(The Conversation) – Turkey’s general election on Sunday, May 14 will see voters cast their ballots for 600 members of its parliament and the country’s powerful presidency. This election has become intensely competitive in a country which has undergone severe democratic erosion over the past decade, but may now be looking for change.

Turkish president, and previously prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is attempting to extend his 21-year rule, but the unified opposition candidacy is now consistently ahead the in the polls. Many opposition parties agreed to nominate the leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, as their candidate, overcoming previous divisions.

Kılıçdaroğlu has led the CHP since 2010, and has helped spearhead some of the opposition’s recent local election victories. He hails from Turkey’s Alevi minority, an Islamic tradition which has been persecuted over the years, and would be the first Alevi leader if elected. His appointment as a presidential candidate was not easy, with leaders of allied parties initially preferring the charismatic mayor of Istanbul Ekrem İmamoğlu.

But Kılıçdaroğlu has managed to secure the support of a wide range of parties that now form the Millet (nation) Alliance. These include: the nationalist İyi, the small religious Felicity party, the conservative Democrat party and two splinter groups from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) – the Democracy and Progress party and the Future party. Since his candidacy was confirmed, Kılıçdaroğlu has maintained a steady but narrow lead over Erdoğan in the polls. Many people are now asking what changes Kılıçdaroğlu and his coalition would make.

Erdoğan’s past and present

In 20 years of AKP government Erdoğan has massively centralised power, undermining the rule of law and constitutional checks and balances. Undoing this process is a core policy for the alliance and was highlighted in the draft constitutional reform package they published last November. This document proposes measures to prevent future leaders from accumulating power in the way Erdoğan did, as well as strengthening the independence of the judiciary. The alliance’s election manifesto, published in January 2023, also heavily emphasised these themes.

Over the years, the AKP government has taken control of most media outlets in the country. In addition, a vaguely worded disinformation law was passed in 2022, which has made it easier for the regime to crack down on its critics and further tighten its control over online platforms. The opposition leader and the coalition have put an emphasis on freedom of speech and expression. Kılıçdaroğlu recently released a video on his Twitter account, stating that: “If I become president, you will be free to criticise me.” He also vowed to repeal the law on insulting the president, which is punishable by imprisonment of one to four years.

The opposition campaign has been focused on plans to reverse some of the changes that Erdoğan has made to the Turkish constitution since 2002. This is widely supported by the coalition parties, who are fiercely opposed to the hyper-presidential system introduced in 2017 and which concentrated power in Erdoğan’s hands.

The proposals discuss restructuring into a parliamentary system and reducing executive dominance. The president would be reduced to a single seven-year term, the post of prime minister re-established and the presidential veto abolished, increasing the power of parliament. This is partly a response to the extreme personalisation of the executive that has taken place under Erdoğan and the single-party dominance that has existed since 2002. They also plan to change the threshold for parliamentary representation from 7% to 3% of the vote, to give smaller parties a chance.

Foreign policy shift

Turkey’s foreign policy could also undergo a significant change if Millet wins. The country’s relationship with the west has suffered under Erdoğan, with the EU accession process stalling, tensions with Greece and Israel increasing and conflict with US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria. Turkey’s now warm relationship with Russia has also been a source of concern in western capitals. The opposition parties have largely coalesced around a pro-west agenda. They have pledged to restart the EU accession process, comply with ECHR rulings, and to abandon strategic positions at odds with their Nato alliance partners.

It is unclear whether human rights would improve for Kurdish people, Turkey’s largest minority group. Erdoğan has cracked down on Kurdish organisations and activists in the last few years – making over 120 arrests of Kurdish activists, journalists, and artists only a few weeks before the election. While elements in the Millet coalition have expressed conciliatory views towards the Kurds, CHP governments have been equally repressive in the past and İyi leader Meral Akşener is a former hardline interior minister.

The alliance has also pledged to build free houses for those people who lost their homes in the catastrophic earthquakes on the Turkish/Syrian border, where 50,000 people died and where irregularities in planning regulations are believed to have led to many sub-standard buildings being destroyed.

Kılıçdaroğlu and the opposition would start off with a difficult hand. Turkey has been going through an economic crisis for years. With consistently high inflation rates and a significantly devalued currency, economic constraints are felt through all parts of Turkish society. It will prove to be an extremely difficult task for the opposition to fix this. The dire state of the country’s economy has been one reason why Erdoğan has lost support and voters will be expecting a rapid improvement. It also faces massive reconstruction work in the earthquake zone, where millions are now homeless.

The AKP has carefully placed loyalists into all parts of the state who are not likely to cooperate with a new regime. Regardless of this, Millet is a diverse coalition of the left and right united only by their opposition to Erdoğan, and keeping this unwieldy band united for an entire term will be an enormous challenge.

