One of my earliest memories is of an incident in the kindergarten of my childhood in Vienna. I must have been at most five years old. I was supposed to speak a line in a play about which I have no memory. All I remember is that I was wearing a top hat and was sitting on some sort of cupboard—and that I did not want to speak my line. The teacher cajoled me several times, but I kept shaking my head. She was quite angry, but finally gave up. I came down from my perch, having successfully disobeyed an order from legitimate authority.
I am not sure that this episode indicates a profound character trait. But, although I am both temperamentally and philosophically inclined toward compromise in conflict situations, I have always resisted if authorities or peers wanted to make me do things against my will. Furthermore, I have always sympathized with people who stubbornly refuse to be swayed from deviant views or behaviors. Unless the views or behaviors are morally repugnant (I don’t sympathize, say, with deviant racists), my sympathy does not hinge on agreement with the stubborn refuseniks. In my own field of the sociology of religion, along with most colleagues I concluded long ago that secularization theory—the notion that modernity necessarily leads to a decline of religion—cannot be maintained in the face of the evidence. Yet there is a rather small group of social scientists who stubbornly continue to adhere to the theory. I rather admire them. Admittedly the sociology of religion generates less than profound disagreements. But I have a lingering admiration for people who refuse to accept evidence of a more fundamental kind—such as socialists or creationists—perhaps, at a stretch, even flat-earth theorists.
The Religious News Service provides daily briefings which are quite useful to obsessive religion-watchers like me. On January 12, 2012, the briefing contained two stories from different sources. Each dealt with stubborn people, the sort I instinctively sympathize with even though I totally disagree with them.
The first story, reported by the Associated Press, came from Kentucky. As other states, Kentucky has a law which requires slow-moving vehicles (such as tractors or trailers) to affix reflective signs to avoid faster vehicles to run into them from behind. The horse-drawn buggies favored by Amish of the strict observance clearly fit the description of slow-moving vehicles. There have indeed been some collisions with Amish buggies, including one in Kentucky when an SUV ran into such a buggy and killed a teenager. The mandated sign is a bright orange triangle. An especially strict group of Amish, going under the melodious name of Swartzentruber, refused to affix this triangle. They claimed that the object is garish and offends their commitment to “a simple, plain life”. They also said that they rely on God for protection on the road. They are willing to use (supposedly less garish) gray tape and hanging lanterns. Other states have accommodated the Amish position, on grounds of religious freedom. The Kentucky authorities did not. They pressed on. Amish buggies were ticketed. But the Amish refused to pay the fines and were accordingly jailed (for some days at a time). A more recent story in daily newspapers indicates that the conflict continues, with more Amish going to jail, though a bill is pending in the legislature to allow an exemption from the putatively garish triangle.
The second story comes from a blog of one Jonathan Turley under the highbrow title Res ipsa loquitur (“The Thing Speaks for Itself”). It is about Jessica Ahlquist, a Rhode Island high school girl. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, Ahlquist went to federal court asking that her school be compelled to remove a large mural displaying a prayer asking God, among other things, to help students “to be good sports and smile when they lose”. Before resorting to federal court, Ahlquist had made her demand at various meetings of the local school committee. She said that “As an atheist, I have the right to go to school and not feel discriminated against by the people who are praying there.” She met with strong hostility from committee members and many fellow-students. She received insults and threats in school, on the way home from school, and online. She said that she felt alone and hated—and, most important, that her first-amendment rights were being violated. The US district court agreed with her. The school was ordered to remove the prayer. I don’t know if “the thing speaks for itself”, but it seems to speak for the readers of the blog—there were ninety-eight responses, most of them endorsing the sentiment expressed by the title of the post: “Brava, Jessica Ahlquist”.
My own sentiment is not as enthusiastic. But between Jessica and a clutch of hostile Godders, as between the Swartzentruber and the mighty state of Kentucky, I empathize with the stubborn orneriness of the former two. This despite the fact that, God knows, I strongly disagree with the two respective worldviews. (In the unlikely case that Jessica reads my blog, I hope that she concedes my first-amendment right to invoke the deity). The best I can say about the Mennonite faith of the Amish is that it derives from the less bloodthirsty version of the Dutch Reformation. I find the Amish lifestyle quaint but unappealing, and their pacifism morally irresponsible. As to the atheism in question, I consider it, precisely, a worldview appropriate in adolescence but not later in life. To be an agnostic is a very reasonable position to take in view of the depressing realities of the human condition and the absurd puzzles of the universe. The agnostic says “I don’t know what it ultimately means”; the atheist claims to know. Those of us who have not been visited by angels are, almost by definition, agnostic. Yes, we can have faith—I would say, faith alone (sola fide). But faith is not knowledge. That is another story. The ACLU featured in Jessica’s story has a view of the separation of church and state that can be described as Kemalist—the public space of the republic must be kept antiseptically clear of the religious virus. Kemalism has not been working very well in Turkey. It will work even less in the United States.
