God wars

Is the upsurge of faith in America and the West a glorious spiritual reawakening, or a barbaric superstition that must be stamped out? Two opposing new books turn religion into a heavyweight brawl.

By Laura Miller

Aug 2, 2004 | "Through a glass darkly" is how Paul described the way we see the truth about the universe, and when it comes to matters of faith, you don't have to be a believer, let alone an Apostle, to agree. There's something inadvertently eloquent about the fact that Alister McGrath's "The Twilight of Atheism" and Sam Harris' "The End of Faith" have been published within a month of each other, as they so perfectly illustrate the triumph of heat over light in this debate. The first book is a semi-disguised crowing session about the subsiding of godlessness in the Western world; the second is a 336-page fulmination on the evils of religion and the urgent need to crush it before it kills us all.

Each of these two books epitomizes a position on the question of what role religion should play in contemporary life, and each one mixes credible arguments with some pretty fancy footwork around inconvenient facts. In other words, they are acts of sheer rhetoric, parries and thrusts in the long jousting match between faith and skepticism, rather than genuine explorations or illuminations of ideas. Like a lot of political books published lately, they amount to ammo. Inquiring minds need not inquire here, but minds that are already made up will feel right at home. It's enough to make you suspect that it's no longer possible to have a real conversation about religion.

What's the thinking agnostic to do? Well, observing the combatants in action can at least help us understand the nature of the impasse. McGrath's book is a masterpiece of condescension masquerading as sober consideration, lucid in a magnanimous, Olympian sort of way, and so ensconced in its authority that it positively reeks of Oxford, where, sure enough, McGrath is a professor of historical theology. Only rarely does he allow himself the kind of biting retort Harris manages to squeeze onto nearly every page -- McGrath knows that sort of thing just makes you sound defensive. But he succumbs to jeering at the other side often enough to make you suspect he's not nearly as confident of his own side's triumph as he wants to appear.

Harris, by contrast, is fiery, a polemicist raging against the "life destroying gibberish" he maintains is threatening humanity's very survival. He can't resist studding the pages of "The End of Faith" with seemingly every withering zinger that's occurred to him in the shower or during bouts of insomnia, from deploring "religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher's stone and unicorns" to asking us to "imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of "Star Wars" or Windows 98." And if you can't imagine that, it's easy to picture the intended readers of this book storing up an assortment of these righteous epithets to fling at pious relatives over the Thanksgiving turkey.

McGrath reveals that he embraced atheism in his youth but grew out of it, and suggests that the rest of the modern world has done the same. "The Twilight of Atheism" is a history of the belief during its heyday, which according to McGrath consisted of the 200 years between the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Much of the book is a potted overview of such influential thinkers as Feuerbach, Marx and Freud (the "three great pillars of atheism") who between them laid most of the groundwork for the atheist arguments that no doubt continue to rage on Internet bulletin boards today.

McGrath makes a great show of respecting these arguments and of valuing the "moral seriousness" of atheism, in the manner of Marc Antony praising Caesar now that he's safely dead. He finds plenty of support for writing atheism's obituary in the current resurgence of religious belief in the West, it's true. But whatever ground religion has actually regained isn't quite enough for him, and so McGrath stoops to making faith's provinces appear even larger, using an array of dodgy rhetorical maneuvers and artful omissions that would put a used car salesman to shame.

Next Page: Sure, Freud was a misogynist and Madalyn Murray O'Hair a homophobe. Um, what about today's Christians?

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