Books for a "doubting Xian"

A friend has a book request so I thought I’d see what Twitter thinks. Give me your suggestions! Especially if there’s a book that was influential in your deconversion. “S’pose you had a doubting Christian ask you for a book on science and religion. What book would you recommend?”

— god Free World (@godFreeWorld) May 28, 2019

Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston

Personal History
Christianity formed my deepest instincts, and I have been walking away from it for half my life, fifteen years dismantling what the first fifteen built.

By Jia Tolentino
May 20, 2019

The church I grew up in was so big we called it the Repentagon. It was not a single structure but a thirty-four-million-dollar campus, built in the nineteen-eighties and spread across forty-two acres in a leafy, white neighborhood ten miles west of downtown Houston. A circular drive with a fountain in the middle led up to a bone-white sanctuary that sat eight hundred; next to it was a small chapel, modest and humble, with pale-blue walls. There was also a school, a restaurant, a bookstore, three basketball courts, an exercise center, and a cavernous mirrored atrium. There was a dried-out field with bleachers and, next to it, a sprawling playground; during the school year, the rutting rhythm of football practice bled into the cacophony of recess through a porous border of mossy oaks. Mall-size parking lots circled the campus; on Sundays, it looked like a car dealership, and during the week it looked like a fortress, surrounded by an asphalt moat. At the middle of everything was an eight-sided, six-story corporate cathedral called the Worship Center, which sat six thousand people. Inside were two huge balconies, a jumbotron, an organ with nearly two hundred stops and more than ten thousand pipes, and a glowing baptismal font. My mom sometimes worked as a cameraperson for church services, filming every backward dip into the water as though it were a major-league pitch. There was tiered seating for a baby-boomer choir that sang at the nine-thirty service, a performance area for the Gen X house band at eleven, and sky-high stained-glass windows depicting the beginning and end of the world. You could spend your whole life inside the Repentagon, starting in nursery school, continuing through twelfth grade, getting married in the chapel, attending adult Bible study every weekend, baptizing your children in the Worship Center, and meeting your fellow-retirees for racquetball and a chicken-salad sandwich, secure in the knowledge that your loved ones would gather in the sanctuary to honor you after your death.

The church was founded in 1927, and the school was established two decades later. By the time I got there, in the mid-nineties, Houston was entering an era of glossy, self-satisfied power, enjoying the dominance of Southern evangelicals and the spoils of extractive Texan empires—Halliburton, Enron, Exxon, Bush. Associate pastors flogged fund-raising campaigns during Sunday services, working to convert the considerable wealth of the church’s tithing population into ostentatious new displays. When I was in high school, the church built a fifth floor with a train for children to play in, and a teen-youth-group space called the Hangar, which featured the nose of a plane half crashed through a wall.

My parents hadn’t always been evangelical, nor had they favored this tendency toward excess. They had grown up Catholic in the Philippines and, after moving to Toronto, a few years before I was born, had attended a small Baptist church. When, in 1993, they moved to Houston, an unfamiliar and unfathomably large expanse of highway and prairie, one pastor’s face was everywhere, smiling at commuters from the billboards that studded I-10. My parents took to his kind and compelling style of preaching—he was classier than your average televangelist, and much less greasy than Joel Osteen, the better-known Houston pastor, who became famous in the two-thousands for his airport books about the prosperity gospel. My parents began regularly attending services at the Repentagon, and, soon afterward, they persuaded the school’s administrators to put me in first grade, even though I was four years old.

I would regret this situation when I was in high school at the age of twelve. But, as a kid, I was eager and easy. I pointed my toes in dance class and did all my homework. In daily Bible classes, I made salvation bracelets on tiny leather cords—a black bead for my sin, a red bead for the blood of Jesus, a white bead for purity, a blue bead for baptism, a green bead for spiritual growth, a gold bead for the streets of Heaven that awaited me. During the holidays, I acted in the church’s youth musicals; one of them was set at CNN, the “Celestial News Network,” and several of us played reporters covering the birth of Jesus Christ. When I was still in elementary school, my family moved farther west, to new suburbs where model homes rose out of bare farmland. On Sundays, as we drove into the city, I sat quietly in the back seat next to my cherubic little brother, ready to take my place in the dark and think about my soul. Spiritual matters felt simple and absolute. I didn’t want to be bad, or doomed. I wanted to be saved, and good.

