Scope:
What are we saying — and what are we doing — when we profess belief in God? When we pray? When we join with others in rituals of worship? These questions have been asked and answered for centuries, almost exclusively by thinkers who themselves believed in one god or another and practiced one religion or another. However, with the advent of modernity — roughly since the Scientific Revolution of the 17'" century — new views of knowledge and reality and new methods of inquiry allowed Western thinkers to question the existence of God and criticize religion to a degree unheard of in the premodern West. As a result, one of the major dynamics of modern religious thought in the West is the tension and conflict between faith and suspicion.
Outline
I. What are people doing when they profess belief in God? Is religious faith a response to life that flees &om reality or courageously embraces it? In these lectures, we will examine how leading Western philosophers, theologians, and cultural critics, over the past 400 years, have debated these questions, particularly in light of the criticisms of religion that emerged during this period.
A. This period is generally referred to by historians as "modernity." The question of religion and the question of what constitutes the modern are closely bound together.
B. With the advent of modernity, new views of knowledge and reality and new methods of inquiry allowed Western thinkers to question the existence of God and to criticize religion to a degree unheard of in the premodern West.
C. Since the 19'" century, religious practice has declined markedly in many parts of the developed world, with the United States being a notable exception.
D. Most leading intellectuals in the mid-20' century thought that modernity meant the gradual decline and, perhaps, even the death of religion.
E. Today, the picture looks very different, and many secular intellectuals are worried more about the danger of militant religion in the world than they are confident about religion's decline.
II. What do we mean by "debating religion from the Enlightenment to the postmodern era"?
A. These lectures focus on religious thought in Western culture.
B. "Modern" does not mean contemporary but refers to a cultural epoch that, for our purposes, can be defined as beginning in the 17 century with the Scientific Revolution and the emergence of explicitly non-theological conceptions of religion.
C. Also for our purposes, the term "religious thought" encompasses both thought from within religious traditions, which we will refer to as "theology," and thought about religion, which we will refer to as "philosophy," "cultural criticism," or "religious studies," depending on the context.
III. What do we mean by "faith and suspicion"?
A. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has called Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud the "masters of suspicion."
B. One of the crucial elements of this response is that some major 20'"-century theologians begin to incorporate this suspicion into their own religious visions.
C. But after such events as the Holocaust and with the recent rise of militant religions and the escalation of religious violence around the world, religious thinkers are increasingly confronted with questions not only of religion and reason but also of the possibility of religious pluralism and the relation of religion and politics.
Suggested Reading:
Harris, The End of Faith. Lilla, The Stillborn God. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. Ricoeur, "The Critique of Religion."
Questions to Consider:
1. What are the most important characteristics of modernity as a cultural and intellectual epoch?
2. What is the difference between philosophical and theological perspectives on religion?
Lecture One — Transcript
Religion and Modernity
Welcome, my name is Tyler Roberts, and I am a Religious Studies at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. I'm happy that you've decided to join me for this series of lectures exploring how leading Western philosophers and theologians have, over the past 400 years, defined and debated, defended and attacked, religion. We will hear from pious, deeply spiritual figures who felt and communicated the passion of faith — and from biting, sarcastic atheists who thought that religion was infantile and dangerous.
We will hear from philosophers who carefully and rationally explained why religion is essential for human life — and from philosophers who just as carefully and rationally explained why religion is irrational and illusory. We will talk about why it continues to be important today to think about these figures and their ideas. We will talk, too, about what it means to be modern.
When I say that we will be looking at debates about religion over the past 400 years, I am following those historians who use the term "modern" not to refer simply to what is contemporary or up to date, but to refer to a period in Western society and culture that starts in the 17 century with the Scientific Revolution.
The Scientific Revolution was the beginning of a wave of intellectual, cultural, political, and technological change that radically transformed Western civilization. In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, Western thinkers came to understand themselves as standing at the beginning of a new era of history. They saw themselves as making a radical break from the past and forging a new vision of what it means to be human.
But, as in any new era of major social and cultural change, this vision emerged in the context of debate: Which aspects of the past are still important? What does the future hold? What does it mean to be human? Or, in this case, what does it mean to be modern? At the center of these debates was the question of religion. Is religion a part of the past to be rejected, or can one be modern and religious?
