A Constructive Critique of Religion

Encounters between Christianity, Islam, and Non-religion in Secular Societies

Mia Lövheim, Mikael Stenmark, Mia Lövheim, Mikael Stenmark

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350113114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Why do some strategies for critique of religion seem to be more beneficial for constructive engagement, whereas others increase intolerance, polarization, and conflict? Through an analysis of the reasons underpinning a critique of religion in institutional contexts of secular democratic societies, A Constructive Critique of Religion explores how constructive interaction and critique can be developed across diverse interests. It shows how social and cultural conditions shaping these institutions enable and structure a critical and constructive engagement across diverging worldviews. A key argument running through the book is that to develop constructive forms of critique a more thorough and systematic investigation of resources for criticism located within religious worldviews themselves is needed. Chapters also address how critique of Islam and Christianity in particular is expressed in areas such as academia, the law, politics, media, education and parenting, with a focus on Northern Europe and North America. The interdisciplinary approach, which combines theoretical perspectives with empirical case studies, contributes to advancing studies of the complex and contentious character of religion in contemporary society.

Part One

Philosophical and Theological Perspectives

1

Criticizing Religion in a Secular Democratic Society

Mikael Stenmark

Due to the increased plurality or diversity which characterizes contemporary society, there is now a veritable market in different worldviews, moralities, and lifestyles. On a nearly daily basis we encounter directly or indirectly (through social media) people with different—sometimes radically different—beliefs, values, and identities than our own, and the liberal democratic state has to find means to protect and respect its citizens without establishing or endorsing any of these competing worldviews or ways of life. At the same time, it must be legitimate for us, in the public life of a sound democracy, to criticize the religious or secular worldviews which our fellow citizens embrace. But how could and should this be done? If we want to live in a pluralistic society that is sustainable also in the long run, we need to address these difficult issues. We need to explore and learn how to cultivate ways to critically engage with one another on issues that concern the worldview commitments that set us apart.

Important questions to address, therefore, are the following: what options do we have when it comes to criticizing religions (and for that matter their secular counterparts such as secular humanism or naturalism)? How are we able to reach the others so that they take what we say into account? What is critique of religion (or of worldviews),¹ more precisely, and is it possible to develop constructive or successful forms of such criticism in secular democratic societies? And which ways of critical engagement have proven to be more or less dead ends in that they increase violence, conflict, and resistance rather than fostering peaceful coexistence, critical dialogue, revision of belief and practice, and exchange of ideas? Some of these questions are beyond my competence as a philosopher to address, but what I shall provide is an account of different forms of critique and also point out some of their strengths and weaknesses.

Within the academic community, as well as in the public intellectual discourse, a number of critical engagement strategies have indeed been proposed or used in dealing with these issues. In what follows, I will identify and rationally reconstruct some of these, try to evaluate them, and in the end argue that we should develop and embrace what I call the open strategy. Before exploring these questions, however, some things need to be said about what critique of religion could or should be within the context of a Western secular democratic society.

Critique of Religion

As indicated in the introductory chapter, by critique of religion we mean an assessment or evaluation that is directed by someone (for instance an individual, a group, or an institution) against religion as such, against a religion as a whole, or against a part of it in order to reject it, question it, or to point out that something needs to be changed in it. The first thing to pay attention to is that the goal of criticism is not the same as the goal of understanding, even if the first should include elements of the second activity. (It is hard to develop justified forms of critique if one does not really understand what one aims to critically assess.) When I criticize what someone believes, values, or does, I think that something is wrong, lacking, or unjustified; I am not expressing a desire to grasp or comprehend why or what it means to believe, value, or do these things. We could perhaps say that the logic of criticism differs from the logic of understanding. Critique is an expression of disproval of someone or something; the quest for understanding carries no such connotations. The target of the critique could be, as I have already hinted at, religion as such, that is, all religions, or a particular religion (say Christianity), or a certain denomination or form of that particular religion (say, Christian fundamentalism), or a specific belief, value, or activity of that particular religion (say, the belief in the inerrancy of the Bible or the convictions that abortion and same-sex marriage are morally wrong), or of a specific belief, value, or activity of more than one religion (say, that God exists, that the world is God’s creation, that humans are unique, or that life has an ultimate meaning) but perhaps not all religions. So, one could question the prohibition of blasphemy, which could be found in both Christianity and Islam but not in Buddhism. Moreover, the critic or critics could be an individual, a particular group, or an institutional entity of some kind.

