Been reading Richard Rorty’s Philosophy & Social Hope, a collection of essays wherein he argues that belief is a habit of action. (Not too different from Foucault’s assertion that thought is the form of action.)

The trick here is American pragmatism’s assertion that there is no inherent correct or incorrect: there is only correct and incorrect within a certain context. The best question we can use to test a belief’s correctness, says Rorty, is to ask, “For what purposes would it be useful to hold that belief?” (If your purpose is to replace a light bulb, an incorrect answer would be to stick your tongue in the socket. So he’s not being a relativist, just a contextualist.)

Following William James, he argues that the obligatin to justify your own beliefs only arises when one’s “habits of action” interefere with the fulfillment of another’s needs. And so “by their fruits ye shall know them” is placed side by side with a belief’s consequences. Until your beliefs start messing on another’s life, your beliefs are your own private business — and should stay that way.

Unfortunately, Rorty has allowed the catechist to define religion. Rorty cannot imagine religious belief without anthropomorphic monotheism, without sentimentalism, and without the literalization of symbols. You would think that if belief is habits of action, the best way to characterize religion would be to observe and ask self-described religious folk how their religions inform and shape their life habits. In other words, to know them by their fruits.

But instead Rorty decides that — for religious folk — it is enough to know them by their rhetoric, and at that the rhetoric they feed to twelve-year-olds before confirmation/baptism/bar mitzvah. In Piaget, this is the concrete-operational phase, when everything means what it means and nothing else. It’s no wonder, then, that Rorty goes on to praise religions’ “demythologizers” as heroes, because they “know” that the rhetoric is only rhetoric. But why does it matter?

Alisdair MacIntyre says that virtue is 1) intentionally cultivated “habits of action,” 2) a body of supporting texts, and 3) a community of practice. All three must be present for a virtuous life to appear. For our purposes, the three can also describe the religious life.

Rorty argues that the religious life is safe for public display only insofar as it totally, irrationally consumes the self in romantic attachment to that self’s god. This pattern of religious life occurs across the board, in all faith traditions and cultures. In its highest form it is the mysticism of Teresa de Avila. In a more pedestrian form, it is the cyring teen falling in love with Jesus at summer camp.

But this form of faith is only one possible development of religious life (even if it’s the predominant one in America). Unless maintained with the exactness of a Teresa de Avila, even the best of “Jesus crushes” will fade. Otherwise, why the proponderant rhetoric in evangelical circles of “rededicating your life to Jesus” and of “regaining your first love?”

Equating the life of faith with swooning for your high school sweetheard is unworthly of the august philosopher and does a disservice to both experiences. Rorty explains away religion as a “way to take the world by the throat” — a “sacrifice of the intellect” because “the world was too wretched to lift the heart,” hence, “looking to a power not ourselves” (p.162). More simply, when it comes to religion, faith is no longer a habit of action but an erotic attachment, a longing for some something to possess the self in full emotional immediacy. To allow catechists and televangelists to define a faith tradition — any faith tradition — is just plain rude.

Stephen Carter is one of Rorty’s imaginary conversation partners. Carter complains that religion has been confined to the realm of the private in American public life or in other words made into a hobby. Carter argues that — especially among liberals — a religious person cannot acceptably explain her advocacy of, say, school reform, on religious grounds. It’s considered bad manners. He laments that religious folk are forced to explain their acting out their religious faith in purely secular terms — a rhetorical handbag that’s falsely neutral. For religious folk, says Carter, religious is a source of moral knowledge, and asking them to deny it is asking them to lie. (The rise of the Religious Right, then, is an overreaction to this trend.)

Rorty imagines a monolithic society composed of atmoistic individuals, where “communicative reason” and “intersubjectivity” reduce all public rhetoric to the least common denominator of moral consensus. Religion, in this view, is a wrench in the works.

But a public is not best described as a collection of atomistic individuals seeking a least common denominator consensus — at least not for public purposes. For one, individuals do not experience themselves as atoms bouncing up against other atoms in some vague holding container called “society.” Individuals experience themselves as friends, family members, enemies, neighbors, employees, etc.

Public goods matter to individuals primarily as they effect their deep, embedded relationships with other individuals. These many small communities create publics as much as (or more than) individuals do. Or why would the sociologists talk of a “third sector” sitting beside government and the Market™? Rorty’s atomistic model of society betrays his earlier commitment to “intersubjectivity.”

Further, publics do not maintain themselves. Without maintainence of their infrastructure and mutual care of their members, publics collapse. Thus the absence of anything resembling a public when totalitarian governments collapse. You can kill a public, like any other organism, especially by depriving its constituent parts of whey they need.

Thirdly, successful public discourse is an ecclectic mix of religious and non-religious discourse — see espeically Ghandi and MLK. Secular discourse is no more value neutral than the discourse of the corner Southern Baptist church. All fundamentalists know this and hate the secular humanists for their hypocrisy. Historians know that much “secular” rhetoric is merely religious rhetoric one step removed.

Many of my fellow Unitarian Universalists imagine that removing explicit god-talk is the only enlightened approach to approach post-Christian religious life. If that helps you for a time, I say go to it. I certainly did, and I may yet again. But doing rhetorical violence to other faith communities (or others in your faith community) does no one a favor.

It’s the stuff of high school cliques. I would guess that those living out this regression to adolescence do so because that is where their woundedness originates. You can only move so far forward without patching up the past, so this clique-ishness can be good, for a time. But fixating there, and insisting that everyone else must join you there to be likewise “enlightened,” rings of a thirty-year-old still hanging out at the mall.