Tidings of Pride, Prayer and Pluralism
Review by JON MEACHAM
December, 2005

On this morning of all mornings, the story of Christianity can seem smooth, straightforward, even sweet. With its angels and shepherds and luminous star in the sky, Christmas understandably tends to the cheerful; the faithful ponder the crèche, not the cross. Amid all this, it is unsettling to recall that Christianity is a confounding, often paradoxical faith. A father who sacrifices his son? A king who dies a criminal's death? A God whose weakness is his strength? Even St. Paul admitted that faith in Jesus required, if not what Samuel Taylor Coleridge later called a "willing suspension of disbelief," then at least an honest acknowledgment that much about the new religion surpassed understanding. There were often as many questions as answers. When the angel Gabriel tells Mary that she is to bear Jesus, her first, shaky words are: "How can this be, since I know not a man?" On the morning of the Resurrection, terrified by the empty tomb, Mary Magdalene runs to Peter and John to say: "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him." We do not know. And so it was that the faith now confessed by two billion people was born in fear and confusion.

Christianity is difficult, both in practice and in theory. Following in the Judaic tradition of valuing human reason, Christians treasure the mind as a gift of God, and the faithful are called to use his gifts to the fullest; to fail to do so is a sin. Every believer, says the author of the First Epistle of St. Peter, should "be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you." The admonition is a good one, for it encourages the faithful to ask questions, and in asking questions, one enters the debate about God and man that began with the ancient pagans.

The suggestion that Christianity is a matter of both intellect and imagination, however, has fallen from popular favor. Many secularists see the whole business as fanciful, or, at best, as a comforting tale impossible to square with empirical truths. To literalist believers, imagination is beside the point: in their eyes, inerrant Scripture teaches humankind all it really needs to know.

The current clash between secularism and religion in America is not new, but it is fierce. From Salem in the 17th century, to the Scopes trial in the 20th, to abortion rights, stem-cell research and "intelligent design" in the 21st, it appears that such conflicts will, as Jesus said of the poor, be always with us. Now as in the past, it is fashionable for many on the left to caricature the faithful as superstitious and stiff-necked; on the right, conservatives attack the skeptical with anything but Christian charity. Yet whether one believes or disbelieves, many of us would like to see a calmer, more measured conversation about faith and reason than we have had in recent years. We might well begin with those on each extreme acknowledging that life is essentially mysterious: the world does not lend itself to simple explanation. "O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!" Paul wrote. "How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" For the secular, there is Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

In my view, allowing for the existence of a transcendent order seems sounder than flatly denying the possibility altogether. "Reason itself is a matter of faith," G. K. Chesterton wrote. "It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all." Light can neither enter into nor emanate from a closed mind, and intellectual humility - acknowledging what we do not, and cannot, know - is often the beginning of wisdom.

There is not much humility to be found in the pages of Rodney Stark's provocative new book, "The Victory of Reason." If one had been asked to choose in the ninth century A.D. which part of the world would dominate the others for much of the coming millennium, one would almost certainly have put money on the world of Islam - not on Western Europe. Why Europe and its New World colonies rose to pre-eminence after the close of the Middle Ages is arguably the single greatest puzzle of modern history. Stark, however, is not puzzled. His answers are crisp, certain and to the point. Four decades ago the historian William McNeill credited Europe's ascent to its taste for war, its navigational techniques and its resistance to disease; more recently - and more vividly - Jared Diamond argued that guns, germs and steel decided the fate of the world. Now comes Stark, a prolific sociologist of religion, with a different argument. "Christianity," he writes, "created Western Civilization." He believes that the Christian emphasis on reason was the motive force in the West's rise to global dominance: "While the other world religions emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guide to religious truth."

Stark is right to argue that the idea that Christianity is incompatible with reason, a line of thought running from Celsus in the late second century to the philosophes of the Enlightenment, does not withstand historical scrutiny. In many ways, Christianity was a force for good in the West - though as the Inquisition, pogroms and centuries of intolerance show, it could also be a force for evil, a fact believers ought to confront, confess and guard against.

