Originally appeared in the Boston Book Review.
(Date approximate).
Some
atheists will make the . . . argument that religious rituals endorse and
encourage irrationalism. You can hardly praise religion for keeping people sane,
they say, when it sanctifies their delusions. But that wrongly assumes that it is
possible for us to rid ourselves of all supernaturalism. I'd treat religious cravings
homeopathically. The cure is the disease, in small doses.
"Sleeping
with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety" (1999)
HB: We've had
calls for a new spiritualism for a long time now. Do you think it might be time
to call for a new anti-spiritualism? Do you think this country has enough
religion?
WK: Obviously, we've been in a revivalist period for the
last ten or fifteen years and what is frustrating about it is the media really
has put a kind of tacit ban on being critical of religion.
It was a fairly common complaint at the time. Religion was
so important to American life, and the press was supposedly such a hotbed of
secularism and didn't cover it. Today, if you look at newspapers you will find
an increase in the number of religion editors and religion columns. They
started covering it more, but they cover it in a very reverential way. They
don't cover it critically. They cover individual religious leaders critically
sometimes -- Jimmy Swaggart.
HB: Elmer Gantry is always a story.
WK: Right, Elmer Gantry is always a story, and cults are
always a story. But there is this tacit and widely observed prohibition against
writing critically or even irreverently about mainstream religion. It's very
strong and it's reflexive; it's not something they even think through.
HB: How do you account for it? Why does the media tread so
softly on this subject?
WK: I don't know if it has to do with the kind of religious
tradition they've grown up with. I don't know if has it do with their having bought
into this widespread assumption that religion is good for us, and that, after
all, religion is sacred. And there is an exaggerated fear of giving offense. Of
course, they don't mind offending Moonies or people who follow various cult
figures. They just don't want to offend members of established churches.
HB: So it's permissible to take on cults as long as we leave
the major denominations alone.
WK: Cults and any kind of new age spirituality. I wrote
briefly, in "Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials," about my experience
doing an op-ed for the New York Times. They invited me to write something
critical about Hillary Clinton's conversations with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt.
They expected me, they essentially invited me, to make fun of New Age
practices. My piece said, why are we making such a fuss over this? Why is it so
strange that Hillary Clinton talks to Eleanor Roosevelt when millions of people
go to church and talk to Jesus and he's been dead for a long time? I said that
to an atheist, a seance is not necessarily any sillier than a sacrament.
The reaction from the editor was immediate. The piece came back
to me with all references to established religion deleted. I argued with them
about it and pressed them to tell me why they were taking this out and the
editor kept saying, it's gratuitously offensive. And I kept saying, it's not
gratuitous.
HB: What were they afraid of?
WK: Well they're risk averse because they're afraid they're
going to get sued for libel. I may not agree with their judgment but I understand
it; at least there's something of a rational there. If Jesus were a living
person and I were making derogatory remarks about him, I would understand why
they wouldn't want me to make those remarks.
But really, what were they afraid of? That they were going
to get a lot of letters? I mean, they're the New York Times! Angry readers
write letters all the time. I kept pressing to get them to tell me why they
wouldn't print it, and the only answer was, it was offensive.
HB: Is it new, this tendency to tread softly around
religion?
WK: I can tell you that people like it when I write
critically and irreverently about New Age spirituality. You can make fun of
that but you're not allowed to be satirical about established religion. And I can't
tell you why because they can't tell me why. It's partly that they look at
making irreverent remarks about established religion the way they look at
racial epithets. It's the same kind of instinctive taboo, except it's not an
epithet. Epithets are thoughtless, they convey nothing, they're nothing but
hurtful. But if you're conveying an idea, or simply stating the fact that an
atheist thinks a sacrament is as silly as a seance, well, that's not even
saying anything critical.. It's just an observation.
But they're very afraid of it. Maybe they're all afraid of going
to hell.
HB: I don't think there was the same timidity in the past.
WK: It certainly wasn't true when H.L. Mencken was writing.
HB: I grew up under Kennedy and Johnson, and don't remember
religion suffusing politics the way it does now.
WK: No. It didn't.
HB: There was nothing like Clinton having to go to his
pastor every day, as you recall he did during the Monica affair. The Republican
Party was being run by fundamentalists, who were running him out of office,
and, as if he hadn't had enough religion, he would go his pastor. Religion was
everywhere. It seemed like you couldn't take a position without couching it in
religiosity.
WK: Popular piety has merged with popular therapies. We were
already living in a therapeutic culture, say, in the 1980s. Therapy played an important
role in defining popular culture. The recovery movement was quite
spiritualized. The 12 step movement, in fact, came out of the evangelical
movement, and was based on surrendering to higher powers and to spiritual
authority. So there were two very powerful forces coming together, the one the
therapeutic movement, the other religion.
HB: How well undersgtood are the links among pop culture,
therapy and religion?
WK: I wrote critically on therapeutic culture in "I'm
Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional" (1992). And the critiques of the cult
of victimization have become cliches. But you won't see people making the
connection between popular religion and popular therapy, partly because not
many critics pay serious attention to books on pop spirituality, and that is
where you see the connection most clearly.
It's hard to find a critic who will read these books. I am one.
I find them highly entertaining.
HB: Is there anything in them as satisfying as fiction?
WK: No.
HB: Romance fiction?
WK: No. They're too painfully stupid. At most you can find
them funny. I alternate between being amused and depressed by them. When I was
reading self-help books ten years ago, while writing "I'm Dysfunctional,
You're Dysfunction," I might occasionally come across a book I could
respect. I could understand why intelligent people might find them useful. But
I can't say that I've ever read a pop spirituality book that engaged me, except
as a critic. And it's one of the interesting things about this phenomenon that
there are a lot of intelligent people who read these books and take them
seriously.
