Taught By Professor Tyler Roberts, Ph.D., Harvard University,
Grinnell College)
Published by The Great Courses
Scope:
Even if we agree that not all religious language is propositional, it does seem that the religious life involves making claims about the nature of reality. What kind of claims? In this concluding lecture, we categorize the approaches to religion we have explored throughout the course with respect to their views on the relation of faith and reason.
Outline
I. One of the most important questions in the world today is how we understand and engage the issue of religious diversity and tolerance.
A. The answers to this question are crucial for thinking about how we respond to conservative and fundamentalist forms of religion around the world and how we engage in the political and cultural debates about abortion, stem cells, and education.
B. It is appropriate to close out these lectures by continuing our discussion of pluralism and secularism because in some ways, this topic brings us back to where we began and gives us a way to think about the trajectory of faith and suspicion in modernity.
II. At the dawn of the modern period, intellectuals were forging new ways of thinking about knowledge, truth, morality, and politics.
A. In the 18th and l9‘h centuries, the dominant view was that if religion was to survive, it would have to prove itself before the bar of reason.
B. Many argued that religion could prove itself in this way, though others, the masters of suspicion, argued that religion was illusory and dangerous.
C. In the 20th century, many started to question modernity itself.
D. Increasingly, as we moved into the 21” century, criticisms of modernity led thinkers to question secular ideologies and to ask whether secular societies could allow robust freedom of religion
E. In this lecture, we’ll contrast strong secularism with a weaker version of secularism, then move to a discussion of secularism, democracy, and tradition. Finally, we’ll conclude with a discussion of how rethinking the religious and the secular might lead us to think differently about how we educate our children.
III. Jeffrey Stout has argued that we should distinguish a weaker form of secularism, or what he calls “secularization.”
A. As a defender of secularization, Stout argues that freedom requires discourse in which religious people are not required to relinquish their religious beliefs.
B. For Stout, secularization occurs when people step from diversity to pluralism: In engaging with others, they must accept that their interlocutors will not bring the same assumptions and sources of authority into ethical and political debates. .
C. Stout’s secularization does not require people to relinquish their religious beliefs or to refrain from giving them as reasons. His is a “come as you are” public sphere.
D. But what happens when fundamentally different religious or non-religious assumptions are brought to bear in public debate?
1. Stout argues that public discourse in a democracy must be a combination of both “normal discourse” and what he calls “conversational improvisation.” One such improvisation is what Stout calls “immanent criticism.”
2. Here, we might want to invoke the religious pluralism of Diana Eck, who points out that pluralistic dialogue is not a matter of coming to agreement but of making and keeping connection.
IV. Let’s think about Stout’s secularization in terms of democracy.
A. Stout’s main argument is that democracy is, first of all, a tradition, that is, a set of ideals and practices handed down through time and modes of cultivating in one another and in our children a certain kind of political character.
B. This idea brings us back to George Lindbeck’s claim that “[t]o become religious is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training.”
C. Stout is saying the same thing about democracy and makes the point that religious pluralism requires a commitment to the value of diversity and engagement with people across different religious traditions.
V. Is religion bad for kids? Let’s look at the way we educate our children in the United States.
A. Daniel Dennett, in the midst of discussing the “pros and cons” of religion, suggests that we need to consider carefully whether it is morally defensible to teach belief systems to children.
B. From the perspective of such thinkers as Stout and Lindbeck, this is an astonishingly misguided question. For them, it is a modernist, classically liberal illusion to think that selves can be shaped in any significant way outside of traditions.
C. It may be that those whom Dennett mentions assume that there is some fundamental distmotion between religious beliefs and other kinds of beliefs.
VI. Our concluding question takes us beyond the parents to consider schools.
A. Given the topic of these last couple of lectures, We might ask: How do we in the United States educate our children to live constructively in a religiously plural world?
B. Let’s consider the debate over intelligent design in schools, which is really the latest phase ofthe long-standing battle in our country over the teaching of evolution in schools.
C. The American public school system is dominated by what Noah Feldman calls legal secularism, which makes it difficult to figure out how to teach religion in the schools.