I am going to give this question a twist by claiming that not only were debates about religion at the center of the effort to define "modernity," but that the very concept of religion itself, as we use it today, was a product of this questioning — an idea that emerges as Western thinkers struggle to understand what it means to be modern.
If you asked someone in premodern Europe whether they were "religious," they would have thought that you were asking them whether they were a monk or a nun. To be religious, or to be more precise, to be a religious, in premodern Europe meant that you were part of a Catholic order; a religious was a monk or a nun.
Today, of course, we use the word differently. We talk about religion as a set of beliefs, and practices, and institutions that constitute a sphere of human life that we distinguish from other spheres of life such as politics, or art, or science. So, what I am suggesting is that this way of talking about religion — that is common sense for us today — only really emerged as Western intellectuals in the 18'" and 19'" centuries struggled with the question of modernity — and as a result, starting looking at the world in a new way, started dividing things up, categorizing the world in new ways.
Part of this process was to make the conceptual distinction between what we call religion and other aspects of life — and, again, to ask whether this thing we are calling religion was something that was essentially premodern, or whether it was possible to be modern and religious. In many respects, this question is still with us today.
Let's fast-forward just a bit to the middle of the 20'" century — let' s say the late 1950s. If you had spoken to most leading intellectuals during this period and had asked them about the importance of
religion for thinking about modernity, they would have told you that this question had been settled in the 19'" century, and that modernity meant the gradual decline and perhaps even the gradual elimination of religion.
That is, they would have offered you a version of what has been called the "secularization thesis," the thesis that in the modern world religion comes to play a less and less important role in the public and especially the political sphere, and becomes confined to the private sphere of the family and the individual — and perhaps even withers away completely. However, if you put this kind of question to intellectuals today, 50 years later, many of them will give you a very different answer.
As you know, religion is all over the news today. We hear about it in relation to the very visible conflicts in the Middle East and Iraq-and, at least to us in the West, the somewhat less-visible conflicts in India. We hear about it in connection with the problem of terrorism and the so-called "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West.
We know that religion is at the center of the so-called "cultural wars" in the United States — whether we are talking about stem cells, evolution, or the meaning of the separation of church and state. We saw two things happen in the 1970s that started many people thinking that perhaps historians, sociologists, and others had been too hasty in accepting the secularization thesis. In 1976, Jimmy Carter a self-declared born-again, evangelical Christian — was elected President of the U.S.
There is an excellent PBS documentary called With God on Our Side, which examines the history of evangelical Christianity in the United States since the '40s. There is a striking scene in the documentary, taken from a major network newscast around the time of Carter's election, where the anchor person — with a look of genuine bafflement — asks the question: Who are these people? What is evangelical Christianity?
Of course, after decades of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the Christian Right, and prayer meetings at the White House, we all know — more or less — about evangelical Christianity. We know that religion continues to play a powerful role for many people in the United States — and not just Evangelical Christians — and that for many of these people, religion is not just a private matter, but is and should be public, even political.
Equally baffling for most commentators in the West was the second major religious event of the 1970s: the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Until this revolution, the Shah of Iran had been a close ally of the West and had sought — with some success and much brutality — to modernize and secularize Iran. With the revolution, though, the Shah was deposed, and a militant Islam asserted itself and turned Iran into
a new kind of religious state.
Today, we are well aware that the reemergence of Islamic consciousness and politics in Iran were not an anomaly — that throughout the 20 century, many Muslims had been chafing at the cultural, political, economic, and secular power of the modern Western world and resisted the models of the modern secular state being imported from the West.
My point here is that these events of the late '70s led many to revise the received wisdom about the relation of religion and modernity, about what modernity means for religion, and about the place of religion in the modern world.
We still, of course, find powerful defenders of one version or another of the secularization thesis who say that, despite the events of the past 30 years, the march of secularization remains if not inevitable,
then at least as an ideal for which we should be working.
But we also find many who declare that the secularization thesis has been shown to have been wrong, who even argue that the rise of religion in the past decades is one of the signs that modernity is over — that we've entered a post-modern phase of human history that will involve a whole new way of thinking about the place of religion in human life.
