Is It Child Abuse to Raise Children in a Religious Tradition?

There's a claim made by some recent atheist critics of religion--including Richard Dawkins--that I haven't taken up on this blog. Specifically, some argue that it amounts to something like child abuse to raise children as “Catholics” or “Southern Baptists” or “Hindus,” to encourage them to think of themselves in these terms before they have reached a level of intellectual maturity necessary for reflecting critically on the content of the belief systems correlated with these labels.

It turns out that some time ago I started a post on this topic but then never finished it. Given how little time I have this month to devote to this blog, I thought this would be a good time to finish up that essay and post it here. So, here it is--a post on what we should make of the claim that raising one's child in a religious tradition amounts to child abuse.

The claim matters to me in a very obvious way. I have children. I'm raising them in a religious tradition. Am I thereby being abusive?

Sam Harris on Torture

Although Sam Harris's PhD is in neuroscience, he never left his undergraduate philosophy degree (from Stanford in 2000) far behind him. This has been clear from the time of his first major bestseller, The End of Faith. In that book--the first of the so-called "new atheist" bestsellers--Harris devotes a chapter to ethics, previewing what he later attempts (and, in my view, fails) to do in The Moral Landscape.

In that ethics chapter from The End of Faith, Harris even does a bit of applied ethics (by which I mean the discipline of thinking about particular moral issues and dilemmas in a rigorous way in the attempt to provide reasoned guidance in decision-making). Specifically, he focuses on the moral status of two controversial questions: the ethics of torture and the ethics of pacifism (spoiler: he thinks torture can be justified while pacifism is "flagrantly immoral").

This past semester I had my introductory ethics students read what Harris has to say on torture. I wasn't surprised to find some students convinced (at least initially) by what Harris says. In a manner characteristic of the new atheist writers, Harris tackles the ethics of torture with the kind of confident authority and eloquence that so effectively obscures the serious defects in his argument. This is not to say that Harris has nothing of value to say about torture. He makes some interesting and important points in the course of developing his unsound argument. But the main argument is nevertheless unsound on several levels.

It struck me as a useful exercise in critical thinking to assess with my students a piece of writing of this sort: writing in which word choices create false equivalences and authorial confidence masks a deep ignorance of relevant literature. And it also seemed that Harris's essay--and a consideration of what he overlooks--could serve as a useful springboard for deeper reflection on the issue of torture and the broader ethical issues it brings to light.

For the very same reasons, it seems worth addressing on this blog. But doing so adequately--especially in a way that affords us a deeper look at torture and surrounding issues with an eye towards broader ethical insights--would take more than a single post. In this post, then, I want to content myself with offering an overview of Harris's core argument and, as I go along, quickly identifying his main oversights. A deeper look into these oversights and their significance will have wait for later.

So, what is Harris's main argument? Harris focuses on the issue of torturing suspected terrorists for the sake of acquiring life-saving information (such as the location of a hidden bomb that will take untold innocent lives unless found and disarmed in time). This way of framing the issue--in terms of the so-called "ticking bomb" case popularized in recent years by Alan Dershowitz--may itself be problematic. David Luban has argued precisely that in the Virgina Law Review, because it treats a highly unusual scenario as if the moral status of torture in that scenario could be considered on its own, isolated from a consideration of the ethics of our broader policy (either secret or open) with respect to torture. Luban offers some quite interesting and useful remarks about the difficulty with such isolated consideration of the extreme-and-rare case. Harris seems utterly oblivious to any such difficulties. If he's aware of them, he ignores them utterly.

Moving on: Having focused in on the ticking bomb scenario, Harris begins his argument with the assumption--which he takes to be rather self-evident--that if the prospective torture victim is known to be guilty (and, presumably, to possess the needed information), torture is clearly justified.

This starting assumption is hardly as uncontroversial as Harris takes it to be. First of all, there are those who will balk at its consequentialist character--taking there to be something intrinsically wrong about the deliberate infliction of pain when such infliction is not merely foreseen as a side-effect of something one is doing but is an intended aim of one's action (even if it is intended not for its own sake but as a means to some more ultimate objective).

Second, there is the whole question of the relative efficacy of torture as compared to other forms of interrogation. If one is sufficiently consequentialist about these matters, what the ticking bomb scenario would do is justify that means of extracting the needed information that is most likely to produce the desired result. When, if ever, is it reasonable for us to suppose that torture is that most-effective means and so act accordingly? Harris doesn't even take up the question. He does concede that the probability of successfully extracting reliable information through torture may be low, but he fails to consider that this may mean there are other interrogation techniques with a higher track record of success (or with which trained interrogators have more training and experience, and so are better equipped to use effectively).

Of course, in order to explore such comparative issues, he'd need to conceptually distinguish between torture and interrogation. Harris never even attempts to do this.

In any event, Harris assumes that torture is justified if you've got a known terrorist in your clutches who has the information you need in order to save countless lives but who refuses to divulge it. The moral problem, for Harris, arises when we suspect but don't know for sure that the person in our custody is indeed a terrorist with knowledge of the whereabouts of the hidden bomb. In that case, Harris says that the moral problem is that we risk torturing an innocent person by mistake.

In fact, Harris's next error is in arguing as if this--the risk of torturing an innocent--is the only risk. He doesn't explore the risk of torturing someone who is indeed guilty of terrorism and involved in the bombing plot, but who lacks the relevant information. Torturing someone to extract information they don't possess is, in the ticking bomb case, not just a dangerous waste of time. The problem runs deeper. What lies behind the idea that torture can be justified in these cases is the assumption that increasing someone's suffering is more likely to break down their resistance to doing what you want. If they don't talk, you move from interrogation to thumb screws. If they still don't talk, you tighten the thumb screws. Follow this pattern with someone who doesn't have the information you want, and you are inflicting ever increasing amounts of suffering to no good effect. Continued escalation can lead to false information or death, but not to anything useful.

But all of this is preliminary. Harris's real argument begins only once he has swept a host of philosophical and practical problems under the rug in order to get to this premise: The main moral problem with torturing a suspected terrorist in order to gain life saving information is that the suspect might be innocent. His aim, then, becomes to challenge the view that "uncertainty about a person's guilt will generally preclude the use of torture." He challenges this view, interestingly enough, by arguing that "such restraint in the use of torture cannot be reconciled with our willingness to wage war in the first place."

Here it is important to pause long enough to remind the reader that Harris's discussion of torture is immediately followed up by an attack on pacifism. Harris's immediate conclusion with respect to torture is this: Either we give up on war, or we accept torture. By making it clear that we should not give up on war (that it would be "flagrantly immoral" to refuse to go to war in the right cases), Harris drives home his own broader conclusion, namely, that torturing people--even those who might be innocent--can be morally justified.

That, then, is his broader argument. But in his focused discussion on torture his aim is the more narrow one of arguing that if we think war can be permissible, then we have to hold that torturing potentially innocent people can be permissible too. And why is that? Because war inevitably brings with it "collateral damage"--the deaths of innocents who are in the wrong place when the military installation is blown up, who end up in the crossfire when enemy soldiers are targeted, etc. Here's how Harris puts the point:

What, after all, is "collateral damage" but the inadvertent torture of innocent men, women, and children? Whenever we consent to drop bombs, we do so with the knowledge that some number of children will be blinded, disemboweled, paralyzed, orphaned, and killed by them. It is curious that while the torture of Osama bin Laden himself could be expected to provoke convulsions of conscience among our leaders, the unintended (though perfectly foreseeable, and therefore accepted) slaughter of children does not.

