I'd attended a talk on "The Challenge to Secularism" by the eminent sociologist Peter Berger, long at Boston University but earlier in his career here at the New School. His argument was familiar Berger material: secularization theory of which he had been a prominent advocate in the 1960s) has proved untrue. Modernity pluralizes but does not secularize, and pluralization is not a bad thing. Religion, except in a few curious cases worth looking at, is going strong. Indeed our world is being reshaped by a Muslim revival (not the jihadis we read about in the paper) and an evangelical
Protestant revival also largely unnoticed by a secularized intelligentsia; Pentecostalism, now numbering about 400 million adherents, is the fastest growing religious movement in history.This was all well and good, but then we were warned against fundamentalism, especially "secular fundamentalism." And in the dinner I found a way to get myself invited to afterwards, I was privy to a world I've never seen before. The talk was in memory of one of the founders of Partisan Review, an American magazine which started Communist and quickly became anti-Soviet, and the central forum for the "New York Intellectuals" of the 1950s. Their anti-totalitarianism actually makes them fellow travelers with much of the tradition of the New School's graduate programs, but you'll hear nothing but dutiful leftism here now. So I was floored to hear a defense of Intelligent Design, and be assured by a woman at my table that atheistic scientists all "revert" on their deathbeds. I suppose I should have known I wasn't in Kansas anymore already when people seemed pleased to hear that there was someone (even if only one person) teaching religious studies at the New School, something whose unlikeliness they well appreciated. And when people started reminiscing fondly about the compulsory Bible courses they took as freshmen in the 1940s and 1950s - although (or especially) because they were quick to point out they'd never had anything to do with religion since, but bore it no ill-will.
The ancient philanthropist next to me denounced Richard Dawkins and got all gooey over the way Robert George managed to set up a center at Princeton which the university faculty and administration could not deflect from a conservative agenda. She seemed to like what I was telling her about religious studies at Lang (she passed over my description of Princeton as better for having both Robbie George and Peter Singer) and said it sounded "like something which should grow," but I doubt she'd like what we actually do! Did I miss my one chance to take someone's money and run with it?
