FIRlnGLlne WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. DAN WAKEFIELD, ERNEST VAN DEN HAAG SUBJECT: "WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE FEAR GOD? "

Transcription

1 The copyright laws of the United States (Title 17, U.S. Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. If a user makes a request for, or later uses a photocopy or reproduction (including handwritten copies) for purposes in excess of fair use, that user may be liable for copyright infringement. Users are advised to obtain permission from the copyright owner before any re-use of this material. Use of this material is for private, non-commercial, and educational purposes; additional reprints and further distribution is prohibited. Copies are not for resale. All other rights reserved. For further information, contact Director, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. 0 FIRlnGLlne HOST: GUESTS: WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. DAN WAKEFIELD, ERNEST VAN DEN HAAG SUBJECT: "WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE FEAR GOD? " FIRING LINE is produced and directed by WARREN STEIBEL. This is a transcript of the Firing Line program (#1054/2504) taped in New York City on July 11, 1995, and telecast later on public television stations. copyright 1995 FIRING LINE

2 .l MR BUCKLEY: Some months ago the author Dan Wakefield published a book called Expect A Miracle. He undertook the traditional book promotion tour and came upon a phenomenon not widely perceived in American life. It is that a great many Americans, indeed the overwhelming majority of them, believe in God and most of them practice their religion. But except from pulpits and to punctuate ceremonial occasions, the mention of God is simply not done. It is taken as a form of bad manners, of intrusiveness. It mal'-es people, what, blush? It is this phenomenon we wish to explore today, with of course Mr. Wakefield as one of our guests. His book is subtitled, "The Miraculous Things That Happen." It is his fifteenth. He is a renowned journalist, he has written plays and screen dramas and has received numerous awards. Somewhere along the line he decided that he had become an alcoholic. That discovery came with a flush of faith. He dropped booze and adopted God and told his story in his book, Returning: A Spiritual Journey. Ernest van den Haag is well known to addicted viewers of Firing Line. He is a sociologist, a philosopher, a legal theorist, who has taught at many distinguished colleges and universities and has published in many fields. I'd like to begin by asking Mr. Wakefield this: How in fact have interviewers acted when you raised with them, for instance, the incidence of miracles in the modern world? MR WAKEFIELD: Well, they are very uncomfortable. And I have often been reminded of your interview with Malcolm Muggeridge, where you said, I don't know how it is in your country, but in New York if you mention God more than once at a dinner party, you're not invited back. MR BUCKLEY: I didn't know you could mention Him once. [laughter] MR. WAKEFIELD: That's right. Well, you know, really, when I started back to church in 1980, I was very aware of that, very aware that it made people uncomfortable, and in fact I remember only about three or four years ago being at a dinner party in New York of some very renowned literary folks, and the friend I went with afterwards said, "Did you realize there was a taboo subject tonight?" And the main subject was the book, American Psycho, and while we were eating dinner people were talking about dismemberment, you know, and so on and so forth as we were-- I

3 MR. BUCKLEY: That was okay. / MR WAKEFIELD: That was fine. You know, that was a good dinnertime subject. And when it skirted next to the subject of religion or God, there was this incredible quiet that came over the room, and we, my friend and I, were afraid to breach it, almost, you know. There was a very real sense of discomfort. MR. BUCKLEY: How long would you guess this has been so? Certainly during your lifetime and mine. MR WAKEFIELD: Yes. Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. MR. BUCKLEY: Was it so 7 5 years ago, would you guess, or not? MR. WAKEFIELD: I don't think it would have been so in the time of Emerson and-- MR BUCKLEY: Certainly not then, no. During this century, would you say that-- MR. WAKEFIELD: Well, I would guess after the first world war. I would think of Fitzgerald's statement, "All wars are fought, all Gods are dead," and that was sort of taken as that's what now the intellectual, the wise, learned person, would think. And I think that's one of the things that carries this, the idea is that if you're educated, if you're really a smart person in todays world, that you don't-- MR. BUCKLEY: Engage in superstitious talk. MR. WAKEFIELD: Yes, you engage in scientific talk, which is approved. The irony to me-- You know, one of the definitions of "miracle" is an extraordinary event in the physical world that can't be explained by the laws of science. But the laws of science keep changing, and even in my time--1 got out of Columbia in 1955 and I was told I was living in a Newtonian universe and everything was solid and the world was like a great mechanism. And now I am told that that's_ not true at all, I am living in a quantum physics universe, and everything is liquid and we don't know if something may be a particle or a wave. MR BUCKLEY: But they don't worry about that. 2