In other words, Harris's argument for torture purportedly piggy-backs on the justification for allowing collateral damage. If collateral damage is morally justified (given a certain probability of achieving a sufficiently good result), then torture will be justified (assuming a comparable probability of achieving a similarly good result).

But if Harris wants to piggy-back his case for torture on the case for collateral damage, it would make sense to look at how and when collateral damage has, historically, been taken to be justified. It would make sense, in other words, to try to show that the reasons why people have historically justified collateral damage are also reason that would, likewise, justify torture. There is, after all, an enormous body of literature on the ethics of war. There is, in fact, a "just war tradition" that has given rise to the so-called "just war theory," which has through the years served as the basis for much of our national and international policy-making and deliberations with respect to war. And, as a matter of fact, the just war theory has explicit things to say about collateral damage. There is, if you will, a conventional understanding of the conditions under which so-called collateral damage can be justified.

Sam Harris presumably never encountered this just war tradition and the body of literature surrounding it during his years as an undergraduate philosophy major. I say this because he makes no mention of it. None. He argues that torture is justified if collateral damage is, but at no point does he actually take up the classical justifications of collateral damage to see if, in fact, they transfer to torture.

As a matter of fact, they don't. Let me say that again: According to the classical just war conditions for the justifiability of allowing collateral damage, there is no parity between causing collateral damage in the pursuit of military aims and torturing a suspected terrorist to extract information. The conditions that are classically invoked to justify the former DO NOT justify the latter. So Harris' oversight here is a serious one.

It is made even more serious by the fact that Harris goes through the motions of looking for some relevant difference between torture and collateral damage that might be invoked to challenge the moral parity he attributes to them. He considers and nimbly refutes some very poor reasons for denying this moral parity. Perhaps he thinks that the standard just war position on collateral damage--which, if accepted, would undermine the purported moral parity with torture--is just as bad a basis for denying the moral parity as the bases he considers. But if so, he fails to say why. He fails to even take up the question.

In short, he says that A is like B--but fails to consider the standard account of B, which if accepted would render A unlike B. And he fails to consider this standard account, which would refute his thesis if it worked, even though he pretends to go through the motions of looking for considerations that might refute his claim that A is like B.

But if anything should be taken up in a philosophically serious attempt to show that A and B are morally equivant, it would presumably be the standard understanding of B, at least if, according that standard understanding, A and B are not equivalent at all. Failing to do this is either a serious philosophical failing in its own right (completely ignoring the clearest and most historically important basis for objecting to your thesis) or evidence of a profound ignorance of the scholarly knowledge that anyone making Harris's argument ought to have.

I should note that, even though I think the standard just war view here would, if acceptable, undermine Harris's purported equivalence between collateral damage and torture, I'm not at all committed to the standard just war position. I think it may very well be one we shouldn't accept. And if we don't accept it, the equivance between torture and collateral damage that Harris asserts would be restored--but for reasons that, I suspect, would make it much harder for Harris to make the case that war is justified even when it produces collateral damage. In other words, I think the strongest basis for challenging the just war tradition on this point is more likely to establish an equivance that tips the scales against BOTH collateral damage and torture than one that tips the scales in favor of both. But that is an issue for another time.

For now, I want to say this: In this post I've boldly asserted that Harris's claimed equivalence between collateral damage and torture would be undermined if we accepted the standard just war position on collateral damage. I have yet to explain why this is so. A full explanation will have to wait for a later post, but a brief account is warranted here. In brief, then, the just war tradition works out, in relation to collateral damage, the implications of something called the doctrine of double effect. This is a doctrine that lays out precise conditions under which it can be morally permissible to pursue an action that has both a good effect and a bad one. Among other things, the bad effect cannot be a means to the good effect (another crucial requirement is that the good effect outweigh the bad). In other words, the bad effect has to be an unintended, if foreseen, side-effect--that is, an effect the elimination of which would not prevent the good effect from being achieved.

This is what distinguishes bomb attacks with "collateral damage" from bomb attacks that directly target civilians in order to terrorize the population and thus weaken their resolve to continue the war. The latter is strictly ruled out on traditional just war grounds because the bad effect is in this case intended as a means to the good. Fire bombing of Dresden? Ruled out by traditional just war theory. Nazi bombing raids over London? Ruled out. Atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ruled out.

What characterizes a legitimate case of "collateral damage," on just war theory, is this: If the innocent civilians could be evacuated from the site of a bomb attack on a military target, it would still be possible to perform the very same bomb attack for the sake of achieving the very same end result (taking out the military target). You don't need the suffering and death of the civilians in order for the bomb attack to achieve the military objective it is intended to achieve. The same cannot be said of the suffering of a torture victim that is pursued for the sake of extracting information. You can't torture information out of someone without causing them pain. Put bluntly, if you give them enough sedatives that the torture doesn't hurt them, it's not torture and the whole method of pursuing the goal has been abandoned. In the case of torture, you are pursuing the bad effect in order to achieve the good one.

You might think this distinction makes no moral difference. In other words, you might disagree with the weight of the tradition and the majority of scholars in the just war tradition. But if so, it is not a sign of impeccable scholarship to refuse to say why--to refuse to even acknowledge that there is such a basis for rejecting your thesis.

Progressive Religion vs. Fundamentalism, Part 2: A Slippery Slope?

Two Kinds of Religion

A few weeks back I offered the first post in a promised series--a series in which my aim will be to consider objections to the legitimacy of religion in general in the light of the distinction between progressive religion and fundamentalism.

In that first post my purpose was to explain what I have in mind by the two kinds of religion--not in rigorous philosophical terms, but in an accessible way that I hope is useful. As I made clear in that post, the distinction I have in mind is between ideal types. Actual religions can be more or less progressive, more or less fundamentalistic.

In brief, the key feature of fundamentalism is certainty: This creed, these texts, this leader or institution offers us the Truth with a capital "T"--that is, a deep and ultimate truth about the nature of reality (in theism, about the nature of God), and a decisive account of how we ought to live so as to be in harmony with this deepest reality (in theism, living in tune with God's nature and will). In fundamentalism an equivalence is asserted between the teachings of a particular book or other authority and the self-disclosure of the creator. The Bible is the Word of God. Hence, no distinction is made between doubting that the Bible is God's Word and doubting God's Word. Anyone who doubts the chosen holy book or prophet or clerical authority is thus an enemy of Truth.

In brief, the key feature of progressive religion is critical appropriation and living out of inherited worldviews and ways of life: A religious tradition, with its creeds and sacred narratives, its scriptures and its sacraments, is embraced on account of its perceived promise in helping us to grow in wisdom. It's a matter of trajectory. The religious tradition is seen as offering a powerful template for engaging with the world, one that promises ever deeper insight into fundamental truths about ourselves and the world if only we are open to having that template itself evolve in the light of what lived experience--our own and others'--teaches us.

In other words, like fundamentalism, progressive religion reaches for profound truths about ourselves and reality that transcend what ordinary empirical inquiry gives to us. But while fundamentalism claims to have grasped these truths, equating them with the doctrines and practices and narratives of their religion, the religious progressive sees these doctrines and practices and narratives as instruments for progressively moving towards truths that, by their nature, may never be fully within reach.

The Slippery Slope Premise

A recurring challenge to progressive religion, especially in the last few years, is that there's something about even religion in its progressive forms that facilitates fundamentalism. If we endorse or legitimize progressive religion, we thereby endorse or legitimize a pattern of thinking or approach to life that opens the door to fundamentalist belief. You can't have one without the other.

