If I have a complaint about George Scialabba's What Are Intellectuals Good For? it is the constant repetition throughout various essays that religious belief is no longer a tenable, intellectually viable alternative in the west. While I understand the reality that much of western Europe has been de-Christianized, and the United States is increasingly less religious than a generation or two ago, I believe this confuses two very different things - one is social secularism and the other is personal, and even communal, agnosticism or atheism. With religious belief ne of the driving forces behind so much of the social and political conflict in our world, the repeated invocation that religious belief itself is some kind of anachronistic, intellectually void area leaves me thinking that self-satisfied and self-declared intellectual elites like George must believe that those who hold to some kind of religious belief are the benighted, intellectually incoherent crowd who haven't heard that God, like the tooth fairy, is an illusion best left behind as we as a species mature.
The persistence of religious belief is, perhaps, the most unremarked upon phenomenon of our time. While militant atheists publish near-best-sellers declaring the tattered remnants of the faithful to be incoherent, even socially and politically dangerous, and the beliefs themselves to be nonsensical, millions and even billions around the world pay them no heed whatsoever, and carry on their lives as if the question of intellectual coherence and moral confusion were of little interest to them. Whether it's Muslims in Indonesia and Malaysia, Roman Catholics and Muslims in the Philippines, Pentecostals across Africa, Seventh-Day Adventists in South America, snake-handlers in the deep woods of Appalachia, animists in most Chinese villages, or whatever, religion persists.
Yet, the conceit among intellectuals that (a) they understand religious belief better than believers, and are (b) capable of rejecting it far more easily has led to a third unchallenged assumption among our late-modern intellectuals - (c) this rejection of religious belief allows them to see and think about the world far more clearly than those who have not done so. Yet, I would ask: if this is so, why don't you see that billions of your fellow human beings not only don't agree with you, but find your insistence that religious belief is no longer a live, viable, human option not just insulting but really kind of silly?
Part of the confusion, I believe, lies in missing an important distinction. On the one hand, many western societies have become far more secular in their official position regarding matters of state. While many western European nations remain officially religious - they have a state-sanctioned church, and regulate religious practice, going so far as, for example, Germany, in which clergy are state employees - in day-to-day reality, the de-Christianizing of their societies (go to any European country on Sunday and check out church attendance; you'll find more people in pubs on Sunday morning than in church) has led to a hands-off approach to religious matters. In the United States, one of the great benefits of the separation of church and state in an official capacity has been the on-going liveliness of our national religious life, yet even here, where even the most convinced political liberal has to make some kind of obeisance to our demand our political leaders have some kind of religious belief, we are increasingly less religious in practice. The golf course, beach, and ski resort are the places we spend our Sunday mornings (or in bed, or sitting around and watching television, the real high priest of our society). Increasingly secular in our social life, the language of religious faith less familiar than a generation ago, our common western heritage gives to religious life a place. This place, however, is far more peripheral to our official view of ourselves than in the past.
The realities of becoming less capable of speaking a common religious vocabulary and the increasing social secularization are not, however, demonstrative of the demise of religious belief as a powerful force, either in our own societies or the world at large. At best, they are part of the larger fracturing of any kind of common vocabulary, common to a diverse, pluralist society. Ours in America has always been a minimalist public vocabulary, rooted in the Constitution and our burgeoning democratic sense (this was first noted by de Tocqueville). The realization that we can speak of religious belief less and less is part of the marginalization of most common vocabularies rather than the demise of religious belief.
Yet, this would seem to contradict my earlier assertion that ours is an increasingly de-Christianized society. I believe, however, that most Americans would profess some kind of belief, in a vague, generalized sense, in some kind of generic God. They would also, I believe, insist that such belief is a necessary part of human life, both personal and communal (in nine days, check out the parking lots at various churches as communities gather for Christmas Eve services if you don't believe me).
This contrasts with the kind of atheism espoused by Scialabba. While less militant than that of, say, Richard Dawkins, it is no less insistent that religious belief is, as George himself says quoting the godfather of western Enlightenment Immanuel Kant, part of our self-imposed social and cultural minority. My problem with quoting Kant in this context, however, is that Kant was a devout Christian, after a fashion. While his expression of belief, given in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone is hardly "orthodox" by any stretch of any definition of that particular word, Kant, the son of an 18th-century evangelical pastor who spent his entire life under the roof of his parents, would hardly insist that part of true Enlightenment is tossing off the shackles of religious belief. He might insist we clarify what kind of religion we profess; for Kant, it was a highly individualized profession, centered in an ethical commitment to our innate moral sense that, he insisted, was the divine spark within us. While later Enlightenment figures in Germany and elsewhere would seek to distance themselves from any profession of religious belief at all - Nietzsche, too, was the child of a Lutheran minister, it should be recalled - to quote Kant in this way is disingenuous.
Skipping forward to our own time, the reality that our public life is dominated by issues and events rooted in various kinds of religious belief is undeniable. Yet, far too many commentators seem unwilling, or unable, to grant this reality, or at any rate to discuss it in an intelligent manner. Even the website GetReligion.org, dedicated as it is to fleshing out half-assed religious journalism, doesn't always get to the heart of the matter as it explores various questions and issues and even quotes before us. It would be nice, to be sure, if journalists whose job it is to make sense of various events, could be a little more interested in the relationships among religious belief, religious practice, and public events from the profound to the horrific. Yet, again, this inability on the part of journalists is less evidence of the efficacy of religious belief and simply more evidence of the fracturing of a common vocabulary on any number of topics.
Directly, I think the insistence that religion as a viable human personal and collective option is no longer sustainable, either intellectually or existentially, is demonstrably false. Look around the world, or even one's own community. Indirectly, I believe its repetition, while certainly heartening to the person who holds that view, is evidence that, despite his or her best intentions, it just can't be sustained in the wake of massive evidence to the contrary. While it might be an overall social benefit for religious beliefs of all sorts to just fade away (yet, I'm not sure how that argument makes any sense, considering that officially atheist societies have been, in the previous century, the perpetrators of the most horrific acts of cruelty against their own and other populations), I see no evidence whatsoever that this is going to happen any time soon. Refusing to grasp that fundamental reality, self-declared intellectuals sideline themselves, in many ways, from serious, on-going discussions of public import. While this may give them a sense of their own heroic advantage to we benighted few who still profess some kind of belief in this or that religious tradition, it makes what they say less relevant, and less intellectually honest than it might otherwise be.
Virtual Tin Cup
