Think back to your school days, when your class would recite the Pledge of Allegiance. If you looked around the classroom during the exercise (and of course most of us did from time to time, even though we were supposed to be focused on the flag), would you see a room filled with fine young patriots, standing upright with hands squarely over hearts, reciting the words with great seriousness and solemnity, pondering the meaning of each phrase?

If your school was like mine, it probably fell a bit short of such a patriotic ideal. Slouched, half-awake students, mumbling the words and giving little thought to their meaning, were as common as the upright patriots. In the lower grades, terms like “allegiance” and “indivisible” were often mispronounced and misunderstood. By high school the exercise had lost much of its mystique, not because kids are unpatriotic, but mainly because the pledge was seen as rote recitation that was required by authority figures.

Perhaps recalling such lackluster attitudes from their school days, some people seem to think governmental religious references are meaningless, not worth disputing. Every now and then, for example, when I'm discussing a church-state issue, someone will throw out a question that has nothing to do with legalities, but instead raises a more practical angle: Why are you fighting over this? Does it really matter? The issue might be "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, a crèche on a public park, or "In God We Trust" as the national motto: “What’s the big deal?” 

There are many reasons why church-state separation is a big deal (indeed, the fact that a valid constitutional claim is being raised should, in itself, qualify the matter as a legitimate “big deal”), but there is a psychological component to such issues that sometimes gets overlooked amid all the legal analysis. This component, which I call “crisis-induced devotion” (or “CID”), illustrates why governmental religiosity, while sometimes appearing benign and unimportant, is always at least potentially dangerous.

CID shows us that what appears mundane, given the right stimulus, can quickly become extremely intense. CID occurs, for example, when a person who is not particularly religious or patriotic suddenly becomes fervent about their religion or patriotism due to some external crisis that triggers intense devotion.

Continue reading at Psychology Today.

If you think it's rough being an atheist in America, consider the situation in less open societies. In Bangladesh, for example, several atheist bloggers were recently arrested and dozens of others face possible charges. Their crime, although described in various ways (including "insulting religion"), appears to be nothing more than being openly atheist.

The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) via an action alert and other measures, is trying to raise public awareness of troubling anti-atheist developments in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Around the world, enforcement of blasphemy laws, sometimes described as "defamation of religion," is threatening fundamental freedoms of conscience and expression, thereby making religious dissent, especially in the form of open atheist activism, very dangerous. (Some blasphemy laws call for the death penalty.) American secular groups are working with the IHEU, and plan to take steps, including possible protests and demonstrations, to call more attention to the issue. (Follow my Twitter feed for updates on these activities.)

Interestingly, mainstream American media have given little coverage to this issue, even though it presents a plain case of indefensible repression of not just one basic freedom, but several: freedom of religion, free speech, freedom of conscience, and even free press (if we consider blogging as a form of press). Guilty of little more than standing up publicly as atheists, these criminal defendants go unnoticed in the media of the free world. Where is the outrage?
Nothing is more repugnant to freedom of conscience than the notion that some ideas - whether religious, political, or philosophical - are beyond criticism. Thus, it's not surprising that we see countries governed by religious fundamentalists claim that "defamation of religion" must be discouraged. Perhaps more concerning, however, is that the idea of defending religion is gaining traction in some unexpected places, such as Russia.

One of the many problems with the concept of protecting religion from defamation is that ideas (including religious ideas) cannot be defamed - only people can be defamed. If governments feel that any idea must be shielded from scrutiny, questioning, or even ridicule and satirical commentary, that idea must be extremely weak, or alternatively the society in question must be repressive.

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Fads come and go in America, whether we’re talking about consumer products, hairstyles, or social-political ideas, so it's reasonable to wonder whether the secular movement might be just another trendy fashion. If we’re considering what’s hot and what’s not in popular culture, clearly the notion of personal secularity is in the former category, with demographic trends breaking in favor of nonbelievers and the nonreligious. But will it last?

For several reasons, it's hard to see the modern secular movement as a passing phase that will be gone tomorrow. The movement may level off, and even experience ebbs and flows over time, but the emergence of seculars resulting from the modern secular movement is highly unlikely to reverse itself, and the impact of that emergence is likely to be lasting and profound. Here are five factors indicating that the contemporary trend of secularity should have long-term traction:

1. The secular demographic won’t disappear

Secular Americans are a broad tent that includes not just atheists and agnostics, but millions of Americans who are simply not religious. These are good, taxpaying citizens who are generally skeptical of grand theological claims, who wouldn’t dream of spending Sunday morning sitting in church, and who tend to see church-state separation as important. These seculars have always been around, and there is no chance that they are suddenly going to disappear.

Indeed, if the secular movement seems like a new phenomenon (and it is), that’s because many of these nonreligious and nontheistic Americans have only recently begun to appreciate their secular identity. By remaining in the closet for decades as the religious right was growing into a major political force, seculars inadvertently helped create a landscape ripe for anti-intellectualism and disastrous public policy. The modern secular movement can be understood as a response to that mistake, taking root as seculars increasingly realize that they must be “out” and visible in order to fight back against the religious right.