Let's call this the slippery slope premise: There's a slippery slope from progressive religion to fundamentalism, not in the sense that every person who embraces the former is inevitably going to slide into the latter, but in the sense that if society lets the former in the door, the latter will slide in with it.
The most sweeping recent critics of religion (the "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris) have offered various reasons for thinking that this slippery slope premise is true, and have then made use of it to conclude that even if what they call "moderate" religion is in its own right harmless, it should be opposed because (in Dawkins' words) its teachings "though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism" (The God Delusion, p. 306).

There's a sense in which my first book, Is God a Delusion?, was largely about this slippery slope argument. I wanted to delineate a way of being religious (which I perhaps unwisely sometimes called "true religion") that wan't touched by the New Atheist challenges. I responded to these challenges, in essence, by saying, "Here's a species of religion that doesn't have the vices you rail against; and your glancing efforts to show that 'moderate' religion provides succor to more extreme forms don't succeed in showing that the species of religion I have in mind does anything of the kind."  

But, of course, there are different ways to support a premise. Just because Dawkins and Harris haven't shown that progressive religion is "an open invitation to extremism," it doesn't follow that it's not. There might be better arguments for the slippery slope. In fact, there are probably different sorts of slippery slopes, in the sense of different ways in which endorsing one form of religion might inevitably advance the cause of another. Dawkins and Harris focus on what we might call logical slippery slopes: They think that you cannot consistently complain about or critique fundamentalism if you respect "moderate" religion. But perhaps there are slippery slopes that are less logical and more sociological, or perhaps psychological. What would be the arguments for those sorts of slippery slopes?  

While I hope to devote more attention to these questions in future posts, I don't want to do so here. Rather, for the rest of this post I want to consider what follows if you buy into the slippery slope premise.

Letting in the Bugs

If we accept the slippery slope premise as described above, should we conclude that religion in general ought to be opposed?

The New Atheists think so, but this is one of those places where they seem to be jumping to conclusions. Consider: What if the patterns of thinking that open the door to fundamentalism--and which are purportedly present even in progressive religion--are so deeply rooted in the human condition that there is no real hope of reducing their presence in human society? Our best hope, then, might be to channel those patterns into benign forms of expression. And what if progressive religion is the most effective way to do that?

In that case, promoting progressive religion could help reduce extremism even if it also legitimized a way of thinking found among extremists.

Or what if religion, in addition to having the harmful effect of promoting patterns of thinking that generate extremism, also has an array of positive effects? What if the negative costs of extremism can be overridden by religion’s benefits whenever the fundamentalist/progressive balance is weighted sufficiently on the side of progressivism? And what if such a progressive weighting is within reach?

In that case, legitimizing progressive religion might make the world a better place despite the negative side-effect of offering space for fundamentalism. To return to an earlier metaphor, perhaps it is true that if you open the door to progressive religion, fundamentalism will slip in, too. But likewise, when I let my dogs inside at night, bugs inevitably slip in with them. The opening for my dogs is wide enough, and my dogs slow enough, that sometimes a dozen insects pour in, attracted by the light, before I can get the sliding door shut again.

It hardly follows from this that I should forego the joys of pet ownership. Perhaps if I lived somewhere swarming with mosquitos carrying deadly diseases, the costs might outweigh the benefits. But even then, whether the costs outweigh the benefits might depend on whether there are steps one can take to minimize the number of bugs that pour through.

With my own dogs I've become quite adept at such steps. I avoid letting them out and in at twilight, when the mosquitos are most prevalent. When I let them in at night, I dim the lights inside the house, turn on a floodlight outside that attracts the bugs, open the door enough to call the dogs, shut the door quickly, and don't open it again until they're right there ready to come inside. Sometimes, I'm afraid to say, I almost nip off the tips of their tails sliding the door shut again.

Likewise, there may be strategies that we can take as a society to let in progressive religion while minimizing the number of fundamentalist bugs. If there is some sort of slippery slope--and if, as I believe, there are substantial and important contributions that progressive religion can make to society--then I think an exploration of such strategies is worth having.

And meaningful conversations about such strategies is hindered by polarizing language that throws all religion into a single basket, insisting on all or nothing.

An Interesting Critique from Someone Who Has Actually Read Harris's FREE WILL

I just looked at a review of Harris's Free Will, by Russell Blackford (a writer with a couple of PhD's, one in philosophy)--a review that doesn't help me overcome my aversion to reading the book.

Blackford comes at the book from the standpoint of someone who actually agrees with Harris's criticisms of the view Harris explicitly attacks--but complains about the book anyway, for reasons that are, I must say, disturbingly familiar. Blackford's complaint is summed up in the following passage:

Harris may, indeed, have isolated one tendency in the thinking of some philosophers and some ordinary people. Perhaps he has met people who think about free will in a way that matches up with his definition, and I'm sure some readers will find that the definition rings true for them (the evidence suggests, remember, that ordinary people do not all think alike about free will - and philosophers certainly do not).


But Harris does not claim to be attacking one tendency, perhaps a dangerous one, in ordinary thinking or the philosophical literature. Nor does he limit himself to claiming (against the evidence to date) that it is the dominant tendency.

As far as he is concerned, he is writing about the true conception of free will, and anyone who disagrees is changing the subject. They are not talking about free will, he thinks, but only about "free will" - about an intellectual construction of their own making. That is almost the reverse of the truth, and if anything it is Harris who wants to change the subject by insisting on his own pet definition.

I say this critique is disturbingly familiar because, well, it has the same basic form as my criticism of Harris's attack on religion in his first book, The End of Faith. Here is what I said in Is God a Delusion?:

Religion, for him, is about scriptural literalism...Religious moderates are therefore represented as people without the integrity of their convictions, people who are simultaneously unwilling to accept where literalism leads (because of the influence of modern insight and rationality) and unwilling to accept where modernity and rationality lead (because of nostalgic attachment to the text).

We aren't led to this conclusion unless we accept the equation that Harris makes between fundamentalism and religion. Harris never considers the possibility that fundamentalism may be the perversion...He blithely equates religion with fundamentalism, and the rest is easy: fundamentalism is irrational; it has no resources for transcending itself. If religious moderation is born out of fundamentalism, it can only be because these moderates can't stomach fundamentalism but are unwilling to follow reason to its conclusion.

Had Harris offered, at the start of the book, a narrow stipulative definition of "religion," and said that he was only attacking religion in that very narrow sense, I would have praised the book for identifying a dangerous phenomenon and explicating precisely what made it so dangerous. But instead, Harris allows his attacks to sweep indiscriminately across anything that calls itself religious...

Apparently intellectual vices are hard to shake off. Or maybe when a fallacious way of reasoning works once (works in the sense of launching you to fame and fortune), there's little incentive to abandon it.

Atheist Opposition to PZ Myers

For quite awhile now, I've been following with interest the conflict that exists within the secular humanist/atheist community--a conflict over how to engage with religious believers. In this debate, there seems to be something of a continuum between "friendly atheists" on one end and "hostile atheists" on the other.

That is, there are atheists who think reasonable, decent people can honestly disagree about the existence of God; and there are atheists who think that anyone who believes in God is a willfully blind, selectively irrational, dangerously misguided threat to all that is good and true. And there are atheists who fall at various places in between.

Those on the "friendly" end generally disapprove of the kind of polarization and animosity generated by those on the hostile end. Those on the "hostile" end, by contrast, are inclined to call their atheist opponents "accomodationists."

The authors of the new atheist bestsellers--most notably Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens--seem to be clustered towards the "hostile" end of the spectrum (although sometimes they are more hostile than at other times). But the epitome of the hostile atheist is, without much doubt, PZ Myers.

And some atheists are fed up with him.