Balki Begumhan Bayhan, PhD Candidate in Politics, Coventry University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Since the death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini in September 2022, much has been said and written about the protests in Iran. Amini died while in the custody of Iran’s morality police. She was arrested for supposedly wearing her hijab incorrectly.

Her death triggered widespread protests against the morality police, the government and a host of other issues facing the country. A recurrent theme of discussion surrounding the protest movement has focused on its so-called secular nature.

Why ‘secularism’ is problematic

In December 2022 TIME magazine published a piece written by Iranian-American writer Azadeh Moaveni who characterized the uprising in Iran as educated, liberal and secular. Other commentators have pointed out that protesters have not used religious slogans. This differentiates this protest movement from previous ones. It is secular in nature and therefore, historically significant.

In January 2023 I attended a symposium at the University of Toronto called Women, Life, Liberty: Iran’s democratic future in which the protests were described by some commentators as secular. For example, in one of the panels called A Charter of Rights for a Democratic and Pluralistic Iran, secularism was described as one of the common demands of the Iranian people whether they joined the street protests or not.

Photo by Thiago Rocha on Unsplash

These kinds of statements are meant to demonstrate the extent to which the political regime is rejected by Iranians. The assumption underpinning this narrative is that the government’s ideology stands in opposition to the secular views of most Iranians.

One of the most important, and challenging, narratives on secularism is the belief that European secularism is a global tendency, and that secularism is incompatible with religion.

In the West, secularism is closely tied to the removal of religion from public spaces, and the decline in its influence on social and behavioural practices. For example, in France, the government has created a new Forum on Islam to reshape Islam in the country. The forum is made up of Muslim figures handpicked by the government. Examples like these are not about a separation of the state from religion. Rather they are about increasing the state’s control over religion and religious institutions.

However, using the term secularism, especially in this sense, does not necessarily help us understand what is happening in Iran today. These narratives are often based on conventional meaning of secularism. Consequently, they do not necessarily resonate well with the views and demands of Iranian people.

Rejecting state control of religion

The protests in Iran are about rejecting the state’s regulation of religiosity in public life, and not about rejecting religion in Iranian society.

Narratives that put secularism against religiosity contrast with the images and chants that have emerged from the protests in Iran. In November 2022 one video clip from the protests showed women in chadors marching on the streets chanting “Go ahead for revolution with or without hijab.” Western conceptions of secularism cannot explain images of chador-wearing women taking part in protests against the Iranian government.

But views on secularism in Iran vary considerably. Political scientist Nader Hashemi argues that the desire for secularism has emerged within the civil society among intellectuals, Iranian youth and the urban middle class who are disillusioned with the government.

Iranian-American writer Dina Nayeri and others have argued that there is a decline of religious beliefs and practices among Iranians. In other words, that Iran is undergoing a process of secularization.

On the other hand, sociologist Abdolmohammad Kazemipur suggested that the state has gone through a secularization process for pragmatic reasons. He states that in post-revolution Iran, the state itself has moved to a more secular political philosophy as a pragmatic response to political pressures.

The types of people and groups that have been involved in the protests suggest that the movement transcends debates around secularism versus religion. The protests were sparked by the morality police’s treatment of Amini. But many other issues have been raised by protesters including corruption, alarming unemployment, failed international policies and oppression of minorities.

Protests have also taken place in Sistan and Baluchestan, a southeastern province populated by many Sunnis. Those protests have received support from the local Sunni Imam Molavi Abdolhamid.

A recent study shows considerable change in Iranians’ religiosity. Around 40 per cent of the participants still self-identified as Muslim and 78 per cent said they believed in God. The study also showed that 72 per cent of participants are against mandatory hijab laws.

Religion still remains an important dimension of Iranian life. And religious segments of Iranian society have been expressing their solidarity with the protests.

How can we make sense of these facts about the situation in Iran? Secularism as a label cannot fully explain the ongoing situation in Iran. Instead, the protest movement in Iran is a rejection of the state’s control over how people express their religious beliefs.

Roodabeh Dehghani, PhD candidate, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

My friend was in Tehran during protests after the death of Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the morality police (Gasht-e Ershad). My friend went into a grocery shop intending to buy milk. The seller refused to sell anything to her. “Why are you refusing?” she asked. “I can see that you have milk.” “Because you are wearing a hijab,” the seller responded.

