Of couse, some might argue that Lewis is mistaken (along with others who employ the so-called Moral Argument for God): there are no objective moral facts about right and wrong. If that were the case then the argument would fall apart. Well, to such skeptical folks and as an aid to the Wednesday night class, the following is an argument for the reality of objective moral facts grounded in broader considerations of epistemology, that is, theories of knowledge or ideas regarding how we know what we know.

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We believe most of what we believe on the basis of evidence of one sort or another: informal observation, formal experimentation, reportage, etc. (I’ll call these evidential beliefs “Level 3 Beliefs”; the reason why is coming later.) But in all these cases, our “ways of knowing” are predicated on more fundamental epistemic principles, principles which are ultimately rooted in unprovable, indeed untestable axioms of belief. Here are two just as examples.

The Reality of the External World: I have an experience of light, color, temperature, texture, smell, taste, etc. Taken together this aggregate is sometimes called my “phaneron,” the totality of that of which I am aware. But, does this aggregate refer to something external to myself, an objective reality beyond my own mind? There’s no way to prove that, no way to test it even; it’s entirely possible that I am experiencing something comparable to an extended dream and every test I could think of might just be another part of the dream. And yet, despite this, it’s entirely reasonable to believe that the external world is really “out there,” that it’s not all just “in my head.” In fact, the alternative (i.e. solipsism) seems quite insane.

The Reality of the Past: Just as I have a strong (and totally intuitive) belief in the reality of the external world, I likewise have a very strong sense that there is something we call “the past.” I have thoughts which seem to be about that past: we call them memories. I see what seem to be signs of time’s passage all around me. But just as with the external world, the reality of the past isn’t really open to test. How do I know that my memories refer to anything? How do I know that they aren’t just fanciful creations of my mind, a function of my imagination perhaps? How do I know that the apparent signs of age around me are really signs of age and not just the way things are? Every test I could conceive of and carry out would seem futile. After all, once I plan the test, execute it, and then find myself in a position to consider the results, the entire test will be “in the past”… so how do I know I’m not just imagining the past reality of the test itself? And thus solipsism can become “moment solipsism”—a philosophy advocated by some schools of Buddhism. But again, despite the impossibility of proving that the past really happened, it’s an entirely reasonable dogma, one that would seem—if not impossible—then at least insane to deny.

Now these probably aren’t the only fundamental, untestable, and axiomatic rational human beliefs (I’ll call them Level 1 Beliefs), but they’re enough to demonstrate that there are indeed some pieces of legitimate knowledge about objective realities that do not come to us by way of evidence or experimentation of any sort.

Once we’ve established this very important concept with reference to the Level 1 Beliefs, I think that we can move on to legitimately class belief in some other objective phenomena alongside them as (at least largely) axiomatic. These beliefs, while not being utterly immune to test like the Level 1 are, can nevertheless be seen as epistemic “defaults” which can reasonably be believed in the absence of evidence (Level 2 Beliefs, let’s say).

I’d class notions like freewill in this category. I think I’m justified in just assuming that it’s real—my intuitive experience of it is that immediate and strong. The same thing goes for the reality of conscious minds “in” people beside myself. After all, I know that I exist—in the sense of an integrated psychological ego. I’m quite confident of that. And I see other bodies out there in the world that look a lot like mine. Those bodies move and dress and talk a lot like me, too. I’m even told that those bodies contain a specific part—brains—that are a lot like my body’s brain. Indeed, given all this I have a strong intuitive sense that those bodies aren’t just bodies but that they have self-conscious minds (however that works) “in” them also, minds just like me. But I can’t really prove that. I can know that I have an internal consciousness, but I can only assume that the same is true of them, that they aren’t just highly sophisticated biological automata mindlessly executing neurological programming. But even though I can’t prove it, again, it’s entirely reasonable to believe that other people have minds and are therefore full “persons.” And, again, the alternative belief just seems so absurdly egotistical as to be literally crazy.

Now, unlike the reality of the external world or the reality of the past, however, it seems at least possible that someday someone could develop a way to test the reality of free will and other minds. And it’s possible that these tests would end up either proving or disproving their objective existence. But until that day comes—indeed, even if it never comes—I feel entirely justified in assuming—on the basis of my intuitive experience—that my free will and your mind are objectively real. In other words, for Level 2 Beliefs, the default position is one of belief, and the burden of proof rests on the denier.

Now we come to morality.

Just as I have an immediate and powerful subjective mental experience of such qualities as color and temperature and texture, I also have an immediate and powerful subjective experience of such qualities as wickedness and, to a lesser extent, goodness. I see footage of the emaciated bodies of Auschwitz prisoners staring blankly through barbed wire fences, I read stories of the outrages of Josef Fritzl, I hear of children abducted from their families only to be raped and tortured before being dumped (dead) into a shallow grave along the interstate. In each case my mind immediately forms the strong and unshakable impression that these things aren’t merely indecorous, or socially gauche, or rude; they’re something qualitatively different, they partake of a phenomenon we call “evil.” Similarly, when I read of men like Jaime Jaramillo rescuing Colombian street children from sewer hideouts and giving them a decent life, or Bishnu Shrestha fighting off forty armed men to protect an Indian woman (no joke, forty men!), I likewise have a strong immediate impression that these actions aren’t simply kindly or seemly; they also partake of a qualitatively different phenomenon: what we call “righteousness.” The former are things which simply should not be done; the latter are things which, in some sense, should be done.

