There seems to be a penchant these days for some atheists and secularists to tell us how we need to replace religion with secular alternatives. Philip Kitcher wrote a pretty good book about it, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism, but there are others who argue in a more annoying fashion, viz., Alain de Botton.

My response to most of this palaver that if we finally manage to dislodge religion from the American consciousness, people will find their own satisfying ways to make their lives. Do we need “Sunday Sermons”? Well, maybe for the recently-converted who simply can’t do without  some group activity on Sundays, or for the lonely people who need to find a coterie of like-minded people. But they don’t have these things in those Northern European countries like Sweden, Denmark and France—nations that are largely atheistic. In France, where I lived on and off for about a year, people just sleep in on Sundays. They seem pretty ethical, too—so you clearly don’t need God or religion to be moral. And I haven’t noticed that Sweden and Denmark, among the most atheistic countries in the world, are hotbeds of crime and perfidy.

It’s my feeling that as religion wanes, other, secular activities gradually fill the vacuum. That, at least, is the lesson of the secularism of Europe, and although the lessons of Europe may not fully apply to the increasingly secular U.S., I simply can’t get exercised about the “we-need-to-replace-religion-with-something-else” trope. I haven’t, for example, noticed that any of the atheists I know suffer from nihilism, ennui, or existential angst. (Such feelings, of course, are required if we’re to be “serious atheists”—or so say the Sophisticated Theologians™ like David Bentley Hart and Terry Eagleton.) Maybe once in a while we feel sad about having to die, but it doesn’t dominate our lives. After all, most religious people have the nagging worry that there’s no hereafter, too. If they didn’t, why are they so afraid to die?

By and large, atheists seem to me a happy, well-adjusted group.

But David Brooks doesn’t think so. Several readers called my attention to his column in Tuesday’s New York Times, “Building better secularists.” It’s one of the more sanctimonious and tut-tutting attempts to chide atheists that I’ve seen in a while. Brooks has taken it upon himself to tell secularists how we must fill the void left by the death of God.

Here’s the problem he sees:

The point is that an age of mass secularization is an age in which millions of people have put unprecedented moral burdens upon themselves. People who don’t know how to take up these burdens don’t turn bad, but they drift. They suffer from a loss of meaning and an unconscious boredom with their own lives.

I haven’t seen that—have you? Are there more drifters now than, say, in the 1950s, when the Beat Generation (who, by and large, had a nebulous spirituality, often derived from Buddhism), were seen as “drifting”? Are the kids whose heads are glued to their iPhones doing that because it’s a failed substitute for God? Where are Brooks’s data?

But he apparently doesn’t need data to wag his fingers at us and tell us what we must do. Here’s his remedy:

But I can’t avoid the conclusion that the secular writers are so eager to make the case for their creed, they are minimizing the struggle required to live by it. Consider the tasks a person would have to perform to live secularism well:

• Secular individuals have to build their own moral philosophies. Religious people inherit creeds that have evolved over centuries. Autonomous secular people are called upon to settle on their own individual sacred convictions.

• Secular individuals have to build their own communities. Religions come equipped with covenantal rituals that bind people together, sacred practices that are beyond individual choice. Secular people have to choose their own communities and come up with their own practices to make them meaningful.

• Secular individuals have to build their own Sabbaths. Religious people are commanded to drop worldly concerns. Secular people have to create their own set times for when to pull back and reflect on spiritual matters.

That’s right: I need a Build Your Own Sabbath kit! It comes with tapes of inspirational music and a some books by Deepak Chopra.

I doubt that I need to spend much time refuting Brooks’s contentions, except to say that the French “sabbath” consists of going to the country and eating good food; and I suspect that goes for Danes and Swedes as well. The moral philosophy part is just dumb, but I’ll leave that to Dan Dennett, who, among others, replied to Brooks’s misguided screed. It’s not as if nonbelievers have to build a moral philosophy from the ground up, you know—we can draw on the work of dozens of secular philosophers from the Greeks to Peter Singer. Is Brooks really that pig-ignorant?

And this unctuous paragraph really irks me:

The only secularism that can really arouse moral motivation and impel action is an enchanted secularism, one that puts emotional relations first and autonomy second. I suspect that over the next years secularism will change its face and become hotter and more consuming, less content with mere benevolence, and more responsive to the spiritual urge in each of us, the drive for purity, self-transcendence and sanctification.

My response to the call for an “enchanted secularism” is this:

Dear Mr. Brooks,

We’re doing great, thank you.  We don’t need more stinking spirituality: the awe and emotions we feel now before things like science, music, art—and cats!—are just fine. And a good meal with friends and wine, combined with some activities that help others, go a long way toward establishing our sense of community.

Yours,
The secularists of America

Fortunately, although readers literally begged me to take on Brooks at length, others have filled the breach, and so I don’t have to re-till the fields. Have a look at two of the four letters that came in to the Times in response, published under the header, “Secularists: We’re fine without God, thanks.” First, Dan Dennett takes on the philosophy issue:

To the Editor:

Re “Building Better Secularists” (column, Feb. 3):

David Brooks says secular individuals have to build their own moral philosophies, while religious people inherit creeds that have evolved over centuries. Autonomous secular people are called upon to settle on their own individual sacred convictions.

Secularists don’t have to “build” anything; we can choose moral philosophies from what’s already well tested. If religious people think that their “faith” excuses them from evaluating the duties and taboos handed down to them, they are morally obtuse.

Does Mr. Brooks think that religious people are not “called upon to settle on their own individual sacred convictions”? Children may be excused for taking it on authority, but not adults.

Mr. Brooks writes, “Religious people are motivated by their love for God and their fervent desire to please Him.” We secularists have no need for love of any imaginary being, since there is a bounty of real things in the world to love, and to motivate us: peace, justice, freedom, learning, music, art, science, nature, love and health, for instance.

Our advice: Eliminate the middleman, and love the good stuff that we know is real.

DANIEL C. DENNETT
Medford, Mass.
The writer, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, is co-author of“Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind.”

Well said! If Brooks thinks that all religious people get their moral codes from faith, or even have them buttressed by faith, he’s living on Mars.  What about the many Catholics who deliberately violate church dogma on stuff like extramarital sex and homosexuality, seeing that dogma as immoral? And does Brooks know about the not-so-good stuff that comes from religiously-inspired morality? Look at the Republican party, or at ISIS.

A bioethics professor also slaps Brooks down:

To the Editor:

How presumptuous of David Brooks to instruct us “secularists” on how to live the moral life. We have to build our own moral philosophies? Nonsense. I learned mine from my atheistic parents and from teachers throughout my education (not to mention Aristotle, Kant, Mill and the many other moral philosophers I studied).

We have to reflect on spiritual matters? No, I reflect on the injustices in this world, why so many children in the United States go hungry, and why centuries of violence continue to persist in the name of religion.

In place of the religious spiritual life, we atheists may be enraptured by a Beethoven symphony, moved by the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, enchanted by a Rembrandt portrait. We have to build our own Sabbaths? No, thanks; I’ll spend my secular weekends at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, attending a New York Philharmonic concert or rereading “A Theory of Justice,” by John Rawls.

RUTH MACKLIN
Bronx
The writer is a professor of bioethics in the department of epidemiology and population health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Finally have a look at the other two letters on the site.  One, from a Mennonite minister, says this:

God is not some idea that you believe is either true or false. Faith is not so coldly rational.

Once again we see a person of faith claiming to speak for all believers, and getting it wrong in the process. “Not true or false”, really? Tell that to Alvin Plantinga!