Pagans and Christians in the City

by Steven D. Smith

  8. See Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 17 (asserting that the secularist conception that they advocate, and that they perceive to enjoy a global consensus in liberal democratic societies, “has appeared only recently in history”). See generally Steven D. Smith, “The Plight of the Secular Paradigm,” Notre Dame Law Review 88 (2013): 1409.

  9. Maclure and Taylor, Secularism and Freedom, 2.

  10. Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 612–13 (1971).

  11. See Andrew Koppelman, Defending American Religious Neutrality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 46–77.

  12. See Graeme Smith, A Short History of Secularism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 20–41.

  13. In this vein, the philosopher John Searle describes the “picture of reality” that he says is mandatory for educated people in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: “The world consists entirely of entities that we find it convenient, though not entirely accurate, to describe as particles. These particles exist in fields of force, and are organized into systems. The boundaries of systems are set by causal relations. Examples of systems are mountains, planets, H2O molecules, rivers, crystals, and babies. Some of these systems are living systems; and on our little earth, the living systems contain a lot of carbon-based molecules, and make a very heavy use of hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Types of living systems evolve through natural selection, and some of them have evolved certain sorts of cellular structures, specifically, nervous systems capable of causing and sustaining consciousness. Consciousness is a biological, and therefore physical, though of course also mental feature of certain higher-level nervous systems, such as human brains and a large number of different types of animal brains.” John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), 6.

  14. With respect to philosophy, for example, Hilary Putnam explains that “philosophers announce in one or another conspicuous place in their essays and books that they are ‘naturalists’ and that the view or account being defended is a ‘naturalist’ one; this announcement, in its placing and emphasis, resembles the placing of the announcement in articles written in Stalin’s Soviet Union that a view was in agreement with Comrade Stalin’s; as in the case of the latter announcement, it is supposed to be clear that any view that is not ‘naturalist’ (not in agreement with Comrade Stalin’s) is anathema, and could not possibly be correct.” Hilary Putnam, “The Content and Appeal of ‘Naturalism,’ ” in Naturalism in Question, ed. Mario de Caro and David MacArthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 59.

  15. For a helpful survey of divergent views on these questions among professing “naturalists,” see Mario de Caro and David MacArthur, “Introduction: The Nature of Naturalism,” in de Caro and MacArthur, Naturalism in Question, 1–20.

  16. Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1963), 173.

  17. Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 97.

  18. In this vein, physicist Steven Weinberg confidently declares that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 154.

  19. See, e.g., David Niose, Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans (London: St. Martin’s Press, 2010).

  20. See, e.g., Jacques Berlinerblau, How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 53–68; Darryl Hart, A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006).

  21. One can, in other words, hold an utterly naturalistic worldview and yet think that “religion” serves a valuable and necessary social function. See, e.g., John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Penguin, 2011), 207–9.

  22. See, e.g., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155 (“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’ ”).

  23. For a sustained critical exploration of this worldview, see Joseph Vining, From Newton’s Sleep (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

  24. Edward O. Wilson, “On Human Nature,” in The Study of Human Nature: A Reader, ed. Leslie Stevenson, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 271, 272.

  25. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Why I Am Not a Christian (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), 104, 107.

  26. W. T. Stace, “Man against Darkness,” in Man against Darkness and Other Essays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), 6–7.

  27. Stace, “Man against Darkness,” 6.

  28. Stace, “Man against Darkness,” 7.

  29. Stace, “Man against Darkness,” 11.

  30. See Nancy Ann Davis, “Contemporary Deontology,” in A Companion to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 205.

  31. David Hume, “An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals,” in Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 167, 212–84.

  32. See Philip Pettit, “Consequentialism,” in Singer, A Companion to Ethics, 230. For my part, I have tried to suggest a religiously grounded answer to some of the major objections to consequentialism. See Steven D. Smith, “Is God Irrelevant?” Boston University Law Review 94 (2014): 1339.

  33. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 82–84.

  34. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic, 100–102.

  35. John Gray, Straw Dogs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).

  36. Quoted in Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life (New York: Penguin, 2007), 222.

  37. For a classic treatment of the issue leading to a negative verdict, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). For a more popular essay to similar effect, see Arthur A. Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal 1979, no. 6 (1979): 1229.

  38. See above, 23.

  39. Stace, “Man against Darkness,” 16–17.

  40. See A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 14–21. For a recent popular book advocating this Epicurean approach to life, see Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011).

