Chris Stedman: How Dangerous for Civil Society is an Atheist Appeal to the Interfaith Movement?

JAMES WW ADDOMS

hris Stedman, the Assistant Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and author of "Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious," is carrying the banner for an expanded interfaith movement that attempts to emulsify the ancient dialogue between immiscible faith traditions and an equally contradictory atheist perspective. Mr. Stedman, in a longer passage given below, states the movements goal as discovering, a way to disagree and still live in a way that transcends tolerance and prioritizes collaboration over critiquing one anothers religious beliefs. On the surface this seems reasonable, even utopian. In a world of purely privately held religious convictions I would be the first to build up the infrastructure for expanding bridges of understanding between competing worldviews. Mr. Stedmans utopian vision of believers in civil society notwithstanding, secularists have long observed the historical tendency of faith communities to project their convictions onto secular civil society. In a world where faith has rarely sequestered itself safely within the confines of the psyche of its holder, there is perhaps no more inherently unstable state of affairs as the current clash of pluralistic, porous society with faith-based communities founded on fundamentalist ideologies. Understandably, Mr. Stedman and his atheist collaborators are seeking a method of engaging, arresting and reversing this trend. Unfortunately, his proposition that collaboration with and between faith communities has an intrinsic value as a force in civil society, while undoubtedly born of good intentions, is inherently dangerous to the survival of the civil society he hopes to engage. Notions of Collaboration What forms of collaboration does Mr. Stedman hope to enhance with interfaith dialogue? It is evident by his writing that he would not welcome collaboration in the form of conversion attempts, and would look unfavorably on members of interfaith communities who use the lowering of barriers in the interfaith arena to attempt to proselytize. If he seeks collaboration in the project of humanitarianism as he advocates through his support of numerous interfaith volunteerism programs he is quite late to the party. Humanitarian projects that have taken place en masse without the acceptance or refutation of a faith concept are a well-established phenomenon. If he seeks cultural collaboration, again, he is only the most recent of observers

who recognize that artistic collaboration (either in support or refutation of supernatural forces) has existed since people self-segregated themselves into faith communities. If he seeks an interfaith dialogue on economic cooperation he need look only to the existing pluralistic economic landscape. In fact, it is at best superfluous to the existing forms of humanitarian, cultural and economic cooperation to stress the question of faith. The struggles between adherents to opposing faith traditions have been subsumed into and have been overridden by cooperative human achievements. This has happened already and will continue to happen without any imposed interfaith framework. However, if he looks to foster interfaith collaboration in the public sphere, that is, collaboration seeking a progressive and not reactionary political consensus in the public policy process, Mr. Stedman is skirting a very dangerous line. I would argue that most forms of cooperation between individuals of widely disparate faith traditions and non-believers are an evolutionary reality necessary for the emergence of human societies. In other words, we wouldnt have come this far without religious forces employing at least a minimum of self-supporting progressive concepts in civil society without the patronizing graces of interfaith-obsessed secularists. Mr. Stedman must therefore actually be proposing collaboration between faith and non-faith traditions in the last and most important frontier of paralyzing disagreement: the crafting of public policy. Introducing interfaith dialogue to this process is dangerous in several ways:

1.

It fails to juxtapose the lack of unfalsifiable presupposition with mutually exclusive claims that suspensions in the natural do take place in response to the actions and propitiations of the faithful. This buries important philosophical disagreements between materialism and theism that must be brought under scrutiny if a serious and adult debate is to be had about the wellsprings of moral authority with which we inform important questions of public policy.

