Theophobia

Just a few days ago, I was discussing a mutual friend with a former colleague. The latter was astonished by our mutual friend’s Christianity: “What’s up with that?!” he exclaimed, expressing bewilderment and even nervousness at the thought that a well-regarded – indeed, by academic standards, famous – professor could believe in the existence and beneficence of an omniscient and omnipotent God. If was as if our Christian friend had declared that the world was flat or was dabbling in alchemy. My former colleague even worried that, if a serious academic could believe in God, he was capable of believing in, or attempting, anything -- attempting to walk across the East River unaided by a water taxi, gunning down students in hallways, speaking in tongues at a faculty meeting, you name it.

Admittedly, my former colleague is an extreme case, but I have more frequently encountered less intense versions of what I will call “Theophobia” – the academic’s irrational fear of, or intense discomfort around, theist and, in particular, Christian, beliefs. Theophobia does not have a DSM designation (yet), but I tend to think that it mimics many of the characteristics of paranoia about gay and lesbian couples: It seems to driven by unfamiliarity with anything except the crudest caricature of the object of horror, derived from distant rumors of bizarre and violent behavior in a strange faraway place (for homophobes, say, the Castro; for theophobes, perhaps Lubbock, TX or Colorado Springs, CO). Secular academics typically do not know many religious believers -- especially not many overly devout Christians -- and their isolation leads to the most naively lurid fantasies about what religious belief entails. (The growth of conservative law schools -- Ave Maria, Pepperdine -- is calculated to exacerbate this segregation with the consequence that secular academics will be even more isolated and more naïve about religion)

Of course, some would dispute that theophobia is truly phobic. Religious belief does genuine harm, they would argue, and therefore, it is rational to be wary of it. Following the jump, I’ll offer my own reasons for why fear of religious belief is indeed phobic and, to that extent, undesirable.

I say that theophobia is irrational, because there is no obviously persuasive reason to believe that religious belief as such has any more harmful consequences than lack thereof. True, religious believers have done some horrible things in the name of God. But there is no obviously persuasive reason to believe that the body count attributable to religious belief is higher than the death toll from whatever ideology one wishes to ascribe to Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Hutu Nationalists, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, or any number of other despots motivated by secular ideologies. (Yes, I know Hitchens & Co. disputes that this string of despots killed for the sake of secular ideologies, mostly by gerry-rigging the definition of “religion” to include beliefs like Nazism. But, using the same looseness of definition, I can claim Stoics, Epicureans, even diehard Rawlsians -- yes, there are such people -- among the religious believers).

Suppose one takes God to subsist rather than exist, as an intellectual construct akin to pi or imaginary numbers? What harm can come from guiding one’s life by the supposed judgments of the being that Adam Smith called “the impartial spectator” – a perfectly wise judge with perfectly accurate information about your motives and actions? I can think of worse heuristics. The fact that someone takes this heuristic to be ontologically "real" in some sense strikes me as utterly harmless, whatever its merits as a philosophical position. Yes, one could imagine that religious believers might ignore the welfare of the secular world in favor of the eternal one. But one can also imagine religious believers who ignore their secular welfare out of obedience to God’s command to value the secular world. If what you need is passionate altruism, my bet would be on the theists: It is not easy to imagine a rational self-maximizing welfarist throwing himself on a grenade for the sake of a world that, from his point of view, will cease to exist at the moment of detonation: What’s in it for him, after all?

I do not wish to enter into the tired controversy about whether atheism or theism is more conducive to ethical behavior. I want only to suggest that this controversy is tired precisely because there is no obvious answer to the question inspiring it. One can wrangle forever about the relative merits of theism and atheism without reaching any firm conclusion, which is precisely why it is irrationally phobic to have an intense fear of theism on this score. Accept such a belief or reject it as you please, just as you might accept or reject any number of other beliefs that are not provably true or false – Raz’s argument against anti-perfectionist liberalism, Derek Parfit’s theory of personal identity, or the fatalism that the NY Yankees will collapse again this baseball season. But do not panic around a Christian (or a Muslim, Jew, Hindu, etc).

How widespread is theophobia among academics? I cannot say for sure -- I've only casual anecdotes to guide me -- but I suspect that, whatever its prevalence, it is on the decline. Atheism’s fatal error was to go middlebrow. When the books of Dawkins and Hitchens became bestsellers, their ideas lost several points in the academics’ stockmarket. Intellectual pride is the academic’s signature sin (oops – I mean failing), and few academics want to be associated with an ideology tied to the vulgar laity. Moreover, I think that there is a powerful case that God, whether He exists or not, has historically had the better writers on His side: Who would you rather read, after all – Dawkins, Hitchens, Bradlaugh, Paine, d’Holbach and other (semi-)atheist writers, or Pascal, Kierkegaard, Locke, Unamuno, Donne, Dante, Milton, and Flannery O’Connor?

Of course, I might be wrong about the prevalence of theophobia among academics: I’ve only my very anecdotal experience to go by. (If anyone out there can confirm or disconfirm my sketchy suspicions, I’d be grateful). But even if theophobia is on the wane, it is still worthwhile to hasten its demise. After all, change is difficult, and you have to want to change.