Letters to a Christian

1

(Christ Healing the Blind. El Greco, ca. 1570)

X—

Thanks for writing. Please forgive me if I’m not immediately bowled over by the idea that you were once a “militant atheist” just like me, and that now, under the influence of Jordan Peterson & Friends, you’ve discovered Jesus Christ to be the sole savior of humanity. It might surprise you to learn that it’s the first claim which gives me pause. In situations like this, I generally discover that the former “atheist,” militant or otherwise, has been dawdling on the brink of faith for years, wrestling with his doubts, and yearning, above all, to join a community of believers. Some roads to Damascus are far more crowded than you might imagine.

But it seems that you and I agree that there really is a problem with religious fundamentalism. I’m glad to know, for instance, that you are just as worried about Islamic extremism as I am. On your account, we simply disagree about faith itself and about the special validity of Christianity—or rather, Catholicism, which is the form you recommend. I think it should strike you as interesting, at least—if not entirely damning of your whole enterprise—that you don’t even agree with all Christians, nor they with you, about what leads to salvation. Perhaps that’s a point to which we will return.   

I should acknowledge at the outset that we use the term “faith” in a variety of ways. However, most religious people (as well as most atheists) use it to indicate the acceptance of specific religious doctrines without sufficient reason—that prayer can heal the sick, that the historical Jesus was resurrected and will be returning to Earth, that believers will be reunited with their (believing) loved ones after death, etc. Hebrews 11:1 really does give the game away— “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” According to the Bible, therefore, faith is some combination of wishful thinking (“the assurance of things hoped for”) and belief without evidence (“the conviction of things not seen”). I am not alone in thinking that this frame of mind is antithetical to reason and that faith-based religion remains in perpetual conflict with science. However, I want to make it clear that I’m not criticizing faith as a positive attitude in the face of uncertainty, of the sort indicated by phrases like, “have faith in yourself.” There’s nothing wrong with that kind of faith.

So, as you expect, I think that the religious “moderation” you champion in your letter amounts to an elaborate exercise in self-deception. I recognize, of course, that there are differences between moderation and fundamentalism. But I don’t consider the boundary that you draw between them to be clear, much less principled. And I hold a very different view of many of the topics you raised—Pascal, for instance. I think Nietzsche had it right when he wrote, “The most pitiful example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed in the corruption of his reason through original sin when it had in fact been corrupted only by his Christianity.”

So let me address my longstanding frustration with religious moderates, to which you alluded. It is true that their “sophisticated” theology has generally taught me to appreciate the candor of religious fanatics. Whenever someone like me or Richard Dawkins criticizes Christians for believing in the imminent return of Christ, or Muslims for believing in martyrdom, moderates like yourself claim that we have caricatured Christianity and Islam, taken extremists to be the sole representatives of these great faiths, or otherwise overlooked a shimmering ocean of nuance. We are invariably told that a mature understanding of the historical and literary contexts of scripture renders faith perfectly compatible with reason and contemporary ethics, and that our attack upon religion is, therefore, “simplistic,” “dogmatic,” or even “fundamentalist.” Needless to say, such casuistry generally comes moistened by great sighs of condescension.

But there are several problems with any such defense of moderate religion. First, most moderates assume that religious “extremism” is uncommon and, therefore, inconsequential. But 40 percent of Americans believe that we are living in the End Times (63 percent of Evangelical Christians, 76 percent of Black Protestants, 31 percent of Mainline Protestants, and 27 percent of Catholics). This idea is extreme in almost every sense: It is extremely silly, extremely corrosive of our politics, extremely worthy of scorn—but it is not extreme in the sense of being rare.

The problem, as I see it, is that religious moderates don’t tend to know what it is like to be truly convinced that death is an illusion and that an eternity of happiness awaits the faithful beyond the grave. They have, as you say, “integrated doubt” into their faith. Another way of putting this is that they just have less faith—and for good reason. The result, however, is that your fellow moderates tend to doubt that anybody is ever motivated to sacrifice his life, or the lives of others, on the basis of religion. Moderate doubt—which I agree is an improvement over fundamentalist certainty in most respects—often blinds a person to the reality of full-tilt religious lunacy. Such blindness is now especially unhelpful, given the hideous collision between modern doubt and Islamic certainty that we are witnessing across the globe.

Second, many religious moderates imagine, as you do, that there is some clear line of separation between their faith and extremism. But there isn't. Scripture itself remains a perpetual engine of extremism: because, while He may be many things, the God of the Bible and the Qur'an is not a moderate. Read scripture as closely as you like, you will not find reasons for religious moderation. On the contrary, you will find reasons to live like a maniac from the 14th century—to fear the fires of hell, to despise nonbelievers, to persecute homosexuals, and to hunt witches (good luck). Of course, you can cherry-pick scripture and find inspiration to love your neighbor and turn the other cheek, but the truth is, the pickings are slim, and the more fully one grants credence to these books, the more fully one will be committed to the view that infidels, heretics, and apostates are fit only to be crushed in God’s loving machinery of justice.

And how does one “integrate doubt” into one’s faith? By acknowledging just how doubtful many of the claims of scripture are, and thereafter reading it selectively and allowing its assertions about reality to be continually supplanted by fresh insights—scientific (“The world isn’t 6000 years old?”), mathematical (“pi doesn’t actually equal 3?”), and moral (“I shouldn’t beat my slaves? Wait, I can’t even keep slaves?”). Religious moderation is the result of taking scripture less seriously. So why not take these books less seriously still? Why not admit that they are just books, written by fallible human beings like ourselves?