A theory of famous and forgotten atheists

In the New York Times, in a review of Susan Jacoby's new book on Robert Ingersoll, there's a proposed theory of famous and forgotten atheists, and of why they're famous or forgotten. It's not clear if the theory is Jacoby's or the reviewers' (presumably it's Jacoby's), but this is the theory:

There have been atheists and religious doubters throughout history, but the ones who remain famous after their deaths tend to have been equally famous for something else as well; otherwise, people most notable for their bravery in the face of religious conservatism have to be celebrated by a population equally brave, and that is often too much to ask.

Is this true?

Besides the problem of the question of the definition of "atheist" and whether there have been those "throughout history," and how "atheist" and "religious doubter" are being mushed together, is this true?  Is there really any way to divide public religion-doubters in such a way as to predict their permanence, their public memory?

The model for the remembered atheist/religious doubter that is being proposed here would apparently be Thomas Paine; Ingersoll's the model of the forgotten atheist. Paine had the "something else" of the American Revolution and the French Revolution. But then, it's not like Ingersoll did nothing but doubt at the religious. He fought in the Civil War. He had an active political career.

Maybe it's just the vagueness of "something else as well" I am having a problem with. It seems very unclear what this wouldn't apply to.

Did Ayn Rand do something else? Probably that's how her other political and artistic efforts would be thought of here, though she might not have accepted those distinctions separating her philosophy from everything else. Did Madalyn Murray O'Hair do something besides atheist activism? It wouldn't seem so, but surely she counts as one who's remained famous. Emma Goldman could fit into the Paine model of an atheist who's remembered but who's "equally famous for something else." What about Marcet Haldeman-Julius? She did lots of other things besides doubt, but isn't particularly remembered, I don't think.

Besides, isn't it because one is remembered that multiple aspects of one's life and work are remembered?  Not the other way around.

The proposed theory of why remembered atheists are remembered elides over the many complications of the functions of discourses that publicly preserve a memory. In place of a more nuanced explanation for why some public figures remain that way after death and others do not, it slides into talk of "celebration" and "bravery." Which is to say, it into a case for a kind of hagiography.

The proposed theory seems like it's going to be a historical argument, an interesting explanatory device. But then it  seems like it turns out to be really something else entirely.

This is my concern with Jacoby's history of American freethinkers, and why I'm skeptical about her book on Ingersoll.

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Judge: pastor not protected from public criticism, accusations

Pastors are public figures, and aren't completely protected from former members' online criticism and accusations, according to a California judge.

Bob Grenier, the pastor of a Calvary Chapel church in central California, is suing his step-son, Alex Grenier, for defamation. The pastor claims he is being attacked and his reputation is being ruined by his step-son's blog and internet activities, activities that Alex Grenier says are designed to call attention to allegations of a long history of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and "ecclesiastical corruption."

According to the lawsuit, "Alex continues to this day to conduct a cyber-bully hate campaign by scouring the internet continuously, hour-by-hour, day-by-day, for the purpose of generating negative posts about his Parents." The suit claims the younger Grenier uses as many as nine websites "aimed at ruining credibility of Parents," regularly accusing the elder Grenier of child molestation and stealing from the church.

Two of the pastor's other sons -- adopted and biological -- have confirmed Alex Grenier's accounts of abuse.

Bob Grenier of course denies these allegations, but the primary case that's being made in the California court is that such allegations should not even be allowed. Similar to the argument that Sovereign Grace Ministries' lawyers are making in a Maryland court, the point is to protect internal affairs from outside scrutiny. In this week's preliminary ruling, however, a California judge rejected the idea that Bob Grenier's purportedly private affairs were really private and should be protected as private.

The judge ruled that the pastor is a "limited purpose public figure," and as such subject to a fair amount of public criticism.



Statements about public figures are only defamatory if they false statements, damaging statements, and published with "reckless disregard for the truth."This means that Bob Grenier does not just have to prove that his step-son's online statements were wrong and hurtful, but that Alex knowingly published false information intending to harm his step-father. According to the preliminary decision, the pastor is a public figure, and the bar is raised for claims of defamation:

Plaintiff, as pastor of Calvary Chapel Visalia, has placed himself in the public eye sufficiently to be considered a Limited Purpose Public Figure. Defendants have submitted evidence showing that Plaintiff has a Web site promoting his church and has video feeds of church services available through the Web site. Additionally, Plaintiff has published and distributed a book about his activities as a church leader, and has been active in various community events such as the mayor’s annual prayer breakfast and as a volunteer chaplain with the local police department. Plaintiff has also been active in producing and promoting regional church activities. In these public activities, Plaintiff claims to adhere to, teach, counsel, and to promote high standards of Christian morality and the teachings of the Bible, topics of substantial public interest. The evidence submitted supports Defendants’ claims that Plaintiff sought to have not only church members but others in the community see him as a church leader.

Such court decisions are good news for the growing number of online "survivor" communities that share and bring attention to allegations of "spiritual abuse." It's bad news for the many churches that want to squelch such public criticism of how they counsel members.

The court is scheduled to hear arguments about "reckless disregard for the truth" in the Grenier vs. Grenier case in April.

