1. Introduction
Our concern here is with the roles of religious faith in political movements. "Faith" will cover both the kind of faith that involves affirmation of religious claims of a factual nature, and other ways of being religious. "Political movements" will include everything from loose groupings of people who think in the same way and identify as having that much in common up to fully organised political parties.
There is a view within some some political movements that religious faith has a central role to play in politics. Some members of these movements speak of family, flag, and faith. When this slogan is used, Christian faith is usually meant. Other religious beliefs could be given a comparable political role, but for the purposes of this discussion we shall concentrate on Christianity.
Here we shall explore whether atheists (such as the present author) could comfortably align themselves with movements within which faith had a significant political role.
Would atheists be as easily convinced as religious people that the specific political positions taken were adequately supported against alternative positions?
More generally, would atheists be entirely comfortable working within movements in which faith was important? There is no suggestion that atheists would be deliberately excluded. Atheism, in which we include the agnosticism that has no definite idea of a deity and might as well be atheism for all practical and most theoretical purposes, is now widespread. It would be an unusual political group that would exclude such a large proportion of the population and thereby lose a lot of potential members and supporters. Moreover, many people would probably not wish to be associated with a group that took such a censorious attitude based on religious difference. But atheists, even if accepted, might still feel ill at ease.
2. Support for political positions
Religious faith may play a role in supporting political positions as against alternative positions. Arguments for one position as against another might be arguments with other people, or arguments within the minds of individuals who were aware of alternatives but who sought to be fortified in their convictions.
We must consider whether an atheist could see faith as providing any such support, and then if not, whether that would create difficulties for atheists.
When we speak of faith, we mean actual religious faith (although, as we shall see, not necessarily centred on propositional content). Some speak of faith in Christian values, which one might read simply as commitment to a range of values traditionally associated with Christianity without any need for distinctively religious faith. But that would reduce the relevant political debates to arguments about the merits and the applicability of different values, to be conducted in the ordinary way without any specifically religious element. We shall in sections 3.2 to 3.4 consider ways of understanding religious faith that edge toward that sort of position, but they still keep one foot in religion and thereby prevent such an easy reduction.
3. Could an atheist see faith as providing support?
Religious faith may be regarded as a matter of belief in certain propositions, or as something else. We shall consider the first option in section 3.1, and the second one in sections 3.2 to 3.4. We shall use the term "religious belief" to denote the propositions that may be believed, and the term "people of faith" to encompass both people who do believe them and people who understand their religion in some other way.
3.1 Faith as belief
From an atheist starting point, religious belief as it is found in Christianity or any other monotheistic religion would require belief that God existed, taken as a factual claim. There are variants. A Jesuit priest once told the present author that the wording should be "God is", rather than "God exists", but that variant would not help in the discussion that follows here. Nor would other sophisticated theological approaches help, because the claims made would still be rejected by atheists as false or regarded by them as meaningless. Sophisticated theology may appeal to those who are already believers. They do not need to find a way round any objection that there is no good reason for those not already committed to a religion to believe the factual claim that there is a God. It has no appeal to the atheist as a way round such an objection. And since atheists are our concern here, their need for straightforward facts must be respected if they are to be convinced.
Atheists simply cannot allow a theistic claim. So they cannot accord religious belief an argumentative role in supporting political positions against alternatives. An understanding of religion could still be important in political debate, helping the comprehension of positions by reference to their historical and social contexts. But that would be all. Suppose that some religious claim is designated "p", and some political claim is designated “q”. "If p, then q" can provide no encouragement either to accept or to reject q if one thinks that p is false, or indeed that it is meaningless.
There would also be no good way to repair the damage that would be done to the political force of faith as belief by the rejection of theistic claims. Given that rejection, and without adopting some other model of faith, Christianity would be reduced to exhortation backed up by stories that might be historically accurate in their naming and description of people, places and events, but in the reading of which literal readings of all references to divine aspects would have to be avoided in order to avoid factual inaccuracy. Then Christianity would be too weak to be a source of imperatives with sufficient force behind them to override competing imperatives.
