Secular academics and religion
Some advice for my fellow academics, gleaned from several days of
conversation made and overheard. Sometimes I feel like a tour
guide. Others I wonder at the lack of knowledge.
- Please know something about the terms you use.
Don’t just throw them about because they sound aspersive and will get a
particular hoped-for reaction from your listeners. Know that
fundamentalists, evangelicals, and Christians may and do all refer to
separate groups of people. Similarly, just because”Methodist” and
“fundamentalist” end in the same ending, “-ist”, this does not mean
that there’s any synonymity there. - Overall, it might help to know something about religion in general.
What do people actually believe? How do we account for the
significant diversity within religions? Ask yourself this
question: “Do all [political scientists, sociologists, economists,
etc.] believe the same things? Do they fight over what things are
important?” Assume that religions might operate similarly.
Remember that religion is a social phenomenon, albeit one that’s
possibly more widespread than any other in time or place. So to
generalize about religion unknowledgeably allows only the demonstration
of ignorance. Case in point: the Roman Catholic Church no longer
celebrates Mass in Latin, nor does it teach that Jews were Jesus’s
killers. In fact, in the case of the latter, just the opposite is
true: the RC Church goes to great lengths to apologize for its role in
anti-Semitic activities through the ages, teaches (at least in the
Western World) its adherents lots about Judaism (some might even argue,
more than it teaches them about Catholicism or the Christian Bible),
and has formally apologized for its complicity in many evils
perpetrated about Jews and asked for forgiveness. - By the way, you have to understand religion.
It’s a massive, forceful (good and not), and affective. It’s here
to stay. If you are interested in the world, you have to learn
about it to make sense of the world that we live in, where the
non-religious are an extremely small group. We now know that
“progress”, “liberalization”, and such do not automatically secularize
people; the opposite may in fact be the case. But even in religion’s
non-extreme versions (i.e., most of it, but what does not generally
make the news), it still explains a vast amount of what’s going on with
people, why they live as they do, why they act consistently or not, who
they see themselves as, and all the repercussions that can come from
those. As an educated person, it would simply be irresponsible to
not know something substantive about religions and their adherents. - Your negative experience with some congregation, denomination, or a religion may not be generalizable.
It’s a good bet that it is not.
Yes, it’s true that those were formative experiences for you, but that
doesn’t mean that you can say much beyond that. Example: you may
have found Christianity intellectually unsatisfying in your youth or
even be discouraged from being intellectual in your faith (just
as I did and was told), but that does not mean that the whole religion
is devoid of
intellectual content nor that you would still find it such. You
have changed, the particular congregation you grew up in may have
changed, and the world may be more complex than the community in which
you had experience. - “Religion” does not equal “stupid.” I have noted this before.
Plenty of very intelligent people are religious; I’d like to think that
I am a decent example here. Plenty of the religious aren’t
particularly dumb. In fact, they may be more educated in some
forms of social life than many secular academics. Many Christians
and Jews know more about literature than secular people, because they
have a background in the scriptures that provide much of the
inspiration for that literature. Could many contemporary American
Christians stand to bring more intellectual rigor and questioning to
their faith? Yes, of course. But who is there to teach
them, if we as academics tell them that their religious life is
incompatible with the life of the mind? For one thing, it’s not
true, and for another, we fail them if we don’t teach them how to think over what to
think. Finally, academic credential or progressivism or both do not
equal intelligence — I’ve heard plenty of stupid, stupid, stupid
reasoning come from the pens and mouths of the progressive and the
academically credentialed. Sometimes, my fellows academics, “the
Christians” are smarter than you. - Stereotype and disdain for the religious verge on the hypocritical.
Look, I’m not trying to accuse any person of actually being a hypocrite
here. But there is more than a small disconnect when we
stereotype the religious as [fill in the blank] or we look down on the
religious because they are not open-minded. These are precisely
the sins I hear the religious most often accused of committing.
But there’s no power in the criticism if we have to do such to make the
point. What I think this comes down to, often, is that some of us
academics are unhappy that those who are religious don’t share
our values. But some of us who are religious could complain that
intellectuals (and, I might add, other co-religionists) don’t share our
values.
This is not to say that academics and intellectuals are anti-religious,
anti-Christian, or anything like this. I’ve found many of my
fellow academics who are interested in religion, and for whom I provide
a safe person to talk to about the matter. And this is not to say
that similar criticisms and suggestions don’t apply to many of the
religious people in our society.
But to hold each other to standards that neither will live up to itself
strikes me as more than just ignorance — it is an active violation of
the standards that each community professes to live by, whether it be
the quest for knowledge and discovery, the Law, or the Gospel.
UPDATE (17 January): While wandering about the interweb, I found an article that says some of the same things as I did.