Empty Pulpits

By AM Sunday, August 8, 2010

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Resignation and frustration are spreading rapidly among both the clergy and the active laity. Many feel that they have been left in the lurch with their personal needs, and many are in deep distress over the state of the church. In many of your dioceses, it is the same story: increasingly empty churches, empty seminaries and empty rectories. In many countries, due to the lack of priests, more and more parishes are being merged, often against the will of their members, into ever larger “pastoral units,” in which the few surviving pastors are completely overtaxed. This is church reform in pretense rather than fact! – Hans Kung, 2010

The dissident Swiss theologian’s complaint had been aired in book form by Malachi O Doherty although there it was made as an observation rather than a complaint. Empty Pulpits sets out to provide an explanation for the Irish dimension of the trend Hans Kung has identified.

I am not sure what I expected from this book, probably more than I got. Long a fan of O’Doherty’s scepticism I had anticipated the excoriation of religious belief, yet the expected polemic against religious faith simply was not there. This is not the author’s fault; rather the result of my having sought something that it was not his intention to provide. What O’Doherty served up was a critical treatise on certain religious practices, procedural beliefs and articles of faith combined with an explanation as to why organised religion in Ireland is now blighted, blessed I might offer in paradoxical style, with institutional malaise. O’Doherty does not emerge from this book as an atheist, certainly not an ardent one. If anything there is a sense that he hopes to be persuaded that there just might be something beyond the grave, rather than succumb to the poet Philip Larkin’s bleak characterisation of ‘the sure extinction that we travel to.’

O’Doherty’s opening gambit is the claim that Ireland is losing its faith at a rate unequalled by its European partners. That this is a strange ploy becomes evident on the opening page where it is argued not that faith per se is being lost but that there is a collapse in the religious orders: belief in a god is not diminishing significantly, people are simply getting by without being shadowed by it.

This is not the type of belief that the clerics want; it limits their ability to interfere in the lives of people otherwise not disposed toward paying clerics any attention. Clerics don’t want people to merely think that a belief in god is crucial, but to think that clerics are crucial to sustaining that belief. Yet it is clear that they must contend with a central theme of Empty Pulpits: people believe but do not belong.

Where religion is on the up, O’Doherty makes the point that it is rooted in those religions based on the promise of hell for the sinner. Those promoting love seem not to compete as well in the market of superstition. To be successful religion must ally with hatred.

I found the reasons for the emptying pulpits less engaging than some of the arguments Empty Pulpits engaged in. For example, religion is taken to task for its insistence that secularism cannot be the source of a moral code.

One of Ireland’s leading Catholic moral theologians Vincent Twomey is quoted:

Virtue finally needs faith in God to flourish. Trustworthiness is not exclusive to believers but it is rarely found in abundance outside faith communities. Atheism is not an option for a healthy state or healthy democracy.

Twomey then extrapolates from this that there is one moral code which Benny the Bad shall decide upon. Unsustainable bunkum which is laid bare by O’Doherty as such. He summed up the ridiculous Catholic position in one telling sentence: ‘better that unwanted children be born than that someone somewhere should be masturbating and feeling good about it.’ What moral code, other than a bad one, could grow on those founds?

O’Doherty cites a Fr Moloney who complains that those who want religion eliminated from society will take solace from the fact that priests in Ireland are dying out. Moloney completely misses the point about what it is that should be eliminated. Religion should not be squeezed out of society anymore than science fiction. People should be free to believe, or disbelieve, whatever they want. If people want to worship the devil, fine, likewise with any other deity. As Walfa Sultan suggested they can worship rocks if they please as long as they don’t stone the rest of us with them. Religion simply should have no input into the lives of people who do not want it. As Michael McDowell once said canon law should have no greater status than the rules of a golf club. Religion should not be allowed any special status that would permit it leverage over the lives of others within society. It is the enforcer status of religion that should be eliminated not the belief itself.

Empty Pulpits explores the collapse of respect for religious opinion. It presents an image of bishops – now the ‘last dictatorship in Christendom' - touring their dioceses in the 1960s where they were greeted by adoring crowds. Today by contrast they might be stoned. That would make a change from clerics doing the stoning.

