The Conservative Nature of the New Atheism

10/20/2015—I’ve long had the feeling that the New Atheists—the late Chris Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, etc.—are essentially politically conservative. But this has been just a feeling and given the power of the Christian right in the Republican Party, hardly a convincing one. My assumption just had to do with how selfish and individualistic the New Atheists seemed. There was little sense among them of human solidarity.

Anyway, I now have at least an example. Look up the interview in the Sunday New York Times Book Review of Matt Ridley. Ridley praises the New Atheist wing and likens it to Voltaire. But he also says the last book to make him furious was Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth because of its misstatements of science and claims that business people are made villains by novelists who live off the wealth they create. Ridley claims this is a bit facetious, but it undoubtedly represents his true feelings.

Then he describes the Bible in these words: “the grim tedium of this messy compilation of second-rate tribal legends and outrageous bigotry.”

Well, now. How can Gore’s misstated science make him furious and not the underlying danger itself? And how wrong can the science be in Gore’s book. Greenhouse gases make it warmer and that change floods a lot of people. That’s all the book really says and it is happening already, or so I hear.

As for the Bible, the followers of this book have done an awful lot of good in the world—bad, too—but what have atheists ever done for others? What has Ridley ever done for others?

Going After Faith

4/12/2015—I have always thought that Philip Kitcher is the best of the New Atheists. That is the group that came to the consciousness of the American public around ten years ago arguing against religion. The first wave of the movement culminated in the late Christopher Hitches’ blockbuster, God In Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Other well known members of the group were Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. My own books, particularly American Religious Democracy (2007) and Hallowed Secularism, (2009), which no one can afford to buy, were written in opposition to certain aspects of the New Atheism, though acknowledging the reality that many people were leaving the religious traditions—including the author.

Kitcher was the best of this group because of his compassion for people, especially in Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith in 2007. He knew that religion offered something that people needed and he thought that trumpeting atheism without regard to that was almost cruel.

Kitcher’s recent book, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism, appears to continue in that vein. I haven’t read it yet so I’m not going to discuss it. I want instead to inquire after its starting point.

Why would anyone want to argue “the case for” an alternative to religion? In much the same way that almost all people born into a religion end up becoming members of that religion without actually evaluating the other religions, people don’t “choose” to cease believing and become secular. Once that happens, people might “choose” to leave or stay in a religious tradition physically, but once the supernatural becomes unreal, that is the end of a certain kind of faith. At least that is what happened to me. (I know that there is a tradition of radical doubt within the religious traditions, which leads to crisis, but that is another matter. In a culture in which the supernatural is in question, doubt need not be experienced as crisis.)

So, why seem to argue against religion and for secular humanism? In his review of Kitcher’s book in the New York Review, Adam Kirsch points out that “secular humanists have the duty to be evangelists.” That is how Kitcher and the others feel--evangelists against religion--and it is the wrong starting point. Since Kitcher has always said that faith is great for those who have it—-something Christopher Hitchens could never admit—-and since faith is not an option for those who don’t, why argue at all? In other words, why should the nonaffiliated write about religion, other than as a resource for secular life?

Therefore, the subheading of Kitcher’s book should have been “Life in Secular Humanism.” Kitcher knows this—-in fact, the blurb on Amazon reads, “Although there is no shortage of recent books arguing against religion, few offer a positive alternative—-how anyone might live a fulfilling life without the support of religious beliefs.”—-so why does Philip still speak of argument? Why does he devote a chapter to vindicating doubt about religion and another to refined religion that does not espouse supernatural belief?

The answer is that Hallowed Secularism—-or secular humanism-—is hard. Criticizing religion is easy.

Philip Kitcher does not accept the responsibility of this hour. How do we now live, now that God is dead? It is a simple question. But the question haunted Nietzsche. I doubt that the answer to that question is any kind of humanism. Humans are not in control of reality.

It may be that among the nonaffiliated, the differences may finally have to be confronted, which the preoccupation with religion still prevents. For me, the category of the transcendent is the starting point. Phillip points out that the transcendent cannot function the way traditional religion does. Fair enough. But is the transcendent real? Does it teach humans something lasting about reality? If it is real, then it, not reason, is our proper starting point.

The holy does not disappear when one stops going to church, synagogue, mosque or temple. It just becomes harder to live by it.

