The New Religious Wars

I am a secular person. Not irreligious, or atheist, but secular. This is a distinction that many on the Christian right find confusing. Which is what is so scary about them. They believe that because they believe a truth, it is the only truth. They have the epistemological arrogance to assert that their perceptions of reality are necessarily correct. In this regard they are rejecting the compromises reached at the end of the religious civil wars. In the seventeenth century, people realized that matters of faith were irreconcilable, and therefore for the sake of civil peace should be removed from the domain of politics. It was the beginning of civil liberties, and the foundation of the enlightenment. It is this compromise that the religious right is determined to overthrow.

Why am I bringing this stuff up now? Well, there is a lot of it floating around the net. There is the Spongebob controversy, which David Neiwert reveals is really about attacking the notion of tolerance itself. There is the fight over creationism in schools, recently discussed by Susan Jacoby in the New York Times. There is the gay marriage issue and abortion, of course. And there is William Raspberry's cogent piece about the unwillingness of believers to accept the necessity of compromise.

There are two principal threats generated by the fundamentalist worldview. The first and most familiar is its other-regarding character. The Christian right is easily offended: they are not satisfied with their own method of life unless everyone else is living it too. The existence of alternative modes causes them psychic discomfort. So they are forced to impose their beliefs on everyone else, hence their illiberalism. And because the "traditional family" requires women to accept a subordinate position, fundamentalists have to make sure they have a steady supply of submissive women. This need requires them to intervene in the affairs of others.

The second danger is less well-known but equally disturbing: the death of reason. Fundamentalists are opposed to the very idea of critical reasoning (this is one reason why you don't see so many of them in the academy). This is due in part to the nature of fundamentalist religious belief, which frequently takes the form of submission to a diety. Appeals to religious belief are necessarily fallacies in the form of Appeal to Authority. The suspension of reason a believer takes on makes him uneasy about rational argument, because this sort of belief is by nature very fragile.

But the difficulty goes deeper. Because fundamentalists have a strong desire to pass their truth on to their offspring, they are forced to war against every external influence on their childrens' development (another reason for their intolerance). To guarantee the transmission of their beliefs, they are forced to raise their children without the ability to think independently. If the kids did think for themselves, they might reject The Way. So sadly enough many on the Christian right have drifted into the realm of anti-intellectualism. They really do want to make their kids stupid, because to do so makes them obedient to religious indoctrination.

This conspiracy of infantilization has real consequences for democracy. Free governments require citizens who are capable of thinking intelligently about the world, who are willing to compromise with others, and are not overly submissive to authority. To raise a society full of people who react rather than think, who obey rather than resist, and who persecute rather than discuss is to make a nation fit only for masters.

And that is why I am a secular.