Christine Scheller reports at the Huffington Post’s Religion section on Women in Secularism…from the pov of someone not very keen on secularism.
When women leave moderate forms of religion, are their stories less interesting or was it a coincidence that all but one of the deconversion narratives I heard at the Women in Secularism III conference May 17 in Alexandria, Virginia, involved women leaving fundamentalist versions of faith? Because I’m a Christian, and I would leave those too.
So, she’s hinting, there should have been more about “moderate” forms of religion.
The question arose in light of these stories as to what keeps women in religion when it is so often hostile to us? Among the answers suggested were rationalization, a culturally imposed lack of self-confidence, the need for community, a lack of basic life skills and/or education and a longing for purity that also involves disdain for the body.
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Missing from the discussion was the idea that other women have positive experiences with religion and/or have grappled with similar challenges and come to different conclusions.
Only Jones said it is important to draw a distinction between fundamentalism and more moderate and progressive traditions. She finds the same battles over ideological purity in the secular community that she found in fundamentalism, she said.
“I worry that we’re trying to single religion out as the scapegoat,” said Jones.
Of course one person’s “battles over ideological purity” may be someone else’s efforts not to lose the plot altogether.
In an email after the conference, Jones said it takes a great deal of work for her to admit that religion can be a force for good because she was “treated shamefully so many times by so many people who justified their actions by claiming that they were just following the Bible.”
“I’d be lying if I said that didn’t make me angry. It still makes me angry. I’m still in the process of recovering from that pain, and I have no idea how long that process will take,” said Jones.
Nonetheless, she sees parallels between hardline atheism (the perspective that the world would better if we were all atheists) and fundamentalist Christianity (the view that the world would be better if we were all fundamentalist Christians).
“Both are very rigid perspectives. And the world isn’t a rigid place,” said Jones. “There’s abuse in organized atheism — the church doesn’t have a monopoly on that.”
Because Jones had mentioned her involvement in interfaith work, I wondered if that work might inform her perspective. It taught her that there can be more than one philosophical justification for the same human rights principle, she said.
“I don’t care if someone supports gender equality, for example, because they believe it’s a religious tenet. I care that they support gender equality,” said Jones.
I on the other hand do care. Of course it’s better to have a religious believer who supports gender equality than to have one who doesn’t, but the religious believer remains vulnerable to being told by a religious authority that gender equality is not pleasing to god, and believing it. It’s an extra vulnerability in the commitment. That’s not an abstraction: most people have decidedly believed exactly that throughout recorded history.
As a storyteller, I understand that dramatic narratives can be the most compelling, but far too much public discourse about religion is driven by arguments with fundamentalism.
Really? Surely a great deal more public discourse about religion is driven by the assumption that religion is the source of goodness.
Hmmm, she’s also either conflating all Islam with fundamentalism or all African-American Christianity with fundamentalism. Or wait, both. I assume she’s going with Roman Catholic being the one “moderate”. I would’ve only considered two of the five panelists to have been raised in a fundamentalist version of religion, unless I’m misremembering Heina’s descriptions.
A thousand times this. There’s no way to accommodate “moderate” religion without opening the door to fundamentalism. Religion is a flaw in the thought process, an open invitation for appeals to false authority to take root and for evidence to take a back seat. Once faith is deemed acceptable there is no way to distinguish epistemologically between “moderate” and fundamentalist religion, and there is no way to immunize the “moderate” believer against fundamentalist appeals.
A world filled with “moderate” believers in which religion holds influence in society but fundamentalism is not a scourge is a world that can not exist. There will always be assholes willing to use faith as a tool so long as faith is a tool that people respond to.
One thing I really dislike is that there are so many fiction and non-fiction accounts about women returning to their faith or to a more ‘moderate’ faith but few of women leaving and making a success of their life thereafter. The culture is not ready for women to find something better in a non-theist life. (This reminds me of fiction narratives 100+ years ago of women who left their marriages. For many years these accounts ended universally with the women dying or committing suicide).
