Religious Extremism: Critiquing a Facebook Meme

There's a (new?) Facebook meme that's crossed my newsfeed recently, one which I think warrants some critical attention. It looks like this:



There are several problems with this meme. Let me list a few.

1. Caricaturing the Left

I've never seen or heard anyone on the political left openly "side" with Muslim extremists--that is, defend the horrors perpetrated by such groups as ISIS or Al Qaeda, or argue that these groups are justified in what they do.

Rather, what I've seen and heard them do is react to sweeping generalizations that impute to all of Islam these horrors, or that strive to hold moderate Islam accountable for Muslim extremists in a way that they don't hold moderate Christians (or Jews) accountable for Christian (or Jewish) extremists.

This is not to say that there don't exist "leftist extremists" who are cheering on ISIS as they lop off Christian heads. But if they exist, they have no reputable public voice in this country--and so I suspect that this meme is really intended to caricature and thereby prematurely dismiss the kind of views I have heard from the political left.

People often hear what their biases tell them to hear, rather than what others are saying. I suspect there are people out there who believe that many moderate voices on the political left are really "leftist extremists" who are "siding with the decapitators" because they don't hear what those voices are actually saying.

The person on the political left says something like the following:

"There are extremists in every faith, and just as we don't stereotype all Christians as extremists based on the existence of extremists who act in the name of Christianity, so too should we avoid stereotyping all Muslims as extremists based on the existence of extremists who act in the name of Islam."

But what is heard is this:

"In saying that not all Muslims are extremists, I am defending Islam--which means I'm siding with Muslim extremists. And in saying that there are extremists who act in the name of Christianity, I am criticizing Christianity as a whole, which means I'm siding against Christians."

The above meme invites such an extreme and extremely muddled mistranslation, and hence perpetuates misunderstanding.

2. Framing the problem as a matter of who to side with in an us/them polarization

There's a disturbing us/them theme running through this meme. There's "us": the Jews and Christians who are labeled as extremists for wanting to exercise religious freedom (freedom to pray where we want and to withhold services where our religious conscience tells us to). And then there's them: the Muslims, who really are extremists, who are actually killing people in gruesome ways. And the liberals, by defending the Muslims while criticizing the Jews and Christians, have chosen to side with them.

This way of framing things actually builds on the first issue I talked about. It is clearly and obviously a mistake to compare a conservative Christian baker's refusal to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding with a nominally Islamic extremist's participation in terrorism and murder. Anyone who treats the two as morally comparable is operating with dangerously distorted lenses.

But no one with any publicly credible voice does that. There are many on the left who both criticize the Christian baker and defend the typical Muslim from being wrongly stereotyped based on the actions of extremists. But that is not the same as likening what the Christian baker does to what the ISIS terrorist does, let along siding with the ISIS terrorist over the conservative Christian baker.

The deeper problem here is the tendency to deflate the meaning of "extremism" in the first two examples so as to implicitly suggest that what is identified as Muslim extremism is as common among Muslims as the desire for freedom to act on religious conscience (even in controversial cases) is among Jews and Christians.

Let me be clear: I think Christians who want to withhold their business services from gay and lesbian couples are misconceiving Christian ethics in a way that promotes division and marginalization, thereby undermining the core thrust of Jesus' love ethic. But laws requiring them to provide such service are demanding that they act in ways that violate their sincere beliefs. Not without reason, of course. For the sake of preserving equality of opportunity for a socially marginalized group, it may be necessary to tread on freedom of religious conscience--but if so, to treat this matter as equivalent to invoking the law to keep extremists from beheading their targets does no one any good.

But in a sense, this meme does that very thing. It lifts up, as the paradigm of Christian extremism, something that even the most progressive Christian can understand and (somewhat) sympathize with: the struggle of conscience faced by the Christian baker. By implication, the meme suggest that even the most progressive Muslim is likely to view in a similar light the ISIS foot soldier hacking into the vulnerable neck of an aid worker.

As such, the meme plays into anti-Muslim stereotypes. It draws a sharp line between us and them, between what we are like and what they are like. By portraying "our" extremism as mild and at worst controversial compared with "theirs," the whole Christian and Jewish community is contrasted with Islam as a whole. And since their extremists target us, they are a threat to us. Sides must be taken.

3. Minimizing non-Muslim Extremism

My final point is related to the preceding one. The meme minimizes the extremism of those who self-identify as Christians and Jews for the sake of sharpening the perceived divide between Islam and other religions.

If we're looking for the worst cases of Christian extremism, refusing to bake a cake isn't among them. One might be tempted to point to Westboro Baptist Church and their hateful signs as a better example--or perhaps the isolated acts of those who kill abortion doctors in the name of Christianity. But these Christian extremists operate within the context of a civil society that has been relatively stable since the Civil War. By contrast, ISIS operates in a war-torn region of the world, one heavy-laden with ethnic conflicts which were, for a long time, forcibly suppressed by oppressive regimes.

We can only learn so much from comparing the worst that Christian extremism has produced in the stable environs of contemporary America with the worst that Islamic extremism has produced in the more volatile social, economic, and political climate of the Middle East.

There are better comparisons. And although I'm not a fan of Christopher Hitchens' overall assessment of religion in god is not Great, Hitchens does discuss, in that book, an example that may offer a better basis for comparison: the ethnic violence that tore through the former Yoguslavia after the collapse of its totalitarian communist regime. Hitchens describes the scene that greeted him when he visited the region in 1992:

The mainly Muslim city of Sarajevo had been encircled and was being bombarded around the clock. Elsewhere, in Bosnia-Herzegovina...whole towns were pillaged and massacred in what the Serbs themselves termed "ethnic cleansing." In point of fact, "religious cleansing" would have been nearer the mark...In effect, the extremist Catholic and Orthodox forces were colluding in a bloody partition and cleansing of Bosnia-Herzegovina. They were, and still are, largely spared the public shame of this, because the world's media preferred the simplification of "Croat" and "Serb," and only mentioned religion when discussing "the Muslims."

Hitchens goes on to  further describe what he takes to be the media's glossing-over of religious identities and divisions:

It would have been far more accurate if the press and television had reported that "today the Orthodox Christian forces resumed their bombardment of Sarajevo," or "yesterday the Catholic militia succeeded in collapsing the Stari Most." But confessional terminology was reserved only for "Muslims," even as their murderers went to all the trouble of distinguishing themselves by wearing large Orthodox crosses over their bandoliers, or by taping portraits of the Virgin Mary to their rifle butts. 

In Is God a Delusion?, I criticized Hitchens and the other new atheists for failing to distinguish between religion and what I call religionism. There is a difference, I think, between living out a religious faith and using religion as an identity marker to ideologically divide the world between us and them. The latter is what I mean by "religionism," and it's what I think is at work in cases like the violence in the former Yugoslavia. The Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs weren't slaughtering Muslims as an expression of their faith. Rather, they were acting out a divisive us/them ideology, and were invoking Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam as identity markers in their ideology of hate (in much the way that racists invoke "white" and "black" and other racial categories).

