Protestants and Atheists
In
this essay I will argue two things, The first is that Protestants and atheists
are ruining the cultural discourse of North America and probably other nations
as well. The second is that Protestants and atheists are the same people. Where
I am concerned there is not a scintilla of difference between them. I used to
think this relationship was dialectical in the sense I shall explain below. I
have discovered, though, that it is literal as well. A great deal of ‘atheist’
discourse is being generated by bitter ex-Protestants who have not changed
either their personality or style of engagement. Nor have they overcome their
deep anti-intellectualism. In fact, they have intensified it. Other individuals
may not be jaundiced ex-fundies but, in the U.S. especially, live in a culture
defined by Evangelical Protestantism whether positively or negatively. Thus, by
osmosis they absorb its theological categories and replicate them unconsciously.
This includes even some Catholics. I have ZERO doubt that somewhere, right now,
some lapsed Catholic is thinking that young Earth creationism and the rapture are
universal and normative Christian doctrines.[1]
Of course, there are people who switch the other way too and they are as little
altered by this change as the first set of people. One further point. Not all
the Protestants I refer to fall under the category of ‘conservative
evangelical’. Some fall under the category of ‘progressive evangelical’. Many
are secular people who replicate theological categories that determine their
thinking non-thematically. These too are bound at the hip not only to atheists
but to the conservative evangelical opponents they despise most. They see the
destructive external effects of ‘bad theology’ but remain bound to the framing of
that theology by direct antithesis. This is the fate of ALL who stake their
identity on the passionate negation of protest. They become slaves to the
perspective of their enemies. They are one side of a negation and so are
determined by that which they negate. Hegel would have noted this but, alas,
one cannot bring him up in the company of Protestants for, and this is a
mystery I have yet to fathom, there is nothing Protestants despise more than
their own great thinkers. Clearly, they are at war not only with external foes
but with their own core nature. You can only out-protest the other by, finally,
protesting yourself. One last point before we begin our deconstruction of the
Protestant/atheist binary. I have no interest in converting either group into
something else. I would not myself know what that something else should be in
any given instance. I am not a Protestant about Protestants or an atheist about
atheists. What I actually want are better Protestants and more thoughtful
atheists. As my job description (professor of humanities!) indicates I want
HUMANE discourse about HUMAN things that avoids crude binaries and polemical
caricatures. Humane discourse is not an easy or obvious achievement. It is a
skill acquired by cultured people. It goes against the grain humanly speaking
for we all want to be done with thinking and reflecting as fast as possible to
go on to more satisfying things. Humane discourse as a standard must be
constantly asserted and constantly defended against the legions who want to see
it buried in the name of something else.
There
is a persistent enemy of humane discourse which, updating Matthew Arnold, I
will label the philistine. The Protestant and the atheist are above all
philistines: all knowledge is, as the kids now say, mid. Popular theology and
popularized science are the standard of public discourse.[2]
To understand the philistine, however, we must first consider the sectarian for
philistinism is a mode of the sectarian. In turn, to understand the sectarian we
must understand a myth: the myth of the empirical. The myth of the empirical is
a form of the myth of Adam. The myth of Adam is the myth of original knowledge:
the complete self-production of the world as known by a pure, unfallen
consciousness. These involve modes of direct purgation. In the light of faith
(and in defiance of the founders of the Reformation itself- who were no
subjectivists) the contemporary Protestant directly produces scripture as
immediately known. He recovers the Edenic innocence of knowledge and sees the
text of scripture, as it were, for the first time. The scientist is purified
not by faith but by method. The application of rules, of ‘canons of reason’
produces for him the world as it is seen for the first time. Similarly with the
progressive Protestant, who let me add once more, can be an entirely secular
person. The progressive Protestant sees the moral world directly as it is for
the first time through the immediacy of conscience. He knows directly and
intuitively what any human no matter how situated ought to have known at any
time: the evil of oppression. This means he can range over all of time and
space moralizing over whatever bad thing he finds there as if all were his
immediate contemporaries. If there is no God to judge the living and the dead the
task falls to him for judgment on sin there must be in some mode. At any rate,
THESE Protestants (including a great many people who would NEVER profess
confessional Christianity in any form) have forgotten the lesson Hegel learned
from actual historical Protestantism (along with Greek tragedy). This is that
the moral world, when taken as autonomous, falls into tragic contradiction. The
law must be transcended in grace to put the same point theologically. There is
no doubt a book to be written on how Protestantism, which began as a critique
of moralism and legalism, has bred the most intense forms of moralism and
legalism ever seen. I would be curious to know by what alchemy this so reliably
happens.
