Robert Wright & Joseph Blankholm [The Wright Show] (full conversation)

That's correct.

Yeah, it's interesting because you're absolutely right, there are a lot of differences there. But I think they have two things in common, and they're really different kinds of things. Which is the struggle. So on the one hand, I mean, if you're not religious, if you're atheistic, even if you're agnostic, these are negating prefixes. It says more about what's not present, in a way. So there's not a lot of belief in the supernatural in the crowd. There's not a lot of, you know, I guess you'd say, belief that there are parts of the world that contravene the laws of nature. So there's a lot of naturalism. But then this gets us to the other side, which is the kind of positive description of what's actually believed, which is usually physicalism or materialism, kind of monism. So an argument that the world is only made of one substance, that substance can be known empirically, science is the best way of knowing it, usually some assumptions about how language works as well.

Yeah, spending years hanging out with people in local and national groups, this is what I gathered. And I listened a lot for what they affirmed, I listened a lot for what they really don't. So I think, you know, Sam Harris has been interesting the way he started adopting spirituality more. When I was conducting my research back mostly in 2012-2013, that really wasn't the case. So there's a lot of things that are sort of not on the table, and there are some things that are. And listening carefully to what people say, I would say at the national level, the natural leadership, there's a lot of really clever people who can, I'd say, like maybe discourse switch. So they have a way of talking to me sometimes that's different than how they would talk in a press release or maybe to their general membership. And they're pretty conversant. I was generally really impressed.

Absolutely right, yeah. And they'll speak at a pretty high level, too.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. So if you're a religious nun, N-O-N-E, you are religiously unaffiliated, and it really only gets at one of the three major aspects that sociologists, political scientists look at when they're looking at religions. You're looking at belief, behavior, and belonging. Well, it says you don't belong religiously. It doesn't really tell us anything about your beliefs, your behavior. So the people at the Reason Rally, for the most part, but not entirely, they are the non-religious. There are people who do not believe, belong, or behave religiously. But of course, you had Ann Clites on your show, so this all breaks down pretty quickly with certain subgroups.

So there's a really interesting range of organized non-believers in the United States. And a lot of the older groups, if not always, they can identify as religious. So Ethical Culture, most people now, the Ethical Culture movement at the New York Society for Ethical Culture and the other Ethical Culture societies around the country, they identify as religious humanists. And the same is true for people who are members of societies for Humanistic Judaism. And you can also find a very small minority who are members of the American Humanist Association. And so you have people who identify as religious non-theists, and then of course you have people who are non-theists who would not even go to a bar to meet up with non-theists because that would be joining a religious group. So you really have the full spread, and it's a really interesting spread.

Right. They definitely don't mean religious belief. They mean religious belonging. And so if you survey them, they're probably not showing up in the religiously unaffiliated. They're not the 'nones,' technically speaking, because they'll put 'other' for religious affiliation. And so, I'm being wrong to say this is that the Reason Rally is a subset of the 'nones.' Actually, on the Venn diagram, there's a large area of overlap, but there's three different zones, really.

Yeah, some of it's absolutely functionalist. And some of it's also, it's really, they come from a time before we formed our understanding of how secular and religious are separate. That boundary was really hardened during the Cold War period. If you look at the jurisprudence, the Supreme Court jurisprudence from 1947 to 1990, that's really when we get most of our separation of church and state jurisprudence. And so groups like Ethical Culture, founded in 1876, even groups like the American Humanist Association, founded in 1941, but really coming out of a Unitarian church in the early part of the 20th century, these groups, they're sort of holdovers from a prior way of drawing this boundary. So when they say they're religious, they mean they're kind of there, they're getting together in groups, often on Sundays, maybe singing hymns. They're doing religious things and they're looking religious, and they're doing interfaith work at times as well. So they're not believing in supernatural entities, but they're doing all the other things that might write exactly these functions of religion. They come out of a legacy that even produced the function of sociology, if you want to go back to Comte. It's kind of an interesting and tangled history.

