Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm March 25, 2016

Anthony Pagden is worried about the rise of religion in the past several decades (The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters). He fears “the outcome might indeed be something close to the nightmare dreamed up by the contemporary American philosopher and psychologist Daniel Dennett: ‘The Enlightenment is long gone: the creeping secularization of modern societies that has been anticipated for two centuries is evaporating before our eyes . . . religion soon resumes something like the dominant social and moral role it had before the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century . . . populations come to be even more divided among Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism. . . . Eventually one major faith sweeps the planet.”

He offers reassurances. Perhaps the world does have some who “look eagerly forward to a future in some revivified version of the Middle Ages, with the added benefits of antibiotics and running water.” Some of these are in rather high places: “Benedict XVI may look back nostalgically upon a world in which theology was still the ‘mother of sciences,’ the dominant ‘magisterium,’ and still had the last say; in which the Church was still the most powerful international institution in the (western) world and secularism a slightly freakish anomaly. Charles Taylor may sincerely believe that we are now entering a post-secular age.” Those efforts are likely to fail: “the attempt to reinvigorate religion though rational argument as the solution to the perceived crisis of modernity (or postmodernity) is no more likely to be persuasive in the twenty-first century than it was in the late nineteenth. It is unlikely that Christianity, on the retreat since the seventeenth century and long accustomed to dissimulation and compromise, will be able to make much significant impact on the modern world.”

Still, he is concerned that “the ‘religion’ that is on the increase today is not anything over which Benedict XVI could hope to exercise much control. It is chaotic, chiliastic, intuitive, pathological, and for the most part utterly devoid of any theological content. It has also turned its back upon its founders. The Christians who crowd the ‘megachurches’ of the United States know who Christ was, or was believed to have been; they may even have some sketchy notion of some of his teaching; but they have probably never even heard of St. Paul—the true founder of the Christian Church—and have certainly never encountered any of the Church Fathers. Their faith is, indeed, a reflection of those ‘pathologies of religion’ that Benedict rightly fears. It is what Hume would have called ‘enthusiasm.’”

That remarkable paragraph raises a series of questions. Has Padgen ever set foot in one of these churches? Does he know a single Christian of the sort he describes? Megachurches that “have probably never even heart of St. Paul” – really? Where would they be found? And then there’s the hubris implicit in the scare quotes around “religion,” as if secular Prof Pagden has assumed the right to tell us what counts as true religion and what doesn’t.

Animosity toward religion is not uncommon. Pagden manages so common animosity with uncommon level of ignorance.


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