And so I think Hitchens is wrong to blame religion for the violence in the former Yugoslavia. But for the same reason, it is wrong to blame religion for the violence perpetrated by ISIS and other groups like them. ISIS and similar groups deserve to be called Islamist extremists only insofar as Islam serves as the identity marker with which they work out their ideology of hate. But if that is what warrants calling them Islamist extremists, then the closest parallel in Christianity--what deserves the corresponding label of "Christian extremism"--may be the brutal ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina by nominally Christian Croats and Serbs.

It is quite possible that different religions don't do enough to identify and guard against elements in their theologies and religious practices that lend themselves to extremist interpretations. It is quite possible that Islam can do far more than it has done in this regard. It is even possible that in recent years, Christians or Jews have done better. I don't know. But if so, these concerns need to be raised and addressed in a spirit of solidarity, in which people of all faiths are working together to defeat the problem of extremism, rather than taking sides against each other and seeing extremism as the problem of the other guy.

Because as soon as we do that, we are on our way to embracing the very us/them thinking that leads to extremism.

When You Blame Religion, What are You Blaming?

In a recent Raw Story piece, "These are the 12 worst ideas religion has unleashed on the world," Valerie Tarico comes up with a list of some really harmful ideas--ranging from notions such as "blasphemy" and "heresy" and "holy war" to practices such as female genital mutilation and blood sacrifice and male ownership of female fertility. And she blames religion for them.

Yesterday, Kate Blanchard--a religious studies professor at Alma College--shot back with a concise but pointed response, one that resonates with my own perspective.

In the course of answering the Raw Story piece, Blanchard makes the following insightful observation about our use of the term "religion":

Some people like to think that the "essence" of religion is all sweetness and light, while the violence and bigotry for which religious people are famous are unfortunate cultural add-ons. The flip side is the idea expressed in the aforementioned post, that the essence of religion is tribalism and violence, while all the good stuff is "our shared moral core."

This is a point I tried to make a few years ago, in connection with a debate/discussion between Christopher Hitchens and Unitarian Universalist minister Marilyn Sewell. In my more academic writing, I've argued that religion has become a "bifurcated essentially contested concept": On the one hand, people use "religion" as a value-laden term and offer competing understandings in part because we disagree about what deserves the value-ascription that goes with religion. On the other hand, we don't agree on what the value-ascription is that goes with religion.

The result is that people can have all the same values and the same assessment of the facts and yet end up seeming as if they fundamentally disagree about religion--when really they're just talking past each other. Joe Shmoe can hate all the things that Valerie Tarico hates, and they can (perhaps) love all the same things about Martin Luther King, Jr. But they disagree vociferously about religion. Why? Because Ms. Tarico attributes the former things to religion (because religion is bad, and these are the things that make it bad), while attributing MLK's virtues to humanism; but Mr. Shmoe attributes MLK's virtues to religion (because religion is good, and these are the things that make it good), while attributing Ms Tarico's list of horrors to the general human propensity for tribalism and the like.

There are ways I expressed myself in the book, Is God a Delusion?, that put me very close to sounding like Joe Shmoe--and were I to rewrite it today, that's one of the things I'd change. What I wanted to say then (at least in my moments of greatest clarity) is what I will say now: It's not that the essence of religion is all sweetness and light. Rather, there is something important that runs through the religions of the world that, if we take it to be religion's essence, provides an internal basis for critiquing the very things that Valerie Tarico criticizes in her piece. And this is a reason to take it to be religion's essence--because it provides a reason for religious people to rethink some of the more harmful things that religious communities have endorsed and perpetuated (if not originated).

What is this thing that I find running through the religions of the world? Well, it's a bit hard to summarize briefly, but here's my best effort: There is this thing I call the ethico-religious hope: the hope that in some fundamental way, reality is not indifferent to moral goodness, that despite the cold indifference of natural laws there is something beyond the empirical skin of the world that is on the side of the good. There is, within religion, a lifting-up of mystical experiences that speak in favor of this hope--even if, of course, they can be explained away as delusional. But one thing that religious communities do is make a decision to live as if this hopeful possibility is true--as if the mystical experiences that speak to it are not illusory, but are rather glimpses into a dimension of reality that transcends the ordinary run of our empirical lives.

One feature of religion, then, is a commitment to aligning our wills and lives to this ethico-religious hope, and cultivating the kinds of mystical experiences that nurture this hope.

I think that if we extract from the religions of the world these elements, it will be hard to blame Valerie Tarico's 12 bad ideas on them. In fact, I think that if we focus on these elements, they provide the basis for challenging such evils. This is one of the things I aimed to show in Is God a Delusion?

But it is also true that real-world religions embody a diversity of features, including our propensity for tribalism and our urgent desire for certainty and easy answers. But blaming religion for these features is itself an instance of falling prey to the desire for easy answers. This is a point that Kate Blanchard makes nicely towards the end of her short piece:

Many of us are willing to ignore the overwhelming evidence that human nature and history are irreducibly complex, in favor of bedtime stories that let us sleep better at night. We blame the worst stuff on religion and dream of a better world without it, as if other factors like land, nationalism, gender, wealth, power, or the desire to be right are unique outgrowths of religiosity. As if heresy, blood sacrifice, glorified suffering, or the desire for eternal life are not equally insidious in their secular incarnations.

The result is the naivete of John Lennon's Imagine. A friend recently shared on Facebook his conversation with his young daughter about this song, in which he went into a detailed account of its oversimplified and naive vision of the human condition...putting her to sleep in the process. But maybe it's the song that should put us to sleep. I kind of like the song. I find it pretty--but pretty in the way that oversimplified bedtime stories are pretty. In fact, Valerie Tarico's list of religion's evils and Lennon's wistful imaginings seem to be different ways of articulating some of the very same ideas.

If so, Kate Blanchard's response is not just a reason to resist oversimplified attacks on religion, but a reason to be suspicious of Lennon's more lyrical naivete.

If you haven't read Blanchard's piece, it's a quick read and worth clicking over to.

A Bit More on Hitchens

Glenn Peoples, over at Say Hello to my Little Friend, has posted a rather scathing "tribute" to Hitchens almost worthy of Hitchens himself. He begins by noticing (for the sake of bucking) the supposed trend of "Christians coming out of the woodwork to say nice things about him" now that Hitchens is dead. One can almost hear the scorn in his voice.

I would certainly qualify as one of those Christians who, on hearing about Hitchens's death, felt moved to say something nice. To be honest, had he died immediately after I'd first read god is not Great, I wouldn't have had much nice to say and so probably would've remained silent. But the more I followed Hitchens' career in the wake of finishing Is God a Delusion?, the more...fond...I became of him.