Now my experience of evil and righteousness is not only immediate and strong, it’s also fairly consistent: the same stimuli provoke the same evaluations over and over again. Also, the great bulk of humanity—across time and cultures even—agree with me in my evaluations; we generally concur, at least with reference to the extreme cases, as to which realities and states partake of evil and which of righteousness. Given all this—the immediacy, the strength, the consistency, and the transpersonal ubiquity of these moral judgments—I’m inclined to think that my subjective experience of good and evil is not merely subjective but is instead a perception of legitimate objective realities beyond myself, of objective existential duties. And this in much the same way that I believe my subjective experiences of light and darkness refer to legitimate objective realities beyond myself. Or, again, just as my mind naturally forms the conclusion that other people besides myself have minds of their own and that I possess free will, so my mind rather naturally forms the conclusion that some things are indeed objectively evil and others objectively good.

Now I don’t think that the objective reality of good and evil are necessarily beyond the reach of testing. I suppose that some clever person could one day imagine a way to test whether my experience of good and evil were veridical or totally illusory. And thus I wouldn’t class my belief in the reality of objective good and evil as a Level 1 Belief. Still, I think the belief is very much an epistemic default and so I would class it as a Level 2 Belief. As such, I think that belief in the objective reality of good and evil is justified until such notions are disproven and, thus, the burden of proof rests on the denier.

Now I’m familiar with several arguments employed by skeptics of objective morality in an attempt to meet that burden of proof. There are those who argue on dogmatic grounds that nothing other than matter and energy exists and that moral duties, as neither matter nor energy, simply cannot therefore exist. There are those who argue that the lack of complete agreement among people as to what is right and what is wrong undermines the idea of objective moral duties. There are those who point to the grisliness of the animal world as cause for skepticism. And there are those who argue that our perceived sense of moral duty is just an atavistic delusion, that “right” and “wrong” ultimately reduce to actions which promote Darwinian reproductive advantage and disadvantage respectively and that our consciences are just our genes bossing us around under the guise of something grander.

When I survey these arguments I find them all to be more or less weak. Indeed, I find some of them so weak as to seem sort of sad.

As for the physicalists, their attempted disproof merely begs the question: how do they know that only matter and energy exist? When was that proven? As for people like me, we already believe that something that transcends the universe of matter and energy exists (the universe’s metaphysically necessary cause); maybe objective moral duties are just one more of those things in heaven and earth, Horatio Dr. Dennet, than are dreamt of in your philosophies.

The relativist argument is a bit better in that it at least tries to prove its case, but it still falls far, far short of success. So there are some few people out there in the world who don’t think raping children is wrong. So what? There are also some few people out there in the world who are blind, and many more who are color blind. Do those people prove that there’re no objective stars in the sky to be seen, or that light doesn’t actually come in different wavelengths? Of course not. Those people just have bad eyes. Similarly, unabashed child molesters are just bad people. The presence of defective senses (physical or moral) doesn’t at all demonstrate the unreality of the thing intended to be perceived.

There is the argument the while it is seemingly “wrong” for people to kill other people, it is not thus wrong for lions to kill other people and that this undermines the idea of truly objective moral truths. This argument is better. But it’s still not good. Lions aren’t genuine moral agents and so their actions don’t rise to the level of morality or immorality.

Imagine that you brought a lion into a room with large numbers painted on the floor at different places. Then, from some safe vantage point you tell the lion, through a loud speaker, “Lie down on the number that is equal to square root of nine!” After a few moments the lion grows bored of standing around and plops down on the ground. As it so happens, the lion lies down on the number twelve. Now, would it be correct to say that the lion did the math incorrectly? No, of course not; the lion isn’t doing math at all. Its mind (assuming it has a mind) isn’t sophisticated enough to even understand the concept of square roots; it’s just lying down when it’s tired. But the objective truth that the square root of nine is equal to three is unaffected by this obvious limitation of the lion’s. In the same way, the objective truth of morality would be totally unaffected by the inability of lesser minds’ to understand it—whether those lesser minds belong to lions “murdering” people for food or to babies “stealing” other people’s keys for stimulation.

Now for the biggie.

The Darwinian reductionistic argument is probably the best thing going in the skeptical community on this matter. It’s simple, it gets to dress itself up in the trappings of scientific jargon (always a plus), yet, just like all instances of evolutionary psychology, it’s immune to scientific testing since all the supposedly relevant neurological changes are supposed to have taken place at the microscopic level millions of years ago—good luck finding those fossilized neurons! It even has some plausibility to it: after all, I grant that I may indeed find my wife’s figure attractive because of Darwinian reasons, why not apply the same calculus to my antipathy for child-murder?

But even with all these advantages, there are fatal problems with a socio-biological reductionistic interpretation of our sense of moral duties.