It’s as if the narrative, as it exists, is overdetermined by the reading public’s lack of knowledge or imagination for how humanism (in my case) enriches and transformed my life. I think more of us should be writing these accounts and putting them into anthologies. My feminist literature professor in college in the 1900’s had us all write a final chapter of Ibsen’s A Doll House. That was a great exercise.
Funny – I left Christianity. As a very contented atheist, I wouldn’t want *ANY* of those superstitious, irrational religions.
Yours ain’t any better than theirs, honey.
Ophelia:
R Johnston:
Absolutely. I wrote back in December about 8 problems with secular movements respecting or including religious arguments. (That post is about animal liberation, but the issues are the same for all secular, ethical movements.)
Organized atheism?
“Both are very rigid perspectives. And the world isn’t a rigid place,” said Jones.
So a system which tells people exactly what they should think and how they should behave is exactly the same as a system which tells them that the answers can’t be found in a holy book handed down by a mythical guy in the desert.
Yup, exactly the same.
Which forms of Christianity support gender equality as a religious tenet? Any aside from Quakers?
Gretchen – yes. That’s why I’m so keen on blogs by ex-Muslims and ex-Quiverfulls and ex-Mormons and the like – they’re about leaving it and how great it is to leave it, and many are by women.
There’s only a million stories out there of women who have left moderate religions and didn’t suffer religiously-motivated abuses from their families. Is this person aware of the internet? Or is this her only exposure to anything of the sort, sent to cover this conference?
Of course, their stories are classically “less interesting” (or captivating, maybe) in the sense of “stories”, at least in reference to what is blatantly popular in the world of storytelling. That market constantly eats up any extreme conflicts, inciting incidents, wild action, and climaxes, and demands more. So yeah, for the market HuffPo is largely aimed at, they are probably less interesting.
I’m not sure this “less interesting” question is a very good question to ask, though. And I’m rather sure that the speakers were not chosen for the interesting-ness of their stories. Or they would have picked some Michael Bay-esque Deconversion! (in theatres now). I would rather expect it is about reaching out to those in similar situations, which would be the hardest to get out of, regardless of Scheller’s estimation that she would leave those too. I don’t think it is as easy a choice or thing to accomplish that she imagines. People involved in moderate faiths don’t need quite so much courage or support to dump their religion once they figure out it is wrong.
I figure I can assume since no one present has yet said otherwise that her characterization of the bulk of the stories being about fundamental sects is accurate enough, so maybe this isn’t entirely on point. But on a more meta/generic level, it seems to me there’s now a pretty standard flow to these discussions. You can criticize religion, give sixteen reasons it’s a bad thing…
… a believer hearing will still, if you give them any out, figure that theirs is somehow different, theirs is somehow the exception. Heck, you don’t even have to give them an out; they seem to hear selectively to create one. Give them fifteen reasons that apply to theirs, one that doesn’t, they’ll excitedly pop up, say, hey, my religion, it doesn’t do that last thing! Clearly, you shouldn’t have a problem with us, then…
I wonder if there’s some hugely informative reason behind that, or if the cognitive people are just going to tell me look, that’s pretty standard motivated reasoning. But anyway, I get to thinking, geez, maybe I should very consciously compensate. Save some time, here. Look them in the eye, give ’em a moment so I’m sure they’re listening, and say very firmly: ‘There are a thousand religions on this planet this applies to, a thousand with their various odd gods and canons and interpretations and reinterpretations thereof; you will notice many of the criticisms are about how you arrive at what you do, about social mechamisms… The middle name of your god’s favourite poodle or which headgear you require and which foods you specifically abhor are… intriguiguing… but all pretty beside the point; so do you seriously think somehow your personal thing is some kind of exception, here?’
Something I overlooked in the article –
I noticed Sarah’s use of the label “hardline atheist” at the time, and thought it was a bit tendentious. If that’s the definition of it, it fits very few people.
That’s a very shaky rhetorical stance…to support some religious tenets, and not others, based on how much you like them, because supporting any means that you have to respect the process that generated them. Yuck. Easier just to say the whole idea of faith-based tenets is rotten. Picking and choosing pleases no one.