Samuel Moyn’s Questions about Church, State, and the Crisis in American Secularism

4/4/2012—Yesterday, I gave a booktalk at Yale Law School, hosted by the irrepressible and charming Blair Kauffman, the librarian there. The commentator was Samuel Moyn, professor of European history at Columbia, and the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, who is visiting at Yale Law this semester.

Sam gave a respectful but skeptical review of the book and I am grateful for the attention from such a thoughtful person. Sam raised a number of important questions, which I set forth below and which I will not answer today. As I did at the talk itself, some of the points require engagement rather than some immediate defense. Of course I cannot replicate all of Sam’s points here. I will inform the virtual world when the recording of the exchange will be available online.

Sam asked what kind of “crisis” is the crisis in the Establishment Clause that the book purports to engage? Since the American people seem quite content with religion in the public square, is it just a crisis in legal doctrine? If so, how important is that, actually?

Doesn’t my higher law proposal for both Establishment Clause doctrine and secularism generally lead to the disappearance of the underlying commitment to government neutrality that I claim to be defending?

Doesn’t my higher law proposal lead to a pretense that is similar to the kind of pretense I criticize in regard to the Supreme Court’s refusal to enforce neutrality consistently?

Is my higher law proposal a strategy and a compromise or not? While I state plainly in the book that it is not, some language in the book suggests otherwise.

Isn’t the higher law that the book endorses merely a rhetorical emptiness that has no actual content? If so, doesn’t the proposal risk describing the mere appearance of consensus rather than helping to actually forge consensus? Nor is it clear that progressives still attach much meaning to the rhetoric of higher or natural law anyway.

Finally, morally serious secularism already exists. So where is the crisis in secularism that the book refers to and why would surrendering a commitment to traditional government neutrality be an improvement over what is present now?

Enlisting the Help of Sam Harris

12/28/2011—I’ve been reading Sam Harris’ book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, in which Harris defends the objectivity of values against moral relativism. He is clearly an ally in my work. I called moral relativism the crisis in American Secularism in my book, Church, State, and the Crisis in American Secularism. Harris would agree.

Here is how he puts the general issue: “Many people believe that something in the last few centuries of intellectual progress prevents us from speaking in terms of ‘moral truth’ and, therefore, from making cross-cultural moral judgments—or moral judgments at all. Having discussed this subject in a variety of public forums, I have heard from literally thousands of highly educated men and women that morality is a myth, that statements about human values are without truth conditions (and are, therefore, nonsensical), and that concepts like well-being and misery are so poorly defined, or so susceptible to personal whim and cultural influence, that it is impossible to know anything about them.”

So, what is the problem? Harris has a bug about religion. Religious believers are not moral relativists, so one would think, as I do, that they are allies in this fight. But they are not for Harris because they take morality from sources other than their own experience, informed by science Harris claims generally, but he admits that informed by rational thought would be enough.

Harris just won’t compare good religion with good nonreligion. All religions I know emphasize experience and encourage the believer to look to the signs of the times, as Jesus says. In Christianity this is called general revelation and it is available to all human beings. In fact, the scientific tradition arose out of the religious commitment that God made the world for humans to understand and in understanding the world we would better know God.

The basic orientation of religion to truth creates a problem for Harris when he quotes Einstein. Harris tries to debunk the Einstein quote—“science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Harris points out in a footnote that this does not mean Einstein believed in God or accepted unjustified belief. True enough. But just look at the quote Harris is forced to use: “[S]cience can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling…springs from the sphere of religion.”

Harris has the nerve to call this aspiration “the primitive urge to understand the universe.” But here he exposes his elitism. Religion is the urge to understand the universe. As is science. I doubt science will be better at it. We shall see.

Harris does not examine his own biases. For example, Harris makes several slighting references to stem cell research opposition and abortion to show how unreasonable religion, and the Catholic Church in particular, are. But he admits that the potential as well as actual well-being of conscious creatures is his definition of morality. He does not do crude addition to compare killing one person to the well-being of the many. So, why is it irrational to oppose the killing of human beings at the earliest stages of their lives? Harris’ answer is that these beings are not yet “sentient and suffering human beings”. But of course by this argument it is less immoral to kill babies than adults, which is ridiculous, as Harris would probably admit (or would admit except for its consequences to his argument).

