Why Religion Matters: the Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief.

by Huston Smith (New York, NY: Harper San Francisco, 2001); 290 pp; $14.95 paper.

Does religion matter? Well, yes. Religion or religions have mattered in many different ways in every society throughout history. Sometimes they are associated with altruism, good will, sound ethics, benevolence, social responsibility, justice, and love. At other times they are joined with intolerance, bigotry, fanaticism, oppression, sexism, ethnocentrism, persecution, ignorance, and superstition. But you will find little or none of this correlation in Why Religion Matters, the latest book by Huston Smith--a noted scholar of world religions.

What you will find in Why Religion Matters is an abstract and rather dull discourse on Smith's four vertical, ranked categories of religion: mysticism, polytheism, monotheism, and his particular bete noir, naturalism (which he sometimes calls atheism). He distills these four groups into "the two Big Pictures," one offered by modern science--of which he takes a dim view--and the other by the many varieties of traditional supernaturalism. Naturalism is to Smith much as secular humanism is to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Smith scoffs at the naturalism expressed by Carl Sagan in his PBS series Cosmos. He also buys into the notion that American society is hostile to religion, which he seems to have borrowed largely from the curiously popular writer Stephen Carter and that is propagated by the current occupant of the White House and myriad religious right figures.

At the end of his book Smith makes the astonishing assertion that "theodicy, which wrestles with the problem of evil, is the Gibraltar on which every rationalistic system eventually founders." Serious thinkers, however, would say that the problem of evil and the existence of a beneficent deity give more Excedrin headaches to theologians than to naturalists.

Smith lectured on "God, the Incredible Surmise" before a large Unitarian Universalist congregation in Virginia on December 6, 2002. I was one of the three people invited to respond. I challenged Smith's four vertical categories as less than useful and made the point that such columnizing--as in the usual ways of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Humanists, and others--had little relation to reality. Rather, the division should be thought of as horizontal, with moderate, liberal, and progressive Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Humanists, and others being and working together on social justice and other issues toward one pole; while, toward the other pole, are people of fundamentalist inclinations across the religious spectrum who basically dislike one another for theological reasons but who find common cause on school vouchers, Bush's faith-based initiative, antiabortion crusades, school prayer, and other items on the religious right agenda.

As for societal hostility toward religion, I pointed out that virtually all of the nearly 2,000 religious radio and television stations in the United States are controlled by the religious right and evangelicals, and that over 90 percent of members of Congress claim a Christian religious affiliation. Smith countered that the "chattering classes," the New York Review of Books, and academia are unfriendly to religion, which of course is something of an exaggeration.

To try to get a better grasp of Smith's thinking, I consulted his previous book, published in 2000, entitled Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic ["God-containing" or "enabling"] Plants and Chemicals. In reading this I learned that Smith flipflopped as a college undergraduate from naturalism to mysticism, expressing a preference for Aldous Huxley over his humanist brother Julian and referring to John Dewey as the "Jesus" of naturalism.

Digging further, I found this statement in Smith's 1991 book The World's Religions: "The project of becoming fully human involves transcending, sequentially, egoism, nepotism, parochialism, ethnocentrism, and chauvinistic nationalism, and (we should now add) self-sufficient humanism." Smith's understanding of humanism, which is scarcely mentioned in his world religions book, is somewhat out of skew--as in Why Religion Matters he writes that Isaac Asimov and John Ciardi were signers of the 1933 Humanist Manifesto (when Asimov was thirteen years old and Ciardi seventeen). However, in his 1991 world religions book he writes that the Disciples of Christ evolved into the United Church of Christ, which makes as much sense as saying Baptists turned into Episcopalians. Not only does Smith's new book use a lot of space attacking evolution, but on page 254 he makes this remarkable assertion: "If a two-year-old drops her ice-cream cone, that tragedy is the end of the world for her.... Can there be an understanding of life so staggering in its immensity that, in comparison to it, even gulags and the Holocaust seem like dropped ice-cream cones?" How can anyone who makes such a statement be taken seriously as an authority on how religion matters?

Edd Doerr is president of the Americans for Religious Liberty.