Don’t Blame Secularism

David Eller

Attorney General William Barr recently told an audience at Notre Dame’s law school that secularism was responsible for America’s pathologies, including depression and mental illness, “dispirited young people” and “angry and alienated young males,” not to mention the usual suspects of family breakdown, suicide, drug addiction, and “senseless violence.” Worse, he chastised secularism as an organized assault on society, which could only be cured by “religion and traditional values.”

Barr and his ilk cannot blame secularism for all these problems, and urge religion (specifically Christianity and more specifically Catholicism, of which Barr is a fervent follower) as the remedy, firstly because it invites an unconstitutional establishment of religion. But he also cannot blame secularism because the accusation is false.

Let’s take one symptom of social dysfunction mentioned by Barr, namely suicide. Statistics (that is, facts, an undervalued commodity in the present administration) show that the highest suicide rates occur in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Lithuania is #1, Russia #2, Belarus #5, Kazakhstan #7, Ukraine #8, Hungary #12, etc.), while highly religious India is #21 and highly secular China is #69. The United States ranks high but not in the top twenty for suicide (#27), between Serbia and Sweden. More, as the world has reputedly become more secular, observers have actually noted a decrease in teen suicide, especially in Europe where church membership and attendance have hit historic lows. If religion seems to offer any immunity to suicide, it might be Islam: among the lowest rates on the planet are Kuwait, Pakistan, Morocco, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

Results within the United States tell a similar story. There is no relation—perhaps even a negative relation—between religiosity and suicide. The lowest rates come in some of the most secular states like New York, Massachusetts, and California, while the ten most suicidal states include Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana, New Mexico, Idaho, North Dakota, and even Utah—hardly bastions of secularism. (Alaska has the very highest incidence of suicide.)

Secularists, humanists, and atheists share Barr’s alarm at the sickness evident in American society, but they look more realistically to the many facets of what Los Angeles Times writer Melissa Healy calls the “epidemic of despair” afflicting our country. Much of the cause can be traced to economic changes, often intentionally wrought by government and corporations. Globalization and so-called “late capitalism” have ripped jobs and opportunity from urban and rural residents alike, leaving unemployed, impoverished, and depressed populations in their wake. According to the CDC, folks in rural counties suffer from higher rates of smoking, obesity, physical inactivity, high blood pressure, and alcoholism. Fake food and unhealthy lifestyles make us sick, and in the absence of healthcare (and exploited by pharmaceutical companies), many get hooked on opioids. Underfunded and failing schools perpetuate disadvantage, while growing economic inequality and stagnating wages rob average Americans of the benefits of work. And all of these factors, together with ironic increasing isolation and long-distance bullying brought with social media, make life more lonely and intolerable for some of society’s most vulnerable.

America has many deep and fatal problems, driven by forces beyond individual control and almost invisible to individual perception. How we live today, and how capitalism and conservative policy have shredded communities and relationships, sicken and kill us. Don’t blame secularism.

Published in the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs Freethought Views advertorial in the Colorado Springs Independent on November 6-13, 2019 with the quotation below.

Secular societies establish tolerance by being equally non-accommodating toward all religious demands within the public sphere.

Gad Saad