Max Weber once called himself "religiously unmusical."  The extent to which this is true remains doubtful, but the phrase is a useful one to keep around.  Many people who write about religion have not felt the grip of such commitments very deeply, it seems.  I think glibness is an especially destructive acid for any phenomenology of religious life.  

Then again, people who were once "true believers" (in their own minds) often retain the sense that theirs is the only kind of "belief" worth considering, others are simply diluted versions of what they offer.  I don't think that's so--I think there's a kind of mature religious belief or disposition that is very different from the adolescent zealot.  But it's not a lesson that the zealous ex-zealot readily learns.

I write on this because I've been interested in the reception of Martin Hägglund's book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom.  Much of the reception has been positive.  And there is some stuff about it I like.  I appreciate the way in which Hägglund emphasizes that the stance he propounds is a "secular faith"--that is, it is a commitment that is not deductively, unquestionably derivable from an unbiased examination of the relevant facts.  I like that very much, as a way of (potentially) opening dialogue.  I am also interested in his argument that we all should become Scandinavian democratic socialists, and reimagine life in quite radical ways as about valuing time rather than things.  

But I am disappointed in what the majority of the book is about--its depiction of religion.  I just think that its interesting arguments are hung awkwardly on an anti-religious polemic that obscures instead of clarifying.  Again, it seems that contemporary scholarship has a hard time engaging seriously with religious thought, or experience.

This is, to be frank, surprising to me.  Hägglund is praised in reviews I've seen for the seriousness with which he engages with major thinkers like Augustine and Kierkegaard.  (Few note that he tries to promote C.S. Lewis to their ranks--a mistake.)  For my money, a quick look at his notes will show that while he cites Kierkegaard directly (he is Scandinavian, after all), his account of Augustine is largely at second hand and mostly through some small acquaintance with the work of Charles Taylor, who is brilliant, but not as an exegete of pre-modern thinkers.  In fact the scholarship reminds me of Gibbon's crack at Augustine: his learning is borrowed, but his arguments, alas, are largely his own.  Except that in this case even the arguments aren't Hägglund's own; they're platitudes of knitted inanities and slogans.  

I never know what happens with books like this.  It's kind of like the book of a few years ago, All Things Shining, by Dreyfus and a philosopher from Harvard.  Not stupendously well done.  They're the pseudo-academic analogy to Jon Meacham's next presidential history book, or something.  They're more events than contributions.  I worry that they're more exemplary of a particular collection of opinions than the result of hard first-order thinking by an individual thinker.

A couple good reviews have pointed out some of the problems here.  Matthew Engelke offers a nice summary: 

Hägglund’s rendering of religious faith is particularly problematic. He is dogged in his efforts to show that religious faith is all about a misplaced emphasis on eternity. It is, he writes, “the common denominator” of “all world religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity).”

…It is not that Hägglund cannot have his own definitions of “religion.” In the best case, this would underscore his recognition of that term’s contingency and embeddedness within particular discursive traditions and projects. The problem is that he never clearly demonstrates an awareness of such contingencies.

truly, however, Engelke notes, "Hägglund’s (world) “religious faith” never really moves beyond a certain version of Protestant Christianity rooted in German and Scandinavian theology and philosophy."

Similarly, what Peter Gordon says seems right to me as well: 

his interpretation of King as a secularist is nevertheless an indication that something in This Life has gone awry. The book rarely descends from the lofty heights of philosophical speculation to make contact with the long and complex empirical record of religion in the world. This record is so rich that it would take more than a lifetime to master all of the relevant sources. But with his extraordinary confidence in his definitions, Hägglund does not refrain from offering a final verdict on what religion has been and what it can be. “Neither Jesus nor Buddha nor Muhammad,” he writes, “has anything to say about freedom as an end in itself.” This is not accidental, he continues, because from a religious perspective, “what ultimately matters is not to lead a life but to be saved from being alive.”

he later goes on to say that Hägglund "has much to say that is truly instructive in his readings of Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Marx."  But--again--does he, really?  Instructive to whom?  And who is Gordon to say?  I would trust him on Marx, maybe Kierkegaard, but the claim about Augustine is, as I suggested above, dubitable.  In the end he says this:

Hägglund is too quick to affirm the place of finitude as the source of all meaning and too eager to blame religion for our flight from the world. In fact, when we consider religious traditions in all of their extravagant diversity, we may begin to wonder how religion can be assigned any singular doctrine at all. For many religious believers, the recognition of a higher meaning beyond life is precisely why they care so much about their moral and political conduct in this world. I suspect this was the sort of sentiment that animated King in his political struggles, and a similar sense of worldly commitment has inspired Christian socialists and liberation theologians alike.

