One thing Greta Christina did in criticizing DJ Grothe was refer back to a previous post she had written, Why “Yes, But” Is the Wrong Response to Misogyny. When I saw this post, I thought it was pretty obviously problematic, for reasons that don’t require any preamble to explain, so I want to talk about that now. Here’s the core of the post:

When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it trivializes misogyny.

When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it conveys the message that whatever men want to talk about is more important than misogyny.

When the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject to something that’s about them, it conveys the message that men are the ones who really matter, and that any harm done to men is always more important than misogyny.

And when the topic of misogyny comes up, and men change the subject, it comes across as excusing misogyny. It doesn’t matter how many times you say, “Yes, of course, misogyny is terrible.” When you follow that with a “Yes, but…”, it comes across as an excuse. In many cases, it is an excuse. And it contributes to a culture that makes excuses for misogyny.

Whether this is right or not depends on what kinds of situations Greta is talking about. Situation 1 is where someone says, “this is an example of horrid misogyny” full stop, and someone else changes the subject. In that situation, the second person definitely seems like they’re trivializing misogyny. But then there’s situation 2, where someone says “this is an example of horrid misogyny, and also X” and someone takes exception to the “and also X.” It’s hard to see how a rule against taking exception to the “and also X”s in situation 2 could be justified.

For one thing, if such a rule ever truly came to be accepted in a particular community, it would invite abuse. People could cite instances of misogyny to push any crazy agenda and then invoke the rule to block criticism. But even without active abuse of the rule, there’s still the possibility of cases where the “and also X” is problematic in important ways, and it doesn’t necessarily trivialize misogyny to discuss that.

Now, Greta’s initial “yes, but” post was made in a context that made what she said sound pretty plausible. A 15 year old girl had made a short post on Reddit’s atheism community (known as r/atheism) with a picture of herself holding up a copy of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World with a message saying, basically, “look what my mom got me for Christmas!” The post got a lot of nice comments, but it also got quite a few nasty, sexual, harassing comments. Obviously that was horrible.

But even then, the “yes buts” weren’t directed only at people saying “that’s horrible.” Rebecca Waston’s post on the incident was titled, “Reddit Makes Me Hate Atheists,” and ended with “Fuck you, r/atheism.” It’s not surprising to see pushback against this, especially from r/atheism users who didn’t contribute to the horribleness.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to say in Rebecca’s defense here (such as “it should be obvious from context that she didn’t mean all atheists,” “r/atheism really is especially bad,” that r/atheism’s moderators need to delete those kind of comments, etc.) The point is that it’s not reasonable to expect people to refrain from pushback as a matter of general principle, and the defensibility of Rebecca’s post doesn’t make “no yes buts” a good general principle.

The dustup with DJ is a pretty good example of why “no yes buts” is a problematic general principle. For starters, Greta doesn’t seem to be sticking to a strict “no yes buts” position. Instead, she says:

My problem is that — when weighing on the one hand, “Greta did something that in my opinion was unfair by quoting someone out of context,” and on the other hand, “Ryan publicly stated that he wanted to ‘slap the bitch’ and ‘kick her readers in the cunt’” — you seem to think that the former is of greater concern than the latter. You have certainly devoted significantly more space to discussing it. In the discussion on Stephanie’s blog, you devoted one sentence to saying that “there is never any defense for real or pretend threats of violence”… and 2,371 words discussing other matters, including 602 words (by a conservative count) justifying Ryan’s behavior, defending it, explaining the context for it, expressed a wish that people have sympathy for it, defending your own reaction to it, and blaming me for having instigated it.

Those priorities are, in my opinion, exactly backwards. If you’d spent one sentence saying, “Yes, I think Greta’s behavior was unfair,” and then spent the rest of your comments on the topic saying that obviously the important issue here was threats of violence, specifically gender-based, sexualized threats of violence against a female writer and her readers… we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Though it’s a little unclear, this makes it sound like her position is that it’s okay to say “yes but” as long as you don’t dedicate too many sentences to the “but.” The underlying idea is that how much attention you devote to different issues reflects how important you think those different issues are. However, while importance is one factor people use to decide how much attention to pay to different things, it’s only one of many. This makes the whole idea of criticizing someone based on how many sentences they devoted to different points a little strange.