4 .. p' MR. WAKEFIELD: But no, that's all right. That's totally reversed. MR. BUCKLEY: How would what we have just said apply to conversation and folkways in Europe? MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Let me start by pointing out that I think a miracle requires a little bit more than an extraordinary event not explained by the known laws of nature. It requires also some reason to believe that there has been a divine or supernatural-- MR. BUCKLEY: Intervention, yes. MR. VAN DEN HAAG: --intervention. Because if I am suddenly cured of an incurable disease but I happen not to have appealed to God or anything, then I think it is written down as an unexplained cure and not necessarily a miracle. I think people speak of a miracle, if this happens, it's totally unexplained by the known laws, and in addition-- MR. BUCKLEY: This is not really what we are arguing about though. MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Pardon? MR. BUCKLEY: This is not what we are arguing about, whether a particular thing is miraculous as a metaphor or miraculous as strictly applied. It's a question of whether or not discussions involving God are prohibited by the folkways of Europe the way they seem to be here. MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Oh, I see. I hadn't understood that. Yes, they are since the rise of science. Science in effect requires that there be evidence for any assertion of a specific kind called scientific, and God almost by definition is that which we cannot explain, certainly not explained by scientific laws, so people are uncomfortable about it. We are all brought up in the scientific spirit, so that the notion of God, apart from all ritual assertions or so, but the actual notion that God intervenes in our lives and history, etc., that notion makes most people uncomfortable. And you are right. That used to be the case altogether in Europe and not really in the United States as much. Now it's the case in the United States just as much. MR. BUCKLEY: Well-- 3

5 MR WAKEFIELD: I remember-- MR. BUCKLEY: Sony. MR WAKEFIELD: Excuse me, I just remembered it was William James in The Varieties of Religi.ous Experience who says God is real because He has real effects. And that was as late as the early part of the century at any rate.. MR. BUCKLEY: But you run into the paradox that although it's true that with the advent of Darwin et al, people, a lot of them, tended to depose God. A lot of people did not do so, and the people who did not do so were objectively at least as bright as those people who did. MR. WAKEFIELD: Right. MR. BUCKLEY: But what we don't understand--at least I don't understand--as for instance in your recent experience with your book, Miracles, is how is it that the scientific hubris completely overcame the Christian--which has simply not been invalidated by any scientific findings. MR VAN DEN HAAG: Let me-- You mentioned Darwin. You can go a step further and mention Freud. Freud would explain the belief in God in terms of childhood experiences and so on. Now many people are under the impression that given this explanation, what Freud has really said they believe is not true. But that doesn't follow in the least, because the very childhood experiences that lead according to Freud to the belief in God could very well be caused by God if you believe in God. I mean, in short, the trouble, which makes people uncomfortable is that the existence of God cannot be disproved. It also cannot be proved according to scientific criteria. And I admire Mr. Wakefield in particular because of his optimism and willingness to rely on faith. MR. BUCKLEY: Well, presumably God is on our side too. That helps, doesn't it? MR. WAKEFIELD: I think this really comes through in the media particula~ly, and I think that what happens there is, as Mr. van den Haag said, that it's not something verifiable. And the person at the publisher who was trying to arrange some of these things for me, said a lot of journalists say, Well, this isn't a subject we can check. [laughter] And so that immediately puts off bounds the-- 4

