Human Decency Across Ideological Divides: The Case of Penn Jillette

Penn Jillette (of the entertaining magic duo "Penn and Teller") wrote a blurb for Dawkins' The God Delusion in which he called it "true like ice, like fire." Beyond this, I've not had any exposure to his thoughts on religion--just a vague knowledge that he's an atheist. But when Robin Parry over at Theological Scribbles posted a video message (below) from Jillette, calling it "refreshing," I was intrigued enough to check it out.



I find Jillette's message moving and thought-provoking--and it touches in various ways on themes that are central to this blog. So I thought I'd repost it here and solicit thoughts/reaction from my readers.

In his blurb for Dawkins' book, Jillette says, "If this book doesn't change the world, we're all screwed." I can't say I agree with that, but I do think that if we can't find ways to understand and appreciate each other across the divisions created by different understandings of the world (and ways of living in it), we are all screwed. It may be for this very reason that I don't hold out much hope for the new atheist books changing the world in a positive way. In this brief video, Penn Jillette models for me--in a way that Dawkins, at least in the pages of The God Delusion, does not--the capacity for the kind of understanding and appreciation that we all need to have.

And he expresses this capacity despite being convinced that he has the truth--and that, by implication, the man who proselytized him is wrong ("I know there's no God," he says quite emphatically at one point in the video). Jillette has convictions--he thinks he knows--on matters about which I am pretty sure there is nothing like knowledge to be had. And yet I don't find in him--at least in this personal moment--the kind of dangerous ideological conviction (with its concomitant in-groups and out-groups) that I too frequently hear coming from Sam Harris at one pole and Pat Robertson or John Piper (who likes to excommunicate by tweet) at the other.

While resisting the allure of certainty about our worldviews--either by being agnostic in one form or another, or by holding "lightly" to one's beliefs in the way that Allen Stairs describes (a lightness that, I think, depends on a consciousness of one's fallibility)--seems to be one way of avoiding dangerous ideological division among people, I wonder if Jillette in this video message is modeling another way. And if so, how should we characterize it?

Some Thoughts on Religious Exclusivism

In my last post I explored the religious pluralism endorsed by, among others, the theologian John Hick and my mother. Both see the various religions of the world as historically and culturally situated responses to a transcendent reality. But this transcendent reality is infinite, and our grasp of it is only partial (what “part” we see being a function of what our cultural ideas and presuppositions enable us to see). Furthermore, this transcendent reality defies literal description in terms of ordinary human concepts. As such, Hick and my mother see all religious belief systems as literally false. These systems of belief need to be understood as metaphors, as gestures towards a mystery that defies our understanding. As metaphors, their worth is measured pragmatically—by how well they help us to attune ourselves with this transcendent reality, and so live our lives in harmony with it. Insofar as different religious traditions succeed in achieving this goal, they are all pathways to “salvation” in the broadest sense, and they all have a share in “truth” in some non-literal, pragmatic sense.


Now there is much about this picture of religion that I admire and think is on the right track. Clearly, there is much religious language and narrative that is best understood as metaphorical—and that loses its value when treated in essentially literal terms (the first two chapters of Genesis come to mind). But this does not entail that all religious doctrines and narratives are purely metaphorical, that there is nothing implied by a statement like “God is good” that could qualify as literally correct. Respecting religious diversity doesn’t require denying this possibility. Nor does admitting this possibility undermine the pluralistic interpretation of religious diversity. The hypothesis that the diversity of religions is consistent with a common inspiration, that this diversity springs from the same well of divine revelation, doesn’t depend on the nothing-but-metaphor hypothesis.

Recall again the Hindu parable of the blind men who encounter an elephant. If the man who grasps the trunk says, “It’s a snake,” that will be literally false but metaphorically useful. But if the same man says, “It’s flexible,” that is not a metaphor. And when the blind man who grasps the tusk says, “It’s hard,” that is not a metaphor either. In this case, the diversity arises because, even though they are using literal language to correctly describe what they've encountered, they are in contact with different parts of the beast.

But whatever we think of the issue of just how much religious language is metaphorical (and this issue here is not one of all-or-nothing), the idea that divine revelation is limited to one faith tradition—and that there are no insights into ultimate reality that can be gleaned from serious attention to other worldviews, other traditions—is deeply troubling. We might call this view “extreme doctrinal exclusivism”: the view that divine revelation has only been poured into your faith tradition, and that all other traditions are mere lies and human invention.