  41. In this vein, see Richard Joyce, The Myth of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  42. Peter Berger, “A Bleak Outlook Is Seen for Religion,” New York Times, February 25, 1968, 3.

  43. Peter L. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World, ed. Peter L. Berger (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 1, 2, 9, 10.

  44. Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (New York: Norton, 2011). With respect to religion itself, the authors explain that “contrary to . . . predictions, the portion of the world population adhering to Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism jumped from 50 percent in 1900 to 64 percent in 2000” (2). Moreover, “a dramatic and worldwide increase in the political influence of religion has occurred in roughly the past forty years” (9 [emphasis deleted]).

  45. Ran Hirschl, Constitutional Theocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 47.

  46. See, e.g., Edward J. Larson, Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 264–6
5.

  47. See Edward J. Larson, Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory (New York: Random House, 2004), 284–85.

  48. Larson, Evolution, 292.

  49. Larson, Evolution, 20–25.

  50. Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York: Schocken, 2011), 24.

  51. Alister McGrath, Surprised by Meaning: Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 43.

  52. See Yu Jie, “China’s Christian Future,” First Things, August 2016, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/08/chinas-christian-future.

  53. See Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  54. See below, 242–43.

  55. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).

  56. See Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (New York: Clarendon, 1985), 237–89.

  57. Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986).

  58. Ronald Dworkin, “Liberty and Moralism,” in Taking Rights Seriously, 240.

  59. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, 248–53. The chapter reprinted an article that had been originally published in 1966.

  60. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, 251.

  61. See Ronald Dworkin, “Do We Have a Right to Pornography?” in A Matter of Principle, 335.

  62. John Hart Ely, “Professor Dworkin’s External/Personal Preference Distinction,” Duke Law Journal 1983 (1983): 959; H. L. A. Hart, “Between Utility and Rights,” Columbia Law Review 79 (1980): 828.

  63. Ronald Dworkin, “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It,” Philosophy and Public Affairs Journal 25 (1996): 87.

  64. Dworkin, “Objectivity and Truth,” 90, 99, 105.

  65. Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 25, 68–101.

  66. Dworkin, Life’s Dominion, 25, 71–78.

  67. Dworkin, Life’s Dominion, 79.

  68. Dworkin’s “process” explanation was the more suspect because, as he conceded, only some processes seem to elicit this reaction from us. “We do not treat everything produced by a long natural process—coal or petroleum deposits, for example—as inviolable,” Dworkin acknowledged, “and many of us have no compunction about cutting down trees to clear space for a house or slaughtering complex mammals like cows for food.” Dworkin, Life’s Dominion, 80. So then, why would we regard the products of some long processes as “sacred” or “inviolable” because of the process and the products of other long processes as totally exploitable and expendable?

  69. Dworkin, Life’s Dominion, 81.

  70. Ronald Dworkin, Religion without God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.

  71. See also Dworkin, Religion without God, 24 (“The religious person perceives the universe as ‘something of intrinsic wonder and beauty’ ”).

  72. To be sure, on this point Dworkin gave mixed signals. At one early point in the book he appeared to endorse “the supernatural,” or “something beyond nature,” or “some transcendental and objective value [that] permeates the universe” (Dworkin, Religion without God, 6). And he insisted on distinguishing his view from “naturalism.” E.g., p. 13 (“The religious attitude rejects all forms of naturalism”). But elsewhere, as we have seen, Dworkin said that the religious judgment holds that “what we call ‘nature’—the universe as a whole and in all its parts—is not just a matter of fact but is itself sublime: something of intrinsic value and wonder” (10 [emphasis added]). Dworkin also deliberately and laboriously distinguished the realm of “value” from the realm of “science” (22–29), or describable facts (a realm that for Dworkin included claims about God, who if he existed would be “a very exotic kind of scientific fact”). Religion, Dworkin emphasized, belongs in the realm of value, not of describable facts. This is surely a puzzling conjunction of propositions: namely, that the sublime is objectively real but that it does not belong to the realm of facts. Still, if the question is raised whether Dworkin located the sublime within or outside of nature, it seems that the better answer would be “within nature.” The sublime would seem to be an aspect or feature or dimension of the world, albeit one that transcends the sorts of “matters of fact” that naturalistic science studies (23).

  73. See, e.g., Martha C. Nussbaum, “Skepticism about Practical Reason in Literature and the Law,” Harvard Law Review 107 (1994): 740 (“If we really think of the hope of a transcendent ground as uninteresting or irrelevant to human ethics, as we should, then the news of its collapse will not change the way we think and act. It will just let us get on with the business of reasoning in which we were already engaged”).

