Category: Faith

Ross takes a swipe that deserves unpacking a little. His argument is weak, which is why, I suppose, he feels the need to grace it with a whiff of nativism:

Andrew misunderstands American history, American religion, and the intersection thereof, and how he’s trying apply a continental model of faith and politics to a context where that model has never applied, and so and so forth.

Please. If someone thinks I’m wrong about a country I wasn’t born in but have lived in my entire adult life, then please say why I’m wrong. Don’t play the "you weren’t born here" card, however guilefully. Ross’s beef was with my concern with Sam Brownback’s recitation of the Mother Teresa line "All for Jesus! All for Jesus! All for Jesus!" as part of his primary stump speech. You can see it above. For Ross, this kind of appeal is fine in American politics. I disagree. Now, of course, American political rhetoric has been much more saturated with religious imagery and idiom than British or much European discourse since the Enlightenment (though not before). Some of this, as the theocons keep reminding us, has been to the good – the abolitionist and the civil rights movements spring to mind. What they’re less likely to say is that the institutional core of today’s Christianism was on the wrong side of those struggles (SBC anyone?) and that abolitionism and the civil rights movement emerged to undo the Christianist impulse to enslave, torture and then segregate a race that God had allegedly set apart. Moreover, much of the rest of Christianist campaigning over the centuries has also been for the bad – Prohibition, anti-miscegenation laws, vicious persecution of homosexuals, etc. The difference between the good and the bad in Christianism is that the good was also often framed in terms of secular, non-sectarian arguments (as MLK took pains to do), while the bad, having much less logic to stand on, was more reliant on pure Biblical authority. The more explicitly Christianist you get, in other words, the greater the likelihood of abuse to human dignity and individual freedom.

The notion that this kind of politics has no victims, has not led to evil, has not at times led to absolute insanity (like Prohibition), and is not still a constant threat – is preposterously complacent.

It is as preposterous as the notion that the dangers of religion in politics apply "a continental model of faith and politics to a context where that model has never applied." As Ross surely understands, the political-theological question knows no boundaries in human life or history. And it knows no final settlement. The notion that this tension somehow doesn’t apply to America is ahistorical, or a form of religious faith in itself. Look at the Brownback video. Notice the crowd’s response to his rallying cry in a political setting. Even a child is clapping. The words "All for Jesus!" were in fact a political and partisan rallying cry in a major election event. The audience members completely conflated the struggle for their souls with not just politics but a particular party in politics. Once this happens, once it is acquiesced in, once it becomes normal, the immense power of religion and its unequaled capacity to change society and politics is unleashed in unpredictable and dangerous ways. If you doubt that, look at Iraq. Or read your seventeenth century European history. The core achievement of the modern West – its success in changing the subject in politics from the eternal to the mundane – is threatened. It is just as threatened by a statement at a political event by a corrupt and petty Majority leader, Tom DeLay:

"The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will … It is for us then to do as our heroes have always done and put our faith in the perfect redeeming love of Jesus Christ."

So vote Republican.

America’s great, great advantage over Europe, of course, is its Constitution. This deeply conservative bulwark against theocratic impulses has managed to keep the threat of theocracy at bay. Even so, even within the constitution, the damage has often been great in American history. It was particularly great during the first term of the Bush administration, where office and policy were placed in trust to the phalanx of voters whose primary criterion for political judgment was sectarian. It’s also no accident that Christianists seek to amend the Constitution as often as they can, to ensure that their religion trumps others’ freedom. Brownback wants to amend the Constitution on the abortion question and the gay marriage question. The founders, mercifully, have won again. But they lost over Prohibition, didn’t they? And the attempt by the GOP to remove the Supreme Court from any rigorous defense of minority rights and freedom is part of a conscious strategy to make future Prohibitions more feasible. This is Hewitt’s "Constitutional majoritarianism." It can also be called the tyranny of the majority.

But the rhetoric poisons nonetheless. How can an atheist American respond in civil discourse to a politics based on revelation? Or a Muslim to a politics based on Jesus? And how can we restrain the eschatological and utopian strains within Christianism that threaten to turn all politics into cultural warfare and therefore all discourse into religious bragging? How, above all, can we tackle our greatest enemy – Islamism – while supporting a similar, if weaker, conflation of religion and politics at home?

I don’t believe America is on the verge of theocracy. I don’t believe that Christianism can be put in the same category as Islamism in terms of its threat to the West. If you read my book, this is clear. But Christianism comes from within, draws strength from currents within the West itself, and is a subtler, more insidious threat to Western freedom and constitutionalism. The manners of our politics matter. I see no reason for complacency, and when I see a speech like Brownback’s, a man who is completely unashamed to base his entire political thought on religious doctrine, I worry. To quote Mark Lilla’s splendidly lucid forthcoming book on the theologico-political problem, "The Stillborn God,"

The river separating political philosophy and political theology is narrow and deep; those who try to ride the  waters will be swept away by spiritual forces beyond their control.

