In answer to the parent, atheism in America may have started becoming a more liberal pursuit somewhere around 30 years ago when the Republican party started being substantially more religious and dismissive of atheism and science.
I would actually have said that Nixon was the last Republican president that wasn’t actively hostile to science and atheism. Compared with Reagan and Bush, he certainly has a very different reputation.
EDIT: I would have said that without having looked at the link or having been alive at the time.
How is the Southern Strategy related to atheism? It seems to have been an appeal to ethnocentrism. What are the religiosity stats for Southern vs. Northern states in that period?
My first response is that human societies are like ecosystems in that it’s difficult to only do one thing to them; moreover, to understand this it’s probably better to see the “appeal to ethnocentrism” as more of a strategic meme intended to shift the voting behaviors of an entire group. The Republicans simply wanted to expand the “vote Republican” behavior, identified a likely population, and then found something easy, near and dear to get them motivated: States Rights (at the time used as a justification for segregation). Former Dixiecrats flock to the Republican Party in droves and change its makeup—where it used to be a party of the Northern cities, it’s now becoming the party of rural, Southern conservatives.
This is the late 60s. The culture wars are already in swing. And the Republicans are now fast gaining ground among a population that is largely rural-to-suburban, quite ethnically-homogenous and xenophobic, for whom the church is the center for much of civil as well as religious society,
Martin Luther King has just been assassinated. There are riots among African-American communities over this. The Black Power movement comes to prominence, changing the flavour of much of the civil rights movement’s dialogue (King terrified people enough with his civil disobedience). Demonstrations against the Vietnam War are a regular occurance and shown on nightly news programs—very often the flag is burned. The hippie culture is spreadiing drugs and free love.
The new Republican contingent is quite amenable when Nixon starts talking about a side dish of Law And Order next to States Rights. The seeming paradox simply does not matter here. As the Republican party demographics and representation shift over the next decade, federalism in areas relating to the culture war becomes a key part of voting trends and and policies within this bloc. Explicitly religious and ethno-nationalist rhetoric become critical parts of communication within this group. The Creation Science movement comes to prominence, not as a quirky little subcultural thing barely anyone thinks about much but as a platform of the more extreme segments of the religious right. Republican atheists find themselves part of a deeply-divided base. They probably don’t like it much, but the Southern Strategy seems to be very successful, at both state and federal levels, so they get lots of the attention at a party level.
It takes a while for this all to shake out. Some of the atheists jump ship; others are in traditional Republican strongholds where this is not such a point of tension but find themselves increasingly-outnumbered as the party grows into a new population and thus, less-prioritized by the Party in general.
This new Republican movement is not only successful in the South—pretty much anyplace where demographics match up somewhat closely is a new Republican hotspot waiting to happen. The Lower Midwest, the Rockies and the Southwest all see inroads of this new brand as well.
The Republican Party is becoming more hostile to atheists. The Democrats are staying steady or slowly becoming more receptive, but critically, their new Civil Rights platform means that they’re growing steadily in urban areas in the North and the upper East Coast, as well as California. These areas are better breeding grounds for atheists—high population densities, higher income, higher rates of education, more diverse in many ways and sometimes more tolerant of that diversity, sometimes even in matters of civil law.
What are the religiosity stats for Southern vs. Northern states in that period?
Not available to me offhand, but I’m not necessarily describing a net shift in religiosity, but rather a redistribution of certain forms of it within the population, as indexed to Party affiliation.
What are the religiosity stats for Southern vs. Northern states in that period?
Not sure, but they’ve generally been consistently higher for a long time. That’s where we get the term Bible Belt which has been around since the late 1920s. Moreover, the Lost Cause was early on heavily connected to religion.
Empirically, Nixon was ok on science issues. For example, Nixon was essentially responsible for both the founding of NOAA and the EPA. If one wants to hang this on a specific Republican President, Reagan seems easier, given that he made multiple deeply uninformed comments about science.
Nice job breaking it, Nixon.
I would actually have said that Nixon was the last Republican president that wasn’t actively hostile to science and atheism. Compared with Reagan and Bush, he certainly has a very different reputation.
EDIT: I would have said that without having looked at the link or having been alive at the time.
How is the Southern Strategy related to atheism? It seems to have been an appeal to ethnocentrism. What are the religiosity stats for Southern vs. Northern states in that period?
My first response is that human societies are like ecosystems in that it’s difficult to only do one thing to them; moreover, to understand this it’s probably better to see the “appeal to ethnocentrism” as more of a strategic meme intended to shift the voting behaviors of an entire group. The Republicans simply wanted to expand the “vote Republican” behavior, identified a likely population, and then found something easy, near and dear to get them motivated: States Rights (at the time used as a justification for segregation). Former Dixiecrats flock to the Republican Party in droves and change its makeup—where it used to be a party of the Northern cities, it’s now becoming the party of rural, Southern conservatives.
This is the late 60s. The culture wars are already in swing. And the Republicans are now fast gaining ground among a population that is largely rural-to-suburban, quite ethnically-homogenous and xenophobic, for whom the church is the center for much of civil as well as religious society,
Martin Luther King has just been assassinated. There are riots among African-American communities over this. The Black Power movement comes to prominence, changing the flavour of much of the civil rights movement’s dialogue (King terrified people enough with his civil disobedience). Demonstrations against the Vietnam War are a regular occurance and shown on nightly news programs—very often the flag is burned. The hippie culture is spreadiing drugs and free love.
The new Republican contingent is quite amenable when Nixon starts talking about a side dish of Law And Order next to States Rights. The seeming paradox simply does not matter here. As the Republican party demographics and representation shift over the next decade, federalism in areas relating to the culture war becomes a key part of voting trends and and policies within this bloc. Explicitly religious and ethno-nationalist rhetoric become critical parts of communication within this group. The Creation Science movement comes to prominence, not as a quirky little subcultural thing barely anyone thinks about much but as a platform of the more extreme segments of the religious right. Republican atheists find themselves part of a deeply-divided base. They probably don’t like it much, but the Southern Strategy seems to be very successful, at both state and federal levels, so they get lots of the attention at a party level.
It takes a while for this all to shake out. Some of the atheists jump ship; others are in traditional Republican strongholds where this is not such a point of tension but find themselves increasingly-outnumbered as the party grows into a new population and thus, less-prioritized by the Party in general.
This new Republican movement is not only successful in the South—pretty much anyplace where demographics match up somewhat closely is a new Republican hotspot waiting to happen. The Lower Midwest, the Rockies and the Southwest all see inroads of this new brand as well.
The Republican Party is becoming more hostile to atheists. The Democrats are staying steady or slowly becoming more receptive, but critically, their new Civil Rights platform means that they’re growing steadily in urban areas in the North and the upper East Coast, as well as California. These areas are better breeding grounds for atheists—high population densities, higher income, higher rates of education, more diverse in many ways and sometimes more tolerant of that diversity, sometimes even in matters of civil law.
Not available to me offhand, but I’m not necessarily describing a net shift in religiosity, but rather a redistribution of certain forms of it within the population, as indexed to Party affiliation.
Not sure, but they’ve generally been consistently higher for a long time. That’s where we get the term Bible Belt which has been around since the late 1920s. Moreover, the Lost Cause was early on heavily connected to religion.
Empirically, Nixon was ok on science issues. For example, Nixon was essentially responsible for both the founding of NOAA and the EPA. If one wants to hang this on a specific Republican President, Reagan seems easier, given that he made multiple deeply uninformed comments about science.