(Notice that someone like PZ Myers, on this definition, qualifies as a certain kind of extreme doctrinal exclusivist, insofar as he regards all supernatural religious traditions as nothing but lies and human invention. This may help explain why, when religious fundamentalists give up their faith, they are more likely to become atheists in Dawkins’ or Myers’ mold than they are to become pluralists. From the starting point of “They’re all made up except one,” it’s a shorter step to “They’re all made up” than to “They’re all finite, partial, and fallible responses to the same underlying transcendent reality.”)

Much of my aversion to extreme doctrinal exclusivism is pragmatic. First of all, if different religious traditions do have insights to share with one another, and wisdom to gain through such sharing, then the idea that one’s own tradition has exclusive access to all the truths that matter would block the open-mindedness which is a prerequisite for such mutual learning. This seems a bad pragmatic bet.

Furthermore, this extreme exclusivism seems a pathway to a kind of ideological division, a cultural bifurcation of the world into “us” (those who have been enlightened) and “them” (all others, who’ve been left in the dark). If human history has taught us anything, it is that such divisions are a source of intractable conflict and violence. No good has ever come of them.

These pragmatic considerations can be supplemented with theological ones. If there is a God anything like what the Judeo-Christian tradition affirms, it would seem strange indeed that this God would limit divine self-disclosure to one small corner of the world, leaving the rest of humanity in the dark about the existence and presence of a caring creator until such a time as unsubstantiated testimonies should wend there way across the globe. And if there is some other sort of transcendent reality which has in some fashion impressed itself upon the consciousness of people in one cultural and historical context, it would seem strange that it wouldn’t happen in other cultural and historical contexts, given that it is the same human nature that exists everywhere.

None of this, however, implies that one religion won’t have insights that other religions lack, or that one religion won’t have been the only vessel into which some distinctive truth of great importance has fallen. In fact, the possibility of religious traditions learning from one another seems to presuppose that each religious tradition at least potentially carries insights that are unique—insights into the divine that are left out, underappreciated, or mistakenly rejected by the others.

Not only does it seem important not to deny this possibility when considering traditions other than one’s own. It seems important not to deny this possibility when it comes to one’s own faith tradition. In other words, it is consistent with this model of interreligious respect to believe that your own faith tradition has something important to contribute to the conversation, some insight into the truth that other religions might not have.

And if you do believe this--perhpas with respect to most central and distinctive teachings of your faith tradition--aren’t you then being an exclusivist about those teachings? Clearly, you’re not being a soteriological exclusivist—that is, you’re not ascribing to the view that salvation only comes through your faith, and that adherents to rival religious traditions are damned. Nor are you an extreme doctrinal exclusivist.

But you would be an exclusivist in a broader sense, encompassed by the following definition of exclusivism offered by Alvin Plantinga: “the exclusivist holds that the tenets or some of the tenets of one religion—Christianity, let’s say—are in fact true; he adds, naturally enough, that any propositions, including other religious beliefs, that are incompatible with those tenets are false." (emphasis added)

Another point to keep in mind about religious exclusivism is that the Hickian pluralist is an exclusivist on a meta-level. While Hickian pluralists do not hold that one religion is true and others false, don’t they hold that their pluralistic take on religion is correct, and that other takes on religion are incorrect to the extent that they disagree? It seems so, and this is what leads Kevin Meeker, for example, to conclude, “The real debate is not whether we should exclude, but what type of exclusion is defensible… In short, there is no sharp dividing line between exclusivism and pluralism; so we are faced with a continuum of options.”

In fact, it is precisely because progressive religion does exclude, does reject some modes of religious expression (most notably fundamentalism), that it doesn’t fall prey to Sam Harris’s overgeneralized critique of moderate religion. Harris accuses moderate religion of teaching the “terrible dogma” that “every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God.”

But religious progressives don’t believe this terrible dogma. They reject the image of God as a vengeful tyrant, insisting that such an image is dangerously mistaken. That’s exclusion. They reject the notion that God has entrusted His revelation to only one faith in human history. That’s exclusion, too. They reject the idea that God chose to reveal His will inerrantly in a single holy book. That’s exclusion. They reject the notion that God planted fossils of creatures that never existed and created evidence of great age in a world that is only a few thousand years old, all in order to test the faith of those who might question His inerrant literal revelation in the aforementioned holy book. That, again, is exclusion.

