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Must Religion be a Conversation-Stopper?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2009

Stuart Rosenbaum
Stuart Rosenbaum*
Affiliation:
Baylor University
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Extract

Richard Rorty has suggested that religion is a conversation-stopper.1 Jeffrey Stout has questioned this claim, gently chiding Rorty for his animus toward increasing assertiveness on the part of religiously committed individuals in their address of public issues.2 Stout concludes that “conversation is the very thing that is not stopped when religious premises are introduced in a political argument.”3 He is convinced that Rorty is overly sensitive on this matter and believes, with Nicholas Wolterstorff and others, that religious people in a pluralistic democracy have not only the right but also the responsibility to share their convictions and the reasoning that leads to their opinions on vital moral and social issues. Stout quotes Wolterstorff as follows:

It belongs to the religious convictions of a good many religious people in our society that they ought to base their decisions concerning fundamental issues of justice on their religious convictions. They do not view as an option whether or not to do so. It is their conviction that they ought to strive for wholeness, integrity, integration in their lives: that they ought to allow the Word of God, the teachings of the Torah, the command and example of Jesus, or whatever, to shape their existence as a whole, including, then, their social and political existence. Their religion is not, for them, about something other than their social and political existence; it is also about their social and political existence. Accordingly, to require of them that they not base their decisions and discussions concerning political issues on their religion is to infringe, inequitably, on the free exercise of their religion.4

In what follows, I revisit Stout's question, “is religion a conversation-stopper?” and explain why he believes that Rorty is inappropriately skeptical regarding the role of religion in public life. I then show why Rorty is in fact correct to be skeptical about bringing religious views into discussions of significant public issues.5 Stout, along with Wolterstorff and others, is overly optimistic, and his critique of Rorty reveals his undue optimism. I explain why current perspectives on religion justify Rorty's skepticism about bringing it into public discourse. I also suggest a different perspective on religions that might enable the sort of optimism Stout embraces. The change of perspective I suggest involves taking our religious views not as justified or warranted by documents, sources, traditions, and revelations but rather as embedded in or deriving from those documents, sources, traditions, and revelations. The latter way of understanding our religious views opens them to intellectual strategies of genealogy, or to explanatory strategies that contextualize them within particular traditions of culture and history. I conclude this essay with two relevant points. The first is that neither justifying nor explaining the sources of one's religious views, the strategies roughly of justifying religious beliefs and providing genealogies of them—tools for “deconstructing” them as some would have it—can claim proper priority in our religious lives. Explaining the sources of our commitments is as trenchantly definitive of those commitments as is providing dialectical justification for them. (William James discerns and exploits this fact about our religious views throughout his work.6) My second concluding point is that Stout departs significantly, in ways that adversely affect his views, from the constructive intellectual stances of the classical pragmatists, among whom I include primarily William James and John Dewey; Rorty, although many dislike his views on religion, is a better representative of classical pragmatism than is Stout.

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ARTICLES
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 102 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 393 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2009

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References

1 Richard Rorty, “Religion as a Conversation Stopper,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999) 168–74. Originally pubished in Common Knowledge 3 (1994) 1–6.

2 Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004) ch. 3, esp. 85–91, “Is Religion a Conversation-Stopper?”.

3 Ibid., 90.

4 Ibid., 72. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues,” in Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997) 105 [italics in original].

5 For a perspective affirming Rorty's skepticism regarding the propriety of allowing religion fully into public life, see Lewis H. Lapham, “The Wrath of the Lamb,” Harper's Magazine, May 2005, 7–9. See also in the same issue, Jeff Sharlet, “Soldiers of Christ: I. Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch,” 41–54. For an expression of concern that shares my perception of the Christian right as an emerging political/social juggernaut, see the editorial, “Onward Moderate Christian Soldiers,” by John C. Danforth, The New York Times (17 June, 2005).

6 See William James's Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985) esp. lecture 18; see also Lecture 1 of James's 1910 series of lectures, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). The strategy I here call “genealogy” or “explanation” is ubiquitous in James's work.

7 See, for example, Robert M. Baird and Stuart Rosenbaum, Gay Marriage (Buffalo: Prometheus, 2004).

8 This quote is from an unidentified minister of the Christian gospel in Washington, D.C. For similar sentiment without the compelling rhyme of this quote, see “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Henry,” in Baird and Rosenbaum, 115–16.