On January 7 The New York Times 
In December 2011 the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (Washington) 
There are few current questions about international developments as important as the ones concerning the future of what, rather optimistically, has been called the Arab Spring. Will this series of popular uprisings indeed lead to a new era of democracy and progress in the Middle East? Or will it rather lead to an era of violence and totalitarianism inspired by a Jihadist version of Islam? Obviously either outcome will be affected by a variety of factors, many of them with little if any relation to religion. I would like to suggest that a controversy which preoccupied Islamic philosophers a thousand years ago may have a surprising relevance to this alternative.
In its December 2011 issue Christianity Today carried an 
. Keener has a quarrel with most of his colleagues, who tend to dismiss these accounts as legends rather than actual facts. He recommends jettisoning the “naturalistic tradition” of modern historical scholarship and dealing with miracles as alleged facts to be investigated for their veracity just as all other facts that historians come across. He points out that the “naturalistic tradition” originated in Europe in the modern era, when none of these scholars had ever witnessed a miracle. The situation is different today. Keener spent time in Africa, where Christians claim to witness miracles in their everyday lives: “Extraordinary things are taking place around the world”.
It has become common now to speak of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as constituting three forms of “Abrahamic faith”. I have not been able to nail down just when this term was first used. (To use another term of current interfaith politeness, this may be due to the fact that my Internet skills should properly be dated BCE—“before the common era”.) I have the impression that it came to be widely used in America in the wake of 9/11, with the altogether admirable intention of countering anti-Islamic hatred. In that it is similar to the term “Judaeo-Christian”, which originated around the 1950s with the similarly admirable intention of countering anti-Semitism. In 1955 Will Herberg published an influential book, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, in which he argued, among other things, that these three faiths now constituted a common foundation of the American creed. Even then this left out a lot of people—for example, the millions of Americans belonging to Eastern Orthodox Christian churches. The notion that “Abrahamic faith” now undergirds the political ideology of the United States naturally annoys American Hindus and Buddhists, not to mention agnostics, atheists and adherents of more exotic religions (how about Wiccans?!). But there has also been opposition to the usage within the three alleged religious cousins.
Some years ago a sizable number of American Evangelicals, perhaps in search of a more colorful version of Christianity, became Eastern Orthodox as a group. For some reason they chose to join the American branch of the Patriarchate of Antioch, one of the most ancient Christian bodies in the world. (Its liturgical language is traditionally Arabic. You can’t get much more colorful than that.) Apparently these refugees from Billy Graham embraced their new faith with a fervor that alarmed some who were born Orthodox. People converting to Orthodoxy have been described as having gone “swimming in the Bosphorus”. It seems that now an increasing number of Evangelicals, this time Southern Baptists, are preparing to swim in the Swiss lake on whose shores John Calvin presided over his somber (hardly colorful) Protestant commonwealth.
. In it he bemoaned an anti-intellectualism that had become established in the Evangelical community. He understood this as a defensive reaction against an elite culture which was increasingly secular and which looked down on Evangelicals as backward provincials. A big change has been occurring more recently. There is a new cohort of Evangelical intellectuals, well-educated and increasingly self-confident. Some are ensconced in a nation-wide network of Evangelical institutions, but others have moved into mainstream institutions. (Noll’s own move, from Wheaton College to Notre Dame, is prototypical.) There is a certain instructive parallel here with the new class of Jewish intellectuals, who flooded into mainstream academia and media in the 1950s (though the Evangelical development has not yet reached that level). The underlying fact, however, is the same and very simple: upward social mobility and higher education, with a concomitant decline of prejudice against the rising group. Evangelicals, including the Southern Baptists among them, have developed a more sophisticated approach to the faith, and they have looked for intellectual resources to do this. Despite the aforementioned difference, Calvinism had to be appealing in this quest. It has a great intellectual tradition, with roots in European cultures. It shares with American Evangelicals a conservative theology, a high regard for the authority of the Bible (frequently moving over into the notion of Biblical inerrancy), and a gut dislike of all liberal directions in contemporary Protestantism.
Some years ago there was a cartoon in The New Yorker showing Zeus in conversation with two other Olympian divinities. The caption read: “They call it monotheism. I call it downsizing.” Also some years ago, a Japanese philosopher (whose name I forgot) wrote that Western civilization has been dominated by two fallacies: monotheism, the belief that there is only one god; and the principle of the excluded middle, asserting that anything must be either A or non-A. He added that every reasonable person knows that there must be many gods, and that most things are both A and non-A. East Asian cultures, including both Japan and China, suffer from neither alleged fallacy and have traditionally been averse to downsizing. This may be changing, as seen in the spread of Christianity, but there persists a stubborn (let me call it) natural polytheism.
, 2011). Both Communist regimes propagated an atheist ideology and persecuted all religious groups, at times with very great brutality. There were differences between the religion policies of the two Communist countries, but it is in the recent period (post-Communist de jure in Russia, de facto in China) that the differences have become very sharp indeed. Since the advent of the Putin administration the Russian Orthodox Church has come very close to being the state religion—as it was before the Bolshevik revolution. No such thing in China. Instead the regime presides, in a mixture of antagonism and toleration, over a robust pluralism, which it seeks to domesticate in the service of a “harmonious society”—a truly Confucian concept. Thus the fate of religion in the two countries is a great example of what economists call “path dependence”—the weight of history over the present. This is an important phenomenon beyond the borders of any one country.
