The New Believers: Re-Imagining God

Review of The New Believers
Brenda lent me this over a month ago, and I have just finished it and wanted to review it before giving it back.
It's interesting that the cover of this book includes a quote from John Shelby Spong: "Dr Kohn offers to those who have the eyes to see a new pathway into a religious future that is real. It might be religion's last chance." This is odd for two reasons. Firstly, Kohn is very critical of Spong, finding his revisionism full of "assumption and conjecture" and thinking his view of the future of religion is "unlikely". And secondly, in her introduction, Kohn has this to say:

"…today one often hears the cant that religion has never before been so tested and found so wanting. This is bunk, of course. Religion has always been tested and always found wanting, which is why it has never stood still, but has been a hotbed of controversy, innovation and striving like every other aspect of human endeavour."

When I read that, I thought, good, at last someone writing about the contemporary religious landscape who has a sense of history about it. And indeed Dr Kohn, who has been a religious studies lecturer in several countries, has a great wealth of knowledge about both the history and the current state of religion in general and the major religions of Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism in particular. She kept telling me things I didn't know, which I always enjoy in a book, as well as providing what struck me as a very sensible perspective in her own arguments.
She thanks her editor for "careful attention" to the manuscript in the acknowledgements, which appears to be a recognition that her skills as a writer fall short of her skills as a thinker. There are a number of awkward, even inept, sentences scattered through the text, but they only detract in a minor way from an interesting and thought-provoking book.
It is worth going through her chapter titles and commenting briefly on each.
Chapter 1, Re-Inventing the Self: The Lesson of Oz, uses Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz as a way in to the now widespread way of thinking about the power inherent within each of us that we only need to believe in - or be reminded of. Baum was a Theosophist (one of the things I didn't know), but his message has become a pervasive belief both inside and outside the New Age. And in redefining the Self as all-powerful, God has been stripped of the same power and become a foolish old man behind a curtain.
Chapter 2, Rewriting the Bible: Jesus was a Man, reviews the outcome of a couple of hundred years of critical reading of the sacred texts and the consequent reinterpretation of the figure of Jesus as a "great teacher" or revolutionary. She reviews the split between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, and explores the consequences of liberal theology (such as Spong's) - what babies might be going out with the bathwater. In particular, there is very little room left for an effective approach to evil, a theme she picks up again in later chapters.
In Chapter 3, Returning to the Mother: God was a Woman, she detours slightly onto another topic - the rise of feminine spirituality both within and outside traditional religions. In an interesting and informative chapter, she outlines the long history of appreciation of the feminine aspects of God, while also gently debunking the more extreme claims of modern goddess worshippers, particularly those that would paint women as inherently morally better than men.
Chapter 4, Restoring the Earth: The Earth is a Bible she similarly explores the long history of appreciation for creation in the major religions and suggests that those who point to Christianity's theology of creation as the culprit for environmental degradation in the West miss the point that industrial civilization has largely been built by those who reject this theology (and that there is widespread environmental degradation outside former Christendom). She urges a recovery of a spiritual sense of the world.
Up to this point she has been concentrating on Christianity as the historical majority religion in the West. The next two chapters look at two other important faiths. Chapter 5, Reforming Buddhism: The Buddha is Western, examines how Buddhism is adapting to Western culture, in the process foregrounding the contradictions and divisions which exist within Buddhism as within all major religions. The more successful adaptations seem also to be the more extreme departures from tradition.
A surprising number of Jewish people have turned to Buddhism and other Eastern paths since the 1960s, and this is one of the phenomena Kohn - herself Jewish - discusses in Chapter 6, Renewing Judaism: Jubus and Kabbalah. (A "Jubu" is a Jewish Buddhist.) The Jewish Renewal movement, with which she appears to have considerable sympathy, is active across the various Jewish denominations and reminds me very much of what is happening within Christianity - people are ceasing to see denomination as important and are also open to importing ideas from other traditions, such as Buddhism. At the same time, a new appreciation of the history of the faith and its particular treasures is arising, in Judaism taking the form of a popularization of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical teaching.
In Chapter 7, Re-Souling Psychology: The Soul is Clinical, Kohn looks (not always sympathetically) at the claims of psychology, particularly its encroachment into territory traditionally considered part of religion. She discusses "spiritual psychology", which contrary to the reductionist and atheist predictions of Freud has become highly significant, while faith, from its side, has often made friends with therapy. She warns, however, that psychology falls down in that it is unable to instill a moral vision, and thus introduces the theme of her next two chapters.
Chapter 8, Removing Morality: Morality is Dead, and Chapter 9, Reclaiming Moral Sense: The Chimps Have It, function as one extended argument for reversing the growing disbelief in morality which has characterised the last couple of centuries. She rather mercilessly exposes the bankruptcy of approaches such as those of Neal Donald Walsch (Conversations With God) and Don Cupitt, which basically say that morality was only ever an external imposition and holds you back from your true self. In the wake of World War II and the moral atrocities of Nazism, she finds this an untenable position (as do I). In the second of these chapters she turns to primate research and argues that far from being an oppressive external imposition of culture against the sovereign individual, morality and altruism are an inherent and appropriate form of expression for social beings. She calls, consequently, for a return to serious consideration of the moral beliefs and teachings of the traditional religions.
In a slight digression, in Chapter 10, Redeeming Religion From Itself: Cults Don't Think, Kohn argues that an important benefit of Western civilization which we need to hold onto firmly is the tradition of critical thought which protects us from having our thinking hijacked by cult leaders (in which category she includes Islamic, and other, fundamentalists). Along with this goes the important ability for people of differing opinions and backgrounds to live together peacefully, without demonising each other as aliens, heretics or otherwise subhuman. She discusses Hans Kung's appeal for a "global ethic", and finds it commendable but somewhat naïve, because it is dependent on exactly these two requirements: Critical thinking which doesn't permit dogmatic blindness, and the consequent ability to accept others who hold differing views.
Her final chapter is called "Rethinking Rigid and Romantic Religion: Where We Are Now", and this is a good summary of the book; she has no time for rigidity which wants things to stay the same when they evidently aren't and can't, but she equally has no time for naïve romanticism about how wonderful the future will be if we only toss out the old certainties. Kohn (in this chapter, and in the book as a whole) doesn't provide answers for the "future of religion" so much as point out useful and less useful paths to pursue. In the process she pops a few bubbles of prominent figures who claim to have "the answer", pointing out that (as is always the case with reductionist approaches) they leave significant issues unaddressed.
In summary, her appeal is for us to work towards a faith, or rather faiths, which are mutually tolerant, internally self-critical, and capable of offering a credible moral teaching to the world, backed up by acts of altruism, compassion and preservation of what is truly valuable. She is clear-sighted enough, I think, to know that this is a process which won't soon come to an end in paradise on earth, but considers the effort well worth making - indeed, the only effort worth making.