Secularism is a Religion

Peter Leithart, in a brilliant piece of simultaneous satire and book review, offers an interesting take on secularism as religion, and the myth that "religion" is inherently violent. Truly, it is secularism that is the inherently violent ideology. But let Leithart tell you instead of me:

In the beginning was religion, and only religion.

Now religion was irrational, absolutist, and divisive, and so chaos was on the face of the earth.  Religion drove kings mad.  Because of religion, because religion was all, Catholics killed Protestants, Protestants killed Catholics, and both Protestants and Catholics killed pagans across the seas.  And darkness covered the face of the earth.

And from the darkness, far in the West, came the Liberal State, and the Liberal State said, Let there be light.  And there was light.  And the darkness was afraid.

And in the Liberal State there was no religion.  And the Liberal State called itself Secular.  And it was so.

And the Liberal State said, Let us divide religion from life, and, lest the darkness return, let us place between religion and life a firmament that cannot be crossed.  Let us bury religion deep in the heart of man, where it can do some small good but no harm.  And let us make religion innocuous and rational.

And the magicians and sorcerers and court prophets shouted and said, All you have commanded, so shall we do.

And it was so.  And the Liberal State saw that it was good.

And peace dripped like honey from the rock and flowed like wine from the mountains.  Lions supped with lambs.  All nations rejoiced in the Liberal State, for its mercy endures forever.

And still the darkness grew strong.  It wept and called itself Beck.  It raged and grew a beard and called itself bin Laden.

And the Liberal State said, The darkness has grown strong and will soon be as one of Us.  We must grow stronger, for we are light and light must triumph over darkness.

And the Liberal State said, Eternal vigilance is the price of secularity.

And all the peoples said, Amen, and Amen.  Most of them, anyway.

Tis only the beginning: read the whole thing.

Resurrection and Particularity

Abstraction is easier than earthiness. Religious principles command little, but a God become man is difficult indeed. A God who dies and comes back to life in real space-time human history might be the most difficult reality of all. Notice I didn't say "truth" for that word is so easily abstracted.

It's much safer to have religious values. It's much more demanding to deal with a God who passed through death and back to life again; and there's reasonable enough evidence to the fact.

In response to a world of theologians that neuter every Christian symbol and abstract every Christ-event into a vague principle for living, David Bentley Hart proclaims:

If then a theology of beauty stands with the concrete and the particular, in defiance of any species of thought that places its faith in abstractions or generalities, it militates of necessity against practices that simply sort narratives into discrete categories of story and metaphysics, myth and meaning, symbol and reality, and then rest content...If indeed Christianity embraces "the aesthetic principle" par excellence," then abstraction is the thing most contrary and deadening to the truth it offers...God's glory, though, is neither ethereal nor remote, but is beauty, quantity, abundance, kabod: it has weight, density, and presence...In the end, that within Christianity which draws persons to itself is a concrete and particular beauty, because concrete and particular beauty is its deepest truth.

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, 2003

I couldn't help but think, on a week we celebrate the Resurrection in Christendom (except for the Orthodox community which celebrates next week), how counter-cultural the truth of history really is. We live in an America that craves principles for life, that likes to abstract God to generic religious values, and the raw fact of Jesus coming back to life stands opposed to such abstractions.

A related idea is prominent in Time's cover story this week: Rethinking Heaven, by Jon Meachem. Meachem's basic thesis is that too many Christians view heaven as a bodyless existence in some pie-in-the-sky afterlife. Meachem challenges that notion, appealing to a new heavens and new earth and a bodily resurrection and afterlife.

Of course, if you know anything about Christianity, Meachem is absolutely correct, which makes his title rather presumptuous. Meachem, nor the theologians he cites, are rethinking anything. One need not go back to the Bible to point out that Christians, even since the second century, have believed in the resurrection of the body, as opposed to the mere immortality of the soul. Christians have been professing this truth by way of the Apostle's creed for 20 centuries.

But Meachem's still on to something. Far from challenging Christian stereotypes, he's really challenging the common American clinginess to abstraction and ease. Much easier to believe in a bodyless heavenly paradise, than for the fact that God the Father will redeem, through the risen Jesus Christ, this world and unite it to his new heavens.

In sum, Jesus' Resurrection shames our sense of existential viability, needing to feel certain things or perform certain religious tasks to have a fake or weak experience of the divine. No, in Christianity, as Hart notes, the particular beauty, the raw fact, of Christ's Resurrection is the deepest truth, my feelings be damned.

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

Religious Freedom Can Erode Slowly, But Not Yet

Last week, a monumental piece of news went mostly unnoticed. It regarded a U.S. Supreme Court decision (Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) that the Obama administration was contesting against a religious establishment. You can read the details of the case in many other places. Essentially what was at stake was a religious organization's freedom in hiring and firing whom they want without government interference.

Does the government have a stake in a religious organization hiring whom they want? Of course they do. In this particular case, it was about a person with a disability. This was a dicey situation, to be sure, but if the government can tell a religious organization whom they can hire and fire, even in this case, what's to stop the slow slide into greater breaches of the 1st Amendment (wherein religious persons and organizations are guaranteed the "free exercise" of their religion)? What's to stop the government from pressing ideological concerns into religious hiring and firing, particularly of pastors, priests, and ministers? For instance, how far are we from the government intervening in a church by demanding it hire someone as a pastor who disagrees with certain sexual mores of that church's beliefs?

