David Niose

On the strength of this book, I nominate David Niose as secular America’s ambassador to religious America. Nonbeliever Nation seals a crucial gap in the recently trendy genre of secularist literature, in that it might actually be read with empathy and enjoyment by our religious fellow citizens. What’s more, it has a hope of winning at least some over to its relatively modest thesis: that the growing and increasingly self-identifying population of American secularists is a net-positive development for the U.S.

Nonbeliever Nation is not in the least concerned with establishing the secularist viewpoint. Niose’s tone is almost never “militant” or “strident,” which epithets are habitually slung at atheist writers like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. Niose’s project, accomplished with aplomb, is only to argue that the marginalization of secular viewpoints in the U.S. has needlessly undercut the ability of liberal and moderate America to effectively rebut the arguments of its antagonists on the political and religious right. As such, the emerging group-identity of secular Americans should be welcomed by liberal and moderate religious groups. (An equally important corollary, unmentioned by Niose, is that secular Americans ought to view moderate and liberal religionists as potential political allies, and so ought not to needlessly antagonize them).

Niose sets forth a valuable history of religion and secularism in America, from the founding generation through the present, arguing convincingly that secularism has been an ever-present, but seldom acknowledged, feature of American public life. The centerpiece of this history is the emergence of the Religious Right in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which Niose treats as a watershed, after which American secularism was forced above ground. Niose documents example after example of the ignorance, greed, corruption, and hypocrisy of the Religious Right, but worst of all, its terrifying and ubiquitous influence, at all levels of authority—both public and private; local, state and federal; legislative, executive, and judicial; both military and civilian. He then documents, with specificity, how the public has been injured by this influence: our schools have been turned against science, our tax dollars have been unconstitutionally diverted to religious establishments, we’ve been coerced to acquiesce in theistic propaganda, our military moonlights as an evangelizing organization, and the rhetoric of both major parties is calculated to appease these zealots. And if all of this weren’t enough to provoke a secular backlash, the radicals comprising the Religious Right have had the audacity, during the whole of their decades-long offensive against the U.S. Constitution, to insist that they are the ones under attack. You don’t need to be secular to acknowledge and bemoan the constitutional fallout of the Religious Right’s pernicious influence. And you don’t need to be secular to push back. This is Niose’s thesis in a nutshell. (I’ve given in to the temptation to rhapsodize here—Niose studiously resists it, much to his credit).

On that parenthetical note, it has to be admitted that the prose of Nonbeliever Nation lacks the vigor and dexterity found in the writings of Dawkins, et al. But Niose doesn’t want to set the world on fire; he’s attempting to leverage a formidable and boisterous—and still coalescing—group-identity into real political capital. That project demands the sometimes ponderous prose of the diplomat, not the dynamic (but divisive) invective of the polemicist. Niose hits his stylistic mark.

This is a book that I can recommend without reservation to all Americans. In a just world, Nonbeliever Nation would make a much bigger splash in the publishing world than I fear it is destined to make. Rather than divide us over our expectations about the next world, Niose attempts to unite us over our hopes for this one.… (plus d'informations)