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Wendy Kaminer is the author of five previous books, including I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional (1992), a witty and widely quoted look at the recovery movement that firmly established her credentials as an urbane but unsparing social critic. In her new book, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety (Pantheon), Kaminer turns her attention to what she regards as another species of human folly: the penchant for the irrational, by which she means everything from High Church Anglicanism to a credulous fascination with UFOs. (The belief that Elvis lives, Kaminer says, is no more irrational than the belief that Jesus rose from the dead; both beliefs are irrational, but one enjoys greater prestige than the other.)
Christians and other religious believers are likely to experience considerable cognitive dissonance when they hear Kaminer on the talk-show circuit decrying "the trendy deference toward religion" that plagues our land. "What's striking about journalists and intellectuals today," Kaminer writes, "is not their mythic Voltairian skepticism but their deference to belief and utter failure to criticize, much less satirize, America's romance with God." Michael Cromartie spoke with Kaminer in October in Washington, D.C.
I'm struck by how radically at odds your take on religion is with the conventional wisdom. I was just reading, in a recent issue of The New Republic, Andrew Delbanco's review of a collection of American sermons. In the tone of a man stating an obvious truth, he says that belief is really not an option for thinking people today. From the other side of the divide, Christians and observant Jews see an America in which religious belief is thoroughly under attack. Now along comes Wendy Kaminer saying that American society suffers from too much deference to religion, to such an extent we are threatened with a cultural turn away from rational thought. Why the discrepancy? Why do so many people, believers and unbelievers alike, look at America to day and see a picture so different from what you describe in your book?
I don't think we suffer from too much religion. I think we suffer from too much religiosity. Especially too much public religiosity. Religion is an indescribably powerful phenomenon—not just in this culture—and no indescribably powerful phenomenon ought to be immune from public criticism and public debate, just as a matter of course. People tend to confuse criticizing a religious practice or religious belief with an attempt to deprive somebody of the right to engage in the practice or the right to hold the belief. I don't. I am really very protective of people's individual rights to practice or not practice whatever religion they choose, however they choose it, as long as it doesn't involve things like human sacrifice. (I'll draw a line somewhere!)
But when it comes to public debate, we really shouldn't hold anything sacred. We need to be civil, we need to be courteous, we need to talk about ideas and not make ad hominem attacks on each other. But I don't think we should hold anything sacred, and I'm troubled by the way religion or religiosity is held sacred in the public debate.
How does this square with the notion cultural conservatives have, that we live in an excessively secular society? I think that when they say that, they are primarily talking about their sense of the popular culture. Well, they're right. They are, in a way, under siege by the popular culture. Sexual mores have changed, maybe irrevocably. Gender roles have changed—for the better, I think, but many conservatives would not agree. So it's accurate for them to say that they feel besieged if they're talking about sexual and social mores. It is not accurate for them to say that religion is under siege in America because we are still an extremely religious country.