My purpose in these lectures will not be to make a judgment on this issue, but rather to put it in context — to look at the history of thinking about religion that would allow us to address this kind of contemporary question intelligently, to allow us to consider in an informed way some of the debates that are going on today.
To give one example, one response to the reemergence of political religion around the world has been what some are calling the "new atheism" — a perspective on religion and modernity that has been articulated in a number of books and articles written by some very vocal and smart critics arguing that for the sake of humankind, we should get rid of religion once and for all.
In 2006, the esteemed American philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote a book called Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. A more demonstrative title can be found on a book published in 2007 by the critic Christopher Hitchens: God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Perhaps the most well-known title of this emerging genre is Sam Harris's best-seller from 2004: The End ofFaith.
There, Harris argues that religious belief is inherently irrational and is a — if not the — leading factor in much of the world's strife today. For Harris, religion, because it is irrational, is extremely dangerous,
and we should all be working to eliminate it. Contemporary fundamentalism, with its extreme biblical literalism and its intolerance is, for Harris, not only the most dangerous form of religion, but is what religion is really all about. Fundamentalism, Harris argues, is genuine religion.
Thus, he is very critical of those he calls "religious moderates," those who think that one can be both religious and modern — on two grounds. First, they aren't really genuinely religious, but rather misguided hybrids of traditional — that is, real — religion and modern sensibility. And second, they are dangerous because they lead some to think that religion can be modern — that it isn't inherently intolerant and destructive.
Harris writes:
The moderation we see among non-fundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is rather the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt .... Such concessions to modernity do not in the least suggest that faith is compatible with reason, or that our religious traditions are in principle open to new learning.
He goes on to say that "by failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally." So one is either religious and irrational or modern and rational; there is no other real option — for Harris. This, in rather extreme form, is one of the major perspectives on religion that defines modernity.
But it is not, of course, the only one — for there are many today who do consider themselves both modern and religious who do not believe that genuine faith means that you have to read your scriptures literally, and who would, in short, contest Harris's claim.
So, one of the things I hope to achieve with these lectures is to explain what such a debate might look like — and to offer some tools for thinking about how we might understand and evaluate these different positions. In other words, is religion an anti-modern, anti scientific holdover from an earlier time? Is religious faith essentially blind submission to the authorities of scripture or tradition? Is religion so inherently intolerant that it will always be a source of violence in the world — or can religious faith be part of an intellectually vital, engaged, and realistic view of the world? Does religious faith help people to come to a constructive understanding of the limits of human reason and human power? Can religious faith be an integral part of a life that builds bridges, rather than barriers, between people — or must we choose between these two options? That is, is religion essentially one or the other of these? Why not say that it is, and always has been, both — that just like so many other aspects of human life, religion is a messy, complicated phenomenon, at times bound up with the worst in human thought and behavior, and at other times bound up with the best? For the past 400 years, people have been asking variations of these questions and, as we see, continue to do so today.
At this point I want to define some terms that will help make sure that we are on the same page from the start of these lectures. I have developed these lectures from a course I teach at Grinnell College that I call Modern Religious Thought, and I think it can be helpful to get us on the same page if we consider these lectures in terms of that rubric: What exactly is modern religious thought? So, let me start with the idea of modernity. I've already said some things about what this means, but I want to now identify four more aspects of the idea.
Modernity began as a Western cultural and social phenomenon. Part of what we mean today by "globalization" involves the modernization of cultures and societies around the world, but modernity starts in the West — that is, in Europe and then North America. This means that the intellectual tradition I will focus on in these lectures develops in places like Germany, France, Britain, and the United States and traces its roots back to the intellectual traditions of Judaism and Christianity, as well as Ancient Greece and Rome.
So, we will be looking at many Christian and a few Jewish thinkers as well as philosophers who did not view themselves as religious, as Christian or Jewish, but who — for the most part — came out of Christian or Jewish backgrounds. As we get closer to the contemporary period, we will see that it also becomes important to start considering Islam and Islamic sources of thought.
Modernity is a cultural epoch in which the leading thinkers increasingly turned away from the authority of past traditions and to the authority of reason. We see this most clearly in the period in early modernity that we call the "Enlightenment," a period in European intellectual history from roughly the late 17 century to the end of the 18'" — a period that can be summed up in Kant's injunction: "Dare to Know." That is, don't take things on faith, out of trust in authority, but ask questions — use your reason.
