George Packard’s quietly brutal takedown of Ross Douthat’s Believe defines and defends secular liberalism in an especially engaging way. His recital of the Creed (see above) is both inspiring and resolute, and he quite correctly opens the review with it, so that readers can understand right off the bat what he brings to Christian apologetics like Douthat’s. Packer makes clear that he understands, given existential panic and the tragedies of life, the emotional appeal of redemptive faith; he makes just as clear that what seem to him consoling fictions remain fictions, and thus fail to console, much less make life meaningful. We make life meaningful.
The rational, speculative approach of Believe comes to an end in its last pages, when the authoritarianism that underlies Douthat’s, and perhaps all, religion, suddenly shows its face. He adopts a darker tone as he asks what you will do if you’ve guessed wrong—if God turns out to exist and is waiting on the other side to punish you for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book.
That’s nice – for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book – and it reminds us of the amusing tendency among some believers to really let nonbelievers have it.
[Douthat] repeatedly sneers at “Official Knowledge,” the capital letters suggesting that scientific materialism is some sort of conspiracy of the legacy media and the deep state. He accuses atheists of taking the easy way out, of claiming to be serious grown-ups when their worldview is irresponsible and childish: “It is the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human.” But even in Douthat’s own account, religion is driven by hedonistic self-interest, for it promises an escape from the suffering of this world, and it conditions the offer on a desire to avoid pain in the next. The humanist view that we have only one another in an instant of eternity—that this life, with all its heartache, is all we’re given—raises the stakes of love and imposes sacrifice beyond anything imaginable to a believer in the afterlife.
I wish Packer had mentioned something like Camus’ Lyrical Essays, full of lucid apprehensions of a world which is ours and ours alone.