Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Claudia Sander
I was born in this town,
which may explain how I got into all of this.
In Chicago, we have a name for the abuse of power.
We call it clout.
We sometimes think we invented it.
In this town, we know the smell of dirty politics,
and so I recognized that Christian fundamentalism is clout.
It's clout wrapping itself in the illusion and the disguise of religious legitimacy.
And it stinks to high heaven.
If there's a system anywhere that we need to rethink,
it's the political clout of Christian fundamentalism.
Little disclosure here:
I'm a Christian myself.
In fact, I am a Jesuit-educated Irish Catholic.
So, I'm at stake here, personally,
in a really intimate way.
My religion has been hijacked.
My religion has been weaponized and used to attack innocent people.
The religious, the radical Right,
aided by a lot of, you know, well-disguised corporate money,
has flat out redefined the public image of Christianity.
The religious Right claims to represent the moral high ground in American culture.
But look, will you look at what they advocate:
Racism, sexism,
hate, mongering, xenophobia.
And look at what they deny:
They deny the reality of evolution,
they deny the reality of climate change,
they deny the reality of gay marriages and families
and, above all, they are radically authoritarian.
They have "absolute truth,"
and so they will not listen to evidence or arguments about why or how
from anybody else.
That's dangerous.
It's dangerous, it's nonsense, and it is not Christianity.
The attacks of 9/11 showed me, showed all of us, good heavens,
just how dangerous it is when a religion is hijacked
for narrow political purposes.
I realized then that I had to stop rolling my eyes and saying,
"Oh, that's not Christianity.
Oh, just ignore them. That's nonsense. That's not Christianity."
I had to stop doing that.
I had to do something, I had to say something.
If I were Christian, I had to confront Christian fundamentalism,
I had a moral obligation.
I spent the next ten years trying to find a way to do that.
It was this bizarre detour.
But, eventually, I did find what I was looking for.
It's called Christian Humanism.
Some people have said to me,
"Christian Humanism? That's a contradiction in terms."
It's not. It's a really old intellectual movement in the West.
It begins in the high Middle Ages.
Later, some people take to calling themselves secular humanists
because the values of Christian Humanism are broadly shared by other religions
and by secular thinkers too, and I'll get back to that.
The point is, this is a set of values, a language for conceptualizing values,
around which we can unite
to confront fundamentalism together and effectively.
Humanists in any tradition, religious and secular alike,
share two moral commitments.
The first is to human rights.
For Christians, and Muslims, and Jews, human rights is based on the belief
that the image of God dwells in all people everywhere.
For Buddhists, we all share Buddha nature.
For Hindus, we're one with the cosmos,
and so we should not cause suffering to any sentient creature,
human or not.
For secularists, secular humanists,
the foundation of human rights are various philosophical analyses,
like the one offered by Immanuel Kant in the 1700s.
Kant argued that it's simply logically self-evident
that we should behave in ways
that we could wish everyone universally would behave.
He called that the categorical imperative.
You can also call it the golden rule.
It works, it works pretty well, no matter what you call it.
Take your pick.
How many different ways can you explain
the need to be a decent human being,
the obligation to be a decent human being?
The second major value that we all share, that all humanists share,
is to be morally committed to seeking truth and wisdom,
which I would define as good judgment in difficult situations.
The very first Christian humanists argued that God calls us to ask questions,
just as God calls us to love our neighbors.
Human curiosity and human creativity, they argued,
are as direct an echo of the image of God in us
as the obligation to love.
These obligations are not to be denied.
Humanists in other traditions of course have other ways of explaining
the deep-seeded human yearning for truth and wisdom,
for curiosity and creativity.
So, once again,
pick an explanation that works for you.
Here's the bottom line, though:
There's not a moral tradition on Earth that would defend the sleazy deceptiveness
of the radical religious Right.
Critical thinking and the honest use of language
are not simply intellectual standards.
That's a moral issue, it's globally recognized as a moral issue.
We are to seek truth and wisdom,
not just wealth, and power, and dishonest political advantage.
And so, when the hard Right ridicules science and expertise,
when they manufacture irrational facts and illusionary data
to support their claims,
don't kid yourself about where that's headed.
It's the abuse of power.
It's the abuse of power
because, if you repeat a lie often enough -
about voter identity fraud, about bathroom safety -
if you repeat a lie often enough, some people will believe you.
Contempt for the truth is politically dangerous.
In a democracy, we argue from data, not from dogma.
We seek to persuade one another honestly and on the basis of the facts.
That's the great threat posed by authoritarian fundamentalism,
whether Christian, or secular,
or any of the other fundamentalisms around us today.
Fundamentalists will not collaborate.
Government, democratic government, grinds to a halt.
Humanism has a really long history in the West,
and I think it helps to know that history and I'd like to tell you that story,
because, if we know our own past, if we know our story,
we can, I don't know, more reasonably rustle up the moral courage that it takes
to do something about the mess that we seem to be headed toward today.
The very first people called humanists were public intellectuals in Italy
in the early 1300s.
At that point, the very first use of the word "humanism" in the West,
all that it meant was "educated in the humanities."
"Humanist" is to the humanities as "scientist" is to the sciences.
That's really all that word meant when it first shows up in the West.
It becomes something much more than that, however,
because of what the humanists achieved.
The first great humanists learned Greek
from Arab scholars who fled to Italy from the rise of the Ottoman Empire.
One of many really important intellectual collaborations
between Christian scholars and Arab scholars.
