The Narcissism Epidemic, Atheism, and the decline of Christianity

This morning while doing morning things, I  watched this youtube interview with W. Keith Campbell:

The Narcissism Epidemic

In it Steve Paikin of TVOntario is the interviewer on his The Agenda show. They do not mention religion, but about three-quarters through the interview I realized that the decline of Christianity in the West is symptomatic of the rise of narcissism. By narcissism, I should add, Keith Campbell does not mean ordinary pride in accomplishments, but a culture where too many people base their lives and actions around their own wants and desires and needs. This got me to thinking about Richard  Dawkins and an essential view of atheism, expressed in this debate with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams over faith and atheism:  Richard Dawkins, Rowan Williams, Anthony Kenny: "Human Beings & Ultimate Origin" Debate.  In it, amongst many other points, Richard Dawkins states his belief that existence began as an accident.  It is fundamental to many religions that there is purpose at the heart of reality and existence. According to essential atheism, there is no overarching, fundamental purpose to the universe, including life or inanimate objects - to everything in short. When I initially mulled over that one statement of his, I saw that you must, as an individual atheist, be narcissistic in order to live - because if there is no overarching, pre-existing purpose to life  then each person must create that purpose within - that meaning only subsists in your own head - cogito ergo sum, that famous statement by Descartes is here taken to its extreme position: I think, therefore, I am. Thus in a world where narcissism has become the default social reality, any religion, but in the case of the West, Christianity, will decline because once one strips away all the complex details (I am reading Leviticus right now and that book is all about details), Christianity is about purpose lying as the foundation of everything. Also, Christianity contradicts this narcissistic basis of atheism in its two fundamental precepts:  1. love of God and 2. love of others.  Christianity is being rejected because it violates narcissism, not because it is scientifically unprovable, or illogical, or did or did not cause wars, but because at root it tells individuals to think of oneself third, if at all.

Religious Studies and History: two views of the same thing

This morning, while sipping my first caffeine of the day, I sat quietly looking out my kitchen window at bare tree limbs, blue sky, scattered clouds and snow.  Meditating I guess, or perhaps just thinking. Anyway, for no particular reason I began to think about the study of religion through two different lenses. Most universities in Canada have Departments of Religion, or Religious Studies (not all, my own doctoral alma mater the University of Guelph does not), and they graduate individuals who study religion in all its aspects.  These departments are the successors of theology departments. Again, most but not all, universities in Canada had church origins. For example, the University of Toronto began as an Anglican school, the University of Windsor was Catholic, Queen's was Presbyterian and my undergrad and MA school McMaster was Baptist.  When the provincial governments dangled 30 bits of silver before each institution they gave up their church control and secularized.  (One of the last holdouts was Waterloo Lutheran which did not accept the money until very late  in the game and transmogrified into Wilfred Laurier - maybe so they didn't have to change their monogrammed linen).

After secularizing, these universities kept a church college or colleges to act as a seminary in most cases, but suspended their rights to grant full Arts or Sciences degrees. In the place of theology they tended to institute departments of Religion or Religious Studies, where religion would be examined in a social scientific manner.

About ten or so years ago, I faced the prospect of no work, and saw that my school, the University of Guelph did not offer much in the way of the study of religion.  So I came up with the idea of a World Religions' course in the History department, as I am an historian. This was accepted, and was structured and taught through an historical, not a social scientific view of religion. While religious studies courses and textbooks include the historical development of religion, this is not their central focus. For my course history came first, and as a social/cultural historian, the complex dance or duet of religion and society as it changed over time was the focus.

While searching for a textbook to complement the course material, I found that most were written by graduates of religious studies programmes and not appropriate therefore for an historical approach. I did find one finally, written by one of the pioneers of the study of world religions, the late Ninian Smart. I have yet to find another that does as well as his 1999 second edition. The many, many world religions' texts approach religion overall and in particular cases from the religious studies focus, while I remain an unrepentant historian first and foremost.

