Andrew Sullivan, conservative religionists, and development

"From moderate religion comes pragmatic politics," writes Andrew Sullivan in "When Not Seeing Is Believing," an excerpt in Time from his forthcoming book The Conservative Soul. The heart of Sullivan's message--urging conservative religionists (Sullivan calls them "fundamentalists," obviously not wanting to taint the word "conservative" with their ilk) to moderate their religion by embracing a humbler variety of faith--might just hit its mark.

The first problem: humility (as in lack of confidence that your worldview isn't a myth) is only one of several key issues for those he is trying to reach. A second problem (I will suggest): humility (in its formulation as an acknowledgment of the limits of reason) is precisely the opposite of the message religious conservatives most need to hear. Sullivan sometimes conflates these senses of humility, and consequently sometimes urges doubt when confidence is better prescribed. However this article is, I believe, on the money in identifying and articulating the key issues in spiritual development for those of a more moderate faith--those folks more like Sullivan than Jerry Falwell or Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Sullivan's article presents an implicit three-part scheme in the development of religious faith. It is this developmental hierarchy that gives his argument its greatest punch. I'm not claiming that Sullivan would necessarily agree that this hierarchy is a summation of his views of religious development or that it is a complete picture. But it's there. Nor am I claiming that this model must represent some sort of rigid evolution toward progress (a developmentalist view discredited since the nineteenth-century). These are the three levels:

The three stages of religious development, per Sullivan's article:

1. Fundamentalism. It's a source of "complete calm" from "complete certainty," born of the "relief of submission to authority." "Doubt and tactical adjustment" are "alien" to its psyche. It is not merely a type of religion associated with Islamic radicals and Catholic traditionalists; it can also represent a stage of personal development through which one must pass on the road to more fruitful spiritual terrain. Sullivan writes:

I remember in my own faith journey that in those moments when I felt most lost in the world, I moved toward the absolutist part of my faith and gripped it with the white knuckles of fear. I brooked no dissent and patrolled my own soul for any hint of doubt. I required a faith not of sandstone but of granite.

Fundamentalism provides solace in time of doubt by easing the pain of uncertainties. It offers solidity in time of need, not a bending reed.

2. The Faith of Doubt. Doubt dissolves the fundamentalist certainty, doubt that leads to "spiritual humility," "sincere religious doubt," and "moderate religion.". Doubt that is born in conflict. We might say conflicts such as the encounter of tradition with modernity, monolithic religion with pluralism, the Bible with historical criticism, the limits of reason in resolving disputed issues of meaning and value (we might say, but Sullivan doesn't in this article precisely define the territory through which doubt arises in the fundamentalist psyche). The faith of doubt respects religious diversity because one realizes that "[i]f we cannot know for sure at all times how to govern our own lives, what right or business do we have telling others how to live theirs?" Sullivan says, "As humans, we can merely sense the existence of a higher truth, a greater coherence than ourselves, but we cannot see it face to face," and then approvingly quotes Montaigne:

The 16th century writer Michel de Montaigne lived in a world of religious war, just as we do. And he understood, as we must, that complete religious certainty is, in fact, the real blasphemy. As he put it, "We cannot worthily conceive the grandeur of those sublime and divine promises, if we can conceive them at all; to imagine them worthily, we must imagine them unimaginable, ineffable and incomprehensible, and completely different from those of our miserable experience.

Faith is born of a humbled reason; that is, reason aware of the limits of imagination, aware of the limits of words and comprehension, the limits of analogical thinking and reasoning based on the datum of the senses. By humbling our reason, we can experience a "higher truth" (there's a hint at the developmental hierarchy) which offers "greater coherence than ourselves."

3. An Encounter with Pure Truth. The faith of doubt is not the end of the road in Sullivan's developmental scheme. Rather, there is the hint of something beyond. Recall the hints of a "higher truth" that is an opening to "greater coherence." And consider this:

I remember my grandmother's faith. She was an Irish immigrant who worked as a servant for priests.... I saw that she was utterly oblivious to those around her. She was someplace else. And there were times when I caught her in the middle of saying the Rosary when she seemed to reach another level altogether--a higher, deeper place than I, with all my education and privilege, had yet reached.

Was that the certainty of fundamentalism? Or was it the initiation into a mystery none of us can ever fully understand? I'd argue the latter. The 18th century German playwright Gotthold Lessing said it best. He prayed a simple prayer: "If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left hand only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand, and say, Father, I will take this--the pure Truth is for You alone."

