Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  Today, when patterns of mutual trust are quite securely established in modern democratic states independently of any shared religious belief, the bristling defenses of religions against corrosive doubt begin to look vestigial, like fossil traces of an earlier epoch. We no longer need God the Policeman to create a climate in which we can make promises and conduct human affairs on their basis, but He lives on in legal oaths—and in the imaginations of many who are terrified of the prospect of abandoning religion.

  But reward in heaven is not the only—and certainly not the best—inspirational theme in religious doctrine. The God who is watching you need not be seen to be either list-making Santa or Orwell’s Big Brother, but instead a hero or “role model,” as we say today, someone to emulate rather than fear. If God is just, and merciful, and forgiving, and loving, and the most wonderful Being imaginable, then anyone who loves God should want to be just, and merciful, and forgiving, and loving, for goodness’ sake. Blurring these two very different views of God’s motivating role into one is yet another casualty of the gauze curtains of soft-focus veneration through which we traditionally inspect religion.

  Still, there may be the best of (free-floating) reasons for not peering too closely at these fine differences between doctrines. Why create dissension where none need exist? Don’t rock the boat. It is widely agreed that all religions provide social infrastructures for creating and maintaining moral teamwork. Perhaps their value as organizers and amplifiers of good intentions far outweighs any deficits created by the putative incoherence created by contradictions between (some of) their doctrines. Perhaps it would be foolish perfectionism, and an act of moral ineptitude, to distract ourselves with minor conflicts of dogma when there is so much work to be done making the world a better place.

  This is a persuasive claim, but it has the disadvantage of undercutting itself somewhat in public, since it amounts to making the acknowledgment that “good as we are, we aren’t perfect, but we have more important things to do than fix our foundations”—a modest admission that jars with the traditional claims of purity that religions find irresistible. Moreover, any such lapses from absolutism threaten to undermine the chief psychological source of the very organizational power that is being recognized. Today’s religious warriors may be too sophisticated to expect their God to stop the bullets in midair at their behest, but their belief in the absolute rightness of their cause may well be a crucial ingredient in creating the calm with which truly effective soldiers go into battle. As William James puts it:

  Whoever not only says, but feels, “God’s will be done,” is mailed [armored] against every weakness; and the whole historic array of martyrs, missionaries, and religious reformers is there to prove the tranquil-mindedness, under naturally agitating or distressing circumstances, which self-surrender brings. [1902, p. 285]

  This heroic state of mind does not harmonize well with secular modesty, and though many think it is true that religious fanatics make the most reliable soldiers, we may well wonder whether, all things considered, James is right when he goes on to note (quoting “a clear-headed Austrian officer”), “Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness” (p. 366). Here is a morally relevant question well worth careful empirical investigation: can a secular armed force, motivated in the main by a love of liberty or democracy, not of God (or Allah), maintain its credibility, and hence its effectiveness, with a minimum of bloodshed, against an army of fanatics? Until we know the answer, we risk being blackmailed by sheer fear into indoctrinating the troops with barbarism. It will take a combination of courage and wise planning—and maybe a large helping of luck—even to do the research needed to find out. But the alternative is even more grim: perpetuating the fatal downward spiral of “righteous” wars, fought by misguided young people sent into dubious battle by leaders who don’t really believe the myths that sustain those who are risking their lives. As the Grand Inquisitor says in Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, “Beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.”

  There is a further allure for the zealot, and it is probably—who knows?—a more robust motivator than the prospect of heavenly reward: the license to kill (to adapt Ian Fleming’s all-too-appealing fantasy about the official status of James Bond). Some people, it seems—who knows?—are just bloodthirsty, or thrill-seeking, and as our customs become ever more civilized and opposed to violence, such people are highly motivated to find a cause that can provide them with a “moral” justification for their swashbuckling, whether it is “liberating” laboratory animals (whose subsequent welfare seems not to motivate the activists sufficiently), avenging Ruby Ridge with the Oklahoma City bombing, murdering doctors who perform abortions, sending anthrax to “evil” federal employees, murdering an innocent person under cover of fatwa, achieving martyrdom in jihad, or becoming a “settler” (armed to the teeth) in the West Bank territory. Religion may well not be the root cause of this dangerous yearning; the Hollywood-inspired desire to lead an adventurous and hence “meaningful” life may play a larger role in multiplying the number of young people who decide to frame their lives in such terms. But religions are certainly the most prolific source of the “moral certainties” and “absolutes” that such zealotry depends on. And although people who can see the shades of gray are less apt to be able to find excuses for committing criminal acts themselves, they are also, today, all too likely to see devout religious conviction as a significantly mitigating factor when meting out punishment. (We can hope that this will change swiftly if given sufficient public attention. We used to regard drunks as somewhat diminished in their responsibility for their actions—they were too drunk to know what they were doing, after all—but we now see them, and the bartenders who served them, as fully responsible. We need to spread the word that religious intoxication is no excuse either.)

