If you’re tired of their arguments, you mightwant to entertain the elemental questions of existence from Frank Schaefer’sperspective. His latest book, PatienceWith God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism) (publishedby Da Capo) is an engagingly ardent, often humorous critique of thecontemporary marketplace of bad ideas, Richard Dawkins through Rick Warren.Dawkins and Warren, by the way, are outstanding targets for Schaefer’s scornfor their naked hucksterism, the gleeful merchandizing of their tiresomemaxims. Schaefer concludes that the New Atheists and Evangelical Christiansneed each other. The followers in both camps need to feel oppressed and theirleaders need their fat lecture fees.
In keeping with his campaign to break down theclichés that get in the way of open and intelligent thinking, Schaefer ishimself an anti-cliché. He’s the opposite of those old saws that a conservativeis a liberal mugged by reality or that people inevitably drift rightward asthey march through adulthood toward the grave. Thirty years ago Schaefer was ayouthful leader in the emerging “Moral Majority” and “Christian Right.” ButSchaefer became a conservative mugged by the paradox of reality and inchedleftward as he grew into maturity. He dropped Evangelical Christianity forEastern Orthodoxy. He voted for Obama.
Given his background, Schaefer is familiar withthe fundamentalist mindset and recognizes its adherence to narrow principleeven in places where religion never treads. Or perhaps Dawkins and his ilk, bytrying to cut the vastness of existence and experience to fit the Procrusteanbed of their theories, have created a religion without God, resting on dogmaticassumptions only a heretic would challenge? But as Schaefer points out, it’s hard to know what to say about Dawkins’bestseller, The God Delusion, exceptthat it’s an advertisement for his website, which turns out to be a cybermallof Dawkins memorabilia. That the dean of the New Atheists rivals anytelevangelist as a dealer in junk merchandise brings us around again toSchaefer’s main argument: Enough already with both sides!
The egomaniacs encountered on the pages of Patience withGod are enough to make one lose patience with humanity. Schaefertakes on George W. Bush’s favorite atheist, Christopher Hitchens, a Trotskyitewho followed the well-rutted road of the neo-conservatives until he became acheerleader for the Iraq invasion and a conduit for conspiracy theories aboutthe Clintons. And then there is the cult of personality surrounding thepurpose-driven Rick Warren, the idol of fundamentalist pastors “in much thesame way that a wedding singer grinding out tunes in some godforsaken HolidayInn lounge would rather be Bono.”
The fundamentalist mindset, with its tendency topillory opponents and organize thought posses to enforce one particularworldview or another, is a tendency that can be found in any belief system.Schaefer presents the faith he eventually embraced not as the answer foreverything, but as an aesthetically, philosophically and historically richparadigm that freed his imagination and helped him overcome the easy anddangerous division of humanity into the “saved” and the “lost”language echoedby Dawkins, not to mention Hitler, Stalin and the Inquisition.
“One is freed from the illusion of certainty,”he writes of his spiritual journey, as well as the life of reflection andquestioning, the skepticism of humility, that are the marks of an enlightenedmind in any culture, religious or non-religious.
