During my second year at Harvard Divinity School, I listened to a classmate describe a challenge she’d experienced as a Sunday school teacher. She had planned a lesson on Noah and the Ark; instead of listening, her students galloped around the room, knocking things over and making a mess.
My first reaction was “Good!” This wasn’t to spite my classmate; it was a response to the lesson she had hoped to teach. To me, the Noah story is one of the most repugnant episodes in the Bible. Reading it might help us understand how myths functioned in the lives of ancient people, but it certainly isn’t moral teaching. When the end of the sentence is, “and then God drowned nearly every living thing on Earth, babies and little children included,” then it really doesn’t matter how the sentence starts – and only a combination of gauzy piety and intellectual laziness could suggest otherwise. Unfortunately, these traits dominate life at Harvard Divinity School.
* * *
As my classmate described chasing her students around the room, I found myself rooting for them: Run for it!
This feeling created some dissonance. The seven or eight of us in that classroom were supposed to support one another, to help each other sort through the challenges we faced in the course of our individual ‘spiritual development.’ Depending on the day, that could mean a lot of things – asking questions about our feelings, offering textual resources, and so on. What we never did, though, was call each other’s basic goals or theology into question. That was very clearly out of bounds, and it left me confused: how could I support my fellow student if I couldn’t support what she was trying to do? And why weren’t we talking about exactly this?
Perhaps it worked differently in other sections. But I suspect not, and here’s why: during my three years at HDS, I didn’t find myself in a truly open-ended, existentially exploratory conversation more than a handful of times – and then only with people who already saw the world pretty much like I did. For a divinity school, we almost never talked about whether god is real, or whether training people for the ministry is a good idea.
* * *
I once suggested to a professor that we invite Christopher Hitchens to campus for a debate about his book, God Is Not Great. She wasn’t enthusiastic: Hitchens’ problem, she said, is that he “reduces religion to propositional statements.” In a sentence, she had swiped away some of my longest-held cobwebs about religion. Religion, she was telling me, is far more than a set of true-or-false claims about god or the afterlife. It’s also about building communities, about the stories, rituals, and practices that give shape to our lives. Religions are as capacious as any civilization, and much longer-lasting than most.
Hitchens had missed some of this, and my professor was right to point that out. But I wondered if she hadn’t swung too far in the opposite direction, associating propositional inquiry with religion-haters and then dismissing it entirely. Much of the school pretty clearly had, and it helped explain why we didn’t talk about god much – because for many students and professors, doing so would have seemed simplistic, even dangerously naive.
* * *
Anthropologist Michael Jackson once summed up the HDS ethos. “You don’t walk up to people and tell them their beliefs are wrong,” he said. “That’s just rude.” And I agree – not much good comes of interreligious dialogue if one party is only participating in order to convert the other.
Thankfully, I didn’t see that kind of evangelism at HDS. The school works hard to sustain a pluralist atmosphere, a space in which people are free – and even encouraged – to pursue their individual journeys. This is a nice thing all by itself, and it’s even nicer given the ignorance and aggression that passes for so much of our culture’s religious discourse. There is wisdom in HDS’ approach; at some level, we’re all figuring things out for ourselves, and it can’t really work any other way.
It’s Your Journey, Bro – But Don’t Make Me Come With You
But HDS isn’t just about providing a haven for ethical and religious exploration. It’s about something more – though it took me a long time to figure out what. I once shared my confusion with then-Dean William Graham in an interview for one of the school’s publications. “How do you think about HDS and its mission?” I asked. “Is there a cluster of things you hope students take with them when they leave?” In his response, a few lines jumped out at me:
“I refer to HDS as an advanced liberal arts institution. I like to think we are training people to do whatever they do with greater acuity and knowledge about the religious, spiritual, and philosophical dimensions of their careers and of society.”
“An advanced liberal arts institution” – in other words, a place for rigorous training in the humanities, that grand tradition driven by our desire to understand ourselves and the world.
It’s a noble task, one I believe in perhaps more than anything else. But at HDS, it’s a mission that’s often confounded by another loyalty – to religion itself. In class after class, students and teachers analyze religion through a variety of interpretive lenses – historical, exegetical, political, literary, etc. What we almost never do is question religions’ central moral and metaphysical claims directly. In other words, HDS treats religion with kid gloves.
