Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  It is easier to understand how a pagan, believing in many gods who embody a multitude of human characteristics, might turn to belief in a three-personed deity than it is to understand how, for example, a Jew might embrace a religion insisting that the role of the Jewish people in the divine plan must end with Jesus. It is equally mystifying to contemplate the conversion to Islam of those who, having formerly worshipped Jesus as the Messiah, are now convinced that the once-supreme Galilean was only a prophet—and a less important prophet than Muhammad. The intellectual rationales for the replacement of one absolute truth by another are as diverse as the intense personalities of those who consider religious conversion the most important experience of their lives, but at some point, they all boil down to “I was blind, but now I see.” This explanation is sufficient from the standpoint of faith alone but not from the standpoint of reason.

  The complex motivations for conversion in every era belie the standard Christian explanation for the victory of the followers of Jesus in the world of late Roman antiquity—that Christianity was right and everyone with a modicum of sense saw that. Augustine could not have been more wrong when he remarked that the chief characteristic of those defined by both the church and the state as heretics was their inability to see what was obvious to everyone else. Heresies would not have needed to be suppressed by the church-state duo in the twilight of the empire had the dissidents been so few and their arguments so weak that they were unable to sway other spiritual seekers.

  •

  In this book, I focus on conversion in the Western world—with forays into the Middle East as the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—because I am concerned primarily with places in which the three great monotheistic faiths converged (and continue to do so) with competing truth claims. The split between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox forms of Christianity, as well as the interaction among Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and various nonmonotheistic religions around the globe, is equally important but would require many more volumes than The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I have also concentrated on times and civilizations, from the twilight of the Roman Empire to the twentieth century in the United States, when conversions have been common enough to be responsible for significant cultural change.

  In thinking about both the eternal and temporal power of conversion in the history of the West, the American idea of a free “religious marketplace”—a phrase that strikes people in many other countries as comical because of its economic overtones—might be seen as the completion of a full circle beginning with the potpourri of religions tolerated by the Roman Empire. Yet the intermingling of different religious traditions in the twenty-first-century global village is never friction-free, and it is violence-free only in parts of the world that have gone through the long, contentious Enlightenment rejection of theocracy and come out on the other side. To see freedom of conscience as a human right as the contentious idea it still is, one need only look at instances of religious persecution and violence around the world. They offer an embarrassment of examples rich with blood—massacres in the 1990s of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian Christians; the choice of death or conversion to a particular brand of Islam now being forced on Middle Eastern Christians and on dissenting Muslims by radical Islamic terrorists; the imprisonment of atheists and freethinkers in many Muslim-majority countries; the repression of practicing Christians and Buddhists in Communist China. In much of the world, the free Enlightenment conscience is still regarded with all the affection directed at Dr. Frankenstein’s creature.

  Even when forced conversion is not involved, intense proselytizing by monotheistic religions asserting that they represent the only “true” faith raises problematic issues throughout the world. Mainstream Islam and many Christian churches remain aggressive proselytizers for voluntary conversion today—especially in Africa, Latin America, the Indian subcontinent, and the Far East. The new proselytizers compete not only with one another but with other historically established faiths, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. In South America, Pentecostals have made considerable inroads in historically Catholic populations.

  Christianity remains a forceful and successful proselytizing religion mainly in the poorest regions of the globe. The immense personal popularity of Pope Francis, exemplified by the enthusiastic reception he received in the United States last year, has created considerable speculation that Christian conversion efforts might become more fruitful in prosperous, educated countries—at least for the Roman Catholic Church. However, the pope’s tolerant tone has not led to any compromise on doctrines—especially regarding contraception, divorce, and gay marriage—that have drawn educated Catholics away from the church and discouraged conversions in most developed nations. Any reference to the ineffectiveness of proselytizing in well-educated communities elicits resentment on the part of many religious moderates as well as fundamentalists. On a panel several years ago, Reza Aslan, a liberal Muslim and the author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013), immediately accused me of believing that all religious people are stupid when I mentioned the connection between successful proselytizing and poorly educated societies. Aslan was confusing lack of education with stupidity. I would never suggest that that every person of faith is stupid; such an idea would be, well, stupid. Who would defend the preposterous position that every devout scholar of every religion, from time immemorial, has been a fool? But it is quite a different matter to say that the intellectually brilliant Augustine was unhealthily obsessed with original sin, or that the sophisticated Pope Francis, however appealing a figure he may be in other respects, is displaying misogyny by his reaffirmation of an all-male priesthood. I do not consider the holders of such beliefs stupid; I think they are wrong. What I do argue, and my argument is amply supported by demographic evidence, is that the less educated people are, the more likely they are to be gullible when presented with the most simplistic forms of faith—those relying on literal interpretations of “sacred” books and supernatural experiences that defy evidence. Educated religious liberals may not like it, but there is a strong correlation, everywhere in the world, between secularism and higher education, and between religious fundamentalism and low levels of education.