Their objections are sometimes strategic (a minority group won't make much progress in changing hearts and minds by engaging in endless bellicose attacks on the religious majority), sometimes principled (religious believers as a class just don't warrant, at least not uniformly, the kind of assault that Myers directs towards them). Some, I'm sure, are worried that reason and truth aren't served by someone who puts together so-called "take-downs" of his opponents that, as was the case with the one blog post he devoted to attacking me, are almost nothing but fallacy and pseudoreasoning.

But in a recent Secular Perspectives essay, "General Myers and His Endless War on Error," Sarah Hippolitus may offer the most comprehensive expression of these complaints. If the other essay by Hippolitus that I've discussed on this blog is any indication, she isn't at the opposite extreme from Myers on the atheist spectrum. To argue that Christian belief is damaging to phsychological health, as she does, may not be precisely hostile, but it's not exactly friendly either. I'd put her somewhere in the middle.

But this is significant. Atheists in the middle of this spectrum--who are not afraid to make rather stinging critiques of religion--are less than happy with Myers.

I'm curious what readers of this blog think of Hippolitus's arguments.

New Statesman essay on the New Atheism

A friend called my attention to an essay that recently appeared in the New Statesman--The God Wars--which may be of interest to readers of this blog. The author, Bryan Appleyard, is a self-described agnostic who finds the neo-atheism disturbing. I know that some regular followers of this blog will be quite sympathetic...others far less so. Thoughts?

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?

Shelter from the Storm

(A picture taken by Bruce Hundley of downtown Stillwater after yesterday's storm--which swept through like a brief but damaging hurricane)

It took very little time for the temperature to plummet from 106˚ F to 79˚ F. We were driving in the minivan when it hit. When I saw the force of the wind I gunned the engine to get off the tree-lined street we were on and onto a main road. The children, strapped into their car seats in the back, stared wide-eyed out the windows. The sky ahead of us was still blue, but behind us it was black, and it was roiling over us. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw lightning tear the sky in two.


“Were they predicting storms today?” my wife asked. I shrugged my ignorance, and she began urgently tapping the keys of her Blackberry to try to find a weather update.

We could be forgiven for not paying attention. For weeks now the weather had been the same: blistering heat and sun, temperatures approaching or topping 110 most days. And then, on Thursday, our air conditioning had finally groaned and shuddered to a stop. The repair crews were overworked and, because of the back log, couldn’t get to our house until Monday.

We boarded the dogs, carried the fish tank to the neighbors, and—since we had overnight guests—rented a hotel suite that could accommodate seven people. The next day, after our guests left, we moved in with my wife’s cousins.

When Monday finally arrived all we could think about was getting the AC fixed and getting settled back into our own house and our own routine. My wife’s cousins are wonderful people, and we enjoyed our unexpected long weekend with them. But it was time to be home.

The day was spent in a holding pattern, waiting for the AC people to call. An urgent conversation with our home warranty company, just before 5 PM, finally rustled up the repair crew, who declared our air conditioner operational again just before 6. We didn’t think to check the weather before deciding to run back to our relatives’ house, pick up our things, and then stop somewhere for dinner before heading home.

As we got into the van I noticed the dark skies—but they were to the north, and since I’m used to thinking of dangerous Oklahoma storms as moving towards the northeast, I imagined the storm would miss us. I felt a twinge of regret. We badly needed the rain.

We had managed to load our overnight bags into the car and start down the tree-lined lane before the wind really picked up. We’d made it out from under the trees before it became truly frightening (winds upwards of 80 miles an hour, according to this morning’s newspaper report).

We could see the dark streaks of torrential rain off to our left, but where we were it was still just spitting. The surging storm quickly consumed the last bits of blue sky. I thought at first it was hail that was beating on the car, but it was wind-blown debris. My son said something about a tornado, but my wife quickly assured him that it wasn’t the season for it.

But I could see the worry in her eyes. It may not have been a tornado, but the straight-line winds were dangerously tearing at every tree and pole that lined the street to our left.

Suddenly, most of a tree broke loose and blew across the road ahead of us. I slowed down and maneuvered around it. A minute later a lightning bolt struck a power line next to our van.

“There’s a church!” my wife gestured to our right. “Pull into the parking lot behind it.” Another bolt of lightning hit a field across the street, immediately sparking a fire in the parched grass.

It was a large church building, and there were a number of cars in the spacious lot—so we knew there were people there. I pulled up to the covered drive by the front entrance. My wife and kids jumped out and ran for the doors, but they were locked. They immediately turned and ran the length of the building, looking for an open door. As I turned the van around I saw a gust of wind bodily lift my son off the pavement. My wife clung to his arm and clutched my daughter to her breast. Then they disappeared into a doorway.

I parked the car and for a moment wondered whether it was safer to stay where I was. But my family was inside, and the large open lot didn’t threaten much in the way of blowing debris. So I ran for it. The door opened for me, and I was in.

I saw my family sitting in the hallway. My daughter was clinging to my wife, who was whispering soothing words. “Safe now, safe now.”

My son stared up the hallway towards a bank of windows, which offered a clear view of the storm. We watched as the rain finally hit, torrents beating down. “What’s that coming off the roof?” my son asked.

I looked at the sheets of white that were blasted off the roof by the wind. “That’s water,” I said.

“It’s like a waterfall!”

I became aware of others. A solidly-built older man with a cross on his t-shirt clapped my shoulder and offered words of welcome. And then a white-haired woman was leading me by the hand, saying something about all the food that was still left, asking if we’d eaten any dinner. I could feel the pressure of her warm fingers, the gentle tug.

A middle-aged man with a developmental disability came up to me and asked me how I was. When I said I was fine he smiled and wandered away. We were in a fellowship hall, with old 1950’s album covers propped at each of a dozen round tables. Older women began fussing over us. Our plates were soon heaped with casseroles and macaroni and three bean salad. “There’s homemade ice cream over there,” someone told me. “Be sure you try some of that!”

The storm continued to rage outside, but it didn’t take long for the kids to care more about the table full of desserts. And then the gathering began to move to a different part of the hall. Chairs had been set up in rows facing a low stage, where a grey bearded man was settling himself behind a keyboard. He’d used hair gel to pull his bangs into what I thought of as a “Sha Na Na” point.

Someone at an adjacent table said something to me which I couldn’t understand. I looked up. A heavy young man with slightly slurred speech asked me again whether I wanted a song sheet. I shook my head. “Maybe when I’m finished eating.”

But soon my family was sitting in the back row, singing “Ain’t That Ashame” and “Blue Suede Shoes.” The old woman who’d led me by the hand was trying to get someone to dance.

The place was called Countryside Baptist Church, and I have no doubt they embrace a theology that's far more conservative than mine. Many of their beliefs—about hell, about homosexuality—are ones I’d likely call harmful. But in this moment what they offered was hospitality, and shelter from the storm. There were no conditions placed on their welcome, no theological litmus test my family needed to pass before we could pass through their doors. They saw our need and they took us in.

And if we’d been two gay men, fresh from our honeymoon in Niagara Falls, I have no doubt they would’ve done the same thing. The doors would have opened. Had we been a Muslim family I’m convinced the welcome would have been just as immediate.

In either of those cases, at some point, someone might have felt the need to evangelize, to try to “save” a lost soul. The welcome would, then, have become infected with a thread of condescension: You aren’t like us, and your otherness makes you incomplete. To be whole you must become like us. Even if the words were never spoken, the guests might have sensed them in furtive glances.

But this impulse—this urge to draw dividing lines in the dirt (and then invite those on the far side to cross over)—wouldn’t have come immediately. For some it wouldn’t have come at all, and for others it would have felt out of place in the face of the original impulse to open the door. And for those who might have actually spoken the words—you are other; you need to change—it would have been out of duty, a duty born of doctrine.