  74. Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 5.

  75. Harris, Waking Up, 6. See also 202 (“Spirituality remains the great hole in secularism, humanism, rationalism, atheism, and all the other defensive postures that reasonable men and women strike in the presence of unreasonable faith”). Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.

  76. Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything (New York: Twelve, 2014), xx, 1. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.

  77. Ehrenreich, Living, 216.

  78. Dawkins at least sometimes seems to endorse the same Einsteinian sense of the mystery and beauty of the world that is central to Dworkin’s “religion.” Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 40.

  79. Dworkin, Religion without God, 5, 42–43.

  80. Dworkin, Religion without God, 2–3.

  81. See David Masci and Michael Lipka, “Americans May Be Getting Less Religious, but Feelings of Spirituality Are on the Rise,” Pew Research Center, January 21, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/21/americans-spirituality.

  82. See Masci and Lipka, “Americans May Be Getting Less Religious, but Feelings of Spirituality Are on the Rise.”

  83. See Michael Lipka, “A Closer Look at America’s Rapidly Growing Religious ‘Nones,’ ” Pew Research Center, May 13, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/13/a-closer-look-at-americas-rapidly-growing-religious-nones.

  84. Among Americans who say their religion is “nothing in particular,” 48 percent reported regularly feeling a sense of awe or wonder at the universe. See Masci and Lipka, “Americans May Be Getting Less Religious, but Feelings of Spirituality Are on the Rise.”

  85. Indeed, self-adopted labels such as “atheist” can be quite unilluminating or misleading with respect to people’s actual beliefs. For example, Pew research reveals that although about 9 percent of Americans say they do not believe in God, only about 3 percent describe themselves as “atheists,” but of those who do so self-describe, about 8 percent say they believe in God or a universal spirit. See Michael Lipka, “7 Facts about Atheists,” Pew Research Center, November 5, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/05/7-facts-about-atheists/.

  86. Martin Gardner, introduction to The Ball and the Cross, by G. K. Chesterton (New York: Dover, 1995), vi.

  87. Gardner, introduction to The Ball and the Cross, vii. Cf. Frank Viola and George Barna, Pagan Christianity? Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2002) (arguing that a great deal in modern Christian practice and worship is more pagan than authentically Christian). Viola and Barna define “pagan” rather loosely as indicating “those practices and principles that are not Christian or biblical in origin” (xxxv).

  88. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Modern American Poetry, accessed July 13, 2017, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/whitman/song.htm.
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  89. For a discussion of modern movements that call themselves “pagan,” see Owen Davies, Paganism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 106–22. Several readers suggested to me that paganism so-called has been making a comeback in Scandinavia in recent years. See, e.g., “Enormous Increase in Pagan Ásatrú Religion,” Iceland Monitor, March 28, 2017, http://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/culture_and_living/2017/03/28/enormous_increase_in_pagan_asatru_religion_in_icela.

  90. See above, 88–93.

  91. See above, 90–94.

  92. Ehrenreich, Living, 213.

  93. Ehrenreich, Living, 215.

  94. Cf. Acts 17:28.

  95. Ferdinand Mount, Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 1.

  96. Mount, Full Circle, 3.

  97. Mount, Full Circle, 6. See also 6 (“We are now hard-wired to expect history to deliver progress, flawed progress marred by horrors usually of our own making, but progress nonetheless”).

  98. Mount, Full Circle, 96.

  99. Mount, Full Circle, 441:

  By the time of the Antonine emperors in the second century AD—that period which Gibbon regarded as the summit of human felicity—Rome was a ferment of religious choice. You could believe in anything or nothing. You could put your trust in astrologers, snake-charmers, prophets and diviners and magicians; you could take your pick between half a dozen creation myths and several varieties of resurrection. Or if you belonged to the educated elite, you could read the poetry of Lucretius and subscribe to a strictly materialist description of the universe.

  In short, this is a time when anything goes and the weirdest, most frenzied creations of the human mind jostle with the most beautiful visions, the most inspiring spiritual challenges and the most challenging lines of scientific inquiry. It is hard to think of any period quite like it, before or since—until our own time.

  100. Mount, Full Circle, 204–5.

  101. Writing critically as a Christian theologian, William Cavanaugh asserts that “what remains when humans attempt to clear a space of God’s presence is not a disenchanted world but a world full of idols.” William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 120.