  This is not to say that only those lacking formal education are willing to embrace literal and aggressively anti-scientific forms of faith. I happened to have a doctor’s appointment on the day in 2012 when an ultra-conservative senatorial candidate from Missouri, Todd Akin, opened his mouth to suggest that women who had been subjected to “legitimate rape” had natural bodily ways of preventing themselves from becoming pregnant. The doctor said to me, “Surely he doesn’t really believe that.” Having interviewed many such evidence-blind believers (with and without college degrees), I assured my doctor that such people reject any medical facts—such as the inability of a woman to decide, without contraception, whether a sperm will fertilize her egg—that undermine their religio-political beliefs. How much more vulnerable to the most anti-scientific forms of religion are those with no education at all, like many in areas of Africa and Latin America where Catholicism and evangelical Pentecostalism have garnered large numbers of converts in recent years? These new converts are not stupid—or they are no more stupid than any other group of people—but they are woefully undereducated. As for Akin, who lost his senatorial race, his statements prove not that all educated believers are stupid but that some stupid people with a formal education are religious believers. And, yes, there are stupid and gullible atheists, too. The atheist Ayn Rand’s philosophy of “Objectivism” is every bit as mystifying as the Holy Trinity, and I have received a fair number of e-mails from atheists who worship at that goofy altar. Those religious believers who agree with Ayn Rand’s extreme free-market economics simply ignore the fact that their goddess was an atheist.

  •

  The idea of religious choice as a human right—for the stupid, the brilliant, and everyone in between—always depends on the degrees of separation between chur
ch and state. The Puritans who founded the theocratic Massachusetts Bay Colony were concerned about their own freedom of religion, not anyone else’s. Only the availability of plentiful nearby land, which enabled Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson to flee to Rhode Island to practice their own form of faith, saved religious dissenters in the New World from the fate of their contemporaries in theocratic Europe. (Two hundred years later, the spaciousness of America would save the Mormons from their persecutors—though it wouldn’t always save non-Mormon settlers on their way to Utah from the Mormons.)

  By the time of the American Revolution, the colonies were populated with divergent Protestant denominations that had been at one another’s throats in the Old World, along with a minority of Catholics and an even smaller minority of Jews. The framers of the Constitution wanted a new government that neither favored nor was controlled by any religion. And so the Constitution omitted any mention of God—a deliberate oversight, much debated at state ratifying conventions, that has never ceased to be a subject of dissension in American political discourse.

  The godless Constitution is arguably the main reason the United States is a more religious society today than any of the nations of Europe. The separation of church and state, the framers’ original gift to their own people, also separated religious dissent from political dissent—a distinction impossible in countries with an established church. If an American didn’t like the faith of his fathers, he could go off and found a new religion without any imputation of political disloyalty. In the nineteenth century, when Europe was still struggling with its ancient entanglements between church and state, Americans founded three new, aggressive proselytizing faiths—Mormonism, Christian Science, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses (although the majority of Americans disliked all of these faiths for a long time). In the twenty-first century, religious conversion is much more common in the United States than it is in the more secular developed countries of Europe and Asia—ten to twenty times more common than it is in Italy, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, or Japan. Whether the default religion is Catholicism, as in Southern Europe, or Protestantism, as in most of Northern Europe, Europeans who no longer practice the faith into which they were born generally lapse into a comfortable, socially uncontroversial secularism or atheism (a word with none of the pejorative connotations that it possesses in the United States).

  The American propensity for changing religions and inventing new ones is also related to the “pursuit of happiness” encoded in our national DNA. In the United States, religious choice is yet another form of personal satisfaction open to those with many other potential sources of well-being. “Religion seems more like psychology here than anything else,” says a Russian friend of mine who immigrated to the United States in the late 1990s. “It’s a tool to make you feel better about yourselves.” I know what she means. Nowhere else on earth is the connection between religion and secular self-help psychology as strong as it is here—though religion everywhere, at all times in human history, has always been a tool for making people feel better, or less bad, about themselves.

  Only in America do we speak with approval about a religious marketplace, a sort of spiritual bazaar in which everyone is free to sample the wares, whether proffered by Western monotheist faiths, Eastern religions, or the quasi-religious self-help groups that encourage people to assert, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” What this statement often means is “I want the consolations of faith without the obligations of an organized religion.” In any case, the varieties of religious experience on display in the American spiritual bazaar are luxury goods, to be tried on and taken home without obliging the consumer to incur any of the costs attached to religious conversion in less tolerant societies and periods of history.

  But even in America, the customer is not always right if his or her religious choice falls too far outside the norm. The generally positive American attitude toward religious conversion does not apply to minority faiths perceived as “un-American”—Catholicism and Mormonism yesterday, much of Islam today. Nevertheless, the United States has displayed a remarkable capacity, since the 1970s, for tolerance toward religions that used to be despised. My father would be surprised to know that Jew-hating is socially unacceptable now—whatever anti-Semitic views Americans might still hold privately. Atheism, however, is still viewed much more negatively by Americans (although the young are more tolerant on this score) than any religion.

