by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Just About Exactly Half-True
Even the New Yorker people take a few days off – and not just David Remnick on a grim busman’s holiday to Sochi. The proof of it is the annual “Eustace Tilly” double issue. (It’s on newsstands now.)
Well, I took a few days off just when the New Yorker people did – and so missed the Adam Gopnik piece published under the title “Bigger Than Phil” and the subtitle “When Did Faith Start to Fade?”
“I expected you to blog about it,” a friend wrote – the literary agent Ted Weinstein, in San Francisco. That’s just what a person in my position wants to hear. So let me blog about it semibelatedly, which is to say, in my own good time. (It’s on newsstands now.)
The title suggests something whimsical, the title something historically halfway definitive. The piece itself – I wouldn’t call it an essay – is a roundup of recent books about atheism and the rejection of ideas of God by one of the New Yorker’s smartest, busiest, confident-est writers. (On Friday he posted a piece about the Olympics, saying that “with all the good hockey taking place in Sochi, Team Canada has played none of it.” Then Team Canada shut out Team USA, and the piece came off the home page.)
It’s all here, efficiently compacted and aphoristically/apodictically commented on. Poll data records about thirty percent of Americans saying they are not religious, and about fifty percent of people in Western Europe. The loss of faith tracks with prosperity. The nature-of-existence arguments used to be about physics; now they’re about biology. The “tone frankly contemptuous of faith” taken in current polemics against religion seems a new thing (OK, I said to myself, if you leave out Mark Twain, who is left out here). And yet transcendence still figures into the everyday worldview of people – in an idea of order, say, or in personal experience – who have rejected religiously based arguments for transcendence or who never cottoned to them in the first place. It seems that some people have the “temperament” for transcendence – whether rooted in biology, culture, or something else, Gopnik wouldn’t venture to say – and some (a “some” that does seem to be getting larger) do not.
It’s all true, more or less, which is to say it is just about exactly half-true (which is as much truth as Gopnik grants to John Lennon’s stance toward religion); and it is all set out in the way Gopnik and other writers working in the affable-generalist mode minted by E.B. White have sought to keep fresh: engagingly curious at the beginning, locally certain in the body of the piece, and inconclusive at the end in a way that is at once unsatisfying and a relief – unsatisfying because you hoped to learn something, a relief because such local certainties, deployed globally, would be truly insufferable.
It’s all here, I say, except religion. In a way, that is the piece’s unstated (because un-figured-out) point: that the most prominent arguments about the existence of God and the legitimacy or illegitimacy of religious faith have not been settled so much as they have been moved out of houses of worship and into the seminar room, the book group, the metropolitan museum, and the YouTube channel
(A bad thing, in that religion now has a looser claim on the truth, and a good thing, in that religion now has a looser claim on the truth.)
As I say, that point isn’t made. Neither is a related point, which is that even now, in spite of the change of venue for these questions, most people’s reckonings with religious questions still have something to do with religion – as they do the only time formal religion appears in the piece, in a blind quote from an account a novelist (it is Dani Shapiro) gave of her son’s bar mitzvah in an interview on Positively Positive.
I suspect that many of us who stick with formal religion are not all that much more settled in our beliefs than the “noes” and the “nones” in the piece, or any less aware of the preponderance and cultural sex appeal of the arguments against. Imagine no religion? We do this all the time. We have to. What makes us stick with it, to begin with, is our sense that when it comes to religious questions it doesn’t make sense – in history, in our society, in our families, in our individual lives – to leave religion out.