Let us spell out some of these aspects by taking criticism against science as a parallel case. Hence, I will assume that there is nothing special about critique that is directed at religion; it is merely an instance of a broader category. The target could, for instance, be religion, science, politics, education, media, secularism, socialism, or capitalism, either as ideas, institutions, or practices. Normally, we tend to think that critique comes from people outside of the practice in question (criticism from without), but it could just as well come from people who are engaged in the practice, from the religious or scientific practitioners themselves (criticism from within). This means that critique could be internal or external in relation to whom it is who offers or expresses the critique against the phenomenon in question. No clear-cut line could of course be drawn because people will disagree on who’s in and who’s out, who is a (true) religious believer or say a (true) Muslim or who is a (good) scientist or (genuine) representative of science and who is not. Moreover, the distinction is context-sensitive, so in certain debates I may be an insider, in others I may be an outsider, and sometimes it will be hard to tell what I am. Either way, many of us have no problems identifying, say, the atheist Richard Dawkins as an outsider in his critique of Christianity and Islam.

We must also take into account that critique of religion or critique of science could be external or internal in a different way. In that case, it does not have to do with who the critic is but with the grounds on which the critique is based. What kinds of reasons are presented against the object of criticism? Is it scientific reasons that provide the basis for the critique against scientific practice, or is it rather based on religious, moral, philosophical, or legal reasons? Some people are deeply worried about the destructive tendencies of modern science as these express themselves in for instance genetic engineering and biotechnology. They maintain that science in the end will undermine both human dignity and Mother Earth herself. Thus, essentially moral or ethical reasons provide the basis for this kind of critique of science. Or take as an example the critique that aims at those Jews, Christians, and Muslims who believe that the earth was created by God roughly 10–15,000 years ago and that God directly created each of the major species found on earth: it is a criticism to say that young earth creationism contradicts some of the findings and theories of science. Here we have external, more specifically scientific reasons which are used against the theology of creation embraced by these groups of religious practitioners. But the criticism could just as well have been from within their own ranks. Other Jews, Christians, or Muslims have argued that young earth creationism cannot find support in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, or the Quran, since such interpretation of Scripture goes against established traditional hermeneutical principles. Here we find an internal critique of the theology of creation that young earth creationists advocate.

To simplify, let us call reasons that are religiously grounded religious or religion-based reasons. One example of such a reason is when Christians claim that we should believe that all people have equal worth because we are all created in the image of God. It could be aimed at other Christians who deny that we all have equal value, and then it functions as an internal reason. Or it could be directed at people who reject or question that belief, like for instance some utilitarians or Darwinians do, and then constitute an external reason. Consequently, whether reasons given for or against a belief, value, or pattern of behavior are external depends on who or what the object of criticism is. There exists of course no clear-cut line between these different types of reasons, but we could without too much trouble give paradigmatic examples of each kind. Whether any of the reasons or arguments given above are (what philosophers call) good reasons or valid and sound arguments is, of course, a different matter. Here we find plenty of space for disagreement too.

There is also a third question we need to keep in mind, besides “Who offers the criticism?” and “On what ground is the criticism based?”; this third question is “What is the aim of the criticism?” In raising this question, we are interested in knowing what the one who is issuing the critique hopes to achieve with his or her critical assessment: what is its purpose? First, one could engage in a negative form of criticism. One can try to show that a way of reasoning, a belief, a value, an argument, or a theory is not convincing because there are good reasons to reject it, or that even if the premises of the argument are reasonable, perhaps even true, the conclusion does not follow. The previous example of critique against creationism is purely negative; it says what Jews, Christians, and Muslims should not believe about creation. If the goal of negative forms of critique is to show deficiencies or find faults or even to completely undermine the position criticized, the objective of constructive forms of critique is to investigate possible ways of improvement. With constructive negative criticism, then, the critic tries to show how a particular line of reasoning, an argument, or a point of view could become more coherent, justified, or convincing, if certain changes are made.

