Irony and Experience in Today's World

Huston Smith's The Soul of Christianity

Religion scholar Huston Smith's The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition is a 2005 book that stands in eloquent riposte to a number of books that have been published recently maligning Christianity and religion in general. Among these is Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which I discussed at length in my Science of Religion? series. Another is The End of Faith, Sam Harris' recent book proposing an end to religious faith as an antidote to religious hatreds, which I talked about in my The End of Faith? series.

To Smith, the Great Tradition that was the Christian Church of the first millennium and that thunders down through history to reach us (in diluted form) today is the answer to all such atheists who take a principled stand against religion in general, and who oppose Christian religion in particular.


There are many reasons why today's church pales beside the church of the past. We are the heirs of "new" outlooks that began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:

• the advent of the controlled experiment, the rise of science, and the adoption of a "scientistic" worldview
  
• the burgeoning of secularism in governance and religious indifference in the ordering of human affairs
• the dominance of technology, innovation, and the "myth of progress"
• the replacement in our philosophical inquiries of the understanding that truth is objective with the insistence on purely subjective standards of truth
• individualism run rampant, aided by the idea that each person can, and ought to, read Holy Scripture without mediation through church teaching
  
• the "cult of narcissism"; the belief that "our wills are sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and the highest endowment we have" (pp. xxiii-xxiv)
  

Coming about as a reaction to all those features of modernity has been religious fundamentalism, Christian and otherwise. Smith takes Christian conservatives to task for throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In their insistence on reading the Bible literally, they miss much of its grandeur and, even worse, its meaning.

In their signature intolerance of the viewpoints of others, they also offer atheists like Dennett and Harris a takeoff point for junking all religion.

Smith offers a mild and moderate — yet ultimately radical — return to the understandings that informed the Christian life for a millennium or more after Christ was born, as a valid third way between atheism and fundamentalism ... while avoiding the mistake that has so long been made by modern religious liberals: taking a transcendent, supernatural God out of the picture and replacing him with a touchy-feely sentimentality and endless "rallying cries to be good" (p. xx).


While all the above is true, and most welcome, my one quibble with it is that it is preaching to the choir. Since I am a member of the choir, it is dulcet music to my ears. But I recognize that it will not be music to the ears of Mr. Dennett, Mr. Harris, Mr. Christopher Hitchens, Mr. Richard Dawkins, etc., etc., etc. (See In Search of Comity.)

Nor will it soothe the savage breast of the many vocal fundamentalists who spout in evangelical circles today.

Even worse, it is unlikely to persuade the many basically apathetic young people of today, irreligious but not formally atheistic. I'll call them the "lost sheep" who have simply given up on the search for God as source and guarantor of life's meaning. That is, they have "given up" to the extent that they ever considered committing to such a search in the first place.

There are several reasons why so many young people now have a tin ear when it comes to religion. For some, the very dogmatism of the conservatives is a red flag, a turnoff. For others, the problem is simply that their parents didn't even begin to communicate the "good side" of religion to them.

But let me tell you what I think the most basic problem is. It has to do with the point I made earlier about the "cult of narcissism": each of the "lost sheep" experiences his or her will as sovereign; as "unpremised" (meaning that what it wants doesn't have to square with what anyone thinks it ought to want); and as spontaneously, radically free.


I'd like to focus on the most important word in that tangled mass of verbiage: experience.

What we do depends on what we believe, and what we believe depends on what we experience. Smith himself makes much of this fact in his discussion of the early church:

Religion begins with experience — ritual, belief, and experience, and (to echo the cadence of St. Paul's aphorism ["Now abideth faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love"]) the greatest of these is experience. The experience of things that inspire us gives rise to symbols as the mind tries to think about these invisible, inspiring things. ... eventually the mind introduces thoughts to resolve the ambiguities of symbols and to systematize intuitions ... (p. 97)

And that is where theology — "the mind of the church," initially absent in the original Christians' experience — came from. Theology formalized "faith's focal attention ... on a vision of reality that sets morality in motion, as a byproduct almost." Thus did Christianity come to "include the summons to the upright life" (p. 96).

Yet, however valid the summons, we are already several links in the chain down from the first disciples' pristine, original "experience of living in the presence of someone [Jesus] whose selfless love, crystalline joy, and preternatural power came together in a way [they] found divinely mysterious" (p. 96).

Some fifteen to twenty centuries after Christian theology and morality began to be codified, today's "lost sheep" see the church as simply disseminating moral teachings that don't square with their inner situation. In their experience, a sovereign, unpremised, "dark" will is the only thing between them and chaos.


We hear that word, "dark," a lot today. A recent series of "Pearls Before Swine" comic strips by Stephan Pastis, lampooning another well-known strip, "The Family Circus," illustrates what the word means in today's with-it culture (click to enlarge):


"We're so dark and they're so sweet" could stand as Reason Number One why so many young people won't consider joining up with the Christians today. They experience a life in which the only thing that stands between them and the chaos of their "dark" impulses is their idiosyncratic, sovereign will. If they don't do all of the "bad" things defined by Christians as sinful, it's simply because the don't choose to.

That is the ultimate irony of it all. The individual will, decoupled from God's overarching intent for us, can sometimes stand as a buffer against sin. But what it cannot do is open the self-willed up to the "experience of living in the presence of someone whose selfless love, crystalline joy, and preternatural power came together in a way [they might otherwise find] divinely mysterious."


The "lost sheep's" much too sophisticated awareness of how their own "dark" impulses can be self-managed — and their own sense of irony about doing it — means that their experience is unlike that of any earlier generation in history. What Huston Smith fails to do, sadly, is take this into account.

Irony is another "in" word these days, as this recent Doonesbury strip by Garry Trudeau indicates (again, click to enlarge):


We live in an age in which it is not only possible, but necessary for many, to take an ironic stance toward many of the worst evils of our history, not to mention the "dark" impulses within the human soul. As a result, we simply experience the world today in ways that must baffle Huston Smith and stands to impede any well-meaning attempts to turn back the clock to the sensibility of the Great Tradition of the church.