I like trying to spot fads and trends in our media and best-seller saturated society, and I think I can see one developing in the public discussion of religion. I think two recent trends are
- Militant atheism.
- Acceptance of the fact of religious belief and its impact on society.
The Militant atheism is more than just a lack of faith or skepticism, it is an active attack, and almost hatred and fear of religion and religious belief, demonstrated by the series of best selling books, such as Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion", aimed and destroying religious belief, using any argument that will serve the cause.
I think there are couple of problems with this approach. As any steak-knife salesperson knows, the best way to convince people is gentle persuasion with some humour, not by shouting abuse at them. People like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens write angry books, and when I have seen them being interviewed on TV, they often get a little hot under the collar.
Having experienced the 60's and 70's myself, I think I have an explanation for this anger. When I was at university in the early 70's, it was almost universally accepted that religion was nonsense and would soon wither and expire. We were on the threshold of a space-age, nuclear-powered, free-loving, gender-changing, flower-powered future of happiness freed from the medieval constraints of all religions.
But here we are 40 years later and it didn't happen. Religious belief is growing amongst poorer nations and although it is withering in the wealthy West, I don't see the predicted universal contentment in society. My theory is that the most militant atheists are about my age, and their anger is not the anger of confident belief, but the anger of frustration that the hopes of their youth have failed.
As a little bit of quantitative justification for my theory, here are the years of birth of some of the New Atheists:
- Richard Dawkins 1941
- Christopher Hitchens 1949
- Daniel Dennett 1942
- Michel Onfray 1959
- Andre Comte-Sponville 1952
with the exception being youngster Sam Harris (1967), who missed out on the swinging sixties and seventies, unlike the others above.
Now for the newest trend. I heard of a book called "God is Back" by Economist magazine editors John Mickethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. I haven't read it, but I believe the argument is that religion is increasingly accepted by politicians and to understand the behaviour of people in society, it has to be studied. (I have heard that one of the authors is an atheist and the other a Christian.)
For a bit of local Australian content, there was a report on religious talk in politics, where "university research shows" that
"Melbourne University politics researcher Anna Crabb analysed 2422 speeches by 60 prominent federal politicians — the leaders and senior frontbenchers of the three main parties — between 2000 and 2006. She tallied the number of these speeches that included the words Christ, church, faith, pray, Jesus, Bible and God and found the use of religious language by politicians had increased.
In 2000, 9 per cent of the speeches in Ms Crabb's sample used religious terms. The proportion increased in each of the following five years, reaching 24 per cent in 2005, before easing to 22 per cent in 2006."
Sounds like a fun piece of research.
Then I heard a programme on the ABC radio programme about political theology. It referred to books edited by Scott and Cavanaugh and written by Hent de Vries, among others. I haven't read either of these books (hey, time is short), but the argument seems to be that the effect of religion is one factor contributing to politics, and postmodernists, unlike aging children of the sixties, are eager to examine all ways of looking at society.
Finally, the enterprising Tony Blair has set up his Faith Foundation, so he can see the need to study religious faith.
In my opinion, both the militant atheists and the postmodern political theorists are only looking superficially at what they say are the results of religious belief, and are not really examining faith and its relationship with reason. To do that, you would be better off reading St Augustine, the early Church Fathers, or, closer to home, Pope John Paul II, or the book A Comprehensible Universe by Fr Michal Heller.
In any case, I find it interesting that the militant atheists are only interested in attacking religion, despite the fact that it seems to be outlasting them, whereas the postmodernists are happy to accept the fact of religion and talk about it. When atheists manage to produce a society that is a little better than the cruel, oppressive, atheist dictatorships of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, they can then talk about their alternative to religion.
