This book has been several decades in the writing. It was born out of my fascination with three distinct yet overlapping questions about religion and society. The first question, What is the epistemic status of religious belief?, it seems to me must be settled before we can answer the subsequent questions. Without knowing whether religious belief can be warranted belief — and if so, how it can be so warranted — we cannot answer the other questions that have to do with what role religion ought to play in society.
Lately, these questions have taken on a kind of urgency because each of them are relevant in their own way to current social crises. Prior to 2016, I was content to let these remain academic questions. But then, leading up to the 2016 U.S. election, misinformation went mainstream and was weaponized politically. And when U.S. society did not return to any kind of normalcy thereafter but instead the problem was exacerbated, I began to see the beginnings of a true nationwide (and perhaps worldwide) epistemic crisis, and the problem of what a person is warranted to believe took on a new urgency. Although these problems are not unique to religious belief, it does nonetheless seem to be the case that the sub-societies are breaking down roughly along religious lines, and that the churches have played an important role in exacerbating the situation, even advocating for an unsupportable political and epistemic framework from the pulpits. As a result, there is now high correlation between holding certain religious views and the simultaneous holding of extremist, hypernationalistic political views, as well as offensive and anti-social views on race, sex, immigration/migration, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The culture wars have expanded, and now vast segments of U.S. society have been otherized, primarily by certain popular forms of religion. And, while this has always been true to an extent, it is also the case that these forms of religion now receive very little pushback from the social and physical sciences or from within the faith traditions themselves; it’s not so much that the social sciences or more progressive people of faith are not speaking at all, it’s just that our society has been so divided — on epistemic matters that get to the heart of what we ought to believe — that those voices are not even heard in the offending faith communities. And so the groupthink is never seriously challenged from within, and the problem only continues to worsen.
The title of this book probably gives away my view that these all-important questions are rarely ever asked, especially in the forums in which they critically must be asked. Of course, there has been some academic work completed on all of these questions. But these questions are rarely ever asked in the exact locations that they ought to be asked if they are going to make a difference in our society. They are not asked from our pulpits. They are not asked in our legislatures and in our courts. And they are not, typically, asked in our media. Moreover, while they are sometimes asked by think tanks and philosophers, all too often even in these venues the central problem is skirted around rather than taken on headfirst.
These questions go unasked for a variety of reasons. Some of these questions are simply mistaken for other questions and so go unasked because we do not realize that they are unanswered questions at all. Still other questions are not asked because we believe — falsely, if I am correct — that we have already answered them correctly. And still others go unasked because we believe that there are no good answers to them. But the end result of failing to address these unanswered questions is that tangible social problems go unaddressed and simmer below the surface of our political discourse. This ultimately results in the bifurcation of society. Society becomes divided into two distinct camps that are constantly at war with each other. Old wounds, never healed but merely left to fester, are continually re-opened. And society cannot progress on critical issues because it’s too busy fighting yesterday’s battles all over again.
The path forward is to actually consider these questions in an honest way. They are rarely asked publicly, but people are still asking them and answering them in their own private circles, often using traditionalism or “common sense” that not only is not rooted in the social and physical sciences but in fact often openly hostile to them. But because there is no discourse about these fundamental questions, we never come to any social consensus about the answers. And so the answers to these questions serve as assumptions that private actors make. They do have a bearing on all of our other social actions, it’s just that those assumptions are never challenged and society cannot act in a unified way because these questions are not being openly considered.
I hold no delusions that people will read this book and immediately come around to my way of thinking on these issues. I will, of course, have to make my case for my answers to these questions. And I am certain that many of the answers I give to these questions will be unpalatable for many individuals in society. Probably, every section of society will find something to hate about my answers. But at least they will finally be asking these questions of themselves. And in so doing they will have to craft answers of their own. And maybe, through the process of dialogue, society will finally come to some sort of consensus on what the right answers to these questions actually look like. Instead of having individual divergent assumptions underwriting our approach to this issue, we might start to have a unified approach that everyone in society can agree upon and live with.
The first question: What is the epistemic status of religious belief?
