Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalists Sunday service, Sept. 30, 2007
By Robin McNallie
Recently, we have seen a spate of books produced by what The Nation has dubbed “the New Atheists.” These include Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great. We might also add to these Susan Jacoby’s Free Thinkers, written several years ago. I must confess that I have not given much close scrutiny to these books since I heard all the standard arguments against God long ago when I was taking philosophy courses in the 50’s at St. Lawrence University where the logical positivist school reigned over the metaphysicians. I got “the God doesn’t exist” argument from the old atheists, ranging from Voltaire to Bertrand Russell. The new ones don’t seem to have added much to the debate. Indeed, this present no-God vs. God face off seems to bring out the worst in both camps, with the no-Goders assuming a smarter-than-thou stance and the fundamentalist theists assuming a holier-than-thou one. I find it difficult to side with either the superciliousness of the one or the sanctimony of the other. I suspect that the New Atheists’ fight is not so much with God as it is with his, her, its acolytes, the abuses to which they have put religion itself-. Lamentably too much on display in these divided times -not only the 9/11 attacks but Shia and Sunni warfare in Iraq, Jewish and Palestinian violence, and here at home, mindless assaults on Darwinism, on gays, on reproductive choice, on stem cell research, on church-state separation. The list seems endless.
Such excesses partly explain the appearance of the books I have named. Their authors have mounted a full-scale counter-offensive against religion in all its powers and principalities. This total war approach explains the often intemperate tone of their works, the simplified view of history in them and their own faith-based assumption that with the extirpation of religion will come an end to all the world’s major ills. These writers, if allowing themselves a calmer moment, might have credited the medieval churchmen with promoting one good idea. The fathers came up with-I don’t know when or where precisely, probably at some religious retreat-a list of the seven cardinal or deadly sins. I had to memorize them in a Chaucer class (it wasn’t too hard; there were only two more of them than the Great Lakes): Pride, Avarice, Wrath, Envy, Sloth, Gluttony, and Lust. These seem to me to provide a better explanation of human misbehavior than blaming a particular institution, although I might exempt sloth and lust while substituting power hunger. Chris once worked with an investigative reporter who reduced the list to one-“human failure.”
However, this morning I’m not as interested in the particulars of the new Atheists’ books as to why they have veritably rushed onto the stage simultaneously, leaping with spectacular fanfare onto best seller lists and the agendas of reading clubs. Besides responding to the trespasses of the religious zealots of the world, they, along with their publishers, must have sensed a potential readership.. Ronald Aronson in the June 25th issue of The Nation in a piece entitled “The New Atheists” (I’ve already indirectly alluded to it) thinks this is the case. Basically, these books have hit the market precisely because it is there, and it’s a fairly significant one composed of (Surprise! surprise!) secularists. Although noting the difficulty of making an adequate survey of non-believers, Aronson cites recent surveys that indicate there exists a significant number of them. He notes, in particular, a Financial Times/Harris poll, of Europeans and Americans. The poll’s finding was that 18 percent of the more than 2,000 American respondents chose either agnosticism or atheism. A recent poll by the Banta Group resulted in similar findings and reveals that non-believers tend to be concentrated among young educated, fairly affluent males. Aronson’s conclusion: “All this helps explain the popularity of the New Atheists-Americans as a whole may not be getting too much religion but a significant constituency must be getting fed up with being routinely marginalized, ignored and insulted.”
I credit Aronson’s article for inspiring me with the idea and title for my talk-Is Religion Necessary? In a sense, of course, I and Aronson have already answered the question, for almost 20% of Americans (and the number is probably even higher for Western Europeans) religion is not just unnecessary but, at least, in the view of Dawkins, Harris, and Company, qualifies as something to be discarded in that non-recyclable trash bin of history labeled ‘superstitions.” Maybe then I need to recast my question to “Does Religion Have a Future”? Will it, that is, be subscribed to by a majority of people in the foreseeable future? My answer is a fairly confident yes. I simply don’t see religion as going either soon or gently into that good trash bin; it has simply been around too long and has shown and continues to show too powerful an appeal. I am taking religion in its generally understood dictionary meaning , as, for instance , this one in Webster’s International: “The service and adoration of God or a god as expressed in forms of worship, in obedience to divine commands, especially as found in accepted sacred writings or as declared by recognized teachers.”
More germane, however, to the point of my remarks this morning is the root meaning of the word. Religion is from the Latin re(back) and ligare(binding). This root of the word conjures a more positive image of religion than the one the New Atheists are raging against, for it denotes a binding, an integration, a connection of some kind. From this base, we might see religion as a human striving both to integrate the self with the self and beyond that to other selves and to this world and the cosmos. From what I can ascertain, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins speculate that religion may have originally aided in the survival and evolution of our species. William James actually anticipated this line of thought about a hundred years ago in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience. I quote from James: “Taking creeds and faith-states together, as forming ‘religions’, and treating these as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of their ‘truth,’ we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind.”