9 Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 88. For Stout's account of the idea of immanent criticism, as well as his understanding of its importance, see ibid., 73.

10 Ibid., 90.

11 Ibid.

12 In fairness to Stout, one should acknowledge that he takes up many of these issues at various points within the chapters of his book and frequently expresses strong preferences or presents extensive arguments addressing them.

13 In his more recent essay, “Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration,” Journal of Religious Ethics 31 (2003) 141–49, Rorty moderates his view that religion is a conversation stopper only modestly. Rorty allows in this more recent essay that Wolterstorff has persuaded him that it is no more illegitimate for Wolterstorff to cite Biblical passages in favor of his social views than it is for Rorty to cite John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Rorty still believes that religion is a conversation stopper in so far as it involves an appeal to authority in justification of any particular view on any social issue. Rorty avers that he would not regard his appeal to Mill as authoritative and definitive in support of any particular position he might hold, and he would urge a similar modesty on those, including Wolterstorff, who might be tempted to appeal to the definitive authority of some biblical passage or religious personage.

14 See n. 4 above.

15 Notice that the failure of political strategies designed to appease the religious right during the congressional elections of 2006 does not diminish the temptation among Republican politicans to curry favor among religiously conservative voters.

16 For some rumination on this phenomenon, see for example Stanley Fish, “One University Under God?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 January, 2005.

17 See Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, printed in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (ed. Andrew Lipscomb and Albert Bergh; Washington, D.C., 1903–1904) 16: 281–82.

18 Gilbert Meilaender raises a similar question in connection with Stout's perspective on democracy and religion, and finds that Stout has recourse ultimately to the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism. See Meilaender's review, “Talking Democracy,” in First Things 142 (2004) 25–31. Meilaender finds Stout's recourse to pragmatism finally disabling because he sees it as inevitably committed to contextualism, relativism, and a refusal to engage questions of ultimate authority. This refusal to engage questions of ultimate authority or to submit to it (“to bend the knee”) and to bring the results into the public arena Meilaender finds inimical to his Christian commitments.

19 Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

20 Plantinga's acronym for these internal instigations of the Holy Spirit is “IIHS.”

21 Ibid., 177–79.

22 In fairness to Plantinga, one should notice that this characterization of believers' epistemic situation requires, in his view, the assumption that God exists and that there is indeed a Holy Spirit who provides the occasion for these believers' views. Humans' epistemic situation depends, for externalists generally, on their ontological situation.

23 For a sober, yet Christian, assessment of Plantinga's views, see Paul K. Moser, “Man to Man with Warranted Christian Belief and Alvin Plantinga,” Philosophia Christi, Series 2 (2001) 3:369–77. (Plantinga responds to Moser in adjoining pages of the same issue.)

24 See esp. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 248, and esp. nn. 15 and 16.

25 A noteworthy, but not exceptional, instance of this failure of modesty on the part of a Christian minister occurred in Waynesville, North Carolina during the month of May, 2005. The Reverend Chan Chandler allegedly expelled members of his Southern Baptist church for their refusal to support the Presidential candidacy of George W. Bush. Many lifelong Democrats and members of Rev. Chandler's church found themselves excluded from church fellowship on political grounds. The episode resulted in Rev. Chandler's eventual resignation and his taking with him many of the church's previous members. One who left with him, Misty Turner, was quoted as saying, “I'm not going to serve where there are so many ungodly people.” For an account of this episode, see The New York Times, 16 May, 2005, A1.

26 Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 248 n. 15.

27 See Ibid., 248 n. 16.

28 In further support of this claim, I would note Lewis Lapham's citation of a quote from the National Association of Evangelicals's booklet entitled “An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.” The quote reads as follows: “We engage in public life because God created our first parents in his image and gave them dominion over the earth (Gen 1:27–28)…. We also engage in public life because Jesus is Lord over every area of life … to restrict our stewardship to the private sphere would be to deny an important part of his dominion and to functionally abandon it to the Evil One. To restrict our political concerns to matters that touch only on the private and the domestic spheres is to deny the all-encompassing Lordship of Jesus (Rev 19:16). “Notebook: The wrath of the Lamb,” Harper's Magazine, May 2005, 7.

29 See again Rorty's 2003 “reconsideration” of his view, cited in n. 13 above. Insofar as the idea of justification by authority is concerned, note that Rorty does not back down; he would be fully sympathetic to the critique of Plantinga offered here.

