Just Like Pim Fortuyn’s Blues

Matthew Yglesias took a trip to the Netherlands recently, and, as if struck by Zeus's own thunderbolt, discovered that secularists in Europe tend to come into conflict with the most combative and aggressive modes of religiosity there, whereas secularists in the United States tend to come into conflict with the most combative and aggressive modes of religiosity here. What he takes away from this observation is that secularism in Europe can be allied to right-wing nationalism, as it shares, according to him, a common goal of minimizing the spread of Islam, though each group has its own motivations. In fact, there is no reason why European secularists couldn't in principle welcome immigrants from Muslim countries; what they can't and shouldn't abide is any effort to amend European civil law to conform to Islamic religious norms, including calls for exceptions within Muslim communities to equal rights for women and gays.

Granted, there are European political figures who are both secularist and anti-immigrant, e.g., Pim Fortuyn — though it's worth noting that his party, the List Pim Fortuyn, like Connecticut for Lieberman, was an ego trip and not a movement. In general, however, collaboration between anti-immigrant and secularist forces in Europe is a tactical accident, and as there is no reason a secularist who does not maintain anti-immigrant priors should have any principled objection to Muslim immigrants per se, such an alliance is likely to dissolve as Muslims assimilate into European culture.

Conversely, the same rationale that Yglesias points to as the cause of xenophobe-secularist cooperation in Europe exists in the United States. Right wing nationalists here are doing their (thankfully insufficient) damnedest to keep out the Mexicans. Secularists might just as easily be alarmed by a huge population of Catholic would-be immigrants. Yet there is no such alliance between anti-immigrant populists and secularists in the US. And that's because Mexican Catholics neither aggressively proselytize on behalf of their faith, nor do they engage in efforts to subvert or amend the law to restrict other people's personal freedoms. Instead, it's illiberal native-born Protestants who do that, and consequently, it's illiberal native-born Protestants against whom American secularists direct their efforts.

The root of Yglesias's analytic confusions is his free susbtitution of the concept of atheism for the concept of secularism, and back again. I'll assume he, and Jewcy's readers, are well aware of what the difference is, and refrain from elaborating. What he takes to be the voices of strident anti-religiosity are atheists. The warm and fuzzy ecumenical pluralists who tolerate religious diversity over here are secularists. Except that, when push comes to shove and Christianists make efforts to insert their faith into civil law, secularists push back as strongly as they can, just as European secularists push back against Islamism. Amazing, I know.

Whereas Yglesias fails to draw relevant distinctions between atheism and secularism, he ahistorically fabricates distinctions among varieties of atheism. What, pray tell, is this innuendo supposed to mean:

the "new atheism" — which is mostly like the old atheism but involves people acting like jerks

The "jerks" he has in mind are Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Which leads me to wonder, what point in time is the dividing line between the "old" and the "new" atheism, 2006? It certainly can't be very long ago. In 18th century Scotland, where the Enlightenment produced Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, and David Hume, the father of modern philosophical skepticism and atheist par excellence (nobody has ever substantively improved upon Hume's savaging of the argument from design) — in other words, the birthplace and birth time of modern materialism — people were still burned at the stake for heresy. Even so, atheist literature throughout history treats religion every bit as caustically as Hitchens and Dawkins do today. The "old atheists" that David Broder might approve of are figments of Yglesias's imagination. The only "new" development in atheism is that by the late 20th century, the combination of free speech doctrines and changing mores enabled atheists to come out of the closet in relatively large numbers without fear of ostracism or worse — and even today, atheists are a reviled minority in the US. So is the distinction between "old" and "new" atheists anything other than that the latter express their views openly?

To Yglesias, the "new" atheists are distinguished by their strident rhetoric, which is entirely unlike the un-strident rhetoric of, say Matthew Yglesias, in the very same post, alleging that "Will Saletan…proclaim[ed] the truth of white supremacy." Not that I particularly disagree. But please explain to me what makes Yglesias's remark an example of civility while Hitchens' and Dawkins' oratory remains vicious. On the other hand, if nothing intrinsic to each specimen of rhetoric makes any more intemperate than the others, we should consider the possibility that the Hitchens-Dawkins line on religion only strikes anyone as especially strident because religion in our society continues to be elevated to a protected sphere of discourse, such that criticizing religion in terms just as forceful as one would criticize anything else is somehow out-of-bounds purely in virtue of the fact that it is religion being criticized. One of the premises of the "new" atheists (if we must), is that religion deserves no such special privilege.

Have I mentioned that sneering at the supposed stridency of contemporary atheists is reading from a worn-out, hackneyed, lazy, positively Pragerish script?