The great nonreligious gender realignment

A subway platform sign reading "Mind the Gap"

The atheist community has always had more men than women. Why?

One commonly heard answer goes something like this: more men are atheists because logic and science disprove religion, and those are inherently male pursuits. They’re rigorous and objective and based on hard facts. Women care about feelings and other squishy stuff, which makes them more susceptible to appeals based on wishful thinking and emotion.

A different answer points to the intersecting circles of privilege and exclusion. In a majority-religious society, nonbelievers still face ignorance, prejudice, and oppression. Women, too, have to deal with sexist treatment and harmful stereotyping. In particular, they’re judged more harshly than men for breaking with social norms. In essence, women might decide they have enough to deal with without voluntarily adding one more source of discrimination to their lives.

We can debate which of these answers are closer to the mark, but the underlying fact of the gender imbalance remained. Skepticism remained stubbornly male, and over the years, this gave rise to huge blowups and divisive arguments. Nonreligious women repeatedly spoke up about sexist language, sexual harassment and even assault at atheist gatherings. No surprise, some of them concluded that the secular community was no home for them.

This is ironic because, as skeptics of all genders pointed out, women have suffered a disproportionate share of religious oppression through the ages. Historically, religion has held women to far stricter rules. It’s barred them from positions of power and authority, demonized them as temptresses and sources of sin, harassed and shamed them for their appearance, sought to deny them autonomy over their own bodies, dismissed their ambitions of being something more than mothers and housewives, taught them to be silent and to obey the commands of men.

When religion is the source of so much hateful sexism, the nonreligious community should be a safe and welcoming place for women. We should have so much more to offer: more freedom, more equality, more respect for self-determination. But, again, the numbers refused to reflect that.

Until now.

Over the last two decades, which witnessed an explosion of religious disaffiliation, it was men more than women who were abandoning their faith commitments. In fact, for as long as we’ve conducted polls on religion, men have consistently demonstrated lower levels of religious engagement. But something has changed. A new survey reveals that the pattern has now reversed.

Older Americans who left their childhood religion included a greater share of men than women. In the Baby Boom generation, 57 percent of people who disaffiliated were men, while only 43 percent were women. Gen Z adults have seen this pattern flip. Fifty-four percent of Gen Z adults who left their formative religion are women; 46 percent are men.

In demographic terms, this is a magnitude 8 earthquake. As Phil Zuckerman points out, women have scored higher than men in every measure of religiosity in every survey since at least 1945. This finding, if it holds up, shatters a pattern that’s held up throughout the world for the last eight decades.

What changed?

It certainly appears that, though it took time, the secular argument is making headway. This is tied to the overall progress of feminism in society: more women than ever are completing higher education, having careers of their own, getting married and having families on their terms or not at all. There’s an expectation of equal treatment and autonomy that didn’t exist in previous generations.

And as women become more accustomed to fairness, the churches are increasingly an outlier. Most major denominations still preach male superiority and female submission. They haven’t changed, while the world has. That makes their archaic, harmful attitudes easier to notice:

Sixty-one percent of Gen Z women identify as feminist, far greater than women from previous generations. Younger women are more concerned about the unequal treatment of women in American society and are more suspicious of institutions that uphold traditional social arrangements. In a poll we conducted, nearly two-thirds of (65 percent) young women said they do not believe that churches treat men and women equally.

When we zero in on specific causes, two big sociopolitical changes – the movement for LGBTQ equality, and more recently, the fall of Roe and the spread of abortion bans – have had an impact. Both of these have made women, especially young women, more liberal and more politically conscious. It’s impossible not to notice when your rights are under attack, and women can see for themselves that conservative churches are the major cultural force behind it:

It’s not only about gender roles. There is a cultural misalignment between more traditional churches and places of worship and young women who have grown increasingly liberal. Since 2015, the number of young women who identify as liberal has rapidly increased. I speculated in a previous post about whether the abortion issue might be driving young women away from church. They are unequivocally pro-choice—54 percent of young women believe abortion should be available without any restriction in the 2022 General Social Survey.

