LET IT BLEED

Let It Be: The greatest development in modern religion is not a religion at all?it's an attitude best described as "apatheism" (Jonathan Rauch, May 2003, Atlantic Monthly)?

It came to me recently in a blinding vision that I am an apatheist. Well, "blinding vision" may be an overstatement. "Wine-induced haze" might be more strictly accurate. This was after a couple of glasses of Merlot, when someone asked me about my religion. "Atheist," I was about to say, but I stopped myself. "I used to call myself an atheist," I said, "and I still don't believe in God, but the larger truth is that it has been years since I really cared one way or another. I'm"?that was when it hit me?"an ... apatheist!"

That got a chuckle, but the point was serious. Apatheism?a disinclination to care all that much about one's own religion, and an even stronger disinclination to care about other people's?may or may not be something new in the world, but its modern flowering, particularly in ostensibly pious America, is worth getting excited about.

Apatheism concerns not what you believe but how. In that respect it differs from the standard concepts used to describe religious views and people. Atheism, for instance, is not at all like apatheism; the hot-blooded atheist cares as much about religion as does the evangelical Christian, but in the opposite direction. "Secularism" can refer to a simple absence of devoutness, but it more accurately refers to an ACLU-style disapproval of any profession of religion in public life?a disapproval that seems puritanical and quaint to apatheists. Tolerance is a magnificent concept, John Locke's inestimable gift to all mankind; but it assumes, as Locke did, that everyone brims with religious passions that everyone else must work hard to put up with. [...]

I believe that the rise of apatheism is to be celebrated as nothing less than a major civilizational advance. Religion, as the events of September 11 and after have so brutally underscored, remains the most divisive and volatile of social forces. To be in the grip of religious zeal is the natural state of human beings, or at least of a great many human beings; that is how much of the species seems to be wired. Apatheism, therefore, should not be assumed to represent a lazy recumbency, like my collapse into a soft chair after a long day. Just the opposite: it is the product of a determined cultural effort to discipline the religious mindset, and often of an equally determined personal effort to master the spiritual passions. It is not a lapse. It is an achievement.

The short-sightedness of this idea is apparent enough if you simply consider the possibility of a world in which you truly don't care whether your neighbor shares the same morality as you. It seems a pleasant enough notion when it means you take no notice of his sexual preferences and he doesn't mind the woicker man you burn in your yard once a year. But what happens you have no way of knowing whether he's comfortable with the idea of sex between adults and children or when your new neighbor's religion tells him that it's okay to murder infidels?

At any rate, drivel like this makes W. B. Yeats seem all the more prescient:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 15, 2003 2:56 PM