Religion editor Lisa Miller’s essay in this week’s Newsweek, combatively entitled “Harvard’s Crisis of Faith” troubles me. One can easily grant her point (not actually hers but Louis Menand’s) that Harvard ought to provide undergraduates with a serious opportunity to study present-day religious discourse, especially now when “conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians; between Christians, Muslims, and animists in Africa; between religious conservatives and progressives at home over abortion and gay marriage—all . . . relate, if indirectly, to what rival groups believe about God and scripture.” One can even grant her subsidiary argument that it’s a pity “for Harvard, its students, and the rest of us who need leaders better informed about faith and the motivations of the faithful” if the university fails to do these things.
However, it’s by no means clear to me (and certainly not clear from Miller’s essay) that Harvard indeed doesn’t do these things. Sociology, history, anthropology, literature, philosophy, and other disciplines, each and all, might contribute to understanding of the cited concerns. But that seems not to be the issue. Whilst reporting on Harvard’s debates about a proposed undergraduate requirement entitled Reason and Faith, Miller notes with disapproval that Harvard has neither an undergraduate religion department which can hire and fire and grant tenure, nor a specific religion requirement, but rather relegates religious study to an interdisciplinary program some faculty seem to regard as an academic poor relation or to the divinity school where students “can take graduate-level courses about belief from people who are, by tradition, believers.” She then notes, simplistically, that “This separation of ‘faith’ from ‘reason’ occurred in the early part of the 19th century, when the American university evolved into a secular place,” and concludes:
Even now, in an era when a presidential candidate cannot get elected without a convincing “faith narrative,” the scholars who study belief continue to reside in the Divinity School [at Harvard], and when the subject of religion comes up, the scholars on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences sniff at its seriousness.
It’s a curious position for a Jewish writer, given Judaism’s historic emphasis on practice, but the target of Miller’s critique is unbelief. Not only that, she makes the frightening claim that today’s global conflicts legitimate religious faith. She seems, as in another Newsweek piece, “Faith in love” to occupy a positon somewhat like that of an Israeli friend who advised her, “This is the new world . . . . Deal with it,” in which rhetorical zingers acquire truth in proportion to their effectiveness as weapons. And again and again, she seems to stick a rhetorical thumb in the eye of skeptical readers like me, gloating “Deal with it” when we squirm.
“Harvard may or may not be the pinnacle of higher learning in the world,” Miller solemnly intones,
but because it is Harvard, it reflects—for better or worse—the priorities of the nation’s intellectual set. To decline to grapple head-on with the role of religion in a liberal-arts education, even as debates over faith and reason rage on blogs, and as publishers churn out books defending and attacking religious belief, is at best timid and at worst self-defeating.
The priorities of the nation’s intellectual set? To study religious discourse in any respectable department of religion (as opposed to, say, talking about religion at a cocktail party) is not, as Miller supposes, to toss rival truth claims about in a Proufrockian fog. Moreover, it’s one thing to argue, as Menand does in The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, the book Miller takes as her starting point, that “college is a time to ‘unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what’s going on beneath and behind appearances’” and quite another to claim in the next sentence, as Miller does, that “[f]orcing kids to grapple head-on with the world view of a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist, . . . would be a part of this unsettling.”
“Harvard faculty cannot cope with religion,” Miller announces in her second paragraph. Regardless of what Menand may have meant in championing the proposed Reason and Faith requirement, it’s clearly not religious assumptions that Miller believes should be unsettled at Harvard but rather what she characterizes as secular fundamentalism, something she seems to identify with the Harvard establishment and particularly with Professor Steven Pinker, who opposed the Faith and Reason course. “In Pinker’s view,” says Miller, “human progress is an evolution away from superstition, witchcraft, and idol worship—that is, religion—and toward something like a Scandinavian austerity and secularism. (Pinker is one of those intellectuals who speak frequently about how sensible things are in Europe; one suppresses the urge to remind him of the Muslim riots in the Paris and London suburbs).”
Ad hominem arguments are odious, but Miller has made her own religious practice into something of a cause, portraying her adult reaffirmation of Judaism and raising her daughter as an observant Jew (who also conveniently celebrates her father’s diverse background) as part of an approach to life that celebrates everything.
Our Jewish daughter knows about her Jewish heritage and can say the Shema. She also knows that she comes from generations of French and Irish Catholics, and WASPs, and Native Americans on her father’s side. She’s obsessed with the statue of the Virgin Mary in the garden of the church down the street. She believes in Santa and we celebrate Christmas — with a tree, and lights, and bright green cookies made of Rice Krispies.
