Beloved Infidels

Religious belief, it would seem, has fallen on bad days. God is dead. Hell has cooled. Man's only heaven is what he can make of earth. Old-fashioned militant atheism may be on the wane, but to some appalled and devout Christians, unbelief seems ascendant, and Antichrist just around the corner. The trouble with the image, according to an international symposium on unbelief last week, is that it is all wrong. "The modern world," declared University of California Sociologist Robert N. Bellah without irony, "is as alive with religious possibility as any epoch in human history."

That conclusion seemed almost as unlikely as the conference site itself: Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University. Meeting under the joint sponsorship of the Vatican and the University of California at Berkeley, and financed by the Fiat auto company's Giovanni Agnelli Foundation, two dozen scholars from eight countries set out to explore "The Culture of Unbelief." In their collective view, the world's supposed infidels are more sinned against than sinning--and sometimes more religious than those who call them unbelievers.

Search for Transcendence. Harvard Divinity School's theologian of the secular, black-bearded Harvey Cox, startled an opening-day crowd of 4,000 at the conference when he charged that "hypocrisy--not unbelief--is really the major religious problem of our time." He suggested that the Vatican might well establish a secretariat on hypocrisy to deal with Catholics who attend Mass and "even give the correct answers" but who "do not really have a living belief which motivates their life." Against such believers, asked Cox, "how can we really use the label 'unbeliever' for people whose search for the transcendent is somehow more serious and many times more ardent? They may think of themselves as Marxists or scientific humanists or behaviorists, but 'nonbelievers' is not the name by which they know themselves in their own hearts."

Part of the problem, explained Sociologist Bellah, derives from the traditional idea of belief. From the days of the church fathers, Christianity has tended to equate belief with intellectual assent to a given body of dogma. In Bellah's view, young people today see it rather as a commitment, part of a "quest for personal authenticity" that can take them into Black Power or the Peace Corps, hippiedom or Zen, drugs or sex. Some of these convictions hardly qualify as "beliefs" by any standard, and most of them are clearly not oriented toward God at all. Nonetheless, they may unwittingly reflect "the operation of the Holy Spirit," Bellah says. He looks on the Peace Corps, for instance, as "a secular monastic order whose members take a voluntary vow of poverty and go out to work for the alleviation of the sufferings of the world."

Beliefs from Within. Children raised in benevolent American homes, argued Sociologist Peter L. Berger (TIME, Jan. 10) of New York's New School for Social Research, often turn to unbelief when they move from the unprecedented happiness of a modern childhood into the cruel adult world. When they encounter institutions that are not as benign as they should be, they revolt. Harvey Cox laid the blame for such revolts at the door of the church itself. "It may be that the major reason for unbelief is not that people find the Gospel incredible but that they find the church incredible," he said. "The church of the Prince of Peace is unable to take decisive action against war, and the church with the ideal of poverty continues to accumulate real estate."

Sociologist Thomas Luckmann of Frankfurt University predicted that eventually the categories of "belief" and "unbelief" will disappear. "A particular form of religion, institutional specialization, is on the wane," he contended, and as it goes, the distinctions between believers and nonbelievers will fade. One type of person will then evolve his private set of ultimate values; another will find that he can express his best through one of the churches that remain. But Luckmann warns that the surviving churches must understand their true role: not to command belief but to help each person articulate his beliefs from within himself.

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