Atheists, in my experience, are colossal bores.
What else could they be, stomping around as they do, passionately trying to prove a negative?
But sometimes atheists are on the side of the angels. I think the current boom in atheism is a response to the crap spread across the land by the born-agains and their campaign to run the world on the principle of erotophobia. Like their counterparts in the Islamic world, the man sitting up in the pilot seat of this juggernaut may talk loftily about the will of God, but where the rubber meets the road it tends to flatten the good, the true, the imaginative, and the just plain terribly interesting. Religion, as it has come to be understood of late, is an ugly thing. It’s not surprising the atheists should now be riding high. Newton’s Third Law of Motion, don’t you know: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
Some weeks ago I attended a conference which brought a number of Germans over to talk about religion in America. Totally fascinating couple of days. I tend to think of Europe as pretty much beyond religion, but these guys set me straight. The keynote speaker was Karsten Voigt, a leader of the German Social Democrat Party, Coordinator for German-American Relations in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and self-identified Christian. Knows America like de Toqueville knew America.
Voigt made some interesting comparisons. Unlike in France, where a strongly assertive laïcité (secularism) is official policy, Germans have no trouble mixing church and state. On the contrary, they long ago gave the church to the state to run. The result is establishment religion in Germany (and there’s not much of the other kind) is terribly bourgeois. It’s all about being nice. Makes me think of the Lutheran church where I grew up. Nice clean red carpet running down the middle, beautiful polished oak pews, fresh white painted walls and fresh cut flowers. And Bach. Glorious Bach. How could one ever think of going to a church which didn’t feature Bach?
But I digress. Religion, says Voigt, is to Germans, more than anything else, the source of their ethics. It’s about helping people in need, about doing your best to educate your children and care for the sick. It has little or nothing to do with keeping women from having abortions or gay people from forming lifelong unions with the full support of the community. With religion like this, there is nothing to fear, and even people who don’t believe in God are willing to pay their church taxes. You can even have prayer breakfasts. Did you know German political leaders did that?
To German eyes, says Voigt, this demand that religion be kept out of the schools that France calls sacred and America fights endlessly over, is hard to fathom. Cool it, folks. No big deal, the Germans tend to say. Crucifix on the wall in Bavaria? “Just two of us Jews at school,” says Michael Brenner, professor of Jewish history at the University of Munich, “Me and the guy hanging on the cross.”
Ah, yes. So easy to say. In 1968, 64% of American teenagers believed in angels. In 1994 that figure was 76%. One assumes anyone buying into angels is buying into a larger package and it doesn’t take long to realize when George Bush says God guides his actions there are a lot of folk who might want to give him the benefit of the doubt. Is it any wonder the atheists are coming out of the woodwork?
Start with Richard Dawkins. He’s the best one to listen to. Talks like your classic British intellectual. Witty and sharp. I heard him address a small private women’s college in Lynchburg, Virginia (on one of those New York TV stations that bring you gems like this, now on YouTube). A whole bunch of folk from Jerry Falwell’s so-called Liberty University were there to refute his ideas. It was a bloodbath, revealing how unready such poor lambs are to talk with people who have sharpened their skills in a lifetime of debate and critical thinking.
“I have never been so insulted…” says one poor Falwell innocent. “I don’t understand why you should feel insulted,” says Dawkins. “I didn’t insult you. I insulted God.”
America’s most articulate atheist, I think, is probably Sam Harris. He’s got two great reads: The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.
And then there’s Daniel C. Dennett. His latest is Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.
There’s also this guy David Mills, who has been described as America’s leading atheist. I had not heard of him until recently. Author of the best selling book on atheism in 2005 and 2006, apparently — outselling Dawkins and Dennett and the others. Or so I understand. Can’t imagine why. Mills comes across as a jerk in an hour-long video I watched yesterday of him addressing a group of atheists at Ohio State in Columbus. Dawkins, Harris and Dennett do it with the power of ideas; Mills does it with a baseball bat. You have to pick your atheists carefully.
Bill Moyers, bless his Baptist heart, had his first regular new old program on PBS the other night. (Time to start watching television; Bill Moyers is back!) Three fantastic stories including one interview with Jonathan Miller, who produced A History of Disbelief. It’s not scheduled yet for KQED, but they say it’s coming. The fundies are out in force trying to keep it off, of course.
Miller is my kind of atheist, which is to say not an atheist at all. Unlike so many of us, he was spared religious instruction as a child. (As a shrink told me some years ago, I might have gotten rid of the golden calf of religion, but the mold it came in is still rooted in my soul.) For him it’s more the intellectual question: why do so many people need religion? Which opens the door to all the psychological studies, from Freud’s explanation that religion is an endless father-seeking activity to religion from an evolutionary perspective, such as Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained.