* * *
This tension is rooted in Harvard’s history. Founded in 1636 as a Puritan/Congregationalist institution, Harvard College spent the following decades preparing young men for ministry. In 1811, Harvard established a graduate program for ministerial candidates; five years later, Harvard Divinity School was inaugurated to ensure “the serious, impartial, and unbiased investigation of Christian truth.” [1]
In other words, the contradiction – perhaps even the oxymoron – was built in from the start. We’re familiar with truth’s outer walls; now let’s examine the plumbing. Inquiry, then – but only to a point.
Like the rest of the university, HDS has secularized and ecumenicalized hard in the two hundred years since its founding. Today, the Divinity School has two major missions: providing a home to scholars of religion, and training students entering the ministry in over a dozen different faith traditions. (To be clear, HDS doesn’t actually ordain students. Instead, it offers classes and “denominational counseling” to complement the ordination processes in students’ individual traditions.)
In a series of “guiding principles,” HDS explains how this fusion between scholarship and religious leadership is supposed to work: “Religious and theological studies depend on and reinforce each other,” we are told. More pointedly, “A principled approach to religious values and faith demands the intellectual rigor and openness of quality academic work.”
The school seems to believe that “religious faith” is compatible with “intellectual rigor” and “openness.” Perhaps. But how, I wonder, did the school arrive at this conclusion? Via intellectual rigor? Or via a lingering faith in the value of religion, one that never quite permitted a “serious, impartial, and unbiased investigation” into religions’ basic claims?
* * *
On the whole, HDS holds religion in a glowy, uncritical light. This seems unnecessary, in part because its faculty members don’t agree on what religion is. If we were to poll the faculty on the following questions –
(1) Does a personal god exist?
(2) Does it matter?
– we would receive wildly divergent answers: everything from ‘definitely yes’ and ‘definitely no’ to ‘who knows?’ and ‘who cares?’
Now, if these voices came into meaningful contact with each other – if the faculty and the students tried to articulate big questions and tackle them rigorously – then HDS’s diversity of views would be a rich source of learning. Unfortunately, these conversations almost never happen. Instead, the diversity of views itself becomes the point.
In this way, metaphysical confusion becomes an ethical requirement. Every perspective on reality or human nature becomes ‘interesting,’ and none can be judged superior to any other. I once suggested that we could at least agree on some basics: all humans need to eat, defecate, and so on. A classmate jumped in to report that some Hindus believe in a saint who went twenty years without food. In the silence that followed, disappointment and frustration wrestled in my chest; no one, including the teacher, was willing to point out that believing in things doesn’t make them true, and that disbelieving things – or asking for evidence – doesn’t make you an asshole.
This is the Divinity School’s core problem. Because HDS conflates respect with affirmation and belief with truth, it becomes incapable of the very inquiry it claims to champion. This makes it very difficult to talk about ethics – particularly the ethics of training students to enter the ministry.
Like ‘god’ and ‘religion,’ ‘ministry’ carries a thousand connotations. (During my time at HDS, the school launched a “Buddhist Ministry Initiative” – a promising/perplexing/ridiculous idea, depending on who you ask.) At the very least, the role of religious leaders varies by tradition and sub-tradition, culture and sub-culture. And of course, it’s highly personal.
So let’s acknowledge, then, that there probably isn’t a productive way to ask whether ‘ministry’ is a good thing.
But let’s also acknowledge that some traditions encourage adherents (a) to believe things that aren’t true and (b) to do things that are harmful to themselves and others. Is it legitimate to support and encourage students who carry on those traditions – who plan to teach children, for example, that their lives are supervised by a moody and genocidal god? Or that women should defer to men? Or that priests who defend pedophiles and endanger children are trustworthy guides on sexual health?
I suspect that the administration and faculty would acknowledge some of this tension, and that they’d respond with something like, “It’s always a good thing to learn from each other. If we can provide a space in which devout religionists nuance their faith by studying the humanities, great. And if non-believers can come to a greater understanding of how faith works in the lives of their classmates, that’s great too. We can’t tell people what to do with their lives – and if we tried, it wouldn’t work anyway. All we can do is provide a space for kindness, decency, and mutual respect as we trip along our own paths.”
Maybe. But kindness and decency don’t demand that we endorse each others’ views. And unfortunately, this is exactly what HDS does. At the yearly Seasons of Light ceremony, for example, HDS leaders celebrate each of the traditions represented at the school. The message is clear: we don’t need to worry about each faith’s specific views on reality or human nature, because all religions are ultimately just vessels for human goodness. Your song, my elegy – what’s the difference? After all, isn’t each tradition just a kind of poetry, dancing on the surface of life’s perplexing waves? You can almost feel the distinctions being elided; wishfulness fills the room like a censer’s smoke, and faculty members cover their eyes and hope for the best.
