Category: Faith

A reader writes:

I am learning a lot from your dialogue with Sam Harris. I am a particle physicist, and one thing I know is that our whole edifice is built on faith.  Faith that it all makes sense (and will make better sense once we figure out how gravity comes into the picture …)

At the base of it is faith about the nature of the universe.  That it makes sense, and we were meant to understand it.

In the beginning was logos.

Emails don’t resonate any more deeply than this one:

When I first started reading your blog I was immediately touched by your open struggle to find a welcoming home within the Catholic church. For years now I have been in a faith journey and now points to my becoming a Catholic. My mind still reels at this possibility, but my heart and soul confirm the inexplicable rightness of it. By sharing your own struggles, by loving a church that often has not loved you back, you have helped me understand what a living faith requires of us if we are to live with any integrity. The Church needs us, our hopes, our doubts, our willingness to ask hard questions and not run away, to not give in to the oh-so-easy stupefaction of modernity’s worse preoccupations.

I add that one of my mentors in this journey is a gay, African American Catholic, who, like you, decided to stay within the Church and stand his ground as best he can. I still have a ways to go, but I vow that on the day of my baptism I will bear witness to the world that gay Catholics were significant shepherds who helped bring me home, at long last, after so many years of wandering.

Scott Horton pens a poignant rumination on the great Muslim poet, Rumi, and what he says to us today:

On this point, Rumi, Boccaccio and Lessing ‚Äì the Muslim, the Catholic, and the Protestant who launched the drive for the emancipation of Europe’s Jews – see things very much eye-to-eye. But their message is a vital one for our day. We live in an age in which thoughts of crusaders and caliphates have been resurrected for shameful and blood-drenched purposes. This must be overcome with urgency.

So for the New Year, I wish what Rumi wishes ‚Äì not a rejection of faith, but a faith more profound, based on tolerance, compassion and respect for the ties that bind humankind. I wish that the land where Rumi once walked ‚Äì from his native city of Balkh in Afghanistan to his final home in Anatolian Konya – would know his thoughts and hopes again, and the peace that they promise. But I wish the same thing for my fellow citizens at home in the United States, where the poison of religious bigotry seeps ever closer to the groundwater. I hope we all can find that way "between voice and presence" of which Rumi writes. We need it badly. "With disciplined silence it opens/ With wandering talk it closes." So here’s a resolve for the New Year: Let us find the tools to keep that window open. There is nothing that humanity requires more urgently than this.

I couldn’t agree more.

I am grateful for David Brooks’ thoughtful review of my book. But I do want to take serious issue with a couple of arguments he makes. The first is the following:

When a writer uses quotations from Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and the Left Behind series to capture the religious and political currents in modern America, then I know I can put that piece of writing down because the author either doesn’t know what he is talking about or is arguing in bad faith.

If by that, Brooks means that the scope and scale of American Christianity encompasses far more than these three things, then of course he’s right. That’s why an entire chapter of my book – a chapter he simply ignores – is devoted to conservative, Catholic arguments about life, death and sex. And many evangelicals, as I also take pains to point out in the book, are subtler than their leaders, especially the more politicized ones. Here’s a direct quote from Chapter Two:

It is too broad a brush to describe all fundamentalist Catholics and Protestants this way, let alone most non-fundamentalist Catholics and Protestants. Many have adopted much more open ways of discussing their human failings, and the most successful have put practical counseling to deal with human problems at the core of their ministry. The success of books like Rick Warren’s "The Purpose-Driven Life" is based on his candid and humane acknowledgment that many Christians experience drift, bewilderment and self-doubt. James Dobson’s folksy homilies on how to rear children fall into the same category. Similarly, many contemporary Catholic priests offer compassionate, pastoral care for their flawed flocks; and have learned to subject themselves to careful moral scrutiny.

Does that sound like I’m describing even all fundamentalists as Christianists, as Brooks implies? I’m even giving Dobson credit when he sticks to faith, not politics. But the notion that Falwell’s past, Dobson’s current political clout and the "Left Behind" series’ success do not capture something important about "the religious and political currents in modern America" today is preposterous. For David to deny this says much more about his blindspots than about America.

Falwell may indeed no longer be a central figure in American Christianism. But he was a critical early force in building the movement that now runs the GOP, along with Pat Robertson. You cannot narrate the emergence of the new Republicanism (in which Brooks played a part), as I do in the book, without mentioning Goldwater’s nemesis. As for Dobson, his influence is indisputably enormous. Last year, Dobson’s group spent $150 million on spreading its message. Dobson’s estimated listening radio audience is in the tens of millions a day (some claim 200 million), and his multi-media complex in Colorado Springs is so vast it has its own zip-code. The president vets Supreme Court nominees through him. This is irrelevant to what has happened to conservatism in the last decade? Please.

