Postmodern religion

Public Interest, Summer, 2002 by Adam Wolfson

A PUZZLING aspect of religion in America today is that there is both less and more of it than 40 or 50 years ago. Gone is the recitation of the Lord's Prayer at the start of the school day. Gone are moments of silence in school and clergy-led prayers at graduation. Gone are many of the behavioral restraints imposed by a Christian culture--restraints on dancing, Sunday shopping, abortion, divorce, etc. And gone are the communal bonds that closely tied many individuals to their churches, synagogues, and parishes.

Yet these dramatic cultural shifts have not ushered in the secular age predicted by an earlier generation of sociologists and political scientists. Quite to the contrary. Belief in God and church attendance remain fantastically high in America. (Ninety percent of all Americans say they believe in God, and 64 percent consider religion very important.) Religious opinion continues to shape public debate on a range of issues from abortion to welfare reform to stem-cell research. Home schooling and abstinence education have taken a prominent place in public-policy discussions. Moreover, individual expressions of faith are on the upswing. When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he publicly distanced himself from his Catholicism. In contrast, in the 2000 election, George W. Bush, Albert Gore, and Joseph Lieberman all trumpeted their personal faiths. The Lord's Prayer may have been banished from public schools, but it was what Todd Beamer recited just before he led the heroic charge on the terrorists who com mandeered Flight 93.

An insightful, compactly argued new book by Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, ( ) can help make sense of these apparently contradictory trends. A Canadian political philosopher, Taylor has written extensively on religion, philosophy, the social sciences, and such contemporary political developments as multiculturalism. He is a religious believer himself (Catholic), and while his best known work, Sources of the Self, was widely acclaimed, it was also faulted by some liberal theorists for being "soft" on religion. Taylor is no conservative, however; in fact, he is usually assigned the party label "communitarian." But labels do not do justice to Taylor, and Isaiah Berlin may have been closest to the mark when he said of him: "He is, in short, a great fertilising force, a creative and original thinker."

TAYLOR describes his latest book, which is based on a series of lectures given in 2000, as an "idiosyncratic and selective" "exchange" with the great American psychologist and philosopher William James. The book is neither a comprehensive account of James's thought, which he notes is unfortunately neglected by most contemporary academic philosophers, nor a close reading of James's 1902 classic The Varieties of Religious Experience. Taylor has opted to sidestep the vast foliage and underbrush of The Varieties--James's ruminations on religion and neurology, on the psychology of such religious phenomena as saintliness, conversion, prayer, and mysticism, as well as his philosophy of pragmatism and his advocacy of a "science of religions." Instead, Taylor focuses on the political forest--what The Varieties can teach us about religion's place in modern Western democracies, especially the United States.

It is Taylor's contention that in fundamental respects our world "is a paradigmatically Jamesian one." What this means is that religion in the West has become a radically individualized affair, shorn of all shared theological beliefs and ecclesiastical and public bonds. James was the precursor. The institutional and ceremonial aspects of religion left James cold, as did formal theology. "Ideas about the gods," as James put it, or what might be done to win their favor, were, in his view, of secondary importance. The "primordial thing" was "personal religion pure and simple," by which James meant "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine." As Taylor comments, for James "the real locus of religion is in individual experience," where experience is understood to reside not in intellectual formulations but strictly in the sensibility and emotions.

By grounding religion in the passions, James did not intend to disparage its truth, for as Taylor points out, James was a defender of faith in an age of science. The scientist maintains that one must not believe in God until one has hard proof of His existence. But, as James brilliantly argued, the position of the scientist is as rooted in our "passional nature" as the desire to believe. "On one side," Taylor explains, "is the fear of believing something false if be [the scientist] follows his instincts here. But on the other there is the hope of opening out what are now inaccessible truths through the prior step of faith." So rationality does not lie on one side or the other: It is a contest between our fears and our hopes, and both the scientist and the religious believer take a gamble. If anything, the scientist takes the bigger gamble since he closes himself off from a possible source of truth.