Stark is apparently not one for such confrontation and confession, and therein lies a problem with his argument: he is offering an absolutist answer to one of history's most complex questions. Intent on demolishing the familiar secular thesis that religion impeded progress in economics, science and politics, Stark gets carried away. Crediting Christianity with the good things of life while neglecting the faith's shortcomings, he takes only the most fleeting account of the cultural, philosophical and religious tributaries that helped create the West's mighty river. "Had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect, most of you would not have learned to read and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls," he writes. "Without a theology committed to reason, progress and moral equality" - all of which could describe faiths other than Christianity - "today the entire world would be about where non-European societies were in, say, 1800: a world with many astrologers and alchemists but no scientists. A world of despots, lacking universities, banks, factories, eyeglasses, chimneys and pianos. . . . A world truly living in 'dark ages.' " For Stark, Christianity was the only thing standing between us and such a gloomy fate, for, he writes, the Christian love of reason helped create the whole idea of progress in all fields of human endeavor.

Christianity was unquestionably an enormous factor in the story of Western progress. But there were others. Geography (Islam coveted Byzantium, not Europe), economics (Europe was less dependent on the vagaries of agriculture than other parts of the world) and tradition (in the form of the contributions of other cultures) were essential, too. China created gunpowder and paper and the compass; before the monks could preserve the manuscripts of the classics, Islam rescued the works of Aristotle and other ancient philosophers, laid strong foundations in science and medicine and helped create a global market linking Europe with the East through the Islamic world. History did not begin with Augustine or Aquinas. To return to Chesterton, a view like Stark's overlooks the role of tradition - the handing on of the work of previous generations.

Tradition, Chesterton wrote during the Edwardian Age, "means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. . . . We will have the dead at our councils." Stark declines to acknowledge the debt Christians owe their Islamic, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist fathers. He fails to count all the ballots of the dead and does not really care to: in his eyes, the future not only belonged to Christianity -Christianity basically created the future. In the early years of the faith, he writes, "the church fathers taught that reason was the supreme gift from God and the means to progressively increase their understanding of Scripture and revelation. Consequently, Christianity was oriented to the future, while the other major religions asserted the superiority of the past."

Yet Christianity has never had a monopoly on rational theology or on a concern for the future. Greece and Rome came first, and without the classical principle of "noncontradiction" - the idea that a faith could assert, for example, that "Jesus is Lord" and no one else is - it would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, for Christianity to express its faith in doctrine. Judaism and Islam, meanwhile, have long histories of approaching scripture allegorically and critically. Stark quotes the Koran as evidence of Islam's supposed innate emphasis on fundamentalism: the text, the verse says, is "the Scripture whereof there is no doubt." Many Christians, though, have taken the words of II Timothy - "all Scripture is inspired by God" - to mean that the Bible is inerrant. The fact that Jesus himself spoke so often in parables signals the nature and richness of the Jewish approach to theology and philosophy. Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jew, was a seminal interpreter of Scripture and tradition. His application of classical thought, logical rigor and literary criticism to Jewish texts foreshadowed and shaped the rationality Stark attributes to Christian thinkers. (Philo is not mentioned in the book.) Talmudic and Rabbinic Judaism are built on argument and reflection. Maimonides, who flourished under Islamic rulers, argued that the discoveries of science and philosophy could not be incompatible with the truths ordained by God (Maimonides is not mentioned either). In Islam, every verse of the Koran, meanwhile, is an "ayah," or a "sign," to ponder in order to recognize and understand the divine. One of the four basic "roots" in Islamic jurisprudence is reasoning.

"The Victory of Reason" is more polemic than history, which is too bad, for Stark is on to something important. The author of many books, including the brilliant "Rise of Christianity," he is a consistently interesting writer, and provocation is not necessarily a bad thing. Big debates sometimes need to be shaken up, and intellectual life would be much the poorer without writers advancing bracing, if incomplete, arguments. In this case, Stark is most likely being deliberately contrarian in the hope that his argument will penetrate minds long fortified by Mencken-like snobbery about the Christian intellectual tradition. To me, however, the most relevant lesson of the book is not how much Christianity has done for the world through reason, but how much reason has done, and still must do, for Christianity.

