I've recently read some of the editorial remarks of William F. Buckley as they pertain to his upcoming lecture and panel discussion on the place of religion in academia. Buckley refers to the treatment of personal religious beliefs in the university as a "subtle sequestration that religion is something you do on your own, and it is disruptive to bring it up."
If what Buckley claims is true, it begs the question: why can't we talk about this? Who has established the taboo?
It seems to me that an issue as basic as what one believes about God so radically impacts one's entire worldview that it would be an essential element of our education, our relationships and our long-term goals, but Buckley has suggested that here in the university we suppress such discussion.
If there is an unofficial ban on public discourse on the matter of personal belief systems, it's worth at least a quick look at the legacy of suppression. The examples in history, even on a macroscopic level, are too many to count, so I'll use one that I've come across lately.
The year was 1633. The Church was about to make one of the most embarrassing mistakes of history as Galileo Galilei simply pleaded with its leaders to look into his telescope. Through its lens the great scientist and mathematician had touched the mountainous surface of Earth's moon and chased Venus in its orbit around the sun. This instrument had supplied irrefutable proof that there was indeed change in the heavens and that they did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth.
By refusing to look through that lens, the church missed a number of glorious opportunities, not the least of which was to see the magnificent sight of the heavens as they really are. But far worse, the religious leaders of the day proved themselves to be direct moral descendants those who condemned the man they claimed as their Lord.
In 1992 Pope John Paul II formally and publicly recognized that the charge against Galileo -- "vehement suspicion of heresy" -- was foolish and unjustified, and we can look back after 300 years of scientific discovery and emancipation of ideas and think, "How far we've come!" But have we? What was going through the minds of those leaders in 1633? Are the minds of humans so different now?
What little I know of history seems to indicate a pattern. Whenever free speech is suppressed, there is a common motivation: fear. The Pharisees of the four gospels feared losing their influence over Israel to a carpenter claiming he was a king. The Church feared a loss of authority in the intellectual world (which would exacerbate a continuing loss of political and even religious authority) to a man who dared to insinuate that they were misinterpreting Scripture.
They could have joined in Galileo's search for truth, but they let their fears rule, and their fears came true. If only those 17th-century bishops could have seen the Galileo spacecraft orbiting Jupiter!
It is hard to say who has the real authority in the world now. Perhaps it is science, perhaps politics, perhaps humanism ... in some places it is certainly still religion. I am not suggesting that the forces of suppression are quite so obvious as they once were.
They are far more personal, and they reveal themselves in the way we as individuals react when the sensitive issues of core beliefs surface (Buckley equates asking about someone's religious beliefs to inquiring on their sex lives -- an analogy I'm not entirely comfortable with, though the image casts the issue in a new and provocative light).
The question that lies before all of us is this: when we hear ideas that oppose our own beliefs, do we listen without fear? When the only source of truth we know is questioned, be it the Bible or scientific method, do we scream and holler and try to drown out the noise of heretical banter, or do we peer into the telescope and trust that the truth will come to light?
I hope that here at Dartmouth Buckley will be forced to reconsider his observations regarding that "subtle sequestration." I hope that we are not afraid to engage in discussions which may call into question our whole way of thinking. I hope that just as God is still worshipped by millions after Galileo's pardon, science, politics and humanism will trust progress to continue if God is allowed to be spoken of and that religion will hear the words of others without fearing the wrecking of its faith.
Surely, truth is truth, and it requires no human intellect to make it so. We must live out a tradition of hearing arguments and testing the validity of our beliefs or those beliefs will become hollow and weak. Truth is never destroyed by controversy -- only temporarily forgotten in silence.