Christopher Hutchins is on one of his seemingly endless book-pushing trips, this time for God is Not Great, which came out just a week ago. I’ve got tickets to hear him debate the dean of Grace Cathedral on the 23rd.
There’s this French philosopher, Michel Onfray, who has apparently got a huge following. Onfray, I understand (haven’t read his Atheist Manifesto yet) is making the argument it’s time to get out of the “God is dead” rut and bring him back to life, so that we might offer a more perfect atheism, one better grounded in reason, “solid and militant.”
OK by me. Whatever gets you through the night. And lest you think I’m making it up that atheism is the fashion of the day, Onfray’s book (it also carries the British title In Defense of Atheism) was chosen "Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement.
This doesn’t begin to tick off all the atheist manifestos popping up everywhere. And I’ve said nothing about some of the more classic ones such as Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian. And at the moment I’m working my way through Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh, not so much an atheist pitch as a literary reading of Jewish and Christian writing, with all the brilliance Bloom can muster.
Stephen Prothero, as I mentioned in the last blog, is making the rounds trying to pitch the idea we bring the study of religion back into the schools, if only to keep fresh our cultural references to the Bible stories we once knew. Poor fellow. Just asking for the “where do you get the ‘we,’ white man?" charge.
I asked him what he thought he could accomplish by doing this? Wouldn’t it do more harm than good? He insists it’s already working and that the state can monitor it so that it doesn’t become proselytizing. I’m not worried about that so much. I’d absolutely love to sit in a classroom and engage in religious debate. I just don’t think the religious people can take it. Keep it private and we’ll all make nice. Rub our noses in your walking on water nonsense and it’s chocolate Jesuses till the cows come home.
We were once like the Germans. Our parents taught us it wasn’t nice to say unkind things about other people’s religions. In order to make this work, we all limited religion to the private sphere. With this latest attempt to take America over for the Christian right, religion has entered the public sphere bigtime. It’s no surprise that all these sleeping atheistic dogs have awakened.
Watch it, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson. The atheists are coming to bite your ass.
Americans believe in angels: http://books.google.com/books?id=C525wN5demIC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=number+of+people+who+believe+in+angels&source=web&ots=M6lMh-667i&sig=MY0WW7bw6MMAC3Qv98PdbTVr81U#PPA47,M1
David Mills’ 10 Reasons America is Approaching a Golden Age of Atheism http://www.davidmills.net/
Dawkins’ address at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe7yf9GJUfU&mode=related&search= (Part I - the presentation) and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR_z85O0P2M&source=rss (Part II - Q&A)
To get a sense of who Dawkins is, if you’re not up to two hours of him on the Randolph-Macon Woman’s College presentation, try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_2xGIwQfik&mode=related&search= I
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Religious Literacy - A Review
In Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t, Stephen Prothero takes his cue and his title from E. D. Hirsch’s 1988 volume, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t, now in its third edition (2002). Prayer and devotion went out of the schools in 1963 with the court case of Abington Township School District v. Schempp, and with it went religion altogether. Prothero insists a correction is overdue. Not in prayer and devotion, however, but the objective study of religion as a school subject.
Hirsch complained that our national dumbing down had begun to eat away at our cultural heritage and he set about collecting facts he believed people need to participate intelligently in modern-day American culture. Prothero, after laying out what he calls the problem of religious illiteracy and showing us what Americans once knew about religion, also provides a dictionary of terms he hopes will address that lacuna.
Like Hirsch, as well as proponents of “Western Civilization” courses in the university, Prothero has to contend with the big question of who gets to speak for the national culture. Before Hirsch and Prothero, there was Howard Bloom’s plea that we stop being seduced by popular culture, postmodern relativity notions and low quality writing and renew our acquaintance with the products of the best and the brightest of our civilization. The problem is just what those products might be. Bloom was attacked on all sides for his biases in favor of “dead white men,” and Hirsch hardly fared better. Prothero, too, will have to answer to people who ask why it is when he says religion he almost always means Christianity – and Protestant Christianity at that. He is scornful of the idea that we offer equal treatment to all religions. His dictionary includes other religions, but his discussion of school curriculum lays overwhelming emphasis on knowledge of the Bible. The reason being, of course, that Protestant Christianity is our cultural heritage, warts and all.
There are several problems with that claim. One is its incompleteness. Protestantism is unquestionably a major part of what has made and continues to make America tick. But it’s not all, and there’s the argument that with only so many hours in the day, and in a school year, more hours of Latin and Greek mean fewer hours of Latin American literature, to pick topics chosen arbitrarily and at random.