* * *
Our world can be gratuitously unkind to religion – mocking its traditions and even oppressing its followers. The Divinity School provides a refuge from such nastiness, a religious farmers’ market in which students get to share their wares and sample others’. In other words, HDS embodies a certain kind of democratic ideal.
I enjoyed much of my time there. I met lovely, brilliant people, learned a great deal about traditions familiar and un-, and got introduced to the meditation practices that would change my life.
But there’s something missing – a concern for truth. Now, for anyone educated in higher education’s dominant paradigms over the last half-century, that word alone can bring snickers. (I once heard an HDS professor invoke Harvard’s motto – ‘Veritas’ – only to chortle and move on without explaining himself. In that lecture hall, he knew he didn’t need to.)
But that word is still above Harvard’s gates, as it should be. And weirdly enough, our lingering investment in truth explains why HDS students have so few serious conversations about big questions – because traditional religions aren’t primarily about truth. As William James pointed out, religions are born out of our existential unease. They don’t exist to conduct a clear-headed investigation into the nature of reality; they exist to help people respond to the ecstasy and terror and sheer weirdness of being alive.
Can we imagine a school that does both? That seeks to understand the psychology of religious practitioners and evaluates religion’s truth-claims? In which we acknowledge each other’s spiritual commitments and feel comfortable enough to ask serious, caring questions about why we hold those commitments (and safe enough to answer them)? In which unfettered intellectual inquiry leads to profound personal confession, and vice versa?
In another of its guiding principles, HDS claims that this is what it wants to create: “An exemplary scholarly and teaching community requires respect for and critical engagement with difference and diversity of all kinds.” But on the whole, this isn’t how the school operates. Much of the time, my classmates and I feigned respect for each other through patience and false openness; when one of us said something nonsensical, the rest of us held our tongues in silent condescension. (Wait him out, wait him out – there’s no way he’ll be able to hear my question.) Critical engagement took place on the surface of things, but the real action was down below.
* * *
Could we do better? Could we create and sustain authentic critical engagement that would live up to HDS’ ideals? I think we could.
It wouldn’t be easy, of course. Doing so would require an extraordinarily mature culture, a school-wide devotion to honesty, respect, and compassion in equal measure.
It would also come at a cost. A school this committed to honest inquiry would have to be willing to shine a light on itself. In particular, it would mean asking whether midwifing young clergy is always ethical. It would mean squarely addressing what those clergy believe and what they aim to do with their powers. And it would mean considering the possibility that HDS, in its zeal to support its students, has become an enabler instead.
* * *
If a psychology student wrote a thesis suggesting that babies should be beaten every time they cry, his department would push back. If an engineering student believed that two plus two equals five, she’d probably have a tough time graduating (and we certainly wouldn’t let her build a bridge). But if a theology student believes that a personal god created the world a few thousand years ago, that human beings are damaged from the moment they’re born, and that we require a relationship with this god to avoid spending the rest of eternity in a pit of fire, Harvard Divinity School says, Interesting! Tell us more. And if the student thinks that he’s ‘called’ to don robes and teach these things to other people, HDS says, How can we help?
Thankfully, most HDS students don’t believe all of these things. As long as they’re sort of nice, however, HDS doesn’t really care what its students believe (or what they hope to do in the future). Your theology is okay, my theology is okay. Amidst all this affirmation, the school loses sight of something else: that if you’re going to teach and lead real, suffering human beings, you might have a responsibility to know what you’re talking about.
What Do You Mean By ‘God’?
And here’s the thing: if you’re preaching about metaphysics, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You can’t know what you’re talking about, because these things – the origins and ends of the universe, the existence of gods and devils – simply aren’t knowable to human beings.
I can hear the retort now: if these things aren’t knowable, doesn’t that leave room for faith? No, it doesn’t. Sure, we can’t disprove the existence of a personal god, but that doesn’t make it a 50-50 proposition. Language enables us to formulate all sorts of concepts – god, heaven, unicorns – but that isn’t evidence that they exist. It isn’t evidence of anything at all.