D. If schools are sites of acculturation and we live in a pluralistic democracy, then its seems to follow that schools should be sites for cultivating the skills by which people with different religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds can come together in constructive interaction.
VII. In Lecture One, we noted that one of the identifying marks of modernity was that it was an epoch of universalism and, as such, promised to overcome certain kinds of human difference.
A. The balance between faith and suspicion that we have seen in many of the West’s best modem religious thinkers emerged as these thinkers engaged their traditions, traditions that give them a sense of identity and grounding but also demand of them a certain vigilance with respect to the ways they assert themselves and their own identities over others.
B. Perhaps, then, the modern solution of erasing religious difference was a mistake; perhaps the engagement with religion and religious difference has something to teach us about human difference more generally and about how to live with deep diversity.
Suggested Reading:
Eck, A New Religious America.
Feldman, Divided by God.
Fraser, Between Church and State Stout, Democracy and Tradition.
Westphal, Suspicion and Faith.
Questions to Consider:
1. Do you think schools should take on the task of cultivating the skills necessary for religious, ethnic, and cultural understanding among children of diverse backgrounds?
2. Which do you think is the better solution -- strong or weak secularism?
Lecture Thirty-Six -- Transcript
Faith, Suspicion, and Modernity
We’ve come to the end, though it feels like there’s a lot more to say -- that we’ve only been able to just touch on so many questions and have missed many more about faith and suspicion in today’s world. I hope that these lectures will make it possible for you, and maybe even inspire you, to think further about the questions we’ve explored and to take up new ones.
As I indicated at the end of the last lecture, one of the most important questions in the world today is how we understand and engage the issue of religious diversity and tolerance -- especially as more and more of us experience the diversity at first hand. The answers to this question are crucial for thinking about how we respond to the resurgence of conservative and Fundamentalist forms of religion around the world-and how we think about and engage in the burning political and cultural debates in this country about abortion, stem cells, and education, among others.
With respect to these issues, we need to do at least two things. First, we need to understand the resources people of faith have for participating constructively and peacefully in debates over these issues. Second, we need to reflect carefully on the social and political conditions that can make possible genuine freedom for the religious and the non-religious alike.
So, to conclude, I want to continue my discussion of pluralism and secularism. Such a discussion is an appropriate one for closing out these lectures, I think, because in some interesting ways it brings us back to where we began-and so gives us a way to think about the trajectory of faith and suspicion in the modern period. At the dawn of modernity, intellectuals -- gripped by the power and the promise of reason, many of them suspicious of the authority of the Church and tradition -- were forging new ways of thinking about knowledge, truth, morality, and politics. As they did so, they asked whether religion had a place in this new, modern world taking shape around them.
In these lectures, we’ve explored this debate and its different phases. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was the dominant view among mainstream intellectuals that if religion was to survive, then it would have to prove itself before the bar of reason. Many religious thinkers and some philosophers argued that religion could prove itself in this way -- though others, and among the most insightful here were the masters of suspicion, these others argued that religion was illusory and dangerous. But in the 20th century many philosophers and religious thinkers, theists and non-theists alike, started to question modernity itself They used the tools created and refined by the masters of suspicion to question the modern project. Increasingly, as We move into the 21th century, such criticisms of modernity have led thinkers to question secular ideologies and to ask whether secular societies could allow robust freedom of religion.
At the end of the last lecture, then, we examined some of these criticisms of what I’ve referred to as the “strong form of secularism.” In this lecture, I want to continue to think about secularism, and I’ll begin by contrasting the “strong secularism” I talked about last lecture with a weaker version of secularism. I then want to move to a discussion of secularism, democracy, and tradition. Finally, I want to conclude with a discussion of how rethinking the religious and the secular along these lines might lead us to think differently about how we educate our children.
The philosopher Jeffrey Stout has argued that we should distinguish what I’ve called strong secularism from a weaker form of secularism, or what he calls “secularization.” As a defender of secularization, Stout embraces the separation of Church and state, but he also argues that genuine freedom of religion requires a political and ethical discourse in which religious people are not required to relinquish their religious beliefs or refrain from employing them as reasons when they engage in political discourse. For Stout, secularization simply means that: “The participants in a given discursive practice are not in a position to take for granted that their interlocutors are making the same religious assumptions they are.