This has also coincided with the rise in LGBTQ identity among young women—nearly three in ten women under the age of 30 now identify as something other than straight. It may explain why more Americans cite this as a reason for leaving. A new PRRI poll found that 60 percent of young people who left their childhood religion said that “negative treatment of gay and lesbian people” was an important reason.

To be sure, we’re not on a trajectory towards a world where men are all religious and women are all secular. More young people of all genders are religiously unaffiliated than ever before; that hasn’t changed. But among churches that still have young members, some are starting to see a pronounced gender slant toward men:

Grace Church, a Southern Baptist congregation, has not made a conscious effort to attract young men. It is an unremarkable size, and is in many ways an ordinary evangelical church. Yet its leaders have noticed for several years now that young men outnumber young women in their pews. When the church opened a small outpost in the nearby town of Robinson last year, 12 of the 16 young people regularly attending were men.

What’s comical is the pretense of bewilderment that pastors put on, pretending they have no idea why this is happening:

“We’ve been talking about it from the beginning,” said Phil Barnes, a pastor at that congregation, Hope Church. “What’s the Lord doing? Why is he sending us all of these young men?”

In reality, this should be no surprise. When you preach patriarchy, you get wannabe patriarchs.

We’re living through a time of shifting gender roles and crumbling stereotypes. These mass social changes always create confusion and anger, as the old messaging about masculinity that men have absorbed clashes with new realities. Millions of young men are adrift, struggling to figure out their place in the world. They’re receptive to anyone who tells them where they belong.

Conservative churches have an appealing message for these men. It tells them that they’re entitled to special privileges by virtue of birth: that God put them in charge, that they should have power and authority, and that they deserve obedient housewives who wait on them hand and foot and devoted children they don’t have to give birth to or raise. For obvious reasons, they flock to that message like flies to spoiled meat.

What these pastors would be asking, if they had any sense, isn’t why men are showing up but why women aren’t. What does their religion offer to women, other than a life of subservience and a predefined role they may not want to conform to? Why should they want to attend a church that promises them second-class status? Women have broken out of that box, and they’re not going back into it.

But this is no moment for atheists to rest on our laurels. We have a huge opportunity to bring women over to our side, but we shouldn’t take it for granted that they’ll want to. The problems that drove so many women away from the secular movement haven’t necessarily been fixed. We need to make a deliberate effort to appeal to them and speak to what they care about, in a way that religion hasn’t. This is our moment to seize – but if we fail, we’ll have no one to blame for it but ourselves.

More washing machines in schools, please

A grayscale photo of washing machines in a row

The existence of poverty is a choice, not a fact of nature. We could end it any time we choose. In the darkest hour of the pandemic, we proved it:

In 2020, when schools across the country closed to slow the spread of Covid-19, federal lawmakers did something unprecedented: They decided to pay for free lunch for every public school student in America, every day, no questions asked.

The effect of the free meals was dramatic. Parents, many of them facing layoffs, illness, and grief, no longer had to worry about the cost of lunch for their kids… Instead, they could pick up a free, nutritious meal at their children’s school, or in some cases even have it delivered by school bus. As a result, food insecurity in at-risk households with children declined by about 7 percentage points between the beginning of the pandemic and summer 2021.

It’s a disgrace that it took a crisis of this magnitude to push Congress into acting. Even so, it was a valuable proof of concept. But COVID-19 is receding from people’s minds, and the clouds have rolled back in. The pandemic supports are gone, and America is returning to school lunch debt as a policy:

In a November 2022 survey by the School Nutrition Association, 96.3 percent of districts reported that the end of federal waivers have led to an increase in unpaid debt. At East Hampton Public Schools in central Connecticut, for example, debt is going up by $500 every week. At one district, the Washington Post reported, debt for the school year has already reached $1.7 million.

It’s obscene that there’s such a thing as school lunch debt. Only a mind so warped by capitalism that it’s lost all its morals could conceive of something so sick and cruel. The occasional feel-good stories about donors paying off lunch debt don’t disguise the fact that it shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Thankfully, the more sensible parts of America recognize this. Not every place has given up the pandemic-era gains. A host of blue states and cities, including my hometown of New York City, offer universal free meals to all students in public schools, and more are working toward this goal.

