A critical but substantive faith

William Placher reviews Hitchens’ God Is Not Great at the Christian Century. He’s surprisingly appreciative, though he doesn’t shy from criticism (“The second frustration of reading this book [in addition to the factual errors], at least for a theologian, is that its author seems not to have read any modern theology, or even to know that it exists.”)

Placher ends with a call for religious “moderates” (for lack of a better term) to make their presence felt:

Many Americans today are scared of religion. Radical Islamic terrorists threaten the safety of major cities. George W. Bush assures us that God has led him to his Iraq policy. The local schools, under pressure, avoid teaching evolution. The Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles is selling off property to pay victims of priestly sexual abuse. One trembles to think that many people get their picture of faith from the “Christian channels” on television. No wonder religion has, in many quarters, a bad reputation.

I think many of us—I do not mean just trained theologians, but ordinary folks in churches, mosques and synagogues as well—have found ways to be religious without being either stupid or homicidal. We are, as the cover of the Christian Century puts it, “thinking critically, living faithfully.” Not enough of our nonreligious neighbors know enough about what we believe. We need to speak up.

Repeatedly Hitchens cites some horrible thing that some religious folks did or said and then notes that mainstream religious leaders did not criticize it. Although I do not always trust his claims, I suspect that in this case he is at least partly right. Too many of us have been too reluctant to denounce religious lunatics, and because of our reluctance we risk arousing the suspicion that we are partly on their side.

Hitchens ends his book with an appeal to his readers to “escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars, . . . to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.” Shouldn’t one of the lessons of this book have been that comfortable intellectuals should be more careful of using words like fight? Fundamentalists of one sort or another, after all, urge their followers to fight the evils of secularism and atheism. As the battle lines are drawn between the two extremes, it seems to me that folks like those who read the Christian Century need to put aside our obsessively good manners and shout, “Hey! Those aren’t the only alternatives! We’re here too!”

I think that mainliners often have an easier time articulating what they don’t believe (we’re not like those fundamentalists!) than what they do. We’re supposed to be “living the questions” as they say. But if Placher is right – and I think he is – this isn’t enough. There needs to be an attractive alternative to the extremes of fundamentalism and strident atheism that is committed to the classic center of Christian faith. Without that the church becomes little more than a weird kind of social club (the Kiwanis with crosses as I believe Chris put it recently), or a cut-rate social service organization.