Not entirely arbitrarily, of course. The example parallels the struggle between conservative forces who look back at what we were and want to hold fast, and progressive forces who suggest we fix what went wrong and move on. To bring religious studies back into schools, as Prothero wants us to do, would mean cutting time for something else. Where would religious studies stand in competition with music, drama, or sports? Or more math and science, for that matter. Times have changed. Would courses in ecology not draw greater parental support than a course in which one reviewed the books of the Bible (and distinguished between Jewish, Catholic and Protestant bibles)?
Anthropologists describe, and leave advocacy to others. A Martian anthropologist would look at America and simply observe that Americans no longer learn to make quilts and spinning wheels, no longer burn witches and lynch the descendants of slaves, and no longer care as they once did whether one should be baptized as an adult or as a child.
Prothero, on the other hand, spends a chapter reminding us how much “we” used to know, how much a part of a child’s education was comprised of Bible stories. He then speaks of the “predicament” we are in because that knowledge base has been largely eroded. He gives little weight to the fact that a far greater number of us today are Hindu or Jew, Muslim, secularist, atheist, Buddhist, or Catholic than in days gone by.
“Faith without knowledge is dangerous, ” he says (p. 146). Religion is "the most volatile constituent of culture" and "one of the greatest forces for evil" in the world.” Elsewhere he argues that he is neutral about religion – “I write here not as a believer (or unbeliever) but as a citizen” (p. 15). He is a believer, however, and may be located among the knowledge-based Christians (those who seek to understand the message of Jesus) and not among the increasingly numerous and powerful spirit-based Christians (who speak of Jesus as a friend they talk to on a daily basis). This raises the question of where his supporters and detractors are most likely to come from. Will Jews want to sit through classes on the bible where the large majority are born-again Christians? Will the born-again Christians want to hear the view that anti-semitism is found not only in the hearts of some Christians but in the scriptures themselves?
In a perfect world, one would welcome this kind of exchange. But one can only imagine the can of worms we’d open if we put it in the high schools in today’s America. He insists it’s already being done successfully in 8% of America’s schools, but that claim requires closer scrutiny. Prothero’s proposal would require very serious groundwork indeed and would doubtless only work as an elective.. Will non-religious people be convinced of its value? Will spirit-based religionists agree that knowledge about religion (which will inevitably hold their beliefs up to scrutiny) lead to something good? Should we even care what they think? Should we not go with Prothero especially if we think the renewalist wave is not simply a fact but an alarming one?
Prothero gives mixed messages. His chapter on the history of Protestant America suggests a nostalgia for a time when religion took up more space in American life. And this doesn’t jibe with his ignorance-is-dangerous pitch. He suggests that there is something shameful about thinking Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife, as if it is on a par with those polls which show an alarming number of Americans cannot distinguish Iraq from Australia on a map. And he is especially critical of people who do not know “their own religious history.” But isn’t that begging the question? If they do not know it, perhaps it is not “their own” anymore, and if he is writing as a citizen and not as a Christian, why should he care?
Whether or not he has a religious agenda hiding in his appeal, however, (and I see absolutely nothing sinister in that – he has every right to advocate religion) I think we should take him at face value when he gives us two non-religious reasons for boning up on things Americans once knew about religion, one political and one sociocultural.
Politically, the case can be made that our ignorance of the differences between Shia and Sunni led to catastrophe in Iraq. Another case can be made that knowing nothing about the role of dispensational premillenialism blinds us to the reasons evangelicals support an aggressive Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank. A third, one that brings me around to his side even more than the others, is that we fail miserably to ask interesting questions of Christians who focus more energy on wiping out homosexuality than poverty and follow a war policy but not a turn-the-other-cheek policy.
On the cultural front, a case can be made that a failure to understand the Biblical references and religious argument for civil disobedience in Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail or the moral one in his I Have a Dream speech means we miss a full appreciation of some of the great documents in the history of American democracy. Other examples abound.
Beyond that, what we teach our children, it seems to me, is up for grabs. I agree with Bloom that if you don’t spend some time with Shakespeare, you’re squandering a great resource of the English language. I resonate with much of what Hirsch includes in his canon. And I share with Prothero the wish more people could talk intelligently about Vatican I and II, the separation of church and state, exactly why some people refuse blood transfusions and the like. But I have more than a little trouble shedding a tear that America is no longer what it was when its children were reading the McGuffey readers. Are we really worse off now that Catholics no longer refuse to pray with Protestants, and build parochial schools because the public schools are so antagonistic to Catholicism? Do we really want to go back to the assumption of America as a Christian nation, as we did when Jews could not join country clubs? If the ‘relativization’ of religious beliefs leads Jews to marry out at a rate of 50%, is it really my responsibility as an American citizen to turn the tide?