The characteristics of the "higher level" or "higher, deeper place" of faith: humility, an intensity of experience, and an otherworldly perception. Sullivan denies that it is equivalent to the lower-stage fundamentalism; he must conclude that it represents a higher stage of development, one in which seeking after Truth ceases not in mental possession of knowledge of Truth, but in a loving embrace of the hand of God. The paradox of the Lessing quote is that the speaker's taking of the left hand of God is itself an embrace of the Truth, an embrace of intuitive and bodily experience rather than strictly mental knowledge. It's a faith neither of granite nor sandstone, but seemingly of the wind and time itself--identifying with the force that wears down stone, breaking even the hardest of rock given enough time.

"I am become Time, Destroyer of Worlds," says the Baghavad Gita. Or, to paraphrase and expand on Sullivan's quotation of Lessing, I am become the steady and diligent drive of evolution itself, the Eros of the Kosmos. I will be the seeking Eros; and trust in faith in the returning hand of Agape. faith not of sandstone but of granite. Pure truth isn't known; it is encountered in an act of submission to mystery. Contrary to the faith of doubt, it's a greater coherence not than ourselves, but greater than ourselves only as we usually take ourselves to be. Our self/identity expands to infinity even as our individual ego is recognized in all its profoundly limited dimensions, turning variously between humility and pride as the wind blows.

Is Sullivan persuasive?

Without at this time venturing to critique the completeness or adequacy of Sullivan's three-stage hierarchy of religious faith, let us simply assume its validity. Within this model, where is Sullivan seated? Who is he gunning for (who is his primary audience)? Within that context, does Sullivan's core recommendation make sense? I'll reserve more detailed commentary until after reading Sullivan's book, but here are a few offhand remarks in the meanwhile. I'll answer these questions, briefly raise the problems of secularism and liberalism, and then offer my tentative conclusions.

Sullivan appears to be writing from the voice of the second stage of his developmental hierarchy, i.e., the faith of doubt. That's not to say that the higher or lower stages might not be very much alive within him, only that they appear not to be the dominant ethos of this particular article. It could be, for instance, that he resides at Sullivan stage-three but consciously chooses to write at the second stage for pedagogic purposes.

Since Sullivan's advocacy piece is primarily arrayed against fundamentalists (that is, the first of the developmental stages), I will count these first-stagers as Sullivan's main intended audience. Sullivan uses ample religious examples and metaphors, as appropriate for Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, and others. He avoids any use of "conservative" to describe conservative religionists, or "fundamentalists" to describe anti-religious rationalists. That is to say, his rhetoric appears intended to be gunning (rather civily) toward the stage-one religionists, not secular writers or progressives.

Sullivan is urging the fundamentalists toward doubt (that is, onward to the second stage), a path that could have several possible outcomes. If fundamentalists increase their doubt, this could result in their adopting something like Sullivan's preferred faith of doubt. For example, they could adopt orthodox Roman Catholic beliefs but dissent from the magisterium on select matters of sexual morality. Or they could adopt a "faith that treats the Bible as a moral fable as well as history." Or, perhaps, they would fall prey to the ways of "many Western liberals and secular types" who dismiss religion because of its fanaticism.

If you have at least a casual acquaintance with developmental studies, you may be wondering how it is that "Western liberals and secular types" have entered the picture at this juncture, when they are not obviously present in the developmental model of faith. There is no explicit developmental picture here, so you are left to wonder. The most obvious way of bringing secularism into Sullivan's developmental scheme is to assert that it must be some sort of developmental pathology on the road from stage-one to stage-two. If stage-three is a continuation of a religious understanding of reality and secularism denies religion, then it would appear to be off course. And Sullivan does, after all, characterize the second-stage as one of humble reason, and any sort of secularism that would reject religion because it misidentified its extreme forms with its essence would certainly have to be regarded as imprudent and not entirely reasonable.

It is more difficult to grasp how "Western liberals" might represent a misstep along the road from Sullivan stage-one to Sullivan stage-two, for at least two reasons. First, because there is such great diversity in reasons why those who might be called Western liberals reject religion, including psychological, rational, and identity-based concerns. It doesn't seem that most liberals have rejected religion primarily because fundamentalists have conflated religious and secular power. Second, many Western liberals are friendly toward Eastern religions in ways that suggest that they have already passed through some sort of "faith of doubt" and are well on the way to more ineffable spiritual realizations; often such religious progressives seem to have included and transcended a secular understanding of reality.