The best part of NYC’s free school meals is that they’re available to everyone, no exceptions. There are no hoops to jump through, no cumbersome bureaucracy, no intimidating eligibility checks. If kids are hungry, they can eat. That’s the way it should be. I have a son in public school, and while my family isn’t in distress, it’s reassuring to know they have this service if we ever need it.

Free school meals come from the logical recognition that, for schools to succeed in their mission, it’s not enough to have chalkboards and textbooks. They have to have all the things that make it possible to learn, not just a narrow-minded focus on academics. When students face poverty or homelessness or hunger, school can and should be a haven of stability for them. That’s both wise and compassionate.

For the same reason, it’s a great idea to have schools with washers and dryers. There should be more of this:

More than a decade ago, Principal Joseph Mattina noticed students at P.S. 23 Carter G. Woodson were consistently arriving at the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, elementary school without their uniforms.

Initially, Mattina grew frustrated with the students, asking why they couldn’t wear the clothes that had been supplied by the school.

“One day, one of the kids turned around and said to me, ‘Well, it’s dirty, and my mom can’t wash it,'” he said. “That really resonated with me, because it was something that I had never thought of before. It was an obstacle that I didn’t realize existed.”

This is a pain of poverty that privileged people never have to think about. Families who are homeless, living out of a car or in a shelter, don’t have access to laundry facilities. Even if there’s a laundromat nearby, they may not be able to afford to wash their clothes regularly. When kids’ clothes are dirty or smell bad, they get bullied or shunned by their peers and skip school out of shame.

Not only is this a problem, it’s a bigger problem than you might guess. Chronic absenteeism is shockingly common – as high as 36% of all public school students in NYC, and even higher in some other places. Schools that install laundry machines have found that rates of absenteeism go down dramatically:

At Gibson Elementary in St. Louis, after learning that many children were missing school due to a lack of clean clothing, the principal reached out to Whirlpool to ask if they would donate a washer/dryer. In turn, Whirlpool performed a study of 600 public school teachers around the country to see if they were facing similar issues. The study revealed that one in five students did not have access to clean clothing. As a result, Whirlpool decided to donate a washer/dryer not only to this school, but also to 11 other schools that were in need. After one year, 93% of students who utilized the washer/dryers reported an improvement in attendance. Similarly, in 2017, a Kansas City public school reported that only 46% of students were meeting the requirement to attend school 90% of the time. After installing a washing machine, this figure shot up to 84%.

It’s the same theory as hospitals helping people find housing. People with chronic conditions like diabetes or HIV can’t possibly manage them if they’re sleeping on the streets, with no refrigerator or safe place to store medicine. And it’s not just better for those people – it’s actually cheaper for hospitals to help people find housing, rather than repeatedly patching them up every time they land in the ER with a crisis.

However, making sure that kids have clean clothes is about more than just improving attendance numbers or balance sheets. The deeper purpose is restoring a sense of dignity to students and their families. It helps them feel that they deserve to be there, that they’re not lesser human beings. At that P.S. 23 school in Brooklyn, they’ve seen the effect firsthand:

Now, families can come during the school day to wash their students’ clothes, or drop off laundry for the school to clean. Mattina said he frequently throws loads of laundry into the washer in the morning. The school’s speech therapist also shares an office with the machines and often moves clothes over to the dryer, he added.

… “Often when we tell parents that we have this service for them, they break down and cry,” he said. “Because of the unspeakable things that they’ve gone through and the trauma that they’ve experienced. This is just one less thing that they have to worry about.”

This is the hallmark of a decent society. It’s one way to show we’re serious about breaking the cycle of poverty, treating people as equals in fact and not just in rhetoric.

But more has to be done. Even among the schools that have laundry machines, too many rely on donations to keep them running. This should be a permanent program, not dependent on volunteer goodwill. Like free school meals, it’s an investment in the future, and it will more than pay for itself in the long run.

New on OnlySky: The era of cleanup

I have a new column up today on OnlySky. It’s about a huge, important task that lies ahead for us: the era of cleanup.

