We found that 60 percent believed that atheists would not allow them First Amendment rights and liberties. More specifically, we asked whether they believed atheists would prevent them from being able to “hold rallies, teach, speak freely, and run for public office.” Similarly, 58 percent believed “Democrats in Congress” would not allow them to exercise these liberties if they were in power.Incidentally it is true that many Americans want to strip each other's rights; for example, a large group (the numbers are presented in a confusing way) would deny white supremacists the right "to give speeches in the community, teach in public schools, run for public office and other liberties."
This study's authors go on to say that while some atheists and progressives do want to deny political rights to Evangelicals, that number is smaller than the number of Evangelicals that want to deny rights to atheists. Evangelical fear of progressive power, they write,
comes from an inverted golden rule: Expect from others what you would do unto them. White evangelical Protestants express low levels of tolerance for atheists, which leads them to expect intolerance from atheists in return.I suspect that this is true, if you simply ask atheists about firm believers; the "leave them alone in their silly attachment to the Iron Age" attitude is common among the atheists and agnostics I know.
But I suspect that you might get a very different answer if you asked progressives instead about tolerance for people who think homosexuality is evil. I am quite certain that most progressives and atheists don't want people who believe homosexuals are all going to hell to teach school, and you can, in fact, get fired from teaching public school for saying this to you students. People who are tolerant of religion in a vague, general sense may nonetheless be very intolerant of many beliefs actually held by religious believers.
8 comments:
Perhaps it is worth pointing out that 1) the first amendment enacts restrictions on the government only, not on how civilians treat each other, and certainly not on how they feel about each other; and 2) some Americans hold views that are really inimical to other Americans. How tolerant should non-whites actually be forced to be of white supremacists? I find it quite understandable that a non-white person would not want a white supremacist teaching their kids. And how tolerant should Jews actually have to be of neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers?
I can understand if a deeply believing Christian teacher were to feel aggrieved that they could not preach to their public school students--after all, from the teacher's point of view, the students' immortal souls are at stake. And I can also understand if atheist students and parents felt aggrieved if the teacher spent class time preaching to them (or teaching intelligent design, for example)--or if they wrote on their blog how sad they were that all their students were going to hell.
I suspect that this is true, if you simply ask atheists about firm believers; the "leave them alone in their silly attachment to the Iron Age" attitude is common among the atheists and agnostics I know.
But I suspect that you might get a very different answer if you asked progressives instead about tolerance for people who think homosexuality is evil.
Liberals and progressives generally don't care about what someone believes, but they absolutely do care about the actions you take and the effects you have on others.
If someone is against homosexuality for religious reasons, then all they have to do is not engage in it. Heck, their church is even free to not allow homosexuals - they have freedom of association, after all.
The problem arises when they start trying to meddle in other people's lives and work to prevent other people from being homosexual, or punish them for it. When they start treating homosexuals differently than others, that's when the line gets crossed. They can privately believe whatever the hell they way, but once their beliefs inspire them to negative actions against innocent people, tolerence ends.
Live and let live. If you can't do that, you will face the consequences.
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I am quite certain that most progressives and atheists don't want people who believe homosexuals are all going to hell to teach school, and you can, in fact, get fired from teaching public school for saying this to your students. People who are tolerant of religion in a vague, general sense may nonetheless be very intolerant of many beliefs actually held by religious believers.
The belief isn't what people are intolerant of. Believe whatever you want privately.
The thing people don't tolerate is a teacher in a public school, paid with taxpayer money, who is being abusive to a student.
It is not just totally inappropriate to tell a child that they are an evil abomination who is going to suffer for all eternity because of their sexuality - it is downright psychopathic. You can believe it all you want, but you're not allowed to ever come out and say it, because that's verbal abuse.
There is absolutely no situation in which a teacher's personal religious convictions should influence part of the student's school experience. Children are there to learn, not to be judged and verbally assaulted by people who are supposed to be authority figures and role models entrusted with their wellbeing and growth.
@G-
I obviously don't think homosexuals are going to hell and would not like anyone telling my children that.
The thing is, I am not sure that there is such a thing as a neutral way to teach, or for that matter to do anything. For many believers, everything you do is a religious act; consider, for example, many Orthodox Jews, for whom dressing and eating are religious acts just as surely as prayer. For many believers, a secular society, or a secular school, is not a neutral thing but an active rejection of them and everything they believe. For many believers, not starting public events and rituals with a prayer is not a neutral thing, but a dismissal of God. And their scriptures really do say that God may smite us for rejecting him.