About one in five Americans are now religiously unaffiliated, and many more are simply apathetic towards religion. Trends seem to suggest that those numbers will only increase, but even if there is some fluctuation it seems unlikely that the demographic will shrink to insignificance or suddenly become ambivalent about its agenda.

2. The Internet and social media have changed everything

A generation ago, if you were an nonbeliever living in, say, Columbia, South Carolina, you may have thought you were the only one for twenty miles in any direction. Today, however, by using tools such as meetup.com, you can quickly discover that there is a group called the Freethought Society of the Midlands, with almost 400 members. Thanks to the Internet and social media, seculars are identifying openly, finding community, and connecting with one another in ways that simply were not possible just a few years ago.

Through the Internet, America's religious skeptics are discovering that their views are shared by millions of others, and that there is strength in numbers. When high school sophomore Jessica Ahlquist challenged a prayer banner hanging in her public school in 2011, she was met with great hostility from her community, but she found much camaraderie online. A Facebook group formed to voice support for her effort, and thousands joined. Such solidarity among seculars was nonexistent before the Internet, but is widespread now and unlikely to disappear.

3. Seculars are organized

There are numerous national and local groups promoting the interests of nonreligious Americans, and these groups are attracting resources like never before. The Secular Student Alliance, for example, the national umbrella organization for campus atheist-humanist groups, was formed just a decade ago and has seen spectacular expansion in recent years, growing from a few dozen affiliates to over 400. Now the SSA is setting up atheist-humanist groups in high schools, a move that is sure to normalize atheism and humanism at the grassroots level. Secular Americans now also have a formal lobbying organization in Washington – the Secular Coalition for America – which has launched a grassroots initiative to lobby in all 50 states as well. Other groups, such as the American Humanist Association, American Atheists, and the Center for Inquiry, all of which have been around for decades, have committed to activism and secular visibility in ways that they didn’t years ago. These groups provide professionalism - advocacy, educational materials, lobbying, communications, etc. - that enables seculars to nurture and expand their movement.

Read remainder of article at Psychology Today.

With a new survey from Pew showing that about one in five Americans are now religiously unaffiliated, it would be reasonable to ask what impact, if any, the rapidly growing secular movement will have on public policy. (Among those under 30, the percentage is even higher: one in three.) This enormous demographic, silent for so long, is finding its voice, and the fallout could be significant.

Mistakenly, some have suggested that seculars are too diverse to convey a cohesive political message. Because nonbelievers are independent-minded and cover the entire political spectrum, some pundits say the movement will never gain political traction. "The very notion of uniting nonbelievers behind a common cause is pretty much an oxymoron," writes Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, reflecting the predictable cynicism of a seasoned D.C. journalist, but also a surprising level of naivety.

Consider, for example, that this expectation of political unity seems to apply only to seculars. Surely few would dismiss the women’s movement so quickly, even though the women’s vote is usually split more or less evenly among candidates (48 percent of women voted for George W. Bush in 2004, for example). The LGBT movement, meanwhile, has seen much progress even as “conservative” gays fill the ranks of Log Cabin Republicans. And similar political differences are common within most racial and ethnic groups, despite common generalizations to the contrary.

All these minorities have seen effective identity-based movements even as their members have disagreed on political specifics, because each movement has carried a central message that resonates despite those differences. And the same can be said for the secular movement, driven by an increasingly identity-conscious demographic that is demanding long-overdue recognition. The eleven groups comprising the Secular Coalition for America, for example, include members that run the gamut from left to right, but all share a common vision of an America that embraces reason-based values.

So how might the secular movement play out in public policy? Here are a few areas where the effects of the rising tide of seculars will likely be seen:

Electoral Politics: Texas Governor Rick Perry launched his presidential campaign last year with a prayer rally, an event that was striking evidence of how the religious right has changed the political calculus. A decade or two ago, it would have been suicidal – even in the GOP – to initiate a presidential campaign with a fundamentalist prayer rally filling a football stadium. But this tactic proved to be smart for Perry, who was soon thereafter on top of the GOP polls. (He subsequently proved to be an inept candidate, but the fact remains, sadly, that the prayer rally was politically effective.)

In the realm of politics, the rise of the religious right has resulted in increasing numbers of candidates who proudly profess anti-intellectual, fundamentalist Christian views. Candidates who vocally reject evolution, for example, are now routinely elected to Congress, and we even see them touted as presidential prospects – Michele Bachmann, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, and Sarah Palin, for example.

Thus, one outcome of a successful secular movement would be an influx of reason and sanity into the realm of electoral politics. The emergence of the secular demographic would necessarily diminish the political appeal of biblical literalism and brazen anti-intellectualism.

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