What drives social justice?
Author | Buntz, Samuel |
Position | Secular Faith: How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics - Book review |
Author Mark Smith says religion lags behind culture. Maybe it is the other way around.
Secular Faith: How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics
by Mark A. Smith
University of Chicago Press, 288 pp.
In April 2016, Pope Francis granted priests permission to allow divorced or remarried parishioners to begin receiving communion. Hopeful progressives who thought the pope might recognize gay marriage or allow women to join the priesthood were doubtless disappointed at this comparatively meager gain. But history advances in small steps, prior to the occasional quantum leap. To the anxious religious liberal, Mark A. Smith, professor of political science and adjunct professor of comparative religion at the University of Washington, comes bearing good news--if one is willing to accept the argument underpinning his message. While a religious person could agree with Smith's assertions about the inevitability of progress, she might wince at his claim that religion drags along behind secular culture--like a little brother stiffly bundled into a snowsuit, hurrying to keep up--with no progressive impulse of its own.
Smith's Secular Faith: How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics is an optimistic book, arguing that progressive secular culture is destined to erode conservative religious resistance. Smith bases his thesis on a historical examination of five issues-slavery, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and women's rights. He is more successful in substantiating his argument in certain areas (divorce and homosexuality) than in others (slavery and abortion).
While not convincing in its larger assessment, Secular Faith provides a font of sociological data--its greatest strength. We learn details about changing attitudes toward marriage, divorce, and homosexuality, illustrated through graphs. The book gives broadly useful summaries of how competing schools of Christian thought have interpreted key sections of the Bible: conservatives generally have explained with stark literalism, while liberals have evoked the subtleties of historical context, new approaches to translation, and the overall spirit of the text.
Smith first considers slavery, outlining crucial Bible passages used by southern slaveholders and Christian abolitionists to defend their respective positions. The southerner could cite the fact that slaveholding was permitted throughout the Old and New Testaments, while the abolitionist might appeal to the moral gist of Jesus'...
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