The impulse to open the door was born out of something deeper than that—a force of solidarity and empathy that, while expressed in Christian doctrine, is experienced as far more than just a teaching.

But this is not to say that for the people at Countryside Baptist Church last night, their status as a Christian community played no role in motivating their unqualified hospitality. While I have no doubt that this force of love is at work in human beings across every ideological and religious divide; while I know that atheists open doors to those in need, and that what motivates them is the same immediate sense of care and solidarity in a world of troubles—while all of this is true, I also believe that the community of spiritually united people that Christianity calls the Church has the capacity to nurture this force of love.

If one runs to a private home, the welcome is always less certain—the impulse for hospitality at odds with fears about security and privacy. If we’d pulled up in front of the local country club, we’d have likely enjoyed a grudging welcome in the entry hall. Had we waited out the storm in a fast food restaurant, we’d have enjoyed the same canned welcome one typically receives, and the same invitation to order off the menu.

But here were people gathered, explicitly, in the House of the Lord. They were gathered for “50’s Night” rather than for a Bible study or prayer meeting, but that made no difference. By coming together within these walls they had put on an identity that went beyond their private one. They were the people of God, and with that identity comes a responsibility: to manifest God’s hospitality, to express God’s welcome and God’s love.

It’s true enough that a gay teen growing up in a conservative Christian church will experience much pain and isolation, even quiet despair, because of teachings that are imbued by the community with the obduracy of divine will. But in a raging storm, that same gay teen knows where he can run for shelter.

In contemporary debates about the harms and dangers of organized religion, New Atheists and other critics of religion have made much of the historic atrocities and the contemporary extremisms. And there can be no doubt that the structures and institutions of organized religion can be put to the service of hate. But in a considered conversation about whether organized religion does more harm than good, we cannot forget the less dramatic realities that organized religion can and does help to nurture: the day-to-day acts of goodwill, the gestures of welcome, the offers of shelter from the storm.

The question is whether organized religion’s power for nurturing hospitality and benevolence can be harnessed without the baggage of in-group/out-group ideology, without the false certainties that make productive dialogue about complex moral matters impossible, without the dogmatism that throws up walls against new insights and discoveries.

I believe it can. I believe it can because I believe that where people are gathered together in God’s name there is a force at work more fundamental than our human impulse for tribalism, greater than our individual hunger for certainty. I believe it can because, sitting here in my office today, I can still feel the pressure of that old woman’s hand, leading me and my family into the fellowship hall while, outside, the storm raged on.

Science and Religion and the Science of Religion

Readers of this blog may be interested in some recent online essays pertaining to the scientific study of religion and its significance. The Guardian's online blog, Comment is Free, has launched a new series of essays on the question, "Is there a God instinct?", and the inaugural post in the series is by atheist psychologist Jesse Bering--who articulates a variant of the atheist argument (promulgated in different ways by Dawkins and Dennett) that belief in God can be explained away by the evolutionary adaptiveness of a propensity to believe in supernatural agency.

In an essay replying to Bering in the Guardian, evolutionary biologist Denis Alexander offers a concise response from the standpoint of his own discipline, while Arni Zachariassen, at I Think I Believe, provides a thoughtful theological response in which, among other things, he makes the following points:

(Bering) says that there are "simply no good scientific reason[s]" for theism. Well, of course there aren't! Science brackets out the question of God as a matter of principle and method, and so plainly and simply doesn't address the question, this way or the other...(T)he simple fact that we have evolved certain biases towards seeing reality as being a certain way does not necessarily mean that reality is not that way. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Science will not settle that question for us. Bering's research, as interesting as it is (and it is! Very!), says something about human brains, not God's existence or the validity of religious truth claims.

Arni's response reminds me of my interest in writing a review of the bestseller by journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Fingerprints of God: What Science Is Learning About the Brain and Spiritual Experience. Hagerty's book offers a wonderful catalogue of diverse religious and spiritual experiences, as well as an engaging lay person's summary of the range of scientific research being done on human spirituality (I leave assessments of the accuracy of her summaries to those more versed in the relevant disciplines). 

But what I like best about the book is its potential to help defuse the reflexive suspicion and animosity that religious believers so often direct towards the scientific study of religion (and science in general). It has this potential precisely because Hagerty embodies in her journalistic inquiry the same perspective that Arni so nicely articulates in his recent post. Whatever might be said about the defensibility of this perspective (and I know there are regular followers of this blog who are inclined to challenge it), I think that from a purely sociological standpoint it is a pragmatically fruitful one: It inculcates an openness among religious believers to taking science seriously rather than treating it as an enemy to be rejected.

While new atheists like Dawkins and Victor Stenger (author of God: The Failed Hypothesis) have gotten considerable personal mileage out of promulgating the message that (a) science and religion are essentially opposed and (b) so much the worse for religion, the social reality (as far as I can tell) is that this message has not substantially reduced the number of religious believers. Rather, it has succeeded mostly in reinforcing their belief in (a)--to which they then add, "So much the worse for science."

While my own view is that (a) is false, I know there are those who take it to be true. What I want to say to them at this point is this: At best, surely, (a) is a contentious philosophical position. And given its controversial character, it may be worth treating it with caution when it can have such damaging pragmatic effects for the advancement of science. By treating it with caution, I don't mean refusing to express (a) even if it happens to be your view. I don't mean refusing to share your reasons for this view, or what you find lacking in the arguments of those with a different position. Rather, I mean adopting the kind of fallibilism that is appropriate when the costs of being wrong are high.

Suppose you catch a glimpse from a passing car of someone who, at a quick glance from a distance, you take to be your friend Joe leaving an apartment building in which you know Mary lives. It is one thing to say without qualification, "I saw Joe leaving Mary's apartment yesterday afternoon," when gossiping with friends. It is something else again to say this on the witness stand when Joe has been accused of murdering Mary. High stakes call for humility, an awareness of our fallibility. And the stakes are pretty high when it comes to the idea that science and religion are essentially opposed.

Beliefs can be "innocent" or not, and whether they are innocent or not can be a matter of context. The less innocent a belief is, the more significant our epistemic duties become.

Let me be clear about something here. I don't think that scientists should pander to religious audiences or downplay the implications of their research when that research directly challenges specific beliefs held by religious communities--such as the belief in a "Young Earth" or the doctrine of special creation (the idea that diverse species were created individually rather than evolving from common ancestors). But if one treats the new atheists' controversial and polarizing philosophical view on science and religion as if it were a matter of certainty, then one will pre-emptively alienate the great mass of religious believers, so that when scientific research does challenge their specific beliefs you can be sure they won't be listening.

Contemplating New Atheism's Effects

The other morning I read a brief interview with Bernard Beckett, a New Zealand school teacher and young adult novelist, who shifted from being a self-described atheist to being an agnostic after chairing an event featuring Richard Dawkins. He says he was put off by the kind of true-believer mentality of the fans that crowded in to hear Dawkins speak—and he was reminded of the kind of group-think and demand for orthodoxy that had turned him off of church. Here’s how he puts it:

...it felt more like being in church. Suddenly, there were a whole heap of people who seemed to be responding as one. To me, that reproduced some of the things I disliked about the church I was brought up in, because leaps are made from atheism to other beliefs that you are meant to have as well.

