The Will to Disbelieve

Responding to the critics of my recent article on the Shroud of Turin and the Resurrection.

The exceptional number of comments on my recent article on the Shroud of Turin indicated something important. I argued that the Shroud suggested that the Resurrection might have happened. In 1897, William James published an essay called “The Will to Believe.” What I found in these comments was a will to disbelieve. I say a will, because so many of the comments offered such improbable reasons in attempting to discredit the evidence of the Shroud, and, derivatively, the Resurrection.

I think the will to disbelieve reflects a widespread resistance to the recent efforts of the religious right to use alleged religious imperatives to reshape American culture through political power.

A great deal of evidence supports this hypothesis.

Historians say that we have been in the third “awakening” of evangelical Protestantism:

First Awakening: mid-18th century (Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley).

Second Awakening: mid-19th century; after Civil War evangelicalism flows westward (William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska).

Third Awakening: (Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rick Warren, James Dobson, George W. Bush, and Bush’s Catholic adviser, the late Rev. Richard Neuhaus. We also have had PCT, Protestants and Catholics Together, Charles Colson).

But as the term Third Awakening suggests, these awakenings tend to snooze off.

The Pew Research Center Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes 1987-2007 (March 22, 2007) finds “less religious intensity,” “younger cohorts more secular,” “less social conservatism,” and “Democrats open wide advantage.”

Note: The shift away from religious fervor may actually have begun during the 1990s. Two Berkeley sociologists, Michael Hout and Clause S. Fischer have published a paper titled “Why Americans Have No Religious Preference” (American Sociological Review, 2002) arguing that this phenomenon was not an indication of growing atheism but that more Americans were rejecting organized religion as a “symbolic statement” against the religious right.

Voila! That’s it. People are rejecting what Andrew Sullivan has called “Christianism,” or politicized Christianity, Sullivan’s analogue being “Islamism.”