Humans have prospered, but we’ve trashed the planet to do it. Fossil fuels have choked the atmosphere; capitalism has polluted the oceans with plastic junk; suburban sprawl has bulldozed ecosystems. At long last, we’re coming around to recognizing the price of our folly. In the future, green energy and other innovations will allow us to power our civilization with less incidental harm. But what about the harm we’ve already done? How can we make amends?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column requires membership to read, but you can sign up for free. (Paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter and the ability to post comments.)

For the past eight decades or so, the world has enjoyed relative peace and relative prosperity. Since the end of the Cold War, America has been the unchallenged superpower presiding over a global order of its choosing. It’s been a neoliberal’s dream. Nations signed free-trade pacts, and goods and jobs flowed freely across borders. Industry flourished, damming rivers, building cities in deserts, turning prairies into megafarms and rainforests into cattle ranches. Skyscrapers rose, markets boomed, and air travel and the internet knit distant places together and flattened the world.

…For a while, we prospered with no thought to when the bill would come due. But that time is drawing to an end, as humanity belatedly realizes the magnitude of its folly.

A monumental task lies ahead of us. It’s like waking up in a trashed house the morning after a blowout party. We’ve had our fun. It’s time to clean up.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The natalist plan hits a snag

Abortion bans are always about control. Always.

The religious right lawmakers who push them don’t care about women, children or families. If they did, they’d support paid family leave, or universal health care, or laws to stop gun slaughter. They want to ban abortion for one reason only: to force women into fulfilling what they believe is God’s purpose for them, to be wives and mothers. As long as women are getting pregnant and giving birth like they’re “supposed” to, these theocrats don’t care what happens after that.

The problem, from the anti-choicers’ perspective, is that women know this too. American women can see that they’re in danger of being forced to carry pregnancies they don’t want, threatening their lives, their health and their futures. To reassert control over their bodies, they’re making the logical choice.

According to a new report in JAMA, after the Dobbs decision, the number of reproductive-age women getting their tubes tied spiked across the country. In blue states that protected abortion access, those numbers quickly tapered off. But in states hostile to abortion rights, they kept rising:

In states that enacted total or near-total abortion bans following the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in June 2022, the rate of sterilizations among reproductive-age women that July spiked 19 percent. A similar initial spike was seen across the nation, with states that either limited or protected access to abortions seeing a 17 percent increase.

But, after that, states with bans saw a divergent trend. The states that limited or protected abortion access saw sterilization procedures largely level off after July 2022. In contrast, states with bans continued to see increases. From July 2022 to December 2022, use of sterilization procedures increased by 3 percent each month.

The religious right got their win on abortion, and now they want more. They’ve made their goals clear: They want to ban contraception. They want to ban divorce. They want to imprison women in anti-choice states, preventing them from traveling elsewhere to get an abortion. They don’t care whether a pregnancy comes about through rape, or whether it endangers the woman’s life, or whether the fetus has severe abnormalities that will result in a short life full of suffering.

In fact, they don’t care if women can get medical care at all. Red states have passed anti-abortion laws that are both draconian and intentionally vague, making doctors and hospitals guess at what they can and can’t do. It seems that the religious right wants to intimidate health care providers so that they’re afraid to help pregnant women in distress. If doctors flee and those states become maternity care deserts, they count that as a victory.

But, apparently, the religious right didn’t count on women being able to read these same headlines for themselves. They assumed that they could pass whatever laws they wanted and everyone else would just keep doing whatever they were doing before. Without abortion, they believed, women would have no choice but to bear more children.

In reality, they’ve created a powerful disincentive to get pregnant, and people are responding accordingly. In this sense, the natalist agenda is self-defeating. People are accustomed to freedom, and they’re not willing to give it up, whatever religious zealots with their heads in the Middle Ages might think.

An added tragedy is that anti-choicers are preventing the birth of wanted children. Of course, many people who get sterilized are childfree. But it’s also likely that among this group, there are some women who aren’t dead-set against having kids – or who already have kids and, in a better world, would consider having more.