Back then, believing in God felt mostly unremarkable, occasionally interesting, and every so often like a private thrill. In the Bible, angels came to your doorstep. Fathers offered their children up to be sacrificed. Fishes multiplied; cities burned. The horror-movie progression of the plagues in Exodus riveted me: the blood, the frogs, the boils, the locusts, the darkness. I was taught that the violence of Christianity came with great safety: under a pleasing shroud of aesthetic mystery, there were clear prescriptions about who you should be. I prayed every night, thanking God for the wonderful life I had been given. On weekends, I would pedal my bike across a big stretch of pasture in the late-afternoon light and feel holy. I would spin in circles at the skating rink and know that someone was looking down on me.

Toward the end of elementary school, the impression of wholeness started slipping. A teacher advised us to boycott Disney movies, because Disney World had allowed gay people to host a parade. Another teacher confiscated my Archie comics and my peace-sign notebook, replacing this heathen paraphernalia with a copy of the new best-seller about the Second Coming, “Left Behind.” Three girls were electrocuted when a light blew out in the pool where they’d been swimming, and this tragedy was deemed the will of the Lord... (continues)

New Yorker

If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything

Martin Hägglund argues that rigorous secularism leads to socialism.
By James Wood

May 13, 2019

At a recent conference on belief and unbelief hosted by the journal Salmagundi, the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinsonconfessed to knowing some good people who are atheists, but lamented that she has yet to hear “the good Atheist position articulated.” She explained, “I cannot engage with an atheism that does not express itself.”

She who hath ears to hear, let her hear. One of the most beautifully succinct expressions of secular faith in our bounded life on earth was provided not long after Christ supposedly conquered death, by Pliny the Elder, who called down “a plague on this mad idea that life is renewed by death!” Pliny argued that belief in an afterlife removes “Nature’s particular boon,” the great blessing of death, and merely makes dying more anguished by adding anxiety about the future to the familiar grief of departure. How much easier, he continues, “for each person to trust in himself,” and for us to assume that death will offer exactly the same “freedom from care” that we experienced before we were born: oblivion.

No doubt much will depend on our definitions of “atheist” and “good.” But, if Pliny is too antique for Robinson, listen to Montaigne: the Montaigne who professed a nominal Christianity but proceeded as if his formal belief were essentially irrelevant to his daily existence, and perhaps even at odds with it; the Montaigne whose wanton pagan invocation of “fortune” in his essays provoked Vatican censors. Or attend to the work and life of Chekhov, the good nonbelieving doctor who asserted that his “holy of holies” was the human body, the writer whose adulterous characters in “The Lady with the Little Dog” stop to look at the sea near Yalta and are reminded that their small drama is nothing alongside the water’s timeless indifference:


And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings—the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.

Or James Baldwin, that great recovering Christian, who once wrote, “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being.” Or Primo Levi, who, when faced with death in Auschwitz, was briefly tempted to pray for rescue, and then did not pray, lest he blaspheme his own secularity. Or Camus, especially in “The Myth of Sisyphus” (a philosophical articulation of the atheistic world view), and in his rapturous unfinished novel, “The First Man” (a novelistic embodiment of the secular world view), in which his alter ego is possessed, from childhood, of “a love of bodies” that exalted him when he was able “just to enter into their radiance, to lean his shoulder against his friend’s with a great sensation of confidence and letting go, and almost to faint when a woman’s hand lingered a moment on his in the crowd of the trolley—the longing, yes, to live, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth this earth could give him.”

Or Louise Glück’s extraordinary poem “Field Flowers,” narrated from the perspective of a flower, which chides its human visitors for thinking about eternal life instead of looking more closely at the flowers. In that poem, humans become spectral, and the natural world has the real, everlasting solidity:

. . . Your poor
idea of heaven: absence
of change. Better than earth? How
would you know, who are neither
here nor there, standing in our midst?

Finally, Robinson could look at her own first novel, “Housekeeping,” which is essentially about people in rural Idaho constructing a usable creed out of the near at hand: scraps of the Bible, bits and pieces of culture and folklore, fantasies of resurrection, and a great deal of the natural world, thrillingly described. In that book, Robinson’s lovely phrase “the resurrection of the ordinary” means springtime, which unfailingly occurs every year, not the resurrection of human beings, which seems much more doubtful.


