OrthodoxNet.com Blog

Assignment for OT Blog readers

Wednesday 11 Jul 2007 | Jacobse | Announcements |

3 Responses to “Assignment for OT Blog readers”

1. 1) |  Top | Jul 13 2007 | Dean Scourtes

   What do you think of Ross Douthat’s argument that the higher political profile of the Religious Right has led to a “secular backlash”. Douthat, the conservative columnist for The Atlantic, writes:

   In the forthcoming, not-yet-online Atlantic, for instance, I have a short piece analyzing the rise of mass secularism in America, which draws on this paper by Michael Hout and Claude Fischer on the remarkable growth in the percentage of Americans with “no religious preference.” Hout and Fischer attribute this growth, in part, to people self-defining against organized religion because of its association with conservative politics, but (like Razib) they shy away from calling this phenomenon “secularism” because many of the “no religious preference” types retain supernatural beliefs.

   But I tend to think that the term “secularism” is actually most useful, and exact, when applied to a political hostility to organized religion of precisely the kind that Hout and Fischer are documenting, rather than to a more general disbelief in the supernatural. “Secularist” should be synonymous with “anti-clericalist,” in other words, rather than with “unbeliever.” (It seems like a poor definition of secularist that excludes Deists like Thomas Paine and Voltaire - or that excludes Sam Harris, for that matter, because of his forays into Eastern mysticism.)

   http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/06/what_is_secularism.php

   According to Hout and Fischer, the growth in the numbers of Americans claiming “no religious preference”, resulted not from an increase in athiests, but an increase in disaffected “unchurched believers”.

2. 2) |  Top | Jul 13 2007 | Jacobse

   I’d say he’s got it wrong. How the Democrats Got Religion.

3. 3) |  Top | Jul 17 2007 | Christopher

   Well, I tried to complete my assignment. Instead of the dog eating it, my local Barnes and Nobel decided to put the “August/September” issue on the stands already. The online article is of course not available yet…