Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

We don’t let religions declare that their holy traditions require that left-handed people be enslaved, or that people who live in Norway should be killed. We similarly cannot let religions declare that “infidels” who have been innocently living on their “holy” turf for generations have no right to live there. There is also, of course, culpable hypocrisy in the policy of deliberately building new settlements in order to create just such “innocent” dwellers and foreclose the claims of the previous dwellers on that land. This is a practice that goes back centuries; the Spaniards who conquered most of the Western Hemisphere often took care to build their Christian churches on the destroyed foundations of the temples of the indigenous people. Out of sight, out of mind. Neither side of these disputes is above criticism. If we could just devalue the whole tradition of holy soil, and its occupation, we could address the residual injustices with clearer heads.

Perhaps you disagree with me about this. Fine. Let’s discuss it calmly and openly, with no untrumpable appeals to the sacred, which have no place in such a discussion. If we should continue to honor claims about holy soil, it will be because, all things considered, this is the course of action that is just, and life-enabling, and a better path to peace than any other we can find. Any policy that cannot pass that test doesn’t deserve respect.

Such open discussions are underwritten by the security of a free society, and if they are to continue unmolested, we must be vigilant in protecting the institutions and principles of democracy from subversion. Remember Marxism? It used to be a sour sort of fun to tease Marxists about the contradictions in some of their pet ideas. The revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists believed, but if so, why were they so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that Marxists believe in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was guaranteed in the long run. And some of them, the only ones that were really dangerous, believed so firmly in the rightness of their cause that they believed it was permissible to lie and deceive in order to further it. They even taught this to their children, from infancy. These are the “red-diaper babies,” children of hardline members of the Communist Party of America, and some of them can still be found infecting the atmosphere of political action in left-wing circles, to the extreme frustration and annoyance of honest socialists and others on the left.

Today we have a similar phenomenon brewing on the religious right: the inevitability of the End Days, or the Rapture, the coming Armageddon that will separate the blessed from the damned in the final Day of Judgment. Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millennia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with the Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to “hasten the inevitable,” not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion. And these people are not funny at all. They are dangerous, for the same reason that red-diaper babies are dangerous: they put their allegiance to their creed ahead of their commitment to democracy, to peace, to (earthly) justice—and to truth. If push comes to shove, some of them are prepared to lie and even to kill, to do whatever it takes to help bring what they consider celestial justice to those they consider the sinners. Are they a lunatic fringe? They are certainly dangerously out of touch with reality, but it is hard to know how many they are.¹⁶ Are their numbers growing? Apparently. Are they attempting to gain positions of power and influence in the governments of the world? Apparently. Should we know all about this phenomenon? We certainly should.