According to Wall Street Journal blogger James Taranto, living in modern America, with its easy-going, good-natured inclusiveness, while also believing that your office-mate–who stayed up all night finishing your sales report so you could nurse your sick child–will burn in hell for eternity simply because he is Jewish, is no more puzzling an existential state than feeling that the woman you love is the “most important thing in the world,” while also believing that all men are created equal.
Only someone who suffers from a “poverty of imagination,” writes Taranto, would posit any tension between the lived experience of American tolerance and the knowledge of certain hell for a significant portion of one’s ethical fellow citizens.
With all due respect to my esteemed former City Journal colleague, in my view it may be he who suffers from a poverty of imagination. It cannot be that he is taking the prospect of eternal damnation as seriously as it deserves if he thinks it is so easily reconciled with American openness. I would hope that those who subscribe to the doctrine of divine retribution have struggled a little more than Taranto does with its worldly implications in an era of the rights of man.
Americans have finally created a world in which creedal distinctions are irrelevant to almost all spheres of public and private life. Yet American Christians are to believe that at death, this wonderful ecumenical indifference is yanked away and one’s religion determines whether one has a shot not just at Harvard but at heaven, all thanks to the dispensation of a loving God. If that is not a source of potential cognitive dissonance, I don’t know what is.
Taranto adopts a familiar tactic of religious apologists—the appeal to unreason. “[I]t occurs to us that there are other areas of life that reason alone is inadequate to explain,” he writes. (The appeal to unreason as a grounding for religious faith alternates regularly with the appeal to reason as a grounding for religious faith.) Returning to his analogy between love and eternal damnation, he argues:
“She is the most important thing in the world” makes no sense as a logical proposition, but that does not make it false. Its truth lies elsewhere than in the realm of reason.
I will leave such gobbledygook to those more theologically gifted than I. But let me flesh out Taranto’s analogy.
The statements:
“She is the most important thing in the world” makes no sense as a logical proposition, but that does not make it false. Its truth lies elsewhere than in the realm of reason.
are the same as saying:
“Children who die before being baptised will burn in hell despite possessing equal rights and human worth” makes no sense as a logical proposition, but that does not make it false. Its truth lies elsewhere than in the realm of reason.
James may find this analogy self-evident; I do not. And it is an empirical matter, presumably verifiable after the Last Judgment, whether unbelievers and the unbaptised are eternally punished, not just a matter of feeling.
Pace Taranto, I have not accused Christians of being “insincere or confused.” I hypothesized that because society has changed radically, unrecognizably, since the era when doctrines of eternal damnation were formulated, perhaps the content and experience of religious belief has as well. This is hardly an impious proposition. Ask a believer about Biblical injunctions to stone undevout family members or homosexuals, and you will get a stern lecture about the impropriety of taking such commandments literally in light of evolving faith. Secular, Enlightenment tolerance has revised huge swathes of the Bible; it does not seem so implausible that it could have had a similar if subtler effect on the doctrine of damnation for wrong-believers and the unbaptised. But if it hasn’t, I offer my apologies to all those who are keeping the faith.
P.S. Taranto agrees with me that we should not facilely ascribe bigotry to belief “except on the basis of attitudes toward worldly matters.” Yet he also writes that “[i]t is bigoted to think Jews should not be allowed to . . . live in Hebron, regardless of whether that belief has a theological predicate.” I’m confused. Would it also be bigotry to believe that Palestinians should not live in Hebron?
