Explanashunday!
Yesterday I started what I hope will be an ongoing thing — the presentation without comment of interesting stats I’m uncovering during the research for this book. I call it Staturday.
When Staturday’s stats are perplexing, as yesterday’s apparently were, I’ll follow with Explanashunday.
Two claims from yesterday’s set raised eyebrows. Here are the stats and the explanations:
1. That 98% of Mormons believe non-Mormons can go to heaven
It’s true — but with a twist. Mormon theology holds that everyone will be resurrected and most of them will be received into one of three “kingdoms of glory.” Not everyone gets into the best heaven, but almost everyone gets something. (The only exceptions are the Sons of Perdition, those who explicitly reject the Holy Spirit. They go to the “outer darkness.”)
2. That a majority of “Nones” believe in heaven
If you use the word “Nones” as a synonym for “nonbelievers,” you would have been flummoxed to see 87 percent of them talking about heaven as if such a place exists.
Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up: “None” is not a synonym for “nonbeliever.” Not even close.
The “Nones” is a category almost devoid of useful meaning, in my humble. It’s a pollster’s dustbin containing everyone who is not affiliated with a specific denominational religious label. Many of these folks have nothing else in common belief-wise. Atheists and agnostics are in there, as are the “spiritual but not religious,” many believers in a universal spirit, and a huge number of people who believe in God and Jesus, read the Bible and pray…but don’t see themselves as part of any particular denomination.
That’s how you get a survey result in which a lot of Nones sound more like nuns.
The confusion is largely our fault. Atheists and humanists are eager to show a big, straddling presence in the culture, so we grab that 19.6 percent and run with it. I’m sure I’ve been sloppy with that term myself at times. Time to stop that.
STATURDAY: Tickets to Paradise
Each Saturday I’ll post interesting stats I’ve come across in the research for my current book on the secular/religious mixed marriage, mostly without comment. Here’s the first.
(Putnam and Campbell, American Grace, pp. 535, 537)
Of those who believe that someone outside their own religion can go to heaven, the following include the nonreligious in that number:
Overall: 56%
Evangelical Protestant: 35%
Mainline Protestant: 62%
Catholic: 66%
(Pew Forum Religion & Public Life Survey, Aug 2008)
(Confused about the Nones and the Mormons? See tomorrow’s post.)
Meeting in the cafeteria
An ongoing series of five-minute short posts while I’m writing a book on the secular/religious mixed marriage.
Part of the message of Chapter 1 is that labels can be incredibly misleading. When we hear about an atheist married to a Catholic, for example, we tend to see God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything married to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. How’s THAT gonna work?
Well THAT probably isn’t. But look beyond the antitheist books and the Vatican doctrines to the individuals in the marriage, and things start to make more sense.
The Catholic Catechism says a Catholic is morally obligated to attend Mass on Sundays, that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” matters of “grave depravity,” that birth control is “intrinsically evil,” that “divorce is a grave offense against the natural law” and that a “remarried spouse is then in a situation of public and permanent adultery,” and that abortion is without exception a “moral evil” that is “gravely contrary to the moral law.”
Since these are diametrically opposed to the views of most atheists, it would seem a bad match is in the works. But look instead at the actual opinions of individual Catholics and a different picture emerges.
78 percent of U.S. Catholics say a person can be a good Catholic without going to Mass every Sunday, and 77 percent attend less than weekly, including 32 percent “rarely or never.” 82 percent of U.S. Catholics consider birth control to be “morally acceptable,” and 69 percent say it’s OK to differ from the teachings of the church on divorce and remarriage. And American Catholics closely mirror the general population on abortion rights and are actually more progressive in their attitudes toward LGBT rights than the U.S. average.
Despite what the more orthodox might say about them, these folks do not consider themselves any less religious or less Catholic: 77 percent of U.S. Catholics say they are proud to claim that identity, even those who depart dramatically from the official doctrine of their church.
Other denominations yield similar disparities between doctrine and individual belief. And the gap is growing.
On the secular side: Though atheists lack a central set of doctrines, it’s not difficult to see that strong antitheism in the secular partner would tend to make a secular/religious marriage less successful. But as a recent University of Tennessee study shows, antitheists make up only about 14.8 percent of the population of nonbelievers.