As for the "Left Behind" series of books, the data also speak for themselves. Money quote from USA Today:

Since an initial printing of 35,000 copies, nearly 8 million of the original Left Behind have sold, as well as 62 million copies of related titles. The last six books in the series made their debut at No. 1 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list, a David and Goliath-like feat for a series that didn’t make a significant dent in mainstream stores until 1998 … In 2002, Jenkins and LaHaye joined Tom Clancy, John Grisham and J.K. Rowling as the only authors who have first printings of 2 million copies or more.

The books don’t do nearly as well abroad, because they speak to the particular dynamics of American evangelicalism, especially the popular notion of the Pre-Tribulation Rapture that has rapidly spread in the last five years – especially after 9/11. For good measure, author Tim LaHaye’s wife founded Concerned Women for America, a powerful Christianist lobby group with half a million members. Is Brooks saying that my citing this mass phenomenon means I knows nothing about American religion and politics today or that I am arguing in bad faith? If he is, his dismissal is a function of his own denial, not analysis.

A brush with death gave David Kuo the strength to tell the truth to power:

At the meeting’s end, several of the pastors said they wanted to pray for my healing [from a brain tumor]. They placed their hands on my shoulder and called on God to hear their prayers on my behalf. I listened and loved it and said a prayer of my own: that I would have the courage to tell them what was really going on at the White House.

That was more than three years ago. Their prayers have worked on my body. I am still here and very much alive. Now I am finding the courage to speak out about God and politics and their dangerous dance. George W. Bush, the man, is a person of profound faith and deep compassion for those who suffer. But President George W. Bush is a politician and is ultimately no different from any other politician, content to use religion for electoral gain more than for good works. Millions of Evangelicals may share Bush’s faith, but they would protect themselves – and their interests – better if they looked at him through the same coldly political lens with which he views them.

(White House photo.)

I can only commend the Pope’s latest homily on the great philosophical question of our day: the relationship between faith and reason, as it has unfolded in human history. I need more time to digest it, but its clarity and openness are welcome. I just finished reading "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris, and found much in it that stimulated and engaged and even inspired. On the dangers of an anti-rational fundamentalism in religion, I recommend the book heartily. But it is, I’m afraid, too glibly dismissive of "the whole" to be persuasive, too deaf to the myriad ways in which faith can interact and be strengthened by what the Pope calls "logos", the word, reason itself. This reasoned faith, in order to exist, must include doubt and skepticism and the earnest search for truth, which, in turn, must necessarily never conflict with God. Doubt is not an obstacle to faith; it is necessary for faith to exist at all.

Benedict’s message about faith and reason is a deep and complicated one, and necessarily compressed in the homily. But this passage struck me as particularly profound, and it concerns Benedict’s deep distrust of the Enlightenment:

[T]he fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.

This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: We are all grateful for the marvelous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity.

The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them.

I wish Benedict spoke in this conciliatory and open tone more often. And that he would concede that on some deep issues, like end- and beginning-of-life debates, other voices than the absolutist one he has embraced have things to contribute. The same, of course, with human sexuality.

But Benedict is pointing the way to a more positive dialogue between the reason of science and the reason of faith:

We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

The rationality of faith: now there’s a concept we need to breathe new life into in a world where religion is too often described as an irrational leap or "submisson" to an illogical God.

A reader writes:

I’m entertained by the theory that Cheney and Rumsfeld meant for the war to go this way. Depending on which bad mood I’m in, I’ll now vacillate between this and the incompetence theory. Both work for me. I’m probably still more convinced by the incompetence theory, but not because I believe they’re stupid. They’re not. But they have approached their political theory the same way they have been taught to approach their religious faith: unquestioningly. Once this theory of the domino-effect/wildfire blaze of the spread of democracy/beneficent contagion of western values/etc became ingrained in their own heads, they’ve asked their supporters, just as the great revivalists and zealots of the past and present have, to accept as gospel the righteousness of their mission, the infallibility of the logic, and pre-ordained superiority of the outcome.