Here, secularization starts with recognition of the fundamental diversity of religious, non-religious, and other ways in which people articulate, reflect on, and live their deepest meanings and commitments -- and it’s what happens when people take an initial step from this diversity to pluralism. That is, they see that if they’re going to engage with others across lines of fundamental difference, they must accept that their interlocutors will not be bringing the same assumptions and the same sources of authority into ethical and political debates.
So, in contrast to the strong secularist position, where the recognition of diversity leads to efforts to construct a form of political and ethical discourse that all persons can share in, on the same basis -- which for most secularists was universal human reason-Stout’s secularization does not require people to relinquish their religious beliefs or refrain from giving them as reasons. This is a kind of a “come as you are” public sphere.
From a pragmatic point of view, this may mean that participants in certain situations might want to try to find common ground, might want to refrain from emphasizing religious differences -- or, more generally, metaphysical differences -- too much, but this would simply be a matter of ad hoc adjustments necessary to keep a given conversation going, to keep participants engaged. But what happens when push comes to shove, when there are deep disagreements about how to proceed on a certain issue and when fundamentally different religious or non-religious assumptions are brought to bear on those issues? How does an atheistic defender of a woman’s right to an abortion respond to a Christian who asserts that God says that all life begins at conception, and so abortion must be outlawed? How do they talk to one another? They’ve got fundamentally different authorities in mind, fundamentally different basic commitments. How can they find common ground on which to decide how to proceed? This brings us back to Richard Rorty, who claims that the reason religion must be excluded from public debate is that it’s what he calls a “conversation stopper.” How do you conduct a political or ethical debate, he asks, if everyone in the conversation is basing their arguments on different religious or metaphysical principles? He doesn’t think you can, and so he argues for the strong secularist approach of employing a neutral secular language in such debates.
But Stout argues that public discourse in a democracy must always be a combination of what he calls “normal discourse”-that is, discourse that is based on shared assumptions and what he calls “conversational improvisation.” Conversational improvisation is needed when assumptions are not shared-for instance, when religious premises are introduced into political argument. At this point, one possible improvisation is to engage in what Stout calls “immanent criticism.” So, in the abortion debate it’s possible for the atheist supporter of abortion rights to try to enter into the mind -- set of the Christian opponent to explore with him or her Christian reasons for opposing such rights to see whether they’re internally consistent-but also to draw his or her attention to Christian reasoning that some might use to defend abortion rights. Similarly, the Christian could point out the atheistic reasons to outlaw abortion, and they could engage with one another on the basis of trying to get into each other’s world-view and arguments, and working with them on this basis. This approach certainly won’t guarantee resolution, but it will keep the conversation going.
At this point, we might want to invoke the religious pluralism of Diana Eck and others and extend it also to dialogue between the religious and the non-religious in political discourse. For Eck’s point is that pluralistic dialogue is not a matter of coming to agreement, but of making and keeping connection-that the unity is something created in dialogue and not in establishing or relying on deeply shared commitments-of course, except for the commitment to engage in real conversation and debate without resorting to violence.
With this in mind, lets look a little more closely at this common commitment that does need to be in place for Stout’s secularization to work. He wants us to think about it in terms of democracy. The title of the book from which I’m taking these arguments is Stout’s Democracy and Tradition, and his main argument is that democracy is not primarily a set of rules for establishing representative government, a matter of voting and free elections. These are, of course, crucial-but, for him, democracy is first of all a tradition.
Consider what that means in the context of these lectures. We began by discussing how Early Modem and Enlightenment thinkers turned to the authority of reason in order to counter-and even replace -- the authority of religious traditions. But as many of the U.S. Founders knew, a vibrant democratic government requires virtuous citizens, citizens with the habits, dispositions, and skills-in short, the character-necessary to commit themselves to informed decision -- making, to be willing and able to give reasons for their political positions rather than resorting to force or violence.