I'm suggesting, though not arguing in detail here, that perhaps the group Sullivan calls Western liberals might actually represent a development that's post-Sullivan-stage-two but not quite yet Sullivan-stage-three (in terms of integral theory, Western liberals would be green; Sullivan stage-two is orange). Furthermore, I'm suggesting that secularism and the faith of doubt are actually both healthy developmental paths through orange), and each have their own pathologies. Historically, development from pre-orange levels to orange required not a humbling of reason (that wouldn't find a full expression until Kierkegaard); rather, it required a conviction in the strength, health, and power of reason. That is, it required sufficient confidence in reason to be able to knock down the overgrown branches of religion. The branches of the tree had to be pruned.

Sullivan urges his readers to adopt an attitude based on the humility of reason, when in truth it is precisely the opposite attitude--confidence in reason--that should be most effective at facilitating their development. Sullivan's is a perfectly appropriate and important message for many to hear, but those for whom it is most relevant are those already at Sullivan stage-two (that is, educated and intellectually astute religious moderates). Fundamentalists need an even bolder, stronger message: that reason can be a bearer of their liberation, and reason demands an overthrow of their old ways of thinking. "Unless of grain of wheat fall to the ground and die, it remain but a single grain." The point of making a case against orthodox or traditional religious beliefs isn't to permanently demolish the conservative religionist's faith. The point is to clear the rubbish and to reveal the emptiness behind traditional theological concepts--a prerequisite to understanding the deep, nondual unity behind Emptiness and God, Nirvana and samsara, Heaven/Hell and earth. (In truth, it's only revealing that emptiness (which the traditional West denies) or fullness (which the traditional East denies) which has been there all along.) Of course, an integral view should not urge false overconfidence in reason (say, as in the writing of Sam Harris) at the expense of reason. But in a world of World Trade Center bombings and rising fundamentalism, frankly I'm less concerned that some fundies might have some existential moments of darkness than I am with the spectre of Ahmadinejad getting nukes and blasting away the Great Satans.

In urging a more radical message toward conservative religionists than Sullivan, am I doing so from a perspective of false certainty? How can I be sure that my own integral principles--openness to truth, goodness, and beauty wherever they are found--are distinct from the religious rhetoric attributed by Sullivan to Ahmadinejad who said, "Peoples, driven by their divine nature, intrinsically seek good, virtue, perfection and beauty"? Of course, people will disagree about the answers to such questions. My own view is that I am speaking, as best and imperfectly as I am able to do so, from a Sullivan stage-three perspective. And in doing so, the world looks different than it is often characterized by other writers, those whose sense of egoity would lead them to describe more cohesive and systemic styles of thinking as speculative, arrogant, or (ahem) metaphysical. Where others tend to emphasize ineffability, inscrutability, indefinability and mystery (and I'm not denying the truth in that) ... I prefer to emphasize the side of the coin Sullivan calls "higher truth" and "greater coherence than ourselves." That's not a belief in a greater coherence of God as a supermundane being separate from the world (moderate religionism, or what Sullivan calls the faith of doubt), but a lived, dynamic experience of a greater coherence of self, culture, and nature.

Greater coherence allows you to experience the world not merely from a subjective consciousness, but (imperfectly and humbly) from an objective consciousness, and to realize the unity of the two in your being. Objective consciousness? You might say it's awareness from God's point of view--a dialectical vision perhaps first expressed in history by the Taoists as the three-fold realization that (1) all is Tao; (2) the Tao appears as yin and yang, and (3) these seemingly opposed forces of nature are in the evolutionary process of realizing their ultimate Unity.

To put it another way, objective consciousness is taking the beliefs of the perrenial philosophy, the core wisdom of all the world's religious faiths, seriously. If we are all One, then what might that look like? How might that unity express itself in our bodies, minds, souls, and Spirit? Such a dialectical awareness might seem to some as the height of arrogance in the face of a world demanding greater humility. But humility looks different to people at different levels of awareness. What the world needs now, moreso than humility, is authenticity. We must be true to our selves and highest nature; only with this wisdom can we know when to be humble, when to be proud, and when to forget ourselves entirely.

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Joe Perez is a Seattle-based writer. His book Soulfully Gay will be published in May 2007 by Shambhala/Integral Books.

Cross-posted at this blog's future home: gayspirituality.zaadz.com/blog. Please add your comments at the new location.