First, there’s the problem of scope. My sense of moral obligation extends to all human beings and, potentially, even to non-humans. As a white American I think it’s wrong to torture a white American child. But I also think that it is equally wrong to torture a black Congolese child. And, I suppose, if ever we contact intelligent life on other planets, I’d effortlessly confess my belief that it would be wrong to torture a purple Alpha Centarian child. So why this universal scope to my sense of duty? Some would say it’s due to the effects of “group selection;” not only do individual generational lines evolve, but entire communities evolve as a group and thus come to develop altruistic behavior that benefits all and sundry. The problem with this oft-repeated trope (it’s especially popular among laymen) is that the great bulk of biologists totally reject the idea of group selection. It’s precisely the ability to outperform one’s fellows—to compete against them reproductively and win—that amounts to success on a Darwinian understanding. So my willingness to sacrifice and possibly even die for total strangers that don’t carry my genes would be a terrible Darwinian strategy and thus can’t be reasonably attributed to Darwinian pressures.

Well, what about the more modest idea of “kin selection?” Like group selection, kin selection asserts that altruistic behavior develops within communities so that the reproductive fitness of the community as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But unlike traditional group selection, kin selection posits that organisms will develop altruism within the family, that is, towards those who share the same genes (a corresponding xenophobia is supposed to develop toward “outsiders”). In this way, even if I ultimately sacrifice my life for the good of the tribe, that tribe shares my genes and thus in their Darwinian success I find my own, so to speak. But this just brings us right back to the problem we faced at the beginning: why do I feel a sense of moral obligation, not just to my own blood relatives, but to all sentient life, including the “outsiders?” Why do I think that I should sacrifice for strangers in need or risk harm to defend a powerless woman of a totally different race? The dilemma remains: the informed skeptic is trying to get premium group selection mileage out of economy kin selection gas.

Well, how do informed skeptics respond to this problem? They cheat. They claim that our capacity for altruism developed as a result of Darwinian kin selection and then, wouldn’t you know it, it’s currently “misfiring” in our modern contexts so as to make us act in ways that are often vengefully anti-Darwinian. As Richard Dawkins has written, “Both [our sexual desire for the infertile and our altruism toward non-relatives] are misfirings, Darwinian mistakes…” (The God Delusion). So our willingness to be flagrantly selfless is really just the product of an instinct to be subtly selfish, an instinct that has gone haywire.

Person One: “Why did Joe buy a blue car?”

Person Two: “Because Joe really loves red.”

Person One: “How is that an explanation at all?”

Person Two: “Well, clearly his love of red has gone haywire.”

You’ll pardon me if I don’t find this particularly compelling.

But there is another very serious problem with the Darwinian reductionist account (DRA): it seems to be talking about the wrong thing. Our moral sense is, as I’ve said, largely about what we should and shouldn’t do—and that in something of an absolute existentialist way; not merely what we should and shouldn’t do if we want to pass along our genes as effectively as possible. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that rape “works” in a Darwinian sense; it enables a man to flood the gene pool with his own progeny. Okay, would that make rape morally right? It seems that, on the DRA, it would do exactly that. On the DRA “right” is just an instinctual and lexical place-holder for “reproductively advantageous.” So, if something like rape proves reproductively advantageous it is, by definition, “right”. Similarly let’s assume for the sake of argument that caring for abandoned children doesn’t “work” in the Darwinian sense; it so burdens a couple’s time and resources that they have fewer of their own biological children than they otherwise would and thus they don’t pass on their genes to the extent that they could have. Would this mean that caring for abandoned children is morally wrong? Again, given the DRA, that would certainly seem to be the case. For, again, on the DRA “wrong” is just an instinctual and lexical place-holder for “reproductively disadvantageous.” So if something like caring for abandoned children—feeding them, binding up their wounds, loving them—proves reproductively disadvantageous, then the practice is, by definition, immoral. But surely this isn’t at all what we mean by “right” and “wrong”; in fact, the above “moral” calculations seem disturbingly evil in themselves—like the sort of things a Nazi would tell himself to sooth his conscience after a long day of murdering Jews.

Thus, whatever insights evolutionary psychology may have to offer us in terms of why we do what we do, it seems to be totally irrelevant to the question of what we ought to do—and the skeptics know it. To return to Dawkins for a moment: even though he cheerily chalks up our moral sense to a misfiring herd-instinct, he just can’t leave the matter there, and that’s very much to his credit. As I said above, Dawkins calls our universal sense of altruism one of a pair of “misfirings, Darwinian mistakes,” but he immediately adds that they are “blessed, precious mistakes.”

What?!

One wonders, according to what standard is Dawkins evaluating the “blessedness” of these mistakes? Is he just giving himself over to consciously vicious circular reasoning in which our instincts are “good” because “good” is just another word for our instincts? That doesn’t seem to be what he’s getting at. It seems instead that Dawkins is implicitly endorsing the universality of our altruistic scope as, in some sense, objectively correct—the way it should be. In other words, Dawkins, for all of his pontificating about viciously selfish gene-centered instincts masquerading as transcendent moral truths, just can’t help but concede to an objective moral standard in the end—one against which our instincts can be measured. Our moral impulses may be genetic mistakes, but they’re the right mistakes nevertheless.

For all these reasons I think that the arguments of the skeptics fail; they thus haven’t met the burden of proof necessary to overthrow our intuitive perception of the objective evil and goodness that supervenes on certain phenomena. As a result, our Level 2 Belief in the reality of good and evil stands.