Andrew, Mya said otherwise, in the first comment. (Just in case you missed it.)
Umm… Wow. Somehow, I really did. I’m gonna blame a long day.
But, hey, at the cost of that embarrassment, I guess that generalisation isn’t much out of place hear, then.
Not out of place at all. Somebody should write a book titled Mine Is Special.
I call bullshit. Moderate religion requires belief in supernatural entities. It is a rigid requirement that a person profess belief in some god, and where I live are included a son of god, plus angels and guardian angels, souls, heaven, and *the dead giveaway it’s all bullshit*…eternal torment in hell for the disobedient and the non-believer.
Where my atheism might be rigid is in insisting we keep the conversation founded in reality, as if finding truth is a laudable goal. I have read your so-called holy books and do you know how they read? Like a load of made-up stuff. The Old Testament is goofy and nasty beyond all compare (Leviticus is sublime) and the New Testament has chronological problems with the ordering of passages. If what was written first was placed first, it might look like Paul/Saul of Tarsus was making it all up out of whole cloth and the “gospel writers” wove their tales long after the fact. So that’s a load of made-up stuff, too.
Given the complete and utter lack of evidence for any supernatural claim, what reads like made-up stuff is indeed made-up stuff, undeserving of any benefit of doubt. The rigid thinkers are the ones who insist all or any of this “god reads your mind and intends to punish you” must be true, with no evidence for such claims. What a hideous ideation to think humanity needs an all-powerful mind-reader to keep everyone in line.
It’s the very idea of a retributive god that ties moderate and extremist religious belief at the umbilical cord. They are of one blood.
Here’s one more woman who left fundamentalist Christianity (my “favorite” sermon that I recall was the one where the pastor called us worms no less than ten times) and hasn’t looked back. My quality of life has SIGNIFICANTLY improved in more ways than I can enumerate.
If Scheller is a Catholic then she belongs to a totally misogynist cult. She doesn’t recognize or is unwilling to recognize the Catholic hatred of women.
Is there such a thing as “hardline atheism” in that sense? Hardline atheism in comparatively democratic countries is a response to religion. It certainly isn’t organised the way organised religion is organised. Its ultimate logic is that the world would be a better place if there were no religions- or no formally organised religions- and so we would all be agnostics, not atheists, because there would be no need for us to be atheists. Where there has been organised atheism it has been in ideologically inspired states, where the ideology has been very like religion in that it was an all-explaining “theory of everything”. It just didn’t feel the need for god as part of the explanation.
Fundamentalist Christianity isn’t “the view that the world would be better if we were all fundamentalist Christians”, actually. It’s the view that the world would be better if we were all the right sort of fundamentalist Christians. Different fundamentalist Christians have always been very enthusiastic about persecuting other sorts of fundamentalist Christians too. It’s one of their redeeming features.
When people talk about moderate religion, has there ever been a moderate religion except when sceptics- open or covert- have forced moderation on it or where no-one actually believed it? Ancient Roman paganism in its later years was a “moderate religion” in that no-one actually believed it. That didn’t stop its followers persecuting people who said they didn’t believe it because they actually believed something else. Later moderate religion came about as a kind or recognition of the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction- “We don’t know if we can kill all of you or you can kill all of us, so let’s not try to find out.” Eventually it ended up- as Saki put it- as “a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.”
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All religions support gender equality because they believe it’s a religious tenet. The trouble is, they believe it’s a posthumous religious tenet and that people of different genders must behave differently in life to be treated equally when they’re dead, which isn’t much use .to people who think we’ll all just be equally dead.
As someone said above, “except for Quakers”. Quakers do seem to be the embarrassing exception. My own guess is that Quakerism is organised disobedience to organisation. They do seem to reject all social impositions unless they can be persuaded of their value and to be as willing to die for what they don’t believe as for what they do believe. Quakerism began, though, as a kind of extreme fundamentalist religion. The interesting question is how and why it developed as it did, as a kind of collective way of saying “No!” to conventional obedience.
#NotAllCults