I’ve often pointed out that the mainstream media seems curiously soft on religion, taking the stance that religion is good for America and can heal it in these troubled times. But they never ask—and don’t seem to care—whether religion is true. Instead, they insist that filling the “God-shaped hole”—a spiritual lacuna that supposedly exists in all of us—is what we need to be complete and happy human beings.
The New York Times is particularly guilty of pushing superstition as a nostrum. For two years, until 2023, they had a regular column and newsletter called “On Faith,” by Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest who relentlessly pushed religion. (You can see my many posts criticizing her here.) There were, of course, no atheists writing to point out that the God that Warren extolled weekly didn’t seem to exist.
Now Lauren Jackson, who professes nonbelief but is a spiritual “seeker”, has replaced Warren with a weekly newsletter and column called “Believing”. You can see the list of her columns here, and my post about the column here. Here’s one example below (click to read, or find it (archived here)
Jackson mourns her inability to fully believe:
I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.
For years, I haven’t been able to say that publicly. But it feels like something is changing. That maybe the culture is shifting. That maybe we’re starting to recognize that it’s possible to be both believing and discerning after all.
I don’t think so—not without evidence for God. Can you be discerning and believe in the Loch Ness Monster? That would be easier than believing in God, for at least there used to be some (now discredited) evidence for Nessie.
Here’s another more recent one (click to read), a column that proves that God is made in the image of humans and not the other way around:
A quote:
Reverend Albert Cleage, a leader in the Detroit civil rights movement, wanted to counter what he saw as white dominance of Christianity. He was also trying to make the church into an important center for Black political power. So he and his team commissioned an artist, Glanton Dowdell, to replace the old church building’s iconography, which at the time depicted a white pilgrim. Dowdell scouted a young Black mother and her 3-year-old son at a laundromat and told her she had a memorable face — a crisp jawline and sharp cheekbones. Would she allow him to paint her as a Black Mary?
She said yes. The resulting mural was radical for the time, but it served to both illustrate and venerate an emerging doctrine of Black liberation theology. Cleage was developing a gospel of Black nationalism, one that claimed Jesus was a Black revolutionary whose identity as such had been obscured by white people.
“The basic problem facing Black people is their powerlessness,” he once said.
Look, I don’t care what color God is, because I’m fully convinced that God is a man-made fiction. He’s a coloring book in the mind, and you can make God whatever sex or ethnicity you want. But none of that makes God’s existence more probable.
It’s curious that Jackson, who professes nonbelief, only writes positively about it, and doesn’t allow an atheistic point of view in her column. Though she herself is an unbeliever, you won’t see her discuss the problems with religion, nor will you see her write about Islam, save for tiny mentions. That’s because her brief is to console NYT readers by allowing them to think that religion is compatible with a modern, scientific outlook. Jackson, I believe, replaced Warren because Warren’s take on faith was too strong and was alienating readers. So the paper got themselves a “none” who writes good things about faith.
This also applies to the Free Press, whose softness on religion I’ve often mentioned. This piece, for example, came out just last week:
Here’s an excerpt:
There’s something simple yet profound about mingling with people who are different. At its very best, religion can tamp down feelings of distrust, disenchantment, and disconnection. At their very best, religious institutions are places where people from every economic background and political affiliation can set aside their differences and worship together. Instead of churches being engines of social capital generation and catalysts for building trust and tolerance, the growing polarization of American religion has left us lonelier, angrier, sicker, and more divided than ever before.
. . . . I am under no illusion that American religion is the greatest panacea for all that ails the United States. But people gathering under one roof to sing together, pray together, and work in common cause to create a better community and a better society will certainly move us closer to the ideals that were set forth by the Founding Fathers of our country. There’s nothing simpler and more consequential than people getting up on a Sunday morning, getting dressed, and making their way to a local house of worship.
For religion to effect these changes, isn’t it true that worshipers must share common beliefs about what’s true, and foremost among them must be the existence of God? Well, no, because I have friends who are atheists and nevertheless go to church for the social aspects: the singing, the fellowship, the comity based on a false premise that Kurt Vonnegut called a “granfaloon.” Oh, that we could have a latter-day Mencken, who made his name in journalism even though he wrote stuff like this!:
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
The worst thing is religions that conceal themselves.
New Age religions – like the swill Oprah has mainlined into the United States Zeitgeist for instance – are more obvious examples I think everyone would agree upon, but never come in a box labeled “Religion Inside!” (cf. “Intel Inside!”, remember?).
These appeal to the “spiritual but not religious” checkbox checkers. Homeopathic-Deepak-woo doesn’t advertise itself as “Religion Inside!”.
Maybe the books are in a “New Age / Spiritual / Religious” section in a bookstore. But even so…
The popularity of religion seems to be inversely proportional to the stability and security of a nation. So the more insecure and uncertain one’s life is, the more likely to seek comfort in the fantasy that religion offers.
The outlier is the pre-Trump US, the wealthiest and strongest nation in history yet soaked in religion. Perhaps that’s an indication of its levels of inequality — life is insecure for many in the US.
It also doesn’t explain people such as Jackson, who is presumably secure financially, yet still needs some source of spiritual comfort. Perhaps she just needs some mental therapy to determine the cause of her insecurity.
Who was the first major thinker in The West to promulgate “an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable?”
Plato.
We are still stuck in his toxic sandbox.
Until plato’s metaphysics is utterly rejected, “belief” will fester.
Ms Jackson appears to be filling the hole in her heart with Schrodinger’s catechism.