However, they’ve made a rational calculation of the risks and the benefits. They’d prefer to get sterilized to ensure that they’ll be alive. That’s better than the prospect of an unwanted pregnancy they can’t do anything about – or even a wanted pregnancy where they’re barred from medical help if something goes badly wrong. Given the extreme hostility that red states have shown toward women needing medical care, it’s impossible to blame them.

It pays well to be a useful idiot

A microphone similar to the kind used for recording podcasts

I’ll admit it: If a wealthy benefactor offered to pay me millions of dollars a year to write this blog, I’d be tempted.

As you may know, it’s almost impossible to earn a living in media anymore. Even successful writers and artists have to hustle, and almost none get rich unless they were rich to begin with. Prestigious media outlets have gone bankrupt, and others are resorting to AI-generated filler.

So yes, the temptation is understandable. A rich person who’s willing to fund your journalism and punditry startup is priceless in these turbulent times.

However, the very unfriendliness of the climate ought to spark at least a little skepticism. Specifically, if you find an investor who wants to fund you handsomely, when most outlets are struggling for survival, you should wonder why they’re being so generous and what they hope to get in return. And that’s especially, especially true when this backer doesn’t want their identity known.

That’s a lesson some American right-wingers learned too late.

According to a newly unsealed indictment by the Justice Department, Russia’s state-owned media outlet, Russia Today or RT, was kicked out of the U.S. after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In response, RT hatched a covert plan to influence American public opinion, laundering money through shell companies to evade sanctions, and funding a Western media outlet to push Kremlin-friendly content.

(Full disclosure: In 2013, I was on The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, a progressive TV show which at the time aired on RT.)

The indictment doesn’t name this outlet, but it’s widely reported to be Tenet Media, a conservative agitprop site founded in 2022 by Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan. Tenet employed right-wing influencers like Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Lauren Southern. It’s hosted “high-profile conservative guests, including Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake.”

To be the supposed wealthy backer, the RT employees named in the indictment invented a persona named “Eduard Grigoriann”, supposedly a Belgian banker with a generic resume and no Web presence. However, notwithstanding the clumsy attempts at deception, Tenet Media’s founders seem to have been well aware who they were really working for. According to the indictment, they referred to their funders as “the Russians”, and Googled “time in Moscow” while trying to decide when to send a message in order to get a quick response.

Russia paid $9.7 million to Tenet Media, which, according to the indictment, is almost 90% of all the money it took in. In exchange, they got a stable of American right-wingers to parrot Kremlin propaganda on command.

Commentators like Tim Pool denounced Ukraine as the enemy and raged against American military aid. When Tucker Carlson went on a pro-Putin propaganda tour of Russia, RT urged Tenet Media to promote it. One of the producers resisted – “it just feels like overt shilling” – but gave in after pressure from Tenet’s founders. After the deadly Crocus City terrorist attack in March 2024, RT urged Tenet to ignore ISIS’ claim of responsibility and blame the bloodshed on Ukraine and the U.S.

When the indictment was unsealed, Tenet Media immediately shut down. YouTube also deleted their channels. Pool and other affiliates of Tenet claimed that they were innocent dupes and that they’re the real victims. (None of them, so far, have announced any plans to give away the Russian blood money in their bank accounts.)

The notable thing about this indictment is that none of these right-wingers seemed especially hard to buy. None of them questioned why they were being asked to push pro-Putin content. None of them proved too principled to go along with the scheme. It raises the question: When it comes to the American right’s friendliness to Russia, how much is organic – born of Donald Trump’s love for right-wing dictators because he yearns to be one of them – and how much is astroturf – purchased by Russian rubles and amplified by conservative pundits who’ll say anything they’re told to say for money?

If anyone on the right has a conscience, the exposure of this plot should be an occasion for remorse and soul-searching. Whether knowingly or not, they were doing the bidding of a brutal foreign dictator. They were spreading propaganda to blind and confuse Americans, to turn us against each other and weaken our collective will to fight tyranny. They’re modern-day Moscow Roses. Just call them Putin’s rose garden.