Prothero’s appeal that we be well-read in our cultural history should be welcome by any and all of us. His argument that there are risks in not knowing about something that figures so prominently in our domestic and international relations also has merit. But he provides no reason why his suggestion that we retire to our sectarian camps to renew our various ultimate truth claims should be taken seriously. Those who find religion a glass half full will agree with him; those who see religion as a source of division will not.
Prothero has delivered on his title to a degree. The book is full of interesting facts. I was raised a Christian but learned of Arminius here for the first time. (Jacobus Arminius, who inspired Methodists and later Pentecostalists and others) focused on the importance of a personal (read: emotional) relationship with Jesus. I had forgotten that the Douay version of the bible has more books than the King James; I thought it was a question of different books. I thoroughly enjoyed the history of the sea change from knowing about Jesus to knowing him personally. By and large, though – and Prothero admits this – he only scratches the surface of facts about religion and seriously short-changes some. (There is no mention of Sufi, of Christian Science, of voodoo.) But except for the promise in his title, that’s not a fair criticism. His book is an appeal more than a repository of information.
As many have pointed out recently, religion is on the rise in America, and the European pattern of ever increasing secularism may be the exception, not the rule. The reason we know less than we once did as a nation Prothero attributes not to creeping secularism but to the shift over time from a knowledge-based Calvinism to a passion-based Arminianism.
The pendulum swings back and forth throughout history between times when we make reason central and times when passion reigns supreme. The current zeitgeist is to talk of scripture passionately, but not really know what it says. Many Afro-Americans who do read carefully refuse to read Paul’s letters in church where he urges slaves to submit to their masters. Most renewal (Arminian, Pentecostal, spirit-based, passion-based – we’re still working out the labels) Christians don’t give it a moment’s thought, or consider it trivial. Knowledge of scripture in their camp is so scanty that they associate sin with sexual behavior and not with their failure to feed the homeless. They can tell you why they oppose homosexuality, but not why they prioritize it and other sexual sins over peace and compassion. Rather than debate the scriptures, they often argue along the lines that a little knowledge is dangerous. No-nothingism lives on, and Prothero’s plan would be a challenge to the those who focus on faith healing, speaking-in-tongues and other joyous expression at the cost of critical thinking.
What exactly would we include in a school curriculum on religion? Who would teach it? Would we have a Vatican I catholic debate a Vatican II catholic? Or would we take the power structure view that there is no division and propagate a falsehood? Would we permit kids to laugh out loud at stories of the Rapture? Or would we insist that respect for religion is necessary? What message are we giving our children, Prothero asks, by keeping silent about religion in the public arena? What message, I ask, would we be giving them if we told them there are ideas which one must not express. Would we keep silent about artistic productions such as the Piss Christ and the Chocolate Jesus? Would we depend on the state to determine what might be said in these religion courses?
It would not take long, I suspect, after opening the pandora’s box that holds religious fervor in check before we would be scurrying back to where we are now, where parents who believe it important to inculcate religious beliefs into their children use the opportunities provided by Sunday Schools, catechism classes, summer camps, the dinner table and prayers and discussions before bedtime. And where the rest of us go back to the gentlemen’s agreement we once had based on a conviction that nice people don’t say nasty things about other people’s religion.
If religion comes out in public, it has to be treated like any other idea. Aired and debated and subjected on occasion to ridicule. Is that what Prothero is after? If so, I doubt most religious people in America will be so quick to support his efforts. If we are going to go on being “decently respectful” about one another’s religious convictions, it is best kept in the private arena where one enters at one’s own risk.
I don’t see how you can have it both ways.
But in the end, my view is one of scepticism about how we might successfully implement his plan, rather than opposition. My guess is that Prothero’s idea will catch hold to some degree in some places. And where it doesn’t, it will generate useful discussion.
That’s all to the good.
Berkeley
April 26, 2007
_________
There are at least two excellent treatments of Prothero’s proposal. One is an
interview on Tavis Smiley which gets at the main points: http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200704/20070406.html#
Another is David Van Biema’s article in Time Magazine which outlines many of the objections before seconding the motion:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1601845,00.html
There’s also the Jon Stewart interview:
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=83952&ml_collection=&ml_gateway=&ml_gateway_id=&ml_comedian=&ml_runtime=&ml_context=show&ml_origin_url=%2Fmotherload%2F%3Fml_video%3D83952&ml_playlist=&lnk=&is_large=true
Additional reviews are available on Prothero’s website: http://www.stephenprothero.com/reviews/
Hirsch complained that our national dumbing down had begun to eat away at our cultural heritage and he set about collecting facts he believed people need to participate intelligently in modern-day American culture. Prothero, after laying out what he calls the problem of religious illiteracy and showing us what Americans once knew about religion, also provides a dictionary of terms he hopes will address that lacuna.
