Agnosticism is a polite and mellow response and atheism a more determined rejection of God-conversations. While agnosticism came into being as a refusal to entertain knowledge that is not empirical, it has lately come to register a certain cultural mood of metaphysical abstention, and skepticism as the fitting and sophisticated posture of a secular and scientific age. Many are disinclined to assert, or deny, truth claims unaccompanied by the kind of compelling evidence now widely demanded. The default position is that God is unknowable and therefore a non-starter at table talk. Sometimes agnosticism is a polite form of atheism, or an easily defended defense against the call of religion. Yet some American polls show that people who identify as agnostics often say they believe in God. Pollsters assume the self-designation of agnostic is a way of separating oneself from the disagreeable or disreputable dimensions of what goes for “religion,” warding off the insistent salesmen .

Like the instincts of a runaway bride, agnosticism has a point.  At least tentatively. But is this a good lifetime strategy? Agnosticism looks like an inability to commit. It’s a safe posture that declines to take a chance on disappointment or looking unsophisticated or foolish. It resembles a student’s decision to take all classes credit/no credit and foregoing letter grades. But love, commitment, ultimate meaning—all require a wager.  Religion has an admittedly confessional character, going public with one’s wager.

            Agnosticism saves you from Dostoevsky’s heavy-handed trinity of miracle, mystery, and authority and joins Thomas Jefferson’s project to free us from mystification, burdensome tradition, fanaticism, and the frankly ridiculous, which is good. All things considered, agnosticism seems to many the best default position.  But one of agnosticism’s unpleasant guises is cynicism.  This is where the smart, critical, dissenting, and formerly idealistic go on retreat.  They bask in ironic detachment. They never have to risk seeming foolish, getting snookered, staking their lives on anything. If the engaged life is just too much of a work-out, this is the excuse to sit in the stands together with all those who refuse to suit up for gym. 

            Of course, a very respectable dimension of agnosticism is methodological doubt: don’t believe or assume anything because someone says so; be suspicious of received truths and popular assumptions; grant religion no “epistemological privilege” (arguing because “the Bible says so”). But there’s supposed to be a point to doubt: it’s a means to an end, not the end itself.  You keep moving and find better truth.  Agnosticism suggests a certain failure to close

            What about atheism? Atheists are impolite and lately militant, they don’t fit the American mode of tolerance, and their over-confident nihilism is tiresome at parties.  The Soviets launched militant atheism as the necessary legitimation of the new state their revolution was achieving. Enforced secularism would eliminate religion as the supply side of alternative worldviews. They worked to create atheism as a specific alternative to religion because they saw the necessity of creating alternative rituals that would glue the new society together. In Maoist China, the revolutionary government was determined to eradicate through explicit cultural genocide an entire Tibetan Buddhist civilization. Both countries hoped that an enforced atheistic enlightenment could, over just a few decades, wash away a millennium of religious belief. That attempt failed, and religion inRussia began to make a comeback under glasnost, and especially after 1989, and now Putin is crossing himself. Atheism did not have the lasting effect hoped for on the belief systems of most Soviet citizens and failed to establish committed followers, although forty years of East German Communism had a devastating effect on the land of the Protestant Reformation.

            Of course, atheism is not unique to totalitarian societies. The European Enlightenment and its modern heirs found work diagnosing the problems of theism in the last two centuries. Some thought they could trace the origins of religion to a prehistoric fraud. Image after image of God was deconstructed and found to be humanly constructed--and oppressive. God was dethroned as king once it was seen that a long line of European and other monarchs had claimed divine right in the image of the heavenly ruler. A universe evolving and human nature becoming made God as the Unmoved Mover, dear to ancient Greek philosophers, irrelevant. Feminists unmasked a male God who authorized patriarchy everywhere. Liberation movements arose to insist that God was not white, male, or straight, and ultimately some in the 1960s simply announced the death of God.

            Alas, by the end of the 20th century the “new atheism,” with celebrity atheists all swooning at the salons of the sophisticated, had become the new postmodern superstition:  a pious rejection on the cheap that required neither critical thinking nor moral introspection. The new atheist air was filled with caricatures, ignorance, prejudice based on cherry-picked egregious examples, intemperate crusaders’ zeal, tedious tracking of errors, theological howlers, and category mistakes arising from complete and perhaps deliberate misunderstanding of what species religion actually belongs to. Street corner atheists, some famous, began to mirror the fundamentalist habits of mind they were railing against, and so the term “Enlightenment fundamentalism” was born. Many demonstrated an amazing ignorance of the history of religions and displayed only a sophomore’s grasp of theology. Those who came out of intellectual disciplines well known in universities (natural sciences, social sciences, humanities) rushed to escape all the critical reasoning and expertise required there in order to kill the dragon of religion with their bare hands. Islamophobic rants escaped from the same zoo.