In other words, when it comes to metaphysics, belief and non-belief are not intellectually equivalent. Belief in a personal god requires evidence and argument; non-belief requires none. Beliefs are fragile to error, and error can come from a thousand directions. Non-belief is just a default. [2]
I’m sure that the last couple of paragraphs won’t satisfy hard-core theists. And part of me wants to dive down the rabbit hole, to trot out the traditional ‘arguments’ for god and respond to each of them in turn. But I’m not going to, for two reasons.
First, I never encountered anyone making these arguments at HDS. The school’s lazy pluralism isn’t rooted in theistic argument; it just floats, like ectoplasm.
And second: most of the time, these arguments are smoke screens. Ask yourself: how many people do you know who a) believe in a personal god, and whose faith/commitment/practice is b) premised on rational arguments? Underneath the ‘arguments’ theists tend to bring up, there’s almost always something else – a desire, a need. [3]
This is why the whole “Doesn’t reason leave room for faith?” question is such a red herring – because faith doesn’t care about room. Faith doesn’t exist in the space left over by reason, nor is it reason’s opposite. True faith is indifferent to reason; it is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” In other words, it’s something people want, and evidence has nothing to do with it.
Which, of course, doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. Maybe this kind of hope is good – even necessary – for human beings. But the only way to know is by actually asking questions – and this is precisely what faith doesn’t want to do.
* * *
Why do atheists at HDS take ‘god’ concepts seriously to begin with?
When you boil off the fat, here’s the answer: because we’re afraid of being dicks. Because we worry that if we say what we think – that there’s no reason to believe in the existence of supernatural beings, and that such beliefs are usually motivated by fairly straightforward social, cultural, and psychological factors – we’ll sound arrogant. Oh, so you’re smarter than generations of your forebearers and billions of your fellow human beings? This was the subtext of the exchange with my classmate that I described earlier.
Me: Humans need food.
Her: I heard about these people who disagree. And isn’t their perspective kind of beautiful? Why are you being such an asshole?
This isn’t thinking – it’s passive-aggressive helicopter parenting for intellectuals; it’s the behavior of a confused mother hen worried about her chicks playing nice.
And this confusion – mistaking disagreement for disrespect – is precisely why HDS-style ‘openness’ is so profoundly unsatisfying: because it comes at the tip of a moralizing spear. In such a world, openness is no longer a vehicle for learning; it’s a pose. You can believe anything you want – except that gods are silly and that believing in them is harmful. (And if you do believe that, please keep it to yourself!) It’s an ethos that prizes glazy-eyed agreeableness and pretend wonder over real exploration. Sometimes, it leads to irritating conversations like the one above. And sometimes, it prevents important conversations from happening entirely.
* * *
My professor was right – religion is more than true-or-false claims about god. But HDS likes to pretend that it’s above these true-or-false questions, that they don’t matter at all.
They plainly do – and anyone who’s the least bit curious knows it. Beliefs are not idle things, and bad beliefs can have unholy consequences. But if these considerations are off the table – if we’re not allowed to ask whether something is true – then we can’t ask whether a falsehood (or a lie) is harmful. And if we can’t explore these questions, then we have no way to think about the wisdom of training young ministers. All we can do is smile and nod encouragingly.
And in the end, maybe HDS is comfortable with that – because if we can’t evaluate what the school is doing, then we can’t ask why it still exists.
1. Though affiliated with the Unitarian Church, (and later, the United Church of Christ) HDS was America’s first officially nondenominational divinity school. It has since been joined by four others – at the University of Chicago, Yale, Vanderbilt, and Wake Forest.
2. For this reason, most good philosophy isn’t a matter of constructing beliefs. It’s a matter of de-constructing them – and then figuring out how to live in their absence.
3. The only mildly interesting argument for god is what’s known as the “argument from efficient causation.” It goes like this: Everything is caused, and nothing causes itself. Therefore, there must be a first cause – god. Ultimately, though, this puts us back where we started. (What caused god?) We’re left with two options: a) a universe that comes from nothing or b) infinite regress. Neither makes sense any intuitive sense, and that’s it – that’s as far as we can go.
Even if you prefer the god-as-creator option, though – and you’re willing to kick the ‘Where did god come from?’ can down the road – you’re still left with the thinnest of deities. This creator god is a placeholder, a cog in a logical argument – not a personal god that you could ever know or build a theology on.