Like Hirsch, as well as proponents of “Western Civilization” courses in the university, Prothero has to contend with the big question of who gets to speak for the national culture. Before Hirsch and Prothero, there was Howard Bloom’s plea that we stop being seduced by popular culture, postmodern relativity notions and low quality writing and renew our acquaintance with the products of the best and the brightest of our civilization. The problem is just what those products might be. Bloom was attacked on all sides for his biases in favor of “dead white men,” and Hirsch hardly fared better. Prothero, too, will have to answer to people who ask why it is when he says religion he almost always means Christianity – and Protestant Christianity at that. He is scornful of the idea that we offer equal treatment to all religions. His dictionary includes other religions, but his discussion of school curriculum lays overwhelming emphasis on knowledge of the Bible. The reason being, of course, that Protestant Christianity is our cultural heritage, warts and all.
There are several problems with that claim. One is its incompleteness. Protestantism is unquestionably a major part of what has made and continues to make America tick. But it’s not all, and there’s the argument that with only so many hours in the day, and in a school year, more hours of Latin and Greek mean fewer hours of Latin American literature, to pick topics chosen arbitrarily and at random.
Not entirely arbitrarily, of course. The example parallels the struggle between conservative forces who look back at what we were and want to hold fast, and progressive forces who suggest we fix what went wrong and move on. To bring religious studies back into schools, as Prothero wants us to do, would mean cutting time for something else. Where would religious studies stand in competition with music, drama, or sports? Or more math and science, for that matter. Times have changed. Would courses in ecology not draw greater parental support than a course in which one reviewed the books of the Bible (and distinguished between Jewish, Catholic and Protestant bibles)?
Anthropologists describe, and leave advocacy to others. A Martian anthropologist would look at America and simply observe that Americans no longer learn to make quilts and spinning wheels, no longer burn witches and lynch the descendants of slaves, and no longer care as they once did whether one should be baptized as an adult or as a child.
Prothero, on the other hand, spends a chapter reminding us how much “we” used to know, how much a part of a child’s education was comprised of Bible stories. He then speaks of the “predicament” we are in because that knowledge base has been largely eroded. He gives little weight to the fact that a far greater number of us today are Hindu or Jew, Muslim, secularist, atheist, Buddhist, or Catholic than in days gone by.
“Faith without knowledge is dangerous, ” he says (p. 146). Religion is "the most volatile constituent of culture" and "one of the greatest forces for evil" in the world.” Elsewhere he argues that he is neutral about religion – “I write here not as a believer (or unbeliever) but as a citizen” (p. 15). He is a believer, however, and may be located among the knowledge-based Christians (those who seek to understand the message of Jesus) and not among the increasingly numerous and powerful spirit-based Christians (who speak of Jesus as a friend they talk to on a daily basis). This raises the question of where his supporters and detractors are most likely to come from. Will Jews want to sit through classes on the bible where the large majority are born-again Christians? Will the born-again Christians want to hear the view that anti-semitism is found not only in the hearts of some Christians but in the scriptures themselves?
In a perfect world, one would welcome this kind of exchange. But one can only imagine the can of worms we’d open if we put it in the high schools in today’s America. He insists it’s already being done successfully in 8% of America’s schools, but that claim requires closer scrutiny. Prothero’s proposal would require very serious groundwork indeed and would doubtless only work as an elective.. Will non-religious people be convinced of its value? Will spirit-based religionists agree that knowledge about religion (which will inevitably hold their beliefs up to scrutiny) lead to something good? Should we even care what they think? Should we not go with Prothero especially if we think the renewalist wave is not simply a fact but an alarming one?
Prothero gives mixed messages. His chapter on the history of Protestant America suggests a nostalgia for a time when religion took up more space in American life. And this doesn’t jibe with his ignorance-is-dangerous pitch. He suggests that there is something shameful about thinking Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife, as if it is on a par with those polls which show an alarming number of Americans cannot distinguish Iraq from Australia on a map. And he is especially critical of people who do not know “their own religious history.” But isn’t that begging the question? If they do not know it, perhaps it is not “their own” anymore, and if he is writing as a citizen and not as a Christian, why should he care?
Whether or not he has a religious agenda hiding in his appeal, however, (and I see absolutely nothing sinister in that – he has every right to advocate religion) I think we should take him at face value when he gives us two non-religious reasons for boning up on things Americans once knew about religion, one political and one sociocultural.
Politically, the case can be made that our ignorance of the differences between Shia and Sunni led to catastrophe in Iraq. Another case can be made that knowing nothing about the role of dispensational premillenialism blinds us to the reasons evangelicals support an aggressive Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank. A third, one that brings me around to his side even more than the others, is that we fail miserably to ask interesting questions of Christians who focus more energy on wiping out homosexuality than poverty and follow a war policy but not a turn-the-other-cheek policy.