30 There are differences among these three, as well as among other figures that might also be added to this list. Descartes and Chisholm are, in a proper Enlightenment spirit, thoroughly egalitarian in their epistemological thought; they think of all persons, qua persons, as having the same innate ideas or synthetic a priori principles of evidence. Plantinga, in an opposed but proper Calvinistic spirit, allows for the possibility that the internal instigations of the Holy Spirit may fall only on a select subset of persons.

31 See, for example, 1929: The Quest for Certainty (ed. Jo Ann Boydston; vol. 4 of The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953; Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008) esp. ch. 1.

32 See “Philosophy,” in James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, ch. 18.

33 This preference is ubiquitous in Dewey's work, but his Terry Lectures, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934) express it with specific attention to issues of religion.

34 This way of thinking about this issue would be congenial to Dewey's larger views about belief, knowledge, and religion. See for example 1925: Experience and Nature (ed. Boydston; vol. 1 of The Later Works of John Dewey, 1988) 303: “Were not objects of belief immediate goods, false beliefs would not be the dangerous things which they are. For it is because these objects are good to believe, to admit and assert, that they are cherished so intolerantly and unremittingly. Beliefs about God, Nature, society and man are precisely the things that men most cling to and most ardently fight for. It is easier to wean a miser from his hoard, than a man from his deeper opinions. And the tragedy is that in so many cases the causes which lead to the thing in question being a value are not reasons for its being a good, while the fact that it is an immediate good tends to preclude that search for causes, that dispassionate judgment, which is prerequisite to the conversion of goods de facto into goods de jure.” Note Dewey's emphasis on causes and understanding them.

35 The pragmatist tradition can neither enable nor encourage such constructive conversation so long as any of the conversational partners insists on recourse to strategies of justification by authority, and this is Rorty's point in his “reconsideration” of his earlier, more strident rejection of religion in public discourse; see n. 13.

36 See n. 6 above.

37 I have already mentioned William James's view in Varieties. John Dewey's commitment to this way of understanding human intellectual life is evident throughout his writings, but see in particular 1934: Art as Experience (ed. Boydston; vol. 10 of The Later Works of John Dewey, 1989) for an elaborate account of how all human practices and institutions have roots in human history and human ecological contexts. (I should mention also that this pragmatist view cannot be defended without begging the question any more than can the view that justification is the primary issue.)

38 This fact may explain why “real epistemologists” do not take the classical pragmatists seriously; the pragmatists' “justification” is, by their intellectual lights, not justification at all.

39 See Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 74.

40 Ibid., 293.

41 Ibid., 283.

42 Stout repeatedly distances himself from what he thinks of as Dewey's commitment to the idea that truth is warranted assertability. See, for example, 240 and 248. My own view is that this way of thinking about Dewey's understanding of truth, one not unique to Stout, is inaccurate and overly simplified; see, for example, Dewey's discussion of truth in Logic: the Theory of Inquiry (ed. Boydston; vol. 12 of The Later Works of John Dewey, 2008) 178–79. Also, compare Stout's discussion of truth with that of Duane Cady in Moral Vision: How Everyday Life Shapes Ethical Thinking (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) esp. 55–56. Cady's discussion, while brief, is explicitly genealogical. Speaking of the classical pragmatists, one must not overlook William James; James's struggles to express his understanding of truth were frequent and unsuccessful. See Hilary Putnam's discussion of James's understanding of truth in “James's theory of truth,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James (ed. Ruth Anna Putnam; Cambridge University Press, 1997) 166–85; see also in that same volume the essay by Bruce Wilshire, “The Breathtaking Intimacy of the Material World: William James's Last Thoughts,” 103–24, esp. 115–16.

43 See Stout 251, and more generally 248–55.

44 John Dewey gives a pragmatist account of the idea of a proposition as an instrument of human activity in Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, 162, but this idea is very different from that of propositions as abstract particulars and bearers of fixed truth-values, and the latter idea is the one Stout evidently intends to embrace in his own discussion of propositions.

45 Stout's critique of these conservative Christian perspectives is nonetheless quite helpful in spite of my general conclusion that Stout himself does not go far enough in his embrace of traditional pragmatism. See especially part two of Democracy and Tradition “Religious Voices in a Secular Society,” 64–181.