The word “potential” here is everything. Once a human being is created, that being is valuable as human. Yes, I may have to kill it, as in the unfortunate living undeveloped twin inside a healthy baby that Harris discusses on page 171. But Harris is stuck in principle promoting fetal organ farms. (I don’t mean he admits this). This is all the result of Harris’ bias against religion. It keeps him from honestly developing his own thinking.

Christopher Hitchens R.I.P.

12/16/2011—I was very sorry to read today of the death of Christopher Hitchens from cancer. Hitchens had been suffering from the disease for some time and he faced his death with grace and courage. Well, why not? He was familiar with the classic sources and undoubtedly resigned himself to death years ago.

Hitchens was no fool. But his writing about religion was simplistic. And his error was apparent in the title of his most famous book—God is not great: how religion poisons everything. Hitchens, though he assuredly knew better, confused God with religion. Many crimes are committed in the name of God. But they are committed by people. And the name of the very human associations that commit these crimes—along with all the good—is “religion”. Religions are not God. Even the concept of religion in general, whatever that is, is not God. God is God.

If I remember correctly, Hitchens had little to say about all the different meanings of the word, God. He was interested only in impossible dogmas. He needed God to be as implausible as possible because only then could he debunk religion.

But what if God is not implausible at all? The philosopher Ernst Cassirer, in the early Twentieth century, wrote about the new logic of Bertrand Russell. Cassirer argued that there must be a connection between math and experience. Only when we understand that the same fundamental syntheses on which math is based also govern empirical science will we be able “to speak of a firm lawful order behind the appearances… .”

What if God is the firm moral order behind the appearances? The irony is that Hitchens himself testified to his belief in such an ordering in many ways in his life. I’m just sorry he spent his life enjoying controversy rather than showing similarities.

Sam Harris and Objective Morality

10/5/2010—In a Newsweek debate a few years ago, Sam Harris, one of the New Atheists, debated Rick Warren, noted evangelical minister and author of The Purpose Driven Life. At one point in the debate, Warren challenged Harris on the ground of morality for atheists: “If life is just random chance, then nothing really does matter and there is no morality—it’s survival of the fittest. If survival of the fittest means me killing you to survive, so be it. For years, atheists have said there is no God, but they want to live like God exists. They want to live like their lives have meaning.” Warren was challenging atheism on the ground that atheism is inherently nihilistic. Harris responded, “I’m not at all a moral relativist. I think it’s quite common among religious people to believe that atheism entails moral relativism. I think there is an absolute right and wrong. I think honor killing, for example, is unambiguously wrong—you can use the word evil.” (exchange)

I thought at the time that Harris’ response was disingenuous. I thought that he must endorse moral relativism whether he liked it or not. After all, many atheist thinkers have acknowledged the moral incomprehensibility of the universe empty of God. But it turns out that Harris was quite serious and he has now written a book, The Moral Landscape, in which he argues that there is objective morality, that there are right answers to moral questions, that moral claims are either true or false and that science, particularly brain science, is the most reliable source for moral knowledge.

I haven’t read the book, which is published just today. I have read only the review in the New York Times by Kwame Anthony Appiah. (here). I have my doubts based on the review that science can live up to the claims Harris makes for it or even that morality can be specified in the ways Harris seems to claim.

But my interest is the role of religion for Harris. Harris is very clear, apparently, that moral knowledge does not reside in religion. Yet, in claiming that morality is objective, Harris joins a fundamental religious tradition. As I say in everything I write, C.S. Lewis called that position, the Tao, because it is the assertion that the universe is a certain kind of moral thing and that we are also. For Lewis, the Tao was the essence and starting point for all religion.

What does Lewis think religion is, after all? Just supernatural fairy tales? If the universe produces beings like us who seek objective morality, objectively right ways to live, and if the universe then produces the very structures in the brain that allow us to see that this is possible, then it is likely that there is something moral in and behind the universe, a kind of blueprint. Plato called this the idea. Some religious believers call it God. What difference does it make what we call it? Why does Harris think there is so much distance between himself and the religious believer?

So, Christopher Hitchens is a Hallowed Secularist

2/5/2010—The religious world is abuzz over the interview between Marilyn Sewell, well-known religious liberal, and Christopher Hitchens, the well-known atheist popularizer. (interview site here). In the interview, Hitchens speaks of “the numinous” and the feeling of awe when confronted, for example, by the grandeur of nature. But, then, surprisingly, Hitchens acknowledged that “everybody has had the experience at some point when they feel that there’s more to life than just matter.” Eric Reitan wrote about the interview in religion dispatches in terms you might expect, “religious in spite of himself?”