One of those beliefs which Beckett disagreed with was the view that religion is evil, a danger to the world. A bit further on in the interview, Beckett invokes (in his own way) Kant’s distinction between reality itself (the noumenal realm, in Kant’s language) and the world as it appears to us (the phenomenal world). Beckett argues that ultimate reality is unknowable—especially if our cognitive faculties are the result of evolution through random mutation and natural selection. His idea (a contemporary adaptation of Kant) is that our brains evolved for survival, not for piercing the phenomenal veil to get at the ultimate nature of reality. Hence, even if science offers us some incredibly useful models for engaging with our environment successfully, there is no good reason to suppose that these models can provide us with the ultimate truth about the nature of reality.

Given this perspective, Beckett found himself put off by the confidence of those gathered to listen to their atheist hero—the confidence that they and Dawkins were right and everyone who disagreed with them wrong. Apparently, Beckett couldn’t identify with that confidence, and so found himself gravitating towards agnosticism.

This got me wondering about the broader effects of the new atheist movement (presuming that a cluster of bestsellers coordinated with online communities and speaking engagements, along with groups of avid followers, qualifies as a movement).

Dawkins expresses his own hope about these effects in his preface to The God Delusion. “If this book works as I intend,” he says, “religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” He quickly concedes that “dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument,” so that he really can’t expect to convert them. But he goes on to express the hope that there are “people whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious, or for other reasons didn’t ‘take,’ or whose native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it. Such free spirits should need only a little encouragement to break free of the vice of religion altogether.”

In short, Dawkins—arguably the most prominent and influential new atheist leader—sees his aim as a kind of atheist evangelism (although he probably wouldn’t care for that term). But this evangelical fervor was part of what turned Bernard Beckett off, insofar as he was hoping to escape such things when he left religion behind. And I don’t doubt there are plenty of people like Beckett—people who’ve left religion or stayed away from it because so much religion is wedded to this attitude of “we’ve got the truth, those who disagree with us are idiots or victims or villains, and we must spread the truth to all who are able to hear.” Finding this attitude reproduced in the new atheist movement is therefore enough to drive people like Beckett away.

And then, of course, there are people like me. How does new atheism affect us? I wasn’t subjected to any kind of “childhood indoctrination” into religion (my parents were both agnostic preachers’ kids who responded to religion in much the way that Beckett did)—and, if I do say so myself, had I been I a victim of such indoctrination I’d likely be among those whose “native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it” (unless, of course, religious belief isn't as opposed to reasonableness as Dawkins supposes). In my case, theistic religion is something I came to out of a vague agnostic/atheistic youth—as the result of a personal journey that started in a moment of philosophical reflection in the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees library and carried me through several years of flirtation with charismatic Christianity, close to half a year in India fascinated by the diversity of faiths represented there, and then on to an academic career in philosophy.

Of course, my story isn’t typical of religious believers. But there are others like me. And how are we affected by the new atheist movement? It annoys us—sometimes enough to motivate us to write books about it. It annoys us because it entirely ignores us—that is, it argues against religion as if people like us, and religious faith like ours, doesn’t exist. (Not all atheist critics are guilty of this, by the way--but it is pretty characteristic of the new atheist movement.) And then when we defend our faith—when we say that it does exist and that the new atheist arguments don’t account for it—we get accused of “avoiding the new atheist arguments by redefining religion as something no one believes in.” Which, predictably, makes us even more annoyed.

The religious fundamentalists, by and large, are unaffected by the new atheists in much the way that Dawkins predicted—because, as he puts it in The God Delusion, they are protected by “immunological devices” such as the “dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely the work of Satan.”

I don’t doubt that there are some who have been grating under the weight of the kind of religion that the new atheists most directly attack (poised to reject it as my mother rejected her fundamentalist upbringing) for whom a new atheist bestseller or lecture served as the catalyst. But I also suspect that most of these would have rejected religion sooner or later anyway.

All of this leads me to wonder, first, who the real target audience is for the new atheist movement; and second, what is being offered to that target audience.

So who is new atheism’s target audience? It’s not non-religious free thinkers like Beckett, who are bothered by the movement’s group-think mentality. It’s not religious free thinkers like me (I've thought about devoting a post to complaining about the tendency for atheists to reserve for themselves the "free-thinker" label). We find the new atheists to be not only willfully ignoring our brand of religion but also reproducing in atheist clothes the very same in-group/out-group mentality, the very same demands for “correct thinking” and cries of heresy, that we take to be the crud weighing down the gems we find in religious life and thought.

And it'spretty obvious that the target audience is not devoted fundamentalists, who are mostly immune to atheist arguments.

It may be that those poised to shake off religious fundamentalism like a set of chains are among new atheism’s target audience—but if so they are part of a substantially broader group which includes (for example) those who have already rejected their fundamentalist past but harbor an ongoing resentment, and those who have never been fundamentalists but have clashed with them in various ways (over the teaching of evolution in school, or over the separation of church and state, or over homosexuality, etc.).

And what is it that the new atheist movement offers this loose collection of people? Despite Dawkins’ expressed hopes, new atheism is not ultimately about atheist evangelism. The disaffected fundamentalists are most probably heading towards some species of atheism in any event, and the others in the target audience are already there. What the new atheist movement offers them, I think, is precisely what Beckett saw when he chaired a gathering of Dawkins fans—namely, a church...or the atheist equivalent of one.

The new atheism is speaking to those who have rejected organized religion but who still long for its structures, its unity, the sense of belonging and purpose it has to offer. It’s such people who are most likely to be drawn to new atheism’s evangelical mission, its in-group/out-group mentality, and its established visionary leaders. But instead of gathering together every week in a shared building, they gather together online—listening to PZ Myers’ sermons (delivering their amens! and halleluias! in posted comments) or having small group book studies at RichardDawkins.net—and then occasionally attending a big tent revival when Hitchens or Harris or Dawkins comes to town.

And so I conclude that the chief effect of the new atheist movement hasn’t been to substantially increase the number of atheists in the world. Rather, it has been to help build the atheist’s version of an organized religion—somewhat less organized, but complete with its characteristic vices.

And given the evangelical fervor with which this new church on the scene attacks its rivals, I’d be surprised if one of its most telling effects hasn’t been to exacerbate the ideological polarization and entrenchment in the world. If so, we can only hope that more atheists will have a moment like the one Bernard Beckett experienced at the Richard Dawkins event he chaired: looking at the new atheists gathered all around him and thinking, “Good God, this is just like church.”

The Promise and Perils of Authorial Voice--Academic Edition

Recently I’ve been thinking about how the literary concept of authorial voice relates to my scholarly life. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about how authorial voice influences what I read, and by implication the direction of my research.

In a world where you can’t possibly read everything (especially if you’re a slow reader like me), you have to decide what you’ll read closely from cover to cover, what you’ll skim, and what you won’t read at all. The reality is that, for me, most books (even in my own field) fall into the last category. And at least in my own case, many end up there because of the author’s voice.

Here’s the idea behind authorial voice: authors have personalities, and reading their work can be as much an exposure to them (or at least to the personality they convey) as it is to the topic of their writing. An author has a “voice” in the literary sense to the extent that her personality comes out on the page—or even, I suppose, to the extent that it doesn't (generating the cold, impersonal voice characteristic of some academic writing). When I read, I’m exposed not only to ideas or thoughts or stories, but to the personalities that animate them.

Sometimes what this means is that I really enjoy reading the work of people I disagree with immensely. Sometimes it means that even though I don’t enjoy what they write, I’m captivated by it. And sometimes it means that reading a book is like spending an entire day with someone I can’t stand. Some people I can only take in small doses, and the same goes with their writing—I can manage an article, but an entire book would drive me mad.

