The Divine Camille in Salon. Five pages and a quote-worthy section on every page:
Well, as long as the Democrats are perceived as the anti-religion party, we’re going to lose the culture wars…. I’m speaking here as an atheist who studies religion and respects it enormously. In the history of mankind, the benefits that religion has brought to society in shaping behavior and moral choice are overwhelming in comparison to the negatives, which anyone can list — like religious wars and bigotry. Without religion, we’d have anarchy.
Religion is also a metaphysical system that honors the largeness of the universe. It’s that sense of largeness, which my generation used to call cosmic consciousness, that is missing in the cynical ideologies promoted by the elite universities — like post-structuralism, which is obsessed with politics and language and has a depressingly debased view of human experience. Post-structuralism doesn’t see the stars or the enormity of nature, which for religious people symbolizes God’s power. So I think that the constant sniping at religion coming from liberal Democrats is really a dead end.
But there’s reason for alarm at the right-wing intertwining of religion and politics, where the Bible is seen as the prophetic master plan of the universe and where Israel as the Holy Land must be protected at all costs from Muslim infiltration — duplicating the agenda of the medieval crusades. But to claim, as Democrats often do, that there has always been a separation of church and state in America is misleading: The U.S. simply has no official state religion. The formative influence in our intellectual heritage came from Puritan dissidents in New England. Major universities like Harvard and Yale were founded on religious principles.
The more liberal parents are, the less contact their children have with religious ideas. That will surely disable our future American leaders from being able to understand the religious commitment of Islamic fundamentalists. Liberal journalists often seem incredulous about how anyone would seek death for religious principles. But that was the entire history of early Christianity, when the saints willingly sought martyrdom. We’re heading into that world again.
What do contemporary intellectuals have to offer anyhow? What passionate engagement do they have to appeal to young people? Liberal secularism has become bourgeois and materialistic. It’s snide, elitist, and politically marginalized.
She’s right, liberal secularism is not only a demographic dead end, but an intellectual dead end as well. While science can progress in spite of this handicap, as it is no longer a primarily intellectual exercise but more of an engineering one, the same is not true of philosophy, literature and other arts. Regardless, Camille Paglia’s boldness and willingness to criticize those whose political ideology she shares is always remarkable.