Word has just come down the line that Harvard University has elected its first-ever atheist chaplain. Yes, you read that right: Greg Epstein, who identifies as a “humanist rabbi,” has been chosen as president of chaplains for the religious community at the fancy Ivy.
Talk about jumping the shark.
Epstein, who has been ministering to the nonbelievers and nonreligious seekers at Harvard, has been described as a “devout atheist.” Yet he will be coordinating the efforts of all the chaplains at one of America’s premier universities.
He told The New York Times, “There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life.” The various Harvard chaplains, a professional community representing many of the world’s religious traditions, unanimously elected Epstein to represent them.
Look, as a Catholic bishop, I don’t deny that many young people are drifting into unbelief and religious disaffiliation; one in five Americans now describes himself as “spiritual but not religious,” and this group trends young, educated and liberal, according to pollsters.
Churches should, of course, be reaching out to this demographic, including by sponsoring conversation klatches, or philosophical debating societies, or pizza and beer forums where students discuss matters ethical and spiritual. And if Harvard wanted to appoint an unbeliever to oversee these confabs, the school would get no argument from me.
What does bother me is the complete and abject surrender on the part of the presumably religious leaders at Harvard who chose this man. If a professed atheist counts as a chaplain — which is to say, a leader of religious services in a chapel — then “religion” has quite obviously come to mean nothing at all.
All of this has been a long time coming. The elite distortion of religion to the level of chatting amicably about improving one’s moral life and inner feelings can be traced to two German philosophers writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Immanuel Kant famously opined that authentic religion had nothing finally to do with doctrines, dogmas, prayer and liturgy. Rather, faith was all about the cultivation of morality. The popular version of Kant’s teaching is on display today whenever someone says, “You know, it doesn’t finally matter what we believe, as long as we are nice people.”
Kant’s younger contemporary Friedrich Schleiermacher held that religion, at bottom, isn’t a set of doctrines, but rather a feeling of absolute dependency, or as he sometimes put it, “a sense and taste for the infinite.” The great philosopher G.W.F. Hegel mocked this sentimentalization of religion, noting, “If Schleiermacher is right, then my dog is the perfect Christian!”
My point is that the relativizing of doctrine has led, by steady steps through two centuries, to the situation at Harvard today: Even that most elemental of doctrines — belief in God — doesn’t matter. One can still, evidently, be perfectly “religious” without it.
But this is so much nonsense. As a Catholic churchman, I believe in an all-powerful, omniscient and loving God, who brought the entire universe into existence from nothing and who now sustains it and draws it to himself. This God chose the people of Israel, whom he gifted with divine law, covenant, prophecy and temple. In the fullness of time, he became incarnate in a first-century Jew called Jesus of Nazareth, who died on a Roman cross, rose from the dead and now invites all people to come under his lordship.
Say what you want about all of that. Affirm it, deny it, argue about it. Tell me I’m crazy for believing any of it. But by God, it’s a religion. Of course, different religions make varying doctrinal claims, but at the very least, they affirm the existence of God. (I know, I know, certain branches of Buddhism might be the exception here, but it’s the exception that proves the rule.)
I’m sure Epstein is a nice fellow. I have nothing against him. But I do want to urge his presumably religious colleagues at Harvard who elected him: Show a little self-respect. Being a chaplain has something to do with the worship of God — and you shouldn’t be ashamed to say it.
Robert Barron is the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles.
Twitter: @BishopBarron