Transcript: The Religious Studies Podcast Intro Episode
Episode available on Apple and Spotify
Sections:
Explanation of Michael Clayton Clip and Introduction (00:01:35)
The Data and Contemporary Atheism (00:09:15)
An Awareness of What is Missing (00:12:55)
HENRY: So all these people, they all start having these dreams, okay? You know what a vision quest is, you know for like Navajos and stuff?
ARTHUR: Ya, I think so, like a special dream.
HENRY: Except this is like a whole bunch of people having the same dream. They're all having this dream that they should go to this one place. They don't know why or anything. They just have this feeling that they have to go there.
ARTHUR: They’ve been summoned.
HENRY: That’s the chapter, seriously. That’s what it’s called, Summons to Conquest. That’s the title.
ARTHUR: Yeah, but do they know? Do they know they're all having the same dream?
HENRY: No. That's what's so cool. They all think it's just them. That maybe they're, like, going crazy or something, so they don't wanna admit it.
ARTHUR: Yeah, but they're not crazy, are they?
HENRY: No. It's real. It's really happening.
ARTUHR: Ya, it is happening, isn’t it? Something larger than themselves. And they’re not ready are they to hear it.
HENRY: Ya, but later they will
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------- Explanation of Michael Clayton Clip and Introduction (00:01:35)
Welcome to the Introductory episode of the Religious Studies podcast. The clip at the beginning was from the 2007 movie Michael Clayton. I’m not going to give an analysis or overview of the movie because this is a podcast about books, not movies. Although I do strongly recommend the movie. But I do want to explain why I chose that clip to kick off the podcast. In the movie, the man in the conversation with the boy works for a big law firm defending a multi-national corporation. He eventually has a realization that he is defending a very harmful company and he is trying to ring the alarm bells. So while the clip is kind of tangential to the plot driving the movie, the directors are using the boy and his book Summons to Conquest to add an element of the supernatural. Like a Najavo vision quest, the human is being led to a new truth, something that breaks him out of his current existence and context. But while the individual may feel crazy for seeing this new truth and feeling this new truth, it is ultimately a truth being felt by everyone; it is a social truth.
Later in the plot, a different character, Michael Clayton, sees horses on a hill in a foggy pasture. He stops his car and gets out to go look at them. As he is nearing the horses, the car bomb two assassins had planted in it prior blows up. Michael’s life is saved. After the shock wears off of witnessing the car he was just in moments ago explode, he briefly looks up to the grey, low sky.
Each episode in this series will focus on one book. The books will be philosophical, historical, or theological in nature or approach, with a focus on “the religious” or sacred. Some of the books I have queued up: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. George Kovacs The Question of God in Heidegger’s Phenomenology, The Burned-over District by Whitney Cross, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Act and Being, and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity.
Each book I read will get a 15 minute Book Brief episode. So if you just want something like a book review or summary of the main points, the 15 minute Book Brief’s are for you. If I’m doing my job right, the book brief episodes should tell you what the main thesis is, what the author’s motivation is, and why the thesis is relevant to us today.
And if you want to dive deeper on some of the themes or just want to get a bit more of my perspective/reaction to the book, the Deep Dive episodes will be for you. Of course, the thing about philosophy is it tends to lead to more philosophy; so I’m not going to be providing or guaranteeing exhaustive summaries in the Deep Dive episodes. There are professors for that. I just plan to use these episodes to focus on what I view to be the most interesting/relevant parts of the book or to spend more time developing their arguments if it was complicated enough to not get fully across in the Book Brief episode.
I’ll have text transcripts for the Book Briefs and text outlines for the Deep Dives. So if some people want to read in addition to just listen, or more for notes.
We always read for a reason. We are beings with intention, so just as the craftsman has the idea of a chair in mind before he creates the chair, so the reader has a goal in mind with his reading – he is hoping to uncover some new thing, or put something he thinks he knows in some new light.
So I am reading for this podcast with one goal in mind: I want to figure out where the sacred went. The sacred used to play a defining role at the individual and societal level, and now it largely doesn’t, for the atheist obviously, but my contention is also for the believer. So what happened to it?
While that is my primary objective, I’m going to pay particular attention to some of the following concepts to help us get closer to the primary question: those concepts include: apocalypticism, sacrifice, the role of technology in society, and alienation.