That's true. I think there is a way in which for some people it probably was savvy politics. I think for other people, I mean, there's also a genuine attempt to make the category 'religion' a little bit bigger, to push it to include non-theists. And so, I mean, that's definitely present. Felix Adler, the Unitarians that are coming out of the Transcendentalist movement, I mean, they genuinely, I think, sincerely, if we can adopt that rather Protestant term, they think of themselves as religious, and they just think that should give a bigger umbrella, right?

Right. And there are often times they're not very literalist necessarily about what they mean by God, which gets really fun. So when you're talking to people, sometimes they'll say, 'Well, you know, if God is nature, if God is coextensive with nature, then yeah, I absolutely believe in God.' So they're hyper-conscious of—I mean, I had one gentleman talk to me about Wittgenstein and how he felt like it was a language game, and reference Spinoza directly and say, 'You know, it really depends on what you mean by these terms.' And so when you're talking to someone like that who doesn't adopt a really strict understanding of what a word can possibly mean, words like 'God' and 'religion' they get pretty flexible as well.

Um, actually, okay, so sometimes. So there's a way in which, like, I went to the first Sunday Assembly that was held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. There was one that preceded it that was held in a bar. This one was when Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans transformed any of the church services that people are familiar with. It was held in a bar, absolutely. We'll pass over that. Yeah. And it felt a little bit like an evangelical service, if we want to get into how messy it is, but I'll just leave that aside for now as well.

It was enthusiastic. It was built around a band playing popular music. There are these moments of like crowd interaction and members of the audience encouraged to interact with one another. It's—I used to study evangelicals, and so it set off some alarms for me. Or some non-alarms, that's not a scholarly way to put it. It is not, no. But there was definitely some isomorphism, I think would be the scholarly way to put it, because no one understands what it means. That's a perfectly scholarly way to put it.

Right, yeah, that's absolutely right. You can, I think they put it in various terms, you can sort of leave your beliefs at the door and we really accept everybody. There was an interesting phrase that Sanderson used about religion. He said, 'You know, if there's a rock in your shoe, you don't throw away the shoe.' So there's a way in which they're very self-consciously adapting religion. But you're right, it's almost a non-pluralism in the sense that there aren't silos, there aren't like specific positions being located in a plurality, but there's like just, we're just going to sort of leave out the God talk, we're going to leave out talk of beliefs in general. Which then gets us into this funny place where, you know, are we talking about a secular which God is absent, or are we talking about secular neutral? So yeah, they're definitely playing with that. They're sort of saying, you know, maybe beliefs don't have to be here. But you talk to emerging evangelicals, you hear something similar, which is very interesting.

Almost beyond that, you don't even have to believe. And belief as a question is de-emphasized. And they also will read in some of these very non-literal and metaphorical ways as well. Although at this point they probably won't even call themselves 'emerging,' they would have other terms or reject terms altogether. It's really interesting. I think the Sunday Assembly and emerging evangelicals are sort of converging around a similar set of concerns about wanting to form communities but also feeling a kind of crisis of belief in some ways.

There absolutely are. And a lot of them are going to be more on that—well, it's not that most liberal evangelicals are like the emerging style, but all who are the emerging style who are invested in things like new monasticism, where they're living in intentional communities with many couples or often co-ed communities working on certain community service projects, they're also more liberal.

Yeah, I wouldn't say like, you know, 'don't call it a comeback.' There's a way in which we've stereotyped evangelicals and not fully acknowledged the continued presence, the continued minority presence of liberals. And especially as theirs—I mean, the 'nones' are in some ways a product of the association of conservative religion or sort of politics with religion. And so there's a kind of exodus out of religion by mainline liberals, and then there's also kind of a turn away from that form of religion among evangelicals as well. So you might hear them talk about being spiritual but not religious, or talking about not being limited by the structures of the church.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think that's changing a little bit, especially among really like young people, college-aged people, because I find that they haven't formed their ideas quite as solidly yet about what are the in and out boundaries and have a certain amount of flexibility. But I completely agree. I mean, Sam Harris has no doubt made some headway in this respect, but he hasn't changed the culture completely.

