On the one hand, Mr. de Botton admirably identifies a few of the central functions of religion that humanity seems unable to address fully without it:
Religion serves two central needs that secular society has not been able to meet with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in harmonious communities, despite our deeply-rooted selfish and violent impulses; second, the need to cope with the pain that arises from professional failure, troubled relationships, the death of loved ones and our own decay and demise.Put differently, religion recognizes in typically frank ways that human relationships are fractured and that this is troubling to humans (mentally, emotionally, physically) as reflected in their dispositions and actions.
Mr. de Botton seeks to focus not on the question of whether a particular religion is true. (He finds this question boring.) Instead, he prefers to focus on how aspects of religious belief and practice may be applied across the board to those who have no interest in or commitment to a particular religion. This approach to religion strikes me as potentially valuable within limits but simultaneously amiss at a deep level.
It is valuable because reflecting on what atheists -- or secular society, if you prefer -- are missing by rejecting certain forms of religious belief and practice points to some core elements of humanity. Mr. de Botton is a perceptive observer of religious practice and its place in the lives of the faithful. He seeks to appropriate these for fellow atheists, and he is often discerning. In admitting that life, to some extent, is incomplete when relationships are broken, when community is lacking, when selfishness governs, when violence occurs, when impulses dominate, when death hurts, when creation's corruptibility crushes one's spirit, when the thought of dying amid all of the foregoing terrifies -- this is a real service to understanding humanity, to comprehending who we are as humans, and to fathoming what the governing contours of this world really are.
Something, or rather, many things indeed are fundamentally not right in the world. Religion candidly recognizes this. (Well, it does when it is not the so-called "religion" of hucksters like Joel Osteen.) Religion also seeks to provide fundamental solutions to the problems. Or at least it variously shares its understanding of how these problems are rectified and, as the case may be, by whom.
But this approach to religion also strikes me as deeply amiss. When atheists seek or find value in religion simply for repairing harmony in communities, coping with professional failure, and allaying grief over the death of a loved one, are they really understanding how to use religion as a guide for non-believers in its deepest, most basic, or even most utilitarian sense? Is this what religion offers uniquely (and offers to theists and atheists alike), or is this secular self-help in religious garb?
What is not clear is whether Mr. de Botton and others like him ultimately desire a superior, more profound goal to their lives as a reason for drawing upon religion in the first place, or whether they wish for additional means to pursue the same goals. His book title suggests the latter, but his discontent with life absent some forms of religion makes me wonder about the former. This is an important distinction because it is at least arguable that the most basic purpose of religion is to reorient one to the proper ends, not simply to offer different means.
On the one hand, atheists of the sort that are Mr. de Botton's intended readers agree with religious theists of various types that life in this world has missed the mark, that it is not as it ought to be; on the other hand, the secular-minded only go half-way. If I as an atheist concur with a theist that people and this world are broken, but if I reject the theistic (or religious) understandings of how all of these broken things are ultimately set right and what path I should therefore pursue, then have I just borrowed religious capital without actually investing it in the thing that concerns me so much about the world, namely, that there be some real fix for this widespread brokenness that, in most major religions, is not found strictly within humans and their activity?
Mr. de Botton highlights education, holistic understandings of personhood, community, arts and museums, and pilgrimages as various benefits that religion provides to society and to human experience. These things are good. They are (contrary to the claims of some new atheists) actually pretty lasting, salutary, and edifying contributions. But these things are not most basically that with which religion is concerned, the core purpose for which religion exists, are they? The problems with which religion is primarily concerned go much deeper than any of those effects prompted by a religious worldview.
Driving down the street the other day, I saw a sign in front of a church, one of those with the adjustable lettering. What I read seemed to be applicable to Mr. de Botton's new book and this larger religion-for-atheists phenomenon: "God created humans in his image, and then humans returned the favor." Isn't that what is really going on here if atheists are creating their own de facto religion from the actual religious belief and practice of others? Is this not humanist syncretism?
Humanist syncretism may very well have a place in the panoply of world religions. In fact, it has been there from the very beginning. One religion has affinities with and borrows from another. The ultilitarian syncretism that Mr. de Botton outlines (appropriating religious values and practices for the non-religious) can shed light on humanity's struggles, needs, desires, and activities. But this raises a question: Will this approach fully afford rest for the non-believers' apparent restlessness with contemporary life that now prompts them to mine religious capital?
The widespread interest in the subject of religion for atheists, one could argue, seems to be in having God without God, religion without rules, fellowship without binding commitment, comfort without guilt. It is cafeteria utilitarianism without a helping of meat.
I suspect that Mr. de Botton, who has made some penetrating observations from which the atheist and theist can both learn, would object to such a construal of his well-articulated and often insightful project. I am, however, confident that we could have a respectful, lively conversation about why I think those for whom he writes will misuse religion if -- in effect creating their own -- they seek to appropriate religion's facades without its foundations.
