Liberals embrace all kinds of people: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists, etc. Liberals are for the freedom of people to practice whatever religion they prefer or no religion at all. As the Constitution wisely puts it, there shall be no religious test for office. Why would liberals endorse atheism over anything else? We believe in freedom OF religion and freedom FROM religion.
Conservatives, on the other hand, run the full range of people from right wing Christian to extreme right wing Christian. They believe in the freedom to practice THEIR religion, others not so much.
Here’s a quote from another thread I posted a few days ago, in a discussion about Christian dominionism.
“We must use the doctrine of religious liberty”, Christian Reconstructionist theorist Gary Water declared in 1982, “ to gain independence for Christian religious schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious Liberty of the enemies of God”
No, because Christian liberalism isn’t your only choice. The OP is positing that liberalism and atheism are the same—that one is a requirement for the other. If that happens, then it is no longer religiously tolerant.
I can be a part of a Christian liberalism. I can be part of a religiously tolerant liberalism. But I cannot become part of an atheist liberalism. In order to stick with the more moral philosophy, I’d have to become an atheist, or be willing to pretend. I would not have religious freedom.
Also, due to human nature, I do suspect that a purely atheistic liberalism would start to disparage religion. If religious people are all part of the “other team,” then you start seeing that as part of the problem. And it’s not like that isn’t already a common atheist belief: that religion is the source of only bad, and little or any good. No, not all atheists, but they are the most vocal, and the most vocal are the ones that tend to lead the party.
That’s not to say this is specific to atheism, by any means. Part of what I’m basing this on is what happened with communism, where atheism was considered the “other team,” and what that did to how atheists were treated.
The best defense against this natural tribalism is, in my opinion, to allow diverse peoples into your tribe. We can’t completely override our inherent tribalist nature, but we can use it against itself. We can try to bring everyone into our tribe.
If one starts off with a Tucker Carlson dishonest description of Liberalism or Democratic Party, one has already poisoned the discussion with a serious misunderstanding of Liberalism, Democratic Party, and Christianity, making the discussion silly. As a fervent Christian who would probably be described as “Liberal,” I do not recognize many of my beliefs in your portrayal.
Big Bang rests largely on the work of Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest.
Evolutionary theory, after Charles Darwin, was built on the work of Gregor Mendel (an Austrian Monk) and Theodosius Dobzhansky, a fervent Eastern Orthodox believer.
Your comments on prayer and women would be unrecognizable to Dorothy Day who was both seriously liberal and seriously religious.
A more reasonable question might be: Why does the Extreme Right portray liberalism and the Democratic Party in such a clearly false manner when such beliefs are held by only a portion of such people?
Happy to see a mention of Servant of God Dorothy Day (who I’m told I met once, although I was apparently only about 18 months old, so unfortunately I don’t remember the meeting), who was so liberal she would have made Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez look like, well, maybe not a Trumpist, but let’s say Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney.
True. And another reasonable question might be why has a caricature of Christianity become so firmly planted in the minds of only a portion (but a significant portion) of liberals as to become the dominant idea of what Christianity is?
That probably has a lot to do with the extreme (and extremely loud) faction of the Evangelical movement that has made such an effort to portray their version of Christianity as the “real” Christianity. Serious Christians need to step up and announce their beliefs although such beliefs might not make the sort of headlines as the nutters. Evangelicals were known as Fundamentalists up until about 2002, after which they began to drop the term after it was so often associated with the extremes of Islam. There are many people who do not share the extreme views. (The Southern Baptists made some small steps to show that this summer.) But the extreme faction(s) have dominated the media long enough to create a popular impression.
I am a left-leaning Christian. I tend to vote Democrat these days (and exclusively have voted D in national races). My dad on the other hand is a very hard-right Conservative who is agnostic (I think he’s an atheist but tries to pretend to be open-minded).