And so I wrote the following response to Peoples' roasting:

I generally agree about the quality of Hitchens’ arguments, which were routinely more pugilistically clever than sound. But when it comes to the motivations at the root of those arguments, and their ultimate effect, I think there is much more room for debate.

As far as motivations go, the more I studied Hitchens the more I came away with the sense that underneath the bluster and sneering bravado was outrage at what he saw to be the range of foolishness and inhumanity in the world–and hence, at an even deeper level, a devotion to the true and the good. This is not to say that his response was the best one, or even an especially good one. It is to say that a devotion to the good and the true was the deep source of the passion with which he delivered even his most hostile verbal diatribes.

Of course I could be wrong about this–we cannot readily plumb the hearts of human beings. I certainly did not have this sense when I first started reading Hitchens on religion. In my book, Is God a Delusion?, I rarely had anything positive to say about him–and the general weakness of his arguments on a philosophical level meant I actually gave him less attention in that book than the other so-called new atheists. But as I continued following his career I just had this growing sense about his driving motivations–a sense that I still don’t have with respect to, say, Dawkins or Sam Harris. This sense led me to respond to him with almost a sort of affection (an affection that would, I’m sure, crumble if he ever turned his vitreol directly on me; so not an especially durable affection, but an odd kind of affection nonetheless).

But even if my intuitions here are wrong, there is something I am prepared to say with considerable confidence. Hitchens was a human being, and human beings have an inherent worth and dignity that warrants our respect–even in the cases of those who were not themselves prone to displaying such respect in their own rhetoric. It is quite possible that a roasting of Hitchens at his death–of the sort that Hitchens himself was wont to offer towards those he took to be particularly egregious fonts of foolishness and inhumanity–is a kind of sideways show of respect for him (Kant’s arguments about retributivism point in that direction). But my own inclination is to show my respect by reaching beyond the layers of crud towards what I take to be the mark of his creator at his core–and to live in the hope that this will be preserved long after his pugilistic screeds are forgotten.


I didn't, in that comment on Peoples' post, take up the issue of the effects of Hitchens' attacks on religion. Peoples claims that Hitchens "contributed nothing of value to public discussions around religion," and that his writings and public debates and talks ("circus antics") "only served to egg on the very worst intellectual element of atheism".

I'm not at all convinced that Hitchens' legacy can be reduced to this. One of the things Hitchens liked to do was attack our sacred cows with all the eloquent disdain of which he was capable. He was one of the few, for example, who was prepared to question the near-universal esteem in which Mother Teresa is held--calling her "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud" (among other things). His attack on her was certainly over the top. Unbalanced, unfair, unfitting, disrespectful--all of these are terms I'd be inclined to apply.

But sacred cows often operate as an impediment to intellectual honesty. And while Hitchens' attacks on sacred cows weren't themselves models of intellectual fairness, I suspect that, at least sometimes, his willigness to attack them created a public conversation that hadn't been there before. In place of nothing but pious repetition of Mother Teresa's virtues, Hitchens' attacks forced at least some people to actually come to her defense. And some of those defenses carried with them explicit concessions that wouldn't otherwise have been voiced, or at least wouldn't have been voiced in a way that made it into the broader public conversation. Perhaps there was something problematic--or at least worth critical discussion--about a nun devoted to giving love to dying orphans in an overpopulated city (in an overpopulated country, in an overpopulated world) while continuing to unquestioningly endorse the Roman Catholic opposition to birth control.

When it comes to religion, Hitchens was of course attacking sacred cows that were already being attacked in lively style by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and others. Arguably, then, he didn't spark a public conversation that wasn't already well underway.  But it is surely the case that the New Atheists taken as a whole sparked a public conversation that had been largely sequestered up until that point in philosophy of religion classrooms and in the occasional (mostly ignored) blog. Prior to the New Atheist onslaught, my qualified and conditioned defense of religion--one which takes sharp issue with fanatical, fundamentalist, and science-hating expressions of faith--would have received far less attention than it did (and would likely not have been read at all by conservative religious believers). This is a point I've made in the past in relation to Richard Dawkins.

So, taken as a whole, the New Atheists did in fact provide a public-conversation-starting function. And Hitchens was a defining voice in that movement.

Let me be clear that this is not an unqualified defense of Hitchens' brand of rhetoric or of the New Atheist movement. One of the great dangers of the approach exemplified by the New Atheists is that the public conversation may become polarized to the point of ideological entrenchment. Going from a world in which the merits of religion go largely undiscussed except in rarified intellectual circles, to a world in which the discussion has the character of a shouting match across metaphorical picket lines, may not qualify as progress. And I'm not yet sure that this isn't the nature of the transition we've undergone.

In other words, there is something to Peoples' claim that Hitchens egged on some of the less intellectually respectable voices in the atheist community. My point is that Hitchen's legacy is more complex that this single effect. That complexity needs to be acknowledged and thought about.

And since I have more questions than answers when it comes to the ultimate impact of Hitchens' brand of anti-religious public rhetoric, let me open it up at this point to the thoughts of others: What do you think is the long-term legacy of Hitchens' brand of hyperbolic anti-religious campaigning?

Reflection on Hitchens' Death At Religion Dispatches

I have a brief reflection on Christopher Hitchens' death at the Religion Dispatches blog. Check it out here if you're interested.

Religion and Essential Contestability: Excerpt from an article

Today in my philosophy of religion class, we discussed the complexity of the term "religion" and the ways in which competing usage leads to misunderstanding and confusion. I talked about religion as a family resemblance concept, and then proposed my theory that in the contemporary "God debates," the concept of "religion" functions (or fails to function) as an "essentially contested concept with a twist."

Some of these ideas will be familiar to regular followers of this blog, since I've discussed them here before (such as the last time the topic came up my my philosophy of religion class). However, since much of the background ideas probably went by quite quickly in class, I decided that I would post on this blog--for my students as well as for anyone else who is interested--the way I described and developed this theory in a a recent article, "Moving the Goalposts? The Challenge of Philosophical Engagement with the Public God Debates," that came out a little while back in  Philo: A Journal of Philosophy. What follows is an excerpt (and may be the penultimate version, since it is what I had on my computer). Those interested in the entire article can find it in Philo vol. 13 (Spring-Summer 2010), pp. 80-93.

In my book I hold that “religion” is a family resemblance term, which makes univocal talk about the merits and demerits of religion difficult. One needs to specify what one is talking about to avoid equivocations leading to false generalizations. A main contention of the book is that the New Atheists fail to do this.


