Last week I had the pleasure and privilege of being one of the plenary speakers at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Theology at Nottingham. My acceptance of their invitation marks me out as a “faitheist”, to use Jerry Coyne’s neologism for “atheists sympathetic to religion”. The epithet is not intended as a compliment, but nine times out of ten, I find a genuinely respectful and open engagement with believers only deepens my faitheism.
The SST’s president, Karen Kilby could have been describing any number of academic conferences when she told a reception for speakers and first-timers that many of the papers would be “boring”. Given that general truth and my own lack of interest in theology, I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting the sessions I attended were. Kilby’s own presidential address was one of the most rewarding, especially when she discussed the problem inherent in attempts at interfaith and faith/non-faith dialogue.
“If I determine I want to learn from another tradition,” wrote Kilby, “most fundamentally I have to decide to which voice or voices within it I will listen, which voices represent that tradition most fully or authentically. For I will not have time to grapple with the whole range of what is available—after all, it is not my tradition. So there is a question about how I should decide.” (“Wrote Kilby” not “said” because the SST has an unusually sensible policy of distributing plenary papers in advance and making the sessions discussions rather than mainly recitations of them. Among the many advantages of this is that it allows the audience to prepare really good questions.)
So how do I decide? Whatever the answer, the result is likely to be a distortion of some kind. Kilby argued that because some people are better known that others “if nothing else there is likely to be a clustering effect.” She suggested that “there may be an inclination to choose that which seems most exotic, most different from what I am used to, but which also, perhaps, conforms to a pre-existing sense I might have of the ‘otherness’ of the other.”
With “faitheists” like me, the more likely result is that we will choose theists who are as sympathetic to atheism as we are to religion. This creates its own clustering: a cosy conversation among open-minded, non-dogmatic believers and unbelievers that excludes more exclusionary theists and atheists.
This is the issue facing contributors to a volume published last year, Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide. Its editors, Anthony Carroll and Richard Norman are keen to ensure that the book is the beginning rather than the culmination of a process. To make that real, however, the conversation has to bring in people who are not already so well-disposed towards religious-atheist dialogue.
Kilby pointed to a further limitation when she wrote “ecumenical generosity will mean that in the vicinity of anything I associate with the ‘otherness’ of the other, I should be slow to criticize.” We gather together, comfortable in the common ground we have found despite our differences, but only because we have completely ignored those things we most disagree with. The site of the ecumenical encounter is often a room full of elephants.
Considerations such as these give me much more pause for thought than the accusation that polite discussion with religious believers somehow legitimises the crazies. If anything is going to help the fundamentalists seek cover behind moderates it the latter being lumped together with the former by atheists who cannot see who is dangerous and who is simply (as we see it) mistaken. When the religious feel they are under siege, they are more likely to seek safety in numbers. If we want more reasonable, moderate religious believers to disown extremists more explicitly, we ought too join them in a coalition of the reasonable, not lump them together with those we wish to separate them from.
I value discussion with certain kinds of religious believers for several reasons. First, the best of them are fellow travellers in the sense that they too take life seriously and are looking to make sense of it. Second, their most important values are my values: love, compassion, sincerity, honesty. Third, they challenge me to make the best case for my atheism, preventing me from feeling snuggly secure in it. Fourth, for all our disagreements, we are united by a common enemy: dogmatism. For these reasons and more, I’m proud to be a faitheist.
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