  2 Is religion what gives meaning to your life?

  A puppet of the gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque.

  —Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers

  Ohhh, McTavish is dead and his brother don’t know it;

  His brother is dead and McTavish don’t know it.

  They’re both of them dead and they’re in the same bed,

  And neither one knows that the other is dead!

  —Lyrics to the “Irish Washerwoman” jig

  According to surveys, most of the people in the world say that religion is very important in their lives. (See, e.g., the Web site of the Pew Research Center, http://people-press.org/.) Many of these people would say that without their religion their lives would be meaningless. It’s tempting just to take them at their word, to declare that in that case there is really nothing more to be said—and tiptoe away. Who would want to interfere with whatever it is that gives their lives meaning? But if we do that, we willfully ignore some serious questions. Can just any religion give lives their meaning, in a way that we should honor and respect? What about people who fall into the clutches of cult leaders, or who are duped into giving their life savings to religious con artists? Do their lives still have meaning even though their particular “religion” is a fraud?

  In Marjoe, the 1972 documentary about the bogus evangelist Marjoe Gortner mentioned in chapter 6, we see poor people emptying their wallets and purses into the collection plate, their eyes glistening with tears of joy, thrilled to be getting “salvation” from this charismatic phony. The question that has been troubling me ever since I saw the film when it first came out is: who is committing the more reprehensible act—Marjoe Gortner, who lies to these people in order to get their money, or the filmmakers who expose these lies (with Gortnerâ
€™s enthusiastic complicity), thereby robbing these good folk of the meaning they thought they had found for their lives? Were they not getting their money’s worth and then some before the filmmakers came along? Consider their lives (I am imagining these details, which are not in the documentary): Sam is a high-school dropout, pumping gas at the station at the crossroads and hoping someday to buy a motorcycle; he is a Dallas Cowboys fan, and likes to have a few beers while watching the games on TV. Lucille, who never married, is in charge of the night-shift shelf-stockers at the local supermarket and lives in the modest house she has always lived in, caring for her aged mother; they follow the soap operas together. No adventurous opportunities beckon in the futures of Sam or Lucille, or most of the others in the blissful congregation, but they have now been put in direct contact with Jesus and are now saved for eternity, beloved members in good standing of the community of the born-again. They have turned over a new leaf, in a most dramatic ceremony, and they face their otherwise uninspiring lives refreshed and uplifted. Their lives now tell a story, and it’s a chapter of the Greatest Story Ever Told. Can you imagine anything else they could buy with those twenty-dollar bills they deposit in the collection plate that would be remotely as valuable to them?

  Certainly, comes the reply. They could donate their money to a religion that was honest, and that actually used their sacrifices to help others who were still needier. Or they could join any secular organization that put their free time, energy, and money to effective use in ameliorating some of the world’s ills. Perhaps the main reason that religions do most of the heavy lifting in large parts of America is that people really do want to help others—and secular organizations have failed to compete with religions for the allegiance of ordinary people. That’s important, but it’s the easy part of the answer, leaving untouched the hard part: what should we do about those we honestly think are being conned? Should we leave them to their comforting illusions or blow the whistle? I have eventually come to the tentative conclusion that Marjoe Gortner and his filmmaking collaborators performed a great public service in spite of the pain and humiliation the film no doubt caused to many basically innocent people, but further details, or just further reflection on the details that are known, might lead me to change my mind.

  Dilemmas like this are all too familiar in somewhat different contexts, of course. Should the sweet old lady in the nursing home be told that her son has just been sent to prison? Should the awkward twelve-year-old boy who wasn’t cut from the baseball team be told about the arm-twisting by all the parents that persuaded the coach to keep him on the squad? In spite of ferocious differences of opinion about other moral issues, there seems to be something approaching consensus that it is cruel and malicious to interfere with the life-enhancing illusions of others—unless those illusions are themselves the cause of even greater ills. The disagreements come over what these greater ills might be—and this has led to the breakdown of the whole rationale. Keeping secrets from people for their own good can often be wise, but it takes only one person to give away a secret, and since there are disagreements about which cases warrant discretion, the result is an unsavory miasma of hypocrisy, lies, and frantic but fruitless attempts at distraction.