Precisely because I was so explicit about this point up front, the charge that I was “re-defining” religion to make it immune to New Atheist criticisms puzzled me. But then I noticed a pattern. Progressive religious readers of my book had no trouble seeing what I was describing and defending as religion—in fact, their kind. Conservative Christian readers, while unhappy with my failure to defend their religion (and with my heresies), agreed that what I was defending was a species of religion. It was those in the New Atheist community who were apt to accuse me of “re-defining” religion. When I’ve been able to investigate the matter (mainly with my students), I’ve found that those most likely to level this criticism are precisely those who have been most “stung” by oppressively narrow-minded forms of religion (such as those common in the Bible Belt where I teach).

So what are we to make of this? What I’ve concluded is that Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” notion is of less value for understanding contemporary use of “religion” than W.B. Gallie’s notion of essentially contested concepts. Put simply, I’ve become increasingly convinced that “religion” is an essentially contested concept, but with a twist.

To call it an essentially contested concept is to say that part of the normal use of the term is that different users attach different senses to it, resulting in differences in extension. But this competing usage is unified by a shared set of complex paradigms (which embody numerous features) and an agreed appraisive meaning. With an essentially contested concept, the competing definitions represent competing views about which features of the paradigms warrant the appraisal associated with the term.

The idea here is that some terms have come to be so closely aligned with a certain kind of normative appraisal that we cannot sever the term from the appraisal. If anything is univocally intended by the term, it’s this appraisal. Hence, to insist on a specific descriptive definition among rivals is to insist that the extension of a particular normative judgment should have these parameters rather than some alternative. Rather than risk having legitimate normative disputes silenced by an insistence of uniformity of meaning, Gallie advocates treating some terms as essentially contested.

In short, acknowledging essential contestability is supposed to ensure that a normative dispute—about, say, which acts should be condemned in the way that paradigms of terrorism are condemned, or which human creations should be honored in the way we honor exemplars of art—is not shut down by a kind of definition fiat. But unlike “art,” whose appraisive meaning is positive, or “terrorism,” whose appraisive meaning is negative, “religion” has come to be used such that there are two competing communities of discourse, each using the term in an essentially contested way. But whereas one community of discourse treats “religion” as a positive appraisive concept and seeks to gauge which features of the paradigms warrant the positive appraisal, the other treats it as a negative one and seeks to judge which features warrant the negative appraisal. When a concept comes to be used in this way, we might call it a “bifurcated essentially contested concept.”

My book adopts the language game of that community of discourse which attaches a positive appraisive meaning to “religion.” As such, I look at the complex paradigms of religion in the world (which contain many elements I view negatively), and then seek to isolate the elements which justify the positive appraisal. What results is a picture of theistic religion which preserves those features of the paradigms that warrant the positive appraisal while acknowledging that much in the “real religions” of the “real world” deserve the criticisms of the New Atheists.

But if religion is understood to be an essentially negative concept, then if all the features that justify the negative appraisal are purged from it the result will not be seen as “religion” at all. And so the cry of “That’s not religion!” makes sense. It’s as if one community of discourse attaches to the term “sex” the appraisive meaning that typically attaches to “rape,” while another attaches to it the appraisive sense of “making love.” The former group looks at the range of phenomena that go by the label “sex” (ignoring, of course, those phenomena which no one would ever call rape) and tries to identify what justifies the negative appraisal. The latter does the same (ignoring the phenomena, such as rape paradigms, which no one would ever call “making love”), in the attempt to identify the parameters within which the positive appraisal is warranted. The latter holds up its results, saying, “This is the kind of sex (by which we mean making love) that deserves label!” The former protests, “That’s not sex (by which we mean rape) at all!”

Once again Christopher Hitchens offers an excellent case study for this phenomenon. Not long ago Hitchens was interviewed by a Unitarian Universalist minister, Marilyn Sewell—and one of the most striking features of their conversation is just how much they agree upon. Not only do they agree about the presumed offenses of conservative religious communities, but also about the importance, for human life, of a sense of what Hitchens calls “the numinous”—a sense which Hitchens himself describes, at one point in the interview, as the experience or feeling “that there is more to life than just matter.”

But, of course, Marilyn Sewell not only describes herself as religious but is a clergy person for the liberal Unitarian Universalist Church, while Hitchens describes himself not merely as an atheist, but as an “antitheist,” by which he means someone who is actively opposed to religion and belief in God. How is it possible that two persons can have such similar views not only about specific religious communities and their practices but about what Hitchens calls “the numinous” (a term coined by theologian Rudolph Otto to describe the human encounter with the transcendent), and yet can take such antithetical stands towards “religion,” one identifying with a religious community and the other insisting that “religion poisons everything”? If the former attaches a positive appraisive sense to the term “religion” and sifts through the paradigms of religion to identify what justifies the positive appraisal (leaving off what is negative), while the latter attaches a negative sense to the term and so defines it in terms of those things left out of the former’s understanding, we can readily understand what has happened. If, as seems to be true of Hitchens and Sewell, the underlying value systems according to which the paradigms of religion are assessed by each are substantially the same, the one will include in her understanding of religion the very things that will be excluded from the other’s.

And so, from Hitchens' standpoint, Sewell’s religion isn’t religion at all. Likewise in relation to the new atheists, what I defend in my book isn’t religion all. And this may be why I am accused of “moving the goal posts.” While I’m not sure what to do about this kind of “bifurcated” contested usage, there is no doubt that any scholar who wants to engage the God debates needs to be aware of it.

The Concept of "Religion"

In my philosophy of religion class yesterday I gave everyone in the class a chance to give their own concise answer to the following question: “What is religion?” (To be more precise, I asked them to imagine they were being interrogated by space aliens, and that the fate of the Earth depended on their answer).


Not surprisingly, there were many diverse responses—some emphasizing social and institutional phenomena, some emphasizing beliefs or ways of looking at the world, some emphasizing practices or ways of life, and some stressing inner spiritual experience. Some definitions were, I’d say, quite gilded—that is, they used language aimed at highlighting the beauty or value of the thing being defined. Other definitions were quite the opposite. For example, one student defined religion as a system for justifying the exclusion or marginalization of people from a community.

Once I had the chalkboard covered with these various accounts, I pointed out how this diversity is also represented among scholars—with understandings of religion ranging from the more private, personal, “feeling”-oriented understanding (favored by theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and philosopher/psychologist William James), to more sociological understandings (promulgated by, for example, Emile Durkheim).

I then spent a few minutes considering the idea I advanced in my book—namely, that “religion” is what Wittgenstein calls a “family resemblance” term (see p. 15 of Is God a Delusion? for an account of this idea). Then, in the last few minutes of the class, I turned to another approach—one that, based on some further reflection I’ve done since writing my book, I’m becoming increasingly convinced is the right one. According to this approach, “religion” is best understood as what philosopher W. B. Gallie called an “essentially contested concept”—but with a twist.

Since I didn’t have time to fully explain this idea in class, I want to do so in this post. In fact, I’ve already done so on this blog—here and here. But since it’s always helpful to try to explain ideas in different ways, let me have another go at it here.

