Gregory Wolfe writes of post-Christian public intellectuals in the introduction to the essay collectionThe New Religious Humanists:
Despite the harshness of our cultural climate, a new generation of religious humanists is making its presence known. Many of the most dynamic of these thinkers were born a generation after the ones that experienced the divisiveness of the 1960s. While these younger thinkers care passionately about the issues at the heart of the culture wars, they seek a less apocalyptic and political role for religion. To a great extent they draw their inspiration from the first wave of twentieth-century religious humanists, who were assimilators rather than warriors, but there is a difference. Whereas thinkers like T.S. Eliot could still rely on a social order in which religion was entrenched, contemporary thinkers face a cultural situation that can only be described as post-Christian. This has given rise to a whole new series of cultural and intellectual approaches.
Too bad none of them wrote for his book. Though the book contains essays by such notables as Kathleen Norris and Richard Rodriguez, few of them are post-Christian–though they seem to recognize the present cultural situation deems Christianity less than central. For all the talk of “new cultural and intellectual approaches,” Leon Kass’ essay on Babel might as well have been written in the 1920s. Most of the authors have endowed university chairs, not yet the purview of “thinkers [who] were born a generation after the ones that experienced the divisiveness of the 1960s,” certainly not six years ago when the collection was published. Though I don’t have birthdays in front of me, I’m guessing all the authors experienced the 1960s. This is the same demographic drawn like a moth to flame to the American Life TV promo with this dialogue:
Bobbysocker 1: “Where’s Jimmy going?”
Bobbysocker 2: “Vietnam.”
Bobbysocker 1: “Where’s that?”
Dear God, the irony! Can you feel it?
According to the American Humanist Association, humanism is “a progressive lifestance that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead meaningful, ethical lives capable of adding to the greater good of humanity.” Humanism, generously construed, simply wants to advance what Aristotle called eudaimonia–or full human flourishing–or what Maslow termed “self-actualization.”
Humanism–as a social movement–had a lot to say about how that happens and how it doesn’t happen. The phrase “without supernaturalism” is the tip off. Despite the nods to “religious humanism,” the avante-garde of humanism was adamant that meaningful knowledge came to light via observation, experimentation, and rationalization. And they were adamant that that meant the universe was not created, that humanity had in fact evolved, and that religion causes more harm than good (even if you can still squeeze some juice out of that turnip).
Who cares? The question of whether there is or is not a God who created the universe and humanity seems quaint and adolescent now. Those who care passionately about the rightness or wrongness of God-ism have long seemed more keen on upsetting the opposing team than in resolving the issue for a public they think should care. Talking trash, and not making plays, is the order of the day in this previously fashionable front of the culture war. It’s the science fair dungeon master versus the marching band bible club president. (The bible club president? That would have been me. Ahem.) Still worse, next semester the same two voice-crackers will switch teams, rising quickly to prominence in their new clique by recounting their harrowing conversion from sinful ways of the enemy’s camp.
Babels come and go. In his introduction Wolfe persuasively charts the successive rise and decay of Roman classicism, medievalism, the Renaissance, the Reformations, the Enlightenment, sentimentalism/romanticism, and high modernity. The death of each provides fertile ground for its successors. The hopes of what evangelicals deride as “secular humanism” were to squarely meet the apprehensions of one Yahweh: “Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do. ” Even folks sympathetic to the pioneers of Babel can find these latest Babelites arrogant and overreaching in their hopes of magically transubstantiating the world through science.
Ants and rubber tree plants aside, high hopes both propel a cultural movement to prominence and set it up for a fall. Jonathan Rauch celebrates the rise of a new un-movement: apatheism. He writes, “The modern flowering of ‘apatheism’–a disinclination to care all that much about one’s own religion, and an even stronger disinclination to care about other people’s–is worth getting excited about, particularly in ostensibly pious America.” Rauch’s definition more closely matches what religious scholars have termed “irreligion,” but “apatheism” is catchy–it has a good beat, and I can dance to it.
Perhaps it’s too much to expect post-Christian public intellectuals from Wolfe’s volume. As Wolfe laments, there’s hardly a public intellectual to be found these days, certainly not the likes of Dewey or Niebuhr. I’m not sure apatheism–which would seem more properly to mean the lack of passion about the whole God question–is up to the task. Not caring isn’t exactly good soil for founding a social movement or writing transforming social commentary. (But apatheism’s unique not-caring could provide fertile ground for a rebirth of humanism, or at least get rid of the crabgrass.) Even though I’m not too concerned myself about the God question, I am concerned about the absence of public intellectuals providing an overarching patchwork of cultural kerygma. Here’s to hoping we won’t be scattered for too long after the fall of this latest Babel and can get back to building the city.
