Derb's not a Christian anymore

Via Ross Douthat, I came upon yet another reason why I think John Derbyshire is one of the most interesting conservative writers working today: his long self-interview about why he lost his religious faith. An admirable quality of Derb's is his blunt honesty: as far as I can tell, he never shies away from saying what he thinks, even when it gets him into hot water. Good. It makes him unpredictable, and even when you don't agree with him, you at least have the impression that there is a real, thinking, contrarian human being behind those words (and as I used to work at NR, I can tell you that he is a gentleman, and I regret that he only came to the office every couple of weeks for the meeting, ergo I didn't get to spend a lot of time with him).

Anyway, I highly recommend his self-interview, because even though I cannot endorse his conclusions, he writes about them humanely and engagingly. I particularly liked his discussion of the social utility of religion, which is widely understood, but also the limits of same, which is uncomfortable for many of us religious people on the Right to admit or to discuss. Here's Derb:

I have now come to think that it really makes no difference, net-net. You can point to people who were improved by faith, but you can also see people made worse by it. Anyone want to argue that, say, Mohammed Atta was made a better person by his faith? All right, when Americans say “religion” they mean Christianity 99 percent of the time. So: Can Christianity make you a worse person? I’m sure it can. If you’re a person with, for example, a self-righteous conviction of your own moral superiority, well, getting religion is just going to inflame that conviction. Again, I know cases, and I’m sure you do too. The exhortations to humility that you find in all religions seem to be the most difficult teaching for people to take on board. Mostly, I think it makes no difference. Evelyn Waugh would have been no more obnoxious as an atheist.

And then there are some of those discomfiting facts about human groups. Taking the population of these United States, for example, the least religious major group, by ancestry, is Americans of East Asian stock. The most religious is African Americans. All the indices of dysfunction and misbehavior, however, go the other way, with Asian Americans getting into least trouble and African Americans most. What’s that all about?

In the end, I think I’ve now arrived at this position: An individual might be made better by faith, or worse. Overall, taking society at large, I think it averages out to zero.

But he goes on to say he believes that religion is a natural instinct in humans, that it's just there, like the sexual urge. As with sex, when a society can figure out how to corral the religious instinct into socially constructive forms, religion can be judged good -- and when not, not. I think that's true, though as a believer I would say there's the matter of truth -- but to be fair, he's discussing religion as a social phenomenon.

What this discussion does, though, is to violate the generic American taboo against criticizing religion per se. We are a religious country in the sense that many people have religious impulses, and they are more or less accomodated in the public square. But there's this whole civic religion thing, in which religion is generally understood to be a public good (Kinky Friedman, running now for Texas governor, likes to sign off by gently wisecracking, "May the God of your choice bless you."). It ain't necessarily so. You won't be surprised to find that I'm favorably inclined toward the religious as a general matter, but the older I've gotten, the more I've come to see how religion can serve to fix a bad person in his or her patterns of behavior. I'm thinking of the people I've encountered, clerics and laymen, who have in various ways justified their wicked behavior by cloaking it in a mantle of religiosity ("Nobody'll screw you like a brother in Christ," a cynical Texas Baptist of my acquaintance remarked, from personal experience). This is kind of what I was getting at not long ago when I talked about how suspicious I get whenever someone starts a sentence with, "God told me...". And it is very interesting, Derb's point, about the inverse relationship between personal religiosity and moral self-discipline regarding the African-American and Chinese communities in America.

Finally, Derb is excellent here (emphasis mine):

Q. Can an irreligious person really be a conservative?

A. Of course he can. The essence of modern conservatism is the belief in limited government power, respect for traditional values, patriotism, and strong national defense. The only one of those that gets snagged on religion is the second. But while traditional Western society has had a religious background, it has usually made room, at all points of the political spectrum, for unbelievers. Plenty of great names in the Western cultural tradition have been irreligious. Mark Twain, America’s greatest writer, was a complete atheist; and one has one’s doubts about Shakespeare. In any case, as Bill Buckley has pointed out somewhere, the key word is respect. Respect for traditional values implies respect for religious belief, even if you don’t share it.

The word the Romans used is piety. It implies a sense of respect for that which is greater than ourselves. God (or at least the idea of God, which as Derb observes is so great and universal a part of the human experience that due respect must be paid). Nature. Ancestors. That's what I find so worrying about the modern spirit, which you can find among conservatives as well as liberals, the Godly as well as the godless: impiety, by which I mean the sense that we have the right to remake the world anew, according to our own designs, because we can (or think we can).