6 " MR. BUCKLEY: Unlike human equality. MR. WAKEFIELD: That's right, yes. But you know what it made me think of a lot when I was being interviewed, a lot of the time what came to my mind, there is a scene in the movie Malcolm X, in which Malcolm has come out of jail, he has converted to Islam, he is preaching on the street corners. And one of his old buddies from his criminal days comes up and afterwards says, "Hey man, that was great. That was fabulous. What's the con?" [laughter] And Malcolm says there isn't any, and the other guy can't believe it. And I had the feeling a lot of times talking to people in the press, like there has got to be something behind this. It's sort of like the whole media now is built on expose. Now I wrote about a woman in Ireland who experienced one of these unusual, physical healings. where she was been told she had MS. She was paralyzed, she was blind in one eye, she had lost control of her bodily functions, had a catheter. Well, one of the reporters went over there and interviewed her and her doctor and her priest and came back and said. "Well, you know, Mr. Wal,efield, the whole thing could have been psychosomatic." And I said, Well, how do you mean? He said, Well, she could have brought all these things on herself and then cured herself. And I said gee, that's quite a feat for a woman who works in a factory in Ireland to do all that and then somebody else who talked with her said, Well, you know, I have been -talking to some doctors, and it could be that she didn't really have MS, she just had the symptoms of MS. And I said, Well, wait a minute. You saw the medical records, all these things happened and she was healed of them, but maybe it's not-- Yes, that's right. But an attempt to undercut and to say, "Ah." MR. BUCKLEY: Sure. Yes, I was in Lourdes a couple of years ago, and I learned there that if you claim a miracle, you've got to go through a battery of about 100 unbelieving doctors and a lot of people who you and I would believe were miraculously cured, the doctors won't certify. They've only certified 85 people in the last 100 years. But what arrests me is not so much their attitude towards miracles as the refusal to engage in conversation in which God figures. For instance, Billy Graham is allowed to have his half hour or whatever it is and you expect him to go on about God. But if you invite him to lunch, I don't think you're supposed to mention God. At least I've had lunch with him a _ couple of times and nobody did. [laughter] ls it because that overhang stretches even to that point? It goes, Okay, we had God between 11 and 11 :30; now let's go on to normal things. MR. WAKEFIELD: Yes. Yes. Well, you must have had lunch with a lot of 5

7 media people too. I don't know. That's very odd to me, because a lot of the people that I've met and talked with recently really were anxious to talk about it. Not the people in the media usually, but other-- MR. BUCKLEY: Well, perhaps they thought you were especially qualified and that this was your-- Well, for instance, haven't-- MR. VAN DEN HAAG: I wouldn't like to talk about God at lunch either, frankly, because I think I would like to talk about more frivolous things at lunch. MR. BUCKLEY: Well, you've talked about non-frivolous things at lunch, including with me. Why would God not be one of them? MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Well, as I say, I think it is a very heavy subject which I don't normally want to talk about at lunch. Sometimes, perhaps, but-- MR. BUCKLEY: Well, people talk about love, about love affairs, about their passions. MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Love affairs, yes; love, not really. [laughter] MR. BUCKLEY: I don't agree with you. Of course, you are a psychoanalyst among everything else. Are you saying that people don't talk about-- Of course, presumably you could talk about even God to a psychoanalyst, couldn't you? MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Yes, they do. MR. BUCKLEY: If you charge enough. [laughter] MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Well, I am retired, so you can't bait me. [laughter) MR. WAKEFIELD: You know, another thing somebody said to me from one of the big TV programs, the producer wanted to do something on the subject and then found that the person who would do it on the air was uncomfortable_ because he said that he didn't want to be associated with magic. To him, anything to do with God--not just miracles-- MR. BUCKLEY: Superstition. 6

8 ri " MR WAKEFIELD: Superstition, yes. I've also had the feeling, when we talk about discomfort, like at that dinner party, I've had to feeling that people who know now that I've gone back to church, that I've reclaimed my faith and so on, that they are afraid that I am going to try to convert them. MR. BUCKLEY: Oh, right, right, right. MR WAKEFIELD: Or that I am going to suddenly say,"oh brother, won't you come down the aisle," or something, whatever, you know-- MR BUCKLEY: Yes. MR WAKEFIELD: --and that there is a fear. Of course I have to suspect that behind that fear is the fear of the hound of heaven, that people are particularly afraid who know that that's back there, that that's in their own persona somewhere and they want to push it away. MR. BUCKLEY: Well, let's take a quite relevant case that received a lot of publicity: Senator Helms and before that, Pat Buchanan, managed to suggest that there was divine punishment being executed for evil behavior. Now I hasten to dissociate myself from that point of view. MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Why? Why do you hasten? MR. BUCKLEY: Well, because it seems to me that it would be extra-rational to suppose that God would single out that particular sin for punishment when there are so many other competitive sins. MR. VAN DEN HAAG: But it's not impossible, is it? MR BUCKLEY: No, no, no. Nothing is impossible. MR VAN DEN HAAG: You know-- I don't particularly believe that Senator Helms is right. I have no knowledge and I don't think he does. But the possibility certainly exists. We cannot just say, no, it can't be. God must _ approve of these practices or at least he won't single them out for punishment. MR. BUCKLEY: Yes, but if I didn't make the point clear, let me make it clear now. Can this be brought up in a conversation in which what Senator Helms or Pat Buchanan said becomes relevant? Can people say what you just finished 7