I begin this book with an olive branch to religion. Part One is devoted to providing the religious with a solid epistemic foundation. Whatever philosophers decide about the epistemic status of religious belief, in actual practice the strategy has been to consider this a political question. And this gives a very skewed kind of answer, namely that people have the “right” to believe whatever they want. From the perspective of political philosophy, this is nothing more than a truism, and this answer has never really been in doubt. But it’s also a wholly unhelpful kind of answer. What people want to know is that their religious beliefs are rational. They want their belief to be respected, not just as a political freedom that they enjoy, but as a rationally persuasive approach to their world. After all, it is no compliment at all to say that a person has the political right to do something. There are many things which a person might enjoy the political right to participate in but which would be foolish in the extreme. I can spend my entire paycheck on purchasing lottery tickets or brush my teeth with sand, and those are political rights that I enjoy. But no one would think that doing so would be wise. And so when someone’s religious participation is reduced to a political right that they enjoy, others have not been given a substantive reason to give respect to that choice. It is simply the expression of freedom that is being respected, not the content of the religious belief in and of itself.
I consider this to be an unfortunate side effect of treating the question of belief as a political expression rather than as an epistemic one. What people really want to know is that their beliefs are reasonable, that even those who do not share their beliefs still must concede that the belief is as reasonable as anyone else’s. This is the real basis for mutual respect in a multicultural society. But we have not tended to give an epistemic answer to the religious; we have not crafted an epistemic framework in which religious belief has any kind of role to play, in which religious answers are accorded respect as being “good” answers to questions of knowledge. Our epistemology has been inherently patronizing to the religious. Little wonder then that unbelievers often mock the religious on epistemic grounds. Consider Hitchens’s Razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”1 Those without faith all too often mock the religious on evidentiary grounds. The presumption is that they have no good reason to believe what they believe, that the epistemic status of a person of faith’s beliefs is on flimsy grounds, contrasted, of course, with the solid foundation that the unbeliever’s beliefs supposedly rest upon.
In such a climate, it is only natural for the kind of social bifurcation that we have witnessed in recent years to occur. No one enjoys having their rationality called into question. So believers retreat into their own echo chambers, and unbelievers retreat into their own, each with contempt for the other. And the fundamental problem that has led to this division is quite simply that the prevailing epistemology — evidentialism — leaves no place for religious belief of any kind. This might be a necessary, albeit unfortunate, outcome if evidentialism were itself well grounded. However, this is not the case. Evidentialism has huge problems of its own, and never should have earned its place as the prevailing epistemic worldview.
The problem, of course, is that the academic pushback against evidentialism has not provided a useful alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy. So, while religious philosophers have done a decent job of highlighting evidentialism’s flaws, they have not done as well in coming up with a functional alternative to evidentialism that the religious can rely upon to buttress the religious worldview. And without a satisfying alternative to evidentialism, there’s no basis for the religious to cease their retreat and reengage with philosophy on equal footing. A person with religious intuitions ought to rightly expect that if an epistemic theory is correct it should help them distinguish between various kinds of religion to choose a better religion, that is to say a religion that is better grounded rationally. The epistemic theory should help them choose rationally between, say, Scientology and Episcopalianism. But if a believer turns to the prevailing theories, they will find only theories that rule out religious belief ipso facto, or else they will encounter theories that turn belief into a kind of free-for-all. In other words, they will find only systems that are either too restrictive or too permissive, but none that are actually helpful to their need to rationally ground particular religious beliefs or to choose more rational religious beliefs over less rational religious beliefs.
This work, then, is partially my olive branch to the religious. It is my attempt to show the religious that religion can have a place within a healthy and functional epistemic theory. They do not have to cede the rational field to the atheist. But the tradeoff is that some religious beliefs will turn out to be better rationally grounded than others. So, the believer may have to reject some of their religious beliefs in order to stay on the rational playing field. This work, then, might be thought of as, not just an olive branch, but an invitation: believers are invited to join the rational community, and the rational community is invited to cease its attack on all things religious as “irrational.”
This work is divided into three parts. The first part explores in six chapters questions about the epistemic grounding of religious belief.