But wait! Hold the phone for just a moment. After only a few hours additional details began to emerge and the picture began to change. The shooter had been apprehended and, far from some keffiyah-clad individual intoning “Allahu Akbar” at the top of his lungs, the self-confessed perpetrator was found to be a stridently nationalistic native Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik. My surprise turned to shock when the Oslo police reported that Breivik was a “Christian fundamentalist.”

Wonderful, I thought, for the next decade I’ll be hearing this guy’s name on the lips of every cocky critic of the Christian faith: “Pff, don’t try to sell me that Jesus stuff. Christianity is dangerous! Just look at that Norwegian guy. He was a fundamentalist Christian. See! SEE!!” I wasn’t looking forward to a PR nightmare of my own.

More details have emerged since then, though, and the picture is changing once again. Despite the fact that left-leaning media outlets are having a field day emphasizing the religious angle (e.g the Atlantic’s cautiously titled article “The Christian Extremist Suspect in Norway’s Massacre” and the always even-handed Village Voice’s declaration that Breivik was motivated by his “Christian fundamentalist ideology”) Breivik’s own statements give a very different impression. What does Breivik’s Christian identity mean as far as the man himself is concerned? Well, let’s take a look at his Unabomber-style “manifesto”:

A majority of so called agnostics and atheists in Europe are cultural conservative Christians without even knowing it. So what is the difference between cultural Christians and religious Christians?

If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian.

So there you have it; for Breivik, Christianity isn’t so much about God or salvation through Jesus, it’s a social construct, a cultural platform that can be legitimately embraced even by an individual who continues to affirm atheism. Indeed, Breivik goes so far as to draw an explicit distinction between “religious Christians” and mere “cultural Christians”, placing himself (it would seem) into the latter group. Well, if that’s all it takes to be a “Christian fundamentalist” these days, it would seem that the brand has been watered down a bit.

Given all this it’s quite obviously ridiculous to label Breivik a “fundamentalist Christian” given what that particular label has historically meant. In fact it’s pretty sketchy to label him a Christian at all with the above in mind.

Again I imagine the sardonic face of a critic rising up before me: “Nice try, pastor man! But it ain’t gonna work. Maybe Breivik doesn’t match some dusty technical definition of a fundamentalist, but this is the real world and not some ivory tower! You just don’t like the idea of Christianity’s reputation being tarnished by this guy and so you’re trying to wriggle off the hook. The label stands! FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN.”

Are you sure about that? Let’s see. So on this reckoning, all a person need do to merit the label ”fundamentalist Christian” is to describe himself as a ”cultural Christian?” I seem to recall that someone else once made some noise about being a “cultural Christian.” I’m eager to read the first newspaper article that embraces this sort of absurdity in a consistent way and thus refers to “Richard Dawkins, the notorious fundamentalist Christian.”

I won’t hold my breath.

Given the themes associated with the 4th, I thought I’d post something on the relationship between religion, the American people, and all that. There are some who think that religion has not figured particularly prominently in the history of the United States government. Further, there are those who think that whatever role religion and thoughts of God may have played in our nation in the past, such influence is declining because Americans are becoming less religious. And, finally, there are those who see this supposed decline as a good thing, as something to be both approved and encouraged since religious faith–especially evangelical Christian faith–is bad for government.

I’m going to try to address these three issues in this post and I’ll do so fairly quickly. In contrast to the above I’ll argue that (1) American government has always been significantly informed by religious sentiment, (2) the level of religiousness prevalent in the American people more generally has not decreased with time but has, if anything, only increased, and (3) this religiousness in America and its government is not at all a liability but an asset.

I’ll refer throughout this post to two different books when citing statistics: What Americans Really Believe (from now on just WARB) by Rodney Stark et al. and Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites… and Other Lies You’ve Been Told (from now on just CHFH) by Bradley R. E. Wright.

Neither Stark nor Wright are preachers or refrigerator salesmen (or whatever) trying to pass themselves off as demographic experts. Stark earned his PhD in sociology at UC Berkeley and taught sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington before becoming Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University in Texas and an honorary professor of sociology at Peking University in China. For his part, Wright earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin and is currently a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut.

So here we go.

1. American government has always been significantly informed by religious sentiment.

To demonstrate the prominence of religious sentiment in American government historically is trivially easy. For brevity’s sake I’ll not cite every possible example but only some particularly notable ones from every fifty years or so. First, consider America’s first official document, the Declaration of Independence, penned in 1776:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Here, in the very first two sentences of the Declaration, we find two distinct references to God. And these references aren’t just rhetorical, rather beliefs concerning God and such belief’s implications for human dignity are being used as an explicit part of the underlying conceptual justification for America’s separation from the British Empire.

Similarly we might look at the final stanza of the Star Spangled Banner, the U.S.’s national anthem, drafted in 1814 and adopted officially at a later date:

O, thus be it ever when freemen shall stand,
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Also, consider Lincoln’s second inaugural address that was delivered in 1865, the final two paragraphs of which are reproduced below:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces , but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Not only did Lincoln refer to God in one way or another more than a dozen times in a mere two paragraphs, he managed to allude to Biblical passages twice (Genesis 3:19 & Matthew 7:1) and directly quote them twice more (Matthew 18:7 & Psalm 19:9) in the same short space.