For most modern thinkers, this turn to reason would make it possible for humanity to take control of its own historical destiny. Where intellectuals in the Middle Ages put great stock in the authority of ancient traditions, modern intellectuals looked to the future convinced that reason would guide humanity to the realization of their full potential. For them, modernity meant progress.
Finally, modernity is an epoch that promised to overcome human difference, an epoch of universalism. It was clear to the thinkers of the Enlightenment that human beings had developed differently and had produced different cultures and different religions, but many believed that all humans should and would unite under the banner of reason, which all held in common — and that they thereby would throw off the yoke of the traditions that separated them.
So, to summarize, when we are talking about modernity, we are talking about a world-view that originates in Western cultures and emphasizes reason, progress, and universality. It is also a world-view that for many, today, has outlived its persuasiveness and its usefulness. They claim that we have entered a postmodern age — that the claims about reason, progress, and universality characteristic of modernity have been shown to be misguided, too limited, too oblivious to the rest of the world and the fundamental differences between humans and cultures.
As we will see near the end of these lectures, the turn to the postmodern will have a significant impact on how religion is viewed.
So, that is modern. What do I mean by religious thought?
Basically, I mean two things. First, I mean thought that is religious thinking about God, humanity, and religion that is grounded in Christianity, Judaism, or some other kind of religious life and so sees the world religiously: I will call this kind of thinking "theology."
Second, I mean thought about religion from a position outside of any kind of religious adherence or any religious faith: I will call this kind of thinking "philosophy."
Although both theology and philosophy are very old terms dating back millennia, for the most part the distinction I am drawing here is very much a modern one because Western philosophy before the modern age, at least since the dawn of the Christian era, tended to align itself very closely with either Christian or Jewish thought — and so it was not easy to distinguish philosophy from theology.
Today, though, most modern philosophers see what they do as being radically different from what theologians do. For them, the basic distinction is that theology relies on the authority of tradition or revelation, while philosophy relies only on the authority of reason. Whether, in fact, this distinction can ever be made with real precision is a very interesting question that we will return to in a later discussion — but for our purposes here, the distinction is crucial for thinking about the origins of modern philosophy.
For this, we can turn to the French philosopher Rene Descartes, a figure many credit as being the first modern philosopher, and we can turn to his groundbreaking work — published in 1641 — the Meditations. Descartes places as a preface to this work a letter that he addresses to "those Most Wise and Distinguished Men, the Dean and Doctors of the Faculty of Sacred Theology of Paris." For centuries, the University of Paris had been the heart of Christian theology in the West, Descartes writes to them, explaining that he feels it is necessary to try to show that the most important matters of faith, which for him were the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, that these could be proven philosophically. He assures them that although both he and they believe in God and the soul "by faith," not everyone does — and so it is important to be able to prove these ideas by what he calls "natural reason."
So, here, we see something of what I've been talking about in defining modernity. Not only is Descartes appealing to reason to talk about—to prove—matters of religion, but he is claiming that although not everyone has faith, everyone, believers and unbelievers alike, share a common "natural reason."
This natural reason is universal, and it can provide the grounds for proving those things that Descartes and the "Deans and the Doctors" believe by faith.
This project of defending religion by means of reason becomes a major preoccupation of philosophers and religious thinkers in the first half of this lecture series, as we shall see in figures such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant. But we also will see that for some philosophers, natural reason doesn't defend faith, but is a resource for criticizing it — or at least for arguing, as someone like David Hume does, that reason cannot support religious beliefs.
Roughly the first third of this series of lectures will focus on the emergence of this ideal of reason and on the debates about the rationality of religion that occupy philosophers and theologians well into the 19'" century. At that point, although the question of the rationality of religion by no means disappears, we will find that the main terms of arguments about religion change. We can define these new terms by considering briefly some of the thinkers we will be examining in the middle third of the lecture series.
First, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard writes a series of brilliant books satirizing the efforts of philosophers and theologians to defend religion with reason. He does so, however, not from the perspective of a critic of religion, but from the perspective of Christian faith: For Kierkegaard, faith is a matter of passionate reception of God's revelation — not of rational proof or probability.
