Revenge of the roader: Chinese atheists are reactionary

If one of the first things that someone finds out about me is that I am an atheist, there is a general presupposition that I am a Left-Liberal.

Today, in the US, if you oppose torture, that makes you Left-Liberal.

The correlation you note between atheism and left-liberalism is undeniable, but not inevitable. As an active Libertarian, for example, I find a significant percentage of LPers are atheists, and tend not to hesitate mentioning it.

I suspect there are a far larger number of right-libertarian atheists than many suppose, but they remain "closeted" in order to affiliate with the party and people of their choosing. If the GOP/conservative movement ever escaped from the clutches of America's Taliban, I believe the number of right-libertarian/conservative atheists would nearly equal that of the left. (And double the %-age "admitting to atheism.)

That's interesting - do you think that being an atheist has an effect on your political opinions? It might be interesting to know the difference between atheists who used to be religious and those who never were insofar as this can be parsed.

My hunch is that atheism per se is neither necessary nor sufficient to nix affiliative behaviour/clumping of disparate issues, but it may be evidence of an independent mindset in some people. I sometimes feel that atheism is merely about defending commonsense notions of belief (in the minimal sense that when I say I believe X I know what I mean by X and that belief entails reasoning at some level). But I'd like to think it is more preternaturally rational than that.

re: atheism & libertarians. a disproportionate number of libertarians are atheists, but most atheists are disproportionately non-libertarian. that's just the what data says (i'm a libertarian leaning atheist myself).

but it may be evidence of an independent mindset in some people.

yeah. that's my model. in the USA being an atheist is oddball position, and so probably attracts oddballs....

Hrm... I am coming out of a work-load-imposed silence to comment here...

I think the difference between what the data say and the intuition Americans have for atheists being left-leaning has to do with this:

"In a specific instance I have encountered secular proponents of abortion rights and gay marriage who simply find it hard to conceive that someone would have reasoned objections to these policy positions which were not fundamentally rooted in religion."

I feel that same way (on certain issues). For example, while I can at least conceive of a well-reasoned argument against abortion from a secular standpoint, I can't possibly imagine one against gay marriage... or in favor of prayer in schools.... or against euthanasia... etc. That's not to say I haven't heard people attempt some of them---just to say that they were certainly not well reasoned.

Of course, some issues are more or less independent of whether one is religious: gender roles, inequality, capitalism. I feel like you can make at least plausible arguments on both sides of those issues without religion.

This post has been linked for the HOT5 Daily 4/26/2009, at The Unreligious Right

I haven't done any such research, but I've spent quite a bit of time in Taiwan, and seen very little discussion of abortion there. And as for prostitution, together with offshoots like bargirls and massage parlors, it's pretty widespread in China, so I'm surprised at the high level of stated opposition there. I have to take these surveys with a handful of salt.

DMI: I think the most convincing secular argument against those things is the Burkean/Hayekian default argument against anything new - innovations are more likely to break society than to improve it, and once broken society is hard to put back together, so we should conserve what we have and not risk it by introducing new things willy-nilly. I don't think this is a very strong argument. Mainly because it would have (and did) led people to oppose the civil rights movement and other such reform movements which almost everyone now agrees were positive. But it's an argument.

razib: To my mind the main lesson of the Chinese data is that the American left/right spectrum just doesn't apply to China. The Chinese are both keen on competition, keen on the family, and at the same time more environmentalist and more keen on scientific progress than Americans. That's just not a cluster of opinions that exists in the US, so far as I can see. Is it "left" or "right"? I don't think it's either. (Is China a "communist" or a "capitalist" country? Neither - it's China.)

A big factor in the correlation between religiosity and conservative views on issues such as abortion and gay rights comes from the decision of the Republicans to pursue the "Southern Strategy" starting around the time of President Nixon (late 1960s). The GOP targeted both Protestant Christianity and social conservatives, as well as focusing on the Southern states, and the states with more rural populations (Kansas, Utah, Idaho, etc).

Meanwhile the Democrats pursued the Northeast and West Coast (high-density population areas) and more liberal voters. Democrats also courted labor unions, which the GOP generally opposed, so this was a contributing factor as well. This made the Democrats come across as looking more socialist, because they were supporters of worker's rights, and federal programs for the poor and unemployed.

So a lot of what the tables show for the USA is politically driven, which is to say that these are results of specific strategies by each of the major political parties as to which segments of the voters they would try to appeal to, and leave other segments for the opposition to court.

It wasn't always this way. My grandfathers on both my mother's and father's side, for example, both Southerners, regular church-goers, and staunch social conservatives were Democrats, because at that time (1940s, 1950s) the Democrats were the party of the southern white land-owning class. By contrast, Republican strongholds in those days were the Northeastern states.

So the correlation in the USA is not driven so much by any pre-existing relation between religiosity and social conservatism, as it is a result of deliberate strategies pursued by the major political parties in the USA.

Likewise, a complete discussion here needs to mention that China has not always been secular. It had very strong religions (Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism) in place until the Communist Revolution under Mao. Under Maoist Communism, two whole generations were raised to be secular. So even in China the trends are more directly connected to politics than any pre-existing correlations.

You see that Taiwan is much more religious than China. This is because Taiwan split from Mao's China, and the Taiwanese government pursued no anti-religion policy as in mainland China.

I think the whole thing kind of underscores what a deeply political animal homo sapiens is.

> reasoned objections to [abortion rights and gay marriage]
OT, but could you name some? No debate intended here, just being curious.