Then there’s the fact that in 1908 congress voted to require that the phrase “in God we trust” appear on certain U.S. coins. That legislation would subsequently be expanded to require the motto’s appearance on all coins, and then on all currency whatsoever. Finally, the phrase was adopted as the official motto of the United States in 1956, just two years after the Pledge of Allegiance was officially revised to read “…one nation, under God, indivisible…”, a development that itself took place a mere two years after the Supreme Court declared that the American people are “a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being” in Zorach v. Clauson.

And so we come to the present era. Barack Obama is the President, and he rose to that position from almost total obscurity in what seemed like the twinkling of an eye. What was it that brought him to the attention of the king-makers in the Democratic Party who enabled him to win the primary and then the general election? His speech to the DNC in 2004. In that speech Obama made the normal perfunctory comments and then he offered this remark:

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.

Similarly, when President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden on television, he closed out his speech with the ever-present presidential farewell, “May God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.”

Lest you think that this is something just Presidents do in the modern age, the U.S. Senate’s official web-page contains a sub-page for the office of the Senate Chaplain. That page includes this doozy:

Throughout the years, the United States Senate has honored the historic separation of Church and State, but not the separation of God and State. The first Senate, meeting in New York City on April 25, 1789, elected the Right Reverend Samuel Provost, the Episcopal Bishop of New York, as its first Chaplain. During the past two hundred and seven years, all sessions of the Senate have been opened with prayer, strongly affirming the Senate’s faith in God as Sovereign Lord of our Nation. The role of the Chaplain as spiritual advisor and counselor has expanded over the years from a part-time position to a full-time job as one of the Officers of the Senate.

Keep in mind that these are quotes from a Democratic President and a Democratic-controlled Senate and the Democrats are generally seen as the less overtly religious party. Just imagine what a Republican might say. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it; you can listen to Reagan’s comments to the National Association of Evangelicals when he made his famous “evil empire” speech:

…freedom prospers only where the blessings of God are avidly sought and humbly accepted … Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged … There is sin and evil in the world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might … A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the cold war, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. And suddenly, though, I heard him saying, “I love my little girls more than anything—” And I said to myself, “Oh, no, don’t. You can’t—don’t say that.” But I had underestimated him. He went on: “I would rather see my little girls die now, still believing in God, than have them grow up under communism and one day die no longer believing in God.”

There were thousands of young people in that audience. They came to their feet with shouts of joy. They had instantly recognized the profound truth in what he had said, with regard to the physical and the soul and what was truly important.

I think I’ve established my first point. On to point number two.

2. The level of religiousness prevalent in the American people more generally has not decreased with time but has, if anything, only increased.

Here’s where the sociologists come into play. According to Wright, in 1775 only about 25% of Americans where members (or at least regular-ish attenders) of a church or other analogous institution. That percentage climbed to about 33% in 1850, 55% in 1925, and about 62% in 1980 (CHFH, pg. 52).

Similarly, positive belief in God has remained remarkably stable over the course of American history. Wright notes that data from the Gallup organization indicates that belief in the existence of God among Americans has never once dropped below 90% from 1945 until today (CHFH, pg. 48). Stark points out a similar truth in WARB: atheism remains an extremely small movement in the U.S.—and a consistently small movement at that. In 1944 only 4% of Americans said that they did not believe in God. In 1963 3% made that claim. In 2007 the percentage was back at 4% (WARB, pg. 117). Keep in mind that the 2007 data was collected right at the apex of notoriety associated with “New Atheism” and it’s vigorously publishing propagandists: Sam Harris’ The End of Faith was published in 2004, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion came out in 2006, and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great rolled off the presses in 2007. Given the figures, despite the sales successes of these authors, it seems that they were producing niche literature for a niche audience—the metaphysical equivalent of a spate of cookbooks on vegan brownies.

But surely something has happened, or is about to happen, or will happen inevitably to reduce religious commitment! After all, we’re told over and over again that religion is weaker now than it was in the past. Stark notes a number of instances of this in his book and I’ll quote him at length here.

For several centuries, Western intellectuals have been predicting the death of religion. Writing in about 1710, the English freethinker Thomas Woolston (1670-1731) expressed his confidence that religion would be gone by 1900. Voltaire (1694-1778) thought Woolston was being far too pessimistic and suggested that the end of religion would come within the, then, next fifty years.

The failure of these early prophecies had no deterrent effects. Thus, the distinguished Max Müller (1823-1900) complained in his Hibbert Lectures of 1878: “Every day, every week, every month, every quarter, the most widely read journals seem just now to vie with each other in telling us that the time for religion is past, that faith is a hallucination or an infantile disease, that the gods have at last been found out and exploded.”

By the 1960s this perspective dominated the social sciences. Thus, according to the very distinguished anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace, in his very popular undergraduate textbook: “The evolutionary future of religion is extinction. Belief in supernatural beings and in supernatural forces that affect nature without obeying nature’s laws will erode and become only an interesting memory … belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge … the process is inevitable.”

