23AR28-08

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AR 28:8 - Sexuality intersecting religion, culture and politics

In this issue:

APOLOGETICS - Alister McGrath's reflections upon his retirement

BUDDHISM - "neurodharma" and "prosperity Buddhism"

SEX - the "staggering" fall of traditional Christian views of sexuality in America

Apologia Report 28:8 (1,605)
March 8, 2023

Please Note: Our office will be closed next week so that neglected and aspirational duties, not included with the added duties of cook, nurse, physical therapist, etc., can be attended. Look for AR again no sooner than a week from now. <Selah.>

APOLOGETICS

"The Apologist Retires: An Interview with Alister McGrath" by Rhys Laverty (Editor-in-Chief, <www.bit.ly/3ZE1VfL> Ad Fontes, Jan 25 '23) -- Laverty's introduction acknowledges that "McGrath has made his name in both the Church and the academy as a Christian apologist.... After brief teen dalliances with atheism and Marxism, McGrath converted to Christianity in his first term as an Oxford chemistry undergrad in 1971. On the ferry journey home across the Irish Sea that Christmas, he felt himself shipwrecked on an island of faith amid the debris of his earlier rationalist certainties. He was there struck with a vision for his future: exploring the island of faith, and finding out how Christianity made sense of the whole of reality.

   "During his postgrad work in molecular biophysics, this mission led McGrath to ... a second doctorate at Cambridge on Martin Luther's doctrine of justification. ...

   "In 1971, when McGrath went to Oxford, around 90% of the UK identified as Christian, with only around 10% having no religion. In 2022, Christians, for the first time, became a minority religion in the UK, with 37.2% now claiming no religion." 

   And now "the New Atheism, has faded away entirely," having "dominated pop-level discussion of ideas from 2006 until the mid-2010.... the Four Horsemen have been rather unhorsed. Dennett is nowhere to be seen ('He's keeping his head down–wisely', says McGrath); Harris has embraced spirituality and is pegged as a member of the intellectual dark web; Dawkins has been canceled; Hitchens is dead (and many of his opinions have not aged too well). Their once-energetic fans seem to have aged out of Facebook debate; they have few defenders.

   "McGrath was the chief Christian interlocutor with the New Atheism" things having fallen to him in the early 2000s, when he "found himself in the midst of the New Atheist milieu as it was developing." Laverty passes along McGrath's recollection of a web posting by P.Z. Myers - who was a New Atheist and then stopped being one" - and who asked: "how did Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens come to be the leaders of that movement? Because they were the worst possible choice! They just were an embarrassment. So actually the movement couldn't be sustained, because these guys were totally inappropriate for the public-relations aspect that the job needed."

   Laverty: "Richard Dawkins [has been left] out in the cultural cold."

   McGrath: "The New Atheism really seems to, in effect, be saying something like 'science and reason tell you what's right, and that's it.' And of course there's been this massive movement away from that." Laverety reflects that "the New Atheism was arguably the last great pre-social media intellectual phenomenon."

   Laverty: "Having gotten to know a young research assistant by the name of N.T. Wright at Oxford in the 70s, one might wonder if McGrath has ever felt drawn into this debate. His interests, however, have always lain more in tracing the history of the doctrine, rather than innovating upon it."

   McGrath: "I keep reviewing the scholarship, and there are points at which I think some of my thoughts might need tweaking. ... And one of them is [that] nobody really quite agrees what justification is. ... And actually it's a fair point, but my response would be, look, it's a historical account."

   Laverty: McGrath "has passionately advocated for the importance of apologetics, founding the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics <theocca.org> in 2004. The rise of OCCA and other apologetics institutions is, McGrath thinks, down to the dangerous failure of churches and seminaries to train their preachers in the discipline. "I think really what has happened in effect is that individuals and organizations outside the Church of England have arisen to provide the resources necessary. That's particularly true in North America, but even here in the UK there are other people who are trying to plug that gap."

   You may be interested to know that the lengthy exchange also includes McGrath's response to the question "How disastrous have the results of the Church of England's failure to engage apologetics been?"

   A final tidbit: "McGrath is also a [C.S.] Lewis expert, and regards Lewis as a lifelong intellectual companion." <www.bit.ly/3Fkyubd>

   There's much more on McGrath in AR's past issues. <www.bit.ly/3y9X1vo> (We actually expected more hits in this search of the ARchive. That's a clear indication of his influence in our lives.)

