Freddie DeBoer recently quoted a section in Pete Wehner’s Atlantic piece on social psychologist Jonathan Haidt:
Haidt has been invited to speak to various Christian organizations and universities and has “found a point of commonality.” “I’m always up front that I’m an atheist,” he explained, “but I say to them: I agree with you that there is a God-shaped hole in everyone’s heart.” That line reflects the sentiments expressed by Saint Augustine, and Blaise Pascal in his Pensées. “You and I disagree on how it got there. I’m a naturalist; I believe that we evolved to be religious. A part of being human is believing in gods and worshipping and having a sense of the sacred. And I think we have a need, we have a hole in our heart, I believe it got there by evolution, it got there naturally, and it is effectively filled by God for most people. It can be filled by other things. But I think it needs to be filled by something—and if you leave it empty [people] don’t just feel an emptiness. A society that has no sense of the sacred is one in which you’ll have a lot of anomie, normlessness, loneliness, hopelessness.”
DeBoer, who is also an atheist, comments:
Belief in belief is belief in delusion – worse, in other people’s delusion. It is one thing to argue that religion is true or is not true. It is another to say “it isn’t, incidentally, but go on pretending, it’s good for you.” In the inherent condescension of that attitude I see something worse than Christopher Hitchens ever unleashed against the faithful. Whatever Christianity is, it is not worship of the God-shaped hole. Whatever Judaism is, it is not the worship of the God-shaped hole. Whatever Islam is, it is not the worship of the God-shaped hole. And in fact if you take the precepts of those religions at all seriously, you can see praying to the God-shaped hole for what it is: idolatry.
He goes on to apply this to “the whole Weird Catholic/Trad Cath/Twitter Catholicism thing.”
Young people feel that their lives are bereft of meaning and go looking for it in the church. In that they are little different from worshipers from centuries past. But there’s an extra layer, a knowingness to the trad cath tendency that seems to me to jeopardize the whole project. If you know you are pursuing faith not because you authentically believe in the stories the faith traditions tell, but rather because you believe that the trappings of religion will make you feel better, the journey will be an aimless and likely short one. Religious practice often finds its fullest flower when the fight to maintain faith is the hardest. But who would go through those dark nights of the soul to maintain fidelity to an abstract conception of community, to a God who isn’t there? I do not see how consequentialist religion can be called religion at all. Postmodern Christianity undermines the very foundations of faithfulness by instrumentalizing God, turning God into a means and not an end. But everything I know about Abrahamic religion tells me that God is meant to be the ultimate end.
It is an interesting day when a Marxist atheist is reminding professing Christians, in essence, that the chief end of man is to glorify God, that God is the summum bonum, that our trust should be in God and not belief, and that none of it should matter if it is not true.
C. S. Lewis poked at the idea of faith as a means in The Screwtape Letters, as the senior demon advised the junior demon on how best to distract the young believer:
Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the ‘cause’, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more ‘religious’ (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here.
Of course it’s easier for me—an evangelical Protestant—to jump on a critique of “the whole Weird Catholic/Trad Cath/Twitter Catholicism.” But I can’t help thinking of this old haunting quote from J. I. Packer comparing the Puritans with today’s evangelicals and to ask myself some hard questions:
Whereas to the Puritans communion with God was a great thing, to evangelicals today it is a comparatively small thing.
The Puritans were concerned about communion with God in a way that we are not.
The measure of our unconcern is the little that we say about it.
When Christians meet, they talk to each other about their Christian work and Christian interests, their Christian acquaintances, the state of the churches, and the problems of theology—but rarely of their daily experience of God.
Modern Christian books and magazines contain much about Christian doctrine, Christian standards, problems of Christian conduct, techniques of Christian service—but little about the inner realities of fellowship with God.
Our sermons contain much sound doctrine—but little relating to the converse between the soul and the Saviour.
We do not spend much time, alone or together, in dwelling on the wonder of the fact that God and sinners have communion at all; no, we just take that for granted, and give our minds to other matters.
Thus we make it plain that communion with God is a small thing to us.
But how different were the Puritans! The whole aim of their ‘practical and experimental’ preaching and writing was to explore the reaches of the doctrine and practice of man’s communion with God.
Let’s recommit ourselves to see God himself as our greatest good and highest end.
“One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.” (Ps. 27:4)
“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. . . . For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2 Cor. 3:18; 4:6)
[HT: Samuel James]