Ross doesn’t understand this about religion or politics. He needs to get a life-raft.

Here’s a painfully honest first-person account of a man’s journey into faith, then into the religion beat at the Los Angeles Times and then a series of gruesome encounters with the awful reality behind many religious institutions. Yes, he lost his faith as a religion reporter. The Catholic Church’s sex abuse crisis was instrumental. Its impact on the faith of many cannot be understated. Money quote:

In the summer of 2005, I reported from a Multnomah County, Ore., courtroom on the story of an unemployed mother — impregnated by a seminary student 13 years earlier — who was trying to get increased child support for her sickly 12-year-old son.

The boy’s father, Father Arturo Uribe, took the witness stand. The priest had never seen or talked with his son. He even had trouble properly pronouncing the kid’s name. Uribe confidently offered the court a simple reason as to why he couldn’t pay more than $323 a month in child support. "The only thing I own are my clothes," he told the judge. His defense — orchestrated by a razor-sharp attorney paid for by his religious order — boiled down to this: I’m a Roman Catholic priest, I’ve taken a vow of poverty, and child-support laws can’t touch me.

The boy’s mother, Stephanie Collopy, couldn’t afford a lawyer. She stumbled badly acting as her own attorney. It went on for three hours. "It didn’t look that great," Stephanie said afterward, wiping tears from her eyes. "It didn’t sound that great … but at least I stood up for myself."

The judge ruled in the favor of Uribe, then pastor of a large parish in Whittier. After the hearing, when the priest’s attorney discovered I had been there, she ran back into the courtroom and unsuccessfully tried to get the judge to seal the case. I could see why the priest’s lawyer would try to cover it up. People would be shocked at how callously the church dealt with a priest’s illegitimate son who needed money for food and medicine.

My problem was that none of that surprised me anymore. As I walked into the long twilight of a Portland summer evening, I felt used up and numb.

I know the feeling. My own faith and my own politics have been rocked this past decades by two overwhelming facts. The church I loved was an international conspiracy for the abuse of children and the protection of their abusers; the United States government I trusted was responsible for the torture and abuse of military detainees, and its subsequent cover-up. What remains of religious and political faith after that? I guess I’m still trying to figure that out.

(Photo: Johannes Simon/Getty.)

A reader writes:

I enjoyed reading your take on last night’s Democratic "faith-off." I know you enjoy it when others come around to your way of thinking, but in this case I must admit that I’m enjoying you coming around to mine.  I’ve long felt that the left’s approach was as theocratic as the Right’s, although they were generally careful to label it something else. I don’t think Bush has brought religion into politics, but he has removed the veil from it, first from his own party and now, by reaction, from the Democrats. It has always been about whose moral values would win out, and in each case those values are based upon faith, even if not by that name. (Even such secular areas as environmentalism are based in faith: that nature should be preserved, that the natural state is better, etc.).

Your book ("The Conservative Soul") sees the danger clearly coming from the right but you’ve missed it from the left. Either one would make a cruel and tyranical ruler. For that very reason I am very grateful that the founders of this nation saw fit to fill the Constitution with checks and balances designed to limit through tension the natural instincts and behaviors of men. The right can’t ever pull very far ahead because of the left, and vice versa. The annoying battles that we see take place in Washington are there by design and they serve us well.

I have never been very worried about your "Christianism" for this very reason. Sure, a dictatorship of such "Christianists" would be very bad, but not only does the Constitution forbid it but also the opposition, which would provide an equally loathesome dictatorship itself.

Yes, and no. I have a long record of opposing faith-based politics of the left. Of course, it has not always been explicitly Christian. The use of the state to coerce politically correct, i.e. morally righteous, thinking was, in many ways, my main obsession in the 1990s. I opposed all of it, from hate crime laws to "blank slate" social policy. There’s a reason the gay left disliked me. "Virtually Normal" is an attempt to wrest the argument for gay equality from the left. It’s a case for gay equality, but also a polemic against well-meaning, big-government liberalism. The reason my attention turned to the right in the new millennium is because they were in power and turned out to be even worse than the liberals before them, in their readiness to use government to save souls. My lodestars are limited government, individual freedom, and the fundamental understanding that the world will never be a much better place than it is today because of the actions of any government. The key is avoiding the damage that utopianism can bring and the certainties and delusions that a faith-based politics encourages – whether on the religious right or the religious left.

And, yes, the Constitution is the ultimate bulwark against both temptations. Which is why it remains, for me, the greatest small-c conservative achievement of the West. And it is also why I tend to get very exercized when people mess with it.

