But don't call us religious!

No, I'm not talking about Darwinists who deny that their theory qualifies as a religion. I'm talking about Richard John Neuhaus, uberChristian and proprietor of the First Things blog and magazine:

Robert Royal, who runs the Washington-based Faith & Reason Institute, has a new book out from Encounter, The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West. The argument of the title and subtitle is persuasively set out, and we will be giving the book more attention in the pages of First Things. But I am struck by a review of the book in the New York Sun by Brooke Allen.

She writes: “Mr. Royal’s belief that religion has acted as a restraint on human cruelty rather than an instigation to it addresses a question that probably will never be settled satisfactorily. He points out, as others have, that anti-religious regimes like Mao’s and Stalin’s murdered many more people than religious persecutions ever did. While this is certainly true, Mr. Royal does not take into account the fact that ideology functions as a sort of religion in its own right, offerings its acolytes the feeling of transcendence normally associated with faith, and the sublimation of the ego in a larger cause.”

This is part of a very old word game. If you say anti-religious ideologies are more destructive than religion, it is only because anti-religious ideologies are, in fact, religion in another guise. Part of the problem, of course, is in the defense of religion-in-general. Any thoughtful Christian has to have at least a modicum of sympathy for Karl Barth’s solution, which is to insist that Christianity is not a religion. In this view, religion is a human enterprise aimed at reconciliation with, or manipulation of, transcendent powers such as God or the gods. Christianity, by way of sharpest contrast, is not a human enterprise but the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. It is a human enterprise only in that a community of human beings, the Church, responds to that revelation, but that, too, is the work of God in engendering faith in response to God’s revealing initiative.

I give him A+ for hubris. So, people who gather in churches and worship Christ are not trying to reconcile or manipulate God, it is the other way around. Christians are being manipulated by God, as by remote control, to fulfill God's reconciliation with humans. But that only applies to Christians. All you other guys are religious, because you're just pretending. We're the real thing, baby!

I have to say that this theory takes me by surprise. But it makes sense. A religion (yes, Christianity is a religion, no matter what Barth and Neuhaus say) is like any other organized human enterprise. To sustain itself it has to continue to bring in new adherents (or customers, if you will), and it must compete for those adherents with other like-minded enterprises. What Barth and Neuhaus are doing is known in the marketing world as "differentiation". You have to make your potential adherents/customers believe that no matter what similarities exist between your message/product and others, your message/product stands in a class by itself. The more similar your message/product is to others, the more radical the perceived differences must be made to seem. That is why Coke and Pepsi, two nearly identical brands of sugar water, must advertize so broadly and constantly to make it seem as if the choice between these products is a life-altering choice for the customer.

That brief description does not do justice to the argument of Barth and Barthians, but it suggests one way of drawing a sharp distinction between Christianity and religion-in-general. The whole idea that there is such a category of human belief and action that can be fitted into the category of “the religious phenomenon” is misbegotten, as Robert Royal points out in his critique of “religious studies” departments in higher education.

An alternative to the Barthian strategy is to observe that all thoughtful people are engaged in a search for the truth of things and the wisdom to live in accord with the truth of things. At one level, one might simply call this “thinking,” although traditionally we have called it philosophy—meaning the love of wisdom. In the Christian intellectual tradition, the early church fathers called Christianity the “true philosophy.” The claim was that Christianity, grounded in the logos or reason that created and sustains all things, makes more sense of more facts than alternative ways of thinking about reality.

In this view, it is entirely misguided to speak of philosophy, on the one hand, and religion, including Christianity, on the other. But, of course, over the last centuries, and dating back to the initiatives of Bacon, Descartes, and Kant, a philosophy that aspires to account for the whole of reality is called not philosophy but religion. In our day, John Rawls influentially warned against “comprehensive accounts” that, according to Rawls, do not count as public reason. Authentically public reason, or philosophy, is limited to ways of thinking that assiduously refrain from thinking about the really big questions about, for instance, the final and formal causes of existent beings.

These are huge conceptual problems with a very long history, and the dichotomy between philosophy (or reason) and religion is deeply entrenched in our intellectual culture. The problems are luminously addressed in John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio, but even there we have the difficulty of a title that, contrary to the substance of the argument, suggests a sharp division of labor between faith and reason. That faith is an integral and necessary part of reason is very powerfully argued in Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, a book I never tire of recommending to people engaged by these questions.

While I am in warm agreement with the case that Robert Royal makes, I do wish he had chosen a subtitle other than How Religion Built and Sustains the West. Christians have no stake in defending religion as such. Except to the degree that all rational people have a stake in exposing the irrationality of a philosophy of ideological secularism that refuses to engage the big questions that secularists dismiss as “religious.” In addition to Polanyi, I suggest Robert Louis Wilken’s The Spirit of Early Christian Thought as an important aid in rethinking the way that Christianity should position itself in relation to other ways of thinking. It is the great work of the next generation of Christian intellectuals to rehabilitate philosophy in a way that makes it possible to persuasively propose Christianity as the “true philosophy.”

Good luck with that project. The religious traditionalist really is in a bind. To combat secularism he builds up the value of being religious, and so you see conservative Protestants, Evangelicals, Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and even some Muslims publicly minimizing the differences between themselves to present a united front against secularism. And yet such a stand for the generic practice of religion, or "belief in belief" as Brit puts it, undermines their own truth claims. Neuhaus very clearly expresses this conundrum in the article.

There is additional irony in the title of the book by Robert Royal that Neuhaus refers to in the article: "The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West". It is ironic because the main accomplishment for which we celebrate the West above other world civilizations is Modernity. And yet it is modernity that threatens orthodox faith. Modernity has only been possible through secularization, the disestablishment of orthodox creeds and the multifaith tolerance regime. "Religion" gained at the expense of orthodoxy. And this is why Neuhaus won't celebrate it.