Council for Secular Humanism

OP-ED

R. Joseph Hoffmann

Spiritual Libertarians

A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds back to religion.
- Sir Francis Bacon

Two books published in the same year tell the sad tales of the death of faith and the death of atheism. In ringing out the old order, a pugnacious but academically na�ve observer of popular culture and religious politics, Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004), diagnoses religion as the root of all evil. In his calculation, the most liberal of gay bishops and the most censorious, West-hating mullah are equally part of a problem that can be cured with a large dose of unbelief. It is an old argument: there is more evidence for Santa Claus than there is for God, and in both cases the evidence is provided by those who want to believe childish things and bake the cookies themselves.

One of the traits of believing in childish things is the disposition to defend such beliefs childishly-violently-as we witness now in the reddening tantrums of offended Muslim faithful, who can't stop to ask how a puerile and not very amusing "caricature" can amount to a "representation" of an unknown semblance. But, on balance, Harris is more wrong than right, since, if it is true that there are no gradations in religious toxicity, there should be no gradations in secularism, morality, gender, quality of prose, or love-or anything else that defines human culture.

But there are. Just as there are degrees of immaturity, there are degrees of religious maturity, and as Harris's nemesis, Professor Alister McGrath of Oxford, observed in his dirge for modern unbelief (The Twilight of Atheism, 2004), sometimes atheists behave as intolerantly, speciously, illogically, and childishly as any born-again Bible-beating fundamentalist. McGrath professes to have once gone through an atheist "phase," though his recovery curve is surely miraculous. Like many born-again theologians, he is quietly thankful that his inauspicious beginnings led him (like Dawkins) to Oxford, to enlightenment, and from science to Divinity, where he now serves as a Templeton favorite son in the cause of religio-scientific rapprochement. McGrath's approach to people like Harris would be pastoral, sympathetic, embracing. Harris, as a neo-atheist with self-described spirituality-training, represents a square beyond the secular atheism of, say, a Sidney Hook or a Paul Kurtz. Harris confuses us with defined borders. When is an atheist not an atheist? When he thinks the end of faith is the beginning of religion. But for McGrath, the key to the problem of modern atheism is that it is superficial, dogmatic, and repetitive, whereas the atheism of the good old days was profound, vehement, spacious, and original. Also, it was often English-though he does seem to know a name or two from outside the British Isles-that circumscribes most of his knowledge of the movement.

Reading the two books as a set, one can be forgiven for asking: what time is it-lights out for belief, or the dawn of a new age of faith? Perhaps neither.

While Harris propounds notions of "atheist spirituality" and McGrath intones a dies irae over a tomb for which there is no corpse, the whole debate has changed trains. And it is a change that will affect the recruitment efforts of believers and nonbelievers alike, a beyond-Gen-X noncommitalism that I hereby christen (or equivalently sprinkle) Spiritual Libertarianism.

"SLs" are not dualists. Good and evil are full of ambiguity-like life. They are not precisely atheists and not (exactly) religious either. The adherents are mainly young, well-educated or intellectually curious, devoted to animation of all sorts, and have learned history from having read fantasy well into college. They are the children of postmodern anti-historicism and antiscience. Their patron literary saints are Neil Gaiman, who writes about grails in pawnshops; Philip Pullman, who imagines antireligion religion within the human spirit; Susanne Cooper, of Bogart fame; and Diana Wynne Jones, whose hero, Christopher Chant, has become in her latest fantasy the enchanter Chrestomanci. They dislike the Christian overtones and unsubtle dualism of a C. S. Lewis or a J.R.R. Tolkien, which accounts for the popularity of J.K. Rowling among the youngest of their set. They embrace moral complexity and are relatively cynical about religion in general, but they hold to the belief that there is a spiritual core to life, the universe, or something.

SLs are on the Web more than they use printed matter. They are smart, like Jeff Sharlet, whose webzine (available at http://www.killingthebuddha.com) and book by the same name (Killing the Buddha, 2004) are constructed as antidogmatist oases "for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the 'spirituality' section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God. It is for people who somehow want to be religious, who want to know what it means to know the divine, but for good reasons are not and do not." According to Sharlet, "If the religious have come to own religious discourse it is because they alone have had places where religious language could be spoken and understood. Now there is a forum for the supposedly nonreligious to think and talk about what religion is, is not and might be. Killing the Buddha is it." The name derives from a Zen proverb about a monk who was threatened with complacency following his belief that he had "discovered" an all-encompassing truth-the Buddha-knowledge, "the big pay-off." Told by his master to "kill [this] Buddha" because such certainty could only impede the spiritual quest for truth, the monk is dismayed, and then realizes that meaning is process, not conclusion.