Now, as a quick aside, well, fundamental to the question I’m asking here, because it’s a defense of the question is the fact that a lot of the scholarship today within the study of religion whether that’s within a religious studies department, or a sociology department, or anthropology department, they would say this question isn’t even a good one. We shouldn’t even be asking this question. And the basic idea here is in the 20th century these post-structuralists came along and said look, using these abstract, sweeping concepts, like religion or the sacred is misguided, incorrect, doesn’t yield useful study because they contain all these assumptions built within them and at the end of the day we’re removed from the thing in itself and all we have are these symbols in our collective heads. But here’s what I’ll say. A few thousand years ago, and much less depending on the civilization we were slitting sheep’s throats on an alter to some thing we thought was in the sky. And every city and town in the US has a church at or near the center of that town and it was built there for a reason and it was full most Sundays of every year. And now those churches are a little less full even as they continue to exist at the center of these towns and cities in the SU. And so if you have a question about our ability as a humans to analyze broad concepts like religion or the sacred. That’s fine I’m interested in why we’re no longer slitting sheep’s throats and why the church pews aren’t as full as they used to be. So when I ask the broad question of what happened to the sacred, that’s generally what I’m going to focus on.
------- The Data and Contemporary Atheism (09:15)
Gallup just released a new survey and we continue to see at least 20% of Americans identify as “not religious”, which is up from about 0 in the 50’s. And in England and Wales, No Religion is up to about 35% in 2021 from 25% in 2011 (based on ONS Census data).
So we can debate what it means to be religious or be an atheist, but clearly something is in the water.
I chose the daunting task of reading Charles Taylor’s 780 page A Secular Age to kick off this series but I’m very glad I did because I think it will frame my research up quite well for this podcast. One of the points that Taylor tries to drive home again and again is that it isn’t just that Darwin killed God thing. There is something else going on. This isn’t a simple Science and Reason are supplanting superstition and religion. And this isn’t a religion is the opiate of the masses thing. Darwin and Marx have been dead and gone for awhile now, and this particular trend is recent.
Sure, religion still exists and maybe the sacred exists at moments for a few people. But it has mostly disappeared, even for the religious. At the same time, there are atheists/non-believers who think there is something more (they just don’t know what it is) or wish there was something more. So this story isn’t a clean one.
Another way to put that point is that the contemporary apotheosis of this “darwin killed god” perspective was seen in the militant atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. Hitchens and Harris both held some version of Marx’s “religion is delusion” view, or psychological/sociological view. And Dawkins agreed it was delusion but took it one step further and said it could even be explained in biological terms (because, obviously how else can you explain an irrational belief being so popular?). But those ideas are no longer in the public conversation. We’ve kind of moved through it. Moreover, I believe there is a sense in the secular world that this answer is not satisfying any more - not in a logical argument sense, or a debate sense, but in a vibe sense. And even the believers are probably doubting a little more now than they used to.
So the first Book Brief and Deep Dive episodes will be on Taylor’s A Secular Age and will be available by the time you hear this.
But to end this intro episode, I want to spend a little more time on this noticing I just referenced, by both the believer and non-believer. So I’m going to read a few paragraphs of a Jurgen Habermas paper and add a few thoughts of my own at the end.
--------------- An Awareness of What is Missing (12:55)
Habermas wrote this in the 90s. He wrote it because he wanted to begin to answer the question: how do the religious and the secular speak to one another? Is religion just a conversation stopper. In other words, can two such seemingly opposed worldviews productively engage in communication and understanding?
I’m not going to read the whole thing, but we can use his Intro to help get at what I’m aiming at with this podcast.
So here we see this dichotomy between secular/reason and the religious. And you can see the way that Habermas ends that section. It’s kind of weird that the agnostic chose to have his final rite in a religious place even as he wasn’t religious. But the thing I want to highlight what Habermas also acknowledges. But the religious side chose to allow the rite in their church, this rite: “without an amen”. So both sides recognize what is happening here. Both sides have an awareness of what is missing. The secular realize they cannot form the rite on their own. But the religious realize that is where the people are. They’re no longer with them.
So my first reason for reading, the spiritual has receded, and people do have an awareness of this! The secular but also the religious. The secular for obvious reasons, but for the religious, they see that whatever they believe is not connecting with others the way it used to and potentially not even with themselves with the same force.
And here I will layer in my second reason for reading: in 2022, it is clear that technology has not been the redeemer we thought it would be. As much as it has reformed our jobs, our hobbies, our entertainment, our day to day, our way of interacting with others, literally the structure of our thoughts, it has not delivered us into the promised land. Whatever silicon-based advances we’ve made over the last 30 years, I am not sure we feel any more in touch with what it means to be human, what it means to thrive. And if anything, we likely feel further from that than we did before before.
But to maybe find the silver lining on that very depressing cloud of a thought, I think part of the contemporary, general anxiety that people feel today is due to the beginning of the awareness that this modern techno-scientific world view has holes in it.
And so awareness is the first step toward something else. And so when we get to the Deep Dive of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, I’ll add a little bit more there to that idea. That’s it for the introduction, this has been the religious studies podcast, and we’ll see each other soon.