When Americans Believe Nothing
And what Blaise Pascal would think about it
[Man] buries himself in psychology in the belief that awareness all by itself will be some kind of magical cure for his problems. But psychology was born with the breakdown of shared social heroisms; it can only be gone beyond with the creation of new heroisms that are basically matters of belief and will, dedication to a vision.
― Ernest Becker, The Death of Denial
On the night of November 23, 1654, philosopher Blaise Pascal saw nothing but fire for two hours straight. The fire was burning inside him, outside him, within and without him. It was a vision and a warning, a mystical experience so powerful he recorded his feelings after the moment and sewed the record into his jacket so he would never forget it. As he wrote:
The year of grace 1654,
Monday, 23 November, feast of St. Clement, pope and martyr, and others in the martyrology.
Vigil of St. Chrysogonus, martyr, and others.
From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight,
FIRE.
A relentless prodigy, Pascal had already invented roulette, probability theory, the hydraulic press, the syringe, and new theories of geometry by the time of this religious awakening. Now in his early thirties, Pascal abandoned all worldly pursuits as vanity and dedicated himself to proving God’s existence. In the post-humous collection of his letters, Pensées (1670), Pascal defines his catchiest legacy: Pascal’s Wager.
As he reasons:
God is, or God is not. Reason cannot decide between the two alternatives.
It’s really that easy: it’s a better bet to believe in God, even if he doesn’t exist, instead of betting that he doesn't. Why put all your money on atheism, a life of sin, and the potential of infinite flames instead of Christianity, a life of virtue, and the potential of infinite rewards?
Pascal’s Wager is more relevant than ever: In the early nineties, 90% of Americans identified as Christians. But research from Pew shows that the number of people who believe in “nothing in particular” has doubled in just ten years. Today, about one in three Americans is religiously unaffiliated.
Among Americans under 50, a poll from The Wall Street Journal found that:
One in four say a belief in God is important
One in four say having children is important
One in three say patriotism is important
Betting against God is a sign of high status on campuses. As one source points out, 46% of Harvard’s incoming student body identifies as agnostic or atheist. Pascal would be disappointed. But then again, how many of us have had two full hours of divine fire to set us straight?
In “The Day Atheism Got Cringe,” Litverse talked about the gilded rebellion of the New Atheism movement that swept millennial college campuses. This time, let’s acknowledge that non-belief has triumphed in modern culture. So if younger generations don’t believe in the old building blocks of civilization, what do they believe in? And why?
The Nature of a Wager
Back in 2016, Pew conducted another survey that asked these “religious nones” why they had bet against God. The research put the answers into four primary categories:
Disbelief (49%)
Dislike (20%)
Undecided (18%)
Inactive (10%).
There’s a lot of stories you can make up about these survey results. The glaring group that stands out to me is the “Spiritual but not religious” participants, which makes up a miniscule three percent of the results. I had originally thought that more young Americans may have found some higher power in something like meditation or yoga or maybe even astrology. But evidently there’s no belief powerful enough to resemble a religion. Maybe “religion” itself has become a dirty word in an ultra-rational society where logic and efficiency rule. Maybe there has been irreparable damage done after three generations of media coverage of the continuously cataclysmic effects of organized religion when the religion discriminates and conquers, traumatizes and oppresses. Maybe the shedding of religion like an old skin is just as likely a byproduct of nineties alternative music where defying the existence of God became an easy anthem of rebellion and tenured professors taught the unfortunately fact-based tenets of Howard Zinn and the caustic criticisms of Noam Chomsky to a post-draft youth.
The possible explanations are endless, but the end is clear: more Americans than ever are taking the bet against God. Most of them wagered without malice or principle. They just took a bet on solid ground as religion eroded as a foundation in local communities and households in the face of infinite material freedoms and became seen as severely uncool and even sinister on campuses.
This is why The Guardian’s Jeff Sparrow detested Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, the anointed leaders of the New Atheists: they faked victimhood as they debated the brave believers who came up to the microphone at universities where atheists and agnostics made up half of the student body already. As he wrote:
An earlier generation of atheists were brash and offensive but their provocations were generally directed at a church that still possessed considerable institutional power. The New Atheists were, by contrast, insiders rather than outsiders, writing and speaking in societies where manifestations of fervent religiosity largely occurred on the cultural fringes rather than the intellectual centres.
The point is that, if religion is definitely not cool anymore, proclaiming your atheism and making it your identity is also not cool anymore. This is uniquely American: we eventually get bored of not only our revolutions, but our counter-revolutions and move back to worshiping the supreme scriptures bequeathed by money and tolerance.
Even back in the 1600s, Pascal saw the lassitude of this laissez-faire attitude toward salvation and blamed one evil force above all: rationalism. One man was to blame for spreading this fatally flawed school of thought: René Descartes (1596-1950).
The inventor of the infinitely quotable “I think, therefore I am,” according to Pascal, was a fool. In the proud tradition of disses established so thoroughly by French philosophers and carried on by Kendrick Lamar, Pascal wrote:
I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God, but he couldn't avoid letting him put the world in motion; afterwards he didn't need God anymore.
Rationalism had no place in religion.
How did he know that?
Easy: vacuums.
This is Pascal’s version of rationalism in the universe: even when you take the other bet, you are fated to fill that void of faith with something, anything, and never know peace.
All the data about disbelief should leave us with one question: what do we use to fill the hollow? And does that become our religion, regardless?
Want to know more? Stay tuned for the next episode in Litverse’s “Rationalism, Religion, and Repression” series, which features some stuff about Chappell Roan.
Want to know more, like, right now? Read the previous episodes below the paywall (yes, it’s paywalled to test just how bad you really wat to know more… Also, paid subscribers will be getting full PDF collections starting next month.)
Here’s a preview of how cool the collection of these essays will look:
Table of Contents below the paywall!
Love the dive back into theology here. We can credit Cobain and the mainstreaming of cynicism too, but speaking from the Gen Z front lines, I think that a lot of religious disillusionment stems from a desire to reject patriarchy, conventionalism, and the more restrictive social covenants that in-group participation in a faith system requires. If the Wisdom of the Fathers looks insufficient for addressing problems of society or self - postwar mid-century Europe being the most vivid example - then it gets walked away from.
I also think the Catholic sex abuse scandals which spread out of Boston fundamentally reoriented people's views around faith. The hypocrisy and dark double lives exposed within a whole community of faith leaders tarred all organized religions, and made their motives suspect. If religion provides justification and opportunity for pederasty to flourish, it becomes much less defensible.
But it's tough, because religions also provide a foundation for moral reasoning and identity, and a coherent sense of belonging that secular humanism can't match except through slogans. So the sense of kids being unmoored in a harsh, unforgiving world without a compass is very real, and very much a problem. But I doubt that problem will be met with religious revivalism, since, as you point out, the structures of our information systems and economies don't really support it anymore.
Thanks Blaise!
For the record my husband and I both enjoy your posts, so that's 2 likes. Also, thanks for the update at the end of your post, as I had actually missed reading the last one which was excellent. We both love your insights and the way that you masterfully handle these topics.