This is part of a backlash by those who see themselves as oppressed by the Islamic Republic’s discriminatory hijab law, which prosecutes women for not “covering up”. The term hijab is an Arabic word meaning cover. It’s used to refer to different types of covering, from a long-sleeved coat, pants and scarf to the Islamic government’s preferred form of dress, chador, which is a loose-fitting black cloth worn over the entire body. After Mahsa Amini’s killing in September, mass protests broke out over this law and its enforcement.

Wearing hijab became obligatory for all Iranian women from April 1983, after the 1979 revolution. Since then, all women have been forced by law to wear hijab (a covering of hair and or body) in public, even non-Muslims and foreigners visiting Iran. If they don’t they face prosecution.

The government of Iran, the Islamic Republic, argues that God commands women to wear hijab. This is a government which has leaders who are members of the clergy and merged religious beliefs into state law. But even some Islamic scholars argue that the Qur’an does not suggest that hijab should be compulsory.

Guardian News: “Iran protests: students defy crackdown before end of 40-day mourning period for Mahsa Amini”

Mahsa Amini’s case is polarising Iran: those who rigorously advocate the hijab and religious law are set against those who prefer a secular state, not run by religious values.

This has led the nation to the current upheaval, with vast protests across the country, and people being killed.

At many protests the Iranian resistance chant is Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (#WomenLifeFreedom) is heard. The protesters call for life and liberty to be applicable to everyone (religious and non-religious). A big part of the motivation behind these protests is to challenge how the current religious law takes away the right of women to choose what to wear.

What is secularism?

Secularism is the idea that states should be neutral about religion. The state should not back a specific religion over others. A secular state provides equal opportunity for religious and non-religious citizens to pursue their lives. The state must respect everyone’s values (including minorities), not just some people’s values.

Secularism seems reasonable to many because it is unusual for an entire nation to believe in a religion as one source of law. Some scholars of Islam disagree with the established interpretation of the Islamic Republic about whether God has commanded a mandatory hijab. As a result, they claim that hijab is not about covering hair but about “modesty”. Some others challenge the way the morality police treat women in the street.

While some people might be railing against women being forced to wear the hijab, others continue to feel strongly about its continued use. Reports say that Iranian authorities have closed some coffee shops because of the “improper” hijab of some female customers. And more recently, a woman was arrested for eating breakfast in a café with no hijab.

Iranian history of secularism

Modern debates about secularism in Iran can be traced back to the Constitutional Revolution in 1906. It advocated liberalism and secularism and began conversations about a society without religious rules for all.

Iranians experienced enforced secularisation shortly after Reza Shah Pahlavi was crowned in 1925. In 1936 he issued a decree Kashf-e hijab that any public expression of religious faith, including wearing hijab, was illegal. Again, this was a leader was telling women what to wear. However, his attempt to militantly secularise and westernise Iran faced resistance from society.

The overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979 led to the establishment of a militant Islamic government based on Shia Muslim teachings. After the hijab became mandatory, it became a symbol of compulsory faith. It has also played a significant role in pushing some parts of the Iranian population towards a more secular state.

In 2022 Iran is experiencing some dramatic shifts, including what appears to be a shift towards secularism. Some argue that secularism is an enemy of religion or a product of western colonisation. Despite the majority of Iranians considering themselves religious, some evidence shows that Iranians are less religious than before.

Since the Islamic revolution there’s been a lot of research about how Iran could work as a secular society and about religious tolerance.

The current protest movement, led mainly by Gen Z in Iran, is growing partly because of its use of the internet and social media to communicate and share information. People can also learn from other nations’ experiences of secularism through social media. This is why the regime is shutting down the internet and censoring YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.

One poll suggests that more than 60% of Iranians now want a non-religious state, the question is whether those in power are willing to give it to them.

Hossein Dabbagh, Philosophy Tutor, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The agreement specified that Sudan would have a lay, federal government that would guarantee freedom of religion and worship, saying that it would be achieved “through the separation from the state of cultural, ethnic, religious and local identities; such that the state shall impose no religion on any person nor adopt an official religion, and such that the state will be neutral with regard to religious and doctrinal affairs and matters of conscience.”

Fighting between the old dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir and the southern guerillas had displaced an estimated 400,000 Sudanese in the past decade.

Obviously, the phraseology echoes the US First Amendment as well as the preceding Thomas Jefferson and James Madison’s statute on religious freedom in Virginia. I think Americans are often not sufficiently aware of how inspirational their constitution has been for people around the world. The Sudanese have suffered under fundamentalist dictatorship for decades and are as tired of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis as Madison and Jefferson were of the official Anglicans.

Al-Burhan is the leader of the military Sovereignty Council that forms one half of the transitional government. The other half is made up of civilian revolutionaries, including prime minister Abdalla Hamdok, who signed a similar document last fall. The officer corps had been tied to Muslim fundamentalism in recent decades.

