The myth of religious oppression in the West
For some time now, there has been a trend amongst the religious, particularly at the more conservative end of the Christian faith to claim that their voices are being driven from the public square. This is obviously a reaction against the increasingly diverse societies of Western countries, partly a hankering after the good old days when they could say how it was gonna be in society and people followed and partly a reaction to the ‘new’ atheism of people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, AC Grayling and so on.
This claim is most often heard when ‘hot button issues’ for at least some Christians arise – the troika of abortion, stem cell research and gay rights (and same-sex marriage in particular), but it can also be heard less frequently when it comes to demands to teach biblical myths in the biology classroom.
Several things stand out about this claim. Firstly, its patent falseness, religious figures are never backwards about coming forwards with their views on any number of issues and the ones just mentioned in particular. Their views often make the headlines of the corporate media and there are well organised lobbying outfits that can quickly mobilise significant numbers of the lay supporters to write to their local representative or a government inquiry with their views. In the US, the religious right has had an enormous influence over the past thirty years on everything from education to foreign policy, although it is highly likely that this will abate with the shift that put Obama into the White House.
Secondly, they recognise that they can’t just say “we must do X because the bible tells us so” in secular societies where the percentage of people professing a religion is sharply declining, the varieties of religious beliefs are diversifying and active churchgoers comprise a tiny segment of society. Thus they have to appeal to some other grounds for arguing what they do; typically this involves some sort of claim of objectiveness and/or appeals to the consequences of deciding against them. It is at this point that they will start saying that things like that it is undemocratic or oppressive to silence religious voices etc even though we’ve just established that religious voices are not being silenced and thus not being oppressed in the 21st century. They’re confusing being heard with being followed and they ignore the fact that there are any number of views out there that we don’t take seriously while accepting people’s right to hold them. No one would seek to persecute someone who believed that they had been abducted by aliens, but would we formulate public policy on the basis of such a view? No and nor is it oppressive to refuse to do so.
Ironically for people trying to claim objectiveness for their views (based as they are on a foundationalist or foundherentist epistemology) and who decry relativism, this is a distinctly relativist approach to epistemology. Policies based on evidence, reason and science (e.g. teaching evolution in the classroom) should be discarded they say, or at most given equal weight to those based on divine revelation because there are ‘other ways of knowing besides science’. This is of course exactly what every new-ager and ‘science studies’ professor says when arguing for the validity of everything from homeopathy to astrology and has the capacity to undermine scientific and cultural progress if ever this way of thinking was to gain currency.
Incidentally, they never establish objectiveness because often they don’t propose criteria by which objectiveness is established that people would agree on and the wide disagreement in the general community with their views on the issues indicates something less than the objectiveness of the proposition of, say, murder being wrong. The dark warnings of the consequences are never actually fleshed out, we never hear a clear explanation of what they think will happen if society doesn’t follow them because if they did favour us with their predictions, we’d be able to look and see if they are in fact borne out in other countries where they have already lost the argument or where there are comparable experiences, so better to keep things vague. Of course it goes without saying that appeals to the consequences are a logical fallacy.
Finally, and perhaps most ironically of all, they whinge about oppression when the effects of their ideas, if they were taken up, would be profoundly oppressive to others. One of the differences between conservative and liberal believers is the level of control they would exercise over others and a quick glance at the ‘hot button issues’ shows clearly that one group of people (the ones claiming they are being oppressed) would have control of another (the ones who really would be oppressed):
· Abortion – why should men control women’s bodies?
· Gay rights – why should straight people be more empowered in society than gay ones?
· Stem cell research – why should people be denied the benefits of scientific progress to treat, perhaps even cure their conditions in the name of philosophical idealism?
· Teaching evolution – why should obscurantism retard scientific understanding and why should people be confused to protect the power claims of religious dogma and its priesthood?
In each case, the people arguing against abortion, gay rights, stem cell research and teaching evolution seek to be empowered and conversely, large sections of the population would be (and in some cases are currently) oppressed by their power. Indeed, so called ‘hot button issues’ are flags for their broader quest for power. That they can generate debate on any of these issues at all shows they are certainly being heard, but thankfully despite their best attempts, they aren’t getting their way.
What is actually happening when we hear claims of oppression by reactionary religionists is that would-be oppressors are posing as victims of oppression to build sympathy for their position. In doing this they are trying to dethrone reason, the notion of equal rights, evidence-based policies and science in the name of ‘open’ inquiry and what might loosely be termed alternative ‘knowledge’. Above all they are conflating being heard with being followed.