At about the same time, the well-known sociologist Peter Berger told The New York Times that by “the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture … the predicament of the believer is increasingly like that of a Tibetan astrologer on a prolonged visit to an American university.” In light of the recent lionization of the Dalai Lama by the American media and his cordial welcome on many campuses, Berger’s simile now admits to an ironic interpretation. And, in fact, in 1997 Berger gracefully took it all back, noting that, if anything, the world had gotten more religious during the interim. (WARB, pgs. 115-116)

So why this odd tendency to counter-factual predictions? There are two reasons, I think. First, critics of religion want religion to weaken and pass away so they talk about it as if it really were weakening and passing away. They do this partially because they’re unconsciously projecting their hopes out into the world and partially because they desire to undermine religion by making it appear passé in the popular imagination. In other words they’re trying to offer self-fulfilling prophecies. As the fictional senior demon in C. S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters tells his demonic understudy regarding some man they’re trying to mislead,

I note what you say about guiding our patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist [i.e. a form of atheist] friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s [i.e. God’s] clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” of “false”, but as “academic” or “practical”, “outworn” or “contemporary”, “conventional” or “ruthless”. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.

The pessimism about religion’s current state and its future isn’t the fault of only the irreligious though. Indeed, just as the irreligious say that religion is (thankfully) fading, the religious also often push the notion that religion is (sadly) fading.

Every time we at First Baptist Church take up our annual mission offerings we show videos from our denominational headquarters that showcase missionaries and their work. The videos are entertaining and inspiring and they’re generally very well done. But almost every year some guy appears on the screen and tell us how bad things are, how only 15%, or 10%, or 5% of Americans really know Jesus and are therefore going to heaven.

The claim is, of course, nonsense. The whole thing bothers me and I’ve corrected the false statistics from the pulpit and in our church’s newsletter a few times.

Still, I understand why headquarters sometimes makes these ridiculous claims. Imagine you’re John Q. Christian sitting in church. There’s a special mission offering and the minister introduces it by saying “Things are actually going pretty well; Christianity is spreading and America is now about 75% percent Christian. Not too shabby. Now please give so we can keep up the momentum.” You might give something. But now imagine that, instead of saying that, the minister got up and said, “Things are terrible! 99% of the world is going straight to hell and it’s all our fault for being lazy and complacent. If only we could give more to missions then maybe, just maybe, all the sad non-Christian babies out there will have a chance!” As a sensitive believer you’d probably give more; after all, the situation seems pretty desperate and you certainly don’t want to be a part of the lazy, complacent problem, do you? Of course not, you love those non-Christian babies and by God you won’t let them down!

So the irreligious shut their eyes to the actual statistics concerning religion in the hopes of demoralizing the faithful. And the religious shut their eyes to the actual statistics concerning religion in hopes of energizing the faithful. But regardless of the reason, the effect is the same: people get the impression that after some dark age/golden age of religious fervor, faith is now on the ropes in the U.S. Unfortunately for the haters and the hucksters alike, though, as we’ve seen that just ain’t so.

3. This religiousness in America and its government is not at all a liability but an asset.

I’ve spoken with people who’ve mentioned that they’d be significantly less likely to vote for someone like Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee (or presumably Jimmy Carter) because they are evangelical Christians. The thinking is that these candidates would allow their religious beliefs to influence their policy decisions and that in a detrimental way. Probably the best example of this sort of concern that I’m aware of comes from the actor Matt Damon. In an interview with CBS, Damon spoke dismissively of Palin’s fitness to be the President, claiming that Palin’s folksiness and inexperience would be unconscionable liabilities on the world stage. Fair enough, I suppose; at least I can understand what the man is saying. But then he went on to say, “I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here four thousand years ago. That’s an important… I want to know that. I really do. Because she’s going to have the nuclear codes.”

Now, that Sarah Palin actually thinks dinosaurs lived four thousand years ago is pretty doubtful; she’s said that evolution should be taught as “an accepted principle” and that, while she believes God is at work in the world, only “science should be taught in science class”. But let’s pretend that Palin didn’t say that, let’s pretend for the sake of argument that Palin really does think dinosaurs roamed the earth at around the same time that Stonehenge was being built. Such a view would clearly put her out of step with the findings of modern paleontology. It might even further make her a bit embarrassing in some social contexts. But that it somehow makes her literally dangerous… well, I just don’t see how that’s the case. Indeed the connection is so bizarre as to seem absurd on the face of it. A belief that dinosaurs lived in ancient jungles alongside Man just doesn’t seem to lend itself in any discernible way to a greater willingness to nuke Belgium.

Of course, Mr. Damon and those like him probably don’t intend to draw a direct connection. Rather, the thinking probably is that Palin’s and her co-religionists’ evangelical beliefs imply a willful blindness to the facts, or a general credulousness, or some other broader defect of thought that entails irrationality and thus makes a person a poor prospective President. But if this is the concern, then, once again, the statistics do not bear it out. As Stark notes, evangelical Christianity is strongly negatively correlated with belief in all sorts of wacky things. That’s to say, if someone is an evangelical he’s therefore much less likely than other people—especially non-religious people—to buy into astrology, crypto-zoology, telekinesis, ghosts, communication with the dead, and on and on (WARB, pgs. 129 ff). Again, these sorts of empirical statistical findings run so very contrary to general assumptions that evangelicals are more gullible and irrational than their irreligious counterparts, yet the data is the data.