Reitan makes the intelligent point that religious institutions and religious thought are where human beings mostly encounter and think about just what the experiences Hitchens acknowledges mean. So, Hitchens sounds silly bashing those institutions. For all the noise Hitchens makes about literature and art being the place that nourishes these feelings, houses of worship are where they occur for most people and where they are sustained for almost everyone. If you haven’t noticed, secularists rarely acknowledge and seek out anything like deeper meaning in life.

But I would put Hitchens’ error at a different point. Why does he insist on the dualism of matter and spirit? This is a reflection of a longstanding Christian heresy. The orthodox view is not dualistic, but insists that the incarnation brings the godhead into matter. Thus there is no need to assert, as Hitchens does, that there is “more to life than just matter.” There isn’t. But there is more to matter than Hitchens dreams.

It is important to finally get this right. There is nothing more than matter in reality. How could there be? But as the concept of emergence in physics suggests, reality is more than the sum of its parts. Consciousness is nothing more than wiring in the brain, but there is nothing in the wiring that really explains consciousness. At the subatomic level matter disappears into indeterminate quantum particles and waves. So, at the highest level, why might matter not coalesce into truth, beauty and justice?

The problem with Hitchens is not that he is a materialist, but that he is an incomplete materialist. That is why he imagines more of a conflict with religion than there needs to be.

Pascal on Hallowed Secularism

2/21/2009—The following selection is from Paragraph 12—in only one ordering unfortunately—of the Pensees, by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662):

“Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect.
Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature.
Attractive because it promises true good.”

When Pascal writes the word "religion", he may mean only Christianity and only belief in God. But he may mean instead something of the core of religion that many religions share, such as the objectivity of values and the compassion of existence. If so, he describing the kind of religion that Hallowed Secularism intends to bring secularism into closer connection with.

The situation among secularists today is in part as Pascal described. Many hate religion, although increasingly they are ignorant and indifferent. (That would not have been possible in Pascal’s day, given the dominant role of religion).

As to the differences from what Pascal saw, some secularists today are afraid religion may not be true, as well as fearing that it is. That is, we don’t want to give in to the hierarchical discipline of any church, but we don’t want to live in an empty, meaningless universe either.

There is a cure today, just as Pascal suggested. Religion, in the sense of its core, is not contrary to reason, (we might say today not contrary to science) and it is worthy of reverence and respect. If reality is good for us, welcoming to us, kind to us, we should be grateful.

And pointing this out, makes the core of religion seem like something we would at least wish to be true, as Pascal says. The task then, after implanting this hope, is to show that it can be fulfilled. Or, as the book Hallowed Secularism opens, “Wouldn’t you like to live your life abundantly? …Why don’t you?”

Now the question is, who understands human nature best—the New Atheists, New Age religion, or the Bible? My money is on the Bible. In considering human beings, the Bible is just the right mix of good and evil. Materialism makes us out to be worse than we are, totally without generosity. All forms of humanism make us out to be better than we are. And there is something in reality that sometimes protects us from ourselves, just as the Bible says. It is pretty amazing that we have not yet blown ourselves up and we might still heat ourselves out of existence.

Finally, who has the best word as to true good in our lives? What guidebook is best for the general direction of your life? What model of human being would you like to adopt? For me, it is the Bible and Jesus respectively, not that I actually do this, but then neither do most Christians.

Apparently, things have not changed all that much since the 17th century.

Peter Steinfels on the New, New Atheism

2/16/2009--On Friday, 2/13/2009, Peter Steinfels, co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture and author of a biweekly column, called "Beliefs" in the New York Times, wrote a column on new atheist thinking. Steinfels mentioned in particular Ronald Aronson’s new book, “Living Without God” (Counterpoint, 2008), “The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality” (Viking, 2007), by André Comte-Sponville (which readers of this blog have already heard of) and Phil Zuckerman’s new book on Sweden and Denmark, “Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment” (New York University Press, 2008).

The point of all these authors, despite their differences, seems to be “the incompleteness or tentativeness, the thinness or emptiness, of today’s atheism, agnosticism and secularism.” That quote is from Aronson, but Sponville would certainly agree. Aronson is much less mystical or spiritual than is Sponville but is in other ways quite religious in such themes as the meaning of death and the need for gratitude.

