Author: Andrew Sullivan

Noting that “an astounding 85 per cent of non-Hispanic blacks [identify] as Christian (Pew Report, 2007),” Dale DeBakcsy talks to Mandisa Lateefah Thomas, who founded Black Nonbelievers, Inc. in Atlanta in 2011:

As Thomas explains it, “Because of the historical role that religion and the church played in the black community, many tie in belief as being inherently part of black identity. Therefore, to be someone that doesn’t believe in God is to be considered a traitor. Most of our community – from the people to the leaders – incorporates belief in almost every aspect of their lives, and it is assumed (and sometimes expected) that we all do. So it can be extremely intimidating and stigmatising to openly admit to being a nonbeliever.”

But why does Christianity still have this allure after having been forcefully foisted so many centuries ago? “The historical aspect of Christianity’s influence in the community plays a huge role in why many blacks still believe. While it was used to justify slavery and was imposed on people of color, the church also served as a system for support at a time when legislation discriminated against blacks. So there is a strong loyalty, although the doctrine is very detrimental to growth and development.”

DeBakcsy, a humanist, believes programs like Black Nonbelievers, Inc. will help spread a secular message:

“We are in the process,” Thomas reveals, “of creating a program that will assist ex-convicts and at-risk youth develop professional skills which will help them find jobs and start their own businesses. We also want to intermittently help nonbelievers who need assistance if they lose jobs, or face financial challenges as a result of losing business or a loved one due to being a nonbeliever.” This is critically important work, not only for the cause of humanism, but for that of humanity. If they are successful in creating their support group for ex-cons and youths, it could go far to rewriting how the South interprets its sense of self. This is new ground for a secular group to tread there, and few areas of the nation need it more.

Listen to a recent interview with Thomas here. The long-running Dish thread, “Where Are All The Black Atheists?”, can be read here.

Reviewing David Bromwich’s The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, David Womersley raises the vexed question – familiar to any student of the British statesman – of his consistency:

A frequent emphasis in the radical ripostes published in the early 1790s to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, such as those written by Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine, is that Burke had no consistency as a political thinker. In the 1790s with his attacks on revolutionary France he had emerged as a defender of monarchy and the hereditary principle; but previously (as in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents) he had been acutely critical of the growing influence of the British Crown under Bute and George III. In the 1770s and 1780s Burke had been the advocate of the American colonists and had urged Britain towards policies of peace and conciliation, but in the 1790s he had become the unappeasable enemy of the French revolutionaries and the unflinching spokesman for a regicide war to be pursued à l’outrance. The passage of less than a decade had transformed (so it seemed to the radicals) the indignant champion of the Indians suffering under the despotic administration of the East India Company into an apologist for Europe’s ancien régime who had nothing but indifference for the hardships imposed on the French people by an absolute monarchy.

How Bromwich answers those charges:

Bromwich identifies two areas of important recurrent concern. The first is a nuanced formulation of the proper role of the people in the political life of a nation. As one might expect, it is a position tensed between two simpler, but more damaging, poles:

The people, says Burke, should not be trusted as advisers on policy or even necessarily as true reckoners of their interests in the short run, but they are always the best judges of their own oppression — so much so that we ought to fear any power on earth that sets itself above them.

The second is Burke’s undeviating commitment to justice. And it is in relation to the theme of justice that we encounter moments when Bromwich — himself a respected commentator on contemporary American politics — allows his exposition of the 18th-century British scene to resonate with our present discontents. Sometimes these connections with the present are introduced gently by way of an explanatory analogy, as in this helpful guidance about how to grasp Burke’s insistence that, in politics, the means must justify themselves, and that consequently means “always alter the character of the actor”:

Thus, if you justify the torture of suspects in order to assist a war against a wicked enemy, you will find that in doing so you have incorporated torture in your idea of justice.  You have come to an understanding with yourself, and the utmost savagery will be compatible with your nature thereafter.  You have become one of those who can acquit themselves of any wrong by appealing to a result in a plausible future.