He
who has immediate knowledge, alas, immediately confronts a world of people who
don’t. That or he confronts people whose claims to immediacy differ in form or
content from his own. This means he must distinguish himself from the fallen
modes of consciousness of those who surround him. This he does by the rituals
of purity and impurity that form the boundary of the sect. There are a number
of these, but I will begin with one which is the myth of the end of history.
History is something the sectarian has finally and decisively overcome. He is
free from all ambiguity, all objective irony and above all from any taint of
the fallen human past. He has overcome Popery in the immediacy of faith. He has
slain ignorance and superstition in the light of science. He has overthrown
oppression in the light of his radical moral will. He has done ALL these things
directly and without the mediation of time, rather like an ancient Gnostic. Thus,
each in their distinct mode, the Protestant and the atheist perform rituals of
separation from the massa damnata of humanity (now, usually, in the
current mode of social media performance). This is why sectarian contempt and
seething hostility are not accidental failings of these positions. Most of what
is (culturally) is threatening and alien. Most of what is, is fallen and
corrupt. Indeed, if you conceive yourself as tasked with purging error and
falsehood and the idols of the superstitious mind you are, indeed, in for an
angry, bitter existence as the world goes on in defiance of your sermonizing. The
reason the Protestant/atheist explodes at you on Twitter is that he has defined
himself through an agonistic, confrontational life stance. His being is at
stake, existentially, in every fraught exchange where he must establish his
superior intellect, faith or integrity. This, for instance, is why the Protestant/atheist
can never concede a point no matter how minor![3]
Of
course, the Protestant, in his conservative sub-species, has a special contempt
for the atheist and will believe literally anything about him no matter how
absurd. This is because the atheist does just what he does but better. Much
better. He protests harder than the Protestant will ever protest. He denounces
more superstition, smashes more idols. He calls out MORE bullshit with more
‘facts’ and more ‘logic’. Whatever curve the believing protestant is on the atheist
is ahead of that curve. He out puritans the puritan from his even more negative
standpoint. His iconoclasm is deeper, and he has found a fuller mode of
evacuating the material world of divine presence. That the atheist is, in fact,
an uber-Protestant is evident from one glaring fact: he can frame no religious
question or query without reference to the evangelical theology that he
(supposedly) rejects, yet which rigidly determines ALL his thinking and ALL his
reactions. This is because he lives radically in the now in which things like
Christianity (and for that matter atheism) have no history and have never
existed in any but their current forms.[4]
He lives in the now of a-historical ‘pure reason’ as his antitypes live in the
now of ‘first century faith’ or of progressive ‘moral judgment’. This has the
knock-on effect of a radical naiveite about historicity. We will discuss this
further below. Here though we might note the superiority that Protestants and
atheists feel to the generality of human culture issues in something
surprisingly, nay, relentlessly middle brow. The Protestant and atheist are
philistines as noted above. This is evident in the banality of evangelical
culture in North America which has a parallel world of books, movies, and music
all of which are utterly and without redemption terrible. On the atheist side
we have the equally banal Sagan-esque cult of ‘reason and science’ which trades
in simple, book of the month club level Whig history and refuses to deal with
ANY philosophy of science not 150 years old. This is because the humane study
of culture in all its varied dimensions is pretentious fakery for
pseudo-intellectuals.[5]
The atheist who poses as an intellectual when browbeating a conservative
protestant becomes a resolute anti-intellectual when confronted with Foucault.
