I was watching Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday night, as I am wont to do, and there broke out a more-heated-than-usual argument between how two interlocuters, Michael Eric Dyson (requisite liberal) and Andrew Breitbart (requisite conservative). Then, as so often happens on that show, the panelists on the left side of your screen at home ganged up on the host on the right side. The topic that caused this unexpected alliance? God.
Maher is a flamboyent atheist, and he went nose-to-nose with Dyson on whether science requires faith—Maher says it doesn’t, Dyson says it does. Maher rested easier when Dyson was replaced across the table from him with secular-Jew-ango-atheist Sarah Silverman for the balance of the show.
The Maher-Dyson debate got me to thinking of the last time that I watched someone on Real Time make a thoughtful, reasoned defense of a thoughtful, reasoned faith in the face of Maher’s anti-religious vituperations. That person? Andrew Sullivan, the conservative uber-blogger, HIV-positive, Roman Catholic.
And I couldn’t help but think that 40 or 50 years ago, Maher’s sparring partner might have been an older Reinhold Neibuhr, or a young Harvey Cox. No more. Now we who are theologians proper have been supplanted by political pundits who occasionally rise to the defense of religion.
Last week, Jonathan L. Walton blogged here on RD about a conference that he and I recently attended at Claremont School of Theology. He mentioned my charge, to the collection of two score “progressive” theologians, that they be more savvy about how they market themselves.
More specifically, I accused those theologians of falling asleep at the wheel, of giving up the populist agenda bequethed to them by William Jennings Bryan, and of caring more about tenure and academic guilds than about changing the minds of the people in the checkout line at Walmart.
Surprisingly, just as I was being outnumbered by the assembled professors (for using the dirty word “entrepreneurial”), an unlikely hero rushed to my defense: Jack Fitzmier, executive director of the American Academy of Religion.
“Who is reading your work?” he asked with a clear tone of agitation, “Seriously, who is buying your books? Who is asking you to speak?” He went on to say, in no uncertain terms, that the academic theological guild is quickly becoming irrelevant.
I don’t know if the Fitzmier-Jones tag team made much of a difference, but I was approached by John Cobb and Harvey Cox immediately after my screed, and they both said, in effect, “You’re right.” I was gratified to read that Jonathan had also taken my challenge to heart.
We’re at a turning point, right now, because of a confluence of two events: 1) the MSM has finally figured out that 3/4s of American’s are religious, and 2) the Religious Right has lost its monopoly in the public square.
It’s time for theologians, practical theologians, biblical scholars (I really don’t care in which department you teach) of the progressive and moderate stripes to step forward and engage the popular culture. Sure, writing an op-ed for the NYT counts. I’ll give you four points for that. Getting quoted in Newsweek is two points. Starting a blog earns you ten points, and if Andrew Sullivan links to you, you get 25 bonus points. Posting 3-4 tweets a day earns you 15 points. Just do something, dammit.
I’ll buy an iPod for the first person to 100.
*And, as a postcript, here’s a quote from Umberto Eco posted by a thoughtful commenter on my blog last week:
My answer was that this habit is common to all European intellectuals, in Germany, France, Spain, and, naturally, Italy: all countries where a scholar or scientist often feels required to speak out in the papers, to comment, if only from the point of view of his own interests and special field, on events that concern all citizens.And I added, somewhat maliciously, that if there was any problem with this it was not my problem as a European intellectual; it was more a problem of American intellectuals, who live in a country where the division of labor between university professors and militant intellectuals is much more strict that in other countries. It is true that many American professors write for cultural reviews or for the book page of the daily papers. But many Italian scholars and literary critics also write columns where they take a stand on political questions, and they do this not only as a natural part of their work, but also as a duty.
Tags: academics, jack fitzmier, jonathan walton, theology, tony jones
Hey Tony, I got 25 points on a recent Andrew Sullivan link. I'm at least a 1/4 of the way there!
Totally agree. For too long we've ceded the public religious square to the pundits and religious right talking heads. We do need to begin speaking up - but we have to train the media as well. We have to get into their contact files and be ready at a moment's notice to get in front of a camera or microphone and be part of the conversation.
The question is - how do you retrain the media to look to more progressive theologians instead of the easy call to Dobson, Knight and the others?
Wherever we line up to get into the larger conversation, I'm there with bells on. Bill Maher, Newsweek, I'll take any of them. I'd love to be in their Rolodex and given the chance to change the minds of those in line at the Walmart.
What's the game plan?
"1) the MSM has finally figured out that 3/4s of American’s are religious, and 2) the Religious Right has lost its monopoly in the public square."
A few thoughts:
1. The MSM often frames all who are "conservative" (in some sense of the word) who pull their heads out of the ground as "Religious Right" (meaning buds of Fallwell, Robertson, et al.). That is highly inaccurate.
2. If the Public Square includes the MSM and Academia, there is no version of the Religious Right that has had a monopoly in at least a generation. Often they've had barely a foothold.
3. The 3/4 of America that are "religious" are a diverse lot. A fair percentage happen to be conservative.
4. To which public do we want our theologians to speak? While certain publics get excited listening to Reinhold Niehbuhrs and Harvey Coxs, other publics hear them as representative of interests and positions alien to their ways of life.
5. Some folks who are trying to fill the void - which you are correct to note - are Tom Wright, Al Mohler, Douglas Wilson. Of course these folks vary in their visibility and to the degree they've been vetted by the MSM gate-keepers.
6. The bigger problem is that the culture of the Public Square has changed in the past 50 years. It used to be more local, more bottom up in orientation. Now it's nationalized (even globalized sometimes) and top down.
Disclosure: I attended the Claremont Conference and also defended Tony Jones' point of view. But the fact that academic theologians need to engage the general culture more directly does not mean that they are useless, not entirely anyway. They (we)help an awful lot of college and grad school students think about religion, and their religion, more critically and (sometimes--increasingly) constructively. Still, Jones is right: we need to weigh into discussions in the public sphere far more, and far more effectively, than we do. Why are we hesitant to do so? One reason, cited at the Claremont conference, is that blogging and being interviewed by the media only permit general, unnuanced statements--we can't add all the qualifications we want to add in order to state our viewpoint just so. But that ignores the fact--abundantly obvious now that people are calling us "useless"--that we won't get our more carefully stated views into the public discussion until we are willing to begin at the beginning with more concise, general ones. The vocation of the academic theologian is based on the assumption that knowledge about religion and religious ideas is relevant to the general culture. So it is time that we, too, become (more) relevant. P.S. As a result of Jones' prodding I've started blogging on Belief.Net. That's 10 points. And I continue my more plodding (careful?) blog at progressivetheology.wordpress.com--for which I request at least 5 points.
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