Uncommon Priors

Atheists constantly are accused of being ignorant of Christianity, or religion in general, whenever we have the chutzpah to criticize it.

I don’t think this is even possible, certainly not in the U.S.: religion, and particularly Christianity, are so utterly pervasive in our daily lives — we all celebrate the Christian religious holidays and take the day off; it’s impossible to avoid churches or the post-church crowds at one’s favorite brunch place; everyone knows the basic myths of the Christian religion and the rituals of its major branches, we can all roughly say who Job and Moses and Peter were and what baptism and catholic confirmation and transubstantiation are; we all know many Christians and have doubtless been proselytized at more than once; many of us are former Christians ourselves; most own or have read the Bible; we’ve all dealt with its impact on our politics — need I go on? (All minorities tend to know much more about the majority culture than vice versa, incidentally.)

I take it that the “you’re ignorant of Christianity” crowd does not mean to suggest, then, that atheists are more ignorant of Christianity than, well, Christians are. Rather, the claim is that we are ignorant of some theological texts and arguments — we don’t really have a grip on the latest revisionary scholarship about how one doesn’t have to believe the earth is six thousand years old to be a Christian, or we haven’t read all the way through City of God. As if your average churchgoer, or even your average cleric, knows this stuff!

This comes down, again, I think, to the question of what Christianity, or any other religion, is. Is the essence of a religion in its practice — in what its actual adherents think and do — or is it in some body of text? (Selected how? For every Aquinas there’s a Robertson or a Phelps.) Perhaps we ought to speak of Christianity-P, Christianity as practiced, and Christianity-A, Christianity as Aquinas, Augustine, etc. would have it.

But then those who say “you’re ignorant of Christianity” are guilty of a simple equivocation: we criticize, primarily, Christianity-P, and they accuse us of being ignorant of Christianity-A. We can’t help but know Christianity-P, it’s shoved in our faces all the time. And we’re addressing our objections to Christianity, not to Kierkegaard, but to ordinary believers who ought not to believe what they do believe, and what they do believe is not what Kierkegaard said.

An illustration from the above-linked Salon article, a review of a book by Eagleton repeating the same tired-old atheist ignorance trope:

Many secular intellectuals, for instance, have claimed as Christian doctrine “the idea that God is some kind of superentity outside the universe, that he created the world rather as a carpenter might create a stool; that faith in this God means above all subscribing to the proposition that he exists; that there is a real me inside me called the soul, which a wrathful God may consign to hell if I am not egregiously well-behaved; that our utter dependency on this deity is what stops us thinking and acting for ourselves; that this God cares deeply about whether we are sinful or not, because if we are then he demands to be placated.”

As Eagleton knows, some Christian believers, especially in the various strains of fundamentalism, would subscribe to most if not all of those propositions. But he’s right that from the perspective of the past several centuries’ worth of mainline Protestant and Catholic theology, none of those statements is true. In those terms, they range from crude distortions to outright idolatry. Aquinas would tell you that God is not an entity of any classifiable or verifiable kind and most certainly is not a mega-manufacturer who plotted out the universe on some celestial computer screen. Rather, “God is what sustains all things in being by his love, and … is the reason why there is something instead of nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.”

That is, Eagleton wants us to address a critique of — well, of basically deism, or some sort of Kantian theology, to people who believe in hellfire fundamentalism. Yeah, that’s gonna make a whole lot of sense.

Of course, you could just retreat to expressivism about religious statements:

The creedal declaration “I believe in God” is a statement of action and will; it is performative rather than assertive. It is not equivalent to the claim that God exists (although Christians believe that too). It possesses the kind of certainty that belongs to such wistful sentences as “I love you” or “I believe the Mets are the best team in baseball.” It clearly lacks the empirical certainty of the sentence “I believe this maple tree will turn red in October.”

… but, well, fine! If “I believe in God” means the same thing as “I like cheese,” then I have no objection to religion. You have your God, I have my cheese, and we can go home. (Or, perhaps, I can start knocking on your door with a nice hunk of chevre. “Have you accepted the milk pail marketplace as your personal cheese store?”)

Perhaps this is just me. I am a pragmatic and political atheist. I really don’t care whether people choose to hold a bunch of vague sentiments that happen to be expressed in the language of ontotheology. I care whether people actually believe in ontotheology (they do, they shouldn’t), and, much more, whether they believe things that entail bothering others (they do, they shouldn’t), like the beliefs that abortion and gay sex are immoral because contrary to divine command and should be forbidden, the belief that evolution is false and shouldn’t be taught as true, that I’m going to hell unless they knock on my damned door and blither on at me for a while about some embodied deity who committed suicide by dictator so that I wouldn’t be waterboarded by Satan for all eternity, that is, into periods long after I cease existing for some other dude having eaten a fucking apple. And those are the beliefs that Dawkins et. al. are primarily arguing against.

Judging from the review, Eagleton slips into actual contradiction at some point:

[Eagleton] says that he speaks on behalf of his Irish Catholic forebears, “against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void.”

Wrong! The creed Eagleton defends (at least on the review’s account) is not, on all probability, the creed in which his Irish Catholic forebears believed. Is one to swallow the extravagant claim that they dedicated their lives to a creed other than the one in which they believed? In fact, Eagleton’s theology seems like a sort of bass-ackwards Hegelianism in which the torturing-to-death of Jesus represents “the truth of history” in opposition (!!) to enlightenment progress narratives.

(Incidentally, I do wish people would stop lumping Dawkins and Hitchens in together. Eagleton goes so far as to coin the evidently deliberately offensive “Ditchkins.” Hitchens is an alcoholic moron rantbot. Dawkins is an actual and well-regarded scientist and a thoughtful critic of religion.)