In Chapter 1, I explore the problem of skepticism, showing how the problem of general skepticism is as much a threat to the irreligious as it is to the religious. Typically, general skepticism has been dismissed by the irreligious as a minor problem. Introductory Philosophy textbooks often misinterpret the problem. The problem of skepticism is often portrayed as if it is the problem that we cannot be completely certain that what we believe is true, but that philosophers are agreed that we can still make probabilistic assessments. But nothing could be a greater misrepresentation of skepticism than portraying it as the claim that we lack absolute certainty. The true skeptical argument makes the rather more complicated claim that we have absolutely no reason to believe anything. And, worse, the skeptical argument is exceptionally strong. This, I think, is what is behind the religious claim that “even atheists must have faith.” If we understand “faith” to mean an unwarranted, rationally unsupportable assumption that a person must make before they can continue to believe anything, then the believers are not far from the truth here, at least until there is a comprehensive epistemic theory that can defeat general skepticism. I will make the case that general skepticism is a challenge that every epistemic theory must surmount before it can be regarded as a viable epistemic theory.
In Chapter 2, I consider the primary secular epistemic theory that is en vogue today, evidentialism. I argue that evidentialism does not have the resources to defeat general skepticism, and must therefore be rejected as a viable epistemic theory. For the religious, this will have the laudable consequence of undercutting the primary argument against religious belief, to wit, that there is not proper evidence for religious claims. But evidentialism will not be completely discarded. I will instead show that providing evidence for one’s claims is a sufficient, though not necessary, condition of establishing warrant (I will categorize this as the process of justification). In other words, evidence is one of the ways of having warrant for one’s beliefs, but that not every belief need be established by evidence in order to be warranted.
In Chapter 3, I explore a common religious alternative to evidentialism, namely, Christian Foundationalism.2 I argue that Christian Foundationalism is both poorly named and intellectually bankrupt. It is poorly named, not only because it can serve as a way of grounding non-Christian religious belief as well as Christian religious belief, but in a more important way because “foundationalism” is a theory of justification when the primary adherents of Christian Foundationalism do not believe that justification is the whole story about warranted belief and make no attempt to justify religious belief. It is intellectually bankrupt because it is far too permissive, and thus is unsuitable for the critical task of judging between competing claims. The most fundamental task that an epistemic theory can perform is helping us to judge which kinds of claims are better rationally grounded than the alternatives. In this task, Christian Foundationalism has nothing to say. It thus devolves more into the task of rationalizing religious belief than rationally grounding those beliefs.
In Chapter 4, I make my case for an expanded epistemic theory that provides for non-rational kinds of warrant.3 I explain how we can think of justification as a secondary process that we subject beliefs to only once they have already attained some level of warrant. I additionally argue for a coherentist framework for justification (as opposed to the foundationalist framework that we considered in chapter 3.) I consider the case of non-human animals, and how the beliefs of non-human animals can be warranted, discovering a class of beliefs that are warranted, not through justification, but rather through entitlement. Indeed, I make the case that entitlement is our primary form of warrant, and that only beliefs that have already earned entitlement even go through the process of justification. Using those lessons from our animal nature, I conclude that humans do not lose warrant to believe things that they are entitled to believe simply by virtue of having a secondary, justificatory thought process available to us. I finally argue for a pragmatic, socially constructed view of “truth”. Put simply, justification is not done individually; knowledge is social, and the process of education can be thought of, in part, as society informing the individual which beliefs are expected to be included in their inventory of justified beliefs, such that we can meaningfully speak of justified beliefs that an individual ought to hold, even if they do not, in fact, hold those beliefs.
In Chapter 5, I round out my epistemic theory to discuss beliefs that seem warranted, even though they might have neither entitlement nor justification available to them. Although religious beliefs seem to fall into this category, this category includes a surprisingly large array of beliefs, many of which it seems that humans are dependent upon in order to live anything approaching “the good life”. I argue for a third way of warranting beliefs, which I name ‘epistemic sanction,’ to apply to this category of beliefs. I explain how sanction can provide rational grounding so long as we force the condition that the sanctioned beliefs cannot contradict either entitled or justified beliefs that we either hold, or, just as importantly, ought to hold. (For a sanctioned belief cannot be used to weed out justified beliefs; a sanctioned belief must cohere to the set of justified beliefs, but not vice versa. A justified belief cannot be rejected because it does not cohere to a sanctioned belief, because justified beliefs must only cohere to other justified beliefs). I demonstrate how this system is neither overly restrictive nor overly permissive, and can be used to determine which religious beliefs are better (more rational) than others. So this system is usable and attractive.