The New Atheists, by concentrating on the coercive, divisive and hegemonic impulses of religious institutions and movements, past and present, have overlooked the devotional, aspirational, and communal components which define belief systems and which explain their tenacious hold on worshippers. Religion indisputably provides the believer, through its rituals and sacraments and holy days, with linkage to her contemporary co-believers, to generations of past believers, and putatively to future ones as well, all, she is certain, under the aspect of eternity.
This bonding power Philip Larkin affirms in his poem “Church Going,” written some fifty years ago. The speaker here presumably mirrors Larkin’s own complicated mix of feelings about faith. Stopping and entering the down-at-the-heels rural church and its surrounding grave yard, he says that this edifice once “held unspilt so long and equably what since is found only in separation-marriage and birth, and death and thoughts of these.” The speaker, on one level, an unbeliever, finds himself oddly, even disturbingly moved by the scene. The title is a punning one (trust me to see that!). The church, i.e., religion, is “going” in the sense of being on its way out, while the speaker finds himself literally “church going,” that is, entering the church, more specifically, the sanctuary. His mixed feelings he shows by removing his hat and bicycle clips “in awkward reverence.” He concludes, however, on a note not so much of reverence as of resigned regret. The church he affirms is “a serious house on serious earth,” where “our compulsions meet, are recognized and robed as destinies.” The church finally is a place founded to respond to “a hunger” in people “to be more serious.” The poem, I have always thought qualifies as a legitimate elegy, a somber tribute in this case not to the dead but to the dying condition of institutionalized faith. Quite appropriately, I used to teach this poem alongside what once was probably the most famous conventional elegy in the English language, Thomas Gray’s 18th century “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard.”
Like Larkin, Wallace Stevens in his 1923 poem ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream,” writes from the perspective of a non-believer, essentially presenting a secularist response to Paul’s famous declaration in 1st Corinthians: “Oh, Death, Where is thy sting”? To Paul, death has no sting because eternal life awaits the Christian believer; to Stevens, death is simply an ending to life. (“let be be finale of seem,” he says) and since it is it should make us seize the day, with its sundry tangibles and delectations, all the more fully. But even Stevens, the epicurean or is he a hedonist (?) can not free himself entirely from, if not precisely religion, then let’s say respect for engrained ritual. Amidst the references to “the emperor of ice cream” and “the roller of big cigars,” figures emblematic of a thickly sensuous world, the speaker in the poem calls for flowers to be brought to the anonymous woman’s humble memorial service and for her own hand-embroidered sheet to be placed over her.. Finally, he commands in a line that contains a nearly sacramental image:” Let the lamp affix its beam.” The serene image suggests the glow of an altar light.
So, no, I think that the long habit of religion is not yet close to extinction; As just shown, it can even at times cast a strong subliminal spell on susceptible secularists. Religion, with its observances, sacraments, hymns, chants, responsive readings, silent and guided meditations, provides connection and community, and, most importantly, meets the longing in many for transcendence. Religion’s ritualistic aspect does not subvert the worldliness of Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice Cream” but it does solemnize it. The serious nature of religion, interestingly, is what constitutes its appeal to Larkin’s somewhat adrift spokesman (a spokesman whose very uncertainty appeals specially to me). Remember his reiteration of the word “serious”-“A serious house on serious earth” which feeds people’s hunger “to be more serious.” Like Larkin, Emerson, in that passage from “The Divinity School Address” Chris read for the chalice lighting, feared that the loss of religion would turn society from serious reflection on serious matters to frivolous pursuit of frivolous matters. “And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship” he asks and fears that should such loss occur, society will live, as he says, ‘to trifles.”
That Emerson and Larkin, over 130 years apart, feared for the future of religion and Robin McNallie, 50 years after that, is still talking about it, may well confirm my premise that religion is indeed a hardy perennial, not easily uprooted, that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of its death are an exaggeration. Indeed, the significant diversity in and between faith communities in itself should promise rich cross-fertilization some of which, I think , is already occurring.. For a heartening look at religious leaders who are coming from unexpected places and are drawing their inspiration from unexpected sources, I recommend a book published earlier this year by the Educational Broadcasting System entitled The Life of Meaning,– I like the title, the positive message it implies -the life of meaning , the purposive life, rather than the meaning of life. It may surprise you-it did me– to find in the book some genuinely heterodox thinkers among the supposedly orthodox. We UU’s may not be as alone as we think we are.
Anyway, what I want to suggest finally this morning is that one’s perspective on religion and on whether it has or even should have a future is based, I suspect on a combination of one’s experience and one’s temperament, or sensibility, or predilection, whatever term you choose to describe that faculty which dominates our responses to life and our choices in it. One reviewer of Dawkins’ The God Delusion, H. Allen Orr posits that some people possess what he intriguingly calls the “metaphysical imagination,” which he asserts confronts those “matters that make up religion-matters that stand at the edge of intelligibility and are the most difficult to articulate.” It’s an interesting thought certainly, and I suspect that Orr is talking about a persistent intuition in some people that there may just be something more out there and in here to connect to than is dreamt of in the philosophy of Hamlet’s friend Horatio and religion’s contemporary antagonists.