Rereading President Obama's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast last month, I ran across an idea I'd like to dismiss:
"If we leave our values at the door," Obama said, "we abandon much of the moral glue that has held our nation together for centuries, and allowed us to become somewhat more perfect a union. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel—the majority of great reformers in American history did their work not just because it was sound policy, or they had done good analysis, or understood how to exercise good politics, but because their faith and their values dictated it, and called for bold action—sometimes in the face of indifference, sometimes in the face of resistance."
He's saying, in purposely uncertain terms, that when it comes to social good, Religious People Get More Done.
Now, Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens have spent the last decade saying the opposite, that spiritually deranged religious people do much of the harm in the world, too. The atheists have a point, of course, and they've made it. And made it, and made it, and made it.
And I'm glad.
But mustn't a New York Times-reading, cocktail-snarfing, motorcycle-riding, golfing liberal agnostic writer like me acknowledge, if only in a parenthetical pause from my pontification, that when it comes to drawing a line and laying their life on it, religious people are more reliable than I?
For me—as for most of us, I suppose—Darfur bleeds into the Taliban's treatment of women who make me think about the lives of suicidal Chinese workers who made the computer from which I blog today's outrage (and schedule tomorrow's, a day ahead)?
I certainly don't want to go to0 far with this, but it does occur to me that a religious person might be more likely than a non-religous person to seize on a problem and commit a life to its solution. I honestly wonder whether Lincoln, Addams, King, Day and Heschel would have made their moves and maintained their movements without an explicit moral framework for justification and a church community for backup.
Douglass would have been fine without religion, because he was one bad-ass emmer effer. As were and will be any number of secular, non-religious American heroes.
But can't we all at least acknowledge that religion can be psychologically and socially useful as a provider of bright lines in a world of moral gray?
And if we can acknowledge it, shouldn't we do so, if only so that we may continue to claim to have more intellectual honesty than Rick Santorum, and to undercut his manipulative claims of cultural persecution?
I know Christians can probably never say out loud that atheists are good for the world. But sometimes you just have to be the bigger person.
You’re reading from a teleprompter again, aren’t you David? 😉
I tend to agree with you nonetheless. It can make it easier to draw lines. Although I’m not sure those lines are always drawn in the right places. Or sometimes lines are drawn under the guise of religious guidance when perhaps some true spiritual reflection might have moved them to a different place. But for those truly guided by their faith, it can indeed provide some certainty of purpose and place.
However, I also don’t think the faithful have a monopoly on morality or ethics as is sometimes claimed.
Oh, Rueben, it’s stipulated that religion can be a dangerous drug. That’s why I give Hitchens and Maher and all the other rabid atheists their props.
And I think religious people ought to have some atheists or agnostics in their lives (and throughout their institutions), because we can sometimes leaven the holy bread with a few of our pesky questions.
Some of the most principled and morally courageous people I know are people like me. But others are religious–and I there are moments when the religious folks might just have an edge.
Now load THAT into your teleprompter and smoke it.
I agree. Religion and the lack of it can both be dangerous drugs. They can both heal and harm in equal measure depending on who is writing the prescription. But I also think the greater determinent is somewhere in the deeper fibre of the individual. Religion or education or politics or whatever just help us justify and rationalize decisions that may not be entirely rational. Not saying that’s a bad thing, mind you. It helps us get through.
I also think there are times when having a strong ability to delineate between the right and wrong path isn’t necessarily an advantage. Surely sometimes it is. But sometimes we benefit from ambiguity and being forced to really work to think through an issue to find a resolution we can live with. And maybe that’s also why so many of us struggle with big decisions, because we don’t have the certainty apparently posessed by the most rabid of either believers or non-believers. We doubt and we question ourselves – because in the gray world you mention, the line to follow isn’t always bright. And I think we’re better for it in the end.
Great post and comments.
I can’t get past seeing those bright lines that guide the zeal being manipulated (hijacked) to lead in the opposite direction of the values that should be at the center of faith – acceptance, love, compassion, etc.
I’m guided mostly by “etc.” as I move through this gray world.