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Several years ago I designed and then taught for the very first time a new graduate-level course titled “The ‘New Atheism’ in American Culture.” At the risk of seeming immodest, I must say that it was a terrific course. We read material on secularization and religious change, historical accounts of irreligious notables and movements, and a number of more polemical works by both forthrightly atheist authors and their unimpressed critics. Who could ask for more? The students, I am happy to report (again, with apt modesty), also appreciated the course, and, all things considered, it turned out to be quite the academic success that semester.
But there was this one sticking point. Especially upon discussing some of the recently published books by best-selling atheist polemicists, many of my students divulged that they did not see their own experience reflected in these works. I had expected to hear this from the majority of these students who considered themselves to be religious, some of whom were actually preparing for careers in ministry of one sort or another. And sure enough, at times many of them did get pretty flummoxed by what they took to be wildly off-the-mark depictions. They were not scriptural literalists, they pointed out. Indeed many were, or were in the process of becoming, very sophisticated in the critical interpretation of religious (and other) texts. They also insisted that they were not irrational or in any way anti-science, a response made most vociferously by one of my master of divinity students who also happened to have previously earned a doctorate in molecular biology. Nor, they seemed to guffaw in unison, did they think their religious beliefs should be imposed upon other citizens or that the crucial “wall of separation” between church and state should be allowed to falter in any way. Nor did they condone any form of religiously inspired violence. Nor were they blind to the multitude of perfectly legitimate religions other than their own. Nor could they somehow not tell the difference between what people generally consider to be knowledge and, alternatively, what believers hold to as matters of faith. Nor could … well, you get the idea. Let’s just say that this admittedly small sample of well-educated, self-consciously religious graduate students did not recognize themselves within the pages of these anti-religion best sellers.
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