Al-Burhan said that the signing was the true beginning for the transitional government of the achievement of real change that would lead to a just peace and would create a state of its citizens, along liberty, and justice. These are the slogans chanted by the revolutionaries in March, 2019, when they overthrew fundamentalist dictator Omar al-Bashir.

Al-Burhan emphasized that the transitional government is determined to achieve the change that the people want and for which they sacrificed, even those who took up arms, and all those who dream of a dignified life. He vowed that a Sudan would be founded on the principles of equality for coming generations, wherein all Sudanese would be proud of a nation in which there was no discrimination between north and south, nor based on religion or ethnicity.

Al-Hilu for his part praised the declaration of principles as the step toward more wide-ranging negotiations toward a democratic Sudan that would respect human rights. In the past four decades the country has been wracked by regional and ethnic violence and even genocide.

Al-Hilu praised al-Burhan for this “bold step” that could lead to the attainment of a permanent peace and a just unity. He considered the signing of the principles by the cabinet, as well, asa sign that there was a will both in the civilian and military wings of the transitional government to perfect the peace.

The agreement also envisages that the guerrillas of the SPLM-N would be made part of the regular Sudanese army.

The declaration of principles was hailed by several Sudanese political parties, including the left-leaning Sudanese Professionals Association that had spearheaded the 2019 revolution.

Despite the confusing title, the guerrilla group represents the provinces of Kordofan and Blue Nile in the southern Sudan, which have substantial Christian and animist populations. Most Sudanese are Muslim. Since the old far southern provinces seceded as South Sudan in 2011, the southern provinces that remained under Khartoum’s rule were now the northern part of the south.

Al-Hilu is a fierce proponent of the separation of religion and state and in 2017 established a breakaway faction of the SPLM-N under his leadership that insisted on this principle. Al-Hilu was a disciple of John Garang, the socialist revolutionary who fought for greater southern autonomy. The southern Sudanese guerrilla group he led was more grounded in a desire for “states’ rights” than in a particular ideology, but Garang was a secular socialist of the twentieth-century sort, and al-Hilu, despite being of Muslim heritage, took up these ideals, as well.

After its revolution, Sudan has a hybrid transitional government with a military junta co-existing with a civilian government made up of prominent revolutionaries who ousted Muslim fundamentalist dictator Omar al-Bashir.

Sudan’s officer corps had backed al-Bashir, even after he was charged with crimes against humanity, and had long tilted toward religious fundamentalism. The officers, however, came to terms with the mass mobilization that ousted him. After all, you can’t take hundreds of thousands of people out and shoot them. Al-Burhan’s willingness to sign this document may indicate a major shift of thinking among the officers in favor of the separation of religion and state. After all, Sudan is a multicultural society and al-Bashir caused endless trouble, and the break-up of the country, by trying to impose sharia or Muslim canon law, as the law of the state.

—–

Bonus Video:

Al Jazeera English: “Sudan gov’t and SPLM-N sign agreement to pave way for peace talks”

Looking back over nine decades, I’m proud and pleased because secular humanism – the progressive struggle to make life better for everyone – won hundreds of victories during my time.

When I came of age in the 1950s, fundamentalist taboos ruled America. Gay sex was a felony, and homosexuals hid in the closet. It was a crime for stores to open on the Sabbath. It was illegal to look at something like a Playboy magazine or sexy R-rated movie – or even read about sex. Blacks were confined to ghettos, not allowed into white-only restaurants, hotels, clubs, pools, schools, careers or neighborhoods. Interracial marriage was illegal. Schools had government-mandated prayers, and biology classes didn’t mention evolution. Buying a cocktail or lottery ticket was a crime. Birth control was illegal in some states. Desperate girls couldn’t end pregnancies, except via back-alley butchers. Unwed couples couldn’t share a bedroom. Other Puritanism was locked into law.

Now, all those born-again strictures have been wiped out, one after another. Human rights and personal freedoms snowballed. Society changed so radically that it’s hard to remember the old “thou shalt nots.”

The secular humanist crusade, a never-ending effort to help humanity, began its modern upsurge three centuries ago in The Enlightenment. Rebel thinkers began challenging the divine right of kings, the supremacy of the church, privileges of aristocrats, and other despotism. They envisioned democracy, personal equality, human rights, free speech and a social safety net.

At the start of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party sought many reforms. And women fought bravely for the right to vote. Then, during my lifetime, wave after wave of betterment occurred.

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal passed Social Security pensions for retirees, gave unions a right to organize, provided unemployment compensation for the jobless and workers compensation for those injured at work, banned child labor, set a forty-hour work week and a minimum wage, created food stamps and welfare for the poor, launched massive public works to make jobs, created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect bank depositors, and much more.

