Written by Robin Marie, Davis, California:
″The Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; today we are forced to be.″ — Max Weber.
The atheist community engages in discussion about an impressively broad range of topics. Holy books, doctrine, churches, church tradition, dogma, holy wars, holy persecution, ignorance, intolerance, fundamentalism, Jesus, Islam, sin, drawing Mohammad, the Eucharist, Lent, the mega-pixy – all these topics and more are not only debated about, but learned about. Atheists are, in general, an inquisitive bunch, with a desire to understand and command that which they criticize. However, even with this admirable curiosity, I would like to suggest that we broaden our area of concern even wider – outside of the realm clearly labeled religion and belief, and into the cultural sphere where many of the beliefs have their most subtle but also some of their most powerful consequences.
The impact of religion on secular culture is an underappreciated, neglected issue by atheists. I believe this is, in part, because it threatens the introduction of political issues. A group of atheists will actually run into considerable disagreement with each other on various topics (despite their public reputation as a group of people who love nothing more than to sit around assuring each other how right and smart they all are). However as long as these disagreements touch on some aspect of institutional religion and faith as such, clashes that could seriously damage the good-feeling between atheists are avoided. Whatever we think about Hitchens’s or Dawkin’s public style, for example, we can all agree on the whole “there is probably no God” issue. However, once you start discussing the cultural legacy and role of religion, other questions are immediately brought into play. If seventeenth century Calvinism, for example, has something to do with American’s particular addiction to working, then that throws the value of “hard work” and “individualism” into question. One’s feelings about these topics are usually translated into their personal identity and their political preferences, and before you know it you’ve entered into territory where real divisions can be discovered.
However, the discussion is not only worth having, but vitally important. The cultural impact (or hangover, as I like to call it) of religion impacts both individual lives and whole societies. This impact can be all the more pervasive and powerful for being largely invisible – it works its way into our assumptions without most of us ever realizing we are being indoctrinated. Moreover, once the religious justification for these beliefs is discarded, it becomes more difficult to pin down directly – while a church will tell you what its dogma is and where it supposedly comes from, cultural trends and tendencies never announce themselves so directly, nor state their tenets clearly in order to allow for straightforward evaluation.
The best example of this by far, at least in the Western world, is the heritage of Protestantism and more specifically, Calvinism. I will admit: I am little obsessed with Calvinism. I have a tendency to see its influence working in many places where perhaps something else is at play – but I have good reason to be suspicious. Calvinism and the Protestant work ethic are so deeply engrained in American assumptions about life, work, virtue and the meaning of human life that almost any political discussion which tries to uproot these assumptions inevitably runs into their stubborn resistance. From social justice to consumerism, Calvinism establishes the rules of what can be challenged and what cannot. Its power is not hegemonic, but it certainly is pervasive.
The intellectual history of the Protestant work ethic begins with the famous sociologist, Max Weber. In his classic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber presented his thesis that Protestantism and especially Calvinism encouraged the behavior that helped engender capitalism and also provided a logic which justified its results. What made Calvinism so particular was the doctrine of predestination – the idea that no matter what you do, or how much you repent, God has already decided whether or not to let you into the pearly gates. At first glance, this would seem an odd belief for supporting hard-working self-discipline – after all, if nothing you do makes a difference between heaven and hell, why bother? However, Weber accurately noted that as much as predestination was official doctrine, truly taking it to heart was another matter entirely. Indeed, most Calvinists – which include the Puritans that originally founded New England – considered their membership in a community of “visible saints” as evidence, or a sign, that they were among the Elect. Now, a good Calvinist would never say he knew for sure – to do so would assume knowledge of God’s mind, and that surely was a particularly sinful form of arrogance. But nonetheless, a good Puritan’s time would be spent, day in and day out, looking for signs that could reassure them, even if just a little, that they were indeed one of the Elect.
The consequences of this to one’s lifestyle are obvious enough. A Godly person doesn’t drink, dance, or engage in lustful behavior. A Godly person doesn’t engage in sloth, laziness, or selfish behavior. A Godly person slaves away at a calling , which was a purpose that God wishes you to perform to the best of your ability, and diligently so. Whether you enjoy this calling or not is no matter – the life of the Puritan exists for the glorification of God, so personal happiness is at best a reward of being pleasing to Him, and at worst a temptation the Devil employs to claim your soul. The devout Puritan, however, could take his worldly success as a sign of his Election; officially, believers were not supposed to suppose they knew God’s mind, but functionally material wealth and community status were generally accepted as good signs of being on the good list. Hence material success was connected with one’s chances for salvation – it was connected, in other words, with whether or not God considered you worth saving from the everlasting torment of Hell.
However, less obvious than the material result but more important to this discussion are the psychological consequences; for if one believes they are either saved or damned from the start, they will try to examine their character earnestly for clues to which list they are on. This constant self-examination produces an acute awareness of all the desires and feelings most human beings experience; lust, vanity, selfishness, resentment, love, alienation, jealousy, anger, and so on. Except for the Calvinist, these are not just feelings that are part and parcel of the human experience; they are sins. Therefore every time the Puritan caught himself looking longingly at his neighbor’s bosom, or sleeping in an hour later than he should, fear would strike his heart that these were weaknesses not becoming of one of God’s Elect – that indeed, he was not one of God’s Elect, and was headed straight towards Hell. The result is a constant attempt to both belittle and constrain much of what makes us human, and the consequence of that is a chronic feeling of never being justified, of never having sufficient worth that justifies your existence in the eyes of God. The result, in short, is a tragically engrained discipline of self-loathing.