 ---

BUDDHISM

In a 2001 article for Religion and Ethics News Weekly <www.bit.ly/3YG4JbG> written in 2001, Carl Bielefeldt, emeritus professor of Buddhist studies at Stanford, observed: "Buddhism could be 'submerged in a spiritual soup in which the Asian religion of Buddhism has been so fully blended into American culture that we may no longer be able to speak of it either as 'Asian' or as 'religion.'

   "What Bielefeldt could not foresee at the time was the possibility that when Buddhism was joined to Western science, it would generate its own clarity and become not a thing of infinite passion but a sort of cult, specifically a cult of expertise. ... As Spirit Rock Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield <www.bit.ly/3y9MvEz> has concluded, confirming Bielefeldt's fears, 'Buddhism is not a religion. It is a science of the mind.'"

   So begins an adaptation by Salon magazine (Jan 14 '23) from the book Transcendent: Art and Dharma in a Time of Collapse, by novelist and social critic Curtis White, <www.bit.ly/3EWOnUM> which was released in January. In it, White cites the example of Rick Hanson, a psychologist and fellow at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, whose 'epic eight pages of Who's Who blurbs lead me to wonder if his isn't a cult of expertise Gone Wild!' ...

   "Not in the least surprising, Hanson gave a TED talk in 2014 on meditation and happiness." (Possibly this <www.bit.ly/3T2dtY7> is it.)

   "Extending this irony, the affluence of the TED crowd is a good part of what the Buddha meant by samsara, the world of craving, grasping, clinging, and consequent suffering. TED's congregation arrives 'with a handful of gimme/and a mouth full of much obliged,' as Taj Mahal sang. In short, the wealth displayed at TED talks is itself one cause of the suffering that TED's audience is hoping a neuro-Buddha can fix.... Its final meaning is, 'I can be happy while keeping my wealth and a scientific worldview. I can be a Buddhist without actually having to change.' From a properly Buddhist perspective, this is a delusion."

   Nearing his conclusion, White remarks that "what TED is really about is branding - thus 'neurodharma,' the Rick Hanson brand. ... This is what Danish scholar Jørn Borup calls 'prosperity Buddhism,' marketing happiness to elites who can afford to buy their entrance into the path of enlightenment." <www.bit.ly/3SQ7zJx>

   For a skeptical take on TED talks in general, see <www.bit.ly/3JfM6Xe>

 ---

SEX

"Religious doctrines on sex? Beliefs are changing - big time - in American culture" by Ryan Burge (GetReligion, Feb 1 '23) -- Here's an attention grabber: "There may not be a more salient, newsworthy intersection of religion, culture and politics than sexuality and sexual behavior." And the bottom line? "It's hard to find an issue area in which the average adult in the United States holds a view that is to the right of the average American even 10 years ago."

   What's the connection? "Views of every religious group have moved in a more libertarian direction. 

   "For example, less than 20% of evangelicals favored same-sex marriage in 2004. Now, it's slightly less than 50%. In fact, evangelicals are the only religious tradition where a majority of respondents opposed same-sex marriage. It's almost become an afterthought in the Culture War. 

   "See the Respect for Marriage Act, which enshrined same-sex marriage into federal law passed across party lines. ...

   "What about a married individual having sex with someone who is not their spouse? This graph breaks that question down into five-year birth cohorts and tracks responses over nearly five decades. There's evidence here that even among Americans born in the late 1940s trends are moving toward a more permissive sexual ethic.

   "For people born in the 1970s, the share believing that extramarital sex is always wrong has dropped at least 15 percentage points in just the last 15 years. And among the youngest adults - the decline is even more precipitous. For those born in the late 1980s, nearly 85% believed that extramarital sex is always wrong. That was when that group was in their early twenties. Now, just half hold the same view.

   "There's also a question in the General Social Survey about sex before marriage. 

   "Again - there's one clear and unmistakable conclusion: people are more permissive of sexual behavior outside the bounds of marriage now than in any prior decade. 

   "This shift in overall opinion cannot be blamed on simple generational replacement, either. Instead, every birth cohort is less likely to say that premarital sex is 'not wrong at all' today than 10 or 20 years ago.

   "This is staggering to consider, but there's no birth cohort in 2021 in which less than 50% of respondents said that sex before marriage was 'not wrong at all.' Clearly, the traditional Christian view of sexuality and sexual behavior has fallen by the wayside, as a majority stance in this culture." <www.bit.ly/3EYoWm1>

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