There’s no question that the most successful “new atheist” authors—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—all have distinctive authorial voices. And those voices are part of what makes their books so successful. As much as I disagreed with The God Delusion, I enjoyed reading it. Dawkins’ wit and energy made it not merely an irritating read but a fun one. And while Sam Harris’s The End of Faith often made me irate (because of how I think it promulgates the kind of in-group/out-group ideological framework that I find so dangerous), the writing was elegant and compelling. Whatever else might be said about Harris, his written work has a certain charisma.

And I must confess to having a real soft spot for Christopher Hitchens. His book, god is not Great, is probably the least well-argued of the recent atheist bestsellers; but Hitchens himself may be the most compelling character. And that character comes out in his writing. While he’s prone towards pugilistic excess, it’s the sort of excess I’m inclined to forgive because of the passionate personality that motivates it. Although I not only disagree with what he says but also with the zero-sum approach he takes to debate, Hitchens nevertheless has a personality I’m drawn to. He seems like someone I’d enjoy hanging out with at a bar.

In short, "authorial voice" refers precisely to one of those things that, as a philosopher, I'm supposed to ignore so as to be able to focus on such things as the defensibility of the author's assertions, the soundness of the arguments, etc.

It is true that I have learned the art of extracting the argument in a piece of writing, then formally laying it out premise by premise, so as to assess its validity and identify possible objections. And once this work is done, I can look at the resultant argument as an artifact divorced from the personality of its originator. But even though I have been schooled in doing this, that doesn't mean authorial voice has no impact on my scholarly work. Most significantly, it impacts what I decide to read--and hence, which arguments I end up stripping of their authorial voice so that I can look exclusively at their logic.

When you commit yourself to reading a book, part of what you commit to is spending extended time in the author’s company. And if the author’s voice has the drone of that Chemistry professor who mumbled into the board every class period, then you’d better be darned sure the substance of what he has to say is worth the time, because you won’t enjoy his company.

And then there are the times when I confront what amounts to a personality clash. Despite myself, there are people in the world I just don’t like. Being in their presence is like being around an ex-spouse from a marriage that didn’t end well (but without the history to back up the feelings). Other people may get along famously with this person, but I’d just as soon eat raw chicken liver as spend an afternoon with them.

Often I can’t quite pin down the reason. Of course, they often stand for things I oppose, and this is part of my negative reaction. But there are others with the same opposing views or allegiances who don’t inspire such aversion. My aversion has to do with their character—or at least with prominent aspects of it that clash with my own.

But let me be clear. There are some people whose character I disapprove of in all sorts of ways, but I still find them fascinating. If they are authors, this personality is so arresting, and comes out so vividly, that I'm swept up by it even as I say to myself, "What a horrible person."

These are authorial voices that should repel me but don't. What I want to focus on here are the authorial voices that really do repel me. While these voices usually express character traits that I'd classify as vices, the vices aren't always those I find the most abominable on an intellectual level. Rather, they're the vices that grate most strongly against me--perhaps because they clash with vices of my own.

Sometimes this fact poses a scholarly challenge, because I find myself facing a strong aversion to reading things that, professionally, I probably ought to read.

I'm hesitant to give examples because talking about authorial voice--unlike talking about ideas and arguments--is necessarily personal. If I say that I don't like your ideas or I think your argument is fallacious, I'm not talking about you, whether or not you decide to take it personally. But when I discuss authorial voice, I'm talking about the personality of an author, at least as it comes across to me on the page.

But the grim reality is that no matter how much we might pretend otherwise, personality matters, even in academia. We are persons, affected by our perception of the personality of others--sometimes drawn together, sometimes repelled. And so, despite my hesitance, I'm going to give some concrete examples--not of people especially likely to read this blog, but of people that at least some readers of this blog are likely to have encountered and had their own reactions to (likely different from my own).

Let's begin with the conservative Christian apologist and philosopher, William Lane Craig. Whatever else might be said of him, Craig is a very smart man well schooled in philosophy who often (if not always) offers arguments worth wrestling with. And sometimes I do engage with them. For example, I challenge one of his arguments (effectively, I think) in my 2002 Religious Studies article, “Eternal Damnation and Blessed Ignorance.”

But I hate to read Craig’s work. Why? I might point out that his philosophical arguments are rigidly constrained by strict allegiance to conservative Christian dogma, and that this allegiance sometimes forces him to seriously entertain some deeply disturbing views (about, for example, the eternal fate of those who died without ever having encountered the gospel message). But there are other Christian philosophers about whom I’d be inclined to say the same, and to disapprove of for the same reason—and yet reading them doesn’t leave me feeling as if I’ve spent time with a particularly unpleasant relative.

The problem, in this case, lies with the personality on the page. There are many things that reveal that personality even in academic philosophical writing--obvious things like choice of topic, positions held, views expressed; less obvious things like word choice, strategy of argument, which objections and alternative views are taken seriously and which ignored, which metaphors or analogies are used, which ideas connected, which distinctions made.

But the truth is that when it comes to authorial voice, one doesn't deduce it from an assessment of these factors. Rather, one takes it in on an intuitive level. It's an holistic effect of the writing--sometimes one that emerges gradually, after reading quite a bit from the same author; sometimes one that hits after only a couple of paragraphs. One finds the author's voice agreeable, engaging...or not.

In the case of Craig, if I read enough for the voice to emerge (usually several pages), what strikes me is best captured by a series of personality snapshots. The first comes from my childhood. Back when I was growing up in Buffalo, NY, Michael Tilson Thomas (now music director for the San Francisco Symphony) was the conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic. Once, as I recall, I was at some fairly snooty gala event when Tilson Thomas swept in.

The impression he gave in that moment is surely not representative of his overall personality. It's just a snapshot of one small piece of it. But it's a piece that stuck with me. It wasn’t precisely arrogance. It wasn’t exactly showmanship. It had something to do with a sense of being entitled to the eyes that turned his way as he entered, as if he really believed himself to be somehow more real than everyone else in the room.

Such a personality trait, when it finds its way onto the page, isn't enough to repel me. But let's combine it with another, captured in a second snapshot--this one from an ancient philosophy class in college. The class didn't have any prerequisites, and hence was filled with students from other majors who were satisfying an upper level general education requirement. There was a philosophy major there who clearly longed to be up in front doing the teaching, and made every possible effort to achieve that dream from his seat at the back.


Three or four times every class period his hand would shoot up, all eyes would roll, and he’d begin (in a nasally voice), “This reminds me of…”—followed by a lengthy discourse on some 20th Century philosophical work nobody else had heard of. We stopped paying attention to his actual words fairly early in the semester. What we heard instead went something like this: “Look at how smart I am, and how much more I know about this stuff than any of you. I’m going to shove all your faces in my genius just the way people like you used to shove my face in the toilet back in middle school. Take that, you fools! And that! And that!”

If I weren’t so annoyed at him for hijacking the class, I’d have felt sorry for the guy. Without other characteristics woven in with it, a voice like that wouldn't repel me, although I'd tire of it pretty quickly.

But let's add a third snapshot. It comes from an event I’ve already talked about on this blog, when I was giving a talk about my book for OSU’s Fellowship of Christian Faculty and Staff. I had an exchange with a conservative member of the group, a conversation which came to a crashing halt when I expressed disagreement with him and he replied, “Then you disagree with God.” There was an expression on his face at that moment, a tightening of his lips, that sent all the blood to my face.

Weave these three things together, and you have the authorial voice of William Lane Craig, at least as it presents itself to me. It may be that the impression he gives when you meet him in person is nothing like this—but the impression that comes to me off the page is just like that.

