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AR 30:2 - Two new contrasting theories of relevance
In this issue:
REALISM - "the idea that liberalism could ever be the 'final' form of government is just as hubristic as the Social Gospel movement was"
WORLDVIEW - "a theologically serious, psychologically sophisticated diagnosis" of the West's spiritual condition
Apologia Report 30:2 (1,691)
January 15, 2025
REALISM
"A New 'Realist' Look at Religion" by Sheluyang Peng (Providence, Nov 26 '24) -- a review of University of Oklahoma sociology professor Samuel Perry's new book Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion. <www.tinyurl.com/2s55e9mw>
"The most prominent example before [Perry] comes from the Christian Realist school of thought advanced by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (who identified its progenitors in Augustine and Luther), which pushed against the utopian Social Gospel adherents of his day in favor of a Christian worldview that understood the limitations of humans' fallen natures." Peng explains that "Niebuhrian realism teaches that humans are limited by our sinful nature, while Perry's realism teaches that humans are limited by the way we imagine ourselves as rational individuals.
"The core of Perry's claim, articulated over four chapters, is that the standard way we Americans understand religion is wrong compared to his 'realist' view on religion. Americans typically believe that religion is about individuals coming to faith or adhering to doctrine, but in reality, Perry argues, religion is about groups forming tribal identities: that it 'orients us within our in-group and it clothes "our people" and "how we do things" with transcendence and eternal, cosmic significance.' Perry writes that understanding religion primarily as a matter of individual faith is a very Anglo-Protestant perspective and does not reflect how most people view religion. Perry invokes the psychologist Jonathan Haidt's research about human reasoning, noting that humans see ourselves as rational creatures who hold our beliefs due to logical thinking, when in reality we form our beliefs due to gut reactions and group affiliations and work backwards to rationalize those beliefs. This is not a new claim, and Perry quotes H. Richard Niebuhr, writing back in 1929, that religious schisms are primarily about concerns like nationality, race, and class rather than theological disagreements.
"Perry devotes an entire chapter of the book to discussing ... the evangelical adoption movement of the 2000s...." The entire movement "was simply a posthoc rationalization for the already existing adoptive practices of infertile evangelical couples and did not actually reflect any adherence to theology, nor did the movement actually do much to increase adoption rates, yet both evangelicals and outsiders believed in this narrative wholeheartedly.
"Using this 'realist' conception of religion, Perry points out that shifts in religious identification have more to do with birthrates and demographic change than any changes in theology. ... Perry claims that religious people are often happier than secular people, not because they are comforted by the idea of a loving Creator, but because religion provides networks for deep social relationships to form. Perry also notes that 'Thought-leaders on the far-right around the world, it turns out, are better students of how religion actually works because they are less invested in Anglo-Protestant ideals and narratives about personal faith and spiritual realities.' In other words, those we imagine as 'Christian nationalists' do actually understand religion as Perry claims it really is: not as individuals gathered around a set of beliefs, but as the way groups adhere to beliefs to achieve social cohesion. Considering that Perry has been writing against Christian nationalism for years now, this is a bold claim for him to make, and one that he claims is necessary to actually understand how Christian nationalism functions. ...
"[T]he views that Perry calls Anglo-Protestant are simply the tenets of liberalism, which can be seen as a secularized form of Anglo-Protestant beliefs. ... Perry's 'religion for realists' reflects a repudiation of liberalism's universalist aspirations, one that can be seen in the growing illiberal movements on the global left and right that posit group identities over individual ones. Perhaps Reinhold Niebuhr was right after all: human beings can never reach perfection on Earth because of our fallen natures, and thus perhaps the idea that liberalism could ever be the 'final' form of government is just as hubristic as the Social Gospel movement was. One thing is for certain though: the role of religion in shaping our political climate cannot be denied." <www.tinyurl.com/2a5h85fb>
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WORLDVIEW
In "Ready for Weirdness," Matthew B. Crawford (First Things, Dec '24) reviews Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, by Rod Dreher <www.tinyurl.com/5x8fmjd5> -- Crawford begins: "A chronic depressive, [psychologist William] James applied his suffering to the work of understanding the human condition in its fullness. ... For him, the surrounding intellectual culture of reticence about the biggest questions, or complacent certainty about their answers, was the cause of the malaise that so many of his contemporaries suffered.
"James traced this crisis to a self-inflicted amputation [to] simply exclude elements of experience that they cannot explain, and proceed to declare them unreal.
"Like James, Rod Dreher is prone to depression, as he confides at various points in this new book. And like James, he believes the way out of depression is a fuller recovery of the real. 'The world is not what we think it is,' Dreher writes. 'It is so much weirder. It is so much darker. It is so, so much brighter and more beautiful.'