There would be an additional issue for atheists. They would want the polity to be one that was for them just as much as it was a polity for people of faith. If religious belief were to be essential to being a full member of the polity, they would find that unacceptable. And the larger the role that was given to religious belief, the greater the danger that belief would be essential to full membership. Even if pretended belief sufficed, that would require the great discomfort of continual dishonesty.
Finally, any choice or rejection of religious beliefs to suit politics would imply that the beliefs were not regarded as factual matters. Where facts are at stake, we do not get to choose the facts. Indeed, if one were to start from political preferences and then choose religious beliefs, any support for the politics from those beliefs would be founded on circular reasoning.
3.2 Faith without belief
If we take faith as belief, the beliefs involved would be ones that atheists would reject. Faith in that form could not for them do anything to support political positions. We should however consider forms of religious faith that, while rooted in straightforwardly theistic traditions, do not require factual claims that atheists would reject. Could any such forms play roles in supporting political positions against alternatives?
Such forms of faith may be classed under two headings, although any individual might take elements from both or even fully combine them. The division we envisage is one between the primacy of an imperative to live rightly and the primacy of a frame of mind.
3.3 An imperative to live rightly
There is an approach to religion that goes under the name of orthopraxy, or correct conduct. While this encompasses both liturgical conduct and ethical conduct in everyday life, there is a decided rooting in a religious tradition in which orthodoxy is central, leaving little or no scope for atheists to participate in orthopraxy in its full form.
Atheists could however take on the notion of orthopraxy in the sense of ethical conduct, and they often do. The notion is not merely the idea of conduct of a particular nature. It incorporates what is captured by the prefix "ortho". This indicates a link to regulation by some external source of direction, so that mere private habits would not qualify even if they happened to lead to the same conduct. In relation to ethical conduct in everyday life, atheists could recognise the significance of having an external source of direction just as much as people of religious faith could recognise it, even though their external source would be likely to be an impersonal body of ethical thought rather than a personality or a sacred text.
The specific conduct that interests us here is the promotion of selected political positions because their promotion seems to be the right way to act in debate. We must ask whether the way in which atheists might consider themselves required to live rightly would in that context be a good fit with the way in which people of faith might rely on their religion to justify promoting selected positions.
3.3.1 Thinking in parallel
People of faith within the political movements that interest us might well take the view that in the political context religion was primarily about doing the right things, not by accident but because of religious motivation, and that even if factual theistic belief was also important to them, it did not matter so much when deciding which political positions to promote or oppose.
With that focus on promoting or opposing political positions, atheists might not have any difficulty in working closely with people of faith who saw the application of religion in that context as not being dependent on factual religious belief. The immediate question for atheists in politics would be, "Are these the policies to promote, and those the ones to oppose?". They might easily give the same positive and negative verdicts on particular policies as people of faith would. They would do so on grounds that did not include even implicit reference to the divine, but that to them would be just as imperative as the divine would be to people of faith.
In order to parallel in their minds the model of religion as a matter of living rightly that we envisage here, atheists would have to be motivated by considerations that made their choices of policies mandatory. They could however supply such considerations from philosophical positions that were not theistic in nature. Examples would include utilitarianism and virtue ethics. There would still be a difference from religion in that the source of considerations would be purely secular, but that would be a tolerable difference. It would however be important in supporting political positions against alternatives that they did have some such grounds. The approach to politics that we envisage without some supporting orthodoxy or other external motivation would not count for much in political argument.
3.3.2 Current disagreement
Atheists might sometimes give different verdicts on policies from people of faith, but that would not be a serious obstacle to working comfortably together so long as differences did not arise in respect of prescriptions that were important enough to make acceptance of them practically a condition of belonging to the political movement, or important enough to individuals to make them think it unethical to work with anyone who advocated a contrary position. After all, different people of faith can also have different views on the same issues.