So what is the difference?  Well in the religious studies' approach, presentism reigns supreme -that is, a particular religion is presented as it exists today (well, today being the rough time it took to produce the book).  This involves the beliefs, rituals, architecture, art, geographical spread, ethnicity or cross-ethnicity, and a section on history.  From what I can see in their books, they are primarily sociological studies with some anthropology thrown in, spiced with a dash of history.  In the approach I take, that of the historian, I emphasize and focus on the story - the history of religion in general and the particular religion being presented.  This involves the same facets found in religious studies, but with an emphasis on change within social context.  This assumes that some aspects do change and some do not and this too is a matter to be discussed and studied.

This approach is, I am sure, a disappointment to some of my students as they expect to learn about, memorize and repeat on tests and exams the rituals and customs of people of different religions along with their theologies.  What they get is very little of that and lot of how and perhaps why, religion functions within different social settings at different periods of history and how and why change occurs.

The problem I have had with the religious studies approach is the way in which each religion tends to be hermetically sealed off from every other and the implication that the views and beliefs and practices of ordinary followers mirror that of religious professionals.

I think I stress ritual and belief too lightly and will work to change that, but am convinced that the study of the place of religion in life itself is and should be the primary focus, not the doctrine or dogma or ritual practices.

Epiphany

The other day I put Christmas away.  I took the tree down and put it outside to be recycled into mulch.  I boxed up the ornaments we have inside, especially the crèche. Outside I took the wreath off the front door, removed the red bows arrayed on bushes and railings and the Christmas light from bushes. Tuesday was Epiphany, or 12th night, the 12th day of Christmas and the formal end of the Christmas season.   As most people today who celebrate Christmas are not actually Christians they don't realize that Christmas Day is the 1st day of Christmas and that 12th night celebrates the arrival of the 3 Magi to venerate the Christ child. The name epiphany is curious.  Its Greek roots mean 'reveal', but the word can mean in a secular sense a moment of sudden revelation, usually important and in the Christian sense when Christ was revealed as God for the first time.

As I walk the streets at night with my dog, I notice that many houses still have their Christmas lights up.  Mostly trees are gone from living rooms - often removed within a day or two of Christmas day. The lights and the trees for many are set up early in December and gone by the 26th. This all reminds me that Christmas has become something both similar and different to the holiday celebrated by practicing, believing Christians themselves.  The spirit of this season seems to be the same for both non believers as for believers - a time of feasting and celebration and gift giving - of joy, in short.  But it has little to do with thinking about the birth of Christ for many, perhaps most in our society.  This does not bother me much but is a curious fact that is a mirror image of the origins of this holiday. This date was chosen for a celebration of Christ's birth in order to piggy back on the pagan winter solstice or Saturnalia. These sorts of deliberate syncretism made Christianity more popular as ordinary people did  not have to abandon favourite celebrations entirely.  The irony is that secular people in the West have now incorporated the Christian holiday of Christmas into a secular celebration in order that they not have to abandon the favourite parts of this holiday. This all means of course that Epiphany has been lost in the neb-secular feast of Christmas that runs from sometime in December to January 1.

Jesus was anti-religious

I have been tasting a bit of Tillich's thoughts lately - just a small pdf where he answered questions from an evangelical Christian student about his concept of 'ultimate concern'.  Religious philosophy is interesting sometimes and at others times induces sleepiness. But in this case what interested me was Tillich saying that neither Jesus nor the Buddha were religious. 

What I take from this is related to two artificial concepts I use when I teach history of religion at the university level.  I borrowed two terms from Latin and twisted them somewhat:  religio and spiritus. By religio I mean the institutional face of religion - structured, organized Christian denominations, Islamic mosques and nations, synagogues, temples, rules, regulations, theologies, philosophies.  By spiritus I mean the inner spirituality of the individual believer or believers in groups. Despite the best hopes, efforts and often threats (both theological threats and physical!) of religious professionals, ordinary believers often only share partially in the official dogma and doctrine of a religion.  In situations where religion and the state work in tandem, this spiritus may be hidden and outwardly all believers conform.  In the democratic West, where believers used to conform outwardly due to social pressures, now pretty much anything goes. This does not mean, however, that the two never touch.  Actually they are tangled up together, but just in an asymmetrical fashion.

