This rift is unfortunate, because it upsets a useful institutional and historic balance in American life. Religion has been the supplier of virtue necessary to American exceptionalism. The suggestion here is not of an arid moral arrogance (the "absolutism" so feared by critics) but of reaping material and social benefits from shared virtues that have sustained the American enterprise--from its origins 'til now.
Virtues can vary by religion, but in the U.S. religiously originated virtue by and large organizes behavior toward civic good. Critics such as Richard Dawkins argue that utilitarian virtue can occur without religion. In "The God Delusion," Mr. Dawkins offers his own "new" Ten Commandments, such as "Do not discriminate or oppress" and "Value the future on a timescale longer than your own."
The socially formative virtues I have in mind, most of them expressible in a word and widely understood as a matter of tradition, would include: fortitude, prudence, temperance, justice, charity, hope, integrity, loyalty, honor, filial respect, mercy, diligence, generosity and forbearance. There are others. No one possesses them all, but all should possess some. By now the people of the West are agreed that virtue should allow society to progress. Religion's current critics, of course, say its politics are impeding scientific and medical progress, as with stem cells.
Whatever the truth in that, their own antireligious absolutism risks throwing out the baby with the holy water. The idea that we could get along fine without a public religious presence in American life--dating back at least to the Episcopal congregation in Falls Church--is a risky, untried proposition.
They may think they represent the alternative: a higher, productive rationality. But they are underestimating their own secular competition--the many, often confused cultures loose in the U.S. now. Hip-hop culture, acquisitive consumerism, fashion, hipsterism, street gangs, mystical evironmentalism, Web-centered "reality" cultures. Where's the higher-level thinking here? And by way, the hobgoblin fear of bioengineered food doesn't reside in the American South but in agnostic Europe.
Do virtues matter as ballast in a dynamic, complex society? If yes, where will they come from? Do secularists simply expropriate them from religion? Or do they create their own, such as "do not oppress"?
Atheists and the unchurched undervalue the extent to which they are getting a free ride on the social strength that religious-based virtue provides. It's one thing to write in a book that we don't need them. But I'd rather not run the real-world experiment of navigating without them. And this is why this weekend so many will spend an hour with virtue's originalists.