9 1/ saying? Might it not be God's work? The answer is no, you can't, can you?. MR. WAKEFIELD: I think you can only say it at the beginning and end of speeches if you are a politician. [laughter] You can't bring it into any kind of relevant thing. In the same sense, I don't think that one could bring it in to--a liberal politician probably couldn't bring it in to talk about welfare reform or that God wishes people not to be poor. I don't think that would be accepted in the political dialogue. MR BUCKLEY: Well, now there I don't think you are 100-percent right, because Jesse Jackson--not exclusive by any means--but other people can say God's creatures need to be fed and educated. I think you can say that, not in a laboratory but in a political campaign, can't you? MR WAKEFIELD: Well, in a political campaign. MR. BUCKLEY: You can use God in that sense-- MR WAKEFIELD: Yes. MR. BUCKLEY: --but not in a negative sense. I don't think you can say because we have been evil, we are subject to the fate originally designed for Gomorrah. That doesn't get said, does it? MR WAKEFIELD: Just Norman Mailer gets to say that. MR BUCKLEY: He can say anything. He's immune. MR. WAKEFIELD: Yes. MR. BUCKLEY: He can say anything that he wants and you and I will protect him. [laughter J MR WAKEFIELD: But you know, one thing I find interesting--not just politicians--but it's very rare that God comes up in literature, in contemporary_ literature, contemporary fiction. And I remember being really shocked once when-- There was a play that came out that won the Pulitzer called Mother Night, and it's all about a person contemplating suicide. And they think of every possible thing, reason, that might be into it, and never once is that brought up. Never once is the idea of God-- 8

10 MR. BUCKLEY: That's against the divine law. MR. WAKEFIELD: --against whatever-- And it's a debate; it's a dialogue between a mother and daughter. And never is that said. I think the only writer who really--who I feel like as a novelist has God as part of people's lives is Reynolds Price. You know, he doesn't write "religious novels," but he writes novels in which religion is a real issue to people. And I think that is one of the reasons that Brideshead Revisited had such an effect when it was shown, that it took seriously-- MR. BUCKLEY: A life force, yes, and Graham Greene. MR. WAKEFIELD: --the idea of God and religion. Yes, yes. MR. BUCKLEY: Well, compare it to a casual conversation between, say, a couple of college students, or graduate students, and the girl is eating her hamburger and she says, You know, I've been wondering about the Trinity [laughter] and the auspices of that idea-- MR. WAKEFIELD: See, there is an example of lunch where somebody- [laughter] MR. BUCKLEY: Well, you're supposed to be curious, right? MR. WAKEFIELD: Yes. MR. BUCKLEY: And to begin with, the person she was lunching with would have no idea of what the auspices of the Trinity were-- MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Right. MR. BUCKLEY: --even if he knew what the Trinity was. But mostly these are questions that don't get asked. Have you revived enough to comment on that? MR. VAN DEN HAAG: No, I think you are right. But I think one major thing is : People lack, so to speak, a religious vocabulary. They won't understand what is meant by Trinity and redemption and depravity and any of the need for salvation. Most people certainly no longer understand fully what is meant by these things, even if they know the words. The second thing is that the very notion of God, to the extent to which it still exists in people's minds, 9

11 has changed. God is no longer someone who wants you to avoid sin and possibly might punish you for sinning. He is someone who forgives a priori everything and admits everything, so-- MR. BUCKLEY: Except Hitler. MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Pardon? MR BUCKLEY: Except Hitler. MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Yes, perhaps, except Hitler. But even those who, when you ask them, Do you believe in God? will say yes, they do, really don't in many cases believe in the God of the Gospels, as far as I can see. They believe in a God that they have fashioned themselves. It may be better than nothing, but not very good. MR. WAKEFIELD: Well, my biggest shock in doing the research for this was talking to some of the theologians, and as a lay person, I didn't realize that advanced theology was setting about disproving the miracles of Jesus. And I spoke to Father John Crossan, who is an eminent Roman Catholic theologian, and he is part of the Jesus Seminar, where they are trying to say, This is exactly what was said or done by Jesus. And he says, well, Jesus didn't heal anybody; He healed the social situation around which they lived. And I said, gee, now you know, we're living in an age in which the National Institute of Health gives grants for the effect of prayer on recovery from drug addiction, you know, and then the whole mind-body connection is explored and being used in major hospitals. So the idea that Jesus couldn't do this is remarkable to me. It's very strange--and that a theologian is telling me this. And I remember that I brought up to him, I said I thought the story of John 21, where Jesus after the Crucifixion appears to the disciples and tells them to cast the nets over the side, and they say, It's the Lord, and he fixes them breakfast. And I said that always seemed to me, as a writer, to have a literalness, a specificity, that I believe that story. And he said, Well, you were taken in by a good novelist. MR. BUCKLEY: Is that right? MR. WAKEFIELD: Yes. And I was suddenly thinking, how did I get on this part with a theologian? You know, the-- MR. BUCKLEY: How do they handle the fact that such eminences as Newman 10