Second, in the middle of the 19'" century, a new way of thinking about — and criticizing — religion emerges in the work of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. These thinkers are not primarily interested in whether religious beliefs are true or rational, but rather in the way religious beliefs and practices are means by which human beings deceive themselves.
As Marx puts it, religion hides things about human reality that we refuse to recognize or admit. It produces in believers what he calls "false-consciousness"—that is, illusions and self-deceptions grounded in cultural and social relationships. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud each argued that we can interpret these ideas and practices to reveal psychological and social conditions that we would rather not know about ourselves.
So, when we get to the middle of the 19 century, we need to start talking about faith and revelation on the one hand, and what I will call the "suspicion of religion" on the other hand.
In the remainder of this lecture, I want to say just a couple of more things about faith and revelation and address the question of suspicion at the beginning of the next lecture. Kierkegaard's conception of faith complicates the question of modernity and religion. One of the main threads that I want to untangle from this complicated knot is the problem of revelation, which will play an especially crucial role in these lectures when we get to the 20th in century.
The basic question is this: If modernity is defined in large part by the authority of reason, how do we understand those religious thinkers like Kierkegaard in the 19'" century, Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig in the early 20th century, and many sophisticated thinkers today? How do we understand their appeal to a concept of revelation to explain and defend their religious faith?
In many ways, of course, revelation seems to be contrary to reason for by definition, it comes from beyond the human and requires an assent and commitment to something that cannot be fully explained or defended m human, rationalistic terms. But does this mean that a faith based in revelation is irrational — a kind of "blind faith"? Or is it possible to argue that it is reasonable to believe in revelation?
I've found in my own thinking and teaching that for those of us not committed to a religious way of looking at the world, it can be very difficult to understand — and even take seriously — the appeal to revelation.
I find that many of my students — very bright, very open-minded, and in general very secular students — find their open-mindedness most challenged by those thinkers who write theologically and unapologetically by appealing to revelation and then articulating the religious commitments that follow from it.
For those of you who might share this view, one of my goals in these lectures is to make enough sense of the appeal to revelation for you to be able to be challenged by it. That is not to say that I want to persuade you that those who appeal to revelation are right — only that I hope to make them accessible enough, and serious enough, for you to be able to take them seriously. Indeed, I would also say that about thinkers such as Marx, or Freud, or Nietzsche—who certainly do not appeal to revelation, but who propose some radical, and perhaps alienating, ideas about human life.
In these lectures, then, we will consider — with some of the most sensitive and passionate minds of the modern period — how fascinating and challenging the question of religion really can be. When I look back on it, it was this exercise of the imagination, this challenge to my own way of seeing things, that got me started in my own study of the ideas and debates we will explore together in these lectures. I grew up in a very secular family, and though I had some minimal exposure to religion, I never took religion seriously until I got to college and — as I will explain in a later lecture — was knocked for a loop by Kierkegaard's moving and brilliant reflections on faith.
Kierkegaard did not convert me to Christianity — indeed, shortly after my encounter with Kierkegaard I found myself just as deeply immersed and captivated by Nietzsche's atheism — but he did show me the wonders of passionate thought and the challenges and rewards of trying to inhabit, to think and imagine with someone who sees things very differently than you do — and so to be compelled to turn around and reflect on your own life and world-view from that perspective and, perhaps, to change the way you think.
I'm going to borrow from the French philosopher Michel Foucault to suggest that this practice of thought is what it means to do philosophy. Foucault won't make another appearance in these lectures, but he is my inspiration for thinking about how and why we grapple with these ideas and meanings.
He puts it this way in the Introduction to his 19S4 book, The Use of Pleasure:
What is philosophy today — philosophical activity, I mean if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity.... The "essay" — which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes ... is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e. an ascesis ... an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.
Foucault here describes philosophy as an ascesis — that is, a form of asceticism or spiritual discipline.
One doesn't need to be religious, at least not in any obvious sense, to engage in spiritual disciplines. I want to suggest, with Foucault, that serious thought is not just a matter of theorizing, arguing, or proving, but of spiritual practice — an exercise of the imagination and the self that can open up new worlds and possibilities.
In the lectures that follow, we will have the chance to consider many of these worlds and possibilities, religious and non-religious alike.