What Gallie noticed was that there are some terms whose proper use, rather than being determined by an established definition (one that sets out the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to fall within the term’s scope), is instead determined by a shared set of complex exemplars or paradigms along with a shared appraisive meaning. So for example, there isn’t a common definition of “rape.” Instead, there are a bunch of exemplars—sexual acts that we all agree count as rape—together with general agreement that when an act is labeled “rape” there’s a strongly negative appraisal that goes along with that.

Here’s the thing about “rape.” It just isn’t and never will be a neutral, purely descriptive term. To call something rape is (among other things) to condemn it in a particular way. That condemnation is part of the meaning of the term. And so it matters a lot whether or not a particular act qualifies as rape. Acts of rape are morally worse than other classes of sexual acts (such as seduction, say, or aggressive lovemaking, or adultery).

The paradigms of “rape” exist because there are a bunch of things that we all agree deserve to be condemned in this distinctive way. But these paradigms are complex. They have lots of different features. And we don't all agree on what it is about these paradigms that makes them deserving of the negative appraisal. And this means that there are controversial cases.

Consider: A guy keeps pressuring his high school girlfriend to have sex. She doesn’t want to. He threatens to break up with her. She closes in on herself. He backs off for a few minutes, then begins groping her again. She doesn’t resist. He undresses her. She remains totally passive and unresponsive. He puts on a condom and penetrates her.

Is it rape? More people would be inclined to say “yes” today than twenty years ago—but there are still many who’d say it isn’t, that the guy is being insensitive but isn’t a rapist.

The reason for the dispute is that there isn’t agreement about whether the boys behavior in this case deserves the negative implications of the “rape” label. In other words, this is a moral dispute about what warrants a certain kind of negative appraisal.

And moral disputes can’t be resolved through definitional fiat. Suppose someone says, “From now on, rape will mean an act in which someone uses physical force to overcome a woman who is actively resisting sexual penetration. As such, the case at hand isn’t rape.” Such a move isn’t going to just be accepted. Why? Because to call something “rape” is to say that there's a certain kind of “badness” to it—more precisely, the same kind of badness that the agreed paradigms of rape possess. And so, to define rape as “an act in which someone uses physical force to overcome a woman who is actively resisting sexual penetration” is to say, in effect, that only acts which meet these conditions are bad in the relevant way. Put another way, to define “rape” is to take a stand in a moral dispute.

And as long as there is moral dispute, to impose a uniform definition of “rape” on a community of speakers is to impose one disputed answer to a moral question on everyone in the community. This wouldn’t be merely an act of establishing a linguistic convention. It would be an act of using language to truncate debate and to effectively delegitimize certain moral views.

And this is why some concepts become essentially contested. Their being essentially contested is a good thing—a way to keep some voices in a moral debate from being illegitimately silenced through definitional fiat.

My claim is that this idea of essential contestability is useful for understanding religion—but not if we accept Gallie’s idea without modification. Religion, I think, is an essentially contested concept with a twist. And what’s the twist? Here’s how I explain it in a forthcoming article (“Moving the Goal Posts?” to be published in Philo: A Journal of Philosophy):

But unlike “art,” whose appraisive meaning is positive, or “terrorism,” whose appraisive meaning is negative, “religion” has come to be used such that there are two competing communities of discourse, each using the term in an essentially contested way. But whereas one community of discourse treats “religion” as a positive appraisive concept and seeks to gauge which features of the paradigms warrant the positive appraisal, the other treats it as a negative one and seeks to judge which features warrant the negative appraisal. When a concept comes to be used in this way, we might call it a “bifurcated essentially contested concept.”

Unlike essentially contested concepts as Gallie understood them, I’m not at all convinced that bifurcated essentially contested concepts serve a useful function. When an essentially contested concept becomes “bifurcated,” what happens? On the one hand, you have those who attach a positive appraisive meaning to the paradigms of religion. They will be formulating their definition of religion by looking for what it is about the paradigms of religion that justifies the positive appraisal (and so will sift out of their understanding of religion anything in the paradigms that warrants a negative appraisal). On the other hand, those who attach a negative appraisive meaning to "religion" will be doing to opposite. The result may be that you have two parties with virtually identical value systems, who therefore make the same appraisive judgments about the various features of the religious paradigms—but who appear to be utterly at odds. An analogy—again from my forthcoming article—can be helpful:

It’s as if one community of discourse attaches to the term “sex” the appraisive meaning that typically attaches to “rape,” while another attaches to it the appraisive sense of “making love.” The former group looks at the range of phenomena that go by the label “sex” (ignoring, of course, those phenomena which no one would ever call rape) and tries to identify what justifies the negative appraisal. The latter does the same (ignoring the phenomena, such as rape paradigms, which no one would ever call “making love”), in the attempt to identify the parameters within which the positive appraisal is warranted. The latter holds up its results, saying, “This is the kind of sex (by which we mean making love) that deserves label!” The former protests, “That’s not sex (by which we mean rape) at all!”

This, I think, is what’s going on in the conversation between Christopher Hitchens and Unitarian Universalist minister Marilyn Sewell, whose unusual debate inspired one of my recent Religion Dispatches articles. It may also help to explain some of the common charges leveled against my book—charges to the effect that I respond to the new atheists by coming up with this definition of religion that has nothing to do with real religion as it exists in the real world.

Of course, what I defend in my book has a great deal to do with actual religions—but when I look at those real-world phenomena, I’m trying to identify the features which might justify a positive appraisal (what I call the germ of a true religion that might be salvaged from the crud of “superstition” and “fundamentalism” and “religionism”). My critics, meanwhile, are sifting through the same phenomena in an attempt to identify what makes religion so bad. And what do they pinpoint? What, from my standpoint, is the crud from which true religion needs to be salvaged. And so they’re holding up the crud and calling it religion, while I’m holding up the gem that was buried in the crud. And they protest, “That’s not religion at all!”

Religion as a "Bifurcated Essentially Contested Concept"

It occured to me that at least a few readers of this blog might be interested in the core section of an e-mail that I recently sent to a philosophical colleague--in which I briefly describe the more technical philosophical idea that was percolating beneath the surface of my recent Religion Dispatches article reflecting on the Hitchens-Sewell interview. In briefest terms, I've become increasingly convinced that the concept of religion operates in a rather strange way in contemporary discourse. I've decided to call it a "Bifurcated Essentially Contested Concept."

In fact, the first draft of the RD article included a brief discussion of this more technical idea, but I decided that it didn't work for that venue. I'd either need to go into so much depth expositing the relevant ideas in the philosophy of language that the article would have this distractingly dry academic portion in the middle, or I'd end up underexplaining these ideas so much that they wouldn't be helpful.

