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Description
ROGER SCRUTON'S autobiography is called Gentle Regrets. His Prospect article last August responding to Christopher Hitchens and Co might well have been called "Gentle Remonstrances". It's true that in one place he so far loses patience with his adversary as to call God is Not Great a "relentlessly one-sided diatribe", but that's about as rough as the language gets: otherwise he is scrupulously polite to Hitchens, who he describes as "an intelligent and widely read man".
With the title "The Sacred and the Human", the article itself contains much of interest to those of moderate secular views like myself, who wish Western civilisation well, and who fear for its future. Opposing the new pulpit atheists, and the view promoted by Hitchens and Dawkins that religion "poisons everything" and provokes conflict, aggression and war, Scruton writes that "religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it. The violence comes from another source, and there is no society without it [that is, without religion] since it comes from the very attempt of human beings to live together."
For Christians familiar with the Sermon on the Mount this will hardly come as a surprise. But perhaps feeling that his opponents need to be overawed, and hoping to put them in their place, Scruton proceeds to summon an army of post-Enlightenment European thinkers in support of his argument: Jacobi, Schiller, Schelling, C.F. Dupuis (author of Origine de Tousles Cultes, ou Religion Universelle, 1795), Georg Creuzer (author of Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Volker, 1810-12), Hegel, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Frazer, Durkheim, Freud, not to mention more recent writers like Georges Bataille and Mircea Eliade, along with his favourite contemporary religious theorist Rene Girard (author of La Violence et le Sacre).
What effect all this had on the enemy is hard to say (though one reader at least was stunned by the names alone). Yet it's questionable whether that's how to deal with Hitchdawk and Co. Indeed, it may be exactly the sort of abstract over-intellectualised treatment of religious matters that plays into their hands. Remember--the only reason we're concerned at all about the subject of "religion and violence" is because of one specific religion, Islam, and because of the confused and inadequate response to its murderous depredations by an all-too-accommodating Western Christian host. Why enlarge and obfuscate matters by avoiding specifics and talking instead about the history of all religious practices, in toto, from the Fall of Man to the fall of Baghdad?
Near the start of his article Scruton expresses the opinion that in order to counter the dogmatic certainties of the atheist camp three... |
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