I have a religious background. My parents were raised as Christians, my father somewhat more strictly (Mennonite) than my mother (Methodist). By the time they got married, they had enough of a commitment to good works to spend a decade and a half in Africa under the auspices of a Mennonite sponsor. Mennonites are pacifists, and it’s no surprise that my parents sought a non-military form of service during World War II. I’ve chronicled their experiences in a book I wrote about them.
To call them “missionaries,” with all the baggage attached to that word, is to ascribe to them, individually, agendas I don’t believe they pursued. The apt explanation for what they did in Africa, in my opinion, is that they wanted to help others, no more, no less, and this emphasis became clearer over the course of their career there.
My parents were first stationed in Charlesville, deep in the heart of the then Belgian Congo, where they worked at a mission station complete with all the trappings depicted in movies and popular literature about missionaries: a chapel, a school, a medical clinic, living quarters. My father reports that he and my mother felt more at ease when later transferred to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), on Africa’s west coast, mainly because their duties changed from the overtly proselytic to the educational. In Leopoldville, they ran a publishing company that imported books, mostly in French, and published its own lineup of educational and religious materials, many of them in native African languages.
Toward the end of their service, amid rebellions against the colonial government, their priority switched from publishing to providing relief services, including medical aid, for Congolese affected by the upheaval.
The modern western political take on their presence in Africa, I suppose, would be uniformly grim: they sought to impose, with increasing subtlety (and therefore more and more insidiously), American and European values and languages upon an indigenous people. But this view is institutional; it doesn’t take into account the experiences or reflections of individuals, which varied greatly.
Some missionaries—perhaps most, I don’t know—did harbor naive convictions about the purity of their purpose abroad, even after returning home and being exposed to accusations of cultural imperialism. It went differently for my parents. Even in Africa, they had begun to distance themselves from the gung-ho piousness of some of their colleagues. Back in the States, their sense of religious commitment, though not diminished overall, continued to change. Their disillusionment, if one can call it that, followed the gentle course of their adjustment to daily life as “civilians.” Outwardly, they became more secular. They both became teachers, Dad at a university (in communications) and Mom in the high school I went to (in English and at times French). They settled into the typical church-on-Sundays Protestantism of the Midwest.
As a non-religious philosophy student of scientific and rationalist suasion, I suppose I represent the generational break with their religious tradition. But the break has not been absolute, in an important sense I hope to defend against the current backlash of anti-theists or “Brightists” who disparage religious traditions of all kinds.
What I have gotten from my religious upbringing is an essentially literary aesthetic of life within an unbounded community, predicated upon some intersection of mental capacity—even if obscured by local prejudice—that represents the common ground of mankind. My parents’ outlook came to emphasize the ecumenical starting point of religious tolerance above specific practices of worship, which in the end were seen as more about personal comfort than anything ideological. The distillation of this trend in my own development can be summed up by pointing out that people, however polarized by cultural indoctrination or material fortune, are far more alike as human beings than they are different as members of sundry tribes.
That there is an abstractable element of religion worth holding onto, and that it is fundamentally aesthetic, are mainstays of my position on religion, and I’ll try to bring them out in detail eventually. I’ll just mention here that 1) I find this dimension largely neglected by the Brights, and 2) I believe this commonality may allow religious traditions to dovetail into a rationalist, post-religious culture, rather than remain pitted against it. The point being that blatant aggression is ugly and often not the best instrument for eliciting solidarity.
The Brights are correct in saying that we can lead moral lives full of meaning in the absence of religious doctrine. They are also right in fearing the destructive political or economic impulse so often justified by appeal to religion. The problem with their categorical excommunication of religion from the human enterprise is that they may be ignoring something essential to human fulfillment. And the problem with their polemical approach, perhaps, is that the decline and fall of religion may need to come about as a sea change, not a revolution.
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