One Nation Under God -- Not! [View all]

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-zuckerman/one-nation-under-god-not_b_1858165.html


Phil Zuckerman
Professor of Sociology, Pitzer College in Claremont, CA.

At last week's Republican National Convention, Florida Senator Marco Rubio was loud and clear: What makes us Americans is our shared belief in God. That's it -- above all else. Forget adherence to the Constitution, forget a hatred of tyranny, forget a love for baseball. Forget watching reality TV while ingesting a double-cheese burger, large nachos and a 32 ounce orange soda. No -- what binds Americans together is, according to this Christian politician, theism.

As Rubio proclaimed: "We are special because we're united not by a common race or ethnicity. We're bound together by common values ... that almighty God is the source of all we have." And furthermore: "Faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all."

Rubio's wrong. There are countless values that are far more important than having faith in an invisible, invertebrate, unknowable deity. Valuing education, for example. Valuing democracy. Valuing human rights. Valuing free speech. Valuing trees, mountains, valleys, lakes, rivers and the ozone layer. Valuing affordable healthcare. Valuing nutritious school lunches. Valuing one's spouse, one's friends, one's neighbors. It is far more important to value and love one another, and to act on that love, than to have faith in a god.

Rubio is also wrong about something else, too: faith in God is not shared by all Americans. In fact, millions of hard-working, child-raising, military-joining, coal-mining and liberty-loving Americans live their lives without faith in God. And millions more live their lives without any interest in religion whatsoever. The statistics are surprisingly clear on this front. Back in the 1990s, about 8 percent of Americans claimed "none" as their religion. Then, in 2007, the Pew Forum found that the percentage of non-religious Americans had doubled, up to 16 percent. In 2010, Putnam and Campbell's national survey put the percentage at 17 percent. In 2011, the General Social Survey reported it at 18 percent. This year, the Pew Forum bumped it up to 19 percent. (Anyone see a pattern here?) And then, according to the WIN-Gallup International "Global Index of Religion and Atheism" released about two months ago, a whopping 30 percent of Americans describe themselves as nonreligious. So whether we're talking 16 percent, 19 percent or 30 percent, we're talking tens of millions of Americans who are more secular than not.

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