Take Religion Seriously

Secularists generally don’t take religion seriously; and secularists just don’t think that people take religion seriously. That is one of the fundamental reasons why the secular West has been so incompetent in its fight against Islamism. Secularists, disproportionately represented in the elite sectors of Western societies, are a small minority of the world’s population who project their own feelings and sensibilities upon the rest of the world’s population.¹ This projection has resulted in wave after wave of so-called experts on Islamism who refuse to acknowledge the obvious—viz., that a primary, not to mention the primary, motivation of Islamists is their strong religious beliefs.

Alas, the world has suffered because of such a tragically misguided and politically correct idea.

These secularists are wrong. Not only are they wrong about the extent to which Islamists are motivated by religion, but they are also wrong for not taking religion seriously. However one judges the truth value of various religious claims, and hence various religions, one should not deny that whether or not these religious propositions are true, and our evaluations of their truth, really matters. Religion matters not only for how we as human beings should live, but also for how we explain human behavior. The greatest minds of the world, religious or otherwise, have always believed this; they have always believed that religion and its claims deserve serious study.

Theodore Noldeke (1836–1930), one of the enormously gifted pioneers of Islamic studies in the West, and who the scholar N.A. Newman labels as “a theological liberal,” states the following: “I have little feeling for regulated Semitic godliness, and yet I know how infinitely important this is for the world, and how much it needs to be studied [emphasis added].”² Secularists would do well to take Noldeke’s words to heart.

Whether we like it or not, religion is, for better or worse, an important part of the ongoing story of humankind. And, like I said above, it matters not only for how we as human beings should live, but also for how we explain human behavior.

That the truth value of religious propositions should affect how we live is fairly obvious. If a perfect being or God exists then it is our duty to worship Him. If Christianity is true then we should be following the precepts of Jesus of Nazareth. If Islam is true then we should live in accordance with the Sharia. If atheism is true and all the religions are wrong, then we shouldn’t be wasting our time and resources praying, tithing, going to churches or synagogues, or making offerings to Vishnu. None of this should be controversial.

It is also fairly obvious that how we judge the truth value of religious propositions matters for how we explain human behavior. For if one judges certain religious propositions to be true or false, then one has certain (religious) beliefs, and beliefs obviously affect our behavior. One need only look as far back as the twentieth century to grasp this truth.

Karl Marx’s beliefs about the way society should be structured eventually seeped their way into the minds of many Russian revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin. And the rest, as they say, is history. Now, whether one believes that people like Lenin applied Marxism, or rather butchered it, is besides the point. The point is that the ideas that were spun into being by the mind of Marx actually had a massive effect on Russia and the entire world. The failed communist and socialist projects of the twentieth century are testament to the power of ideas and beliefs.³ For beliefs have behavioral consequences, and all the more so when the beliefs are religious ones.

Marx famously, or rather notoriously, stated that religion is the opium of the people. Now, whether the standard connotation of this statement is correct is a matter of debate. But what should not be a matter of debate is whether religious beliefs are indeed at least as strong as opiates in their effects. Religious beliefs are powerful, and history testifies to this truth.

A clear historical proof of this comes from the case of the most influential religious figure in the world, a figure who also happened to be the most influential person in the world—Jesus of Nazareth. The historical Jesus scholar and Jesuit priest John Meier titles his series of tomes on Jesus as A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. In the first volume of his tome, which is now standard among university students of the historical Jesus, he writes that Jesus was “a marginal Jew in a marginal province at the eastern end of the Roman Empire,”⁴ and that “Jesus was simply insignificant though the eyes of Jewish and pagan historians of the 1st and early 2d centuries A.D. If he was seen at all, it was at the periphery of their vision.”⁵ Meier is certainly correct. But this “marginal” Jew, a mere nobody as far as contemporary Romans were concerned, a person who was put to the most humiliating and agonizing state execution of the time, viz., crucifixion, would become the most influential person to have ever walked the earth. Millions upon millions would be inspired by his message. The extent of Jesus’ influence was so great that later generations would divide history with him at the center, using the locutions “B.C.” or “before Christ,” and “A.D.,” or “Anno Domini,” which is Latin for “the year of our Lord.” Two thousand years after his ignominious death this Jewish commoner from a marginal province of the Roman Empire is still worshipped by a large percentage of the world’s population, his name still mentioned in the inauguration of the most powerful head of state on earth. Such is the sheer power of religious beliefs.