What we are seeing in Steinfels’ column is the birth of a new kind of secularism, one that is beginning to take seriously the responsibility of envisioning a sustainable and flourishing secular civilization. Obviously, Hallowed Secularism is another, and different, approach to that same goal. One thing is certain, the prediction in the book Hallowed Secularism that secularism is growing and would soon need to go beyond religion bashing is already coming true.

Anti-Religion, Progressive Religion and Religion

4/28/2008--The Sunday New York Times on 4/27 is a reminder that the intellectual world in America and some of the rest of the West can be divided, almost neatly, into three categories: anti-religion, progressive religion and religion.

The anti-religion position was represented by Martin Amis, whose book, The Second Plane, is reviewed in the Book Review section, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose relationship with the Muslim reformer Irshad Manji is described in Ideas and Trends. Anti-religion people are atheists and see no reason why anyone should be anything else. Amis says “there are no good excuses for religious belief—unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses… .” Ali wants Muslims to adopt “secular humanism” and I am sure she would say the same about Christians, Jews and all other religious people—[unless their religions already were secular humanism, see below].

The Progressive religious side is represented by Manji, who calls for an “Islamic Reformation” after which there would be “no need to choose between Islam and the West.” This can happen because “the Koran has the raw materials to be thoughtful and humane.” Manji is similar to Christians and Jews who, for example, support gay marriage despite what the Bible says about homosexuality.

The problem for progressive religion is that the values underlying this position do not come from the religion the person is practicing, but instead come from the Establishment tradition. Manji, for example, is holding the Koran up to the standards of “thoughtful and humane” and seeing how the Koran stacks up. She is not holding the norms “thoughtful and humane” up to the Koran to see how they stack up. Thoughtful and humane are self-evidently good.

Despite Manji’s reference to the Reformation, Luther did not do this. Luther held the Catholic Church up to his understanding of the Bible. Luther was not a progressive believer. Luther was a religious believer.

The religious side was not represented in yesterday’s New York Times, except by negative inference. The values of the religious believer come from his or her religion rather than from some other source.

The hallowed secularist does not fit these three categories very well. He or she is not anti-religion because religion has so much to teach us. Not a progressive believer either, despite also being between worlds, as the progressive believer is.

The hallowed secularist is in a sense religious--willing to measure modernity according to the standard of religion, rather than the other way around. The hallowed secularist, in this sense at least, is a religious believer, for whom some of the truths of Our Religions entirely surpass the so-called truths of the modern world.

Anthony Kronman—Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life

2/18/2008--Again commenting on a book I have not read. The most recent Yale Law Report contains a two column description of former dean, now Yale Law Professor, Anthony Kronman’s new book on education and the meaning of life. Kronman calls for universities to be the spiritual leaders they used to be, and that America needs for them to be again, by abandoning the research ideal to return to the great questions the Humanities used to ask, such as the meaning of life. Higher education should not just be for knowledge, but also for exploration of life’s meaning and mystery. Life’s meaning used to be an academic subject for study and could be again.

I don’t know how the book treats religion, but the blurbs in Amazon and the short story in Yale Law Reports suggest that Kronman wants a return to secular humanism as a source of study (the phrase “secular humanism” is in the story as Kronman’s goal for recovery). Here are the authors he cites: Kierkegaard, Sartre and Gabriel Marcel (as sources for a 1965 course he took entitled, Existentialism); Plato, Descartes and other “great works of literary and philosophical imagination that we have inherited from the past.”

It is beyond dispute that much of American education has abandoned the question of the meaning of life, and similar pursuits, and that the culture has suffered for it. But the study of the meaning of life could not possibly be exclusively secular. Much of what the West learned about the meaning of life comes from the Christian tradition (and to some extent Judaism). For all I know, Kronman agrees with that. But it is worth putting forward expressly.

What the New Atheism does not understand is that when you banish religion, or try to, you are banishing the depth of life as well. Undoubtedly, it is possible to live a meaningful life without traditional religion. But it is not possible to do so while holding a dismissive attitude toward religion. The reason is that living well requires answers to questions religion asks extremely well, such as the meaning of life. If Our Religions are mere superstition, as the New Atheism suggests, their questions must be meaningless.

