Yesterday at NPR, Aengus Woods wrote a critical review of De Botton’s Religion for Atheists. Below is an excerpt, along with a few of my own thoughts.

“De Botton fluently identifies how religion traditionally addressed social needs before offering his own secular proposal for meeting them anew. For example, religion has traditionally provided a sense of community that can override divisions of class or income. We might therefore regain this sense of togetherness through rituals that mimic, say, the Eucharistic service. De Botton suggests a restaurant where “our fear of strangers would recede” and “the poor would eat with the rich.” And Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall might be replaced by electronic billboards “that would anonymously broadcast our inner woes,” thereby reminding us that “we are none of us alone in the extent of our troubles and our lamentations.”

The problem with this approach is not simply that the solutions are trite or feel crassly commercial. The problem is that it is utterly impossible to get any sort of consensus on what we poor secularists need from religion. The beauty and danger of organized religion has always been its authoritarian aspect: It tells us what is wrong and what is right, what is healthy and what is impure. Apply these edicts to the secular world, and they begin to look suspiciously like indoctrination.

Where is the place of criticality here, and exactly whose values get to be promoted? If they are common-sense values, we will soon find a plethora of competing commonsensical values. We should remember how quickly Socrates’ ideal republic begins to look like a totalitarian state.”

Interesting, but I think Woods betrays here a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of religion, and secularism for that matter. He seems to be suggesting that “secular” society is something other than religious, and that it is not in the business of telling us what is wrong and right, what has value and why, what is clean and what is impure – this suggestion is of course blatantly false.

From the well practiced liturgy of the mall, to the national and military imagery with which we baptize our holidays and sporting events, or the communal worship experience of a rock concert, the secular world may not openly identify allegiance with a particular god but it is incredibly religious.

It seems De Botton understands this, and is simply arguing that, if that is the case, we may as well be intentional about it. And I think that would be a much more interesting conversation than the tired rhetoric of secularism vs. religiosity.