A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Priorities

I like this, from Brandon:

Here and there over the past few years I’ve seen a great many Christians who are of the opinion that argument with the so-called New Atheists should be a major priority among Christians, and I recently saw another instance of this. They don’t generally ask my advice, but whenever people do, I always suggest that this is exactly the wrong way to go. The fact of the matter is, however important they may seem to themselves, and however visible they may be, they are of extraordinarily minute importance in the vast concerns of the Church. Our relations with Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists are all vastly more important, and our relations with our fellow Christians more important still. And of all the foes we fight in our fight against the World, the darkness of the Zeitgeist, the New Atheists are puppy dogs; it is foolish to spend our time focusing so much on the little pups that we ignore the wolves. And of all the problems we face, we ourselves are more of a problem for us than they are; particularly the absurd ease with which we all are distracted from what is truly important by the fact of who happens to have made it to the bestseller list recently, or by some other utterly frivolous thing. And what is truly important, of course, is clear: Love God and neighbor, and when we somehow fail to do so, set out again and again until with God’s grace we succeed. Everything else is hobby.

When’s the last time you saw a serious Christian engagement with Sikhism?

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5 responses to “Priorities”

  1. Jeremy

    I understand that a lot of people have dismissed the New Atheists as intellectual lightweights not worthy of serious attention. That may be true. Nevertheless, they wreaked hell among some close friends of mine. Now, clearly, it is not the responsibility of every Christian to drop everything they’re doing in order to answer the New Atheists. I am glad, though, (and I say this respectfully) that many Christians haven’t ignored them because there was a time there when I was in serious need of a life raft. The New Atheists are popular because they really are speaking to and for an increasing number of people. If we really are to minister to those in need then those among us (and I’m not one of them) with a gift for apologetics must be willing to engage all comers, whether we think their arguments are respectable or not.

    I hope I don’t come across as rude. I really don’t mean to be.

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  2. Lee

    Jeremy, that’s a fair point. I do think there’s a legitimate division of labor here, and clearly it’s reasonable for somebody to take on the New Atheists. (And clearly, most American Christians are more likely to see atheism as a live option–to use a Jamesian term–than Sikhism.)

    At the same time, I think Brandon has a point that Christians shouldn’t paint themselves into a corner where they’re reacting against whatever gets the most media attention, or seems important to a particular subset of the chattering classes. I think it behooves them (us) to cultivate a less parochial perspective.

    (And I’d say you’re about one of the least rude people I’ve ever interacted with on the Internet.)

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  3. Camassia

    Yeah, when I was going around visiting family and friends last year I found some of them had been reading the New Atheists and taking them seriously. I remember one guy saying that he knew the factuality of Hitchens’ book had been challenged, “but if even half of it’s true, that’s still pretty serious!” It’s too early to tell if this is having any broader cultural impact, but they may be succeeding in their goal of turning squishy secularists in actual anti-religionists.

    I think the debate is also useful in that it’s forcing a lot of Protestants to grapple with Christian history. A lot of the atheist anti-religion tropes are simply the old Protestant anti-Catholic tropes taken to their logical extreme. A lot of the more intelligent responses to the New Atheists have been interesting and helpful to me, precisely because they deal with the impact Christianity has actually had on the world rather than the ideals that people draw from reading the New Testament.

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  4. Brandon

    I don’t think they should be ignored entirely. Not all of them are intellectual lightweights, and certainly some people here and there will occasionally find them in circumstances where some ready answer is demanded and chartiy itself would require that serious attention be given to the matter. But I think it’s dangerous to see them as the primary issue even where they do have influence: the fact that they do speak to and for a growing number of people is symptomatic of deeper underlying problems that they are able to take advantage of. Addressing them is symptom-treatment. As in medicine, there are times when symptoms must be treated; but if you focus too much on that, you’ll cause even more serious problems for yourself down the road. And, in fact, I think this is what gave the New Atheists room to maneuver in the first place. We have wasted so much on so many temporary and minor battles, and we are paying for decades of shortsightedness by losing ground to forms of attack we had plenty of time and opportunity to prepare for and perhaps even prevent.

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  5. Lee

    It’s also worth pointing out the element of crass commercialism in all this. The former publishing-monkey in me has a hard time suppressing the hunch that not all of these responses to the new atheists were rushed to press out of pure zeal for the gospel.

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