Then, the humanists went from monastery to monastery to monastery,
all over Italy and then up into Europe,
looking for manuscripts written in Greek,
and they found a treasure trove of previously unreadable manuscripts
that the good monks had preserved since the fall of Rome or thereabouts,
copying as necessary,
preserving these manuscripts century after century after century.
They knew it was important, but, after a point, nobody could read it.
Until these guys showed up and they could read Greek,
and, soon enough, they could read classical Latin.
So, what happens next?
They translate this stuff and they publish it,
taking advantage of that cutting-edge technology,
the printing press.
They reclaimed the entire classical heritage
from Greek and Roman antiquity.
That's what we mean by the Renaissance.
And that's not all.
They also began a recognizably modern literary study of the Bible
in all of its individual languages,
studying each of those individual works in their own historical context -
who wrote it and for whom was that person writing - and so forth.
So, they discovered, for instance,
that the gospels are not eyewitness accounts.
They discovered, for instance,
that the major "church fathers" of classical antiquity explicitly warned
that the creation stories in Genesis
are not to be taken as literal accounts of historical events.
And so on, and so on.
And that set off the Protestant Reformation.
And then?
And then, they found and translated and studied
the major texts of classical rhetoric.
The European culture rediscovered
what classical rhetoric had worked out in the ancient world,
which was how to conduct rigorous, honest, evidence-based arguments
on matters of controversy.
Observation and evidence,
including direct empirical observation of the natural world,
was a major theme in Christian Humanism and all through the Renaissance.
That's part of why they have such brilliant art.
And then, they did something else.
They worked out a new synthesis of important strands
in the European culture.
They had discovered the immense complexity of that culture.
And so, they laid out a robust and deeply theological foundation
for what would become
the modern, rational, scientific, democratic West.
They changed the face of western culture.
They couldn't have changed the face of western culture
without that robust theological foundation
because Christianity had been the state religion of the West
since the year 1390.
It had to have a Christian foundation.
They worked it out.
So, all of this is happening, you know, the Renaissance and the Reformation,
and the Enlightenment which was their working out the classical rhetoric -
1400 to 1700, thereabouts.
In the later 1700s,
there are three major proclamations of human rights.
The first is the American Revolution.
We hold these truths self-evident that all people are created equal.
The second was the French Revolution:
Liberty, equality, and fraternity.
The third was the Abolitionist Movement,
arguing that it was a violation of the Christian obligation
to the image of God in all people
that white people had enslaved people of color.
But then, there is, growing across the 1800s,
a major authoritarian backlash.
There are major pro-democracy movements across Europe.
They're brutally put down. Tens of thousands of people die.
That's in 1848.
America has to fight a civil war over slavery
because abolitionism, which was successful in England and in other places,
fails when it gets to America.
So, a civil war, 1861 to 1865.
And then, in the 1870s and 1880s,
Christian fundamentalism emerges
right alongside other major authoritarian absolutist ideologies,
ideologies that come to political prominence
in Russia, and in Germany, and in Italy.
Christian fundamentalism emerges to oppose everything
that Christian Humanism had achieved,
specifically including democracy, freedom of conscience,
freedom of religion, and biblical scholarship.
Darwin wasn't issue.
Darwin was small potatoes in comparison to biblical scholarship.
These doctrines are reactionary Victorian inventions.
They are not ancient teachings and beliefs.
They're both theological nonsense.
Christian fundamentalism is a totalitarian ideology,
and I don't say that lately.
As Lord Acton warned at the time,
power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Christian fundamentalism is a dangerous corruption of Christianity.
So, fast-forward to the 1930s, the Great Depression.
Radical, wealthy business executives on the hard Right
reach out to authoritarian Christian fundamentalists.
Together, they denounce the New Deal, Roosevelt's New Deal,
as "godless communism."
In the 50s and 60s, it happens again.
Radical business people and fundamentalists
fan the racism of the former slave states.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the archetypal referent
for intrusive government regulations advancing unbiblical principles.
Then, they attacked equal rights for women.
Then, they attacked gay people.
Now, they're demonizing Mexicans and Muslims and the transgender.
Who's next?
Do you smell something?
I smell religion being used for ruthless political and economic advantage.
I smell clout, pure and simple,
and it has all been documented in extraordinary detail.
Reactionary billionaires continue doing this kind of thing.
In June of 1965,
Martin Luther King gave a commencement address at Oberlin College.
Its title was "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution."
King warned that we must stand together as brothers,
or we will die separately as fools.
Let's not die separately as fools.
We need to reclaim the fact that we share these commitments,
that so many of us, on so many different bases,
are committed to human rights and human decency,
to curiosity and inquiry, and free critical thinking.
We have different motives for doing this, we have different explanations.
All of that's fine.
That diversity is strength.
It fosters our flexibility and our creative problem-solving.
It feeds the moral imagination
of the great and fragile American experiment
in multicultural, multireligious democracy.
And so, when you smell clout and dirty politics
wrapping itself in piety,
speak up,
insist that human decency and clear thinking
are moral values shared by decent people globally,
in every religion and in every secular tradition.
Don't shy away from phrases like "moral obligation."
Democracy, above all else, is a moral tradition.
It depends upon our mutual respect
and honest intellectual collaboration for the common good.
Let us continue bending
what Martin Luther King called "the long arch of history."
It does bend toward justice,
but only if decent people stand side by side,
pulling it that way.
Thank you.
(Applause)