For one thing: when you agree, all you have to say is “I agree.” You can elaborate, but it isn’t always necessary, and it would be a waste of time to rehash absolutely everything the person you’re agreeing with said. But when you say “I think you’re being unfair,” it’s natural for people to expect a somewhat detailed explanation of why you think they’re being unfair. In fact, I think if anything DJ could be faulted for not explaining himself enough.

Furthermore, part of DJ “defending his own reaction” here was DJ responding to some not very nice comments about himself, in particular “DJ Grothe has a problem, an ongoing problem with a pattern, and that problem is him” (from Stephanie Zvan). Had DJ followed Greta’s suggestion in the second paragraph quoted above, he wouldn’t have been able to respond, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people to not defend themselves against such remarks. (Maybe Greta didn’t mean to suggest that, and she was just giving one example of one thing DJ could have done instead, but if so, it’s not a very helpful example.)

But maybe Greta didn’t mean to say that “we wouldn’t be having this conversation” if only DJ had distributed his sentences differently. She certainly does make other criticisms of DJ, and I’ll talk about them in later posts.

Part of the problem with the DJ/Greta dustup is that it was spawned by something that happened on Greta’s Facebook page. Facebook does not make it easy to permalink to old threads, so basically nobody has the context for this unless you’re both (1) friends with Greta on Facebook (2) patient enough to scroll through all the stuff on her page to find something that happened more than a month ago. So I’ve decided to go ahead and make screen caps of the thing. Not whole threads, but I’ve tried to get everything relevant and then some (especially in the case of the second thread).

You can discuss this now or ignore it; I’ll be giving my own commentary later.

However, while there’s a whole lot I have to say about this, I don’t want this to consume my life for any length of time, even on the scale of days. So I’m going to say what I have to say a little bit at a time, starting with just quoting the stuff DJ said that I think is especially important:

I do believe that much atheist and skeptic blogging engages in far too much in-group/out-group categorizing, us vs. them thinking. If the consequence of sharing these opinions means that you or others do not want to attend TAM under my leadership, I’d be baffled. People of good will should be able to disagree about things without such a reaction.

[snip]

I have to say I find this whole discussion of how horrible it is to some that I commented in disagreement on blog posts or liked FB statuses (of CFI Michigan regarding their defense of a speaker on their program, etc.) to be unsettling. I debate ideas professionally, and often they concern central beliefs that are controversial. Unfortunately, nothing in this blog post approaches debating an idea, nor is there much actual criticism of ideas. Instead, there is deceptive and dishonest tarring-and-feathering. I reserve the right to express my opinions, even if I am the ceo and president of a nonprofit foundation, and I hope that others can disagree with them in emotionally and intellectually mature ways. You may think I’m wrong in my view that Christina behaved unfairly. But that is a far cry from saying that I am a misogynist or that women should boycott TAM or that “D.J. Grothe has a problem and that problem is him.” Such overwrought rhetoric isn’t how the good guys debate issues honestly.

[snip]

I think as skeptics, it behooves us to be a bit more generous with others in disagreement, to be slower to vilify, and to engage in less scorched-earthing. I know it may be good for blog hits, but it is bad for skepticism and in my view, is antithetical to our values.

Having quoted this, a whole bunch of caveats. First, there is one thing I’ve just quoted that I don’t agree with. I think DJ correctly identifies a problem with in-group/out-group categorizing, us vs. them thinking, and vilification. However, I don’t think this is the result of people trying to generate “blog hits.” The problems he identifies also exist on internet forums where no one is worrying about generating traffic.

Second, I haven’t given any context for things I’ve just quoted, and I want to be up-front about that. My goal is not to have people read those quotes and think Greta must be wrong because what DJ said was so obviously reasonable. If you want to get into this fiasco without waiting for my other posts, go have a look at the two discussion threads I’ve linked to, both the criticisms that have been made of DJ and his responses.

Third, part of the reason I care about this is because Greta is a strong candidate for my favorite writer on the planet. Seriously, she’s the only person where I’ll automatically read just about anything she writes, just based on the byline. In future posts I’ll be talking about things Greta has said that are, in my opinion, extremely foolish, but I’m suppressing the tiny, childish part of me that wants to react to this by saying, “nooo now I can’t like Greta any more.” The current draft of the book I’m working on quotes and recommends some extremely awesome things she’s written, and it’s not like I’ll be cutting any of that out.

Fourth, I recognize that so far I’m just saying what I think in very vague terms, and not explaining exactly what I think or why. I’m posting anyway because I have too much to say for one blog post, even a very long blog post, and I have to start somewhere. But if you want to flame me over this, I won’t think less of you, because hey, you don’t yet know why I’m writing this crap.