2. It misallocates resources to spending time finding common ground with religious moderates who already believe in the universality of the core tenets of mutual respect for human life, freedom of expression and freedom of economic action. These are more appropriately labeled as humanist concepts of morality and human solidarity that are products of our social evolution already alive in populations well before institutionalized theism. This is a criminal distraction from engaging less palatable religious people, the people who dont come to interfaith meetings with humanists at Harvard or anywhere else, who wont read Mr. Stedmans book and who certainly have no sympathy or appreciation for the nuances of interfaith dialogue. 3. Most importantly, atheist engagement in interfaith dialogue actually achieves the opposite of what it purports to do. By joining, honoring and thereby sanctioning a public discourse that assigns faith a place at the table they are tacitly saying that there is a place for unfalsifiable claims in public debate even when they have entered into the debate to refute it. This eschews dissecting faith-as-a-commodity in the search of utopian mutual understanding.

Mr. Stedmans critique Ive followed Mr. Stedman, intellectually stalked him even, since we were co-attendees at a Secular Student Alliance Leadership Summit at Harvard in April 2010. Mr. Stedman wrote about several of the many attendees. A critique of my presentation was lucky enough to make the cut:

Creating a Semester Programming Arc & Engaging Local Freethought Groups This session was facilitated by Jim Addoms, a graduate student at Syracuse University. He talked about his experiences founding a secular student group. I thought he had an interesting story but was confused by the lengthy portion of his presentation that addressed the fact that there is a lot of interfaith going on at Syracuse and that his group developed as a critique against it. He especially focused on the COEXIST movement, which he called silly. Addoms spent a lot of his talk saying that he has problems with COEXIST, saying there are real differences between religions. Im not certain why he saw that as opposed to interfaith; the new interfaith movement recognizes and acknowledges the reality that we have distinctly different views but pragmatically declares that we need to find a way to disagree and still live in a way that transcends tolerance and prioritizes collaboration over critiquing one anothers religious beliefs. Unfortunately, though his presentation was very professional and it sounded like they have a lot going on at Syracuse, he spent a lot of time talking about how he thinks COEXIST is stupid and I found it to be distracting from the sessions goal of actually talking about developing secular programming. 4/28/2010 Chris Stedman Non Prophet Status (http://www.nonprophetstatus.com)

Im afraid that Mr. Stedman didnt misinterpret my message as much as I was unsuccessful in articulating it. Hes right; it was well beyond the scope of my talk. I took much from that convention and from my colleagues when I returned to our secular group at Syracuse University. I am most interested in honing a message of pause and caution for the unfettered marriage of faith and skepticism under the guise of mutual understanding, as if one side must accept the sometimes laughable assertions of the other lest they be branded intellectual xenophobes. Mr. Stedman also mentions in his definition of the interfaith culture a curious interest in prioritizing collaboration OVER critiquing religious views. Faith communities do not institutionalize such scruples. Faith communities regularly engage in the practice of exposing other theists apparent philosophical shortcomings. Every Christian knows that the Jews havent quite gone far enough and the Muslims know that the Bible isnt quite the final word. Even coreligionists find fault with each other. A Lutheran knows that, while certainly willing to form a civic bond with a Roman Catholic neighbor, the follower of the Bishop of Rome is suffering, sadly, under a misapprehension of the source of authority of Christs church on earth. Co-sectarians debate the meaning of scripture from parish to parish, mosque to mosque. These disagreements need not be mean-spirited or coincident with violence to be true manifestations of the isolationism and the exceptionalism displayed by a religious worldview.

Speaking for myself and reiterating the sentiments of other atheists I know, there are those of us who do retain the intellectual authority to disagree with and to criticize tenets of religious convictions. Engaging in Mr. Stedmans brand of interfaith dialogue does very little to provide the explicit questioning of faith that many apostates have cited as an important impetus in the long road of de-conversion. I know this from personal and publicized accounts. I applaud Mr. Stedmans organizing talent and his enthusiasm for the intellectual sanctity of his fellow creatures. I also admire his ability to cultivate a diverse following among believers and nonbelievers alike. Right on. I only hope that well-meaning interfaith engagement by members of the atheist and agnostic communities does not distract us from the inevitable discussion about the real differences between religions and the faithless that continues to float just under the surface of public policy making in pluralistic civil society.