On the cultural front, a case can be made that a failure to understand the Biblical references and religious argument for civil disobedience in Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail or the moral one in his I Have a Dream speech means we miss a full appreciation of some of the great documents in the history of American democracy. Other examples abound.
Beyond that, what we teach our children, it seems to me, is up for grabs. I agree with Bloom that if you don’t spend some time with Shakespeare, you’re squandering a great resource of the English language. I resonate with much of what Hirsch includes in his canon. And I share with Prothero the wish more people could talk intelligently about Vatican I and II, the separation of church and state, exactly why some people refuse blood transfusions and the like. But I have more than a little trouble shedding a tear that America is no longer what it was when its children were reading the McGuffey readers. Are we really worse off now that Catholics no longer refuse to pray with Protestants, and build parochial schools because the public schools are so antagonistic to Catholicism? Do we really want to go back to the assumption of America as a Christian nation, as we did when Jews could not join country clubs? If the ‘relativization’ of religious beliefs leads Jews to marry out at a rate of 50%, is it really my responsibility as an American citizen to turn the tide?
Prothero’s appeal that we be well-read in our cultural history should be welcome by any and all of us. His argument that there are risks in not knowing about something that figures so prominently in our domestic and international relations also has merit. But he provides no reason why his suggestion that we retire to our sectarian camps to renew our various ultimate truth claims should be taken seriously. Those who find religion a glass half full will agree with him; those who see religion as a source of division will not.
Prothero has delivered on his title to a degree. The book is full of interesting facts. I was raised a Christian but learned of Arminius here for the first time. (Jacobus Arminius, who inspired Methodists and later Pentecostalists and others) focused on the importance of a personal (read: emotional) relationship with Jesus. I had forgotten that the Douay version of the bible has more books than the King James; I thought it was a question of different books. I thoroughly enjoyed the history of the sea change from knowing about Jesus to knowing him personally. By and large, though – and Prothero admits this – he only scratches the surface of facts about religion and seriously short-changes some. (There is no mention of Sufi, of Christian Science, of voodoo.) But except for the promise in his title, that’s not a fair criticism. His book is an appeal more than a repository of information.
As many have pointed out recently, religion is on the rise in America, and the European pattern of ever increasing secularism may be the exception, not the rule. The reason we know less than we once did as a nation Prothero attributes not to creeping secularism but to the shift over time from a knowledge-based Calvinism to a passion-based Arminianism.
The pendulum swings back and forth throughout history between times when we make reason central and times when passion reigns supreme. The current zeitgeist is to talk of scripture passionately, but not really know what it says. Many Afro-Americans who do read carefully refuse to read Paul’s letters in church where he urges slaves to submit to their masters. Most renewal (Arminian, Pentecostal, spirit-based, passion-based – we’re still working out the labels) Christians don’t give it a moment’s thought, or consider it trivial. Knowledge of scripture in their camp is so scanty that they associate sin with sexual behavior and not with their failure to feed the homeless. They can tell you why they oppose homosexuality, but not why they prioritize it and other sexual sins over peace and compassion. Rather than debate the scriptures, they often argue along the lines that a little knowledge is dangerous. No-nothingism lives on, and Prothero’s plan would be a challenge to the those who focus on faith healing, speaking-in-tongues and other joyous expression at the cost of critical thinking.
What exactly would we include in a school curriculum on religion? Who would teach it? Would we have a Vatican I catholic debate a Vatican II catholic? Or would we take the power structure view that there is no division and propagate a falsehood? Would we permit kids to laugh out loud at stories of the Rapture? Or would we insist that respect for religion is necessary? What message are we giving our children, Prothero asks, by keeping silent about religion in the public arena? What message, I ask, would we be giving them if we told them there are ideas which one must not express. Would we keep silent about artistic productions such as the Piss Christ and the Chocolate Jesus? Would we depend on the state to determine what might be said in these religion courses?
It would not take long, I suspect, after opening the pandora’s box that holds religious fervor in check before we would be scurrying back to where we are now, where parents who believe it important to inculcate religious beliefs into their children use the opportunities provided by Sunday Schools, catechism classes, summer camps, the dinner table and prayers and discussions before bedtime. And where the rest of us go back to the gentlemen’s agreement we once had based on a conviction that nice people don’t say nasty things about other people’s religion.
If religion comes out in public, it has to be treated like any other idea. Aired and debated and subjected on occasion to ridicule. Is that what Prothero is after? If so, I doubt most religious people in America will be so quick to support his efforts. If we are going to go on being “decently respectful” about one another’s religious convictions, it is best kept in the private arena where one enters at one’s own risk.