I think their incompetence is triggered by a zealous need to believe that their theory is so righteous as to be unassailable. To alter it, or to adjust to circumstances is to be unfaithful. It’s the same godlike worship of the free market, as though that was also some directive from On High. There are similar examples of unquestioned reverence on the left, but I see too many parallels between GWB’s religious faith (I am a Christian too, I should say) and his faith in his more secular principles. I think he sees no distinction. I think the same of Cheney and Rumsfeld. I believe that this is the source of their incompetence, and is indeed the very thing that hamstrings lots of smart and faithful people:  the inability to reconcile one’s heart and mind.

I’m also intrigued by this aspect of what the second chapter of my upcoming book calls the "fundamentalist psyche." I don’t think you can understand the actions of this administration – i.e. make them make internal sense – without understanding the depth of the president’s fundamentalist mindset. He’s a fundamentalist convert and an alcoholic. Faith is the one thing that rescued him from a life of chaos. So fundamentalist faith itself – regardless of its content – is integral to his entire worldview. And fundamentalism cannot question; it is not empirical; it is the antithesis of skepticism. Hence this allegedly "conservative" president attacking conservatism at its philosophical core: its commitment to freedom, to doubt, to constitutional process, to prudence, to limited government, balanced budgets and the rule of law. Faith is to the new conservatism is what ideology was to the old leftism: an unquestioned orthodoxy from which all policy flows.

Cheney and Rumsfeld, however, do not strike me as the same. They’re just bureaucratic brutalists, thrilled to have complete sanction to do as they please because they have the mandate from the leader-of-faith. Bush and Rove provide the fundamentalist voters; Cheney and Rummy get on with the war they want to wage. If they have to condescend to Bush’s recently discovered faith in democratization, they’ll humor him, while they bomb, wiretap and torture along what they think is the only path to security. They are enabled by the Christianist; but they’re just plain old "bomb ’em to the stone-age" reactionaries.

Here’s Hugh Hewitt’s creed:

"I do believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Gonzales and Ashcroft have run the global war on terror about as well as it could have been run, and their commitment to its prosecution has been unyielding. I admire their courage and their consistency.  This presidency is already among the most significant of our nation’s history, and like Reagan’s, will be admired for generations long after the Bush haters have been forgotten."

He can see no flaws in the war strategy as run by this administration. The secretary of state may have confessed to "thousands of errors" – but not Hugh. Then he accuses yours truly of being an anti-Christian bigot and a Bush-hater. I am a Christian myself and find the notion that I am an anti-Christian bigot deeply offensive. Readers of this blog also know that while I am extraordinarily angry at the incompetent recklessness that has characterized this presidency, I find it impossible not to like the president personally. Except when his cruel streak emerges – laughing at women on death-row, endorsing torture, telling Islamists to "bring it on" against U.S. troops, for example – he seems like an amiable fellow, if completely out of his depth. This realization came too late for me. I once lionized the guy in the wake of 9/11, letting my fear and hope overcome my skepticism and better judgment. To equate me with haters like Michael Moore is preposterous. I gave this administration every single benefit of every doubt until it became impossible not to acknowledge their dangerous incompetence.

But Hewitt says something else about my use of the term "Christianist." He writes the following:

"Sullivan’s "christianist" rhetoric, like a great deal of other similar rhetoric, is deeply offensive, and is in fact hate speech, designed not to describe but to incite, specifically to incite an emotional, irrational hatred of the person(s) to whom it is applied. Sullivan has never defined the term, but its accordian-like quality allows it to expand to take in Roman Catholic-turned-Presbyterian, Arlen Specter-supporting big tent Republican me." [my italics]

Hewitt is not telling the truth. I have defined the term very carefully and very often. My most thorough attempt was in a very widely-disseminated Time essay, which Hewitt read. You can read it here. Money quote:

Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

I have also repeatedly and carefully defined it on my blog – here, here, and here, for a few recent examples. Hewitt needs to issue a factual correction. He won’t, I’ll wager (and I’ll link if he does). Like most fanatics, if the truth contradicts him, he simply reasserts more forcefully his own dogma. Like George "we do not torture" Bush, Dick "last throes" Cheney and Don "stuff happens" Rumsfeld on Iraq. But saying something does not make it so, as any sane person must now concede. A lie is a lie is a lie.

I should add that Hewitt still refuses to acknowledge or account for his own role in credentializing, supporting and using for political purposes the work of fanatical anti-Semite Mel Gibson. Again, his inability to cop to even basic moral and intellectual responsibility is a feature of the very Christianism I have tried to sketch. He still insists that "The Passion" is not an anti-Semitic movie, but does not make an actual argument against the many Christian and Jewish scholars who see in it deep tropes of medieval Jew-hatred, perhaps invisible to a contemporary Christian. Hewitt backed the movie for political reasons. If abetting anti-Semitism (or homophobia, for that matter) can achieve the party’s aims, then so be it. As he once used as the very slogan of his site "The Power of the Democrats Must Be Destroyed." It’s the one coherent thread in everything he writes. It is his true faith.