Being a simple historian in the British empiricist tradition, I was left confused as to what Tillich meant by saying neither Jesus nor the Buddha were religious, so I squeezed this thought into my own wineskin (see Matthew 9:17 "Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”). Both Jesus and the  Buddha broke the rules of their religions and the societies within which they were integral.  Jesus the Jew and Siddhartha the Hindu poured their truth into new wineskins. That is, they were filled with spiritus but not so much followers of religio.

Rethinking Secularism: preliminary thoughts

I am reading through again a collection of essays called Rethinking Secularism.  I've gone through the first article by Charles Taylor and am deep into José Casanova's contribution, but have read the entire book through once before.

First some general thoughts:  the volume has 14 contributors of whom one is an historian, one is a philosopher, one is an anthropologist and the remaining 11 are divided between sociologists and political scientists, which gives the volume a heavily theoretical ambience.  I, as an historian,  long for a clearer foundation in actual events upon which to build this theoretical edifice.  Having said this, the book is thought provoking.

The first article, by Charles Taylor follows the sophisticated twists and turns one expects of a philosopher and in the second by José Casanova, the careful constructions expected equally of a sociologist.  But getting to the essence of their arguments one sees an agreement that 'secularism' and the process 'secularization' are to them a 'western' phenomenon and not a general theory of human development as, for example, evangelical atheists such as Richard Dawkins claim.  They both see the roots of secularism (of course, to make their case they have to 'do' history!) in the development within western Christendom of a dualism of this world and the next, a division of life both lived and conceived in Latin Christianity into a dyad of separate spheres. They do not see this process occurring outside of 'western' Christianity.

So far so good, says this historian.  But.....

What exactly do they mean by 'western' Christianity?  I think they mean the long running show the Catholic church centred in Rome and its spin-off series, Protestant Christianity. Here they see a commonality of conceiving existence as being a dyad of this world and the next which over time morphed into an emphasis on life in this world and eventually to varying degrees of rejection of the importance or even existence of, the next world. Thus today you see a spectrum ranging from those who are fully religious and structure their lives around preparation for the still separate next world,  to those on the other end who reject the existence of the next world utterly, and the vast majority lying at different points between these two extremes.  Most of the middling sort lie closer to the atheist end of the spectrum than the believer end.

My problems with these two approaches and also with their underlying similarity lies in the lack of contextual nuance.  Both see secularism's roots as beginning with a late mediaeval emphasis on this world vs the next.  Yet this part of their separate yet similar  analyses miss all the historical research on the mediaeval mentality where this world and the next are fully blended - a world of enchantment as Charles Taylor put it in  his book A Secular Age.  I would argue that this  lack of separation continued and even continues for a much longer time than they postulate. You see this most clearly where ordinary believers find their regular practice of religion (not only personal faith - but practice within an institutional setting) threatened in some fashion.  I saw this in my own close study of individual congregations in late 19th century Canada. 

'Doing' religion is intrinsic to any religion and is far more important and necessary to any religion than a stadium filled with arguing philosophers and sociologists. A close look at the evidence over time does show a theological emphasis on this world in contradiction to the next, but turning the lens of research onto how populations 'do' their religion reveals something quite different.  One sees an overall and an individual concern to live one's faith, to breathe it in.  Where a break occurs, following the research of the Canadian historian Michael Gauvreau and the British historian Callum Brown,  is in the mid to late 20th century.  This is when you begin to see large numbers of people abandoning the public and private practice of Christianity in the western world.  The ruminations of philosophers and social scientists over late mediaeval roots for this  turn are interesting and part of the puzzle, but miss too much.  Why so late in the day?  The evidentiary thread is so long and so thin attempting to connect a mid 20th century cultural change with a theological turn 500 years earlier causes me to put on the scholarly brakes. There is no good  evidence of such a change of any social significance during that 500 year span.  It all seems to happen very rapidly within a 20-30 year period in the second half of the 20th century.  Callum Brown notices this and postulates it is connected somehow to the feminist movement of the 1960s and the resultant abandonment of Christianity by women in western societies.  This is a good start, but the theoretical work of philosophers, sociologists and political scientists desperately needs some 'in the trenches' research by historians to provide an evidentiary foundation for their thinking, if indeed they are correct.

