Pufferfish

Newsweek Talks Christianity

It's Easter weekend, which means it must be time to talk God. Using Newsweek's religion feature as a jumping off point, Huffington Post blogger Bruce Ledewitz writes "secularists have an unwarranted confidence in themselves and in a new cultural formation. In contrast, I think raising children without religion is quite difficult." Ledewitz goes on to talk about how religion makes it clear that people are not inherently good, which is a "realistic" way of looking at human nature. I wholeheartedly disagree. And it seems like someone's doing a bit of projecting.

Ledewitz's post came in response to the piece in Newsweek entitled “The End of Christian America,” which is actually a lot more thoughtful than the tabloid headline would suggest. The article reports the number of people identifying themselves as apathetic toward religion doubled this decade, with a big spike coming in the Northeast, where Christianity in this country has its deepest roots. As a result of this surge in Agnosticism, the unaffiliated members of the voting bloc are now roughly as influential as blacks. And for the first time there is a sizable number of people growing up without a religious background (that's me), instead of non believers being comprised largely of failed traditionalists like Christopher Hitchens or characters in a Woody Allen movie.

Now, with respect to the Ledewitz post, this is a point where reasonable minds have to disagree. I was raised without religion. I don't look at myself as being morally deficient. Where Ledewitz really loses me, though, is when arguing that religion deals with a realism that non-believers lack. Matt Taibbi can take it from here:

I’m not even going to bother arguing with Ledewitz. If it makes him happy to think that people like me are unequipped to raise children — well, that’s weird, but mazel tov. The one thing I wonder about is this notion that somehow religions are “more realistic” because they teach children that people are bad. First of all, I don’t think this is really what religions do. In my experience, religion taught something very different: that because two half-naked people with leaves over their genitals named Adam and Eve ate an apple in paradise a billion years ago, I, Matt Taibbi, was somehow a sinner and doomed to roast in the hot flames of hell for a billion years unless I accepted God’s authority. Which was not “realistic” at all, I don’t think, but completely retarded on about nineteen different levels. Moreover, you teach any normal kid the Bible and what he’s going to get from it is not a “realistic” view of the world but a disturbing series of questions to ponder. Like for instance, what does it mean when my own parents tell me, with a straight face, a story about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his only son? You’re a little kid, listening at bedtime in your pee-jays to the story, expecting that Abraham is going to tell God to go fuck himself because he loves his children so much, and be rewarded for doing so. Instead it’s exactly the opposite, the father in the story is rewarded for being willing to carve his innocent son up with a knife, the moral of the story somehow being not that God is an insane murderous psychopath, but that God is just and wise and should be obeyed. When the story is over, Dad tucks you in to bed and says he’ll see you in the morning. Now that’s realism for you.

With 75 percent of the country still self-identifying themselves as being a Christian, clearly we're not living in a post-Christian America. You could say, even, that Christians surround everyone else. Which I think is what Glenn Beck was getting at with his creepy reminder the other day, muttering "we surround them." Liberals scoffed at the comment while pointing at the political poll numbers. But I think Beck was looking at different poll numbers.

Religion And Morality

Via Patrick Appel, I see that Heather Mac Donald is taking issue with Michael Novak's argument that people wouldn't know how to function within a moral framework without religion:

Without a purported origin in divine commandment, Novak says, moral codes have little purchase on human behavior. “If morality were left to reason alone, common agreement would never be reached,” he writes, “since philosophers vehemently—and endlessly-disagree, and large majorities would waver without clear moral signals.” Ethical paralysis would set in: “If God is really dead, by what authority do we say any particular practice is prohibited or permitted? In the resulting social disarray, the most urgent of all moral questions has also become unsettled: ‘How shall we raise our children? What kind of moral example should we set?’”

I’m puzzled as to why Mr. Novak and other Catholic thinkers believe that reason can discover something as abstruse and remote as God but not a workable set of ethical principles, but I will leave that quibble aside for now. His predictions of secular moral paralysis strike me as rather overblown. Does any parent ask himself whether he must allow his nine-year-old son to run over his four-year-old sister with his bike because “God is really dead” or because philosophers disagree on whether morality is consequentialist or deontological? He does not, because the value of his children is self-evident, as is the necessity of inculcating in them common decency, if only for the sake of a sane household. And his children will learn that common decency through repetition and by gradually understanding that others have the same capacity for pain and sorrow that they do. To be sure, some households remain dysfunctional, but their problems almost invariably stem from the parents’ incapacity, not from the failure to invoke God as a reason to not kick your mother when she asks you to pick up your clothes.

I've heard Novak's argument from conservative Cahotlic friends. There's no disagreeing with them. Despite being raised by recovering hippies who never took me to a church service, my Catholic friends say that my morals are a product of society's saturation with religious teachings; apparently it took a religious village to instill decency in this child.

Turkey Day Reading

Hertzburg has a fantastic piece in the New Yorker on Prop 8. The final anecdote is memorable:

“Look,” Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, said the other day (on the air, to Bill O’Reilly), “I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence. . . . I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact.” For diversity’s sake, he added that “the historic version of Islam” and “the historic version of Judaism” are likewise menaced—which is natural, given that gay, secular, fascist values are “the opposite of what you’re taught in Sunday school.”

This sort of sludge may or may not prove to be of some slight utility in the 2012 Republican primaries, but it is, increasingly, history. A couple of days before the California vote, the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Wildermuth noticed a “No on Prop 8” sign on a front lawn. The lawn and the sign belonged to Steve Young, the football Hall of Famer and former 49er quarterback, and his wife, Barb. Steve Young is a graduate of Brigham Young University, which is named for his great-great-great-grandfather. The Youngs still belong to the Mormon Church. “We believe all families matter and we do not believe in discrimination,” Barb Young said. “Therefore, our family will vote against Prop 8.” It wasn’t enough this time. But the time is coming.

Damn right it is. Gay marriage is just the latest in a string of depressing struggles against this country's conservative orthodoxy that one day will be viewed by most Amerians as a regretable blemish. As for Steve Young, I don't think he has taken his fight public. Nonetheless, it's notable to see a public figure - a former star athlete -  make a stand against discrimination, despite the homophobic cutler found in the Mormon Church and the professional locker room. Good for him.