We can even find humorous specific examples which support the statistics here. Bill Maher is an acerbic anti-religious comedian who enjoys painting religious people as fools and has also made his own “nuclear codes” comment about Sarah Palin and other evangelical politicians. He’s even made a movie on the topic entitled Religulous and was the recipient of the 2009 Atheist Alliance International’s Richard Dawkins Award for “rais[ing] public awareness of the nontheist life stance” and “advocat[ing] increased scientific knowledge”. And yet, despite his confident ridicule of believers and his fame in irreligious circles, the smugly irreligious Maher is on record loudly trumpeting his own manifestly wacky and anti-scientific ideas. He disbelieves germs make people sick, opposes vaccinations, and thinks aspirin is toxic; he dismisses it all as just “Western medicine”. Nice.

It’s interesting to note that this hardcore preference for “alternative medicine” (as opposed to real medicine) is precisely the sort of quasi-paranormal belief that evangelical Americans are statistically far less likely to hold than the average non-religious American.

So I ask you, which belief is more likely to result in dangerous practical government policy? That dinosaurs lived a few thousand years ago, or that germs don’t make people sick? As I said previously, I just don’t really see how a naive form of creationism would foster nuclear belligerence. But it’s trivially easy to imagine scenarios in which a presidential denial of “germ theory” leads directly to serious problems; I shudder to think of the sort of quack a President Maher would appoint to lead the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control.

Thus, in the end, while evangelical Christianity may sometimes lead people to hold false beliefs concerning dinosaurs and the like, those errors are generally not “actionable”; they don’t lend themselves to any practical policy. Conversely, evangelical Christian faith inoculates a person rather effectively against a whole host of other false beliefs which are surprisingly prevalent among the irreligious and which quite obviously are actionable. Given all this, that the U.S. is generally governed by religious people—and that mostly Christians—and that often doctrinally conservative Christians—would seem to be no cause for alarm; indeed, it would seem to be cause for celebration.

The Christian faith is a complex thing with all sorts of remarkable components: theological doctrines like the Trinity and justification by faith, predictive claims like the resurrection of the dead, and ethical imperatives like turning the proverbial cheek are all part and parcel of the larger whole.  But even with all this complexity, and regardless of the direction from which one approaches it, eventually the person inquiring into Christianity will have to deal with Jesus.  Jesus stands at the center of the faith; indeed one could reasonably say that Christianity is Christ, that it is Jesus. 

Now from an evangelistic standpoint this is great.  People love Jesus; even people who hate Christianity often love Jesus!  His character, his ethic, his style—all these things are just so attractive.  I think it’s safe to say that Jesus is generally the first thing the non-Christian seeker finds appealing about the faith and the last thing that the Christian doubter finds repellant.  Even if one feels that the somewhat esoteric or supernatural elements of the faith are just so much pious superstition, that same person generally regards Jesus as a decidedly good and noble human being, as a teacher of wise and moral things. 

But there’s a trap here for such sympathetic unbelievers: the ethics of Jesus—along with his style and character and all that—seem to have utterly failed him in his own life on a non-Christian reading.  As the skeptical New Testament scholar, Dale C. Allison writes in Resurrecting Jesus:

“[T]here are reasons I should very much like to believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus and reckon it more than a symbol, more than just a way of saying that his cause continues or that he lives on in the memory of the church.

“My first reason is the conviction that the teaching of Jesus, which as a Christian I am committed to, may well hang in the air without a dramatic, postmortem endorsement… Unlike the wisdom sayings of Proverbs, Jesus’ sometimes otherworldly, sometimes ascetical, often eschatological, often counterintuitive teachings—‘Love your enemies,’ do not be ‘angry,’ do not divorce and remarry—are not self-validating.  On the contrary, they are at every turn debatable.  They further self-destruct if the humble, including Jesus himself, are never exalted.  So the crucifixion and Jesus’ cry of dereliction require a sequel.  If they do not receive one, most of Jesus’ speech loses much of its plausibility, and he becomes just another futile dreamer, a messianic pretender whose words may be dismissed as fantasy.  But if the resurrection is the sequel, then God has ‘transformed the fate of the lost Jesus by openly and finally acting out in the person of Jesus the image of God that Jesus espoused.’”

If the story of Jesus is really to be denuded of its supernatural elements (resurrection and all) then Jesus’ beautiful ethic of love and compassion is shown up as worse than useless before the harsh realities of the world as it actually is.  If Jesus’ story really does end on Good Friday, then our hope for a kindlier truth dies with him and Rome triumphs; once again Caesar prevails and the brutal logic of pragmatic violence prevails through him…  But if Christ really rose from the grave (as his disciples vigorously declared in the face of threats, beatings, and death itself) then that hope can live on.  And if Christ really did rise, then, it would seem, a great many more of Christianity’s historic claims are back on the table. 

Think about it.

            In Sunday’s sermon I drew attention to the scandalous results of a recent Pew study which indicates that Christians approve of torture in even greater numbers than do religiously unaffiliated people.  I said that this study reveals that however much people may claim to be worshipping the Jesus found in the Bible—that is, the Jesus of history, the real Jesus—many are merely worshipping a mental idol of their own creation that they’ve simply dubbed “Jesus”. After the sermon a man approached me and remarked “I’m afraid to ask you what you think about national defense.”  This article is intended as a response to that remark and the much more important matter of Jesus’ probable view of such things as national defense.  After all, one often hears well meaning people speak of Jesus as if the man were a strident pacifist.  Indeed, entire denominations are built on this premise.  But as we shall see, the idea that Jesus was opposed to all forms of physically force—even when employed by lawful authorities—is simply untenable in light of scripture.