In Chapter 6, I argue for a particular moral theory, namely, the society-centered meta-ethical theory that has been espoused by philosopher David Copp. My purpose here is to divorce ethical beliefs from the list of sanctioned beliefs and to put ethics firmly within the category of justified beliefs. This will be helpful in the next part of the book because we will not have to adjudicate between competing moral claims that are made by the religious, and can instead dismiss religious moral claims that contradict our set of justified moral beliefs, especially to the extent that they cause harm.
The second question: What can be done about religious harm?
One of the questions that has really perplexed me over the years is the question of what accountability can be had for religious kinds of harms. It has not escaped my notice that religious beliefs seem capable of causing great harm, and yet religious belief is the only category of harm for which no serious attempt is made by the state to regulate, nor is there typically any recourse for the victims.4
Of course, there is a subjective element to any claim of harm. And almost every activity can be construed as harmful in one way or another. So it isn’t realistic to expect that religion — like any other human activity — will be completely harmless. Even the most benign statement could be offensive to someone or other. “God loves a cheerful giver,” I might say, and inevitably the stingy or those who give to charity unenthusiastically out of a sense of duty might take offense. But those are not typically the kinds of harms that our society might have an interest in trying to regulate or ameliorate.
I say “regulate or ameliorate” because it’s clear that our society has ways both a) of preventing harm before it occurs and b) of making the victim whole again after harm has happened. Usually, we employ both tactics. We license drivers to make sure that someone who is driving knows the rules of the road and has sufficient experience to actually control the vehicle. Those who are permitted to drive, therefore, can be expected to, more or less, drive responsibly. But when they do not or when a mistake happens despite their otherwise responsible driving, we have methods of providing restitution to the victims, of ameliorating the harm so that the victim is made, more or less, whole.
Practically every facet of life in our society is thus regulated. We have rules about what someone can do for work, rules surrounding education, rules surrounding the purchase or lease of residential living space, rules surrounding transportation. We interact with others on a daily basis, and we cannot assume that our actions will not affect them, so we regulate individual behavior to coordinate the activity of a large society to attempt to minimize harm. We also concern ourselves primarily with preventing and ameliorating not trivial harms, but rather significant, tangible, identifiable harms.
There are some kinds of activities that are subjected to less scrutiny than other kinds of activities. In the United States, these kinds of activities are typically found in the bill of rights, which guarantees individuals the right to freedom of worship, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, and so on. It is thought that since these rights are explicitly given to citizens, that the bar is raised on what kinds of harms must be experienced before the state is willing to step in to make a victim whole or, perhaps in extreme cases, even try to prevent the harm from occurring in the first place. So the right to bear arms cannot be infringed … unless, of course, one has the kind of background that makes us think that that person would be highly likely to abuse the firearm, in which case the right is infringed and almost everyone thinks that that is acceptable. Very few people are willing to advocate that violent felons receive unfettered access to firearms, after all.
My point is simply that I understand why religion would be subjected to fewer regulations to prevent harm than some of our other activities. Even the most die-hard secularist (and I definitely consider myself in that camp), does not want to live under a tyrannical regime that tries to dictate to people what they can and cannot believe. So I have always accepted that some religious harms are the unavoidable result of living in a (relatively) free society. But what I cannot accept is the extent of those harms. If there are significant, tangible, identifiable religious harms, it seems to me that my society ought to try to prevent those, and if it cannot prevent those it ought to try to make the victim whole. And yet, there are almost no regulations on religious belief at all, and even very few attempts to try to restrict the behaviors associated with those beliefs. Part of this is undoubtedly the quirkiness of the American system of government. After all, it is not just the right to believe one’s religious precepts that is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, but rather the right to “free exercise thereof.” This seems to enshrine a right to practice one’s religion, not just a right to believe whatever one wants, and a right to practice religion will inevitably include a right to engage in certain behaviors, behaviors which may indeed cause great harm. But I will never understand just how absolute we consider this right to be, and frankly it is not just the American system. Rather, liberal democracies as a whole have done a really bad job of preventing religious harm, even when the practices in question are known to cause significant harm. This has always been puzzling to me.