For Stout, democracy is thus a tradition -- a set of ideals and practices handed down, modes of cultivating in one another and in our children a certain kind of political character. This brings us back to George Lindbeck, whose theological argument for a cultural -- linguistic approach to religion we discussed two lectures ago. To remind us of Lindbeck’s approach, we can recall his claim that: “to become religious-no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent -- is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training.”
Stout is saying the same thing about democracy, and in doing so he helps to drive home a point I made in the last lecture about religious pluralism: Religious pluralism requires a commitment,” above and beyond specific religious commitments, to the value of diversity and the value of engagement with people across different religious traditions. Some, of course, and Milbank might be an example of this, find such a commitment in and through their religious traditions -- so, for example, some Jews find the command to love one’s neighbor as a command to respect and engage religious difference.
But the main point here is that Stout is not arguing that secularization and democracy set up some kind of neutral space for pluralistic engagement, but rather that democracy demands a certain kind of character and allegiance to traditions in which such character is cultivated. This character is one that is based in respect for difference and the willingness to do the difficult work of engaging with such difference across political and other kinds of debates. This means that a religious pluralism practiced in the context of democracy does have its limits-it cannot grant any complete religious freedom. But it does seem that this secularization makes more room for religious freedom and religious pluralism than the strong secularism I discussed in the last lecture.
This religious pluralism is one that I think most of the figures I’ve talked about in these lectures would find congenial-for there is a certain affinity between the kind of democratic tradition Stout is talking about and the kind of self-critical, religious thinking I’Ve been emphasizing in these lectures. Indeed, I’d go so far as to suggest that for thinkers such as Barth and Rowan Williams, the challenge that is put to Christians in the context of engagement with people from other religious traditions, or with people who are not religious at all, can itself be integral to the process by which revelation is encountered -- that such engagement can shake Christians out of their worlds and direct them back to their traditions with new questions and new problems.
I want to conclude by bringing this theoretical discussion down to earth a bit. Over the past few lectures, I’ve returned more than once to the idea of tradition in thinkers such as Levinas, Williams, Lindbeck, and now, Stout. In their view, traditions-whether specifically religious or more generally cultural, such as Stout’s democracy -- are contexts for the formation of particular kinds of selves with certain ways of understanding, experiencing, and acting in the world.
So, I want to turn this discussion to a concrete issue by considering the way we in the United States educate our children. In Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett -- in the midst of discussions of the pros and cons of religion -- raises the question of whether religious upbringing is dangerous for children. He doesn’t claim that it is, but he cites others who compare the idea of raising a child as a Catholic or a Muslim to the idea of raising a child to be a smoker or a drinker. These thinkers, and Dennett wants to take them seriously, suggest that we need to consider carefully whether it is morally defensible to teach belief systems to children.
From the perspective of thinkers such as Stout and Lindbeck, this is an astonishingly misguided question, for they would argue that we only ever get to be selves in the first place by learning language and culture, which is already full of belief-which is always, from the earliest ages, a matter of being taught habits and dispositions; always a matter of, to use a loaded word, being “indoctrinated,” whether with religious beliefs or not. For such thinkers, it really is a modernist, classically liberal illusion to think that selves can be shaped in any significant way outside of traditions, outside of some form of indoctrination-or, to use maybe a less-loaded term, “acculturation.” It’s an illusion to think that selves ever really are unencumbered, free, rational agents who simply choose their beliefs.
It may be that those whom Dennett mentions are thinking specifically about religious belief systems, assuming that there’s some fimdamental distinction between religious beliefs and other kinds of beliefs -- that there is something more morally questionable about raising children to believe in the God of the Torah than to believe, say, in capitalism as the best way to organize and share the resources necessary for life, or to believe in democracy as the best possible political arrangement. Is there some fundamental difference between teaching children to believe in God and teaching children that capitalism is the best economic system? Perhaps the claim is that, at least in general, raising a child to be religious is more likely to produce narrow -- minded intolerance or more likely to produce someone who cannot critically evaluate his or her options in life than raising them to believe in other sorts of things might.