(“Cincinnatus in Retirement” by James Gillray, 1782, a cartoon that caricatured Burke’s support of rights for Catholics, via Wikimedia Commons)

Stephen H. Webb criticizes John Updike’s biographer Adam Begley for not “getting to the heart of what he most cherished in his personal experiences” – especially the novelist’s attachment to Christianity:

The reason why critics as perceptive as Begley marginalize Updike’s religious faith has to do with the content of his theological convictions, not the lack of them. For Updike, writing was a religious act. He thought the best way to be a Christian and a writer was to try to be a very good writer (while, at the same time, avoiding any claim to being a good Christian). He reserved his deepest faith not for America but for the world as he saw it, on the theological assumption that the ordinary and everyday—the most mundane elements of human existence—are a gift from God. This strategy let him keep his most specifically Christian beliefs somewhat private, even as he never shied away from a public theology of praising God’s creation.

Webb – who notes he corresponded with Updike about the religious ideas in his novel Roger’s Version – goes on to unpack how the novelist was influenced by the great 20th century Protestant theologian Karl Barth:

Updike as a believer was saved by his reading of Barth, since he looked to him for “confirmation of the bad news about the human situation vis-à-vis ultimate reassurance.” As a writer, however, I am not so sure that Barth did him much good. There is a way of reading Barth that leads to a radical separation of faith from the world, so that the world, in all of its secularity, can be affirmed just as it is, without trying to impose a thick theological framework on it.

That is how Updike read Barth, but it is not how he read the world, since he was nearly medieval in his belief in the power of material objects to convey the sacred. Updike’s celebration of the everyday was not just rooted in a natural theology of the goodness of creation. It was also entangled in what I would call the metaphysics of a Eucharistic realism. He believed that material objects could be revelatory if given the proper words. Writing for Updike was a profoundly transubstantional act.

Recent Dish on Begley’s Updike biography here, here, and here. Check out a religion-related Updike short story here.

Nick Spencer claims that the emergence of modern atheism had less to do with “slow, steady scientific advance” than the disastrous collusion of religion and politics in early modern Europe:

“Science”—if we can treat that collection of disparate disciplines as one single, coherent enterprise—did have something to do with the growth of atheism in the West, but very much less than most imagine. Those three great moments of scientific progress—the Copernican revolution in the 16th century, the scientific revolution in the 17th and the Darwinian in the 19th—were hardly atheistic at all. Copernicus was a priest; Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, devout; and Charles Darwin incredulous that anyone could imagine evolution demanded godlessness. “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist,” he wrote in 1879.

In reality, the growth of atheism in Europe and America has much more to do with politics and, in particular, ecclesiastically backed politics, than it has with science, something that is clear even from its earliest days… Europe’s first public atheists were driven from mere scepticism and anti-clericalism to full-blown unbelief not by reason or scientific progress but primarily by a venal and violent theo-political settlement.

Which is one reason why, he goes on to argue, that only about 2% of Americans identify as atheists:

If atheism were a function of science and progress, then surely America, from the late 19th century the world’s most self-consciously modern and scientific nation, would become its atheistic capital. It didn’t—for reasons that go back to its founding.

Christianity was, of course, in the blood of the country’s first Anglophone settlers, but just as important was the fact that many American clergy enthusiastically supported the revolution. They described it as a just war and Christianity became associated with the people’s political emancipation, in a way that it did only partially in Britain, and not at all in France.

At the same time, the nation’s new constitution did not refer to God (beyond the reference to the Year of our Lord in Article VII), precluded any religious test from becoming a requirement for office, and, most famously, in its First Amendment, legislated against Congress making any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” … This could be construed as de facto godlessness—indeed it was and is—but in reality it ended up being the nation’s strongest bulwark against atheism, denying the church the temporal power that had done it so much harm in Europe and effectively draining the wells of moral indignation on which atheists drew.

