To Affirm Belief In God Is Not Yet to Affirm Much of Substance

According to a Gallup poll that has attracted some interest today, 92% of Americans declare that they believe in god, significantly, presumably, just a smidge fewer than did in 1940.

Of course, people hear many different questions in the question whether they believe in god, and people mean many different sorts of things when they declare they believe in god. Among these questions and answers people hear or try to answer when asked "do you believe in god?" are the questions, Do you think you are a good person or try to be a good person? Are you part of a community of like-minded people who help and comfort and support one another? Are you the kind of person who rocks the boat? Do you think there is more to life than making money? Do you still value things your parents or teachers or others you respect told you or seemed to think were important to them?

Further, many people who affirm a belief in god go on to conduct themselves in ways so utterly indifferent to this belief, or in ways that so contradict the more particular articles of their faiths it is hard to treat any 92% affirmation of belief as more impressive than, say, the 92% of selfish short-sighted people who decry selfishness and short-sightedness.

And then, just as strikingly, among those who really do take seriously their belief in god it is quite apparent that so many people are willing to die or to kill over the endlessly many different ways they embed this broadly affirmed belief in radically different spiritual practices and institutional commitments, specific creeds and communities, it is hard to pretend even the well-nigh universal affirmation of belief in god -- even setting aside the hypocrites and liars and rationalizers making this declaration -- expresses any kind of coherence or unanimity, or even anything much more than a near vacuity.

I have been a cheerful confirmed atheist since I was a teenager myself, over a quarter century by now, but I am enough of a pluralist in matters of warranted belief to sympathize with and find some measure of inspiration in ethical or in aesthetic terms in many human lifeways that have been shaped conspicuously by forms the belief in god takes in some people, even as I am horrified by others in which that belief provokes or justifies authoritarian or moralizing rages for order, promotes cruelty or parochialism, closes off self-criticism or critical inquiry.

To be told that someone "believes in god" does not yet tell me much of anything about what form that belief takes in the life of that person or what sort of person they are in consequence. To be told that 92% of Americans "believe in god" does not yet tell me anything of substance, and to treat it as a substantial claim seems to me to lose sight of almost all the differences that make a difference in the very matter at issue.

Certainly it seems rather obvious to me that the differences among believers are often incomparably more decisive (both to them and to me) than their differences with an unbeliever like me. And I must admit I find it a bit frustrating when polls and studies and discussion like that of the Gallup poll pretend "belief in god" actually means something monolithic to those who affirm the belief, when clearly nothing could be farther from the case, and on that basis go on to treat my own non-belief more marginal than forms of belief more marginal than mine.

Is there really anybody who believes that it matters more that nearly as many people will assert in 2011 the near-vacuity of an uncharacterized belief in god as would do so half a century ago than it matters how much more (or less) secular our public institutions have become now since then, how much more (or less) diverse the landscape of organized religiosity has become now since then, how many more (or fewer) people participate actively in regular church attendance or engage in religious/spiritual practices like prayer or meditation or proselytizing now since then?

Worse than the fact that the poll result that "92% of Americans believe in god" really tells us next to nothing important is that it pretends to tell us something very important indeed while keeping us from understanding almost everything important about the substantial life of beliefs in the world.