The U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren transformed America: outlawing racially segregated schools, outlawing government-enforced school prayer, striking down state laws against birth control and mixed marriage, protecting poor defendants against police abuses, mandating “one man, one vote” equality in districts to stop sparse rural conservatives from dominating legislatures. The Warren Court gave couples privacy in the bedroom – which set the stage for a later ruling that let women and girls end pregnancies. Other subsequent decisions decriminalized gay sex, gave homosexuals a right to marry, and made gays safe from cruel discrimination.

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society leaped forward with Medicare, Medicaid, the Job Corps, Head Start, public radio and television, consumer protection, pollution curbs, senior citizen meals, the National Trails System, and 200 other improvements. Four major laws guaranteed racial equality.

Meanwhile, the historic civil rights movement made America honor its pledge that “all men are created equal.” Birth control pills freed women from endless pregnancy and triggered the sexual revolution against bluenose church taboos. Women’s liberation weakened male domination. Gays gained legal equality through historic breakthroughs. The youth rebellion of the 1960s still has repercussions.

A 1987 high court ruling forbade public schools to teach “creationism.” Other progressive advances included marijuana legalization in many states, and the beginning of “right to die with dignity” laws.

Finally, the collapse of the idiotic Trump era and the disintegration of supernatural religion in western democracies are more victories for secular humanism.

Decade after decade, progressive reformers defeated bigoted religion and right-wing political resistance to wipe out hidebound strictures.

Barely noticed, humanist advances helped billions. War between nations has virtually ceased in the past half-century. In the 1800s, life expectancy averaged 35 years because of high childhood deaths, but now it’s near 80. Literacy and education have soared. Each day, 200,000 more people rise above rock-bottom $2-per-day poverty. Each day, 300,000 more gain access to electricity and clean water for the first time. Famines have almost vanished. Progressive values keep climbing.

We existentialists see the chaotic carnival of life – all the absurdities and idiocies (the Trump era, for example). Sometimes we want to embrace Macbeth’s bitter lament that life is a pointless farce, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But I know that’s only part of the truth. The marvelous rise of secular humanism in a single lifetime – greatly improving life for all – paints a much-brighter hope for humanity. Let’s keep striving for more advances.

—

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

PBS NewsHour: “Here’s what’s making America less religious”

The voting patterns of religious groups in the U.S. have been scrutinized since the presidential election for evidence of shifting allegiances among the faithful. Many have wondered if a boost in Catholic support was behind Biden’s win or if a dip in support among evangelicals helped doom Trump.

But much less attention has been paid to one of the largest growing demographics among the U.S. electorate, one that has increased from around 5% of Americans to over 23% in the last 50 years: “Nones” – that is, the nonreligious.

I am a scholar of secularism in the U.S., and my focus is on the social and cultural presence of secular people – nonreligious people such as atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and those who simply don’t identify with any religion. They are an increasingly significant presence in American society, one which inevitably spills into the political arena.

In this last election, the emerging influence of secular voters was felt not only at the presidential level, but also on many down-ballot issues.

The new ‘values voters’

For years, both scholars and pundits have referred to the political impact of “values voters” in America. What that designation generally refers to are religious men and women whose scripturally based values coagulate around issues such as opposing marriage equality and women’s reproductive autonomy.

But dubbing such religious voters as “values voters” is a real semantic bamboozle. While it is true that many religious Americans maintain certain values that motivate their voting behavior, it is also very much the case that secular Americans also maintain their own strongly held values. My research suggests they vote on these values with just as much motivation as the religious.

Sex education

This played out in November in a number of ballot initiatives that have flown under the national media radar.

Voters in Washington state, for example, passed Referendum 90, which requires that students receive sex education in all public schools. This was the first time that such a measure was ever on a state ballot, and it passed with ease – thanks, in part, to the significant number of nonreligious voters in the Pacific Northwest.

The fact is, Washington is one of the least religious states in the union. Well over a third of all Washingtonians do not affiliate with any religion, more than a third never pray and almost 40% never attend religious services.

The referendum’s passing was helped by the fact that nonreligious adults tend to value comprehensive sex education. Numerous studies have found that secular Americans are significantly more likely to support comprehensive sex education in school. In his research, sociologist Mark Regnerus found that secular parents were generally much more comfortable – and more likely – to have open and frank conversations with their children about safe sex than religious parents.

Drugs policy

Meanwhile, voters in Oregon – another Pacific Northwestern state that contains one of the most secular populations in the country – passed Measure 110, the first ever statewide law to decriminalize the possession and personal use of drugs.