But perhaps this is understandable as a resulting feature of our failed epistemic project. If we cannot distinguish between better and worse religious beliefs as a function of our epistemology, in other words, if our social sciences have no way of telling someone what they ought to believe, then the only way to understand religious pluralism is as a function of political freedom. And since there is no way of adjudicating between religious beliefs, it has often seemed to liberal thinkers that the state just has to give the same level of freedom to every religion, without respect to what the content of those beliefs happen to be.
But if I am correct about my epistemic theory, then we do have a way of judging between religious beliefs; we can tell someone that they ought not believe something, especially if that belief causes harm. At least, we can tell them that if they believe it, they cannot put that belief into practice. When I have taught religion in my classes, I have often tried to get the students to make a list of the pros and cons of religious belief. And what I have noticed is that the “pros” often aggregate to the benefit of the individual who practices the religion whereas the “cons” often affect others. So, for instance, perhaps it is true that religion provides comfort for individuals, making them happier people. The research seems to bear that out. But what if my religion also makes me homophobic? Then, I am accruing the benefits of my religious belief but someone else is paying the price. What can the state do to even out this sort of inherent imbalance? In a word, what can make religions accountable for the harm that they cause? Can we make a list of the categories of harm that religions frequently cause, and then come together as a society to figure out how we can ameliorate the harmful effects of religion while keeping the benefits?
So Part Two is devoted to cataloguing the various categories of harms that accrue to individuals and society at large that seem religiously motivated, or at least religiously mediated. The focal question might best be expressed this way: What are the significant, tangible, identifiable harms that religion often imposes on others? I express the question in this way because — like most of my readers — I despise a nanny state. By my lights, it is not sufficient to show that a religious belief causes some harm to the person who holds the religious belief. Rather, it would have to be shown that the religious belief ends up causing significant, tangible, identifiable harm to someone other than the believer in order to justify the imposition of a restriction.
Chapter 7 examines the case for restricting religion. I compare religious freedom to freedoms that seem rooted in the same “right to conscience”, especially freedom of the press and freedom of speech. I examine the rules that liberal societies have constructed to ameliorate the harms caused by freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and I find that there is no conceptual basis within liberalism for excluding religion from some reasonable restriction or privileging religion over other freedoms, none of which are taken to be absolute.
Chapter 8 examines the role that religion has played in recent years in exacerbating political tensions and encouraging political violence. I make the case that religions should be expected to stay politically neutral, advocating neither for political candidates nor ballot initiatives. Further, religions should eschew identifying with political parties or attempting to influence the political process.5
Chapter 9 examines the role that religion has played in carrying out various kinds of psychological harm. From restricting what members can read or participate in, to shunning those who leave, to threatening adherents that there will be some sort of tortuous afterlife for those who do not follow the religion’s doctrines or code of conduct, to promoting unhealthy family structures and hierarchies, religions have tended to promote psychologically abusive dynamics. Religions have also fomented human bigotries, to the detriment of those of minority races, genders, sexual orientations, and gender identities. I argue that religions should keep their doctrines compliant with the latest research of the social sciences, and that there should be a code of best practices that religious institutions follow when designing their doctrines, policies, and structure. I further argue that religions should be held accountable for compliance with these best practices — there should, in other words, be an enforceable tort claim for harms that result from a deviation of these religious best practices.
Chapter 10 examines the role that religion has played in perpetrating and enabling sexual violence. I argue that members of the clergy should be mandated reporters to all forms of sexual violence, but especially against children. I further argue that the pro-natalist position that most religions take has its roots in patriarchal views that harm women and subject those women to sexual violence, that consensual sexual activity should be de-stigmatized in the church because stigmatizing sex inevitably leads to abuse, and that no member of the church should be subjected to expectations of celibacy. I also consider the practices which cause genital mutilation to young children, and I argue that these practices should be forbidden by the state, at least as performed on anyone under the age of twenty-six or without their consent.
