Religion doesn't resonate

A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in place of the Sun - Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97). Source: Wikimedia.

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.

Life in the modern world brings about difficulties for faithful Christians. In this week’s essay, I discuss how modernity reduces the resonance of the Christian faith, reducing it to a dry value system to be accepted or rejected.

This is the first week of a three-part essay series (Essay 2: Religion doesn’t resonate; Essay 3: Return to Bugnini’s negative spirituality) inspired largely by Charles Taylor’s three “axes of objection” to the modern moral order, which can be found on pp. 311-21 of the 2018 Harvard University Press edition of A Secular Age. They explain mindsets that object to modernity, from which Taylor takes indirect steps towards a secularising world. I here use his objections directly to explain the malaise of the Christian faithful. If you are interested in more like this, please put down your e-mail below and receive a weekly essay:

Axis 1: We are all questioning the meaning of life

In the Dutch song, “Is Dit Alles?” (“Is this all?”), the writers raise questions about their purpose in life.

We lack nothing, we have it all. A kid, a house, a car, and each other. Hm, but you know darling, what the situation is? I’m looking for more, I just don’t know what. Is this all?

We have the material needs organised. Yet we still look for more. This song reflects the feelings of many in the modern world. Once the material necessities are sorted, we start to look higher on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It is a quintessentially modern experience to be materially comfortable but still feel a deeper anxiety about purpose.

Even seemingly material problems of the modern world (the starvation of children in Africa, the suffering of the drug-addicted homeless) are better understood in a moral sense: They are not caused by a lack of material resources, but by moral failings in the distribution and usage of them.

This means that the modern man must seek. If material success doesn’t satisfy me, then what kind of immaterial success do I need? If material resources don’t solve our problems, then what kind of moral system do we need to follow to do so? The material successes of the modern world turn us into “seekers.”

That trend at first seems like it could be good for Christianity – as more search, surely more will find? True enough. But seeking causes us to question our basic assumptions. This means that individual Christians cannot as easily rely on momentum to keep their faith going and must test their faith more.

Axis 2: Purely rational arguments for God repel us

Furthermore, in a world where all are seeking, it does not satisfy for God and religion to provide their own justification. Arguing that somebody should be Christian because it is the right thing to do may have worked a few centuries ago. Nowadays, people simply respond “But why would I want to do the right thing?” To convince, the faith must now provide arguments even for its underlying assumptions of morality.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to prove something when we start with nothing, and we must rely on the very basic principles that underly our knowledge – such as our own existence. (“Cogito, ergo sum” has been the bedrock of mainstream epistemology since the Enlightenment.)

This means then the only place to ground our underlying assumptions is the individual’s existence, and that morality must spring from selfishness. This repels us. Even if we question why or how morality exists, we all have an underlying moral conscience planted deep within. The idea that we should be moral out of self-interest, not because our conscience is worthy of being followed, is abhorrent to most people.

For this reason, there are not many people who choose to worship God because of modern apologetic arguments like Pascal’s wager. If your faith is based on rational calculation that it is worth any amount of finite effort to avoid a risk of the infinite pains of Hell, then your faith is selfish and repellent. Transaction does not equal veneration – and any God who relies solely on the carrot of Heaven and the stick of Hell is a tyrant not worthy of worship.

Axis 3: Natural moralism lacks transcendence

These difficulties in argument make apologetics more difficult (St Thomas’s 13^th Century arguments for the existence of God aren’t particularly convincing to somebody who doesn’t share his metaphysical assumptions). But even if we do share some assumptions (Platonic metaphysics, a belief in the value of life and existence) and use reason to come to some kind of natural law argument for God, we still do not end up with a religion that resonates. Taylor sums up the Deistic religion that came to exist through reason thus:

Our duty to God consisted in establishing and conforming to the moral order he had designed for us. The proofs of his existence and goodness pointed to his design of a world in which this order was appropriate. … What had got lost was the sense that devotion to God, for its own sake, was the centre of the religious life.

This is a good summary of a Deism that provides a moral code, but that does not inspire the radical devotion and self-sacrifice necessary for the Christian faith.

That makes sense too – after all, if we can prove God from the material world and reason to him from our innate sense of good, then it seems that God is essentially equal to us. A God who is fully understandable isn’t a transcendent being who governs the universe – quoth Augustine, “Si comprehendus, non est Deus.” But a non-transcendent being isn’t worthy of worship or of self-sacrifice: to paraphrase Groucho Marx: “I don't want to worship any God that I can discover by myself.”

Our entire society have become seekers, questioning their purpose and how to be fulfilled. This means that we question the fundamental moral conceptions that underly our faith. For individual Christians, it becomes harder to take the leap of faith towards transcendence that Christianity requires.

Epilogue: The solution is love

My blog promises to advise the Christian about how to live in the modern world. I do not think that it is a good idea, or even possible, to end our material success, stop questioning metaphysical and moral assumptions, or ignore the demands of our reason. Therefore, I fully encourage Christians to engage with the greats of modern apologetics (especially my favourite, CS Lewis) However, this addresses only the symptom of these axes of objection to religion, and does not solve the difficulties that Christians have to remain faithful in the modern day.

The solution is to use love, rather than reason, to come to God. This necessitates learning that God is lovable, even if not knowable. To do this, we must get to know him as a person, especially as the most lovable person, Jesus, which we can do most effectively by reading and meditating on scenes of the Gospels, as it is through these stories that Christ has chosen to reveal his person to us most clearly. That said, I know that I have many readers who are faithful Christians who may have different thoughts – how do others propose dealing with the malaises of modernity?

This essay will be continued in two further instalments over the next two weeks - if you’d like to receive them, type in your e-mail and hit subscribe below!