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God's Cartoonist: The Comic Crusade of Jack Chick (full film)

Jason C. Bivens, in Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism:

Chick writes himself into and out of fallen America, making connections and establishing resolutions that are as succinct as a thought ballon, as emphatic as a trio of exclamation points. The social and cultural history of Chick Publications is a marginal one, both insofar as Chick has doggedly maintained his status as an underground artist fighting 'the world system' and also in the sense that his important contributions to evangelical popular culture have gone largely unacknowledged by scholars of American religions. Yet his sensibility is a powerful one in its widespread accessibility, its longevity, and the influence it has had on several generations of American Christians. No matter how fervently one might seek to ignore them, Chick tracts keep turning up, often in the oddest places.

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Abstracts: regarding contemporary evangelical cultural engagements

The Kincade Case for Kincade: The Painter of Light’s Arguments for His Art 

When Thomas Kincade died in 2012, his images hung in one out of every twenty American homes. His works sold for up to $250 million annually, and were regularly dismissed as kitsch. Kincade, however, continually argued with the gatekeepers of the art establishment about the importance and aesthetic value of his work. He positioned himself as peer to Daimen Hirst and Jeff Koons, and also Walt Disney, refusing to accept that popularity was antithetical to artistic value, or that his ideological embrace of sentimentality meant he could never be taken seriously. This paper traces those career-long struggles.

Previous scholars -- notably in Thomas Kincade: The Artist in the Mall, edited by Alexis L. Boylan -- reevaluated Kincade by considering him in the context of conceptual and transgressive art, problematizing distinctions between art and kitsch. This paper seeks to further that reevaluation, demonstrating that Kincade’s own arguments should be taken seriously.

Explaining the Market for Christian Fiction

Christian fiction occupies a peculiar place in twenty first century America. Despite significant commercial success and these novels’ regular best-seller status, people are still surprised Christian fiction exists. Readers puzzle over reasons for Christian fiction genres on websites such as Goodreads, and express shock in one-star reviews on Amazon.com. Cultural critics psychoanalyze Christian fiction readers, speculating on their pathologies and on what the popularity of these novels says about contemporary American.

This paper proposes a better answer to the question of why Christian fiction exists. Examining historical developments in twentieth and twenty-first century book markets and critically examining the evolution of what Robert Darnton called books’ “communications circuit,” i.e., processes of authorship, publication, distribution, sales and consumption, the argument is made that the Christian fiction readership should be demystified and “detotalized.” Shifts in consumer capitalism, rather than readers’ religious pathologies, account for the market for Christian fiction.

Re-considering Demonization in Popular Spiritual Warfare Fiction

Demonization marks the end of the possibility of reasonable discourse. When opponents are characterized as demonic and disagreements are not thought of as matters of method or degree but rather as about ultimate fealty to forces of good and evil, dialogue is rendered impossible.

The prominence and success of spiritual warfare fiction in the last 35 years, then, would seem to be another sign of the intractability of America’s “culture war.” In this wildly popular genre of evangelical Christian fiction, cultural conflicts are depicted as the machinations of Satanic forces. The metaphor of “demonization” is imagined in the most literal ways. Millions of readers avidly consume these novels, where demons are elaborately realized and contemporary social reality is re-rendered as spiritual battle. Imaginations formed by such fictions, it would seem, would be completely closed to compromise. As journalist Daniel Radosh wrote, speaking on behalf of liberals, “common ground will never be possible because they don't object to specific ideas that can be reframed or adjusted. They object to Satan, whose bidding we are doing.”

Counterintuitively, this paper argues that this genre of evangelical fiction doesn’t foreclose discourse, but opens new possibilities. The paper closely examines representations of the demonic realms of cultural conflicts in the popular fiction of contemporary Pentecostal novelists such as Frank Peretti, Tosca Lee and Linda Rios Brooks, and considers them in the context of theories of ideology and ideological conflict. Investigating specific instances of the conceptualization of spiritual warfare enables a more nuanced and thorough understanding of the function of imagined demons, demonstrating the multiple ways the fictive depictions of demonic spheres serve to move readers to more open and even empathetic engagement with those with whom they disagree. Fictions of demonization mark out a possible space for dialogue, rather than obdurate disagreement.

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An emerging alliance in defense of sharia

The attacks on sharia law in American have been vociferous and completely out of proportion with actual instances of sharia law in America. A coalition of conservatives with various concerns have sought to enact legislation prohibiting sharia -- prohibiting state judges from considering religious codes that Muslims believe to be binding and might, e.g., have cited in private contracts, or even going so far as to enact legislation that equates adherence to the Islamic rules for worship with terrorism, so that "sharia organizations," including mosques, would be illegal.

Defenders of sharia against these state prohibitions are now arising from a perhaps unexpected quarter. Sharia has an ally with some Jewish legal thinkers and some Jewish groups concerned about the way these laws infringe on religious liberty.

From Florida:

A Florida state bill targeting a supposed threat from Islamic law may instead end up preventing Orthodox couples from using Jewish religious courts, or batei din, to arbitrate their divorces, according to legal specialists and some Jewish groups. 