Sharlet has diagnosed the SL phenomenon: "I do see a slightly ridiculous alt country strand running through it all. The Louvin Brothers, especially, are patron saints. It's an uneasily urban bunch, drawn to cities like all intellectuals. Its strongest religious feeder faiths are leftist Catholicism and Jewishness, if not Judaism. Buddhism is something else altogether-too often, too earnest. Protestants of this ilk often end up retreating into anti-capitalist conservative orthodoxy, � la The New Pantagruel."

Or take the equally cynical Society of Mutual Autopsy, named after a group of combative French anthropologists of the late nineteenth century who espoused scientific atheism in society, morality, and culture. SOMA consists mainly of essays written by a small circle of contributing editors and is fronted by the impressive prose talents of John Spalding and Mary Beth Crain. Spalding, a once-born Catholic who survived an evangelical childhood to escape into Episcopalian Christianity, is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and a relentless foe of what he calls "inauthentic" (read: cheap, evangelical, dogmatic) faith. Crain describes herself as a "born Jew, born-again Buddhist/Native American with a healthy respect for Jesus and anybody else who's willing to die for the jerks who killed him, and love them too." As with Killing the Buddha, the essays in SOMA are often topical and sometimes personal or anecdotal: the equivalent of a "testimony" to being unborn again, or being reborn to a more penetrating or critical "faith." In a recent issue, Crain describes her eighty-five-year-old Jewish mother's receiving Communion in a rest home in Rochester.

In the March 21 issue, Jason Byassee responds to a book by Miroslav Volf that redefines the Trinity as "a pattern for human relationships and Christology as a source for rethinking enemy-forgiveness and for rethinking politics in the wake of unspeakable violence." The sites are slick, the readers accustomed to a potent blend of cynicism toward traditional religious ideologies and inspirational stories about how to find little gods (a little good?) in everything.

Self-described as the last stop in religionless ideology is Universism (http:// universist.org/about.htm), "the long-awaited dawn of postmodern religion- religion in the first person. We're about living creatively, free from universal truths." Where KtB and SOMA are often clever and ironic, Universism is bold, banal, and blue. Its Web site screams at you with the unmerited self-confidence of a founder who really believes he has the spiritual solution for you. The answer? "We encourage Questions about such heretofore unthought of head-scratchers as 'What is the meaning of life?' 'Where am I going?' and 'Does God exist?'" These unexacting queries, posed by founder Ford Vox, the self-appointed guru who earnestly seems to believe that he has stumbled onto finality, culminate in this helpful statement: "Universism is a religious philosophy that celebrates the mystery surrounding us. Universists don't pretend we have the answers, and we celebrate that fact! As Universists we do our best to seek answers, and the first step in our process of discovery is recognizing what we do not know. Our philosophy unites individuals who have held a wide variety of freethought perspectives along with those who consider themselves spiritual."

If KtB and SOMA provide well-written and thoughtful articles-whatever their merits as theology and philosophy-Universism offers only itself, the evolved form of humanism, deism, and freethought, of which all previous examples are incomplete and unworthy predecessors. To understand Universism as the self-professed "fulfillment" of secularism with value-added spirituality is to understand Islam in relation to Judaism and Christianity. Is the growth of the SL movement a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing? Reflect on the fact that it all boils down to you-your good or bad religious experiences, your gnawing search for meaning, your inability to find relief through the traditional avenues of church, pastoral, and sacramental care. In one sense, spiritual libertarians are unbelievers: they do not believe in much, or any, religious dogma; they are not perplexed by theological controversies; their social ethics are up for grabs or persuasion. But in other respects, SLs believe too much. In their search for a meaning that "transcends" the material and physical world, they run the risk of transforming personal experience into a kind of ego-mysticism that equates the personal with the transcendent. In this vaguely religious universe, "God" by any name other than "God" is cynical, shares your sense of humor, is variously ironic and disapproving (like you) towards a world in which humans only screw things up through war and poor planning, and would abolish religion if he wasn't (like you) so darned nice. This God invites you to skepticism about his existence at a minimum, maximally toward disbelief. And that's OK too: it's a real spiritual awakening. To the extent that this isn't about God, exactly, it looks like atheism. To the extent that it's about something that gives you a suitably "lite" equivalent for the God you don't want, it's spiritual. Religion meets South Beach.

The growth of SL must be taken seriously, because it may signal the growth of a new kind of unreason of which fundamentalism is the blunt opposite. At the same time, SLs should take seriously the real possibility that the growth of their movement, like the growth of existentialism, will result in what Sartre predicted for his own philosophy: a cause so inclusive that it means what anybody wants it to mean, and thus means nothing at all.

R. Joseph Hoffmann is Chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion at CFI/Transnational.

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