I went to the Democratic faith-off last night to see Edwards, Obama and Clinton expose their religious life to a religious-left audience. It felt to me like that scene in Coriolanus when the great leader is forced to go into the town square and let the hoi polloi examine, discuss and judge his war-scars. It was a spectacle at once spiritually crass, politicallly vulgar and democratically corrosive. It didn’t help that the theologically-challenged moderator, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, asked questions like: "What’s the biggest sin you’ve ever committed?" Just when you think cable news cannot get any dumber, someone like Ms O’Brien slinks onto a stage.

But the implications of the debate were more worrying. We have had terrible problems grappling with the religious right these past few years, but we may have just begun to adjust to the power and emergence of the religious left. The rhetoric would have done evangelical statist, Michael Gerson, proud. And when you see three leading Democratic candidates fall over each other to endorse faith-based initiatives, and insist, in Clinton’s words, on "injecting faith into policy," or, in Obama’s words, basing politics on a "Biblical injunction," you realize that George W. Bush really has had a legacy. He has decisively increased the religiosity of public debate – as well, of course, as its fatuousness. How can we "end poverty" in the next ten years, asked Jim Wallis? Umm: didn’t LBJ already try that? And, given the certainty and self-righteousness all around me, why not just end poverty, illness, and illegitimacy in the next ten months? Why not end tyranny as well, while we’re at it? (Oops: we just tried that. Never mind.) Jeez. Some people just keep putting boundaries on the power of God. When merged with government, what social ill can it not solve?

Both the religious right and the religious left make me feel more profoundly conservative. And between them, they have helped throttle the principle of limited government until the body politic is turning blue.

Mark Hoofnagle notes:

It’s important to remember both the left and the right have anti-scientific tendencies, the left’s just tend to be less religious, less world-threatening and more woo-based. My brother recently told me about moving to California, "they don’t believe in Jesus here, just bullshit" in reference to the woo-based beliefs of large portions of the population. The risk of unscientific tendencies is when people with potential to become cranks see a scientific theory as a threat to some overvalued idea they hold dear. Sometimes the over-valued idea isn’t even a bad quality, it can be compassion – but taken to an extreme. If the left starts to see global warming policy as a money-grab by the elites, expect to see more left wing crankery and climate denial based on conspiratorial beliefs about carbon markets.

Just stick to the data, as best you can. I prefer hoo with my woo, personally.

We’re back to Locke. Jonathan Rowe explains:

Whenever I criticize the more extreme elements of Islam, I always stress that most Muslims say this doesn’t represent the authentic version of their faith. Now, in truth, I have no idea whether I’m right and may well be engaging in a Straussian lie. But, if Islam, as a faith, isn’t going away — and I don’t think it is — Muslims must be convinced that a more liberal, sober and rational understanding of their faith is the authentic one. This is exactly what Madison tried to do with Christians in his Memorial and Remonstrance.

… The paradox is, the rights of conscience are so profound government has no business saying what is true or false religion. Yet, government indeed does have an interest in promoting the ‘right’ kind of religion, that is religion compatible with liberal democratic, secular, pluralistic norms. Our Founders did to Christianity what the modern liberal governments and institutions, are, or ought to be doing to Islam (like telling folks extreme Islam doesn’t represent authentic Islam).

More comment from a "tolerant atheist" here. Pharyngula prefers the term "do-nothing atheist."

A reader writes:

In your Wednesday post "Dobson, Armageddon, and Foreign Policy"  you noted that the untouchable James Dobson, "the most influential man in the Republican base", is "quite clearly out of his mind". I could not agree more. Reading the bizarre transcript you quote of his interview with author Joel C. Rosenberg ("Jesus… is moving in the Middle East"), I was reminded of my teenage nephew and his friends playing one of their online virtual-reality role-playing games – most notably their favorite: "World of Warcraft" (WOW). As you know, WOW is an MMORPG, a "massive multiplayer online role-playing game", a "multiplayer computer role-playing game that enables thousands [actually, millions] of players to play in an evolving virtual world at the same time over the Internet." The only difference I can see between MMORPGs and fundamentalist sects is that the kids know they’re playing a game, while Dobson and Rosenberg think their own "World of Rapture" is actually real. They are – literally – out of their minds.