Of course, there surely are ways of raising children religiously that produce narrow-mindedness and intolerance, but there are also plenty of secular ways of raising children that produce the same outcome. I hope that I’ve shown in these lectures that it certainly is possible to be religious and rational, to be religious and to be a critical thinker at the same time.
Dennett, to his credit, argues that parents should be able to raise their children religiously in any way they see tit as long as they don’t close their children’s minds by teaching them fear or hatred, or by disabling them from open inquiry. This seems completely reasonable to me as long as we understand that any open inquiry will always be conducted from particular positions-that by the time children become critically thinking agents in the world they will already have been shaped to believe, to see, to experience the world in certain ways.
The question with which I want to conclude takes us beyond the parents to consider what might be one of the most important acculturating and political institutions a society has -- its schools. The question is not only how parents raise their children, but how societies raise, acculturate, even indoctrinate their children in their public schools. Given the topic of these last couple of lectures, we might ask it this way: How do we in the United States, in a society based on a secular Constitution that enshrines in its Bill of Rights the disestablishment of religion on the one hand and the freedom of religion on the other, how do we educate our children to live constructively in a religiously plural world?
Consider two issues that have been frequently debated in the last couple of decades of the 20th century and still today. First, whether the government should supply vouchers so that parents can send their children to private schools, including private religious schools; second, whether creation science or Intelligent Design should be taught alongside evolution in science classes. To a significant degree, both questions hinge on how we understand the purpose of our public schools: Are schools just places where students learn instrumental skills, or are schools places where children learn certain values?
It seems clear to me that the answer is the latter. My children learn to read and write, but they also learn how to work with others. They have sessions on character-building, in which they are taught how to respect themselves and others. They have mock elections in presidential election years. They focus heavily in their social studies and geography classes on the United States. Once a month or so, I go to one of my children’s classes to read to them for half an hour, and almost inevitably the book that the school has chosen for me to read involves what we might describe as a lesson in multiculturalism or in battling stereotypes. In short, my kids in their public schools are learning how to be good people, good citizens, good pluralists.
With this as background, lets consider the debate over Intelligent Design in the schools -- which, in fact, is really the latest phase of the longstanding battle in the United States over the teaching of evolution in the public schools. In 2005, the Judge John E. Jones III, presiding over the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, ruled in the case of Kitzmiller versus the Dover Area School District, ruled against the school district’s requirement that teachers in ninth-grade science classes, where evolution was taught, had to read a disclaimer that included the following. So, this is the school’s disclaimer that science teachers had to read:
Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defmed as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.
The judge ruled that Intelligent Design is a form of creationism, and that requiring this disclaimer violated the Establishment Clause in the Constitution. I’ll say, first, that I think this was the right ruling because I do think, despite what I’ve said about religion and reason, that there are crucial distinctions to be made between different kinds of discourses, and specifically here between the discourse of science and the discourse of religion. Where the scientific method focuses on explaining things in naturalistic terms that we can test empirically, religions tend to invoke -- and creationism and Intelligent Design certainly invoke-forms of non-natural causation and explanation.
The problem with this disclaimer is that it’s not specific enough about what is entailed in the scientific sense of the word “theory” -- and so it blurs a rather clear line between the kind of explanation the theory of evolution offers for the origins of life and the kind of explanation offered by Intelligent Design. In science, a theory is not just a guess or a belief-it’s an explanation that produces hypotheses and experiments that can be tested empirically. How, in the end, do we test empirically the claim that there is an Intelligent Designer that transcends natural forms of causality and created the universe? This does not mean that belief in Intelligent Design or creationism is necessarily irrational. It only means that because Intelligent Design does not follow the rules of science, we need to be clear-and we need to be clear when we teach our children-that it is a religious belief and not a scientific theory.
In my view Intelligent Design should not be taught in science classes in our public schools. But is this all there is to say on the issue? Consider this passage from the judge’s ruling:
[The disclaimer] reminds school children that they can rightly maintain beliefs taught by then parents on the subject of the origin of life, thereby stifling the critical thinking that the class’s study of evolutionary theory might otherwise prompt.