Tagged as:
Harvard Divinity School
The Perils of Lazy Pluralism (Should Harvard Divinity School Still Exist?)
by Matt B. on January 24, 2015
During my second year at Harvard Divinity School, I listened to a classmate describe a challenge she’d experienced as a Sunday school teacher. She had planned a lesson on Noah and the Ark; instead of listening, her students galloped around the room, knocking things over and making a mess.
My first reaction was “Good!” This wasn’t to spite my classmate; it was a response to the lesson she had hoped to teach. To me, the Noah story is one of the most repugnant episodes in the Bible. Reading it might help us understand how myths functioned in the lives of ancient people, but it certainly isn’t moral teaching. When the end of the sentence is, “and then God drowned nearly every living thing on Earth, babies and little children included,” then it really doesn’t matter how the sentence starts – and only a combination of gauzy piety and intellectual laziness could suggest otherwise. Unfortunately, these traits dominate life at Harvard Divinity School.
* * *
As my classmate described chasing her students around the room, I found myself rooting for them: Run for it!
This feeling created some dissonance. The seven or eight of us in that classroom were supposed to support one another, to help each other sort through the challenges we faced in the course of our individual ‘spiritual development.’ Depending on the day, that could mean a lot of things – asking questions about our feelings, offering textual resources, and so on. What we never did, though, was call each other’s basic goals or theology into question. That was very clearly out of bounds, and it left me confused: how could I support my fellow student if I couldn’t support what she was trying to do? And why weren’t we talking about exactly this?
Perhaps it worked differently in other sections. But I suspect not, and here’s why: during my three years at HDS, I didn’t find myself in a truly open-ended, existentially exploratory conversation more than a handful of times – and then only with people who already saw the world pretty much like I did. For a divinity school, we almost never talked about whether god is real, or whether training people for the ministry is a good idea.
* * *
I once suggested to a professor that we invite Christopher Hitchens to campus for a debate about his book, God Is Not Great. She wasn’t enthusiastic: Hitchens’ problem, she said, is that he “reduces religion to propositional statements.” In a sentence, she had swiped away some of my longest-held cobwebs about religion. Religion, she was telling me, is far more than a set of true-or-false claims about god or the afterlife. It’s also about building communities, about the stories, rituals, and practices that give shape to our lives. Religions are as capacious as any civilization, and much longer-lasting than most.
Hitchens had missed some of this, and my professor was right to point that out. But I wondered if she hadn’t swung too far in the opposite direction, associating propositional inquiry with religion-haters and then dismissing it entirely. Much of the school pretty clearly had, and it helped explain why we didn’t talk about god much – because for many students and professors, doing so would have seemed simplistic, even dangerously naive.
* * *
Anthropologist Michael Jackson once summed up the HDS ethos. “You don’t walk up to people and tell them their beliefs are wrong,” he said. “That’s just rude.” And I agree – not much good comes of interreligious dialogue if one party is only participating in order to convert the other.
Thankfully, I didn’t see that kind of evangelism at HDS. The school works hard to sustain a pluralist atmosphere, a space in which people are free – and even encouraged – to pursue their individual journeys. This is a nice thing all by itself, and it’s even nicer given the ignorance and aggression that passes for so much of our culture’s religious discourse. There is wisdom in HDS’ approach; at some level, we’re all figuring things out for ourselves, and it can’t really work any other way.
It’s Your Journey, Bro – But Don’t Make Me Come With You
But HDS isn’t just about providing a haven for ethical and religious exploration. It’s about something more – though it took me a long time to figure out what. I once shared my confusion with then-Dean William Graham in an interview for one of the school’s publications. “How do you think about HDS and its mission?” I asked. “Is there a cluster of things you hope students take with them when they leave?” In his response, a few lines jumped out at me:
“I refer to HDS as an advanced liberal arts institution. I like to think we are training people to do whatever they do with greater acuity and knowledge about the religious, spiritual, and philosophical dimensions of their careers and of society.”
“An advanced liberal arts institution” – in other words, a place for rigorous training in the humanities, that grand tradition driven by our desire to understand ourselves and the world.
It’s a noble task, one I believe in perhaps more than anything else. But at HDS, it’s a mission that’s often confounded by another loyalty – to religion itself. In class after class, students and teachers analyze religion through a variety of interpretive lenses – historical, exegetical, political, literary, etc. What we almost never do is question religions’ central moral and metaphysical claims directly. In other words, HDS treats religion with kid gloves.
