The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Utilitarians for Jesus
Matthew Parris, just back from Africa, has an essay in London’s Times bearing the provocative title “As an Atheist, I Truly Believe Africa Needs God”:
Travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.
Call it the utilitarian argument for Jesus: Christianity is in some sense vindicated because it has good effects on believers.
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Is there a utilitarian response to Parris’s argument? Certainly atheists frequently try to argue against faith on utilitarian grounds, pointing to all manner of misdeeds or atrocities that have been committed in the name of religion. But the record here is, obviously, mixed, and in the case of Christianity, one has to go back centuries to make a convincing indictment. As regards contemporary Christianity, it is hard to deny that the good vastly outweighs the bad.
Constructing a utilitarian argument in favor of atheism is harder still. It would have to contend with the relatively fresh–and in some cases continuing–atrocities in the officially atheist communist world. Atheism need not imply communism, of course, but utilitarian arguments confront the world as it is, not as it might theoretically be.
A more promising argument would be to note that in the West specifically, a slow decline in religious belief has been accompanied by political liberalization, economic prosperity and technological innovation. It is not immediately evident, however, that the decline in belief is primarily a cause, rather than an effect, of these other trends. And it is also the case that America is at once more religious and more liberal, prosperous and innovative than the nations of Western Europe.
We will concede that we were predisposed to agree with Parris’s argument. We’ll see if those inclined to disagree can do a better job of arguing against it.
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