United States probably has more funda-mentalist Christians than any other nation on earth, and their ranks have swelled during recent years. If we used Duncan's procedure for assigning causes, we should probably conclude that bible-believing

The Politics at God's Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization, by Michael Harrington (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983), 308 pp., cloth, $16.95.

Edward Walter

The theme of The Politics at God's Funeral is that atheism was made ten-

able about four centuries ago and belief in God has been declining ever since, creating a crisis from which the West has yet to emerge. The author, Michael Harrington, contends that a de facto atheism exists in the West today because religious belief has lost its influence in social and political affairs. During the Middle Ages, religion allegedly established common values that harmonized human behavior, legitimized political power, and guaranteed personal identity. Today, governments have lost the confidence of their peoples, economic growth is unplanned and irresponsible, and social and economic inequities persist. Peo-ple have reacted by supporting totalitarian regimes and adopting relativistic moral values.

God as a social reality has been dying in the West, according to Harrington, since Enlightenment thinkers demonstrated that the new science did not require God's exis-tence to account for natural processes. The intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment adopted Stoic philosophy as an answer to the loss of a personal God. Publicly, they promoted traditional religion so that the masses would remain submissive and pas-sive. According to Harrington, the masses were too intelligent to be duped and, as a consequence, rejected the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

Rousseau, who influenced the French Revolution, tried to overcome the wrench created by the new science by claiming that authentic religious belief was an inner

Edward Walter is professor of philosophy and chairman of the department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

Christians are responsible for our social and educational ills.

I recommend Homer Duncan's book to logicians and other scholars interested in studying fallacies, errors, and misinterpreta- tions—for this it is invaluable. •

reverence for God. This maneuver removed God from the public sphere so that his presence could no longer fuel social action. By the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class atheism was quite prevalent, and religious practices declined in all Western nations. Earlier, Protestant Christianity had elevated the notion of personal salvation based on inner conviction.

These divergent sources agreed that people could separate their moral lives from their social lives. Capitalism allegedly developed because it, too, bifurcated the world. Liberal democracy reinforced this unnatural situation by instituting a legal system in which people were equal but tolerating a socioeconomic system where people were unequal. Thus, society is torn apart because people are motivated to act hedonistically and selfishly. As Marx under-stood, Harrington says, capitalism is a system of disguised rule that is structurally agnostic.

The Marxist-Stalinist state eventually emerged as another attempt to repair the damage caused by the rending of the medi-eval social order. As Nietzsche recognized, the socialist state could rule by an appeal to the lowest common denominator. This occurred in many places because "scientific socialism," which was really developed by Engels after Marx died, became the philo-sophy of many revolutionaries. In it, anti-religious sentiment combined with a ration-alistic political structure to suppress dis-sidents. Totalitarianism necessarily emerged. Marx is exonerated by Harrington for this state of affairs.

Theologians from Friedrich Schleier-macher to Dietrich Bonhoeffer have attempted to rescue Christianity from the implied atheism of modern science in three ways, according to Harrington. First, God's existence and Christ's divinity have been established by an irrational leap of faith. Second, the concept of God has been reduced to a vague "ground of being" or to a feeling of awe when one confronts the universe. Third, modernism and science have been abjured. This last approach was

adopted by the Roman Catholic church from 1864 to 1958 and by American Protes-tant fundamentalists. Harrington is unsym-pathetic to these maneuvers on the ground that they are either irrational or reactionary. The current revival of religious funda-mentalism in the United States is said to be insignificant because studies show that Americans are not religious in practice.

Harrington hopes that ultimately a communitarianism will develop that will honor the functional differentation of modern society while providing common values that will motivate people to act morally. Collectivism, as was found in feudal society and is found in Stalinist states, is rejected because it is repressive. Democratic socialism ought to be the political system of the future because it blends the rational structure of liberalism with the organic society favored by Marx. In such a society, the economic sphere would become public and responsive to the will of the majority. The people, Harrington claims, could estab-lish new transcendental values that will do away with capitalistic hedonism. This kind of society could be achieved by the joint action of atheistic and religious humanists.

Harrington's thesis is developed by a review of the thought of significant thinkers of the last four hundred years. References to Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and others appear throughout this book. Although Harrington's treatment of these thinkers is sweeping and controversial, it is also fas-cinating and insightful. Harrington knows what is important and presents it in an exciting way. The reader is filled with the desire to reread these masters because of their intrinsic worth and to check Harring-ton's interpretations. This is a tribute to his perspicacity. A "democratic Marxist," he comes across as erudite, nondoctrinaire, and vital. Nevertheless, when one analyzes and interprets four hundred years of history, there is room for differences of emphasis and opinion.

Harrington's Marxism, rather than pro-viding a perspective from which to view social history, prejudices his opinion. A per-spective in which all assumptions are made explicit is impossible, as C.S. Peirce pointed out some time ago. But one ought to try to minimize the effect of this unhappy condi-tion as much as possible. Harrington does not try sufficiently hard. His Marxism leads him to go beyond reason to rescue Marx's reputation and to blame liberal democracy and capitalism for most of the problems of the contemporary West.

Marx cannot be exonerated for the totalitarianism of socialist states. Marx worked closely with Engels for many years.

Harrington's Marx and God

Summer 1984 59

Engels is perhaps a better source of Marx's thought than the contemporary disciples of Marxism. Their joint writings contain innumerable references to the "inevitability" of historical processes, religious institutions as epiphenomena, ideas as "reflexes" of material conditions, and the need for a dic-tatorship of the proletariat. It is in these statements that the seeds of totalitarianism are found.