This aligns with research showing that nonreligious Americans are much more likely to support the decriminalization of drugs than their religious peers. For instance, a 2016 study from Christian polling firm Barna found that 66% of evangelicals believe that all drugs should be illegal as did 43% of other Christians, but only 17% of Americans with no religious faith held such a view.

Science at the ballot box

Secular people are generally more trusting of scientific empiricism, and various studies have shown that the nonreligious are more likely to accept the evidence behind human-generated climate change. This translates to support for politicians and policies that take climate change seriously.

It may also have factored in to the success of a November ballot measure in Denver, Colorado, to fund programs that eliminate greenhouse gases, fight air pollution and actively adapt to climate change. The ballot passed with over 62% of the vote – and it is of note that Denver is one of the most secular cities in the nation.

Meanwhile voters in California – another area of relative secularity – passed Proposition 14 supporting the funding of stem cell research, the state being one of only a handful that has a publicly funded program. Pew studies have repeatedly found that secular Americans are far more likely than religious Americans to support stem cell research.

Values versus values

On issues that the religious right has held some sway in recent years, there is evidence of a counterbalance among secular “value voters.”

For example, while the religious have been more likely to oppose same-sex marriage, secular Americans are more likely to support it, and by significant margins. A recent Pew study found that 79% of secular Americans are supportive, compared to 66% of white mainline Protestants, 61% of Catholics, 44% of Black Protestants and 29% of white evangelicals.

There are many additional values that are prominent among secular Americans. For example, the U.S. Secular Survey of 2020 – the largest survey of nonreligious Americans ever conducted, with nearly 34,000 participants – found strong support for safeguarding the separation of church and state.

Other studies have found that secular Americans strongly support women’s reproductive rights, women working in the paid labor force, the DACA program, death with dignity and opposition to the death penalty.

[Expertise in your inbox. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter and get expert takes on today’s news, every day.]

Secular surge

According to Eastern Illinois University professor Ryan Burge’s data analysis, around 80% of atheists and agnostics and 70% of those who described their religion as “nothing in particular” voted for Biden.

This may have been decisive. As Professor Burge argues, “it’s completely fair to say that these shifts generated a two percentage-point swing for Biden nationwide. There were five states where the gap between the candidates was less than two percentage points (Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina). Four of those five went for the Biden – and the nones were between 28% and 37% of the population in those key states.”

As this past election has shown, secular values are not only alive and well, but they are more pronounced than ever. It is also noteworthy that more openly nonreligious candidates were elected to public office than ever before. According to an analysis by the atheist author and activist Hemant Mehta, not only did every member of the secular Congressional Freethought Caucus win reelection, but 10 state senators who are openly secular – that is, they have made it publicly known that they are nonreligious – were voted into office, up from seven two years ago. There is now an all-time high of 45 openly secular state representatives nationwide, according to Mehta’s analysis. Every one of them is a Democrat.

Religious voters will certainly continue to vote their values – and for politicians that express similar views. But so, I argue, will secular voters.

Phil Zuckerman, Professor of Sociology and Secular Studies, Pitzer College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

——

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

News 1130: “Millennials moving away from religion?”

Many of the deplorables are white evangelicals. Sociologist Robert Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute, says they are the most prejudiced group in the United States.

In his latest book, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, Jones asserts that white churches have always been at the heart of racism, helping lock it into the culture. He says born-again whites display bigotry in many different ways.

For example, they are far more likely to shrug when white police kill unarmed black men, dismissing it as “isolated incidents.” And they generally say the Confederate flag is “more a symbol of southern pride than of racism.”

In contrast, young Americans who shun religion tend to feel greater compassion and understanding. They strongly agree when PRRI interviewers recite this statement: “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.” But fundamentalist whites don’t.

As chief researcher, Jones created a “racism index” to identify bigotry. White evangelicals scored worst at 78 percent, while irreligious whites rated 42 percent. Jones told CNN:

“President Trump, who has put white supremacy front and center, has brought these issues from just barely below the surface into plain view…. White Christians have inherited a worldview that has Christians on top of other religions, men over women, whites over blacks.”

Trump has been the champion of the deplorables. He showed everyone how large their cohort is in America. Presumably, they won’t vanish. Where will they go after the King of Deplorables is gone? I hope they slink downward in shame.

After any election, it’s easy to look back and count various groups of voters who clinched victory. For four decades, researchers have confirmed how white evangelicals secured Republican wins. Now, in the wake of the Biden-Harris triumph, it’s obvious that Democrats couldn’t have won without black votes, or Hispanic ones, or labor union ones, etc.

Or “nones.”