From Paul to Origen of Alexandria and beyond, the faith has fueled much intellectual good. In 1925, Alfred North Whitehead, whom Stark cites, argued that Christianity helped make Western science possible. It was the Christian idea of God, "conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher," Whitehead wrote, that rewarded reasoned thinking and exploration.

Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Taoism, it is true, are not monotheistic - there is, to use Whitehead's imagery, no single philosophical Jehovah. Yet each culture has made its share of contributions to the rising tide of civilization, from developments in mathematics, the sciences and rational philosophy in India to philosophical thought and early inventions in China to the flowering of thought, high culture, economic systems and scientific achievement in medieval Islamic societies.

Christianity has also had its share of dark intellectual hours. Stark mentions Galileo only twice, both times in passing, which is unfortunate, for there were voices in the Galileo affair arguing for a more reasoned reaction to the new science than condemnation and house arrest. It was Galileo who understood, better than his persecutors, how to reconcile apparent contradictions between faith and science. If reason leads humankind to discover a truth that seems to be incompatible with the Bible, Galileo argued, then the interpretation of Scripture, not the rational conclusion, should give way. In this he was echoing Augustine, who wrote: "If it happens that the authority of sacred Scripture is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning, this must mean that the person who interprets Scripture does not understand it correctly." Such is the intellectual footwork of a believer who is unprepared to allow the possibility that the Bible might be fallible, but Augustine's work enables Christians to take advantage of scientific and social advances without surrendering the ultimate authority of revelation. Guided by these lights, despite its sins and shortcomings, the church has ultimately removed the biblical support for the ideas that the earth, not the sun, is the physical center of the universe, that slavery is divinely ordained or that women are property.

In the West, a combination of curiosity and courage, one with roots in both classical and monotheistic thinking, enabled Europeans to set out, learn from other cultures and put that borrowed knowledge to work, often on a grand scale. As Bernard Lewis and others have pointed out, Europe had more reason to be interested in Islam than Islam did in Europe. Christianity's holiest places were under Muslim control after earlier, short-lived crusader kingdoms in Jerusalem. Islam was also a military threat to Europe; on two occasions, one in the 16th century, the other in the 17th, the Turks nearly conquered Vienna. The Western hunger for information and invention was not intrinsically Christian. It was, rather, intrinsically human. That the questing Europeans were Christian was not insignificant, but their faith in Jesus was hardly their sole motive.

Stark is to be commended for celebrating the rational element of Christian religion and culture - a part that deserves celebration and needs to be recovered. To paraphrase John Donne, though, Christian Europe was not an island. To act as if it were amounts to a sin of pride - and, as the Book of Proverbs says, "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."

Pride is fueling an unhappy trend toward Christian self-satisfaction in the United States. Though roughly 80 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians, conservative evangelicals have long felt themselves under siege, particularly since the 1962 Supreme Court decision banning government-written prayer in public schools. In reaction they have spent the ensuing four decades becoming a major political force. Instead of reading Stark as an amicus brief for the faith, though, believers might be best off taking his case for an intellectually curious Christianity to heart.

Such a faith might profitably begin with a consideration of Augustine, who argued for the significance not only of reason but of free will - the idea that people have it within their power to choose to accept God and follow his commandments in the hope of attaining everlasting life. We are also free to choose another course, one leading, in religious terms, away from God. This is not esoteric theology, for free will is linked to a question central to American life: religious liberty. If the prevailing culture can coerce the reluctant to say prayers they do not wish to say, then faith is no longer a matter of free will. To render religion compulsory cheapens it and turns the entire enterprise into a sinful one, for the majority is making an idol of itself by compelling obedience - something God himself refuses to do.