He wins by having the best of both worlds: suave sophistication when faced with
a creationist or flat earther and golly gee shucks man in the street honesty
when faced with an academic expert. The progressive moralizer is similarly
blessed for however great a writer Homer may have been he does not have the
simple, natural moral clarity that tells us that hierarchy is bad and owning
slaves immoral. In fact, excellence itself is evil and wallowing in the culture
of therapeutic self-affirmation superior to any aesthetic or spiritual
discipline produced by any past iteration of order. All that stuff is, after
all, just one indistinct mass of ignorance and oppression.
Thus,
the ‘original Adam’ of knowledge, in whichever iteration he comes, possesses
the direct light of wisdom in a democratic, egalitarian form that is his
birthright as a citizen. From this stance he knows all about the Inquisition or
the Spartans or who wrote Shakespeare without the need for anyone but Bill Nye
to tell him things. Even if the expert is RIGHT, strictly speaking, he is WRONG
simply for having his knowledge in the false form of priestly expertise. He is
wrong just in being who he is. The important thing to remember here is that for
the philistine and his middle brow perspective this knowledge, like all
knowledge, is the direct product of his gut or at very least his simple, honest
heart (if not his pure a-historical intellect). The thing NO knowledge can EVER
be is mediated, especially if we are talking about historical mediation. This
feeling is particularly intense in the United States where it is reinforced by
the navel gazing of an imperial culture. The American Protestant/atheist lives
in the nunc stans as much as the medieval God does. All of history turns
around the immediacy of whatever is trending in the current culture wars. Thus,
we do not have a past strictly speaking, only various ‘nows’. For instance,
there is ancient Greek now when liberals like Pericles were in charge. There is
medieval now when the Republicans took over. There is early modern now when
science, for the first time, challenged Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. None
of these events have any density of meaning, any reality beyond what America is
concerned about this week. Nor have the characters changed: progressives and
liberals have fought Republicans since Cro-Magnon times because these types are
fixed and eternal. This attitude, by the way, transcends political lines and we
find it, cheerfully self-confident, on both left and right ends of the cultural
spectrum. What is more, many people who see the falsity of this attitude with
their intellect still believe in it with their heart or gut. This is evident in
how even educated people use words like ‘medieval’ ‘inquisition’ or ‘divine
right of kings’ not for their precise denotation but for their emotive
resonance: these words are empty signifiers, emotive cliches that gesture
indistinctly at the past ‘when things were rotten’. They are ways of signaling
that one is so done with history by being cavalier, even lazy, in how one
speaks about it. One signals not that one doesn’t KNOW what the Stuart monarchs
held about the nature of royal power or the relationship of the Spanish
inquisition to the crown but that one doesn’t CARE. One shows how superior one
is to the need to get such things right.
The
problem of history, though, probably needs some unpacking. When I say that
certain people have no historical sense, I DO NOT mean that they are ignorant
of ‘historical facts’ (though they may well be). I mean they do not understand
experience as historical. They do not understand historicity. There is a
ready reason for this: we tend to figure knowledge a-temporally. Because
‘universal truth’ exits it must be possible for any subject at any time and any
place to know it. Human reason and human conscience must shine the same light
anywhere and always. Its light is ‘out there’ as an object to be seized like a
rock or a hammer. Alas, as Hegel spelled out so clearly, even our most
‘immediate’ knowledge is the product of an extensive, though non-thematic
mediation. The subject must be prepared to see the light. This preparation is
temporal and hence historical. This is hard for Americans especially as their
country was founded in the age of Locke and for this reason his epistemology is
written in the very fabric of their society. The tabula rasa is the original
unfallen mind of the American Adam who has been freed from tradition and custom
to look at things directly as they are. The result is either ‘primitive
Christian faith’ in the first century sense or ‘pure facts and logic’ that
allow us to purge the historical midden pile of human culture and experience to
pull out the bits of ‘common sense’ that every child can know. This means, of
course, purging a great deal of supposed ‘high culture’ but the Protestant is
fine with that as such things are contemptible and un-democratic anyway. There
is also an anxiety that governs this position: the fear of relativism. If
reason and morality are historical, if the moral or scientific universe can
change in a sense not directly reducible to progress or decline, then there is
no truth and no morality and you MIGHT AS WELL have the creation museum in
Kentucky or bring back slavery. This seems to me very wrong though it is, I
suppose, intuitively easy. It is the exact same argument evangelicals of a certain
stripe use to defend the infallibility of scripture: if any part of it can be
questioned in any way all of it is in doubt. This defense of ‘universal justice’
justifies the tedious moralizing ALL protestants (Evangelical, atheist or
progressive) indulge in over bronze age texts like Homer’s Odyssey or
the Hebrew Bible under the mistaken idea that this is what ‘real
criticism’ does.
