Why religion is fading in the West

Recently Pew released polling results showing that atheism was continuing its assent in America.

Now if you read American opinion pieces, nine times out of ten you will find some religious person, or “good atheist” type slamming new atheism.

You will find repeated claims that “New atheists” are jerks, how the atheist movement is hurting itself, and yet the figures keep coming out showing atheism going from strength to strength.

Over the past few weeks, I think I have seen exactly why this is the case.

I could say it is that atheists have better arguments, which as an atheist I obviously think we do, but the arguments haven't really changed all that much in the last few hundred years.

I think there is something else going on.

Take the Josh Duggar story. Duggar molested most of his little sisters as a teenager. This has been a very public case, because the Duggars are reality TV stars, they're presented as this super-Christian super-sized family by TLC.

So when the news broke a lot of atheists expressed horror at the fact that Duggar still lived in that house when the show began, that rather than dealing with the problem his parents sent him to a religious therapy group, and to a state trooper who later turned out to have an extensive child porn collection.

This had consequences – after Josh was caught, he went on to molest more girls.

And the response from conservative Christians has been to proclaim that atheists hate God, that atheists are bitter and twisted individuals, that Josh Duggar, at the age of fourteen, was simply “playing doctor.”

From the comments of that article:

“Liberal-atheist-Christ haters always go way off the rails at the mention of Christian goodness and ethics. They’re deeply influenced by demonic power and can’t help themselves.”

Remember this is on a story in which it was revealed that a prominent figure on America’s religious right molested his little sisters.

It all echoes Bill Donahue, who in the wake of the Catholic abuse scandal went out of his way to argue that the victims were not children.

Earlier this month at Salon Sean Illing, who is an atheist but not of the "new" stripe, wrote the following in response to something Richard Dawkins wrote:

"But denying the truth claims of religion won’t suffice, because religion is about much more than truth; it’s about meaning, values, tradition, consolation, community, and transcendence. Dawkins flew right past this point in his response. That’s unfortunate."

Here is what I think of that comment.

Religion requires a defence, precisely because of those elements that Illing says Dawkins ignores.

When we look at the Duggar scandal, what we see is meaning, values, tradition, consolation, community, and transcendence at work.

We see how, in the absence of truth each of those elements is in fact twisted such that anger at child abuse is phrased as a bad thing, such that values become more about protecting the perpetrator than defending the innocent.

All with the veneer of transcendent "forgiveness" - which simply means rising above the harm, so that nothing has to be done about it.

Each of those elements that Illing cites, can only be justified if the central claims of religion are honest. In the absence of honesty, they very easily become toxic.

"Everything but the truth" - doesn't have that honesty. The truth matters, because when you base all of that other stuff on lies, it goes very badly wrong.