America Needs Religion, Even if You Don't Believe

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In my last post, I mentioned that the Christian religion, whether you believe in it or not, should be viewed historically as a civilizing force.

The pagan world the Christianity superseded knew how to create order, art, music, philosophy, poetry, and military genius, but was not well-known for its sterling respect for human dignity.

Christianity came on the scene and changed all that. The Western values we know, the jurisprudence we practice, the understanding we have about the value of every human life — these are not things the human race always took for granted. Christendom gave us more than we realize.

But in the West, religion is disappearing. More and more people, myself now included (which always feels strange), are claiming no religious affiliation. Belief is on the decline as many behaviors that were once considered taboo or even uncivilized are on the rise.

Eric Weinstein, an atheist Jew who carries out aspects of his faith tradition religiously despite unbelief, offered this observation recently, and it resonates:

If you’re not familiar with the naturalistic fallacy, it’s basically the idea that natural things are good because they’re found in nature, and unnatural things are evil because they’re not.

The Christian notion of teleology obviously connects to this. Acts are naturally ordered towards certain ends (ie., sex > procreation) and thus intentional frustrations of those ends are considered, according to this teleological view, to be “disordered” acts. In the language of Catholic theology, disordered acts are evil.

I have come to suspect that the teleological view can be a kind of logical fallacy. For example, perverted faculty arguments around the use of generative organs for non-procreative purposes seem to forget that according to the design of human sexuality, men have involuntary orgasms in their sleep beginning in adolescence, or that most of a married couple’s time together is in fact infertile, also by design. Even in my most fervent time as a Catholic, I couldn’t win nature-based arguments against things like homosexual behavior. I could get close to something compelling, but it was impossible to really close out those arguments. They always seemed to fall short of something persuasive. (The naturalistic fallacy could equally apply to the “but homosexual behavior is found in nature in the animal kingdom” argument, so I don’t just mean to point this criticism at teleology. Some animals also throw poo and eat their own young. But I digress.)

In any case, Weinstein is undeniably correct about the fact that these beliefs about natural law — or religious beliefs that build upon it — create moral codes that can, in theory, be universally agreed upon.

In their absence, all bets are off.

In a way, I feel like I’m having a bit of a debate with myself. I have written before (see below) that I disagree with the Dostoyevskian adage that “if God is not, everything is permissible.” That said, while I think it’s certainly possible not to believe in God but still act morally, in the aggregate, degenerate behavior seems to emerge across populations that are lacking a theistic framework — and yes, the consequent fear of God — that religion (particularly Christian religion) imposes.

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I’ve not yet gotten around to reading Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. (A gracious reader actually sent me a copy recently that I just haven’t had time for yet.) I expect that when I do, I’ll find little to disagree with in the theme that Christianity took the pagan world from something dark and barbaric and uplifted it to the kind of civilization we take for granted — and are rapidly losing sight of — today. Holland himself was not practicing when he wrote the book, but in writing it, and in the comparisons between the pagan world and the one he grew up in post-Christian Europe, he began to find his way back. As he said: "To live in a western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions."

It would seem that the American founding fathers understood this as well. John Adams famously wrote that

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.

Alexander Hamilton, who was a non-practicing Christian, supported the idea of a Constitutional ban on non-Christians in public office.

Jefferson was a bit of a weirdo, who thought that eventually, thinking Americans would evolve an enlightenment-friendly religion of some sort; a national creed that all citizens could participate in. In his book, So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State, the late author (and Unitarian minister) Forrest Church writes:

The Jeffersonian revival paralleled the explosion of democratic Christianity on the American frontier, known to his tory as the Second Great Awakening. Doctrinally, Jefferson could not have stood further from his most avid religious allies. Believing that a universal, liberal faith would arise from the spread of knowledge, he modeled his approach to religion and politics on Enlightenment doctrine. If Adams was a Puritan skeptic, Jefferson was an Enlightenment priest.

Of the republic’s first president’s views on the civic role of religion, Church writes:

[George] Washington viewed the United States as a religious (not Christian) commonwealth, to be directed by a morally grounded governmental authority. One thing he would not abide was sectarian interference in the affairs of state. More wary of disunion than he was careful of liberty, he slowly gravitated toward order as the nations top priority, with one notable exception: religious freedom. His deep sense of duty to all Americans made him scrupulous to avoid the slightest hint of religious favoritism. Religion was one sturdy pillar of the temple of government he helped design and construct, but Christ, about whom he was deafeningly silent, was absent from the temple's architecture. By the end of his second term, leaders of the established churches had grown openly restive toward Washington’s ambiguous religious posture.

It’s all quite a conundrum. To not believe in it and yet to need it. To understand the power of its moralizing force, but find that in their particulars its morals and teachings are often wanting. To desire deeply to know the truth of it, but know that by design you will never be allowed to fulfill that need.

It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that the human race needs religion, whether or not it’s true.

What does that say about us?