That sounds right to me as well.  The problem here is that a series of contestable metaphysical, ethical, and axiological claims have been smuggled in and employed in a fairly Procrustean way to mutilate the manifold realities they purport to represent.  Gordon suggests this is because Hägglund, for all his primping as a secular thinker, remains deeply caught up in certain Christian polemical categories and styles of thought:

what should trouble us about this inversion is that it rehearses the same game of epistemic superiority that religious believers have used in their endless battle against those who do not believe. The religious believer is certain that the unbeliever is in error. Hägglund is no less certain that the believer is in error. To be sure, certain religious traditions have also counseled humility: If we cannot know the ways of God, they have reasoned, then we should not dare to judge the ways of humanity. This doctrine of apophatic (or negative) theology ranks among the most powerful themes in the history of religion. A secular philosophy that places a similar emphasis on human finitude might be expected to sustain a similar posture of epistemic humility and an openness to doubt. But in Hägglund’s book, such virtues are in short supply.

In the end Gordon suggests we need a less theological discussion:

In the cool eyes of the unbeliever, these people subscribe to beliefs that may appear misguided or even foolish. But we should still find a way to speak not for these people but with them, especially when it comes to the political arrangements that will benefit us all. Dismissing their beliefs as the wrong metaphysical grounding for socialism will not get us terribly far. But if we direct our attention to more material and political concerns—to housing, health care, education, economic equity, and popular rule—we may realize that the old battle lines between the secular and the religious are losing their grip.

Whether we really need to bind together politics and metaphysics in the way Hägglund does remains an open question, but given the urgency of the tasks that confront us, it may be best to forgo the task of metaphysical grounding altogether. When it comes to economic justice, after all, the most compelling arguments are political, not metaphysical.

I am not convinced that Gordon is right--I think we need a conversation on both registers.  But Gordon is right that if the non-religious people can only talk in procrustean caricatures of religion, then yes, it's better for them to try to begin with more mundane topics, until they've come to understand something of what their religious interlocutors believe, and what they see.

For what some of them, anyway, see is not the empty husk of a world that Hägglund, and others, imagine that they see.  What some of them see is not a world of meaningless grey entropy.  What they see is not nothing.  What they see is a world vibrant with significances, exploding with the semiotic and transfigural beauty of a finite object that gives so much more than we could expect of it, that it seems almost impolite not to impute an infinity of gift to it.  What they see is a world roaring with beauty, and roaring with the message that this beauty is significant, and that our capacity to apprehend, or at least glimpse, this significance is also significant.  Christians, some of us anyway, figure this under the sign of the Incarnation, the idea that God saw fit to plunge into the materiality God created, and render Godself wholly available, radically intimate, in this matter; and by doing that, revealing that this matter, as good as it is now, as tragically good of course but good nonetheless, will one day become something even more amazing, even more wondrous, even more glorious.

I wonder if the problem is that there is no category of "glory" in Hägglund, or maybe that the issue is not expressly thematized.  I wonder if the problem is that he hasn't yet figured out what to do with the experience of wonder that, I do not doubt, immanentists recognize that all people sometimes feel at the world.  Perhaps they think they can capture that in the emphatic rapture with which they talk about this life.  Perhaps immanence can bear the weight of this glory, or can try to do so, anyhow.  That would be an interesting discussion.  But there is no evidence in the book that Hägglund even thinks it is a discussion worth having, or that he can imagine having it.

In short: something is importantly off in Hägglund.  It seems almost a fideist's account of religion--very abstract.  Kind of what a theologian would do, I say in sackcloth and ashes.  I just wish there was something new in these critiques, but it strikes me as the kind of thing Arendt said, because she heard it from Heidegger, who seemed to find it in late antique Roman and Greek pagans, etc. etc.  I suppose the OG of this strategy was Julian the Apostate, the 4th century emperor who was raised Christian (a nephew of Constantine, or something like that) but then revealed himself, upon elevation to the purple, to be a devotee of the pagan gods.  But the fun thing about him was that his rejection of Christianity still governed the propagation of pagan polytheism--he wanted explicit confessions, he wanted coherent practices, he was interested in uniformity of practice and scripture and communal professions of belief, etc.--all of which he learned from the Christians.  Talk about "dynamic structural isomorphism." 

Finally, I'm puzzled at what this book suggests about the isolation of scholars of religion from other humanists--or rather, other humanists' ignoring of those scholars.  How could Hägglund have been at a place like Yale, and not engaged more seriously the people there?  There are really good philosophical and theological voices there, in the Div school and in the department of religion and even elsewhere.  Was it just that he didn't go talk to them?  Scholars like Jennifer Herdt, Kathryn Tanner, Noreen Khawaja.  A more bracing encounter might have been with John Hare.  He says in the acknowledgments that he talked to Miroslav Volf, but that's about it--and Volf's presence in the book is not very deep.  Would this kind of ignorance be acceptable on any other topic?