God of Our Fathers, Gods for Ourselves: Fundamentalism and Postmodern Belief

Introduction: But Which One? God is back. -John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge (2009)1 Western culture has been obsessed with the "death of God" at least since Nietzsche.2 During the 1900s, this took the form of a prediction - mostly by intellectual elites - that modernization had so preempted belief that the latter would eventually disappear entirely.3 That prediction turned out to be spectacularly wrong in the United States,4 if not elsewhere,5 so here the obsession has lately shown itself as denial: God is not only not dead, he' s not even sick. Popular and academic literature is now filled with triumphant - and regretful - expositions ofthe contemporary vibrance and vitality of religion.6 God has cheated death (or, at least, Nietzsche). Or has he? There is the God whose death was widely predicted, and there is the God who today is alive and well, but they're not the same God. The God who died is the God of Christendom, who bound together Western society with a universal account ofthe world that did not survive the advent of postmodernism; this God, indeed, is dead.7 The God who remains alive is the one adapted to postmodernism; the vitality ofthat God is on display in contemporary American religion, especially in the spirituality movement.8 The most pressing religious problem now confronting the world is posed by believers who refuse to recognize the postmodern condition that has brought about the demise ofthe first God and the rise ofthe second; I will refer to such believers as "fundamentalists."9 All three of these phenomena - the death of God, his rebirth in postmodernity, and his remnants in fundamentalism - are manifest in recent religion clause decisions, though there are also recent suggestions that the Court may be poised to take a fundamentalist turn.10 I will close with a suggestion linked to that most traditional of believing virtues, humility.11 I. THE DEMISE OF METANARRATIVE God is dead. -Friedrich Nietzsche (1882)12 Reports of God's death have been greatly exaggerated in the United States, and probably everywhere else except Western Europe. To be sure, the number of selfdeclared unbelievers in the United States has dramatically risen in the last half century, from about three percent of the population in the 1950s to between eleven and sixteen percent now, but still remains low relative to the number of believers.13 Much of the reported increase in unbelief, moreover, might be attributed to a mistake in statistical analysis: For years, those who declined to state a religious affiliation were categorized as unbelievers, whereas it now appears that many of these folks actually believe in "God or some higher power."14 Indeed, some data suggest that as many as twenty-one percent of self-identified atheists actually believe in "God or a universal spirit,"15 which means that many unbelievers are more confused than unbelieving. So was Nietzsche wrong? Some philosophers - notably Martin Heidegger - maintain that the "death of God" is a metaphor signifying the end of metaphysics.16 The "death of God" is the demise of "metanarratives," to use Lyotard' s term17 - that is, "general accounts of human nature and history that purport to be independent of time, place, culture, and other contextual influences, and that determine how knowledge and truth are constituted."1 8 Metanarratives purport "to grasp the true structure of reality, the laws of history, and the method for acquiring knowledge about the only 'truth.'"19 "God is dead," then, does not mean that there is no God, but rather that there is no metaphysical or other foundation that enables humankind to demonstrate obj ectively the essential character of the world. The death of God marked the birth of postmodern life - that is, life without hope for certain and demonstrable knowledge about how or what the world really is. Like the death of God, postmodernity is an understanding of the world both powerful and misunderstood. …