Educated, intelligent, young adults who say their religion is “none” generally hold compassionate, progressive values: favoring women’s right to choose, supporting gay marriage, advocating climate control, urging low-cost college, wanting universal medical care as a human right for all, backing sex education and the public “safety net” that protects less-privileged people, etc.

These liberals naturally lean to the Democratic Party and have become the largest faith group in its base. Unfortunately, they vote at lower rates – but several freethought organizations mobilized efforts to rouse their democratic instincts.

I hope plenty of research ensues in coming months to pinpoint how much “nones” were decisive in swinging the 2020 election.

—-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Evangelist Paula White Praying for Trump’s Victory

Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s mass mobilisation of Islam showed that modernisation by no means implies a linear process of religious decline.

Reliable large-scale data on Iranians’ post-revolutionary religious beliefs, however, has always been lacking. Over the years, research and waves of protests and crackdowns indicated massive disappointment among Iranians with their political system. This steadily turned into a deeply felt disillusionment with institutional religion.

In June 2020, our research institute, the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in IRAN (GAMAAN), conducted an online survey with the collaboration of Ladan Boroumand, co-founder of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran.

The results verify Iranian society’s unprecedented secularisation.

Reaching Iranians online

Iran’s census claims that 99.5% of the population are Muslim, a figure that hides the state’s active hostility toward irreligiosity, conversion and unrecognised religious minorities.

Iranians live with an ever-present fear of retribution for speaking against the state. In Iran, one cannot simply call people or knock on doors seeking answers to politically sensitive questions. That’s why the anonymity of digital surveys offers an opportunity to capture what Iranians really think about religion.

Since the revolution, literacy rates have risen sharply and the urban population has grown substantially. Levels of internet penetration in Iran are comparable to those in Italy, with around 60 million users and the number grows relentlessly: 70% of adults are members of at least one social media platform.

For our survey on religious belief in Iran, we targeted diverse digital channels after analysing which groups showed lower participation rates in our previous large-scale surveys. The link to the survey was shared by Kurdish, Arab, Sufi and other networks. And our research assistant successfully convinced Shia pro-regime channels to spread it among their followers, too. We reached mass audiences by sharing the survey on Instagram pages and Telegram channels, some of which had a few million followers.

After cleaning our data, we were left with a sample of almost 40,000 Iranians living in Iran. The sample was weighted and balanced to the target population of literate Iranians aged above 19, using five demographic variables and voting behaviour in the 2017 presidential elections.

A secular and diverse Iran

Our results reveal dramatic changes in Iranian religiosity, with an increase in secularisation and a diversity of faiths and beliefs. Compared with Iran’s 99.5% census figure, we found that only 40% identified as Muslim.

In contrast with state propaganda that portrays Iran as a Shia nation, only 32% explicitly identified as such, while 5% said they were Sunni Muslim and 3% Sufi Muslim. Another 9% said they were atheists, along with 7% who prefer the label of spirituality. Among the other selected religions, 8% said they were Zoroastrians – which we interpret as a reflection of Persian nationalism and a desire for an alternative to Islam, rather than strict adherence to the Zoroastrian faith – while 1.5% said they were Christian.

Most Iranians, 78%, believe in God, but only 37% believe in life after death and only 30% believe in heaven and hell. In line with other anthropological research, a quarter of our respondents said they believed in jinns or genies. Around 20% said they did not believe in any of the options, including God.

These numbers demonstrate that a general process of secularisation, known to encourage religious diversity, is taking place in Iran. An overwhelming majority, 90%, described themselves as hailing from believing or practising religious families. Yet 47% reported losing their religion in their lifetime, and 6% said they changed from one religious orientation to another. Younger people reported higher levels of irreligiosity and conversion to Christianity than older respondents.

A third said they occasionally drank alcohol in a country that legally enforces temperance. Over 60% said they did not perform the obligatory Muslim daily prayers, synchronous with a 2020 state-backed poll in which 60% reported not observing the fast during Ramadan (the majority due to being “sick”). In comparison, in a comprehensive survey conducted in 1975 before the Islamic Revolution, over 80% said they always prayed and observed the fast.

Religion and legislation

We found that societal secularisation was also linked to a critical view of the religious governance system: 68% agreed that religious prescriptions should be excluded from legislation, even if believers hold a parliamentary majority, and 72% opposed the law mandating all women wear the hijab, the Islamic veil.

Iranians also harbour illiberal secularist opinions regarding religious diversity: 43% said that no religions should have the right to proselytise in public. However, 41% believed that every religion should be able to manifest in public.

Four decades ago, the Islamic Revolution taught sociologists that European-style secularisation is not followed universally around the world. The subsequent secularisation of Iran confirmed by our survey demonstrates that Europe is not exceptional either, but rather part of complex, global interactions between religious and secular forces.