  What if Marjoe Gortner were to con a cadre of sincere evangelical preachers into doing his dirty work for him? Would their personal innocence change the equation and give genuine meaning to the lives of those whose sacrifices they encouraged and collected? For that matter, aren’t all evangelical preachers just as false as Marjoe Gortner? Certainly Muslims think so, even though they are generally too discreet to say it. And Catholics think that Jews are just as deluded, and Protestants think that Catholics are wasting their time and energy on a largely false religion, and so forth. All Muslims? All Catholics? All Protestants? All Jews? Of course not. There are vocal minorities in every faith who blurt it out, like the Catholic movie star Mel Gibson, who was interviewed by Peter Boyer (2003) in a profile in The New Yorker. Boyer asked him if Protestants are denied eternal salvation.

  “There is no salvation for those outside the Church,” Gibson replied. “I believe it.” He explained: “Put it this way. My wife is a saint. She’s a much better person than I am. Honestly. She’s, like, Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it’s just not fair if she doesn’t make it, she’s better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it.”

  Such remarks deeply embarrass two groups of Catholics: those who believe it but think it is best left unsaid, and those who don’t believe it at all—no matter what “the chair” may pronounce. And which group of Catholics is larger, or more influential? That is utterly unknown and currently unknowable, a part of the unsavory miasma.

  It is equally unknown how many Muslims truly believe that all infidels and especially kafirs (apostates from Islam) deserve death, which is what the Koran (4:89) undeniably says. Johannes Jansen (1997, p. 23) points out that in earlier times Judaism (see Deuteronomy 18:20) and Christianity (see Acts 3:23) also regarded apostasy as a capital offense, but of the Abrahamic faiths, Islam stands alone in its inability to renounce this barbaric doctrine convincingly. The Koran does not explicitly commend killing apostates, but the hadith literature (the narrations of the life of the Prophet) certainly does. Most Muslims, I would guess, are sincere in their insistence that the hadith injunction that apostates are to be killed is to be disregarded, but it’s disconcerting, to say the least, that fear of being regarded as an apostate is apparently a major motivation in the Islamic world. As Jansen puts it, “There can be no Hare Krishna or Baghwan, no Scientology, Mormonism or Transcendental Meditation in Mecca or Cairo. Within the world of Islam religious renewal has to steer clear of anything that implies or suggests apostasy” (pp. 88–89). So it is not just we outsiders who are left guessing. Even Muslims “on the inside” really don’t know what Muslims think about apostasy—they mostly aren’t prepared to bet their lives on it, which is the surest sign of belief, as we saw in chapter 8.

  Here, then, we see a different face of the epistemological problem we encountered in chapter 8, on belief in belief. There we discovered that it is all but impossible to distinguish those who genuinely believe and those who (merely) believe in belief, since the beliefs in question are conveniently removed from the world of action. Now we see that one reason, free-floating or not, for such systematically masked creeds is to avoid—or at least postpone—the collision between contradictory creeds that would otherwise oblige the devout to behave far more intolerantly than most people today want to behave. (It is always worth reminding ourselves that not so very long ago people were banished, tortured, and even executed for heresy and apostasy in the most “civilized” corners of Christian Europe.)

  So what is the prevailing attitude today among those who call themselves religious but vigorously advocate tolerance? There are three main options, ranging from the disingenuous Machiavellian—

  1. As a matter of political strategy, the time is not ripe for candid declarations of religious superiority, so we should temporize and let sleeping dogs lie in hopes that those of other faiths can gently be brought around over the centuries.

  —through truly tolerant Eisenhowerian “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply held religious belief—and I don’t care what it is”—

  2. It really doesn’t matter which religion you swear allegiance to, as long as you have some religion.

  —to the even milder Moynihanian benign neglect—

  3. Religion is just too dear to too many to think of discarding, even though it really doesn’t do any good and is simply an empty historical legacy we can afford to maintain until it quietly extinguishes itself sometime in the distant and unforeseeable future.

  It is no use asking people which they choose, since both extrem
es are so undiplomatic we can predict in advance that most people will go for some version of ecumenical tolerance whether they believe it or not. (It’s just like Sir Maurice Oldfield’s predictable denunciation of my subversive hypothesis about Kim Philby.)

  We’ve got ourselves caught in a hypocrisy trap, and there is no clear path out. Are we like the families in which the adults go through all the motions of believing in Santa Claus for the sake of the kids, and the kids all pretend still to believe in Santa Claus so as not to spoil the adults’ fun? If only our current predicament were as innocuous and even comical as that! In the adult world of religion, people are dying and killing, with the moderates cowed into silence by the intransigence of the radicals in their own faiths, and many afraid to acknowledge what they actually believe for fear of breaking Granny’s heart, or offending their neighbors to the point of getting run out of town, or worse.