Humble prophets hard to find in these secular times

Over the last several decades, those who view religion with respect regularly come back to the same question: What has happened to the religious intellectuals, the thinkers taken seriously by nonbelievers as well as believers?

In this increasingly secular time, a natural follow-up question ratifies the point of the original query: Who cares? Why should the thinking of those inspired by faith even matter to those who don’t share it?

Well, historically, secular and religious intellectuals often engaged in helpful dialogue, and Alan Jacobs of Baylor University suggests religious intellectuals are the missing solvent in our culture wars: They are uniquely well-placed to mediate between secular liberals and conservative believers whom progressives often see as “forces of reaction.”

Religious intellectuals, Jacobs writes in Harper’s, are “people who understand the impulses from which these troubling movements arise, who may themselves belong in some sense to the communities driving these movements but are also part of the liberal social order.”

Jacobs’ effort is thoughtful and well worth engaging. But I am not sure we have a shortage of Christian intellectuals. Rather, we live in a world where (1) religion has been subsumed by politics; (2) many liberals have accepted the view that religion now lives almost entirely on the right end of politics; (3) the popular media tend to focus on the most extreme and outlandish examples of religion rather than the more thoughtful kind; which means that (4) the quieter forms of religious expression — left, right and center — rarely win notice on the covers of magazines or anywhere else.

The politicization of religion is obvious, and it tells us something that when we routinely talk about “religious issues,” go straight to hot-button issues such as abortion or gay marriage.

As the wise sociologist Alan Wolfe has noted: “At earlier periods in American history, people have argued over which Bible should be read in schools and how it should be interpreted . ... The people who fight today’s culture war, by contrast, put politics first.”

The result: Religion is talked about a lot, but mostly superficially. “The absence of sustained, public scrutiny of religious ideas in our time,” the Berkeley historian David Hollinger has written, “has created a vacuum filled with easy God talk.”

Moreover, public discussion of religion often ignores the rich and visionary tradition of African-American Christianity except in times of crisis (most recently, the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston) or controversy (the attention paid to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 campaign).

Occasionally, Pope Francis’ passionate pleas on behalf of social justice penetrate the public consciousness.

But more typically, the relative lack of attention to non-stereotypical versions of Christianity reinforces the tendency of more secular people to treat religion as consistently promoting either extremism or, in milder forms, garden-variety conservative politics.

Humble prophets are hard to find, especially in this election year, but they have a special vocation: to remind the skeptical that religion, which can indeed be divisive, is also a moral prod and an intellectual spark.