But for those interested in the more academic side of my work, the note to my colleague is brief enough to fit in a blog but detailed enought to offer a sense of one of the philosophical projects I'm am developing. So here is what I wrote:

In brief, (the philosophical project) involves an analysis of the concept “religion” that makes use of W. B. Gallie’s notion of “essentially contested concepts.” In case you’re unfamiliar with Gallie, he understands essentially contested concepts to be characterized by (a) a shared set of complex paradigms, (b) a common appraisive meaning, and (c) disagreement over which features of the paradigms justify the appraisive judgment. Since the appraisal has become an ineradicable feature of the term’s use in ordinary language, any proposed definition takes sides in a moral dispute: by fixing the extension of the term, the definition makes a judgment about which entities should be subject to the normative appraisal that goes with the use of the term, and which shouldn’t. According to Gallie, preserving the essential contestability of a concept—that is, characterizing the “language game” of proper usage in terms of (a) and (b) and, arguably, paradigmatic examples of things that fall outside the extension of the term, rather than in terms of a conventional definition—prevents normative disputes from being ended by definitional fiat (and thereby having certain moral perspectives illegitimately silenced).

What I’ve been thinking as I get increasingly caught up in the current “God debates” is that “religion” operates today as an essentially contested concept with a twist. The twist is that, although there is a shared set of complex paradigms, there are two competing appraisive meanings—one positive and the other pejorative—and hence two communities of discourse—one disagreeing over which features of the paradigms justify the POSITIVE appraisal they attach to the term “religion,” the other disagreeing over which features of the paradigms justify the NEGATIVE appraisal they attach to the term. Thus conceived, Sewell is in the same community of discourse as, say, Pat Robertson, but fundamentally disagrees with him about which features of religious paradigms justify positive appraisal because they are operating from deeply opposed normative frameworks. Hitchens, by contrast, is in the opposing community of discourse, but is operating with very similar normative lenses as Sewell. The result is that her understanding of religion, derived from her culling from the paradigms that which justifies a positive judgment, falls entirely outside the scope of Hitchens’ definition of “religion” precisely BECAUSE it has been stripped of all the things that justify a NEGATIVE appraisal. But they agree about so many things that one might even start to think of Hitchens as a closet Unitarian.

Since this passage from my e-mail explicates Gallie's "essentially contested concepts" rather quickly, without the help of clarifying examples, let me just add two examples for the sake of my readers here. First, there is "work of art." We all agree that DaVinci's Mona Lisa is a work of art, and that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a work of art, etc. That is, there is a shared set of paradigms that we can all agree fall within the extension of the term. And we all attach a positive appraisive sense to the term "work of art." That is, for something to be properly called a work of art, it needs to exemplify an achievement of a certain sort. So, we agree that the paradigms exemplify this achievement. But when it comes to, say, certain post-modern creations on display in modern art museums, some will call them works of art and others will vociferously disagree. Why? Because to call it a work of art is to say that it achieves something--something of the same sort that the Mona Lisa achieves. Perhaps not in the same measure, but enough so that they both deserved to be classed as works of art.

The result is that you have clear cases of works of art--in which there is general agreement that this or that is a work of art--and borderline cases (which some will call works of art and others won't). Gallie's point is that this is well and proper, because to insist upon a strict definition with precise boundaries would be to illegitimately shut down an ongoing normative disagreement about which features of the paradigms justify the positive appraisive judgment that attaches to the term "work of art."

Here's the second example: the concept "terrorism." This one works in very much the same way, except that the appraisal that goes along with the use of the term is strongly negative. There are, again, a bunch of agreed paradigms--the 9/11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, etc.--as well as a range of contested cases. The disagreement turns on which features of the paradigms of terrorism justify the negative judgment that "terrorism" implies.

So anyway, my working theory, from my observation of the way "religion" has come to be used, is that it fits the model of essential contestability in a number of important ways--except that, crucially, some attach to the term a positive appraisive sense while others attach to it a negative one. This fact may imply other differences. Part of my current work is to tease out in a systematic way precisely WHAT other differences are entailed.

Hitchens' Spiritual Side--New Essay in Religion Dispatches

A couple of days ago, several posts on facebook alerted me to an interview/conversation between Christopher Hitchens and the retired Unitarian minister, Marilyn Sewell. Because I've explored with some care (in an earlier essay for Religion Dispatches) the parasitic and self-serving dynamic that characterizes Hitchens' engagement with religious conservatives such as Douglas Wilson, I thought it would be interesting to explore how Hitchens might engage with a self professing "liberal Christian."

As might be expected, one of Hitchens' early salvos in the interview amounted to strictly defining who qualified as a Christian and who didn't--with the apparent aim of disqualifying Sewell. It was this feature of the interview that put it on the radar screen of many religious progressives. But as I read through the interview, what emerged for me as the most interesting feature of it was just how close Hitchens was to being a Unitarian. The biggest difference was that Unitarians call themselves religious, while Hitchens calls all things religious "poison."

In any event, reading the interview inspired a reflection, "Christopher Hitchens, Religious in Spite of Himself?", that's the feature article in today's Religion Dispatches. It includes some early autobiographical material, for those who can't wait for the "spiritual autobiography" I have yet to compose.

Hitchens and the Atonement

Christopher Hitchens has a problem with the Atonement. At one point in the recent documentary, Collision—which follows his debates with evangelical pastor Douglas Wilson—Hitchens puts it this way: “I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all—that is, the one of the vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else.”

His opposition to this doctrine predates his debates with Wilson. In fact, he devotes a section of his book, god is Not Great, to trashing the doctrine. But if you read what he says there, you quickly realize that his numerous objections to the doctrine are based on an understanding of it modeled on the ancient practice of human sacrifice performed in order to appease an angry tyrannical deity.

Although I have a great interest in defending the Christian doctrine of the Atonement, I have no interest in defending this particular version.

Even as I say this I'm conscious of the kind of outraged response Hitchens and his followers are likely to voice. It’s the kind of response that’s repeatedly been expressed in response to my book—most recently, in the latest Amazon reader’s review. According to that reviewer, I am guilty of “first re-defining religion so that it no longer matches the target that the New Atheists attack, then defending the re-defined religion, and then finally claiming that since re-defined religion is so easily defended, that (sic) the New Atheists are therefore wrong.”

But here’s the thing. Dawkins, in The God Delusion, does not claim to be targeting the particular version of theistic belief dominant in mainstream religion (or something along those lines). He claims quite explicitly to be “attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented” (p. 36). To point out that his arguments only address one species of theism, and that a more nuanced species exists which is immune to his attacks, is not a case of “talking past” Dawkins. It’s a matter of showing that he’s guilty of a faulty generalization.

