Curious Christian

I recently came across Andrew O’Hehir’s review of Terry Eagleton’s book Reason, Faith, and Revolution, and it really got me thinking. O’Hehir highlights this sharp critique Eagleton has of atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Eagleton says they’re catering to the “high-minded liberal-humanist prejudices of their elite audience” while, ironically, missing the mark on understanding religion. Eagleton’s point is pretty clear: the way they approach religion is so shallow, it wouldn’t be tolerated in other intellectual circles. As he puts it, “Would anyone be permitted to write a book about courtly love in the Middle Ages based on several visits to a Renaissance Faire, or a book about Nazism based on episodes of Hogan’s Heroes?”

That line made me laugh—I can almost hear Sergeant Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes saying, “I know nothing!” But it also struck a chord. There’s something to be said about how easy it is to make sweeping critiques when you’re not actually engaging with the complexity of a topic.

What really resonated with me, though, was Eagleton’s description of contemporary Christian fundamentalists as “faithless.” I’ve had that same thought before. So many times, fundamentalists seem to equate faith with certainty, or worse, with a kind of aggressive suppression of doubt. But I’ve always felt that real, mature faith isn’t afraid to face doubt. It’s about engaging with it, struggling with it, instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. There’s a strength in that kind of vulnerability that gets lost in the rigid certainty of fundamentalism.