Without some measure of exclusivism, religious believers would fall prey to Harris’s terrible dogma. And so I don’t want to treat exclusivism in every sense of the word as an evil. There are reasons to exclude—some based on a preponderance of empirical evidence, some based on morally pernicious implications, some based on logical coherence, some based on pragmatic fruits.

But sometimes we don’t have compelling reasons of any of these kinds. What then? Under those circumstances, should assuduously eschew exclusivism in any form?

Perhaps not. Allen Stairs, a philosopher at the University of Maryland, attempts to offer a portrait of a certain kind of religious exclusivism—what I’m tempted to call a friendly exclusivism—that might be legitimate even if you have no compelling reason to reject those who disagree with you.

Stairs explains what he has in mind by offering a kind of portrait of a certain sort of religious believer: one who doesn’t “settle for a vague, free-floating theism” but has more concrete religious beliefs that exceed what the weight of evidence can sustain. But her belief, he says, “is not a sham; she thinks they might really be true and that even if they aren’t fully true, they capture something important about the Ultimate. They also flesh out her sense of the Ultimate into something that can form the basis for a religious practice.” Stairs goes on to describe the view as follows:

…Plantinga takes religious belief at face value; Hick maintains that all specific religious belief is strictly speaking false. The view we’re considering isn’t like either of these. It agrees that, broadly speaking, the believer is entitled to trust her sense that the skeptic is wrong. It allows that perhaps some one religion captures The Truth, and perhaps the Ultimate is a Kantian noumenon, entirely beyond our cognitive grasp. At the level of practice, however, the view is more like exclusivism; the Hindu will believe as a Hindu does; the Christian will believe like a Christian. But behind the belief there will be a higher-level lightness; not an ironic attitude, but trust coupled with a deep sense of epistemic humility.”

In capturing this “higher-level lightness,” Stairs offers the example of Paul, a Roman Catholic who accepts the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation—that is, the belief that the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Christ in the Mass. “Nonetheless,” Stairs writes, “he knows that most people, including many Christians, believe otherwise. I think the following is perfectly possible: actively believing this is deeply important to Paul’s religious identity. At the same time, actively disbelieving contrary doctrines isn’t important to him at all.”

Paul, as portrayed by Stairs, feels no urgent need to persuade those who think otherwise. They are as entitled to their view as he is to his own. Even so, he remains deeply devoted to this doctrine to the exclusion of others that conflict with it. He believes this and not that. But if you believe that, it doesn’t bother him in the least. And, says Stairs, “he might not be willing to say that people with this Protestant view are making a mistake, and if asked whether he thinks they are wrong, he might reply that the question seems beside the point for him; saying ‘no’ would do a bad job of capturing his attitude, but so would saying ‘yes.’”

Stairs offers a careful look at what he takes to be the underlying rationale for this kind of attitude. I won’t go into the details, but the core of it is a balance between two things: first, the inescapable sense (which defines the person as a believer) that “there is something Ultimate and that it is to be trusted or even loved,” a sense that excludes “beliefs that make the Ultimate morally ugly”; second, an awareness that the specific elaboration of this sense which grounds our religious life does not rise to the level of knowledge, and as such could be mistaken. Not only that, but on crucial matters other religious traditions could, on matters where they disagree with us, be right, or partially right—or the nature of the divine could defy our grasp in such a way that the tension between our own views and those of rival faiths might do a better job of capturing the divine reality than any of those beliefs alone.

The kind of “friendly exclusivist” Stairs has in mind (which Stairs is inclined to call a “pluralist exclusivist”) holds to her religious beliefs in a manner that does not rule out these possibilities—that one’s beliefs are in error, that one has mistaked metaphors for literal descriptions, that one can gain genuine insight from listening to and engaging with those who have an opposing view.

So, is this kind of exclusivism something we should hold up as legitimate, as expressing a way of cleaving to religious faith that is (in language I use elsewhere) intellectually respectable and morally benign? I think more needs to be said before reaching any final conclusions, but it does seem right to me that we should resist the urge to too quickly label exclusivism as “bad” and pluralism as “good,” and treat the two as incommensurable opposites. The situation, as usual, is muddier and messier than that.