Right, absolutely. It's amazing. It's for someone like me who's very interested in the moment in which things appear contradictory because they then demand explanation, they demand better explanations, he's fascinating. He's a fascinating case. I mean, if you look at The End of Faith, that 2004 book, so much of it is dedicated, at the end, dedicated to meditation and his sort of explorations in that area. So it doesn't really come out of nowhere. But I was surprised. I think it goes way back in his own life, and I don't think it's a recent invention. I just mean it's kind of ironic, I guess I would say, in the sense that the part of the atheist movement he represents is generally, I don't think of it as very pluralistic and inclusive.

Absolutely. He's in some ways responding to the same set of assumptions about religion that have produced an efflorescence of spirituality in the late 20th, early 21st centuries. Because spirituality gets to be the thing that doesn't have the structure, it's not the tradition, it's not the easy way we use these terms, it's not the tradition, it's not the creed, it's not the formalistic aspect. It's the kind of part that connects the individual, the autonomous individual especially, with a kind of truth about reality, with a deeper meaning. And so in that way, by having such a defined idea of what religion is and what kind of problem it is, he's able to separate it from spirituality. And so he's in some ways, yeah, reacting to the same pile of things. I agree that it is a surprising turn.

I think that's true. But he was starting to, you know, go—you know, it wasn't clear that you would call him, after reading that book, like a hard-core materialist, I guess.

When he's talking about insights that you only have by meditating, he's talking about an insight that is not scientifically derived. Because what experiences I have when I meditate are not amenable to science. No one else can see them. It is part of the definition of scientific inquiry that it deals with phenomena that more than one person can observe. So, I don't—I'm just—I don't want to have you know, it is—there's a wonderfully rich literature on religious experience. There's actually one of my colleagues wrote a book called Religious Experience Reconsidered, and it's this really trying to address this question of how you approach the religious experience, whether it's a private thing that can't be accessed, how you might talk about it empirically. So it's a difficult topic.

Yeah, they organize in some ways around the cleavages that produce the various groups, and people are pretty sensitive to them who are active enough to go to the Reason Rally. I found the last question when I was interviewing anybody, I said, you know, I didn't ask it, I said the labels question, and they would talk to me about the various labels they use. Secular humanist is definitely one of them. They have a really interesting history. Paul Kurtz broke away from the American Humanist Association in the late '70s, founded the Council for Secular Humanism, eventually an umbrella organization is the Center for Inquiry. So people who identify specifically a secular form of humanism. There are people that eschew any kind of adjectives that would qualify it. So that's going to be your humanist more broadly, sometimes American Humanist Association will take that stance, 'We're not going to qualify it.' Oh, you like, okay, like about the word 'secular'? I think it's not so much that they dislike the word 'secular,' but they feel like once you add it to 'humanist,' it creates divisions. Right? So if you're a religious humanist who, I don't know, agrees about what exists and what the best way to know it is, but you have this, you know, you get together on Sunday and you're like, 'Hey, I'm religious,' then suddenly you're apart from people who are secular humanists, even though you disagree on pretty much everything else. And so just by calling yourself 'humanist,' it's a bigger tent. And then you can invoke this longer history. Also, AHA is involved in some lawsuits where they're very strategic about identifying as religious and seeking protections as a religious minority. So they have these very sort of concrete disagreements that will become more salient in court cases or something like that. And then there's an atheism plus subset, which is people who are much more dedicated to feminist values and in general, like participating in the new civil rights movement that we're in the middle of right now, and sort of pushing toward more progressive values associated with atheism. I think people sense all these things. And then, you know, maybe what you call more like hardline or hardcore atheist people, who have jokingly called themselves evangelical atheists, who joke about how they're proselytizing, those people might be different from people who are more on the rationalist side, skeptics, the skeptic movement. You can even be religious and skeptic. There are definitely people who are. So most skeptics that I met are not religious, but that's sort of a big tent. Some of those people might be there as well, just because Reason is intentionally a bigger tent than just atheism or something like that.

Right, exactly. Yeah, then that obviously has a deeper tradition among magicians going back to Houdini and his attempts to debunk spiritualists. And this is kind of this nice legacy of really of...

You mentioned earlier that some groups like at the Reason or ALC are more interested in advocating for certain kind of, I guess, liberal domestic policies than others. My sense is that generally on domestic issues, this is a pretty fairly broadly liberal group, right?