Systems often get locked into standards. For example, computer systems get locked into programming language and operating system standards. When people notice that existing standards have unsatisfactory features, they often try to create and promote alternate standards. Such attempts usually fail, however, due to the large costs of coordinating to switch to new standards, including the loss of complementary investments into old standards. In order to induce a switch, expected gains from a new better standard have be large enough to compensate for switching costs, and users need to coordinate their actions in order to switch.

And religion is a standard we’ve been locked into, one we won’t be able to switch from for a very long time:

It seems to me that religion will handily win this contest for a long time to come. The social support that can be mustered by a few intellectuals hoping for more uniform standards of interpretation and evaluation across diverse topics seems quite weak compared to strong interests others have in the usual complex religious processes. Even if many broad-thinking intellectuals decide to pick a noisy fight over this, most of society will just shrug their shoulders and ignore it. Surely this fact is known to most atheists, so this can’t really be about inducing a social change to a new less objectionable religion substitute. So it is probably mostly about other things, such as status contests within the smaller world of intellectuals.

This analysis strikes me as incredibly out-of-touch with what’s going on in America right now. Importantly, Robin is a middle-aged academic, so it’s easy to imagine this is just a matter of “a few intellectuals” engaging in “status contests within the smaller world of intellectuals.” But my experience is that, at least among the younger generation, there’s no shortage of non-academics who identify as atheist, agnostic, or generically non-religious.

The statistics bear this out. A recent Pew survey found that, “young adults [in the US] ages 18-29 are much more likely than those age 70 and older to say that they are not affiliated with any particular religion (25% vs. 8%).” Even worse news for U.S. Christianity is the Barna study that found, “91 percent of young non-Christians and 80 percent of young churchgoers say present-day Christianity is ‘anti-homosexual.’” Given increasingly tolerant attitudes towards gays in the US, that’s an epic PR disaster for Christianity.

Back to Robin’s analysis: “switching costs” isn’t a bad way to understand (part of) why religion persists. If your entire life revolves around Evangelicalism, Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, Hasidic Judaism, what have you, becoming an atheist will be a painful experience for you. It could mean reorganizing your entire life, or living with a secret.

Thing is, if none of your friends or family members are especially religious (even if some of them believe in God), becoming an atheist will be no big deal. In fact, I’d guess that becoming an atheist in the modern US is mostly easier than coming out as gay. And just as people from conservative areas do often come out as gay, people embedded in conservative religious communities do sometimes become atheists, in spite of the costs.

This isn’t an original prediction, but I expect that in 50 years, the US religious landscape will look a lot like Europe and Australia do now. This is not to say we’ll see the end of weird, quasi-religious beliefs–Europe and Australia have their share of pseudoscience. But I expect to live to see traditional religion all but die out in the United States.

This way of framing things, if you’ll excuse the term, is unfavorable to the accommodationists insofar as Chris Mooney and Josh Rosenau wouldn’t want to admit to lacking principles or having narrow priorities. However, it’s very favorable to them in that it implicitly concedes their central claim–that if all you care about is teaching evolution, trying to accommodate religious believers is the smart tactic.

I’m convinced, though, that critics of accomodationists shouldn’t concede this. This is because of the obvious and too-rarely-stated risks in the accomodationist strategy. In particular, accomodationism risks letting science be held hostage to religious dogma.

Remember why the debate over accomodationism is happening. Mostly, its happening because huge numbers of people in the U.S. think that the Bible is inerrant, and the plain meaning of the text is that life on Earth was made by God in a few days, rather than evolving over millions of years.

Some believers buy into non-literal interpretations of that part of the Bible, but lots don’t, and they reject evolution because of it. Then they cause headaches for everyone else when they attack the teaching of evolution in schools.

Yes, some believers oppose evolution because they’re trying to salvage the design argument, and some feel uncomfortable with evolution even though they hesitate to say it’s incompatible with the Bible. Biblical inerrancy, though, is the original source of the evolution-creationism conflict.

This is what the accomodationism debate is about. It’s a debate about what to do about that problem, the problem of science being attacked by people who insist the authority of the Bible trumps everything.

Now suppose you aren’t real sure about Biblical interpretation, have defending evolution as your top priority, and don’t mind saying things you don’t believe if it will help your policy goals. Should you be an accomodationist? That is, should you avoid criticizing people’s religous beliefs, and tell them that in fact science is compatible with their religious beliefs–in this case, that evolution is compatible with the Bible?