Harrington is too kind to Marx in that he uncritically accepts Marx's critique of liberal democracy, which is dismissed as an agnostic structure permitting a disguised rule by the capitalistic class. Possibly, Harring-ton's views of liberal democracy would have been modified if he had reviewed more care-fully the political history of England and America, where liberal democracy was nourished, and if he studied the thinkers who devised it: Locke, Hume, Smith, Ben-tham, Mill, Jefferson, Dewey, and Keynes do not appear, or appear only fleetingly, in the pages of The Politics at God's Funeral.

Although Harrington admits to being an atheistic humanist, he is, in my judgment, too easy on religious beliefs. An epistemo-logical relativism, probably learned by read-ing Hegel, Marx, and sociological theorists, leads him to claim that atheism is a conse-quence of social developments attending the scientific revolution rather than that atheism was shown to be probably true. In his book, the attempts by theologians to construct elaborate explanations for believing without evidence or to redefine God as a feeling of awe are painfully strained and provincial. Why should anyone believe that God exists or that Christ was divine because he has uncritically read the New Testament? Would a Christian theologian suggest that one should read the Old Testament, the Koran, or any other religious writing in that way? And is not the Christian who retains Christianity without believing in God and Christ's divinity merely treating his religion as a featherbed on which to fall? Finally, as Freud observed, is not the desire to survive

death the reason that people construct elaborate theories assuring themselves of an afterlife?

Harringtoñ s historical diagnosis of the present crisis in Western civilization, despite these problems, is perceptive. Many of his remedies, however, mentioned only in the last two chapters, are questionable. He wants to heal the human spirit, establish social justice, and harmonize behavior. Very few people do not have similar goals. Unfor-tunately, Harrington only identifies the end; he does not disclose the means to achieve it. His conviction that democratic socialism can best resolve the so-called spiritual impasse in modern society remains, in the last analy-sis, as an article of faith, a faith that has been seriously shaken a century after Marx's death in the light of what has happened since. For many democratic humanists, not only is the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jesus, and Muhammad dead, but the second com-ing of God, under the mantle of Marxism, has also failed. •

Sex and the Bible, by Gerald A. Larue (Buf-falo: Prometheus Books, 1983), 212 pp. cloth, $17.95; paper $9.95.

Robert T. Hall

Sex and the Bible by Gerald A. Larue is a commentary on or an interpretation

of the Bible. It avowedly contains no new historical research; the author readily admits that "little of the material presented here will be new to clergy trained in accredited universities and seminaries."

True enough, but as the author also perceptively recognizes, the graduates of accredited universities and seminaries of the major denominations do not always tell people what the Bible actually says, or help them to interpret it wisely, or show how an enlightened Christian or Jewish approach to sex can be based upon a biblical perspec-tive. The failure of liberal and moderate Christians on this score has practically left the field to fundamentalists, who now suc-cessfully claim that their own sex ethic is the one and only true and authentic biblical

Robert T. Hall is an Episcopal priest and professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Steubenville in Ohio.

(thump, thump) faith. It is as a counter to these claims that

Larue tells us what the Bible says, and does not say. His account is fair, realistic, and even-handed, as befits a professor emeritus of biblical studies. He has no axes to grind and no program to sell, save enlightenment on the subject. When it comes to the ques-tion of premarital sex, for example, Larue is as sympathetic to those whose ideal is to share their first experience with someone who will be their lifetime partner as he is to those whose development prior to marriage includes sexual expression.

Of course the last thing fundamentalists (whether they be sectarian or within major denominations) want is for someone who knows the Bible as a scholar to tell people what it actually says on these subjects. It undermines the one and only true and authentic biblical faith to discover that there is no one and only ultraconservative sex ethic in the Bible and that those who claim to find one there simply read their own Victorian mores in selected pages and ignore the rest of the text. To be fundamentally biblical, one would have to revive the levirate (the duty of a dead man's brother to impregnate his widow to provide an heir), ritual purification, and perhaps polygamy. Such practices would hardly sit well with the conservative conscience.

Beyond telling it like it is as far as the Bible is concerned, Larue offers some com-mentary on sex attitudes and practices in modern society. It is not at all clear what his purpose is in this effort, however, since he does not trace the development of sex mores from the writing of the Bible to the twentieth century, nor does he seem to be offering a consistent perspective or set of principles of his own. It is mostly a matter of conventional wisdom—perhaps a little too conventional, as in his all too easy accep-tance of the notion that gay men and lesbian women grew up as sissies and tomboys. But no doubt the commentary on modern atti-tudes toward sex is intended as an aid to reflection on the great cultural differences between the biblical age and our own times.

The only shortcoming of this otherwise interesting book is Professor Larue's failure to acknowledge the many contemporary enlightened liberal and moderate Christians who find that the Bible embodies some important humanistic principles and values—or at least stands as the cornerstone of a tradition in which such values and prin-ciples have continued to develop throughout the centuries. For these people, who treat the Bible as an ancient text and not simply as a justification for their own preconceived ideas, the task of developing a contemporary approach to sex and human relationships is a matter of discovering new meanings in an old tradition. Such folk, however, who may still constitute the greater part of Christian-ity, have unfortunately been as Larue sug- gests, an all too silent majority. •

Sex and the Bible

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