   The New York Times, May 24, 1998, p. WK11.

   The Most Religious Century

   By Michael Novak

      Michael Novak, a theologian at the American Enterprise
      Institute, is the author, with his daughter Jana, of the
      forthcoming "Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His
      Daughter's Questions About God."

   Washington. It was hardly an opinion one expected to hear
   from Norman Mailer. "Religion to me is now the last
   frontier," the writer said in a recent interview.

   These words are almost as surprising in their way as Vaclav
   Havel's assertion last fall about today's crisis of moral
   responsibility in this "first atheistic civilization in the
   history of humankind." The crisis, he said, is the result
   of our loss of the feeling that "the Universe, nature,
   existence and our lives are the work of a creation guided
   by a definite intention."

   When Mr. Mailer and Mr. Havel, ripe with years and not 
   particularly known as pious men, join in emphasizing the
   new importance of religion, and evoke perspectives
   introduced into the literature of our time by Aleksandr
   Solzhenitsyn, you may be sure that the 21st century will be
   the most religious in 500 years.

   A sea change in the realm of ideas helps make this so. Of
   the three great intellectual struggles of the bloody
   century now passing, two have been resolved, while the
   reckoning on the third has been postponed.

   The first challenge was political, and took this form:
   dictatorship is better for people, especially the poor,
   than democracy. This idea swept large portions of the
   globe--until the dictators committed unspeakable abuses
   against humanity. While many dictators remain in power, no
   one today (except, perhaps, Fidel Castro) argues that
   dictatorship is the wave of the future.

   The second challenge was economic: socialism is better for
   poor people than capitalism. No practical person today
   accepts that boast. Socialist countries are rushing to
   absorb capitalist insights, practices and reforms,
   precisely to improve the economic conditions of their
   poverty-stricken populations.

   But suppose that every country in the world succeeds in
   adopting a free political system and a free economic
   system. Then the third great challenge asserts itself: how,
   then, shall we live? How must we live, to preserve free
   societies and to be worthy of the blood and the pain? This
   is the unfinished business of our century, and serious
   thinkers have begun to take it up.

   Another reason that moral and religious questions have come
   to the forefront is this: For some five centuries, a
   leading secular elite has held that moral questions can be
   resolved on the plane of reason alone. Some still believe
   that. But it has become ever more apparent that such a
   belief is only a belief, a faith, a kind of religion of its
   own.

   For who, looking at the butcher's bench that was the 20th
   century finds it self-evident that reason is adequate to
   its own defense? That reason is in tune with nature,
   history or even itself? All around us, postmodernists,
   nihilists and relativists have been assuring us that reason
   has no particular grip on reality. Against this onslaught,
   reason has not defended itself well. This inadequacy is the
   more apparent when one thinks not of the rare individual
   but of the whole social order, in all its teeming varieties
   of passion, ignorance, ambition and talent.

   These reflections suggest why our present crisis is better
   described as religious, or at least as moral and religious,
   rather than simply as moral alone. For the underlying
   question is deeper than moral. Why are our sentiments about
   justice so strong? Why do we long for universal amity? Why
   should we trust reason? Why should we be moral, especially
   when no one is looking and no one is harmed and no one will
   ever know?

   Secular humanism gave us answers for 500 years that no
   longer seem adequate even to many who tried hard to be
   faithful to them. That is why so many far-seeing souls
   announce that we have come to the edge of the Enlightenment
   and are stepping forth into something new, untried, not yet
   transparent.

   This brings us to a third reason for the rising
   preoccupation with religion. Faith in reason alone had as
   its premise the belief that humans are not naturally
   religious, but naturally irreligious. Therefore, to be
   religious was in some way to be alienated from oneself and
   to exhibit a form of weakness. The fearful might cling to
   a blanket or need a crutch, but not the free and the brave,
   not the mature.

   Today, however, the religious question arises most
   insistently among some of the most successful and the most
   powerful, and not at their moments of weakness but during
   their hours of greatest triumph--in the arts (Mailer), in
   politics (Havel) and in every other field. Just then, just
   when they have achieved everything they once thought would
   make them happy, they bump into their own finitude--and
   their infinite hunger. I have seen this happen to many
   acquaintances. "There must be more to it than this!" is the
   essential cry of the human heart. In brief, some of the
   leading spirits of our age have begun to sense that humans
   are naturally religious. They have learned that to discover
   God, one does not have to be driven down on all fours.
   Today it is often the brightest and the most able and the
   most fortunate who are becoming aware of their true nature.
   This very nature sings to them of God.

   For Americans especially, every return to first principles
   brings us back to convictions central to this republic. Why
   are we so ardent about the separation of church and state?
   Not because we are irreligious but precisely the opposite.
   Our founders knew, as we know, that the fundamental human
   drama occurs in the depths of every human will. Lord Acton,
   the great historian of liberty, held that the idea of
   liberty is coincident with the history of Judaism and
   Christianity. Without liberty, Judaism and Christianity are
   empty, just as they are empty if reason is destroyed.

   Thus it is that Norman Mailer begins to speak, tentatively
   and indirectly, not merely of "religion," but of Judaism
   and Christianity. In these two traditions, reason and faith
   spring from the same stream. The death of either reason or
   liberty means death for them, too. 

   Suppose, finally, that in the 21st century, the findings of
   science and the reflections of religion, particularly of
   Jews and Christians, converge as they have not done for 500
   years. Suppose, too, that scientists begin approaching
   religions in an empirical frame of mind instead of
   adversarially, and begin to search out fruitful hypotheses
   in them, instead of trying to replace them with a rival
   Weltanschauung.

   Quietly, this already seems to be happening in practical
   spheres like medicine and in theoretical spheres like
   physics. Mutual respect sometimes goes a lot further than
   automatic hostility. In such a context, even conflict and
   disagreement bear great intellectual fruits, as all parties
   struggle to go deeper and to start again in a fresh way.

   Last year, Vaclav Havel darkly suggested that modern
   science grew up within the context of a surrounding Jewish
   and Christian culture, one of whose deepest convictions is
   that everything that exists proceeds from insight and
   love--the active powers of one Creator--and thus is subject
   to fruitful inquiry: everything is made to be
   understandable by those who have the wit to inquire.
   Inquiry is an altogether fitting response to the Creator.

   We have come through a long and bloody century, and
   something new is stirring everywhere. It is none too soon.

   [End]