The problem with American education is not too much emphasis on research. That is a symptom of something more fundamental. The problem is that educators feel they must avoid deep questions out of a commitment to avoid traditional religion. Research just fills the resulting void. Much as shopping, entertainment and advertising fill the rest of American life. The antidote, if there is one, is a return to religion as a starting point. We secularists can’t be religious in the traditional sense, but we can’t be fully human without engaging the religious questions.

The Secular American Young

2/7/2008--The extent to which the young in America shun organized religion for a secular orientation was brought home in a 2/4/2008 op-ed in USA Today by Professor Stephen Prothero, author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t (2007). Professor Prothero teaches an Introduction to Religion course to undergraduates at Boston University. For the past two years he has asked the students to "create their own religions.”

The results are, naturally, pretty funny and, in part, intended to be. But what struck Professor Prothero “is how similar they are.” These religions do not involve dogma. They are nonjudgmental. They make few demands, either intellectually or morally.

They are also secular: “They are allergic to divinity and even heaven.” These religions, writes Professor Prothero, are similar to the religion offered by Joshua Boden of the music group Angelic Bombs in an upcoming documentary: This life is the one that counts; this IS your eternal reward.

Another student in the story calls this “organized atheism” but I don’t think that is the case. These students are the “‘spiritual but not religious’ generation” as Professor Prothero says and others have also suggested. But they are not atheists. Actually they don’t know enough to be atheists.

Atheism is more than a denial of a God-being outside time and space. Atheism, despite Christopher Hitchens, is more than antipathy to some of the commitments and actions of organized religion. To be an atheist means to have thought through the meaning of life and the shape of history. Materialism and humanism are not all that attractive when you get to know them. Nor are they really reflective of what most of us experience in our lives. We are meaning-hungry beings and the fundamental religious question is whether that thirst for meaning is in some sense real—that is, reflective of the way things are—or is just a thirst for a mirage in a desert.

Opposition to Islam as Opposition to Religion

1/7/2008--On Saturday, January 5, I attended a conference at which Michael W. McConnell, Federal Judge on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, suggested that appeals to Muslims to be “moderate” reflect a view of religion as inherently irrational and violent. Such a view is a criticism—a deep criticism—of all religion, not just of a radical and violent form of Islam.

On Sunday, in the New York Times Book Review, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the courageous woman who was subject to death threats in the Netherlands over her outspoken criticism of Islam, confirmed Judge McConnell’s insight. Ali criticized “the enemies of reason within the West” who are enfeebling the struggle against radical Islam. Those enemies are, she said, “religion and the Romantic movement.” The way to prevail over radical Islam is through Enlightenment reason and individualism.

Perhaps it is unfair to criticize Hirsi Ali. She has apparently never seen healthy religion. But she is repeating a widespread secular charge—all religion is irrationally prone to violence. This is the message also of Mark Lilla, for example, in his book, The Stillborn God.

The call to atheism, however, as a way to engage Muslims, is an absurd suggestion. It makes much more sense for religious believers to confront religious violence because they have credibility with any community of faith.

Hirsi Ali’s comments also remind us of the inherent conflict between capitalism and religion. It is no accident that she is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Despite the description of the Republican Party alliance between market conservatives and religious conservatives as “fusion,” Hirsi Ali reminds us that capitalism is premised on an individualism and a materialism that are alien to Judaism and Christianity, indeed to all religion. This is the inherent tension that Mike Huckabee is, perhaps unintentionally, laying bare.

Hallowed Secularism and Humanism

9/21/2007--Visiting family in Florida, I was reminded of the need to retrieve the history of humanism for the project of Hallowed Secularism. For example, in her New York Times book review of Norman Davies’ book on WWII, No Simple Victory (9/9/2007), Susan Rubin Suleiman notes the following strange entry in the book: “[Kurt Vonnegut] succeeded Isaac Asimov as president of the American Humanist Association.”

I had forgotten that there is such a group, though it has been around for over 60 years. There is also an active movement called “Secular Humanistic Judaism”. There are two points to be made here. One, why are we reinventing the wheel? Why, in other words, is there a new atheism when there is an old and established one?

The second question concerns the quality and tone of this older humanism. Look at the quality and intellectual centrality of a Vonnegut and an Asimov. These were giants of American letters and deeply educated and cultured persons. Hostility to religion was not their thing. Their thing was the human condition.

