So it seems after reading Jonathan Rauch's recent essay "Let It Be" in the Atlantic Monthly. The piece is a creed for apatheism—the combination of atheism and apathy. Rauch is an atheist, he says, but not a "hot-blooded atheist [who] cares about religion as does the evangelical Christian, but in the opposite direction." Rather, Rauch says he doesn't have strong feelings about the matter. And he presumes to speak for the majority of Americans. Between society’s bookends of atheists on one side and fundamentalists on the other lies a silent majority we presume to be agnostics. But Rauch says they’re actually apatheists. Agnostics don't know if there's a God; apatheists don't care.

The more you read, though, the more dogged and dogmatic Rauch sounds about his supposed apathy, rendering his premise dubious. As he proceeds from description (reporting that the number of Americans who say they never go to church or synagogue has tripled in the last 30 years, and that many more may be fudging their answers to pollsters out of guilt) to prescription (saying, not so passively, that apatheism is a "major civilizational advance"), he approaches the level of "zeal" he condemns. The most credible thing he could write on the topic would be a one-sentence essay that reads, “America is wallowing in apathy, and I don’t have strong feelings about it one way or another.” 

Rauch’s tone is tongue-in-cheek, of course, aiming to amuse with his contrarian rallying cry: “Yea for apathy!” And yet Rauch’s half-seriousness—and the sincerity of many who would accept his premise—begs a direct response. Rauch idealizes “a world generously leavened by apatheists … who are neither controlled by godly passions nor concerned about the … religious beliefs of others.” Apatheism, he says is about “discipline … It is not a lapse, it is an achievement.” Apatheism is to society, in other words, what a lightning rod is to heavenly storms—a neutralizing agent that makes life on the ground more livable. And here is where the classic irony about secular humanist pronouncements of tolerance comes out: preachers of tolerance effectively say, "My beliefs about the relationship of religion to society are thus, and society should function according to them; your beliefs about the same matter are such and such, and society should not function according to them." Which isn't very tolerant at all. Rauch does try to soften what he calls "ACLU-style disapproval" of any religious expression in public (a fussiness he says is too "devout) with his wishy-washy apatheism, but he still manages to come out swinging. More helpful is the priest in the companion essay who recommends we strike the word "tolerance" in favor of "mutual respect."

As a libertarian, Rauch is comfortably aboard the Enlightenment bandwagon driven by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, who believed in rational democracy as an antidote to the strong central political and religious institutions that dominated pre-democratic history. In their view, the absence of religious passions in public life and freedom from religious traditions is necessary for peaceable social intercourse. Now, we can agree that society is dysfunctional if overrun with self-anointed prophets who see themselves as, quoting again from the companion essay, "the privileged recipient of God's final message to humankind." We can further agree that that silent majority in the middle is legitimately unimpressed by fanatics who seek to browbeat others with their certainty, and go on to observe that self-serving displays of piety for political gain ultimately dishonor God. But Enlightenment "apatheists" are kidding themselves if they wish to remove religious understandings of civic virtues such as justice, charity, and compassion from the public square. Would America have been better off without the intense religious inspiration that led Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. to enact a “more perfect union”? Would society today be better off without faith-based organizations working for social justice in our cities? September 11 has convinced Rauch and other commentators that acting upon religious conviction is fundamentally destructive. But could it be that we need religious understandings of moral purpose more than ever in an increasingly apathetic and wandering world? 

One of the things that distinguishes humans from animals is that while, say, worker ants march in line according only to the impulse of natural instinct and inertia of social dynamics, humans act upon an ethic of moral direction (ranging from a Franciscan ethic of compassion to the far less sentimental Ayn Rand ethic of self-interest). Removing this moral element doesn't strengthen the human creature; it weakens her. Rauch’s essay is called “Let It Be,” but this advice is far from satisfying. A strawberry that tastes too tart will be much less so if you leave it be on the kitchen counter for three months, but it will also stink to high heaven. Or, to use another odiferous analogy, if I have a cleanliness fetish that compels me to wash my hands every few minutes and refrain from touching anything without wearing rubber gloves, it is a trait you will find unpleasant. But I will be no more pleasant if I adopt an indifference to personal hygiene altogether. Then you will learn the meaning of the stench of indifference.

This was the odor God smelled in Revelation when he said to the church in Laodicea, “So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” And here we find the most frightening apocalyptic prospect: the greatest doom our society could suffer is not, as we always hear, the retribution of God against the active defiance of a once-pious people. Even worse is his projectile vomiting of the lukewarm. 

From the Atlantic Monthly:
- Jonathan Rauch: "Let It Be"
- Bernard Lewis: "I'm Right, You're Wrong, Go To Hell"