The Territory of Belief

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines Higher-Education Price Index Rises 3.6 Percent The measure of colleges' inflation costs grew only slightly more than last year, but it doesn't include recent jumps in some expenses, like utilities. Higher-Ed Bill Slowed by Two Disputes Campus Planners Discuss How to Attain Sustainability Ruling Says Colorado Board Discriminated Against University Universities in Beijing Tighten Security for Olympics U.S. Universities Negotiate Tricky Terrain in the Middle East Newly Found Chameleon Lives Fast, Dies Young Commentary Richard H. Hersh and Richard P. Keeling: On a 'Liberal Education'

By ALAN WOLFE

Americans are a religious people, and the great proportion of the faithful are Christian. Do those facts place a special burden on non-Christians — or, for that matter, nonbelievers — who seek to understand American religion? Richard John Neuhaus, a Roman Catholic priest and editor in chief of the influential First Things, argues in the journal's June/July issue that it does. "If you're not a Christian and not about to become a Christian, but you're a public intellectual who is paid to be an expert on a society that is overwhelmingly Christian, you have to make a decision about how to position yourself," Neuhaus writes.

Much of that positioning is done in particular by Jews, he continues. Some Jewish intellectuals maintain their faith but argue that religion ought to be private. Others reject God but accept that religion is nonetheless good for the republic because it instills respect for authority. Some seek to pursue progressive political goals through a Jewish agenda, while others encourage dialogue between Judaism and Christianity.

And then there are those who promote a "de-Christianization" of America by claiming that Christians don't always believe what they say they believe. Neuhaus is particularly interested in those Jewish public intellectuals — he names Harold Bloom, David Brooks, Stanley Fish, Adam Kirsch, and myself — who, he says, use that last "ploy" and therefore render "a great disservice" to America. Claiming that we dismiss beliefs that threaten us as a minority, Neuhaus accuses us of promoting a "safely neutered Christianity whose hard edges have been replaced by the warm and fuzzy." Afraid of a society that isn't as secular as we had hoped, he says, we can only distort "the effort to understand the maddening changes and confusions that are the permanent state of American society."

Neuhaus singles me out for making the most "audacious" effort to redefine Christianity along those lines. He finds it "passing strange" and "not very polite" that a non-Christian would even presume to offer expert commentary on religion in a society so thoroughly Christian. When I argue, as I do in my book The Transformation of American Religion (Free Press, 2003), that American Christianity has been losing its sharp edges, I am, according to Neuhaus, guilty of charging 85 percent of the population with "false consciousness," a term coined by Marx to explain why the working class had not overthrown the bourgeoisie. (Before becoming a right-wing Catholic priest, Neuhaus was a left-wing Lutheran pastor).

Neuhaus has not read my book very carefully. Contrary to what he says, I do not welcome the dumbing down of American religion but praise fundamentalist Christians for "their willingness to stand against the emotionality of American culture in favor of ideas — strongly held ideas, to say the least — about who God is and why he asks so much of us."

Still, Father Neuhaus does raise some interesting questions about the sociological study of religion. Alas, he invariably answers them in the wrong way. But the question he asks — can non-Christians become experts on Christianity? — is worth answering.

The answer is yes. Being in the minority can actually help you understand the religion of the majority. And everyone who writes about religion in America positions themselves to one degree or another.

Far too much research in American religion has been conducted by insiders who may not always be the most objective commentators on their own faith. That problem has especially plagued Catholic scholarship in the past, and continues to bedevil scholarship on Mormonism in the present; it will be present whenever scholars, from any religious tradition, feel the need to defend their faith against hostile outsiders or to renounce their own previous beliefs.

Then there is triumphalism: viewing one religion as good and others as, well, not so good. A recent example is Rodney Stark's The Victory of Reason (Random House, 2005), which attributes to Christianity all the wonders of the modern world — reason, science, democracy, and capitalism — while ignoring or explaining away contributions by Muslims and Jews.

Against such insiders, outsiders may have much to contribute. Neuhaus may not agree, but a number of extremely conservative evangelical Protestants do. My book was warmly received by Cal Thomas, the syndicated columnist; Charles Colson, the evangelical prison reformer; and R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. They all found, as Mohler put it, that I offered "an outsider's perspective with a fascinating angle." I argued that evangelicals, so successful at planting new churches and watching them grow, had made a Faustian bargain with America's secular culture: They would give up a fire-and-brimstone insistence on the ubiquity of sin in favor of Oprah-style confessionalism. Evangelical insiders too often congratulate themselves on their success, Mohler pointed out. Perhaps they need an outsider to remind them of the costs they pay.