* * *
This tension is rooted in Harvard’s history. Founded in 1636 as a Puritan/Congregationalist institution, Harvard College spent the following decades preparing young men for ministry. In 1811, Harvard established a graduate program for ministerial candidates; five years later, Harvard Divinity School was inaugurated to ensure “the serious, impartial, and unbiased investigation of Christian truth.” [1]
In other words, the contradiction – perhaps even the oxymoron – was built in from the start. We’re familiar with truth’s outer walls; now let’s examine the plumbing. Inquiry, then – but only to a point.
Like the rest of the university, HDS has secularized and ecumenicalized hard in the two hundred years since its founding. Today, the Divinity School has two major missions: providing a home to scholars of religion, and training students entering the ministry in over a dozen different faith traditions. (To be clear, HDS doesn’t actually ordain students. Instead, it offers classes and “denominational counseling” to complement the ordination processes in students’ individual traditions.)
In a series of “guiding principles,” HDS explains how this fusion between scholarship and religious leadership is supposed to work: “Religious and theological studies depend on and reinforce each other,” we are told. More pointedly, “A principled approach to religious values and faith demands the intellectual rigor and openness of quality academic work.”
The school seems to believe that “religious faith” is compatible with “intellectual rigor” and “openness.” Perhaps. But how, I wonder, did the school arrive at this conclusion? Via intellectual rigor? Or via a lingering faith in the value of religion, one that never quite permitted a “serious, impartial, and unbiased investigation” into religions’ basic claims?
* * *
On the whole, HDS holds religion in a glowy, uncritical light. This seems unnecessary, in part because its faculty members don’t agree on what religion is. If we were to poll the faculty on the following questions –
(1) Does a personal god exist?
(2) Does it matter?
– we would receive wildly divergent answers: everything from ‘definitely yes’ and ‘definitely no’ to ‘who knows?’ and ‘who cares?’
Now, if these voices came into meaningful contact with each other – if the faculty and the students tried to articulate big questions and tackle them rigorously – then HDS’s diversity of views would be a rich source of learning. Unfortunately, these conversations almost never happen. Instead, the diversity of views itself becomes the point.
In this way, metaphysical confusion becomes an ethical requirement. Every perspective on reality or human nature becomes ‘interesting,’ and none can be judged superior to any other. I once suggested that we could at least agree on some basics: all humans need to eat, defecate, and so on. A classmate jumped in to report that some Hindus believe in a saint who went twenty years without food. In the silence that followed, disappointment and frustration wrestled in my chest; no one, including the teacher, was willing to point out that believing in things doesn’t make them true, and that disbelieving things – or asking for evidence – doesn’t make you an asshole.
This is the Divinity School’s core problem. Because HDS conflates respect with affirmation and belief with truth, it becomes incapable of the very inquiry it claims to champion. This makes it very difficult to talk about ethics – particularly the ethics of training students to enter the ministry.
Like ‘god’ and ‘religion,’ ‘ministry’ carries a thousand connotations. (During my time at HDS, the school launched a “Buddhist Ministry Initiative” – a promising/perplexing/ridiculous idea, depending on who you ask.) At the very least, the role of religious leaders varies by tradition and sub-tradition, culture and sub-culture. And of course, it’s highly personal.
So let’s acknowledge, then, that there probably isn’t a productive way to ask whether ‘ministry’ is a good thing.
But let’s also acknowledge that some traditions encourage adherents (a) to believe things that aren’t true and (b) to do things that are harmful to themselves and others. Is it legitimate to support and encourage students who carry on those traditions – who plan to teach children, for example, that their lives are supervised by a moody and genocidal god? Or that women should defer to men? Or that priests who defend pedophiles and endanger children are trustworthy guides on sexual health?
I suspect that the administration and faculty would acknowledge some of this tension, and that they’d respond with something like, “It’s always a good thing to learn from each other. If we can provide a space in which devout religionists nuance their faith by studying the humanities, great. And if non-believers can come to a greater understanding of how faith works in the lives of their classmates, that’s great too. We can’t tell people what to do with their lives – and if we tried, it wouldn’t work anyway. All we can do is provide a space for kindness, decency, and mutual respect as we trip along our own paths.”