  “I was blind, but now I see” is surely one of the most powerful metaphors written into one of the most beautiful songs of faith in the history of Christianity. But there has always been a disturbing, unsung corollary for those who are certain that they possess absolute spiritual truth: “You are blind, and now you must see what I see.” In my experience, this dualism was expressed most poignantly by a devout student at Augustana College, a Lutheran institution of higher education in Illinois. I had been invited to speak in 2005 at Augustana (one of the many old, religion-based colleges in this country that bear no resemblance to intolerant fundamentalist institutions founded in recent decades by men like Bob Jones and Jerry Falwell) about my book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. After the talk, an eighteen-year-old freshman approached me and said, “My mind tells me one thing and my soul another. I see all of the arguments you’re making for the importance of complete freedom of conscience in a democracy and for not imposing your own religious views on others who think differently. But I know that I am in possession of the truth, and I just don’t know how to reconcile that with not doing everything I can to spread the truth to others, even if you might call it an intrusion on your freedom.” I sympathized with this young man, although I cannot begin to understand what it feels like to think that you know—he chose that word deliberately when he might have chosen to say “believe”—the truth as decreed by any god. I would not be surprised—because he would not have sought me out if he had not already begun to question the faith of his fathers—if he eventually becomes one of the millions of Americans whose religious beliefs change enough to qualify as conversions. He told me that he had already made one major change in his “life plan”: after a year of college, he had decided to become a high school history teacher rather than a minister.

  This student, like millions of spiritual seekers in the distant past and the present, is more than a social construct. He nevertheless offers an excellent example of the social forces—in his case, exposure to a first-rate secular as well as religious higher education—that shape and potentially change individual faith. Conversion is not merely a metaphor of rebirth but a flesh-and-blood experience that plays out on earth, not in heaven. Only on the mortal plane can we begin to understand how the “curious” conversion impulse, as James put it, has shaped not just individuals but the course of Western history—for better and for worse.

  * * *

  *1 This story is told in greater detail in my 2000 memoir, Half-Jew: A Daughter’s Search for Her Family’s Buried Past (New York: Scribner), recently published as an eBook by Vintage Books.

  *2 See Lecture IX, “Conversion,” in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

  *3 The statistic comes from the Pew Research Center, considered the gold standard of research on American religious practices and trends today.

  *4 Much of the data in American Grace comes from surveys, titled Faith Matters, conducted by the authors in 2006 and 2007.

  *5 There is some dispute among scholars about whether Luther actually did nail his theses to the church door or whether the story is just a part of Luther’s legend. There is no doubt, though, that many of his contemporaries believed in the literal truth of this story.

  · PART I ·

  YOUNG CHRISTENDOM AND THE FADING PAGAN GODS

  1

  AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO (354–430)

  Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

  —PAUL, COLOSSIANS 2:8

 
AUGUSTINE, a teenager studying in Carthage in the 370s, begins to ponder what he will one day consider the inevitable shortcomings of human philosophy ungrounded in the word of God. This process begins, as Augustine will later recount in his Confessions, when he reads Cicero’s Hortensius, written around 45 B.C.E. The young scholar, unacquainted with either Jewish or Christian Scripture, takes away the (surely unintended) lesson from the pagan Cicero that only faith—a faith that places the supernatural above the natural—can satisfy the longing for wisdom.

  “But, O Light of my heart,” Augustine wrote to his god in Confessions (c. 397), “you know that at that time, although Paul’s words were not known to me, the only thing that pleased me in Cicero’s book was his advice not simply to admire one or another of the schools of philosophy, but to love wisdom itself, whatever it might be….These were the words which excited me and set me burning with fire, and the only check to this blaze of enthusiasm was that they made no mention of the name of Christ.”1

  The only check? To me, this passage from Confessions has always sounded like the many rewritings of personal history intended to conform the past to the author’s current beliefs and status in life—which in Augustine’s case meant being an influential bishop of an ascendant church that would tolerate no dissent grounded in other religious or secular philosophies. By the time he writes Confessions, Augustine seems a trifle embarrassed about having been so impressed, as a young man, by a pagan writer. So he finds a way to absolve himself of the sin of attraction to small-“c” catholic, often secular intellectual interests by limiting Cicero to his assigned role as one step in a fourth-century boy’s journey toward capital-“C” Catholicism. It is the adult Augustine who must reconcile his enthusiasm for Cicero with the absence of the name of Christ; there is no reason why this should have bothered the pagan adolescent Augustine at all. Nevertheless, no passage in the writings of the fathers of the church, or in any personal accounts of the intellectual and emotional process of conversion, explains more lucidly (albeit indirectly) why the triumph of Christianity inevitably begins with that other seeker on the road to Damascus. It is Paul, after all, not Jesus or the authors of the Gospels, who merits a mention in Augustine’s explanation of how his journey toward the one true faith was set in motion by a pagan.