Two weeks ago I took my infant daughter to an Easter egg hunt hosted by a family down the street. After the festivities I struck up a conversation with the man whose wife organized the activity and discovered that he had graduated with a Ph.D. in philosophy and was currently writing a book on modernity. I tried to describe my reading plan of the Great Conversation in a few fumbled sentences and was promptly invited inside the house for a conversation that lasted the better part of the afternoon as we discussed everything from Rousseau and Hobbes to Hume and Kant. In the space of a few hours he declared that he was “not a very nice person,” that he was mostly “just some quack sitting in his basement,” and that he “would rather have a smart enemy than a dumb friend.” The role of the novel entered the conversation and he labeled the novel as “nothing more than a grandiose fable.” “Melville,” he said, “Is the only great American novelist. I discount those who say anything about Twain.”
“Surely,” I said, “Twain is worthwhile if only because of the culture he captures and preserves in The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn.”
“If you’re a kid, sure. As an adult, I have no intention of returning to Twain. Melville, though, I’ve read three times. He is like Dostoyevsky in his depth.”
Recently we conversed again and as the subject of God came up, my neighbor pointedly declared that he was not an atheist. I asked how he was able to keep atheism at bay after reading what Lucretius had to say about the immortality of the soul. “I do not,” he explained, “believe in the immortality of the soul or any of that nonsense. I am a Christian, but only because I believe Christianity needs defended.” As the conversation progressed, it became clear that this was not to be a typical discussion of apologetics.
“You see,” my neighbor said, as he refilled his stem-less wine glass with the now half-empty bottle of Black Opal Shiraz, “Modernity has delivered a crushing blow to religion through its declaration that God is dead. God is dead, modernity has proven this. Modernity has spent far too much time laughing at Christianity and it is time to defend the religion.”
“And you believe Christianity to be worth defending?” I asked, finding a pause in his stream of thought.
“Well it certainly is not being defended by the evangelicals—they’re fighting the wrong battle. They’re caught in the literal interpretation debate when the Bible itself says not to take it literally. Here you have a text that was written before the very idea of historical fact came into being and then you have idiots defending it based on historical fact. They can talk about archaeology all they want, but it misses the point. Then they go off and make these creation museums with men riding dinosaurs and they make God look like a fool. I do not like it when men make God look like a fool.”
“So your reason for defending the religion is simply because it is not being defended well?”
“Look,” he said, “It needs to be defended because it has, at its core, a cool idea. I mean here you have a religion that involves God, one God, becoming human. Socrates made it clear in his dialogue with Euthyphro that polytheism is idiotic—what if the gods disagree? Doesn’t that negate the very idea of God if there are multiple ones? Monotheism is the only logical religion in light of Plato’s Dialogues. And of the monotheistic religions, Christianity has the coolest idea. If God can become man, then doesn’t it innately suggest that man can become God? If the word takes flesh through God descending, then it suggests that man can ascend to God. I like that.”
“Where does Christianity suggest that sort of transcendence?”
“This is not evangelical Christianity. You don’t have to be an evangelical to be a Christian—you have to separate yourself from Aristotle’s view that Fable is tied to poetry. Release that. Fable now has a philosophical, or at least much broader meaning. This is the mythos. This is why I defend the religion.”
“Normally,” I said, “When people defend Christianity, it boils down to a fear for the afterlife. This is unlike most defenses of the religion I’ve heard—it sounds as if you are defending it merely to spite modernity.”
“No one knows about the afterlife, and besides that, what does it matter? Death doesn’t scare me. Boredom terrifies me more than death—I’d rather die than be bored. And this society bores me. Modernity, in killing God, has killed our souls. Without a soul, we no longer have a mythos, a culture. With no mythos, we have given ourselves over to consumerism. And I loath consumerism.”
“You’re preaching to the choir now,” I said.
“I’m not suggesting we hate or despise the consumers, but rather hate consumerism which has taken them over. The demon of consumerism, to borrow an idea from our lost mythos.”
“Now you’re sounding evangelical with the ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ concept.”
“Exactly,” he said, “‘Love the sinner, hate the sin’—and the sin is consumerism. It brings me back to my defense of Christianity. Why do I defend it? Because we need mythos, and Christianity can bring it back.”
“If modernity killed the soul, how can mythos return?”
“Modernity killed the soul in part by accident. In killing God, the soul died along with it, because religion is tied to art and beauty and culture. Modernity is here to stay, and although it will eventually be replaced just as everything that has come before it from the Hellenistic world to pre-modernity, it is here for now. But in defending Christianity, we change the outgrowth of modernity. We get rid of consumerism. If we can fix that, we can foster the return of mythos. We need our mythos, and I defend Christianity because I believe Christianity can bring back the mythos we have lost. Without art, without culture, we are nothing.”
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