This
is a serious enough problem, however, to justify an extended answer. This is
because knowledge has two parts. There is the ‘in itself’ moment and the moment
of ‘mediation’ to a subject. The first may be as timeless and platonically pure
as anyone pleases but the second is the very process of history, temporality,
and change. This even the ancient Church Fathers knew when they said that the
gospel was preached in the fullness of time. Part of history is what is and
part of it is what we construct. This we can see by the following
consideration. We can all see from our current standpoint that modern societies
have opened new spaces of liberty for people in the past could never have
dreamed of. This is good. However, it is NO denial of this goodness to say that
it could not have simply popped into the world full blown. Freedom as a pursuit
requires narratives of emancipation and humans have to construct those
narratives. They must construct rhetorical spaces, discourses, foundational
metaphors that make certain projects conceivable. They must do this over time
by processes that are slow and devious and if, to quote Hegel, they get ‘help from
on high’ this aid cooperates with human finitude and does not simply override
it. Discourse is what mediates between dull resentment at your rotten lot and
active striving for liberation. People must articulate freedom in speech before
they can articulate it in act. To construct a new moral world, one must
persuade people of the new framework and overcome self-interest and the inertia
of institutions (the abolitionists were great because they did something HARD
not because they did something obvious or easy). This is what is actively in
process in all the texts that people want trigger warnings on or want to
sermonize over ad nauseum. Freedom
is also directly and necessarily the history of freedom. All this history is,
of course, elided in the struggles of the moment and in a certain sense that is
human and natural. It may even be in some instances a productive kind of
forgetting for we can all feel the weight of the past as a kind of burden.
There is an appropriate innocence to the ahistorical Protestant when
things actually do need to change and someone needs to be the agent of that
change. Indeed, the truth of this position is that the world of reason or
morality may be taken as immediate at a certain level of resolution by the
practical intellect. However, it does not seem to me that ahistoricism can be
the truth of the matter when taken in a reflective sense. If it is SOMETIMES a
necessary illusion it remains an illusion.
If
there is indeed universal justice or universal truth (and I have no reason to
think there isn’t) it is not ‘in the world’ in the sense of a present to hand
object. It comes into the world from beyond the world. It comes into the world
in time and temporally. The whole determines itself for itself naturally and
historically. By a radical condescension it comes to be in the temporal mode
and the radical symbol for this is the incarnation itself. This means that
every person occupies the moral and rational framework of whatever historical
mode of being they dwell in. We tend to define these modes as the hills we
choose to die on (me as much as anyone!) but one must always avoid the
temptation to absolutize any of these moments. All discursive judgment is finite
and conditioned though piety must ever remain open to the whole as it gives
itself temporally from its own totality. As one judges one gives oneself to be
judged. One cannot transcend what one does not first acknowledge. On this point
I must conclude by acknowledging one thing. I neither expect nor desire a world
in which there are no Protestants and no atheists. Protest, iconoclasm, the
negation of the idol, are among the permanent modes and, if I am in conflict
with them, this conflict is dialectical. I might even be in conversation with
them though it is hard to say this of the world of Twitter and Facebook where
conversation is exactly what does NOT happen. No doubt, person on person
interaction would improve things immeasurably as people would feel less
temptation, and less license, to be the very worst version of themselves. One
might find people whose online personae seem almost feral to be rather more
subdued! There is another problem however, one which would require a separate
essay and THAT is the problem of polarization. Political and social
polarization coarsens discourse even among the educated as repeating certain shibboleths
become a means for placing oneself socially and politically. In the 21st
century religion and irreligion seem less and less about the content of beliefs
and more and more about declaring a position or social identity or claiming a
certain status. That, though, is for another day.