Having said that, the role of religion might make it likely that there would be conflict in respect of prescriptions of great importance, a contemporary example being a prescription actively to oppose (or to support) abortion rights. We should expect religion sometimes to create conflict in respect of prescriptions of great importance, because religions typically have specific things to say about fundamental aspect of human life.
When such a conflict arose, people on one side of the debate might not want to work closely with people on the other side in the promotion of a party that sought a place in government, for fear that the party would then legislate for the position on that issue that they abhorred.
3.3.3 Stability and future disagreement
For a person of faith for whom orthopraxy was in the forefront, orthodoxy would still be in the background, both as an optional extra that the person of faith could choose to add to his or her orthopraxy and by virtue of orthopraxy's roots in traditions of orthodoxy. That would give a certain stability to the detailed positions adopted, at least so long as the individual's faith lasted. There would always be scope to interpret a religion differently, as shown by the fact that people of different political persuasions manage to claim the same religion as central to their own positions. But the way in which a specific individual interpreted his or her religion for political purposes would probably be reasonably stable, especially if he or she was in a political movement in which many others were of the same religion.
For an atheist, there would not be the same kind of source of stability. General ethical positions, such as utilitarianism or some virtue ethic, might provide reasonable stability, along with some predictability as to how novel issues would be handled. But such positions are at sufficient distance from the specifics of life for this to be far from guaranteed. Religions, on the other hand, having grown up over centuries in actual societies where there was a need to achieve agreement on laws and conduct, tend in their principles to be closer to the specifics of life.
The result of this difference, together with the fact that religious principles sometimes promote results at variance with what schools of secular ethics can recommend, would be potential for disagreement over questions of what should be done that might arise in future. There might even be a current fear that such future differences could lead to schism within the relevant political movement. Moreover, the different grounds of commitment to specific positions, religious and secular grounds, would encourage different forms of political argument and rhetoric in the present, making the difference in grounds visible to the public and thereby perhaps reducing support because the risk of a political party's taking an unexpected direction would deter voters. For reasons such as these, disquiet at being in the same political movement as people on the other side of the divide between people of faith and atheists might persist.
3.4 A frame of mind
It is possible to regard religious faith as a matter of seeing the world in a particular way. This does not involve assent to propositions that would be specific enough to be assessed for truth or falsity in the way that theists and atheists might assess a claim that God existed. Rather, it amounts to commitment to a view that, while it could expressed in propositional terms, would have to be expressed in propositions so general that they would not be testable. Examples would be the proposition that reality was all a single substance, in a Spinozist kind of way, or the proposition that everything had mental qualities, in a panpsychist kind of way.
Such propositions would be accompanied by an imperative to look at the world in their light. Thus someone who adopted a Spinozist approach would see the world as both a divine thought and a physical reality, while a panpsychist might see each event as explicable by reference to the purposes of the participant entities. One consequence might be to respond to the world as a person of orthodox faith might well do so, at least at the level of broad values such as concern for people and the environment and respect for all. There might also be an inclination to attend religious services, not in order to affirm the contents of creeds but because one would feel at home there.
Any such framing of the world would be flexible in its effects on the selection of particular prescriptions for views or conduct. This flexibility might be reduced by a background of orthodoxy. Such a background might have an influence even if an individual did not subscribe to any such orthodoxy, because the place of the orthodoxy in the relevant cultural history would have shaped the range of options likely to occur to the individual and the ways in which he or she would interpret the chosen option. But there would still be some flexibility, and some potential to derive alternative and perhaps opposing prescriptions.
It is therefore unlikely that such a framing could suffice to support political positions against alternative positions. Even if a given framing were agreed, it would be possible to derive support for different positions from it. And it is unlikely that a framing would be agreed precisely, given that it would not even be formulated with any great precision. So atheists who rejected such framings, seeing them as mystical, would not be any less able than people who adopted such framings to find support for political positions against alternatives.