Chapter 11 deals with the contentious idea of religious freedom. I argue that there is a basic contradiction between the basic concepts of liberalism and our expansive view of religious freedom as inclusive of a parent’s right to raise a child in the parent’s choice of religious systems. I argue that many of our society’s views on religious freedom privilege adults over children and thus expand religious freedom for adults at the expense of savagely curtailing it for children. I argue that liberalism still needs to come to grips with what Locke’s theory means for children, namely, that children are full rights holders who are individually entitled to their own religious freedom. I propose a common sense set of practices that preserve the child’s religious freedom without encroaching too much on the rights of parents. Nonetheless, I do argue that the state is tasked with preserving the rights of its most vulnerable members, and thus when there is a conflict between the religious rights of the parents and their children, it is the children’s rights which should be privileged. I also argue that the primary reason for assigning a very wide scope to religious freedom historically has been the inability of the state to distinguish between true and false, legitimate and illegitimate, religious beliefs. However, with this epistemic tool that I am providing, the state now has a means of distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate religious belief, and thus there is no reason to provide religious freedom when the religious beliefs are unwarranted and those beliefs cause harm. So society would be well served by providing common sense religious restrictions to root out the most harmful beliefs and practices.
The third question: What is the rightful place of children within our society?
This third questions seems a little disconnected from the other two, in the sense that it goes beyond religious questions, affecting practically the child’s entire life. From questions of education to healthcare, from questions of divorce and child rearing, to rights of freedom of association and religious expression, to even the question of when adulthood should be thought to begin, this particular question touches on much more than just religion. So why are we considering this question in a book on religion?
There is the question of legal obligations of the state with respect to children, of course, but the primary authority in a child’s life is not the state it is the parents or guardians. And often these relationships are fundamentally illiberal, often downright authoritarian. And all too often this parent-child relationship is impacted by the religious beliefs of the parent. Parents often have very strongly held beliefs about how they ought to perform their role, and those beliefs are just as likely to have been formed by using the Bible as by using John Locke or John Stuart Mill to guide the parent. But if the fields of ethics and child developmental psychology belongs to the social sciences, as I insist, then we ought to have justified beliefs about how children ought to be raised, and there is no reason for anyone to raise a child according to a sanctioned set of beliefs, as religion happens to be. So we might think of this section of my work as determining how to disentangle child rearing practices from religion.
This is especially difficult to do because most parents are beyond the age where state provided education might be expected to be provided. And given that someone has a set of beliefs, it is difficult to expect that they will parent contrary to those ideas. So the Church actually might be expected to pick up some of this slack. Child rearing doctrines that align with the best research from the social sciences ought to be a part of the package of best practices that churches align their teachings with.
In part three, I address questions of religious belief as it impacts children.
In Chapter 12, I look at the history of religion vis a vis children in liberal societies. I show that children have tended to be viewed, historically, as the property of their parents (and especially of their father), and how this view shaped the idea — common to many societies — that children have special obligations to their parents and that parents have almost unlimited authority over their children. I demonstrate that this idea is in direct tension with liberal ideas about children and parental authority.
In Chapter 13, I take on the idea of “parental rights,” by insisting that parents have no rights within a proper view of liberalism; indeed, parents cannot have rights respective to their children because the proper rights holder is the child themself. I argue for a causative view of parental obligation that, I argue, reverses the traditional order of obligation. We will discover that, while children have absolutely no primary obligations to their parents, parents in fact have enormous primary obligations to their children. I further argue that it is the primary duty of the state under liberalism to secure the rights of its most vulnerable members, and that thus the state should do a better job of supervising parents in their caretaking and child rearing responsibilities.
In Chapter 14, I argue that one of the primary duties of parents is to secure a so-called “open future” for their children, which I define as a situation in which no barriers have been erected to try to foreclose the exercise of the child’s rights. I argue that religious freedom is one of the primary freedoms that parents often try to savagely curtail, namely by trying to foreclose those options in childhood via inappropriate indoctrination. I argue against the religious indoctrination of children, and propose reasonable measures that the state can take to ensure that parents are not denying an open future to their children in the matter of religious expression.
In my concluding chapter — Chapter 15 — I summarize the other fourteen chapters and enumerate all the major policy proposals that I recommend for the regulation of religion. I emphasize one word — accountability. We can either live in a society that holds its institutions accountable and prevents the accruing of significant harm, or we can live in a society — like ours! — that fails to hold people and institutions accountable and thereby permits significant, unredressed harm to befall its most vulnerable members. I thus argue that a culture where “religious freedom” knows no limitations is, in fact, an inferior, unaccountable society. And that with freedom comes naturally responsibility and accountability if freedom is to be enjoyed by everyone.