Once the real question has been put clearly, I think it’s obvious that the accomodationist strategy could go badly wrong in at least two ways:

1. You might just fail to convince people that evolution really is compatible with the Bible, so that those who started out rejecting evolution because it conflicts with the Bible will continue doing so.
2. You might convince them on the one point of Biblical interpretation, but be unable to win the Bible interpretation argument on the next science vs. religion issue, or on moral issues like gay rights.

In both bad outcomes, the problem is that you got into an argument Biblical interpretation while not challenging the assumption that Biblical interpretation should matter. Yet the idea that it might be right to settle scientific or moral issues by arguing over Biblical interpretation is not only wrong, it’s one that has obvious potential to cause huge problems on a broad range of issues.

This makes it an idea that would be insane not to challenge, unless the prospects for challenging this idea were utterly hopeless. And they’re not hopeless. Biblical inerrancy is a doctrine that even many hard-core Evangelicals now shy away from defending in public. They look for small scraps of scientific evidence for their beliefs, rather than say (openly) that they will side with the Bible come what may

I’m also convinced that the number of people who accept Biblical inerrancy deep down is far smaller than the number who claim to. Few Evangelicals really think, for example, that the question of whether we should round up and execute gay men should be decided through careful Biblical interpretation.

Given those facts, people who care about science education should not be afraid to point out places where science contradicts the Bible. If you can convince someone that the Bible wrong is about just one thing, you’ve opened their mind to thinking the it could be wrong about a lot of other things.

To refuse to do that is to fight with one hand behind your back. It’s to let not just science, but also ethics, be held hostage to religious dogma.

And we must let nothing be held hostage to religious dogma.

Understanding Christian thinking about sin is important for understanding why much of Christianity is so messed up. The problem isn’t what Christians believe, but what they don’t believe–and the effects of Christians pretending to believe what they don’t.

Some background: Over the past couple of months, I’ve been thinking a fair amount about Evangelical attitudes towards sex, and homosexuality in particular. The puzzle is this: the Bible says nasty things about homosexuality, plenty of Christians in the U.S. today spend their time saying nasty things about homosexuality, and yet some Evangelicals try to insist they’re tolerant and loving people without jettisoning the basic anti-gay views common among conservative Christians.

Sometimes, this insisting sounds sincere. Sometimes, it doesn’t. Earlier this month, Hemant spotted Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute trying to distance herself and her fellow Christians from anti-gay bullying. He then dug up a number of nasty things Higgins had said about gays, including this gem:

No sane person would ever argue that homosexuals have contributed nothing to society. That’s as absurd as claiming that adulterers, porn users, or gossips have contributed nothing to society… Those who experience, for example, selfish, vain, greedy, gluttonous, deceitful, promiscuous, incestuous, sadistic, pederastic, gossipy, philandering, or polyamorous impulses and engage in behaviors impelled by such impulses have also contributed to society.

This is nasty. Higgins is comparing gays to pedophiles. Nevertheless, the basic thought isn’t that different from the logic of many allegedly gay friendly Evangelicals. They tell themselves they can be accepting of gays by saying “homosexuality is a sin like any other,” and avoid dwelling on the fact that the “other sins” category includes things like child rape and genocide.

Lumping lots of different “sins” into one category is not a recent development in the Christian tradition. Here’s the Sermon on the Mount:

“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.

[snip]

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

In other words, think bad thoughts and your as bad as a murder and an adulterer. This suggests that, in general, all sins are created equal. This is what I think no Christian really believes.

I have no doubt that countless Christians have read that passage and told themselves they believed it. Liberals like it because it helps back up the “judge lest ye be judged” idea. Conservatives like it because it supports the belief that we are all miserable sinners. Indeed, it’s a staple of many Evangelists’ sales pitches: “Have you ever thought a bad thought? OK then, you deserve Hell as much as Hitler and need Jesus(tm) to save you from it.”

In spite of the number of Christians who claim to love this idea, it’s not hard to find signs they don’t really believe it. A pastor who admits to having an affair risks his job, but who would want to fire a pastor for pulling a Jimmy Carter and admitting to having lust in his heart? Similarly, while the Bible tells Christians to repent and sin no more, they quickly learn that they’re never going to stop doing everything the Bible calls “sin,” which can be real theological headache. A common solution seems to be to sort sins into big ones and small ones, and mainly worry about not doing the big ones: “yeah I’m a sinner whatever at least I’m not having sex like those damn liberals.”