I don’t see how you can have it both ways.
But in the end, my view is one of scepticism about how we might successfully implement his plan, rather than opposition. My guess is that Prothero’s idea will catch hold to some degree in some places. And where it doesn’t, it will generate useful discussion.
That’s all to the good.
Berkeley
April 26, 2007
_________
There are at least two excellent treatments of Prothero’s proposal. One is an
interview on Tavis Smiley which gets at the main points: http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200704/20070406.html#
Another is David Van Biema’s article in Time Magazine which outlines many of the objections before seconding the motion:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1601845,00.html
There’s also the Jon Stewart interview:
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=83952&ml_collection=&ml_gateway=&ml_gateway_id=&ml_comedian=&ml_runtime=&ml_context=show&ml_origin_url=%2Fmotherload%2F%3Fml_video%3D83952&ml_playlist=&lnk=&is_large=true
Additional reviews are available on Prothero’s website: http://www.stephenprothero.com/reviews/
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
The Pursuit of Happyness: A Review
The best way to watch The Pursuit of Happyness is to unplug the cable connecting your head and heart, or shift to heart only mode and sit back. You’ll soar. So much love. So much appeal to your best instincts to care for the little guy.
There’s so much to groove on. (Sorry if groove dates me; I can’t find a better word.) There’s Will Smith’s face. There’s the man’s affection for his son. The son’s voice when he says, “You’re a good papa.” The fact that the son is played by Smith’s own son and gives you reason to think there might be a gene for good acting. There’s the Italian director, Gabriele Muccino (don’t miss the extra features when you rent the DVD), and the obvious affection between him and Will Smith. There’s the scene with the Glide Memorial Choir and there’s Cecil Williams, played by Cecil Williams. And there’s Will’s face when he gets the news he is unemployed no more.
I assume you know the plot line. The script is based on the book by Chris Gardner who, if his tale is true, busted his ass to get a job with Dean Witter against what seem like impossible odds, including a stint as a homeless man sleeping in the toilet of a BART Station with his son.
Muccino barely knew English when he started filming, but he knew what he wanted to make the story about. You have to be an outsider to understand the American dream, he said. Don’t know about that, but he got it right.
And that brings us to what happens if you plug your head back in at some point. If you do, you begin to understand why rottentomatoes.com gave the film only a 2/3 positive rating. One man’s tale of courage, will power and determination is another man’s tale of everything that’s wrong with the American dream.
In pragmatic America, where philosophy is for sissies, individual effort is often taken for the sole governing factor in success, and not merely a contributing factor. It’s all about being a winner, not a loser, not about making the world a better place to live in. It’s about individual heroes, not groups or institutions. We’ve got John Wayne and Superman and now we’ve got Chris Gardner. One person can make a difference. Michael Jackson builds a fantasy land because he just wants to “help the children” and flies in a dying kid here and there and treats him like a prince. Oprah gives away cars and builds schools in South Africa and tells about it to millions of teary-eyed fans. We see her enabling a whole generation of new Nelson Mandelas. We don’t see the kids who miss out on her generosity.
Charity, the chief virtue of the great religions, goes hand in hand with an acceptance of the status quo. God must love poor people; he made so many of them, the saying goes. And thank God he provided us with so much opportunity to display our generous hearts.
Occasionally Americans pull off things like Social Security and Medicare. We also generate a critical mass of folk who try to tear those institutions down. We’re not much on universal health insurance but as our leaders Tom Delay and Bill Frist reminded us, we have developed the technology to support our life-at-all-costs values. Remember the efforts to keep Terry Schiavo alive?
The communists failed, any Republican can tell you, because they removed incentive. We, on the other hand, know America is Number One because we don’t make that mistake.
But talk about things like this has no place in a rags-to-riches American moral tale. It gets in the way of the tears and the inspiration and the pride. Worst of all, it’s boring.
In Pursuit of Happyness the wealthy are kind and generous and supportive. The poor are thieves. In one telling scene the Gardner character takes a basketball away from his son. Good, you think. A black American father who is reminding his kid not to fall in the trap so many ghetto kids fall into thinking sports will save your ass. Another winners and losers way out for the few with failure for the many. (For the many, there’s the military, of course, which is fine except when the military does what it’s meant to do.) But then he changes his mind and the message becomes, “Don’t listen to anybody. Not even me.” Don’t let anything get between you and your dream.
Really? Not anything? Not a wife and kids? Not a community? Not the pursuit of truth and the maintenance of a pure soul? Not a serious talk with yourself about who you might have to step on to get to the top? What happens to those of us who can’t make it to the top? Where do we sleep?