This implosion of respect, Empty Pulpits links to the relentless raucous criticism thrown religion’s way by the New Atheists represented by Richard Dawkins et al. O Doherty finds nothing in New Atheism that was not already there in the last century, thinking that it floats on the high tide of Islamic fundamentalism; that after 100 years of reflecting on Darwin there should be something to show for it other than restating that there is no god. Dawkins, however, cannot be reduced to such a simplistic schematic. The celebrated author of The God Delusion and many other works knows there is no god and rather than merely try to prove it has applied his thinking to the reasons that people continue to hold religious beliefs.

In assaulting the New Atheists O’Doherty is too simplistic, approvingly quoting Alexander Chancellor who claims that non-believers feel guilty about their non-belief and are in need of constant reassurance. The mutual reassurance spawned is supposed to push up the sales of books despite there being nothing new under the sun within their pages.

However, it seems an insupportable contention that humanist writers like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have failed to come up with novel insights into religion. Dennett’s innovative work on consciousness is absent from major works by Old Atheism writers such as Durkheim and Darwin. Perhaps put off by what he perceives as the arrogance of Dawkins, O’Doherty appears unwilling to delve deeper into what motivates the modern humanist thinkers and opts for the easy put down. New Atheism we learn may be nothing other than a ruse for annoying believers. Where true it can only explain a miniscule amount of the dynamic behind the flourishing of humanism. In his insinuation that Dawkins enjoys annoying people O Doherty must realise that this type of gibe has often been thrown his own way on spurious grounds in retaliation for his challenging take on situations not appreciated by all. It is disappointing that he should seek to arm his own critique of New Atheism with it.

In arguing that the next big clash between religion and science will take place on the battlefield of consciousness, Empty Pulpits seems far removed from its earlier suggestion that New Atheism offers nothing new. Daniel Dennett is at the forefront of this battle, yet is barely considered in this work.

Moreover, religion, O’Doherty contends, gets beaten every time it argues with science. Yet those who play a crucial part in science are New Atheists like Richard Dawkins. In many ways it is in Dawkins’ simple comment that ‘planes fly witches don’t’ that the triumph of science is so concisely articulated.

Empty Pulpits throws up the challenges the articulation of religious belief confronts by making light of the arguments put forward by two of its more prominent Catholic advocates, David Quinn and John Waters. The book makes the very simple point that Dawkins has more chance of understanding what lies behind the big bang from science than David Quinn has from reading the bible. Although this is more an argument against bible based beliefs in god than a belief per se.

In what may prove startling for some Empty Pulpits tackles the hypocrisy with which the case against abortion is pressed.

Ireland has always wanted rid of inconvenient babies and has always inflicted huge pain, if not actual death on daughters and their babies, in pursuit of this … There are folksongs about how to get rid of the changeling, the sickly child that the fairies had left with you in exchange for your own bright healthy baby. If you put it on the fire it would leap up the chimney and your real child would return. And if that didn’t work at least you had killed only a fairy, and one who had already been rejected by its own.

One argument that does not persuade is that Sikhs should be allowed to wear their turban if they are Garda. O’Doherty claims that the turban is a cultural thing. No more so than a Garda wanting to wear a Liverpool hat. Why elevate one cultural symbol? There is no reason for one culture to trump another in a societal rather than a sectional institution ostensibly serving the whole of society.

It is hard to find fault with the contention of Empty Pulpits that ‘the great evil that the church inflicted on societies was the curtailment of free thought and imagination.’ This is a typical trait of the totalitarian mind which on occasions unites totalitarians more than it divides them, hence the totalitarian Left embracing totalitarian Islam in a crude symbiotic dance that saw the balance within the totalitarian symbiosis shift increasingly to the totalitarian side of the equation and way from the Left.

In his closing words the author claims that while few are going to ask guidance from a few lonely celibate old men on how to be happy, the rest of us don’t know the answer. There is no answer towards which the teleological march can progress. The search for one at some point invites the imposition of an answer. The metanarrative resulting from that is too terrifying to contemplate. Grand attempts to perfect humankind have merely shown how imperfect it is at root.

Empty Pulpits – long may they remain as such.

Empty Pulpits by Malachi O'Doherty. Gill & Macmillan. Dublin: 2008