Ok, you may think, go found your own school. Which is what many Christians and Jews have done. But at the same time that means, for them, that the broader society actively rejects them and what they believe. I believe that is is just as firm and punitive a rejection as, say, the schools I went to vis-a-vis homosexuality, which was absolutely never mentioned except in locker-room taunts about faggots. If you are a very conservative Catholic, then not being able to say that homosexuality is evil is a rejection of who you are, a silencing. Exactly the thing that gay people used to complain about and trans people complain about now. If school should provide same-sex bathrooms as a way of accepting trans and binary people and the like, then why shouldn't they provide modest single-sex bathrooms as a way of accepting conservative religious people? Or, for that matter, girls who have been sexually abused? Because I have been places (for example, professional archaeological conferences) where signs proclaim that all the bathrooms are unisex to make people of every gender and identity feel welcome. But not, apparently, Evangelical Christians; archaeologists don't seem to care about welcoming them.
There just isn't any sort of society that is neutral about religion. A society can be Christian, or Muslim, or Jewish, or Buddhist, or it can be Secular. But secular is a *choice,* a decision to make the world a certain way, a way that makes many religious people uncomfortable. And don't gay people and trans people complain all the time about things that make them uncomfortable, or that ask them to keep quiet about who they are and what they believe?
I think conservative Christians are every bit as deserving of protection as gay people. I do not accept the notion that homosexuality is different because it is not a religion. (Or, for that matter, heterosexuality.) If teachers can say that being gay is good, why can't they say that it is bad? Neither way is neutral toward either sexual identity or religion.
These are just really hard problems and "don't condemn other people" is not an obvious solution, because they way we choose to arrange our public spaces is necessarily a condemnation of many ways of being and living.
I would agree entirely that "conservative Christians are every bit as deserving of protection as gay people." The question is, how do you compromise so that they can live together? And lately I've been wondering if the answer is, no compromise is really possible, at least for those who aren't prepared to accept that the preferred position for them on every level is go-along-to-get-along. So perhaps variations on the Benedict option may be the best we can do.
A while back there was a white supremacist scheme to turn Leith, ND, into a sort of white supremacist haven. The people of Leith who weren't into that fought them off, and I don't blame them. But perhaps in principle letting the white supremacists have some little ministate, as long as they were content with that and nothing more, might not a bad idea for the rest of us too?
We already do this, to an extent. Provincetown is famous around MA as a gay town, and I doubt there are many biblical fundamentalists living there. I'm sure there are towns around the country that are dominated by the religious, and, unless you want to live a life of constant confrontation, they're probably not good places to be militantly atheistic or openly gay. Maybe that is the best we can do.
Then I suppose the question is, how much local control do we allow? Do we allow a white supremacist ministate to break out the old Third Reich teaching tools, like the ones that demonstrated to kids which nasal angles were good and which were too Jewish? Do we allow an Afrocentric ministate to teach that whites are the twisted creations of the mad wizard Yusuf? (This is a story put out by the Nation of Islam; the resemblances to Tolkien's best-known scenario for the creation of orcs are uncanny.)
Perhaps more immediately relevant, do we allow a whole state to once again outlaw the teaching of evolution?
I realize I'm Bogarting this conversation, but I think about these issues all the time. The thing is, we've just scratched the surface in talking about these big-name ideologies and identities. All human life involves conflict and repression, silencing and denial of who one is. What about the weak and lazy people, for whom every copy of "Atlas Shrugged" is a slap in the face? I'm quite serious. And what about all those John Galts who feel held back by the mediocrity around them? What about the angry and violent, who have to learn "anger management"--doesn't that deny who they are? I wouldn't want to live in a world that allowed the angry and violent, or the John Galts, even more play than they already have, but that's just my preference--what about them?
Some of us who've been reading John's blog for 20+yrs--how long HAS it been?--may remember Maureen, the Yale student who admitted to a reporter that she just wanted to be a mom. She got slapped down good and proper. A lot of people made it clear they didn't want to hear her say that, and a few days later she came back with a shame-faced, "I didn't mean it. I want to work hard and have a career just like you guys!" I wouldn't be surprised if she still talks to her therapist about it.
Human life is full of pain, and most of it we inflict on each other. I don't know what to do about it.
@David,
I have considered the "separate communities" approach but I think its usefulness is limited. For one thing, most of us need to live in megacities for work, and any sort of scheme to divide suburban towns would be both impractical and loudly protested. For another, what about the gay children born into Benedict Option towns? Are we really going to let them try to reprogram the kids? Or religious kids born into atheist communities? Do they have the right to practice, or do they have to move to a religious town? That's part of what happened to most of the "intentional communities" founded in the US, i.e. the Plymouth Pilgrims.
Second, it's hard to have a religious community when you are surrounded by secular people; part of what made traditional communities work was the sense that this was the only way. I guess Orthodox Jews and the Amish make it work, but both groups lose a lot of people every year, and both enforce their beliefs in ways that I find objectionable. Plus most people seem too wishy-washy for that, so the wishy-washy 90% of us are still stuck living together.
I was assuming the wishy-washy 90% (or whatever number it is) would indeed go happily together.
I can see many of the problems with the separate communities approach, as I tried to suggest in my second-to-last post.
But then the question is, what other solution can one propose? I would be very interested to hear one.
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