[1]
This is why evangelical Christianity is now conflated with ‘Christianity as
such’ and, absurdly, with ‘religion as such’. It should not take a professor
with a Religious Studies degree (like me) to remind people that there is more than
one or two religions (the one or two I just so happen to be mad at!). Once, of
course, one could have found genteel Protestants of the mainline tradition or,
for that matter, atheists and humanists of discernment and culture. Such people
still exist (i.e.one can still find atheists in the reasonable sense of that
term in fields like Philosophy of Religion as one can still find an articulate Methodist)
but they have lost control of the discussion at least where social media and journalism are concerned. Here the barbarians reign for the reason Yeats said: they bring all
the passion and energy and fanatical commitment to their preferred discourse. There
is, though, a sort of malign genius to the way a certain kind of evangelicalism
has highjacked the word ‘religion’ in a world where literally anyone can google
Jainism or Navaho spirituality. Without being anything close to a majority they
are driving everyone else’s agenda which is how you ‘win’ a ‘culture war’. As
to the atheists, I give them the following advice: choose better enemies and
you will be a much better atheist. There is, alas, an iron law of life by which
one sinks to the level of one’s chosen opponent.
[2]
This would not be such a problem except for one fear I have: university administrators
and the politicians they dine with love ‘mid’ and university students expect to
be taught it. It is what they conceive themselves as paying for. They want ‘higher’
education to affirm all the therapeutic platitudes they have been absorbing
since kindergarten. To this extent one can be thankful that the hard sciences
remain ‘hard’ at their core. However, I always live in fear of some university
president or minister of education picking up Dawkins in an airport and
deciding that, yes, Tolstoy and Kafka ARE a bunch of baloney along with
religion, metaphysics and all the other non-scientific ‘memeplexes’ scarce resources
are being wasted on. That said, mid, and its quest for the readily digestible form
of knowledge that lets you get on with the rest of your day, seems a
precondition for ‘democratization’. It is a way to filter knowledge down to
people who lack leisure to pursue it directly. To that extent, it has a point
at least in our current capitalist ‘economy of knowledge’.
[3]
The thing one notices most about the Protestant, especially the ATHEIST
Protestant, is his (and sometimes her) intense fragility. When one defines
one’s identity around a set of passionate negations one becomes deeply
self-conscious about the authenticity and integrity of one’s own position. This
is only worsened by the performative environment of social media. Here one must
perform, over and over, the same rituals of conversational dominance. ‘Atheist’
is, in this context, a performative mask of superior intelligence and
integrity. Only the atheist has the commanding intellect and integrity to see
through all the bullshit! Of course, the mask is, as all know, fragile. The
mask, notoriously, can slip. This is why the atheist, who doles out buckets of invective,
cannot bear the mildest criticism himself. Critical feedback from others
disrupts the flow of his act unless it is of the cliched variety the
atheist has already prepared his dunks and mic drops for. Thus, he soars and
plunges in terms of his confidence in the display he is putting on. He cycles
between grandiosity and depression and falls into a snarling rage when the
slightest thing does not go according to script. Worse, as victory is of its
nature fleeting, he must keep at it, grindingly, day in day out. The likes and
LOL’s he craves are his narcissistic supply as are his self declared ‘victories’
and, one senses, without evangelical opponents to crush and destroy he would be
quite lost.
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