1922 came to my mind, Hitch, when I read this of yours: “Religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”

But before I get into that, I hasten to address the two challenges you’ve put to us “On Faith” panelists:

1) “Can [anybody] name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person, that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever?” Of course not! But consider what your statement concedes: Such moral statements and actions as HAVE come from religious persons, only “COULD” have come from unbelievers. Religion actually HAS been productive of your desiderata; you can only speculate that your irreligion MIGHT have been so productive.

2) “Can [anybody] think of a wicked action or statement that derived directly from religious faith?” Of course! Religion is natural, human beings are naturally wicked (as well as naturally good), so we should expect wickedness (as well as goodness) to come out of religion. Your claim that the world would be better off without religion is almost as patently stupid as would be saying that the world would be better off without sex, which is guilty of a list of horrors rivaling religion’s list. As for your assumption that religion is natural only to the extent of a surgically removable wart (the knife being reason), the cumulative evidence of history and of the human sciences is against you.

Back to 1922 and the yellowed newspaper clipping I have from my father about a sermon preached by “Harry,” a schoolmate of his. What Harry Emerson Fosdick preached on Sunday morning was frequently in the Monday-morning papers. Like you, Hitch, Fosdick had a witty way of irritating religious folk. This sermon's title was “How Religion Helps Mess Up the World,” a title you yourself could preach a rip-snortin’ sermon on. There the similarity stops. What I have to say to you I choose to say by contrasts.

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Observation 1.....“Only in America,” as “Carolina Israelite” Harry Golden used to say. In our country more than anywhere else on earth or in human history, one’s background may not be one’s foreground. We're tolerant of jumping one ship for another. Nobody gets killed because of converting to another religion. This is my first observation on this week’s “On Faith” question:
“GOP presidential candidate John McCain said recently that he ‘admired’ Islam but would prefer a president with ‘a solid grounding’ in the Christian faith. Would you consider a candidate’s religious background in deciding for whom to vote? If so, under what circumstances?"

Observation 2....Religion is one of the story-strands in the rope of a person’s reality, and knowing this background-foreground strand is essential to knowing the person and guessing her/his performance in political office.

Observation 3.....It’s unfair to the candidates, and irresponsible as a citizen, to vote for a candidate on any single story-strand of the candidate’s reality, or any single political issue.

Observation 4.....In addition to having more differences of background than any other people in history, all of us Americans have the same background (namely, the American heritage) and the same foreground (namely, the American present).

Observation 5.....In voting today for the America we want, we Americans vote “American"--whatever that severally means to us.

Observation 6.....For John McCain and me, voting American means voting for candidates with “a solid grounding” in America’s founding religion, Christianity. The earliest Americans in the continuity of our customs and laws were English Puritan and Separatist Christians, who before landing in 1620 drafted our first founding document, the Mayflower Compact. In our documentary history, they were followed by the English Enlightenment Christians who wrote the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Constitution (in effect, 1789), and the Bill of Rights (1791).

Observation 7.....The taproot in the formation of the American mind was the American religion, a dynamic mix of English Christianity and a rationalist spin-off therefrom, namely, the English-Scottish-French Enlightenment.

Observation 8.....Since America’s Founding Fathers were scattered all along the Chrisian spectrum from conservatism to deism, we Americans today can choose our favorites among the Founding Fathers according to our own predilections, our own way of seeing and living in the world today.

Observation 9.....When I say “Vote American!” I am expressing my concern for honoring and promoting the American mind of private and public dialog between our Founders' Biblical faith and their Enlightenment reason. Only in this light, and within this very specific sense, do I view as un-American all other minds. This does not mean that those of other minds cannot be good Americans. It does mean, as historians of culture will agree, that only by the promotion of the American mind can the American heritage survive and thrive. Negatively put, America could not survive the death or even the radical re-definition of the American mind. Analytically put, ideological multiculturalism in America's public schools now threatens the American heritage/religion/mind with death by amnesia.

We Christians don’t believe in life after death. We have full belief in Jesus, and afterlife with him is implicit in our experience of him as alive in our here-and-now. (“I am with you always,” he says at the end of the New Testament’s first book.)

Jesus is unique in that his is the world’s only name with which the full range of possibilities exists:

1.....FULL UNBELIEF. Jesus never was born, never lived. Christianity’s foundation is nothing but fantasy. Though this position is, most historians agree, highly improbable, it reappears whenever conditions are right for it.

