By Mustafa Akyol
Sunday, April 21, 2024
Richard Dawkins, probably the world’s most prominent
atheist, stirred up social media recently by signaling a change in his
typically hostile stance against all religion. In a March 31 interview by
Rachel Johnson on the British channel LBC, he revealed that he now
identifies as a “cultural Christian.” He then explained what that means:
“I’m not a believer, but there is a distinction between
being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian. … I love hymns and
Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, and I feel
that we are a Christian country in that sense.”
But his declaration came as he opposed another religion
whose growing visibility in the West disturbed Dawkins. It was, unsurprisingly,
Islam. He was “slightly horrified” to see that Oxford Street in London was
promoting Ramadan, the Islamic month for fasting, instead of Easter. “If I had
to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single
time,” Dawkins added, only to claim that the former is “a fundamentally decent
religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.”
In return, some public Muslim voices slammed Dawkins, an
evolutionary biologist and author of the 2006 book The
God Delusion, for Islamophobia. Among them was the well-known
journalist Mehdi Hasan, who, in another interview on LBC,
criticized Dawkins’ remarks as a case of “normalization” of “bigotry towards
Islam.” Rizwaan Sabir, a scholar at Liverpool John Moores University, also made
a similar
point: “Turns out the anti-religion dude isn’t anti-religion. He’s just
anti-Muslim.”
As a Muslim, I also found Dawkins’ comment on Islam all
too biased and ill-informed. But I would still welcome his shy appreciation of
religion—any religion, even if it is not mine—and see it as his first step
toward recovering from his own delusions about the “God delusion.”
That first step may be too small for many
believers—including genuine Christians, some of whom dismissed
Dawkins’ mere “cultural” Christianity as a matter of principle. But for a
staunch atheist like him, it actually is a significant step. For decades, both
Dawkins and his fellow “New Atheists,” including the late Christopher Hitchens, kept
telling us that “religion poisons everything.” Dawkins infamously
defined religious faith as a “virus,”
from which children should be protected and of which “the patients,” meaning
believers, should be cured.
Beneath all these diatribes against religion lay the
atheists’ own belief: that once traditional religion
disappears, humanity would rejoice in rationality and flourish in harmony. It
was the same old utopia that John Lennon popularized in his 1971 classic, “Imagine”: that once
there is “no religion,” all people would be “living life in peace.”
The empirical reality has shown, however, that the
disappearance of traditional religion often does not lead to an earthly heaven
of science, reason, and deliberation. Humans just find other things to fight
over: the glorious revolution that should be exported, the precious homeland
that should be expanded, or the mighty empire that should be restored.
Meanwhile, as the late Father Richard Neuhaus once
aptly observed, the vacuum from traditional religion is filled by “ersatz
religion,” a novelty that may come with its own passion and the zeal of its
newfound converts.
In the 20th century in which Lennon wrote his song,
such ersatz religions included fascism, communism, and many cases of murderous
nationalism, which wreaked more
havoc on humanity than any older violent religious episodes, such as
crusades or jihads, had ever done. In this century, things have not gone that
bad—at least so far—but it seems to be no accident that the increasingly
secular West, especially America, is finding itself in the midst of fierce
battles between new political faiths: a race-and-gender-obsessed “wokeism” on
the left and a conspiracy-obsessed cultish populism on the right. Both are
similarly eager for domination and conquest and similarly intolerant of heresy
and dissent. This new “America without God,” as Shadi Hamid observes,
is proving to be not a home of “rational politics, drained of faith’s inflaming
passions.” Instead, those inflaming passions are channeled to politics, which
is getting more intense, bitter, and fanatic.
Could Richard Dawkins be observing these facts as well
and learning some lessons? Telegraph columnist Madeline Grant
seems to think so. “Christianity’s decline has unleashed terrible new gods,”
she recently
wrote, which shows that “new Atheism was mistaken in its diagnosis of what
would follow religion’s decline.” Dawkins, if he is really a man of “good
old-fashioned scientific observation,” may finally be facing this reality. He
may be joining, in other words, the ranks of more nuanced atheists in modern
history who appreciated the social functions of religion without believing in
it.
That would be a good step for Dawkins, as I noted, as
well as other “new atheists.” But another step is much needed, both for new
atheists and for many conservatives in the West who believe there is a simple
dichotomy when it comes to liberty: that there is a good religion and a bad
one. The former being Christianity, the latter being Islam.
This dichotomy is simple and misleading for two main
reasons.
The first is that it is often based on a caricature of
Islam created by a collection of the most disturbing elements of the
contemporary Muslim world. This cherry-picked “Islam” is defined by the
Taliban, ISIS, Hamas, or the Iranian regime, which represent only the darkest
extremes in a much more diverse and often brighter part of the world. From
Bosnia-Herzegovina to Indonesia, hundreds of millions of Muslims happily live
in fairly free societies, where women wear what they choose, piety is at peace
with pluralism, and minorities live without fear. Quite a few Muslims are in
fact only “cultural Muslims”—just as
Dawkins in his newfound “cultural Christianity”—and they too have a place in
that infinitely complex world of Islam that is often wrongfully depicted as an
austere monolith.
Secondly, there are indeed major problems in mainstream
Islamic teachings today regarding human rights and liberties. They include
severe punishments for apostasy and blasphemy, legal inequalities for women or
non-Muslims, institutions of “morality police,” and religious justifications of
political violence.
But, alas, Christianity had traditions of religious
violence and coercion for more than a millennium—from torture chambers of the
Inquisition to heretics burned at the stake, from sectarian violence to
antisemitic pogroms. In fact, just a few centuries ago, Christendom was the
bastion of religious oppression, while the Islamic world offered freedom. Hence
when Sephardic
Jews were expelled from Catholic Spain in the 15th century, many of
them found
haven in the Ottoman Empire, the very seat of the Islamic caliphate. Hence
when Protestants and Catholics were slaughtering each other in the 16th
century, French philosopher Jean Bodin was admiring “the great emperour of the
Turks,” which “permitteth every man to live according to his conscience.”
Today, the scene is of course quite different: Minorities
escape from the lands of Islam to the West, not the other way around, and it is
the latter civilization where every person can live according to his
conscience. But this is because latter-day Christianity has made its peace with
the best political idea ever devised: liberalism. It was neither an easy nor a
quick transformation. (It may not be even permanent, as there are Christians
today—such as the Catholic
integralists—who seriously want to turn the tide and go back to the good
old days of medieval theocracy.) In the meantime, things got only worse in the
Islamic world, where traditional pluralism was overshadowed by both new
eruptions of religious fundamentalism, and ersatz religions of its own, such as
xenophobic nationalism or “Arab
socialism.”
In other words, it is not that Christianity is more
“decent” than Islam, as Dawkins believes. He is just observing Christianity at
its most liberal and relaxed stage, and while observing Islam at one of its
most illiberal and anxious ones. But these tendencies within religions are not
carved in stone. Freedoms are certainly “delayed”
in the Middle East, as historian Timur Kuran rightly points out, but they are
not necessarily denied.
Surely, it would be a major step for the Islamic
civilization to finally liberalize. For many people, it may even be too major
of a step to imagine that this is even possible. But thinking anew is what
keeps the world going forward.
And if Dawkins can begin thinking anew about religion,
all of us can.
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