I find myself wondering why the
ruling classes of America are so grindingly antagonistic to religion. I understand
having no interest in religion. I do not understand the animosity.
One might say, “The world’s
religions are so many, so internally inconsistent and contradictory of each
other, and so dependent on assertions which seem to me not to be factual,
that I cannot believe any of them.” The position is neither unreasonable
nor rabid. One holding it might go about his affairs, leaving others to believe
as they chose. He might respect the faith of others without sharing it, might
regard religions as harmless and colorful folklore, might indeed regard them
as socially beneficent.
In the Unites States, though,
we see something very different: an aggressive hostility to religion, a desire
to extirpate it and, though no one quite says this, to punish its practitioners.
A curious witch-hunt continues in which people seem to look for any trace
of religion so that they can root it out. I would call it vengeful, except
that I do not know for what it might be revenge.
Why? The explanations given do
not make sense. A store whose sign says “Merry Christmas” is a
threat to nothing, just as a nativity scene can offend only one who is looking
very hard for something to offend him. The stridency of the evolutionists
seems overblown, since a mention of the theory of intelligent design in the
high schools would hardly lead to the closing of departments of biochemistry.
The notion that the Ten Commandments
on the wall of a courthouse will lead to an established religion is palpable
nonsense. Constitutional piety doesn’t wash either. If nativity scenes
contravene the Constitution, why was this not noticed by anyone, assuredly
including the authors, until at least 1950?
(I am reminded of the old joke
about the high school that issued a boy a condom, and expelled him when he
was discovered praying for a chance to use it.)
A common reading is that the sciences
have become a sort of secular religion, with the Big Bang replacing Genesis,
and evolution as a sort of deanthropomorphized god chivying humanity onward
and upward. There is a large element of this, yes. The self-righteous intolerance
directed by disciples of evolution against religion assuredly resembles the
intolerance of religion against heresy. Does this explain the anger of the
rooters-out? Is it partly that believers in America tend to be Southern or
Catholic, both of which are regarded as politically inappropriate conditions?
Why have the sciences achieved
such power over the popular mind? Obvious answers are that they work spectacularly
within their ambit, that they produce wondrous gadgets, that they are swathed
in incomprehensible runes such as triple integrals or tensors dripping with
sub- and superscripts, and have resounding incantations like “pentaerythritol
tetranitrate.”
I wonder whether something else
is not involved. Today most of us live in profound isolation from the natural
world. People in large cities can go for decades without seeing the stars.
Should they drive through the countryside, it will be in a closed automobile
with the air-conditioning running. On a trip to the beach, the sand will be
overrun by hordes of people, half of them on whining jet skis.
We exist utterly in a manmade
cocoon, as much as desert termites in their mud towers. This, I think, profoundly
alters our inner landscapes. Live in the rolling hills around Austin, say,
as they were before they were turned into suburbs, with the wind soughing
through the empty expanse and low vegetation stretching into the distance,
the stars hanging low and close in the night, and you get a sense of man’s
smallness in the scheme of nature, of the transitoriness of life, a suspicion
that there may perhaps be more things in heaven and earth. It makes for reflection
of a sort that throughout history has turned toward the religious.
People no longer live in large
wild settings, but amid malls and freeways. The ancients believed that the
earth was the center of the cosmos. We believe that we are. There is little
to suggest otherwise in manicured suburbs and cities where the sirens will
be howling at all hours. It is an empty world that begets philosophically
empty thinking.
Without the sense of being small
in a large universe, and perhaps not even very important, the question arises,
“Is this all there is?” and the answer appears to be “Yes.”
Without the awe and wonder and mystery of a larger cosmos, existence reduces
to blowing smog, competitive acquisition of consumer goods, and vapid television
with laugh tracks. We focus on efficiency, production, and the material because
they are all we have. It is not particularly satisfying, and so we are not
particularly satisfied.
I suspect that the decline of
religion stems less from the advance of scientific knowledge than from the
difficulty of discerning the transcendent in a parking lot. Certainly the
scientific has generally replaced the religious mode of thought, even in people
who believe themselves to be Christians. For example, it is amusing to hear
them saying that the parting of the Red Sea refers to diminution of water
by a wind in what was essentially a swamp. That is, God is all-powerful, but
only to the extent that he behaves consistently with the prevailing weather.
Yet note the decline of even non-religious
contemplation of such matters as meaning and purpose, right and wrong, ultimate
good, and so on. It is not that people behave worse without faith, but that
they cannot explain why they do not. The use of the sciences as a substitute
for belief in God or gods has produced a religion that cannot ask the questions
central to religion. It has also made discussion of such questions a cause
for eliminating the offender from the guest list for the next cocktail party.
But this does not answer the question
of why the hostile stalking of religion that pervades the ranks of the educated
and influential in the United States. In almost all times and places, disbelief
and secularism have existed, yes. Few educated Romans actually believed in
Jupiter the Lightning Chucker. There have been Cathars and Wiccans and Manicheans
and innumerable agnostics. Yet, so far as I know, only communism and Americanism
(is that the word, perhaps?) have tried to eradicate religion.
Mexico has separation of church
and state, and yet a bus driver can display a crucifix without upsetting anyone.
I do not know how many Thais are believing Buddhists. Certainly Buddhist symbols
are visible everywhere, and it doesn’t seem to have engendered disaster.
Why the angry rejection in the US? I will get email telling me that it is
a Jewish plot, like everything else, but in fact it is the default attitude
of the educated. Why? Who cares?
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