HB: Well, religion and intelligence are not mutually
exclusive.
WK: I'm not talking about religion. I'm talking about
"The Celestine Prophecy" (1993). I think if I had read it when I was
fourteen years old, I would recognized it as really stupid. It's a dime novel adventure
story, the writing is very childish, and the ideas are borrowed from all the
pop psychology and pop spirituality of the last ten years. And there are some
very intelligent and accomplished people who read it and like it.
It shows me that intelligence and existential anxiety, or spiritual
need, are very compartmentalized. People they don't respond with their critical
intelligence when they read "The Celestine Prophecy." They're reading
it out of some kind of anxiety or need not connected with thinking.
HB: Somewhere along the line in "Sleeping with
Extra-Terrestrials," you say that the current emphasis on feeling and on
subjectivity makes it hard to think things through rationally. But isn't it the
case that scientific rationality, rationality of any sort, just can't satisfy all
our needs?
WK: That goes without saying. But what we get from
therapeutic culture is the facile notion that it's a zero sum game, that you're
going to be completely rational or completely emotional, that reason and emotion
must compete with each other.
That's an idiotic notion. It doesn't work that way. It seems
to me obvious that you have both emotional needs and intellectual perception.
The self-help books tell you to think with your heart and not with your head;
and it seems to me quite obvious you need to think with both.
HB: Not everyone is going to enjoy the universe according to
Einstein. It may be an astonishing place but it's very mediated by science,
very intellectual. There's a need to get it on a more immediate level, to learn
it without calculus.
WK: I understand that. I'm not out to denigrate religion or
spiritual experience. What concerns me about religion in our society is its pervasiveness.
There are realms where faith is appropriate and realms where reason is
appropriate. We seem to be taking a faith-based approach to problems that
really demand empirical analysis. It's fine to believe that Jesus is the son of
God. You can only have faith in the divinity of Jesus, that's not an assertion
amenable to empirical proof.
But the
relationship of mandatory minimum sentences to drug use is not something you
should take on faith. That's something you give careful empirical analysis. You
don't take it on faith that executions deter murder. And yet, we do. Our policy
arguments are conducted as if they were arguments about articles of faith.
HB: So it's essentially the erosion of separation between
church and state that worries you, politics being faith carried out by other means.
WK: I would never say that religious people shouldn't be
active politically or that people who are active politically shouldn't be motivated
by their religious beliefs. Religion frames ideals and morals for a lot of
people. It's what motivates them to go out in the world and do they do
politically.
What I'm talking about is the inappropriate appeal to faith
at times when you want to be appealing to reason. I'm saying you don't approach
political questions the way you approach religion questions. Policy questions
need to be understood rationally unlike religion questions that need to be
understood instinctively or emotionally. You take on faith that God parted the
Red Sea for Moses or that Jesus is divine, but you don't take on faith that
cutting off welfare benefits will end teenage pregnancy.
HB: It was pretty frightening, after the Littleton
shootings, to hear Tom DeLay, say, well, what can you expect from kids who are
taught they are descended from monkeys?
WK: And what did Congress do? It passed a law saying we have
to put the Ten Commandments up in our schools. There's this widespread assumption
that we can't be virtuous without religion, and by religion people don't mean
the Moonies or any number of what they would consider marginal faiths. They
mean Christianity, for the most part, maybe Judaism, maybe Islam, mainstream
religions palatable to the majority of middle class Americans. There's a
widespread belief we can't be good without these faiths. And nobody wants to
challenge that belief.
You get into a discussion about this and you say, let's just
look at the Crusades, the witch hunts -- obvious examples in which religion
didn't lead to virtue but to violence. And people say, oh, that's just a bunch
of cliches. They don't engage the issue. Mary McCarthy said that religion is
good for good people. I think that's the most you can say about it. For some
people it's a source of compassion. For some people it's a source of murderous
brutality and tribalism.
HB: What would happen if all traditional religions were
suddenly forgotten in some huge outbreak of amnesia? Would be better off? Would
we reconstruct something equally loaded?
WK: We would reconstruct. People need to worship.
HB: But we would not have thousands of years of tribal
rivalry piled on top of religious belief.
WK: I try never to answer impossible hypotheticals but I
think the question you're asking is, is religion an historical accident or something
that comes naturally to us? My answer is that it comes very naturally to us.
I want to get back to what you were saying about Clinton publicly
responding to the Monica Lewinsky affair, and how that response seemed so
governed by religion. It was, but it was also governed by the ethic of the
therapeutic culture. You see it in Clinton turning to his three counselors
after he makes his public confession that he did have an affair with this young
woman. You hear it in his language. He uses both the language of the
therapeutic culture and religious language about confession, and they fit
together beautifully.
HB: So religion becomes more popular as it's dressed up as therapy.
And vice versa.
WK: Right. After all, he was getting counseling, pastoral counseling.
One of his counselors is a self-help writer.
HB: I can't imagine this bunch of politicians doing anything
like instituting a separation of church and state, as in the Constitution.
WK: It is very frightening. It would not happen today. You
have the Democrats as well as Republicans advocating faith-based social services,
which means giving government money to church groups. Al Gore has found it
necessary to declare his own religiosity and his own disapproval of atheism and
agnosticism. He had to put it on record that he thought secularism was hollow
and really not very good for us. You're right. It's impossible to imagine the
current crop of politicians ever writing the First Amendment.
I think that secularism is precious. It's essential to
public life in a pluralistic society, and I think it's very frightening to see
it under attack, and to see it associated with immorality. I think it will get
better after the millennium. I think if we can just get through Y2K, some of
this will just disappear.
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