A framing might however still suffice to resolve a debate within the mind of a single individual, with the outcome fortifying the individual in his or her convictions.
4. Working with people who rely on faith
No political movement that could only attract people who had religious faith, or could only attract people who did not, could expect to make great progress in a modern democracy. So we must consider any difficulties that might arise when atheists and people of faith sought to work together.
4.1 Support for positions
It would be difficult for an atheist to see faith as providing support for political positions. Faith as belief could not do so, because an implication from a religious belief to some political position would have what the atheist regarded as a false antecedent. And faith without belief, while it might encourage people with the faith to sustain their political positions, would be seen by the atheist as providing merely psychological support, the existence of which had no probative value.
This would not in itself need to present any difficulty, so long as atheists could find adequate reasons of their own to support the positions that were important to the movement, or alternatively if any failures to support certain positions could be tolerated.
There might however be a felt loss of coherence of the overall stance of the movement. If the main positions were mostly natural consequences of the relevant religious faith, that would for the faithful justify holding the positions as a package. Without that central core of faith, the different positions might come across as a disparate bunch, justified individually but not collectively.
Moreover, future loyalty to the movement would be more uncertain for the atheist than for the faithful. There is a view that this would be a good thing. It is rational to consider each political position on its own merits, and to be willing to change one's views if appropriate. On the other hand, the faithful might be uncomfortable with the constant risk that their atheist colleagues would start to deviate from the programme, and atheists might feel uncomfortable at the expectation of continued loyalty to a programme that could not remain static but would have to evolve as new developments in the world demanded new responses.
4.2 Conflicts over positions
If religious faith were central to an approach to political issues, it is quite likely that at least a few positions would flow naturally from the relevant faith but would conflict with the values of some of the people without faith. So there would be occasions when atheists would want to reject some positions within a broad faith-inspired programme.
How far this would be likely to happen would depend on the core values that went along with the relevant faith. We shall now take a look at what might be called Judaeo-Christian values, and then consider some specific conflicts.
4.2.1 Christian and Judaeo-Christian values
The phrases "Christian values" and "Judaeo-Christian values" are widely used, but they are easy to interpret in several different ways. If pressed, those who use them within the political movements that interest us here will cite some specific values, such as justice, mutual respect, doing as you would be done by, charity, the sanctity of life, and avoidance of behaviour traditionally regarded as sinful. But those values too are not especially specific in their implications for contemporary policy. It can however be clearer what they forbid than what they require, as when references to the sanctity of life are used to argue against abortion rights, or an imperative to avoid sin is used to justify forbidding certain personal relationships.
Clarity on prohibitions reflects the Old Testament inheritance, with its regulations and ideas of structures of authority. Those regulations and ideas of authority are more muted in the New Testament. Their strongest recurrence is in the Pauline Epistles, but there they come across as balanced on the single point of faith in Jesus, lacking the force that comes from being rooted in the profound history of a people that is recounted in the Old Testament.
It is therefore not surprising that the concept of Judaeo-Christian values, including the Old Testament part, should have considerable appeal to members of a political movement who advocate family and flag. But it also prepares the ground for conflicts on some specific issues between members with religious faith and atheist members.
4.2.2 Specific conflicts
Atheists are likely to object to the promotion of any particular religion, or of religion generally, in schools or in the life of the state. They regard the beliefs promoted as simply false, and therefore as not to be advocated. This opposition may bring them into direct conflict with those who advocate a political role for faith. Those who think that faith has a valuable role in supporting their political choices are likely to want those choices to be supported by as many people as possible, in order to ensure their implementation in a democracy.
A related point is that an atheist of integrity would not be able to say that while he or she did not believe the propositions of religion, it would be good if the population at large did. That would be to say that it was good for people to be misled in certain ways, a position inconsistent with taking truth seriously.
