By Tommy Lapidese
Over the past decade, religion scholar Joseph Blankholm met with nonreligious groups, activists, and organizations across the country, from L.A. to New Orleans, from Madison, Wisconsin to Washington D.C. After attending their ceremonies and analyzing their customs, Blankholm, a specialist in atheism in the Religious Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara, came up with the concept of the “secular paradox,” the idea that many secularist groups look like organized religions when examined closely, despite the desire of these groups to avoid religion altogether.
In his new book The Secular Paradox, Blankholm proposes that the very definition of “religion” in the English language is flawed, as the term has been shaped by the parameters of Christianity and its outsized influence in the culture.
Blankholm sat down for an interview recently to discuss his grassroots research and what he has in store next.
UCSB Religious Studies professor Joseph Blankholm’s decade of research has culminated in his new book, The Secular Paradox.
What religion did you grow up in? How do you identify now?
I'm going to resist answering for this reason: because I don't think it’s very illuminating. I don't have an interesting religious background. I didn't really grow up religious. Some of my family members are religious, some of them aren't. I think it's really important to ask why we ask scholars of religion that. All of us grew up in different ways. And the same is going to be true of scholars in the Physics department. So, it says more about the larger culture in which we ask it.
Then let’s get into it. How did you get into Religious Studies?
I switched from anthropology to religious studies because I felt I didn't really understand what religion was. I was studying evangelicals in Zambia, the only officially Christian country in Africa. And then I realized I didn't have the intellectual tools to even trace the history of evangelical theology. So part of me knew that for the rest of my life, if I went and got a Ph.D. in religion or religious studies, I'd be asked odd questions about my religious upbringing. But I also knew I couldn't understand this thing if I didn't get intensely involved in it.
You say that the secular paradox exists because of the prevalence of Christianity within the culture at large. Would you say that’s because Christianity influences American culture so deeply, or all cultures?
There’s nowhere that Christianity doesn't have an influence. If we can talk about the protestantization of Buddhism in the 1800s, then we can talk about other places the paradox exists. I do think that the farther you get, the more the more tentative you have to be. But I've talked to visiting speakers from Bangladesh who were persecuted for being atheist. They, like American atheists, think science is the best way of knowing the world. And so they participate in a network of people that have the same secular set of beliefs they share - but then what they negate about religion is going to be more distinctive to Bangladesh. But even our global conception of religion is deeply influenced by Christianity, because of capitalism and colonialism.
How does something such as atheism — defined by a lack of belief — come to be a belief system in-and-of itself?
For most of its history, the term ‘atheist’ meant heretic. Everyone is an atheist to someone's gods. The early Christians called the Romans atheists, and vice versa, because they each denied their respective gods. No one called themselves “atheist” until the late 1700s. That's when the term atheism gets married to a philosophy with affirmative contents. By 1850s Britain you have groups forming for atheists as an identity, with concrete beliefs in science associated with it, with institutions and rituals —almost like a religion. The Catholic Church invented its own "atheism" in the early modern period, in order to prove God by proving it wrong. So there's "atheism" before there are people who call themselves "atheists."
Religious Studies scholar Joseph Blankholm in his office at UC Santa Barbara.
Has atheism grown in recent years?
It is growing, but it's not growing as fast as non-religion. Non-religion is what's really growing.
So you define non-religion and atheism as completely separate things?
Totally. Because “non-religious” is vague and atheism is a subset of non-religion. But when I talk to people who are atheists, they mostly believe the same things. If I survey somebody and they check the atheist box, I know they think science is the best way of knowing the world. Being atheist is being non-religious, and I'm not negating that, but also being part of a religion-like tradition. That's the secular paradox.
I went to a secular Dia De Los Muertos event in L.A. This woman there explained the contradiction by saying, “We're secular, but human.” And I thought it was such a great phrase, because she's saying we need to mark time, we need to mark the deaths of our loved ones. But because we associate these traditions with religion, if we define ourselves as atheist, we're going to prohibit ourselves from accessing those ceremonies. Then we'd have to live in religion's remainder. If you have a big definition of religion, that's a small life. So being non-religious, that’s part of being secular, but it's also being something.
What’s next for you?
The next project I'm working on I'm calling “The Meaning of Religion.” I have really rich data from surveys where I ask people about terms they associate with religion. Combined with interviews, I can analyze how people have different working understandings of what religion is, because we don't all have the same understanding of what it is we're even talking about. But that doesn’t mean we have to stop speaking about religion. I think paralysis is the wrong reaction. And I don't think needing a new word is good either, like, “Here's a new definition of religion.”
There's not going to be a silver bullet. But if you can spend a few hours reading this book, it's going to change how you think and talk about religion in subtle ways, in ways that I think will help people have more productive conversations.
Tom Lapidese is a fourth-year Communication major at UCSB. He conducted this interview for his Writing Program course Digital Journalism.