"In fact, open this book and it gets real weird, real fast. In the first three pages we encounter UFOs, aliens, and exorcisms. One chapter is titled 'The Dark Enchantment of the Occult.' Viewing the world as a spiritual battlefield, Dreher is on high alert, vigilant against irruptions of the demonic. ...
"America is ready for weirdness. The commissars of right-thinking have so beclowned themselves over the last eight years, not least as spokespersons for something they call Science, that they have induced a renaissance of curiosity about phenomena long considered outside the bounds of respectable opinion. Moreover, I believe a still more fundamental shift is underway, a resurgence of doubt concerning the adequacy of scientific epistemologies. ...
"Dreher does not merely wallow in weirdness, however. He wants to tap into what [philosopher] Charles Taylor calls enchantment, the elusive 'sense of fullness' we get once in a while, based on fleeting experiences of life as 'fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be.' Such moments are difficult to access, but supremely important because they give us indications that there is an objective reality, independent of ourselves, that is morally substantive, in the sense of being shot through with significance. [Taylor] felt significance of the world is a fitting response to my sense that there is something transcendent into which I fit, or must fit myself - something that makes a claim on me.
"In Christian belief, this claim on me grows out of an astonishing fact: The source of this objective moral order cares about me. It gets even more astonishing, as this caring has an emotional register: love. If love is the ontological root of all that is ... then life is most definitely worth living. This is the central point of Living in Wonder.
"Dreher wants to recover the metaphysical drama of existence, the sense of adventure and high stakes that comes with enchantment. It is a quest that is friendlier to the Eastern church than to the Roman, in Dreher's account, given the centrality of mysticism to Orthodox belief and the somewhat inhibiting influence of Thomistic rationalism in the Western church. He doesn't make too much of this, and the book is ecumenical in intent - to the point that it can speak powerfully to agnostics. Indeed he draws on secular thinkers who offer powerful arguments on behalf of wonder, including the psychological writer Iain McGilchrist and the social theorist Hartmut Rosa. ...
"Dreher is superb in showing that the gathering clouds of 'technology-driven totalitarianism' have an animating principle, one that itself amounts to an unacknowledged metaphysics. ...
"Modernity progresses from disenchantment to disenchantment, advanced under the banner of liberation.... Like Dreher, C. S. Lewis saw where this freedom leads: 'The power of Man to make himself what he pleases' really means 'the power of some men to make other men what they please.'
"Dreher quotes at length from his conversations with a man he calls Jonah, who once was deep into occult practices but later converted to Orthodox Christianity. Jonah suggests to Dreher that 'transgender ideology is an attempt to destroy the image of God within us. The distinction between men and women, and the metaphysical implications of correct relationship between masculinity and femininity, are key to correct theological understanding. Destroy this boundary and many others will follow, such as the boundaries between human and animal, and human and technology. If one of these foundational distinctions can be made to seem arbitrary, do we expect the others to hold?' ...
"Reductive materialism is not a scientific method but a posture toward reality. ... What is wanted is 'undifferentiated human matter' that is maximally pliable to the needs of global capital, like the smoothest brand of peanut-flavored sandwich filling.
"Sexual difference is one impediment to the spreadability of human matter.... The meteoric increase of young people who identify as 'non-binary,' neither male nor female, gives us some indication of the success of the HR [human rights?] ideology of sameness, that late fruit of scientific materialism. ...
"James lived at a time when positivism and scientific materialism were flush with confidence. We had it all figured out. ... The strictly mechanistic and deterministic worldview would soon collapse, with the arrival of quantum mechanics.... A complementary teaching, dressed up in neuro-talk, is audible today in such pronouncements as those of Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford science-explainer who recently came to the conclusion that there is no free will. ...
"Dreher mentions psychedelic drugs in order to warn us against them. The problem with psychedelics, he tells us, is that they are a shortcut, making the numinous available to us without the spiritual discipline of the religious life. ...
"As Dreher writes in Wonder, riffing on an Orthodox idea, 'perichoresis [coming-around-to] describes the flow of transforming grace from God to individuals, which is returned to God as love. ...'
"Most of the time enchantment is in eclipse. Therefore, Dreher writes, 'the best we can do is live within a framework - mental and spiritual, and within the home we build for ourselves - that keeps us open to it and also sustains us in stability until the comet returns, so to speak.' ...
"The discipline that is hardest of all is prayer, which means turning one's attention to God. Dreher writes that faith is 'primarily a matter of perception, not conception.' ... Ultimately, attention is a form of love. Dreher invokes Augustine's dictum: What we love, we will become. ...
"Readers accustomed to his internet polemics may be surprised to find here a theologically serious, psychologically sophisticated diagnosis of the spiritual condition of the West. More than diagnosis, Dreher gives us wise counsel. His aim is not to divert our gaze to the next world, but to equip us with reasons to throw ourselves more fully into this world, alert to God's presence." <www.tinyurl.com/mrbfsxdw>
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