12 believe it? Was he also taken in? Well, I guess by definition-- MR WAKEFIELD: I guess so. MR BUCKLEY: --anyone who believes in the literal truth-- Jesus was just a nice guy, right? MR WAKEFIELD: Yes. And he said, well, see those stories are metaphors. And I said another thing that I think people who aren't writers don't realize is that something can be a metaphor and also have happened. It happened and then it also may be seen as a metaphor. MR VAN DEN HAAG: If it is merely a metaphor, I don't think it has anything to do with anything. MR. WAKEFIELD: That's right. Well, I love Flannery O'Connor's famous statement. She was at a dinner party in New York and Mary McCarthy said to her, kind of condescendingly, trying to bring her into the conversation, she said, Well, I think that the Resurrection and the Trinity and those things are wonderful metaphors. And Flannery O'Connor said, Well, if they are metaphors, to hell with them. [laughter] MR BUCKLEY: Robert De Toledano years ago sent his novel to the editor and where he had Heaven and Hell, they were capitalized. So the editor simply put them in the lower case and sent it back. So he put them in upper case and sent it back. This happened two or three times, and finally his editor called him and said, Why are you capitalizing Heaven and Hell? And he said, "Because they are places--you know, like Scarsdale." [laughter] But it was that shocking, you know, the notion that one would seek to objectify-- MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Which one is Scarsdale? [laughter] MR. BUCKLEY: Well, people who read your extraordinary book and reacted to it, have you found among any of them any willingness to believe that any of the miracles that you cite might have been an act of divine intervention? MR WAKEFIELD: Not those who weren't believers-- MR BUCKLEY: To begin with. 1 1

13 MR. WAKEFIELD: --before, to begin with. Those who were not believers before, they may finally accept that such and such occurred, but they would say, Well, it occurred by happenstance or it's explainable by some scientific or medical reason. Just like those people talking about the woman in Ireland, oh, it's psychosomatic, or it's only the symptoms of the disease. I never quite got what the difference is if you're that ill between having the disease and the symptoms. But there is always a way to justify it-- MR. BUCKLEY: Yes. MR. WAKEFIELD: --and they are very uncomfortable until they do make that justification? MR. BUCKLEY: Is it socially embarrassing to be a Christian in a faculty in a modern-- MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Yes. MR. BUCKLEY: It is. So one just shuts up about it. MR. VAN DEN HAAG: Right. Well, not altogether. There are some more respectable types. You may be a Tho mist, say, as a philosopher,. but if you simply assert that there are miracles and they are due to divine intervention or something, that would be embarrassing in any faculty, I would think. MR. WAKEFIELD: Even if-- MR. BUCKLEY: Suppose somebody spots a member of the faculty at church? Does that become-- MR. VAN DEN HAAG: I didn't hear you. MR. BUCKLEY: Suppose one is spotted in church on a Sunday? MR. VAN DEN HAAG: No, that's regarded as a ritual. That's forgivable. One doesn't assume that people who go to church necessarily believe. [laughter] MR. WAKEFIELD: Right, they may just be fulfilling a social function. MR. BUCKLEY: So that their mother will be pleased or something. [laughter] 12

14 MR. WAKEFIELD: Yes, right. Yes. MR. BUCKLEY: Now did you press this point in talking about your book or did you simply stick to the subject of the miraculous circumstances? MR. WAKEFIELD: Well, I did ask when there was an opening or something, and again, what fascinated me was this--there's got to be a way around it. You could see people's brows furrow as they tried to come up with whatever would be to them a "rational" answer. But I loved the fact that despite all these experts and medias that there is such a huge trend in the country, such a hunger, for God, the spirit, however it can be manifested. And again, you know, what really bothers me too, I had my one minute on Oprah, and they had brought their- The main expert was a man who is a private detective who goes around disproving miracles. MR. BUCKLEY: And that's his job. MR. WAKEFIELD: Yes, that's his job. MR. BUCKLEY: Thank you, Mr. Wakefield; thank you, Professor van den Haag; ladies and gentlemen. 13