A reader writes:

"I respect Sam Harris, but he is dangerously off base here on Islam. No basis for a pluralistic wordview? Come on. He needs to visit Turkey. He will find at least 50 million people who must have done "some seriously acrobatic theology to get an Islam that is compatible with 21st century civil society." Or go to Indonesia, there’s another 100 million there. Or how about Southern India, where Islam and Hinduism peacefully coexist with Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism and Zoroasterism?  How’s that for plurality? In Hyderabad, I saw many Muslim women in their black chadras casually gossipping and laughing with their Sari-clad Hindu friends. I saw this scene far too many times to believe that Muslims are incapable of religious pluralism. And how does Mr. Harris account for the fact the Mogul emperors ruled India for about 400 years without imposing their Islam on the majority Hindu poplulace?  I would say the Moguls were the world’s greatest example of a religiously pluralistic government, not a product of an inherently intolerant religion.
Of course, the Wahabis are dangerous fanatics, and they are widely prevelant in Afghanistan. But we would make a grave miscalculation if we assumed that all Muslims share the intolerance of the Wahhabbi. Sam’s attitude that we must change Islam is wrong. Most Muslims are perfectly harmless and even enjoyable company. We really need to defeat the Wahhabi strain of Islam, which is something most Muslims would be happy to see."

I haven’t read Harris’ book, but I hope to after I’ve finished my own (nearly there). My own view is more in line with the reader’s. What Harris doesn’t grasp sufficiently, perhaps, is the variation within all religion. There is an absolutist, fundamentalist, authoritarian tendency in all monotheisms. Right now, that tendency is ascendant in all the major faiths – but it has become particularly dangerous in Islam. The problem is not religion as such, or faith as such. The problem is fundamentalism, and its certitude. There is another kind of religious faith – more rooted in doubt, more subject to humility in front of the ineffability of an ultimately unknowable God, less abstract, more sacramental. That kind of religion, which sees the different faith of others as an invitation rather than a threat, is compatible with liberal democracy. And it’s that faith we have to recover and reinvigorate if we are to combat the excesses of both Islamic and Christian fundamentalists, and their political ambitions.

A reader writes:

Thank you so much for your recent writings about the importance of applying the principle of religious freedom to atheists (like myself), as well as followers of all religions. 
I’m a staunch liberal (raised in Lexington, MA), but have been a surprised fan of yours since October of 2004, when I saw you come close to losing it on Real Time with Bill Maher, while discussing the lack of respect that the liberal ‘elite’ often show toward the faithful.  Now I can see that you are similarly chagrined that atheists like myself are being treated with increasingly open derision in our society.  It‚Äôs amazing!  Unlike what I used to think of as a ‘typical conservative,’ you seem to operate within a fairly logical set of principles that don’t change based on whether or not a specific outcome will be to your own personal advantage.  Why can’t there be more like you?
I don’t believe in God, and I spent a lot of time studying and thinking about the subject before I came to that conclusion.  Perhaps as a result of all that studying, I don‚Äôt ever look at the religious with distrust or disrespect simply because of their beliefs (unless they’re Scientologists ‚Äì ha!).  However, I have started worrying in recent years that I will eventually be forced to pretend to believe, and that‚Äôs a horrifying prospect. I’m ironically glad that you are also horrified.

All I can say is that my own flawed faith-journey would not have been the same without entertaining the possibility of no God at all. Contemplating atheism, in other words, can be an integral part of believing in the God of the New Testament. Similarly, others arrive at Christianity or other faiths only by wandering for a while in atheist or agnostic territory. I cannot say the atheist temptation has ever been very strong in me, although reading Nietzsche in graduate school was a terrifying experience. For most of my life, I have found it impossible not to believe that something we call God exists. When I went through a time of thinking I would not live past my thirties, my main doubt was not that God did not exist, but that he was evil. I actually did have an epiphany of sorts over that issue, and I wrote about it in my book, "Love Undetectable." My respect for atheism mainly emerged by reading Albert Camus. "The Plague" remains, for me, a great testimony to the integrity of faith and unfaith in the presence of evil. I have come to respect both, and sometimes I find it particularly heartening to be involved in some cause where Christians and atheists can unite: such as fighting the tyrannical and blasphemous pretensions of theocracy.