However, I doubt they’ll be unduly bothered. Trump’s M.O. is to always deny, never admit fault, and double down whenever you’re caught, and that attitude has been adopted by his fans and followers. They’ve learned that the only sin in modern-day conservatism is to apologize. As long as you deny everything and keep yelling that the accusations against you are concocted by the deep state and the liberal media, there are legions of Trumpist true believers who’ll lap it up. This means that Putin’s cronies are sure to try again, and they’re likely to find many more receptive targets.

What kind of person moves to Russia?

Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square

[Previous: Uncle Vladimir wants you]

Vladimir Putin is encouraging Western conservatives to move to Russia to escape oppressive liberal values. He’s gone so far as to exempt them from immigration quotas and waive language tests that were previously required. The real question is how many people will take him up on that offer.

Notwithstanding enthusiasm from people like Alex Jones, I suspect the answer will be “not many”. Conservatives moving to Russia is like progressives moving to Canada. It’s something that a lot of them fantasize about, especially when an election doesn’t go their way, but few follow through on.

Here’s one who actually did it.

His name is Joseph Gleason. By his account, he was born in America, raised as a Protestant and became a pastor, then converted to the Eastern Orthodox church. In 2017, he moved to Russia with his wife and eight (!) children.

In an interview he republished on his Substack site, he explains why he took this drastic step:

In 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States of America upheld the “right” of all states to recognize same-sex “marriages”. Of course, the acceptance of homosexual behavior is the primary reason why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God. I believe that the foundation of any society and any nation is based on what people think about God, what they believe in, and how they feel about the institution of family. If these fundamental values — faith in God and family — are destroyed, then the whole country will come to destruction. I think that either America will repent of this monstrous sin, this idea of same-sex marriage, which destroys the family, or this country will be destroyed.

He sounds pretty confident about that. So here’s my question: what’s taking so long?

Same-sex marriage has been legal in the U.S. for almost ten years, and LGBT people have benefited from societal acceptance for longer than that. Massachusetts has had marriage equality since 2004, over twenty years now. Vermont has had same-sex civil unions since 2000, almost a quarter-century.

Where’s the brimstone? Why hasn’t God destroyed all these places yet, if he hates gays so much? Is he procrastinating? Is he asleep at the switch?

Here’s his list of reasons to move to Russia. There’s some normal-sounding stuff about how taxes are low, land is abundant and cheap, Russian culture is great… and then, in the middle of it, you come across this:

The GloboHomo LGBT Rainbow Mafia is not allowed to force their views down your throat here. Homosexual “marriages” are not permitted in Russia, nor are there any civil unions. LGBT propaganda for minors is illegal. And they are now working on putting a new law on the books, which will make LGBT propaganda illegal nationwide, regardless of age.

In a perverse way, you have to respect the bluntness of his bigotry. There’s no tiptoeing around the subject, no “hate the sin, love the sinner” evasions. He just says it flat out: LGBTQ people shouldn’t exist, they should have no rights, and it should be illegal for them to speak out, punishable by gulag or deportation. The law should favor his views and crush any opposing views.

Just in case you thought this profound homophobia was the only personality flaw in someone who’s otherwise a lovely person, here’s another of Gleason’s reasons to move to Russia:

You won’t get called a “racist” every five seconds. No riots. No “Black Lives Matter” marches. Lots of white people live here, and we aren’t aware of any particular reason we should be ashamed of it.

Obviously, Russia doesn’t have the same history of plantation slavery and Jim Crow segregation that America does. That doesn’t mean it’s free of racism.

On the contrary, racist attitudes are widely reported to be omnipresent. There’s widespread racism by ethnic Russians against migrants from Central Asian countries, as well as against foreign students from African countries. Immigrants in Russia report discrimination like “Slavs only” signs on apartment buildings. Russia has committed mass deportation so brutal, it’s been called a form of ethnic cleansing.

It’s safe to assume that Gleason hasn’t experienced this kind of treatment himself. Therefore, in his eyes, it doesn’t exist. Judging by his attitude toward Black Lives Matter – where his disdain is clearly for the marchers, and not for the racism they’re protesting – he doesn’t care what racism exists in his society, just as long as he doesn’t have to hear about it.

