[Allen] writes: “Mr. Royal’s belief that religion has acted as a restraint on human cruelty rather than an instigation to it addresses a question that probably will never be settled satisfactorily. He points out, as others have, that anti-religious regimes like Mao’s and Stalin’s murdered many more people than religious persecutions ever did. While this is certainly true, Mr. Royal does not take into account the fact that ideology functions as a sort of religion in its own right, offerings its acolytes the feeling of transcendence normally associated with faith, and the sublimation of the ego in a larger cause.”

This is part of a very old word game. If you say anti-religious ideologies are more destructive than religion, it is only because anti-religious ideologies are, in fact, religion in another guise. Part of the problem, of course, is in the defense of religion-in-general. Any thoughtful Christian has to have at least a modicum of sympathy for Karl Barth’s solution, which is to insist that Christianity is not a religion. In this view, religion is a human enterprise aimed at reconciliation with, or manipulation of, transcendent powers such as God or the gods. Christianity, by way of sharpest contrast, is not a human enterprise but the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. It is a human enterprise only in that a community of human beings, the Church, responds to that revelation, but that, too, is the work of God in engendering faith in response to God’s revealing initiative.

An alternative to the Barthian strategy is to observe that all thoughtful people are engaged in a search for the truth of things and the wisdom to live in accord with the truth of things. At one level, one might simply call this “thinking,” although traditionally we have called it philosophy—meaning the love of wisdom. In the Christian intellectual tradition, the early church fathers called Christianity the “true philosophy.” The claim was that Christianity, grounded in the logos or reason that created and sustains all things, makes more sense of more facts than alternative ways of thinking about reality.

That brief description does not do justice to the argument of Barth and Barthians, but it suggests one way of drawing a sharp distinction between Christianity and religion-in-general. The whole idea that there is such a category of human belief and action that can be fitted into the category of “the religious phenomenon” is misbegotten, as Robert Royal points out in his critique of “religious studies” departments in higher education.

[...]

While I am in warm agreement with the case that Robert Royal makes, I do wish he had chosen a subtitle other than How Religion Built and Sustains the West. Christians have no stake in defending religion as such. Except to the degree that all rational people have a stake in exposing the irrationality of a philosophy of ideological secularism that refuses to engage the big questions that secularists dismiss as “religious.”