Yeah, I agree. I think in some ways it tells you about the kind of atheists that are participating in the Reason Rally. You know, we're not talking about the radical Marxists and anarchists. We're not talking about the people that are going to show up at a, you know, WTO protest or something like that, which are also, I mean, are also maybe hardline identifying secularists, even anti-religion people, but they have very different politics. They're invested in a different tradition. They're invested in that Marxist tradition. And so I absolutely agree the people who are showing up to these, they're always a little more mainstream liberal in that sense. And yeah, on foreign policy there can be huge hawk-dove divides. It's really interesting how the New Atheists have framed themselves in terms of foreign policy. In general, I saw them as doing so. There's this interesting 20th-century political theorist Carl Schmitt who thinks about the concept of the political, and really the political is a situation in which you have an enemy, and you can have a domestic and an external enemy. And so I really saw someone like Hitchens consciously aligning your domestic and foreign enemies in the wake of 9/11, in the wake of the 2000 Bush election. So you had evangelicals domestically and you had Muslims abroad, and they're both religion. And here we have this elegant way we can identify the things we don't like. And that, I think, didn't fully take off as a narrative in the way that you do.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it's something that I think maybe I'm sensitive to, especially being in the academy where there are so many people who identify as atheist or so many people identify as secular. But if you're in the humanistic academy, if you're in anthropology, if you're in social sciences, people's foreign policy views are generally not that hawkish. So when you see something like, I can, you know, Daniel Dennett's 'Breaking the Spell,' there's a section on this. Richard Dawkins' 'God Delusion' has a section on this. They're talking about educating Muslims, so setting up Western schools and things like that. I mean, talk to an anthropologist about that. There's a way in which that simply doesn't fly. And so I do think it's interesting the way they have a particular view that's really distinct from academic atheism as it's known.

Right, right. Okay, that's interesting. Now, you've done a lot of interesting work on the history of these terms, in particular secular and humanism. So going back to the 19th century, when I guess the word secular became... the word secular itself goes back much further, but you're going to talk a little about like where that comes from and then how in the 19th century that word starts entering this particular discussion?

Somehow the cyclical... right, you still hear the cyclical meaning among statisticians, by the way. They'll talk about secular trends, and I guess that's what they mean.

Hmm, okay. And so he means it in a good way. Uh, it comes to be a term of almost derision. I mean, certainly secular humanist as of the middle of the century is being used as an accusation, right? As the middle of the 20th century, I mean.

That's really clever. It's good. Absolutely. Because if it's religion-based, right, right, exactly. I know what you do wind up teaching if you rule that out. But if you, you know, if that's religion and you can't teach religion, I don't know what exactly would be left in the end. But um, so that's interesting. And then humanism has its separate... humanism, which gets mixed up in this, this hybrid label, has a separate history, right? Where does that come from?

Now, did he really, did Comte really want to create a religion of... I mean, turn science into a religion? Or am I just getting him mixed up with Saint-Simon, who didn't... kind of follow someone in that or not?

Especially since I've got a head start with the Ordo part. Um, so okay, so by... so secularism, this guy wanted it to be a movement in the 19th century. As that word evolved, it didn't have as much of that flavor, I think, moving into the heart of the 20th century as humanism had, right? I mean, now we have this combined frame, secular humanism. But humanism, I think of as much more a movement animated by certain values, whereas I think of secular as being just a qualifying adjective that conveys that this humanism does not involve belief in God, right? And that's... so that's kind of what the two... so humanism doesn't maintain this flavor of being like a thing, whereas secular is more like the absence of a thing in a certain sense. But anyway, the term, although used, you know, in an accusatory way mid-20th century, has now, I gather, been embraced and adopted by some people who think it describes them, right?

