Marriage in America: From “Civil” to “Secular?”

As I’ve pointed out in the past, marriage historians are quick to note that the American wedding was an ostensibly “civil” affair until well into the Victorian era. It is perhaps not surprising that the Puritans, who were strict Reformation anti-ritualists left wedding ceremonies to civil authorities. Protestants also did not believe that marriage was a sacrament; though of course that did not preclude the religious importance they placed on family arrangements formed around a legally married couple. As wedding historian Elizabeth Pleck points out even Catholics, for whom marriage was still a sacrament, usually had a civil ceremony to satisfy state authorities as well as a private religious ceremony in front of a priest. But why did Catholics need to perform both ceremonies?

It is my understanding that religious officials have had the power to solemnize marriages for quite some time. In fact the British Crown opened the field up to religious officials even prior to the Revolution. So why not just go to the priest? Perhaps because of what I quoted Tracy Fessenden about yesterday–the pervasiveness of an “unmarked Christianity” in American civil life. As we know it was de rigueur for the Protestant establishment to favor civil weddings, but to favor them for religious reasons. The civil wedding, in other words, was not “secular” in any contemporary sense of the term, but instead an extension of (and later survival of) the Puritan religious ethos that in Fessenden’s words not only required that the “difference of the religious per se be dissolved in the conduct of day to day life, but also that religious difference itself be constituted as a threat to that life.” The Catholic marriage rite would have been just such a threat and I suspect that this is why it was sectioned off from appropriate American civil life.

This means, I believe, that wedding historians are doing their readers a disservice by simply harping on the “civil” nature of early American marriage, as if those marriages stand in contrast to religious ones the way that civil marriages often do today. I would propose instead that the meaningful distinction between religious and “secular” weddings does not happen until the 19th century and even so does not come into wide application until the last few decades. Last year I found a news clipping from 1911 that ties the nonreligious values expressed by a civil wedding to secular identities, and as I’ve written elsewhere organized irreligious communities, like Secular Culture were practicing secular ceremonies, expressing nontheistic values, since their inception in the late 19th century. But these communities were small and rare, and for a vast majority of the nation the culturally normative practice of lavish church weddings took over the civil ceremony as consumerism motored on in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Flash forward to the last few decades and the notion of secular ceremonies being expressively and self-consciously nonreligious appears to be in full bloom. Today’s secular and religious marriage ceremonies are of course not usually very different in form and in fact they often express many of the same values about love, individuality, commitment, etc. Despite these similarities the self-conscious expression of difference in terms of religious content and nonreligious identity maintenance make today’s secular ceremonies starkly different from the “civil” ceremonies of pre-Victorian America.

Afterthoughts

Of course Fessenden would most likely put yesteryear’s civil and today’s secular ceremonies on the same trajectory since she sees our very version of “secularism” as an extension of American Protestantism. I want to be clear that I don’t disagree with this general assessment but I also think we can’t leave the story there. Contemporary nonreligious identities, and the practices that constitute and rejuvenate them, are more than just the inevitable telos of American Protestantism. Yes, these practices are heavily indebted to the trajectory Fessenden maps out, but they are also working against and/or away from it. In fact my dissertation navigates one of the many ways in which that very tension is playing out among disaffiliated Americans. Stay tuned to find out!

Secularity in the Religious Marketplace?

In a recent Religion Dispatches op-ed, “Why Atheists Should Fight For Establishment of State Religion,” professor Shanny Luft advises American atheists on how they can win the “culture war.” Using the recent proposal to establish a state religion in North Carolina as an example, Luft points out that our nation’s various squabbles over religious/public entanglements add up to a veritable stalemate in the larger culture wars, a situation he claims a remedy for:

Those atheists and progressives hoping to end religious intrusion in government affairs should not have protested this legislation or claimed the founding fathers as secular liberals. Instead, they should have done everything in their power to promote North Carolina’s Freedom of Religion Act and, more, fought to establish the Christian state of North Carolina as quickly as possible. And conservative evangelical legislators need not waste their time writing toothless resolutions establishing state religions. Rather, if the Christian Right would like religion to prosper in America, they should erect a wall between Church and State so high it can be seen from orbit.

According to history, the side that heeds this advice first will win.

