Post Pale and Nerdy

White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert Jones is making the interview and excerpt cycle, here and here. I’m on the fence whether to read it since I think I get the gist from the excerpts and interviews, though I do often read controversial social criticism, social science, and religious thinking (Charles Murray, Coming Apart; Ehrman, Heaven and Hell; etc.). I inevitably learn something new. Here, though, the meta question is how a major religion that makes truth and moral claims to its adherents can harbor and tolerate something as repugnant as slavery and racism. Now, it might be argued that slavery and racism were simply part of our shared human past where tribes and nations vied for resources and land, but this of course argues against the possibility that religious traditions reflect some kind of special truth insofar as we are wedded to the idea that slavery and racism are bad, always and everywhere. Yet, from the “curse of Ham” to the endless support for slavery in the Old and New Testaments, and even the skin color tribal curses in Book of Mormon, there was plenty of ammunition for recent religious communities in America to be supportive of white supremacy, much less slavery.

And this is where the pale and nerdy comes in. In his review of Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing (which I also own) in the New York Times, physicist and philosopher David Albert took Krauss to task for bothering with the whole effort of trying to seriously engage with religious arguments concerning the origins of the universe at all:

When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.

I’ve made related points before concerning the Kalam cosmological argument, much less the origins of morality and ethics. The religious and theological claims—much less their subservient philosophical arguments—don’t need to be deeply addressed because they are outlandish and unimportant. There is science and intellectual work to be done. This was once the default perspective of the cognoscenti. To quote Steve Martin: “In college they told us that was all bullshit.” Indeed, simple observations of the world should be enough to make religion at best a William James-style pragmatic option or a fascination with ancient things and their details. It’s an interesting and very human phenomena, but should be held to task for its history and impact, not angels, pins, dancing, or all the other unimportant crap.

A whole little industry of post-New Atheism has arisen with online video makers and influencers arguing over the minutiae of Christian apologetics. They are mostly ex-evangelicals, so I can sympathize with their reactive desire to lead minds from the strange mental landscapes they themselves once inhabited. People cheer and make Patreon donations. Debates overflow (or did pre-pandemic). Young Earth creationism gets seriously deconstructed along with all the tenuous history of the religious traditions. The serious matters, less pale, small, silly, and nerdy, are with resisting religious believers when they are cruel, racist, and theocratic in their aspirations, not pointing out that they are merely wrong or deluded. White Too Long seems a useful touchstone in a return to a more muscular secularism.