Religion offers needed structure

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Updated: March 6, 2012 8:16AM

As I sit through and observe the God-smathered GOP presidential primary, I look longingly at Europe, where people can have intellectual, stimulating discussions about religion, atheism and politics.

Europe is a place, unlike the U.S., where they don’t expect a bolt of lightning to strike down any person who mentions that he or she is an atheist. At the same time, Europeans are not as zealous in their lack of faith as religious voters here are in their beliefs. Europeans recognize that religion fills some basic human cravings that atheism just can’t sate.

A recent review in the Financial Times of London compared three new books. The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions is by atheist Alex Rosenberg, who sees religion the way most people view “Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” The Importance of Religion: Meaning and Action in our Strange World is by Gavin Flood, a religious scholar who argues for the importance of religion even in today’s world, where science and technology make it horribly outmoded for some. In Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, writer Alain de Botton travels a middle path somewhere in between religion and atheism.

Reviewer Stephen Cave, a Berlin-based philosopher, writes: “This tension between religion’s intellectual implausibility and its emotional satisfactions remains unresolved to this day. As a result, there is a pattern to Western thinking on religion since the Enlightenment: First the intellectual classes gleefully declare God dead, then they set to worrying about what, if anything, is to fill the God-sized gap He leaves behind. The Cult of Reason was one answer to this puzzle. Now, after God’s recent execution at the hands of the New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Co.), a number of thinkers are again asking whether, even in his absence, we need religion regardless.”

Can you imagine Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney speaking in such terms or even suggesting that God may or may not exist? They, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum (and let’s not forget Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and all the rest) can’t find enough ways to prove themselves the most religious one in the room. Texas Gov. Rick Perry even hosted a stadium-sized, revival-style prayer rally that drew 22,000 faithful on the eve of his presidential-nomination campaign to sport his God-fearing credentials.

There is no “tension between religion’s intellectual implausibility and its emotional satisfactions” in the good ol’ U.S. of A., because in most circles it is considered zany to admit to atheism. In American politics, it is tantamount to suicide.

Yet, I would love to be able to have a serious conversation in public about what secular Americans can learn from religion.

I have often pondered why it is that 90 percent or more of all Americans tell pollsters that they believe in God when, in fact, many of those polled don’t attend church regularly or belong to a congregation.

It’s seen as embarrassing by most Americans to admit a lack of faith, even if that admission is made to an anonymous pollster.

Religion is appealing because it answers the unanswerable questions, and faith gives people a reason to hang on and even to enjoy life when they may have no other. Religion also provides a ready-made social structure, a calendar of activities and events and groups of friends with similar interests.

Atheism would do well to adopt some of these structures and to offer adherents an alternative to socializing solely within church (or synagogue or mosque) walls.

Bonnie Erbe is a TV host and a weekly columnist for Scripps Howard News Service.