Other research on population growth, whose decline has been linked to higher levels of secularisation, also suggests a decline in religiosity in Iran. In 2020, Iran recorded its lowest population growth, below 1%.

Greater access to the world via the internet, but also through interactions with the global Iranian diaspora in the past 50 years, has generated new communities and forms of religious experience inside the country. A future disentangling of state power and religious authority would likely exacerbate these societal transformations. Iran as we think we know it is changing, in fundamental ways.

Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Utrecht University and Ammar Maleki, Assistant Professor, Public Law and Governance, Tilburg University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured Photo: h/t Wikimedia Commons.

The agreement included the language, “The state shall not establish an official religion. No citizen shall be discriminated against based on their religion.” It added, “Sudan is a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural society. Full recognition and accommodation of these diversities must be affirmed.”

Revolutionary Sudan had already repealed its apostasy and blasphemy legislation, and had bolstered women’s rights.

Sudan has been one of the world’s experiments with a Muslim fundamentalist state. Organizations rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood, along with the Sudanese branch of the MB itself, backed the military coup of Omar Bashir in 1989. Although one of the movement’s main ideologues, Hassan Turabi, later fell out with the dictator, the Muslim Religious Right remained an important pillar of Bashir’s rule. This mixture of military dictatorship and religious fundamentalism powerfully shaped Sudan’s society in the past thirty years. Women’s rights were constrained under laws mandating male guardianship. The Communist Party and other Left parties were driven underground and peasants and workers were increasingly poorly paid.

Worse, the fundamentalist junta around Bashir had a monochrome Arab-Sunni-Muslim vision of the proper Sudanese subject. Ethnic groups like the Fur in Dar Fur, who speak a Nilo-Saharan language at home rather than Arabic, were targeted for genocide. Southern separatists were hunted in a long dirty war. Sudan is a diverse country of 43 million. About 30 million have Arabic as their mother tongue. Many non-Arabs are Sunni Muslims, as with the Fur. In the south of the country other African languages are spoken, and about 5 percent of Sudan is Christian. The proportion was greater before South Sudan, largely Christian and animist, seceded in 2011.

The Sudanese Revolution of 2018-19 overthrew Bashir, forcing the other officers to remove him.

The revolution was a mass movement. The Sudanese Professional Association spearheaded it, made of of attorneys, physicians, engineers and other educated middle class people. Youth played an out-sized role. Non-fundamentalist mystical Sufi orders also joined.

While the Sudanese Left had been suppressed for decades, it had not been destroyed, as Kevin B. Anderson argues. In the revolution, a small Communist Party reemerged. Khartoum University had long been a center of leftist thought, and an inchoate leftism that supported better wages for workers and peasants was adopted by many young people.

We saw this in Egypt in 2011, where many of the protesters were red diaper babies, from leftist families in a society where leftist parties had been dismantled and driven underground.

Bashir combined in himself a horrible dictatorship, an unbelievable amount of corruption (he just had $350 million from the Gulf lying about in his house), and an oppressive Muslim fundamentalism.

The new transitional government, with the backing of the people, wants to undo all three of Bashir’s main attributes. They want a gradual transition to democracy, an end to corruption, and, now, an end to fundamentalist laws.

The left and secularism have a storied history in the modern Arab world. South Yemen was Communist 1967-1990. Algeria’s revolution against the French was spearheaded by the Left, though there was a fundamentalist wing to the movement. But unfortunately, in the 1960s and 1970s, many secularists suffered from the Omar Bashir syndrome– they were corrupt dictators who imposed secularism from the top by diktat. The Baath Parties of Syria and Iraq were largely secular, but they were also horrible oppressive one-party states. That sort of oppressive, state-directed secularism only seemed to foment Muslim radicalism and fundamentalism.

So we have come full circle. In Sudan, we see a revulsion against fundamentalism on the part of students, the professional classes and workers, precisely because the fundamentalists so often were closely associated with the hated Bashir. To be fair, some fundamentalists in Sudan did join the revolution, but they were a minority.

Whether these steps can survive in the medium term is still an open question. After 39 months of cohabitation between the civilian revolutionaries and the officers, the country will go to elections. Fundamentalists could do well, and repeal secularization.

That would be a shame. If Sudan had had a healthy separation of religion and state it might not have lost South Sudan (where most of the oil is situated). For a diverse country like Sudan, it was always the soundest policy, which the Muslim Brotherhood types just could not see. They made an unholy mess of the country, and now the people are insisting on setting it aright.

——

Bonus Video:

AP: Sudan’s transitional authorities and rebel alliance sign peace deal