And the fact is that the New Atheists in general are on a campaign to stamp out, not fundamentalist religion or dogmatic religion, but religion as such—and they make pains to include “moderate” religion within the scope of their assault. They claim that core religious notions are to blame for the crimes of religious extremists—most notably the concept of “faith,” which is the target of Sam Harris’s unrelenting assault in The End of Faith.

And so, when I say that I am interested in defending the doctrine of the Atonement, but not the version which Hitchens explicitly attacks, I can already see the critics lining up to call foul. But the fact is that Hitchens makes no nuanced distinctions between different versions of the doctrine of the Atonement. He simply says, “This is what the doctrine holds. It is evil.” And it is not illegitimate, in response to such an argument, to say something like the following: “The doctrine admits of many alternative interpretations, and even if the one that you single out is evil, it doesn’t follow that we should throw out every interpretation on those grounds.”

And the fact is that there is no singular, agreed meaning that all Christians attach to Christ’s crucifixion, no one univocal theological understanding of how His death at human hands is supposed to lift the burden of sin from human shoulders.

In a Religion Dispatches article not too long ago, I sketched out one way of conceiving the Atonement. But although I find that understanding important and moving, I am not prepared to declare it to be the One True Doctrine of the Atonement. I have no interest in such entrenchment, in large measure because it shuts down what is perhaps one of the richest fruits of the gospel narrative: namely, the ongoing creative human response to it.

For me, the core gospel narrative, in which Jesus suffers on a cross, dies in agony with the full burden of human sin on His shoulders, and then rises again—this core narrative is like one of those resonant high points in a work of fiction, in which metaphor and symbol merge with human drama to create a wellspring of alternative meanings. At once mysterious and profound, such a narrative comes alive for readers precisely because they must bring themselves to the text, creatively engaging with it in the light of their own experiences and concerns. With such a narrative, we can keep returning to it and each time discover something new, something that speaks to who and what we are today.

The Jewish practitioners of midrash believed that the entirety of the Scriptures were like this, living texts rich with undiscovered meanings. As Karen Armstrong puts it in The Bible: A Biography, the early practitioners of midrash “were not interested in recovering the original significance of a given scriptural passage. Like Daniel, they were looking for fresh meaning. In their view, there was no single authoritative reading of scripture…Scripture was inexhaustible” (p. 81).

In part, this approach was motivated precisely by their conviction that Scripture was a gift from God and a pathway to relationship with God. As the literal surface meaning gives way before the rich array of interpretations, we are afforded a glimpse of the Infinite pushing out against the boundaries of the finite words. As new meanings blossom with each new reading and each new reader, it becomes clear that revelation is found not in the text by itself, but in the living engagement of persons with the text. On this view of revelation, it isn’t the Bible (or some other holy book) that is the revealed word of God. It is, instead, the vibrant, living human engagement with the Bible through which God speaks.

The cross, while not a text, is like that. Its significance cannot be bounded by a single interpretation, a single theological treatise. For Christians, Jesus is the place where the human most perfectly intersects with the divine, and the cross is the place where the import of that intersection is fully realized. The full weight of the infinite is pressing up against that moment of crucifixion, that space between anguish and death.

What does it mean? The answer doesn’t plunk out like a stone to sit there, dead and solid at our feet. To engage with the crucifixion is to pierce a rock behind which endless waters flow. What results is a torrent.

One moment, I look at the cross and I see God manifesting the relentlessness of vulnerable love, persisting even in the face of the most hostile conceivable rejection.

At the next moment I see the incarnate God crying out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”; and I find in that cry God’s paradoxical way of standing in solidarity with us at the point of utmost affliction, the point at which God is experienced as wholly absent.

I look again and I see God’s repudiation of sin. “This is what sin means. This is how bad it is. It is like nailing God Himself to a cross!”

I look again and I see what it means to choose the good regardless of the cost, in defiance of the torture that a fallen world imposes on those who do not submit to the demands of coercive power. If only we could hold unflinchingly to the good even under the threat of torture and death, then death will have lost its power to destroy who we are. If only the powers and principalities would find themselves unable to manipulate us with the fear of death, then, paradoxically, we would no longer have anything to fear from death. But even when we stand our ground against the darkness, we flinch and are changed by it. By death. But here is Christ, unflinching, forging the pathway to the empty tomb.

I look again and I see the physical crucifixion as but a symbol of a deeper and more profound spiritual one, as Christ faces what we cannot face and endures on our behalf what we cannot endure: the honest subjective understanding of what we have done and left undone in our lives, the unvarnished truth about our finitude and our failings. We do not know the depths of our sin, the gravity of it, because we cannot bear the truth. So Christ bears it for us.

And I hear the words: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

But when Hitchens looks to the cross, this "man of letters" sees none of these things. Ignoring the rich and varied interpretive tradition, he focuses on the most banal and literal understanding, the narrow fundamentalist one in which an angry tyrant demands blood sacrifice to appease his wrath.

Like most of the New Atheists, he wants to pin poetry to the dirt. And then he furiously points to the dirt stains and declares it filth.

“Yes, that’s filth,” I want to say in response. “But what about the poem?”

What about the poem?

My response to the New Atheists is consistently this: What about the poem that you persistently and almost willfully ignore as you delight in pounding banalities into the ground? It’s true that I am not defending what the New Atheists are most directly attacking. Rather, I am trying to wave in their faces the thing that they aren’t seeing, which they don’t seem to know exists, which they are content to consign to the dump right along with the junk they are explicitly heaving in the trash.

And yet, when it comes to Hitchens’ attacks on the Atonement, my response cannot be purely this. Because there is something that he targets for attack which I have to own. Hitchens accuses the doctrine of vicarious redemption of affording us the chance to “throw our sins onto somebody else.” If the Atonement is about anything, it is about this: the cost of sin, the burden of our errors, is (somehow) lifted from our shoulders and borne in our stead by Christ.

The how may be a richly rendered mystery of the faith, an invitation to endlessly creative re-appropriation—and insofar as Hitchens attacks a particularly banal rendering of the how, his critique means little. But when it comes to the what, Hitchens stands on firmer ground. Amidst all of the diversity of understandings, there remains this consistent them: Christ lifts from sinners the wages of sin.

Of course, not all Christians understand the implications of the Atonement in the same way. One of the chief points of contention has to do with scope. Are all human sins objectively atoned for on the cross, as Lutherans typically believe? Or is the Atonement only hypothetical until the sinner actively accepts Jesus as savior?

My own theological predilections fall in line with the former. But it is the former that is most obviously susceptible to Hitchens’ challenge. He thinks it is wrong, immoral, for us to embrace a teaching which says that we can “throw our sins onto somebody else.” His view seems to be this: We should be responsible for our own actions. And the practice of making someone else a scapegoat for the worst of them is morally abominable.