These are visions of the secular. A systematic articulation of the atheistic world view, the one Marilynne Robinson may have been waiting for, is provided by an important new book, Martin Hägglund’s “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom” (Pantheon). Hägglund doesn’t mention any of the writers I quoted, because he is working philosophically, from general principles. But his book can be seen as a long footnote to Pliny, and shares the Roman historian’s humane emphasis: we need death, as a blessing; eternity is at best incoherent or meaningless, and at worst terrifying; and we should trust in ourselves rather than put our faith in some kind of transcendent rescue from the joy and pain of life. Hägglund’s book involves deep and demanding readings of St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (with some Theodor Adorno, Charles Taylor, Thomas Piketty, and Naomi Klein thrown in), but it is always lucid, and is at its heart remarkably simple. You could extract its essence andoffer it to thirsty young atheists.

His argument is that religious traditions subordinate the finite (the knowledge that life will end) to the eternal (the “sure and certain hope,” to borrow a phrase from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, that we will be released from pain and suffering and mortality into the peace of everlasting life). A characteristic formulation, from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, goes as follows: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” You die into Christ and thus into eternity, and life is just the antechamber to an everlasting realm that is far more wondrous than anything on earth. Hägglund, by contrast, wants us to fix our ideals and attention on this life, and more of it—Camus’s “longing, yes, to live, to live still more.” Hägglund calls this “living on,” as opposed to living forever.

His notion of religion seems to be northern-European Christian first and foremost; he is quiet about Judaism, whose practices are sensibly grounded in the here and now, and which lacks the intense emphasis on the afterlife characteristic of Islam and Christianity. (And he has very little to say about, for example, Hinduism.) Yet he wields a definition of religious faith wide enough for his purposes: “any form of belief in an eternal being or an eternity beyond being, either in the form of a timeless repose (such as nirvana), a transcendent God, or an immanent, divine Nature.” That should cover most contenders. Elsewhere, Hägglund defines “the religious aspiration to eternity” as part of any ideal that promises us that we will be “absolved from the pain of loss.” Defining the religious ideal in this way enables him to characterize, however unfairly, Stoicism, Buddhism’s Nirvana (a detachment from everything that is finite), and even Spinoza’s “pure contemplation as the highest good” as essentially religious.

The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist (Hägglund is uninterested in the pin dancing of proof and disproof) but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth to learn, because we are naturally fearful of loss, and therefore attached to the idea of eternal restoration. Hägglund, who was born and reared in Sweden and now teaches comparative literature at Yale, begins his book by telling us that he returns every summer to the northern-Swedish landscape he knows from his childhood. His love of the place is premised on the knowledge that he will not always be able to return; that he, or it, will not be there forever:


When I return to the same landscape every summer, part of what makes it so poignant is that I may never see it again. Moreover, I care for the preservation of the landscape because I am aware that even the duration of the natural environment is not guaranteed. Likewise, my devotion to the ones I love is inseparable from the sense that they cannot be taken for granted. . . . Our time together is illuminated by the sense that it will not last forever and we need to take care of one another because our lives are fragile.

Once we seriously consider the consequences of existence without end, the prospect is not only horrifying but meaningless (as the philosopher Bernard Williams argued years ago). An eternity based on what Louise Glück calls “absence of change” would be not a rescue from anything but an end of everything meaningful. Hägglund puts forth his eloquent case: “Rather than making our dreams come true, it would obliterate who we are. To be invulnerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care. And to rest in peace is not to be fulfilled: It is to be dead.”

A liberal rabbi or pastor might object that Hägglund is unhelpfully hung up on eternity. Eternity is not at the heart of what such people care about; they hardly ever spend time envisaging it. But Hägglund’s central claim is that a good deal of what passes for religious aspiration is secular aspiration that doesn’t know itself as such. He wants to out religionists as closet secularists. When we ardently hope that the lives of people we love will go on and on, we don’t really want them to be eternal. We simply want those lives to last “for a longer time.” So his reply would probably be: Just admit that your real concerns and values are secular ones, grounded in the frailty, the finitude, and the rescue of this life. He makes a similar point in relation to Buddhism. He is happy to welcome, as essentially secular, those popular forms of meditation and mindfulness which insist on our being “present in the moment”; but he chides as religious and deluded those doctrinal aspects of Buddhism which insist on detachment, release from anxiety, and an overcoming of worldly desire.