Maybe. But kindness and decency don’t demand that we endorse each others’ views. And unfortunately, this is exactly what HDS does. At the yearly Seasons of Light ceremony, for example, HDS leaders celebrate each of the traditions represented at the school. The message is clear: we don’t need to worry about each faith’s specific views on reality or human nature, because all religions are ultimately just vessels for human goodness. Your song, my elegy – what’s the difference? After all, isn’t each tradition just a kind of poetry, dancing on the surface of life’s perplexing waves? You can almost feel the distinctions being elided; wishfulness fills the room like a censer’s smoke, and faculty members cover their eyes and hope for the best.
* * *
Our world can be gratuitously unkind to religion – mocking its traditions and even oppressing its followers. The Divinity School provides a refuge from such nastiness, a religious farmers’ market in which students get to share their wares and sample others’. In other words, HDS embodies a certain kind of democratic ideal.
I enjoyed much of my time there. I met lovely, brilliant people, learned a great deal about traditions familiar and un-, and got introduced to the meditation practices that would change my life.
But there’s something missing – a concern for truth. Now, for anyone educated in higher education’s dominant paradigms over the last half-century, that word alone can bring snickers. (I once heard an HDS professor invoke Harvard’s motto – ‘Veritas’ – only to chortle and move on without explaining himself. In that lecture hall, he knew he didn’t need to.)
But that word is still above Harvard’s gates, as it should be. And weirdly enough, our lingering investment in truth explains why HDS students have so few serious conversations about big questions – because traditional religions aren’t primarily about truth. As William James pointed out, religions are born out of our existential unease. They don’t exist to conduct a clear-headed investigation into the nature of reality; they exist to help people respond to the ecstasy and terror and sheer weirdness of being alive.
Can we imagine a school that does both? That seeks to understand the psychology of religious practitioners and evaluates religion’s truth-claims? In which we acknowledge each other’s spiritual commitments and feel comfortable enough to ask serious, caring questions about why we hold those commitments (and safe enough to answer them)? In which unfettered intellectual inquiry leads to profound personal confession, and vice versa?
In another of its guiding principles, HDS claims that this is what it wants to create: “An exemplary scholarly and teaching community requires respect for and critical engagement with difference and diversity of all kinds.” But on the whole, this isn’t how the school operates. Much of the time, my classmates and I feigned respect for each other through patience and false openness; when one of us said something nonsensical, the rest of us held our tongues in silent condescension. (Wait him out, wait him out – there’s no way he’ll be able to hear my question.) Critical engagement took place on the surface of things, but the real action was down below.
* * *
Could we do better? Could we create and sustain authentic critical engagement that would live up to HDS’ ideals? I think we could.
It wouldn’t be easy, of course. Doing so would require an extraordinarily mature culture, a school-wide devotion to honesty, respect, and compassion in equal measure.
It would also come at a cost. A school this committed to honest inquiry would have to be willing to shine a light on itself. In particular, it would mean asking whether midwifing young clergy is always ethical. It would mean squarely addressing what those clergy believe and what they aim to do with their powers. And it would mean considering the possibility that HDS, in its zeal to support its students, has become an enabler instead.
* * *
If a psychology student wrote a thesis suggesting that babies should be beaten every time they cry, his department would push back. If an engineering student believed that two plus two equals five, she’d probably have a tough time graduating (and we certainly wouldn’t let her build a bridge). But if a theology student believes that a personal god created the world a few thousand years ago, that human beings are damaged from the moment they’re born, and that we require a relationship with this god to avoid spending the rest of eternity in a pit of fire, Harvard Divinity School says, Interesting! Tell us more. And if the student thinks that he’s ‘called’ to don robes and teach these things to other people, HDS says, How can we help?
Thankfully, most HDS students don’t believe all of these things. As long as they’re sort of nice, however, HDS doesn’t really care what its students believe (or what they hope to do in the future). Your theology is okay, my theology is okay. Amidst all this affirmation, the school loses sight of something else: that if you’re going to teach and lead real, suffering human beings, you might have a responsibility to know what you’re talking about.
What Do You Mean By ‘God’?
And here’s the thing: if you’re preaching about metaphysics, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You can’t know what you’re talking about, because these things – the origins and ends of the universe, the existence of gods and devils – simply aren’t knowable to human beings.
I can hear the retort now: if these things aren’t knowable, doesn’t that leave room for faith? No, it doesn’t. Sure, we can’t disprove the existence of a personal god, but that doesn’t make it a 50-50 proposition. Language enables us to formulate all sorts of concepts – god, heaven, unicorns – but that isn’t evidence that they exist. It isn’t evidence of anything at all.
