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Andrew Levine, bad faith, Emile Durkheim, Friedrich Nietzsche, In Bad Faith, inauthenticity, liberal Christianity, Ludwig Feuerbach, Rodney Stark, secularisation, Sigmund Freud
On the one hand – given the pressures, pains and uncertainties of everyday life – it is hardly surprising that many people hold on so desperately to diluted forms of Christian belief, in particular “liberal Christianity”. On the other hand, such a position has long struck me as intellectually dishonest and morally questionable.
Here’s the interesting blurb for the latest book by political philosopher Andrew Levine, In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong with the Opium of the People (November, 2011):
“In this fascinating book, Levine combines an insightful analysis of important nineteenth-century thinkers who puzzled over why religion persists with a critique of twentieth-century liberal theologies as they have developed in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Levine argues that liberal theologies are intellectually flawed. They provide a means for those who cannot give up on religion to retain pale shadows of the traditions with which liberal believers try to remain in contact. Those shadows, Levine contends, are untrue to what liberal believers, in their hearts, already know.”
— Elliott Sober, author, Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of the most important and influential heirs of the Enlightenment tradition—Ludwig Feuerbach, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche—wondered, implicitly, why belief in God persists and even flourishes among those who should and in some sense do know better. Looking at aspects of their thinking through this prism provides fresh insight into their work, while advancing understanding of the puzzlement they addressed.
In this book, Andrew Levine reflects on the explanations proffered by these authors and on their very different explanatory strategies. He concludes that, for all their many differences, their respective explanations share a common core and that they are driven by a similar (largely unelaborated) normative commitment. On Levine’s account, believers today believe in bad faith—in other words, they evince a fundamental intellectual inauthenticity. If only for this reason, they merit reproach, even in the comparatively rare instances when their “faith perspectives” do more good than harm.
From the standpoint of this normative standard, Levine reflects on the liberal turn in the so-called Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), arguing that a condition for its possibility is the waning of genuine (authentic) conviction. On this basis, Levine depicts liberal religion as a vehicle of exit for those who at some level acknowledge the untenability of the beliefs they profess while not yet being able or willing to face this reality squarely. He argues that liberal religion is therefore a transitory phenomenon, albeit one that has survived for a long time and that is not about to expire soon.
Levine then faults the religious left on this account, arguing that even in those historically rare conditions in which bad faith motivates welcome political engagement, it is nevertheless infirmed by its deep inauthenticity.
Finally, a defender of the secularisation thesis in some modified form – if only to counter all the monstrous and pious bullshit that Rodney Stark has been penning in his senility.
The Dunedin School 
“He argues that liberal religion is therefore a transitory phenomenon, albeit one that has survived for a long time and that is not about to expire soon.”
Nice semi-falsifiable vehicle of exit there, fella.
Oh, you empirically minded critics with your Popperian “falsifiability” – which all gets in the way of a good story.
I think terms like “liberal” and even more so “left wing” are so vague as to be almost useless. What exactly is a “left wing” Church?
I assume that by liberal you mean theologically liberal and not socially liberal? The two may go together often – but certainly not always.
Some clarification of what is meant by these vague terms, and even better a couple of examples of what makes a “liberal” version of Christianity would make this a lot easier for me to understand.
The other thing that strikes me (from just reading the blurbs which, unless they make a movies, is all I will read of it) is that it comes close to the old statistical approaches to liberal and mainline Christianity which treated them as simply weaker forms of an authentic fundamentalism rather than a distinct tradition. This allowed good short stories to be told: you semi-literate subsistence farmers socialized into pastoral Polish Catholicism, you’re a 7. Moderator of the Uniting Church in Australia, you’re a 2. The End.
I dunno – couldn’t find a page for free online. Was amused by the blurb though.
I think Islam may be the joker in the pack here – Jihad, forced conversion or execution of non-Muslims, female genital mutilation etc etc etc are all part of the authentic religion set up by Mohammed after he abandoned his existence as the leader of a philosophy of peace and toleration in Mecca to be worshipped as a warlord in Medina. People who hank after a reformation to “authentic” Islam seem not to realise that 9/11, 7/7, Al Qaeda and all that are that reformation, which seeks to extinguish the flame and even the lives of those Muslims who wish “peace to all, harm to none”.
Gerry,
Oddly enough, your reductive view of the varied Islamic tradition is precisely the same as those fundamentalists who commit the acts of violence you mention. It is thus equally flawed, from both a historical and a logical standpoint.
From a truly scholarly standpoint (and this site is largely run by professional or semi-professional scholars of religion), there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ tradition, given that there are no reliable ways to adjudicate between different claims to purity or authenticity, which are more often than not simply asserted in the support of some interest (often economic or political as well as religious) or another.
Islam is a tradition like any other and has been practiced in ways that most people find morally repellent, just like it has been practiced in many other ways less offensive to modern categories of justice and equality. I don’t intend here to apologise for violence in the name of Islam – any more than I would try to excuse Christians who murder abortion doctors (not to mention the Catholic Church’s willingness to look the other way during the rise of the National Socialists in Germany), those ultra-Orthodox Jews who endlessly provoke their Palestinian neighbours, or those Hindu nationalists who burn down mosques – but I do feel the need to point out that history and human culture are never as simple as you make them out here.
The great irony of this kind of thinking (whether in relation to Islam or any other system of belief, up to and including strong forms of nationalism) is that, by oversimplifying things, it fails to take the threat of religious extremism seriously and thus robs us of the understanding needed to counteract it.
Eric