In short, neither partner is likely to be embracing the far end of his or her spectrum. I call this “meeting in the cafeteria.”
Beyond the Pat ‘n’ Madalyn marriage
An ongoing series of five-minute posts while I’m writing a book on the secular/religious mixed marriage.
Had a good time with Chapter 1 today — a look at the changing nature of both religious and secular identity in the U.S. Neither one means quite what it did 30 years ago at the individual level, which is why the secular/religious marriage has a much better shot at success now.
Despite the culture war bullets whizzing over their heads, there’s more common ground and common experience between the average religious believer and the average nonbeliever than ever before. The data are stunning, including a much greater overlap in social attitudes, political opinions, values, and daily experience than was true even a generation or two ago. Those things bode well for any marriage, and it’s no different for the secular/religious ones.
Our conceptions of what it means to be religious or irreligious are based mostly on the extreme examples of each, even though each extreme is a relative sliver of its worldview. If you think of the secular/religious marriage as Madalyn Murray O’Hair and Pat Robertson…well, it’s no wonder so many of you offered a one-syllable word for that kind of marriage: “Short.” I imagine it would be. But Pat ‘n’ Madalyn is a cartoon with very little to say about the people actually living these marriages.
Yes, there are plenty of secular and religious people who should not be married to each other. But plenty of others willingly manage the difference, sometimes easily, sometimes not. This book is for them.
In the beginning
An ongoing series of five-minute posts while I’m writing a book on the secular/religious mixed marriage.
I’m working on the intro right now, which starts with a bit about my own wedding to Becca, 22 years ago this month. If major religious differences doom a marriage, ours really should have been toe-tagged at the altar. Our religious differences were arguably about as major as they could get — a committed Christian believer marrying an equally committed atheist.
I’d identified as an atheist for 15 years at that point. I read the Bible critically at 13, argued theology with classmates in high school, and debated preachers in the plaza in college. I was a vocal critic of many aspects of religion and still am.
Becca was a born and raised Southern Baptist. I’d recently witnessed the adult baptism ceremony that confirmed her in the faith. Her stepfather, uncle, and grandfather were Baptist ministers. Her parents met at a Baptist college. She went to church every Sunday and planned to continue doing so once we were married.
So why was I crying tears of joy as she came down the aisle? Why was she smiling so enormously as she approached me? And why are we still very happily married 22 years and three kids later?
The short answer is that people are more interesting than their labels. The long answer is this book.
I’m not just looking at secular/religious marriages that have worked, but also those that struggle or fail. My hope is to figure out what accounts for the difference.
(REMINDER: If you’re in a secular/religious marriage, please take the survey and submit your stories!)
Ambi-omni-vari-mari-reciprocidocious
An ongoing series of five-minute posts while I’m writing a book on the religious/nonreligious mixed marriage.
One more post on terms, then on to content and process.
I had the pleasure of lunch with Greta Christina a few weeks ago. At one point she asked how my search was going for a word to describe the religious/nonreligious mixed marriage. I told her I was stumped — that despite a lot of really smart and thoughtful input, I couldn’t seem to find something that completely worked — not too obscure, cumbersome, unpronounceable, unfocused, or too broad (including other types of mixed marriages) or too narrow (excluding some types of religion and/or irreligion).
For one or more of these reasons I’ve considered and rejected Ambitheistic, Contratheistic, Intracredo, Reciprocal, Binuptial, Matri-omni, Omniunion, Variage, Varimarriage, Variwedded, Matrimerge, Marimerge, Faith/apistos, Quantum, Quarky, Heterognostic, and Cantilevered marriage, among many others. (Actually, Contratheistic is still slightly in the running. It would be perfect if it were one syllable shorter.)
I loved Mixistential and Maradox, but ultimately left both of them weeping at the altar. Just a wee step too obscure. Most of the slash-names (Super/Natural, A/theistic) are confusing when spoken, which is a problem for interviews and audiobooks.
Secreligious marriage is delicious…and no. But a similar variant, Relicular marriage, still appeals to me. Rhymes with “vehicular.” But the fact that I have to add that counts against it. I’m likely to simply use “secular/religious marriage,” despite those who prefer the narrower def of “secular” referring to church/state separation. (Oxford Dictionaries favors the broader def.)