Okay, so Barry Lynn is a Congregationalist minister, or UCC, United Church of Christ? Oh, it's United Church of Christ. Okay, I was thinking... I did... they sound some relationship with a Congregationalist, I was thinking, but maybe not. Maybe I was thinking they've been a merger. But I guess you're right that... um, I didn't even actually realize that he's a minister. I mean, a lot of times it doesn't come through. You wouldn't guess it hearing him talking about it. But um, so okay, so looking and getting back to the Reason Rally, I mean, I guess first of all, I think one thing they tend to have in common, if you look at the groups kind of come for the key sponsors of the Reason Rally, is like they want to have their space to be what they are preserved, right? That is, they don't want to be compelled to, uh, you know, I mean, to go back to the early issues, you know, from 50 years ago, they do not want children compelled to pray in school or even to say 'under God' as part of the Pledge of Allegiance, probably. So they want... there's that. They want the government like out of their business. And a lot of them, and some of them, I guess, want protections comparable to the protections religions have. But then you get to this difference of strategy where some of them are arguing in court we are religion, and some of them aren't. But still, that's kind of a common set of concerns. Uh, beyond that, when you look at this specific... let's talk about some of these specific groups and what they represent in terms of a kind of ideology, I guess you would say. So you refer to the American Humanist Association, which I guess kind of grows out of the Unitarian church. Um, is that like... uh, that'd be right? Now, we mentioned the Center for Inquiry, which I... it's funny, I think that's a group that the actor Steve Allen started, is that right, some decades ago, or not?

And I mean, what I was going to say, I was surprised by was that on the Reason Rally website, they listed among the sponsors Center for Inquiry and the Dawkins Foundation separately. Was... I thought I'd read that the Dawkins Foundation was merging with the Center for Inquiry or being absorbed by it or something.

Yeah, it's almost a sort of idiosyncrasy of their respective histories that that's the case. Because Kurtz is leaving AHA, he really needs to double down to create a separation to sort of justify his departure. And he becomes the first organization that actually organizes secular humanists, because really, there hadn't been really a lot of people who identified as secular humanist before that. There hasn't been an institution. So he's taking this thing out of its footnote boogeyman place into institution, and then that creates a need to continue to produce a separation between religious and secular humanism, and continue to produce a separation between AHA and Center for Inquiry and Kurtz's other endeavors. So it's a little bit of an idiosyncratic charismatic leader kind of history to it. Um, yeah. And there's also the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is a different thing, but also kind of... I don't know if militant is the word, but aggressive in terms of the legal cases they bring and stuff.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. Exactly. Yeah, they have over half a dozen lawyers on staff, and they're actually basically an offshoot of American Atheists, which is Madalyn Murray O'Hair. She did the famous court case in the early '60s that established that you couldn't have prayer in the public schools, right?

Is it like people come to them and say, 'I'm being discriminated against because of an atheist' or something, and they examine the case and see if they want to take it?

So is it possible to say of the main groups, and I probably failed to list all the main groups, but like which ones have the most dynamism or, you know, or the most youth and energy or anything like that? Is it clear that kind of history is on the side of some of them as opposed to others or anything?

I see. And so does that tell us something about the ideology of the Secular Student Alliance, that they are partnering with the Center for Inquiry?

And then finally, as far as speaking of campuses, there's a trend toward having a humanist chaplain on campuses, right? I mean, at least you see a fair number of them at major schools, and I don't think you saw many 50 years ago. Is that a thing? And if so, is any coherent thing, or is it, you know, in other words, you know, to the extent in terms of the things you've been discussing, like the pluralism versus exclusivism and militancy versus whatever, is there any coherence here, or is this just like different... these things are sponsored by different groups on different campuses?

Hmm, okay. And in any of it, that the humanist chaplaincy thing seems to be a growing thing. It's still... there's more and more of them?

Okay, well listen, uh, we've been talking close to an hour, and your image started to get a little blurry and the sound started to break up a little. And I think that's because, as it happens, it's 5 o'clock. I think what has happened is you are on a college campus. I think a bunch of students just like got out of their final exams or something and start furiously downloading, um, you know, pornographic videos or something. Or possibly not pornographic, let's give them some credit. Let's give the new secular generation some credit here.

Yeah, the line is increasingly blurry. That's right. Well, well, thank you so much, Joe. And anything you wanna, um, plug in closing? Is there a Twitter handle you want to get people to follow you on or anything you want to talk about?

Okay, well, I admire your lack of self-promotion. That lack is an all too rare thing in modern society. Well then, I encourage you to continue in that humble vein. But thanks so much, this has been very informative, and maybe we'll have a chance to come back and talk down the road.

Okay, thank you.