            First one needs to understand that the ancient Jews, like all nations, had a military of a sort. It may not have been a professional army (at least not all of it) as we’re accustomed to but the Hebrews nonetheless had, in times of need, an assembly of armed men, organized along some pattern, which would fight other people to the death at the command of their national leaders.  This wasn’t some anomaly in a particular part of their history, it was a simple and essentially ubiquitous fact of their national character.  We might say that the legitimacy of a military (at least in principle) was just a given in the wider Hebrew psyche—especially considering the positive role the Hebrew military had in much of the nation’s scriptures.

            Secondly one needs to remember that Jesus was an ancient Jew.  He wasn’t a conservative 17th century British Evangelical, a nihilistic 19th century German rationalist, or a liberal 21st century American agnostic.  He was an ancient Jew and thus he ought to be understood against the backdrop of his own actual cultural milieu and not, anachronistically, against our own.  The practical upshot of this is that one ought to assume that Jesus likely supported, at least tacitly, those things which his larger culture supported unless we have actual evidence to the contrary. (Just as we would assume that a given 18th century white American southerner would probably support democracy, slavery, and Christianity unless we had actual evidence to the contrary.)

            Now with these two caveats in mind (ancient Judaism’s belief in the acceptability of at least some military force & Jesus’ identity as an ancient Jew) we can look at the actual specifics we find in the New Testament beginning with Jesus’ immediate context and then working our way to Jesus himself. 

            First we should look at the case of John the Baptist since every single canonical gospel presents this man as the long-prophesied forerunner of Jesus who in turn predicted the coming of Jesus. Additionally, when commenting on John the Baptist, Jesus said, “among those born of women there is no one greater than John” (Luke 7:28). 

            When John was baptizing people as a symbol of repentance he was asked for advice by a number of different groups…including soldiers. In Luke 3:14 we find this: “Then some soldiers asked him, ‘And what should we do?’ He replied, ‘Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.’”  Now this seems like it would have been a great opportunity for John to denounce military service.  He had been asked point-blank what repentance for active soldiers would look like and could very easily have said, “Get a different job!”  But he didn’t.  He didn’t say anything even vaguely disapproving of military service at all let alone advocate for thorough-going pacifism.  He merely condemned an abuse that sometimes accompanies occupations: extortion.

            Well now let’s look at the apostles Peter and Paul, something of Jesus’ successors. 

            Peter wrote (in 1 Peter 2:13-14) “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right” (emphasis added).  And Paul wrote (in Romans 13:1-6) “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing” (emphasis added).  Given these two passages it seems clear that, again, the legitimacy of force as exercised by the state is affirmed—at least in principle.

            So what we have established is that not only Jesus’ wider cultural context believed that a state could legitimately use physical force (expressed supremely through a military) but his immediate predecessor and (far more significantly) his immediate successors (who regarded him as utterly authoritative!) did so as well.  Given all this it is extraordinarily likely that Jesus felt much the same way—that is, unless we can produce definitive evidence to the contrary.

            But when we look to Jesus himself this evidence is rather lacking.  Yes, Jesus did say things that would seem (at least in themselves) to indicate a support of pacifism: “Do not resist the evil man, turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39), “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword” (Matthew 26:52), and so on.  But at the very same time Jesus both heartily approved a man (the Centurion of Matthew 8:5-13) who’s whole job (at least ostensibly) was to “resist the evil man” and Jesus himself called Peter to arms (Luke 22:35-38).  So what’s going on here?  I confess that I’m not quite sure.  Perhaps these statements are further manifestations of Jesus’ well attested tendency to use hyperbole and they were merely meant as stern warnings against militarism and vengefulness on the one hand and quietism and fatalism on the other.  Or perhaps Jesus’ seemingly pacifistic words were directed at a specific issue at hand—like the seething nationalistic insurgency afoot in Israel in his day; I think N.T. Wright does a pretty good job arguing that perspective.

            In the end, then, what we have is a Jesus who was the inheritor of a culture which saw the value of state-directed force, who was forerun by a man who he himself approved who had no qualms with militaries in principle, who produced a movement that was radically committed to his person and teachings and likewise felt that the state had the right, as an instrument of God (in some sense), to utilize force at times, and who himself approved a soldier and called for swords.  Given all this, the idea that Jesus was a through-going Ghandi-esque pacifist is utterly implausible; it simply doesn’t align with the data.  Rather, the evidence in hand suggests that Jesus saw the value of police forces and militaries and approved of them within certain reasonable limits as outlined by his wider-ranging ethic of mercy and love.

            Of course one could claim that Jesus actually repudiated his culture’s mores, firmly (but silently) disapproved of John’s permissive response to the soldiers, didn’t actually mean what he said when it sounded “militant,” and was subsequently wildly misunderstood by his closest followers.  But such a maneuver is not the sign of a humble and receptive attempt to understand the Jesus of history through the records of his life that we actually possess.  Instead, such mental gymnastics belie a desire to force Jesus into a preexisting ideological mould—a process which, once again, leads us away from the real Jesus and towards an idol of our own construction.