Reading Christopher Hitchens' much discussed book against religion, I was reminded of the Chaser’s War on Everything on ABC TV. It has the same good humoured and rather likeable style of presentation, the same manic energy, and the same breadth of scope. It also offers a good check-list of the arguments that can be brought against different forms of religious belief, many of them compelling. But I found it unpersuasive. Not because it was against religion, but because I find the wide-screen polemical style unpersuasive — especially when it is used to defend religion.
Christians have been as good at dishing out as copping criticism. In the early church, Christian writers took apart Pagan beliefs, Jewish practice and heretical theological systems. Subsequently Catholic and Protestant preachers demolished each other’s theological frameworks, and representatives of both traditions took with vigour to the post-Enlightenment world. Not all this critical writing was polemical, of course. Polemic characteristically avoids entering enquiringly your opponents' inner world, preferring to present their ideas masterfully in the worst possible light.
The much commented-on recent books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have reintroduced a broad brush anti-religious polemic. It has much in common with religious polemic against the secular world. Christian polemic is more often conducted through sermons, speeches and essays on particular topics than through comprehensive books. But as in the extended works of Dawkins and Hitchens, it characteristically contains two elements: an argument made in very broad terms showing the wrongness and inferiority of the ideas that the writer opposes, and some anecdotes which demonstrate the truth of this large argument.
Religious polemic likes large terms. Culture is analysed through categories like reason, faith, religion, science, democracy, modernity, postitivism, secularism, individualism, Marxism, post-modernism etc. These terms are related in a way that tells a story about the origins of the evils being opposed, the nature of those evils, and the remedy for them. In early twentieth century Catholic polemic, the integrated world of medieval Catholicism was ruptured first by the religious self-assertion of the Reformation and then by the rational self-assertion of the Enlightenment. This fragmentation played itself out in the anti-Christian Liberal movements. The way back lay through acceptance of the authority of God and of the Church.
This large story is normally supported by smaller stories that illustrate the argument. Polemic about religious belief might include improving stories about the soldier in the fox hole who did or did not pray, the theist or atheist psychopath, the wise or mad scientist/priest, the open or closed minded representatives of religion and anti-religion. The opponent, laid flat on the anvil of cultural analysis, is smashed with the hammer of discrediting examples.
This kind of writing can make enjoyable reading when done with panache, and can rally the faithful, but it convinces only those who wish to be persuaded. The favourably impressed reader does not murmur, "Now I see", but shouts, "Go, go, go!" Others move on. The reason why it does not persuade is that neither the large account of the world nor the panoply of examples represents in sufficient complexity the world that we know.
When a grid of '-isms is laid across the world, it fails to capture the unpredictable mixture of ideas, values, hopes and spontaneity that human beings display. More significantly, it does not capture the variety, the complexity and the delicacy of the way in which people respond intellectually and affectively to the world. Polemical accounts fail to do justice either to the views of the world that they condemn or to the ones that they claim to defend. The castle they defend is straw, and the opposing soldiers they massacre are also straw.
The telling examples also ring untrue. If we appreciate how various is the motivation for our own good and bad actions, and how unpredictable a guide is anyone’s belief to the way in which they will act in particular situations, we are unlikely to attribute people's bad behaviour simply to their agnosticism, Catholicism, secularism, Marxism or whatever. Stories of human action become examples only when they are stripped of the personal qualities that make them human actions.
This is why any polemic, whether on behalf of or directed against Christian faith, is unpersuasive. But Christian polemic against other views of the world has another, critical disadvantage. It harms its own cause because it necessarily misrepresents Christian faith. At the heart of Christian faith is a conversational relationship between God and humanity in which God takes seriously the world of the conversation partner. God enters the human world from within and engages with it. To represent Christian faith accurately, then, we must not only speak of its content but embody in our communication its conversational style. When we address those who hold different views from ours, our conversation needs to be question shaped.
Polemic supposes that we can read accurately the large patterns of God’s action in the world, and that we can effortlessly place and accurately judge those with whom we differ. Nothing in the Christian account of God’s dealings with us substantiates that assurance.