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Frank Schaeffer

Frank Schaeffer

Posted: November 5, 2008 11:44 AM

President Obama: Bad News For the New Atheists and Other Fundamentalists

The Obama presidency is great news for almost everyone. It's bad news for some odd ideological bedfellows: the Religious Right and the so-called New Atheists.

Into the all or nothing culture wars, and the all or nothing wars between the so-called New Atheists and religion the election of President elect Obama reintroduces nuance. President elect Obama's ability to believe in Jesus, yet question, is going to rescue American religion in general and Christianity in particular, from the extremes.


Full disclosure: I was raised by American missionaries -- Francis and Edith Schaeffer -- who became leaders within the American Evangelical subculture. When I was in my twenties I was their sidekick. We Schaeffers had a lot to do with the formation of the Religious Right. (Sorry!) In the mid 1980s I escaped my tribe's literal-minded religion and currently go to a Greek Orthodox Church. I've also been one of President elect Obama's most vocal and prolific -- judging by the amount I've written -- supporters.

The pro and anti God industry churns. I know. I've worked this turf for years. But there is a new sheriff on the religion beat. He's smart! President elect Obama is a knowledgeable fan of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, has lectured seriously on his faith and the relationship of church and state, and is not a nominal Christian for political purposes, but someone who actually prays, believes and lives his faith.

To the New Atheists who think that with the resounding defeat of the Religious Right, we are entering a secular age, think again. Obama will block your path. He'll do it for the same reason he'll make the Religious Right's paranoid fantasies about him soon seem shamefully ridiculous. That's because President elect Obama is that rarest of all rare people: a thoughtful, compassionate and likable statesman who also is a thoughtful, compassionate and likable religious believer.

In the last few years there has been a spate of best selling books published that are for or against religion. All of them are by literalists who speak in fundamentalist tones. On the pro-religion side we find A Purpose Driven Life and the Left Behind series extolling a Jesus-solves-everything one note evangelical born-again message. On the flip side are the equally evangelistic one note New Atheist books including Sam Harris's The End of Faith, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great.





But President elect Obama has spoken of the need to meld religious ethics with the philosophical underpinnings of statecraft, when for instance he says that the Democrats have been mistaken in not understanding that the abortion issue is first and foremost a moral issue.

On June 28, 2006, Senator Obama spoke at the Call to Renewal Conference sponsored by Sojourners. President elect Obama said:

"For some time now, there has been plenty of talk among pundits and pollsters that the political divide in this country has fallen sharply along religious lines... Conservative leaders have been all too happy to exploit this gap... Democrats, for the most part, have taken the bait... At worst, there are some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word 'Christian' describes one's political opponents, not people of faith...


"And if we're going to do that then we first need to understand that Americans are a religious people... This religious tendency is not simply the result of successful marketing by skilled preachers... I speak with some experience on this matter.




Pre the Religious Right take over the traditional focus of the Republican Party had been on foreign policy issues, the economy, military preparedness and a generally libertarian laissez-faire view of the world-things William F. Buckley, and Barry Goldwater would have recognized. This was replaced by the "religious ethics" of what I imagine as the Saturday Night Live Church Lady's older, stricter, uglier, dumber and terminally self-righteous big sister. This humorless desiccated hag remade the Republican image as the anti-everything party. And in doing so this hag also took down all religious people through guilt by association. And that is the context in which the evangelistic New Atheists emerged.

Okay, so a lot of religious people are nuts, or worse, intolerant. That still doesn't address the baby swirling down the Maher/New Atheist anti-religion drain along with the right wing bathwater they're flushing.

President-elect Obama brings another perspective to faith . It goes something like this:

How do cultures define themselves if not through ritual? In the "big moments" of life; birth, marriage, sickness, death "who" -- in the inimitable words of Ghost Busters -- "you gonna call?" As President elect Obama has said, and I paraphrase: Strip the human race of our spiritual language and what do we tell each other about hope?

As President elect Obama has pointed out, a world of all math but no poetry is not fit for human habitation. If everything feels flat and dull, stripped of mystery and meaning who will bother to do the science? Why bother, if all we're doing is serving those selfish genes for another round of meaningless propagation?

So does this faith always make "sense?" No. Because our perspective is from the inside, something like paint contemplating the painting of which it's a part. We're all in the same boat, all stuck on the same "canvas."

So let's admit we all share the problem that was best articulated by Darwin in his dairy: "Can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?"

As our new president recognizes, self-awareness and mortality are already such a mutually exclusive (and terrifying) contradiction that accepting a few more contradictions is par for the course! And President elect Obama has a generous enough spirit and a large enough intellect so that he can do with his spiritual life, what the Religious Right and the New Atheists have not done: understand that there is no shame in embracing paradox.

President Obama is about to make reasoned faith fashionable again. It's about time.



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