[....] 

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has vowed to fight the bill. So too has the strictly Orthodox umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America.

There are other problems with the proposed Florida law, including the fact it is worded so ambiguously that it's not at all clear how the courts might apply the legislation. One Jewish state representative is arguing that the law is designed to have no legal effect at all, actually, and is merely meant to "generate fear of Muslims," reinforcing some of the political rhetoric of recent days.

What's interesting, though, is this alliance between a religious Jewish groups and Islamic groups. An important feature of fights over religious liberty in the United States is the way that different groups end up politically allied, with common cause. This was true in 1802, when Deists and Baptists came together in opposition to the establishment of religion, and in 1989, when the Native American Church's religious use of peyote was defended by the Traditional Values Coalition, the Christian Legal Society, the National Association of Evangelicals and the American Jewish Congress in their push to enact the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

As the political landscape shifts, groups that might otherwise have little in common come together. Change, in these sorts of affairs, seems to happen by this process of alliances.

Others have noted the possible common cause of Muslims' wanting to defend their right to use sharia in some limited legal contracts and so forth and other religious groups in America. Eric N. Kniffen, of the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, has argued that the case against Muslims' religious practice in America is historically similar to the cases made against Jews, Mormons and Catholics, implying that those groups ought to sympathize with and even support American Muslims in these political struggles. Matthew Schmitz, of First Things, made the argument that there's no reason to be more suspicious of Muslims' claims to religious freedom than of Protestants' or Catholics', and that there is, rather, a common cause the three groups could share: protecting the US Constitution against illiberal excesses. Eliyahu Stern, a religious studies and history professor at Yale, also made a case in the New York Times for the specific alliance of Jews and Muslims in opposition to a ban on sharia.

It has seemed to me, though, that those alliances was mostly theoretical. Jewish groups' sympathies for Muslims' rights to religious exercise have been mixed. For example, in the controversy over Perk51 -- the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" -- there seemed to a lot of conflict between Jewish groups, and even within Jewish groups.

It's too early to tell for sure, but perhaps that's changing. There are at least some efforts being made at the moment to flesh out the connections between Jewish religious practice in American and Muslim religious practice in America, and how their relationship to America law is identical. In Chicago, next month, for example, there's a conference of religious scholars and legal scholars considering the topic of "Shari'a and Halakha in America." There are experts on Judaism and on Islam scheduled to attend, as well as one scholar from a evangelical Christian school. At the conference, they plan to consider:

how liberal democracies can and should accommodate legal systems that are not themselves originally grounded on liberal or democratic principles [and] to what degree can systems of this sort adapt themselves to a liberal democratic environment? This conference will explore these questions, as they pertain to both shari'a and Jewish law (halacha).

The questions are good, but what's more important is the combination of Jewish and Muslim religious laws as the subjects of the question. Whether or not such efforts change the political landscape remains to be seen, but this is the sort of shift that does change things.

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Finding Tübingen on a map

From the USA Today:

Back in 1968, when Rev. Joseph Ratzinger was a theology professor in the Bavarian town of Tubingen, a neighbor's cat visited him daily. 

'It even accompanied him to his lectures and to Mass. It was a black cat, a very intelligent pussycat,' the older brother writes.

That's a very nice story about the cat. Dubious, but nice nonetheless. It's very difficult to check the facts on such things.

It's not difficult at all, on the other hand, to check facts about where a city is located. The very simplest fact in this newspaper story is where Tübingen is. Most newsrooms are connected to the internet. If the USA Today's offices aren't, perhaps they could invest in a world atlas.

Supposedly newspapers care about these things, details and accuracy, since it's a matter of credibility. If you can't be trusted with an easily verifiable detail, why should a reader trust any other detail in your story? Saying that Tübingen is a Bavarian town is sloppy.

It's not in the state of Bavaria, nor in the region. Nor is it even particularly close. This is akin to saying New York is a plains state, or that Louisiana is in the Southwest. Pope Benedict is a Bavarian. Maybe the cat was Bavarian. The town where Ratzinger supposedly had a cat listening to his lectures is not Bavarian.

Tübingen is in the state of Baden-Württemberg, in the region known as Swabia. This is relevant because Bavaria is strongly Catholic. Swabia is predominantly Protestant, with a strong tradition of Pietism. The town itself has both a  Protestant seminary and a Catholic seminary, which is unusual in Germany, and is known, historically, for the "Tübingen School" of theology, which pioneered higher criticism, the hermeneutic so important to the religious liberalism and modernism that Benedict has commitment much of his life to opposing.

That means there were three ways that Tübingen was an alien place for Ratzinger (at least three, not even counting what was going on in German universities in '68 or his fraught relationship with Hans Küng). In the standard narrative of his life, his time in Tübingen is pivotal.

He probably could have really used a friendly cat, if the one in the story didn't actually exist.

It's easy to say that it doesn't matter. What's a detail like geography? But if it doesn't matter, then context doesn't matter, and facts don't matter, and understanding stuff doesn't matter. And then why have journalism at all? This is almost certainly an overreaction on my part, but there's a fine line between overreacting and just giving a damn.

The cat thing is cute, though.

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