I don’t know how many readers here were following the discussion about E.J.Dionne’s new book, Souled Out, at the TPM Book Club. I think there were some interesting things said by Dionne and the people invited to respond to his posts and the book itself. What amazed me however was how predominant were the obtuse, ignorant, and negative comments made by the majority of the commenters. So partially as a vent, but also to make a point, I’m cross-posting here a riff I did on a point Brian McLaren makes in his last contribution to the discussion:
McLaren said: Just as religious folk fear being marginalized by secularists, secular folk may fear (with more statistical reason, it should be noted) being marginalized by the religious; just as religious folk fear the negative social consequences of materialism and atheism, nonreligious folk fear the negative social consequences of religiosity.
If we recall a quote that has been attributed to several people – the antidote to bad religion will not be no religion, but better religion.
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It’s astonishing really how difficult it is for reasonably intelligent people even to hear what McLaren, Dionne, and the other responders are saying. I always think of TPM as one of the rare sites where you can read the comments and learn as much there as from the original post. But I guess not when it comes to religion. And I think Brian McLaren put his finger on why in the quote above. The secularist/new atheist is as uninterested in dialog–or even as incapable of it–as the fundamentalist because both sides are thinking with their lizard brains. They both, rightly, fear the extinction of their moribund late modern worldviews.
When I listen to or read the new atheists, it’s as if they are thinking in World War I categories even though we’ve moved into the nuclear age. It’s as if because they don’t understand their current world or where it is going, they latch onto something they think they understand and which bolsters their sense of identity. It’s as if the new atheists need Christian fundamentalists the way 1950s-era conservatives needed communists. The anticommunists needed some focus point to which they could direct their anxieties. They didn’t know who they were unless they could define themselves over against what they hated. And they hated with the over the top hate of the cornered animal, their thinking soaked in adrenaline, high on the fear that their very survival was at stake. Oh it felt good, and they were so righteous in their hatred. They were a brotherhood and sisterhood of righteous survivors against the plague that threatened civilization as they knew it.
Well as with the threat posed by the Soviet Union in the postwar period, or the threat posed now by Islamic fundamentalist terror, the threat posed by the Dobson/Falwell Christianist right is not something to be dismissed as if it were nothing. These are people who have done and will continue to cause a lot of damage, but they are best confronted with poise and prudence, not hysteria. Such reactions just feed the beast, and what it needs, instead, is starving. And the best way to starve it is by refusing to participate in the polarity. And you can do that, I would suggest, by just moving beyond the moribund positivism that defines both fundamentalism and its rationalist materialist twin.
There is life beyond the stale conflict that we’ve been madly iterating since the Scopes trial. There are interesting developments in religion, and those developments point to a different kind of religious future. But the new atheists would prefer to stay in the comfort zone where they can feel safe in their smug sense of late modern rationalist superiority. Fine, but they are the mirror image of the fundamentalists they love to detest.
P.S. Cusanus is my default user name when my real name won’t work for whatever reason. For other posts on my debate with the new atheists, see the several posts and comments from last summer which can be found in the July Archive.
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