Addressing Religion: Blunt Confrontation or Polite Accommodation?

One of the complaints which many liberal and moderate religious theists make about so-called "new" atheists is that they engage in too much blunt confrontation. Even some atheists argue that atheists should be working more towards polite accommodation with religious believers rather than directly challenging, denying, and arguing against beliefs, practices, and traditions we disagree with.

What tends to get missed in all this is the fact that, traditionally at least, religious believers themselves have never actually held this as a value for themselves. Religious believers -- and Christians in particular -- have throughout history not shied away from direct confrontation and arguments with other believers, whether they be other Christians or adherents of other religions. This is just how things work in politics, science, philosophy, economics, and pretty much every other sphere of human endeavor, so it's not the least bit surprising or problematic.

So what changed? How and why did some believers suddenly get the idea that atheists have an obligation to avoid blunt confrontation in favor of polite accommodation?

Ross Douthat writes about the Vatican making overtures to Anglicans who find that the Anglican Church is no longer sufficiently homophobic and misogynistic enough for them:

But in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind -- not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity's global encounter with a resurgent Islam. ...

Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam's compatibility with the Western way of reason -- and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world. ...

What's being interpreted, for now, as an intra-Christian skirmish may eventually be remembered as the first step toward a united Anglican-Catholic front -- not against liberalism or atheism, but against Christianity's most enduring and impressive foe.

Source: Salon

People are seeing in this a shift away from the "ecumenical movement" of the past decades. Basically, most mainstream Christian denominations decided to call a "cease fire" in their arguments with each other, choosing instead to find ways to work together on the basis of common beliefs and end attempts to convince each other to change their minds in areas where they disagreed. I'm not sure why they thought they couldn't do both -- work together in some things and argue in others -- but this is where things have been in the West for the past few decades.

The result was, as might have been predictable, terminal boredom. No one passionately argued against or for anything. No one disagreed. There was no powerful intellectual give-and-take over issues people passionately debated. Even the most boring scientific conferences probably held more arguments and excitement than the interdenominational, interfaith movement of the modern West. They'd probably have been better off trying to combine both disagreements and working together because they sucked all the passion out of their institutions. Today, the less ecumenical and more confrontational denominations are the ones which are growing the fastest. Coincidence? I doubt it.

So to be fair, the people insisting that atheists cease blunt confrontations are often the same ones who have bought into the same interfaith policy for religious believers. This means that they aren't entirely hypocritical, since they at least pay lip service to it when it comes to believers, but they are ignoring the fact that so many believers don't do it, they are ignoring that it certainly wasn't standard in the past, and they ignore the fact that no one expects or follows it in pretty much any other area of life. So why expect atheists to do it, unless it's just that atheists' critiques of religious beliefs are too uncomfortable and too close to the mark?

Glenn Greenwald comments on the idea that Christians should unite in a confrontation with Islam:

It's obviously true that some Islamic extremists are inherently incompatible "with the Western way of reason," but that's just as true of Christian extremists and Jewish extremists and a whole array of other kinds of extremists. And some measures taken in the name of accommodating Islam are in tension with core liberties -- just as laws enacted in order to impose Judeo-Christian dogma are.

But the claim that Islam itself -- and the world's 1.5 billion Muslims -- cannot be accommodated by, or peacefully co-exist with, Western values or Christianity specifically is bigotry in its purest and most dangerous form. It's hard to imagine anything more inflammatory, hostile and outright threatening than a call for Christians of all denominations to unite behind the common cause of fighting against Islam as Christianity's most "enduring and impressive foe." No more "conciliation" or appeasement. What, exactly, does Douthat have in mind for vanquishing the Islamic menace from Europe? What weapons will this "united Anglican-Catholic front" employ against its reason-hating enemy? Which "accommodations" of Islam exactly should cease?

I'd be happy to see Christians engage in more direct confrontation with each other because the more they argue with each other, the less likely I think it is that they will pose a threat to secularism. James Madison and the other founders envisioned exactly this: reducing the chances of a tyranny by the majority by having the "majority" broken up into enough social factions that they can't get their act together long enough cause real problems. So long as the confrontations take place in the field of verbal arguments, more confrontation is probably better than less in the long run.

I'm not as optimistic, though, about "confrontation" with Islam. Domestically, verbal arguments between Christians and Muslims is fine, but on the international stage the primary "confrontations" are the invasions of Muslim lands by Western, Christian armies. The American military is supposed to be secular, but there are large numbers of evangelical Christians who see the military as a means for spreading Christianity through force of arms, not just through the gospel. Anti-Muslim bigotry from evangelical Christians is sometimes taken to extreme lengths, as for example when Christians in Congress complained about the presence of Muslim interns in the government.

Instead of toning down our confrontational methods, as some theists and even some atheists insist, perhaps we atheists can provide an example of "blunt confrontation" that doesn't devolve into bigotry and violence. Perhaps we can work to set an example of confrontation that rests upon evidence, reason, logic, and compassion. We already have a strong working model in science, a model which has helped science produce far more knowledge about our world in the past couple of centuries than all the religions have in the past couple of millennia.