Another way to engage believers

THIS WAS WRITTEN A LONG TIME AGO, IN DECEMBER OF 2004

After November's electoral defeats, during liberal soul-searching, one common suggestion was the need for us liberals to be more comfortable talking about God, to reach across the divide to embrace "believers".

With this in mind, I was intrigued by a book review in the November issue of Harper's, written by David A. Hollinger. One book he reviews favorably is "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism", by Susan Jacoby. I wonder what lessons it may have for us. A few passages from the review:

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Jacoby offers a lively account of those Americans who espoused a"concept of public good based on human reason and human rights rather than divine authority," a group that includes not only atheists and agnostics but also deists and those who maintained other liberal religious affiliations. Her subjects may have been skeptical in varying degrees about the specific doctrines espoused by their contemporaries, but, as Jacoby notes at the beginning of her book, what united them against the "religiously correct" was their "insistence on the distinction between private faith and the conduct of public affairs." They accepted Christianity as a formidable challenlge to a healthy civic life, and they went after it with determination and a critical vigor.

Jacoby thus calls to our attention a tradition of analytical engagement with religious ideas that languished as twentieth-century secularists became complacently aloof and arrogantly dismissive. After all, if religion is in inevitable decline, one can largely ignore it; if it is only for the weak-minded, strong minds should not be wasted in its critique; and if religion is ephiphenomenal, its ideas need not be refuted intellectually, nor subjected to the same degree of critical scrutiny commonly applied to economic and political ideas. Prior to the spread of these secularist conceits, freethinkers tried to get believers to think through the basis for their faith
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Candid discussions of religious ideas are rare in the UnitedStates today. Believers argue among themselves and occasionally attack the academic and media elites for their godless ways, and secularists usually let the believers alone, treating their ideas as private matters to be respected or tolerated but not challenged. Only when confronted with something immediately threatening and scientifically obscurantist -- such as the banning of evolution lessons by some willfully ignorant schoolboard -- do secularists actually bestir themselves to refute what is being said in God's name. When Al Gore claims to resolve life's tough questions by asking himself, "What Would Jesus Do?" he can count on the respectful silence of those who privately doubt the guidance promised by this pious principle of applied ethics.

Religious ideas have become oddly privileged. Since most secularists consider religion a strictly private matter, they generally deem it impolite to express about a believer's religious ideas the kind of skepticism they might reveal in response to someone's notions about the economy or race or gender. Of course, there is no excuse for rudeness, yet the more impact on public affairs religious ideas are understood to have, the more troublesome this deference becomes. Jacoby's freethinkers understood that the society in which they lived depended in part on the basic view of the world accepted by their fellow citizens ... For the last sixty or seventy years, however, secularists have more often supposed that the ideas of religious believers did not matter; that the ideas could be scorned when out of the earshot of the faithful or, in mixed company, could be patronizingly indulged the way one might listen to the words of a child or an aged relative before tactfully changing the subject. One result of this secularist complacency is that the religious ideas of the population have been shielded from a pointed, critical scrutiny they might otherwise have received.