) say that the statement “religion causes division and intolerance” describes their views a great deal or a fair amount…” While I agree about the divisions —historically there is more than ample evidence of Western religions creating division and stoking intolerance — what I found bizarre about the results of that survey is that “About three-quarters of U.S. atheists (77%) do not believe in God or a higher power or in a spiritual force of any kind… At the same time, 23% say they do believe in a higher power of some kind, though fewer than 1% of U.S. atheists say they believe in “God as described in the Bible.”

That last result suggests to me that a lot of so-called American atheists aren’t really sure what they do or don’t believe. How can almost a quarter of respondents who call themselves atheists also say they believe in a supernatural deity? That makes as much sense as a Repugnican member of Congress making a speech in favour of re-electing Joe Biden. Maybe they don’t understand the meaning of the term atheist. Maybe they’re confused about what not believing in gods or supernatural entities entails. Given how little Americans understand political terms like liberal or socialist, that lack of knowledge about religious terminology wouldn’t surprise me at all.

In 2022, a previous Gallup poll found “81% of U.S. adults say they believe in God — down 6 points from 2017,” adding “More than 90% of Americans believed in God between 1944 and 2011.” Frankly, I find that latter number scary but it does explain a lot.

I find the reduction in believers mildly uplifting, but am cautious about celebrating it too soon. Can we reach 49 percent any time soon? I personally doubt it, because Americans are a deeply superstitious people. Besides,  rightwing evangelism (aka pseudo-Christian Talibangelism) has a firm hold on American politics, making it impossible for even modest disbelief in the orthodox faith — let alone atheism — to be accepted by even a minority.

But back to the most recent poll: is it a trend or simply a part of a cycle that will see belief in the supernatural climb back up again? I hope for the former but fear the latter. On the other hand, church attendance has been falling in the USA, Canada, and the UK, a trend, The Guardian reported as being greater among younger people:

…while Covid-19 may have accelerated the decline, there is a broader, long-running trend of people moving away from religion. In 2017 Lifeway surveyed young adults aged between 18 and 22 who had attended church regularly, for at least a year during high school. The firm found that seven out of 10 had stopped attending church regularly.***

The religious demographic in the USA has also shifted. As the Guardian story also notes, in 1972, 92% of Americans said they were Christian, but only 64% did in 2020. Pew Research has suggested that will fall below 50% by 2070, adding the number of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans – or ‘nones’ — will probably outnumber those adhering to Christianity by then. But that has created a backlash among the Talibangelists who want to force a reversal through political power. And Donald Trump is their instrument.

I fear — with good reason given his past performance in office pandering to the Talibangelists — that, should Americans re-elect Trump, the USA will quickly become a pseudo-Christian theocracy with him as dictator. He will put the Christofascists into office for them to create oppressive laws that not only require expressions of belief, but will punish dissenters. And atheists will be top of the list of enemies to hunt down and punish. As the New Yorker magazine reported in 2018,

Americans, in large numbers, still do not want atheists teaching their children, or marrying them. They would, according to surveys, prefer a female, gay, Mormon, or Muslim President to having an atheist in the White House, and some of them do not object to attempts to keep nonbelievers from holding other offices, even when the office is that of notary public. Atheists are not welcome in the Masonic Lodge, and while the Boy Scouts of America has opened its organization to gays and to girls, it continues to bar any participant who will not pledge “to do my duty to God.”****

Hyperbole? Or merely an extension of discrimination and laws already in place? As Wikipedia notes, “In the United States, seven state constitutions include religious tests that would effectively prevent atheists from holding public office, and in some cases being a juror/witness.” Under another Trump regime, it will only get worse and I suspect if he is re-elected, soon no one will be allowed to admit their lack of faith in the USA, and be forced to attend church services in the face of severe legal repercussions for not doing so. And that will empower conservatives in other Western nations — including Canada if PoiLIEvre gets elected prime minister — to echo that legislation and become more and more like repressive Muslim states with official religion and severe punishment against even mild forms of dissent.

That’s the world Trump and his supporters want to build. I can only hope that not enough voting Americans are smart and caring enough that they don’t want to see it happen.

Notes:

* For example, as quickly as they could, Trump’s newly-appointed Talibangelists on the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and took away the rights and freedom of choice from millions of American women, even allowing states to pass Medieval-style laws punishing women further if they were victims of rape or incest, or if they tried to leave their state for medical treatment elsewhere. Anyone who thinks more and more vicious repression, especially of women, will not be forthcoming under a second Trump presidency is being deliberately ignorant of the facts.

** Whenever I read about the belief in the supernatural, particularly when it shows that many people still have faith in invisible sky people, and especially when I read the pseudo-religious, often conspiracy-addled comments following posts about science on social media, I recall the words of French novelist Henry de Montherlant, who wrote in his Carnets (Notebooks),

Stupidity does not consist of being without ideas — that would be sweet, blissful stupidity of animals, molluscs, and the gods. Human stupidity consists of having lots of ideas, but stupid ones.

*** For Canadian data, see the 2021 StatsCan report on religiosity. It notes, “Both religious affiliation and frequency of participation in group religious activities have trended downward in recent decades. For example, the share of people who reported having a religious affiliation fell from 90% in 1985 to 68% in 2019. Meanwhile, the share of those who attended a group religious activity at least once a month fell by almost half, from 43% to 23% over the same period… recent generations were less likely than the generations that came before them to report a religious affiliation, to participate in group or individual religious activities, or to place a high value on religious and spiritual beliefs in how they live their lives.”
In a 2022 story, Global News also reported that “the number of Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and Hindus is increasing, and StatCan predicts the number of Canadians reporting a non-Christian religious affiliation could double by the year 2036.” The article also suggests “After a membership decline between 1961 and 2001 of 50 per cent, and a similar decline between 1991 and 2015, Elliot projected the Anglican Church would run out of members completely by 2040.”

**** My grandfather was a Mason; he left me his Bible and his certificate showing his degree, perhaps hoping it might influence me to join. He wore the ring, and had the car decal, too, but never really made an issue of his participation with the family. A couple of decades back, I was being recruited to join a local Masons’ chapter. But over dinner discussions with the members looking to recruit me, I said I could not profess belief in, let alone loyalty to any supernatural “supreme being.” And that ended their interest in me. A Freemason website says it clearly: “Those who do not believe in a Supreme Being, atheists, and women (depending on who you ask) are not allowed to become Masons.” To which I must respond with Groucho Marx’s famous quip: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”

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