Here’s yet another of Gleason’s reasons to move:

There are gazillions of Orthodox churches and vibrant Orthodox Christian communities here. For example, in Rostov Veliky there are five monasteries, numerous churches, and zero mosques.

He doesn’t state the reason for this. Do mosques just happen to not exist near where he lives, or are they not allowed there? Is he concerned for religious freedom at all?

Last but not least, there’s this reason that should provoke bitter laughter at his shameless hypocrisy:

The American military industrial complex has no power here. No need to worry about the United States arriving on the doorstep to overthrow another national government.

Gleason felt no compunction about republishing this interview while Russia was waging an unprovoked war against its historically Orthodox Christian neighbor, Ukraine. The Russian invasion has included torture and mass slaughter of civilians, kidnapping of children, leveling cities with artillery barrages, and indiscriminate bombing of churches and cathedrals along with other civilian targets. It’s a level of brutality and callous destruction that American colonialism never reached, even at its harshest.

Most notable about his list is what’s not there. He admits that Russian bureaucracy can be slow and unpleasant to deal with, and that the Russian language is difficult to learn – but that’s it. He says nothing whatsoever about Russia’s lack of freedom, its oligarchical government, its corrupt and arbitrary law enforcement, or Putin’s habit of imprisoning protesters and murdering dissidents. It’s not listed, even euphemistically, in reasons not to move.

In summary, what kind of person moves to Russia? The answer is: a violently homophobic, white supremacist, Christian dominionist who decries American imperialism but cheerfully turns a blind eye to even more brutal and violent Russian imperialism. He doesn’t want to live in a free country where people have rights. He wants to live in a dictatorship, just one where he’s on the same side as the dictator. In Russia, that’s what he’s found.

New on OnlySky: When we abolished borders

I have a new piece of short fiction today on OnlySky. It looks forward to a future where declining birthrates and global warming have become serious problems for the industrialized world, and explores the obvious solution – abolishing borders so that people can move from climate-change-ravaged areas to cooler lands where labor is needed. It imagines what a post-border world might be like for those who live in it, both the positives and the negatives.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full story:

For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, our numbers as a species were declining every year. Capitalist economies premised on the assumption of infinite growth couldn’t cope. Stock markets stagnated, inflation surged out of control. Governments had belatedly tried to address the problem, but every means of encouraging people to have kids—longer parental leave, tax breaks, cash payments, religious scolding—had failed.

Rural villages were emptying out, becoming ghost towns. Grass and weeds pushed up through cracked pavement in silent streets. Abandoned cars decayed on the roadside. Vacant houses were overgrown with vines, dry leaves and birds’ nests. Trees sprouted like the vanguard of an invading army as forests spread and reclaimed the urban areas humanity had ceded.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

Pause for joy

When was the last time you were genuinely happy?

You may be a fortunate soul who has no trouble answering this question. You may have led a charmed existence free from trouble, or you may be a natural Zen master, who suffers like everyone else but lets those pains roll off leaving without a mark.

Or it may require some thought. You may have happy memories in the past, but they’ve grown misty with time. It may take an effort of will to recall them.

Or this may be a difficult question. Your life may be scarred by regret. You might strain to recall even an instant of joy.

Either way, I’d suggest that if your life is lacking, you schedule more happiness into it.

It sounds absurd, because you can’t conjure emotions into existence by willpower. But what you can do is create the conditions for happiness. If you put yourself in the right circumstances, the emotion often follows.

We all know this works in the opposite direction. If I’m tired or hungry or stressed, a minor inconvenience can put me in a bad mood. Our emotions are more dictated by circumstance than we might realize. You can use this to make yourself happier as well.

It doesn’t have to be a peak experience. It can be a simple thing that brings you joy: a party with music, a neighborhood cookout, a gathering with friends or family, a walk in nature, an afternoon in a coffee shop with a good book.

Only you can decide what holds meaning for you. But whatever it is, you should make a deliberate effort to have more of it in your life. Happiness will only come if you leave a space for it to show up.

Happiness is what we should be fighting for

In my view, happiness is the only thing a moral system can sensibly be based on. If you accuse me of being a utilitarian, I’ll gladly plead guilty to the charge.