Of course, there are a number of problems here. First, the Christian doctrine of the Atonement is not one according to which we make Christ into a scapegoat for our sins. It is, rather, one according to which Christ adopts a burden on our behalf that we cannot conceivably bear ourselves, but which Christ can and does bear. This isn’t something we do to Christ, but something that Christ does for us. We aren’t asking Christ to do something that we should be doing ourselves. Christ, out of love, is doing for us what, otherwise, would not be done at all, because we couldn’t possibly do it.

And the doctrine of the Atonement isn’t about responsibility for our actions so much as it is about responsibility for our salvation. It’s the wages of sin that Christ bears on our behalf: guilt, shame, denial, indifference, despair, resentment; all the things that poison loving relationships or cut us off from them, all the things that therefore keep us from the beloved community—either because we think we don’t deserve to be a part of it or because we have put ourselves so deeply into self-righteous denial that we can’t participate. Loving community requires honesty and vulnerability. It requires a sharing of one’s authentic self. The wages of sin are precisely those things which stand in the way of taking that step into true intimacy. Salvation is about removing those impediments, so that the doors of heaven—the doors that close on our own hearts—are cast open.

So what does this mean for Hitchens’ critique of the Atonement?

Obviously, one of the most fundamental differences between Hitchens’ atheism and the Christian worldview is this: for Hitchens this life is all there is, and when it’s done then all of us, the good and the bad alike, come to the same end: oblivion. What does this mean for the wages of sin? It means that, once we are dead it makes no difference. The worst sinners and noblest souls face the same fate in the end.

It means, in other words, that if there is a reason to be good, a reason to cultivate compassion and openness rather than resentment and defensiveness, a reason to favor forgiveness over revenge, empathy over hatred—if there is a reason for any of these things, it won’t be found in some heavenly rewards or hellish punishments. It will be found it what it means for your life and the lives of those you affect, to be good rather than wicked.

In a sense, the doctrine of the Atonement, if it does anything, makes the theistic worldview more like the atheist one in this respect than it would otherwise be. If the wages of sin are borne by Christ; if they can no longer stand between us and our eternal participation in the Kingdom of God, then heavenly rewards and hellish punishments will no longer function as the reason to be good. In a theistic worldview according to which the wages of sin are overcome by the Atonement or something like it, our attention is turned to the intrinsic merits of a life of virtue, rather than towards extrinsic rewards.

In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, I think that anyone who takes the doctrine of the Atonement seriously cannot consistently sustain anything like the traditional doctrine of hell. But even those who do not go this far must, I think, admit something more modest: if there is a hell, given the doctrine of the Atonement it cannot be the case that what puts someone in hell is that they deserve it on account of their wickedness.

Instead, if any are damned, it will likely be because, first of all, damnation just is being so full of resentment and hatred and bitterness and petty self-righteousness that one cannot enter into genuine loving communion with others; and secondly, one has failed to subjectively appropriate the divine gift whereby such things are lifted away.

Once again, it is the intrinsic merit of our moral character that becomes the important thing, the thing that matters. This is what the doctrine of the Atonement does: by lifting the wages of sin from our shoulders, it puts the focus not on the extrinsic rewards and penalties of our actions, but on the intrinsic worth of being a moral agent rather than a wicked one.

And this, of course, is precisely where Hitchens says that the focus ought to be. It is therefore deeply ironic to me that Hitchens’ sparring partner, Douglas Wilson, challenges Hitchens atheism on precisely these grounds.

Wilson repeatedly challenges Hitchens with the example of the prosperous atheist villain who, on his deathbed, declares that he’s “gotten away with it.” Let’s suppose that this is a man who’s truly villainous, having committed horrible atrocities of genocidal proportions, and who has enjoyed immense earthly fortune in the process (I assume it is a man only because the legacy of patriarchy entails that few if any women could achieve the position of influence necessary both to effect genocidal massacre and to become filthy rich in the process). What can you say to such a villain, Wilson asks, if the villain is convinced he’s about to meet the same oblivion he would’ve met anyway had he been saintly all his days?

In response to this challenge, Hitchens makes the standard move: being moral out of a desire for a heavenly reward or fear of a hellish one is not really being moral at all. To be truly good is to do the right thing because it’s right.

But while I agree with this, it doesn’t answer the question. What do you say to this atheist when he chuckles and claims to have “gotten away with it”? Do you really just say, “You should have done the right thing just because it was right”? I think the atheist can say more—at least an atheist who is attuned to the moral life, and knows something about what it’s like to live in the light of justice, compassion, and mercy.

So here’s the answer I propose: “You lived a bad life. You go to oblivion having not mattered to the world, except in a negative way. That you don’t feel bad about this is evidence that you have missed the point of life, and you die in a dark pit of ignorance, having lost out on the sweetest nectar that life can give. You die thinking you got away with something, when in fact you got away with nothing. You came in with nothing. You leave with nothing. And while you were here all of the very greatest goods, goods which are available to those who live with compassion and respect, have utterly eluded you. You will go into oblivion having experienced empty pleasures in abundance, but never any real joy. And so you are the most pitiable of creatures, more pitiable than the many victims of your crimes.”

And this seems to me to be a better answer than the one that Wilson seems to think Christians have at their disposal. Of course, Wilson’s answer to the atheist would be a blunt, “You won’t get away with it! God will smite you in the afterlife!” Perhaps, assuming that Wilson rejects the doctrine of the Atonement or selectively ignores its implications, such an answer is available to him. But it is precisely the doctrine of the Atonement, the doctrine that Hitchens so reviles, which would force Wilson (if only he’d take it seriously) to offer an answer more like the atheist one that I proposed.

Put simply, the manner in which our sins are “thrown” onto Christ in the doctrine of the Atonement has implications that should either lead Hitchens to condemn his own atheism or view the doctrine of vicarious redemption as the best part of Christianity, insofar as it puts Christianity (at least in one important respect) into moral waters similar to the ones in which atheists sail.

Of course, there is something Christians who take the Atonement seriously can say to that atheist monster on his deathbed, something Hitchens and atheists like him cannot say. It isn’t that he won’t get away with it. It is, rather, that despite his wasted life, despite living all his mortal days without ever having tasted anything of real value, despite existing in a pit of meaninglessness in which all the deepest and most fulfilling goods of existence have eluded him completely—despite all of this, and despite the fact that nothing remains of his mortal life in which to find what has eluded him, there’s still hope.

Because God still loves him and doesn’t cast His precious children to the void.

Collision? Hardly--New Religion Dispatches Essay

I've got a new essay in today's Religion Dispatches. It's a reflection on the significance of the recent debates between atheist "public intellectual" Christopher Hitchens and evangelical pastor Douglas Wilson, chronicled in the new documentary, Collision. The RD essay doesn't delve into the merits of the arguments laid out by either man (I may take that up in a later post on this blog), but focuses instead on the form of the debate--a form which, unfortunately, has become all too typical of the so-called "God Debates."