It's becoming more and more popular to argue that there is something fundamentally inappropriate and/or intolerant about criticizing religion and religious beliefs. It sometimes seems as if no serious and pointed criticisms are permitted against what people believe if those beliefs are part of religion ? regardless of how bigoted or nasty those beliefs are.

People can level very pointed and even vicious criticisms against a movie or play without censure; on the contrary, they'll often be praised for their wit.

Similarly pointed criticisms against a political or social ideology are also readily accepted as part of public debate. If anything even remotely similar is said about religion and religious beliefs, though, and the critic will quickly be tarred as intolerant, bigoted, anti-religion, anti-Christian, and anything else which apologists for religious privilege can come up with.

In God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong, S. T. Joshi explains that one tactic in this defense of religion is to portray membership in a religious community as if it were akin to belonging to a racial minority:

In some senses it appears that religious belief is now regarded as somehow equivalent to racial identity, so that it becomes a kind of "religious racism" for anyone outside of a given religion to criticize it. The history of actual race prejudice is certainly such that one would do almost anything to avoid repeating its errors and injustices. But even the most cursory examination of this analogy of religion to race shows it to be fatally flawed.

...[O]ne surely cannot plausibly maintain that one is ?born? with a specific religious outlook as one is presumably born into a given racial or ethnic group. ... There is no intellectual factor involved in one?s race (that is, one does not choose to belong to a given race by a conscious intellectual decision), whereas there are numerous intellectual factors involved in the choice of one?s religion.

Religion is nothing like race, at least not in contexts like this, so while it may be wrong to attack someone's race that's no basis for arguing that there is anything wrong with attacking a religion. So, if religion can?t be portrayed as something for which criticism is morally objectionable, perhaps it can be portrayed as a mere ?preference,? something over which disagreement is pointless:

It is still less plausible to assert that religion is a kind of preference ? a matter of taste for which there are no grounds for disputation. Indeed, even if such an analogy were true, it would be far more harmful to religion than otherwise. One surely cannot dispute over genuine matters of taste ? say, my preference for chocolate ice cream over your preference for vanilla ice cream ? but it is plainly evident that religion is not one of these matters. If it were, the depth and bitterness of the arguments that have gone on over the centuries would be incomprehensible.

Even more importantly, the notion that one?s religion is merely a preference would shatter the truth-claims that every religion seeks to make. Surely it cannot be declared that my preference for chocolate ice cream is ?truer? than your preference for vanilla ice cream: truth ? in the sense of an accurate conception of the nature of the universe ? does not enter into this matter. But every religion wishes to claim ... that it is indeed ?truer? than every other religion, and certainly truer than irreligion. This notion of religion as a preference is merely another way in which members of various religions seek to protect themselves from intellectual examination of their doctrines and dogmas.

Most devout believers don?t make any explicit claims that their religion is merely a matter of preference ? they are more likely to insist that religion is analogous to race in the sense that outside attacks are morally inappropriate. Joshi explains what that isn?t a valid argument, but at least they are trying to defend a serious belief. Arguing that religion is merely a preference, a matter of taste, does more to undermine religion than anything the critics say. I can?t imagine why anyone would imagine it to be a sound defense of anything worth defending.

Then again, maybe it doesn't matter if this defense undermines the worthiness of that which they are defending, just so long as it causes criticism to stop. If that's the case, then it's a sign of how bankrupt religion has become. Why? Because only a bankrupt ideology would be willing to undermine itself in order to prevent others from criticizing it. Not only is such extreme fear of critique indicative that an ideology has nothing to offer, but the lack of concern that the defense is self-destructive indicates that there's nothing of value left to destroy.

 

Read More Book Notes from the Book Reviews on this site.