Nate Knows Nada

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. “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.

6. 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.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
• 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 11 January 2005 at 12:23 am and is filed under IvoryTower. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.