Witnessing-free zones

Susan Harding, an anthropologist at UC Santa Cruz and author of the wonderful Book of Jerry Falwell is here as part of the Religious-Secular Divide conference. Her new project is on young anti-fundamentalist evangelicals, and her location in Santa Cruz has made Dan Kimball's Vintage Faith Church, a leading "emerging church," an object of study. (I assigned some of Kimball's work in my Cultures of the Religious Right course a year ago.) More than that. She told me that she's become a regular at The Abbey, a coffee shop for your hipsters and artists maintained by Vintage Church. What's interesting about it, besides the good coffee, is that's it's a space for the "secular religious" people Kimball appeals to. Besides having coffee blends called "nun's blend" and "monk's blend" (laced with several rich ironies for postmodern evangelical Protestants) it's an entirely secular place, the "archetypal bourgeois space."

But as she told me about it, the secularist Harding seems to get a particular thrill from it's being a "witnessing-free zone." You can be reading Nietzsche but the person at the next table (perhaps reading the Bible) won't witness to you, even though they know you're going to hell. "Such self-restraint!" she said, not without admiration.

I was impressed too, since this "witnessing-free zone" clearly functions as a form of witness after all. How ingenious, how postmodern. Susan Harding may or may not be going to hell later, but for now she's going to The Abbey. Is "such self-restraint!" the postmodern update of "see how these Christians love each other"?

"Witnessing-free zone" is a suggestive term (coming from Harding, who delights in polysemy and revoicing, I don't know it isn't also a term Kimball uses) and helped me name something I experienced on Wednesday at a forum at the New York Times Building sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. Kick-off for their yearlong "Darwin 200" series, it was a discussion on "Evolution and the Ethical Brain," featuring three important writers on the subject - Michael Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, and Steven Quartz - and moderated by Times columnist David Brooks. All four are, so far as you can tell, entirely naturalistic in their under- standing of things.

The Templeton Foundation isn't into naturalism, at least not exclusively. Although it's refined its image in recent years to deemphasize the language of the spiritual (still part of the Templeton Prize description), it's definitely about "The Big Questions" which religions explore, and has been using its considerable resources to generate visible dialogue between the natural sciences and religion. It even sponsors seminars for scientists and others called the "Humble Approach Initiative." This panel had not even a whiff of humility about it, but this struck me in a way comparable to the way The Abbey struck Susan Harding. Providing a platform for variously naturalist accounts of human nature, entirely uncontested... What self-restraint!