Since Weber wrote his famous essay, much criticism has chipped away at some of its main tenets, especially whether the Protestant ethic as such can really be credited too heavily with the development of profit-oriented capitalism. And as Weber himself noted, capitalism today functions smoothly without the moral overtones of the Puritan discomfort with material wealth and personal satisfaction – we’ve retained the focus on hard work, in other words, but have completely given up the search for ascetic self-discipline and replaced it with the endless pursuit of comfort through consumerism. However, the idea that profitable, occupational work is the primary activity of man, and that work is what justifies an individual to the larger society and, ultimately, constitutes his worth, is as strongly with us as it ever was. The consequence of this viewpoint to social policy cannot be stated strongly enough. If work is what makes a human fully human, those who do not work are viewed as somehow less than worthy of full human dignity. Black and white mothers trying to raise children in deplorable conditions are derogatorily called “welfare queens,” because regardless of all their struggles and what would be best for their children, the only ‘work’ they do that qualifies them for respect is work that earns a paycheck. Indeed, almost all social programs which seek to smooth out the economic injustice caused by a largely unregulated corporate capitalism run up against the objection of ‘redistribution,’ because if someone cannot be viewed as “earning everything he has” he is considered as deserving whatever degradation and hopelessness the rest of his life will afford him. The fact that the vast majority of people that conservatives and mainstream Americans alike consider ‘lazy’ and undeserving are anything but is not the point, nor is the fact that the majority of people who enjoy the prosperity of a middle-class lifestyle are able to do so because of ingrained privileges they themselves did nothing to earn. The point, here at least, is that whatever the causes of poverty, the majority of Americans do not believe that poor people – that all people – have a right to lead a life of dignity, of hope and of possibility. Most Americans do not believe that merely being human is enough to justify your humanity – and that is a historical travesty of the first degree.
The consequences of the American fetishization of work does not just hurt the disadvantaged of America, however. The middle-classes too are impacted, and the price they pay is largely psychological. For indeed, this engrained faith in work does not only impact our view of ‘work,’ properly defined as that which pays the bills – it also impacts how we evaluate our behavior in almost every aspect of our lives. We all know of people who are overworked, of course – people who live at the office, the stereotypical Dad that never has enough time for the kids, or the anti-feminist caricature of a single woman in New York who has no time for real romance. But what most of us do not realize that even when we are not working – indeed, when we think we are pursuing pleasure and satisfaction – we are often applying the same concept of Puritan justification. Nothing attests to this more than the huge American industry of self-help, which manipulates the desire for justification for a profit. Every media outlet, from books to morning shows to movies, encourages us to ‘take charge’ of our lives – to lose weight, to find a hobby, to start a small business, to travel around the world eating pasta and praying in Buddhist temples – in short, to improve ourselves. Very rarely or ever are we told that our lives are pretty good as they are, that as long as things are working for us, we ought to feel content and justified. Very rarely are we told that human life is not something that has to be constantly upgraded, updated and made into a redemption tale that would qualify for a recommendation from the Oprah Book Club. We are asked constantly to be more confident, more beautiful, more happy, more active, more creative, more daring, more relaxed, more thoughtful, more sexual, more outgoing, more intelligent; indeed we are asked to be anything other than simply ourselves. The consequences are so obvious that all I need to invoke is a couple of well-worn stereotypes that speak to larger truths; the overstressed soccer mom that never feels appreciated, the constantly wandering college graduate that cannot find contentment regardless of how many recreations of herself she experiments with, the work-obsessed businessman who inside is silently being choked to death by an overwhelming loneliness. So imagine, what if tomorrow morning, most Americans woke up in the morning and not only felt like valuable human beings, but believed there was nothing they needed to do to earn that distinction? What if we all simply allowed ourselves to be human, and to love that humanity?
The Protestant work ethic and Calvinism as a whole are by no means the only sources of what I have here described, and indeed to what extent they are responsible for these phenomena, and to what extent other factors should be given more weight, are open for debate. So too is the value of what I’ve sketched out; to someone who engages in self-improvement plans out of an earnest desire to improve their life and love themselves, all I’ve said here might seem terribly off the mark. Libertarians of the Randian type might also object to the idea that there is something unjust about evaluating people according to their talents and success. Nor is all of our Protestant heritage entirely bad – Protestantism is also largely responsible for the American belief in the value of the individual, and the introspection that sincere free-spirits undertake to keep themselves honest and uncorrupted by a society which asks them to conform. But I’ve make this argument as way of example – to some degree or another, Calvinism and the Protestant work ethic has shaped much of American culture, and it touches us in ways I have not discussed in this essay. That our religious heritage can express itself so powerfully through now secularized cultural traditions that seem removed from Faith and Church is an issue that atheists cannot afford to scuttle aside. For indeed, if we do not realize how religion is not simply a matter of faith in the supernatural – that it impacts the entire cultural milieu in which it operates – we will not be able to apply all our critical thinking to give ourselves choices about what we as individuals choose to believe in and value. For as of today, as R. Jay McGagill writes, “We’re all, to some degree, Protestants now.”