Couple that insight with your comment that:

"[T]he Republican party has not been very keen on reason these past few years. What matters is faith in a leader and unremitting violence in accomplishing goals. Whatever else this is, it isn’t conservatism as I have come to understand it."

and you can see why Sam Harris, in his book "The End of Faith" and in his online discussion with you, is so concerned: our belief systems, our "massive multiplayer real-life role-playing games", when unmoored from reality, propelled by the paranoid delusions of dogmatic fundamentalist cults (whether Islamist, Christianist or Communist) and supplied with weapons of mass destruction, bring our very survival in the next century into question…

The ancient world fell. So might we – and by "we" I do not mean just the United States, but our whole evolving modern global civilization. I do not think that will happen – but it certainly could. It is possible. And I know you share that concern. If we do fail and fall, it will be an expression of sheer human insanity, of fear and paranoia and self-destruction overwhelming love and courage and creativity in a huge psychotic break – the kind of break already enjoyed by Dobson and Rosenberg. If we survive these times, it will be because we are forced to find a better answer than either rational atheism or raptural nihilism. This is a test – an evolutionary challenge. So although I disagree strongly with Sam about the existence of God and the nature of faith, I am with him 100% in his call to confront our own beliefs – and the beliefs of the world’s fundamentalists – with a large dose of cold reality. We can no longer afford to coddle insanity in the name of faith. The paranoid narratives of the world’s fundamentalisms – including secular fundamentalisms – must be demonstrated to be the fantasies they are.

Fundamentalists – including our home-grown variety – need to have their thinking challenged. There are at least two good ways to do that: Cognitive therapy – the public variety – and humor.

Both James Dobson and Joel C. Rosenberg are public figures making public arguments that effect our collective future (as Rosenberg said, "…given the events going on in our world today, people at the Pentagon, people at the CIA, people at the White House are asking to sit down and talk [with me] about these issues, to understand the Biblical perspective…"). They should be challenged publicly without deference to their "faith" status.

Serious cognitive challenges to this insanity must be offered. Both you and Sam helped begin that process with your recent books ("The Conservative Soul" and "The End of Faith", respectively), though from very different angles. But, with all due respect, nothing matches the power of… South Park:

While this famous episode does not address fundamentalism directly, it would allow your readers to get a first-hand (well, second-hand) glimpse of an MMORPG in action: "World of Warcraft" as experienced by South Park fourth-graders Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny. It’s only a short leap from there to James Dobson and "World of Rapture". 

A reader writes:

You’re going to get into trouble using Einstein to justify religious faith, doubt, and awe of mysteries. He specifically addressed these points:

"A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt about the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation."

[Einstein, Nature 146 (1940), p. 605]

"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of ‘humility.’ This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism" – cited here.

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. " 

[Albert Einstein (1954) From Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press.]

Well, I cited him not to defend my own faith, but to defend the reasonableness of a "modest defense of mystery." I stand by that.

A reader writes:

Your latest essay back to Sam Harris coincided with the arrival here at home of a CD of Anton Bruckner‘s 2nd symphony, conducted by the late Carlo Maria Giulini, performed by the musicians of the Weiner Symphoniker. Among classical music fans, the Guilini/Weiner version of the 2nd is something of a gem. Bruckner (1824-1896) is often noted for being a devout Catholic from a small town in Austria, and both items show through in his music. He dedicated his last, unfinished, still magnificent symphony No. 9, "to my beloved God."

I write about this because your dialogue with Sam and several of the more astute and moving reader responses have made it clearer to me than ever that my deep love for a good deal of classical music, and of Bruckner’s music in particular, shows where much of my Catholicism "went": it sort of sublimated from its solid, early forms of devotion and practice as a child and adolescent (in a large, extended Irish-French Catholic family) — to a transcendental, aurally carried experience and communion; religious practice sublimated into musical meditational forms. Listening, playing, brings the same awe that you’ve written about and hinted at visually in the several pictures that have accompanied your essays on faith and the unfathomable.

Richard Osborne believes that Giulini and Bruckner’s shared Catholicism is a big part of their unusually strong concert:

"Giulini is a believer, a committed Catholic. Those who have worked with him have rarely been in doubt that here is a man, in tenor Robert Tear’s memorable phrase, under ‘the clout of God.’ Walter Legge … talked of Giulini being surrounded by "a radiant nimbus." He also referred to him as Saint Sebastian, the suffering one. Tear saw this quality at first hand: ‘Sometimes you felt music-making was something of a hair-shirt to him. The music was too beautiful to endure because what was coming through was getting closer to this vision of "the cymbol clash" with God as Elgar once put it. And the closer Giulini got to this the more painful the experience became.’"

Music is not a hair shirt for me: I’m too much the Irishman for whom it is a sentimentalist’s airy feast. Between Bruckner and Giulini we have the prophet of the divine aural spark, and a great priest of a conductor to lead the enactment of the sacrament.

I do like it that most of this music is wordless; it keeps the theologians at bay.

My own taste in music is also, I realize, skewed toward believers. Tallis, Byrd, Messiaen and Tavener all speak to me as musical vessels of the divine. But unlike my reader, I don’t see music as an alternative to faith – but as one sublime expression of it. If only the hierarchy of the church were able to channel these immense cultural resources toward a reinvigorated and thoroughly modern Catholicism. But they seem more concerned with enforcing sexual strictures.

(Photo: the interior of Washington’s national cathedral by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty.)