To put a finer point on it: no one believes that all “sins” are horrific crimes the way raping children is a horrific crime. If you try to believe that, one of two things will happen. You might start failing to take child rape seriously. Or, you’ll fall into bizarre inconsistencies about what you denounce: insisting you’re not a homophobe one minute and hinting that gays are conspiring to destroy civilization the next.

Critics of Christianity should talk about this more often. I’ve seen non-Christians attack Christians for believing that Anne Frank is burning in hell for being Jewish. I’ve seen Christian apologists, say, roughly, “It’s a misrepresentation of Christianity to say Christians believe God damned Anne Frank for being Jewish. What we believe is that God damned her for failing Ray Comfort’s good person test.” (The Christian might add, by way of further explanation, that God forgives Christians and only Christians for failing the Comfort’s test.) I’ve never seen an atheist go after a Christian for saying that, even though those two claims are roughly equal in moral insanity.

Why don’t critics talk about this? Maybe because they see the connection with the “judge not lest ye be judged” line, and that line sounds really nice to them. If so, it’s not just Christians who need to think about the question of whether they really think all the things they think they do.

This is dishonest because most people who don’t write dictionary entries for a living can’t define most of the words they use every day. And yes, some of those words they use in confusing ways, but most of them they communicate perfectly fine with. Even professional dictionary makers have this problem to a degree: give a dictionary definition to any competent philosopher and they’ll be able to pick holes in it.

For example, if I had to suggest a definition for the word “bigot,” I’d propose something like “someone with an irrational hostility to another group of people,” but I’m sure if I suggested this definition in a room full of philosophers they could poke holes in it. But everyone still understands perfectly well what I mean when I say that Mel Gibson is a bigot.

I wasn’t going to write about this, as I no longer find pointing out that some religious person said something stupid all that exciting. But then I read a story at the American Atheists blog about how one parent reacted to finding out her daughter was a lesbian:

When Sarah’s mother saw Rachael in the store she ran up to her, face contorted and red with anger, pointer finger waving in Rachael’s face, and began chastising Rachael for doing this to Sarah. Sarah’s mother accused Rachael of causing her “lesbian curiosity” and for “polluting Sarah’s mind with lesbianism.” Sarah’s mother then told Rachael, “I want to rip your face off.” According to the witnesses, Sarah’s father had to pull Sarah’s mother screaming from Hot Topic.

(Read the rest–there’s more where that bit of crazy came from.)

Reading this was a jolt for me. As I’ve mentioned before, I rarely encounter anyone of my generation who can hold anti-gay views in a more than half-hearted manner. That story was a reminder that in America, anti-gay bigotry is still alive and well enough to make a fair number of young people’s lives miserable (though if you’re one of those young people, it gets better.)

It’s also a reminder that, whatever the difficulties in giving necessary and sufficient conditions for bigotry are, there is still such a thing as an obvious case of anti-gay bigotry. For one thing, if you would begin putting all your effort into making one of your own children miserable upon finding out that he or she was gay, you are an anti-gay bigot. Really, obvious cases of anti-gay bigotry aren’t that hard to come by.

For example if you think homosexuality is such an abomination that it is sometimes right to kill people just for having gay sex, you’re an anti-gay bigot.

Or, if you’re under the delusion that homosexuality is a punishment visited by your god on those who reject Him, you are an anti-gay bigot.

Now, supposing these to be instances of anti-gay bigotry has what for many people will be an awkward implication: sincere, informed believers in Biblical inerrancy will be anti-gay bigots. This is because the two points just mentioned can be found in the Bible. That, though, seems the right conclusion to draw. No one would doubt the bigotry of saying analogous things about Jews or African-Americans. The main reason non-fundamentalists have for doubting those things are bigoted is that they have the funny idea that the contents of major religious texts, and utterances of major religious leaders, are never more than a little bad.

I have to qualify this by repeating what I’ve already said, that many people’s anti-gay views are only half-hearted. Under some circumstances they are quite comfortable explaining that they believe what the Bible teachers, and just think homosexuality is a sin like any other. However, if you press them on whether they think certain texts say what they appear to, they can only mumble a response. These people don’t deserve to be called bigots. That, though, won’t stop me from laughing at their awkward attempts to triangulate between bigotry and decency.