Here, I think the judge misses something important about critical thinking and about the tension between religion and science that he’s working with. The judge seems to be asserting that critical thinking only goes one Way, from the science classroom to what We learn from our parents-which, in this case, is a religious belief. But I’d suggest that real critical thinking must go both ways. That is, it’s not necessarily the case that official knowledge of the schools should trump the knowledge of religious tradition and family. It seems to me that genuine critical thinking also needs to be directed at what gets determined as official knowledge.
I’m not really interested here in questioning the importance of science education, but I am interested in questioning the strong secularism that seems to have determined that religion has no real place in the public schools. Currently, in the United States the public school system is dominated by what Noah Feldman calls “legal secularism” that makes it very hard to figure out-for teachers, administrators, school boards-makes it very hard to figure out how to teach religion in the schools, and this leads many educators to drop the subject altogether for fear of running afoul of the law or of a law suit. James Fraser, in a book called Between Church and State, has argued that secularism-and here I’d specify a strong secularism-has become the status quo in our schools to the extent that only the secularist student will feel fully at home. This echoes a concern, of course, voiced by many Evangelical parents today, that the schools send a message, through the absence of any real discussion of religion, that religion is somehow unimportant-and especially unimportant for thinking about our public lives, our lives as citizens. This would be a variant of Stephen Carter’s argument about the trivialization of religion.
What l’m suggesting here is that the Kitzmiller ruling raises important questions about the kind of social and cultural authority we give, respectively, to scientific and religious discourses, and questions about how we translate that authority into what we teach our children about the world and life. But while this leads me to echo concerns of Evangelical parents, I’m not suggesting that we should weaken or cut down on science curricula. I also don’t think that we should privilege a Christian account of origins of life in our schools-maybe in a social studies class or something, if not a science class-or that our schools should engage in the project of trying to teach students how to be religious, or that they should be religious. This is not a matter of endorsing religion, or any particular religion, which clearly would be unconstitutional.
But I do think that real critical thinking is not going to happen unless we figure out ways to address and talk about the strong differences in world-views, values, and fundamental religious or secular commitments that students bring with them to the schools from their homes. If we don’t, we’re not giving our students the tools to critically and constructively reflect on their own deepest values and commitments in a way that allows them to engage difference with both pride and respect. If schools are sites of acculturation and we live in a pluralistic democracy, then it seems to follow that schools should be sites for cultivating the skills by which people with different religious, ethnic, cultural backgrounds can come together in constructive interaction. We do already do this-in age-appropriate ways-with gender, race, and ethnicity in our schools, but we seem to be afraid to do this with religion.
I began, way back in Lecture l, by saying that one of the identifying marks of modernity was that it was an epoch of universalism and, as such, promised to overcome certain kinds of human difference. High on this list for many modernists was religious difference, which was seen to be a source of social disharmony, if not violence. But in this respect, modernity has failed -- for it is clear that religion remains, today, a source of conflict in many societies around the world. But is this a problem inherent to religion, or is it a problem inherent to the human need to create strong identities-whether on the basis of religion, or on the basis of ethnicity, or nationality, or race?
One of the things I’ve tried to show in these lectures is that religious thinkers in the modern period have made it clear that faith in God can be a means to transcending -- in the sense of thinking critically about -- this attachment to identity. The balance between faith and suspicion that I’ve located in many of the West’s best modem religious thinkers, especially in the past 100 years, has emerged not just through an engagement with modern ideas, but also as these thinkers have engaged their traditions -- traditions that give them a sense of identity and grounding -- but also, insofar as they are oriented toward a transcendent God, also demands of them a certain vigilance with respect to the ways they assert themselves and their own identities over others. It gives them a different way of thinking about how to be attached to their own identities -- to bare their identities in a kind of lighter way.
Perhaps, then, the modem solution of erasing religious difference, at least from the public sphere, was a mistake. Perhaps the engagement with religion and religious difference has something to teach us about human difference more generally -- and about how to live with deep diversity.