Hägglund is a deconstructionist; his second book, “Radical Atheism” (2008), was about the work of Jacques Derrida. Put simply, deconstruction proceeds on the assumption that literary texts, like people, have an unconscious that often betrays them: they may say one thing, but they act as if they believe another thing entirely. Their own figures of speech are the slightly bent keys to their unlocking. “This Life” is a work of profound deconstruction. If the religious believer often behaves like an unconscious secularist, then one can assume that some of the great canonical religious texts will do something similar, revealing their actual procedures to a skeptic who is willing to read them against the grain.

Hägglund examines writing by C. S. Lewis, Augustine, and Kierkegaard with a generous captiousness, fair but firmly forensic. He begins with Lewis’s memoir of mourning, “A Grief Observed,” which the Christian writer and apologist wrote after the death of his wife of four years, Joy Davidman. It was a late and unexpected love affair; the book is notable for Lewis’s frank admission of his inconsolable grief, in the course of which he seems to grant that God’s eternal consolation could not be adequate to the loss of this particular worldly loved one. Lewis concedes, remarkably, that a religious mother who has lost her son might receive comfort at the level of “the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her,” but not in her earthly and all-consuming role as a mother. “The specifically maternal happiness must be written off,” Lewis allows. “Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.”

New Yorker
==

Considering the Afterlife

Reading James Wood’s review of “This Life,” by Martin Hägglund, I was mystified by his argument that the main consideration in defining personal morality is whether one views existence as finite or eternal (Books, May 20th). As a lifelong atheist, I’ve never considered the principal difference between my value system and that of religious people to be my belief that existence ends with death. The critical distinction, rather, is that, whereas the believer submits to a moral framework received from a supposedly divine source, the atheist constructs his or her own. Contrary to Wood’s argument, time is not all that we atheists have if there is no God. We have one another, and that fact should be the cornerstone on which we build our moral foundation.

Derek Prater

Overland Park, Kans.

Wood’s description of Nirvana as “a detachment from everything that is finite” is not the best way to define the term. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has explained that the root meaning of Nirvana is “extinction.” As such, the word can be understood as the state in which all erroneous perceptions, which cause suffering, are extinguished. Finding Nirvana may require detaching not from everything finite but, rather, from false viewpoints.

Ben Howard

Professor Emeritus of English

Alfred University

Alfred, N.Y.

Religious Freedom in the Age of Pandemic

We have a right to practice our beliefs, but we don’t have the right to discriminate against others, or endanger their lives

....We live in an age of easy travel and widespread misinformation, and it’s long past time for lawmakers in this country to propose a much more reasonable definition of religious freedom. The Constitution protects my right to believe whatever I want to believe, including my right to shun science and modern medicine. It does not give me the right to expose innocent people to unnecessary suffering. Because there are people who cannot be vaccinated against deadly communicable diseases — infants, people with compromised immune systems, etc. — the decision not to vaccinate should come with some conditions. If you decide not to vaccinate your children, then they should not be allowed to take public transportation or go to public school.

Likewise, if you’re a baker whose religious convictions prevent you from baking a wedding cake for a gay couple, then you need to find a line of work that doesn’t involve selling wedding cakes from a public storefront. You can take your chances with natural family planning if that’s what your religious faith calls you to do, but you’ll still be required to offer your employees health insurance that covers birth control. Before you ask an entire student body to bow their heads and pray, remember that banning prayer in public school never stopped any child from praying. It just prevents students who don’t belong to the dominant religion from feeling ostracized.

Religious faith is a private matter between a believer and God. But how a believer lives in community with other people is something different altogether. It’s time to stop giving believers a pass just because their beliefs happen to run counter to the laws of the nation they live in. Human lives may depend on it.

Margaret Renkl

nyt

Rachel Held Evans, R.I.P.

The progressive Christian writer and resident of Dayton TN Rachel Held Evans has died, at just 37...

Evans’ last blog post appeared online on March 6, Ash Wednesday in the Christian calendar. It is a day of repentance and solemnity that marks the beginning of Lent, which leads up to the joyful Easter celebration of resurrection. She wrote:

It strikes me today that the liturgy of Ash Wednesday teaches something that nearly everyone can agree on. Whether you are part of a church or not, whether you believe today or your doubt, whether you are a Christian or an atheist or an agnostic or a so-called “none” (whose faith experiences far transcend the limits of that label) you know this truth deep in your bones: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.”

Death is a part of life.

My prayer for you this season is that you make time to celebrate that reality, and to grieve that reality, and that you will know you are not alone.

Slate 

nyt obit... Renkl on RHE