In another sentence Miller admits that the exclusivity of Judaism troubles her but seems to dismiss that concern as she affirms the value of a serious cultural grounding.
Only in marrying a non-Jew did I become aware of how much of the Jewish story one learns by osmosis. Without two Jewish parents, my child would not absorb these stories automatically. We would have to teach them to her.And so we joined the Temple. My daughter and I go, every Saturday morning. Together, we’re learning the prayers. My husband supports us, though he rarely joins — partially because he’s ambivalent about God, and partially because this is not his tradition and he feels like a foreigner there.
Why, one might ask, does Miller’s faith take precedence over her husband’s unfaith. I think perhaps because whatever she believes about God she passionately believes in a kind of religious entitlement. As she puts it more or less directly, “If my husband and I were of different races rather than different religious backgrounds, our daughter would no more be able to ‘choose’ her identity than she would the color of our skin.”
Of course a child with parents of “two different races” must perforce “choose” an identity—we now can cite the life and experience of the President of the United States as a case in point. And, one might argue, Miller’s daughter will in her turn have to choose, in spite of her mother’s protectiveness. No less, the Harvard student Miller quotes as part of her final anecdote in “Harvard’s Crisis of Faith.”
On one of my visits to the Yard, I met a sophomore named Ryan Mahoney in a basement pub. Raised in Queens, N.Y., and educated, as generations of Irish Catholics have been, by Jesuits who saw in him some promise, Mahoney was forthright about a despondent feeling he had, in class and among his friends: neither the Catholic theology that framed his thinking nor the religious community that gave him comfort were appropriate subjects for discussion. He once overheard students in the dorm making fun of his rosary. “I do not think there would be any openness to discussing God in any of the classes I took last year,” he said. “But acknowledging the fact that religion exists and that it’s not lunacy to believe in God would be helpful.”
So much for unsettling presumptions and defamiliarizing the familiar. Miller tags this story with the observation (her last word) that “[t]o dismiss the importance of the study of faith—especially now—out of academic narrow-mindedness is less than unhelpful. It’s unreasonable.” By “the study of faith” Miller seems to envision some sort of sensitivity training in a safe zone where religious beliefs and practices constitute protected areas of individual identity and are therefore not legitimate objects of criticism. This might be a good thing, but it isn’t the critical study of religion Miller affects to admire—”Fluency in religious history and texts, in fact, is the sharpest weapon against fundamentalism, as Sam Harris demonstrates in his polemic The End of Faith.”—and it belongs in the Hillel Yeshiva or the Canterbury House or the Baptist Student Union or the Islamic Center, not in the classroom. Miller’s readers get the point. As one of them puts it,
It is outrageous that a Catholic student should be ridiculed by other students for his Rosary. I bet those same students would not make fun of a Muslim student in a hijab. That would not be politically correct now, would it? The Catholic student should transfer to a Catholic college/university. Harvard is so overrated.
I greatly admire the work of Louis Menand, and I support the now familiar trend that seeks to infuse present day undergraduate education with a new emphasis upon citizenship. To that extent I am in sympathy with Miller. And to be fair I should admit that the movement of my own mind over many years has been away from faith. Both my commitment to secular humanism and my commitment to Christianity are cultural, but the humanist commitment is deeper because it is a product of my adult experience. I think a systematic interrogation of religious faith and practice (indeed of all ideology) ought to be part of undergraduate education, as it was part of my own. I don’t think simplistic claims that universities insult the pious serve any useful purpose.
And I think Miller’s primary point is that Harvard disrespects religion; albeit that’s an argument worthy of somebody like Brit Hume or Sarah Palin. Miller has defended Hume in another column, in which she also defends Christian proselytizing—”I’m not at all sure why the liberal left is always so shocked that evangelical Christians want other people to become Christians.” There is secular bigotry just as there is religious bigotry. Miller’s own critical perspective reflects neither; it is sharply political at best. But it is sloppy and impressionistic at worst. Harvard students don’t need to study religion as an exercise in identity politics. Still less do they need to study religion because supposedly religious controversies are all the rage in popular culture.
In the final analysis we all choose and do not choose our identities. And in the final analysis the old-fashioned positivist tradition, which seems to have won the day at Harvard for the present, “isn’t the only—or even always the best—tool for understanding human experience,” as Miller puts it. I agree with Miller (and Menand) that undergraduates should “engage fully with the messiness and contradiction of clashing ideas.” The Harvard argument over Reason and Faith exhibits just such a messiness, and it isn’t a bad messiness. Actually, it’s normal. Miller might have pointed that out, instead of trying to score cheap points in a tired culture war whose only remaining antagonists are people like Hume, Palin, and maybe David Horowitz.