2.....NATURAL belief. Like everybody else, Jesus lived and died. This is the Jewish position.

3.....HALF belief. Jesus lived but didn’t die (he was taken to paradise): that was somebody else who was crucified. This is the Muslim position.

4.....FULL BELIEF. Jesus lived and died but didn’t stay dead. Three days after his execution, he appeared among his followers—and continued to re-appear many times for more than a month—often enough, and in sufficiently different circumstances, to overcome all their understandable doubts that he could be alive again. His disciples experienced him not as resuscitated (restored to the life he had lived on earth) but as resurrected (re-created in newness of life, with powers of life as we know it but also beyond). We should not be surprised if these experiences—once, to “more than five hundred” (1 Corinthians 15:6)—were variously reported, as indeed they were: we should rather be suspicious if the Bible were to have given us a neat, mythic miracle-story. The materials we have point to a singular historical event in which nature and the supernatural converged. For us Christians, Easter is more than a festival of springtime.

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“Don’t go there!” A burst of laughter usually accompanies this playful outburst of warning against engaging a hot conversational topic. The warning popped into my mind, and I smiled, when I read this week’s “On Faith” question:

“The Dalai Lama says ‘All major religious traditions carry basically the same message: That is love, compassion and forgiveness.’ Do you agree?”

Why the warning? Why is it dangerous to deal at all critically with the Dalai Lama’s saying, self, and society (Tibetan monastic Buddhism)? Well, in plain language, because he’s such a nice guy. Harmless, in a world in which religion since 9/11 is increasingly viewed as dangerous. Breezily jocular and smiling in a worried world. Exotically free in a world trammeled by ever more complex and seemingly irresolvable perplexities. A persistent world-stage witness to gentleness in this ungentle world. A Nobel Peace laureate now granted the U.S. Congress’ highest civilian honor. A religious eminence addressed by his followers as “Your Holiness.” A monk with monasticism’s common characteristics whatever the religion of his monastery.

All this adds up to a wraparound untouchability that is itself problematic. Such a sentimental-romantic picture is seductive, and needs the corrective of some realistic observations addressed to this Buddhist missionary to the West. But the multicultural dogma of the equality of religions is so pervasive in America that (as a standard text on the world’s religions concludes) to criticize another’s religion “is declared to show prejudice and the inferiority of the protester’s religion.”

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Preachers are indignant against what offends what they’re for. I felt that indignation in E.O.Wilson when I heard him snort, “Ants are not bugs!” It’s the first thing I thought of when I read the new “On Faith” question:

“In his ‘letter to a Southern Baptist pastor,’ biosociologist E.O.Wilson warns: ‘An alliance between science and religion, forged in an atmosphere of mutual respect, may be the only way to protect life on earth.’ Is such an alliance necessary? Possible?”

Next, I thought of another Southern Baptist—Al Gore—as a Nobel Peace Prize winner for protecting life on earth. Then I remembered two other Baptists of the South who were awarded Nobel Peace Prizes as fighters for human dignity: Martin Luther King Jr. and Jimmy Carter. And I recalled that Wilson himself has a Southern Baptist background. And that Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island, the only state of the United States to be founded on complete religious freedom, was a Baptist preacher. And I remembered the influence of the Baptists on Thomas Jefferson, resulting in the Virginia declaration of religious liberty, the predecessor of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And I recalled Jefferson’s letter to Connecticut Baptists, from which we got the phrase “the separation of church and state.” And I remembered that Baptist vision and money founded the University of Chicago, whose faculty has been awarded more Nobel Prizes than any other institution. (What’s with these Baptists?)

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Let’s keep Halloween going! It’s scary fun, playful fright, celebrating mysterious perceptions, weirdly satisfying some needs our dailiness obscures.

Hallowed-holy sites and times are layered realities. In Vienna, I was eager to enter the Christian church built on the site of a pagan temple in which the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius worshiped in AD 180 CE. That’s a PLACE instance of this layering.

Halloween is a TIME instance. It’s a two-day Christian festival (October 31, the evening [een or e’en] of Hallows + November 1, All Saints [Hallows] Day).
The layer immediately underneath it is the Druidic festival of Samhain (the Celtic word for “November”: November 1 is the first day of the Druidic year).

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