In other words, when it comes to metaphysics, belief and non-belief are not intellectually equivalent. Belief in a personal god requires evidence and argument; non-belief requires none. Beliefs are fragile to error, and error can come from a thousand directions. Non-belief is just a default. [2]
I’m sure that the last couple of paragraphs won’t satisfy hard-core theists. And part of me wants to dive down the rabbit hole, to trot out the traditional ‘arguments’ for god and respond to each of them in turn. But I’m not going to, for two reasons.
First, I never encountered anyone making these arguments at HDS. The school’s lazy pluralism isn’t rooted in theistic argument; it just floats, like ectoplasm.
And second: most of the time, these arguments are smoke screens. Ask yourself: how many people do you know who a) believe in a personal god, and whose faith/commitment/practice is b) premised on rational arguments? Underneath the ‘arguments’ theists tend to bring up, there’s almost always something else – a desire, a need. [3]
This is why the whole “Doesn’t reason leave room for faith?” question is such a red herring – because faith doesn’t care about room. Faith doesn’t exist in the space left over by reason, nor is it reason’s opposite. True faith is indifferent to reason; it is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” In other words, it’s something people want, and evidence has nothing to do with it.
Which, of course, doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. Maybe this kind of hope is good – even necessary – for human beings. But the only way to know is by actually asking questions – and this is precisely what faith doesn’t want to do.
* * *
Why do atheists at HDS take ‘god’ concepts seriously to begin with?
When you boil off the fat, here’s the answer: because we’re afraid of being dicks. Because we worry that if we say what we think – that there’s no reason to believe in the existence of supernatural beings, and that such beliefs are usually motivated by fairly straightforward social, cultural, and psychological factors – we’ll sound arrogant. Oh, so you’re smarter than generations of your forebearers and billions of your fellow human beings? This was the subtext of the exchange with my classmate that I described earlier.
Me: Humans need food.
Her: I heard about these people who disagree. And isn’t their perspective kind of beautiful? Why are you being such an asshole?
This isn’t thinking – it’s passive-aggressive helicopter parenting for intellectuals; it’s the behavior of a confused mother hen worried about her chicks playing nice.
And this confusion – mistaking disagreement for disrespect – is precisely why HDS-style ‘openness’ is so profoundly unsatisfying: because it comes at the tip of a moralizing spear. In such a world, openness is no longer a vehicle for learning; it’s a pose. You can believe anything you want – except that gods are silly and that believing in them is harmful. (And if you do believe that, please keep it to yourself!) It’s an ethos that prizes glazy-eyed agreeableness and pretend wonder over real exploration. Sometimes, it leads to irritating conversations like the one above. And sometimes, it prevents important conversations from happening entirely.
* * *
My professor was right – religion is more than true-or-false claims about god. But HDS likes to pretend that it’s above these true-or-false questions, that they don’t matter at all.
They plainly do – and anyone who’s the least bit curious knows it. Beliefs are not idle things, and bad beliefs can have unholy consequences. But if these considerations are off the table – if we’re not allowed to ask whether something is true – then we can’t ask whether a falsehood (or a lie) is harmful. And if we can’t explore these questions, then we have no way to think about the wisdom of training young ministers. All we can do is smile and nod encouragingly.
And in the end, maybe HDS is comfortable with that – because if we can’t evaluate what the school is doing, then we can’t ask why it still exists.
1. Though affiliated with the Unitarian Church, (and later, the United Church of Christ) HDS was America’s first officially nondenominational divinity school. It has since been joined by four others – at the University of Chicago, Yale, Vanderbilt, and Wake Forest.
2. For this reason, most good philosophy isn’t a matter of constructing beliefs. It’s a matter of de-constructing them – and then figuring out how to live in their absence.
3. The only mildly interesting argument for god is what’s known as the “argument from efficient causation.” It goes like this: Everything is caused, and nothing causes itself. Therefore, there must be a first cause – god. Ultimately, though, this puts us back where we started. (What caused god?) We’re left with two options: a) a universe that comes from nothing or b) infinite regress. Neither makes sense any intuitive sense, and that’s it – that’s as far as we can go.
Even if you prefer the god-as-creator option, though – and you’re willing to kick the ‘Where did god come from?’ can down the road – you’re still left with the thinnest of deities. This creator god is a placeholder, a cog in a logical argument – not a personal god that you could ever know or build a theology on.
Tagged as: Harvard Divinity School