An important new book, "Taking Religious Pluralism Seriously," edited by Barbara A. McGraw and Jo Renee Formicola, lays out the history of tolerance in the United States while urgently reminding us what is at stake when we speak, as we so often do, of "church and state" or "moral values" or "the culture wars." A series of essays by various contributors, the volume discusses religion in America's public square from the perspective of different traditions and recovers early American thought on the connection between God and politics. Exploring John Locke's influence on the founders, McGraw writes that, contrary to prevailing academic sentiment, Locke was not a "secular" philosopher. "Locke did not reject religion," she writes. "Instead, he shifted to a different religious idea based on a very simple theology: there is God, and God communicates with the people." Hence the centrality of religious liberty. "This is why freedom of conscience must be preserved: so that the people can listen for and hear the voice of God and participate in society according to that call," McGraw says. By "God," the founders meant many things. They referred to a supernatural presence by the following terms: "Supreme Governor of the Universe," "Governor of the Universe," "the Universal Sovereign," "Nature's God," "Creator," "Supreme Judge of the World" and "Divine Providence." McGraw coined the term "America's Sacred Ground" a few years ago, a social science construct with subsidiary parts called the "Civic Public Forum" and the "Conscientious Public Forum," about which the contributors speak as though these were geographical places (for example, such and such issue should be debated on "America's Sacred Ground" in the same way one would say something should be debated in, say, Boston or Atlanta). The technical terms are distracting, but distraction is a small price to pay for the book's valuable insights and welcome spirit of moderation.

The politics of what is called, depending on where you stand, the "religious right" or "the faith-based community" are put in devastating historical context. In the volume's best essay, Derek H. Davis examines what he calls "The Baptist Tradition of Religious Liberty," invoking the denomination's history of insisting that the church follow Jesus' lead in rendering to God those things which are God's, and to Caesar those things which are Caesar's. "According to traditional Baptist belief, a government that gives preferential treatment to certain religious beliefs breaches the eternal and inalienable rights of each individual," Davis writes, "and disobeys the will of God" - a message that will probably surprise some in the pews and pulpits of politically active congregations. John Leland, an 18th-century Baptist evangelist who worked with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to secure religious freedom in Virginia, wrote: "Let every man speak freely without fear, maintain the principles that he believes, worship according to his own faith, either one God, three Gods, no God, or twenty Gods; and let government protect him in doing so."

Leland's image of the free man going about his business, answerable only to himself and his conscience so long as he does no harm to others, turns our attention away from theology and politics to what religion actually is for most people: the prayers they say, the emotions they feel, the questions they ask. In a lovely, interesting new book, "Prayer: A History," Philip and Carol Zaleski explore this most personal of religious practices in an ecumenical spirit. Defining prayer as an "action that communicates between human and divine realms," the authors trace its long and rich history, from evidence of Neanderthal prayers for the dead to Franny's "Jesus Prayer" in J. D. Salinger's "Franny and Zooey." Thomas Merton called the exercise "a raid on the unspeakable"; Solomon beseeched the Lord to grant "whatever prayer, whatever supplication is made by any man or by all thy people Israel"; Ramakrishna sought "God-Consciousness" through spiritual rapture.

The beginning of tragedy, it has been said, came when a suffering mortal first raised his hands to the heavens and cried, "Why?" This, too, is a prayer, a manifestation of the longing to make sense of the insensible. For many, the answer has led them to become one of the children of Abraham. For many others, the answer lies with the Buddha's Dharma (or Teaching), or with Brahman, or with the Tao, or with Confucius. For many others, the answer comes from the sciences or from secular philosophy. The common thread is the search for comfort and order in a world that inevitably falls short of our expectations. The common hope is that perhaps one day, as St. John the Divine said in an echo of Isaiah, "there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away."

On Christmas morning 1825, John Henry Newman, a young man of ferocious intellect and intense faith who had just been ordained an Anglican priest (he would die a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church), preached a sermon while a curate of St. Clement's Church, Oxford. "It is a day of joy: it is good to be joyful - it is wrong to be otherwise," Newman said. "Let us seek the grace of a cheerful heart, an even temper, sweetness, gentleness and brightness of mind, as walking in His light and by His grace." Such was the view of a questing and committed Christian, a view not so different from that of Robert Ingersoll, the 19th-century American agnostic. "Christmas is a good day to forgive and forget - a good day to throw away prejudices and hatreds - a good day to fill your heart and your house, and the hearts and houses of others, with sunshine." Newman thought the brightness came from the Christ child; Ingersoll from simple human kindness. The important thing is that both detected light and each cherished it according to the dictates of his own mind and his own heart - an encouraging sign that there is more than one way to overcome the darkness.