Greta made an interesting historical point — that it’s a lot like the search for a more concise general term for “significant other.” The term partner is now so familiar that most of us can’t even recall a time it
DING.
Coming to terms
The first in a series of five-minute posts while I’m writing a book on the religious/nonreligious mixed marriage.
One of the biggest challenges in writing this book is the damn terminology. Some of the most important terms and labels in this area mean very different things to different people.
Start with the basics: religious and nonreligious. Most people think of someone as religious if they believe in the existence of a God or gods. But many Unitarians, Buddhists, Humanistic Jews and others consider themselves religious even if they do not believe in God. They embrace aspects of religion unrelated to theistic belief, including identity, shared values, community, and tradition.
On the other side is an old friend of mine who believes deeply in God, prays daily, attends church weekly, and has Psalm texts painted around the border of her living room, but once told me she is “little if at all religious.”
She’s not alone in this. A slew of surveys show that millions of Americans believe in God but consider themselves nonreligious. Even more surprising are the six percent of respondents who identified as atheists in a 2007 Pew survey but said they believe in God — something Sam Harris says is like claiming to be “a happily married bachelor.”
Capturing this categorical mess nicely is a message I received from a nontheistic humanistic rabbi whose husband is an agnostic Catholic. “Steve would say we are a religious/nonreligious couple,” she said, “and I’m the religious one!”
In terms of the main message of the book itself — more on that eventually — all of this line-crossing ambiguity is PERFECT. But for the purpose of communicating with people outside of my own head, it would be nice to have some terms that mean roughly one thing each.
DING! (Okay, that was 9 minutes. More discipline next time.)
Once again, into the mix
Last year, while I was writing Atheism For Dummies on an insanely short timeline, I did something counterintuitive — I committed to a daily 5-minute blog entry about the process. As it turned out, that helped me structure my time and mark my progress, and I got to bounce ideas off my readers in a way that improved the book. (In case you haven’t seen it, here’s your shout-out.)
As I transition out of the heavy research phase and into the heavy writing phase for my current book on the religious/nonreligious mixed marriage, I’m going to make the same dumb commitment again. Starting Monday (he said), I’ll write a short, unpolished post at the end of each weekday as I work my way through this incredibly complicated project.
Thanks for coming along for the ride! I appreciate the company.
Take the mixed marriage survey
Share your mixed marriage stories
The religious/nonreligious mixed marriage survey
The main survey for my book on the religious/nonreligious mixed marriage is now open. Many thanks to Mary Ellen Sikes of American Secular Census for her brilliant help in designing the survey and (eventually) crunching the numbers.
This survey is designed to gather information for a book on marriages (and other long-term relationships) between religious and nonreligious partners. For the purpose of the survey, “religious” is defined as any viewpoint that includes belief in a supernatural God or spirit, while “nonreligious” is any viewpoint lacking that belief.
Many questions are phrased in terms of marriage, but all are intended to include other long-term committed relationships.
It’s ideal for both partners to complete the survey, but not required. I will use your email addresses to link your survey to your partner’s. If your partner will not be completing the survey, your solo participation is still entirely welcome.
Most questions are optional. If a question does not make sense for your situation or is confusing, please skip it.
Allow 20-30 minutes to complete the survey, and thanks for your help!
(This is just one of several ways I’m gathering information for this book. Another is the form to submit religious/nonreligious mixed marriage stories. If you’re in this category, don’t forget to submit your stories there as well. Thanks!)
Poll: How did you get mixed?
As I work on my book about religious/nonreligious mixed marriages, one of the important variables is when the couple got “mixed” and whether they still are. Couples who were both religious at the beginning, then had one partner lose the faith, deal with different issues than a couple that was already mixed at the altar. Same with couples who were both nonreligious, then had one partner become religious.
There’s also much to be learned from couples that started mixed, then both ended up on one team or the other. This is all part of the formal survey coming out later this month, but for now, here’s the informal poll question of the week.
[poll id=”3″]
[Note: If you choose “none of the above,” please explain in the comments. Thanks!]