The alternative to utilitarianism is a morality that’s based on either virtues or rules. You can hold up martial courage, or adherence to tradition, or obedience to duty, or honoring your elders, or religious faith, or any of a thousand other qualities as the supreme guiding principle of life.

However, those moral systems all fall short because they have no explanation for why we should prefer one rule, or one virtue, over a different one. Why tradition, rather than innovation? Why sobriety, rather than hedonism? Why the family rather than the state, or vice versa? Why one church rather than another? If there’s no answer to the “why”, all these choices are ultimately arbitrary.

By contrast, when happiness – or well-being, or flourishing, or whatever you choose to call it – is the key to your morality, you have a guide for how to choose among priorities. You go by what produces the best outcome for human beings, rather than maximizing some impersonal measure of goodness, like getting the high score in a video game.

That doesn’t mean morality is always easy. People can argue (and do, at length) over what the rules should be, when we should hold firm and when we should make exceptions. It will always be difficult to judge between mutually exclusive claims. But if we agree on what the goal is, and if we agree that arguments have to be based on evidence that everyone can see for themselves, it is possible to reach consensus. The expanding circle of moral progress across history testifies to this.

However, a utilitarian philosophy comes with an important asterisk. That’s that we have, in a sense, a duty to be happy. If happiness is the desired state for everyone, doesn’t that mean we should try to nurture it in our own lives?

A duty to be happy

In a society built on capitalism, it can be hard to make time for happiness. Our jobs tend to demand everything we’re able to give and then some. Even among those of us who don’t have bosses to report to, there’s the insidious “hustle culture” mentality that we should devote every waking moment to “productive” (read: money-making) pursuits.

There’s also a political angle to unhappiness. In my experience, where conservatives are prone to disastrous overconfidence, atheists and progressives are habitually gloomy and downbeat. That’s because we look at the world and imagine how it could be, and reality comes up short by comparison.

We dream of a world without violence, exploitation, or suffering. Yet those evils persist, and often it seems like they’re multiplying. We hope for change, but those hopes have so often been dashed – whether because the powers that be strangled reform in its cradle, or because people were kept divided and powerless by their worse impulses of bigotry, ignorance and greed.

When fascism and climate change are knocking at the door, it can seem like the only moral response is to redouble your activism. But if the struggle demands all we have, then leisure and happiness can seem like luxuries you can’t afford. At best, they seem like inexcusable selfishness; at worst, a betrayal of your comrades. Some leftists act as if we have a positive duty to be discontented, the better to motivate us toward rejecting the present order and creating a better one. When the world is so bad, how can you be happy, unless you don’t care?

However, I see a problem with this outlook. If we have it so bad, what about previous generations, who lived in even worse poverty with even fewer rights?

When should past generations have been happy?

What if you were born a medieval peasant, legally bound to a feudal lord, in a rigidly stratified society ruled by kings and churches? The common people in those times had none of the rights we take for granted, and starvation was rarely more than a bad harvest away. Or what if you were born into a Jewish family in that same era, when the entire Christian world was viciously antisemitic?

What if you were born a woman, in any of the patriarchal societies of the past and some that still exist today, that grant women far fewer rights and freedoms than men? Or what if you were a Black person in America in almost any era of the past – or for that matter, America today? (If you’re not American, you can substitute whatever minority is in disfavor in your country.)

What would we say to people born in those repressive, unenlightened times? Was it their duty to be miserable their entire lives, hoping that the far future would be better? Or did those generations have a right to find happiness where they could get it?

To my mind, any morality which claims that happiness is an unaffordable luxury isn’t worth advocating for. It’s a morality that, literally, offers us nothing. No one should be expected to sacrifice their entire life for the sake of others – not a capitalist ruling class, and not their descendants in the distant and uncertain future.

As much as struggle is necessary, you can’t build your entire life around it. We need to make room for joy.

We have to work, and we should fight for a better world. But life can’t be all duty and work and obligation. We also need time and space for ourselves. We need music and art, we need love and beauty, we need rest and celebration. Our lives should partake of all the colors in the palette.