A number of years ago I had an argument with him, he was insisting that Creationism should be taught in schools as an alternative to evolution. I disagreed with him, that science and faith are not necessarily anathema but that they are definitely separate and should be kept that way. I was adamant that faith-based teachings have no place in science classes because they have nothing to do with science, and he was stubborn about the schools needing to be “open to alternatives”.
It was a very surreal conversation given that I am someone who has faith in God and he isn’t. He was playing “Devil’s Advocate” (forgive the bad metaphor).
Religion and politics definitely are intertwined, but only in the sense that the way religion is handled in society tends to fall along political lines, because religious belief very often does not.
The evangelical-fundamentalist split dates back to at least the 1950s, and focused on the acceptance of varying levels of modernity in the two different movements. Fundamentalism had split earlier from the considerably more modernist mainline denominational movements; evangelicals (such as Billy Graham) were non-separatist and took a more serious view of scholarship in Biblical interpretation.
Graham’s 1957 Crusade in New York is generally regarded as the final act of the division; in a more practical sense, the roots of the division went back well into the 1930s.
In this case, the caricature of Christianity seems to have been provided by the OP. And multiple liberals in this thread have pointed out the existence of Christian liberals. So I think your impression that a significant portion of liberals have that caricature as their dominant idea of Christianity may not be coming from liberals.
Are you suggesting that Joe Biden, who regularly attends church and probably goes more often than practically any recent President (up to Jimmy Carter), should embrace atheism?
No, it is coming from liberals (of whom I’m one). Both here at SDMB and out in the world. I’m not talking about conservative caricatures of Christianity, which can be at least as bad, if not more so (actually, I suppose “reductionist” is a better word for how a portion of conservatives think of Christianity).
You’ll notice I said “a portion,” not “all,” or “a majority.”
But it’s out there. There are liberals who are intolerant of religion in general, and Christianity in particular. Some of them treat all of Christianity as if it’s all fundamentalists and evangelicals. Which is a caricature, and makes criticism of Christianity as illiberal pretty much shooting fish in a barrel.
I was responding to a post by another poster about false protrayals of Christianity by some conservatives. It seemed valid to point that liberalism can have an element of that too. Again, some liberals, not all, not a majority.*
* Certainly it’s true that the liberal militant atheist types, like the fundamentalist Christian conservatives, make noise out of proportion to their numbers. But they’re not a big bunch, and not all that influential (unlike the right-wing fundamentalist/evangelical Christians)
Does that mean you wouldn’t vote for an outspoken atheist candidate? Are there specific policy decisions you think an atheist might make that you’d be opposed to, as a Christian?
I have no candidates to choose from if I refused to vote for an outspokenly Christian candidate. I can’t think of a single Democratic politician who hasn’t discussed the way their faith influences their politics in some way. Atheists are still an unrepresented minority in liberal politics. Fortunately my values generally mesh with those of liberal Christians.
I don’t believe values come from religion. Religion is the Rorschach to be interpreted at will. People have an inherent, biologically driven and environmentally influenced sense of personal morality which they impose over whatever belief system they’ve attached themselves to. Liberalism is not inherently any kind of religion or not-religion, it’s just a place for people with similar values. Those values are not derived from atheism, it’s arguable they’ve been culturally derived from some strains of Christianity. Hell, it’s arguable my values as an atheist have been derived from some strains of Christianity. But the spectrum of Christianity is so enormous at this point, ranging from jingoistic fascism to bleeding-heart socialism that the label is almost meaningless when it comes to ascertaining a value system. So it makes no sense to me to associate any kind of religious label with any sort of political label.
Because unlike the party of white guys, the Democratic party welcomes diversity. Hell, the current Democratic President is a devout Catholic. You think atheism should be a part of a political party platform? Pardon me, but that’s silly at best.
I would imagine most atheists these days would be religiously tolerant no (they said they can be a part of a religiously tolerant liberalism)?
Personally, if there was an atheist liberalism (with no room for the religious) and a corresponding religious conservativism (with no room for the non-religious), I would have to find a good third party to join.