One last word on the apparent U.S.-centrism of this work. I realize that this introduction has been very centered on U.S. social and political practices. In part, this is very intentional. I am a U.S. citizen; while I do not think that societies to which I do not belong are beyond any criticism at all, I am nonetheless very reticent to criticize other societies to which I do not belong. I am especially reticent to criticize other societies when there is a long history of U.S. and European colonization. Colonization is not just a political practice; it is also an ideological one. Thus, while I do believe that some of my criticisms could be extended to other parts of the world, I am not the one who is well-positioned to make those kinds of arguments. If members of other societies find the principles that I elucidate in this work to be compelling, and want to adapt these arguments for their own societies, I certainly have no objection to them doing so. But I feel unsuited to making those arguments myself. I am primarily concerned with my own society.
Additionally, the U.S. has sort of marketed itself as the “beacon of liberty,” the “light on the hill,” the “Exceptional Nation” or “Indispensable Nation”. While I consider these kinds of descriptions to represent an inflated sense of national self, it is nonetheless true that many of my fellow citizens hold these views. So American religion has, in a sense, become uniquely problematic on the world stage. So correcting America’s excess on these issues will go a long way towards correcting the problem globally.
I feel no hostility towards religion in its best forms, but my concern is making all religion “good religion.” As a religious outsider, I have no particular axe to grind. I am not trying to advocate for one form of religion because it coincides naturally with the form that I have become accustomed because I have no such religion to bias me. I am strictly irreligious. My sole means of evaluating religions is how well they accord with sound epistemic theory, as well as how amenable they are to our set of received justified beliefs as given to our society by the social and physical sciences. In this, we have a lot of work to do. But, if I am correct that we can distinguish between better and worse forms of religion, this is not an insurmountable task. Not all religion is “bad religion,” but there are a sufficient number of examples of “bad religion” in the United States to cause worry to a sensible person. And now that we have the right tools to distinguish between bad religion and good religion, we ought not shy away from the task of trying to change our religious institutions so that they represent healthy religion and not diseased religion. This is my great hope, and the reason that I wrote this work.
- Hitchens, Christopher. God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Kindle ed.). Twelve Books. p. 258. ↩︎
- Those who are familiar with theology may find the term presuppositionalism more familiar. I am using the term Christian Foundationalism to intentionally put my theory in dialogue with Plantinga, but presuppositionalism is essentially the same theory. ↩︎
- It is important to distinguish between something that is “irrational” and something that is “non-rational.” No worthy epistemic theory can account for irrational beliefs, namely those beliefs that are contrary to reason, because it would be a perverse system indeed that said that one ought to believe things that are contrary to reason. However, non-rational beliefs are those that are not contradicted by rational beliefs, but themselves are not rationally compelling. We might think of non-rational beliefs as not being compulsory, though they are permitted, but that isn’t probably very helpful because most of the beliefs that we form through entitlement are not rationally compelling but nonetheless we find ourselves compelled to believe them. In this case, though, they are still non-rational beliefs because it isn’t our thought process that convinces us of them. In fact, even if we were to construct a rational argument for these beliefs, that argument would be less compelling than the already existing strength of the belief. So they are compelling beliefs, but the origin of their compulsory status is not their rational strength. In contrast, sanctioned beliefs as we will see are very different from entitled beliefs because they are truly voluntary beliefs in that there is nothing — outside of perhaps social pressures — that can compel one to accept them. They are non-rational beliefs, but they, too, ought not be irrational. ↩︎
- Of course, I am writing this within the context of the American political system. Some other systems might employ much more strict regulations on religious belief. However, I am also operating under the assumption that Western societies such as the United States would find such programs unacceptably heavy handed and counterproductive. ↩︎
- Of all my claims, this is likely the least controversial. Indeed, the U.S. still has the Johnson Amendment which codifies these sentiments. However, we have not been true to our principles, as the Johnson Amendment is almost never enforced and Churches routinely violate it without consequence. ↩︎
