Many wonderful days in New York with friends and family concluded the old and began the new year with happiness. A happy new year to you!
If any cloud darkened the horizon in my days here, it has been the realization that at least among educated professionals, the culture wars have not died with the election of a Democratic President and Congress, or even abated. In truth, I avoid the most sensitive topics with most of my secular friends. I know we agree that the Bush presidency has been a disaster, but I generally steer away from theological questions, life issues, and other other controversial matters of moment to enjoy their company, talking about books and movies and children and life in general.
That said, a few of my friends– decent and good people, faithful to their spouses and devoted to their children– simply assume and feel free to orate to sundry company that, as “enlightened” people, we “know” that religious people are ignorant, authoritarian, and bent on control and crude, pathetic evangelism that even in its benign forms, is something like being accosted by an Amway representative with a quota to fill, but with less authentic care for the well-being of the person being sold a (more or less fraudulent) bill of goods.
The fact that these “enlightened” opinions (and accusations) are delivered in a state of ignorance about Christianity that is to deep theological knowledge what zero degrees kelvin is to tropical temperature, that the tone is apodictic and in somewhat menacing fashion, brooks no dissent, and that even mild expressions of skepticism are either ignored or are occasions for manifest incredulity, resentment or condescension– none of these ironies register with the “enlightened” speaker. They speak in the fashion of a tribe that knows it has transcended the mere tribalism of religion. They need provide no evidence, nor inquire after what they dismiss, to know it is arrant nonsense. The same goes for pro-life arguments, or really anything that does not comport with various platitudinous, postmodern bourgeois secularisms.
How does one engage in conversation with people who deliberately and on their own volition raise deep and difficult questions, only to express complete certainty about their stock answers, and become peevish, aggrieved or passive-aggressively condescending when unanimous assent and applause is not immediately forthcoming? It’s not a rhetorical question; I really struggle with it. I will say this: the question I am posing is precisely the one that would come to them, good and decent people as they are, if they found themselves in a social setting where a Christian began to loudly declaim his or her convictions to them, in which a kind of a brittle, just-short-of bilious certainty is supposed to make up for the absence of dialogue.
Secularism advertises itself as a neutral space where ideas can be debated with civility and rationality; revealed religious “comprehensive views” are said to substitute vehement emotions for productive inquiry. In my experience, secularism is itself a “comprehensive view,” often quite aggressive and oddly fideistic. I am close to many very secular people that I truly admire for a host of reasons; but I do wish that a few among them had, if nothing else, a more generous sense of irony about their own highly-developed and visceral antagonisms.