Any of the elements by themselves wouldn’t generate the level of aversion I experience, although the "If you disagree with me you disgaree with God" trait comes close. (These words, by the way, are something Craig has the good sense never to actually voice out loud, but I nevertheless hear them in the background). But when woven together, these traits so grate on my nerves that I want to reject everything the author says—even when, as does occasionally happen in Craig's case, I agree with him.

And I suspect that my research program is influenced by this. Among other things, I simply haven’t done any scholarly work on the Kalam Cosmological Argument. None. Because there’s no possible way to do so without seriously engaging with Craig's work.

Consider another case. This one relates to a book that it seems to me I ought to read but haven’t. The book (which I think came out at around the time I was finishing my manuscript of Is God a Delusion?) is John Loftus’s Why I Became an Atheist . Loftus is a former evangelical Christian apologist and preacher who “de-converted” to atheism, and who now energetically pursues what he calls “counter-apologetics,” not only through his books and speaking engagements but through his blog, Debunking Christianity , which I make an effort to check out every once in awhile. In these respects he's very similar to the young atheist who maintains the Common Sense Atheism blog, Luke Muehlhauser. But whereas I really enjoy Luke's authorial voice and can spend considerable time reading his stuff, the same cannot be said for Loftus.

Why I Became an Atheist tells the story of Loftus’s intellectual journey from Christian apologist to proselytizing atheist, and in the process makes a case against theistic religion in general and Christianity in particular—a case that, from what I can tell, is likely to be more philosophically astute and informed about evangelical Christianity (if not progressive theology) than the bestsellers I responded to in my book.

But I haven’t read it. I suppose there are several reasons for this. One has to do with the book’s content. A driving idea behind it is what Loftus has come to call the “Outsider Test of Faith”—essentially the view that Christians should test their faith according to the same standards they use to reject rival faiths. His argument is that Christians have reasons for rejecting Hinduism and Islam and Judaism, etc.—and consistency requires that they use the same criteria to assess their own faith that they invoke in assessing others.

This principle seems sound enough within its sphere of application, but it is clearly framed in response to an exclusivist brand of religious epistemology radically at odds with the pragmatic and neo-Hegelian approach that I find compelling—an approach which leads me to articulate an inclusivist respect for alternative religious traditions conditioned by what I call (in my book) “the logic of faith”—a logic which imposes standards on when it is morally and intellectually appropriate to live as if a hoped-for possibility is true. These standards are ones I apply to my own religious life as well as to the religious lives of others. It is according to these standards that I extend conditional respect to a diversity of religious traditions—the condition being that they fall within the parameters of the logic of faith. And it is according to these standards that I trenchantly oppose more fundamentalistic expressions of Christianity.

In other words, Loftus is not talking to people like me—whom he tends to dismiss rather precipitously on his blog as engaged in little more than intellectual gerrymandering to avoid atheist arguments. As far as I can tell, he never takes seriously the possibility that our perspective was arrived at through critical reflection in the light of a range of experiences, ideas, and arguments, including those pointed out by atheists like Loftus.

And this is one reason why I haven’t read his book. But it’s not the most important reason. The most important reason has to do with authorial voice. I’ve read enough of his blog to get a sense of it. And while I sometimes don't mind it (especially when he gets caught up in the substance and details of an argument), there are too many occasions when what I'll call a belligerent self-certainty saturates his words. And it grates on me.

This aversion to his authorial voice has led me to a not-so-trivial scholarly decision: Instead of reading Why I Became and Atheist, I will look at the anthology Loftus has recently edited, The Christian Delusion, which appears to be framed around some of the same core ideas and arguments that shaped his own de-conversion. While Loftus is the author of several entries in that anthology, his voice is interspersed with those of other atheist scholars (including the anthropologist David Eller, who wrote an uncharitable review of my book which I still haven’t carved out the time and energy to responded to, even though the several key misconstruals of my thinking deserve to be corrected—if someone wants to do it for me, please feel free).

In any event, despite being a bit put off (and astonished) by the nature and scope of Loftus’s book-promotion efforts (he even has a post in which he invites readers of his blog to become mini-sales reps for the book, going so far as to encourage them to “buy up copies to hand out” to Christian family and friends), I’ll probably get my hands on a copy of The Christian Delusion. Because I can manage Loftus’s authorial voice in small doses. What I can’t handle is spending 400+ pages in his company.

Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Loftus, before he de-converted, was not only an apologist in the same mold as William Lane Craig, but was his student. Maybe the character triats they inculcate in evangelical apologist circles are harder to shake off than the doctrines, and it is these traits I'm reacting to in both Craig and Loftus.

Be that as it may, there's no doubt that authorial voice matters. But despite its significance, it's not the sort of thing writers should attempt to manipulate or control. If one's readers don't like the personality on the page, the solution is not to fake a different personality. No author will get far with an inauthentic voice. And nobody has a personality that everyone finds congenial.

But if our authorial voice puts off a lot of people, it may be worth asking why. That is, it may be worth asking if we have vices that are manifesting on the page, character flaws that we can and should do something about. But we don't do something about them by changing how we write. We do something about them by changing who we are--by cultivating our character. The change in our writing--at least if one of the things we cultivate is authenticity--will follow.

The Most Saintly Thing the Pope Could Do...

In today's Religion Dispatches, Frances Kissling and I offer opposing views on the merits of the recent New Atheist call to arrest the Pope.

In my article, I argue that an arrest-the-Pope campaign, if it is launched by the avowed ideological enemies of all things theistic and religious (including, of course, the Catholic Church), will only inspire the Church to become more entrenched in its defensive "we-are-under-assault-by-the-forces-of-Godless-secularism" stance. And entrenchment in that stance can only hurt efforts to pressure the Church to take the steps that, morally, it must take. Frances Kissling, in her opposing piece, argues that the Church has proven itself incapable of the moral responsibility necessary to root out abuse, and will do what needs to be done only in the face of the kind of strong legal actions that Dawkins and Hitchens advocate.

I see and understand this opposing viewpoint. In fact, as I confess in my essay, I have had some arrest-the-Pope fantasies of my own. But I'm still convinced that a legal move like this will do nothing but harm unless (a) it is based on truly compelling evidence that the current Pope was in fact guilty of criminal obstruction of justice, and (b) the impetus behind the move originates somewhere other than among the most publicly recognized leaders of a movement defined by overt hostility to all things theistic and religious.

That said, however, I think there is something to be said for the Pope suffering the penalty for the unquestionable crimes--the widespread and horrific abuse of children and the equally widespread instinct to cover up and minimize the abuse--perpetrated by officials of the Church he leads. More precisely, I think there is something to be said for the Pope volunteering to take on this penalty.

The Roman Catholic Church embraces the doctrine of Vicarious Atonement--that is, the doctrine that Jesus, who was himself innocent, bore on behalf of a sinful humanity the punishment due us for our sins. As the supreme pontiff of the institution that takes itself to be the true inheritor and preserver of the divine revelation that took place in Jesus of Nazareth, the Pope of all people should follow in the footsteps of Christ. And those who would be followers of Christ are sometimes called to take up a cross of their own.

I think there is good reason to think that, as a Cardinal, Ratzinger was actually one of those in the Church who advocated for a stronger response to child abuse cases than the Church actually pursued. While I certainly won't claim that he was wholly innocent, I am confident that he did not molest anyone. But what would it say if the Pope presented himself to secular authorities, asking to be held legally accountable for the crimes of all those pedophile priests? What would it say if, motivated by his own moral horror at what has been done, Pope Benedict XVI took it upon himself to do penance, vicariously, for every priest in his fold who raped a child, for every bishop who quietly reassigned a pedophile and thus left him free to molest again?

In the face of what has been done, it might just be the most saintly thing the Pope could do.

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.