Guest Post by Morbo
Two weeks ago, I mentioned Thomas Jefferson’s 1878 1787 letter to his nephew Peter Carr. Jefferson wrote the missive from Paris, offering his nephew advice on how a young man who aspired to live a cultured life ought to get started in the world.
Any politician who dared to write a letter like this today would find his political career in shreds. For starters, the letter unmasks Jefferson as a snob. It contains references to Livy and Tacitus and employs ancient Greek terms. He comes off as yet another sneering, East Coast elitist full of that fancy book learning. An egghead like Jefferson could never connect with the NASCAR crowd.
Worse yet, in the letter Jefferson dared to advise his nephew to question the claims of religion. He wrote, “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. (Read the entire letter here.)
Note that Jefferson did not tell his nephew to become an atheist. Although he rejected the divinity of Jesus and the more fantastic tales of the Bible, Jefferson was not a non-believer. He merely told his nephew to not fear doubting; Jefferson advised Carr to boldly question any claims, even those widely accepted. Basically, Jefferson is saying when it comes to religion, keep an open mind and be skeptical. That would be enough to sink him in James Dobson’s America.
Fundamentalist Christians complain constantly about being persecuted. Every time a federal court orders a Ten Commandments monument out of a courthouse or makes a public school stop pushing Jesus, the TV preachers and their ilk commence to portray themselves as victims.
But their whining is unpersuasive. In fact, it is no longer acceptable in polite society to be like Jefferson and question the claims of our major religions — no matter how fantastic they may be. If you doubt me, I offer this dare: Name one prominent American in public life who questions the claims of religion, including Christianity, on a regular basis. (Sorry, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are not Americans.)
Columnist Matt Taibbi of the New York Press put it powerfully in a recent column.
In general, there is almost no public figure, anywhere, who has ever suggested publicly that fundamentalist Christianity, as a thing-in-itself, should be opposed. The strongest suggestion most critics will make is to say that it should be contained, and indeed that seems to be the best-case strategy of progressives: that the God-fearing set can be boxed in, kept from being a nuisance and from meddling in areas where they don’t belong, just long enough for them to eventually die out of natural causes.
This is a mistake, and it is the same mistake people have made for centuries: underestimating the American zeal for superstition, for boobism, for living the intellectual lives of farm animals. A large statistical majority of Americans would rather live their whole lives in perpetual fear of the devil than listen to ten minutes of common sense.
What’s especially maddening is listening to fundamentalists arrogantly sneer at the absurd things members of minority faiths believe. It’s easy to poke fun at Tom Cruise for believing in space aliens and for swallowing goofy Scientology dogma. After all, that’s a “cult,” and its claims are branded absurd. But hasn’t anyone noticed that other religious tales seem equally daft — for example, asserting that a young woman got pregnant without having sex and gave birth to a god who was in fact his own father?
Things have gotten so bad that some rationalists have called for a type of surrender. In an attempt to defuse the long-running feud between religion and science, the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once proposed a framework he called NOMA – or “non-overlapping magesteria.”
Gould argued that science and religion addressed two very different aspects of human existence. Science concerns itself with the natural world and how we can understand it better. Religion deals with spiritual things and questions such as how to get to Heaven, which lay outside the realm of science.
Under the NOMA theory, science and religion pursue their lines of inquiry with mutual respect and everyone goes home happy. It was well-intentioned effort, but Gould was hopelessly naive. NOMA was doomed from the start but not because science is too arrogant to stay on its own turf; it’s religion that keeps straying.
Fundamentalist Christians insist that their Bible is more than a guidebook for a moral life. It’s also a history book and a science book. They arrogantly proclaim that if anything in their interpretation of the Bible contradicts modern science, it is modern science that must yield. They will never recognize Gould’s NOMA because, according to their theology, the Bible is the basis from which everything else springs. It must, by its very nature, trump everything else.
Jefferson, a spawn of the Enlightenment, knew why such an approach was dangerous. Mainly, it chokes off debate and open inquiry through the substitution of rigid dogma for free thought. Jefferson certainly had his flaws and moral blind spots, but he would not tolerate substituting dogma for reason.
Today, according to the latest Harris poll, nearly half of all Americans say they reject evolution. (Only Americans would be so arrogant to think they have the right!) We have repudiated the Enlightenment, and tragically, are proud of that fact.
And that’s what makes Jefferson a loser by today’s political standards. It’s a shame. Jefferson was an amateur scientist, historian, inventor and architect. His book collection was so massive it became the basis for the Library of Congress. He wrote the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom (a precursor to the First Amendment) and the Declaration of Independence and founded the University of Virginia. In retirement, he found time to carry on a vigorous correspondence with numerous friends touching on dozens of topics.
Jefferson was confident that as the nation grew, a rational form of deistic faith would take root and drive out the more flamboyant forms of Christianity and their fantastic claims. Despite his other talents, Jefferson was no seer. On this point, he could not have been more wrong. We’ve turned our backs on the Enlightenment that so inspired Jefferson. The result is that the man who helped birth our nation could not today be elected so much as dogcatcher anywhere in it.