The models for Chris Gardner are the men with the Jaguars and ringside seats at sports events. The dream home is not a little home with a picket fence but a pretentious as hell mansion – goals he ultimately achieves, by the way.
Then there’s the fact that Gardner wows ‘em with his brilliance in solving the Rubic cube in a short cab ride from downtown San Francisco to Noe Valley. He’s always been a whiz kid. He’s got the stuff, in other words, to make it, given the opportunity. Ah, yes. Star material.
But what have we got with all this Marxist trashing of the American dream and raining on a winner’s parade? It’s a good way to ruin a good cry.
Watch those eyes of Will Smith tear up when the dream comes true. It will restore your faith in mankind.
The winner class, at any rate.
There’s so much to groove on. (Sorry if groove dates me; I can’t find a better word.) There’s Will Smith’s face. There’s the man’s affection for his son. The son’s voice when he says, “You’re a good papa.” The fact that the son is played by Smith’s own son and gives you reason to think there might be a gene for good acting. There’s the Italian director, Gabriele Muccino (don’t miss the extra features when you rent the DVD), and the obvious affection between him and Will Smith. There’s the scene with the Glide Memorial Choir and there’s Cecil Williams, played by Cecil Williams. And there’s Will’s face when he gets the news he is unemployed no more.
I assume you know the plot line. The script is based on the book by Chris Gardner who, if his tale is true, busted his ass to get a job with Dean Witter against what seem like impossible odds, including a stint as a homeless man sleeping in the toilet of a BART Station with his son.
Muccino barely knew English when he started filming, but he knew what he wanted to make the story about. You have to be an outsider to understand the American dream, he said. Don’t know about that, but he got it right.
And that brings us to what happens if you plug your head back in at some point. If you do, you begin to understand why rottentomatoes.com gave the film only a 2/3 positive rating. One man’s tale of courage, will power and determination is another man’s tale of everything that’s wrong with the American dream.
In pragmatic America, where philosophy is for sissies, individual effort is often taken for the sole governing factor in success, and not merely a contributing factor. It’s all about being a winner, not a loser, not about making the world a better place to live in. It’s about individual heroes, not groups or institutions. We’ve got John Wayne and Superman and now we’ve got Chris Gardner. One person can make a difference. Michael Jackson builds a fantasy land because he just wants to “help the children” and flies in a dying kid here and there and treats him like a prince. Oprah gives away cars and builds schools in South Africa and tells about it to millions of teary-eyed fans. We see her enabling a whole generation of new Nelson Mandelas. We don’t see the kids who miss out on her generosity.
Charity, the chief virtue of the great religions, goes hand in hand with an acceptance of the status quo. God must love poor people; he made so many of them, the saying goes. And thank God he provided us with so much opportunity to display our generous hearts.
Occasionally Americans pull off things like Social Security and Medicare. We also generate a critical mass of folk who try to tear those institutions down. We’re not much on universal health insurance but as our leaders Tom Delay and Bill Frist reminded us, we have developed the technology to support our life-at-all-costs values. Remember the efforts to keep Terry Schiavo alive?
The communists failed, any Republican can tell you, because they removed incentive. We, on the other hand, know America is Number One because we don’t make that mistake.
But talk about things like this has no place in a rags-to-riches American moral tale. It gets in the way of the tears and the inspiration and the pride. Worst of all, it’s boring.
In Pursuit of Happyness the wealthy are kind and generous and supportive. The poor are thieves. In one telling scene the Gardner character takes a basketball away from his son. Good, you think. A black American father who is reminding his kid not to fall in the trap so many ghetto kids fall into thinking sports will save your ass. Another winners and losers way out for the few with failure for the many. (For the many, there’s the military, of course, which is fine except when the military does what it’s meant to do.) But then he changes his mind and the message becomes, “Don’t listen to anybody. Not even me.” Don’t let anything get between you and your dream.
Really? Not anything? Not a wife and kids? Not a community? Not the pursuit of truth and the maintenance of a pure soul? Not a serious talk with yourself about who you might have to step on to get to the top? What happens to those of us who can’t make it to the top? Where do we sleep?
The models for Chris Gardner are the men with the Jaguars and ringside seats at sports events. The dream home is not a little home with a picket fence but a pretentious as hell mansion – goals he ultimately achieves, by the way.
Then there’s the fact that Gardner wows ‘em with his brilliance in solving the Rubic cube in a short cab ride from downtown San Francisco to Noe Valley. He’s always been a whiz kid. He’s got the stuff, in other words, to make it, given the opportunity. Ah, yes. Star material.
But what have we got with all this Marxist trashing of the American dream and raining on a winner’s parade? It’s a good way to ruin a good cry.
Watch those eyes of Will Smith tear up when the dream comes true. It will restore your faith in mankind.
The winner class, at any rate.
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