GUEST COLUMNIST: Middle course in religious discussion

Alexander Webster, Guest Columnist Alexander Webster, Guest ColumnistWe're in the truth business." In a DP guest column ("Remain open to spiritual journeys," DP, 9/11/97), Dale invoked the dreaded "B" word to dismiss "the belief of the innate superiority of one's own religion and the innate inferiority of the religion of the other." The only logical alternative to such religious "bigotry," as Dale would have it, is the proposition that all religions are equally true or equally false -- in any case, of equal value or merit. As a committed Eastern Orthodox theologian ever willing to subject all truth claims to serious intellectual inquiry (as well as the test of personal experience), I am certainly not prepared to concede this point -- the possible nuance concerning innateness notwithstanding. I believe I can assert, with some degree of confidence, that the religious worldview of communities that used to practice human sacrifice and that of communities that still exhort their followers to convert others at the point of a sword, extoll the virtues of vice, or mischievously exult in the name of Satan, is woefully misbegotten, socially harmful and patently false. Nor do I consider myself -- or the many devout Christians, Jews, Muslims and others who cherish their religious faith as divinely revealed, universally true, or more true than other belief systems -- to be necessarily "bigoted" in any way. If I were not such an easy-going, fun-loving Irish-American follower of Jesus Christ, I might even resent the use of that epithet against people of conscience! At the very least, it is a discussion stopper, an a priori exclusion of whole sets of religious folk from public conversation about ultimate concerns, an unfair constraint on the notions of tolerance and diversity. A deeper, more expansive and liberal practice of tolerance would allow for dialogue even with those who may question one's own place at the table. Unfortunately, Dale also trotted out the old canard that "an arrogant presumption of being right" may lead inexorably to a litany of social sins. The flow of her argument -- in truth, her series of assertions -- seems to link "Christian bigotry," in particular, to abortion clinic bombings and neo-Nazi harassment of Jewish students. Such sweeping logic is, at once, breath-taking and disappointing, if only for the hasty resort to a device that Leo Strauss -- the late great political philosopher at the University of Chicago -- dubbed the "reductio ad Hitleram": a too-facile invocation of the universally despised Nazis may betray a depleted arsenal of real arguments. Bigotry is obviously at the root of anti-Semitism, but how does Dale know, in any particular instance on campus, that it emanates from an ostensibly "Christian" source? As for the clinic bombings, the etiology of such anonymous violence is usually far more complex and pathological than a mere "presumption" of "being right." No serious scholar in the sciences, social sciences, or other humanities would subscribe to the kind of artificial, coerced equality of propositions upon which Dale insists. On the contrary, in some humanities disciplines the academic guild appears driven to enforce certain orthodoxies --sometimes even ruthlessly -- to the exclusion of competing points of view. Both of these extremes reveal a fearful lack of confidence in the ability of intelligent persons to engage ideas and assess their relative merits. Those of us who value religion -- either as an academic discipline or a personal faith commitment or both -- need not succumb to the Scylla of pseudo-equality or the Charybdis of oppressive correctness. We can steer a middle course in pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, wherever that journey may take us. We are, after all, in the truth business.