Many, including myself, have maintained that if theists (roughly, people who believe that there is a God, that the world is God’s creation, that life has an ultimate meaning, and that humans are created in the image of God) take seriously that God neither had to create a world nor create it in a particular way—God could have done things differently—then it is a purely empirical question how the world came into existence and how life developed. Given our present state of scientific knowledge it is, therefore, reasonable for theists to believe that God has started, directed, and influenced the process of evolution; that is, God has used natural laws, the primitive soup of matter, and guided natural selection and mutations to create and develop life. Moreover, it is because God created us human beings in God’s image that we are able to apprehend and know the world and this contingent fact about it. This philosophically and theologically grounded form of constructive critique implies that those Jews, Christians, and Muslims who are theists should accept evolutionary theory but reject a naturalistic interpretation of it (roughly, that there is no God or all-encompassing mind but that the world, at bottom, is wholly impersonal and that matter lies at the root of everything, that life merely is a product of chance, and that there is no purpose to be found behind how cosmic and evolutionary history unfolds). That is to say, they should reject creationism and instead accept theistic evolution. And of course you do not need to be a theist yourself to offer constructive critique of this sort.

After this overview and rough distinction between negative and constructive critique, we could perhaps say that constructive critique of religion signifies such forms of critique which, rather than undermining or debunking a religious worldview (including beliefs, values, and behavior), aims at modifying, reforming, or improving it in relation to a particular problem, objection, or challenge that has appeared. We also need, in one way or another, to consider the reactions of those that receive this criticism. It is presumably not merely the intentions or aims of the critic that determine whether or not a critical remark should be understood as constructive, but also how it is perceived by the target of criticism, the “critique-receiver.” So, a critique against, say, Islamic veiling or punishment for blasphemy which is not meant to undermine Islam as a religion but is rather driven by a yearning to improve this way of life, but which nevertheless completely ignores the reasons that Muslims themselves give for these practices, cannot straightforwardly be conceived as a case of constructive critique.

Let me add a few more questions we need to consider besides:² (1) Who offers the criticism? (2) On what grounds is the criticism based? What kind of reasons are used in the argument? And (3) What is the aim of the criticism? Is its goal positive or negative, reformistic or debunking? These questions are: (4) Who is permitted to offer criticism and respond to it and who is silent, silenced, or ignored? (5) In what social or professional role is the criticism delivered by the critic and in which social setting or arena is it located? And (6) How successful is the criticism? What is its impact on people in general and on the target group in particular?

Whereas question (1) focuses merely on who is inside vs. outside of the religion or worldview which is the target of the critique, question (4) addresses issues of legitimacy, representation, and power when it comes to identifying the critic, the critique-receiver, and the “critique-responder,” that is, he or she who actually responds to the criticism. (Notice that although we typically assume, I believe, that the critique-responder is someone within the religion or worldview that is the target of the critique, it could still be someone outside it.) Question (5) is often intimately related to (4), but analytically distinct. It has to do with the fact that what we can say and do is constrained or made possible in different ways by different contexts. The kind of critique of religion I could “afford” to give, to take merely one example, is enabled and constrained by whether I express it as a private person, a professor, or a prime minister and whether I do it in an academic setting, a popular science book, a daily newspaper, on Facebook, or at a private dinner party.

Question (6) focuses instead on impact and successfulness. Where question (4) requires of scholars of religion to perform a power analysis, and question (5) an affordance analysis, question (6) demands an impact analysis. This latter question is especially challenging in the context of critical engagement with groups of violent religious extremists and their tacit supporters. They could be, say, advocates of militant Islamism supporting ISIS or Christians who are prepared to burn down abortion clinics and kill doctors and nurses working there. How could critics reach such groups of people with their arguments and critique? This is an important issue, because what I am really interested in is whether we can offer or develop a model for a constructive critique of religion which has at least the potential to be successful in the sense that it actually changes the beliefs, values, or behavior of the target group. (A response, on the other hand, is successful if the critic realizes that the criticism is unfair or unjustified.) When can critique help rather than hinder revision of religious commitments? How could we criticize religions or worldviews that differ, sometimes radically, from our own, in a constructive and successful way? Notice, however, that I measure success here in terms of how the target group of the critique responds, and not in terms of how other people in society respond to it. (We can, of course, measure both kinds of responses.) So, for instance, an argument against ISIS showing that their actions violate human rights might be an argument that many people in secular democratic societies in the West find completely compelling, but it might lack evidential force against the target group and their supporters because their basic beliefs and ethical norms are not the same as those espoused by many in secular democratic societies.

Sometimes convincing a third party, located closer or further away from the target of the critique, is actually what we aim at with our critical engagement. A criticism of Islam in this regard might, therefore, not be intended to change what a group of Muslims think on these issues, but to convince the general public that the critique is not merely justified but that we (say, in Europe) ought to severely limit the number of immigrants from certain parts of the world. We can call such arguments “third-party target-arguments.” However, those critics want to con...