In a widely quoted
essay a well-known Catholic writer recently stated
“secularism cannot defeat jihad.” Silly me. I hadn’t known
secularism was attempting to defeat jihad. I thought that was the
job of the U.S. Armed Forces and the CIA.
The author, Elizabeth Scalia (apparently no relation to the
Supreme Court justice), suggests the West is fast becoming a
“post-faith society — disdainful of religion and confident in
the primacy of reason alone,” thus “rendering itself ineffective
and mute” to battle religious extremism.
This seems a popular, if erroneous, notion — that the West is
overrun with bug-eyed atheists, freethinking fanatics, and
villainous infidels. Where so many pundits and journalists get
the idea that Westerners are largely disciples of Darwin and
Dawkins is an utter mystery. Certainly they don’t get it from the
research. The fact is the United States — the largest, richest
and most culturally significant Western nation — is one of the
most religious societies in history. Only about 10 percent
of Americans claim to be neither spiritual nor religious. Another
survey finds a mere 6 percent
confess to be atheists or agnostics. Sure, that’s America for
you. What about Europe? Again, few persons in so-called “secular”
Europe are genuinely irreligious. The latest European Union
poll (pdf) finds a mere 18 percent of Europeans say “they do
not believe there is a spirit, God, nor life force.” Probably the
same percentage as in Muslim countries, though one would be
butchered for saying so.
Sweden is often cited as typical of Europe’s secularism, though
even among the suicidal Swedes a mere 23 percent report that
“they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life
force.” The skepticism of the backsliding Lutheran Scandinavians
is more than offset by Catholic Poland, Ireland, Spain and Italy
where the percentage of nonbelievers is minuscule.
France has one of the highest percentages of
nonbelievers (19 percent atheist, 16 percent agnostic), but this
is hardly a recent trend. The French have had a problem with
organized religion going back to the Albigensian Crusade
(1209–29) when the Catholic Church dispatched crusaders into
southern France to massacre upwards of a million Cathars for
their unorthodox beliefs. Hardly a way to win converts. It was in
France — not Spain — that the Inquisition was born. What’s
more, it was after the French Revolution — in part a
reaction against church and state entanglement — that
Robespierre, a deist, sought to establish a new state religion,
the Cult of
the Supreme Being. These revolutionaries were not irreligious
radicals. They simply (and violently) opposed the regime-coddling
Catholic Church.
Like most complex concepts, religion is more complicated than we
like to think. Take, for instance, the term “atheist.” An atheist
is one who does not believe in gods. He is the opposite of a
deist, or one who believes in gods. But many non-Western
religions do not have gods — at least not in the way Westerners
think of them. In this sense, arguably the world’s most spiritual
man, the Dalai Lama, is an atheist, and readily admits as much.
Doubtless some will argue that simply being spiritual, or a
“spiritual atheist,” like his holiness the Dalai Lama, is not the
same as being religious in the traditional Western sense. And
indeed, most popular surveys equate spirituality with
irreligiosity, and are interested only in whether the subject
“believes in God.” Obviously, this makes the West seem much more
irreligious than it in fact is. Even in the U.S., one fifth of
Americans describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious”
or belonging to a non-theistic religion.
To complicate matters further, some Christians have long
maintained secular humanism is a religion, though a heretical
one. Usually, fundamentalist Christians make this claim when they
hope to exclude the teaching of evolution from schools. The U.S.
Supreme Court in 1961 agreed, noting, “religions” need not be
based on a belief in the existence of God. Again in Welsh v.
United States the Court similarly found that: “If an
individual deeply and sincerely holds beliefs that are purely
ethical or moral in source and content…those beliefs certainly
occupy in the life of that individual ‘a place parallel to that
filled by…God’ in traditionally religious persons.” For the
courts, at least, non-theistic religions occupy a place parallel
to that filled by God. Taken to this extreme — if extreme it is
— every one, save perhaps Christopher Hitchens, is religious.
Of course many purists will say that’s hogwash. Any true religion
requires a belief in a creator god. Being spiritual doesn’t
count; one must be religious. And of a particular
religion. Such traditionalists remind one of Fielding’s the Rev.
Mr. Thwackum who said, “When I mention religion, I mean the
Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the
Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but
the Church of England.” And indeed some secular humanists
wholeheartedly agree with the religious fundamentalists. As
Austin Cline, a regional director for the Council for Secular
Humanism, points out, “the very label ‘secular’ means,
essentially, non-religious. A non-religious religion isn’t
logically possible.” In that sense, secular humanism is no more a
religion than is feminism, communism or vegetarianism.
AT ITS BASE, Ms. Scalia’s real objection is not with the West’s
fictitious lack of faith, but with the Enlightenment and arguably
its greatest accomplishment: separation of church and state.
“These groups [secular Jews, elites, governments and the media]
are stymied by their own enlightenment,” she offers as her
contribution to the increasing perception that conservatives are
anti-intellectual.
Incredibly, Ms. Scalia says the West should, in this instance at
least, follow the lead of the jihadists — not by discrediting
the language of jihad, but by adopting it: “By failing to speak
in the same language, [the West] has no weapons for victory,
short of destroying whole cities.” Do we really want our leaders
speaking the “same language” as the jihadists? And if our leaders
should adopt jihad-speak, does anyone besides Ms. Scalia believe
that will end terrorism? Or will we have to go further, and adopt
the actions of jihad too?
Why we should have to defend continually the fruits of the
Enlightenment to Americans — whose Declaration of Independence,
and whose ideas of separation of powers and separation of church
and state, were the direct result of its ideas — is beyond my
poor powers of understanding. Apparently Ms. Scalia would have us
travel back to the good old 17th century, when Christian sects
battled unto the death. For myself, I like to think we can be a
spiritual or religious people without abandoning the
Enlightenment, and certainly without parroting the language of
jihad.