It is precisely at this crossroads where the myth of an impassioned "secular" government must forever die. The government- and particularly the Obama administration and the Justice Department- wants to apply enforcement standards on religious organizations. They wish to force an ideological- not an impartial- agenda on religious organizations. There is no magical middle ground free from the influences of any worldview- religious or otherwise- and there will always exist the certitude that someone is going to influence the government on his or her view. It isn't just the church that tries to influence the state, but everyone is trying to influence the state. Secularists who decry the mixing of church and state misunderstand the inherently evangelistic nature of their position.

So what of the outcome of the Supreme Court decision then? Well, the Supreme Court unanimously (that's 9-0 for folks scoring at home) struck down the EEOC and the Obama administration's argument. Fortunately, this is a pretty simple reading of the 1st Amendment to the Bill of Rights, and that means that two of the Justices that Obama nominated disagreed with him.

The lesson in all this is that religious freedom is a tenuous venture. Even in a country with supposedly guaranteed religious freedoms, those freedoms can erode slowly, imperceptibly. The very imperceptibility lies in the fact that this news- news the Wall Street Journal called the most significant Supreme Court ruling on religion in over 50 years- was barely covered by mainstream media.

But, alas, we have Supreme Court Justices who can read, and so religious freedom is spared the slow decline into autocracy, at least for the foreseeable future.

Pastors and Congressmen

This is not the start of the joke. The irony of the title is that it references the two things you aren't suppose to discuss in polite company: religion and politics. The other irony is that it's the only thing people ever really want to talk about. Even still, that's not what this post is about. This post is about the universal phenomenon of disliking something collectively, but loving it personally. I can explain.

It seems we are consistently told in this day and age that Congress is broken and the two parties can't work together. As such, the approval rating of Congress is at an all-time low (but it's always really low, somewhere near 10-30%). And yet there's an irony to this, because individual representatives to the House of Representatives often have very high approval ratings. Even in landslide election years such as last year, about 70% of Congress is still re-elected.

And I've been noticing that same kind of trend with pastors recently. A pastor friend of mine recently remarked that he never wanted to be known as "that pastor," and that it was one of his goals to be a different kind of pastor than others. I knew what he meant: the reputation of pastors collectively is not very good and he was always trying to confound this by being nice and congenial to church outsiders. Often, the manifestation of this impulse means that pastors tip well.

The irony behind this trend is that almost every pastor I have known- in the dozens and dozens and dozens- is like this pastor. They are all great people: warm, friendly, caring, and considerate of those who don't go to their church. And, seemingly contradictory to that, the view of pastors and priests across the U.S. is not good as a whole.

So when I experienced this sentiment this past weekend, I wasn't confused. I performed a wedding and after the ceremony I got quite a bit of attaboys from typically non-religious folks saying that I did a nice job, and that I wasn't like other pastors. And of all the pastors I've known- which, again, is many of all ages- regularly receive that same kind of feedback. "Your not like regular pastors," they opine.

And I begin to wonder how such a phenomenon appears in the zeitgeist. If everybody loves the pastor they know- whether they are Christians or not- how come nobody likes the idea of a pastor?

And despite how unspiritual or unreligious people tend to be, how come they still want pastors for weddings and funerals?

Something deeper must be afoot.

Jewish, Islamic, and Christian Seminary Together

Update: I received an inquiry directly from the Claremont School, which is a very helpful email and cites what I hope is best for the school, below. Please read the comments section for clarificaiton and correction to this post.

I keep close tabs on Time magazine because I find it to be a cultural gatekeeper, one of those supposedly reputable bulwarks of good news. A week ago, they had an article entitled "Interfaith U.: A theology school's push to train pastors, rabbis, and imams under one roof."

An interfaith seminary is certainly a weird and new concept, and it's being pushed by Claremont School of Theology in California, a United Methodist Seminary. The seminary is also seeking to have Buddhist and Hindu partners. Clearly, this is a unique "innovation" of American religion.

If the seminary truly seeks to train each person seeking to lead in their faith, then it will require rigorous scholarship from all faiths. In other words, the best way this seminary could proceed is as if it's three seminaries under one roof. The worst way it could proceed, and the way I imagine it will proceed, is that each student will be required to rigorously study in the other faiths. This will result in people who aren't really trained to lead in their own faith, but they'll be appropriately sensitive to other faiths.

And over time, the school will probably become some amalgamation of all the faiths, which will develop a vague belief in a monotheistic god. In other words, the seminary will train people to believe what most Americans already believe anyway.

And to give some historical context, theological liberalism dies in America. Claremont is "innovating" because the school's enrollment is decreasing. The school's enrollment is decreasing because the seminary, as one representative seminary in a fairly liberal denomination of United Methodism, is liberal. Liberal theology dies in this country. Conservative theology thrives. That's why evangelicals are powerful political voices and liberal Christianity is a weak political voice. I could cite a dozen historical reasons why liberal theology doesn't survive, but there's a simple sociological reason: if all religions are basically the same, then why go to church?

And because Claremont seems beholden to even more liberal thought- the idea that all religions are basically the same- I suspect this will only quicken the decline of the actual Christian thought in the institution.

Hear me well: I think all people should study other faiths and always seek to listen and learn (that's partly why I'm so fierce on Islam, because I've actually read much of its scripture). But to do this in one institution seems to be a recipe for religious confusion and disaster. Seminaries should train people on their own faiths so that they can best lead people of those faiths. As a Christian pastor, I should not go to a seminary that trains me to be an Imam.