MysteriousFaith

Agnostic Obligations

Contemporary Christian scholarship has made much of an elemental error of the Enlightenment; specifically, the abrupt cultural and mental transition its thinkers imposed on the average person with respect to the question of God. Among the Enlightenment’s implications was that it was left to man to acknowledge and accept at best a deistic view of the cosmos and in doing so, to realize that it was time for man to no longer look towards the heavens for problems here on earth. Taking man from the pervasive religiosity in the public sphere, something that permeated politics, the law, and every social relationship, towards a view of a distant and uninvolved God was a step people were not prepared for. Perhaps more importantly, in its embrace of rationalism, the Enlightenment downplayed the interior dimensions of life to a stoic rationalism devoid of the emotional quotient many people long for. In many cases, these were questions religion had done a sufficiently good job at addressing. Left without a tangible God to latch onto, many people’s entire system of beliefs came cascading down. Man needed a transition between the warm promise of a loving creator-God and the cold-reality imposed by simple rationalism.

Large social transitions of the magnitude proposed by the Enlightenment are rarely bloodless, as the transition from cronyism to Marxist-Leninism in early 20th century Russia serves as just one example, the ever-classic French Revolution as another. Man needs ideas to shape his life, and religion had up to the Enlightenment served this purpose adequately. In pointing out the limitations and internal conflicts that needed to be addressed within religion, the Enlightenment forced people to leave something formative behind them, and gave them an incomplete and hence overly-rationalistic view of reality. This is one of the most important mistakes of the Enlightenment, and its resolution will propel the second half of the Enlightenment forward, out of the muck of postmodernism and the incompatibilities of simple religious pluralism. The thinkers and ideas that will move us out of this stasis will acknowledge man’s need to have ideas that address our internal lives, and will be willing to embrace religious ideas and concepts.

The complication for a secular rationalist is that in striking such a balance they must walk into the occasional gray area where a particular word or concept carries with it religious overtones that touch on unknowable questions or ideas whose only contribution is to orthodoxy and systematic theology. The best example of this is the life of Christ, whose identity as God in the flesh, Christians are unwilling to compromise on. Rationalists would very much like to make large parts of the life of Christ play a primary role in shaping questions of meaning, but are reluctant to do so because of Christianity’s unwillingness to not make Jesus’ identity as God anything less than of primary importance.

Man’s reality is fundamentally different now than it has ever been; while seemingly a simple one-dimensional statement, the reality of our smaller world requires more of us as individuals than any other time in history. As with every cycle of evolution, the increasing complexity of the world makes it more likely that we will be unable to evolve and will collapse from the weight of our own systems. A smaller world, with incompatible truth statements about questions of ultimate meaning, will not be solved through simple religious pluralism. Additionally, it will not be solved either by simple secular denial of spiritual maxims. The truth to be found is the truth that Enlightenment philosophers have downplayed and that theologians have struggled to embrace – some call it mysticism, others call it spirituality – simple truths of spiritual transcendence.

American culture is an interesting amalgamation of post-Enlightenment rationalism (hence our infatuation with capitalism is made that much easier) and traditional Christian ideology. While statistics as to the population within American Christendom are inconsistent, it is obvious that Christianity serves as a mediating metaphor for people who are in day-to-day life quite separated from the traditional teachings of Christianity. Within the world today, two models of religion’s role in shaping culture are in play. The one is in America, with the terse balance previously described. The second is in China, where the accommodation of religion in the public sphere is not tolerated for reasons that go back both to the Marxist distrust of organized religion, but also millennia of influence from a non-theistic Buddhism that focuses people on internal questions as to life and meaning. The latter tension may resolve itself more easily than does the situation in America because the upside potential socially in China is more obvious to the average person. An uncertain economic, political and social future in America is leading many people to believe the ultimate resolution of our church-state problem will only be found on the other side of a religious fascism. It would be a shame for such a problem to evolve if for no other reason than it would be a terrible sacrifice of American potential, and a squandering of the lessons of history from which America was formed.

Striking a balance in America is going to ride on the backs of two camps – religious liberals and moderates in conjunction with thinking rationalists and secularists. This is why in my own writing I have many occasions to apologize to my Christian friends for my own polemic tendencies. Many of my friends, specifically those who see truth in the Emergent movement, are those leaders who are honestly attempting to reconcile their faith with modernity. These are the people upon whom a meaningful future can be built; their own conservative and fundamentalist brothers will never accommodate anything less than conversion, conversation being an unacceptable compromise. In what may become one of the more interesting phenomena of the next twenty years, the balance may only be found if moderate to liberal religious voices and secularists actively look to work together. While I may remain a committed secularist after years of honest searching for meaning within theistic constructs of reality, I refuse to disavow the truths nestled within traditional theism. In being willing to seek truth where it may be, I choose to exercise the muscle of pragmatism and believe that in doing so, the potential for not only common ground, but productive common ground, can be found.

Some 200+ years after the Enlightenment, religion still exists and admittedly struggles not to exist in the entrenched forms of fundamentalism and blind dogmatism that ultimately led to the Enlightenment cries of “Remember the Cruelties!” This is less the fault of religion, and more a shortcoming of Enlightenment thinkers. In being unwilling to find common ground unless religion bends to pure rationalism, Enlightenment thinkers have disavowed statements of enormous human significance without replacing them with something as equally formative. The challenge is not to find some simple-minded and easily reduced religious pluralism to bind us together and allow us to all “get along”; rather, the challenge is to wrestle with finding truths, teachings, practices and insights that bind us together and that elevate humanity from its baser condition of simple self-preservation.

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• October 11, 2005

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