Similarly, more or less the founder of Jewish Humanism as a movement, Rabbi Sherwin Wine, who was killed in an automobile accident in Morocco in July, was a towering figure and a serious and pastoral religious leader.

And, more generally, the thinking of humanism in its heyday, with the drafting of the Humanist Manifesto in 1933, was not opposition to religion, but the creation of a secular civilization with a complex relationship to religion.

I guess I am saying that the project of Hallowed Secularism, although quite religious in tone, may be closer to the humanist tradition than is the current atheist enthusiasm. John Dewey, for example, a signer of that Manifesto, was always aware of what religion had, and could, bring to human life.

The New Atheism and Democracy

9/1/2007--Can people think and talk about our collective lives in meaningful ways? Increasingly, some thinkers on the left question that premise—the possibility of meaningful political discourse. There are a number of political writers, most recently Drew Westen in The Political Brain, who argue that rational political discourse is a cover for various psychological needs. In Westen’s book this psychological need is for emotions that make us feel good. John Judis expanded this theme in The New Republic in August 2007, arguing that politics is a subconscious struggle against the fear of death.

What is the message of these writers? Partly, it is an excuse for past Democratic Party losses. The Party, it is said, is too intellectual, too rational. The Republicans are better at the needed psychological manipulation. This idea is also present in political work, like that of Jeffrey Feldman in Framing the Debate, that suggests that framing an issue is the key to winning elections.

There is a sense in which all of our efforts in life are an attempt to come to terms with death. The point of this recent psychological work, however, is not to help us understand who we are, where we are going and what it all means. The point is to view politics as psychological manipulation. These thinkers conclude that voters don’t actually know what they are voting about.

I assume something very different. I assume that political discourse is meaningful on its own terms. When I say politics is rational, I don’t mean that it is mere instrumentalism. Nor do I mean that it is mere self-interest. I mean that the voters do know in a general way what they are doing. If their emotions are engaged, it is only because that is how we live. If the fear of death is in play, that is only because we know we are mortal.

Of course there is such a thing as persuasive discourse. And politicians, like trial lawyers, should put their arguments in the most persuasive package they can. But we assume that in court trial tactics only go so far. We assume that at some point, the facts decide the matter.

That is true in politics too. The Democratic Party lost its majority status after 1968. There were many reasons for this. People certainly will disagree about what happened and why. But there were reasons for this political change. It was not all image. Like trials, politics is ultimately about something real in the world. Good presentation only gets you so ar.

The new political irrationalism that says politics is unthinking psychology and rhetoric is another form of atheism. It is another way of saying that we live in a world of chaos and meaninglessness. Hallowed Secularism stands on this key point with Our Religions in denying that that is so.

Christopher Hitchens and Hallowed Secularism

8/20/2007--I read the story Christopher Hitchens wrote recently in Vanity Fair about his book tour for God Is Not Great. I was impressed by how smart Hitchens is and depressed by how shallow his challenge to religion is. Hitchens’ basic argument is that religious people do terrible things—although of course they sometimes do good things too--and that secular people do good things. But, while secularism does not cause anyone to actually do bad things, religion does cause bad behavior. Hitchens has a standing bet challenging anyone to come up with something good that only a religious person would do.

The main response to Hitchens is that his challenge cannot be tested in this culture because there is no such thing as a person unaffected by religious categories. The very concept of doing good is, in the West, an invention of Judaism and Christianity. Before they influenced the western world, people of course did things we now think of as good, but the category that one should do good things did not exist. As I think Peter Brown put it, almsgiving, that is, support for the poor, was not something Romans did.

So, there is no way to really answer Hitchens’ question. The problem for him is that this is a post-Christian culture. That means that our categories of cultural behavior are still premised on a Judeo-Christian outlook. Even people like Hitchens, who fancy themselves atheists, know what the biblical God is like. That influence will take generations to weaken, although in many ways secularism is growing in America and the West.

Nevertheless, there is one way to begin to test Hitchens’ surmise. We simply look at those parts of our culture furthest away from Christian life and ask whether they seem a good bet to ground a healthy and sustainable culture in the future. Since the market is the part of the culture I would identify as furthest from the Church, and since I think the market’s influence on human attitudes is harmful, I am afraid secular culture as currently constituted is not self-sustaining in a healthy way.