Violence and Recent Events here in Canada

Like most Canadians, I was moved, transfixed and altered to some degree by the events in Ottawa.  I was affected too by the death of Patrice Vincent in Québec, but in that case it was the historian who reacted, alas, not my affective human self.  But that death was what did get me thinking about violence and the nature of war and the relationship of religion to violent acts.  These were inchoate thoughts, mulled over in spare moments until the attack in Ottawa.

I wondered at first if these two were the actions of random mentally unstable individuals, but that seemed unlikely, given their personal histories and recent conversions to that perversion of Islam personified presently in ISIS/ISIL. As much as commentators as diverse as a neighbour and the radio host John Moore, or those wild individuals who post anonymously on the net might like to assign these actions to random violence perpetrated by individuals with no meaning beyond that, I cannot agree.

At this point in my ongoing internal analysis I have some tentative conclusions, and I stress they are carefully tentative.

First:  there is enough evidence to understand that a certain type of individual, citizens of this country,  is attracted to the ideology of radical Islam.  They are particularly attracted to ISIS/ISIL because of that groups skilful use of social media, in videos particularly. From sketchy media reports, these individuals, who come from English-speaking western countries (though they may also come from other western countries; I simply do not know this one way or the other), are usually young males. Most of them seem to be the sort of young male who has been in trouble in petty ways with the law - drugs, assaults, small crimes, regardless of their upbringing.  But another group are reported as being stable, friendly, popular and 'ordinary' individuals who changed fairly rapidly.  But virtually all of them are young men.

Second:  Even where the label, 'mentally unbalanced' can justifiably be applied as perhaps in the two recent incidents, their unbalanced violent rage was pointed at targets symbolic of western civilization in a deliberate fashion by social media produced by ISIS/ISIL.  These individuals may well have killed, but they would have lashed out at some other target that offended their mental states, rather than the military and parliament.

At this moment in time, I rate arguments that this violence is fundamentally random as specious.  As I wrote on my Facebook page this is a new sort of warfare, that uses social media to inspire unpredictable violent acts that in former circumstances would have been unreachable by combatants half a world away from us.

We have here two conflicting ideals of human civilization.  On the one hand the form developed over the past thousand years or so in what is loosely called 'the West'. Historians happily debate the roots, but Christian ideals of the intrinsic worth of each individual are part of that mix.  This idealization of the individual person grew slowly over a thousand or more years, given large boosts in the Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the gradual expansion of democracy, and the wild explosion of individualism that is the marque of the present day. It is a messy civilization, where corporate interests of businesses, governments, schools and so on conflict and swirl around with individual desires for expression, all loosely held together in a constantly evolving ferment. Part of this ferment is religion - in this case, religion adopted by and more importantly, adapted by, individual desires. In this bubbling cauldron, we have individuals choosing to change their religion, reject religion entirely, accept wholly the traditional beliefs of one faith, or choose which bits and pieces to accept or reject.  An observer from far above would see a unity of individualism held together by social chewing gum and tape, but constantly disassembled and reassembled.

Opposed to this, is an ideal for human civilization that demands a unity of faith, of purpose, of political organization.  This is an old ideal.  'Western' civilization observed it when that concept called 'Christendom' still prevailed.  Islam observed it when there was a single Caliphate in the first centuries of that religion.  The ideal of a holistic society composed of believers who integrated civil and religious under a single successor of the Prophet ('Caliph' being the anglicized word for 'kalifah' or 'successor') or Caliph.  This was a unitary idea for society, where others were tolerated only where they stayed to themselves and paid special taxes, and was tolerant in that situation.  This new 'caliphate' self-declared, has perverted this original idea and sets about killing those who do not adhere to its dictates. Mercy was a central teaching of Muhammed, and these 'successors' have decided to abandon his central teachings in this regard.