Some Christians who lack Barna’s “Biblical worldview” have thought long and hard about all of the more controversial Christian doctrines, and only then made up their minds about which ones they can accept and which ones they have to modify. But I suspect most of them aren’t like that. Rather, they hear some things and say they believe them because they’re supposed to, never hear about other things, and hear about some things but reject them because they understand that the American mainstream thinks them icky. In other words, their thinking about the religious beliefs that they claim to be serious about tends to be pretty fuzzy.

These facts worry those conservatives who’ve paid attention to them. Last month, for example, one got CNN.com to publish an article warning parents that their teens may be “fake Christians,” adherents of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” a term invented several years previous to describe the wishy-washiness (from the conservative point of view). Roughly, the complaint is that many self-described Christians think that all God really wants is for us to be happy nice people.

Most atheists will rejoice at these findings. If all religious believers in the U.S. dropped Biblical inerrancy, creationism, the belief that non-believers are damned, and screwy ideas about sex, PZ Myers might be able to call it a day. However, while Moralistic Therapeutic Deism may not not be as morally pernicious as many of the things Evangelicals believe, the worried conservatives who coined the term may be onto something.

Consider the Bruce Almighty, the Jim Carrey movie that came out in 2003. Early in the movie, we see Carrey’s character (Bruce) bickering with his girlfriend over whether he’ll donate blood. Then he gets fired from his job as a news anchorman, and curses God. God (played by Morgan Freeman) appears to him and announces he’s giving Bruce all his power, with obvious ha-ha-you-won’t-be-able-to-do-better implications. Bruce uses this power to make his girlfriend’s boobs bigger, get re-hired as an anchorman, and land headline-grabbing stories. Then he decides he needs to be altruistic, so he answers everyone’s prayers. This results in a lottery jackpot having to be split so many different ways that each winner only gets a few dollars. There’s a break up, a near-death experience, a revelation that Bruce’s girlfriend just wants him to be a better person, and finally, a momentous decision by Bruce to help promote a blood drive.

On a moment’s reflection, it’s obvious that Bruce Almighty has a profoundly distorted set of values. It’s a world where a selfishness means wanting fame and a big-breasted girlfriend, where lacking these things is the worst misfortune that ever happens to anyone, and where being a good person means being the kind of guy that women who look like Jennifer Aniston would agree isn’t an asshole. It never occurs to Bruce to create for himself a tropical island filled with naked women, nor does he ever think “I’ll start off my good deeds with the cancer patients.” In other words, Bruce Almighty is a movie with a weirdly shrunken moral imagination.

Appallingly, while Bruce Almighty may not have been hailed as a master piece, some people still appear to have actually liked it. If memory serves, it was even used by my parents’ church as part of a “God in the movies” series. This suggests that many people see nothing wrong with a fairly obnoxious form of the “God just wants us to be happy nice people” view.

In a way this isn’t surprising. That people have obnoxious notions of what constitutes a nice person is old news, and the true cynic might claim to have expected that many people would never think to go beyond certain stereotyped behavior of the 21st-century U.S. middle class. The real puzzle is why people feel the need to bring God into it.

Perhaps due to reading too much Robin Hanson, my mind immediately leaps to a signaling explanation. Perhaps declaring a nebulous belief in God has been arbitrarily settled upon by some people as a way of signaling “I may be mainly interested in advancing my career, by I make token concessions to niceness like helping with blood drives!”

But explanations that don’t rely on the ideas of obscure economists aren’t hard to find. If you have a shrunken moral imagination to start with, I suppose it isn’t hard to worry that, unless people are told that God (played by Morgan Freeman) is on the side of niceness, people might fail to make important token concessions to that principle. I suspect that was the main thing going through the writers’ head when they wrote the script.

Also, invoking God is a good way to insulate yourself from mockery. It’s all too easy to mock ambiguously Buddhist hipsters for their ideas of what makes a good person. Once a person’s ideas of niceness are backed up by God, though, mockery is dangerous, because only vehement people would mock another person’s religious beliefs. Looking at it another way, we may frown on women who bitch to their friends about what an asshole their boyfriend is, but we are kinder to a woman that looks like Jennifer Aniston who kneels by her bed, praying to God for her boyfriend to be less of an asshole.

None of these attitudes are as pernicious are as pernicious as, say, religiously rationalized homophobia. But when we encounter the sort of attitudes expressed in Bruce Almighty, or other silly attitudes found among the fuzzier religious believers (like the narcissistic tendency to attribute every bit of good luck to God), we should still be willing to take the time to point and laugh.

