Speaking of prominent British non-Christians defending Christianity (and the role of religion in society more broadly), the UK’s chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, recently published a long-form essay in Standpoint Magazine on “the limits of secularism.” It’s a scholarly piece, weaving and engaging various theories, historical turning-points, and intellectuals living and dead.
Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? We will always ask those three questions because homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal, and religion has always been our greatest heritage of meaning. You can take science, technology, the liberal democratic state and the market economy as four institutions that characterise modernity, but none of these four will give you an answer to those questions that humans ask.
“Amen” to that astute and basic separation of theology and philosophy from other disciplines, a distinction which robs the simpler materialists of their usual rhetorical indictments of religion for its “datedness.” Yet it doesn’t seem, at least to this reader, to get the story precisely, or fully, right. Part of the problem stems from Sacks’ misfire at defending science, which leads him to repeat a semi-well known maxim of Albert Einstein: “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” But that phrase, once you get past the indubitable impressiveness of the author’s credentials, offers both a too-easy dichotomy and a too-simple resolution to the matrix of faith and science. It actually posits the necessity of each discipline for the internal functioning of the other, which is simply not the case.
Sacks also writes that:
every function that was once performed by religion can now be done by something else. In other words, if you want to explain the world, you don’t need Genesis; you have science. If you want to control the world, you don’t need prayer; you have technology. If you want to prosper, you don’t necessarily seek God’s blessing; you have the global economy. You want to control power, you no longer need prophets; you have liberal democracy and elections
Again, this is not so, and it consigns swaths of religion to historical necessity. Serious believers have not ceased using prayer as a vehicle through which to change the world, nor replaced God with the market economy. At best, what Sacks describes is a waning of superstition, not authentic faith, and it is not necessary to juxtapose the two choices so starkly. Nevertheless, Sacks’ essay, which can be seen in its entirety here, remains a valuable (if flawed) contribution to what seems to be a growing consensus on the limits and failures of secularism as a basis for political theory.
February 24th, 2012 | 11:15 am
I would certainly agree with Lord Sacks that despite all predictions religion is still here. And it is to stay here for long. Ant that militant secularism is both a flawed theory and practice.
There is a certain triumphalist rhetoric at work in his article – as if he’s saying: look, we’are back in town again! But this is understandable, given the equally triumphalist rhetoric of his opponents such as Richard Dawkins.
There is an entire turn right now in the sociology of religion (that discipline that still has to ask forgiveness for its too premature embracing of the pathos of the “secularization of the world”). There is consensus that religion must be taken as the independent variable, i.e. to evaluate to what extent it influences social phenomena such as economy, globalization, family, and not, as it was before, how these factors influence religion. There is much to think about the reciprocity between these “variables” but there is a desire to build a bridge…
February 24th, 2012 | 6:22 pm
That remark is preposterous. It is not like science has reached a consensus regarding the origin of the Universe. Technology, while it has enabled us to blow up the world, certainly has not given us control over it, or an ethical basis for not blowing it up. And if it ever did give technicians control over the world, do we want that? The global economy has lowered the standard of living of workforces that can’t compete with slave labor or near slave labor around the globe. Liberal democracy and elections no longer control power, that has been subverted by the dumbing down of electorates that are increasingly easy to bamboozle with the self serving propaganda spewed forth by those in control of the media outlets. They don’t have to fool everybody. And they don’t. All they have to fool is a majority – which they often do. What planet is this guy talking about?
February 25th, 2012 | 2:09 pm
Sacks is, as a general matter, one of the more thoughtful popular preachers that have taken to the internet and television in recent years. However, he’s come under fire for surrendering too much to secularism in an attempt to coopt its appeal. One need only look at his views on “Plato’s ghost” to see how much of a fabian Sacks is when it comes to combating post-modernity.
February 26th, 2012 | 6:58 am
Matthew.
You are quite correct: it is a robust article, and a persuasively-written one, by Jonathan Sax. Standpoint Magazine is, in UK terms, a solid and thought-provoking journal (one I’ve subscribed to for a while).
If it has some limitations in the area that you’ve highlighted, then that is almost inevitable – but I, for one, am grateful for it, given that most of our spiritual leaders in the UK appear so insipid, and so prone to political-correctness, that few of them can articulate much of a rationale to combat the superficially-plausible contentions of the new atheists.
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