Another testimony to the power of religious beliefs is provided by the history of Islam, which was started by (arguably) the second-most influential person in the world, who also, by the way, happened to be religious—viz., Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim. Muḥammad very likely believed that he witnessed angelic visions while in Ġār Ḥirāʾ, a cave located on a mountain about two miles from the Ka’ba’ (though it should be noted that the earliest-known biography of Muḥammad recounts that he initially believed that this was a demonic visitation, not an angelic one; indeed the earliest-known biography tells us that he was so frightened by what he initially believed to be a demonic visitation that he was about to commit suicide by throwing himself off a mountain).⁶ For Muslim believers these visions or “revelations” would form the backbone of the last of the three Abrahamic faiths. Motivated by his belief that he was receiving revelations from God, Muḥammad went on to conquer much of Arabia and brought the sundry embattled tribes under the banner of the Islamic umma. After the death of Muḥammad in c. 632, the Arabs conquered a swath of continuous landmass so vast and so quickly that the feat was second only to the impressive Mongol expansion centuries later. The success of such a rapid expansion is at least partially due to the Muslims’ unifying idea of the umma,⁷ or Islamic nation, and their belief that there hardly was a more magnanimous act than dying in battle fi sabeel ilah (for the sake of Allah).

“Death for the sake of Allah” remains something that many Muslims today strive for. Fourteen-hundred years after Muḥammad we witness many Islamists, in their multiple manifestations, all too eager to don on suicide vests and blow themselves up, in their own words, fi sabeel illah. Such suicide bombers, and violent Islamists more generally, are hardly motivated by worldly gain—for they seek to abandon the world and all that is in it. They willingly renounce the luxuries of their previous lives, luxuries that are relatively great if they are foreign European recruits, to go on jihad. These jihadists are motivated by their religious beliefs. They unquestionably believe that they are doing Allah’s will by fighting kuffar (infidels) and bringing the whole world under the sovereignty of Islam so that all religion will be God’s (Q 8:39). They seek to purchase nothing less than paradise through their blood, and the blood of infidels. Such is the sheer power of religious beliefs. It is as strong as an opiate in its effects on the human psyche. Indeed, it is stronger—for opiates would not sufficiently motivate many men to laugh in the face of death or desire to be martyred.

Religion is a serious matter that should be taken seriously.

But many people still do not take it seriously, even the “gurus” that our society turns to for insight regarding religion. Reza Aslan is a prime example of such a guru. He was constantly brought in by media outlets to opine on religion, and CNN recently began to air his new series on religion called “Believer.”

His February 26, 2017 article published by CNN, entitled “Why I am a Muslim,” makes it all too clear that he doesn’t take religion seriously. For in this article he expresses what he has similarly expressed in other media:

Let me be clear, I am Muslim not because I think Islam is “truer” than other religions (it isn’t), but because Islam provides me with the “language” I feel most comfortable with in expressing my faith. It provides me with certain symbols and metaphors for thinking about God that I find useful in making sense of the universe and my place in it [emphasis added].

This is nothing but post-modernism under the veneer of religion. It is once again an instantiation of not taking religion seriously. Religions are not simply sets of linguistic items that merely serve a utilitarian purpose in expressing the ineffable, as Aslan seems to believe. Religions, at bare minimum, offer their answers to life’s greatest questions—about God, meaning, the soul, life after death, and how we should best live. To be a religious believer is therefore, at minimum, to be committed to the truth of a set of religious propositions—and the falsity of their negations (so, e.g., the Muslim is committed to the truth of the proposition that “the Qur’an is a divine revelation,” and thereby to the falsity of the proposition that “the Qur’an is not a divine revelation.” It should go without saying that religions offer different answers to life’s greatest questions, and so they cannot all be true (although they can all be false); to be committed to some religion is to be committed to a set of religious propositions that will logically be incompatible with other ones. Therefore, to claim, as Aslan does, that he is a Muslim and that Islam is not “truer” or more reflective of reality than other religions is simply incoherent. It reflects the words of someone who merely dabbles in religion, but who doesn’t take it seriously.

Aslan’s unseriousness about religion is characteristic among many Western secularists, even those who appear on popular media to opine on religion in general, and Islam and Islamism in particular. Even if many secularists do not adopt the extremely post-modern and unserious outlook of religion as Aslan, they come close. For many secularists tend to view religion as an amorphous whole, each as correct as the other, each as violent as the other, each as ridiculous as the other, and each providing the same amount of utility or disutility to the world. It is this mentality that of not taking religions seriously that blinds them to what fundamentally motivates Islamist groups like ISIS. For Islamists, their commitment to Islam is not a matter of choosing an empty word game; rather, their commitment to Islam expresses what they fundamentally believe about reality.

In the war on Islamism, just like in life in general, we ignore the power of religious ideology to our own detriment. So, for God’s sake, take religion seriously.

Footnotes