The same is true concerning public policy. I cannot speak for any of the other Jewish figures mentioned in Neuhaus's article, but my relative tolerance for public religious expression grows directly from my status as an outsider to America's dominant religious culture. Appreciating what it means to be in a minority, I am not prepared to dismiss out of hand the claim made by religious believers that their rights are being violated by too strict an interpretation of what the separation of church and state demands. That is why I took a position critical of the efforts of a California atheist to remove the words "under God" from the pledge of allegiance. Believers belong to America just as nonbelievers do, I argued in a 2002 article; if the former win some battles, the latter ought to have some victories as well.

What is most insidious about Neuhaus's argument is his assumption that non-Christians position themselves to speak about religion while Christians do not. Such double standards are nearly always reprehensible, conveying, as they do, the suggestion that Jews — or members of any religious minority — do not quite qualify for full membership in a Christian society. That is especially troubling because Judaism, as Neuhaus uses the term, refers not to a religious identity (from which one can convert) but to an ethnic identity (which is forever fixed). Neuhaus correctly says that I do not have a religious bone in my body, yet he identifies me as a Jew. What is Jewish about me, at least in his eyes, has nothing to do with belief and everything to do with birth. Since I am not about to change my parents, my scholarship can always be condemned for my attempt to position myself, a fate I would never have had to endure had I been born Christian.

The effort to ascribe positioning only to those born into the wrong religion is especially absurd because all who study religion, sensitive subject that it is, position themselves. Surely Catholics think twice before passing judgment on Protestants, just as Muslims and Jews are careful before stepping onto each other's turf. Neuhaus ought to appreciate that. He is, after all, a Catholic priest writing about Jews, and secular Jews at that.

In some instances, Neuhaus actually agrees with Jewish public intellectuals. He berates "Wolfe, Bloom, et al." for refusing to accept the fact that Christians have strong religious convictions, yet he himself writes that "many Christians are mediocre in their faith and its practice." (How he reconciles that with his attack on us is a puzzle to me.) And he refuses to accept that the great majority of American Jews themselves have deep feelings: notably, deep fears that the religious right plans to further "Christianize" America. Neuhaus is as uncomfortable and uncertain among the tolerant and the nonbelieving as we presumably are among those with deep Christian convictions.

Thus he makes a point of attacking secular Jews for being "as alienated from Judaism as they are fearful of Christianity, or even more so." A generation or so ago, their pervasive distrust of religion, even their own, did not pose a problem for those intellectuals. Convinced that America was on the European path toward secularization, they could bide their time. But the religious revival that swept this country in recent decades took them by surprise. It became clear that a secular America would not happen on its own. So, Neuhaus concludes, Jewish intellectuals are again forced to position themselves. Instead of comforting their fellow secularists with the thought that religion will disappear, they instead inform them that religion has so adapted itself to secular culture that it is no longer a threat.

That might be more persuasive if the Jewish public intellectuals Neuhaus cites were advocates of a more secular America. But they are not. David Brooks is a political conservative who rarely rallies to the side of atheists. Stanley Fish has made his career attacking the liberal belief in toleration while defending the believer's quest for certainty. Harold Bloom is a literary critic fascinated by the religiosity of American culture. Adam Kirsch is primarily a poet and book critic who writes on religion for a conservative newspaper, The New York Sun. When I address the question of religion in the public square, I find equal fault with, and occasionally common positions between, the fundamentalist right and the secular left.

If a Christian writes negatively about Christianity, Neuhaus suggests, he is prophetic, calling on Christians to find the right and true path. When Jews do the same thing, they are engaged in "a particularly bold exercise in chutzpah." Neuhaus's objections to outsiders are territorial more than they are theological; he simply does not want people like me presuming to venture onto his turf.

He may not welcome me, but I welcome him. I worry that the intellectual positions I hold can morph into self-satisfaction and intolerance. We secularist public intellectuals need our critics, and Neuhaus, an adept polemicist and voracious reader, ought to be one of them. I just wish he were not so blinded by his ideology and so unpleasant in his prejudices.

Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, and a professor of political science, at Boston College.