Don't cringe
Don't apologise for being religious. Don't apologise for being nonreligious, either.
One of the most important things I’ve learned, since I started attending Quaker meetings almost two years ago, is not to do the religious cringe. Do not make comments like “But of course I don’t really believe in a traditional God,” for example.
“I don’t really believe in a traditional God” would be okay. Such opinions are not unusual. It’s the “but of course” that would be the problem, especially if I said it in a tone of wanting to avoid censure or embarrassment. After all, some regulars at our meeting do believe in a traditional God. I do not actually think these people should be embarrassed; I welcome their perspective. If I were to evince embarrassment or awkwardness at the possibility of being mistaken for one of them, I might signal to them that they ought to be quiet. I might also accidentally signal to myself that I should not be open to insight from them. I would not want to do that.
This is the religious cringe. It’s an impulse to clarify that you are not one of those believers, even though you don’t really object to those believers, because you have learned to feel socially awkward about the possible association. It would be different if we were talking about a belief that you felt strongly to be very bad, of course. My point is that it is better not to imply negative things about a viewpoint in cases where this is done merely out of awkwardness and not out of conviction.
There is also a nonreligious cringe. This is when people feel the need to apologise for certain types of nonreligious statements, out of awkwardness, even when they are actually fine with them. They might follow up “I don’t believe in God” with a wince and a “Sorry!” even if they are not sorry about this in their everyday life. They might feel the need for qualifiers like “But I try to follow Christian values” even if they actually quite happily pick and choose.
The nonreligious cringe is not as common as it used to be. The New Atheists had some good points and some bad ones, but this is one of their good ones. Atheism shouldn’t be treated like something impolite on its face, in need of apology or softening in order to be socially acceptable. Just say what you believe. It’s fine.
Positive worlds, negative worlds
I think I’m not alone in following a broad ideological range here on substack —broader than I’ve habitually read before. Links take me yet further afield, which I think is how I ended up on the substack of
the other day. Renn is known for a 2022 article entitled The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism. In it, he posits that the standing of Christianity in America has undergone a significant fall over the past few decades, from a “Positive World” in which publicly professing Christianity is a status-enhancer, through a “Neutral World” and all the way into a “Negative World” in which “Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of society.”Renn is referring to many things, with this, but one of the mildest and yet most important details may in fact be the cringe. In Renn’s Positive World, it is non-Christians — particularly nonreligious cultural Christians — who are expected to cringe. In his Negative World, by contrast, Christians start to feel social pressure to cringe when they announce their beliefs.
Renn posits that the Negative World truly took off in 2014 with the Supreme Court ruling in favour of gay marriage, which tells you a lot about what he, personally, considers Christianity to consist of. But in truth, the religious cringe goes way back. Evangelicals have been pointing to the possibility of being laughed at for their beliefs as evidence of potential persecution for decades, perhaps longer. Moreover, the nonreligious cringe goes quite far forward. I was at a rally in California in 2009 to overturn Proposition 8 — speaking of gay marriage — and the organiser seemed to feel the need to do the nonreligious cringe when talking to the LGBT-friendly religious leaders who were present, much to their apparent bemusement.
Aaron Renn would call 2009 the “Neutral World,” and perhaps it was, on average, in places. But a pro-gay-marriage rally in California could still have a nonreligious person pay lip service to an implied need for religious belief or something like it, in order to be socially acceptable.
I think we humans just really like to cringe, sometimes. The use of religious beliefs as a form of social glue probably doesn’t help. Your religion or lack thereof really can mark you as an insider or an outsider. People try to anticipate reactions accordingly.
Sincerity
There is a potential paradox, here. I began this piece with the importance not just of not cringing about your own beliefs, but also with the importance of not cringing unnecessarily about other people’s. The point is not just to be sincere but to encourage sincerity in others. But some of those other people might sincerely believe that atheists — or theists — really ought to cringe, a bit. If I leave space for them to be sincere, they may respond in a way that encourages other people not to be sincere. That’s awkward.
Still, I would prefer to embrace this tension. If the traditional unit of faith is the mustard seed, then what faith I have barely amounts to a speck of dust. Yet I wouldn’t trade that speck of dust for any larger thing to which I’d have less commitment. I love my speck of dust. And when I imagine some other person, with some similar love — for the true, or the beautiful, or the good — I don’t want that person cringing about it. I would like, where possible, to be able to love with them, by proxy, differences notwithstanding.
Religious beliefs — including a lack thereof — can be personal, and it’s understandable that we feel a need for caution and circumspection when discussing them. Precisely because they are so personal, however, there is something beautiful about being open about them, and leaving room for others to be open, also. By all means try to be kind to others when raising the subject, but don’t let the desire to be agreeable lead you into feigning a cringe you don’t feel.