Is Religion
the Devil?
Amid the
din or debate over recent anti-theistic books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher
Hitchens, Daniel C. Dennett, and Sam Harris, I catch one recurrent strain that
bothers me. These critics do not merely decline to accept arguments for God’s
existence. They do not merely lament the great evils done by religious people
and for the sake of their religions. They seem to go a significant step farther
and declare that religion is inherently evil, and, worse yet, that it is the
root of humanity’s problems. Call it a Utopian atheism that “imagines”
John Lennon’s faith-free world as a paradise.
And it
strikes me that I have heard something much like this before. What was it? Oh
yes: the fundamentalist belief in Satan, the anti-panacaea, the source of all
ills. Satan, without whom no evil would infiltrate existence, without whom evil,
to borrow Hitchens’s term, would not “poison everything.”
Some regard fundamentalism as pessimistic, seeing evil crowding everywhere,
lurking behind every bush, as Young Goodman Brown did. Paranoid, yes, but pessimistic,
no. Instead, I should say fundamentalists are naively optimistic. How simple
a matter, in principle, to cure the world’s ills: get rid of Satan. “Cast
out the scorner, and dissention will go out,” Proverbs tells us. And Satan
is the Big Scorner, the one who pitches apples of discord everywhere, like hand
grenades, in every direction, every chance he gets. If we could just stop him,
like silencing a loud-mouth dog late at night, we could all go peacefully back
to sleep.
I hardly
need point out, that is to scapegoat Satan. Believing in the devil at all, as
Feuerbach explained, is a refusal to take responsibility for our own actions
and urges. God, too, is a scapegoat: upon him we pile our own greatness, our
own virtues, because we are too lazy or too cowardly to bear them on our own
shoulders.
If not
for Satan, everything would be peachy. Once, in 1978, just after the Jonestown
horror, I was chatting with a Professor of Missions at Gordon-Conwell Theological
Seminary. (Incidentally, he had once pastured a church for English speakers
in Afghanistan—until the local savages tore it down.) He said to me, “Bob,
don’t you think this Guyana tragedy attests the reality of Satan?”
I replied, “No, Dr. Wilson, I’m afraid I don’t. What it attests
is the perversity of human nature.” I only wish we required a handy devil
to explain these things! I only wish evil was such a mystery that we had to
posit some unseen, non-human source, to account for it. But we don’t.
Don’t
get me wrong. It’s not that I deny there are suprahuman agencies that
screw things up for us. These are not the devil, but the similar myth of the
Principalities and Powers. In sociological terms, there are corporate entities
that we humans create, and which begin to run on their own steam till they do
not need us and they rule us instead of serving us. Bureaucracies of various
kinds are a prime example. Public Opinion, Big Business, Big Money, the Vatican,
the Military-Industrial Complex, etc. These are powerful human creations run
amok—like the Frankenstein Monster. It’s no longer possible to shut
them down and correct them. But they, too, are our fault. There is no devil
to blame.
If our
strident atheists argued merely that people have done terrible things in the
name of religion, they’d win the argument quickly because absolutely no
one disagrees with this. Everyone laments such religious atrocities (except,
of course, the fiends who are busy planning new ones!). And if that was where
you had to leave the matter, the door would still be open to improving religion.
One could not argue it would be best to repent of religion as a sin, to eradicate
it as a disease. So militant atheists have to argue that religion is inherently
evil and “poisons everything.” It is the sum of all fears, the root
of all evils. If we could only get rid of it, all would be fine.
There is
the same naivete I was talking about in fundamentalism! Doesn’t militant,
“take no prisoners” atheism dream implausibly of a godless paradise?
But surely it was not belief in God that caused Hitler to gas the Jews or Stalin
the Ukrainians? I know the programmed reply of the atheist apologist at this
juncture, ready on the tip of the tongue, is “Hitler and Stalin essentially
were religious, being dogmatic zealots, holding to dangerous beliefs despite
the evidence against them.” But it is merely circular to assign religion
these negative predicates. What makes narrow-mindedness essentially religious?
What makes fanatical zealotry religious more than merely psychological? You
can’t just get away with saying, “The narrow-minded atheist is being
religious insofar as he is narrow-minded”! Seems to me that narrow zealotry
is a regrettable trait shared by religious and nonreligious people alike, while
obviously neither religiosity and impiety are so shared. I suspect these atheists
are claiming “Heads I win, tails you lose!” Haloed heads and pointed
tails.
A friend
and colleague just sent out an essay which took Richard Dawkins to task for
taking religion too seriously as the source of our problems. I was amazed at
how similar the point was to the one I wanted to make in this column. But then,
as I read on, I saw that my friend had simply substituted a different devil:
Capitalism, which I consider no devil, or evil, at all. Sure, there are greedy
bastards who take advantage of the system, but that was just as true of Communism
where it once flourished. Now I could say my friend is “religious”
in his use of this tactic of scapegoating and oversimplification. But I won’t.
Because it is in no discernable way “religious” if he is not using
it in service to religion or as the direct outgrowth of religious beliefs. It
is just a thing people do. Capitalism is not the devil, but my friend is not
religious for saying that it is. He is just mistaken, as human beings often
are. And as religions often are, with terrible consequences.
So says
Zarathustra.