I doubt these two ideals for civilization can exist together in the same space.  They can of course, tolerate each other so long as they live in separate geographical locations and restrain attempts to convert one another to their ideals.  But the world is never so neatly organized and separated.  Few people in the broader Islamic world wish for the sort of place promulgated by ISIS/ISIL or the Taliban when they controlled Afghanistan. They may well prefer a more corporate and holistic society than obtains in our very untidy 'western' world, but they do not at all like the harsh nonsense of the radicals.  We in the 'western' world often pine for a more holistic and unitary world, often imagined as existing in some past golden age.

What then, does this have to say about the relationship of religion to violence?  It says that violence is not intrinsic to religion, but a tool sometimes used for the promotion of an ideology.  If Christianity is one of the roots of 'western' society's veneration of the individual, then violence is and has been used to promote an individualistic view of the proper ordering of human affairs, that arose in a Christian incubator.   If Islam is a religion that is one of the roots of the ideal of a unitary society, then violence has also been the tool of that view.  At this point in history, ISIS/ISIL is using violence in a very direct fashion to recreate the Caliphate in Syria and Iraq.   I suspect the long term goal is to conquer Saudi Arabia and controll thereby Mecca and Medina and truly recreate the ancient Caliphate. They quite rightly see the 'western' world with its Christian roots in individualism as the enemy and chief threat and impediment to their goals.  They don't, I think, really care about directly attacking within 'western' countries like Canada, but are concerned to  create a little disruption here by influencing the sorts of young men I mentioned above, in aid of their ultimate cause.

Thoughts on this War

I watched the opening of parliament on TV today here in Canada.  I witnessed a rare unity of parliament, where partisan differences were put to one side.  The Prime Minister did not give a Churchillian speech.  Rather he spoke in the manner ordinary Canadians would express themselves. He spoke from the heart as a Canadian and as a parliamentarian. After his words, greeted with applause by all Members, he rose and walked to shake the hand of the Sergeant-at-arms, Kevin Vickers in thanks and then handshakes and hugs with Justin Trudeau, the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Thomas Mulcair the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Canada and leader of the New Democratic Party.  These actions, as far as I could tell from the body language were genuine on the part of both Prime Minister and his opponents. Parliament on this day rose to its height as the chief organ of democracy in this country. We all owe to the unflappability of Kevin Vickers the fact that our democracy functioned today. From reports of his character, Mr. Vickers is a kind and gentle man with a grave demeanour, but one of those individuals who does what needs to be done, who rises to whatever the occasion demands. Thank God for that.

We are in a war now.  I am convinced of that. They say that armies are always preparing for the last war.  Yesterday in Ottawa and a few days ago in St. Jean-sur-Richelieu in Québec we saw the new face of war.  Yes, traditional bloody battles on land, sea and air will continue.  But this new face of war happens at home and in attacks from individuals or small groups who are not connected by lines of command, but through propaganda found on the internet.  This war is not a war of countries making formal declarations and putting their armed forces into the field until one side or all sides win or lose.  

This war is a war of two ways of life.  On our part, we wish for a world where people can live with friends and family  and work and play in proper measure.  On the other part, is a world of harsh dogma, where rules are set and all must live by those strict rules or die. Some here think that by bowing out of direct combat we are isolated from this.  We are not.  The ideologues hate us and will kill us when they can even if we buried all our weapons, along with our heads, in the sand.  This is not a war of religion. I teach the history of religions at the university level and know how rare purely religious wars have been, and have a good understanding of the role that religion sometimes does play in warfare.  But this is not a war of Christianity vs. Islam, or the secular West vs. the religious Islamic world.  It is a war of us - those who are atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druids - whatever your belief, who believe that living in peace with family and friends is a higher good than strict adherence to one set of rules for existence - a war of us against those who want to enforce their view of life onto the world through violence and terror.  In the Middle East where a traditional war is raging, the ISIS or ISIL group is battling both Sunni and Shia Muslims and Christians and soon Jews.  They are a polyglot group of haters who battle ethnic groups that do not share their hideous ideology. 

Our role here in Canada is to do as parliament did so magnificently today, to continue on loving our families and friends, and working at our tasks and enjoying our play, and eschewing hate.