New Atheism and the Trouble with Literalism

English literature scholar David Hawkes describes the New Atheism movement of the early 2000s as “arguably the first genuinely popular movement in the world of ideas for several decades.” Hawkes writes that the movement was fueled by Americans’ widespread fear of Islamic fundamentalism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Another factor, particularly among political liberals, was the worry about homegrown Christian fundamentalism.

As the focus on fundamentalism suggests, the New Atheists were particularly concerned about believers who take sacred texts literally, resulting in confusion about science and history and in rigid moral thinking. But they were equally bothered by arguments that the Bible or Koran could be read non-literally. As New Atheist superstar Christopher Hitchens wrote in his book God is Not Great,  “either the gospels are in some literal sense truth, or the whole thing is essentially a fraud and perhaps an immoral one at that.”

But that’s a position that Christians have been refuting since the very beginning. In fact, Hawkes writes, in the ancient world where the religion began, “the literal was but one among several levels on which a text might be interpreted. It was the least exalted level, and it was consistently associated with carnality and slavery.”

Socrates, for example, described literalism as a view of the world instinctively picked up by children, which adults can disprove through reasoned dialogue. The ancient Greeks viewed enslaved people, who had no opportunity to find a higher purpose for their own lives, as being limited to the childish pursuit of carnal pleasures and to viewing life through a literal lens.

Likewise, in the gospels of the New Testament, Jesus repeatedly insists that his disciples must learn to understand his words as parables or metaphors. And the early Christian theologian Origen wrote that scriptures “have a meaning, not such only as is apparent at first sight, but also another, which escapes the notice of most.”

In 401 CE, Saint Augustine warned Christians against taking biblical stories regarding subjects like the natural world literally in terms strikingly relevant to debates about New Atheism. If non-Christians “find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well,” Augustine wrote, “how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven?”

On the other hand, Christians often attributed literalism to the Old Testament and characterized Jewish thinking as excessively legalistic. This trope is also found in Shakespeare’s antisemitic characterization of Shylock demanding the “letter” of his “bond.”

As Hawkes writes, up until the seventeenth-century “scientific revolution,” scholars in general were less interested in understanding the world as it appears than considering how those appearances might be deceiving. And even then, many Christian writers continued to insist that religious matters required a different approach. For example, responding to opponents of divorce who found justification in a literal reading of Christ’s words in the Gospel of Matthew, John Milton railed against “that letter-bound servility of the Canon Doctors.”

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