On the issues of abortion and euthanasia, atheists are more likely than people of faith to be in favour of the freedom of the mother and the terminally ill respectively. There is no guarantee that any given atheist or person of faith would take the position one would expect. There will be anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia atheists, and pro-abortion rights and pro-euthanasia people of faith. But a political movement will tend to want a single coherent position on each major issue, and the more people of faith dominate, the more likely it is that this position will be anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia. That may leave a substantial proportion of atheist supporters uncomfortable, and even schismatic.
Another area of potential conflict is personal lifestyle. Atheists are more likely than people with religious faith to take the position that individuals should be free to live as they choose so long as their lifestyles do no harm to others. And someone else's horror that anyone should be living in a particular way would not count as harm. Without a notion of divine disapproval, the regulation of conduct should be limited to conduct that can be characterised as wrong on purely secular grounds. People of faith, on the other hand, may well have a notion of divine disapproval and see it as part of the role of the state to forbid conduct that would incur that disapproval.
Here, the notion of freedom that is sometimes joined to family, flag, and faith is at stake. The libertarian position would be that freedom included leaving harmless people alone. A more conservative and quite possibly faith-inspired position would be that it required allowing such freedoms as might be suitable while in some respects constraining people for their own good or for the good of society. As with other issues, there is no guarantee that any given atheist or person of faith would take the position one would predict in this way. But again, there is a tendency for a political movement to want a single coherent position on each major issue. And whichever way such a decision was made, one might expect some disaffection, either predominantly on the atheist side or predominantly on the side of people of faith.
One reason why conflicts over issues like abortion, euthanasia, and personal lifestyle may be hard to resolve by discussion within a political movement is that the grounds for positions may be different. For the atheist, the grounds may be given in arguments against a background of secular values that are themselves open to challenge by argument which may lead to adjustment of those values. For the person of faith, the grounds may be given in arguments against a background of values that come from the relevant religious tradition and that are not themselves to be challenged by argument, but only rejected by abandoning the faith in question.
5. Avoiding reliance on religious tradition
There would be advantages in a political movement that had hitherto given an important role to religious tradition moving away from any reliance on that tradition, whether the tradition was still linked to actual faith or was seen as merely historical.
5.1 The risks of reliance
When a tradition was linked to actual faith, there would be a risk that people, including some of the keenest supporters, would lose their faith. Then if faith was important to the political movement, those people might very well leave the movement. Alternatively, if they were a large enough group, they might seek radical change within the movement, and schism could easily result.
Even when a tradition was seen as merely of historical significance, and as a way to influence current choices of policy on the basis that the tradition was central to the relevant country's culture and that it would be sensible to choose policies that fitted well with that culture, the argument for respecting the tradition would weaken as faith diminished in the population. To sustain respect, there would need to be a reasonable proportion of the population who thought that the relevant religious beliefs were true. In a generally atheistic population there would be considerable doubt that the tradition deserved continuing respect, simply because the beliefs on which it was founded were seen as mistaken.
5.2 Alternative support for positions
If faith were discarded, and moreover the weight of a tradition viewed merely historically was reduced because the beliefs on which it was founded were seen as mistaken, what alternatives might be available to support the positions typically favoured by the political movements that interest us?
Fortunately, there are rich traditions of ethical thought on which to draw, some developed in Europe from Ancient Greece onward, and some developed elsewhere in the world. These traditions have deep roots in culture, placing them on a par with established religions in that respect. Abstract ethical theories when considered independently of history would come across as lacking such roots, leading to a fear that they would be flimsier than religions, but in fact there is history to hand.
European traditions of thought that have endured were, in years AD, influences on and influenced by Christianity, but they are still identifiable as traditions that could stand independently of theistic religion. To see that, one only has to wind the clock back to the time before Christianity became widespread, a time for which there is also not much sign of dependence on Jewish thought, and then imagine winding the clock forward again on a path without Christianity. The vaunting of truth, beauty, and in political arrangements courage and cooperation with others can all be found in such traditions. And subsequent ethical thought, such as Locke on government, Kant on duty and justice, or Mill on liberty, could easily have arisen and stood independently of theistic traditions. (Locke and Kant would require some editing, but their edifices would not crumble.)
