"The Secular Society Gets Religion," Felicia Lee reported in the top story in the Arts & Ideas section of Saturday's Times. "Experts Differ About the Re-Emergence of Faith in Politics." In the large, cartoonish illustration for the piece, religion is represented by a gaggle of Crusaders, anachronistically led by a priest who appears primed to perform an exorcism. The secular society is represented by people who are trying to find cures for cancer and Parkinson's Disease and exploring the distant reaches of the universe.
With this setup, you might expect a snide article to follow. Not a bit of it. Ms. Lee reports that, while "intellectual giants like John Dewey and Sigmund Freud dismissed religion as infantile and predicted an increasingly secular society, … lately a growing number of social scientists, philosophers, historians, and other scholars are trying to account for the energetic re-entry of religion into the public sphere."
She talked to many of the right people—Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Michael Cromartie, and Wilfred McClay, among others, all of whom will be familiar to readers of Books & Culture. And she directs readers of the Times to what promises to be an interesting book, Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Public Policy in America, a Woodrow Wilson Center publication coming this fall from the Johns Hopkins University Press, edited by McClay and Hugh Heclo, a professor of public affairs at George Mason University, who is also quoted in the article. (Wendy Kaminer, the winsome skeptic who was interviewed for Books & Culture by Cromartie, and Paul Kurtz, the tireless champion of secular humanism, are called upon to huff and puff, but their dissent is rather tepid: "Hark, hark back to the days of Galileo," Kurtz says, deploring "the intrusion of religion into science, with a ban on cloning.")
The puzzle is what this piece, published at this late date, presumes about the Times' readership—and the paper's editors. It's as if every time the subject of religion in America comes up, the editors feel the need to start at Square One. Not everyone in America is thoroughly secular! Not all those religious types are ignoramuses! Some of them even read books! (A few may even read the Times.) Some of them—brace yourself—write books! Some of them—I know this is incredible—are scholars, taken seriously by their scholarly peers! And so on.
And then there are passages like this, from the concluding paragraph of Lee's article:
A Gallup Poll last year, for instance, showed that 82 percent thought of themselves as Christians, 10 percent belonged to other faiths, and 8 percent were atheists or agnostics, Professor Heclo said. But they also said that no dogma, religious creed, or denominational commitment guided their beliefs.
What exactly this means—and what Professor Heclo actually said—is anyone's guess. Who are "they," for instance, in "they also said"? Are we supposed to be reassured that, although "they" think of themselves as Christians, "no dogma, religious creed, or denominational commitment guided their beliefs"? And what beliefs are those, anyway? Beliefs about the divinity of Christ? Beliefs about whether cloning should be permitted? Beliefs about whether the United States should invade Iraq? Would this kind of sloppiness be tolerated in the business pages or the science section?
The paper of record already has the resources to cover religion in America; what's lacking is the will. Isn't it time for the Times to move beyond Square One?
John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture and editor-at-large for Christianity Today.
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