I’m dubious about the extent to which “history” can accord future outcomes and especially based on the observed correlation between just two of many interrelated variables. Luft’s premise follows the assumption that America’s “free market” of religious competition is the cause of our nation’s religious vitality. As the argument goes religious monopolization in Europe (in the form of state churches) spurred on the secularization of European society by regulating religion and limiting choice. Apparently when faced with only one choice religious consumers grow disinterested, or so say the supply-side rational choice theorists (e.g. Rodney Stark, Roger Finke and Laurence Iannaccone) who originally championed  the theory. The flip side is that by (constitutionally) deregulating the religious market in the United States–through the freedom of (personal) religion and from (state) religion–our founding fathers set into motion a self-replicating personal interest in religion. Not only are Americans interested in faith because as consumers they inherently like choices, but because competition between religions and denominations has meant the production of innovative religious goods, services and perhaps above all marketing plans. Or so the story goes, and that is why Luft suggests that atheists should fight for state religion(s), because, following this argument, it will lead to European style secularization.

I’ve always found this particular narrative of American religious history wanting and consider its current ubiquity unfortunate because it prevents scholars from considering other variables that may have been equally or perhaps even more responsible for American religious vitality. Consider the so called “rise of the nones” we are currently experiencing in the United States. Surely the contemporary decrease in religious affiliation (and belief/practice to different degrees) is not due to the regulation and/or monopolization of the religious marketplace, which has remained unchanged for the most part. So why is it happening if the religious marketplace remains free? No singular cause has been pinpointed with certainty, although the going explanation is usually that people on the liberal ends of American religion (mostly Christians) have left organized religion altogether because of the public association between faith and social conservatism. And of course in keeping with supply-side assumptions religion scholars have been busy working on depictions of these unaffiliated Americans as no less interested in religious goods and services. According to these commentators American “nones” just aren’t attracted to the mainstream producers of those goods and services or indeed to the very category of production they operate within. While it is true that most of the unaffiliated still believe in various supernatural phenomena and find some “religious” practices meaningful the assumption that disaffiliating Americans are merely shifting their religious needs away from established institutions is just as unfounded as the idea that they are all becoming atheists. What survey data from Pew, the GSS and ARIS has shown us is that in the last three decades American religion has, perhaps slowly, been losing ground across a spectrum of measures, including beliefs and practices. So is that trend mainly or merely due to the religious politics of social conservatism?

I don’t mean to downplay the negative effects that the Religious Right has had on religious affiliation, as noted early on by Michael Hout and Cluaude Fischer and more recently “confirmed” by Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s work  in their recent book, American Grace. Surely these scholars are onto something, but just perhaps not onto everything. In fact there is one obvious correlation that has to date been seriously explored by no one (at least to my knowledge), and that correlation brings us back to Luft’s essay. As evidence of religious vitality Luft states that: “Compared to Europeans, three times more Americans report that religion is ‘very important’ to them, and three times more Americans attend church regularly.” On the one hand it should be noted that the first of the two indicators is perhaps the most significant, since it is well established that church attendance figures in the United States are widely exaggerated by survey respondents. The obvious explanation is that religion is deemed so “important” by Americans overall, that many are driven to exaggerate their relationship to it. In Europe, where religion is considered much less important, scholars have found virtually no exaggeration of church attendance. So why has it been so much more important for Americans to be religious? This is where the other correlation comes in…

The “rise of the nones” began in earnest in the 1990s, which not only correlates with the political entrenchment of the Religious Right but also with the end of the Cold War. While the first correlation has been investigated by several scholars at this point, the second hasn’t been considered in earnest by anyone looking directly at the rise of the nones (although in his chapter of Religion and the New Atheism Stephen Bullivant suggests that the abatement of Cold War rhetoric has at least made “atheism” more acceptable as an identity).* So why is no one treading this path? Perhaps because it doesn’t conform as easily to the afore mentioned “free market” narratives that underlie so many perceptions of American religious life. If the end of the Cold War is indeed related to the “rise of the nones” it suggests the importance of another narrative in our religious history–the story of America’s civil religion. If we consider church attendance (actual and reported) as an indicator of religious vitality, we have to consider the fact that at our nation’s founding virtually no one attended church, and the pattern remained the same for much of our early history. While the nineteenth century saw an increase in church attendance the astronomically high figures being reported at the tail end of the 20th century were a product of that same century, and especially starting with WWII. As American civil religion became increasingly nationalistic in contra-distinction to the “godless” foes of the Cold War, Americans reported an increasingly intense involvement with (mostly Christian) religion(s).  After all this was the era in which the Pledge of Allegiance was officially blessed with the additional words “under God” (1954) and “in God we trust” became our nation’s motto (1956).

In contrast to supply side claims then, church attendance and the American experience of religious importance went hand in hand with an increasingly intertwined relationship between American politics and religion–not through specific Christian denominations like the state churches of Europe perhaps but instead (as Robert Bellah originally noted) through a tacitly (Protestant) Christian civil religion. With this in mind one could argue that the supply side comparison between the United States and Europe is, at minimum, too general. The world of contemporary global religion also suggests that state religions backed by nationalism actually thrive in the right geopolitical contexts, and I’m unsure why we should consider the United States exceptional in that regard.