This contemptible tactic is a reaction to a loss of power and its practitioners must be called out on it when they try it on.
This claim is most often heard when ‘hot button issues’ for at least some Christians arise – the troika of abortion, stem cell research and gay rights (and same-sex marriage in particular), but it can also be heard less frequently when it comes to demands to teach biblical myths in the biology classroom.
Several things stand out about this claim. Firstly, its patent falseness, religious figures are never backwards about coming forwards with their views on any number of issues and the ones just mentioned in particular. Their views often make the headlines of the corporate media and there are well organised lobbying outfits that can quickly mobilise significant numbers of the lay supporters to write to their local representative or a government inquiry with their views. In the US, the religious right has had an enormous influence over the past thirty years on everything from education to foreign policy, although it is highly likely that this will abate with the shift that put Obama into the White House.
Secondly, they recognise that they can’t just say “we must do X because the bible tells us so” in secular societies where the percentage of people professing a religion is sharply declining, the varieties of religious beliefs are diversifying and active churchgoers comprise a tiny segment of society. Thus they have to appeal to some other grounds for arguing what they do; typically this involves some sort of claim of objectiveness and/or appeals to the consequences of deciding against them. It is at this point that they will start saying that things like that it is undemocratic or oppressive to silence religious voices etc even though we’ve just established that religious voices are not being silenced and thus not being oppressed in the 21st century. They’re confusing being heard with being followed and they ignore the fact that there are any number of views out there that we don’t take seriously while accepting people’s right to hold them. No one would seek to persecute someone who believed that they had been abducted by aliens, but would we formulate public policy on the basis of such a view? No and nor is it oppressive to refuse to do so.
Ironically for people trying to claim objectiveness for their views (based as they are on a foundationalist or foundherentist epistemology) and who decry relativism, this is a distinctly relativist approach to epistemology. Policies based on evidence, reason and science (e.g. teaching evolution in the classroom) should be discarded they say, or at most given equal weight to those based on divine revelation because there are ‘other ways of knowing besides science’. This is of course exactly what every new-ager and ‘science studies’ professor says when arguing for the validity of everything from homeopathy to astrology and has the capacity to undermine scientific and cultural progress if ever this way of thinking was to gain currency.
Incidentally, they never establish objectiveness because often they don’t propose criteria by which objectiveness is established that people would agree on and the wide disagreement in the general community with their views on the issues indicates something less than the objectiveness of the proposition of, say, murder being wrong. The dark warnings of the consequences are never actually fleshed out, we never hear a clear explanation of what they think will happen if society doesn’t follow them because if they did favour us with their predictions, we’d be able to look and see if they are in fact borne out in other countries where they have already lost the argument or where there are comparable experiences, so better to keep things vague. Of course it goes without saying that appeals to the consequences are a logical fallacy.
Finally, and perhaps most ironically of all, they whinge about oppression when the effects of their ideas, if they were taken up, would be profoundly oppressive to others. One of the differences between conservative and liberal believers is the level of control they would exercise over others and a quick glance at the ‘hot button issues’ shows clearly that one group of people (the ones claiming they are being oppressed) would have control of another (the ones who really would be oppressed):
· Abortion – why should men control women’s bodies?
· Gay rights – why should straight people be more empowered in society than gay ones?
· Stem cell research – why should people be denied the benefits of scientific progress to treat, perhaps even cure their conditions in the name of philosophical idealism?
· Teaching evolution – why should obscurantism retard scientific understanding and why should people be confused to protect the power claims of religious dogma and its priesthood?
In each case, the people arguing against abortion, gay rights, stem cell research and teaching evolution seek to be empowered and conversely, large sections of the population would be (and in some cases are currently) oppressed by their power. Indeed, so called ‘hot button issues’ are flags for their broader quest for power. That they can generate debate on any of these issues at all shows they are certainly being heard, but thankfully despite their best attempts, they aren’t getting their way.
What is actually happening when we hear claims of oppression by reactionary religionists is that would-be oppressors are posing as victims of oppression to build sympathy for their position. In doing this they are trying to dethrone reason, the notion of equal rights, evidence-based policies and science in the name of ‘open’ inquiry and what might loosely be termed alternative ‘knowledge’. Above all they are conflating being heard with being followed.
This contemptible tactic is a reaction to a loss of power and its practitioners must be called out on it when they try it on.