Homosexuality is next on the list. More and more educated Evangelicals seem to feel they must find a compromise between the inherited party line and their liberal social conscience. This is especially true with seminarians and young ministers. And such theological accommodations are not hard to find. It doesn’t take as much text-twisting as slave-abolition or feminism, that’s for sure.

[snip]

Recent surveys indicate that more and more Evangelicals are questioning or rejecting the doctrine of an eternal hell as well as the idea that non-Christians will not be saved in the afterlife. You can see where this is headed: they are making their way toward being one more tolerant, live-and-let-live mainstream denomination.

[snip]

But the thing that will sooner or later bring the Evangelical Wailing Wall down is sex. More and more, Middle School, High School, and College Evangelicals admit to having sex in the same casual way as their “unsaved” contemporaries. That is, pre-marital, recreational sex…

From the standpoint of sect-maintenance, this shift is fatal… if this fundamental plank of the Evangelical platform rots and snaps, you can find little of similar magnitude to point to as the signal difference between the saved and the unsaved.

I think Price is basically right about hell and the salvation of non-Christians. At Notre Dame, at least, universalism (the doctrine that everyone will be saved) is endorsed by at least a couple Evangelical-identified grad students in the philosophy department. It’s a matter of series discussion (rather than dismissal as an obvious heresy) at the Center for Philosophy of Religion pub nights. And there are people at Notre Dame who try to make room for the salvation of non-believers, without going as far as universalism.

I can’t say I’ve seen so strong a shift on sexual matters, however. What Price is missing about casual sex is that admitting to having it doesn’t entail any attitude change. In high school, I knew a number of Evangelical girls who were having their share of casual sex, but they were sure to feel guilty about it afterward. Then there are the tales of Campus Crusade members wearing shirts saying “I’m not doing it” when they were. The Evangelical community has worked out a not-obviously-unstable approach to sex that’s one part outright hypocrisy and one part resignation to human sinfulness.

This approach may not “work,” but to its practitioners that’s not the point. Michelle Goldberg’s book Kingdom Coming had a great quote on this from “abstinence educator” Pam Stenzel:

AIDS is not the enemy. HPV and a hysterectomy at twenty is not the enemy. An unplanned pregnancy is not the enemy. My child believing that they can shake their fists in the face of a holy God and sin without consequence, and my child spending eternity separated from God, is the enemy. I will not teach my child that they can sin in safety.

Few would put it in such extreme terms, but many Evangelicals have decided that they can accept teen pregnancy, STDs, and high divorce rates, as long as people don’t go around saying that premarital sex is okay. (See also: Bristol Palin’s career as an abstinence spokeswoman.)

With homosexuality, the situation is more complicated. I’ve never met anyone of my generation who was enthusiastic about being anti-gay (except the kids from the Bible college who used to come to Madison once a week to hand out tracts). Still, among the young Evangelicals I’ve met, the text twisting Price alludes to hasn’t caught on. And I don’t buy Price’s claim that this issue is easier than feminism: the Bible may say that women aren’t to speak in Church, but there is obviously no Biblical prooftext requiring them to be nurses rather than doctors, grade school teachers rather than professors, or secretaries rather than MBAs.

The best most Evangelicals can come up with on homosexuality is to say it’s one sin among many. If they’re well-informed and think things through enough, they’ll shun conversion therapy and propose that God wants gays to be celibate. The trouble with this solution is that while most Evangelical talk about sin amounts to “repent and try to sin a bit less in the future,” here Evangelicals are asking certain people to give up on expressing a core part of who they are. It’s no easy sell. No matter how much Evangelicals try to love the sinner, I predict gays will soon become severely under-represented in Evangelical churches–or at the very least, this will happen once everyone figures out being a closet case is bad. Nevertheless, many Evangelicals seem comfortable with the “one sin among many” approach for the time being.

So what’s Evangelicalism’s long-term forecast? In the short term, it looks like it can adapt to the abolition of a clear distinction between the saved and the damned. The fate of Evangelicalism will likely be all about sex. I think it can resist giving in to temptation to open up to straight fornication. But the question of whether to loosen up to gay sex may be the problem it can’t solve. And perhaps once Evangelicals don’t think more secular folks are going to hell, they won’t mind imitating their sexual habits.