Lauren Ely portrays the Irish director John Michael McDonagh’s new film, Calvary, as capturing “the horror of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church while at the same time presenting a case for the necessity of the institutional priesthood.” The plot centers on a threat to kill the main character, Fr. James, made during confession by a parishioner who was raped by a now dead priest as a child:

What follows is a surprisingly complex, if imperfectly executed, meditation on the nature of sin and mercy, set in the epicenter of the sexual abuse scandal. We are introduced one by one to Fr. James’s parishioners, each with their own set of problems including drug use, adultery, and prostitution to name only a few. Their attitudes toward the parish priest range from begrudging respect to apathy to outright contempt. Every hackneyed anti-Church saying one can think of is used by the townspeople as a taunt against Fr. James: that the Church is only out for money, that priests are control freaks, that Catholicism has no good answer for the problem of evil. By contrast we see Fr. James doing the hard, daily work of the priest with dogged fidelity as he counsels prisoners, administers last rites in the middle of the night, and comforts a young widow. The film paints very clearly the life of the priest in stark relief to the world’s perception of what a priest is, all while allowing Fr. James to retain his spirited, gruff, flawed humanity.

S. Brent Plate sees the film grappling both with the abuse perpetrated by the Church and “what occurs in the wake of that abuse” – that is, what happens to a society when an institution like the Church collapses:

Calvary depicts a land freeing itself from the constraints of the church, from the ethics of obedience to commandments, from the compulsions of hell. Father James dwells among them, though retains little authority, like the church itself. He still hands out Communion to those who come, but the parish is hollowed out. When the church building burns down Father James is upset, even if no one seems surprised. The church itself becomes the sacrifice that allows society to live on. But at what cost is not clear.

The alternatives to the ethical and spiritual influence of religion are not all they are cracked up to be. The smart and rational-minded fritter life away with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The commoners don’t appear to have the sense to make sense. The rich piss it away. The sensitive become self-destructive to the point of suicide. While under the shadow of a corrupt church, Calvary ultimately questions the integrity and sustainability of a secular world. The final scene repeats the opening scene, even as it inverts it. The secular confessional seems dim by comparison.

In an interview, McDonagh and Brendan Gleeson, who plays Fr. James, discussed that issue as well:

BG: For a while there, the Celtic Tiger was bling. It was quite vacuous, and not very nice to witness, to be honest. There was a kind of vacuousness as to what people were substituting for spirituality. It’s still an open question. People are coming around to perhaps understanding that they have a responsibility to contribute to the answer. That they can’t just expect to be led all the time, that they have to contribute to a positive viewpoint and get constructive about the way they intend to live their lives.

JMM: And I think what we’re saying now is, after all the crashes and all the scandals, is that I don’t think it’s led to a complete negativity. I think there are more and more people seeking [something], whether it’s a spiritual meaning or a political meaning to their lives. Sometimes you have to have a great depression, but other, more positive values can come out of that. Sometimes you have to be at the lowest ebb for things to get better.

Jonardon Ganeri discusses (NYT) how, in Hinduism, “a personal God does not figure prominently as the source of the idea of the divine, and instead non-theistic concepts of the divine prevail”:

One such concept sees the text of the Veda as itself divine. … Recitation of the text is itself a religious act. Another Hindu conception of the divine is that it is the essential reality in comparison to which all else is only concealing appearance. This is the concept one finds in the Upanishads. Philosophically the most important claim the Upanishads make is that the essence of each person is also the essence of all things’; the human self and brahman (the essential reality) are the same.

This identity claim leads to a third conception of the divine: that inwardness or interiority or subjectivity is itself a kind of divinity. On this view, religious practice is contemplative, taking time to turn one’s gaze inwards to find one’s real self; but — and this point is often missed — there is something strongly anti-individualistic in this practice of inwardness, since the deep self one discovers is the same self for all.

Ganeri also emphasizes the religion’s “long heritage of tolerance of dissent and difference” – a heritage he attributes, in part, to Hinduism’s approach to religious texts:

One explanation of this tolerance of difference is that religious texts are often not viewed as making truth claims, which might then easily contradict one another. Instead, they are seen as devices through which one achieves self transformation. Reading a religious text, taking it to heart, appreciating it, is a transformative experience, and in the transformed state one might well become aware that the claims of the text would, were they taken literally, be false. So religious texts are seen in Hinduism as “Trojan texts” (like the Trojan horse, but breaking through mental walls in disguise). Such texts enter the mind of the reader and help constitute the self. The Hindu attitude to the Bible or the Quran is the same, meaning that the sorts of disagreements that arise from literalist readings of the texts tend not to arise.

(Image: Rigveda manuscript in Devanagari, early 19th century, via Wikimedia Commons)