Back in the 1920s, self-identified 'fundamentalists' declared war on virtually all other Christians in America for declared reasons of theology, but more deeply, over who got to control particular words: most particularly ‘evangelical,’ but also 'Christian.' After the Scopes trial held up fundamentalists to public ridicule, they ceased their struggle for the public square, and those with whom they vied -- liberal evangelicals like Henry Sloane Coffin and Harry Emerson Fosdick -- claimed victory for an inclusive definition of both terms, and a broad tent for the faith. But eighty years later, this linguistic victory seems reversed. "Evangelical" has come to be identified with a vaguely suspicious cultural fifth column, so close to 'fundamentalism' as to make not much of a difference. And, if Rice's experience is at all representative, a similar slippage of the term 'Christian' itself is underway.
I think the God Scare is not entirely conscious of this phenomenon, mostly because it seems already to assume the process is finished in fact rather than in rhetoric. Mainly, it emerges when they assail those who claim to be "moderate Christians," a term which they have adopted wholesale because it serves their rhetorical purposes. But it's also a term they use sneeringly, with the implication that the qualifier already renders it rather impotent, rather like OB-GYN might react to a patient claiming to be "sort of pregnant." To the God Scare as to Joe McCarthy, you can't be kind of a communist; to embrace any aspect of the word is to embrace it all, and the catch-22 is that the work of defining the 'all' has already been done for you. You are either thus a conscious villain or a dupe; there's no in between. As Dawkins claims, "The teachings of moderate religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism" (God Delusion, p. 306).
On the one hand he and Harris view "moderate Christianity" (which perhaps should be simply called 'Christianity,' given that these "moderates" vastly outnumber their fundamentalist brethren, but such a concession would violate the rhetorical case the God Scare builds) as something inflicted upon Christianity from the outside and therefore good; they are convinced that the history of religion is the history of a war between dark and light, black and white, unthinking faith and the light of reason, and the moderates live in the enemy territory reason has seized and occupied. But perhaps because of that, “moderate Christians" are even worse than fundamentalists; the moderates have already drunk from the cup of reason. They should, simply, know better. And that they keep enabling the nefarious stubbornness of their brethren is a crime that the God Scare seems to take quite personally. Harris claims that "this is a problem for moderation in religion: it has nothing underwriting it other than the unacknowledged neglect of the letter of divine law" (End of Faith, p. 18). This epitomizes the irrational self-contradiction that the God Scare sees in "moderation"; it also, perhaps, reflects the frustration that "moderation" causes. It fits only with difficulty into the world of reason against unreason the God Scare has created, and thus, it must be rhetorically marginalized as lukewarm.
Precise objectivity in any sort of nonfiction writing is of course an impossibility, and clearly I've not achieved it here. And that is, actually, sort of the point. The God Scare sketches out an apocalypse, a world in which faith in God will inevitably lead to mindless execution of Old Testament dietary laws and sexual mores, to war with jets and missiles in the name of ancient Middle Eastern ideology, to poverty and patriarchy and poorly run hospitals. We are promised these horrors can be avoided if we simply embrace the pure light of reason. But of course, the pure light of reason is, practically speaking, not terribly influential. Except in the ideal world an elite and educated few imagine, Enlightenment rationality has never been how human beings have governed themselves; it's not even today the governing ideology behind how most human beings make decisions about where to go for lunch, what to do Friday nights, who to date, who to marry, what school to attend, what clothes to buy, which job to take, what movies to see, and so on and so forth. And yet lots of people manage to live happy and productive lives and make successful and fruitful decisions and don't actually blow each other up as frequently as we might expect.
Particularly in the messy democratic system of the United States, pleas for rationality and promises that it and it alone will serve as an objective arbiter of the public sphere seem wildly overoptimistic and even, to some degree, ominous. The God scare is an ideology that claims that it is not; a system of thinking that excludes and privileges even as it promises neutrality. But it's precisely because of this pretense that it will largely remain a marginal curiosity in American life. The primary value of rational empiricism remains as a language that allows scholars to communicate with each other; as Bell and Hofstadter mourned, attempts to implement it as a governing ideology nearly always break upon the rocky shoals of irrational and emotional old human nature itself.
Matthew Bowman is a graduate student in American religious history at Georgetown University.
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