We do not here reach directly for the work of those who characterise themselves as modern-day humanists, although their promotion of values is explicitly non-theistic. This is not to scorn their work. But the values for which they tend to argue are not ones that are distinctive of the political movements that interest us. Rather, they are values of scientific progress, liberty, and consideration for others that reach across the political spectrum. We may however make indirect use of the modern-day humanists by pointing out that their publications show how values can perfectly well be supported without any kind of religion.
5.3 Consequences of reliance on alternative support
Support from religious belief can easily be support for a complete package of political positions. Quite a lot of interpretation and argument to conclusions may be needed to reach political positions appropriate to the modern world from an inherited corpus of texts and doctrines, but support for anything in the package can be seen as derived from that corpus.
Correspondingly, the exclusion of rival political positions may be supported by interpreting and drawing conclusions from the same corpus. Rivals may be able to cite the same corpus in support of their positions. But at least the debate can be shifted from "Your position is mistaken" to "You are interpreting the corpus and drawing conclusions in the wrong way". Then it is easier to be confident in one's own positions, because one's confidence is based on a view that one is epistemically superior in general terms, a view that need not be defended by reference to any particular interpretation of the corpus or by reference to any other body of information at a comparable level of specificity. This is not to say that a claim of epistemic superiority would be justified. One might invent the claim that opponents were misusing the corpus simply because one did not like their conclusions, and then hunt around for moves in their thinking that could be claimed to be mistakes. But at least one would have found a move to make.
All this changes when one moves away from support for positions that is based on religious belief. Support for a complete package would be most unlikely without a single foundational corpus. The most extensive foundational corpus would be the set of established results in the natural sciences, but while such results would sometimes be necessary to make a good secular case for a political position, they would rarely if ever be sufficient. So one would be left having to justify positions one by one, rather than as a package. There might well be constraints on positions by reference to other positions. The final package would have to be coherent. The adoption of some positions might require or exclude the adoption of others. But imposition of the need for coherence would come after the search for support for specific positions against rivals. And while coherence might be promoted by adoption of a single overall approach to ethics, such as utilitarianism or virtue ethics, such approaches would be somewhat too distant from specific political positions to give much of a guarantee of coherence, given that many policy choices could not easily be ranked by their exhibition of virtues or generation of happiness. Only some extreme choices would be likely to be easy to exclude by reference to such criteria.
One consequence is that specific positions would come to seem more open to change than when they were based on religious belief. Any position could at any time be seen to have lost its secular support, without that requiring the large mental shift that would be involved in abandoning a religious tradition. There would be no guarantee underwritten by a tradition that we would keep our political positions stable.
On the other hand, a consequence that might be found more pleasing would be that political positions might maintain their support even if religious belief were lost, or respect for a religious tradition faded. Religious belief has declined among the population as a whole, and with it any automatic entitlement to respect that religious traditions may have enjoyed in the past. Even within a movement in which most members were committed to religious belief or at least to deep respect for a tradition, the fact that belief and respect had declined among the wider population should serve as a warning that they could just as easily decline among the membership of the movement.
It follows that support from religious belief or from respect for a religious tradition would be fragile, however long the belief or the respect might have lasted so far. Reliance on secular arguments for positions might be safer, even if the consequence was that the overall programme of the movement might come across as piecemeal.
Members of a political movement that had historically given a central role to religious belief or to respect for a religious tradition might however still feel nervous about a shift to secular support for their positions, even if such support was reasonably easy to find. As the development of modern-day humanism has shown, it is entirely possible that values somewhat out of keeping with the traditions of movements of the kind that interest us would come to get equally good support and would be adopted.