Perhaps a civil religion/religious nationalism approach provides a more accurate explanation of religious vitality in twentieth century America than the supply side approach does. It would be interesting to see religious historians and social scientists alike tackling the “rise of the nones” as a distinctly post-Cold War phenomenon. In fact, it isn’t difficult to consider ways in which the going explanation of reactionary politics could complement a post-Cold War theory of religious decline. Perhaps after America’s communist foe disintegrated as a godless superpower American civil religion became so fractured that it has become easier for Americans to both shed their religious identities and to question various ongoing relationships between God and government that still persist. If that is true one might also reconsider Luft’s advice to atheists and their culture wars foes. If American religion thrived throughout the twentieth century in no small part due to a form of institutionalized religious nationalism then Luft’s advice would itself be upside down.

*UPDATE: Barry Kosmin has also commented on this correlation in Free Thought Today but from a socio-economic angle, suggesting that post-Cold War prosperity and national security could be linked to secularization (in line with Norris and Inglehart’s “existential security” thesis). But then what do we make of continued disaffiliation post-9/11 and now in the wake of the Great Recession?

Belonging to a Religion without Being Religious?

As I noted earlier, the Pew Forum released a report two days ago about religious disaffiliation in the United States entitled “‘Nones’ on the Rise.” As one might imagine Pew has been publicizing this report in a variety of ways, but often by emphasizing one particular finding at a time. That’s why they tweeted a table not long ago that shows how those who claim to be “spiritual, not religious” stack up against the “religious” and those who claim to be neither spiritual, nor religious.

So what does the table tell us? Well a lot of things actually, but what struck me from the outset was how a good number of Protestants and Catholics are identifying as nonreligious.  The largest group in the “spiritual, not religious category” are Protestants. In fact only a third of the people in this category claim no religious affiliation at all. So what does “not religious” mean to those who are linking their own identities to religious institutions and communities? I’m tempted to interpret those who are both Christian and “spiritual, not religious” through the sentiments expressed by the creator of the (in)famous “Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus.” But if that’s the case then what does identifying with a specific denomination mean? What does it mean to reject religion in it’s institutional sense while still identifying with specific religious institutions? Or put another way if you’re an anti-institutional follower of Jesus what sense does it make to say you’re Catholic or Protestant as well?

The “neither” group is perhaps more perplexing because it includes those who are not even “spiritual” while still identifying as Catholic, Protestant and so on. In fact a full 45% of those who aren’t religious or spiritual still identify with specific religions. Here it makes little to no sense to apply the guess from above. These are clearly not devout, spiritual anti-institutionalists. So what are they? Do they adhere to a European style “cultural religion,” which would make some of them, for instance, “lapsed Catholics?” If that is the case then why are they rejecting the “religion” label? Why accept the label of a specific religion but not the generic?

The Pew survey doesn’t answer these questions, and in fact large-scale surveys never really do. They involve mostly black and white choices between various  terms, the meaning of which is not always clear. There is nothing wrong with that of course, but the job of clarifying must happen also if we are to really understand what’s going on. So how do we clarify these questions? The annoying answer is, “with a lot of qualitative research, of course.” But before that we can make a couple of guesses, and point possible researchers in certain directions.

So what kinds of directions would I personally point them in? Well I’d be interested in what this data suggests about the very identifier, “religious.” It clearly does not mean merely associating with a religious tradition, institution or community (see above). It must mean doing something specific, but is that something specific belief oriented (holding certain beliefs) or is it practice oriented (participating in religious activities)? Put another way is it about the intensity of emotional and cognitive commitment to the religion one identifies with or a fulfillment of its ritual obligations? Or could it be either with some groups (e.g. Protestants) leaning towards the former while others (e.g. Catholics) lean towards the latter?

A related question I would ask is what does all of this signify about specific religious identifications? What does it mean to be “Catholic,” if one is not religiously fulfilling various obligations or Protestant if one does not truly, religiously believe? What meaning do those categories of affiliation have outside of the ideals that people are possibly caging “religiousness” within? These last questions especially, I think, are exceedingly unclear to us despite the fact that we have been measuring religious affiliations for decades now. What we need is to step back several paces from these religious affiliation surveys and get our hands dirty with religion as a “folk category,” to steal Benson Saler’s phrase. And while we’re at it we should also attend to those other folk categories, “Catholic,” “Protestant,” “Muslim,” “Atheist,” etc. Let’s find out what muddying these waters can really tell us. Trust me it will be fun.