On the other hand, perhaps in two hundred years even the biggest cities in the bluest states will have been overrun by the highly-fertile spawn of Evangelical shotgun weddings.

In spite of thinking this, I’ve recently started to wonder about Harris’ dismissal of religious moderates on the Muslim side, partly because of the controversy over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” organized by alleged moderate imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and also because of encountering criticisms of another alleged moderate Muslaim, Tariq Ramadan.

My doubts here stem from thinking about what makes a “moderate Muslim”–and what makes a “moderate Christian.” In the present-day US, the varieties of Christianity that manage to get any attention at all range from stereotypical fundamentalism (young earth creationist, sexually repressive, and convinced everyone else is going to hell) to uber-liberal Christianity (often atheism in all but name, as in the case of John Shelby Spong). The moderate label doesn’t get used much, though I suppose you could apply it to the sorts of religious academics who try to save as many beliefs of their conservative brethren as possible, while admitting the Bible may not be quite inerrant.

But put things in the context of Christianity’s 2000-year history, and it begins to look like even most of the “fundamentalists” deserve the name “moderates.” Most “conservative” Calvinists are moderate relative to the historical Calvin, insofar as they don’t support burning Unitarians at the stake. True, there are exceptions in the U.S., and the situation in the U.S. is not the global situation even today (see: killing gays in Uganda). But the fact that these strains of Chrsitianity exist today does not make them live options for most believers in the US.

In this environment, it is hard to see that the “moderate” strains of Christianity do much good. What many US Christians need isn’t someone to stop them from becoming Christian Reconstructionists. They just need someone to point out to them that they hardly believe any of the things they think they’re supposed to believe. Someone to tell them not to fear giving up their Christian identity.

With Islam, though, from what I’ve seen “moderate” Muslims tend to correspond to the US’s “conservative” Christians, or at best the more-nearly-liberal Evangelicals. Even Irshad Manji, in her book The Trouble With Islam Today, wasn’t quite willing to give up on Koranic inerrancy. This makes her closer to the Evangelicals who try to show the Bible never condemns homosexuality than to the uber-liberals of US Christianity.

When we talk about Muslim “extremists,” we’re talking about something whose Christian analog ceased to be a force in Europe and North America during the Enlightenment. But Muslim extremism remains a force in Islam’s traditional strongholds. There have been plenty of people in the Muslim world who’ve thought the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was just, or who’ve idolized Osama bin Laden. Muslims in the US tend to be of the “moderate” sort described above, but I understand that the “extremist” variety of Islam is having some success in Europe. (This is probably a symptom of Europe’s overall problems assimilating immigrants.) And importantly, US Muslims are still likely to be in contact with parts of the Muslim world where extremism is a force, creating an avenue for the promotion of Muslim extremism here.

In this context, it doesn’t seem crazy to think that moderate Muslims leaders are doing important work giving US Muslims an alternative to the extremists, and generally helping them assimilate into US society. This could be true even if there’s much to dislike about the so-called moderates. There’s much I dislike about Rick Warren, but I recognize that he’s preferable to Torquemada. Similarly it could be true that Rauf is, in Ilya Somin’s summary the charge against him:

seems to praise much of the ideology of Iran’s repressive theocratic regime, refuses to admit that Hamas is a terrorist group… claims that the US was ‘an accessory’ to the 9/11 attacks, and sometimes draws a kind of moral equivalency between US foreign policy and Al Qaeda

and at the same time true that he’s no bin Laden. The difference is just that we don’t need Rick Warren in order to convince people that the Inquisition was a bad idea, but it might help to have Rauf to convince people Al Qaeda is a bad idea.

Sometimes, a “moderate” Muslim leader will be suggested as a candidate for “Islam’s Martin Luther,” an unfortunate comparison given Luther’s ideas on what we should do to Jews. A more enlightening comparison might be to John Locke. Locke’s “Letter on Toleration” leaves much to be desired. It never made clear whether he thought anyone but Protestants deserved religious freedom, and appeared to endorse the idea that believing the wrong things would damn you–the very dogma which had provided the original need to suppress heresy at all costs. At the same time, the value of Locke’s letter is undeniable.

On the other hand, recognizing that the relatively moderate may do some good is no reason to refrain from criticizing them. The fact that Locke advanced the cause of liberty does not mean that Spinoza and Thomas Paine hurt it by attacking many of the traditional dogmas Locke held dear. So, in spite of what I’ve just said, we probably shouldn’t be afraid to criticize “moderate” Muslims.